Clinton took office with enthusiasm, bold concepts (many from the dialogue he and Hillary had been embarked on since Yale), and an electorate that seemed relatively amenable to change. His agenda as governor was an ambitious extension of his campaign promises. But he was nowhere near as good governing—at least not yet—as running for office. His plans were full of ideas he’d been making notes on for years, based on the suggestions of academics, business people, friends ensconced in think tanks, and his voluminous reading from political economy to scientific tracts to day care manuals. But the ideas often clashed with budgetary realities, and with the priorities of legislators who were heavily indebted to the state’s moneyed interests—just as Hillary’s health care priorities would be at odds with the policies developed by his own presidential economic advisers, and put to death by moneyed interests and legislators in their thrall, and her own hubris.
The notion of Hillary and Bill Clinton as power-hungry acquisitors with little interest in the public weal save some sort of left-leaning ideology, however, has always been at odds with the facts. Even before they met, each believed fervently in the concept of public service, even the humble nobility of it, however unlikely the term might seem today in a declarative sentence that includes the names Bill and Hillary Clinton in it, however difficult this objective might be. The principles that they believed in upon Bill’s election as governor are indicated by the programs he proposed, and the words he (and Hillary) spoke and wrote, especially in his inaugural address, even if a bit florid: “For as long as I can remember,” he proclaimed, “I have believed passionately in the cause of equal opportunity, and I will do what I can to advance it. For as long as I can remember, I have deplored the arbitrary and abusive exercise of power by those in authority, and I will do what I can to prevent it…. For as long as I can remember, I have loved the land, air and water of Arkansas, and I will do what I can to protect them. For as long as I can remember, I have wished to ease the burdens of life for those who, through no fault of their own, are weak or needy, and I will try to help them.” Bill, more than Hillary at first, believed also that his message needed to be informed by advanced models of economic development and fewer restraints on investment capital than traditional liberals had advocated. At the time of his accession in Arkansas, many governors and mayors, Democrats and Republicans, working at the ground level of American politics, not the Olympian heights of Capitol Hill in Washington, were trying to devise imaginative formulas that would break out of the old liberal-conservative stereotypes to deliver better services to constituents and bigger profits to business and industry, thus increasing jobs and the tax base to pay for civic improvement.
Bill’s major spending priorities, he said, were meant to pull the old Arkansas into the modern era. Over the next two years Clinton would find himself walking a thin line between implementing policies that could dramatically contribute to improving the lives of his fellow Arkansans, and attempting not to rattle too hard the sensibilities of the ArkoRoman establishment and the good ole boys who ran the legislature. Indicative of his new-school approach (the term “policy wonk” had not yet been applied to Hillary or Bill), Bill used surplus funds from his campaign to hire Price Waterhouse to help him devise a budget and projections for its implementation. Other surplus funds went to Dick Morris to survey citizens about the ideas and programs called for in the budget. Bill wanted him to rank them in order of appeal to the voters, and then develop an overarching theme connecting them all. “He was left with a program that was thoroughly admirable but indescribable,” said Morris. There was no theme, but rather “a bit of everything. Like a kid in a candy store he wanted to do it all.” Because he had won election by so large a margin, Hillary and Bill both were convinced he had a mandate to initiate wholesale change. (The same mistake was repeated in 1993, largely at her instigation, though Bill had won the presidency without even a majority of the popular vote.)
The budget book he presented to the state legislature was impossibly thick, in number of pages and density of factoids. But there were identifiable priorities: education, reorganizing school districts; providing a rural health care system in a state where doctors and hospitals were many miles away from people with little means of transportation; establishing new departments of economic development and of energy. Some legislators dismissed the Clinton program as the idealistic over enthusiasm of a boy governor. But in his two years in office, Clinton made some progress: a $1,200 annual raise for teachers; a 40 percent increase in education spending; an extension of public transportation; the maintenance of a 10-cent pay phone call (most neighboring states were up to a quarter); a study on the ill-effects of clear-cutting by the big timber companies that were setting up in the state (and then succumbing to their interests by appointing a forestry commissioner to their liking).
And he appointed Hillary to head his health care advisory committee. Characteristically, this came about when he ran into trouble, in the first year of his term. He had appointed a health commissioner from out of state (already a mistake) who had proposed that nurse-practitioners be permitted to serve as doctors in many areas of Arkansas where physicians were scarce. The state medical society—licensed doctors—were in an uproar that their fat Medicaid fees were about to get eaten up by a bunch of paramedics. He cleverly appointed Hillary to solve the problem of delivering expanded health care to the poorest counties and towns in Arkansas without taking a bite from doctors’ fees; he was bypassing the bureaucracy so he would be able to reach a decision at home in the governor’s mansion. It worked. Navigating the federal shoals as she had in getting funding for a rape crisis center in Fayetteville, Hillary used her contacts in Washington to obtain federal money to pay for rural health care services in Arkansas. Four rural clinics were opened almost immediately, construction began on three others, and the use of midwives and nurse-practitioners was expanded.
Despite her studied uninterest in ribbon-cuttings and formal dinner parties at the governor’s mansion, Hillary carefully monitored guest lists for the occasional informal dinners she and Bill gave. “Think about who you really want to have dinner with because now anyone will come,” a friend recalled her telling Bill. The friend speculated that instead Hillary “was going to continue to suffer his old friendships way long past their value stage.”
For the next twenty years until the Clintons left the White House in 2001, a line between his Arkansas friends who predated Hillary and all the others was increasingly apparent. When bad things happened to one or both of them, many in the old Arkansas crowd attributed the problems to Hillary—to aspects of her character rather than this. Those who had not known Clinton in his youth in his home state were inclined to more complex and probing explanations of the difficulties.
During Bill’s first term as governor, rumors of his alleged affairs with a multitude of women were persistent. Though he was now married, he was also now the governor, and women gravitated toward Clinton as never before. He loved the attention. Being on the road was always fun, because Hillary wasn’t around and he could freely flirt, not that he was too reticent sometimes when she was around.
It may be that, as in his White House years, Clinton was trying to restrain himself, with difficulty. One of the ironies of the Lewinsky circus was that their “relationship” began during a period when he’d tried to put the brakes on his libido, in his first term in the White House. In his initial term as governor, “Bill was like a kid with a new toy,” said an acquaintance. “The perks, the mansion, having the most powerful people in the state paying court to you. And he always had a weakness for bleached blondes with big jewelry, in short skirts, their figures shown off to best advantage.” Rudy Moore, Bill’s campaign manager, had fired a travel aide for bragging about taking the candidate to nightclubs. But Moore thought “appearances were more than what was going on,” which was often the result of Clinton’s bad judgment about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Randy White, another aide who traveled with Clinton, said that
he never saw any evidence of Clinton having an affair during that first term. Inevitably, though, rumors reached Hillary, who, in the pattern of their marriage for years to come, became suspicious, incensed at Bill, and then seemed—to those around them—to experience “a quiet humiliation,” in the words of one observer. But she was determined to stay married to him.
CHELSEA CLINTON, from the moment of her difficult conception through the dysfunction and difficulties, personal and political intertwining, of the first family’s life in the White House, was an enormous factor in keeping her parents together.
After Chelsea’s birth, far more complicated considerations were at work than the simple nostrum of parents who “stay together for the sake of the children.” But Hillary’s and Bill’s devotion to their daughter, an only child, was in its unconventional way (given the chaos and tension they generated) absolute and unconditional. Whatever the distractions, the family unit, when isolated from the outside world, functioned reasonably well. Bill and Hillary were both good at being hands-on parents. Given the time-devouring nature of their public lives, they found a remarkable amount of time to be with their daughter: discussions at the dinner table, driving her to school, cheering from the soccer sidelines, Scrabble games, and enjoying movies—including her favorite, Snow White, and his, High Noon—and then taking them apart. There was a genuine naturalness to it all.
For Bill Clinton, being a constant, loving father was, to his mind, the real test of his manhood: creating what he had never had, ensuring the wholeness of a real family. For Hillary, having a child was an equally consuming desire and drive: “I don’t think I could ever be a woman without having a child,” she told a friend during her pregnancy. Hillary had married for love, to have children, and to create her idea of a model family life—such as had been denied her mother, twice, in childhood and marriage. She felt she could figure out how to make the political part of her life work, but unless she could be a mother with a loving husband who was father to their children, life’s fulfillment would elude her. Thus the prospect that she could not bear a child, which seemed increasingly likely in the first two years of her marriage—and which she had probably feared even earlier—could have been as frightening to her as anything she might conjure about her husband and other women.
Since very early in their marriage (or, as he said, “for some time”), Hillary and Bill had been trying to have a child. Unsuccessful, they decided in the summer of 1979 to see a fertility specialist in San Francisco, and scheduled an appointment for shortly after their return from a brief vacation in Bermuda.
Hillary suffered from a condition called endometriosis, which often makes conception difficult, can cause infertility, and frequently results in extreme pain during and after intercourse. In Fayetteville, before moving to Little Rock, she had told two friends (both women) that she feared the condition might prevent her from conceiving a child. Some doctors believed endometriosis could cause miscarriage. It is not clear whether the condition preceded her marriage—which seems possible, given when she mentioned it to the women—and at what point Bill first learned of it. Bill, with his desire to learn everything there was to know about any subject crossing his horizon, upon hearing the news would have logically sought to learn all its implications. According to standard medical literature, “between 30 percent to 40 percent of women with endometriosis are infertile, making it one of the top three causes of female infertility.” Many women don’t learn they have the malady until they experience difficulty getting pregnant. *6
There is little question that Hillary’s difficulty getting pregnant—and all the extraordinary measures and frustrations that attend such a situation—added strain to the early years of their marriage. But within days of their return from Bermuda in July 1979, and before they were to leave for their doctor’s appointment in San Francisco, Hillary learned she was pregnant. Diane Kincaid and Jim Blair were among the first to be told. Hillary and Bill radiated excitement, and relief.
She and Bill took Lamaze classes together, in preparation for natural childbirth. Other expectant parents with whom they attended seemed, after some initial curiosity, to take it in stride that the governor and first lady of the state were practicing deep-breathing exercises with them. They read parenting handbooks (Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, the author of one of the most famous, would lend support and expertise to Hillary’s health care task force); sought advice from their friends; asked questions about doctors, nurses, and midwives; and received plenty of unsolicited suggestions (“Think of a baby like a football, and hold it tight,” advised an ex–football player).
In January, late in her pregnancy, Hillary flew to New York with board members from the Arkansas Children’s Hospital, for which she did pro bono legal work, to make a presentation to underwriters who would determine the hospital’s bond ratings. That would be her last trip before Chelsea was born. She developed problems (of a nature neither she nor Bill publicly described) late in her pregnancy, and was instructed by her doctor to cease traveling. The doctor’s orders were both worrisome and disappointing. At the end of February, she and Bill had planned to attend the annual Washington meeting of the National Governors Association and dinner at the White House with President and Mrs. Carter. By now they were on the “extended list” of guests for state dinners and other official functions; both Hillary and Bill—not always by virtue of being a couple, but also through the particular qualifications of one or the other—were asked frequently to participate in conferences under either White House auspices or convened by the Democratic Party. In the last week of February, Bill attended the governors meeting, accompanied at the closing White House dinner by Carolyn Huber, who had left the Rose Law Firm to manage the governor’s mansion for Hillary and Bill. Every few hours he phoned home.
Fifteen minutes after his return to the mansion on the night of February 27, three weeks before Hillary’s due date, her water broke. Frenzied preparations for the trip to the hospital ensued. Consulting his list of instructions from Lamaze class, Bill shouted to the troopers to get the car ready and to bring a bag of ice cubes for Hillary to suck on during labor. Meanwhile, he threw together other items on the list for Hillary’s hospital stay. As Hillary got unsteadily into the car, one of the troopers arrived with a huge garbage bag filled with ice—enough for a whole Lamaze class of mothers in labor—which got heaved into the trunk of the sedan. The drive took only minutes, and upon immediate examination, doctors told Hillary and Bill that the baby was in breech, upside down—the kind of last-minute surprise that expectant parents most dread. Hillary had never before been hospitalized. Now she would have to undergo cesarean section to deliver her baby, and she was terribly frightened, trying not to panic. Normal procedures forbade fathers in the delivery room when surgery was ordered, but Bill appealed to the hospital’s administrator, saying that Hillary needed him, and promised “that they could cut Hillary open from head to toe and I wouldn’t get sick or faint.” The administrator gave his approval, either because Bill was the governor or simply because he had been his usual enormously persuasive self, or both.
Throughout the surgery, in which a local anesthetic was administered, Bill held Hillary’s hand. He could see what was happening over a screen that blocked her own “view of the cutting and bleeding,” Bill recalled. At 11:24 P.M. he watched the doctor lift out the baby, a girl, healthy. She weighed six pounds, one and three-quarter ounces. Bill professed later, “It was the happiest moment of my life, one my father never knew.” And perhaps just as tellingly, “At last I was a father.” A few minutes after the umbilical cord was cut, their newborn was cleaned up and handed to Hillary and then Bill to hold.
Like most parents whose child has been born healthy after last-minute complications—plus in this case Hillary’s extreme difficulty conceiving—their daughter’s birth seemed to Hillary and Bill to be even more special. They frequently referred to Chelsea as their “miracle child.”
On a Christmas vacation in London in 1978, they had chos
en her name, after hearing Judy Collins’s version of the song “Chelsea Morning,” an evocative Joni Mitchell (who also recorded it) piece of quasi-poetry of the day, set in London. Bill had said to Hillary that, if they ever had a daughter, they should name her Chelsea, where they had been walking when they heard the song. During the Clintons’ years in the White House, Judy Collins would entertain or be a guest there on several occasions, invariably singing “Chelsea Morning.”
That night, while Hillary was in the recovery room, Bill carried their daughter to be seen by Virginia, members of his staff, and friends he’d summoned. He “talked to her…sang to her,” and, he later wrote, “I never wanted that night to end.” Hillary, too, noted that Bill was, from the beginning, a doting dad.
Hillary has described herself as the “designated worrier” in the Clinton family (others have more frequently identified her as the designated warrior) and said that, for months after Chelsea was born, she worried incessantly. Years later, she wrote of praying that she would be a good enough mother for her baby. Some aspects of motherhood did not come easily, including breastfeeding. Hillary at times seemed “mystified” (her word) by Chelsea’s arrival, noting how disconsolate Chelsea was at times despite the most gentle treatment. To calm them both, Hillary came up with a motherly mantra: “Chelsea, this is new for both of us…. We’re just going to have to help each other do the best we can.”
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