A Woman in Charge

by Carl Bernstein

  Hillary had no shortage of motherly help in the mansion. Eliza Ashley, the cook, was a pampering presence from the beginning, and Carolyn Huber became Chelsea’s adoring surrogate aunt. Dorothy and Hugh arrived from Park Ridge to coddle their first grandchild. Few settings could be more advantageous to a mother and her baby. And Bill was constantly holding her, playing with her, singing to her, nuzzling her. Later, when she reached nursery school age and thereafter in Little Rock, he drove her to school himself, as often as possible, putting her on his lap in the car.

  Hillary was determined—and, to a remarkable degree succeeded, from the time of Chelsea’s birth through college graduation—in keeping the press away from their daughter. More than a week passed before the governor’s press office consented to giving Arkansas’s newspapers a picture of the new first family. Not surprisingly, Hillary was later almost totally unsuccessful (despite trying) in shutting down journalistic exploration of the Clintons’ marital history. But both she and Bill went to extraordinary lengths to see that Chelsea’s childhood be as normal under the circumstances as possible (a difficult concept in the case of someone raised almost exclusively in a governor’s mansion and the White House).

  Hillary took four months off from her job at the Rose Law Firm after Chelsea was born but continued to travel for board meetings and other responsibilities outside the state. She was sensitive to any criticism that she skimped as a mother. Carolyn Yeldell Staley, who had gone to high school with Bill, had had a very brief romantic interlude with him when he was at Georgetown, and maintained a genuine friendship afterward in which they corresponded, came to visit shortly after Hillary and Chelsea had come home from the hospital. Carolyn, an opera singer, and her husband had moved back to Little Rock from Indiana so she could work for the Arkansas Arts Council. She had written a song about Chelsea, which she sang for mother, daughter, and father, to her own piano accompaniment. The song was written from the point of view of the baby’s parents, and was partly about humility and the awe of bringing a child into the world. One line was: “We may not be worthy, but we’ll try to be wise.” When Carolyn had finished singing her offering, Hillary seemed to bristle at the notion she was unworthy.

  Six weeks after giving birth, Hillary went to Memphis and left Chelsea with Peach Pietrafesa, a friend from Wellesley days whose husband had gone to work in Bill’s office. “The feminist I considered myself to be did not think a child of six weeks old should be left with anyone else,” Pietrefesa said. “Especially to go to some second-rate junko regional bar association meeting. This was her denial of emotional circumstances—by getting out there to fight what she had decided was going to be a terrific fight, it was a way to make what she was doing heroic.” This was the kind of damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t critique that Hillary was constantly subjected to (and not just on motherhood), especially by former employees in the governor’s office or White House who had left under disagreeable circumstances. It became part of the constant and increasingly vocal dialogue about her.

  Whispering had started at the Rose firm among female employees and partners both about whether Hillary might resign after Chelsea’s birth despite the fact that she had been made a partner in 1979. Some partners “had assumed she would quit ‘when her husband got a real job,’” Webb Hubbell said. “They assumed she would quit ‘when Bill became governor.’ Surely she would quit ‘when she had a baby.’”

  It was then, Hubbell said, that Hillary began to believe that the partners wouldn’t acknowledge her work as much as that of her male colleagues. (Some of the partners simply believed her work was not up to par.) “Hillary began—subconsciously at first, I think—taking her show on the road,” he said. “She looked for causes, board memberships, other ways she could expand her career as a lawyer and her persona as an independent person. But she was also feeling the pressure of Bill’s problems in the state—especially when it became clear that some of the criticism of him was due to her.”

  Indeed, her desk at Rose—after she went back—was increasingly a platform from which she could reach out to the world beyond Little Rock, and concentrate less on cases assigned by the firm; that was for the most part tedious, routine work that somebody in every law office had to do. She was far more interested in her pro bono activities on behalf of Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, which she had helped found. It worked closely with the Children’s Defense Fund in Washington. Her work on the Governor’s Commission on Early Childhood was important to her. But the office at Rose was still a place where she could find camaraderie with her Two Amigos—and a strong shoulder and confidant in Vince Foster when there were bumps in the road.

  Friends of the Clintons were aware of her disappointment at not being able to have a second child. Even during their early years in the White House, she and Bill talked seriously about adopting, and discussed with friends in California who had adopted how they might go about the process themselves. In Hillary’s forty-ninth year, she raised the subject bizarrely in an interview with a Time magazine reporter. “I must say, we’re hoping to have another child,” Hillary said. When the stunned journalist asked if she meant by natural birth, she added: “I have to tell you I would be surprised but not disappointed. My friends would be appalled, I’m sure.” Having another child had been a recurring discussion in the Clinton marriage. “I think we’re talking about it more now,” Hillary said. “We’d obviously wait to get serious about it until after the [1996] election.” This was before she’d heard the name Monica Lewinsky.

  BILL CLINTON had become governor of Arkansas in 1981 with enormous goodwill toward him in his state. He was the youngest governor in the nation; he had shinnied higher and faster up the greasy pole of American politics than any member of his generation; his wife was recognized as a first-rate political organizer and a highly principled advocate for people in need; he was a model of the new Southern politician but transcended regional appeal; and he (and his wife) held the loyalty, affection, and awe of an army of well-placed young men and women who had been saying for years that he would someday be president and were prepared to help make that happen. Bill possessed a voracious intellectual capacity and curiosity that could be harnessed to practical politics in the best sense, on behalf of ideas, many of them bold, new, and with a real chance of making the lives of citizens of his state and his country better.

  He was also capable of self-absorption, self-defeating distraction, juvenile outbursts, a debilitating weakness for women, and a tendency to throw it all away when he was on the edge of greatness. This was particularly true—and would become more so—when left to his own devices, without the constant help, guidance, and encouragement of his wife.

  During the first eighteen months of his two-year term as governor there had been some solid achievements—creating a new economic development department and making incremental progress on reforming rural health care, for instance. But Bill’s record fell far from meeting his or Hillary’s hopes and expectations, and was hardly triumphant. He had encountered serious, unexpected obstacles, not the least of which was that his wife hadn’t turned into the available political asset and invaluable adviser that, under different circumstances, she might have been. Instead, with his encouragement, she had gone off to pursue her own career, under her own name, for which he was being made to pay in loss of political support from too many Arkansans reluctant to accept a first lady with such nontraditional ideas. Moreover, parenthood, as much as it was welcomed, was not necessarily consistent with immediate political needs. Hillary had been understandably preoccupied by her pregnancy and then the care of their baby, born two months into his governorship, when he could have greatly benefited from her help.

  Hillary felt certain that Bill had the brains, the manner, the analytical skills, the energy, and the rhetorical ability to overcome any serious difficulties. And, at home, there were sublime moments with their baby daughter.

  As his campaign for reelection was reaching critical mass, the perception of C
linton as champion of ordinary citizens was taking a beating. He was losing the support of too many people who worked hard for their money and were left with little, who resented the power and wealth of the oligarchs and industries that had run roughshod in Arkansas for years and were showing few signs of losing influence. After all, he had been elected largely on the strength of his promises to make the lives of its working people better, to take the state in a new direction in which his smarts and contacts would yield tangible results: improved schools, lower utility rates, new roads, extended health care, benefits in jobs and aid dollars that would flow from his closeness with the folks in Washington, most importantly from the new Democratic president for whom he had campaigned and helped deliver Arkansas’s electoral votes. Clinton had said he could do more than his opponents and predecessors, but the results were hard to see—which was one of the problems of a two-year term: you were running for reelection before you could convincingly show why you should be reelected. Moreover, the whole country seemed to be in an unusual slump, economic and psychological. There were hostages in Iran, race riots in Miami, the Russians had invaded Afghanistan, and the states—including his own—were not getting their expected share of revenue from Washington because the economy had gone into serious decline. Cars were lined up at gas pumps. Ronald Reagan was leading a conservative crusade for the presidency that looked as if it might swamp Carter. Castro had permitted 100,000 Cubans, many of them criminals and mental patients, released from jail, to leave for Florida in the so-called Mariel boatlift, overwhelming the state’s capacity to deal with them.

  One of Clinton’s objectives for his inaugural term as governor was to put to bed once and for all the idea still held by some Arkansans, particularly those in rural areas, that he wasn’t really one of them, that his time as a Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law graduate and his four years at Georgetown and bringing his wife down from—wherever it was she was from—had defined him more than his roots. With polling help from Dick Morris, even before he’d been sworn in, Bill decided that road-building was both the answer politically and a way to drag the state toward modernity in at least one basic way. It would be his signature issue. Arkansas’s roads were a disaster, undermining the economic future of the state, which was heavily dependent on trucking. But to fund $3.3 billion in highway and road improvements, he unwisely gave lobbyists for the trucking and poultry industries a dominant hand in devising a formula for additional taxes on car license fees. The fees would be based on weight, not value, of a registered passenger vehicle. Thus, in a state full of old pickups and junkers, the less-well-off generally paid higher tax fees to get their license tags than the swells who drove around in faster, newer, lighter, costlier cars. Meanwhile, the trucking and poultry companies got off easy, too.

  “I could sign the bill into law and have a good road program paid for in an unfair way, or veto it and have no road program at all,” Clinton said years later. “I signed the bill. It was the single dumbest mistake I ever made in politics until 1994, when I agreed to ask for a special prosecutor in the Whitewater case when there was not a shred of evidence to justify one.” He had alienated rural Arkansans and blue-collar urbanites as well. People waiting in DMV lines to pay higher car taxes were fuming all over the state.

  Hillary, a rationalist as always, was unhappy about the uproar, but not yet overly worried. People would surely understand that Bill had tried to do the right thing. Then a turkey farmer named Monroe Schwarzlose, who had challenged Bill in the Democratic primary, received 31 percent of the vote (he’d gotten 1 percent in the same primary in 1978) by attacking Bill on the car tag issue. This was the kind of demagoguery that made Hillary uncomfortable with electoral politics. Bill’s Republican opponent in the general election, Frank White, was also making headway on the issue. But increasingly, the focus of his assault on Bill became Hillary’s decision to remain Hillary Rodham.

  Usually, she introduced herself as “Hillary—Governor Clinton’s wife,” but formal invitations to dinner at the governor’s mansion were in the name of “Governor Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham.” The Republican nominee took to introducing his own wife as “Mrs. Frank White” at campaign stops. But perhaps most disturbing to those who tended to be disturbed by such matters—and most advantageous to White—was Chelsea’s birth announcement, which gave the names of her parents as Hillary Rodham and Governor William Jefferson Clinton.

  Hillary maintained that keeping her maiden name had been a show of self-esteem and independence, and would mitigate any conflict of interest allegations, an odd assumption. But Hillary’s discussions with friends made clear that she regarded it as anything but a small gesture. “It showed that I was still me,” she said. And, as Jim Blair noted: “She still had that same child-of-the-1960s aura.”

  Bill, meanwhile, looked younger than his thirty-two years and, as his political troubles worsened, editorial cartoonists took to depicting him as a child, often on a tricycle, and calling him “Baby.”

  The most staggering blow was especially painful for Hillary and Bill because it was administered, inexplicably, by Jimmy Carter, to whom they had been unceasingly loyal. Carter had been challenged for the 1980 presidential nomination by Senator Edward M. Kennedy. Most of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party supported Kennedy, including many friends who had been with Hillary and Bill since the McGovern days in Texas. But Hillary was steadfast in her support for Carter, admonishing them, saying, “You have to look at who can get elected and what he can accomplish.” (Her argument against Kennedy was the same one that many Democrats would use to oppose her own candidacy for president a quarter-century later.)

  When 100,000 Cuban refugees arrived in Florida in the Mariel boatlift, Carter had dispatched them to four military camps, including 18,000 to Fort Chaffee, in northwest Arkansas. On June 1, more than 1,000 rioted and breached their quarters at the Chaffee resettlement camp. Bill’s performance under pressure as governor was cool and impressive, including his justifiable assignment of responsibility for the incident to Army personnel who had failed to maintain order at the facility. (“Well shit, General, who left the wire cutters in the stockade if none of this was the military’s fault?” he challenged the commanding general in a private conversation.) Only the intervention of state police had quieted the situation, after hundreds of the Cubans had run down a highway carrying sticks and bottles. But it was inevitable that Bill would pay politically for the riot, because of his and Hillary’s close identification with Carter. Frank White used pictures and film footage of the rioting—showing only black rioters—to great effect in his ads, associating Bill with an aura of anarchy. And then it got even worse: Carter broke a promise to Clinton that no more prisoners would be sent to Fort Chaffee. On August 1, he sent word to the governor’s office that all remaining Mariel refugees from resettlement camps in Florida, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania would be shipped to Fort Chaffee, and that a single holding facility would be established there for the whole boatlift operation. “You’re fucking me,” Bill yelled over the phone to a presidential aide, but it was too late.

  Hillary saw ominous signs before Bill did. By October she told Bill her feeling that polls with him in the lead were wrong, and that he “might actually lose.” She also made a mental note that would inform the conduct of all future Clinton campaigns: the negative ads of Bill’s opponent trumped not just the news broadcasts but the reality and complexity of what had happened at Fort Chaffee.

  Just eight days before election day, Hillary called Dick Morris in an effort to save the Clinton campaign. Morris had been fired shortly after Bill was elected because so many people on the governor’s staff disliked working with him, and Bill himself was ambivalent. To him, Morris combined the powers of a savant with a snake. But he had warned Bill about the potential negative political consequences of raising the car tag fee, and Hillary’s practical instincts weren’t wrong in asking him to help save the campaign.

  Hillary’s phone call to Morris initiated her new role in manag
ing Bill and his campaigns. A basic dynamic in the Rodham-Clinton marital and political relationship was undergoing a momentous shift. “She believed very much in him but felt that he needed someone to protect him, someone more maternal or lawyerly more than anything else,” Morris said. “You know, This guy’s so nice he’ll sign anything and [I’ve] got to read the contract first. That kind of stuff.”

  Morris, in Florida working on a Republican campaign, told Hillary that it was probably too late to salvage a win for Bill, but he went to Arkansas anyway. As was often the case when Hillary considered electoral politics, she was appalled at its unfairness and illogic. Bill’s ideas and ideals towered above not just Frank White’s, but (to her mind) the whole political class in America. That fact had been on prominent display at the Democratic convention in New York in midsummer. Bill had been a Carter floor whip, and was chosen by the Democratic governors to deliver a prime-time speech as their representative. His speech was enlightened. The time had come to find “more creative and realistic” solutions than the old Democratic coalition had been recycling for two generations, he said.

  We were brought up to believe, uncritically, without thinking about it, that our system broke down in the Great Depression, was reconstructed by Franklin Roosevelt through the New Deal and World War II, and would never break again. And that all we had to do was try to reach out and extend the benefits of America to those who had been dispossessed: minorities and women, the elderly, the handicapped and children in need. But the hard truth is that for ten long years through Democratic and Republican administrations alike, this economic system has been breaking down. We have seen high inflation, high unemployment, large government deficits, the loss of our competitive edge. In response to these developments, a dangerous and growing number of people are simply opting out of our system. Another dangerous and growing number are opting for special interest and single interest group politics, which threatens to take every last drop of blood out of our political system.