A Woman in Charge

by Carl Bernstein

  Bill’s answer was exactly what had been rehearsed: Hillary was seated next to him. “Like nearly anybody who has been together for twenty years, our relationship has not been perfect or free from difficulties, but we feel good about where we are and we believe in our obligation to each other, and we intend to be together thirty or forty years from now, whether I run for president or not.”

  Godfrey Sperling, the breakfast’s founding eminence, wrote later in The Christian Science Monitor:

  Mr. Clinton received a “boffo” rating in the articles written by the 40-plus journalists there that day. The test very specifically included the need to find out whether the widely circulated rumors about Clinton’s infidelity would be too much baggage for him to carry out a winning campaign. Clinton received an especially understanding and sympathetic response from the journalists when he said that, like so many married people, he and Hillary had had personal problems between them to work out—and they had done so…. Mrs. Clinton nodded emphatically.

  Two weeks later, at 2:30 A.M. on October 3, Bill was poring over his announcement speech, making the final revisions. In preparation for his address, he had watched tapes of John F. Kennedy, hoping he would be able to suggest JFK’s gestures. All that was left was to consult Hillary one more time. Soon he would be standing in front of the Old State House to declare his candidacy for president.

  As Bill finally stepped to the podium, he could see among the crowd of two thousand many of the same friends who had come to Little Rock in July 1987 expecting him to announce his candidacy. Diane Blair, looking at Hillary next to him, remembered later that she was thinking about how, when they had first met, her friend had looked more like a hippie than a first lady. Bob Reich, who had flown in that morning, thought to himself, “God, I hope they know what they’re getting into.”

  SOON AFTER THE ANNOUNCEMENT, Diane Blair, who had written a well-regarded political science textbook, decided she would write a book about the Clinton campaign of 1992. She was certain Hillary and Bill were going to the White House. As preparation, she asked campaign workers at every level to make extensive notes through the whole campaign. After the election, she interviewed them—126 members of the campaign staff in all. The answers to her questions, verbatim, with their firsthand reports of everything from advance team preparations to the most important strategy decisions of the campaign, filled four enormous binders. Her book was never written. She died of cancer in 2000, at age sixty-one, and the binders were locked in storage.

  In the aggregate, the single-spaced contents of the binders, knee-high, provide a developing portrait of Hillary as she became the chief strategist and sounding board of her husband’s presidential campaign, and contemplated the kind of first lady she intended to be. Her overreaching is recorded, on the one hand, and on the other, her incomparable ability to channel the best of Bill Clinton into action. And she is seen at her fiercest and most determined, grabbing the reins of the campaign when it appeared the Clinton candidacy would be buried in allegations—in the same week—that he had dodged the draft and had a long sexual affair with Gennifer Flowers.

  At Hillary’s direction, a special “defense team” was established to deal with allegations about Bill’s history with the Selective Service System, women claiming to have had affairs with him, and other personal aspects of the Clintons’ lives. Betsey Wright was dispatched to Little Rock from Washington to research the underlying facts—including and beyond Gennifer Flowers—about women in Bill’s past, and to find any old records relating to his draft status; James M. Lyons, a Denver lawyer and friend of the Clintons, was summoned from Colorado to assist her—including hiring detectives to check the backgrounds of the women—and to handle questions about the Clintons’ finances; and Kevin O’Keefe of Chicago, a friend of Hillary’s for many years, dealt specifically with the draft issues. Part of the problem was that the campaign had been unprepared and lacked documentation and relevant information that it should have had on hand in anticipation of the inevitable questions.

  Among the questions Diane asked each of her interviewees was, “This campaign is now being described as the most effective presidential campaign in recent American history. What, from your perspective, made it so effective?” Their answers, because of their trust in Hillary’s closest friend, tend to be very revealing.

  “Probably Hillary. Honestly,” Nancy Hernreich, Bill’s scheduling secretary, answered. Many others came to the same conclusion. “She just has a way of cutting through to the core of something,” noted Hernreich, who would become Bill’s secretary in the White House. “She can see what the problem is and she can make a decision and find the right people to come in…Bill listens to Hillary. He’s obviously very bright and creative.” Undoubtedly, when the campaign was in deep trouble that could have buried Bill’s future, Hillary stepped in decisively to dig it out.

  There had been hints of how vicious the attacks on the Clintons would be, said Hillary, especially in a telephone call to Bill from an aide in the Bush White House, Roger Porter, while the Clintons were still trying to reach a final decision on whether Bill should run. Porter, whose White House portfolio included education, had worked with Clinton and other governors on an education project. According to Bill, they were having a serious phone conversation for about five or ten minutes when Porter’s tone changed abruptly, and he startled him with the words, “Cut the crap, Governor.” Porter allegedly said the Bush high command feared Bill’s candidacy and therefore they would have “to destroy” him.

  “Roger said he was calling as my friend to give me fair warning,” Clinton wrote in his autobiography. “If I waited until 1996, I could win the presidency. If I ran in 1992, they would destroy me and my political career would be over.” Some journalists who covered the Clinton campaign thought the story was exaggerated.

  Still, the slash-and-burn attack through the campaign was unceasing: constant assertions about Bill as a sexual predator, as a sybarite (orgies with black hookers), about ethical lapses in Arkansas, the fact that Bill had dodged the draft, a supposed murder that Clinton had covered up as governor to protect cocaine and arms trafficking out of Arkansas’s Mena airport, Hillary’s feminist advocacy, her supposed lesbianism, his and her (especially) histories as supposed left-wing ideologues (Bill, one rumor had it, had “disappeared” in Russia while dodging the draft). Sometimes it was difficult to separate the lunatic from the half-true, the outright lies from fact in the heat of a campaign, particularly in the new media configuration in which the gap between the standards of the New York Post and the Star tabloid (later bought by the Post’s owner, Rupurt Murdoch) was often a narrow one, and the lead-time between trash television and CNN could be very short. There was certainly insufficient time to try to establish the relationships, or lack of them, between the official Bush campaign apparatus and the armies of right-wing and religious-inspired Clinton-haters, which served as an echo chamber for every charge and accusation, no matter how outlandish.

  By the time of the New Hampshire primary in March 1992, Hillary’s view of the vast right-wing conspiracy was taking more precise shape, for good reason.

  The contents of Diane Blair’s notebooks document Hillary’s increasing skill at managing the response to the attacks, and the acuity of her judgment that George Bush would be reelected unless the Clinton campaign could find a way to rapidly and effectively repel them—and keep the attack machine silenced long enough to effectively trumpet the Clintons’ own substantive message (the platform of Putting People First: health care, middle-class tax cuts, job creation, the whole panoply of ideas that had, in fact, been Bill Clinton’s political lifework, and to an extent hers, too). Getting the public to listen carefully to anything Bill said would be especially difficult, Hillary believed, because of what the press—as posse—had become. Long before the Gary Hart episode, she saw the press as out of control, hell-bent on personal destruction and manufactured controversy—while ignoring serious issues, whether at the local level or in Washing
ton. In 1977, she told a Rotary Club audience, “One of our problems is trying to control a press that is far out of line because of Watergate.”

  The big story of the campaign, she feared, was going to be Bill’s private life and hers, and a grotesque distortion of the record of the Arkansas years. The famous mantra inside the Clinton campaign was “It’s the economy, stupid.” But it’s apparent in interview after interview in Diane’s binders that the real guiding premise was: Keep them away from us and our private lives. Turn the attacks on us into our issue.

  Hillary’s ability to manage Bill—sensing his moods, knowing how to schedule him so he got adequate rest, all the things she had done in Arkansas to help him be effective—were of little help in the new situation she faced in 1992. Now she had to handle her own staff, her own campaign, her own schedule, the focus on her by the national press—without any clear guidelines from the central campaign. Instead of an integrated campaign structure, it had been decided with her approval that Hillary would have her own aides, who reported to her. Communication between the two layers of assistants and policy aides and schedulers was cumbersome. Even maintaining regular contact with a designated aide to Bill on his plane became difficult. The same problems would plague the Clinton presidency, because Hillary’s operation seemed an alien culture to the presidential staff in the West Wing, and vice versa. “I think that Hillary got very mixed signals from the campaign about what they wanted her to do,” said Jody Franklin, Hillary’s chief of staff, as quoted in one of the binders. Not until very late in the campaign were adjustments made.

  Inevitably, the contents of the binders picture Hillary as the campaign’s crisis manager. But that was too simple a reading, as one of her aides noted:

  She doesn’t look at her life as a series of crises but rather a series of battles. I think of her viewing herself in more heroic terms, an epic character like in The Iliad, fighting battle after battle. Yes, she succumbs to victimization sometimes, in that when the truth becomes too painful, when she is faced with the repercussions of her own mistakes or flaws, she falls into victimhood. But that’s a last resort and when she does allow the wallowing it’s only in the warm glow of martyrdom—as a laudable victim—a martyr in the tradition of Joan of Arc, a martyr in the religious sense. She would much rather play the woman warrior—whether it’s against the bimbos, the press, the other party, the other candidate, the right-wing. She’s happiest when she’s fighting, when she has identified the enemy and goes into attack mode…. That’s what she thrives on more than anything—the battle.

  The crucial test of the Clinton campaign came in New Hampshire on January 23, with a call from Bill to Hillary: the Star tabloid was about to run a story that Gennifer Flowers, one of the women who had sworn in an affidavit in 1990 that she had not had sex with Bill Clinton, now was claiming she, in fact, had had a twelve-year affair with him. Bill denied it.

  Hillary set the tone of the campaign’s response at a rally in Bedford two nights later. “From my perspective,” she said, “our marriage is a strong marriage. We love each other, we support each other, and we have had a lot of strong and important experiences together that have meant a lot to us.” Yes, there had been “issues,” as she called them, in the marriage. But that was between them, and they deserved a “realm of protection…. Is anything about our marriage as important to the people of New Hampshire as whether or not they will have a chance to keep their own families together?” The cheers of the crowd made it impossible to hear the rest of her answer.

  A week later, Flowers, a not-so-talented lounge singer, was back, in the Star again, this time under the headline, “They Made Love All Over Her Apartment.” Flowers claimed she had tapes of telephone conversations with the governor. Hillary now recognized that a tabloid story had become a huge national media sensation, and she was prepared to go to the mat. Mandy Grunwald, a media consultant hired in part so a woman could defend Clinton in an instance just such as this, was dispatched to appear on Nightline with Ted Koppel. “If we don’t turn this into a positive, we’re going down,” said Paul Begala, one of the campaign’s principal consultants, who, like his business partner, James Carville, had won the trust of both Hillary and Bill.

  Hillary did not disagree. Her initial impulse, after getting the call about Flowers from Bill a week earlier, had been to “just go for it. Tell them the truth and get this off our backs,” according to people on his staff. They had the old affidavit that Flowers had signed. Now that strategy did not seem viable, given what else Flowers was saying: that Bill had frequently jogged over to her house for quickie sex, had once asked her to have sex in the men’s room of the mansion while Hillary was on the premises, and that he had told her he was considering leaving Hillary for her but couldn’t because a divorce would finish his career as a politician. And Flowers said she had tape recordings.

  Harry Thomason, Paul Begala, Mickey Kantor, and George Stephanopoulos devised a media strategy to save Clinton’s candidacy: a joint appearance by Bill and Hillary on 60 Minutes immediately following the Super Bowl. “It took a lot of convincing that such exposure was worth the risks, loss of privacy and potential impact on our families, especially on Chelsea,” said Hillary. But without such an extraordinary response, she became convinced Bill’s candidacy would be finished.

  Before the 60 Minutes taping, Hillary and Bill met with a small group of aides to prepare. Both were adamant that he would not utter the word adultery. They would not go into specifics. It was nobody else’s business. Hillary, others could see, was still worried that she might cry on television.

  Then they went downstairs to a room where the television cameras were set up. They were ready—Hillary in a turquoise suit with her arm fastened around her husband. They sat next to each other on a white couch. “She steeled herself,” said Bob Reich, who had gone to Boston to offer moral support. “When she steels herself, you know, she knows that she’s going into a kind of combat position…. And she is ready for that.”

  Who was Gennifer Flowers? correspondent Steve Kroft asked. How would you describe your relationship? (Very limited, said Bill.) He and Hillary talked on-camera about how they loved each other, how deeply they cared about Chelsea, how they had stayed together through the kinds of “problems” that married couples often encountered.

  Don Hewitt, the show’s producer, whispering off-camera, urged for a second time that Clinton simply confess to adultery. It didn’t happen. *9

  A few days later, in a packed press conference, Flowers was asked if Clinton had used a condom. She played tapes, scratchy, their audio quality not unlike Nixon’s tapes that Hillary had heard eighteen years before, but this time it was her husband’s voice, bragging to Flowers about how he had “shoved it up Larry Nichols’s ass” when, after Nichols had named five women in his suit against Clinton, all the women had signed affidavits denying they had had sex with Clinton.

  Richard Nixon, meanwhile, had been asked to comment about the Clinton campaign in an interview during a rare visit he had made to Washington. “If the wife comes through as being too strong and too intelligent,” he remarked, “it makes the husband look like a wimp.” Nixon said voters tended to agree with the assessment of Cardinal Richelieu: “Intellect in a woman is unbecoming.”

  IT WAS HILLARY that night, after 60 Minutes, who rallied the campaign staff. A message to the troops was clearly called for, and she had good news. A conference call was arranged. The polls were showing that Bill was still leading in New Hampshire, despite Flowers’s press conference, despite the tapes. Eighty percent of Americans thought Bill should stay in the race.

  “She was her husband’s ultimate character reference,” said Brooke Shearer, a friend who traveled with Hillary during much of the campaign and was interviewed by Diane Blair. That role would be Bill’s salvation.

  The next day Hillary telephoned Tammy Wynette. On 60 Minutes, Hillary had said, “You know, I’m not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I’m sitting
here because I love him and I respect him and I honor what he’s been through and what we’ve been through together. And you know, if that’s not enough for people, then heck, don’t vote for him.”

  Wynette was not pleased. She had publicly demanded that Hillary apologize for…well, it wasn’t quite clear what for, but it appeared that she was offended that Hillary hadn’t distinguished between her and her famous song, “Stand by Your Man.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt Tammy Wynette as a person,” Hillary said. “I happen to be a country-Western fan. If she feels like I’ve hurt her feelings, I’m sorry about that.” Hillary’s attempt did not go over well with the singer, and the following day Hillary again called Wynette at her home in Nashville to apologize personally, and told her she would try to bring up the issue on her scheduled taping of Primetime Live with Sam Donaldson that night. After the call, Wynette said, “She seemed like a very nice lady and she seemed genuinely sorry.” The apology didn’t exactly fix the problem. “The undercurrent we couldn’t eradicate was the notion that their partnership was less a marriage fired by love than an arrangement based on ambition,” said George Stephanopoulos.

  Nonetheless, Hillary’s appearance on 60 Minutes was a triumph, and probably had saved Bill’s candidacy—because she had indeed stood by her man, as she would do again on the Today show when Monica Lewinsky became (like Gennifer Flowers) a household name. Bill finished second in the New Hampshire primary—a near-miracle, given what they had been through. His campaign, and Hillary, were not about to go down.

  STAN GREENBERG, the campaign’s chief polling consultant, was in awe of Hillary’s talents, her intellect, and especially her tough-mindedness. In 1990, the Clintons came out of a difficult gubernatorial primary nervous about the general election ahead. They invited Greenberg to Little Rock to help manage the rest of the campaign. The candidate’s brain trust became Hillary, Dick Morris, Greenberg, and Gloria King, who had replaced Betsey Wright as the governor’s chief of staff. “I came in to try to figure out a rationale for why you would give him another term,” Greenberg said years later. Clinton’s opponent was attacking him relentlessly on both his record and his character. The overwhelming strategic question, discussed immediately upon Greenberg’s arrival, was: “How aggressive to go in attacking the opponent and when to do it. And I can tell you she came down on the side of aggressive, and all on her own. She had a strong point of view…she was a fighter.”