A Woman in Charge

by Carl Bernstein

  Since the days of her work on Watergate, a whole new city had grown up along K Street north of Pennsylvania Avenue, stretching from fashionable Georgetown to political downtown—gleaming office buildings that housed more than 100,000 lobbyists, regulatory lawyers, public policy advocates, and their attendant pollsters, PR people, and legions of so-called grassroots guys who were paid millions of dollars by corporations and trade associations and unions to “spontaneously” organize the folks back home so that their congressmen wouldn’t be tempted to controvert the will of their biggest contributors. Part of this lobbying boom had been fueled by loopholes in campaign finance reform laws passed in the wake of Watergate, which had allowed hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions to be spread around the Congress, mostly by corporations. In Franklin Roosevelt’s time there were only a dozen lobbyists in town; when Ronald Reagan was inaugurated there were still fewer than one thousand. Capitol Hill, by the time of Clinton’s election, danced enthusiastically to the tune of the ten thousand lobbyists clustered around K Street, a gigue that owed almost nothing to either tradition, protocol, or decent government. The coarseness had its effect on debate in the House and Senate, which often sounded more like talk radio than deliberative government.

  “The concept of service has little political currency in Washington,” wrote political journalist Sidney Blumenthal in The New Yorker as the Clintons were getting ready to settle in. “Everybody is fair game, simply for being on the other side. Humiliating one’s prey, not merely defeating one’s foes, is central to the process. The press is hardly an impartial referee; rather, it is often caught up in a blundered game of chase.”

  Whatever Blumenthal lacked in irony he was on the money about much of the Washington press corps and the culture of the city they covered. His was a message that Hillary could embrace, along with its author, who would decamp soon enough from the magazine to become her amanuensis.

  HILLARY AND HER MENTOR on the Nixon impeachment staff, Bernie Nussbaum, had stayed in touch since 1974, as her young husband moved up the political ladder. Nussbaum had become a leading New York City lawyer specializing in corporate takeovers. In 1988, she had asked him to get ready to raise funds in New York for a presidential race. When her husband had finally made the run four years later, Nussbaum had helped organize some fund-raisers among lawyers in Manhattan. During the transition he had presided over a team of attorneys dealing with Justice Department policies.

  Less than two weeks before the inauguration, Susan Thomases phoned Nussbaum in Puerto Rico, where he was vacationing. She asked if, given a choice, would he rather be counsel to the president or deputy attorney general.

  Counsel to the president, he said without hesitation.

  Thomases told him to be in Little Rock the next morning, January 8, to meet with the Clintons. Upon his arrival, Nussbaum met with Thomases and Harold Ickes. The job was his. They immediately introduced him to the man who had already been named deputy counsel to the president, Vince Foster. It was clear to Nussbaum that the choice of a deputy was being imposed on him, and that in a sense Foster was looking him over, vetting him. Then he went to see Hillary.

  Watergate had been the crucible of Nussbaum’s experience in government, and over the next fifteen years, he had watched, somewhat bewildered, as each of Nixon’s successors became debilitated by legal difficulties: Carter in the Bert Lance affair; Reagan in Iran-contra, which then went on to taint Bush; even Ford in Nixon’s pardon.

  Now Nussbaum cautioned Hillary that since Watergate a new culture had taken hold in Washington, a culture of investigation, suspicion, and exposure that drove the media, but also the congressional opposition. The culture of the town had turned mean, and nobody was immune. FDR, Ike, JFK, Johnson—they’d all have been easy prey in today’s atmosphere in which every aspect of a president’s private or public life was fair game. Any legal problem, no matter how small, had to be dealt with quickly and effectively, before it did the kind of irreparable damage that Clinton’s immediate predecessors had suffered.

  Nussbaum was convinced that the counsel must be the president’s boldest and most determined advocate, serving him only. The counsel had to use every legal means to contain the small problems that could balloon into the kinds of scandals that had undermined Carter and Bush, and brought even the most popular president since Ike, Ronald Reagan, to the brink of impeachment. The independent counsel was still investigating Reagan after he was back on his ranch in California, and Bush’s role in Iran-contra was part of the investigation, too.

  “I’m looking for you to keep me out of trouble,” Clinton told Nussbaum—any kind of trouble, wherever it was coming from. The president’s counsel was his early warning system, his first line of defense.

  Clinton also asked Nussbaum what his impressions were of his deputy-to-be, Vince Foster.

  Nussbaum said he’d liked him and could see how serious and professional he was.

  “He’s a great guy,” said Clinton.

  Nussbaum liked the idea that Foster was a close friend of both Bill and Hillary. He regarded Foster as his partner in a new law firm. Foster concurred. “We’ll build a great little law firm,” he said. From the outset, it was clear that Nussbaum would report directly to the president, and that Foster saw his primary job as being Hillary’s lawyer, representing her private and public concerns.

  Given the investigative atmosphere of which he had warned, Nussbaum suggested that he and Foster examine each other’s potential vulnerabilities.

  “What’s the worst thing they can say about you?” asked Nussbaum.

  “Some people claim I had an affair with Hillary,” replied Foster.

  “Is it true?”

  “No, it’s not true,” said Foster.

  Several days later, Bill called Webb Hubbell and asked him to help prepare the new administration’s takeover of the Justice Department. Zoë Baird, a Warren Christopher protégée, the woman Hillary and Thomases had agreed should be the new attorney general (“the last woman standing,” joked other members of the transition team), needed help in organizing the department, Bill said. He wasn’t sure yet exactly what job Hubbell would eventually get at Justice, but there was no hesitation on Hubbell’s part about joining the team.

  Before leaving for Washington, he wanted to remove several cardboard file boxes from his office at the Rose Law Firm. They contained records he and Foster had put together on Whitewater—including the law firm’s files relating to the land deal—and other materials assembled by Betsey Wright and Diane Blair. Hubbell later said he assumed the papers, which were left behind when he went to Washington, would go to the Clintons’ personal attorney, once that person was designated.

  Hillary, Vince, and Webb—the Three Amigos—were to be reunited in Washington.

  7

  Inauguration

  There is no training manual for First Ladies.

  —Living History

  IT IS REMARKABLE how many of the contradictions of the Clinton presidency and its two principals were on display at the new administration’s difficult birthing: the faultless intentions, the reckless fund-raising, the seriousness, the infatuation with Hollywood, the idealism, the physical exhaustion, the sensitivity to matters of race, the boomer sensibility, the surprising naïveté, the intense religiosity of the new president and first lady, their folksy grandiosity, her disregard for the rituals of Washington and disdain for the press, the rivalry between Hillary and Al Gore, her sense of entitlement and the shading of the truth, her protective instincts toward her husband, her confusing relationship to feminism, her occasional tin ear, her lack of sophistication, her misreading of the voters’ health care mandate, the propensity of their enemies to hammer them for conduct that other presidents and their wives had gotten away with routinely. Less visible was the first fraying of the disintegrating and doomed relationship between Vince Foster and Hillary.

  The inauguration week was almost as much Hillary’s show as her husband’s—in conceptio
n, too—and marked her debut as story editor of the Clinton presidency. She and Bill had settled on five days of nonstop festivities, beginning with their arrival in the capital with the Gores by bus caravan. But it was Hillary, Susan Thomases, and Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason who had perfected the neopopulist motifs and fine-tuned the symbolic references into a coherent tale of national redemption and renewed civic purpose. The last, triumphant stage of their long journey to governance resonated profoundly for Hillary—from Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s plantation home overlooking the Shenandoah Valley, through rural Virginia, in exact reverse order of the route she had followed southward in August 1974 when she had left Washington upon Richard Nixon’s resignation to join twenty-nine-year-old Bill Clinton in Arkansas. The final miles to the crowds awaiting them in the city took the procession down Lee Highway, lined on both sides by citizens who seemed more prayerful and hopeful than exuberant. Bundled against the January chill, many held signs blessing the new president and first lady and wishing them Godspeed. The Clintons, through the windows of their bus, could glimpse the icy Potomac stretching below the Arlington Heights. The cherry trees on the riverbank were bare as the motorcade crossed Memorial Bridge to Lincoln’s temple, where tens of thousands of cheering, exultant supporters were waiting to proclaim the end of the Reagan-Bush era and the reclamation of the presidency by enlightened Democrats of a new generation.

  Every public inaugural appearance thereafter swathed Hillary and Bill in the symbolism of their heroes and shone a light on the new first lady as his full partner. The week’s events were choreographed to fix the attention of the American people on the historical legacy the Clintons saw their presidency as reviving and carrying forward into a new millennial age—Jefferson’s (the great Democrat and libertarian), Lincoln’s (hence the trip from Monticello to Lincoln’s marbled Memorial on the Mall), John F. Kennedy’s (hence Hillary and Bill’s visit to his simple gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery the evening before the inauguration), and Martin Luther King’s (whose birthday Clinton observed with an eloquent speech at Howard University).

  Every opportunity was exploited to contrast the egalitarian values and youth of the Clintons with the privileged era of Reagan and Bush, a plutocratic epoch that Hillary, more than Bill, believed was now in final retreat; and to proclaim a transparency in government that would extinguish all vestiges of Nixonian secrecy and paranoia in the White House.

  The tab for the week of celebration was fit for a pasha, running to more than $25 million, a record unsurpassed until George W. Bush’s $40 million extravaganza in 2000. Most of it was financed by the same kind of special interest and corporate back-scratching that had long paid the bills for Republican presidential campaigns and inaugurations. The new Democratic president seemed to justify it because of the “new direction” of his leadership. The explanation, with its attendant sense of entitlement, sounded positively Hillaryesque.

  Hillary thought the price in dollars was justified by the all-embracing message of every theme tent on the Mall, including Native American heritage, gay rights, country music, clog dancers, wood choppers, and unionized stevedores. In a sports arena in suburban Maryland, there was a star-suffused salute to the Clintons on inaugural eve. The gala, watched on television by a huge national audience, projected precisely how the Clintons wished to be perceived—as a brilliant, appealing, informal young president and his equally impressive, attractive wife, who was essential to the package, the two secure in marriage and unswerving purpose after a long and difficult journey in which their principled vision for the country never wavered. They sat onstage in two high-backed chairs through the whole production, smiling and interacting with a cast and script such that Washington had rarely seen. Barbra Streisand looked the new president in the eye and dedicated her signature song “Evergreen” to “You and Mrs. Clinton,” adding: “We must put children first and we are so fortunate to have a first lady who has fought for and will continue to fight for the rights of children.” The arena erupted. Fleetwood Mac, reunited for the occasion, flogged the chorale of the Clinton campaign, “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow).”

  Observing events from high in the rafters, a reporter who had attended more than a few quadrennial rituals of presidential assumption jotted in his notebook, “remembering Kennedy Inaugural, a snowy day when America was mesmerized by another young President’s wife…. This time the priority won’t be redecorating WH or bringing Pablo Casals to play in the East Room. HRC wants to tend to affairs of state with husband, change the country, not just hairstyles, bring the values of women—liberated women?—to the national weal; this time, Yo-Yo Ma and Stevie Nicks in the East Room.”

  Meanwhile, Jack Nicholson recited the words of Abraham Lincoln. Aretha Franklin, swathed from neck to toe in furs, sang from Les Misérables about single motherhood. Bob Dylan mumbled, “We gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.” Chuck Berry rang out “Reelin’ and Rockin’” with “Set my watch and it was quarter to eight/You know Bill’s gonna get the country straight.” LL Cool J rapped, “Ninety-three! U-nitee!/Time to par-tee with Big Bill and Hillaree.” Judy Collins sang “Amazing Grace.” Yo-Yo Ma played Bach. Michael Jackson appeared in formal Jackson moonwalk military dress and white gloves, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses, and his pet monkey perched on gold epaulets. Inevitably, he led the house in singing “We Are the World.”

  The gala was produced by Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason. Whatever the program’s considerable excesses (Warren Beatty, just married, recited poetry about marriage and honeymoons, political and otherwise), there was also a sense of unstilted fun to the evening, a quality in almost constant decline in official Washington for many years.

  Much of the week’s focus was on Hillary, who remained reticent when questions were raised by reporters about the costs of all the partying in her and her husband’s honor. A few days before the gala, she had been forced to instruct her brothers, Tony and Hughie, to cancel a series of self-aggrandizing parties they had dreamed up with help from delighted lobbyists to honor campaign aides and relatives of the Rodhams and the Clintons. The brothers had obtained $10,000 pledges from major corporations, always on the prowl for influence, to underwrite the events, the grandest of which was to have been a dinner-dance for one thousand guests, with ballroom-view tables on a balcony reserved for sponsors who could gaze upon the hoi polloi below. Ron Brown, the outgoing chairman of the Democratic Party and new secretary of commerce, was likewise compelled to scrap a dinner-dance in honor of himself that was to be financed by $10,000 donations from corporate invitees. The cancellations occurred only after the prospective sources of funding were disclosed in the press.

  Tony and Hughie, said Lisa Caputo, Hillary’s press secretary, had simply “made a mistake…. They didn’t tell Hillary. They didn’t tell the governor. They just didn’t know any better” than to solicit corporate financing for a presidential-family party.

  Hillary was fiercely protective of her younger brothers, who within months would be known throughout the West Wing as “the Monsters” for their embarrassing scrapes, strange attempts at policy intervention, and ethical imbroglios. Hughie and (more so) Tony represented a certain ironic yet harmonious continuity of the legacy of underachieving presidential brothers from Richard Nixon’s to Jimmy Carter’s: they were but presidential brothers-in-law, and yet, along with Bill’s brother, Roger, filled their stereotypical Washington roles with typecast fealty.

  “We’re now dealing with appearance problems, and they [Tony and Hughie] didn’t know the way it would appear,” Hillary’s incoming chief of staff, Maggie Williams, elaborated. “They didn’t think they were doing anything more than trying to get a reception paid for…. They now understand that this was not the right way of going about it, and it’s stopped.”

  The explanation was more forthright than the awkward attempts to explain how Hillary had come into possession of the beaded $14,000 designer gown that she was planning to wear to one of t
he inaugural balls. Asked who was paying the tab, Caputo initially described the dress as “a labor of love” by its creator, who considered it “a contribution to the Clinton-Gore efforts.” However, after press accounts noted that this was news to the couturier, Caputo backtracked. “There had been a miscommunication about the gown,” she said, adding that Hillary had intended to pay for it all along. A “check has already been cut.” The first lady “has also returned, or will be returning, any clothes that were sent to her which she did not decide to wear” for inaugural week, Caputo added preemptively. The new administration hadn’t yet reached the White House, and already Hillary, the first avowedly feminist first lady, found herself in the sort of situation, whether silly or symbolic depending on the judge, for which Nancy Reagan had had her wrists slapped by the press and Democrats.

  THE CLINTONS ARRIVED back at Blair House from the gala at 2 A.M., January 20, ten hours before Bill was to take the oath of office. His inaugural address was still rambling to the point that his aides were as worried about its length as its substance. With Hillary, Chelsea, and Al Gore seated on folding chairs in a small reception room, Bill stood in front of a TelePrompTer and began reading. Hillary, as usual, was his most important audience and critic. She had been discussing with him the themes of his address for weeks, since he’d started writing it back in Little Rock. The tone it set for the new administration had to be just right, and the example of JFK’s stirring edict to another generation—the last time a president in his forties had been inaugurated—was never far from mind.