A Woman in Charge

by Carl Bernstein

  One of the president’s principal deputies, who was present for many of the meetings at which Hillary tried to persuade her husband’s advisers, could see her frustration growing, “because the budget [uncertainty] was preventing him from preparing for health care.” This official concluded that Hillary’s real interest in deficit reduction was virtually nonexistent. “The Rubins and Bentsens of the world were also the ones who were most skeptical about the health care plan. They saw it as big government—that it wouldn’t be respected by the markets. She was feeling hemmed in—her attitude was, ‘The same people that are making us give up our dreams on the economy are trying to do it to health care too.’ So you could sense her bristling. Rubin was careful. He certainly believed in universal coverage. But he had specific questions—doubts—about the way Ira and Hillary were doing it. The numbers. The mechanism. That it wasn’t thought through enough.”

  IN A BRILLIANT STROKE, the president had invited Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, to sit next to Hillary in the gallery for his speech to Congress of February 17, thus demonstrating implicit support for his economic plan and Hillary’s ambitions for health care. Though the chairmanship of the Fed was considered a nonpartisan position, and Greenspan had been appointed by George Bush, the president’s request that he sit next to the first lady made it all but impossible for Greenspan to decline. Moreover, he was pleased with the direction in which Clinton was proceeding on the budget.

  Though the budget Clinton described in his speech did not include funding for universal health care, Hillary received meaningful consolation in a few lines in which he reaffirmed his commitment to her plans. “All of our efforts to strengthen the economy will fail unless we also take this year—not next year, not five years from now, but this year—bold steps to reform our health care system,” the president said. “Reducing health care costs can liberate literally hundreds of billions of dollars for new investment and growth and jobs, reducing not only our deficit but expanding investment in America.” It was the biggest applause line of the night, and the television cameras were trained on Hillary, beaming, with Greenspan beside her, as Clinton had known they would be.

  But the opponents of the health care reform envisioned by the Clintons now knew they had the means to effectively attack her plan, and perhaps sink it. The country’s medical establishment, represented by the American Medical Association, had been successful since the Truman administration in killing all attempts at health care reform. On February 25, the equally establishment Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and new organizations formed specifically to fight Hillary’s health care plan filed a lawsuit in federal court demanding that the secret deliberations of the health care task force be outlawed; that its meetings be ordered open to press and public; and that the names of the five hundred consulting experts be released. “That would be like opening the White House at every staff meeting we have,” the president said. It would be impossible to “get anything done.” Health care would be fully and fairly debated, he promised, and every interest group would be able to voice its opinions, once the bill made it to Congress.

  Hillary fully understood what had happened. She charged that her opponents had used an “obscure law” to undermine the orderly process of developing her plan. It had been a deft political ploy to create an exaggerated impression of secrecy.

  She told Vince Foster to fix it.

  THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN Hillary and Foster, said Webb Hubbell, “was no longer co-equals. He was working for her. Originally she had worked for him [at the Rose Law Firm]. At first he was thrilled to be working at the White House. But the relationship was shifting…. As opposed to, Let’s talk this out, it was, Let’s get this fixed.”

  In effect, Hillary burdened Foster with much of the weight of her hopes for health care. The high stakes of the lawsuit were clear. If they lost in court, she feared something akin to Humpty Dumpty’s fate—Hillary was not sure her health care initiative could ever be put back together again.

  “I think the beginning of Vince’s downturn was when the health care task force was sued,” said Hubbell, whom Foster immediately enlisted to help him. Vince said he would need all the available resources of the Justice Department. Every relevant related case needed to be researched, as well as the legislative intent of Congress in regard to government boards. Was there a way to get an immediate dismissal of the suit on jurisdictional grounds? Did the plaintiffs have standing? And speed was essential.

  Within several days, more than one hundred Justice Department lawyers were working under their supervision on health care matters, several from every department. Then 150 were working. Hillary was constantly on the phone asking questions, following up.

  “Instead of a team working together toward a glorious goal, [Vince and Hillary] were suddenly attorney and client,” said Hubbell. “His legal advice was now front-page news. And with the pressure Hillary was under to get a health care bill passed in the administration’s One Hundred Days, she became a very demanding client indeed.”

  Vince’s office was only a few feet from Hillary’s, across a reception area in the West Wing. Hubbell was seven blocks away at the Justice Department. Vince told him, “Webb, I told Hillary you’re in charge of this at Justice. And that you and I are talking, and talking constantly. This is the most important thing we can do—make sure that we get this thing through, win this litigation.” Hubbell had always known Foster to be cool, methodical, imperturbable. Not now. Reporters were constantly calling him. “‘Fix it, Vince!’ he said she had hissed. It hurt him deeply. The stress was getting to us all…. She was the boss. And when she says, ‘Win the litigation,’ you’re feeling pressure from the boss. Not only the boss, but a very good friend, who’s under a lot of stress, and taking a lot of heat for this…. He was feeling the pressure, and it was a different relationship.”

  The efforts of Foster, Nussbaum, Hubbell, and an army of Justice Department lawyers came to virtually naught. On March 10, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, ruled that Hillary should be treated like an “outsider” working for the White House, and thus the health care task force would have to meet in public when gathering facts.

  Technically, the decision was not a total loss: the judge ruled that staff-level working groups could still meet behind closed doors and that the task force could meet privately when creating policy proposals for the president or giving him advice. Practically, the White House would merely have to comply with legal requirements for crafting a task force charter and publish meeting notices in the Federal Register. But it would have to list its consultants, whom reporters would immediately seek out.

  Perception was the most important consideration of all, and it was clear that the judge had delivered a stinging rebuke to the first lady and the president. He had armed the Clintons’ opponents with exactly the weapon they needed: opprobrium.

  Hillary had put enormous pressure on Foster and he had failed.

  NEARLY A MONTH AFTER Bill’s speech to the joint session of Congress, he still had not made a decision about whether to include health care in the budget. But he was feeling Hillary’s unrelenting pressure.

  On March 11, he placed a phone call to Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, the senior Democrat in the Senate, whose support was essential to the legislative success of health care reform. The senator was famously known for his “Byrd rule,” prohibiting the introduction of “extraneous” matters into the supposedly pure budget process: incorporation of health care in the budget would put its consideration on a fast track and exempt it from much of the scrutiny required of other bills, and keep it insulated from threats of filibuster. Majority Leader Mitchell, Senator Jay Rockefeller (also of West Virginia), and the president all pushed the chairman to forgo his rule and allow the incorporation of Hillary’s health care plan in the budget. Byrd refused.

  Thereafter, Gephardt and Mitchell, the senior leaders of the pr
esident’s party in Congress, warned Hillary that it would be impossible to pass both the budget and health care legislation before the 1994 congressional elections. The Clintons would pay a great price for ignoring the two leaders and not delaying. Later, Bill recognized his mistake in not taking a longer view.

  Hillary now hurried to meet with congressmen and senators to agree on a bill they could give Congress to vote on. Only later, with the benefit of her Senate experience, did she realize that to ignore Byrd’s opposition was a grave error. Her desperation to present a good health plan to the American people, to keep her promise, in her eyes, had forced her to act imprudently. Later, while a member of the Senate herself, she came to appreciate Byrd’s position.

  At the time, however, Hillary’s outrage was concentrated as much on the Democratic political establishment as the Republican opposition. “She was furious with the Democrats because they didn’t rise up and stand with her in what she tried to do,” her friend Sara Ehrman said.

  There had been no “due deference” paid by the Democratic leadership to her and her husband, the president, Hillary said.

  12

  The Politics of

  Meaning…and Family

  [I]f I hadn’t believed in prayer before 1992, life in the White House would have persuaded me.

  —Living History

  AT THE TIME of his son-in-law’s inauguration, Hugh Rodham was eighty-one years old, in frail health and more foul-tempered than ever. “When he turned eighty,” said his son Tony, “he figured out that he could say just about anything he wanted. Who’s going to stop him?” His health had been in decline since he had suffered a heart attack during Bill’s gubernatorial inaugural speech to the Arkansas legislature in 1983, after which he’d undergone a coronary bypass. Several strokes followed in the next decade, during which his wife became his caretaker. At the White House, often confined to a wheelchair, Hugh was regarded by many members of the staff and Secret Service as rude and nasty. “He was mean, mean, mean,” said one aide to the president.

  On March 19, Hillary and some twenty staff members had decided to celebrate the House passage of Bill’s economic stimulus package with lunch in the White House mess. It was one of the rare moments when Hillary let down her guard. It was then that Carolyn Huber whispered to her that her father had had a stroke. She traveled immediately to Little Rock to be by her father’s bedside. While she was in Arkansas, Vince Foster would file an appeal to the court’s decision regarding the health care task force, and Donna Shalala and Tipper Gore would take over Hillary’s responsibilities at previously scheduled health care forums and tours around the country.

  Hillary’s days in the hospital were a painful yet transforming experience. While the press waited outside for news, Hillary talked to other family members of patients who were sick and dying, and to hospital personnel. She wrote in Living History that she learned of doctors distressed because their patients couldn’t afford to have prescriptions filled, as well as people who had to make prescriptions last by riskily skipping doses. She said all of this buttressed her notion of how vital health care reform was.

  While Hillary was away, the American Medical Association bused hundreds of doctors from every state to Capitol Hill to visit their elected representatives with a central message: universalize health insurance, stop the rise in health costs, but do not freeze physician fees as Hillary wished to do. In a closed meeting, Magaziner told about thirty House Democrats that the administration was “leaning toward requiring” that individuals pay the percentage of health insurance that their employers did not cover, or, if they were self-employed, buy their own policy. Meanwhile, under a court order, the White House released the names of the 511 federal employees, congressional aides, and outside consultants who were participating in the health care task force.

  IN THEIR FIRST months in the White House, both Bill and Hillary were force-fed the unpalatable truth that, contrary to their expectations, the capital was not to be easily commanded in the same way they had dominated the politics of a small Southern state. Bill matured politically during his eight years as president, learning to achieve many of his objectives piecemeal in the face of adamant Republican opposition. But in terms of his character, he remained basically unchanged: ambitious, narcissistic, charming, brilliant, roguish, undisciplined, incredibly able—and often personally disappointing. The engine of Hillary’s evolution and of her enormous capacity for change seemed sturdily bolted under the hood of her religious convictions, a set of beliefs that to some bordered on a messiah-like self-perception, to others a license to do whatever she pleased in the name of God, and to others a touchstone of spirituality that infused her notions of love, caring, and service.

  Since mid-century, with the exception of the Carter years, the White House had been largely the spiritual province of such establishmentarian preachers, priests, and evangelists as the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, Francis Cardinal Spellman, and Dr. Billy Graham. Their eminent visitations had lent an imprimatur of white Christian approval to the works of Democrats and Republicans alike. The Clinton White House, however, from the earliest days of the administration, became a welcoming beacon for a procession of less exalted reverends and rabbis, theologians and gurus, New Age spiritualists and sages, from serious to (arguably) charlatan. Eventually, Graham’s role of unelected spiritual adviser to the president would be inherited by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, a comfortable and—especially during the Lewinsky affair—politically useful presence whose own sins of the flesh were of a nature quite familiar to the first couple.

  Part of the changed religious dynamic of the Clinton White House was an openness to new ideas and spiritual paths plowed since the 1960s and 1970s, particularly offshoots of the movements inspired by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and the black church, and the psychospiritual pseudosciences derived from twelve-step philosophy and theories of co-dependence. But most of the change was attributable to the simple fact that Bill and Hillary were both genuinely religious. Bill would say that one of the two most impressive world figures he’d met during his presidency was Pope John Paul II (the other was Yitzhak Rabin), notwithstanding the Clintons’ profound disagreement with the pope’s views about women’s rights, abortion, and birth control.

  The ambitious nature of Hillary’s vision could be glimpsed vaguely through the inarticulate haze of her extemporaneous commencement remarks at Wellesley. A decade later, as a woman in her thirties, she had preached a series of Sunday school and church sermons in Arkansas (never unearthed by the national press) which were clearer evidence that she was evolving a politics that borrowed heavily from her spiritual notions. Before the presidential campaign, she had done occasional lay preaching and taught adult Bible classes. During the campaign, she had carried with her everywhere a tiny Bible.

  Perhaps the most revealing interview she gave between her husband’s election and inauguration was with the United Methodist News Service, though it received scant attention in the mainstream press. A single paragraph encapsulated much of what her friends found so appealing about her, and her enemies were most enraged by: her seeming moral certainty.

  Methodism’s “emphasis on personal salvation combined with active applied Christianity,” she said, was what she believed in. “As a Christian, part of my obligation is to take action to alleviate suffering. Explicit recognition of that in the Methodist tradition is one reason I’m comfortable in this church.”

  Though Hillary had often spoken from the pulpit, never had she allowed herself so public an epiphany, or preached so grandly, as at the University of Texas Field House in Austin on April 6, 1993, with fourteen thousand congregants in attendance, while her father lay dying not far away in Little Rock. The occasion was the annual Liz Carpenter Lecture, named for Lady Bird Johnson’s White House press secretary, a woman who had commanded a degree of influence, respect, and affection in Washington that few of Hillary’s aides, sadly, would ever attain. Both Lady Bird Johnson and Liz Carpenter were seated on the
stage with Hillary.

  It had been her intent, and that of the White House political staff, to use the occasion—on the seventy-fifth day of the Clinton presidency—for her first major speech on health care reform. Instead, as she flew from Washington to Austin on Executive One that morning, she began scribbling notes that reflected both the intense internal turmoil, personal and political, of the past weeks, and the calm, purpose, and steadiness she found in scripture and religion. The stroke her father suffered eighteen days earlier had left him in extremely critical condition and the family with an imminent decision about discontinuing life support. She had rarely left his bedside for more than a day since. Newspaper photos of Hillary during the previous two weeks, taken between hospital and car, “showed the toll of universal truths about what it means to lose a loved one,” a Washington Post reporter wrote.

  The themes of the speech she delivered in Austin, though obviously rendered more immediate and profound by the fact of her father’s illness (“When does life begin?” she asked at one point, then lowering her voice, “When does it end?”), had been developing in her mind for months, maybe even years, some of her aides said later. The speech—a sermon, really—was as audacious a public address in memory by a first lady, ample evidence of how far (or not, some critics later decided) Hillary had traveled as a thoughtful human being and as a speaker since Wellesley. Instead of searching for words at the podium, as she had at her commencement, they now flowed almost perfectly, in full, often elegant sentences delivered from her handwritten notes jotted on the plane, extemporaneous bursts, and (to a much lesser extent) from an earlier draft of a health care speech she had worked on with the White House speechwriters. Yet, as she’d struggled to do since Wellesley, she was still determined to solve the mind-conservative, heart-liberal, dilemma.