A Woman in Charge

by Carl Bernstein

  Her message was as presumptuous as it was direct. The United States, she declared, was undergoing nothing less than a grave national “crisis of meaning and spirituality,” which she further diagnosed as “a sleeping sickness of the soul.” The latter phrase was that of Albert Schweitzer, she noted, who had discovered in colonial central Africa that more than the body could be ravaged by sleeping sickness.

  To support her sweeping assertion of sea-to-sea affliction, she shrewdly invoked the repentant deathbed remarks of Lee Atwater, the young architect of the slash-and-burn Republican politics of the Reagan-Bush era, who when he was “struck down with cancer…said something…which I cut out and carry with me in a little book I have of sayings and scriptures that I find important and that replenish me from time to time.” Her tack, brilliantly executed, sought (not incidentally) to reclaim from the Republican right its corner on issues of so-called family values. In the twelve years since the defeat of Jimmy Carter by Ronald Reagan, the male moguls of the Democratic Party had eschewed prominent mention of God or of the old verities and virtues, which by 1992 seemed to have become an exercise of Republican divine right. Hillary meant to change that.

  “Much of the energy animating the responsible fundamentalist right,” she said in an interview a few days after her Austin sermon, “has come from their sense of life getting away from us—of meaning being lost and people being turned into kind of amoral decision-makers because there weren’t any overriding values that they related to. And I have a lot of sympathy with that. The search for meaning should cut across all kinds of religious and ideological boundaries. That’s what we should be struggling with—not whether you have a corner on God.”

  Her witness was Atwater. “He said the following,” she proclaimed to her audience in Austin: “‘Long before I was struck with cancer, I felt something stirring in American society. It was a sense among the people of the country, Republicans and Democrats alike, that something was missing from their lives—something crucial. I was trying to position the Republican Party to take advantage of it. But I wasn’t exactly sure what it was. My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me. A little heart, a lot of brotherhood.

  “‘The eighties were about acquiring—acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn’t I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn’t I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye-to-eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime.

  “‘I don’t know who will lead us through the nineties, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society—this tumor of the soul.’” In fact, Hillary regarded the result of the 1992 presidential election as a cleansing of the national soul, a spiritual and political verdict.

  “That, to me, will be Lee Atwater’s real lasting legacy, not the elections that he helped to win,” declared Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first Democratic first lady since Lee Atwater had enunciated the postmodern Republican gospel and written the ballad of Willie Horton. *12 And there came from the crowd filling the arena in Austin shouts of “Amen” and “Yes, yes,” and cheering, followed by the kind of fervent murmur that, appropriately, usually attends a religious rally, not a political speech.

  “[T]he debate over family values,” she declared, was “off point” and “devised for political purposes. There is no—or should be no—debate that our family structure is in trouble. There should be no debate that children need the stability, the predictability of a family. But there should be debate over how we best make sure that children and families flourish. And once that debate is carried out on honest terms, then we have to recognize that either the old idea that only parental influence and parental values matter, or the nearly as old idea that only state programmatic intervention matters, are both equally fallacious.

  “Instead we ought to recognize what should be a common-sense truth—that children are the result of both the values of their parents and the values of the society in which they live…. That’s the kind of approach that has to get beyond the dogma of right or left, conservative or liberal.”

  Balancing the conservative-mind, liberal-heart equation, addressing “this tumor of the soul,” filling the “spiritual vacuum” that Lee Atwater had discovered on his deathbed, these notions, she suggested, would inform the Clintonian principles of governance.

  “We need a new politics of meaning. We need a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring. We need a new definition of civil society which answers the unanswerable questions posed by both the market forces and the governmental ones, as to how we can have a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.”

  On this day, Hillary appeared intent on articulating for herself, her husband, and their presidency an overarching, benevolent, even deistic governmental philosophy that embraced both traditional notions of family and individual responsibility, as well as belief in compassionate government programs to help those less able to help themselves. The Clinton presidency would be the calm spiritual harbor in the ugly political storm. By choosing her husband as president of the United States, the electorate had shown it was intent on “remolding society.” It had now embarked on fundamental change, including the recognition of a proper spiritual realm in government policy; and the faithful at last had a path to follow. To Lee Atwater’s question, she responded:

  “Who will lead us out of this spiritual vacuum? The answer is, All of us. Because remolding society does not depend on just changing government, on just reinventing our institutions to be more in tune with present realities. It requires each of us to play our part in redefining what our lives are and what they should be…seizing the opportunities that you are given, and of making the very best choices you can. That is what this administration, this President, and those of us who are hoping for these changes are attempting to do.” It sounded a little like a presidential partnership with God.

  A few weeks earlier, Hillary had been visited in the White House by Michael Lerner, the editor and publisher of Tikkun, a bimonthly secular Jewish journal that was an amalgam of liberal cultural and political commentary, post-Marxist dialectic, Talmudic principle, and New Age jargon.

  In Hillary’s office, as he had in his magazine, Lerner had propounded his Politics of Meaning, a vision of spiritually infused public life that very much fit Hillary’s perception of the raison d’être of government service. Lerner’s underlying assumption held that government had satisfactorily addressed the basic question of political rights, if not the economic needs, of the people; “but for the majority of Americans, there’s another set of needs, totally ignored: The need to be part of an ethically based spiritual community that links us to a higher purpose. Many of us are involved in social change movements like the women’s movement, the environmental movement, the movement for economic justice, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, the labor movement,” Lerner had written. “And yet, we believe that these movements have tended to underplay or even deny a very important dimension of human life—the spiritual dimension.”

  In Austin, Hillary borrowed from her discussion with Lerner, asserting that “We are, I think, in a crisis of meaning. Why is it in a country as economically wealthy as we are…there is this undercurrent of discontent—this sense that somehow economic growth and prosperity, political democracy and freedom are not enough? That we lack, at some core level, meaning in our individual lives and meaning collectively—that sense that our lives are part of some greater effort, that we are connected to one another, that community means that we have a place where we belong no matter who we are?”

  Her father’s dying was obviously weighing on her, and when she did briefly discuss the need to “provide decent, affordable health ca
re to every American” the words sounded almost tortured. “We have to ask hard questions about every aspect of our health care system. Why do doctors do what they do? Why are nurses not permitted to do more than they do? Why are patients put in the position they’re in? When does life start; when does life end? Who makes those decisions?…[These] are issues that we have to summon up what we believe is morally and ethically and spiritually correct and do the best we can with God’s guidance.

  “How do we create a system that gets rid of the micro-management, the regulation and the bureaucracy, and substitutes instead human caring, concern and love? And that is our real challenge in redesigning a health care system.”

  By the end of her sermon, Hillary seemed to be lapsing back into the same kind of banal generalities (“We must make change our friend, not our enemy”—the same words that her husband had used in his peroration at Camp David, just before introducing her) that had punctuated her Wellesley commencement remarks. Her answer to most of what ailed the nation—indeed humanity—might be construed as a spiritual malaise that had settled over the planet, and enervated its elites from journalists to politicians.

  “What do our governmental institutions mean? What does it mean to be educated? What does it mean to be a journalist? What does it mean in today’s world to pursue not only vocations, to be part of institutions, but to be human? And, certainly, coming off the last year when the ethos of selfishness and greed were given places of honor never before accorded, it is certainly timely to ask ourselves these questions.”

  Such generalities, both in her remarks at Austin and in Michael Lerner’s annunciations in Tikkun, led The New Republic magazine to comment, “It is good to hear the First Lady is also pro-meaning, but before we sign on, one question:

  “What on earth are these people talking about?”

  The end of her sermon, about the necessity to reject cynicism, was especially striking for a woman who, only weeks earlier, had sent her minions from the Camp David mountaintop down to the White House swamp to write a story about “villains” and, in her next major appearance after Austin, would advise the Senate Democrats that the time had come to “demonize” those who would slow down the health care train for some important roadwork. “To fill that spiritual vacuum that Lee Atwater talked about,” she said in Austin, would require “most profoundly and importantly…millions and millions of changes that take place on the individual level as people reject cynicism…as they truly begin to try to see other people as they wish to be seen and to treat them as they wish to be treated.”

  ONLY HOURS BEFORE her father died, Hillary returned to Washington from Little Rock. She had been at his bedside there, along with Chelsea, for two weeks as the family awaited his death.

  Upon her return, Hillary found the White House in disarray. She had always been the one person able to keep her husband focused, so her short absence was noticeable. She blamed Bill’s staff for making bad judgment calls, for not planning and executing well enough. The health care initiative was in trouble. She was frustrated, sad, and drained.

  To make matters worse, Hillary learned that while she had been tending to her father on his deathbed Bill had taken Barbra Streisand—who had gone to the White House to give the president a preview of her new album—and his mother to the annual Gridiron Club dinner (a Washington institution at which the Washington press corps salutes itself and the president). Streisand had boasted about sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom. Soon after, Hillary reportedly ordered Streisand banned from the White House (on the ground that, being unmarried, it would be unseemly for her and her then-fiancé to stay together in the presidential mansion). Members of the press accompanying Clinton on his jog the following morning noticed that he had a deep scratch along his jaw. Dee Dee Myers explained to reporters that Clinton had cut himself shaving. But she, like many of the reporters, came to believe the wound had been inflicted by Hillary in her anger over the Streisand invitation at a time when her father was dying.

  Two days later, the president eulogized his “tough and gruff” father-in-law in a simple funeral service at the Scranton church where Hillary, her father, and her brothers had been baptized. Hillary’s relationship with her father had been rocky and tense at times, but she felt a heavy weight of grief at his loss. Bill recalled so many years before when Hugh drove to Arkansas to help in that first campaign in 1974. “He never told a living soul I was in love with his daughter, just went up to people and said, ‘I know you’re a Republican and so am I. I think Democrats are just one step short of communism, but this kid’s all right.’”

  As the church bells pealed, naval pallbearers had carried the coffin, draped in an American flag, into the brick-and-stone church. Looking toward his wife and the Rodham family in the front pew, Clinton said, “Lord, they loved to argue. Each one tried to rewrite history to put the proper spin on it. It was a wonderful preparation for politics.”

  AT THE END of the month, on the weekend of April 23–25, Bill and Hillary attended a political retreat for Senate Democrats at the Kingsmill Conference Center in Williamsburg, Virginia, that was closed to the press. Hillary updated those in attendance about the progress of the health care reform task force and the upcoming reform bill.

  Hillary’s Golden Rule could be a sometime thing. Her remarks now were received with disgust and distrust by two senators in particular, Bill Bradley and Pat Moynihan, who were among the most thoughtful and highly regarded men in Congress and who should have been natural allies of the Clintons. Instead, they became deeply alienated from both. Bradley and Moynihan later said they were flabbergasted at Hillary’s words and attitude that afternoon, but each came to believe that the incident was indicative of something more revealing about her character.

  Hillary understood—has always understood—that words count, and on this occasion she was asked by Bradley whether the Clintons’ failure to meet their promise of submitting health care legislation to Congress in one hundred days—by then only a few days ahead—would make it more difficult to win passage as the administration’s plan became competitive with other legislative goals on the calendar. Perhaps some substantive changes might be required in the interest of realism, Bradley suggested.

  No, Hillary responded icily, there would be no changes because delay or not, the White House would “demonize” members of Congress and the medical establishment who would use the interim to alter the administration’s plan or otherwise stand in its way.

  “That was it for me in terms of Hillary Clinton,” Bradley said many years later. “You don’t tell members of the Senate you are going to demonize them. It was obviously so basic to who she is. The arrogance. The assumption that people with questions are enemies. The disdain. The hypocrisy.”

  Lawrence O’Donnell explained the depth of Moynihan’s disappointment with the woman who would eventually succeed him in the Senate. The senator “didn’t hold grudges, didn’t personalize such matters,” said O’Donnell. “But the ‘demonizing’ colored his perception of Hillary, and how she operated, for the rest of his life.”

  APRIL WAS a particularly difficult month. Hillary had to grieve her father’s death while trying to pick up the pieces of health care reform, something she believed would be the most important aspect of her husband’s presidency and her legacy. She was angry that other things were taking precedence over her portfolio.

  Bill and Hillary recognized they had not been able to make progress on nearly as many things as fast as they had hoped. To mitigate some of the criticism the administration was expecting, Bill held a press conference on April 23, a week shy of the first hundred days. “In this first hundred days we have already fundamentally changed the direction of an American government,” he said. It was a bold statement for a president who couldn’t deliver a health care plan within the timeframe he had promised, and whose basic economic stimulus package—the first element of his larger fiscal plan—had failed to pass in the Senate.

  On April 30, every member of the White House sta
ff upstairs and downstairs was given a long-stemmed pink rose, and a notecard. It read: “I want to thank you for all the work you’ve done since the inauguration. We have an historic opportunity to make great things happen in our nation. Thanks for being part of the first 100 days.” Each was signed, “Bill” and “Hillary.”

  13

  The Cruel Season

  [T]o achieve our overall goals for the economy, we had to sacrifice some specific promises.

  —Living History

  HILLARY’S ANGER at her husband’s aides, the Democrats in Congress, and the Republican opposition was heightened by the toxic culture of Washington itself, manifested, as she saw it, in the unchecked power of the press, and personified by a permanent political and social elite more covetous of its personal prerogatives and perks than zealous of the commonweal.

  She had arrived in January displaying supreme self-confidence. No first lady had come to the White House with as much substantive experience in government and politics. Yet, somehow, this bright, orderly, and supposedly most logical and disciplined of women failed either to comprehend or appreciate the degree to which the town’s political, social, and media cultures were inextricably linked, and required careful tending.

  There were Freudian, Machiavellian, even Darwinian theories about her self-destructive disdain for the ways and means of Washington (prior to her election to the U.S. Senate), and her inability to convert an inbred, parochial, local culture to her own uses—as she had in Arkansas, a place that would seem at first glance far less amenable to her charms than the nation’s capital. It was all the more confounding because she was now positioned to “do all the good you can” as perhaps no woman in American history before her.