A Woman in Charge

by Carl Bernstein

  But something essential had changed since the Clintons had left Little Rock. In Arkansas, her hand had always been firmly on the wheel with his, and on the infrequent occasions when their enterprise had been forced to take an unexpected sharp turn, they were accustomed to steering it together. The exception had been after his decision not to seek the presidency in 1988, when his recklessness had almost destroyed any chance of fulfilling their dreams.

  In their first months in the White House, a new and unfamiliar political dynamic was in play, owing largely to the hard economic realities they faced. Bill had surrounded himself with a coterie of strangers to deal with the economy, actuaries, Wall Street bond traders, and Washington insiders (however distinguished) whose instincts were almost exactly the opposite of Hillary’s. Lloyd Bentsen seemed to have cast a spell over him. Worse, from her point of view, they all seemed to be steering Bill in the wrong direction, pulling against her, oblivious to her guidance and ignoring her navigational skill, heedless of what she and Bill stood for or how he had successfully operated in the past.

  In Arkansas, almost no major policy decisions had been made in contravention of Hillary’s views, and if they were, she had been present at the creation. Betsey Wright had an inviolate rule: that Hillary, Bill, and Dick Morris, convened by Wright, were always fully involved in consequential discussions and decisions. Since the Clintons had come to Washington, Hillary had to fight both for time on the president’s calendar to deal with health care and, incredibly, given their history, for dominant influence over policy and process. The situation increasingly exasperated her, diminished her stature inside the administration, and chipped away at her mystique. Whatever indignities she may have suffered because of her husband’s sexual adventuring, she had never before experienced a diminution of her primacy in policy matters.

  Bill now seemed to be occasionally avoiding or ignoring her advice, acquiescing even to her exclusion from some meetings that had significant implications for her health care plans. “You keep telling us we have to put off these meetings [to discuss health care] because it’s going to hurt the economic plan,” she complained to her husband and his advisers en masse. Others implied in her stead—since it was not the kind of thing she would say—that the situation was humiliating to her. He had appointed her to develop the signature policy initiative of the Clinton presidency, yet he and she seemed at times to be operating at cross-purposes to achieve it.

  “You could see her feeling hemmed in,” said a senior aide to the president. She believed the administration should ride health care as its lead vehicle, clearing the way for other achievements and reelection in 1996. “Her attitude was, The same people who are making us give up our dreams on the economy are trying to do it to health care, too.”

  In Little Rock during the transition, she had put in place, with Bill’s approval, a structure to ensure her oversight of all domestic policy. She and Susan Thomases had staffed the White House so that her influence and, if necessary, intervention would almost always prevail. Maggie Williams attended the daily meeting of senior presidential aides chaired by Mack McLarty, whom Hillary had personally favored to keep the trains rolling smoothly. The cabinet and the president’s economic advisers had been vetted personally by Hillary, to ensure Bill’s comfort and hers, and guard against surprises. She had located her own office in the West Wing, where little of consequence was likely to escape her attention, and others could not fail to notice her big foot. She had intended and expected that the clear goals and priorities she and Bill had evolved over a lifetime would guide administration policy. Those goals were methodically catalogued in a presidential campaign platform she had helped draft, and that hadn’t been meant to be discarded the minute the new president was inaugurated, as was the custom.

  Fundamental economic decisions, in her expectation, were to be driven by the Clintons’ larger goals, not vice versa. But the enormity of the budget deficit had, of course, caught everyone by surprise, and had utterly upset the priorities and planned methodology of governance in the first hundred days, and from there forward. The new economic realities gave the economic advisers, notably the deficit hawks, a sovereignty in social policy that had never been intended—certainly not by Hillary.

  By June, she believed their agenda was on the verge of overpowering basic principles and programs she and Bill stood for. Bentsen, Rubin, Shalala, Panetta, and Rivlin kept chipping away at her health care design before she could even see the whole picture in sufficient detail herself.

  The orthodox litany of the hawks pierced her ears and was unceasing: “It won’t be respected by the markets.” “Wall Street won’t accept Big Government.” “We must keep down costs.” “If there are price controls, there will be a negative reaction by the markets.” Sometimes Bill seemed to follow his economic aides like a dog on a leash, other times he’d strain and bark and lash out, but in the end he—and, increasingly, she and her health care mission—was restrained by their superior strength. Hillary felt she was losing the fight for the soul of the Clinton presidency.

  Bentsen, especially, felt Hillary approached her work with a holier-than-thou attitude that left little room for criticism of any kind. She appeared at times to be uncharacteristically bewildered, driven too often by frustration and increasingly by wrath, instead of her usual methodical ways. Through the summer, the conflict between Hillary and the economic advisers expanded and became both superheated and personalized. Bentsen and his deputies believed Hillary was extracting her own directives about health care in private from the president, and that further advice wasn’t welcome. In fact, “we did give the right kind of advice,” Shalala insisted later. “She just didn’t take it. The first month, Alice Rivlin gave the president an idea: simply go to the Hill with a set of policy ideas, and then draft the legislation with the Hill, so [members of Congress] would be co-opted. In the end, we co-opted no one.”

  The advisers worried that Hillary’s plan, as developing, was bloated with overregulation, too ambitious in concept, and too difficult to maneuver politically. Part of the problem was that they could not get a handle on what it was she and Magaziner were proposing exactly, because they both spoke in generalities and promised forthcoming details that rarely materialized with meaningful specificity. To fully realize the “grandiose” (as some of them called it behind her back) kind of reforms Hillary was envisioning might take a decade or longer. It was difficult to get Hillary to focus on the substantive aspects of decisions being made that mutually affected health care and the overall economic plan. “It was hard to get her attention on thinking through the implications of the decisions or anything else,” Shalala recalled. “But that was my experience with Hillary. She was doing twelve things at once, especially after her father’s death and the disarray in the White House in her absence.”

  Concerned that the president’s economic advisers weren’t included enough in the health care reform process, Rubin suggested in May that two teams debate how extensive the proposal should be. More than thirty top advisers gathered with Hillary and Bill in the Roosevelt Room to hear the arguments in behalf of two approaches: The first was less costly but essentially covered only catastrophic or serious health problems. The second was much more comprehensive, Bill and Hillary’s preferred plan according to those who observed their reactions that day. But, inexplicably, the health care task force hadn’t come up with hard numbers about the actual savings over the existing system the plan would produce. The stakes of that were enormous: if the promised savings did not materialize, Clinton’s advisers feared he’d have to raise taxes radically. Some of the people in the room were even worried that the plan might cause enough small businesses to go bankrupt and trigger a recession. In private, many members of the economic team were terrified by how Hillary was going about health care reform. At the debate, however, officials who were already wary of criticizing the first lady in front of the president were loath to poke holes in her plan in front of a group. Instead, they pronounced the mor
e comprehensive plan commendable but added phrases like “if the numbers work out” or “so long as it doesn’t divert resources from other things we want to do.”

  At the close of the three-hour meeting, Hillary warned those present not to talk to the press. Still, accounts reached the New York Times and the Washington Post in a matter of days, with headlines declaring a dispute between Hillary and Bill’s economic advisers. The first lady was enraged, and she took her frustrations out on her husband. “Are these people part of the administration or not?” she demanded. “What side are they on? These guys are going to derail you.” The American people hadn’t put him in office to reduce the deficit, she snapped. “You didn’t get elected to do Wall Street economics.” Worried about future leaks, Bill decided that health care meetings would no longer be so inclusive.

  BILL CLINTON, no matter how fiercely embattled or frustrated in those first six months of his presidency, woke up every day thrilled and enthusiastic about the task ahead. He’d had his sights set on this job since he was a teenager. “I love this stuff,” he often said. An optimist by nature, he had confidence in his vision and his ability to move past the obstacles. His anger and ill-humor in those early months rarely lasted long. The pattern had been established many years before: he blew up, used and sometimes abused people around him who became accustomed to his outbursts (though he seemed oblivious to his own excess), but he was invariably invigorated by the challenges. “The difference between their temperaments is very simple as far as I’m concerned,” said Bob Boorstin, Hillary’s deputy for press and communications on the health care task force. “He gets angry, and he gets over it. She gets angry, and she remembers it forever.”

  A White House aide who saw Hillary almost daily observed, “Some mornings she would wake up pissed off, and some mornings it would be okay. Sometimes it would be a glorious day. She has the capacity for epiphanous, spiritual awakenings.” Unfortunately, those days on which the spiritual equation was wrong-sided could be brutal for others. “The person on the receiving end never gets over it,” her longtime aide and family retainer Carolyn Huber had observed of Hillary’s ire in the last year Bill served as governor.

  One of the most senior White House officials, who was often at her (and her husband’s) side during the many critical events of the 1992 presidential campaign and the White House years, raised in a conversation toward the end of the Clinton presidency the question of whether Hillary had ever been by nature a genuinely happy or even contented person. This deputy maintained that perhaps the most essential thing to understand about Hillary was that (from what he had learned and observed) she must have been an unhappy person for most of her adult life. And a very angry one at that, in his view, often in a state of agitated discontent in the years he worked with her, sometimes icy cold and embittered, though obviously capable of fun and laughter and warm friendship (though rarely of irony). Not everyone agreed, especially in Hillaryland. And it’s important to note that much of the anger and unhappiness seemed to dissipate following her election to the Senate. Thereafter, for the first time since her wedding day, she began to eclipse and succeed in the public consciousness—and Democratic Party—the dominating presence of her husband. It was her turn, and that might have liberated her.

  The deputy believed that Hillary’s deepest anger was toward her husband, perhaps the source of most of it, unless it came from her childhood and had been aggravated by Bill and the compromises she’d allowed herself to make in their marriage. But the deputy was also aware of the enormous strength of the bond the Clintons had forged, their own obvious belief (most of the time) in the love between them, their shared commitment to certain important values and ideals, to Chelsea, and, within weeks of their arrival in Washington, their growing sense that they couldn’t catch a break.

  One friend who knew the Clintons quite well thought they were caged in a marriage that they both deeply resented; the ultimate prize, the presidency, was so alluring, however, that it was worth suffering. It might even be redeeming. Such an observation was not terribly original, but was dismissed by most of their close acquaintances.

  But the high-ranking deputy agreed there were aspects of the relationship that trapped the two of them in ways that only increased their anger at and resentment of each other. It was obvious that Bill and Hillary could never have achieved what they had without each other, yet it had come at the cost of some great periods of unhappiness.

  “Does he need her?” the deputy asked rhetorically. “Yes. Does he like her? Yes. And there are times when he’s almost embarrassingly affectionate toward her. But the ambivalence is there on both sides: Because he’s trapped in the marriage. He has no way out…it just pops out in ways he can’t control. He acts out by fucking around. She’s unhappy, and angry a lot of the time, and lashes out at people…. Punishing him, with maybe being remote, going out on her own, establishing her own identity, fighting even harder against his enemies.” The deputy could see Hillary’s increasing frustration with Bill in their first year in the White House.

  Betsey Wright believed there was an altogether different source and timeline of Hillary’s deep anger, locating its beginnings in the 1992 campaign, when Hillary’s integrity first came under heavy attack, and intensifying thereafter. In Wright’s view, and the view of many of Hillary’s close female friends, the political facts of life in the nation’s capital and the White House, not her past domestic life with her husband, were the source of her anger, and her resentment was transitory.

  “Bill’s women problems were not the core,” said Wright. “The core was [the attack on] her integrity, her law practice, her board memberships, her income, the Whitewater development. That was the anger. The White House staff probably knew her only as an angry person because she was being besieged…. The real question is, Is she still an angry person now, or was that just part of what she had to do to survive? That’s not always the way she was.” Despite the ups and downs, until taking up residence in the White House, Hillary appeared to have absorbed Dorothy Rodham’s lesson with the leveling bubble inside the ruler: stay steady.

  But that would have required virtually superhuman restraint during the White House years for any first lady subjected to what Hillary had to deal with, no matter how much might have been of her own making. During her time as first lady, Hillary was being judged constantly—in a sense, penalized—not for what she saw herself as actually doing and believing, but rather as a cartoonish misrepresentation of other people’s speculation, envy, anger, and even hatred. Or so she explained it to others. It is certain, though, that Hillary was tested as few public citizens have been.

  More than her husband, Hillary thrived on predictability and order. Since inauguration day, the rhythm of her life had changed radically, in ways and to an extent she probably could not have anticipated, despite the baptism of a presidential campaign. Bill was not the only Clinton locked in a golden cage after January 20, 1993. To an even greater extent perhaps, Hillary was finding herself a prisoner of the presidency. For the first time since she and Bill were married, she had no independent life, no identity to pursue separate from his, no outside job, no agenda of her own, no escape. She had little outlet except for her time with Chelsea, no opportunity to shoot the breeze with Webb or enjoy the closeness of her friendship with Vince, who was now her vassal and employee, and who was increasingly troubled and distant. In Little Rock, she had been able to go about her business largely under the radar. Now there was no getting away from the intrusive presence of cameras and reporters and Secret Service agents. Since January her every move and word had been scrutinized. She had no privacy. She had to whisper in the corridors of the White House lest she be overheard by servants or security people. More than ever before, she was a captive of her marriage. She no longer had the option of leaving even if things became intolerable.

  “Once that impeachment and the investigation and all that stuff was shut down is when I think she came out of her anger,” Betsey Wright said. “And p
art of coming out of the anger was what she worked out with Bill. And I think what she worked out with him was: I’m going now…. It’s my turn.”

  HILLARY WAS THROWN more off-balance than the president in the first months of the administration. Her attention lurched without apparent method from one problem or issue to another. Her seeming disorientation was not without cause. More than Bill, she seemed to recognize early on the seriousness—even intractability—of some of the problems they were already up against, and the interconnectedness of so many seemingly disparate factors that would determine the administration’s success or failure. She comprehended, beyond the budget mess and health care, that lethal dangers lay ahead (partly because she had superior knowledge of some of the troubling matters lurking in the past, aside from his womanizing). She recognized earlier that they were under attack from very powerful forces who would use that past to undermine the Clinton presidency.

  According to Webb Hubbell, both he and Vince Foster formed the impression by early spring that Hillary feared her health care agenda could become an unintended casualty. Though she felt blindsided by her own economic team, the opposition from Republicans, outside lobbying interests, and a nasty chorus on talk radio felt to her not like criticism on a single issue, but a first strike against “Clintonism.”

  After five months in the White House, she was under constant strain, still grappling with the death of her father, unable to get the time or space to grieve in private. More than Bill, she was physically exhausted; she lacked his stamina and was losing weight. A newspaper story noted archly that Hillary “looks thinner than ever, even though she confesses that her exercise regimen has gone the way of the middle-class tax cut since she moved into the White House.” On trips to the Hill, her aides noticed how she would perform perfectly during an appointment, then immediately afterward begin yawning and then collapse in the car on the way back to the White House. Bill would stay up to two or three in the morning, looking at the pictures in the halls, or reading, especially about the presidency, playing cards, picking up the phone at any hour to discuss some matter of strategy. She spent tiring hours each afternoon and evening trying to help Chelsea with her own difficult adjustment, and the extraordinary attention accorded the daughter of a president.