On May 19, without any opportunity for Travel Office employees to defend themselves, all seven holdover members of its staff were fired and told to clean out their desks. There had been moments when some officials—Watkins and, perhaps, Foster—had wondered whether Hillary wasn’t moving too fast. But they had felt her ire when they had expressed caution about getting rid of longtime Secret Service agents and White House domestic staff, and they were disinclined to be reprimanded by her again.
Neither Hillary nor Bill, who had less intimate knowledge of what was happening with the Travel Office, was prepared for the firestorm of press fury that now struck the White House. In fact they had expected to be congratulated for shutting down an operation that ostensibly was cheating the taxpayers. Instead, many reporters concluded that the firings were a cover-up for the Clintons’ cronyism, especially after the White House confirmed that the beneficiaries of the firings might include Harry Thomason and a young cousin of the president.
Only three weeks earlier, the Clintons had brought their staff to Camp David to discuss how their story should be told to the American people. Reporters now discovered that Watkins had improperly ordered an FBI investigation, and that Stephanopoulos had asked an FBI agent to modify the bureau’s public statement in a manner that would strengthen the case for firing the employees. Janet Reno, the new attorney general, complained publicly that the FBI had been contacted by the White House without her authorization. When the White House claimed belatedly that the Travel Office problems had, in fact, been discussed as part of the vice president’s “Reinventing Government” assignment, Gore’s office denied it.
The same day that the Travel Office dismissals were announced, newspaper front pages and the morning television broadcasts were already trumpeting the dissonant tale of Air Force One burning fuel on the tarmac at Los Angeles International Airport for forty-five minutes while the president had his hair cut by Christophe of Beverly Hills, whose fee was usually $200 a clip for nonpresidents. Though the White House press office denied heatedly that the tarmac trim had resulted in flight delays of other planes, the Federal Aviation Administration made clear that numerous aircraft were held up because two of the airport’s four runways had to be closed for more than an hour. (To make matters worse, a press plane had waited behind Air Force One while Christophe administered his haircut.)
For the press, the confluence of these events was something straight out of The Beverly Hillbillies. Linda Bloodworth-Thomason gave the critics more ammunition by appearing on Good Morning America to defend her husband, who she said would never have thought, “Ooh, I’m going to like take my six-figure salary a week and fly off to Washington and see if I can’t get those seven little guys out of that Travel Office in the White House. It’s sort of the equivalent of taking over a lemonade stand.”
Later, Hillary and Bill noted wanly that the Travel Office—even in the final view of the special prosecutor, as it turned out—was hardly a professionally run operation, and was worthy of scrutiny. But for weeks after the firings, the White House response, much of it fashioned through the counsel’s office and Vince Foster, was to backtrack under duress while going to great lengths to keep Hillary’s role obscured. Each unappealing detail that revealed her and the Arkansas “cronies’” involvement excited the investigative instincts of the press. This was confirmation, as many had always maintained, that Hillary manipulated her husband, and that, as always, she had something to hide.
For the Clintons, a state of warfare now existed. The White House became the Clintons’ bunker, and stonewalling often seemed to be the safest defense. Dee Dee Myers confirmed under harsh questioning that Catherine Cornelius was, indeed, related to the president, but no nepotism was involved because she was “a distant cousin.”
Six days after the firings, the administration totally distracted, the White House announced that five of the seven Travel Office employees would receive new government jobs. “Travelgate” rolled on, though, as editorial pages expressed outrage. Now Hillary argued against further apologies or backtracking.
In fact, there was wholesale mismanagement and financial chicanery in the Travel Office. The Peat Marwick report established that records for press receipts were not meticulously kept. *13
On May 26, Bill ordered an “internal investigation” of the firings, to be led by a senior presidential deputy, John Podesta, and his aide Todd Stern. Throughout the inquiry, McLarty, Thomason, Foster, and Watkins all downplayed Hillary’s role to the point of nonparticipation. Foster pressured Watkins to protect Hillary by preventing disclosure that she’d suggested cleaning house to get “our people” in the Travel Office.
Podesta faced a dilemma in whether to fully investigate Hillary’s role. As Stern described in his notes, “We need to think seriously about whether or not it won’t be better to come clean. In sense of saying, even to point of conceding, that HRC…had some interest.” In their initial interviews with Podesta and Stern, neither Foster nor Watkins had mentioned Hillary.
What Hillary did and did not do in the Travel Office matter, the circumstances, and who else was involved, were described in a memorandum written by Watkins six months later but not revealed until it was turned over to the special prosecutor’s office under a subpoena. It stated:
At the time the Travel Office situation began to receive our attention…we had not had a victory or any press success since the February address to the Joint Session of Congress on the Economic Plan, and the perception was that a big success was needed. This was apparent to all at the White House, but especially to the First Lady whose Health-Care Task Force was being delayed and extended beyond its May deadline.
Harry [Thomason] sold the First Lady on his plan and vision of this as a good story, and he got her excited about it. Her enthusiasm for the issue and story likewise got Harry more excited and more committed to the project. Then, Vince Foster became involved, and Vince conveyed his, Harry’s and the First Lady’s excitement to me via regular visits and discussions…. The First Lady, in particular, was tired of delays on Health Care and other fronts; she wanted us to just do it—we are in control.
In late May, the Clinton administration seemed to many outsiders to resemble a car barreling downhill with failing brakes. There appeared to be no one in the White House capable of preventing a fatal wreck. The question of whether the Travel Office machinations represented a “Gate,” a “fiasco,” a “conspiracy,” or a “criminal enterprise by the president’s cronies and his wife” seemed to overshadow everything else. The perception was not altogether fair. The economic plan was moving forward. But Hillary was right that they weren’t getting their message out, though she saw herself as blameless. Reports of fights between Democratic members of Congress and the White House on the economy and the budget were still overshadowing her health care reform agenda. To her horror, the leaked item in the Chicago Tribune (about her supposed lamp-throwing tirade) had revived—in the press and among Washington gossips—questions about the emotional state of the Clinton marriage, just when she’d thought the subject might be retired. *14
Throughout May, Hillary showed up on the cover of one magazine after another, the result of a public relations blitz originally intended by the White House to correspond with the release of the health care bill, which didn’t exist. People magazine’s “Hillary Clinton—Mom, Wife, Policy Wonk” showed her trying to balance her work with her role as a nurturing mother. Time’s cover read, “Hillary Rodham Clinton is the most powerful First Lady in history. Does anybody have a problem with that?”
Another Time cover that month pronounced him “The Incredible Shrinking President.” By the end of May, his poll ratings had slipped twenty points to below 40 percent, the lowest approval rating any president had received so quickly. The controversies and lack of focus of the first hundred days had taken their toll.
When he wasn’t angry he seemed dejected. Clinton was disgusted with Republicans and the press for refusing him a honeymoon. He saw himself resp
onsibly adapting his presidency to the new fiscal and political realities, but critics were still branding him as a tax-and-spend liberal. He was so down that his appointments director, Nancy Hernreich, constantly readjusted his pace to accommodate his swinging moods. At one point, Bob Rubin asked another cabinet officer going into a meeting with Clinton to find some way to cheer the president up.
When called for, Hillary had always acted like a supra-chief of staff, protecting her husband and holding his staff accountable. Now, as she had in the past, she called her husband’s aides to bawl them out. In the White House, she addressed her frustrations in larger staff meetings. Her anger sometimes seemed to be an indirect criticism of her husband, as if his staff’s missteps were a reflection of his own inadequacies. Describing one of her outbursts at the White House, a top administration official said, “Her words were about the staff, but it was clear the president was her target.”
On another occasion, aboard Air Force One en route to meet the pope, Hillary intervened in a discussion between her husband and his trip director, Wendy Smith, about whether the president should leave his briefcase on the plane upon arrival in St. Louis. “You don’t need it. Leave it here. You always do that. Leave it. We have maybe five minutes of downtime. Just leave it,” Hillary told him. But when Clinton’s entourage reached its destination, they learned the pope would be three hours late. And the president was without his briefcase. “You know, your staff always does that,” Hillary was heard to whisper to her husband. “They don’t serve you well. They never ever serve you well.” The president ordered the entire party back to the plane, which required a forty-minute drive. The Clintons’ rage intensified on the way back. “Everybody [was] just in a pissy mood,” a member of the staff said. “Everything [was] building. The pressure…. She [had] been screaming at him for forty minutes by car about how shitty his staff is.” When they reached Air Force One, the president exploded at his trip director in front of the press.
During this period, Hillary went to see a prominent Democratic elder—not an elected official, but one of the capital’s most powerful insiders—for advice. “She was very nervous about the press,” he said. She told him that Washington was very different than she expected it to be. People were vicious. They would try to stab you in the back. She said she was particularly unnerved by the coverage—news stories, editorials, columns—of the New York Times and the Washington Post. They seemed to object to her having opinions, she said, playing a role in the administration, her health care portfolio. They always wanted to project the idea that she was usurping the powers of the president.
“I said [in response] there’s never been a first lady who’s really been an acting policy adviser, and been given a major policy role by the president,” recalled the Washington elder. “And that I didn’t know if it was a role that anybody could possibly succeed at.” Learning to deal with the press was essential to getting anything done in Washington, however, and probably as difficult a trial as any presidency had to undergo.
Gently, he suggested that there were not enough people on the president’s staff or her own who had sufficient experience in Washington. At night, especially, when the president would have people over and summon friends for conversation, except for Vernon Jordan, he was hearing too much from “the outside,” not the inside.
She responded that they wanted to have “a national staff—not an Arkansas or a Washington staff.” The Washingtonian noted that Magaziner and Nussbaum seemed to be running into particular troubles; he was sensitive to the fact that her months in the White House were “probably the first time she really had been consistently criticized for her policy judgments.”
Aware that members of the city’s establishment felt she was snubbing them, Hillary said she didn’t “mind doing all the things a first lady is supposed to do.” Throughout, she referred to Bill as “the president,” and proceeded to talk about “We” in terms of plans for the administration.
BILL ASKED Mack McLarty to engage Washington veteran David Gergen in conversation about the administration’s troubles. Gergen had been writing critical editorials in U.S. News & World Report, making suggestions about what the president ought to do. After their initial conversation, Gergen suggested McLarty hire someone like Stu Eizenstat, who had worked in the Carter administration. A few nights later, the two talked again, but this time McLarty said the president wanted him for the post and invited him to dinner. Gergen could solve several serious problems. His Republican credentials would help Clinton appear more centrist, his age (fifty) and experience would lend comparative seniority to the White House team, and his knowledge about the inner workings of Washington would help the president improve relations with the city’s press, politicos, and socialites.
The next night, after the two ate a lamb dinner at McLarty’s home, the president called around midnight. “Bill Clinton can be highly persuasive one-on-one, and over the next thirty minutes, he made a convincing appeal,” Gergen recalled. “How deep a hole he was in. How my experience and judgment could help him out. How I could serve as a bridge to the press, to Republicans, and to people I respected in Washington. How much it mattered to the country. Would I please consider it?”
The position was billed as counsel to the president, which would put Gergen in the inner circle with Hillary, Al Gore, and McLarty. Gergen understood the most important dynamic of the Clinton presidency, so before agreeing to sign on, he wanted to meet with the first lady. He wanted to know if she was the hard-core liberal pulling her husband to the left that the press was painting her as.
“I didn’t want to be there for decoration. So I had to talk to her. I also had to know this wasn’t being done against her will.”
Gergen met Hillary on the third floor of the residence while they waited for Bill to return to the White House from a speech in Philadelphia. Hillary was already sold on Gergen, whom she knew fairly well from several Renaissance Weekends. She started in right away about why she thought Gergen was the right choice to help the Clintons. The staff had never established a satisfactory daily routine to make the White House run smoothly. The president was not conveying a single, coherent message, and he didn’t have any Washington veterans on staff to help him avoid amateurish mistakes. “She was very positive,” Gergen said. “She said, ‘You’ve got to help us,’ and you know, ‘We really need somebody to help [us] understand Washington.’” Gergen was blunt. Why did she hate the press so much? Why hadn’t she made an effort to court the Washington elite? Hillary sidestepped. The press had been brutal, she said, but she genuinely wanted to improve the relationship. Sure, she would reopen the press corridor if he thought it would help. And she was planning social events—dinners to court the Washington establishment and a barbecue for the press. Gergen was just as concerned with Hillary’s ideology. “If he’s asking me to come in and help him get back to the center, I don’t want to get in a fight with you about getting back to the center,” Gergen said to her. “I mean, I’ve got to know where you’re coming from. And she said, ‘No, you have to understand I’m much more traditional,’ going back to the Goldwater Girl stuff, and you know…‘I want traditional values, and I really think we can do it in a bipartisan way,’ and so forth and so on. She gave me all the stuff that is very reassuring about why someone of my background and interests would feel comfortable.”
The internal mess Gergen found when he arrived was greater than he had anticipated. It had been caused to some degree by parallel power structures that had been allowed to form in the White House. “In the new world, the first lady and the vice president maintained sizable staffs of their own whose primary loyalty ran to them, not to the president,” Gergen said. Gergen and his deputy were “tagged as ‘Bill people’ when we arrived and everyone assumed he was our liege, which he was, in effect. But we soon found there were ‘Hillary people’ and ‘Gore people’ who were less interested in the president than in the person they served. Some crossed barriers. The president, for example, had faith in the p
olitical judgment of Maggie Williams…and Maggie managed to serve both principals well. But she was a rarity.”
Hillary’s criticism of Bill’s staff could be caustic, and she made no secret of her view that the staff of the first lady was better and more efficient. “One felt that even though people were on the White House staff, some belonged to her and some belonged to him in their first loyalty,” Gergen said.
Dick Morris said Hillary thought Bill’s staff members were too independent: “She’d say, ‘That staff in the White House. They’re so screwed up. They just talk to each other. They don’t talk to anybody else. They don’t care what I think. They don’t care what Bill thinks. They just go ahead and do things. And they screw it up every time.’” Said Roy Neel, the vice president’s majordomo, “She was very frustrated in having senior staff have a kind of misplaced deference to her, and I think she found it insulting that they wouldn’t [engage] with her. It was kind of patronizing, and I think there were people who were frightened of her as well…unclear how they were supposed to relate to her.”
Hillaryland had quickly morphed from an offhand remark in the campaign to a full-blown culture in which Hillary surrounded herself with people who were loyal to her cause and would do her bidding. When the stress of the office got to be too much for the first lady, Hillaryland became a place of comfort that she might not otherwise have had. It was a protective recovery zone. In Living History she wrote about their “own little subculture.” She said leaks came from the president’s people, not hers, who were discreet and loyal. She spoke of their “camaraderie.”
“She probably has the least amount of staff turnover and the most loyal staff of anybody in Washington,” said James Carville. But the loyalty, some believed, could be blind, and came at a price. A senior aide to the president said the only people Hillary could get close to her on the staff were “Kool-Aid drinkers.” In Talk magazine, Hillary’s deputy chief of staff, Melanne Verveer, had asserted that the staff didn’t hesitate to stand up to Hillary. But others said that meant nothing: the only criticism of their boss had to do with trivial things. “They think because they can say to her, ‘Oh my God, that [outfit] looks ridiculous,’ that they have a really honest relationship with her. But I’ll tell you one thing. There’s not one of them that, when she comes off of an interview, they say, ‘You know, Mrs. Clinton, you fucked up,’ or ‘Mrs. Clinton, I mean, what were you thinking?’ It doesn’t happen,” said the presidential aide.
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