A Woman in Charge

by Carl Bernstein

  Though Hillary’s method and attitude were really no less offensive than what would be practiced by Republicans for the next dozen years, her critics were far less accepting of it. “When your purpose is to pass legislation,” said O’Donnell, “you don’t set up war rooms and you don’t believe that you are going to vanquish the opposition.” Such “campaign-think” had dominated the Clintons’ governance, but it was native more to Hillary than to Bill. The Clintons had declared war on the Arkansas teachers and had prevailed. But that was far different from Hillary being in a permanent state of warfare with Congress, including members of their own party—and especially different from demonizing powerful senators.

  Bill blamed himself for delaying health care, passing up the opportunity to enact meaningful welfare reform, and for including a gas tax and a levy on upper-income Social Security recipients in the economic plan. He did not blame Hillary in any overt way, but her exile had already begun.

  HILLARY’S EMOTIONAL state was now as fragile as it had ever been. The cumulative effect of her father’s death, Vince’s suicide, Whitewater, the failed health care program, and now a repudiation by the voters was devastating. She was overwhelmed. “I don’t know whether she was seeing a doctor or not”—she wasn’t, as far as is known—“but she was depressed,” said David Gergen. “Deeply depressed. I just felt she went into a downward spiral.” This was a near universal view in the White House.

  Bill’s state, in the short run, was equally bad.

  “I was profoundly distressed by the election, far more than I ever let on in public,” he said later.

  Gergen thought it took about two or three months for Bill to come out of his depression. But for Hillary, “it was a matter of many [more] months. I think she still must be scarred by that,” he said several years later, before she had decided to seek election to the Senate. “What was clear was not only her policy advice had failed, but she was politically at fault…. Bill no longer asked her for political guidance after that.”

  As the president and first lady sank into a fog of depression, one of the strangest episodes of modern American governance proceeded from it: the ascendancy of Dick Morris as presidential regent. For the next several months he virtually took over the White House. And for the period from 1994 to 1996, he was the real power in the Clinton administration after the president. Hillary had choked on her opportunity. Now it was Morris’s turn (again), and the circumstances were ideal for his machinations. In the next two years, there would be two primary objectives: survive Kenneth Starr and the inevitable investigations led by Republicans in Congress, and win reelection. Morris could do relatively little about the former. But in terms of molding new policies and preparing for the next presidential campaign, Morris was the ideal fixer.

  “We weren’t moving after that election,” said Donna Shalala. “It was three or four months before we regrouped.” She said the president was “almost incoherent.”

  “My friends [closest to the Oval Office] kept telling me that he was extremely distracted,” said Gergen, “and he would lash out, but then he would pull back. He just sort of seemed lost…. Leon [Panetta, the new chief of staff] was sort of running the day-to-day, and then Morris came in…. The fact is, for whatever else you think about Dick Morris, he helped to save the president.”

  Hillary’s instinct had been right in this instance. “I think she saw him as just…the person you turn to when you’re in real trouble,” Gergen said. “She saw how much trouble they were in politically. I mean, it was a comeback all over again. It was the two-year problem that they had in Arkansas. And he’d rescued them once before, and performed as an anchor.

  “Morris replaced [Hillary] as consigliere—though that may be a little simplistic. But there was a real passage of power away from her and to Morris. And to some degree, the president felt he was also liberated afterward from having to be deferential to Hillary. He took health care as a defeat, but because it was her defeat, it was okay…. He still needed here motional support, but there had been a time in which he felt that he had to be very deferential.” No longer.

  Though Bill did not criticize her openly, he was less hesitant about making his displeasure—and, for a while, real anger—known with those whose advice he thought, in retrospect, had been just plain bad. They—Magaziner, Stan Greenberg, Mandy Grunwald among them—were all widely regarded as “Hillary people,” though that, too, was an oversimplification. Stephanopoulos was also hung out to dry.

  Morris was unambiguous about Clinton’s attitude toward his wife at this point: in terms of the co-presidency, it was over—“he pushed her aside. It’s very clear to me that in 1995 and even 1996 he did not speak to Hillary very much about anything, because I would know. I mean, she never attended strategy meetings, and I never saw her gravitational pull in his thinking. He and I would talk on Monday. We’d talk on Tuesday. We’d talk on Wednesday. And we’d talk on Thursday. And, on Friday, he’d take an action. And over the five-day period, I couldn’t see any of Hillary’s fingerprints on anything.” (Unfortunately, her fingerprints would show up—literally—on the White House billing records, at the most inopportune of moments.)

  After the election, said Harold Ickes, “she literally withdrew. I mean, you just didn’t even see her. She would come over to her West Wing office from time to time. I would talk to her on the phone. But even I, who was as close to her as anybody on the president’s staff, hardly saw her at all. And I don’t know what she was doing. I don’t know what she was thinking. It must have been a stinging time…. She wears a stiff upper lip, as we know…. But she no longer participated…. She didn’t talk to the White House staff.”

  SHE RETREATED at first into the relative comfort of Hillaryland. “She didn’t trust” most of the president’s staff, said Ickes. “She didn’t like a lot of them, and thought many of them were young, self-serving assholes who should have been fired a long time ago. And her staff was extremely loyal. There had been almost no turnover in her staff, which really puts the lie to the fact that she’s a wicked witch.”

  In the early weeks after the election, Hillary frequently turned to Morris in her frustration. “I had a conversation with her in November where she said, ‘You know, I’m so confused. I just don’t know what works anymore. I mean everything we’re trying is screwed up. I just don’t know how to do it, what we ought to be doing,’” Morris recalled. Despite her confident manner, Hillary could “lose her bearings when things didn’t go right. Her strong and resolute leadership has a brittle quality to it; when her basic assumptions are proven wrong, they undermine her resolve. Hillary has less flexibility, less give than Bill. When her way works, she does very well. But when it doesn’t—as in 1994—it can paralyze her.”

  Meanwhile, Morris, newly empowered, set up shop. Stephanopoulos watched it all happening:

  [A]s Clinton withdrew from those of us on staff, the clues were silent but still visible, like the boldly inked crib sheets the president slipped out of his folder during meetings. Or the anonymous calls announced by Betty Currie that Clinton would take in the privacy of his study. Or the yellow Post-it notes left by his phone, reminding him that “Charlie called.”

  “Charlie” was Dick’s code name. The president had engaged him to run a covert operation against his own White House—a commander’s coup against the colonels. The two of them plotted in secret—at night, on the phone, by fax. From December 1994 through August 1996, Leon Panetta managed the official White House staff, the Joint Chiefs commanded the military, the cabinet administered the government, but no single person more influenced the president of the United States than Dick Morris.

  Twenty-four months earlier, in triumph, Hillary had demanded an office in the West Wing. Now she was a drag on the White House. It was time to decamp for long periods at a time, withdraw from the working White House altogether, to rethink and to travel. She had never been given to introspection, but she had also never failed on such a scale before. She knew that a midcourse correc
tion of historic magnitude would be required if she and Bill were to remain in the White House a full eight years.

  Hillary was well aware that many of her husband’s advisers blamed her for the situation now confronting them. She was bound emotionally, professionally, parentally, and publicly to her husband, but she’d have to step aside as a visible policy presence.

  Hillary appears to have kept to herself her deepest feelings about the wreckage of the twenty months between inauguration day and election day. And to whatever extent she shared those feelings with her husband is known only to the two of them. Except for conveying her general despondency she did not even discuss with her close friends like Diane Blair, Sara Ehrman, or Linda Bloodworth-Thomason her role in the debacle. As always, there was prayer, and the support of those in her prayer group, who included the wives of some of the men who had led the assault on the Clintons’ presidency.

  Hillary did not need to be pushed into exile. She was ready to go. Her stunning withdrawal from the inner sanctum of power was encouraged by Morris. Bill was having difficulty enough regaining his own composure and was hardly going to object to her disengagement. But given her dominant position in the White House for almost two years, her leave-taking represented the passing of a huge presence.

  First she made sure Morris was installed. If she had to go, it was essential that Bill have a handmaiden who could take her place, engage him, and help him lead. Over the next weeks, she would remind Morris of the little things that she knew Bill liked and needed, as if she wanted to be sure he’d continue to have the fullness of his presidential life.

  “To help get to the bottom of the Clintons’ loss,” Morris devised a series of surveys in November and December. Shortly after the new year, he reported the results to Bill. “I told the depressed president [he later wrote] one third of the people feel you are immoral and one third think you are weak.” Such brutal candor at a delicate time was just the kind of thing Morris reveled in. He defined the president’s “perceived moral failings” as his “draft avoidance, the Gennifer Flowers scandal, Travelgate, Whitewater, or the innumerable scrapes to which the First Family seemed forever prone”—the latter referring, apparently, to the occasional stumbles of Roger Clinton and Hillary’s two brothers.

  There was nothing we could do about his perceived moral failings. But as I examined the reasons that people gave explaining why they thought that the president was weak [wrote Morris] one concern kept coming up over and over again: Hillary. “She’s the power,” the respondents complained. “She wears the pants.” “She thinks she’s president.” “I voted for him, but she’s in charge now.” I read them to Clinton, one after another, letting their cumulative effect wash over him.

  Morris suggested that, rather than nourish the perception that Hillary was continuing to manipulate events behind the scenes, she should do something in which “her outspokenness before audiences can be an antidote to the perception of hidden power. The voters know she’s not sitting there doing nothing. The more they read about her public role, the less they will speculate about her private doings.”

  A week later, said Morris, Bill asked him to “start sending Hillary memos suggesting new directions for her public advocacy, always making sure to send him copies.” Soon, said Morris, “she withdrew from all White House strategy meetings. For a year she didn’t even send a representative. She totally cut herself off from overinvolvement in White House strategizing. She was less involved in decision-making than she had been at any point since the early two-career-couple days of the late 1970s.”

  THE BOOK It Takes a Village, conceived at her post-electoral ebb, was intended to define Hillary Clinton as she saw herself and wanted to be seen, and to establish a public persona based on thoughtfulness, seriousness, and traditional family values.

  For nine Christmas seasons before Bill’s election as president, Hillary, Bill, and Chelsea together had attended Renaissance Weekends with the families of other prominent Americans. Scientists, journalists, educators, business executives, and political figures were afforded a chance at these gatherings to participate in off-the-record panel discussions and workshops that focused as much on individual empowerment and public service as policy. In contrast to Washington political discussions, the Renaissance meetings tended to include a spiritual or religious dimension, from mainstream Protestantism to New Age.

  Of all the New Age thinkers the Clintons had gotten to know from these weekends, few had intrigued Hillary (and millions of other Americans) more than Texas-born Marianne Williamson. Like many New Age authors and circuit-riders, Williamson’s résumé was a mix of the serious (infusing politics with spiritual principles), the celebritized (presiding over Elizabeth Taylor’s eighth wedding), and the silly (promoting a version of solitaire with a fifty-card “miracle deck”). She was five years younger than Hillary, and her “underlying message,” according to one reviewer, “encourag[ed] women to seek and find God via the love inside themselves and to reinforce their sense of self-esteem.”

  In December, when Hillary seemed near the point of emotional collapse, with Bill deeply depressed and dysfunctional and their political future imperiled, Hillary reached out to Williamson. New Age thought borrowed heavily from traditional theology, especially its message of going deep within and finding personal strength in adversity. No one had preached this message more effectively, or profitably, than Williamson, who took the initiative to suggest that Hillary and Bill consider getting together with her and a group of people far removed from the political establishment to discuss alternative ways of looking at the next two years of the presidency, and the difficulties of the previous two.

  Hillary was receptive, and the weekend of December 30 and 31 was set aside at Camp David. Williamson, with Hillary’s approval, picked the other participants, including Anthony (Tony) Robbins, the motivational infomercial king and author of Awaken the Giant Within, and Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and its successor best-sellers. The titles were suggestive both of the participants’ approach and Hillary’s sense of what might have been missing in their first two years.

  Since Don Jones’s counsel to Hillary during her depression at Wellesley, she had been receptive to a pep talk that advised digging down into yourself to call on your inner resources, while maintaining belief in some sort of higher power. Though she had come to see herself since the inauguration as a victim, she was not one to collapse in a heap of self-pity. Even her decision to retreat from the front lines of the administration—regarded by many acolytes and opponents alike as a kind of abdication (when her withdrawal became more obvious)—represented this precept of taking action.

  For the Camp David weekend, Williamson had also engaged two lesser-known women on the seminar and lecture circuit whom she thought Hillary would take comfort in talking to in her current state: Mary Catherine Bateson and Jean Houston, who often worked in tandem.

  Bateson, the daughter of renowned anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, was a highly regarded cultural anthropologist, specializing in the burgeoning field of gender studies. Hillary had read and recommended to friends Bateson’s 1989 book, Composing a Life, which concerned itself with choices women in the post-feminist era could make in balancing and constructing their lives. Jean Houston, with her husband, Dr. Robert E. L. Masters, was co-director of the Foundation for Mind Research, in Pomona, New York, best known for research into psychedelic drugs, hypnosis, sexual behavior, and “humanistic psychology.”

  She was also founder and principal teacher of “the Mystery School,” a bicoastal seminar ($2,995 per student) of “cross-cultural, mythic and spiritual studies, dedicated to teaching history, philosophy, the New Physics, psychology, anthropology, myth and the many dimensions of human potential.” She described herself as a “scholar, philosopher and researcher in Human Capacities.”

  More than anything else, the weekend at Camp David was tacit acknowledgment that Hillary’s hard-edge approach to governance had
failed. The direction she was now inclined to test didn’t leave much room for hard edges. The concept of trying to love one’s opponents and enemies was, of course, a cornerstone of Christ’s teachings, and Williamson eagerly applied it to politics in her work. She did not, however, recite at Camp David her published prayer, “For the Healing of America,” in which she had written: “God loves Bill Clinton and Rush Limbaugh both, and He loves them equally.” Yet, in some way, that was one of the main points the healers (Houston’s term) seemed intent on making: there was only one way to overwhelm Limbaugh’s prejudices and politics, which was through one’s own good works, and to turn the rest over to God.

  If there was one thing the New Agers were not, it was demonizers. Williamson, Bateson, and Houston (by the second day of the retreat Robbins had to make an unscheduled return to his Aspen headquarters) all had a healthy dislike for the Gingrich crowd, but they had earned their livelihoods preaching harmony. Over the next year, Bateson and, especially, Houston—who would form an unusually close relationship with Hillary—struggled to get the first lady onto a new, more “positive” track and off her “negative” woman-warrior path.

  There were hardly any staff members present for the weekend, partly to keep the sessions, with their obvious potential for ridicule, from leaking. In summoning the participants, Williamson had told them that Hillary was at a “low point” and wanted to discuss, among other things, how to better communicate the administration’s message in the next two years. Houston “did the major guiding” (as she later put it), which evolved into a discussion of “the communication of visions”—which, of course, harked back to the Camp David staff meeting of April 1993 in which Hillary had been so adamant both about communicating the new presidency’s “vision” and concomitantly demonizing the Clintons’ enemies and Democratic skeptics alike.