A Woman in Charge

by Carl Bernstein

  “What she’s very good at is sort of marshaling the forces,” said one of them. “Get people ready to fight, get them together. Find the right people, find a Harold Ickes. And then have Harold go find people. But when it comes down to the tactics about, Now what do we do? What do we say? How do we handle this? That’s where her instincts are just awful.” An instance of that was her determination to systematically attack the Washington Post.

  The idea of a campaign against the Post “went fairly far down the road before some of us succeeded in stopping it,” said Fabiani. Hillary told her aides: “We have to figure out all the mistakes that the Post has made. We’re going to document it, and then publicize it somehow or get a journalism review to write an article about it, or go to the Post editors and complain about Sue Schmidt with this evidence, this dramatic evidence in hand.” She summoned a group to the residence: Kendall, Stephanopoulos, Sherburne, Fabiani, Maggie Williams. Fabiani said the first lady pointed at him, saying: “‘You can take it over and meet with Len Downie [the editor of the Post] and…go through this, and then we can publicize it.’ I said, ‘Well, you know, I’m not sure that the content of it is going to be quite as dramatic as maybe you’d hoped for. A lot of the things that you’re concerned about are matters of tone, and maybe a headline, or a placement in the paper, and that’s not exactly the sort of stuff that’s going to grab people.’ And she said, ‘No, if you look at it, I’m sure it’s going to be true. Go ahead.’”

  For the next ten days or so, a team worked to compile a dossier to be used against the Post. Finally, the virtually unanimous opposition of the lawyers and Stephanopoulos prevailed.

  This reflected a new reality. “Mostly she was persuadable,” said Fabiani. “But it took a lot of work, a lot of times it felt like she was going to eat you alive, or you weren’t going to be there the next day. But, if people stood up to her, she listened. To her credit. When some of us stood up to her, she generally would back down. But the kind of people that were around her were yes people. She had never surrounded herself with people who could stand up to her, who were of a different mind…. I always thought that was a real tragedy in that if she had had different people around her [who would challenge her] earlier, that maybe some of the things that happened might not have happened.”

  Hillary was active and outspoken again, but hardly optimistic. “Well, okay, go ahead and do it, but it’s not going to work,” she would say. “We’re never going to get a fair shake.” Some problems were manageable, but for her, everything seemed doom and gloom, her lawyers could see. Much of the gloom no doubt reflected her fear of indictment. Kendall had told her at some point he believed her indictment was a strong possibility, that Starr would stop at nothing. Even if he failed, Maggie Williams had noted, the remainder of the term, the next year, would be dominated by the effort to criminalize and further stigmatize the first lady. The first three years had been dominated by Vince’s suicide, the death of health care reform, the loss of the Congress…and now this. “We had all these great hopes, and they’ve come to nothing,” said Williams.

  AS BILL and his aides developed a strategy for the 1996 presidential campaign, the phrase “damaged goods” was frequently used in the White House to describe Hillary’s political utility and, sadly, more. She avoided planning meetings, preferring to give her opinions to her husband in private. “I would meet with her every two weeks from around July ’95 until August of ’96,” said Dick Morris, “and I would have to brief her on what was going on. I would have to brief her on the ads that were running. I would have to brief her on the polling data. This was not stuff she knew. And while, allegedly, the agendas I prepared were given to her, and I’m sure that Bill did give them to her, she didn’t seem to know it [the material] and wasn’t terribly involved. And that was amazing to me. Her husband was running for reelection as president, and she really wasn’t there.”

  Bill was enjoying the transition from entrapment in the White House to flat-out campaigning, and the opportunity to change some misperceptions.

  There was no attempt, however, to rebuild Hillary’s image before the election. “There was a deliberate calculation made that she was going to be damaged goods through the election,” said one of the president’s aides. On the occasions when she was scheduled to campaign on Bill’s behalf, “it was understood that you would place her in with the hard-core [pro-Clinton] constituencies that weren’t going to be affected by any of this [scandal talk]. She wasn’t going to be able to go anyplace where there weren’t true believers…. You weren’t going to solve the credibility problems that she had unless you did something dramatic, and that carried huge risks. What if she were indicted? If she wasn’t indicted, she was going to sort of limp along to the election. She was going to speak to women’s groups and hard-core Democratic groups, and liberal groups, and raise money from those people. And her favorability rating was going to be what it was going to be. And over time it would get better, but you had to live with it.”

  Inside Hillaryland there was considerable consternation about the first lady being sacrificed. But the president had made a calculated decision. “Why didn’t Bill defend his wife more vocally? Why didn’t he sort of constantly buck her up? I mean he said the perfunctory things about her,” a political aide noted, “but, you know, he was smart. He knew the less he said about this stuff, the better. The more he said, the more people would talk about it…. I mean that was our advice to him, and that was his instinct as well.”

  Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection strategy, especially before the Republicans had chosen their nominee, was to highlight the positive, incremental initiatives his administration had implemented, and the economy, which was stabilized and showing the first signs of explosive growth. The scandal-mongering, in Bill’s view, had kept voters from the real story of what his presidency had accomplished under the most difficult circumstances: a minimum wage increase, changes in the Safe Drinking Water Act, acquisition of new lands for national parks, a crime-fighting bill, the Earned Income Tax Credit, an anti–teen smoking initiative, and serious educational reform, among other things. The Republicans had shut down the government during the previous November’s budget battle, and he was happy to run against the opposition’s irresponsibility.

  Looking toward the Democratic convention, to be held in Chicago in August, Morris’s polling indicated that the so-called scandals of Whitewater were having little effect on the voters—a conclusion that Bill found dubious, especially because Hillary’s poll numbers had hit rock bottom. He seemed invested in holding the press and the Clintons’ enemies responsible for stripping himself and Hillary of their dignity and political effectiveness. His tendency to self-pity was well established, but on this point his anger was understandable. Morris kept telling him, “None of this is having any effect as long as you don’t make it an issue.” Clinton formed the impression—probably correctly—that Morris believed that he and Hillary had been fast and loose both about the finances of their Whitewater investment and in their responses to the investigations that had marked them, thus making the president all the more angry.

  ON FEBRUARY 27, Chelsea turned sixteen. Not long after, the president and first lady attended “college night” at Sidwell Friends School with Chelsea. She was a high school junior—motivated, self-possessed, bright, and remarkably unspoiled given the circumstances of her upbringing. On the way back to the White House, she surprised Hillary and Bill by saying she might like to go to Stanford University, in California. Her mother immediately responded that it was three time zones away and that, trapped in the White House, she and Bill would almost never get to see her. Bill told Chelsea she could go wherever she wanted. She had earned it.

  A few weeks after her birthday, Chelsea traveled with her mother to Bosnia, now pacified, to meet with American peacekeeping troops there. Singer Sheryl Crow and comedian Sinbad were on the trip as well. The Dayton accords brokered by Clinton and his emissary, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, which ende
d the bloodletting among Croats, Serbs, and Muslims, was one of the great achievements of the administration, both morally and practically. (Yet neither the Clinton administration nor George W. Bush’s administration—which never was willing to credit its immediate predecessors with success of any kind—sought to capitalize diplomatically from the fact that the United States, alone among the nations of the world, had sent troops to stop the genocide of Muslims.)

  During Hillary’s trip to Bosnia she spent many hours talking to individual soldiers about their view of the American commitment. That helped convince her that the United States military must continue to maintain secure borders and be engaged in some areas of historic conflict. Though it had been American policy since U.S. troops had stood between Israel and Egypt in the Sinai and the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas, Republicans (and some Democrats) were increasingly pursuing a more isolationist foreign policy in which European troops, not Americans, would be responsible for military commitments closer to home. Hillary’s contrary view would figure later when she was a senatorial candidate and, more controversially, in regard to Iraq.

  WITH THE DEATH of health care reform, Bill and his advisers considered it essential to follow through on his 1992 campaign pledge to “end welfare as we know it.” Hillary shared his view that the existing system of welfare payments corroded the lives of millions of families who subsisted on them. This had become a poisonous subject of political debate, with most recipients subject to unfair characterizations such as “welfare queens”—people who supposedly lived the high life on their family’s meager monthly payments. Contrary to what too many Americans believed, “welfare” went only to families with children at home—unlike unemployment payments for individuals who had lost or could not find jobs.

  Since Republicans had won control of Congress at the midterm elections, conservatives had been trying to take over the welfare reform debate by introducing punishing modifications to the federal government’s program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, as welfare was known. Gingrich’s “Contract with America” proposed a Personal Responsibility Act, which aimed to discourage teen pregnancy and illegitimate children by disallowing benefits to mothers who were minors and denying additional funding to those who had more children. Many of the Gingrich Republicans wanted to abolish the concept of welfare outright. Hillary and Bill both believed changes to the system should be much less harsh, and include funding for guaranteed job training and child care to help recipients as they went back to work.

  Virtually all of the administration’s experts on welfare and the organized “children’s advocates” in Washington—including Marian Wright Edelman—opposed the kind of welfare reform that had been introduced in Congress late in the year. On November 3, 1995, Edelman wrote an open letter to the president in the Washington Post saying that it would be wrong for him to sign any legislation that would “push millions of already poor children and families deeper into poverty, as both the House and Senate welfare bills will do.” She added: “Both the Senate and House welfare bills are morally and practically indefensible. Rather than solve widespread child deprivation, they simply shift the burden onto states and localities with far fewer federal resources, weakened state maintenance of effort and little or no state accountability.”

  Edelman’s letter was intended as well for Hillary, who, given her professional history, had greater credibility on the issue than Bill and, despite her legal difficulties with Ken Starr, more specific political capital. Edelman knew that reporters covering the welfare debate would seize on her letter as putting Hillary under pressure from her close friend.

  There was little danger that the president would sign the legislation under consideration by Congress, but Edelman—and Hillary—were less confident about what Bill might wish to do if squeezed in an election year. Hillary had never publicly opposed any legislation or policy of her husband’s administration, but her views about welfare were strongly held and probably more complicated than his. She recognized the urgency of reform, she wrote, but her work as a child advocate had taught her that welfare was often required as a bridge of emergency support for impoverished families. She had seen the system exploited, but there were many instances in which it had rescued its beneficiaries. She told Bill and his deputies that she would make known her opposition to legislation that did not provide health care through Medicaid (to avoid cutoffs of welfare funds by the states), a federal guarantee for food stamps, and guaranteed child care assistance for recipients transitioning out of the welfare system. Bill vetoed the first welfare reform bill, which was part of a proposed Republican budget.

  When Republicans passed a second bill in early January 1996 “with minimal changes,” the president again vetoed it, and his action required little lobbying from Hillary.

  In August, as the Democratic convention loomed and the prospect of an ugly election debate over welfare threatened, Bill had to decide whether to sign or veto a third welfare reform bill, largely shaped by the Republican majority and lacking many of the safeguards Hillary had specified. He feared, with good reason, that if he didn’t sign the legislation, a great chance to enact serious welfare reform would be lost.

  The latest bill required those who received welfare to work—plain and simple. It also instituted a lifetime benefit limit of five years, and reduced the federal welfare spending program by $54 billion over a six-year period. A particularly objectionable provision of the legislation was the elimination of benefits for most legal immigrants. Critics tried to persuade Hillary to talk the president out of signing the bill. Peter Edelman, who held the position of counselor to Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, urged that the bill be vetoed, as did Shalala. Hillary, Bill, and the Edelmans all had the same concerns—that the bill would throw millions of children into poverty, especially the children of immigrants.

  Shalala’s objections had troubled her particularly. Lynn Cutler, deputy assistant to the president for intergovernmental affairs, who discussed the matter with both Hillary and Shalala, noted that the first lady saw welfare reform first and foremost as a question that affected women and children. “Why should a huge number of women be condemned to a life on the [dole] instead of getting an education, getting the help, and having the self-respect of earning a living?” she said. “And I suspect at some level she [Hillary] absolutely believed in that. I think what might have concerned her, given her Children’s Defense Fund background, was that the child care piece and the support pieces weren’t there in quite the same way that they ought to.”

  Bill had always been inclined toward compromise to win a political fight, but as the death of health care reform had demonstrated, this had not been Hillary’s way. But she had learned a punishing lesson about the perils of not compromising. In all likelihood, this would be the only chance she and Bill would have to accomplish something they had talked about for years. It was an imperfect bill, but Hillary was becoming inclined to support it. Later, many commentators speculated (and some reported as fact) that she had urged Bill not to sign the legislation and was angered when he did. In fact, she accepted the decision as inevitable.

  Carl Sferrazza Anthony, author of a number of books and articles about first ladies, asked Hillary in 1999 whether she and her husband had disagreed on signing the bill. He said she told him, “I was in favor of welfare reform. I…just wanted to make certain that there was a safety net that…if the welfare-to-work didn’t work in some cases, that families weren’t out on the street.”

  On July 31, Bill and his cabinet members met for what George Stephanopoulos described as the “final decision meeting” about whether the president would sign the welfare legislation. Dick Morris vehemently told Clinton he would lose the election by 3 percentage points if he didn’t sign the bill. Stephanopoulos believed that Hillary would rather Bill veto the reform, yet “after the failure of health care, and given the persistence of Whitewater, political prudence and the balance of power in their marriage weighed against a dec
isive Hillary intervention on welfare,” he said. He sensed she was trying to gently note its flaws.

  At a press conference later on August 22, Bill told reporters he would sign the bill, describing it as a timely, excellent chance to reform welfare. Hillary called it a “critical first step” to reforming welfare. She said she wanted Bill to sign it into law; though she was disconcerted by the five-year time limit, she felt importantly that it tried to foster independence rather than dependence.

  In Hillary’s autobiography, she described the bill as hardly perfect, and conceded that pragmatic politics had figured in her willingness to support the measure. She felt it was better to allow the bill to become law with a Democratic administration in charge of implementing it. She recognized that if Bill vetoed welfare reform a third time, he would be giving the Republicans an edge in November, risking not just his own reelection, but endangering other Democratic candidates as well. Eventually Hillary and Bill claimed great success for welfare reform.

  The Clintons’ decision came at a personal cost. Peter Edelman resigned in protest a few weeks after the legislation was signed by the president. For years the Edelmans shunned the Clintons; the breach was painful. Hillary went to great lengths in her memoir to recognize the sincerity and reasonableness of the Edelmans’ opposition. But she said as well that there were times political realities required compromise, though never on “principles and values.” As a senator and presidential candidate, many of her former supporters and other opponents felt she had done just that, especially in regard to the great issue of her time in the Senate: Iraq.