A Woman in Charge

by Carl Bernstein

  HILLARY WAS ENTERING the second term with far more cynicism than she had brought with her to Washington. One of the blips during the campaign had been the revelation in June—based on a passage in Bob Woodward’s book The Choice—that Jean Houston had led her in a “séance” in which she communed with the ghost of Eleanor Roosevelt. That had not quite been what the book said, but news stories interpreted it that way, and there had been a tape recording made of the session, so denying that a “conversation” had taken place was out of the question. The session had occurred in April 1995, when Hillary was near her lowest, and Houston, who specialized in such therapeutic techniques, thought it would be useful for the first lady to have an imaginary talk with her predecessor about the obstacles she was up against. In the ensuing “discussion,” Hillary played both parts—Eleanor and Hillary—and the two of them went back and forth about the shock, enmity, and criticism that had attended the efforts of each first lady to find a meaningful role in her husband’s presidency. *30

  Hillary’s response to the news stories about the dialogue initiated by Houston was, after some initial defensiveness, self-mocking—which served her well. For the second term, Mike McCurry, among others, urged Hillary to let go of her disdain for the media and at least accept the reality of life in Washington as it was lived: lighten up, she was told, drop the defensiveness, build some bridges. In response, she reminded him that there had been attempts to do just that, and how they had failed.

  Only a few months earlier, she and Bill had received a warning—as if another were needed—of what they were up against. It had come from Republican senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming, during a friendly chat with Bill in the Oval Office. Simpson was retiring after the election. “Now that I’m leaving office I can tell you something. You are going to suffer immeasurable difficulty, and this is payback [by Republicans] for Watergate. So expect the worst,” Simpson had said.

  The president had repeated the story to Bill and Rose Styron over dinner one night at the Styrons’ house on the Vineyard. *31 Hillary had told Bill Styron that “this was the tip-off early on that she and her husband were going to continue to face a horrible struggle, which they did.” Her apprehension about their enemies, coming into the second term, was barely diminished.

  Hillary suggested to Bill that, tradition be damned, Chief Justice Rehnquist not be asked to administer the oath of office to the president at the second inauguration, noting Rehnquist “despised” the Clintons’ politics. Either of Bill’s two appointees to the Supreme Court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Justice Stephen Breyer, would be more appropriate. By now, she was certain, Rehnquist was a partisan, ideological zealot, who was even willing to flaunt his relationships with “extreme conservatives” intent on undermining the Clinton presidency.

  Bill considered the idea seriously, but finally bowed to tradition, and his instinct not to provoke Rehnquist and the Republicans any further.

  A WEEK BEFORE the inauguration, Rehnquist had gaveled the justices of the court to order to hear the case of Paula Jones v. Clinton. Bill could tell from Bob Bennett’s description of the justices’ questions that it had not gone well. “Good luck,” Rehnquist said to the president, and shook his hand after he had administered the oath on January 20. Clinton later said that he was certain Rehnquist had been hostile in the way it was stated, that he’d conveyed sarcasm when he spoke the words. At the congressional luncheon following the ceremony, Hillary was seated next to Newt Gingrich, while Chelsea—wearing a thigh-high miniskirt that she had concealed from her mother under a long coat until, leaving the White House, Hillary noticed but it was too late to turn back—was placed between House Republican whip Tom DeLay and Senator Strom Thurmond, the equally anti-Clinton ninety-year-old Republican from South Carolina who, in 1948, had bolted the regular Democratic Party and run for president as a segregationist “Dixiecrat” against Harry Truman. “You’re nearly as pretty as your mama,” Thurmond kept telling her through the meal, while explaining his secrets of longevity (at least some of them): one-armed push-ups, six small meals a day, and nothing on his plate bigger than an egg.

  Gingrich seemed uncharacteristically glum, with reason: he had been under investigation for several months by the House Ethics Committee for setting up his own tax-exempt organizations to finance his public speaking, in violation of the tax laws and congressional rules. In addition to affirming those allegations, the Ethics Committee, which was under Republican control, had determined he’d deliberately tried to mislead its investigators throughout the inquiry. The day after the inauguration, the full House would consider his case, resulting in a reprimand and a $300,000 fine. His deputy Tom DeLay would complain the punishment was out of proportion to the offense. Others whose offenses were less grievous had been treated far more harshly, with Gingrich doing the flogging. *32

  Hillary believed the fact that Gingrich was to be punished would make him even angrier and more aggressive, more dangerous to herself and her husband. That supposition, and contemplating the chief justice while she held the Bible during the administering of the presidential oath of office, had left her spooked and “apprehensive” since the noon swearing-in ceremony, she suggested.

  In the ten weeks since the election, she had been working with administration officials to find ways of saving vital government services and programs that Gingrich and the Republican majority were determined to eliminate in the new session of Congress. They included legal aid for the poor, educational assistance incentives, important Medicare and Medicaid benefits, pension protection, and the minimum wage. Her stated goal was to protect the so-called social safety net, especially for citizens most adversely affected by the disappearance of unskilled jobs due to globalization and technological innovation that benefited so many others. In the second term, she wanted to move further in this direction, to (in her interesting choice of words, so different from her attitude during the 1992 transition) “help shape” White House policies on issues most affecting women, children, and families, especially those at risk. She was reverting to what she had always done best, using her skills and her experience with great specificity, targeting individual programs to be saved, others to be improved, identifying the strong and weak points through diligent study and enterprise.

  The judgment early in the presidency, by Stephanopoulos, Shalala, and others, of her difficulty conceptualizing original programs and promulgating breakthrough ideas (such as Bill seemed to do with ease) had been acute. Perhaps without articulating it to herself, she began to recognize it in her post–health care ambitions, at least until she decided to seek the presidency. She worked well with existing structures, building on them, finding their weaknesses if called for, studying the mechanics of a program, whether foster care (as she did through 1997 and 1998, leading to the Foster Care Independence Act of 1999) or women’s health programs. She was good at it, and very, very bright, Dick Morris’s judgment to the contrary. She was a powerful, effective advocate, as she was discovering in her expanding campaign for human rights. The Senate was a perfect place for such a mind, in fact, and until her presidential ambitions collided with this vision of herself, she excelled without the need for a lot of tutelage or advice, whether from Bill or her policy aides. This attitude and ability had been manifest in her younger years, but dormant later, notably in the first term of the Clinton presidency.

  EARLY IN JANUARY, Hillary invited historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who in 1994 had published No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II, to meet with her at the White House. She wanted advice on her second term as first lady, “about how she might focus her energies and her time in the next four years,” said Goodwin. The meeting, which lasted several hours, included members of Hillary’s staff, whom Goodwin was surprised to find “felt a certain sense of being embattled”—not just with outside forces like Ken Starr, but with the West Wing of the White House. “This was not her high point. Bill was over there, and he had won the election, and she hadn’t
played a big part in it…. They were complaining that she would go out and give a speech and nobody was following her around. And she’d say these important things and only when she went abroad [would] her speeches be well covered.”

  Hillary seemed unsteady. “She thought the special prosecutor’s report was coming out sometime soon. And that she was going to take a hit, even though she didn’t think she’d be indicted. But she might have to wait until that came out to do whatever this thing was she was going to do in the second term.”

  Goodwin said she noticed during her visit just how the Clintons’ relationship had changed. She was astonished that, during a routine ceremony in which Bill presented a human rights award, Hillary’s staff was elated when the president mentioned the first lady by name from the platform. “I thought, Oh, my God, this thing has really gotten out of balance in terms of how she had once been ascendant, up there or ahead of him, and now…I just remember being stunned at that.”

  Goodwin had concluded that there was a seesaw effect: “During the ’92 campaign when Gennifer Flowers appears, and as Hillary pulls him up, she’s way at the top and he’s down. Then the health care failure occurs, and yet he’s beginning to do well. He then wins election in ’96 and she’s down. And then she’s down in ’97 and he’s going up until Monica. And then he falls down, and she goes up.”

  Hillary appeared unclear what her focus as first lady would be in the second term, said Goodwin. “She was talking about children. And she was going to have some children’s conference…. She was looking for someway of giving a focus to various efforts.” Goodwin tried to persuade Hillary that she should become the voice in the administration for “people who were being left out,” reminding her of Eleanor Roosevelt’s support for striking mineworkers. Since Hillary was already regarded as a “liberal lefty” by her opponents, “Why not get the benefits from it? Capitalize on that image,” said Goodwin. Hillary did not act on the suggestion.

  Goodwin also talked to Hillary about Eleanor Roosevelt’s ability to deflect criticism. “If they made funny remarks about her, that it really wasn’t personal. It was because the people out there who were criticizing her didn’t like her liberal views. And as long as it was that, that was fine. Now it wasn’t only that. Sometimes they’d actually be making fun of her, her hats, her curlers. But she didn’t take it personally.” Hillary said only that it was “great” that the former first lady was able to do that.

  There was an essential difference between Hillary’s situation and Eleanor’s, said Goodwin. “Because Eleanor was so far ahead of her time, she didn’t raise deep fears in men because she was going to somehow become a model. Men didn’t worry that their wives were going to wake up in the morning and want to be Eleanor Roosevelt. Eleanor [was] so eccentric…. But Hillary is part of a whole movement of women becoming important in all sectors of life—and [thus is] unsettling life for many Americans. And I think to the extent that she got to be the symbol of that forward-looking, aggressive…sort of taking-control woman, then people did project onto her things that she hadn’t even deserved.”

  ON FEBRUARY 17, 1997, Presidents Day, Starr announced he would resign as independent counsel to become dean of Pepperdine University Law School in Malibu, California. Though not known publicly at the time, the position had been endowed for Starr by Richard Mellon Scaife, who had been the primary source of funding for the Arkansas Project and much of The American Spectator’s campaign against the Clintons. By then, as Kendall and the other lawyers had sensed of late, and especially given Starr’s failure to bring an indictment against Hillary before the inauguration, his investigation gave the appearance of being low on fuel. Webb Hubbell had been Starr’s last great hope of obtaining a lode of damaging information about Hillary. Now the White House was expecting a devastating literary exercise disguised as a legal report that would give microscopic attention to every inconsistency and embarrassment in a narrative of the Clintons’ public and personal lives from Arkansas to Washington.

  By the time of Starr’s announcement, the Clintons had been subject to more than twenty expansive demands for thousands upon thousands of documents. Hillary and Bill had each testified three times under oath, and she had also been required to appear before the grand jury. The first term of the Clinton presidency had been consumed by the investigations undertaken by Starr, the Congress, and federal agencies. Yet with Starr’s announcement that he was removing himself from Washington, the independent counsel found himself the object of scorn from every side—including congressional Republicans who asserted that he was guilty of judicial abandonment. “Your departure will have a very serious, if not devastating effect on the investigation,” said Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee and former federal prosecutor. “Deep down inside everybody knows he’s a quitter now,” said James Carville, the Clinton political consultant, who chose to ignore warnings from the White House hierarchy to avoid gloating. Rather, senior White House officials were quoted anonymously to the effect that Starr’s ignominious departure was confirmation that he lacked a legal case, and that no indictments of Hillary or the president would ensue. Even Starr’s own aides reacted with dismay and fury.

  After four days of unceasing condemnation and ridicule, Starr did an about-face, observing, “As Fiorello La Guardia would say, ‘When I make a mistake it’s a beaut.’ I try not to make mistakes. I do make mistakes.” Specter’s comments had been particularly effective, and Starr extended apologies to his staff for deciding to depart without consulting them.

  Bill said later he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry about Starr’s departure plans and their abrupt cancellation. Hillary was traumatized. She looked ahead at a landscape still clouded with more agonizing uncertainty. On May 27, the Supreme Court announced its 9–0 decision that the Paula Jones case could go forward, ruling that there was no constitutional or practical reasons to prevent a private civil suit from moving through the court system against a sitting president. A few days later, Starr won a decision in the Circuit Court of Appeals that allowed him to subpoena Jane Sherburne’s notes of her conversations with Hillary, which the White House had resisted vigorously. In June, Starr assembled his staff to review the evidence: Hickman Ewing, his deputy running the Arkansas end of the investigation, had drafted an indictment of the first lady for perjury. To the disappointment of Starr and his staff, Sherburne’s notes had not been substantively helpful.

  The review confirmed Starr’s reluctant opinion that, though a circumstantial case could be argued, and might justify indictment, it would be a difficult case to prosecute successfully, even against an ordinary citizen. It would be political suicide—especially since the White House had begun landing some blows on Starr’s operation—to bring forward an indictment under the circumstances. There were no witnesses to confirm chapter-and-verse that there was a pattern to Hillary’s misstatements. To prove perjury is a difficult prosecutorial task if there are any ambiguities, and federal law requires demonstrable evidence of showing intent to lie. Hillary’s Jesuitical distinctions would in the end probably protect her, no matter how misleading or evasive her statements might seem. Under the law, they were not perjurous.

  Sam Dash, who had been counsel to the Senate Watergate committee, had acceded to Starr’s wooing, and agreed to serve as the independent counsel’s adviser on questions of prosecutorial conduct. He concurred that the evidence was insufficient, and urged Starr and his colleagues to start wrapping up their inquiry, absent some momentous finding against the president.

  All the time Starr was desperately seeking records that might help him bring down the Clintons, fifteen boxes of potentially damaging material was sitting in a Washington, D.C., vault. Starr had been told about the boxes by Webb Hubbell, but had either failed to adequately grasp their significance or, much more likely, was able to obtain only a few of the files by subpoena, because of their zealous legal protection by David Kendall.

  Much of the material was protec
ted by the attorney-client privilege, the Clintons’ lawyers maintained, and they were not about to offer Starr a laundry list of what the boxes specifically contained. Subpoenas would have to be extremely specific to obtain any of the material, so Starr was stymied.

  If Starr—or reporters, for that matter—had been able to examine what was in that vault, it seems possible, given the political atmosphere at the time, that the Clinton presidency might not have survived.

  The idea to collect this information came in March 1992, after the Gennifer Flowers scandal during the run-up to the New Hampshire primary, when it became evident to senior figures in the Clinton campaign, including Hillary, Diane Blair, Jim Lyons, Mickey Kantor, Kevin O’Keefe, and Bob Reich, that the campaign needed to be better prepared to immediately respond to any more questions about the pasts of the candidate and his wife. This was true especially in regard to Bill’s other women, Whitewater, Madison Guaranty, Hillary’s work at the Rose firm, the backgrounds of the Clinton and Rodham families, Hillary’s commodities trading, aspects of Bill’s record as governor (among them a lobbying reform bill), tax returns filed by the Clintons, and other financial records.

  The obvious person to locate, segregate, and maintain such information in absolute secrecy was Betsey Wright. Only she had complete knowledge of the thousands of boxes of Clinton files in Arkansas. Wright was technically assigned to work for Lyons, who had helped her investigate some of the women who had claimed to have had affairs with Bill. The reports of a private detective Lyons had hired, Jack Palladino, were among the papers she had in the files she assembled. By working for Lyons, Betsey and her files could be protected by an attorney-client privilege, she said—formal custody of the files would actually be his, as a Clinton attorney. This was especially true of Whitewater and Madison Guaranty, since Lyons was responsible for an internal investigation the Clinton campaign had undertaken in response to Jeff Gerth’s original New York Times stories. “Before I came, Lyons and Kevin O’Keefe were sort of in charge of the Defense of Bill Section,” said Wright.