A Woman in Charge

by Carl Bernstein

  As the proceedings ended, Hillary Rodham Clinton had already begun considering whether she aspired to the same United States Senate that had just acquitted her husband.

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  A Woman in Charge

  The most difficult decisions I have made in my life were to stay married to Bill and to run for the Senate from New York.

  —Living History

  WHILE THE SENATE was voting on the articles of impeachment, Harold Ickes had spread out a large map of New York state and shown Hillary what was involved in running. There was something particularly defiant about choosing this moment to begin her decision-making in earnest. She had put off more serious consideration while the impeachment process hurtled forward, perhaps in part because, without the stigma of impeachment, she and Bill might still have had a chance to accomplish some of their goals, and redeem some of the promise of their journey. But even then, it was hard to imagine that they wouldn’t be remembered primarily for what Bill had done with Monica Lewinsky, and Hillary with health care, and the personal drama they had put on for the nation and the world to watch. Now, Bill looked like the lamest of lame ducks, whatever his popularity ratings. Her anger and pain were still raw.

  She and Ickes pored over the map. Ickes enumerated the problems that lay in her path. He pointed to, and they discussed, towns and cities, tiny hamlets, the boroughs of New York City. New York had almost twenty million citizens, and 54,000 square miles that a candidate for the Senate would have to traverse from the Great Lakes to the Canadian border to Fire Island. She had done a lot of campaigning over the years, but nothing similar to this. There would be so much to learn. She had no experience in the internal politics of New York: its ethnicities, outsized personalities, unions, cultures, suburbs, its broken rust-belt economy upstate, and, in New York City, Wall Street and the toughest press corps in the country, reporters who could spot a rube a mile away.

  There were many reasons she shouldn’t run, and Ickes laid them out. She wasn’t from New York. She had never lived there (she and Bill had decided, though, not long after his reelection in 1996, that they would move at the end of his presidency to New York City and divide their time between Manhattan and Arkansas, where Bill would build his library). No woman had ever won office in New York in a statewide race. The press would live up to its reputation. Republican attacks on her in New York would be vicious. And she was still first lady, with official unofficial duties, so how could she be fully involved in such an exhausting campaign?

  RUNNING FOR public office had virtually never been on Hillary’s agenda. Only when she briefly trifled with succeeding Bill as governor of Arkansas, in 1990—after their marriage had almost ended, and his depression was so great that he had little interest in continuing in the job—had she considered it. Until then, and after she and Bill reached the White House, she had repeatedly told Diane Blair that she had no interest in elected office. In truth, she had never much liked campaigning, until she found her own voice and, to her surprise, connected with voters as her own distinct person in the 1998 off-year elections, in the gritty precincts that had been her husband’s natural habitat. She had asked the voters to elect Democrats not to save Bill’s presidency, but rather to support her ideas of constitutional governance and stand against the criminalization of the Clintons’ politics, which was how she categorized what Starr, D’Amato, Faircloth, Gingrich, and those aligned with them had done. Every poll that Mark Penn had taken showed that the voters were responding to Hillary as a woman whose values they now seemed to appreciate. Her experience had been almost totally different from campaigning with or for Bill, as an adjunct of his agenda. While virtually everyone else caught up in the Lewinsky business had been diminished or, to some degree, discredited, only Hillary seemed to gain in stature. By the time her husband went on trial in the Senate, every opinion poll indicated that she had become widely admired in a way that Bill wasn’t, by both women and men—as a result of her conduct. As he was struggling to stay in office, she was coming into her own.

  “Very specifically we would say to each other over the years, ‘You can have as great or greater impact by doing things other than elective office,’” Diane Blair said. When she visited the White House, she and Hillary—disguised in a hat or with her hair pulled back behind a headband—would sneak off (with the Secret Service hovering) to Rock Creek Park or the C&O Canal towpath for long walks. On one of these during “a particularly hard week” early in the second term, Diane asked, “‘Well, if you had your druthers right now, what would you really like to do?’ And Hillary said, ‘I would like to be in a think tank. I can see a room just loaded with books, next door to a library, and time to really just think hard about some of these policy issues. I just don’t feel like I have time to really mentally engage with some of the things that I know are out there.’

  “She did not say, ‘Oh, I’d like to be a United States senator, or I want to be a governor.’ What she said was, I want to be a policy woman. Until right now [1999], she has not seen elective office as the path that she had ambitions for in any way.” Hillary had never previously felt the need to assert her own “legitimacy,” separate from the single voice of her and Bill’s journey. Now, with Bill having squandered so much of what was to have been their presidency, she felt differently.

  One of the Clintons’ closest aides believed that what was propelling her toward running was “the wrecking of their work, not just the humiliation.” Actually, she wanted to undo both.

  “Prior to this—the impeachment, Lewinsky—she was looking forward to having some semblance of a private life,” Deborah Sale said around this time. “And being the senator from New York affords you none. That is something that could hold her back.” Sale noted that Bill Clinton wanted her to run. “He thinks she deserves a chance to be her own individual person. Now if she chose a different way, he would support it, too. But being the senator from New York…”

  Talking with Bill about whether she would run for the Senate was a kind of therapy in itself. (They also began weekly marital counseling together with a therapist; only a few members of their staffs were aware of it.) Hillary wrote that gradually they both allowed the tensions to fade. Their relationship was beginning to mend.

  Along with Donna Shalala, Ann Jordan, Maggie Williams, and many other friends and advisers, Blair tried to dissuade Hillary from running for the Senate.

  Hillary made the decision slowly, deliberately, analytically. Her decision-making process was different from Bill’s. Ann Stock, her social secretary, noted that “when you look at her making this decision…every bone in her body says, Yeah, I’d love to do that. But, the introspective person says, Yeah, but I need to examine all parts of this.”

  The Lewinsky episode was critical not just to the Clintons’ marriage but to Hillary’s evolution as a politician. She was married to the most skilled politician of the age, yet there was no denying he was also experiencing the greatest presidential free-fall of the twentieth century, apart from Richard M. Nixon’s. Until the day of impeachment when she met with Democrats on Capitol Hill, Hillary had not realized how much Bill was despised—there really was no other word for it—by many of his own party in Congress. She would never put herself in that position, she resolved.

  BY THE LATE spring of 1999, she seemed ready to run, but one substantial impediment remained: the incumbent senator, Pat Moynihan, who had never been warmly inclined to Hillary. His wife, Liz, despised what she regarded as Hillary’s lack of straight talking and dealing. Mandy Grunwald had worked for Moynihan and became an intermediary for Hillary. She tried to convey Hillary’s attributes and vulnerabilities to Pat and Liz. Moynihan was not a liberal in the sense of traditional Democratic politics, nor was Hillary. He was an academic, and she would have been comfortable in the same role.

  Moynihan was never one to personalize fights or hold grudges, but Hillary’s willingness to demonize her enemies had left him with lasting caution about her. He also was a realist and could see the appeal
of her candidacy. Moreover, Hillary had learned a lot in seven years in the White House. She was not going to make the same mistakes. He respected her mind. He accepted what was becoming inevitable. Terry McAuliffe had already promised to help raise the $25 million necessary to fund a winning campaign. He thought Hillary could win. Mark Penn’s polls also were positive.

  On July 7, she stood beside the senator at the Moynihans’ nine-hundred-acre farm in Pindars Corner, in rural northwest New York State. Two hundred reporters were there to cover the event. She announced her candidacy. “I intend to be spending my time in the next days and weeks and months listening to New Yorkers,” Hillary said. Bill visited an Indian reservation in South Dakota that day. “Now,” said Hillary, “I suppose the question on everybody’s mind is, Why the Senate and why New York and why me? All I can say is I care deeply about the issues that are important in this state, that I’ve already been learning about and hearing about.” It wasn’t totally clear if she was talking about the state or the issues.

  DIANE BLAIR was not surprised at Hillary’s decision to run. “Being a U.S. senator gives her an ongoing forum in which to pursue the agenda she’s always been interested in ever since I’ve known her.” Diane, Sara Ehrman, and Deborah Sale, among many of Hillary’s female friends, were sure she would win. They certainly understood her strengths and her desires; perhaps most important, they sensed her determination to redeem her own legacy.

  “I would say that right now most everybody in her life is simply a means of getting where she has to go,” Sara Ehrman said while Hillary was considering whether to run. By then Sara worried that Hillary’s Christian progressive optimism was in danger of devolving into arrogance—“God is on my side can be arrogance”—though it was easy to forget something basic about both Clintons: an irrevocable commitment to public service. “I’m not saying she’s an unethical person, because she’s definitely not,” said Ehrman. “But everything and everybody is now part of the package of getting them there, getting them—her and the president—there for the greater good.” Where Sara had once seen something pure in Hillary, now, after the Clintons’ joint trial in the capital city, there seemed something…conventional. But she saw her old friend accurately as still being “on a mission.” “Hillary still believes that she’s going to shape the world. She’s going to have a place to do it, and if Gore isn’t elected, I have no doubt that in 2002 she’ll start thinking about running for the White House.”

  Whatever else Bill was, he was a practical politician. Hillary welcomed his expertise. In Living History, she wrote that they both knew that in running for office she would be on her own as she had never been before. But they were up for building a new kind of partnership. In his memoirs Bill said he was ready to be the able assistant she had once been to him. The role reversal was fascinating.

  A whole new dynamic had entered the country’s political culture. The first lady’s motives were the focus of frenzied debate. Was her marriage now based on love or political expediency? Was she a victim or an enabler? Could she be a forgiving person? Was she running to remove a political stain or because she truly wanted to be in the Senate? Did she want to be president? And ironically: Had the impeachment of Bill Clinton made possible a Clinton dynasty in American politics?

  By the time she had declared her candidacy for the Senate, she had arguably become a more polarizing figure than he, inflaming the politics of gender in a way not seen since the first days of radical feminism in America, and perhaps not since the suffrage movement. The Republican Party at the turn of the twenty-first century existed for two overarching purposes: to elect a president and to defeat Hillary Clinton and Clintonism.

  THE FEATURE OF Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the Senate that proved brilliant, and the model for her subsequent politics, was the “listening tour.”

  Under the guise of trying to learn the concerns and complaints of constituents, and to offset the “carpetbagger” effect, she did the opposite of a lifetime’s instincts: she restrained her tendency toward unequivocal advocacy and the assertion of her own strongly held views. Instead, she “interviewed” the voters; she made sure not to offend, and she told voters largely what they wanted to hear. In the poll-driven 2000 campaign for the Senate there was hardly a single noteworthy position she embraced that put her at odds with the core constituencies she sought. One principle was beyond compromise, though she enunciated it in the context of her own traditional values: a woman’s right to choose.

  Getting the nomination of the Democratic Party was easy. Congresswoman Nita Lowey, who had been planning on seeking Moynihan’s seat, stepped aside. In the general election campaign, Hillary was blessed with the Republican opponent she drew. New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani had savored running against her, but he self-destructed in a marital scandal at the same time he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Representative Rick Lazio of Long Island became the Republican nominee, and he was out of his league.

  Lazio, well funded and backed by the national Republican apparatus and many of the Clintons’ old foes, tried to paint Hillary into a liberal corner, but it didn’t work. In debates, Hillary won on points, style (if not quite To Kill a Mockingbird, then having a certain charm of her own), and a platform that was perfectly tailored to crafting an electoral majority among the state’s myriad constituencies, especially upstate, long Republican territory but ill-served by a Republican governor who allowed its economy to stagnate.

  What was particularly striking in Hillary’s campaign was how it contrasted with the view of leadership she had long embraced and demanded of others. She had sometimes worried that Bill’s triangulation (the term was actually Dick Morris’s) and centrist balance was too contrived, not principled enough. The leaders she admired were those who had shown the courage to challenge the conventional wisdom—Goldwater, Margaret Chase Smith, Saul Alinsky, Eleanor Roosevelt. In New York she felt risky, unequivocal advocacy would threaten her chances.

  In a sense, her “listening tour” was similar to how Dick Morris had guided Bill’s campaigns—a method of surveying and polling that established what voters wanted, and what would offend their sensibilities. This became her approach as a candidate.

  On November 7, 2000, she won overwhelmingly, 55 percent to 43 percent.

  NOT REDEMPTION, but something else awesomely powerful could be felt among several thousand congregants in the National Cathedral attending the funeral on December 16, 2000, of Charles Ruff, the gentle man who, from his wheelchair, had so eloquently and ably defended Bill Clinton in his trial before the Senate. Something ineluctable passed in the great nave of the cathedral that day, and for those called to witness, the capital city beyond seemed a changed place when they stepped into the sunlight outside.

  Ruff lived an exemplary life in the pit that is political Washington, and the capital’s judges, journalists, members of the bar and of Congress (of both parties), and not a few humble citizens, had turned out to pay their deepest respects. The eulogy, delivered by the president, was offkey. Clinton could not bring himself to properly thank Ruff for the personal service to him, not just during Ruff’s defense in the Senate, but as Clinton’s counsel through the most perilous months of his presidency. The impeached president instead couched his funereal salute in terms of what Ruff had done for the nation during the recent unpleasantness, as if Clinton’s role had been totally incidental to the danger to the country and its institutions.

  Viewed from the row behind where Bill and Hillary were seated for the service, their lack of physical or emotional contact throughout the ninety-minute memorial was almost painful to observe. Then, as the congregation began to recess, all eyes seemed to turn to Hillary, and suddenly her presence became the single focus of attention in the cathedral. Cameras trained on her, not him. Congressmen came up to shake her hand and kiss her cheek. Old friends embraced her tightly and wished her well. Strangers stared. To her side, the president stood comparatively ignored, diminished in the commotion over his wife, even a little l
ost. A new era could be glimpsed at the creation: Hillary was glowing, perfectly turned out, a woman in Washington at the center of the nation’s attention, a woman unique in its history.

  ON THE SAME DAY as Ruff’s funeral, Simon & Schuster, a unit of the Viacom media conglomerate, announced that it would publish a memoir by Hillary of “her years as first lady.” The announcement ended a weeklong bidding war among publishers, presided over by Bob Barnett. In the end, Hillary would receive the second biggest nonfiction book advance in history, $8 million, slightly less than the sum paid to Pope John Paul II. “As far as I am concerned,” said former senator Bill Bradley, “what she did in signing a book contract is no different than what Newt Gingrich did.”

  In 1995, under duress as a result of a House Ethics Committee investigation, Gingrich had returned a $4.5 million book advance from a publishing house controlled by Rupert Murdoch, whose representatives frequently lobby the Congress on behalf of his media interests, seeking tax breaks, exceptions to anti-monopoly laws, and other relief from customary governmental regulation. The Senate, unlike the House, which changed its rules after the Gingrich book controversy, permits income derived from book contracts that reflect “usual and customary” industry practices.

  Hillary’s contract was anything but “usual and customary,” according to Common Cause and the Congressional Accountability Project, which suggested that she forsake an advance on the book and accept only sales-based royalties, on the grounds that the arrangement posed an obvious conflict of interest. The contract, as reported, was particularly favorable to Hillary in that she would receive up to half her negotiated advance upon signing; large advances are usually doled out over the length of a contract tied to stages of progress in the writing. The Washington Post and the New York Times both published editorials questioning the ethics of the arrangement. “The deal may conceivably conform to the lax Senate rules on book sales,” said the Times, but it is “an affront to common sense.”