A Woman in Charge

by Carl Bernstein

  The deal was negotiated before Hillary took her Senate seat, but its royalty provisions were later approved by the Senate Ethics Committe. The matter nonetheless recalled the kind of shortcutting she’d been accused of in the commodities trading uproar, raising again the notion that rules for other people didn’t necessarily apply to her.

  Predictably, Republican senators said Hillary was beginning her Senate career with the same approach to the law that afflicted the Clintons in the White House.

  DESPITE THE FACT that Vice President Gore had been integral to the Clinton presidency and its considerable successes, he had chosen to distance himself from Bill and Hillary Clinton during his 2000 presidential campaign, to their chagrin. They had hoped that his election, with Hillary’s, would stand as a powerful repudiation of the impeachment and the politics that fueled it. Bill and Hillary both believed, as did many astute political analysts, that Gore’s strategy had probably cost him the election. But he had wanted to make an implicit statement that he disapproved of Bill’s conduct—his aides were explicit about his reasons—and the Clintons’ ethical lapses.

  On December 12, the Supreme Court, in a 5–4 decision, with Justice Rehnquist leading the majority, had dismissed the Gore campaign’s attempt to obtain a recount of the disputed Florida results, and George Bush became the president-elect. On January 3, 2001, as vice president and, as specified by the Constitution, the presiding officer of the United States Senate, Gore swore in Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

  There was no precedent for her arrival as a freshman senator. She was still living in the White House, still the first lady of the United States. Her presence totally overshadowed that of the other ninety-nine members. They could see on that first day that she was a senator apart, a national figure, with a national constituency already. Those who had served in the chamber for decades (a few since the days when pages attended to cuspidors stationed at each entrance to the floor) understood this was something unique. In the coming weeks and months, people in the galleries largely ignored the other senators if Hillary was on the floor. They pointed at her. On the Capitol subways that link the House and Senate wings, passersby came rushing up to her for autographs, while other, longtime senators, considered the uncommon commotion. From her first days on the Hill, Hillary had a galvanizing effect on hundreds of women who worked there. Usually blasé at the presence of mere politicos, they followed her through the halls, asked her advice, filed applications to join her staff.

  For the first time since she had left Washington to join Bill Clinton in Arkansas in 1974, Hillary’s slate was her own to keep clean. This was a new beginning. She was now truly a woman in charge.

  But soon thereafter, on the Clintons’ last day in the White House, January 20, 2001, only hours before they were to go to the Capitol for the swearing-in of George W. Bush, Bill’s controversial last-minute pardons set off her fury again—at him. The most offensive of the pardons was of Marc Rich, a fugitive financier whose excesses were the epitome of 1980s greed. His avenue to a pardon was the largesse of his ex-wife, Denise, who had contributed $1 million to Democratic causes, including $450,000 to the Clinton presidential library fund, and as an R&B songwriter gave him entrée into a glitzy New York party world that would enrich his post-presidential life. Other powerful friends and aides of the Clintons had pleaded Rich’s case, including former White House deputy counsel Jack Quinn and Beth Dozoretz, the treasurer of the Democratic National Committee and a close friend of Hillary.

  While Rich had found favor, Webb Hubbell had not. A pardon would have given him the opportunity to resume the practice of law. He had not personally sought a pardon nor sent emissaries; old colleagues had told his family nonetheless they expected Bill to issue a pardon. When he didn’t, Hubbell, his wife, and his children were devastated.

  Meanwhile, it was discovered that Hillary’s brother Hugh—who in 1994 had run a quixotic campaign for senator from Florida—had been paid $400,000 to lobby for a pardon and commutation of a prison sentence for a client/acquaintance, which the president did not grant, for evident reasons. By then the Rodham brothers had been in the news far more than their sister had hoped. “My family can be very demanding and I apologize for that,” Hillary had said after a previous incident involving her brother Tony, who had screamed at White House aides insisting that a friend get a free ride on the first lady’s plane when she was campaigning through Florida on Hugh’s behalf. In 1999 the Rodham brothers had formed a company to sell hazelnuts grown in the former Soviet republic of Georgia; that led to a demand by Bill’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, that they dismantle their effort. “They’re like mama’s boys,” a former Clinton aide told the New York Times. “It’s a very odd family dynamic. They seem to feel, ‘We’ve been out there, we’ve been in this fishbowl, we’re not getting anything.’ Mrs. Rodham [Dorothy] is always telling Hillary, ‘You’re not doing enough for your brothers.’”

  HILLARY’S ABILITY TO adapt to new circumstances, until she had reached the White House as first lady, had almost never betrayed her. Its success was never more apparent than her first year on Capitol Hill. She had returned to form. She approached almost every aspect of her job opposite the way she had in the White House. When she was assigned a freshman’s office in the Capitol basement, she happily accepted it and waited patiently for better quarters, though she could have immediately asked for more space given the size of her constituency. Her modesty, a word not often associated with Hillary, was appreciated by her Senate colleagues, though her grandiosity beyond the chamber as an outsized fund-raiser for her party and Democrat sui generis was a genuine political phenomenon of 2001. With the proceeds of her book deal, she and Bill purchased a $3 million house at the end of a forested cul-de-sac adjacent to the British embassy, which became the nexus of her political operations outside her official office.

  On Capitol Hill, she was deferential. The first senators she sought out for conversation, for co-sponsorship of small but useful legislative initiatives, for prayer, for a drink, or for lunch in the Senate dining room tended to be those who had opposed the Clintons most vigorously, some of whom had voted to impeach or convict Bill: Orrin Hatch, Lindsey Graham, Sam Brownback.

  She was determined to show them how serious she was. From the moment she was elected, it was widely expected that Hillary would become the bull in the Senate china shop. Instead, she inched her way to the head of the Democratic class by dint of study, speaking carefully and in measured tones. She didn’t seek the limelight. (It came to her.) Her tenure as a senator was an extension of the listening tour that helped get her elected. She fetched coffee for her male colleagues, remembered who took cream or sugar, and carried it off with a touch of self-mockery. Hillary’s sense of humor, over the next few years, gradually returned.

  She learned the ways of the Senate. She identified who her enemies were, or those of her husband, and waged a campaign to win them over, or at least neutralize them. That was the internal institutional strategy. The external strategy was to show her constituents that she wouldn’t let them down. She worked particularly hard for those who didn’t support her, as if to prove to them that she wasn’t who they thought she was. Her small-steps policy in the Senate reflected what she had learned from her husband’s car tag experience in Arkansas: she would not forget the day-to-day needs of her constituents while promoting her larger ambitions. She was pleasantly surprised to find that addressing the problems and concerns of the millions of her constituents who lived in upstate New York was often similar to her Arkansas experience. Her representation on behalf of New Yorkers was effective, smart, and bold. Her initial committee assignments were Labor, Health Education, and Pensions; Environment and Public Works; and Budget, all of which enabled her to direct funds to her home state.

  On the Democratic side, her first courtesy call was to Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, the dean of the institution, its self-appointed historian and guardian of tradition (and the most effective facilit
ator of federal largesse to a senator’s home state of the past half-century). West Virginia was littered with Byrd-villes, Byrd FBI buildings, Byrd-funded military bases, Byrd federal records facilities, and the best federally maintained road system in the nation.

  Hillary had always relished being a star pupil and teacher’s pet, and she excelled at playing those roles in the Senate. Though Byrd had years before refused to rescue her health care plan and put it into the federal budget bill (thus effectively guaranteeing its death), she now decided that he had not acted out of enmity or ideological opposition. Rather it was senatorial tradition and the sanctity of the budget process, as he saw it.

  A Democratic colleague touted Hillary as “a workhorse, not a show horse,” which was the kind of filly Byrd appreciated. Still, she set up a brain trust that included former cabinet secretaries, and national security and economic advisers to the president.

  She also joined the Senate’s most exclusive, and private, prayer group, an acknowledgment by, among others, the most conservative of her fellow senators that they accepted the genuineness of her religiosity. They knew this because several of their wives had already been members of Hillary’s women’s prayer group while she was first lady.

  For all her advances, the most surprising aspect of her first term was that she did little in the Senate that drew much attention as making a difference beyond New York. In fact, save for her support of the war in Iraq, she kept a low profile on many issues of great national import. She diligently sought to avoid controversy. She had spent her whole career looking at the big questions; now she seemed to be taking a more narrow view, resembling in some ways the former senator from her state whom she had despised, Senator Alfonse D’Amato, known as Senator Pothole. She delivered.

  More than most senators, the 9/11 attacks radically altered Hillary’s agenda. In office only nine months, she and New York’s senior senator, Charles Schumer, became the city’s most effective advocates for money and services from Washington. Partly through her relationship with Senator Byrd, $20 billion in recovery funds were set aside in the budget for the city. “We’re in real trouble, and it’s going to take a lot to put the city back together. Can you help?” she was quoted as asking him in a September 12 phone call.

  “Count me in as the third senator from New York,” Byrd reportedly told her.

  ON OCTOBER 10, 2002, the Senate voted to authorize President Bush to use force against Iraq and Saddam Hussein. That day, Hillary took to the Senate floor and delivered a long speech. In part she said:

  Because bipartisan support for this resolution makes success in the United Nations more likely, and therefore, war less likely, and because a good faith effort by the United States, even if it fails, will bring more allies and legitimacy to our cause, I have concluded, after careful and serious consideration, that a vote for the resolution best serves the security of our nation. If we were to defeat this resolution or pass it with only a few Democrats, I am concerned that those who want to pretend this problem will go away with delay will oppose any UN resolution calling for unrestricted inspections. This is a very difficult vote. This is probably the hardest decision I have ever had to make—any vote that may lead to war should be hard—but I cast it with conviction.

  And perhaps my decision is influenced by my eight years of experience on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue in the White House watching my husband deal with serious challenges to our nation. I want this president, or any future president, to be in the strongest possible position to lead our country in the United Nations or in war. Secondly, I want to ensure that Saddam Hussein makes no mistake about our national unity and for our support for the president’s efforts to wage America’s war against terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. And thirdly, I want the men and women in our armed forces to know that if they should be called upon to act against Iraq, our country will stand resolutely behind them.

  As it became obvious to Hillary and other Democrats who supported the war’s authorization that the Iraq adventure was becoming a catastrophe, her tone and her words changed, though later than many of her Democratic colleagues. “If I had known then what we know now, there would never have been a vote and I never would have voted to give the president the authority,” she said in the winter of 2007.

  She has since claimed that she didn’t expect the United States to go straight toward war when she cast her vote; rather, that the president would endeavor to do what was necessary to get United Nations arms inspectors back into Iraq to determine Saddam’s WMD capabilities. “Well, I’ve said that he ‘misused’ the authority granted to him,” she said in 2006. “When I spoke at the time of the vote I made it very clear that this was not a vote for preemptive war; this was a vote, I thought, that would enable diplomacy to succeed because we would have a unified front between the president and our Congress to go to the Security Council to try to get the inspectors back in. Obviously we now know, in retrospect, that the president and vice president and his team probably didn’t intend for the inspectors to do their work.”

  At the time, according to former national security officials of the Clinton administration, Hillary was being advised on matters concerning Iraq by her husband and Sandy Berger, his national security adviser. Both felt she should support the president in the vote. Soon aferward, Richard Holbrooke also joined her national security advisory group, which continued to help her work through her statements and position on the war.

  “Her perspective is of someone who lived and worked in the White House for eight years [as] one of the two right hands to the president, who understands the seriousness of intelligence—not just that available in 2002 and 2003, but available for a decade about weapons of mass destruction and other forms of repression in Iraq,” said a former member of the Clinton administration. “She is familiar [with], and was prone to accept, the president saying, ‘We know things we can’t say…that suggest that this is a dangerous regime to the world.’ She had been around when her husband bombed the guy because of WMD.”

  Though few other senators mistook the vote for anything but an authorization for Bush to invade Iraq without going back to the United Nations, Hillary insists she had a different, literal understanding of what the legislation said, and that Bush would honor it. “That’s what Bush said in his speech in Cincinnati on October 7,” she said. “They called me to the White House on October 8 and gave me another briefing. When I got back to my office, [National Security Adviser] Condi Rice called me and asked if I had any questions. I said, ‘Look, I have one question: If the president has this authority, will he go to the United Nations and use it to get inspectors to go back into Iraq and figure out what this guy has?’ [Rice replied,] ‘Yes, that’s what it’s for.’ Privately and publicly, that was the argument they were making.”

  According to officials in both the Bush administration and Hillary’s entourage, there was a conversation between the two women about the meaning of the vote. But that is where the agreement ends, with Bush aides claiming Rice gave no such guarantee and Hillary’s camp saying Rice did.

  “You are not dealing here with two people with great reputations for candor,” noted a disinterested former aide to President Clinton.

  IN THE THIRD year of her term Hillary succeeded in her effort to be appointed to a seat on the Armed Services Committee—highly unusual for a first-term senator. The first thing she did as a member was to pay a courtesy call on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

  It is clear from conversations with her advisers that Hillary’s membership on the Armed Services Committee was intended to be the centerpiece of her new credentials for the presidency. She meant to become a defense intellectual, muscular in her approach, a master of the arcana of policy, weaponry, and strategy that would both serve her if elected, and help her get there by eliminating voters’ fears about a woman being commander in chief. She had fought the crippling effects of Bill’s weak credentials in this area and was resolved (and advised by her husband, among others) to
strengthen her position. She assumed from the start that she could count on the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in the pocket of her pants suits; the challenge would be to win over swing voters, Republican moderates (and she believed they existed, the more so as the presidency of George W. Bush veered toward both debilitating incompetence and terminal mendacity).

  Part of the excitement of a Hillary candidacy was the contemplation of how a new Clinton presidency would work with a woman in charge, and a former president, her husband, behind her. There is no doubt that the Clinton journey continues to be a joint enterprise. As for the state of her marriage, its reality is something known—as always—only to her and Bill Clinton, and their friends seem no more sure than long ago if the perception of the Clinton union by one of the partners is the perception of the other.

  By the time of Hillary’s campaign for reelection to the Senate in 2006, she had recruited a staff ready for a presidential campaign, a huge fund-raising apparatus and war chest, and a strategy to quickly eliminate serious opposition for the Democratic nomination. The strategy, by all accounts, anticipated for far too long military success in Iraq, and a postwar ability to satisfy America’s interests without great sacrifice.