For Hillary, however, the centerpiece of her initiation to the White House – and of the whole first term – was the effort to pass healthcare reform. It’s worth remembering that, in early 1993, healthcare reform was an idea whose time seemed ripe. The need was compelling: Medical costs were spinning out of control, and 37 million Americans had no health insurance. Among Democrats, the only argument was whether to base a plan on government – to expand Medicare or create a new single-payer system – or to build on the existing employer-based system, melding the federal role with market forces. Surprisingly, even the most conservative traditional opponents of healthcare reform were ready to go along with the latter. The American Medical Association and the health-insurance industry had come out in favor of an employer mandate, a law requiring all companies to provide health insurance for their workers. So had the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, along with many large corporations. Reform had been a large plank in Bill Clinton’s campaign platform, and now he wanted it done and done quickly.
There were early signs that speed might be a mistake. The president trusted no one more than Hillary. He had relied on her confidence and intelligence before; this time, it would backfire. Hillary was chairwoman of the health reform task force. Clinton also recruited Ira Magaziner, an old friend and business consultant who had made a major study of healthcare costs, to manage the task force’s day-to-day operations. But by the time the three had lunch in the White House to discuss the project soon after the president’s inauguration, all of them were hearing discouraging words from Capitol Hill. “I think we’re gonna get killed,” Hillary remembered Magaziner warning. “We’ll need at least four to five years to put together a package that will pass Congress.” Hillary said her friends were saying that, too. “I’m hearing the same thing,” the president said. But with his usual optimism, he added: “We have to try. We just have to make it work.” His timetable was unaltered: Come up with a completed bill by the end of the administration’s first 100 days.
Bill Clinton gave a speech to a joint session of Congress to make his case for healthcare reform. The speech was convincing; overnight polls showed that two-thirds of Americans favored the measure, and pundits in the media agreed that the president had posed a historic challenge for the country and set out the best guidelines for getting it done. Six days later, Hillary began a series of appearances to testify for reform before three House committees and two in the Senate.
“This is a crucial moment in the fight for healthcare reform in our nation,” Hillary said. “We all know our nation needs health security that’s decent, affordable for every American.”
She won universal praise for her command of the facts and grasp of detail. But Hillary realized later that many who applauded hadn’t been persuaded, and she decided that at least some of the praise was political theater.
In public forums and town-hall meetings all across the country, Hillary listened to healthcare horror stories. Reminiscent of the woman who had brought Bill Clinton to tears on the campaign trail, people talked about their struggles to pay their medical bills. Some were victims of insurance abuse; others lamented sub-par care. On the road, Hillary listened. But in Washington, her door was closed to outside voices. Only her core advisers were allowed to chime in. “There was a rigidity and an unwillingness to really listen,” Ickes said. “The frailty of Hillary was it was too cloistered, too walled off, and she really thought what she perceived as the public opinion in favor of healthcare would override the resistance of Congress and of the special interests, and it was a big mistake.”
Perhaps the most serious setback came from the Senate, where New York’s Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a long-time supporter of healthcare, declared the task force’s proposals were based on “fantasy numbers.” Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, also a perennial advocate of healthcare reform, initially supported Hillary. But he also became disenchanted with the emerging outlines of the Clinton plan and ruled out playing any part in the process.
If Moynihan and Rockefeller were disenchanted, it was because they felt they had been edged out of the discussion – and not without reason. In the interest of speed, Clinton strategists decided to bypass the negotiation process and all its entrenched players and pressures. Asked about Moynihan, an anonymous White House staffer told Time, “We’ll roll right over him if we have to.” They planned to write the bill with a hand-picked task force and operate mainly behind closed doors.
Even so, by the time Hillary and Magaziner finished assembling their team, the task force had nearly 600 experts in working groups delving into every aspect of the issue. Despite good intentions, it was too many people. Some got frustrated and dropped out while others became overly concerned with politics and lost sight of the overall goal. Meanwhile, all those excluded from the room fretted and sniped over whatever bits of information they could get.
Some reporters grumbled that health reform shouldn’t be done in secrecy. Then three of the working groups sued the task force, arguing that Hillary was not a government employee and thus had no right to head or even attend closed meetings. The work slowed, and the 100-day deadline sped past. By the end of May, the task force had been disbanded. A tighter, more cohesive group kept working on a bill. Healthcare reform fell victim to one crisis after another, beginning with the budget. As failures mounted, President Clinton refused to remove his wife from the process or override her decisions.
Early on, White House strategists figured the best chance of getting a healthcare bill passed was to attach it to the annual budget-reconciliation measure, the year’s final bill tying up all budget adjustments. Under Senate rules, the reconciliation bill wasn’t subject to filibuster and could pass with just a majority of fifty-one votes rather than the sixty needed to break a filibuster. But this tactic would work only if the powerful Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia would agree that health reform was a legitimate budget issue. The Clinton forces tried to persuade him, but Byrd finally decided health reform was simply too complex to pass after the limited debate allowed in the reconciliation process.
All through this phase of the project, Hillary and Magaziner thought they were creating the outline of a bill, with details to be negotiated by lawmakers who would craft the specific language of the law. But then Dan Rostenkowski, head of the House Ways and Means Committee, said he wanted a finished bill. That statement touched off a feverish drafting process, which was rapidly mired in details and competing interests. To please pediatricians, for instance, the bill specified nine vaccinations for each child and six well-child visits per year – a degree of specificity that should have been set aside until after a bill was passed.
When the White House sent the bill to Congress in October, it was 1,342 pages long. Its bulk and complexity triggered derision from the growing legion of reform opponents. The Health Insurance Association of America financed a hugely effective television campaign. The ad featured a middle-class couple, Harry and Louise, poring over medical bills at their kitchen table and worrying that the government was about to demand that they use a complicated insurance plan that they didn’t want. With opposition growing and a tangle of conflicting White House priorities, the bill became a lower priority.
In part, the opposition reflected a broader ideological war between Democrats favoring activist government and increasingly powerful Republicans trying to reduce government power. To these GOP activists, the goal was not healthcare reform, but to avoid government involvement between people and their doctors. “We scared people by saying, ‘the healthcare system isn’t working, and here comes the government to fix it,’” Senate aide Lawrence O’Donnell said. “And Ronald Reagan had been schooling this public for many years now that the government is the problem.”
With the 1994 midterm elections looming, a GOP memo to leaders in Congress warned that health reform was “a serious political threat to the Republican party” and argued that the only good approach would be to avoid compromise or negotiation, but to kill the bill o
utright. The Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers withdrew their backing for an employer mandate. When Hillary spent much of that summer on a nationwide bus tour to drum up popular support for the bill, she was dogged at every stop by organized demonstrators, including anti-abortionists, tax protesters, and militia supporters. Some were angry enough to be dangerous, and Hillary agreed for the first time to wear a bullet-proof vest.
Democrats kept looking for a compromise in Congress, but the political ground kept crumbling beneath them. Republican Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island had proposed a reform bill of his own providing universal coverage and at one point had the backing of thirty-nine other Republicans. He hoped a merger of his bill with the Clinton proposal would win bipartisan support, but one by one his GOP supporters backed away, and in the end, he gave up. Another bill, sponsored by Democrat Jim Cooper of Tennessee, had broad bipartisan support, but it faded as the opposition hardened.
Hillary argued Democrats should push the bill to a vote in the Senate, where the opposition would have to take responsibility for killing it. But many of her advisers said that strategy would only call more attention to the failure and that the bill should be abandoned without further fanfare. And so the fight ended: Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, who turned down an appointment to the Supreme Court to stay in the healthcare fight, declared the bill dead in September 1994. Two months later, a wave of Republican candidates led by Newt Gingrich of Georgia took control of both houses of Congress.
How much of the failure was due to Hillary? She was embittered and depressed by it for months, but was careful to deflect blame and assess it in balanced terms: “I knew I had contributed to our failure, both because of my own missteps and because I underestimated the resistance I would meet as a First Lady with a policy mission. But our most critical mistake was trying to do too much, too fast.”
Other participants in the process agreed, but with provisos. Princeton sociologist Paul Starr, a task force member and Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian of the U.S. system of medicine, wrote that the fatal flaw was that the Clinton team wrote the bill, as Rostenkowski demanded, instead of negotiating its clauses with Congress. In addition, by branding reform with the president’s name and adding Hillary to the mix, the White House made it the Clintons’ personal cause and gave Republicans every incentive to kill the bill rather than shape it. Defeat wasn’t inevitable, Starr concluded: “We had a historic opportunity, and we blew it.”
Not all was lost. In the next few years, pieces of the reform bill were revived and passed. Workers were protected from losing insurance when they changed jobs. CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, proved to be the biggest expansion of healthcare since Medicaid, ultimately insuring more than 5 million children. But universal care was still a mirage. Whatever portion of blame history would assign Hillary Clinton, the healthcare reform defeat would remain on her record.
In later years, Hillary tried to downplay the way the failure affected her. “I didn’t take it personally,” she told Joshua Green for his 2006 article in The Atlantic, “Hillary’s Choice.” “I was disappointed for the country.” But her friends say she was devastated. It was a setback for the Clinton presidency, which had heralded healthcare reform as its top objective. The Clintons took this loss, like so many others, personally. They felt it was not just a disavowal of policy, but of the administration.
For months afterward, Hillary retreated into a much more traditional first lady role. She kept busy putting together a collection of children’s letters to Socks and Buddy, the White House cat and dog. But she never stopped focusing on substance. And in a display of bipartisanship, she joined Republican Congressman Tom DeLay of Texas in backing a 1997 law removing barriers to adoption.
A wave of other trials – by no means minor – punctuated Hillary’s White House years. First came a flap that seemed almost farcical, but mushroomed into the full-blown scandal of the White House travel office, which the media – still obsessed with the Nixon-era Watergate saga – inevitably dubbed Travelgate.
By her own account, Hillary kicked off the affair when aides told her there had been financial mismanagement and possible kickbacks in the White House travel office, an obscure department that handles flight and hotel bookings for White House reporters when they travel with the president. Since arrangements must often be made at short notice, the office usually used a charter service called Airline of the Americas, without seeking competitive bids. Costs were billed to the news organizations whose reporters took the flights. Given the cozy relationship, there seemed plenty of opportunities to trade favors for preferred flights or accommodations. Hillary wrote that she told Mack McLarty, the president’s first White House chief of staff, to “look into it.”
William Kennedy, a former Rose Law Firm partner who had come to Washington with the Clintons to work in the White House counsel’s office, unwarily called the FBI and asked it to investigate the travel office. He didn’t realize this wasn’t proper procedure; ever since Nixon’s abuse of the FBI in the original Watergate scandal, the White House has been careful not to have any such direct contact. The FBI reacted warily but did begin a preliminary investigation. Meanwhile, White House counsel Vince Foster, another former Rose partner, ordered up an audit of the travel office by the accounting firm KPMG Peat Marwick. The auditors said the office’s books were “an ungodly mess in terms of records” and too chaotic for an actual audit, but that the head of the office, Billy Ray Dale, kept an off-the-books ledger and had $18,000 in checks that apparently couldn’t be accounted for. Based on that, McLarty told his director of administration, David Watkins, to fire Dale and his six subordinates and reorganize the travel operation.
The firings on May 19, 1993, touched off a frenzy among White House reporters, who saw Dale and his colleagues as old friends who looked after them. The first wave of stories alerted politicians to the fracas. Then it came to light that the president’s third cousin, Catherine Cornelius, had been put in temporary charge of the travel office. Also, Harry Thomason, the Hollywood producer and Clinton friend who had orchestrated the inauguration ceremony, was encouraging the travel office to use his own charter airline, TRM, rather than Airline of the Americas.
The FBI denied any wrongdoing in its contacts with the White House, and McLarty released the results of his own investigation into the firings. In the strongly worded report, he criticized himself, Kennedy, Watkins, and Cornelius for improper and careless actions. He rehired five former travel office staffers in other positions. Congress, for its part, asked the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (GAO) to make its own investigation. A year after the firings, the GAO concluded that they were legal but that there had been improprieties and possible conflicts of interest.
Later in 1994, after the Republicans had won control of the House of Representative, the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee launched its own Travelgate probe. The committee demanded thousands of documents. After two years of battling back and forth, the committee concluded the White House had improperly asked for the FBI’s background report on Billy Ray Dale.
The committee’s final report charged no legal wrongdoing. However, it recommended that the probe should be continued by the Office of Independent Counsel under Kenneth Starr, who by then was investigating the Whitewater affair.
Another “bimbo eruption” burst out in the late fall of 1993, when the right-wing American Spectator magazine found four former Arkansas state troopers who charged that Bill Clinton had ordered them to procure women for him. The story lacked plausible details and sounded dubious. Only two of the troopers agreed to be identified, and those two quickly damaged their credibility by boasting about cashing in and fishing for book contracts. Adding to general skepticism, none of the women allegedly involved in the scandal could be found to verify it. The story drifted to the back pages of the tabloids. For the next two years, the political damage of all these scandals seemed containable; none of them proved subs
tantial enough to interfere seriously with Bill Clinton’s re-election in 1996. But there was one poignant, even tragic, consequence of the Travelgate scandal: the suicide of Vince Foster.
Hillary later wrote that Foster was “a meticulous, decent, and honorable man,” and that judgment was endorsed by virtually everyone who ever knew him. A well-respected Arkansas lawyer at the Rose Law firm, he had also earned a national reputation as a litigator. Friends and opponents alike knew him as an unfailingly ethical man who cut no corners and played no tricks to win his cases. Shortly before his death, he told the newly fledged lawyers at his alma mater, the University of Arkansas Law School, “There is no victory, no advantage, no fee, no favor, which is worth even a blemish on your reputation for intellect and integrity. . . . Dents to [your] reputation are irreparable.”
As deputy White House counsel, Foster’s first assignment was to vet important presidential appointments, and he blamed himself when several of the people he had approved were not confirmed by the Senate. He was only tangentially involved in the Travelgate firings, but he was both offended and wounded when a series of editorials in the Wall Street Journal (“Who Is Vincent Foster?” the first one demanded) singled him out as a key figure in a clique of Arkansas lawyers brought to Washington by the Clintons. He thought of resigning, and may have meant to do that, but that would take him back to Arkansas. He told a friend that his colleagues in Little Rock took the Wall Street Journal seriously, and he couldn’t stand the thought of what they might think of him after reading the critical columns. His doctor in Arkansas prescribed an antidepressant. The next day, the afternoon of July 20, he left his office, telling his assistant he would be back shortly. He drove to remote Fort Marcy Park in Virginia, ten miles from the White House. Then he put the barrel of his father’s old revolver in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
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