A draft letter of resignation was found in his briefcase, torn into pieces. The note read, in part, “I was not meant for the job in the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport. . . . The WSJ editors lie without consequence.”
For Hillary, who had also just lost her father to a stroke, and the president, whose mother was dying of cancer, the loss was doubly painful. Some of their closest advisers thought this tragedy might break the Clintons. It had the opposite effect. “I kept going on sheer willpower,” Hillary wrote. “I threw myself into a schedule so hectic that there was no time for brooding.”
For the next two years, Hillary’s calendar was full. She traveled to two dozen countries, sometimes with the president but more often as his representative, showing America’s concern for its allies. On these missions, she tried to go beyond embassies and official receptions to meet people, see how they lived, and broadcast her interest in women’s issues. She and the president went on a state visit to Russia, where she was impressed with Russian President Boris Yeltsin and his wife, Naina. She headed the U.S. delegation to Nelson Mandela’s inauguration as president of South Africa and again to Normandy, for the fiftieth anniversary of the D-Day invasion. In southern Asia, she visited Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan. She undertook a mission to Bosnia to underline the importance of the Dayton peace agreement that ended hostilities there. Not least, she traveled to the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia, former Soviet-bloc nations that were on the verge of becoming NATO members.
The trips were important, educational, and occasionally funny: In Russia, Chelsea and her escort were accidentally left behind when Hillary’s motorcade left the Kremlin for the airport. They caught up only by commandeering a laundry-delivery van. In South Africa, Hillary spent an official reception ducking around the room to avoid Cuba’s Fidel Castro, who was pursuing her in hopes of sparking an on-camera confrontation that would doubtless result in considerable coverage in America. Hillary got acquainted with the reporters traveling with her, and learned to relax and even joke with people she had considered adversaries. When a woman in Bangladesh asked if the first lady kept cattle in her house, she answered, “No, unless you count the press room.”
Hillary’s most important trip came in 1995, when she went to Beijing to give a speech at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. It marked a turning point for the women’s movement worldwide and cemented her status as a leader of the cause.
The timing was not auspicious. U.S. relations with China, always delicate, had been deteriorating. Harry Wu, a human rights activist who had been jailed for nineteen years in China before settling in the United States, had just been arrested again and charged with espionage after a visit to Xinjiang Province. His fellow dissidents, human rights groups, and some members of Congress were urging the U.S. delegation, and particularly Hillary, to boycott the conference. They argued that the first lady should not show tacit approval of the Chinese by going to Beijing. Even after the Chinese defused the issue by giving Wu a sham trial and deporting him to America, he argued that a speech by Hillary would be a public relations coup for the Chinese government.
The Clintons both felt that the speech was a chance to confront the Chinese about their poor record on human rights. The president and first lady decided that it would be a tough speech.
Hillary and her staff were still working on the text as her plane approached the Chinese coast. To her surprise, when Madeleine Albright, then U.S. ambassador to the UN and head of the delegation, reviewed the speech, she proposed changes to strengthen it rather than water it down.
It was a difficult speech to deliver. Hillary felt passionately about the subject. What’s more, it was being translated into a dozen languages as she spoke. So the audience heard her points after she made them, and she got no audience feedback. But her words were sharp and dramatic. Among them:
“It is time for us to say here in Beijing, and the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women’s rights as separate from human rights . . .
“It is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution.
“It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire, and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small.
“It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war. . . .
“It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.
“If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights . . . and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all.”
The standing ovation from the crowd was echoed by women all over the world, and the speech became a core part of the women’s agenda. “To this day,” Hillary wrote in Living History, “whenever I travel overseas, women come up to me quoting words from the Beijing speech or clutching copies they want me to autograph.” The speech “may have been her finest moment in public life,” said a New York Times editorial, and from that moment on, there was a new dimension to Hillary Clinton’s image in the public mind. After Beijing, Hillary was a leader.
She found time to write a book, It Takes a Village – a title taken from the African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child.” The book extolled community and the cooperation needed to raise children, and it drew on Hillary’s long experience with the Children’s Defense Fund. She supplemented that effort with a syndicated weekly newspaper column, “Talking It Over,” which addressed both women’s and children’s issues. She joined the effort to defeat breast cancer, launching a national campaign to encourage women to have mammograms and working for free mammography under Medicare. She went on to call attention to the problems of veterans with Gulf War syndrome, urging the president to name an advisory committee to study the problem and to establish disability benefits for veterans with an undiagnosed illness.
During these two years, Hillary was also bringing up Chelsea, who had come to the White House a child and was nearing her sixteenth birthday. Chelsea had done well at Sidwell Friends and had become her mother’s favorite traveling companion on official trips. She had grown in poise and confidence, chatting with European heads of state as easily as she cradled babies at a clinic in Bangladesh. Chelsea’s sixteenth birthday was celebrated at Camp David with her friends and a spirited paintball battle in the nearby woods.
Chelsea wanted a driver’s license, and the president was doing his fatherly duty by attempting to teach her – even though the Secret Service never let him drive anything more substantial than a golf cart. “It isn’t that my husband isn’t mechanically inclined,” Hillary explained. “It’s just that he has so much information running through his head at any given moment that he doesn’t always notice where he’s going.” After Chelsea’s first lesson, in a borrowed Secret Service car at Camp David, her mother asked how it had gone. “Well,” Chelsea said, “I think Dad learned a lot.”
As always in recent years, life in the White House played out against world events, not all of them pleasant. The conflict in Bosnia claimed 100,000 lives, with at least 20,000 women raped and more than a million people displaced. President Clinton’s special ambassador Richard Holbrooke put together the treaty that brought a shaky truce in 1995. The Mideast treaty signed by Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin was followed two months later by the assassination of Rabin by an Israeli fanatic. In the United States, there were three bombings. The first came in 1993 in the basement garage of the World Trade Center in New York. Next came a truck bomb at the federal office building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people, traced to Timothy McViegh, a militia sympathizer who was enraged by the government’s handling of the Branch Davidian siege at Waco, Texas. Then an anti-aborti
on fanatic planted a pipe bomb at the Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta that left one dead and 111 injured. Terrorists bombed the Khobar Towers in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing nineteen U.S. servicemen.
Politics was a constant preoccupation and ever more polarized. Approaching the midterm elections of 1994, GOP Congressman Newt Gingrich led his party’s drive to capture Congress. For Gingrich and the Republicans, only one Democrat mattered: Bill Clinton. They campaigned against the president, determined to turn the election into a referendum on his administration. Gingrich convinced even the most resigned Republicans to enjoin a political war he had spent a decade plotting. “He was a giant personality,” Trent Lott, the Republican senator from Mississippi said. “He was one of the best policy wonks and thinkers of new ideas around . . . His personality and approach was – if it’s not arrogance, at least it’s overconfidence.”
Gingrich’s ultimate goal was the dismantling of what he called the “liberal welfare state.” He proposed a Contract with America, offering tax cuts, increases in military spending, and a balanced budget at the price of deep cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, education, and environmental spending. The mathematics of the contract didn’t make sense, but the conservative flavor of the proposals and their proponents proved both popular and persuasive.
Bill Clinton took to the campaign trail believing he could once again win the people over to his way of thinking. He touted his record, which by the fall of 1994, included an economy on the upswing. “I remember him saying to me on God knows how many speeches, ‘Harold if I can just communicate with enough Americans what we have done and where we want to take the country, we’ll win this,” said Harold Ickes. But the victories were blotted out by his personal and policy failures.
The Democratic turnout was weak on Election Day. Exit polls forecast a storm of opposition to Clinton and his party. Republicans swept to majorities in both the House and the Senate. “The Republican Revolution of election 94 shook capitol hill like an earthquake today,” anchor Dan Rather reported on CBS News. “Its reverberations went into state houses and moved the whole political landscape sharply to the right.” Gingrich assumed the speakership of the House.
Ickes took the long walk from the basement of the West Wing to the president’s residence on the second floor to tell Bill Clinton what he already knew. They had lost. As he was known to do, the president obsessed over the defeat. Christmas came and went for the Clintons as the president paced the corridors of the White House, wondering what had gone wrong. Self-doubt and second-guessing soon became resolve. He turned his attention to fixing it. The first step was to bring in an old friend, Dick Morris. Morris was an abrasive political consultant from New York who had advised the Clintons on their campaigns in Arkansas. He took charge immediately, conducting weekly meetings in which the usually talkative Clinton was quiet and attentive.
“When I first started to work for Clinton in the White House, he had two big negatives,” Morris said. “A third of the country thought he was immoral, and a third of the country thought he was weak. And I basically went to him, and I said, ‘I can’t do much about the immoral, but we sure can solve the weak.’ And, therefore, we embarked on a conscious strategy of making sure people saw Clinton as strong.” Part of the problem was Hillary. The more strength she displayed, the weaker people perceived the president to be
“One of the first things I did was to tell Hillary, ‘you can be as influential as you want to be, but do it in private,’” Morris said. “Don’t sit in on the strategy meetings, don’t make the appointments, don’t make everybody be cleared with you. In the bedroom at night, tell him what to do, but don’t let it be seen in public.”
Of course, Hillary had tried before to present the less-imposing, more-ceremonial visage expected of a first lady. Doing so made her miserable. She was hard driving and outspoken by nature, and people found her intelligence intimidating. Hillary could not retreat fully from the political spectrum. But she began to take on projects and issues that didn’t draw as much public scrutiny.
Meanwhile, President Clinton was left to deal with a hostile Congress armed only with the veto and the power of potential Democratic filibusters in the Senate. He decided to be patient, postponing confrontation so he could clarify just what the Contract with America would cost most Americans, and counting on Gingrich to overreach.
It took time, but both parts of his strategy worked. The president used the bully pulpit of the White House to emphasize his accomplishments, particularly in reducing the federal deficit and creating jobs, and to list his goals, highlighting a minimum-wage increase, improvements in healthcare coverage, and tax cuts for the middle class. He attacked the Contract with America as a “contract on America.” Its proposed welfare reforms, Clinton said, were “weak on work and tough on kids.” Even as Gingrich pushed most of his Contract through the House in the first 100 days of the legislative session, voters were increasingly uneasy about it.
The Republican budget bill denied funding for long-established programs, including consumer protection and support for education. The bill also cut funds for programs that increased revenues, such as tax enforcement and corporate regulation. Gingrich even suggested that children born out of wedlock to welfare mothers should be barred from benefits and placed in orphanages – a Dickensian notion that Hillary denounced in Newsweek as “big-government interference into the lives of citizens at its worst.”
The budget battle went on all summer and fall, and the president announced that he would veto any bill that hurt children, undercut Medicare, and stripped away the safety net for the poor. At the end of the fiscal year on September 15, the government ran out of money to pay its bills. A temporary extension lasted until November 13, and Gingrich overestimated his influence by sending the White House a proposal for another budget extension with more cuts. Clinton rejected it, and the federal government shut down.
The impact of the shutdown on the country was devastating. Only essential federal employees were allowed to stay on the job, manning national defense posts and the like. Social Security payments stopped, along with Meals on Wheels, veterans’ benefits, mail delivery, and the processing of home sales. VA hospitals and the national parks closed.
For Bill Clinton, the shutdown had a more personal effect. An eerie quiet settled over the White House as the president walked the halls, no longer filled with the chatter he craved. That’s when he met Monica Lewinsky, a twenty-two-year-old White House intern. She was the daughter of a Beverly Hills doctor and had graduated from Lewis and Clarke College in Oregon. In her first conversation with Clinton, on the second day of the shutdown, she boldly confessed, “I have a huge crush on you.” The president was intoxicated by her confidence. Within hours of meeting, the two had their first sexual encounter.
The Republicans and the Democrats blamed the other for the shutdown, but Gingrich tipped the balance one morning when he told reporters that he had sent his extension proposal because he felt Clinton had snubbed him when Gingrich was a guest on the presidential plane returning from Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral. “It’s petty, but I think it’s human,” Gingrich said over breakfast. “You’ve been on the plane for twenty-five hours, and nobody has talked to you, and they ask you to get off the plane by the back ramp. You just wonder, where is their sense of manners?”
The White House promptly released a photo, taken on the plane, showing Gingrich chatting amiably with President Clinton and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole. The New York Daily News ran a front-page cartoon showing a weeping, diaper-clad Gingrich with the headline, CRY BABY. In the public view, blame for the shutdown was settled.
A new budget extension ended the crisis after six days, and the struggle continued. But when the final budget reconciliation bill was delivered to the president in December, he vetoed it, with the pen Lyndon Johnson had used to sign Medicare into law. Not only did the budget make heavy cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, it slashed funds for education, environmental protection, AmeriCare, Legal Aid, a
nd programs helping women and children. The president asked the Republicans to negotiate, but Gingrich and his allies, particularly the radical-right newcomers who had captured fifty-four Democratic seats, refused. A second government shutdown, this one only partial but still crippling, began on December 16 and lasted through the holidays.
A new Bill Clinton emerged. Leon Panetta, his chief of staff, remembers the transformation. “We had been going through negotiations on the budget. And there were some of us that were nervous about that. President Clinton might go too far. That he might want to go so far in compromising that he might hurt himself politically,” Panetta said. Gingrich and Republicans had gotten accustomed to pushing the president around. But then the president reached a breaking point. Clinton decided he was done compromising, though he knew that it might cost him reelection. “My first reaction was: He’s drawn a line that he had to draw,” Panetta said. “He understood that he would have to take a risk of not winning, and winning was what he was always about.”
The voters had reached a verdict on who was to blame. Gingrich was off-sides, according to the consensus. Even some Republicans agreed he had abused power that was not his to wield; he wasn’t the president. Early in January, with public approval for the GOP plummeting, Republicans in the Senate decided to negotiate. Republican Bob Dole, with an eye toward his own presidential campaign, led the charge in the Senate to end the shutdown. The House followed, a new compromise budget was passed, and the government was back in business.
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