“Some say the wrong Clinton is in the statehouse,” the governor himself drawled at a charity roast of Hillary four years ago, “and I wouldn’t disagree with them.” On February 7, when I asked if he was concerned about being upstaged by his wife, Clinton was unfazed. “I’ve always liked strong women. . . . It doesn’t bother me for people to see her and get excited and say she could be president. I always say she could be president, too.” At his own fund-raisers he has often quipped, “Buy one, get one free!”
In fact, fewer people seem to have negative feelings toward Hillary than toward her husband. According to a national survey conducted from March 27 to 29 by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman for Vanity Fair, 41 percent of those surveyed have a generally favorable impression of Hillary, while 24 percent have an unfavorable one. Fifty-five percent think she is an asset to her husband’s campaign; 24 percent think she’s a liability. A whopping 84 percent say they would not object to a First Lady with a separate career. Those surveyed use the following descriptions of Hillary: intelligent (75 percent); tough-minded (65 percent); a good role model for women (48 percent); a feminist in the best possible sense (44 percent). The negatives: power-hungry (44 percent); too intense (36 percent); a wife who dominates her husband (28 percent). Most disturbing for the Clintons, however, is the skepticism over their relationship: 53 percent think it is more a “professional arrangement” than a “real marriage” (22 percent).
The raised eyebrows are due in part to the way Hillary has seized the stage at certain public appearances. Even the normally unflappable Tom Brokaw was startled when, in the triumphal glow of the southern stomp on Super Tuesday, she shot past her husband to man the microphone. “What I would like to do, in introducing . . . someone . . .” she began, while her husband danced in the background like a prizefighter trying to stay warm. Soon she was booming, “We believe passionately in this country and we cannot stand by for ONE MORE YEAR and watch what is happening to it!” Over the applause, Brokaw observed dryly, “Not just an introduction, this is a speech by Mrs. Clinton.”
Hillary barely referred to her husband—and then only as “the messenger.” If he is the messenger, she may be the message. Those who keep asking “Why isn’t she running?” miss the point. Hillary Clinton is running. She and her husband have been a political team for more than twenty years. And now they are, despite protestations to the contrary, co-candidates for president of the United States. Asked at the L.A. luncheon if she wanted to be her husband’s vice president, Hillary brushed off the question. “I’m not interested in attending a lot of funerals around the world,” she cracked. She got a laugh, but when she continued it was with serious intent. “I want maneuverability . . . I want to get deeply involved in solving problems.” She later told me that she doesn’t see herself as a Cabinet officer but as an all-around adviser. And she doesn’t see what all the fuss is about. “No one gives George Bush a hard time when he gets advice from Jim Baker,” she’d complained to me earlier in the campaign.
Before he was forced to retreat on the subject of Hillary’s possible role in a Clinton administration on NBC’s Meet the Press, Bill told me, “If I get elected president, it will be an unprecedented partnership, far more than Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor. They were two great people, but on different tracks. If I get elected, we’ll do things together like we always have.”
Which would make Hillary Clinton one of the most formidable women in the world, a model of a full partner in public life. Friends go even further, touting Hillary as the next attorney general by pointing out that she would be better qualified than Robert Kennedy was when his brother named him to the post. Hillary’s own brother Hugh Rodham, a public defender in Dade County, Florida, foresees even higher callings. “Attorney general is only local lawmaking,” he says dismissively. “There’s treaty negotiations she could do. There’s labor stuff. There’s secretary of state . . .”
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The Clinton camp had planned “a slow build for Hillary,” according to her campaign manager, Richard Mintz. That was until all hell broke loose—until the day Bill Clinton was “deflowered” by a cabaret singer who once headlined at the Pinnacle Lounge in Little Rock, [insisting that she and the Arkansas governor had maintained a long-term relationship].
The candidate’s strategists huddled in panicky planning sessions. One significant piece of information: polls showed that 39 percent of voters would have reservations about voting for a candidate who had been unfaithful—but that the number diminishes if the wife knows about it and accepts it. The clear conclusion was that Gennifer [Flowers]’s unforgettable slot-machine eyes and hydraulic lips and indelible black roots required an immediate visual challenge: the apple-cheeked, moon-eyed wife of the governor, staggeringly poised, effortlessly articulate, primly silk-scarved. Blond, too—in fact, Hillary looked like a Town & Country version of Gennifer Flowers, but not with a G, with a good little Wellesley girl’s hair band covering her brown roots.
Hillary rendezvoused with Bill in Boston the night before the Clintons’ extraordinary “Checkers speech” on 60 Minutes. She conferred with the television crew on colors and camera angles. “You can quote me as saying that my sense of it was that she was in control,” says Steve Kroft, the interviewer. “We fiddled around with who should sit on which side, and they fiddled around with chair heights and things like that. You didn’t know she was his wife, you’d have thought she was a media consultant. She didn’t do it in a dictatorial sort of way. . . . She was very delightful and charming. When they left the room, everybody pretty much said, ‘Boy, she’s terrific’”
The next day, before airtime, tension was reportedly running high in the control room, with [60 Minutes] producer Don Hewitt ranting to Clinton advisers George Stephanopoulos and Harold Ickes, “He’s gotta come clean! He’s got to say yes!” Once Bill and Hillary were seated, Mrs. Clinton stared intently at Bill as he responded to the grilling. This was no Nancy Reagan glaze—this was the look of the consigliere sitting vigil over a member of the family.
Kroft’s impression was that Hillary was “tougher and more disciplined than he is. And analytical. Among his faults, he has a tendency not to think of the consequences of the things he says. I think she knows. She’s got a ten-second delay. If something comes to her mind she doesn’t think will play right, she cuts it off before anybody knows she’s thinking it.”
“I have acknowledged wrongdoing,” Bill offered when the cameras were rolling. “I have acknowledged causing pain in my marriage.” At another point when Kroft pressed him—“I am assuming from your answer that you’re categorically denying that you ever had an affair with Gennifer Flowers”—he took the bait. “I’ve said that before,” he replied quickly. “And so has she . . .”
In jumped Hillary the litigator: “I don’t want to be any more specific. I don’t think being any more specific about what’s happened in the privacy of our life together is relevant to anybody besides us.”
It was a signal for her husband to button up. “Having made the mistake of denying Gennifer Flowers, he was undoing what they had decided to do,” explains senior campaign adviser Susan Thomases. “So she was reminding him, ‘Hey, buddy, remember our strategy: if you say you’re not going to talk about any specific case, and then you talk about one case, you’re blowing the strategy.’”
Hillary’s presence was so strong, in fact, that, according to Kroft, “we found ourselves rationing her sound bites to keep her from becoming the dominant force in the interview.”
But some people think it has become obvious that Hillary is the dominant force in the Clinton campaign. Even those awed by her commented after her Super Tuesday speech, “There’s something a little scary, a little Al Haig–ish about her.” Her closest counterparts, high-striving professional women, often react viscerally: she’s “too intense,” they say, or she’s “missing something feminine”—as if they can’t forgive her for appearing to have i
t all.
The slings and arrows never seem to pierce Hillary’s armor-plated determination. “Hillary is convinced the way she does things is the right way,” attests her brother Hugh. Carolyn Huber, the woman who may know her best, having served as Hillary’s “mansion administrator,” day-to-day logistical helper, and surrogate grandmother to her child, affirms that Hillary will simply not be deterred. “She wants to win as bad as he does.” Is she tougher than he is? “I think so,” laughs Huber. “She’s more clear about what she wants and the way she wants it done. I don’t think there’s ever been a time when Hillary set her mind to something she wanted to happen that it hasn’t happened.”
Hillary is widely regarded by their closest associates as the tougher, cooler, and more intellectually tart of the two. Her favorite recreation is standing with friends and talking ideas around the kitchen counter in the governor’s mansion, one long Big Chill party, people helping themselves out of the fridge. (Hillary rarely cooks, and the state dining room is scarcely used.) She might mimic one of her hillbilly witnesses spitting tobacco from the stand while she cross-examines him. Or she’ll burst into a high-pitched Ozark honk—hee hee hee—over one of her husband’s Bubba lines. But come 10:30 she’ll announce, “That’s it for me, I’m goin’ to bed.” Bill is the night owl, the eternal schmoozer; Hillary is the emotionally disciplined one.
Sometimes this causes dissonance. “Hillary’s hard to know,” concedes a close family friend, Carolyn Y. Staley. Another family friend, assured she wouldn’t be identified, is more candid: “I never know from one day to the next how I’m going to be received by Hillary. She’s very busy, she knows exactly where she wants to go and how to get there. You’re either useful or extraneous to her.” Finally she blurts, “Look, Hillary’s tough as nails. Bill has always deferred to women to fight his battles.”
Indeed, throughout his career Bill Clinton has surrounded himself with exceptionally strong-willed, capable women. Following his first and only loss as governor, he drafted the rough-and-tumble George McGovern operative Betsey Wright as his campaign manager; she devoted the next ten years of her life to protecting and re-electing him. (Wright, who quit as Arkansas Democratic Party chair just before Clinton announced, says that she was “fried” by the time this presidential race came around.) He persuaded the flinty Susan Thomases, who had cut her teeth on Bill Bradley’s first Senate campaign, to join his current brain trust. And his top staff in the Arkansas statehouse has been predominantly female. “The only two men I know in American politics who are capable of treating women as real equals,” says Thomases, “are Bill Bradley and Bill Clinton.”
Part of Clinton’s dependence on his wife is financial. As one of the chief litigating partners in the Rose Law Firm and a director on five corporate boards (including a position as the only woman on the board of Wal-Mart) Hillary earned—based on her own figures—an estimated $160,000 in 1990. Twice voted one of the hundred most influential lawyers in America by The National Law Journal, “she could command the top salary for a litigator in any law firm in New York or Los Angeles,” claims her partner Herb Rule. (The going rate is $500,000 and up.) Instead, she has committed much of her energy to pro bono work, such as chairing the Children’s Defense Fund, and serving on the boards of nearly a dozen other educational and social-justice organizations.
“If Hillary were doing what she most wanted to do in this world, she would not be a partner in a corporate law firm,” confides her close friend and former Wellesley dormmate Jan Piercey. “That’s what she’s had to do—she’s responsible for the revenue in the family.” (Bill has increased his salary from $25,000 at the age of twenty-nine to the princely sum of $35,000 almost twenty years later.)
Bill Clinton is the puer aeternus, suggests one of their older, wiser friends—the eternal boy, a Jungian archetype, who remains stuck in an adolescent orientation toward life, often prompted by an exaggerated dependence on his mother. Seductive to men as well as women, the prototypical eternal boy often hopes to redeem mankind; in the archetype he is meant to replace the old king as a symbol of the renewal of life. But the “winged youth” often falls, psychologically, and in crisis turns to strong female figures to raise him up again. “Bill has achieved enormous success, but he’s still reaching,” says an Arkansas friend. “It’s the young man who’s been a star and who is, I hope, not locked in adolescence. We don’t know that yet—he’s only forty-five.”
George Fisher cartooned Bill Clinton in the guise of a boy for fourteen years at the old Arkansas Gazette, starting him off in his first term in a baby buggy, later graduating him to a tricycle and a ten-speed bike. (In real life Bill Clinton plays with a ’64 Mustang—Hillary calls it his “boy’s toy.”) In the mid-eighties Fisher penned a striking drawing that captures Bill Clinton’s dependence on his delivering angels. The cartoon, which was never published, shows three winged, spear-carrying women—Hillary, Betsey, and Clinton’s former press secretary—lifting their barefoot boy from the battlefield. They are meant to be Valkyries, “awful and beautiful,” who gather up the worthy and fly them to Valhalla.
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I saw Fisher’s cartoon come to life during what the campaign calls “the incredible week” after the 60 Minutes appearance, a week I referred to once as a “crisis” only to have Hillary correct me: “This is not a crisis, not a personal crisis anyway.” Flying with her, knee-to-knee, I watched while she fashioned the strategy to bring her husband “back from the dead,” as he now describes it.
It was in a nondescript motel in Pierre, South Dakota, where she had twenty minutes of downtime, that Hillary flipped on the TV on Monday, January 27, and caught the end of Gennifer Flowers on CNN playing tapes of her phone conversations with the governor. They were devastating.
“Let’s get Bill on the phone,” Hillary coolly directed her campaign manager, Mintz, who was himself fighting back tears. According to Hillary, Clinton told his wife he wasn’t concerned—after all, who was going to believe this woman? “Everybody knows you can be paid to do anything,” the governor said.
“Everybody doesn’t know that,” she insisted. “Bill, people who don’t know you are going to say, ‘Why were you even talking to this person?’”
At 6:25 P.M. Central time, Hillary was pressing the flesh at a Pork Producers Rib Feed in Pierre when her campaign manager whispered in her ear, “All three nets led with the Flowers press conference.” She excused herself and made a beeline for the one pay phone in the hall, pursued by a camera crew from PrimeTime Live. Mintz appealed to them not to shoot her. “I promise I’ll give you a shot of her on the phone, but this is not the time.”
I watched as a terrible shrug went down Hillary’s face. Little Rock was telling her about the latest deal—a young woman had been offered half a million dollars to say she’d had a one-night stand with Bill Clinton. Where would it stop?
Back in her six-seat charter plane, Hillary vented her frustration above the grinding hum: “If we’d been in front of a jury I’d say, ‘Miss Flowers, isn’t it true you were asked this by A.P. in June of 1990 and you said no? Weren’t you asked by the Arkansas Democrat and you said no?’ I mean, I would crucify her.”
Hillary boils over at what she perceives as a double standard—that the press has shied away from investigating long-standing rumors about George Bush. “I had tea with Anne Cox Chambers [the heiress who is chairwoman of her media empire’s Atlanta newspaper group],” Hillary recalled to me in a later interview, “and she’s sittin’ there in her sun-room saying, ‘You know, I just don’t understand why they think they can get away with this—everybody knows about George Bush,’ and then launches into this long description of, you know, Bush and his carrying on, all of which is apparently well known in Washington. But I’m convinced part of it is that the Establishment—regardless of party—sticks together. They’re gonna circle the wagons on Jennifer _____ and all these other people.” (Anne Cox Chambers
remembers telling Hillary, “I don’t understand why nothing’s ever been said about a George Bush girlfriend—I understand he has a Jennifer, too.”)
The reference is to a decade-long Bush staffer who now enjoys a senior State Department position. She has been persistently linked with the president in rumors that have never been proved. When I interviewed her in 1987 in Bush’s Senate office, the amply built middle-aged woman, a born-again Christian, was discreet about her work and travel with Bush. (In June of 1987, George Bush Jr. told Newsweek that when he asked his father if he’d ever committed adultery he replied, “The answer to the Big A question is N.O.”)
On the tiny plane, Hillary focused on the problem at hand. “I’m just not going to sit by anymore and say, ‘Well, it’s the press’s responsibility.’ If we can destroy people with paid stories, what’s next? . . . I don’t think Bill appreciates how TV really doesn’t give the other side. It’s like negative advertising.” A light bulb switched on behind her eyes. “That’s what I should have told him. In 1980 the Republicans started the negative advertising; in 1992 we have paid political character assassination. What Bill doesn’t understand is you’ve gotta do the same thing in response as you do with negative advertising—[the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, Michael] Dukakis didn’t understand that.” Suddenly, a brainstorm. “This is the daughter of Willie Horton!” Now she had the outlines of a proactive, not reactive, strategy: pound the “Republican attack machine” and run against the press.
Just before landing, she recited a prayer she says often: Dear Lord, be good to me. The sea is so wide and my boat is so small. Thump, bump, the plane skated through the blackness toward a shack with the sign RAPID CITY. Within minutes, Hillary was clicking across the concrete airfield, coatless, eager to coach her husband and rev up the campaign staff on a conference call. “Who’s getting information on the Star?” she demanded. “Who’s tracking down all the research on Gennifer? Where is our surrogate program? Who’s going to be out there speaking for us?” She let the fragile young staffers who had not experienced a Hiroshima in a campaign know that she and Bill were going to be out there fighting, “and I want you all to be putting this stuff together.”
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