A Woman in Charge (32 page)

Around this time, Bill was also asking some fellow governors whose marriages had deteriorated how they had dealt with the political consequences of divorce. He was clearly suggesting that he might be in a similar situation.

“He would wait me out,” Hillary had observed about the period of time when she was considering whether to marry Bill. Now she would wait him out.

When Wright confronted him on the subject in the spring or early summer of 1989, Bill confirmed he had fallen in love with another woman, but now he wanted to fix his marriage to Hillary. He also confirmed to her, Betsey said, that Hillary had refused to give him a pass out of the marriage. “And that he had thought he was really in love with this woman, but he had also decided he wanted—he'd rather save the marriage with Hillary.”

Wright told Hillary that she was ready to quit her job, and “explained why I had decided to go ahead and leave, that I had a voluntary contract with him and, in a lot of ways, she didn't. Because the minute Chelsea was born, hers wasn't. And that he seemed pretty determined to fix his relationship with her, and I knew he couldn't fix it with both of us at the same time, and that I was leaving.” However, Betsey continued to work closely with both Hillary and Bill and Dick Morris over the next four years, though not as Bill's chief of staff.
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Meanwhile, “in trying to calm our relationship and feeling depressed,” Betsey made arrangements for Bill and herself to see a therapist together. She and Bill were extremely voluble characters, each prone to outbursts, each with responsibilities to the other, and each with responsibilities to Hillary. Two years earlier, they had consulted with a psychologist who specialized in “business dynamics, office management kinds of things. He had done some work with the staff, and he was a friend of the Clintons,” according to Wright. But she concluded after several sessions that, although Bill “liked him [the therapist] a lot, the problem with him was that he was far more interested in social invitations to the governor's mansion than he was in being a psychologist trying to help us with a problem.”

In July 1989, said Wright, she and Bill had two more counseling sessions, this time with Karen Ballard, the psychologist who had worked with Virginia, Bill, and Roger Clinton after the latter's arrest and imprisonment for dealing cocaine during Bill's second term as governor. Hillary had seemed positive about the results of the Clinton family's counseling; Bill learned much about the long-term consequences on his mother, Roger, and himself of his father's alcoholism and violence—and the secrecy it engendered in the family.

Bill's evaluation was less effusive: he talked only about the insight he gained on Roger's problems.

Betsey Wright did not find Ballard useful in dealing with the relationship between herself and Bill, and never told Hillary of the consultations (or those with the previous counselor). The sessions with Ballard were at Betsey's house. But they were discontinued within a month or so on Betsey's initiative, “because she kept telling me I had to…confront the alcoholism in my family. But there was no alcoholism in my family.” According to Betsey, Ballard was a specialist in the fields of alcoholism and co-dependency. “I was perfectly willing to believe I was into a co-dependency [with Bill],” she said. “I don't think we accomplished a thing. So I just went and found somebody else on my own, just for me.” One thing was certain: the theory of co-dependency, that particular specialty of New Age psychology being the realm of expertise of Betsey's and Bill's psychologist, definitely figured in, though who was co-dependent on whom, and how many people could be co-dependent in a single governor's mansion, was something not clearly delineated.

Dick Morris had concluded that Hillary and Bill's relationship was not co-dependent, because “I don't think he's in any way addicted to her. I think that he uses her to help enable him. To do good things and bad things, but to enable him. He sees the world in very functional terms. In regard to affection and relationships and conversation, and rewards, punishments and coldness and warmth and praise and thanks and blame and yelling and all those things, these are tools he uses to get people to do what he wants them to do. And his goal is to get everybody to do what he wants them to do. I don't think he draws a whole lot of a distinction among people…. Some people he just feels are more important to him than others. It's a largely functional relationship: I've always said it's a shorthand that she loves Bill and Bill loves Bill, so they have something in common.”

H
ILLARY WENT
to visit Diane and Jim Blair in Fayetteville. “We were doing our usual long walk and she was very concerned,” said Diane. “She was thinking that they had not made much money. Chelsea was there now. What if she were on her own? She didn't own a house. She was concerned that if she were to become a single parent, how would she make it work in a way that would be good for Chelsea. Hillary never went into details—absolutely never. And I doubt she did with anyone.” The possible exception might have been Vince Foster. “I knew at times that she was pessimistic about their marriage when Bill was governor, but again, I wasn't taking notes back then,” Diane said many years later. She noted that, along with her Methodism, Hillary's zealously guarded zone of privacy is essential to understanding her. “No doubt about it. The fact that nobody has ever wanted their privacy more and had it more excruciatingly violated is still just staggering to me.”

In 1989 and 1990, Hillary joined half a dozen corporate boards, bringing in annual fees in excess of $200,000. Her billing at the Rose Law Firm increased as well. And, as she did in 1999 after Bill's impeachment for lying under oath about Monica Lewinsky, Hillary began talking seriously to friends about running for public office—in this case, for Bill's job as governor, if he didn't run, of course. She had never before explored the possibility of elective office.

With his and Hillary's life in turmoil, Bill had to decide whether to seek another term as governor in the election of November 1990. He had little time to make a decision, and Hillary had shown no inclination to consent to divorce. He continued to surreptitiously see Marilyn Jo Jenkins, and professed to at least one person to be in love with both his wife and Jenkins. To Dick Morris, with whom he discussed the possibility that he might seek a divorce, he seemed “dithering and depressed.” Since the announcement in July 1987 that he would not seek the presidency, his performance as governor overall was inattentive, almost negligent at times, his energies obsessively focused on his relationship with Marilyn Jo and then his attempt to deal with the future and fate of his marriage. If he wanted to become president, whether in 1992 or later, it must have seemed a far reach on his own, without Hillary, with the weight of an ugly separation dragging on him, and his relationship with Chelsea altered perhaps irrevocably.

The first decision, the one that affected all the others, was what he chose to do about his marriage to Hillary. Jim Blair had heard the rumors about Bill's relationship with Jenkins, but he was certain that Bill would never leave the marriage, even with a pass from Hillary. Among other things, it would mean Bill could never run for president, in all likelihood. Bill never suggested to Jim he was considering leaving, and Blair never asked. “I just don't believe that,” he said. “Would it be a woman he might like to spend ninety days on a Caribbean island with? Yeah.” Other friends said Hillary had either demanded or suggested that Bill go into counseling for his “problem.”

Hillary and Bill decided they would work at saving their marriage, whatever was required, presumably including some kind of counseling that Bill would undergo; it was a commitment, and Bill understood his obligations not to be unfaithful. (One can only speculate as to exactly what led to the decision. Betsey Wright's interpretation was that there was a “negotiation,” after which “Bill had to be a puppy dog and do everything she wanted him to do…. I watched the same thing play out after Lewinsky. She would take it [abuse], but she was going to get something out of it, too. So she ran for the Senate.”)

As it happened, Bill and Marilyn Jo Jenkins continued to remain close and see each other on a number of occasions until Bill and Hillary reached the White House. Clinton had called either her office or home fifty-nine times between 1989 and 1991, according to the phone records introduced into the various investigations to which the Clintons were subjected.

 

A
T FIRST,
after their reconciliation, Bill decided tentatively not to run for reelection as governor, and to focus on his relationship with his family. It might also be advantageous not to be burdened with the governorship if he decided to seek the presidency in 1992. If he ran for governor and lost—a possibility, since Dick Morris's preliminary polls were showing that 50 percent of Arkansas voters would prefer a new governor—the presidency might never be attainable.

He and Hillary discussed the possibility of her running to become his successor. Morris conducted two polls to assess her chances. “The conclusion that I came to in those polls was that she had not developed her image, and that she was seen as Mrs. Clinton. She was not seen as Hillary. Which is hard to imagine, but it's true. And people felt that if she were going to run for governor, it would be him putting her in as a placeholder to control Arkansas while he ran for president. And, in fact, I called it in my briefing to her—an unfortunate choice of phrase which she was angry at—the Lurleen Wallace
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phenomenon…. People saw that, and she was very angry about it, very annoyed. And Bill, more so than she, in defending her, saying…‘Did you tell them that she was on the board of the Children's Defense Fund? Did you tell them that she was head of Legal Services Corporation? Did you tell them about what she did for education reform?' And so on. But it was very clear that she had not established her own identity.” Morris and others could see that Bill was being extremely solicitous of Hillary in the aftermath of their decision to remain together, as well as affectionate, appreciative, and far less stressed.

Bill declared his candidacy for another term as governor. Soon he was regaining his form, energized by being on the road again, traveling the state, talking about its future, what he and Hillary had done for its people. Four weeks before election day, Larry Nichols, an ex-employee of the Arkansas Development Finance Authority, who had been fired for making almost 150 private phone calls to the Nicaragua contra leadership, announced to the press that he had filed suit against Clinton, accusing him of using a “slush fund” as governor to conduct concealed affairs with five or more women. One was Gennifer Flowers.

The suit was an obvious attempt to damage Clinton not just in Arkansas, but in any future race for president. (Nichols was a surrogate for Clinton's opponent and longtime antagonist in the governor's race, Shef Nelson.) As such, it was particularly dangerous in both the long and short term to Bill and Hillary, as she recognized.

At the behest of Betsey Wright and Hillary, Webb Hubbell and Vince Foster were then hired, by or through the campaign, to represent the women and obtain from the women their signed statements that they had never had sex with Bill Clinton. Some of the women were brought into an interview room to be questioned by Vince, Webb, and, on one occasion, Hillary. Two of the five women were prominent friends of Hillary and Bill—both black—and almost no one familiar with the case believes they were anything more than friends. But a line had been crossed, in appearance if nothing else: Hillary, or her law firm, or both were now acting as counsel to the women with whom her husband was accused of having illicit affairs. Acting through another lawyer, Betsey Wright was able to get Gennifer Flowers to sign a statement that she had never had a sexual relationship with Bill.

There could be no question that Hillary was Bill's fiercest defender in preventing his other women from causing trouble. Always. It was as if she, much more than he, better understood the danger—to him, to her, to Bill's future, and to their dream. She never doubted that if the women, and the enemies who used them, succeeded or became too visible and credible, the whole edifice could come down, including their marriage.