A Woman in Charge (33 page)

I
N
N
OVEMBER,
Bill Clinton was reelected governor in a landslide, 57 percent to 43 percent. He had carried Sebastian County, which was still hard-core Republican territory, as it had been when he lost by six thousand votes in the congressional election of 1974. At a stop in Fort Smith during this final campaign for governor, Bill had promised that if he won Sebastian County he would dance down Garrison Avenue, the town's main street. Two days after the election, he and Hillary and a couple of hundred others danced away in the rain and cold in celebration.

Happy days were here again.

5

The Prize

While Bill talked about social change, I embodied it. I had my own opinions, interests and profession…. I was outspoken. I represented a fundamental change in the way women functioned in our society.

—Living History

S
INCE
J
OHN
F. K
ENNEDY'S
election in 1960, a particular style of political journalism had established how presidential campaigns were historically regarded. This genre, known as “tick-tock,” was perfected by Theodore H. White in
The Making of a President
and established the myth of Camelot. White and many of his successors recorded every sort of scene-setting and minutiae, with dramatic emphasis added by piling detail upon detail from the point of view of a fly on the wall. But flies are not very discriminating, and the standardization of this technique over the next decade for the most part did little to reveal the real stories of presidential campaigns. This was especially true in 1972 when White wrote the final book in his
Making of the President
series, which in its first edition canonized the geniuses of Richard Nixon's presidential campaign. In the Clinton campaign twenty years later, journalists covering it—and others who wrote books after its conclusion—faced a unique problem: the real story, of course, was the relationship between Bill and Hillary, their partnership and how it largely determined the philosophy, strategy, offenses, defenses, sound bites, ideas, attacks, and general health of the Clinton campaign. This was a new phenomenon in Washington: a campaign that emanated from the collaboration of the candidate and his wife. The essential dialogue was the one between them, and few aides or friends—if any—ever learned the couple's exact conversations when they were alone. The principal deputies of the campaign did know that she sometimes spoke for him, and that his words were often hers, and that she always proved to be the elephant in the room.

Bill was intellectually and politically deft enough to throw George H. W. Bush off-guard and challenge the menacing machine at his command, a battlefield army of brilliant young political savages directed by Lee Atwater and his disciple Karl Rove. Moreover, Bill and Hillary had real ideas and programs to address the real problems of the country in a thoughtful, nonideological way and with a generally positive message—no matter how hard the Bush people tried to taint them pejoratively with the label “liberal.” The easy part for the Clinton campaign was setting out what the candidate believed. The tough part was getting the press and the voters to turn down the noise that Bill and Hillary believed was extraneous: about his sex life and escape from military service, and the public's perception of her as ambitious and power-hungry. They needed to find ways to engage voters with the campaign's ideas and to present themselves convincingly as an appealing new force in American politics—not Machiavellian monsters or opportunists, as the Republican campaign would have it, but a young, smart Kennedyesque couple attempting to send George Bush and his white-haired wife packing.

Bill's tendency to be his own worst enemy didn't help. The sensationalistic rumors, accusations, and revelations about him lent themselves to journalistic hyperbole. Partly because his political life was so intertwined with Hillary's it was difficult to know precisely the reality and context of her life. Remarkably for so public a figure, especially one whose husband had been reelected governor four times and was running for president, the book on Hillary was awfully thin, suspiciously repetitive, and contextually lacking, whether the media narrative in question was admiring, hostile, or an honest attempt to separate the real Hillary from the myth generated by Clinton campaigns past and present. She wanted it that way, through their years in the White House and after.

Meanwhile, of singular significance in the campaign and later in the White House, he often needed to be managed, pushed, reassured, guided, or scolded, depending on the moment, to perform at the level of which he was capable. This was the key to his effectiveness, almost like tuning an instrument. The person who knew best how to do that was his wife, partly because he would listen to her.

 

H
ILLARY BELIEVED,
before Bill did, that he could win in 1992—even when President George Bush's popularity registered near 90 percent. “That's one where her instinct was right, and I didn't feel that way for the longest time,” Clinton said years later. “She thought that in '88 we still had a reasonably good economy and that the adverse consequences of Reaganomics were not fully apparent to most voters; and that by 1992 they would be. And she always believed that. And she never changed her opinion…. It was quite amazing.”

Through the spring and summer of 1991, Hillary and Bill had been discussing between themselves, and to a limited extent with others, the pros and cons of Bill running. George Bush towered over the political landscape after America's victory in the Gulf War, so much so that only a single Democrat, an ex-senator—Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts—had thus far come forward to challenge him. But the most important consideration for Bill and Hillary was not Bush's stature. Rather, it was the same question that ended Bill's flirtation with running in 1988, and consumed the candidacy of Gary Hart.

Hillary quoted Bill as telling her in the early summer of 1991 that he didn't know if he wanted to run. He
knew
how vulnerable he was to insinuation and revelation from the Republicans about his women; Hillary did not know how sordid some of the facts were. But she clearly knew enough to recognize that if the lid were pried open more than slightly, his candidacy would, in all likelihood, be finished. She talked to him about withstanding the kind of take-no-prisoners campaign the Republicans would wage. They were both aware a presidential race would be brutal on their family. In the gubernatorial campaign of 1986, Hillary and Bill said years afterward, they had staged mock debates at the family dinner table in which one of them played the role of Bill's opponent and said mean things about Chelsea's dad (not about sex). Chelsea was now four years older and would understand far more.

In late August 1991, shortly before the school term was to begin, Hillary pressed the case one morning, she said, just as they were getting out of bed, in the guest cottage on the mansion grounds, because their own bedroom was being painted. She had supplied the dialogue to journalists years later.

Her: “I think you have to do it.”

Him: “Do you really?”

Her: “Yeah.”

Him: “Why do you believe that?”

Her: “I think you are absolutely the right person to make these arguments.”

They had been discussing “the arguments” all summer, she said: restoring strength to the economy; pursuing racial justice; reversing the sleazy ethical climate of the Reagan-Bush years; moving the Democratic Party to the center without compromising its fundamental principles. Bill was the right age. The country was ready for its first president born after World War II.

She said she thought he would win, and that he should run only if he was ready for what winning would require.

In one subsequent account—a book written by
Newsweek
reporters about the 1992 campaign—there was a slight variation in the details (“The sudden movement wakened Hillary. She could guess what was on her husband's mind.”) and the dialogue she supplied:

Her: “We have to do this, don't we?”

Him: “We don't have to do anything we don't want to do.”

Her: “But if we don't what will our excuse be?”

Through the fall, Bill sought advice from numerous friends about running for president. Most of them believed that he and Hillary had already made up their minds, and that these exploratory conversations were more for self-assurance, going through the motions rather than genuinely seeking counsel. Many had been with Bill since Georgetown and Oxford, and with Hillary since Wellesley, and with both of them ever since. They had been waiting most of their adult lives for a Clinton presidential candidacy.

 

H
ILLARY AND
B
ILL
together devised a plan to test whether it was possible to acknowledge the problems of their marriage in a general enough way that “serious” journalists would pry no further, or perhaps halfheartedly, or that would at least give the Clintons a dignified means of refusing to answer any more questions about their conjugal life—and beyond—without being untruthful. If all hell broke loose, Bill could withdraw before he had formally declared his candidacy. But they had no plans to do that. There was no question how badly Hillary and Bill both wanted 1992 to be their year.

The optimal venue at which to float their plan was a Washington institution where trial balloons were often released, the so-called Sperling Breakfast, at the Capital Hilton Hotel. Many scenes from the movie
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,
with Jimmy Stewart as the hayseed hero who brings honor back to politics in Washington, were filmed in the hotel. At the Sperling Breakfast, members of the national press corps broke bread with politicians over sausages, eggs, grits, and coffee.

The breakfast of September 16, 1991, was notable almost as much for its lack of spontaneity as the news that ensued, which was exactly what Hillary and Bill had hoped for. They had rehearsed for days with advisers and aides how they would comport themselves, trying out different versions of the same message: that there had been problems in their marriage in the past, that the problems were behind them, and that Bill and Hillary were a strong and committed couple.

Bill was reluctant to say even that much. In one meeting leading up to the breakfast, he told Hillary and the others present that he was inclined to draw a clear line and state plainly that he wouldn't answer personal questions about his marriage or private life. Period. But Hillary understood the need for preemptive measures. “We've got to put a stop to this,” she told two aides, Stan Greenberg and Frank Greer, who would spend the most harrowing hours of the campaign in consultation with her about how to respond to personal attacks on Bill and herself. For the Sperling Breakfast, they all agreed, as Hillary had urged, that Bill should acknowledge that there had been problems in their marriage, but he would not get into the details because those were private matters only for his family to discuss. He was committed to Hillary and to Chelsea, and that's what mattered. End of story—they hoped. They were well aware that the beginning of the end of Gary Hart's campaign had come in a meeting with members of the Washington press corps, when a reporter from a reputable newspaper, not a supermarket tabloid, had asked the candidate if he had ever committed adultery.

Since then, however, there had been some second thoughts within the mainstream press establishment about the zeal involved in helping instigate Hart's collapse, and the tone of coverage.

To Hillary's and Bill's surprise, by the time the dishes were being cleared at the Sperling Breakfast, none of the reporters had asked any questions about their marriage or private lives. Instead, Bill had been at his best at what he was best at: talking policy, evangelizing, fulfilling the kind of expectations that had led one aide to call him “Propeller-Head,” revving at thousands of RPMs about the meaning of New Democratic politics and his commitment to tax cuts for the middle class and an improved health care system. At last, on his own initiative, he brought up the premeditated matter they were actually there to discuss. “All of you are nice not to bring it up,” he said, “but I know all of you are concerned…,” and one of the reporters picked up from there, gingerly.

Bill's answer was exactly what had been rehearsed: Hillary was seated next to him. “Like nearly anybody who has been together for twenty years, our relationship has not been perfect or free from difficulties, but we feel good about where we are and we believe in our obligation to each other, and we intend to be together thirty or forty years from now, whether I run for president or not.”

Godfrey Sperling, the breakfast's founding eminence, wrote later in
The Christian Science Monitor
:

Mr. Clinton received a “boffo” rating in the articles written by the 40-plus journalists there that day. The test very specifically included the need to find out whether the widely circulated rumors about Clinton's infidelity would be too much baggage for him to carry out a winning campaign. Clinton received an especially understanding and sympathetic response from the journalists when he said that, like so many married people, he and Hillary had had personal problems between them to work out—and they had done so…. Mrs. Clinton nodded emphatically.

Two weeks later, at 2:30
A.M.
on October 3, Bill was poring over his announcement speech, making the final revisions. In preparation for his address, he had watched tapes of John F. Kennedy, hoping he would be able to suggest JFK's gestures. All that was left was to consult Hillary one more time. Soon he would be standing in front of the Old State House to declare his candidacy for president.

As Bill finally stepped to the podium, he could see among the crowd of two thousand many of the same friends who had come to Little Rock in July 1987 expecting him to announce his candidacy. Diane Blair, looking at Hillary next to him, remembered later that she was thinking about how, when they had first met, her friend had looked more like a hippie than a first lady. Bob Reich, who had flown in that morning, thought to himself, “God, I hope they know what they're getting into.”

 

S
OON AFTER THE ANNOUNCEMENT,
Diane Blair, who had written a well-regarded political science textbook, decided she would write a book about the Clinton campaign of 1992. She was certain Hillary and Bill were going to the White House. As preparation, she asked campaign workers at every level to make extensive notes through the whole campaign. After the election, she interviewed them—126 members of the campaign staff in all. The answers to her questions, verbatim, with their firsthand reports of everything from advance team preparations to the most important strategy decisions of the campaign, filled four enormous binders. Her book was never written. She died of cancer in 2000, at age sixty-one, and the binders were locked in storage.