A Woman in Charge (38 page)

In December, Thomases went to Washington to tour the White House and obtain floor plans of the West Wing and the Executive Office Building. Upon her return, according to Neel, she announced that Hillary might occupy the suite of offices in the West Wing that, in previous administrations, had been used by the vice president and his staff.

“I told Susan that under no circumstances would that happen, and if she didn't like it she could take it up in person with the president-elect and the vice president–elect,” Neel recalled. Thomases said Neel's memory was mistaken and that she and Hillary were simply seeking any space in the always overcrowded, surprisingly tiny West Wing. But the new vice president, and others who had worked less closely with the Clintons, regarded Thomases's involvement as an example of how Hillary's methodology could insulate her from actions bound to rile the sensibilities of presidential aides and outsiders alike. The incident registered negatively with Gore, who began to regard Hillary with more than a soupçon of suspicion and distrust.

In announcing his senior cabinet choices just before Christmas, Bill Clinton made little effort to play down the role of his wife—a lawyer with more Washington experience than he. Fourteen of twenty cabinet-level appointees were lawyers, despite Clinton's campaign pledge to select “a cabinet that looks like America.” He did not, however, reveal the offstage process that preceded their selection: interviews first with members of the transition team, then with the president-elect (and sometimes Gore, if he hadn't already been present for the initial session), and finally one-on-one in the kitchen of the governor's mansion with Hillary. He made no bones about her role. He was properly proud of her. “She advised me on these decisions, as she has on every other decision I've made in the last twenty years,” he said. However, he did not yet want to publicly discuss in detail how Hillary would define her tasks as first lady, and what job she might take. Even with his staff he remained coy about it. “I'm not prepared to define her role in the White House yet,” he said, “but I will before long.” He did express his hope that she would attend cabinet meetings, observing, “She knows more about a lot of this stuff than most of us do.”

 

O
NE THING WAS CERTAIN:
Hillary Clinton, in many respects a very private person, intended to keep it that way. That didn't mean she was shy. She had rarely been reticent about her political views or what she saw as matters of right and wrong—her values, she would say. However, she zealously protected herself (and her family) from almost any invasive inquiry that might reveal something of her emotional life, her deeper ambitions, or her machinations, especially after her marriage had become an issue during her husband's presidential campaign.

Her closest friends, professional colleagues, and staff members were fiercely loyal and reflexively protective, and would become more so once the Clintons were in the White House. Over the years, she had become extremely careful about what she revealed and to whom on matters that might be of interest to the press. Like many people in public life, the more that was written or rumored about her (inevitably, she believed, bound to be wrong or miscast) the harder she, her entourage, and her husband's handlers tried to control her public image. The book on her husband was voluminous, of course. For every month of his life, it seemed, there was some sort of documentation (including the famous photo of sixteen-year-old Bill shaking hands with John Kennedy), and there always appeared to be a friend, relative, classmate, or acolyte around to offer testimony. In fact, too much was known about Bill Clinton for his own good, down to the fact that (as he had revealed on television during the campaign) he wore boxer shorts, not briefs. Winston Churchill had once said that all great men have an air of mystery, and though the modern media had sorely tested the point, such an air had eluded Bill Clinton long before he reached the White House. Ronald Reagan possessed more mystery after eight years as president than when he was elected. Hillary wanted to maintain that aura of mystery. The Hillary narrative she wished to maintain, from the vantage points of the press and a celebrity-hungry public, was that of a powerful, perhaps transforming figure in the new presidency.

The most vocal internal opponent of putting Hillary in charge of health care was Donna Shalala, who (like Vernon Jordan) knew Hillary far better than most new members of the president's team, and so felt freer about speaking out. Shalala continued to warn both Clintons that Hillary would become a magnet for every kind of criticism, however unrelated to the merits of their health care proposals. If the health care effort failed in Congress, he and Hillary would be personally blamed—and he would not be able to distance himself from the ensuing firestorm of criticism and political fallout. Moreover, she was the only person he couldn't fire. Better, suggested Shalala, that the first lady work behind the scenes in conceiving the Clinton health care plan and campaign vigorously for its implementation.

Shalala, four feet eleven inches tall, of Lebanese descent, an ardent feminist with both academic experience and sharp political skills, had known Hillary almost twenty years, since they'd first served together on the board of the Children's Defense Fund. And though she and the new first lady were friends, Shalala was certain that Hillary was ill-prepared for the job. There was too much mythology about Hillary that stretched the facts, she felt. Shalala had always been made uncomfortable by hyperbolic statements from friends and acolytes of Hillary, as well as leaders in the women's movement who didn't know her personally, who put forth the notion that had she pursued her own political career and not deferred to Bill Clinton's, she would have been a governor or senator in her own right by 1992. “They assume that [just] being smart is enough,” Shalala said. “And it's not enough. It's judgment. It's experience. It's being strategic at the right points.” Hillary had never run a large enterprise. Shalala believed that Hillary often tried to do too many things at once—and later, as her personal and legal troubles accumulated, became distracted. “She's also someone who doesn't do things in depth. Because Hillary's so smart and well educated, I think people missed the fact [that] she has essentially been his supporter, and his support partner…. She hadn't really fully developed an identity until she came up here [to Washington]. She also had a job, but it wasn't with one of the New York law firms with big, high-profile cases. She's clearly smart, and clearly could have been a partner in a New York firm, had she chosen that path.”

Shalala also noted that, in Little Rock, the Clintons “had always been big fish in a little pond.” Until they got to Washington in 1993, they “had never actually banged up against people as smart as they were. They'd spent all of their adult lives in which they were the smartest people in the room. These were two extremely able people who had not really been tested before. So they really had to learn their way.”

Panetta, Rivlin, and Bentsen, as relative strangers to the Clintons, though no less troubled, had to be more concerned about offending the new first lady. Gently, they took their worries directly to the president-elect. It became clear to them that Bill didn't want to disappoint his wife on an issue that obviously meant so much to her. Nonetheless, they all made known their belief that it was a mistake for the president to appoint his wife to run his most important initiative (which was also likely to be the most costly domestic program in the history of the republic), one on which so much of his presidency would be riding.

“That was the argument that everybody gave him when he decided to do it. But Bill and Hillary had already made up their minds,” Shalala said. “I basically said to the president that we had to have a process that was open and participatory. And he said, ‘We will. Ira [Magaziner]'s going to run it day to day.' I said, ‘You can't run a major policy like this out of the White House. You've got to have some insulation from it, in case it falls on its face.'”

The opposition that gave Clinton the most pause was that of Lloyd Bentsen. Bill had an almost filial respect for Bentsen, a tall, patrician Texan who had served in the Senate for twenty-two years, had chaired its Finance Committee, and had run for vice president in 1988 on the ticket with Michael Dukakis. Bentsen, a conservative Democrat who commanded unusual admiration in the capital from both parties, had a keen political sense and, at age seventy-one, no ambitions beyond being secretary of the treasury.

Like Bob Reich, Shalala was particularly concerned as well about the Clintons' general disdain for old Washington hands, and by their decision to include few of them in the new administration. Reich kept telling them that they would need more Washington experience in the White House and prodded them to consider D.C. insiders who might move into senior positions and help them negotiate the tricky culture of the capital. But more than Bill, it was Hillary, reinforced by Susan Thomases, who adamantly insisted that as many senior positions as possible be bestowed on friends and aides who had been with them through the Arkansas years, as well as loyalists from the campaign. Only as a last resort would such posts be offered to members of Congress or other Washington insiders who had not been actively in their corner, particularly if they had been close to Jimmy Carter. The Clintons had never forgiven Carter for overwhelming Fort Chaffee with Fidel Castro's outcasts.

In choosing a White House chief of staff, Hillary, Bill, and Thomases all wanted not a Washington eminence (who could conceivably create a separate base of power within the administration), but someone with whom the new president and first lady would find almost familial comfort. Their choice was Thomas F. “Mack” McLarty, CEO and chairman of the board of the Arkla natural gas company, Bill's childhood friend from Hope. McLarty was more than sufficiently close to Hillary to ensure an easy line of communication with the new first lady and her staff. Later, Bill observed, “I spent so much time on [selecting] the cabinet that I hardly spent any time on the White House staff…. The real problem with the staff was that most of them came out of the campaign or Arkansas, and had no experience in working in the White House or dealing with Washington's political culture.”

 

B
UT THE
C
LINTONS'
desire to do things differently in Washington was also born of many good intentions and some sound reasoning. Whatever their shortcomings, Hillary and Bill understood that the culture of the capital was often inhospitable to serious political ideas in ways it had never been in the days of Roosevelt, Kennedy, or even Nixon. Washington had changed radically. It had become a money town, a power town, a town where appearance routinely eclipsed substance, and idealism was considered weakness. “Washington is largely indifferent to truth,” wrote
New York Times
columnist Leslie Gelb before escaping the capital to head the Council of Foreign Relations in 1993, in Manhattan. “Truth has been reduced to a conflict of press releases and a contest of handlers. Truth is judged not by evidence, but by theatrical performances. Truth is fear, fear of opinion polls, fear of special interests, fear of judging others for fear of being judged, fear of losing power and prestige. Truth has become the acceptance of untruths.” During the campaign, the Clintons had seemed to understand this, or at least that the voters apprehended this. The new president and his wife had therefore pledged that the Clinton administration, in addition to promoting serious policies, would be the most open and ethical in history, and that they would restore honesty and candor to the political process. In her campaign speeches, Hillary had stressed the point repeatedly, heaping scorn upon the ethics that dominated during the Reagan-Bush years.

Since the days of her work on Watergate, a whole new city had grown up along K Street north of Pennsylvania Avenue, stretching from fashionable Georgetown to political downtown—gleaming office buildings that housed more than 100,000 lobbyists, regulatory lawyers, public policy advocates, and their attendant pollsters, PR people, and legions of so-called grassroots guys who were paid millions of dollars by corporations and trade associations and unions to “spontaneously” organize the folks back home so that their congressmen wouldn't be tempted to controvert the will of their biggest contributors. Part of this lobbying boom had been fueled by loopholes in campaign finance reform laws passed in the wake of Watergate, which had allowed hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions to be spread around the Congress, mostly by corporations. In Franklin Roosevelt's time there were only a dozen lobbyists in town; when Ronald Reagan was inaugurated there were still fewer than one thousand. Capitol Hill, by the time of Clinton's election, danced enthusiastically to the tune of the ten thousand lobbyists clustered around K Street, a gigue that owed almost nothing to either tradition, protocol, or decent government. The coarseness had its effect on debate in the House and Senate, which often sounded more like talk radio than deliberative government.

“The concept of service has little political currency in Washington,” wrote political journalist Sidney Blumenthal in
The New Yorker
as the Clintons were getting ready to settle in. “Everybody is fair game, simply for being on the other side. Humiliating one's prey, not merely defeating one's foes, is central to the process. The press is hardly an impartial referee; rather, it is often caught up in a blundered game of chase.”

Whatever Blumenthal lacked in irony he was on the money about much of the Washington press corps and the culture of the city they covered. His was a message that Hillary could embrace, along with its author, who would decamp soon enough from the magazine to become her amanuensis.

 

H
ILLARY AND HER MENTOR
on the Nixon impeachment staff, Bernie Nussbaum, had stayed in touch since 1974, as her young husband moved up the political ladder. Nussbaum had become a leading New York City lawyer specializing in corporate takeovers. In 1988, she had asked him to get ready to raise funds in New York for a presidential race. When her husband had finally made the run four years later, Nussbaum had helped organize some fund-raisers among lawyers in Manhattan. During the transition he had presided over a team of attorneys dealing with Justice Department policies.