A Woman in Charge (41 page)

If you look again at the tapes of that week, it is readily apparent how down-to-earth and unsophisticated this young first lady seems in contrast to the more familiar post-millennium Hillary, and how much more spontaneous her words and reactions appeared to be in January 1993. After what feels like a lifetime of the Clintons' lease on the national consciousness, it is also hard to recall the excitement and expectations surrounding her arrival—the first unretired working woman to be first lady, the first of modern feminism's sisters to live in the White House, the first presidential wife to be given an official portfolio. Though she and her husband had already acquired a formidable list of enemies, and though there was unquestionably something about Hillary that agitated the psyches of men and women disinclined to share her professed values, Americans were fascinated, and many captivated (a word fewer would use today) by this brainy, attractive, articulate woman who was very much of her time. Like Eleanor Roosevelt, her heroine who had also been marked by the vitriol of her enemies, she was determined to use every bit of her unprecedented dominion for the public good. That was the motivating fact of all she and her husband had struggled for. Of this she (and, for that matter he) had no doubt. Eleanor had been a woman ahead of her time, a time that harshly circumscribed her potential and her ability to act. Hillary was determined to locate and assert the remote reaches of her own potential. It would have been unthinkable in the first half of the twentieth century—Eleanor's time—that a first lady select members of the president's staff and cabinet, occupy an office in the West Wing of the White House, participate in her husband's policy meetings, or take charge of the planning of the most costly domestic policy initiative in history. Even in the last decade of the century, these were still daring assertions of authority for a first lady, and soon enough she would become an icon to millions and a hated target for millions of others because of it. Every major poll suggested that Hillary was entering the White House with considerable goodwill, though inauguration eve polls tend to reflect the rosy glow of the event itself. “Does she represent the values that you find important?” the
Los Angeles Times
had asked respondents across the country a few days before the swearing-in. Fifty percent had answered affirmatively. One-fourth said no, and one-fourth responded that they “didn't know.” Meanwhile, 58 percent of those polled claimed to have formed a “favorable” impression of the new first lady, 19 percent held an “unfavorable” opinion of her, and 23 percent answered “don't know.” And though most of those in the same survey expected Hillary to play a larger role in national affairs than other first ladies, their wariness also registered clearly:

Do you think the new First Lady should sit in on the President's Cabinet meetings?

 

Should sit in: 24%

Should not: 68%

Don't know: 8%

 

Other polls by major news organizations recorded similar results, and one in
U.S. News & World Report
concluded that “most Americans object to Mrs. Clinton's plans to carve out an unprecedented role for herself.” In every survey, health care reform remained at or near the top of the public's expectations for the Clinton years. Hillary and the president had decided to announce her portfolio a few days after the inauguration.

After their arrival at the heated reviewing stand in front of the White House, the Clintons proceeded to watch the inaugural parade for more than two hours, until dusk, laughing, clapping, waving, and giving thumbs-up signs to the marchers. With more than ten thousand participants, the parade was both a display of traditional pomp and celebration, and a preview of the values the Clintons hoped to inculcate in their America. It was meant to be a tribute to the diversity of the nation, and a tip of the hat, blue or otherwise, to those who had been ignored in previous inaugurals. There was a marching band whose members were all physically disabled; there were 120 men and women carrying an oversized section of the AIDS memorial quilt; there was a float celebrating American family life that included a lesbian couple and two gay men; another featured an Elvis impersonator (and members of the King's original band). As the twenty-two-unit Lesbian and Gay Bands of America passed the reviewing stand, the new president and vice president each held up three fingers—a sign-language salute to the marchers meaning “I love you.” The Hope (Arkansas) High School Superband saluted their hometown president, and for Hillary, there was the Maine South High School Marching Band, from her alma mater in Park Ridge.

In the reviewing stand, with the Clintons, the Rodhams, and the Gores, were senior members of the incoming administration, including two who were already becoming nagging problems for a presidency not yet six hours old: attorney general–designate Zoë Baird, the highest-ranking woman ever named to a president's cabinet, whose nomination was in jeopardy because she had hired an illegal immigrant couple to work in her household; and General Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Powell, a genuine national hero since presiding over the successful war in Iraq, who had served notice that he was adamantly opposed to his new commander-in-chief's plan to allow known homosexuals to serve in the military. Already Hillary and Bill were second-guessing their decision not to appoint Powell secretary of state, as Vernon Jordan had urged.

But such matters were for the future. It was time to relish the moment. Shortly after 6
P.M.,
holding hands and smiling, Bill and Hillary—accompanied by Chelsea, Virginia, and Roger, and members of the Rodham family—entered the White House for the first time as president and first lady. As they walked up the stairs to the North Portico and into the Grand Foyer, some one hundred members of the permanent White House staff, standing at the ready, were there to greet them.

The dream had come true.

Inside the White House, one of the first photographs the new president and first lady had passed on their way upstairs showed a young Jackie Kennedy, attired in her inaugural gown, adjusting the bow tie of her husband's tuxedo. On this evening, thirty-two years later, a White House photographer would snap a similar shot of Hillary adjusting Bill's tie, the picture soon to hang prominently in a hallway leading to the Solarium, with an inscription from Bill to Hillary, telling her how beautiful she looked. That night, the Clintons attended a dozen raucous inaugural balls, at which they were cheered by some seven thousand celebrants. “Does Hillary look great tonight or what?” Clinton asked, as the crowd at the New England ball shouted its approval. Dressed in a beaded blue-violet gown with sweeping over-skirt, she looked enraptured as she danced with her husband to the tune “You're the Biggest Part of Me.” The most glamorous of the inaugural balls, in terms of invitational cachet, was the one sponsored by MTV. Packed with hundreds of celebrities of all ages from Macaulay Culkin to Jack Palance, it was a peculiarly Clintonian event: simultaneously unpretentious and over-the-top. At the Arkansas ball, jammed with twelve thousand people, rhythm 'n bluesman Ben E. King handed the president a tenor sax. Clinton wailed a couple of choruses of “Your Mama Don't Dance,” while his own Mama (as
Ebony
put it) joined him onstage, and Hillary picked up a tambourine and banged along, though her lack of rhythm and inability to carry a tune were Rodham family lore. What struck many of those present was how fixated on each other Hillary and Bill seemed onstage.

Meanwhile, Chelsea and eight of her friends went on a history-heavy scavenger hunt that the curators and staff had organized at the White House, providing clues like “the painting with the yellow bird” (in the Red Room) and “where it is sometimes said a ghost has been seen” (the Lincoln Bedroom).

 

I
T WAS AFTER
2
A.M.
when they returned to the White House. The retinue there for the inauguration included Hillary's parents and brothers, Bill's mother and her husband, and his brother, Roger; Chelsea's friends from Arkansas; Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason; and Jim and Diane Blair. Hillary and Bill had visited the second-floor living quarters before, as guests, but now, as president and first lady, they explored the premises with their friends. Bill said later he “was too excited to go to bed.” The bulk of their belongings from Arkansas were books—more than there were available shelves for in the White House; bookshelves would have to be built—and Chelsea's things. The Clintons owned only a few pieces of furniture. The high ceilings and elegantly comfortable antique furnishings were nothing like what they had left behind in the governor's mansion. Patterned panels of fine Chinese silk wallpaper covered their new bedroom. Hillary decided that its sumptuous anteroom would become her sitting room. Like the living room and bedroom, it faced south, with a view of the manicured lawn and its century-old elm trees and Southern magnolia, still softly lit on this inaugural night, and beyond, the Ellipse and Washington Monument. A more inspiring sight would have been hard to come by. Abraham Lincoln had had his office at the far end of the hall, where the Thomasons were staying, and one of his handwritten copies of the Gettysburg Address lay on his desk.

It was almost three o'clock when Hillary and Bill finally got to bed. At 5:30
A.M.,
a presidential butler dressed in a tuxedo arrived carrying breakfast on a silver tray—to the total surprise of the Clintons. The Bushes had begun their day with breakfast in their bedroom at 5:30, but this was not the Clinton way. Bill, startled, sent the intruder on his way, according to Hillary.

In fact, this was the Clintons' first serious encounter with the so-called permanent staff of the White House—the ushers, chefs, phone operators, valets, butlers, and maids who serve from administration to administration, and whose loyalty, as the Clintons would discover to their chagrin, was often more affixed to their predecessors.

8

Settling In

I cared about the food I served our guests, and I also wanted to improve the delivery of health care.

—Living History

I
T WOULD BE DIFFICULT
to overstate the chaos of the first one hundred days of the Clinton presidency or the shock to the established political order that the Clintons and their exhausted retinue brought to Washington after a quarter-century in which Republican occupancy of the White House was a constant of capital life, interrupted only by Jimmy Carter's Watergate-driven interregnum from 1977 to 1981. Many of the mistakes of the hundred days had, unknowingly, been set in motion during the transition between election day and the inaugural, a result of preventing experienced Washington figures from joining the team and helping the Arkansans navigate the difficult terrain and culture of political and social Washington. The absence of enough seasoned native guides in crucial positions on the White House staff was, from the start, crippling, no matter how well intentioned.

Hillary, far more than Bill, brought an attitude of distrust and antipathy to the incestuous anthropology of political and social Washington, based in part on her perceptive recognition of its stultifying effects on governmental accomplishment for a generation. Democrats had controlled Congress through the Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush administrations, yet by almost any measure, four presidential terms had passed in which infrastructure, education, poverty programs, health policy, and natural resources had been allowed to stagnate. Meanwhile, a new class of powerful lobbyists held sway over the legislative process to the point where special interest legislation, tax breaks, subsidies, and set-asides overwhelmed the possibility of coherent lawmaking or effective funding to meet national needs.

From Hillary's perspective, Washington journalism was part of the problem, much too often a product of cozy, corrupting relationships between reporters or editors and many of the people they covered. The media seemed almost unwilling to deal seriously with ideas beyond the narrow agendas of powerful factions in the capital—partisan, ideological, or paid—and appeared at times more interested in generating controversy for its own sake than illuminating the serious business of governing. Reporters, she believed, were far more fixated and enthralled by turf fights and sensation than substantive debate. Her belief that the principal power players in media and politics wined and dined together to the detriment of thoughtful policy and new ideas was hardly off-base.

But the Clintons also brought with them to Washington a self-defeating chip on their shoulders, evident from the beginning. Carter's entourage had done something of the same thing, but in the Clintons' case it was far more extreme. Both presidents, of course, had been outsiders.

In these early days, Hillary ignored three essential truths: The first, long ago expressed to a young reporter by one of the capital's most articulate sages, held that “Washington is an easy lay—for power.” This should have worked to the Clintons' great advantage. The second was a maxim from the business world that applied equally to the strange folkways of the nation's capital: it was a bad idea to take over another company without keeping some people on the payroll who really knew how the place worked, and bringing them into management. The third was that the capital had some first-rate minds and experienced professionals who were iconoclastic and tough enough to buck the system, especially if entrusted with important opportunities on the White House staff, or elsewhere in the administration. Such exceptional people could be found in the press, too, which was hardly the monolithic juggernaut the Clintons seemed to imagine.

“I wouldn't have gotten elected if it was up to Washington,” Bill Clinton became fond of saying, and Hillary parroted the slogan. “So they sniffed and they decided the press was against them,” said one capital insider, “that Washington was against them, and almost set out to alienate the two groups. More than anything, it was stupid, and she had it worse than he did.” The assessment was correct.

Katharine Graham, publisher of the
Washington Post
and doyenne of social Washington, gave a dinner for the Clintons in December 1992 at which she and much of the capital's A-list—Republicans, Democrats, lobbyists, journalists, lawyers, diplomats—were captivated by Hillary and Bill. Other movers and shakers followed in Graham's wake. But the Clintons never extended a genuinely friendly hand afterward. They seemed determined to cultivate their “outsider” status, despite the fact that Bill represented the mainstream centrist element of his party, and Hillary brought more professional Washington experience to the White House than any first lady in history.

The president's facile one-liner about Washington was the kind of political cliché he usually rose above. Democrats in Congress represented official Washington as much as anybody else. As for the Washington press corps, and the reporters traveling with the candidates during the campaign, an overwhelming majority probably favored Clinton's election. Moreover, they were drawn to his personality, and Hillary's, too. Reporters craved good stories, and the best story of all, from the point of view of most, would have been the excitement of a Clinton presidency. This seemed to be a president with great potential. But the characters—and secrecy—of the Clintons were inseparable from the larger story.

 

A
S THE NEW ADMINISTRATION
tried to get its footing, unusually green presidential staff in the White House immediately confronted a calamity of Hillary's making. On her orders, the corridor that for the past quarter-century had given reporters access to the West Wing was closed off, effectively locking the world's most important (and self-important) press corps in the White House cellar. Hillary had left to George Stephanopoulos, now the administration's communications director, the impossible assignment of explaining the new arrangements to some two hundred reporters accustomed to unfettered access to the press secretary's office—his office—on the first floor. And Stephanopoulos was to keep the origins of the new arrangements to himself. In neither task was he successful. Stephanopoulos regarded Hillary's plan as downright disastrous, with no upside. He knew that the longer they were confined the more dangerous they would become. As diplomatically as he could, he tried to get the president to abandon the scheme. On his first full day in office, Clinton asked Stephanopoulos—for the second time—why they had sealed off the corridor. Stephanopoulos said uncomfortably that the idea was Hillary's. “She says you wanted to be free to walk around without reporters looking over your shoulder.” Clinton remained silent. Many years later, he described the plan as a terrible mistake, without mentioning that Hillary had formulated it.

Barring the door was only part of a larger blueprint devised by Hillary and by Susan Thomases, who was even more contemptuous of Washington folkways than her liege. Without difficulty, they had sold the idea to Mack McLarty, the already timorous chief of staff. Of all the men to hold the job since the presidency of Gerald Ford, McLarty, an immensely likable and well-intentioned corporate executive with virtually no Washington experience, may well have been the least equipped for the position. He regarded his assignment as enabling the unfettered implementation of the ideas and orders of the president and first lady—not to challenge Bill or Hillary, or postpone their directives for further consideration by others or, as some of his predecessors had done, wait for the boss to cool off and let a dumb idea die a natural death.

Stephanopoulos was certain McLarty would have put a stop to the counterproductive intrigue with the press had anyone other than Hillary introduced it. But in fact she had grander plans. Inspired by Barbara Bush's advice to show reporters who was boss from the outset, Hillary was planning to have them moved out of the White House altogether, as quickly as possible, relocating the press room in the Old Executive Office Building across the street. That would keep the press away from potentially talkative aides to the president. The secondary benefit of such a step was that the White House swimming pool (built for FDR, to help relieve the effects of his polio, and over which the current press room had been installed during the Nixon administration) could be reopened for the first family's use. Hillary had apparently forgotten Dick Morris's advice the last time she decided she and her family needed a swimming facility paid for with public funds, in the first days after the Clintons had moved to the governor's mansion in Little Rock. He'd told her to forget about it.

It would have been difficult to dream up a scheme that would more rapidly raise journalistic suspicion or alienate reporters covering the White House. In the next hundred days the Clinton presidency would be hammered in print and on TV as none of its modern predecessors had been, during what traditionally has been considered a honeymoon period between a new administration and the press.

Some of the reporting certainly accurately reflected the unprecedented disarray of the early Clinton presidency, but it also represented the peevishness and shallowness of some reporters assigned to the White House, many of whom went far beyond the facts. Perhaps a less antagonistic greeting from the new administration might have inclined reporters to treat the early stumbles more fairly and in context, including recognition in their coverage that a radical, historic overhaul of economic policy was under way.

One of the Clintons' senior-most aides described with blunt acuity how Hillary and Bill regarded the press in general, and reporters in particular: “Her ground zero assumption is that you're an asshole. His ground zero assumption is that you're an asshole, but he can charm you.” For the next eight years, that pretty much summed up the approach of each. Their contempt for the press had been telegraphed at the inaugural gala, in a film segment produced by Linda Bloodworth-Thomason. In a series of quick clips, half a dozen of the country's most prominent reporters—including journalists from the
New York Times, Washington Post,
and
Los Angeles Times
—were held up to ridicule as, on the campaign trail, they minimized Bill Clinton's chances of ever being elected president. Years later, Harold Ickes, in many regards Hillary's most important adviser during the whole of her eight years in the White House, said:

They really saw themselves as the White Knight and the White Queen coming in to do good, trying to put the economy back on track, trying to deal with people's fears, and economic circumstances. From their point of view, the press wanted to focus on—for lack of a better word—these “character” issues as manifested by “Gennifer,” “I didn't inhale,” the draft, and then subsequently into “Troopergate,” Paula Jones, commodities, et cetera. It was just a continuum. They came in very sour and felt the press had really mistreated them…. But instead of reaching a hand out to the press, which they should have, and saying, Okay, we had a rough time in '92, we're here. We're going to be here for at least four years. You guys are going to be here. Let's make a truce, and at least have a decent working relationship—that olive branch was never extended [and] the press…continued to carp and they continued to get their backs up. Once they got to the White House, they thought there might be a surcease, and that the press would know that the gamesmanship of the campaign was over, the horse race was over, that the so-called legitimate press would then get down to the business of looking at the main issues of the day. That, they felt, never came to fruition, with rare exception. And they just finally gave up on it, and said, “Fuck 'em. They're out of here.”

On her first morning after awakening in the White House, Hillary walked the short distance from the family quarters to her new office in the West Wing. Like all the working space of the presidential staff, it was cramped and incommodious, in this case even more so than most, low ceilinged with barely room for a desk, some file cabinets, and a cubbyhole for her principal deputy. Symbolically, though, it loomed monumental. Across West Executive Avenue, the little alleyway running between the White House and the Executive Office Building, the remainder of her staff—some twenty policy aides, press attachés, schedulers, secretaries, and personal assistants—set up shop in an imposing suite of rooms occupying a whole corridor of the ornate pile built in 1871 to house the state, war, and navy departments, long since departed from the building beloved by Washingtonians for its wedding-cake excess, and universally called The EOB. Within weeks, the first lady's EOB operation would be referred to by all in the administration's top ranks, including her own aides, as “Hillaryland,” the same sobriquet that had attended her narrower dominion in the campaign.

Asked why the first lady was getting an office in the West Wing, Dee Dee Myers, the presidential press secretary, said, “Because the president wanted her to be there to work. She'll be working on a variety of domestic policy issues. She'll be there with other domestic policy advisers.” Stephanopoulos had elaborated: she would supervise the drafting of a proposal to revamp the nation's health care system. That was the first hint to the public of her eventual responsibility for the entire initiative. Her own press secretary, noting that the first lady had ordered herself announced at the inaugural ceremonies as Hillary
Rodham
Clinton—as opposed to “Hillary Clinton” during the campaign—said the change would be permanent. Her new role, whatever it was (“breaking decades of tradition”), was the off-lead story in the next day's
New York Times,
and on front pages across America.

Hillary's transfiguration from campaign Svengali to cookie-baking mom, to the president's most trusted adviser, billeted in the West Wing, a few steps from the Oval Office, was moving apace.