A Woman in Charge (70 page)

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1995, Hillary gave an interview to
U.S. News & World Report
that announced—if an announcement was necessary—that she was moving to the back seat. Her primary job, she said, was to be a helpmate, to assist her husband so that his administration would succeed. “My first responsibility, I think, is to do whatever my husband would want me to do that he thinks would be helpful to him,” she said. “It may be something of great moment, but more likely it's just to kick back, have a conversation or even play a game of cards and just listen to him ruminate. I mean, whatever it takes to kind of be there for him, I think is the most important thing I have to do.” By her own implication she had gone from presidential partner to pinochle player.

Bill announced soon after that Hillary would make a five-nation trip to South Asia as an expression of American interest in the region and to improve the United States' relationship with India and Pakistan. It was Hillary's first extended trip overseas without Bill. It was not, she said, an attempt to improve her image after the debacle of her failed health care initiative and the election. “I wished I was so clever to think that up,” she said. “But actually, I was asked more than a year ago to go to that part of the world by the State Department.” Hillary was looking forward to meeting women from other cultures. Almost anything at this point would have been preferable to Washington, but the opportunity to highlight women's and children's issues in another region of the world was the timeliest and most welcome of respites. It was also an opportunity for Hillary to take a trip with Chelsea, now fifteen; they needed concentrated time together, to share “some of the last adventures of her childhood,” as Hillary put it.

Hillary rarely commences an undertaking without some idea of the destination, and members of her entourage sensed that she was already trying to find a new role for herself by going abroad and communing with other women. A few weeks earlier she had represented the United States at the United Nations World Summit for Social Development, in Copenhagen. Her address to the conference emphasized “my conviction that individuals and communities around the world are already more connected and interdependent than at any time in human history, and that Americans will be affected by the poverty, disease and development of people halfway around the globe.”

The words sounded rote at first, but there was more than the seed of an idea there.

On the first stop on her twelve-day South Asia tour, in Islamabad, she met the wife of Pakistan's president, Nasreen Leghari, who lived in purdah, or isolation, so that men outside her immediate family would never see her. Hillary spent more time with the country's elected leader, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

Hillary, who had always been concerned with human rights and feminist struggles, was now thrust into a world where equality between the sexes was part of a larger cultural struggle, where men were often expected to make life-changing decisions on behalf of their wives. Going from the private visit with Leghari, where only female Secret Service agents could enter, to a luncheon with Bhutto, where invited guests included women who were bankers, academics, and other accomplished professionals, felt to Hillary like “being rocketed forward several centuries in time.” While Leghari's wife lived in isolation, Bhutto had attended Harvard. Hillary was concerned with the fate of newborn girls in the region. She took note of the elemental contradictions: Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka all had had governments headed by women, yet women are held in such disregard in their cultures that newborn girls are sometimes killed or abandoned.

Chelsea and Hillary visited rural villages in Pakistan and celebrated at more formal state parties and dinners. Mother and daughter had consulted State Department officials about proper attire, and tried out local forms of dress. Hillary brought along plenty of scarves to cover her head in case they went to a mosque or into an area governed by religious tradition. She wanted to be respectful but she also bridled at how women's lives were limited by stifling traditions and religious strictures. Pictures of the Clinton women in exotic plumage, on the backs of elephants, in palaces as well as in squalid villages and in small gatherings at schools, were integral to news coverage of the trip. In India, Chelsea swaddled babies at Mother Teresa's orphanage, many of whom had been abandoned on the streets because they were female. Hillary said she was impressed by the determination of those struggling to support human rights. In Nepal, Muslim women were willing to come to a Hindu village where she was speaking in spite of personal risk. Hillary also wanted to hear what they had to say.

Amazing to her, she got on better with the press. Photographers and reporters on the journey saw her at ease, as a mother, as a woman among women, an emissary, and they took note of how the people she was visiting responded to her, and vice versa. Enormous respect and some emotion appeared to course in both directions. She was at once a revered celebrity, a powerful woman who came to listen to the plight of women in primitive and misogynist societies who would take that message back to America; but she also gave something back, an earnestness and a promise that this was not just another first lady going through the motions.

Women, children, and men waited on dusty rural roads to catch a glimpse of her, to hear her give a speech—even as she was sorting out in her own mind what she would like to accomplish.

While Hillary and Chelsea were in South Asia, Bill addressed the annual dinner of the Gridiron Club, at which the elite of the Washington press corps celebrated themselves and the people they covered, in skits and roasts. “The first lady is sorry she can't be here tonight. If you believe that, I've got some land in Arkansas I'd like to sell you,” he said. Before Hillary left for her trip, she had recorded a five-minute satirical take on the movie
Forrest Gump.
At the touch of the play button, there sat Hillary on a park bench in front of the White House with a box of chocolates balanced on her lap. “My mama always told me the White House is like a box of chocolates,” she said. “It's pretty on the outside, but inside there's lots of nuts.” Later that night when Hillary and Chelsea called the president, he told them that the taped segment had received a standing ovation.

 

B
Y WAY OF
forewarning, Gingrich had declared, “Washington just can't imagine a world in which Republicans have subpoena power.” Now they had it. Hillary and Bill had no illusions that in the next two years leading up to the 1996 presidential election they faced open-ended investigation by congressional committees, chaired by the hungry opposition, in which their Arkansas past and the Clinton White House would be chewed over mercilessly. These investigations, in turn, would feed the inquiry of the new independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, whose long arm was already reaching into the White House for documents and information. Gingrich had said as many as twenty congressional subcommittees or special task forces might be mobilized to get at the “corruption” the Clintons had brought to Washington.

The Clintons felt all of this imposed a threat to Chelsea. As an adolescent it had been possible to keep her shielded from the devastating specificity of what was being said about her parents and their marriage, their morals, and their sexuality. At age fifteen, uncommonly bright, attending school with Washington's most privileged children in a media-centric capital, her insulation was at an end.

Lloyd Cutler had left the White House, as planned, after six months and a brief transition, coincidentally, with Starr's appointment. The new White House counsel was Abner Mikva, a former congressman from Illinois who had resigned his seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals bench—on which Ken Starr had also sat—to replace Cutler. He was not a street fighter, but more important, he knew Starr, and they could get along. Harold Ickes would be responsible for the wider strategy and daily mechanics of meeting the assault they were fully expecting on the White House through the 1996 election season.

Before leaving, Cutler had recommended to Ickes that he hire as his deputy Jane Sherburne, a skilled, tough investigations specialist from his law firm, Wilmer, Cutler, & Pickering. She had worked on Cutler's staff at the White House and knew the territory and the players. She would have just the combination of savvy and skill to put together a rapid-response team. The fact that Sherburne, forty-three, was a woman was not incidental, though nobody said aloud that it was a major factor in the choice. But dealing with Hillary and her staff might be better handled than in the past if there was a legal emissary who was not another white male. And Sherburne had the advantage of already knowing Hillary and Maggie Williams.

Not long before Hillary had left for Asia and Africa in March 1997, Sherburne met with Hillary and Maggie in the West Wing office, now seldom used, of the first lady. As much as anything else, what registered with her was Hillary's weariness, both generally and in terms of the specific subject under discussion: trying to make the Clintons' case more sympathetically in public and still resist Starr's intrusions and the Republicans' determination to smear them. Sherburne said she wanted to stay in front of the facts. She wanted to put together a team of six or eight people who would handle specific assignments for congressional investigations and relations, Starr, media, subpoenas, and political outreach strategy related to all the inquiries, including reporters. Sherburne would hire these people herself and run the unit as a tight ship. Kendall had already approved and was accepting of the approach, and Sherburne's leadership. Part of the plan was to appear as forthcoming as possible and not unnecessarily antagonize Starr or the committee chairmen on the Hill. Hillary remained skeptical that yet another new approach was going to make anything better.

Sherburne had already listed some forty avenues of likely investigation, beginning with the obvious: Whitewater (the land deal), Madison Guaranty, Vince Foster, Paula Jones, and problems specific to Hillary's earlier statements. Hillary said she wanted to be kept well informed.

She was not expecting to get her information from the source of the Clintons' first post-electoral crisis, however—a biography of Bill,
First in His Class,
written by David Maraniss of the
Washington Post.
As was too often the case, the information tore into the domestic fabric, not just the public perception, of Hillary's world. And it sent Bill and his new handmaiden, Morris, into cover-up mode.

Maraniss's book, which the White House obtained in galley form in early February before publication, was a masterful work, a broad character study of Bill Clinton before he won the White House, focusing on the forces that shaped him from his boyhood in Arkansas to his decision to enter the 1992 race—where the book ended.

Its biggest revelation was of the meeting between Bill and Betsey Wright in which they discussed the names of women who might come forward if he decided to seek the presidency in 1988, and Wright's forceful suggestion that he not run. Maraniss's brief description of the meeting noted that Bill and Wright discussed the fact that the state troopers who chauffeured and guarded Clinton were witnesses to many of his assignations.

Upon reading the offending passages in the galleys of the book, Bill was especially upset because he had never told Hillary about his discussion with Betsey. When she learned of it as the White House was debating how to respond to Maraniss's book, she was devastated and enraged—at both Betsey and Bill. The three years before he decided to run in 1992 had been among the worst in her life, and had strained their marriage to the breaking point. Now, yet more humiliation was about to be heaped on her, with Maraniss's confirmation that the troopers quoted in the
Spectator
article were believable. Moreover, she now had for the first time a clear understanding of why Bill did not run in 1988. She felt betrayed, Wright was sure.

Wright had come to Washington after the 1994 election to join the staff of Anne Wexler, the lobbyist and close friend of the Clintons since the Connecticut senatorial campaign of her husband, Joe Duffey, during the semester at Yale when Hillary and Bill had first met. Wright was on local jury duty in the municipal courthouse in downtown D.C. when Wexler's driver came into the jury holding room and handed her a cell phone, saying, “You're supposed to call the White House, and the president asked that we make sure you're connected by regular [landline] phone. But don't call him on this phone. This is just so that they can get you if they need you.” Wright made her way to a pay phone and was connected through the White House switchboard to Bill. “And he starts in on me about the Maraniss book,” Wright recalled. “‘Why would Maraniss say that you had met with me?'”

“Presumably because I told him we did,” Wright responded.

“But that didn't happen,” Clinton insisted, according to Wright.