Daring (50 page)

They became symbiotic.

I understood that kind of interdependent relationship. It was what made my off-again, on-again love story with Clay endure in the face of countless tests. We, too, believed that in working together and helping each other, we made a contribution to the national conversation about ideas and issues. That bond enlivened our work and sustained our mutual respect. It added another dimension to our love, building in surprises as constant as the daily news. These parallels were a good part of what continued to fascinate me in following the Clintons.

Tina Brown's reaction to my first story about Hillary was visceral: “I hate her!” she erupted. “She's too fucking perfect.”

I was stunned. On reflection, I imagined many accomplished women of her generation seeing Hillary as a rival. She was supersmart and intensely ambitious, but she also came across as having no human vulnerabilities. She could speak in paragraphs, without notes. Her confidence appeared impregnable. Never a hint of fear or tears. She held up a new standard for women of high aspiration, an impossible standard for most mere human beings to match.

That first
Vanity Fair
story, “What Hillary Wants,” evoked extreme reactions. Some women embraced her for her courage. Others, mostly high-status white women who did not owe their identity to a man, felt almost voyeuristically degraded by Hillary's acceptance of blatant unfaithfulness. The constant comment I heard was: “Why doesn't she leave him?”

I found the answer the first time I interviewed Bill Clinton. It was early in his '92 campaign. He and Hillary were sitting at opposite ends of the plane. Hillary always had her nose buried in briefing books. Casual Bill played cards with aides. When I interrupted his game of Hearts, he gave me a window on the couple's vision. What did their unique relationship—“Buy one, get one free”—bode for a future Clinton dynasty? I asked. He replied without missing a beat.

“Eight years of Bill, eight years of Hill.”

FOR ME, THE SAGA OF BILL AND HILLARY
continued to dominate the decade. It was clear to me by the mid-1990s that the Clintons were different from every other presidential couple in history. The saga of Bill and Hillary had echoes of Franklin and Eleanor, as well as Tracy and Hepburn, with a dash of Bonnie and Clyde. They gave our country eight years of peace and financial well-being. What made their partnership unique was that no matter how many times they were at each other's throats, or gunned down by their enemies, they arose, together, to fight another day. His recklessness and her eagerness to step in and save the day created a dynamic of perpetual crisis (his) and crisis management (hers). They seemed to thrive on it. Every time he went down, she reared up and turned into a lioness, ready to rip the flesh off their enemies. Bill Clinton could sit through an assault with the passivity of the Buddha while Hillary worked out the counterattack with their attorneys or campaign operatives and flak catchers. And each time she saved him, he rewarded her with ardor and gave her more power.

But it had taken a toll.

CLAY AND I ENJOYED GOING
to Renaissance Weekend every year, an intellectual and spiritual refreshment that brought together political junkies from the north and south who had a peculiar taste for sitting through four days of nonstop panels on every issue, including “What's Been Bugging Me Lately.” We had signed up for the 1992 weekend between Christmas and New Year's. It turned out to be a lovefest for the surprise election of Bill Clinton.

A year before Bill Clinton's reelection race, I ran into Hillary at the 1995 Renaissance Weekend in South Carolina where women really talk—in the ladies' room. Dragging a comb through her untended hair, she looked depleted—even depressed. The crushing defeat of Democrats in the '94 congressional election had been laid by many critics at her feet, for her handling of the health-care initiative. She had confided in her strategist, Dick Morris: “Everything I do seems not to work. I just don't know what to do anymore.”

I had been feeling sorry for her. As I saw it, she was the lightning rod for people's fear of change: the change of generation from Bush to boomers, the change in equation between men and women, the huge social dislocation as we moved into a new information-based economy. Bill Clinton himself had talked about “anxious white males,” but he hadn't figured out how to connect with them.

On seeing me, Hillary's eyebrows shot up and she stretched out her hand. She immediately made me feel important by making reference to my 1992 book about menopause,
The Silent Passage
. I must admit, I was momentarily surprised by her warmth.

“I thought of you when I heard a comedienne refer to menopause,” she said. The comic had quipped, “I've decided I'm not going to do that.” Hillary laughed somewhat ruefully. “Yeah, right, let's do away with that.”

I told her I'd heard the president express empathy for anxious white males, and I had some thoughts. “The whole theme of your campaign was one of change as good, as a chance to make things better,” I said. “But most people don't like change. They fear change. They'll do almost anything to avoid change. Maybe what you can do is connect with the wives of those anxious white males and offer them some ideas for helping their families manage change.”

Hillary began spinning out a strategy right there in the ladies' room. She told me about a recent study that showed most teenage boys still saw their future as primary breadwinners who expected their wives to stay home and take care of them, the house, and the kids. Teenage girls saw an opposite future: completing their education, getting a good job, enjoying the independence of a career, and,
if
they married, having a husband who would share the housework and child care. “So we're on a collision course,” Hillary concluded.

Then, in an unusually candid self-analysis, she ascribed some of the white male backlash to herself. “I know I'm the projection for many of those wounded men,” she said. “I'm the boss they never wanted to have. I'm the wife they never”—she caught herself—“the wife who went back to school and got an extra degree and a job as good as theirs. It's not me, personally, they hate—it's the changes I represent.”

During that reelection campaign, many women began to revise their opinions about Hillary. Even Tina Brown became an admirer. “Hillary's changed, she's grown,” Tina told me.

During their last year in the White House, after Hillary was blindsided by the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Clintons went through the Couple Crossover I had written about in
New Passages
. The couple agreed to marital counseling. Hillary described herself as “shell-shocked.” She received consolation from old friends such as Stevie Wonder and Nelson Mandela, who, after making a speech to the UN, told Hillary gently, “Our morality does not allow us to desert our friends.” When Mandela made a plea to Americans to end the impeachment spectacle, Hillary took to heart his philosophical guidance: “The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” Hillary later confessed that during that year, she tried every day to rise and start over, one day at a time. Trying to forgive Bill.

BUT HILLARY HAS A REPUTATION
for holding grudges against almost anyone who isn't a total adherent. That is not the role of a journalist. Hillary had told me in our first interview that one of her key strategies was to “run against the press.” I learned, firsthand, that included me. Her anger over my first 1992
Vanity Fair
story became palpable seven years later. In 1999, my biography
Hillary's Choice
was published. It looked at the Clinton presidency through the lens of the Clintons' unprecedented partnership. My first TV appearance was on
Larry King Live
, where King gave the book an enthusiastic buildup.

Returning to the green room after my interview, I ran into Hillary's bellicose press secretary, Howard Wolfson. For months, he had refused to take my calls to check facts, a stonewalling that was highly unprofessional. We grunted at each other. He followed me on King's show and savaged the book.

I sat before the monitor, stupefied, and waited to confront him when he returned to the green room. “Why didn't you answer my phone calls?”

He shrugged.

“Howard, it was a sympathetic biography and you know it!”

“We don't need you” was all he said before walking out.

I was furious. The Clintons and their attack dogs played rough. What was most painful about that imbroglio was that I really admired Hillary and I wanted to see her succeed. But as a journalist, I had to adopt a mind-set similar to that of a doctor or psychologist, detaching my personal feelings from the responsibility to report the truth, even—or especially—when it is uncomfortable to do so.

It seemed clear to me that, without Hillary, Bill Clinton would not have become president. And most likely, without Bill, Hillary Rodham would not have had the platform to cast herself as one of the most remarkable women of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. How long would it take Hillary to dare to strike out on an independent political path of her own?

The answer came during a pivotal afternoon in the Clintons' last year in the White House, which was the hook for my third article for
Vanity Fair
on the saga of Hillary Clinton. February 12, 1999, was the day the Senate met to vote on impeachment. Hillary waited in a separate corner of the residence from her husband. She was meeting with a man who had floated between the his and her sides of the White House for two years: Harold Ickes. The abrasive political strategist had a great deal in common with Hillary. They shared a passion for liberal causes, and he, too, felt betrayed by Bill Clinton, having learned the president fired him as an adviser by reading it in the
Wall Street Journal
.

Finally, Hillary was ready to talk to Ickes about her suspended dream of building a political platform of her own. When Clinton wandered by and looked in to greet his wife's guest, Ickes noticed that Hillary barely glanced up. Bill was not invited into their huddle.

Hillary was clearly interested in running for the Senate, Ickes found. But from a state not her own. New York. She showed an urgency to speak with her own voice. The strategist knew the frustration she had endured. He laid it out for me when we met in his Washington law office: “After the pillorying of Hillary and the constant effort to drive the president out of office, for her to run and win a very prestigious seat would permit her supporters to say, ‘There was a lot more here than anybody thought—you guys were wrong!'”

After four hours of discussion that day, Ickes found out the bottom line for Hillary. She declared, “This is a race for redemption. It's really that simple—redemption.”

Hillary interrupted her meeting to watch TV as the Senate voted to acquit her husband of the impeachment charges. There was no elation. Ten minutes later, Hillary resumed planning her own political future. Her poll numbers had hit an all-time high, close to a seventy favorability rating. Bill Clinton's favorability ratings had trailed into the low fifties. In the hearts of the public, the couple had traded places. She was at the peak of her power.

Still, she had to wait.

WHILE BILL CLINTON WAS UNDER
virtual house arrest throughout the fall of 1998, Hillary went out of her way to establish a very public parallel social life in New York. After a makeover, gone were the dark dominatrix eyebrows and the barrel-bottomed suit jackets and treacly pastels. A newly glamorous Hillary emerged, with a golden helmet of shorter, straighter hair, softer matte makeup, a slimmer silhouette, even showing a little décolleté. Suddenly she began appearing at name-dropping cultural events, elegantly dressed by Oscar de la Renta and wearing designer jewelry commissioned by her husband.

“I want independence,” she declared emphatically to me that spring, as she psyched herself up to plunge into electoral politics. “I want to be judged on my own merits.” Although it sounded strange coming from a woman the world saw as iron-willed, Hillary confessed, “Now for the first time I am making my own decisions. I can feel the difference. It's a great relief.”

She appeared for her first fund-raiser as a senatorial candidate on March 3, 1999, in the grand ballroom of the Plaza Hotel. In the back of the ballroom where an army of video camera operators was stacked up on risers, the comments were typical of New Yorkers' cynicism:

“She's probably coming to New York for therapy.”

“Nah, she'd rather run for Senate than look inside herself. Besides, running for Senate is cheaper than therapy.”

That night, she was entertained at a private dinner party. The atmosphere inside the town house was surreal and artificially serene. At the same time, seventy million people were watching Barbara Walters showcase Monica as the femme fatale. The hostess from the dinner party told me, “This has to be one of the worst days of Hillary's life.”

I saw it as the start of the most significant passage of her life.

FOLLOWING HILLARY IN THE EARLY MONTHS
of her 2000 Senate campaign, I found her as stiff as Queen Elizabeth in a cartwheel hat on a windy day. But First Lady Hillary had learned an important lesson. The American public did not relate to a woman of regal bearing. Hillary's sense of entitlement had always gotten in her way. Mocked for her “listening tour,” she paid no attention to the ravening media. Upstate, she began to project humility, meeting voters on their own turf, at state fairs and on small farms and in economically depressed towns that had never before been visited by a national Democratic figure, much less a rock star of Hillary's fame. She took careful note of their concerns. When she got to the Senate, she worked hard to send business to those same upstate constituents who had helped win her an impressive 55 percent of the vote.