Living History (18 page)

Brooke, who had lived in Washington and worked in journalism, brought a wealth of experience about the national media and a wry take on the absurdities of campaigns.

I learned quickly that, in a race for the Presidency, nothing is off-limits. Innocent comments or jests erupt into controversies within seconds of being reported on the news wires. Rumors become the story du jour. And while our past experiences may have seemed like ancient history to us, every detail of our lives was being sifted and combed as if we were some sort of archaeological dig. I had seen this before in other people’s campaigns: Senator Ed Muskie defending his wife in 1972 and Senator Bob Kerrey telling a risqué joke in 1992 without realizing that a boom microphone was nearby. But until you are the focus of the klieg lights, you simply cannot imagine their heat.

One evening, when Bill and I were stumping in New Hampshire, he introduced me to a crowd of supporters. Recounting my two decades of work on children’s issues, he joked that we had a new campaign slogan: “Buy one, get one free.” He said it as a way of explaining that I would be an active partner in his administration and would continue to champion the causes I had worked on in the past. It was a good line, and my campaign staff adopted it. Widely reported in the press, it then took on a life of its own, disseminated everywhere as evidence of my alleged secret aspirations to become “co-President”

with my husband.

I hadn’t had enough exposure to the national press corps to fully appreciate the extent to which the news media was a conduit for everything that happened on a campaign. Information, policy positions and quotes were filtered through a journalistic lens before they reached the public. A candidate can’t get his or her ideas across without media coverage, and a journalist can’t report effectively without access to the candidate. Thus, candidates and reporters are at once adversarial and mutually dependent. It’s a tricky, delicate and important relationship, and I didn’t fully understand it.

The “buy one, get one free” comment was a reminder to Bill and me that our remarks might be taken out of context because news reporters didn’t have time or space to provide the text of an entire conversation. Simplicity and brevity were essential to reporters. So were snappy lines and catchphrases. One of the masters of political innuendo weighed in early.

Former President Nixon’s political instincts remained finely tuned, and he commented on our campaign in an interview during a visit to Washington in early February. “If the wife comes through as being too strong and too intelligent,” he remarked, “it makes the husband look like a wimp.” He then went on to note that voters tended to agree with Cardinal de Richelieu’s assessment: “Intellect in a woman is unbecoming.”

“This man never does anything without a purpose,” I remember thinking when I saw Nixon’s comment reported in The New York Times. My service on the 1974 impeachment staff aside, I suspected that Nixon understood better than many the threat Bill posed to the Republican hold on the Presidency. He probably believed that denigrating Bill because he put up with an outspoken wife, and vilifying me as “unbecoming,” might scare voters anxious for a change but uncertain about us.

By then Bill’s entire life was under a media microscope. He already had been asked more questions about personal matters than any presidential candidate in American history.

While the mainstream press still avoided printing unsubstantiated rumors, the supermarket tabloids were offering cash for shocking stories from Arkansas. Eventually one of these fishing expeditions hooked a whale of a tale.

I was in Atlanta campaigning on January 23 when Bill called to warn me about an upcoming tabloid story in which a woman named Gennifer Flowers claimed she had a twelveyear affair with him. He told me it wasn’t true.

The campaign staff went into a tailspin over the story, and I knew that some of them thought the race was over. I asked David Wilhelm to set up a conference call for me to talk to everyone. I said that all of us were in this campaign because we believed Bill could make a difference for our country and that it was up to the voters to decide whether or not we’d be successful.

“So,” I ended, “let’s get back to work.”

Like a rampant virus, the Flowers story hopped between species of media, from the Star, a supermarket tabloid, to Nightline, a respected network news show. Despite our efforts to keep going, the wall-to-wall press coverage made it impossible for the campaign to focus attention on substantive issues. And the New Hampshire primary was just weeks away. Something had to be done. Our friend Harry Thomason, along with Mickey Kantor, James Carville, Paul Begala and George Stephanopoulos, consulted with Bill and me about what we could do. They recommended that we appear on the Sunday night television show 60 Minutes right after the Super Bowl, when we would be seen by the largest possible audience. I took a lot of convincing that such exposure was worth the risks, loss of privacy and potential impact on our families, especially on Chelsea. Finally, I was persuaded that if we didn’t deal with the situation publicly, Bill’s campaign would be over before a single vote was cast.

The 60 Minutes interview took place on January 26 in a suite at a Boston hotel starting at 11 A.M. The room had been transformed into a set, with banks of temporary lights on poles surrounding the couch where Bill and I were sitting. Partway through the interview, a heavy pole loaded with lights fell toward me. Bill saw it falling and pulled me out of the way just as the tower crashed where I’d been sitting. I was shaken up, and Bill held me tight, whispering over and over, “I’ve got you. Don’t worry. You’re okay. I love you.”

The interviewer, Steve Kroft, started with a series of questions about our relationship and the state of our marriage. He asked whether Bill had committed adultery and whether we had been separated or had contemplated divorce. We declined to answer such personal questions about our private lives. But Bill acknowledged that he had caused pain in our marriage and said he would leave it to voters to decide whether that disqualified him from the Presidency.

Kroft: I think most Americans would agree that it’s very admirable that you have stayed together, that you’ve worked your problems out, that you seem to have reached some sort of an understanding and an arrangement.

An arrangement? An understanding? Kroft may have been trying to pay us a compliment, but his categorization of our marriage was so off target that Bill was incredulous.

So was I.

Bill Clinton: Wait a minute. You’re looking at two people who love each other. This is not an arrangement or an understanding. This is a marriage. That’s a very different thing.

I wish I had let him have the last word, but now it was my turn to add my two cents, and I did.

Hillary Clinton: You know, I’m not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I’m sitting here because I love him and I respect him and I honor what he’s been through and what we’ve been through together. And you know, if that’s not enough for people, then heck, don’t vote for him.

Although the interview lasted fifty-six minutes, CBS broadcast about ten minutes, leaving out much of what was important―at least as far as I was concerned. We hadn’t known how drastically they would cut our words. Still, I was relieved that it was over.

Bill and I felt good about how we had responded and so did everyone with us. Apparently, most Americans agreed with our basic point: that the election was about them, not our marriage. Twenty-three days later, Bill became known as the “Comeback Kid” for his strong second-place finish in the New Hampshire primary.

I didn’t fare as well. The fallout from my reference to Tammy Wynette was instant―

as it deserved to be―and brutal. Of course, I meant to refer to Tammy Wynette’s famous song, “Stand by Your Man,” not to her as a person. But I wasn’t careful in my choice of words, and my comment unleashed a torrent of angry reactions. I regretted the way I had come across, and I apologized to Tammy personally and later publicly in another television interview. But the damage was done. And more was on the way.

In early March, with the Democratic primary season in high gear, former California Governor and Democratic presidential candidate Jerry Brown went on the offensive against Bill, focusing on my law practice and on the Rose Law Firm, where I had been a partner since 1979. After Bill became Governor again in 1983, I asked my law partners to calculate my share of profits, without including fees earned by other lawyers for work done for the state or any state agency. The Rose Firm had provided these services to the Arkansas State government for decades. There was no conflict of interest, but I wanted to avoid every appearance of one. The firm agreed to wall me off from the work and any fees derived from it. When Frank White tried to make this an issue in the 1986 Arkansas gubernatorial campaign, he was embarrassed when the facts established that other Arkansas law firms had received significantly more business from the state while Bill was Governor.

Spoon-fed false information by Bill’s political adversaries in the state, Jerry Brown recycled the charges for the debate in Chicago two days before the March 17 primaries in Illinois and Michigan. Brown accused Bill of steering state business to the Rose Firm to increase my income. It was a spurious and opportunistic charge that had no basis in fact.

And it’s what led to the infamous “cookies and tea” incident.

Bill and I were at the Busy Bee Coffee Shop in Chicago, trailed by a gaggle of cameras and microphones. With the Illinois primary looming, reporters were throwing questions at Bill about Brown’s charges. Then a reporter asked me what I thought of Brown’s accusations against us. My answer was long and rambling: “I thought, number one, [the remark] was pathetic and desperate, and also thought it was interesting because this is the sort of thing that happens to … women who have their own careers and their own lives. And I think it’s a shame, but I guess it’s something that we’re going to have to live with. Those of us who have tried and have a career―tried to have an independent life and to make a difference―and certainly like myself who has children … you know I’ve done the best I can to lead my life, but I suppose it’ll be subject to attack. But it’s not true and I don’t [know] what else to say except it’s sad to me.”

Then came the reporter’s follow-up―about whether I could have avoided an appearance of conflict of interest when my husband was Governor.

“I wish that were true,” I replied. “You know, I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life. And I’ve worked very, very hard to be as careful as possible, and that’s all I can tell you.”

It wasn’t my most eloquent moment. I could have said, “Look, short of abandoning my law firm partnership and staying home, there was nothing more I could have done to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest.” Besides, I’ve done quite a lot of cookiebaking in my day, and tea-pouring, too!

My aides, aware that the press had picked up on the “cookies and tea” comment, suggested that I talk to reporters a second time to explain in greater detail―and more articulately―

what I meant. On the spot, I had an impromptu mini-press conference. But it had little effect. Thirteen minutes after I answered the question, a story ran on the AP wire. CNN

quickly aired one, too, and followed with an afternoon segment that made little reference to the initial question―about conflicts of interest and the Rose Law Firm―but reduced everything I said to, “I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas.” The theme for most news organizations that day was that I had made a serious political error.

I had made an awkward attempt to explain my situation and to suggest that many women who juggle careers and lives are penalized for the choices they make. It turned into a story about my alleged callousness toward stay-at-home mothers. Some reporters merged “tea and cookies” and “standing by my man like Tammy Wynette” into one quote, as if I had uttered both phrases in the same breath―not fifty-one days apart. The controversy was a boon to GOP strategists. Republican Party leaders labeled me a “radical feminist,” a “militant feminist lawyer” and even “the ideological leader of a Clinton-Clinton Administration that would push a radical-feminist agenda.”

I got hundreds of letters about “cookies and tea.” Supporters offered their encouragement and praised me for defending a broad array of choices for women. Critics were venomous.

One letter referred to me as the Antichrist, and another said I was an insult to American motherhood. I often worried about how much attention Chelsea paid and how much sank in. She wasn’t six anymore.

Some of the attacks, whether demonizing me as a woman, mother and wife or distorting my words and positions on issues, were politically motivated and designed to rein me in. Others may have reflected the extent to which our society was still adjusting to the changing roles of women. I adopted my own mantra: Take criticism seriously, but not personally. If there is truth or merit in the criticism, try to learn from it. Otherwise, let it roll right off you. Easier said than done.

While Bill talked about social change, I embodied it. I had my own opinions, interests and profession. For better or worse, I was outspoken. I represented a fundamental change in the way women functioned in our society. And if my husband won, I would be filling a position in which the duties were not spelled out, but the performance was judged by everybody.

I soon realized how many people had a fixed notion of the proper role of a President’s wife. I was called a “Rorschach test” for the American public, and it was an apt way of conveying the varied and extreme reactions that I provoked.

Neither the fawning admiration nor the virulent rage seemed close to the truth. I was being labeled and categorized because of my positions and mistakes, and also because I had been turned into a symbol for women of my generation. That’s why everything I said or did-and even what I wore-became a hot button for debate.