Living History (22 page)

The veteran butler replied: “Yes, sir. Presidents come and go. But George is always here.”

Like many venerable institutions, change came slowly to the White House. The phone system was a throwback to another era. To dial out from the residence, we had to pick up the receiver and wait for a White House operator to dial for us. Eventually I got used to it and came to appreciate the kind and patient operators who worked at the switchboard.

When the entire phone system was eventually upgraded with newer technology, I continued to place calls through them.

I knew I would never get used to the Secret Service agent posted outside our bedroom door. This was standard operating procedure for past Presidents, and the Secret Service was adamant, at first, about keeping it that way.

“What if the President has a heart attack in the middle of the night?” one agent asked me when I suggested that he station himself downstairs instead of with us on the second floor.

“He’s forty-six years old and in great health,” I said. “He’s not going to have a heart attack!”

The Secret Service adapted to our needs, and we to theirs. After all, they were the experts when it came to our safety. We just had to find a way to let them do their job and let us be ourselves. For twelve years, they had been used to a predictable routine where spontaneity was the exception, not the rule. Our campaign, with its breakneck pace, frequent stops and rope lines, made our agents scramble. I had many long conversations with the agents assigned to protect us. One of my lead agents, Don Flynn, said: “Now I get it. It’s like if one of us was President. We like to go places and do things and stay up late too.” That one comment helped set the tone of cooperation and flexibility that came to characterize our relationships with the agents sworn to protect us. Bill, Chelsea and I have nothing but praise for their courage, integrity and professionalism, and we feel lucky to remain friends with many agents who protected us.

Maggie Williams had agreed to help me at the end of the 1992 presidential campaign, but only if I understood that she would return to Philadelphia after the election to finish her Ph.D. at Penn. With the election over, I realized I needed her more than ever. I begged, pleaded, implored and hounded her to stay on through the transition, then to join the administration as my Chief of Staff.

Our first job was to recruit other staffers, pick office space and learn the intricacies of the traditional First Lady duties. Since the Truman Administration, First Ladies and their staffs had operated entirely out of the East Wing, which houses two floors of office space, a large reception room for visitors, the White House movie theater and a long glass colonnade that runs along the edge of the East Garden that Lady Bird Johnson dedicated to Jackie Kennedy. Over the years, as First Ladies expanded their duties, their staffs grew bigger and more specialized. Jackie Kennedy was the first to have her own press secretary.

Lady Bird Johnson organized her staff structure to reflect that of the West Wing.

Rosalynn Carter’s staff director operated as a chief of staff and attended daily meetings with the President’s staff. Nancy Reagan increased the size and prominence of her staff within the White House.

The West Wing is where the Oval Office is located, along with the Roosevelt Room, the Cabinet Room, the Situation Room (where top-secret meetings are held and communications are sent and received), the White House Mess (where meals are served) and offices housing the President’s senior staff. The rest of the White House staff work across a driveway in the Old Executive Office Building, or OEOB. No First Lady or her staff had ever had offices in the West Wing or the OEOB (which has since been renamed the Eisenhower Executive Office Building).

Although the visitors office, personal correspondence and the social secretary would remain headquartered in the East Wing, some of my staff would be part of the West Wing team. I thought they should be integrated physically as well. Maggie made her case to Bill’s transition staff for the space we wanted in the West Wing, and the Office of the First Lady moved into a suite of rooms at the end of a long corridor on the first floor of the OEOB. I was assigned an office on the second floor of the West Wing just down the hall from the domestic policy staff. This was another unprecedented event in White House history and quickly became fodder for late night comedians and political pundits.

One cartoon depicted the White House with an Oval Office rising from the roof of the second floor.

Maggie assumed the title of Assistant to the President―her predecessors had been Deputy Assistants to the President―and each morning she attended the 7:30 A.M. senior staff meeting with the President’s top advisers. I also had a domestic policy staffer assigned to my office fulltime, as well as a presidential speechwriter designated to work on my speeches, especially those relating to health care reform. My staff of twenty included a Deputy Chief of Staff, press secretary, scheduler, travel director and compiler of my daily briefing book. Two of the original staff are still with me today: Pam Cicetti, an experienced executive assistant who became my all-purpose person, and Alice Pushkar, Director of the First Lady’s Correspondence, who assumed one of the most daunting of all jobs with poise and imagination.

These physical and staff changes were important if I was going to be involved in working on Bill’s agenda, particularly as it related to issues affecting women, children and families. The people I hired were committed to the issues and to the idea that government could―and should―be a partner in creating opportunities for people who were willing to work hard and take responsibility. Most of them came out of the public sector or from organizations committed to improving economic, political and social conditions for the underrepresented and the underprivileged.

Before long, my staff was recognized within the administration and by the press as active and influential, due in large part to the leadership of Maggie and Melanne Verveer, my Deputy Chief of Staff. Melanne and her husband, Phil, had been friends of Bill’s since their days at Georgetown University, and she was a longtime Democratic activist and experienced Washington hand. A true policy wonk who loves the complexities and nuances of issues, Melanne had worked for years on Capitol Hill and in the advocacy world. I used to joke that there wasn’t a single person in Washington she didn’t know.

Not only was Melanne a legend in the nation’s capital; so was her Rolodex. At last count, it contained six thousand names. There is no way to catalog the many projects that Melanne masterminded, first as Deputy and then, in the second term, as my Chief of Staff. She also became a key player on the President’s team, advocating for policies affecting women, human rights, legal services and the arts.

Soon my staff became known around the White House as “Hillaryland.” We were fully immersed in the daily operations of the West Wing, but we were also our own little subculture within the White House. My staff prided themselves on discretion, loyalty and camaraderie, and we had our own special ethos. While the West Wing had a tendency to leak, Hillaryland never did. While the President’s senior advisers jockeyed for big offices with proximity to the Oval Office, my senior staff happily shared offices with their young assistants. We had toys and crayons for children in our main conference room and every child who ever visited knew exactly where we stashed the cookies. One Christmas, Melanne ordered lapel buttons that read, in very small letters, HILLARYLAND, and she and I began handing out honorary memberships, usually to long-suffering spouses and children of my overworked staffers. Membership entitled them to visit anytime―and to come to all of our parties.

The West Wing operation was up and running, but my East Wing duties were still giving me the jitters. Just ten days after the inauguration, Bill and I would be hosting our first big event, the National Governors Association annual dinner. Bill had been Chairman of the NGA, and many of those attending were colleagues and friends we had known for years. We wanted the dinner to come off well, and I was eager to dispel the notion, percolating in the news media, that I had little interest in the customary functions of the First Lady’s office, which included overseeing White House social events. I had enjoyed those responsibilities, carried out on a far less grand scale, as First Lady of Arkansas and looked forward to them now. But my staff and I needed guidance. I had been to White House dinners since 1977, when President and Mrs. Carter invited then Arkansas Attorney General Bill Clinton and his spouse to a dinner honoring Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau of Canada and his wife, Margaret. We had been back every year Bill was Governor for the very dinner I was now charged with planning. Attending the event as guests was a far cry from hosting it ourselves.

I had the help of our new social secretary Ann Stock, an energetic woman of impeccable taste and style who had worked in the Carter White House and then as a top executive at Bloomingdale’s. Ann and I tried different combinations of linens and place settings before settling on the gold-and-red-rimmed china acquired by Mrs. Reagan. We worked on the seating arrangements, eager to ensure that our guests would be comfortable with their tablemates. We knew almost everyone and decided to mix them up on the basis of interests and personalities. I consulted with the White House florist, Nancy Clarke, as she arranged the tulips I had selected for each table. From that day on, Nancy’s cheerful stamina never ceased to amaze me.

Every hour of life in the White House brought some new and unanticipated hurdle.

Yet there were few people I could talk to who genuinely understood my experience. My close friends were supportive and always available for conversations by phone, but none of them had lived in the White House. Fortunately, though, someone I knew had, and she understood what I was going through. She became a valued source of wisdom, advice and support.

On January 26, a bitterly cold morning just a few days after the inauguration, I flew to New York City on the regular shuttle. It was my only flight on a commercial airline during my eight years at the White House. Because of the security required and the inconvenience to other passengers, I agreed with the Secret Service to forgo that link to my previous life. Officially, I was going to New York to receive the Lewis Hine Award for my work on children’s issues and to visit P.S. 115, a local public school, to promote voluntary tutoring. But I was also making a private stop to have lunch with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis at her beautiful apartment on Fifth Avenue.

I had met Jackie a few times before and had visited her once during the 1992 campaign.

She had been an early supporter of Bill’s, contributing financially and attending the convention. She was a transcendent public figure, someone I had admired and respected for as long as I could remember. Not only had Jackie Kennedy been a superb First Lady, bringing style, grace and intelligence to the White House, she also had done an extraordinary job raising her children. Months before, I had asked her advice about bringing up children in the public eye, and on this visit I hoped to hear more from her about how she dealt with the established culture at the White House. It had been thirty years since she lived there, but I sensed that not much had changed.

The Secret Service dropped me off at her apartment shortly before noon, and Jackie greeted me at the elevator door on the fifteenth floor. She was impeccably dressed, wearing silk pants in one of her signature colors―a combination of beige and gray―and a matching blouse with subtle peach stripes. At sixty-three, she remained as beautiful and dignified as she was when she first entered the national consciousness as the glamorous thirty-one-yearold wife of the second-youngest President in American history.

After President Kennedy’s death in 1963, she had receded from public view for many years, married Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis and later launched a successful career as a literary editor for one of the finest publishing houses in New York City. The first thing I noticed about her apartment was that it was overflowing with books. They were stacked everywhere―on and under tables, beside couches and chairs. Books were piled so high in her study that she could rest her plate on them if she was eating at her desk. She is the only person I’ve met who literally decorated her apartment with booksand pulled it off. I’ve tried to duplicate the effect I saw in Jackie’s apartment and her Martha’s Vineyard home with all the books Bill and I own. Predictably, ours never look quite as elegant.

We sat at a table in the corner of her living room overlooking Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and continued the conversation we had begun at our lunch the summer before. Jackie gave me invaluable advice about how to deal with my loss of privacy, and she told me what she had done to protect her children, Caroline and John.

Providing Chelsea with a normal life would be one of the biggest challenges Bill and I faced, she told me. We had to allow Chelsea to grow up and even make mistakes, while shielding her from the constant scrutiny she would endure as the daughter of a President.

Her own children, she said, had been lucky to have so many cousins, natural playmates and friends, many of them with fathers in the public eye, too. She felt it would be much harder for an only child.

“You’ve got to protect Chelsea at all costs,” Jackie said. “Surround her with friends and family, but don’t spoil her. Don’t let her think she’s someone special or entitled.

Keep the press away from her if you can, and don’t let anyone use her.”

Already, Bill and I had taken a measure of the public’s interest in Chelsea and the national fascination with a child growing up in the White House. Our decision about where to send Chelsea to school had inspired passionate debate inside and outside the Beltway, largely because of its symbolic significance. I understood the disappointment felt by advocates of public education when we chose Sidwell Friends, a private Quaker school, particularly after Chelsea had attended public schools in Arkansas. But the decision for Bill and me rested on one fact: Private schools were private property, hence off-limits to the news media. Public schools were not. The last thing we wanted was television cameras and news reporters following our daughter throughout the school day, as they had when President Carter’s daughter, Amy, attended public school.