Living History (31 page)

Presidents deliver special addresses to Congress from a podium in the ornate chamber of the House of Representatives. It’s a ritual-filled evening. As the President enters the hall, the sergeant-at-arms announces in a somber tone: “The President of the United States.” The audience rises, and the President greets members of both parties who, by tradition, sit on opposite sides of the aisle. He then climbs to the lectern and faces the audience.

The Vice President and the Speaker of the House sit directly behind him.

The First Lady, along with White House guests and other dignitaries, sits in a special area of the balcony, and it was a favorite Washington parlor game to guess who would be seated with her. On my right that evening was one of the nation’s leading pediatricians and one of my favorite people, Dr. T Berry Brazelton, with whom I had worked on behalf of children’s issues for about ten years. More surprising was the guest on my left, Dr. C.

Everett Koop. Dr. Koop, a pediatric surgeon by training, had been President Reagan’s Surgeon General, in charge of overseeing the nation’s Public Health Service. Bearded and bespectacled, he was a Republican and an adamant foe of abortion who had endured a vitriolic confirmation battle. Bill and I had come to admire Dr. Koop for the courageous stands he took as Surgeon General, warning Americans about the dangers of tobacco use and the spread of AIDS and crusading for immunizations, condom use, environmental health and better nutrition. Having witnessed the failings of the system as both a clinician and a policy maker, Koop had become a vocal advocate for health care reform and was an invaluable adviser and ally.

After motioning the audience to sit down, Bill began the speech. To his immense credit, not even I realized that something was wrong. We learned later that an aide had placed the wrong speech in the TelePrompTer―the economic address Bill had given months before. Bill is legendary for extemporizing and ad-libbing, but this speech was too long and too important to do entirely off-the-cuff. For a nerveracking seven minutes, as his staffers rushed to correct the mistake, he delivered his remarks from memory.

It was a great speech, with just the right mix of passion, wisdom and substance. I was so proud of him that night. It was a courageous path for a new President. Franklin D.

Roosevelt had boldly found a way to give older Americans economic security through the Social Security program; Bill wanted, through health care reform, to vastly improve the quality of life for tens of millions of Americans. He held up a red, white and blue “health security card” that he hoped would be issued to every American, vowing to deliver a plan that would guarantee every citizen health insurance coverage and access to affordable, quality medical care.

“Tonight we come together to write a new chapter in the American story,” Bill told the nation. “… At long last, after decades of false starts, we must make this our most urgent priority: giving every American health security, health care that can never be taken away, health care that is always there.”

When he finished the fifty-two-minute speech, the audience gave him a standing ovation.

Although a few Republican lawmakers immediately took issue with some details of the plan, many in both parties said they admired Bill’s willingness to tackle an issue that had vexed so many of his predecessors. As one journalist put it, the reform effort was like “scaling the Mount Everest of social policy.” We had started the trek. I felt excited yet apprehensive, well aware that a rousing speech was one thing while designing and passing legislation was another. But I was grateful for Bill’s commitment and eloquence, and I believed we would reach a compromise because our nation’s long-term economic and social wellbeing depended on it.

After the speech we loaded up the motorcade and headed back to the White House.

We had planned a post-speech party on the State Floor, but we decided to go first to the Old Executive Office Building, where the health care staff worked in crowded, makeshift cubicles in room 160. Bill and I thanked them for spending days and nights working for reform. I stood on a chair and declared to laughter and applause that with the impending birth of the health care bill, the room would now be renamed “the Delivery Room.”

We had every reason to be optimistic about the reform plan as reviews of Bill’s speech and the outlines of the plan were generally positive. The public overwhelmingly supported action on health care reform. News reports praised the plan and our efforts at reaching bipartisan consensus with headlines that read, HEALTH CARE REFORM; WHAT WENT RIGHT?

Although the bill wouldn’t be “delivered” for another month, I was eager to proceed with my testimony before the committees reviewing reform. Six days after Bill’s speech, on September 28, I had my opportunity. My appearance before the House Ways and Means Committee marked the first time a First Lady was the lead witness on a major administration legislative initiative. Other First Ladies had also testified before Congress, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Rosalynn Carter, who appeared before a Senate subcommittee in 1979 to argue for increased funding of programs that aid mental health patients and support treatment facilities.

The hearing room was packed when I arrived, and I was unusually nervous. Every seat was taken, and there wasn’t an inch of empty space left along the side and back walls. Several dozen photographers were sitting or lying on the floor in front of the witness table, clicking furiously as I took my seat. All of the networks had sent camera crews to record the event.

I had worked hard preparing my testimony. In one of our prep sessions, Mandy Grunwald, the savvy media consultant who had worked with James Carville on our 1992 campaign and continued working for the Democratic National Committee, asked me what I really wanted to convey.

I knew I couldn’t afford to make any factual mistakes, but I also didn’t want the human stories of anxiety and suffering to get lost in the arcana of public policy. I wanted my words to convey the real-life dimension of the health care problem. I decided to start with the personal: why I cared so deeply about improving health care. At 10 A.M., Chairman Dan Rostenkowski, that gruff and gritty old-school pol from Chicago, gaveled the House Ways and Means Committee to order and introduced me.

“During the past months, as I have worked to educate myself about the problems facing our nation and facing American citizens about health care, I have learned a great deal,” I said. “The official reason I am here today is because I have had that responsibility. But more importantly for me, I’m here as a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a woman. I’m here as an American citizen concerned about the health of her family and the health of her nation.”

For the next two hours I answered questions from committee members. Later that day I testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, chaired by one of the longest-serving House members and a longtime champion of health care reform, Democratic Congressman John Dingell of Michigan. Over the next two days, I appeared before one other House committee and two Senate committees. The experience was fascinating, challenging and exhausting. I was happy to have had the chance to speak publicly about our plan and pleased that the reviews were generally positive. Members of Congress applauded the testimony and, according to news reports, were impressed that I knew the intricacies of the health care system. This gave me hope. Maybe my testimony had helped people understand why reform was so vital to American citizens and their families, as well as to the nation’s economy. I was also just plain relieved that I had gotten it behind me and hadn’t embarrassed myself or my husband, who was on the line for choosing me to represent him on such a big undertaking.

While many members genuinely appreciated the finer points of the health care debate, I realized that some of the laudatory responses to my testimony were just the latest example of “the talking dog syndrome,” which I had learned about as First Lady of Arkansas.

There’s a similar thought attributed to Dr. Samuel Johnson by Boswell: “Sir, a woman preaching is like a dog’s walking on its hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

Much of the praise centered on the fact that I hadn’t used notes or consulted my aides and that I generally knew my stuff. In short, even many complimentary committee members who appreciated my appearing were not necessarily sold on the substance of the plan.

I also learned that my popularity beyond the Beltway, my positive reception on the Hill and the apparent willingness of Congress to consider health care reform set off alarms among Republicans. If Bill Clinton passed a bill that provided every American with health insurance, he would be a shoo-in for a second term as President. That was an outcome Republican Party planners were determined to prevent. Our own political experts sensed a scorched-earth strategy emerging on the Right. Steve Ricchetti, the chief White House liaison with the Senate, was concerned. “They are going to come after you,”

he told me one afternoon in my office. “You’re too strong in this process. They have to take a pound of flesh out of you, one way or another.”

I assured Steve that I had taken heat before, and at least I’d be taking it now for something I believed in.

After my testimony, it was time for what the White House called the health care “rollout”―

a series of speeches and events in which the President generates attention and support for the policy. Bill was scheduled to do the rollout for much of the first half of October, starting with a trip to California on October 3, where he would hold town meetings to discuss reform and win as many converts as possible. But any presidential agenda is subject to outside events. Bill was en route to California on October 3 when his aides received an urgent call from the White House Situation Room. Two Black Hawk helicopters had been shot down in Somalia. Details were vague, but it was clear that American soldiers had been killed and that there might be ongoing violence. Troops had originally been sent to the famine-ravaged country by President Bush on a humanitarian aid mission, but it had evolved into a more aggressive peacekeeping effort.

Every President must quickly adopt a strategy when troubling events unfold: He can stop everything else and focus very publicly on the crisis or handle the situation while trying to stick to his official schedule. Bill remained in California but stayed in constant touch with his national security team. Then the news got worse: The body of an American serviceman had been dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, an appalling act of barbarity orchestrated by the Somali warlord General Mohamed Aideed.

Bill was given terrible news about Russia, too. There had been an attempted military coup against President Boris Yeltsin. On October 5, in Culver City, California, Bill cut short a town hall meeting about health care and returned to Washington. Over the next few weeks, Bill, the news media and the nation were consumed by Somalia and the unrest in Russia, and health care reform took a backseat.

We had originally envisioned presenting Congress with an outline of principles that would shape the health care reform legislation. But we subsequently learned that Congressman Dan Rostenkowski ex pected us to produce a detailed bill, complete with legislative language. Giving Congress a comprehensive bill at the outset turned out to be a tremendous challenge and a tactical mistake for us. We thought it would be z qo pages at most, but as drafting continued, it became clear that the bill needed to be much longer, in part because the plan was complex and in part because we acquiesced to some specific requests from interested groups. The American Academy of Pediatrics, for example, insisted that the bill guarantee nine childhood vaccinations in the benefits package as well as six well-child visits. These demands may have been legitimate, but this level of detail should have been negotiated after the bill was introduced, not in the drafting process. The Health Security Act delivered by the White House to Congress on October 27 was 1,342

pages long. A few weeks later, on the last day of the congressional session and with little fanfare, Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell introduced the measure. Though many other bills dealing with complex issues like energy or the budget have more than one thousand pages, opponents used the length of our bill against us. We were proposing to streamline and simplify a major social policy, but it looked like we couldn’t streamline and simplify our own bill. It was a smart tactic, and it effectively obscured the fact that our health care legislation would have eliminated thousands of pages of health-related legislation and regulations already on the books.

With so much happening, I could have easily forgotten my own birthday on October 26. But my staff never missed an occasion for a party. The Hillaryland gang invited over a hundred of my family members and friends to come from around the country for a surprise forty-sixth birthday party at the White House. I knew something was up when I returned to the residence in the evening from meetings with Senator Moynihan and Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, a Capitol Hill veteran known as the “dean” of the women Senators.

All the lights inside the residence were off. A power blackout, I was told. That was my first clue; the power never goes off in the White House. I was ushered upstairs and told to put on a black wig and hoop skirt―the Colonial look, to be sure, and an attempt to replicate the fashions worn by Dolley Madison. Then I was led down to the State Floor, where I was greeted by a dozen staffers in blond wigs representing “a dozen different Hillarys”―headband Hillary, cookiebaking Hillary, health care Hillary. Bill was disguised as President James Madison (with white wig and tights). I loved him for it, but I was glad we were living in the late twentieth century. He looks better in a suit.

On Halloween 1993, I picked up a copy of the Sunday Washington Post and learned that our old, money-losing real estate venture in Arkansas had come back to haunt us. According to unnamed “government sources,” the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC), a federal agency examining failed savings and loans, had recommended the criminal investigation of Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, owned by Jim McDougal. McDougal and his wife, Susan, had been our partners in the Whitewater Development Company, Inc., a completely separate entity created to hold land purchased four years before McDougal bought Madison Guaranty. Because of our past connection with McDougal, however, we were wrongly implicated in his subsequent misadventures. During the 1992