The Truth About Hillary (15 page)

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NTERIM
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EPORT

. . . The current presentation of Hillary Clinton and the Clinton marriage and family to the world is remark- ably distorted. The absence of affection, children and family and the preoccupation with career and power only reinforces the political problem evident from the begin- ning. It also allows George Bush (and probably Perot) to build up extraordinary advantages on family values—32 points in the DNC survey.

We suggest the following steps to improve the situa- tion, without endangering the family’s privacy or tram- pling on reality:

o Hillary should have a lower profile in the immediate short-term, as we try to reintroduce Bill Clinton. It is important to do interviews with publications that have longer lead times, but, for the most part, Bill should appear alone on the popular culture shows. After the June primary, Bill and Hillary should do some joint appearances and Hillary should take up an aggressive schedule of interviews.

*Mickey Kantor was the campaign chairman and David Wilhelm the campaign manager.

†
Stan Greenberg was the campaign’s polling expert, James Carville its chief strategist, and Frank Greer its media consultant.

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• Bill and Hillary need to talk much more of their own family, including Chelsea, and their affection for each other. If Chelsea cannot travel (which we understand) then we ought to figure out how pro- tecting Chelsea from the press and protecting her childhood is an obsession of both parents. We need to make much more of Chelsea faxing her home- work to Bill and/or something that Hillary does with Chelsea.
  

• The family needs to go on vacation together after the June primary, preferably in California (including Disneyland), though there is a minority for the Gulf Shores.
  

• After a short pullback period, Hillary needs to come forward in a way that is much more reflective of herself—both her humor and her advocacy work for children. Linda Bloodworth-Thomason has sug- gested some joint appearances with her friends where Hillary can laugh, do her mimicry. We need to be thinking about events where Bill and Hillary can “go on dates with the American public.” There is a suggestion that Bill and Chelsea surprise Hillary on Mother’s Day.
  

• Bill and Hillary need to clarify Hillary’s role as First Lady. Ambiguity looks like a power game. It is very important that voters feel comfortable with Hillary’s role and not see her as an empowered Nancy Reagan.
  6
  

“What is most striking about the memo,” wrote Michael Kelly, “is the degree to which its ideas were adopted, and were successful. In the months that followed, the Clintons did many

Payback Time
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of the things that their consultants advised. (But not all. They did not, as suggested, vacation in Disneyland, and no media- minded Mother’s Day surprise was arranged for Mrs. Clinton.)”
7
Hillary suddenly became a kinder and gentler woman. She had a new hairdo. She started palling around with Tipper Gore. And the Clintons and the Gores became two middle-class fami-

lies that people would like to have in their homes.
8

After Bill Clinton became president, Hillary reverted to form, and swiftly became an even greater liability than before. In the first two years of the administration, she urged her husband to govern from the political left, even though he had been elected as a centrist. Her left-wing agenda was wildly unpopular among some influential figures inside the administration. Every- one from Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen and Vice President Al Gore to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and po- litical strategist Dick Morris knew that her approach was destined to fail.

During these early months of the new administration, Hil- lary competed openly with Al Gore for the President’s time and attention. Things grew very tense. The President’s top aides muttered that Hillary was a player who didn’t know anything about Washington. She had spent most of her political life being the smartest person in Little Rock, Arkansas—which was a far cry from being the smartest person in Washington, D.C.*

“I told [the President] that he was terribly out of position, and that he had lurched to the left when he came in, and it sent

*Hillary’s ambitions were such that she had originally wanted to be either attorney general or White House chief of staff. But the federal government’s antinepotism law prevented her from assuming an offi- cial post.

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signals to people like me, who thought he was going to be a cen- trist Democrat, you know, that he had lost his moorings,” re- called senior adviser David Gergen.

Gergen continued: “I also had a private conversation with the First Lady saying, you know, ‘It’s widely perceived on the outside that you’re the one who’s pulled him left, and he can’t govern from there.’ They [the Clintons and their aides] didn’t understand Washington very well. They didn’t understand the dynamics of the press corps. They were having a hard time fig- uring out Capitol Hill.”
9

Of course, the President’s costliest mistake was appointing his wife to head the administration’s health-care reform initiative. “Some in the White House saw [Hillary’s appointment as health-care czar] as payback for Hillary Clinton’s steadfast sup- port of her husband during those difficult moments of the New Hampshire primary [when she defended him against charges by

Gennifer Flowers],” said Chris Bury of ABC News.
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If it was payback, Bill Clinton paid dearly.

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H A P T E R E I G H T E E N
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Hibernation

A

s Hillary sat on the stage at Goucher College, waiting her turn to speak at the school’s winter convoca- tion, she played with the thick gold necklace around her

throat.
1

At one point during the ceremony, she was seized by a coughing jag, and had to cover her mouth with her hand. She had brought along cough drops to soothe her sore throat, and she popped one into her mouth just as her friend Taylor Branch, who was a visiting professor, finished his introduction of the First Lady.

Hillary rose from her seat in her black academic gown. It had a four-foot-long hood with a purple-colored velvet border signifying that she was receiving an honorary doctor of laws de- gree. She cleared her throat, smiled at the packed audience of students, their families, and faculty, and then turned to her pre- pared text.

“I am a product of my own experience,” Hillary said in a voice whose raspy quality was amplified by the public-address

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system. “I [became] involved [in race relations] because of a youth minister. He arranged for us to go into the inner city of Chicago. . . . In 1961, I had the privilege of seeing Dr. Martin Luther King [and] when I heard Dr. King speak [it] simply changed my life. . . .

“We have a choice how to react,” she went on. “We can be pulled down by these disappointments, or we can be made bitter and angry. But then, we are the losers. . . .”
2

She might have been talking about herself. The health-care fiasco had been the most humiliating defeat of her life, and most political analysts held her personally responsible for the 1994 conservative wave that swept Republicans into control of both houses of Congress for the first time in forty years.

That stunning defeat knocked Bill Clinton back to his senses, and with the help of Dick Morris, he started to govern from the center, rather than from the left. From all appearances, his leftist wife went into a kind of hibernation. Bill Clinton’s aides put out word that Hillary no longer exercised significant influence over anything in the White House.

“After health care,” noted a White House official, “Hillary did not show up at Cabinet meetings anymore, and she was not in the thick of things. You could watch Bill Clinton change. The longer he was in office, the more involved he became with for- eign affairs. And as that evolution happened, Hillary had even less of a role. After all, what did she know about foreign affairs? After 1994, Clinton leaned on Al Gore, who was a centrist, and who was an expert on foreign affairs. So, after 1994, there are no more jokes in the White House about two vice presidents.”
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It was during this difficult period that Hillary started chan- neling Eleanor Roosevelt, and making foreign trips with her daughter, Chelsea. In her public appearances, she stressed classi- cal First Lady issues—children and women’s empowerment. She

Hiber nation
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even allowed the photographer Annie Leibovitz to capture her in a sultry pose for the cover of
Vogue
.

“And the public liked very much the Hillary Clinton that would go out in public and defend women and children, and fight for her agenda,” said Dick Morris. “What they didn’t like was the behind-the-scenes Hillary who would vet nominees for Attorney General, or who would make suggestions for the Cabi- net, or who was the person who would formulate the inner working strategy on different issues, like health care reform. And they became very suspicious of that Hillary.

“But more importantly, Bill Clinton could not be seen as strong until Hillary Clinton was seen as weak,” Morris contin- ued. “Because the public assumed that the power belonged to one of them. It couldn’t belong to both simultaneously, in their view.

“And therefore, it was very important for Hillary to kind of assume much more of a lower profile, and to focus much more on public advocacy than private machinations. I, in fact, felt that it was not a good idea for her to hide. I felt it was a good idea to talk about things like Agent Orange in Vietnam, or the Gulf War disease, or breast cancer, mammograms—issues where peo- ple would like her and identify with her on. But not to be seen as the power behind the throne.”
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And so, for four long years—from the health-care debacle of 1994 to the Lewinsky scandal of 1998—Hillary kept up an out- ward show that she was no longer a major player in the White House. But as was frequently the case with the Clintons, appear- ances were deceptive.

“Although she was less visible now, devoting large blocks of time to handwriting revisions of her book
It Takes a Village,
the First Lady was still the most powerful liberal in the White House,” wrote George Stephanopoulos. “. . . Although she was

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instrumental in bringing [Dick] Morris back, she also sensed the need for a liberal counterweight to him inside the White House. Several times a week, she’d call to check in and buck me up— often as she exercised. ‘How’re we doing today, George?’ she’d ask, her measured breathing and the hum of the treadmill serv- ing as a background for my morning updates.”
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“I made my speech at Goucher’s winter convocation,” Hil- lary recalled, “then returned to the Baltimore train station, where a mob of reporters and camera crews was waiting for me. I hadn’t been so swarmed in years.”
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As she waited for a train to take her back to Washington, Hillary sat on a wooden bench, bathed in the flattering light that came through the stained-glass skylight overhead. The reporters were all yelling questions at the same time, and someone shouted above the rest, “Do you think the charges [against your husband] are false?”

“Certainly I believe they are false—
absolutely
,” Hillary said. “It’s difficult and painful any time someone you care about, you love, you admire, is attacked and is subjected to such relentless accusations as my husband has been. But I also have now lived with this for, gosh, more than six years. I have seen how these charges and accusations evaporate and disappear if they’re ever given the light of day.”

“Why is Bill Clinton being attacked?” another reporter asked. “There has been a concerted effort to undermined his legiti- macy as President,” said Hillary, “to undo much of what he has been able to accomplish, to attack him personally when he could