Greenberg, a slight man with wire-rimmed glasses, far more bookish in his appearance than in his muscular approach to campaigning, pronounced all this in a tone of unbridled admiration for both Clintons, and the ability of each to play to his or her respective strengths. Bill “was listening” and took a while to agree. “It was a very spirited discussion. Once we decided what the attack was, and we had his agreement, she wanted to do it strong, and she wanted to do it early. Which was exactly what occurred.” Her political instincts, her urge to defend her man (and herself ) and, once attacked, to go for the jugular won Greenberg over almost immediately. And it was no negative in his eyes that she also counseled aggressive handling of the press.
In fact, Greenberg and Hillary looked at politics through the same lens. From the late 1960s on, Democrats had developed a reputation for being soft. Like her, Greenberg believed that Jimmy Carter, who lost his presidency to Ronald Reagan in 1980, typified that weakness. “I don’t mean just soft on policy terms, on crime, or soft on foreign policy. The Democrats were soft in campaigns. They didn’t fight. They didn’t show what they were made of, and people couldn’t trust them to govern. And I think that Hillary was of that point of view that you were not going to have people’s confidence unless you could show that you’re strong and tough against your opponents. Your opponents need to know that you’re not going to be passive, you’re not going to be a punching bag, that you’re not going to get pushed…that you’re going to take control over your destiny.” The Republicans had learned the lesson long before.
Greenberg was with Hillary when she made her first statement defending her husband just after the Gennifer Flowers story broke. “Her attitude was that people will do anything” to derail her husband’s candidacy, “and she said it as forcefully as anything she’d ever said in her life. This did not come out of any kind of campaign discussion. She just got up there and said, ‘People have been saying these things about my husband for years.’ This was her, and what she believed. The press were stunned by it. It was not a planned moment. She took it to a new level [and] set the tone for everything that followed on that issue. We were in a crisis. And she continually set the tone. Her position was defiant—defiant that this was a political conspiracy, that this was being done by the people who were trying to bring down Bill Clinton, using this issue, playing it out to the tabloid press, and our response had to be defiant. This was politically motivated. People had an agenda, the people that hated Bill Clinton, and that they were using Gennifer Flowers, putting her up to it. Bill Clinton certainly agreed with Hillary’s analysis.”
As they moved from the Arkansas scene to the national scene, they carried with them enemies from Arkansas. Those enemies tried their best to take them down in New Hampshire, and the same people played a role later on in future scandals.
“You know, sometimes even paranoids have enemies,” said Greenberg. “I think they have been seared by the experience. I don’t view her as an angry person because I’ve seen her laugh…. I don’t see a simmering kind of anger. But she does believe that there are forces out there that aren’t right, that are determined to take him down, and I think she views herself as the strong, defiant force that deals with them.”
Nothing demonstrated this more than the revelation, implicitly confirmed in Diane Blair’s notebooks, that Hillary pushed after the Gennifer Flowers incident to publicize allegations that Bill’s opponent, Vice President Bush, had also had a history of affairs during his marriage. The binders—and other conversations with campaign aides—confirm that she was furious that the mainstream press and even the tabloids had not gone after the supposed story of Bush’s private life. Several of Bill’s aides took it upon themselves to calm Hillary on the subject and convince her that, if such information were traced back to the campaign, it would be disastrous.
ON MARCH 8, the New York Times published a story on its front page headlined, “Clintons Joined S&L Operator in an Ozark Real Estate Venture.” The Clintons had known for at least a month that reporter Jeff Gerth had been looking into their 1978 land deal with Susan and James McDougal, a fifty-fifty partnership in which the two couples had bought land along the White River in Arkansas in hopes of dividing it into forty-two lots and selling them for vacation homes. Bill and Hillary had resigned themselves to seeing the land deal as an unfortunate venture in which they had lost money. The Times saw something sinister: conflicts of interest and insider deals to line Hillary’s and Bill’s pockets. Susan Thomases—officially in charge of the campaign’s scheduling but, in fact, Hillary’s political deputy and troubleshooter—and the campaign’s counsel had met with Gerth the week before Super Tuesday, desperately trying to persuade him to run the story after the primaries that day. Thomases told Gerth that there were documents that would vindicate the Clintons—but, for the moment at least, they were missing. This added to the brew of suspicion, and rather than delay publication, the suggestion that records may have been removed was now part of the story. Gerth’s story reported that the Rose Law Firm had performed legal work for McDougal’s savings and loan company while Bill was attorney general and governor—but the Times failed to note that McDougal was not yet in the S&L business when the Clintons bought the land.
Bimbos, draft-dodging, and now corruption. In Arkansas, Hillary had become accustomed to being attacked—for not taking her husband’s name, for being overly tough, for her way of doing things. But the Times story represented the first time she was being put on a plane of malfeasance such as Bill was all too familiar with. He asked Paul Begala what he should say at a previously scheduled press conference that day. Defend her, Begala said.
Meanwhile, the investigative engines of the Washington Post began turning. During Bill’s preparation for a major debate on March 15, among all the Democratic candidates, George Stephanopoulos had advised him, “The minute you hear the word ‘Hillary,’ rip his head off. Don’t let him finish the sentence.” Toward the end of that debate, the candidates were asked whether they thought Clinton could be elected given his “recent problems.” Paul Tsongas sidestepped the question. Former governor Jerry Brown of California did not. “I think he’s got a big electability problem,” he said. “It was right on the front page of the Washington Post today. He is funneling money to his wife’s law firm for state business.” Clinton’s face turned red and then he tore into Brown. “Let me tell you something, Jerry,” he said. “I don’t care what you say about me…but you ought to be ashamed of yourself for jumping on my wife. You’re not worth being on the same platform with my wife. Jerry comes in with his family wealth and his $1,500 suits and makes a lying accusation about my wife.”
Brown asked whether the Washington Post was lying. Clinton answered firmly, “I’m saying I never funneled any money to my wife’s law firm. Never.”
The next morning, Hillary and Bill were at the Busy Bee Coffee Shop in Chicago, working the breakfast crowd, when a group of reporters walked in. They began asking him about Hillary’s job at the Rose Law Firm—whether there were inherent conflicts of interest in being a partner of a law firm that did business with the state. Hillary was behind him, drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup. When one of the journalists asked if it was okay to speak directly to her, Bill said, “Sure. Ask her anything you want.” NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell asked the first lady of Arkansas whether it was ethical for a governor’s wife to work in a law firm whose clients did business with state agencies. Hillary had been waiting for such a question. “I suppose I could have stayed home, baked cookies, and had teas,” she said memorably. Later, that quotation often stood alone in the press, seemingly indicating only her contempt for housewives, absent her words that followed: “The work that I’ve done as a professional, as a public advocate, has been aimed in part to assure that women can make the choices that they should make—whether it’s a full-time career, full-time motherhood, some combination, depending on what stage of life they are at—and I think that is still difficult for people to understand ri
ght now, that it is a generational change.”
The abbreviated version, in sound bite form, permeated TV and radio news for days, and columnists cited her remarks as evidence of radical feminist disdain for traditional values. William Safire wrote in the New York Times that Bill had a “Hillary problem,” and called her words the “second outbreak of foot-in-mouth disease,” the first one being her Tammy Wynette remark.
Hillary went on television again to explain her position, but it was too late. “Cookies and tea” would continue to plague the campaign for months to come. Gloria Cabe, manager of the campaign’s Washington office, said they “were inundated with calls from professional women who felt it had insulted them, who made the decision to take a few years off, and many of them talked about baking cookies. And of course lots of cookies were mailed to us…. And the trouble was, I felt like we could overcome the traditionalists, the women who were suspicious anyway of who Bill was and who Hillary was, but when I realized it was eating into our core support, that’s when I really got worried.”
HILLARY HAD BEGUN the campaign as her husband’s full political partner. He had boasted famously that by voting for him, you could “buy one, get one free,” a slogan he had first used campaigning in the New Hampshire primary (with emphasis on his wife’s two decades of work on education and children’s issues).
The cookie quotation, her defense of her work as a lawyer, and her aggressive, explicit direction of the campaign to discredit Gennifer Flowers had put her stage-front. That had not adversely affected the New Hampshire primary election, but it was the first of a long season of primaries, and her assertiveness in public suddenly loomed as a liability as she found herself becoming a moving target for the Republican right—“The Lady Macbeth of Arkansas,” the “Yuppie Wife from Hell.” A New York Post cartoon pictured Bill Clinton as a marionette, with a fierce-looking Hillary pulling the strings.
Delicately, the campaign’s strategists and worried pollsters urged the candidate to trim his wife’s billowing sails. Hillary, her back up, got the message, though neither the tabloid headlines (“Bill Clinton Love Tapes,” “Gennifer & Bill Romped in Our Apartment”) nor the criticism abated. “Hillary Clinton in an apron is Michael Dukakis in a tank,” declared Roger Ailes, the Bush campaign’s designated hit man, soon to be head of the new Fox News channel.
The savaging of Hillary as a doctrinaire leftist and/or “Feminazi” who would encourage the dismemberment of the American family soon became a catechism of the Bush campaign, echoed and intensified in the right-wing press. Bill Clinton’s record in Arkansas was, of course, hardly that of a leftist, but even before he took the oath of office it became commonplace to attack him through her, and so locate his politics on the outer fringes of the “liberal left,” based on the presumed ideological bent of his wife.
Such attacks on her were exploiting what the Clinton campaign was learning to its own dismay from polls, namely that many voters were coming to believe that Hillary was in the race “for herself” and “going for the power.” These were, in fact, phrases from a strategy memorandum that proposed she assume a low political profile for the rest of the campaign, and that “press opportunities” be contrived to show the Clintons acting more affectionately toward each other, and Hillary as a more traditional, maternal figure. “More than Nancy Reagan, she is seen as ‘running the show,’” the memo said. “The absence of affection, children and family and the preoccupation with career and power only reinforces the political problem evident from the beginning.” Recommended were “joint appearances with her friends where Hillary can laugh [and] do her mimicry.” The Clintons, the memo suggested, should take a family vacation in Disneyland, and the campaign should create “events where Bill and Hillary can go on dates with the American people.”
The more she was vilified by adversaries as a radical feminist, the softer and fuzzier she allowed herself to be portrayed. Encouraged by the campaign’s press attachés, a new story line began to take hold in the media about a more feminine Hillary. W, the glossy fashion and celebrity magazine, was typically fed tidbits about how the Hollywood production company run by Hillary’s friend Linda Bloodworth-Thomason had lent three stylists—one each for hair, makeup, and wardrobe—to give Hillary “a softer, natural, honey-blonde look.” Dozens of reporters on the campaign trail advised their readers or viewers that she was no longer wearing her trademark headbands (too “brainy-looking”); that she had “zipped her lip” and now gazed lovingly and silently at her husband from a wifely vantage point. A few cynics intimated in print that she had undergone a personality transplant, “allowing handlers to substitute the heart of Martha Stewart for her own,” as Time magazine put it. But this missed a larger point about Martha Stewart. Divorced, independent, and later to become a close friend of Hillary, she was a powerful, driven, ambitious woman who had established herself near the top of the very male worlds of publishing and communications thanks to the way she wielded the most feminine of arts and crafts.
Hillary would be forced into semi-exile, though less severely than when perceptions of her became overwhelmingly negative after the health care debacle in 1994. Diane Blair’s campaign binders reveal that the schedule was contrived to keep her away from the national press and covered more flatteringly by local reporters.
The anti-Hillary rhetoric reached a crescendo at the Republican convention on August 17, where Pat Buchanan, in a prime-time attack, painted Hillary as a radical feminist. “‘Elect me and you get two for the price of one,’ Mr. Clinton says of his lawyer spouse,” Buchanan ranted. “And what does Hillary believe?” That children “have a right to sue their parents,” he answered, and a view that marriage is an institution comparable to slavery. “Well, speak for yourself, Hillary. Friends, this is radical feminism.” (Buchanan’s assertion was rooted in an article on children’s legal rights—“Children Under the Law”—that Hillary had written for the Harvard Educational Review in 1974, in which she advocated such lawsuits by minors only in extreme cases of abuse and neglect.)
But the strategy backfired on the Republicans in that it made Hillary a sympathetic character and a political victim of the right, something the Clinton campaign never could have done on its own. Until then, Jody Franklin was quoted in the Blair binders, “it was hard for people to see her as a sympathetic figure because she was too strong, she was too independent, she knew what she believed in, and I think people didn’t want to see a warm side to her. Or couldn’t feel sympathy. Or connect with her. But then once she was in a position where she was attacked, people could then connect with her. So I think that’s really what turned things around.” It wouldn’t be the last time.
By the end of the 1992 campaign, Hillary was doing a lot of what presidential candidates’ wives had traditionally done: sit demurely onstage through the drone of their husbands’ speeches, applaud at the appropriate moments, and wave to the cheering crowds at oratory’s end. She had even taken to holding an umbrella over Bill’s head when he spoke in the rain.
The final weekend before election day, a cartoon showed Bill saying to a human-sized box with air holes, “Only a few days more, Hillary.”
She and Bill spent the last twenty-four hours in a tempest of campaigning: Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, Paducah, Fort Worth, Albuquerque, Denver, then back to Little Rock to cast their votes. Hillary was expecting victory, but took nothing for granted.
Within hours, she and Bill were discussing who should be in the cabinet.
6
A Transitional Woman
[I]t wasn’t clear to either of us how this partnership would fit into the new Clinton Administration…. When it came to political spouses, we certainly didn’t expect the nation’s capital to be more conservative than Arkansas.
—Living History
SEVERAL DAYS AFTER the election, Dick Morris and Hillary talked by telephone about what her formal role should be in the new administration. Morris had, contrary to myth, always been closer to Hillary than to B
ill. He had, in fact, often found that the only effective way of influencing the governor was through his wife, and so he was well aware of the degree to which the two were a single, intertwined governing and marital power. He had regularly operated through Hillary to get political schemes and projects reconsidered that he’d first proposed unsuccessfully to the governor.
Others in the governor’s office tended to view Morris as a kind of Rasputin to the Clintons (the fact that he appeared no taller than Hillary contributed to the image), and labels like “mercenary” or “evil force” seeped into Little Rock political discussions about him. Among the characteristics that Clinton partisans found distasteful was his equal enthusiasm for working on behalf of Republicans and Democrats; he also had a reputation for engaging in almost any kind of subterfuge or negative campaigning to gain political advantage. Morris correctly perceived that Bill Clinton himself had begun to think of him as “something dirty that he didn’t want to touch without gloves,” so it was increasingly Hillary who had sounded the alarm when her husband needed help, Hillary who booked Morris’s services, Hillary who strategized and plotted with him on Bill’s behalf. That pattern had been established on the eve of Clinton’s 1980 defeat for reelection.