Now Dick and Hillary were on the phone again, mapping out the future on the grandest stage of all. In her first post-victory conversation with him, Hillary noted that Time magazine had suggested she would make a good White House chief of staff—a job held in previous administrations by such skilled political operatives as James Baker, the Bush family consigliere; Howard Baker, the former senator and Reagan white knight from Tennessee (who had famously asked, as vice chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee: “What did the president know and when did he know it?”); and H. R. Haldeman, who ran Nixon’s White House (and knew the answer).
Morris said it was a terrible idea because a chief of staff, among other things, was the person who had to take the heat for the commander-in-chief. It was important that the president be able to fire his chief of staff. “I said it’s like a baseball owner being able to fire the manager,” Morris remembered. “Something may not be the manager’s fault, but you have to be able to fire somebody at some point. And Clinton couldn’t fire her.”
Hillary seemed to accept the logic of this, according to Morris, and then raised the possibility that, with her legal background, she might instead make a good attorney general, just as Bobby Kennedy had in his brother’s administration; or that, with her experience in the fields of child and family welfare work and education reform, she might make a reasonable secretary of education.
Morris, who talked in staccato bursts with a nasally infused New York accent, responded that secretary of education might be a good idea, “but the better thing would be for her to assume a specific task, become the head of a task force that would deal with a discrete issue, which would be her issue, and develop her credibility like that. And she said, ‘And then maybe in the second term I could become secretary of education?’ And, I said, ‘I think something like that might work out well.’”
He was one of several people with whom Hillary discussed the question of being chief of staff or, alternatively, her husband’s principal deputy for domestic policy, in title and in fact. That idea, too, was opposed by Morris and by almost everyone else with whom she consulted.
In the end Hillary chose Morris’s single-issue approach and settled on an issue of vital interest to the Clintons and America. She would oversee and shepherd through Congress what she hoped would be the single greatest change in domestic social policy since the New Deal, something that had been the unattainable goal of Democrats for decades. The lack of universal health care, or anything resembling it, was a defining failing that set the United States apart from other advanced democracies, and both Clintons were certain that an overwhelming majority of Americans favored universal coverage, even yearned for it. The promise to provide meaningful, affordable, guaranteed health care services to all Americans had been the most resonant pledge of the Clinton campaign, and polls showed that it was perhaps the biggest factor—apart from negative perceptions of President George H. W. Bush, and the third party candidacy of Ross Perot—in Bill Clinton’s victory.
Health care was also, in the judgment of both Hillary and Bill, the ideal issue for her to focus her talents and energy upon. Though she had spent most of her professional career as a lawyer representing corporate clients, her more satisfying work (as opposed to remunerative) had been in the field of children’s advocacy; and she’d had extensive experience in other aspects of social policy dealing with families and children and health care. The notion that she might be able to bring to the most vulnerable and embattled of American citizens what she and Bill believed ought to be a national right—decent medical care—was beyond enticing. It felt right.
And there was also an obvious political component to the equation, as she would remark to members of the White House staff before the Clinton administration was yet ten days old: fulfilling the campaign’s health care promise could ensure the reelection of Bill Clinton in 1996, and a real mandate from the voters. With the Clintons’ youth, Bill’s charisma, her expertise, and the demand by so many Americans that medical costs be contained, how could they not sell such a program to the public and Congress, and at the same time launch the country toward a new era of responsible social policy?
AS THE MEN and women picked by Bill and Hillary to guide his transition from candidate to president gathered in Little Rock, any doubts that she would be the new president’s closest adviser and indispensable deputy—an entirely new kind of first lady—were quickly dispelled. She meant to be involved in the essential decisions of the transition, even to the occlusion at times of the vice president–elect: interviewing candidates for the cabinet (at the kitchen table of the governor’s mansion, on occasion), presiding over the selection of White House staff, deciding how to follow through on the major themes of the campaign. Her primacy was abetted of course by proximity: she was with the president-elect after the others involved in the transition had gone back to their hotels, and in the morning before official meetings were convened. Of course, he could trust her judgment, but more than that, Hillary Clinton, her husband had said more than once, possessed the best mind he knew.
If the process seemed a little jarring to the transition’s eminences—Vice President–elect Gore, former deputy secretary of state Warren Christopher, and the Clintons’ good friend and transition co-chairman (with Christopher) Vernon Jordan—it was familiar to those who had lived through the Clintons’ ride through Arkansas politics. Ernie Dumas, one of the state’s preeminent political reporters, described the frustration of the governor’s first chief of staff, Bobby Roberts, who “would talk about things [with Clinton], get them decided, and then…the governor would talk to Hillary and everything would be turned upside down.” Deborah Sale noted, “He talks to her about everything, and thinks that no one else will listen to him as carefully and challenge his ideas as constructively.” The process was not always pretty. “They don’t do anything that isn’t strongly,” said Betsey Wright. “Whether it’s agree or disagree, it’s strongly. They are two of the most passionate people I ever met. They love passionately, they argue passionately, they parent passionately, they read passionately, they play passionately.”
The Clinton transition occupied several floors of offices in Little Rock, as well as dozens of office cubicles in Washington. In both places, the chaotic pace of the campaign persisted, as members of myriad task forces rushed to produce hundreds upon hundreds of three-ring binders filled with more information than the intended recipients—the president-elect, his wife, and their advisers—could possibly digest. There were reams of data about virtually every issue the new administration would face—foreign, domestic, political. “Message teams” were assessing the new Congress and how best to approach it; “constituency teams” were analyzing the special concerns of and favors owed to labor unions, women, blacks, gays, blue-collar workers, mayors, and municipalities.
The selection of the cabinet, subcabinet, and senior White House staff was being made, and the new administration’s agenda and priorities decided at the governor’s mansion. The Clintons were joined Monday through Friday by the others directly involved at a round six-foot-wide table in the family room, just off the formal dining room. The atmosphere was somewhat less harried, though the time pressure was enormous: Bill had promised publicly, if needlessly, to announce his cabinet by Christmas Eve (almost a month before inauguration day), after which Hillary and her close friend Susan Thomases would proceed to staff the White House, with the president signing off on their choices—a process to be kept from the public.
To complicate matters, Bill was visibly exhausted, and confessed to being “bone-tired” after thirteen months of virtually nonstop campaigning. Hillary, fatigued but focused as ever, concentrated her attention on the areas of domestic policy that most concerned her: education, health care, jobs, child care—the issues of Putting People First that had dominated the Clinton campaign. She and the president-elect had agreed on the importance of selecting a diverse cabinet—one that “looks like America,” he had pledged that spring at San Francisco’s Ci
nco de Mayo celebration. (“I will give you an administration that looks like America. The people here will be involved—women and men, Latinos, African-Americans, Asian-Americans.” Soon after, he said, “I would be astonished if my cabinet and my administration and my staff…is not the most fully integrated this country has ever seen.”)
As the slots were filled, and responsibilities defined, the question of Hillary’s formal position came to be more and more the focus of attention. Late in November, lawyers examining the question for the Clintons advised that the president’s wife could indeed be his chief of staff or his domestic policy adviser, or could serve in any other position that did not require confirmation by the Senate. But she was prohibited from being in the cabinet under an anti-nepotism law enacted during the Nixon administration, a belated response to the appointment of Robert Kennedy as his brother’s attorney general.
It did not augur well that such elemental information had not been evident or available immediately. Soon thereafter, Dick Morris expanded on his advice that Hillary head an issue task force. He suggested to her that she take charge of something akin to the Hoover Commission, which had been appointed to study government reorganization by President Harry Truman in 1947 and, two years later, had produced its transforming recommendations. Morris, however, never mentioned health care; it was Hillary who brought up the idea with him, noting that Bill was drawn to the idea of her being responsible for implementation of the campaign’s key domestic promise.
Apart from selecting a secretary of the treasury and the other principals of the president’s economic team, designating who would oversee the health care initiative was the major decision affecting the new administration’s domestic agenda. Al Gore had indicated to the president-elect that this was the job he might most like to take on, drawing on his legislative skills from his years in the Senate and lending it the prestige of his new office. Clinton was intrigued by the idea, but he worried that the job would demand too much, perhaps almost all, of the vice president’s time. Hillary had a different objection: she felt Gore, not she, would dominate domestic policy if responsible for health care. Clinton had also been thinking about Senator John D. “Jay” Rockefeller of West Virginia for the health care portfolio. As Democratic governors—Rockefeller had been governor from 1977 to 1985—they had grown close, and Rockefeller had studied the issue extensively. But the Democratic majority leader, George Mitchell, advised against putting a senator in charge of an executive branch task force.
A third, less politically charged name under consideration was that of Ira Magaziner, a mercurial Oxford classmate of Clinton’s. The year before, at the high-toned, spiritually infused Renaissance Weekend attended by the Clintons almost every Christmas season, Magaziner had spoken passionately about his role in establishing a public health care system in Rhode Island. Afterward, Hillary and Bill had asked him to contribute ideas on the subject for the campaign, and Magaziner had responded with a series of briefing papers and memoranda that had impressed both of them.
Another Oxford classmate—and close friend—Robert Reich, had been chosen by the Clintons to oversee the assembly of the new administration’s economic team. In the period between election day and the inauguration, the Clintons and Reich often convened privately in the cozy kitchen of the governor’s mansion, away from the full presidential transition team, to discuss policy and personnel questions. These talks had an almost familial quality, which was hardly surprising: Bob and his wife, Clare (she, like Hillary, was a lawyer with great interest in the rights of children and poor families), had known Bill and Hillary since college.
Early in the transition, Hillary asked Reich if he thought Magaziner was the right person for the health care job. Reich emphatically said no. “If you really want him to do it,” he warned her, “just get somebody to look over his shoulder all the time who’s very politically cunning, because he has a tin ear when it comes to politics.” Almost no one, least of all Reich, imagined that on this issue Hillary, with all her years backstage in politics, might have a tin ear as well.
NEAR THE END OF THE YEAR, only weeks before Bill Clinton was to take office, the nature of his presidency took an irrevocable, unexpected turn: the Bush administration’s outgoing budget director, Richard Darman, revealed that the federal deficit was far more substantial than the White House had acknowledged during the campaign. While President George H. W. Bush and his aides had been claiming that the deficit was “only” $250 billion or so, it was in fact $387 billion. The resulting shortfall clouded Bill and Hillary’s optimism about sweeping into Washington and expeditiously achieving the panoply of domestic programs and reforms promised in the campaign’s platform. The whole complexion of the presidency-to-be was altered by what he—but not she—recognized almost immediately as economic necessity: postponing so many of their promises to the voters and instead cutting the federal deficit close to the bone, to the point even of producing a balanced budget. Health care would be the most important program threatened by the new numbers.
Clinton had never been comfortable in the campaign with any health care proposition that was put to him. It was not a lack of knowledge, necessarily; it was an uncertainty about what the solutions might be. After absorbing the shock of the deficit news, “He didn’t think that he either had the time or the ability to figure health care out, given the circumstances,” said a close friend, with whom both Clintons often spoke frankly.
Magaziner had always seemed to Bill cavalier about how large a portion of the federal budget might be consumed in any serious attempt to solve the health care dilemma. (Medical costs in the United States already absorbed 14 percent of GNP, the highest in the world.) Suddenly, he found himself beginning to regard health care as a monster, not just his administration’s greatest domestic opportunity. It was in that context that he finally decided that Hillary was the right person to fill the job. And, of course, she wanted it.
In the Clintons’ years together, there had evolved an intuitive methodology in which each deferred to the other in what they considered their respective areas of expertise and greater experience, though they often argued passionately about each other’s views. “Economics and trade were the issues that he’d really been engaged with for a very, very long time, and [felt] he knew—he has a philosophy, and he had a plan, and he knew where he wanted to go,” said Sale. The same could be said of Hillary in terms of health, education, and welfare issues, especially those most affecting families and children. But confronting the health care quandary—forty million adult Americans had no health insurance whatsoever—would require great skill and expertise both in social policy and economics.
Working within the structure of the Clintons’ marriage—instead of the traditional bureaucratic structure of the executive branch—to forge solutions appealed not just to Hillary, but also to her husband. If she were in charge of the issue, the Clintons could maintain an uninterrupted dialogue about its shifting political dynamics and make rapid adjustments in ways no bureaucracy could—as they had done in Arkansas, when he had entrusted her to solve the volatile question of education reform. Moreover, putting her in charge of health care—a specific project, with specific responsibilities, albeit great visibility—seemed to address the question (already of tantalizing interest to the press and to political opponents) of granting the president’s wife too overarching or ambitious a formal title, say, assistant to the president for domestic affairs. And it would avoid the appearance of a “co-presidency,” an idea from which he had been forced to flee publicly since the blithe introduction of the campaign slogan, “Buy One, Get One Free.”
MUCH LATER, when seeing was easy, more than a few of the administration’s principals concluded that those first weeks after the election were when Hillary “made most of her big mistakes,” as a senior presidential aide put it. Many of her miscalculations were a result of “overrating the win”—which had come with considerably less than a majority of voters in the three-way race.
During the
transition, said one of Bill’s principal deputies in the campaign and White House, her combative posture often seemed to announce: “This is the victory for us, and our party, and our generation. And, so that means I’m going to get the job I want. I’m going to have that office in the West Wing. We’re going to show the press who’s in charge. All our friends are going to get jobs. And, it’s not just friends, it’s our ideological compatriots who are going to get jobs. This is our chance to do it all the way. And we’ve got to seize it.”
The Clinton plurality seemed forgotten. “I mean, that was a fault we all had,” said the deputy. “We all fell into it. But she had it pretty deep.” Some friends who knew her well and newcomers to the Clinton entourage sensed in Hillary (though this was by no means a universally held view) an attitude of entitlement: that because of the rightness or even righteousness of what the Clintons were trying to do, Bill and Hillary could ignore some of the natural laws of politics, or the more reasonable protocols and traditions indigenous to Washington. As they came to feel ever more besieged in the White House, this aspect of her character seemed increasingly pronounced, to her great detriment.
Sometimes it appeared inseparable from an attitude of elitism sensed by her co-workers. A high official who worked closely for years with both the president and his wife said, “It’s as if she thinks that there are some unpleasant compromises one makes when given the responsibility—perhaps by God—of leading the lesser lights to the Promised Land…. She thinks she should be telling the ‘little people’ how to live. Some people react so strongly to her because they sense it about her. Even in the way she gives a speech. She talks sometimes as if she’s explaining something to a third grade class.”