To their total surprise and consternation, among the jolts the Clintons endured in the flush of their victory was serious resistance to putting Hillary in charge of health care from the most experienced members of the incoming domestic and economic policy team: Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, the treasury secretary–designate; Congressman Leon Panetta, to be the new director of the Office of Budget and Management; Alice Rivlin, formerly director of the Congressional Budget Office and the newly designated deputy OMB director; and Donna Shalala, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, who had been handpicked by Hillary to be secretary of health and human services. Even a decade and a half after Hillary’s health care debacle, it remained secret that the president’s senior-most appointees had seen trouble coming from the beginning and opposed her for the job. “Mostly, [these] people thought the idea—the whole system Hillary was setting up—was crazy,” said Shalala, a good friend of the Clintons who had been assistant secretary of housing and urban development in the Carter administration.
The foremost concern was that Hillary’s ideas for solving the health care problem, already reflected in the Putting People First agenda, were too ambitious. There was also fear she would become a lightning rod for anti-Clinton sentiment in the Congress and the country. Her internal critics felt that, almost single-handedly, because of her outsized influence with the president, she could set the whole American economy off-course. Hillary discounted and, according to Shalala, even resented the advice of the naysayers. To accept their judgment would have meant to controvert her most basic notion about herself: that given the responsibility and the power, she could solve virtually any problem she applied herself to by dint of sheer force of will, intellect, study, and hard work.
Bill seemed troubled by the internal opposition, however. He kept delaying his announcement of his wife’s appointment. It would be five days after his inauguration when he finally made it.
“I suspect that there was a level at which he knew it was a really dangerous idea,” said a presidential deputy who was in and out of Little Rock during the transition. “He was president in no small measure because she stood by him in the Gennifer Flowers mess. And he had to pay her back. This is what she wanted, and he couldn’t figure out how not to give it to her. And so he hoped for the best, and jumped over the side with her.”
Even before she settled on the health care job, Hillary was insistent on having an office not in the “social” East Wing of the White House, where other first ladies had traditionally claimed space, but in the West Wing, the demonstrable seat of power. The most influential, and foreboding, voice opposed to giving her a West Wing office was that of their closest Washington friend, Vernon Jordan, who in early December turned down Bill’s pleas to serve as attorney general. Because of Jordan’s bona fides with both Bill and Hillary, and his savvy in the ways of the capital, it was impossible to ignore his arguments. His view had nothing to do with self-interest or ulterior motive, nor did it reflect disapproval of Hillary, to whom he and (even more so) his wife felt especially close. Jordan—handsome, imposing, the former president of the National Urban League, and as well connected an operator as there was in Washington—believed that the press, Republicans in Congress, and the Clintons’ ideologically driven enemies, already gathering, would pounce on any evidence (or even suggestion) of an unelected co-presidency; and they would feast on an announcement that Hillary was to have an office a few feet down the hall from the president’s.
Other senior aides also warned that an overt demonstration of Hillary’s primacy—whether in the form of a West Wing office or the health care portfolio—would divert public attention from the administration’s agenda, and rekindle tales of Hillary as the evil power behind the throne.
Through her surrogates—which was often her preferred mode of battle—Hillary fought back. During the transition, a discerning eye or ear could pick up subtle indications of essential ways in which the politics and personalities of the two Clintons differed. His instinctive tendency, for instance, to accomplish his goals through compromise and accommodation was set against her reflexive urge to stand her ground on principle and fight, even more so after the experience of the campaign. He was always looking for a way to win over opponents before taking up arms. Her approach was more frontal and confrontational, which sometimes undermined the larger plan of battle—but she could also be deadly and on the mark. This difference would have dire consequences for his presidency and her role in it.
Susan Thomases, the woman she and Bill had chosen to organize the staffing of the White House, and Margaret “Maggie” Williams, Hillary’s formidable chief of staff–designate, argued strenuously to Jordan and others that the symbolic importance of a West Wing office for the first lady would send an essential signal about the values and priorities of the new administration.
To the surprise of no one who knew Bill and Hillary well, he sided with his wife. If it were up to him, the president-elect told the press later, he might knock down a wall in the Oval Office and have adjoining his and-hers offices. “I don’t know that anybody’s office has been fixed except mine,” he said. “That’s true. We’re keeping looking at that. I wish—the office structure in the White House is not the best. We’re trying to figure out what to do about that. They won’t let us knock down any walls.”
DURING THE TRANSITION period in Little Rock, others directly involved in the process of selecting the cabinet and the senior White House staff were Al Gore; Gore’s designated chief of staff, Roy Neel; Bill’s closest personal aide and offstage facilitator, Bruce Lindsey; Mack McLarty, who had known the president-elect since they’d been in kindergarten together in Hope; and the transition panel’s co-chairmen, Vernon Jordan and Warren Christopher. As a group, they could not help but be impressed by Hillary’s knowledge of policy issues, which often exceeded their own. Her enthusiasm for what lay ahead was palpable. If she felt any fear or trepidation, she did not betray it. She was well prepared for the topics of the day, her questions revealing familiarity with even the most arcane matters of governance, as when she conducted an interrogation of candidates for secretary of commerce and asked about policies in one of the Commerce Department’s least understood bureaus, the U.S. Patent Office.
Usually she was tactful at the table when it came to demonstrating her power. But even before the Clintons had moved into the White House, new members of the administration had caught glimpses of her tendency to overreach through surrogates—more often than not Susan Thomases—without revealing her own hand if things got sticky. In Little Rock, Thomases was said to be talking up a future Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, and some newer members of the Clinton entourage, among them Neel, came to regard her as meddlesome, stubborn, and politically tone-deaf. She was also extremely able, had a quick and easy wit, and was one of the best campaign schedulers in the business, drawing on skills refined in the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy, Walter Mondale, Bill Bradley, and Ted Kennedy.
In December, Thomases went to Washington to tour the White House and obtain floor plans of the West Wing and the Executive Office Building. Upon her return, according to Neel, she announced that Hillary might occupy the suite of offices in the West Wing that, in previous administrations, had been used by the vice president and his staff.
“I told Susan that under no circumstances would that happen, and if she didn’t like it she could take it up in person with the president-elect and the vice president–elect,” Neel recalled. Thomases said Neel’s memory was mistaken and that she and Hillary were simply seeking any space in the always overcrowded, surprisingly tiny West Wing. But the new vice president, and others who had worked less closely with the Clintons, regarded Thomases’s involvement as an example of how Hillary’s methodology could insulate her from actions bound to rile the sensibilities of presidential aides and outsiders alike. The incident registered negatively with Gore, who began to regard Hillary with more than a soupçon of suspicion and distrust.
In announc
ing his senior cabinet choices just before Christmas, Bill Clinton made little effort to play down the role of his wife—a lawyer with more Washington experience than he. Fourteen of twenty cabinet-level appointees were lawyers, despite Clinton’s campaign pledge to select “a cabinet that looks like America.” He did not, however, reveal the offstage process that preceded their selection: interviews first with members of the transition team, then with the president-elect (and sometimes Gore, if he hadn’t already been present for the initial session), and finally one-on-one in the kitchen of the governor’s mansion with Hillary. He made no bones about her role. He was properly proud of her. “She advised me on these decisions, as she has on every other decision I’ve made in the last twenty years,” he said. However, he did not yet want to publicly discuss in detail how Hillary would define her tasks as first lady, and what job she might take. Even with his staff he remained coy about it. “I’m not prepared to define her role in the White House yet,” he said, “but I will before long.” He did express his hope that she would attend cabinet meetings, observing, “She knows more about a lot of this stuff than most of us do.”
ONE THING WAS CERTAIN: Hillary Clinton, in many respects a very private person, intended to keep it that way. That didn’t mean she was shy. She had rarely been reticent about her political views or what she saw as matters of right and wrong—her values, she would say. However, she zealously protected herself (and her family) from almost any invasive inquiry that might reveal something of her emotional life, her deeper ambitions, or her machinations, especially after her marriage had become an issue during her husband’s presidential campaign.
Her closest friends, professional colleagues, and staff members were fiercely loyal and reflexively protective, and would become more so once the Clintons were in the White House. Over the years, she had become extremely careful about what she revealed and to whom on matters that might be of interest to the press. Like many people in public life, the more that was written or rumored about her (inevitably, she believed, bound to be wrong or miscast) the harder she, her entourage, and her husband’s handlers tried to control her public image. The book on her husband was voluminous, of course. For every month of his life, it seemed, there was some sort of documentation (including the famous photo of sixteen-year-old Bill shaking hands with John Kennedy), and there always appeared to be a friend, relative, classmate, or acolyte around to offer testimony. In fact, too much was known about Bill Clinton for his own good, down to the fact that (as he had revealed on television during the campaign) he wore boxer shorts, not briefs. Winston Churchill had once said that all great men have an air of mystery, and though the modern media had sorely tested the point, such an air had eluded Bill Clinton long before he reached the White House. Ronald Reagan possessed more mystery after eight years as president than when he was elected. Hillary wanted to maintain that aura of mystery. The Hillary narrative she wished to maintain, from the vantage points of the press and a celebrity-hungry public, was that of a powerful, perhaps transforming figure in the new presidency.
The most vocal internal opponent of putting Hillary in charge of health care was Donna Shalala, who (like Vernon Jordan) knew Hillary far better than most new members of the president’s team, and so felt freer about speaking out. Shalala continued to warn both Clintons that Hillary would become a magnet for every kind of criticism, however unrelated to the merits of their health care proposals. If the health care effort failed in Congress, he and Hillary would be personally blamed—and he would not be able to distance himself from the ensuing firestorm of criticism and political fallout. Moreover, she was the only person he couldn’t fire. Better, suggested Shalala, that the first lady work behind the scenes in conceiving the Clinton health care plan and campaign vigorously for its implementation.
Shalala, four feet eleven inches tall, of Lebanese descent, an ardent feminist with both academic experience and sharp political skills, had known Hillary almost twenty years, since they’d first served together on the board of the Children’s Defense Fund. And though she and the new first lady were friends, Shalala was certain that Hillary was ill-prepared for the job. There was too much mythology about Hillary that stretched the facts, she felt. Shalala had always been made uncomfortable by hyperbolic statements from friends and acolytes of Hillary, as well as leaders in the women’s movement who didn’t know her personally, who put forth the notion that had she pursued her own political career and not deferred to Bill Clinton’s, she would have been a governor or senator in her own right by 1992. “They assume that [just] being smart is enough,” Shalala said. “And it’s not enough. It’s judgment. It’s experience. It’s being strategic at the right points.” Hillary had never run a large enterprise. Shalala believed that Hillary often tried to do too many things at once—and later, as her personal and legal troubles accumulated, became distracted. “She’s also someone who doesn’t do things in depth. Because Hillary’s so smart and well educated, I think people missed the fact [that] she has essentially been his supporter, and his support partner…. She hadn’t really fully developed an identity until she came up here [to Washington]. She also had a job, but it wasn’t with one of the New York law firms with big, high-profile cases. She’s clearly smart, and clearly could have been a partner in a New York firm, had she chosen that path.”
Shalala also noted that, in Little Rock, the Clintons “had always been big fish in a little pond.” Until they got to Washington in 1993, they “had never actually banged up against people as smart as they were. They’d spent all of their adult lives in which they were the smartest people in the room. These were two extremely able people who had not really been tested before. So they really had to learn their way.”
Panetta, Rivlin, and Bentsen, as relative strangers to the Clintons, though no less troubled, had to be more concerned about offending the new first lady. Gently, they took their worries directly to the president-elect. It became clear to them that Bill didn’t want to disappoint his wife on an issue that obviously meant so much to her. Nonetheless, they all made known their belief that it was a mistake for the president to appoint his wife to run his most important initiative (which was also likely to be the most costly domestic program in the history of the republic), one on which so much of his presidency would be riding.
“That was the argument that everybody gave him when he decided to do it. But Bill and Hillary had already made up their minds,” Shalala said. “I basically said to the president that we had to have a process that was open and participatory. And he said, ‘We will. Ira [Magaziner]’s going to run it day to day.’ I said, ‘You can’t run a major policy like this out of the White House. You’ve got to have some insulation from it, in case it falls on its face.’”
The opposition that gave Clinton the most pause was that of Lloyd Bentsen. Bill had an almost filial respect for Bentsen, a tall, patrician Texan who had served in the Senate for twenty-two years, had chaired its Finance Committee, and had run for vice president in 1988 on the ticket with Michael Dukakis. Bentsen, a conservative Democrat who commanded unusual admiration in the capital from both parties, had a keen political sense and, at age seventy-one, no ambitions beyond being secretary of the treasury.
Like Bob Reich, Shalala was particularly concerned as well about the Clintons’ general disdain for old Washington hands, and by their decision to include few of them in the new administration. Reich kept telling them that they would need more Washington experience in the White House and prodded them to consider D.C. insiders who might move into senior positions and help them negotiate the tricky culture of the capital. But more than Bill, it was Hillary, reinforced by Susan Thomases, who adamantly insisted that as many senior positions as possible be bestowed on friends and aides who had been with them through the Arkansas years, as well as loyalists from the campaign. Only as a last resort would such posts be offered to members of Congress or other Washington insiders who had not been actively in their corner, particularly if they had been close to Jimmy C
arter. The Clintons had never forgiven Carter for overwhelming Fort Chaffee with Fidel Castro’s outcasts.
In choosing a White House chief of staff, Hillary, Bill, and Thomases all wanted not a Washington eminence (who could conceivably create a separate base of power within the administration), but someone with whom the new president and first lady would find almost familial comfort. Their choice was Thomas F. “Mack” McLarty, CEO and chairman of the board of the Arkla natural gas company, Bill’s childhood friend from Hope. McLarty was more than sufficiently close to Hillary to ensure an easy line of communication with the new first lady and her staff. Later, Bill observed, “I spent so much time on [selecting] the cabinet that I hardly spent any time on the White House staff…. The real problem with the staff was that most of them came out of the campaign or Arkansas, and had no experience in working in the White House or dealing with Washington’s political culture.”
BUT THE CLINTONS’ desire to do things differently in Washington was also born of many good intentions and some sound reasoning. Whatever their shortcomings, Hillary and Bill understood that the culture of the capital was often inhospitable to serious political ideas in ways it had never been in the days of Roosevelt, Kennedy, or even Nixon. Washington had changed radically. It had become a money town, a power town, a town where appearance routinely eclipsed substance, and idealism was considered weakness. “Washington is largely indifferent to truth,” wrote New York Times columnist Leslie Gelb before escaping the capital to head the Council of Foreign Relations in 1993, in Manhattan. “Truth has been reduced to a conflict of press releases and a contest of handlers. Truth is judged not by evidence, but by theatrical performances. Truth is fear, fear of opinion polls, fear of special interests, fear of judging others for fear of being judged, fear of losing power and prestige. Truth has become the acceptance of untruths.” During the campaign, the Clintons had seemed to understand this, or at least that the voters apprehended this. The new president and his wife had therefore pledged that the Clinton administration, in addition to promoting serious policies, would be the most open and ethical in history, and that they would restore honesty and candor to the political process. In her campaign speeches, Hillary had stressed the point repeatedly, heaping scorn upon the ethics that dominated during the Reagan-Bush years.