It would have been difficult to dream up a scheme that would more rapidly raise journalistic suspicion or alienate reporters covering the White House. In the next hundred days the Clinton presidency would be hammered in print and on TV as none of its modern predecessors had been, during what traditionally has been considered a honeymoon period between a new administration and the press.
Some of the reporting certainly accurately reflected the unprecedented disarray of the early Clinton presidency, but it also represented the peevishness and shallowness of some reporters assigned to the White House, many of whom went far beyond the facts. Perhaps a less antagonistic greeting from the new administration might have inclined reporters to treat the early stumbles more fairly and in context, including recognition in their coverage that a radical, historic overhaul of economic policy was under way.
One of the Clintons’ senior-most aides described with blunt acuity how Hillary and Bill regarded the press in general, and reporters in particular: “Her ground zero assumption is that you’re an asshole. His ground zero assumption is that you’re an asshole, but he can charm you.” For the next eight years, that pretty much summed up the approach of each. Their contempt for the press had been telegraphed at the inaugural gala, in a film segment produced by Linda Bloodworth-Thomason. In a series of quick clips, half a dozen of the country’s most prominent reporters—including journalists from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times—were held up to ridicule as, on the campaign trail, they minimized Bill Clinton’s chances of ever being elected president. Years later, Harold Ickes, in many regards Hillary’s most important adviser during the whole of her eight years in the White House, said:
They really saw themselves as the White Knight and the White Queen coming in to do good, trying to put the economy back on track, trying to deal with people’s fears, and economic circumstances. From their point of view, the press wanted to focus on—for lack of a better word—these “character” issues as manifested by “Gennifer,” “I didn’t inhale,” the draft, and then subsequently into “Troopergate,” Paula Jones, commodities, et cetera. It was just a continuum. They came in very sour and felt the press had really mistreated them…. But instead of reaching a hand out to the press, which they should have, and saying, Okay, we had a rough time in ’92, we’re here. We’re going to be here for at least four years. You guys are going to be here. Let’s make a truce, and at least have a decent working relationship—that olive branch was never extended [and] the press…continued to carp and they continued to get their backs up. Once they got to the White House, they thought there might be a surcease, and that the press would know that the gamesmanship of the campaign was over, the horse race was over, that the so-called legitimate press would then get down to the business of looking at the main issues of the day. That, they felt, never came to fruition, with rare exception. And they just finally gave up on it, and said, “Fuck ’em. They’re out of here.”
On her first morning after awakening in the White House, Hillary walked the short distance from the family quarters to her new office in the West Wing. Like all the working space of the presidential staff, it was cramped and incommodious, in this case even more so than most, low ceilinged with barely room for a desk, some file cabinets, and a cubbyhole for her principal deputy. Symbolically, though, it loomed monumental. Across West Executive Avenue, the little alleyway running between the White House and the Executive Office Building, the remainder of her staff—some twenty policy aides, press attachés, schedulers, secretaries, and personal assistants—set up shop in an imposing suite of rooms occupying a whole corridor of the ornate pile built in 1871 to house the state, war, and navy departments, long since departed from the building beloved by Washingtonians for its wedding-cake excess, and universally called The EOB. Within weeks, the first lady’s EOB operation would be referred to by all in the administration’s top ranks, including her own aides, as “Hillaryland,” the same sobriquet that had attended her narrower dominion in the campaign.
Asked why the first lady was getting an office in the West Wing, Dee Dee Myers, the presidential press secretary, said, “Because the president wanted her to be there to work. She’ll be working on a variety of domestic policy issues. She’ll be there with other domestic policy advisers.” Stephanopoulos had elaborated: she would supervise the drafting of a proposal to revamp the nation’s health care system. That was the first hint to the public of her eventual responsibility for the entire initiative. Her own press secretary, noting that the first lady had ordered herself announced at the inaugural ceremonies as Hillary Rodham Clinton—as opposed to “Hillary Clinton” during the campaign—said the change would be permanent. Her new role, whatever it was (“breaking decades of tradition”), was the off-lead story in the next day’s New York Times, and on front pages across America.
Hillary’s transfiguration from campaign Svengali to cookie-baking mom, to the president’s most trusted adviser, billeted in the West Wing, a few steps from the Oval Office, was moving apace.
THE OFFICIAL SCHEDULE for the Clintons’ first full day in the White House, Thursday, January 21, was dominated by a chaotic open house to the public that, at times, threatened to spill out of control. The idea had been borrowed from Andrew Jackson’s famous precedent of throwing open the doors of the Executive Mansion to the people on inauguration day. Now, four thousand Americans of almost every station—one thousand more people than expected—trooped through the Diplomatic Reception Room, where they offered the president and first lady handshakes, hugs, trinkets, and advice. They presented the Clintons with business cards, commemorative coins, personal artwork, and hometown souvenirs. They lingered in the Rose Garden. They strolled the lawns.
At about 1 P.M., Clinton abruptly left the reception to preside over his first meeting in the Oval Office. A few minutes after his arrival, Hillary joined him. Both looked exceedingly frazzled to the others present: Stephanopoulos, Nussbaum, and Howard Paster, the new administration’s liaison to the Congress. Neither Bill nor Hillary had had a vacation in thirteen months, since the beginning of the campaign, and it showed. Clinton was seated behind what was probably the best known of presidential desks, brought from storage on his order, its top still bare. It had been used by Franklin Delano Roosevelt for his fireside chats, and become iconic in a famous Life magazine photo of John F. Kennedy Jr., age one, crawling out from underneath it while his father worked.
“So where are we with Zoë?” Clinton asked. Hillary, obviously the principal adviser in the room, stood to the side of the desk with a severe look on her face. At that very moment, at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, the attorney general–designate, Zoë Baird—selected by default, in haste, vetted more by Hillary than by him, though he’d certainly gone along with the choice—was being submitted to punishing questions from the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Democrats as well as Republicans, who almost uniformly professed themselves aghast that Baird could have been nominated in the first place since she had clearly broken the law.
Congressional grandstanding (always unattractive) aside, this was not an altogether unreasonable position, given the attorney general’s role as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. Worse, before Baird was selected, she had told the chairman of the Clinton transition team, Warren Christopher, her mentor and godfather, that she had hired illegal immigrants, a Peruvian couple, as household help, and failed to pay Social Security taxes for them. She intended to testify, truthfully, that the president had also been informed. Hillary, too, had also learned of the potential problem.
Originally, Baird had been selected to be counsel to the president, a position not requiring Senate confirmation and in which she might have survived scrutiny. But with time pressures building during the transition, she had emerged as the only woman under serious consideration, after two others had turned down the opportunity to be attorney general, and another two (including Susan Thomases) were passed over. Baird, the forty-year-old counsel of Aetn
a Life and Casualty, the insurance giant, had been interviewed by both the president-elect and Hillary in Little Rock, impressing both, and brought with her impeccable recommendations from Christopher and a certified Washington wise man, Lloyd Cutler. Though other cabinet-level jobs had gone to women, there had never been a woman secretary of the oldest and most prestigious departments—Treasury, State, Justice, and Defense (formerly called War). And Hillary had insisted that, with Lloyd Bentsen, Les Aspin, and Christopher getting the other three, the attorney general would be a woman.
The Clintons seemed shocked, even noncomprehending at first, by the rapid congressional furor and gathering public storm over the fact that, having pledged to end business as usual and restore ethical standards in Washington, they had chosen as attorney general a $500,000-a-year corporate lawyer who had evaded her taxes and broken the immigration laws. Howard Paster, formerly head of the giant Hill & Knowlton public relations and lobbying firm, had more Washington experience than anyone else in the room; he told them that the heart of Baird’s testimony—that she was informed in Little Rock that her hiring practices were nothing to worry about—had ensured her defeat and was bleeding the new president barely after he had taken charge. He urged a quick withdrawal of her nomination.
Bernie Nussbaum had been explicitly chosen as counsel to the president by Hillary and Susan Thomases to aggressively protect Bill and Hillary from the capricious investigative climate of Washington. Nussbaum wanted the president to fight, arguing that capitulation would send Congress an unseemly signal of weakness on the administration’s first full day in office.
“No, he can’t do that,” Hillary shot back. She didn’t want Baird’s continuing problems to become the administration’s problems; she wanted no diversions from their agenda, particularly health care; better Zoë go quickly into the night, which was exactly what happened. At 1:30 that morning, Baird, recognizing that the tide was going against her and that neither Bill nor Hillary would try to save her, withdrew her name from nomination. But first she released a statement that she had been “forthright [with the president] about the circumstances surrounding my child care from the beginning.” The new presidency was off to a rickety start.
The furor had initially been generated by Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing radio broadcast hosts who jumped on the Baird nomination, with justification. That Sunday on Meet the Press, the conservative columnist Robert Novak blamed the first lady for setting the debacle in motion. He contended that she had been more interested in finding a woman attorney general than appointing a legal scholar or a capable, qualified candidate whom her husband could trust. This, he insisted, reflected “the hidden hand of Hillary Clinton trying to play Bobby Kennedy at the Justice Department, but unable to get the job on a de jure basis because of the anti-nepotism law.” The comparison to Kennedy was more apt than Novak might have imagined. Bobby was JFK’s most trusted confidant, the person with whom he shared private information and expressed unvarnished views that others were not privy to. If there was a good cop/bad cop routine in the Clinton White House, Hillary, like RFK, most often emerged as the bad cop. Now, in the first week of the Clinton presidency, she had already been singled out as a target by malevolent (in her view) forces.
Nonetheless, Hillary retained the right of approval over the choice of attorney general. The process would assume farcical proportions by the time Janet Reno was finally nominated twenty days later. It was not lost on experienced Washington hands that the Clintons, both graduates of Yale Law School, whose closest friendships were with lawyers, were unable to find among them someone they could put forth as a qualified attorney general. Reno’s name came to Bill’s attention via an unsigned note left on his desk by Hillary, after she had spoken with her brother Hughie, a public defender in Dade County, Florida: What about Janet Reno, Florida D.A., for A.G.?, it suggested. The Clintons, anxious to fill the job, settled on Reno, someone they knew virtually nothing about, a state prosecutor who, it was condescendingly implied by Novak and others, had slithered up from Alligator Alley. In fact, Reno was a by-the-book prosecutor whose resistance to political pressure would seriously injure the Clintons.
Nussbaum was urging that, to take up the slack pending formal nomination and Senate confirmation of an attorney general, Webb Hubbell be appointed associate attorney general, the third-ranking job at Justice, and directed to oversee all but the Criminal Division, which reported to Philip B. Heyman, the highly regarded deputy attorney general. This, he felt, would give a sense of leadership to the department’s career staff while the process of finding and confirming their boss went on—and would keep the department firmly under White House observation. Hubbell was already installed at Justice, and operating as a de facto chief. However, appointment as associate attorney general would require confirmation by the Senate.
Vince Foster was opposed to subjecting Hubbell to Senate confirmation. Already The Wall Street Journal had pronounced Hubbell a political hack, a “Clinton crony,” who should either be “out of the corridors of justice [or]…in the light of day through nomination for a confirmable post.”
Was there anything damaging in Hubbell’s background or the Rose firm? Nussbaum asked Foster.
No, said Foster. Rather he feared “people will take shots at Webb to get at Hillary.”
That possibility didn’t disturb Nussbaum. “If there’s nothing there, then he should be confirmed. Why not?” he asked.
Foster vaguely repeated his fear that the confirmation process would hurt Hillary. He seemed to know something that Nussbaum didn’t.
AFTER THEIR FIRST full day in the White House, Bill and Hillary gathered with Chelsea, Virginia, and the Rodhams in the Solarium on the third floor for their first dinner in the Executive Mansion. Also at the table were Hugh Jr.’s wife, Maria, and Nicole Boxer, who had just begun dating, and in sixteen months would marry, Tony. Nicole, the daughter of Senator Barbara Boxer of California, was having dinner with the Clintons for the first of many times. Over the years she would become a reliable observer of the Clintons during their domestic downtime.
There was no talk at dinner that evening about the next four years, or matters of policy, or the Zoë Baird nomination. Hillary in all seriousness addressed her husband as Mr. President. They were beaming at each other, the depth of their affection for, and their pride in, each other obvious. The warm family atmosphere liberated the conversation. Away from the ceremony, protocol, and travail of the previous thirty hours, the Clintons, with the Rodhams, allowed themselves at last to celebrate: This is really happening! Can you believe we are here?
THE PROJECTED BUDGET deficit inherited from the Bush presidency was staggering, and projected to grow by a ruinous $68 billion more by 1997. Like it or not, Bill Clinton now felt a commitment to the kind of fiscal policies out of which Republican presidents had made rhetorical hay for two generations, while presidents of both parties allowed mountains of debt to pile up. This would contribute to the chaos that ensued.
Most of the platform that had been the foundation for Clinton’s victory, which featured a full menu of social programs and reforms (“investments,” in Clinton parlance, such as health care and a significant tax cut for the country’s middle class), was instantly endangered. Ironically, in those first one hundred days, while the bottom sometimes seemed to be falling out of the new presidency, the course was actually set for a historic economic recovery and sustained boom.
The Clinton administration hardly did this alone. The end of the Cold War meant that, for at least a few years, defense expenditures would not continue to rise in double-digit percentages annually. Nor could the president or anyone else have predicted the extent of economic luck that would be bestowed upon the country during his tenure. Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, inherited by Clinton from the Bush administration, regulated interest rates with uncanny effect. But Clinton alone among contemporary presidents grasped the powerful possibilities of the global economy, and what the explosive power o
f America’s technical invention and new industries could do for the domestic economy, as evidenced in the technology-driven boom that marked his tenure. He had been preaching the message for years. In his first interview after the election, Clinton had told Ted Koppel of ABC that he was going to “focus like a laser beam on this economy,” and he made good his promise. He became the first modern president to actually exercise, as opposed to merely talk about, the fiscal discipline necessary to cut, and even balance, the federal budget, though not altogether by choice.
He was constantly frustrated by the process and hampered by fiscal constraints unimagined during the campaign. He and Hillary had expected to preside immediately over an ambitious, modernized expansion of federal programs in almost every area of domestic policy, reversing the trend of the Reagan-Bush years. The Clinton model, as envisaged during the campaign, called for more government spending on domestic priorities but with far greater oversight and performance requirements than the so-called big government programs of the 1960s and 1970s. But the new deficit numbers meant forestalling almost all such reforms—except health care, and even that was endangered unless the nation’s fiscal well-being could be restored. Both Bill and Hillary fumed and lashed out during meetings about the financial straitjacket restraining their plans. But deficit reduction, the president felt, was essential.
“I compare it to the importance of education in Arkansas,” Hillary told Joe Klein *10 of The New Yorker in the waning days of the Clinton presidency. “He knew that deficit reduction was the predicate, that we couldn’t have a credible activist government unless we could get the budget under control.”
Contrary to the impression left by her remarks to Klein, Hillary’s acceptance of her husband’s economic program was forced and grudging at almost every step. She sensed, quite correctly, that it could endanger their planned initiatives, including her health care mandate, whose preeminence as the cornerstone of Clintonism would be diminished. She also feared that fiscal reform might eliminate whatever appetite Congress had for health care. “We didn’t come here to spend all our time cutting deficits created by Republicans,” she would complain in one variant or another during White House meetings in the first months of her husband’s presidency. She had to be convinced over and over again.