THOUGH HILLARY EVENTUALLY had to accede to the demands of her husband’s budgetary decisions, her slowness in adapting carried some benefits: she served as a positive reference point, reminding him and others in the White House of the basic beliefs and principles she and Bill had held and honed since college; that there was a danger in straying too far, of forgetting or giving up as unattainable those programs that had propelled their pursuit of the presidency in the first place.
Clinton’s economic team, unlike almost every other corner of the administration, could be regarded as Washington-seasoned and Wall Street establishment. Bill, with Hillary’s assent, had asked Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen to be secretary of the Treasury and Leon Panetta, of California, the former chairman of the House Budget Committee, to be director of the Office of Management and Budget. Robert Rubin, who had stepped down as chairman of the investment banking giant Goldman Sachs to head Clinton’s newly created National Economic Council, took it upon himself to tutor Hillary, with the president’s obvious gratitude.
Rubin was taking the long view: he hoped that under his tutelage, she would show the same kind of political flexibility as her husband and, eventually, bend sufficiently to scale down her grand vision of health care to more manageable dimensions. He figured wrong.
“Rubin was terrified that she was going to drive the country over the cliff. He worried about it,” said a top aide to Clinton. “Rubin figured out pretty early that he needed to be engaged in it [Hillary’s management of the health care portfolio], and that whatever problems there were he would try to fix it with the people like Lloyd Bentsen, who also thought the same thing.”
Not long after absorbing the implications of the alarming deficit numbers he had inherited, the president was told by Senator Bob Dole, the Republican majority leader who already aspired to oppose Clinton for the presidency in 1996, that not a single Republican in the Senate would support the budget and economic plan the president was developing. Thus the stage was already set for a partisan struggle that would absorb most of the policy energies of the Clinton presidency for almost a year, and—combined with relentless pursuit of the Clintons through investigations by Congress and the special prosecutor—would further poison Washington’s political atmosphere for the rest of the century.
The question of how to deal with the deficit and with Hillary’s health care initiative produced an enervating and sometimes bitter internal struggle, as most of Clinton’s senior campaign strategists—James Carville, Paul Begala, Mandy Grunwald, and Gene Sperling, as well as Bob Reich—challenged the fiscal orthodoxy of the so-called deficit hawks on the economic team, and continued to push for a tax cut for the middle class, and for expedited consideration of most “investments” promised in Putting People First. No matter how Hillary parsed the numbers, they seemed to add up only to an abdication of what she and her husband had promised the people who’d put them in the White House. She couldn’t shake that feeling.
Because she was the president’s most influential adviser, her reservations ate at her husband’s trust in his course. But his choice held firm. He told his aides he had to deal with budget deficits first, to get the economy going. Once he did that, he was confident the administration’s underlying priorities could successfully be attended to.
But in the chaos of the administration’s first days, neither the deficit discipline that would come, nor the economic successes that would follow, were yet tangible. And other, politically dubious priorities established by the new administration in its earliest days caused controversy both within the White House and outside, and captured the attention of the press.
ON THE FOURTH DAY of the Clinton presidency, January 23, the twentieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that established a woman’s constitutional right to choose abortion, Bill Clinton signed, in a televised Oval Office ceremony, a series of executive orders undoing the draconian policies of the Reagan-Bush era relating to abortion, contraception, and family planning. Until almost the eleventh hour, the Clintons’ senior pollster from the campaign, Stan Greenberg, had tried to persuade the president to postpone the measures until much later in his tenure. Greenberg was extremely close to Hillary, who had pushed unequivocally for the orders, but she was dead wrong on the timing of such a hot-button issue, he had argued. He believed that by acting on abortion policy as one of the administration’s first pieces of business, the president and, worse, Hillary would be perceived as governing from the left, moving away from the New Democrat identity of the campaign and endangering reelection to a second term in office. But Hillary regarded the prohibitions in question as a powerful symbol of Reagan-era policies, and an opportunity to declare boldly that the Clinton era had begun. There was an additional appeal: it was fiscally neutral, monetarily cost-free, and not subject to a drawn-out legislative process.
The policies to be undone were symbolically enormous and carefully designed by Clinton’s predecessors for maximum effectiveness: Reagan, and then Bush, had ordered an absolute prohibition on abortion counseling at federally financed health clinics; outlawed the use of U.S. funds for international population programs that advocated abortion (including those of the United Nations) or for family planning clinics in the United States or abroad promoting contraception; forbidden American military hospitals abroad to perform privately funded abortions; and constrained the federal government from considering importation of the French abortion pill RU-486.
The Clintons believed the comprehensive prohibitions, especially in the case of George H. W. Bush, a onetime proponent of choice on abortion matters, had been promulgated more to offer political red meat to the right-wing Republican base and to entice Catholic voters than out of principled, personal opposition. The policies were sufficiently extreme that organizations like Planned Parenthood (of which Barbara Bush had once been a member) could not promote the use of condoms to fight the spread of AIDS in Africa unless all federal funds and tax breaks were rejected.
The milestone anniversary of Roe v. Wade, in Hillary’s view, was the perfect opportunity to move the new presidency on course unambiguously in terms of women’s rights, signal the religious right that its decade of dominance in regard to such personal questions was over, as was the uninterrupted ascendancy of the conservative movement. Once again, Hillary’s misreading of the election’s results, in which almost 60 percent of voters had cast ballots for a candidate other than Bill Clinton, would be eventful.
Yet Hillary’s personal views of sexuality and the exercise of women’s reproductive rights were far more complicated—and conservative—than perceived at the time. While some of her friends from Wellesley, Yale, and Arkansas had undergone abortions, and (in the era of sex, drugs, and rock and roll) had been promiscuous, she had not. The idea of choosing to abort a child she had conceived, except under the most extraordinary of circumstances, would have been totally out of character and at odds with her own values. One of the fortunate facts of her life was that she was of the generation whose sexuality was fashioned in large measure by the pill and its easy availability and efficacy. Her own difficulty in conceiving a child had only intensified her deeply held belief that abortion, for anyone, was a personal choice that should be made with the greatest reluctance.
Politically, the timing of the executive orders was fraught. Greenberg, a principal architect of the Clinton campaign in whom both Hillary and Bill had great confidence, was distressed about the damage already incurred from the gathering controversy over gays in the military. Greenberg correctly perceived that congressional Republicans, especially Bob Dole—an honored World War II veteran with the use of only one arm as a result of battle injuries—were all too happy to mine the controversy. Dole was making loud noises (pandering ones, in Bill and Hillary’s view) about removing the president’s authority to act on the issue.
In the campaign, Bill had been attacked, near fatally, as a draft-dodger. Now he was instructing his secretary of defense to develop a plan that honored the campaign’s
promise to permit openly gay men and women to serve in the armed forces. On January 25, the outraged Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by their chairman, General Colin Powell, sought an “urgent meeting” with the president to discuss their objections, and in a remarkable show of disrespect for their new commander-in-chief, shared their “request” with the press. Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, another powerful Southern Democrat, who was chairman of the Armed Services Committee and bitter at not being named secretary of defense by Clinton, intended to announce his adamant opposition to gays serving in the military.
Instead of demonstrating the White House’s focus on the ailing economy and on health care, the Clintons were, by their fifth day in the White House, swamped in controversy over homosexuality, abortion, Hillary’s hidden hand, situational ethics, and a perception that, now that they were in the White House, they were ready to reward a coalition from the party’s left that had worked so hard for Bill Clinton’s election and New Democrats be damned.
No office-holding politician had done more than Governor Bill Clinton to advance the intellectual and political agenda of the so-called New Democrats, and both Hillary and Bill had embraced the movement as a symbol of their independence from down-the-line, old Democratic Party views (especially in Congress) that they believed had kept the White House largely in Republican hands since 1968. The New Democrats’ political philosophy had been nurtured in the 1980s by Clinton and others who embraced the traditional, compassionate themes and programs of perennial Democratic liberalism, but also accepted some unorthodox (for Democrats) notions: far more cooperation and partnership between government and business; rigorous fiscal oversight and restraint; welfare prevention and reform; fewer restrictions from Washington on how federal funds could be spent at local and state levels; acceptance and encouragement of an interdependent global economy. In 1990, Clinton had accepted the chairmanship of the Democratic Leadership Council, the dominant engine, philosophically and electorally, of New Democrat principles and strategies.
The Clinton presidential campaign was committed to building a centrist Democratic majority, to counteract the rightward shift and congressional gridlock of the past quarter century. The goal of the Clintons’ politics and the New Democrats’ was to reach out not just to the liberal base that had been the Democratic Party’s intellectual and ideological foundation since FDR, but to more conservative “Reagan Democrats”—blue-collar workers and middle-class suburbanites, many of them Catholics, who had begun to abandon the Democrats in the Nixon years and had significantly helped put both Reagan and Bush in the White House.
But the Clintons’ political ideologies and methodologies were actually far more complex than “New Democrat” or any other label could encompass. It was not always easy to grasp them.
“He’s a hell of a lot more liberal than people understand,” said one Democratic friend during the 1992–1993 transition. “But he’s guileful and he moves crablike, with certain kinds of conservative cover. Part of [the Clintons’] initial attraction [to each other] was that they are both very political people, and there’s not a terrific ideological difference between them.”
“She is much harder-edged on issues, and he’s much more accommodating on issues,” Harold Ickes had concluded early in the Clinton presidency. “To her, the issue itself is more important, but getting it adopted either legislatively, and/or implemented, is also important, and he’s always got a weather-eye over the shoulder about how it’s playing politically. Principles with a Big P are probably more important to her than him…. He’s taking other factors into account, and she won’t necessarily.” Hillary, he added, brought “a collective sort of hewing back to ‘Why are we here? Why are we doing this?’” The same considerations led Bob Reich to put “a little bit more trust in her values. She held them [more] dear.”
“My politics are a real mixture,” Hillary told an interviewer early in 1993. “An amalgam. And I get so amused when these people try to characterize me: ‘She is “this,” therefore she believes the following twenty-five things.’ Nobody’s ever stopped to ask me or try to figure out the new sense of politics that Bill and a lot of us are trying to create. The labels are irrelevant. And yet, the political system and the reporting of it keep trying to force us back into the boxes because the boxes are so much easier to talk about. You don’t have to think. You can just fall back on the old, discredited Republican versus Democrat, liberal versus conservative mind-sets.” By the time she mounted her run for the presidency (with Bill Clinton and Ickes as her strategists), it would be harder than ever to discern some of her principles, especially in regard to the gravest issue of the era: the war in Iraq.
Diane Blair was struck when she first met Hillary by how traditional her personal values were. Virtually everyone in her circle eventually recognizes that. From this, Blair and many others deduced that her politics were no more liberal than her husband’s. But an equal number of friends and associates became convinced that her politics hewed closer than his to the perennial theology of Democratic Party liberalism. Blair disagreed: “It’s not true that she is the liberal one. She came from that family where—with her father, especially—the idea was that you work for everything. She believes in personal responsibility.”
In the Arkansas years, Dick Morris had regarded her as “a very practical, hard, down-to-earth, tough person. At the time, I had no sense either of warmth or of ideologies. I became very surprised in subsequent years when she began to become a liberal, because in the 1980s she wasn’t. I would be sure she would be to the right of him. She would always be against raising taxes…. She was very tough. Bill Clinton was really a Southern moderate-conservative. And Hillary was nonideological, just pragmatic. That all changed in 1993.”
There was another formative factor in the Clintons’ politics: for more than a decade, Bill served as a governor and she as a governor’s wife. Governors (and their wives) generally understood on-the-ground realities, needs, and problems of ordinary citizens better than politicians who had moved on to Washington. Voters seem to perceive that, as evidenced by the fact that only Warren Harding and John F. Kennedy had gone directly to the presidency from the Senate.
The Clintons had run the 1992 campaign with their experience in Arkansas very much in mind. It was a conservative Southern state in most regards, and they understood how to appeal to Reagan Democrats. So it came as a shock to many in Washington, in and out of the media, when the first substantive acts of their presidency, most of them principled, some of them even brave, seemed to signal that the new administration’s priorities were actually listing heavily toward what the Clintons’ opponents insisted was a “leftist-liberal” agenda.
DEEPER PROBLEMS were eating away at the Clintons’ patina of political astuteness with the administration less than a week old. There was still no nominee for attorney general, and the president and his wife had seemed ethically at sea and legally clueless in the Zoë Baird fiasco. Meanwhile, Hillary’s decision to ban reporters from the West Wing had members of the White House press corps seething. (“Well, I want to tell you that I’ve been here since Kennedy, and those steps have never been blocked to us, and the press secretary’s office has never been off-limits. Ever,” Helen Thomas, the dean of the press corps, lectured Stephanopoulos.) The deficit numbers the Bush administration had dumped in their budgetary lap had sent the economic team back to square one, and word was out, accurately, that the new president would probably have to abandon his pledge of a middle-class tax cut, and was even considering—columnists were already writing about it—a new energy tax that would hit the middle class hardest. The latter idea was Al Gore’s.
The nascent perception of ineptitude was heightened by an unauthorized, anonymous quote in Time magazine that put the White House on shaky ground with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the august Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Unfortunately, Moynihan was the senator upon whom the Clinton agenda—and Hillary—was most dependent, since health care, welfare reform, and th
e budget were all handled by his committee and, on all three issues, his colleagues accorded him a level of deference usually reserved for a potentate. “He’s not one of us,” said an unnamed “top administration official” quoted by Time. “We’ll roll right over him if we have to.” Unbeknownst to the president or Hillary, the official was Lloyd Bentsen, trying to tell his former Senate colleague, “one gray hair to another,” to lay off the young president. In fact, it sounded like something Hillary would say, and some members of her staff were suspect at the time.
The president, furious at the leak, was on the phone to Moynihan posthaste Monday, January 25, the day the item appeared. “If I find out who did this, they’ll be gone, I promise you that,” he told the senator. (He ordered Stephanopoulos to find out who leaked and fire him.) “Well, if you’re upset, I’m not,” Moynihan responded, but the affront rankled him (and Moynihan’s wife as well, who came to particularly distrust Hillary). The senator would make life difficult for the Clintons for years.
The buzz around town was becoming a question: how could this most surefooted of politicians and his astute staff, including his wife, be stumbling so quickly and so badly? Inside the White House, the cacophony from Congress and the Pentagon, amplified by the press, sounded deafening—especially when Sam Nunn had thrown in his lot with the Joint Chiefs in opposing gays in the military. Nunn purposefully had made his announcement in Norfolk, Virginia, aboard a submarine, to demonstrate the close quarters of military life in which gay sailors would be forced to cohabit. No other controversy could have so underscored Bill Clinton’s inexperience with the military (which may have led Senator Hillary Clinton as a freshman to successfully seek a seat on the Armed Services Committee). The timing of Nunn’s declaration was itself a declaration of war: it eclipsed Clinton’s announcement the same day, January 25, that Hillary would be formally appointed head of his task force on health care, and that Ira Magaziner would be her deputy.