Right now, the Story was confusing and being written by outsiders in the press and political opposition. That had to change. The Story needed some villains, some wicked enemies. Hillary’s colleagues shouldn’t hesitate to identify them as Clinton’s opponents in Congress, or in the media. They, like the Republicans’ fat-cat campaign contributors who were already lining up to oppose health care, were intending to thwart the public will. What better way than to convey the righteousness of the Story? Moreover, said Hillary, health care reform would be the key to Bill’s reelection in 1996.
After Hillary’s remarks, the president offered an even more demanding list of goals for the administration’s first year: the immediate creation of jobs and opportunity through enactment of an economic stimulus plan, in addition to his comprehensive economic plan of deficit reduction and investment; welfare reform; a campaign finance and lobbying reform bill; and a bill mandating national service for young Americans. To this list, he added incremental policies to encourage free trade; environmental protection; reading programs for all those in the workforce in need of them; a reduction in the homeless population; and the creation of more apprenticeship programs in government and the private sector. When Clinton had completed his list, Secretary of State Warren Christopher questioned whether the goals were too ambitious, given how difficult each task would be to accomplish. He suggested eliminating some of the president’s priorities.
Hillary challenged Christopher sharply. The secretary’s experience in the executive branch was extensive. With Bentsen, Christopher was the member of the cabinet with the most high-level Washington experience. He had served in the Johnson administration as deputy attorney general and in the Carter administration as deputy secretary of state—and that added some heft to the Clinton team. Increasingly, though, Hillary came to view him pejoratively as part of the Washington establishment, though he had made his professional mark as a lawyer in Los Angeles. She now delivered a point-by-point sermonette advocating the antithesis of what Christopher had suggested. She was ignoring lessons learned in Arkansas, and was contradicting her own point of half an hour before, when she said in Bill’s first term he had tried to do too much. And he was defeated for reelection.
Immediately after the session adjourned, Hillary instructed Paul Begala and Mandy Grunwald, two of the campaign consultants most opposed to the message of the deficit hawks, to rush back to the White House and prepare a written version of the Story: with heroes, enemies, and villains.
Al Gore’s staff had expected the meeting to be his show. But what those present saw was the president telling them they were in danger of losing their way, and then turning over the agenda to his wife to plot their course. She had told them exactly what was expected of them to get back on track. The weekend announced to the senior members of the administration that this presidency was intended to function as a joint venture.
Moreover, they had now seen Hillary in a battle zone, operating with ease, intelligence, and calm. She had taken the measure of the situation, dictated an order of march, and positioned the artillery pieces. She seemed to thrive under the conditions of siege, trouble, crisis, and combat. After less than two weeks in the White House, Hillary had assumed her command as America’s first warrior first lady.
IN EARLY DECEMBER, Dick Morris had flown to Little Rock and met with the president-elect and Hillary in the governor’s mansion. “Bill said, ‘Stay in touch with me, and why don’t you do it through Hillary?’” according to Morris. “And, I said to Hillary, ‘I’ll be your political consultant.’” During the first two years of the Clinton presidency, Morris claimed, he spoke to her at length every two weeks or so. “So, in ’93 and in ’94,” he said, “I was constantly calling her with advice. And, the calls would always have two parts to them. My advice for her and my advice for him. She was frequently restless during the parts where I was talking about him, but always attentive during the parts when I was talking about her. And, it was very clear to me that she very much felt in business for herself in ’93 and ’94. She very much felt that she had a task, that she had a goal. Health care was her thing. ‘Talk to me about my image,’ she’d say. I would give her advice; for example, at one point very early I remember saying, ‘There’s an East Wing and a West Wing to the White House. And they’re like barbells that you hold as you walk across a tightrope. And they need to be evenly balanced when you walk the tightrope. Whenever you get a little bit too West Wing, which is substantive, hold a dinner party and get more East Wing, which is social. And whenever you get too much talking about health care policy, you talk about what you like to cook at a state dinner.”
Which was exactly the subject of Hillary’s first White House interview with the press, held two days after she’d met with Jackie Kennedy Onassis in Manhattan.
To the outrage of the same White House reporters whom she’d already confined to the basement, Hillary spent several hours talking with Marian Burros, the food editor of the New York Times, in a cozy sit-down with unusual ground rules negotiated by her press secretary, Lisa Caputo: there would be no substantive discussion about the likes of health care, or the sputtering one-week-old presidency; only questions about food, entertaining, decorating, and other “first lady” things. It was further stipulated that the interview would be published two days after the Clintons’ first formal White House dinner, in honor of the nation’s governors, to be held the evening the Clintons returned from Camp David.
Hillary, Caputo, and Ann Stock, the new White House social secretary, had carefully rehearsed the points and attitude they wanted to convey (a softer, gentler Hillary than the newly appointed health care czarina). Hillary enthused to Burros about how she’d loved every minute of preparing for the governors dinner, from selecting the menu and china to making a last-minute change in the flowers and the color of the tablecloths.
The story ran on page one, next to a photo of the new first lady wearing a bare-shoulder, black Donna Karan evening dress (very un–Barbara Bush). Hillary expressed surprise to Burros at the attention accorded her dual roles—traditional first lady, hostess-in-chief; and head of the President’s Task Force on National Health Care Reform, comparing herself to “every woman who gets up in the morning and gets breakfast for her family and goes off to a job of any sort where she assumes a different role for the hours she’s at work, who runs out at lunch to buy material for a costume for her daughter or to buy invitations for a party that she’s going to have and after work goes and picks up her children and then maybe goes out with her husband: our lives are a mixture of these different roles. I’m still always a little bit amazed at how big an issue this is for people because if they will just stop and think, this is what women do,” she said. “Eventually, I expect, it won’t be a subject for a lot of comment. It’s still in transition.”
The “news,” such as it was, was that there would be far more American food served at family meals and state dinners than the Frenchified fare of previous administrations, a decision that sent Pierre Chambrin, the French-born White House executive chef of the Bush years, into a frisson and toward the door (though this was not mentioned in the Times interview). To Chambrin’s surprise, Ann Stock had consulted with three restaurant chefs, celebrated for their American cooking, to come up with the menu for the governors.
“We’re trying to get a kitchen cabinet, so to speak, of people who will advise us about new menus, new ideas,” Hillary said. “It will keep us up to date about what a lot of American chefs are doing around the country. Asking people for their advice, whether it’s about policy or food, is a way to give even more people a feeling of inclusion. And you get good ideas.”
This was just the type of straight-faced earnestness—inclusive food—that (among other things) tended to drive Hillary’s detractors around the bend. Not to mention the chef. “I can’t say I’m very pleased,” said Chambrin. At Hillary’s instigation, some thirty cookbooks stressing low-fat, nouvelle American cuisine were delivered to Chambrin’s kitchen. In t
he chef’s estimation, the Bushes had been perfect clients, undemanding and sophisticated (“they had lived all over the world”). The obvious implication was that the Clintons were hayseeds.
The changes in the kitchen were in fact perfectly understandable. The Clintons’ desire to show foreign guests, among others, the best of indigenous American culture fit their image in the best sense. In December, a group of American chefs led by Alice Waters, the renowned owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, had sent a letter to the Clintons urging the appointment of a White House chef who would promote American cooking, emphasizing local ingredients and organic food. Hillary told Burros she agreed with many of Waters’s ideas. “I think she’s been a breakthrough figure in American cuisine, in the kind of food she’s prepared and in the kind of positions she’s taken. I think what she says makes a lot of sense.” The handwriting was on the wall, or at least on the front page of the Times: Chambrin was on his way out.
All of this, in retrospect, might have seemed trivial, but in the capital, a one-industry town, it was part of a congealing judgment among the grandees of the Washington social-political circuit, the chattering commentators, and the permanent White House staff that the Clintons did not mind clearing house and changing local customs at the same time. After less than two weeks in the White House, an impression was already taking hold among those inclined to cause trouble for the Clintons that they were sweeping into town like a band of hillbillies with no respect for tradition or what passed in Washington for good breeding or pedigree, whatever that was.
One of Hillary’s most querulous attributes, perfected over decades in public life, was to set herself up as a kind of straw woman—responding to criticism, whether real or imagined, with a claim of being confused about why her actions might be subject to question or even analysis in the first place, when the answers were so obvious (to her at least). With regard to the Burros story, she said people who wanted her to fit in a “certain box, traditionalist or feminist,” were going to be disappointed. She could handle a big job and domestic functions, too. But her dubious premise remained “that people could perceive me only as one thing or the other.”
Hillary chose the Times interview to announce her decision to impose a total ban on smoking in the White House (“because of the atmosphere here, and the age of the house, the furnishings”). She had done the same in Little Rock. “It took some people some adjusting,” she said. “We tried not to be too harsh about it. The big issue about health is so paramount to me that I don’t think we should permit smoking.” At his desk in the Oval Office, the president was often encountered with an unlit cigar in his mouth.
PERHAPS NO PERSON aside from the Clintons knows as much about their political designs, development, ideals, and methodology—together and singly—in the years between 1978 and 1996 as Dick Morris. Only Betsey Wright and Diane Blair had the proximity to be as knowledgeable about the gubernatorial years, with their advantage of friendship and total trust. (Vince Foster, always discreet, was extraordinarily close to Hillary but less so to Bill.) Morris, a firsthand witness through the first three and a half White House years, is brilliant, insightful, prejudiced, megalomaniacal, disloyal, as narcissistic as the president he served, and a Clinton-hating convert of the first order by virtue of his being left no choice than to resign or be fired by Bill and Hillary during the 1996 Democratic convention upon publication of a tabloid report of his affair with a prostitute. His testimony must be judged through the filter of his animus. But he is also a Clinton-hater with a difference: Morris knew both Clintons intimately, and the origin of his bias is not ideological or partisan, though, after his firing, his politics moved far rightward in keeping with his new life as a Fox commentator and Murdoch columnist.
His portrait of the Clintons, drawn meticulously with many shades of light and dark, took form in a series of interviews in the fall of 1999, before he had invented a career for himself as a Clinton-basher. After Hillary’s election to the Senate (he didn’t think she would run), Morris would publish furlongs of newspaper columns and four books about the Clintons and Hillary in particular, with conclusions and assertions often at odds with his interviews of 1999, when his opinions were far less jaundiced.
Morris began by talking of her “aggression,” her satisfaction in “taking the fight to the enemy,” and her inability to see her own role in harming others (“When she does worry about the payload of the missile, it’s kind of like somebody else is delivering it”).
Yet Morris quickly made it clear she could manifest the opposite side as well: “Unlike him she’s a normal human being, with emotions. She is capable of love and affection and caring and compassion and warmth and empathy in a way that he is simply not. When he’s with other people, he absorbs their emotion and their energy, and gives it back to them with a tremendous radiance that passes for emotion. It’s nothing phony, it’s heartfelt at the moment, but it’s your feeling coming back to you. When he’s alone, he’s incapable really of feeling much of anything. He’s an emotional albino.”
“Her spiritual mysticism,” in Morris’s view, is an essential characteristic: “She doesn’t feel all the bumps in the road because she does have a faith…. It’s not ‘Let Go, Let God,’ because she tries to manipulate the outcome. But I think that she has a peace with herself over the outcome…that in times of threats that loom in her life, or have loomed and still loom, they are such that if she took all of them very seriously she’d be a wreck. I think that there’s a kind of detachment that probably has a spiritual sense.”
Surprisingly, Morris almost demeaned her intellect. He called it ordinary. Many colleagues of the Clintons had concluded that Hillary was not as intrinsically bright as her husband (whom they regarded as off the charts). Her intelligence was of a different, more practical order, and few would compare her intellectual curiosity or breadth of knowledge to Bill’s.
“He works in a different way than Hillary,” said another of the Clintons’ most important aides. “Because his is a more creative intelligence. He can take in the world, and put it together in new ways. She takes in the world, and can at times make good decisions, and can see the fault lines and where the fights are. But she can’t necessarily create something new out of it, or create a solution where one doesn’t necessarily exist, or have the patience to let the decision present itself. She’s much more apt to, when she hits a wall, bang her head into it. He’ll figure out a way to get around it or to jump over it.”
“She’s not a creative thinker,” Morris said. “She’s not a heavily substantive person. She’s not a heavy-duty intellectual. He’s much brighter than she is. She’s bright, but she’s not very bright. She doesn’t spend her time like he does worrying about every problem facing the world, and trying to come up with a solution. She’s a lawyer…. She has a certaingenre of intelligence, which is that of a very effective advocate.”
He said Bill’s intelligence was of a completely different order: “He’s always talking about books that he either just read or something he read in college. And he’ll talk about Thomas Aquinas in the conversation. He’ll talk about Erasmus. And he’ll talk about Paul Kennedy. Or he’ll talk about the latest op-ed piece by E. J. Dionne. It will be a mélange, a mosaic…. With her, there are never footprints of anything she’s read beyond immediate preparation for her work.”
Others find her bookish. Morris preferred the term “substantive.” Morris said, “She is not supple, flexible, or terribly skillful politically. She’s brittle, rigid, the fragility of iron that cracks when you drop it as opposed to steel, which doesn’t.” This might reasonably apply to the first few years of the Clinton presidency, but by the end of the second term, she seemed to have learned some important lessons. And certainly, since running for the Senate, she has readily demonstrated a sophisticated political acumen.
In 1999, Morris said she had been “playing the part of Eleanor Roosevelt. There’s a conscious, overt mimicry that’s going on. It’s Eleanor being the dominan
t person—but others, too. She’s almost more like Reagan in the sense that she’s sort of playing…the role of activist and socially involved, socially conscious, hard-fighting, aggressive, strong first lady played by Hillary Rodham Clinton. It’s a role that she consciously adopted and consciously pursued.”
Like Nixon, said Morris, “she definitely has a streak of ruthlessness and paranoia in her political style, in her personal style. She has enemies. She has an Enemies List. She has people who she talks to, and people she does not talk to. When she’s mad at you she doesn’t talk to you for months and months and months. She has a very long shit list. And, she believes always in taking the fight to the other side. In every campaign strategy meeting I’ve ever been in with her, she always wants to run negative ads. She always wants to go on the attack.”
The efforts “to savage women who have been alleged to have had sex with Clinton, or subsequently said that they had sex with Clinton,” always originated with Hillary, Morris said. (If so, she had a handmaiden in Betsey Wright.) “In a real sense she is his human face, not just his advocate…. She’s a real person. I think the big frustration of their marriage is that she’s married to the most elusive, withholding, anal-retentive man you can imagine. He uses denial of affection as his method of getting people to do what he wants them to do—the ones he’s close to—rather than to praise or give affection. It’s the strangers he showers everything on…. If he feels that his relationship with you is set, there’s nothing to lose…. As he does with her.
“I believe that it’s a relationship in which she is…addicted to him. And she adores him. She’s the best thing that ever happened to him. But he’s very elusive and very remote. And when he requires rescue she gets more attention, more affection, more love, more of the caring that I believe she craves from him, and also more power than she otherwise would get.”