First Ladies

by Margaret Truman

  Barbara Bush’s White House success, like Edith Roosevelt’s, suggests the American people are a lot more liberal about their First Ladies than many of the commentators on the subject. They have no strong preconceptions about how a First Lady should look or act. She is free to sell herself to them on the open market, using her glamour, her brainpower, her passion for politics, her love of beauty—or her maternal self. That too is the way it should be.

  Chapter 23

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  NOW PLAYING:

  HILLARY AND

  BILL

  WHEN I TOLD MY HUSBAND, CLIFTON DANIEL, I WAS ABOUT TO WRITE this chapter, he smiled somewhat sardonically, as befits an all-wise former managing editor of The New York Times, and asked: “Which Hillary Rodham Clinton are you going to write about?”

  “The one we met—and liked,” I replied.

  Clifton’s question has more than a little point, however. By this time a lot of Americans are undoubtedly a bit bewildered by the incredible outpouring of print and photographs and TV coverage of the current First Lady. There have been articles depicting her as a religious mystic, Saint Hillary in pursuit of the “politics of meaning”; as a cool, calculating lawyer with a hidden political agenda; as a crude opportunist with shallow ethics when it comes to making money; as a bossy, lamp-throwing termagant who really runs the White House; and as a clotheshorse who has fallen in love with high style.

  I cannot recognize the Hillary Clinton I met in any of these capsule descriptions. In the hours I spent with her shortly after she and Bill moved into the White House, she was a warm, humorous, intelligent woman, completely at ease with her husband, keenly aware of her daughter’s needs, and obviously enjoying life at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But I would be less than honest if I did not note that Mrs. Clinton’s first two years as First Lady have been fraught with controversy. When you view the verbiage from a historical perspective, however, a lot of it ranges from the same old stuff to downright silly.

  Hillary is the real boss of the White House? People said the same thing about Abigail Adams, Sarah Polk, Helen Taft, Edith Wilson, and Nancy Reagan. The politics of meaning? Eleanor Roosevelt was repeatedly attacked for her crusades for social justice. A hidden political agenda? Rather like Rosalynn Carter, Hillary Clinton has been forced to deny she has a major role in shaping White House policy, beyond the one large task the President assigned her—the preparation of a universal health-care bill.

  I decided to cut through the nonsense and asked Hillary Rodham Clinton face to face how she saw herself as First Lady after twenty months in the White House. Her answer revealed a calm awareness of the complexity of her job. She said she was doing her best “to fulfill the many different parts of the role” of First Lady. She was occasionally troubled by the way the press tended to see conflicts between the several sides of the job, announcing when she turned her attention to entertaining or redecorating that she was abandoning politics. “I’ve enjoyed the entertaining and the chance to contribute something to the White House,” she said. “I’ve also enjoyed the chance I’ve been given to work with my husband on health care and other issues of interest to me.”

  In short, Mrs. Clinton sees herself as both a political partner and a traditional First Lady. She says she has read everything she could find about First Ladies and has concluded that almost all of them played some sort of political role in their husbands’ presidencies. There is undoubtedly some truth to that observation. But emphasis is more important than mere numbers. A public political partnership is unquestionably the leading edge of the Clintons’ White House image. This widespread impression is not entirely accidental. When I asked Mrs. Clinton to name her most pleasurable moments as First Lady so far, she replied: “The passage of the Brady Bill. And the ban on assault weapons.”

  The Clintons were political partners long before they got to the White House. “My husband and I have always been each other’s sounding boards,” Hillary told me. “Even before our marriage, when we were students at Yale.” In their years after Yale, Hillary became a lot more than a sounding board. According to many sources, she rescued Bill Clinton’s career from collapse when he was defeated for reelection at the end of his first term as governor of Arkansas. She overhauled his entire political operation, got rid of do-nothing cronies, and put together the team that restored him to the statehouse and maintained the momentum that carried him to the presidency.

  That is only the first of several large debts Bill Clinton owes his wife. During the 1992 primary campaign, a woman named Gennifer Flowers revealed that she and Bill had enjoyed a long-running affair. She had tapes of phone conversations in which Governor Clinton made some very compromising remarks. He was not the first presidential candidate to be embarrassed by such a story—Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt come readily to mind. But in the aftermath of the way a similar story had destroyed presidential hopeful Gary Hart in 1988, the prospects for Bill Clinton were not promising. Until he and Hillary went on the TV show 60 Minutes and she defused the ticking bomb by admitting that the Clintons may have had problems in their marriage in the past but they had worked them out.

  No other First Lady except Rosalynn Carter has come to the White House with the ability to remind her husband that without her he would not be sitting in the Oval Office. I do not think Hillary has to remind Bill Clinton of this fact. On the contrary, it is part of the warp and woof of their remarkable political partnership. Does this give Hillary behind-the-scenes influence? Of course it does. But it is not, as far as I can see, the kind of influence that trivializes that word, or her role as First Lady. On the contrary, it enhances it, because few First Ladies have been more qualified than this Wellesley and Yale Law School graduate to play a public partnership role.

  How successful has Hillary Clinton been as a public partner? Here the story becomes inextricably entangled with the question of how successful Bill Clinton has been as President. It seems to be the fate of public partners to rise or fall together—one of the risks of the high-profile game they choose to play.

  Unquestionably, Hillary Clinton can look back on some successful moments as First Lady She awed Congress with her command of the complexities of the health-care industry when she testified before them on the Clinton bill mandating universal care. A New York Times reporter cited her visit to Capitol Hill as “the official end of an era when Presidential wives pretended to know less than they did and to be advising less than they were.”

  Mrs. Clinton has been well received when she travels the country to speak on behalf of the administration—and she deftly handled several explosive questions about the Clintons’ finances in a nationally televised press conference. But another New York Times reporter summed up Hillary’s dilemma in a comment on her campaign to rally support for health care. Both she and the issue were “linked to a President who is less popular—in some ways, much less—than either of them.”

  Tape recorders whirring, I interviewed Hillary Rodham Clinton in the White House. Don’t we look like we’re taking this book seriously? (White House photograph)

  A few weeks later, a Times Mirror poll underscored this bitter point. The poll asked voters: “Of all the U.S. Presidents who have been elected since you started following politics, which has done the best job?” Bill Clinton finished seventh, behind George Bush. Ronald Reagan finished first.

  Here is a painful example of what can go wrong with the public partnership approach to the role of First Lady. By identifying herself so resolutely—yes, courageously—with her husband’s presidency, a public partner subjects herself to all the hostility a Chief Executive often arouses while struggling to fashion new domestic and foreign policies. She also exposes herself to the fallout from personal weaknesses which the merciless glare of constant press scrutiny may reveal in her spouse.

  I have already expressed my respect for First Ladies who choose to be public partners. The women who espouse this rocky road deserve understanding and sympathy. In Hillary Clinton�
�s case, some extra sympathy is definitely in order. Between my early White House visit with her and our interview for this book, first her father, then her mother-in-law died, and one of the Clintons’ closest friends, White House aide Vincent Foster, committed suicide. Next, two other close friends of the First Lady, White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum and Deputy Attorney General Webster Hubbell, were forced to resign under less than auspicious circumstances.

  Simultaneously, Mrs. Clinton herself became the target of some brutal personal attacks and prying questions from reporters that exceeded anything ever encountered by any other First Lady, including Eleanor Roosevelt. Along with the scandal of the failed real estate development, Whitewater, which she shared with the President, the First Lady has had the dubious distinction of having her own financial scandal to refute—the hundred thousand dollars she made from a one-thousand-dollar speculation in cattle futures early in Bill Clinton’s political career in Arkansas.

  After we finished working, the President popped in, cheered us up with some good jokes, and insisted we pose with him. (White House photograph)

  I wish I could say Mrs. Clinton dealt with this matter effectively. Alas, instead of making all the relevant documents available immediately, and issuing a comprehensive statement on the whole affair, she or her press office mishandled it badly They repeatedly changed—“clarified”—previous statements and dribbled out documents in a way that gave the impression they were being released under duress. As a result, the First Lady’s adversaries felt free to sneer about the way the politics of meaning apparently did not interfere with making a quick buck.

  The cattle futures inquiry paled beside the questions that Mrs. Clinton had to face about the suicide of her former Arkansas law partner and friend Vincent Foster. In the spring of 1994, in an interview for Vanity Fair, journalist Leslie Bennetts achieved a somewhat unenviable first when she asked the First Lady, with maximum bluntness, if she had had an affair with Mr. Foster. Hillary, according to Ms. Bennetts, almost wept, expressed a virtually inarticulate protest at the question, and finally said the rumor was “a lie.” The First Lady then attempted to put the whole subject off the record, but Ms. Bennetts refused to do so.

  Mrs. Clinton has admitted these experiences have made her first years in the White House somewhat less than wonderful for her. “It’s broken my heart, in some ways,” she told one journalist.

  In my talk with her, she returned to this theme. “I have no quarrel with anyone who wants to criticize the President or me,” she said. “I know it comes with the territory. I often think of what your father went through. But it’s [been] very difficult.”

  I fear the White House has been almost as great a culture shock for Hillary Rodham Clinton as it was for Herbert Hoover. Mrs. Clinton has been used to success for a long time. Almost everywhere she has been a star. At Wellesley she was chosen to give the 1969 graduation address. She rebuked the guest speaker, Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, for lacking confidence in her generation. Life magazine printed her picture and relevant paragraphs of her address. At Yale Law School she was an exceptional student, and she went on to a distinguished career as a lawyer, first in Washington and then in Little Rock. It has been upsetting for her to learn that braininess and hard work do not always solve problems in Washington, D.C.

  The shock of being in the public eye has also caught Mrs. Clinton somewhat unprepared for a more traditional First Lady role, as a setter of styles. In the beginning, she seemed to personify the feminist claim that how a woman looks is unimportant. She readily admits that when she was young, she disdained makeup. “It wasn’t just that I didn’t wear it, it was a statement,” she has said. As she grew older, she wore uninspired clothes from a dress shop in Little Rock, and in her first year as First Lady displayed little interest in fashion.

  In 1994 she became a First Lady who suddenly put major stress on her appearance. She changed her hairstyle so often, it created bewilderment not only in the fashion world but among average Americans. She appeared in Vogue in a Donna Karan cutout evening dress, striking a pose sultry enough to win her a screen test. When she went to Europe with the President to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of D-day, the First Lady’s staff issued flowery press releases on her outfits. One gushed over the “lovely U-shape opening at the neck” of a “two piece fuchsia Noviello Bloom suit of linen blend.”

  Such a description of a Nancy Reagan outfit would have drawn no comment—and probably made it onto the style pages of many newspapers. But to hard-nosed reporters, this fervent prose seemed inappropriate to a publicly political First Lady. A few less-friendly types gleefully informed their readers that European fashion commentators had turned thumbs down on most of Hillary’s clothes. “You’re no Jackie Kennedy: Europeans Give Hill a Real Bronx Cheer” was the headline for one story in the New York Daily News.

  Hillary is inclined to make light of the whole style flap. “Anyone who’s looked at pictures of me, going back to when I was in high school,” she told one reporter, “knows I change my hair all the time. I did that long before I was in the public eye. I try different types of clothes. I don’t take it seriously…. I think it’s fun.”

  Unfortunately, that statement does not jibe with her staff’s intense effort to turn the First Lady into a clotheshorse and fashion exemplar. The stream of hyperbolic press releases did not strike reporters as “fun.” Their reaction was, I fear, not fun for Mrs. Clinton either. Here, I think, was a case of a First Lady with no deep fashion instincts allowing her staff to push her in the wrong direction.

  The fashion cross fire was intensified by the somewhat ambiguous position fate has assigned to Hillary Rodham Clinton since Betty Friedan launched the latest phase of the women’s movement three decades ago. As the first First Lady to combine marriage and motherhood with a career before she reached the White House, she has had to pick her way through an emotional minefield. During the campaign in 1992, she stirred a storm with an offhand remark that she was not the sort of woman who stayed home and baked cookies. The uproar revealed the submerged hostility of many working wives and stay-at-home mothers toward higher-paid professional women who can afford domestic assistants and do not have to stretch themselves to hold down a job and simultaneously raise a family.

  On the other side of the divide are feminists who rushed to Mrs. Clinton’s defense when Michael Deaver, the veteran Reagan public relations adviser, offered his unsolicited opinion that Hillary’s venture into Vogue was “kind of odd.” Deaver wondered why, after Hillary had proven herself a tough, savvy political operator, she wanted to go back “to an image based on femininity” Supporters of the First Lady fired back, claiming she personified a new wave in feminism, a “spontaneous uprising” among women who are determined to define their sexuality without any interest in male ideas. “Female sexuality should no longer be perceived as undermining female authority, but as complementing it,” declared author Naomi Wolf. She saw the many faces and hairstyles of Hillary Clinton as “a liberating affirmation of how multifaceted the female consciousness is.”

  With defenders like Ms. Wolf putting out stuff like that to boggle the voters, Hillary Clinton does not need enemies. There has been a tendency among some of her supporters to get carried away. One journalist called her “the icon of American womanhood… the medium through which the remaining anxieties about feminism are being played out…. Like Ginger Rogers, she will do everything her partner does, only backward and in high heels.” Another reporter said she was “replacing Madonna as our cult figure.” This is not intelligent thinking—or writing—about this embattled First Lady.

  Hillary’s stance as a publicly equal partner has unquestionably expanded the role of First Lady. As one astute Washington journalist has pointed out, she not only combined the independent spirit of Betty Ford, the shrewd femininity of Lady Bird Johnson, and the determination of Rosalynn Carter, she was empowered by the President to take charge of health care, the most important piece of legislation his administr
ation undertook in his first two years in the White House. This empowerment was confirmed by a federal court, which described the First Lady as “a virtual extension of her husband” and “the functional equivalent of an assistant to the president.”

  This empowerment soon acquired a symbolic momentum, giving Hillary Clinton’s political comments a weight and authority unmatched by those of any previous First Lady. When she said “we” would accept certain suggestions or alterations in the health plan, there was little doubt that she was speaking not only for her commission but for the President. Not a few people in Washington were upset about dealing with a First Lady with this kind of political leverage. They felt it was, if not illegal, at least unfair. Beyond Washington, it made people ask: who did we elect as President?

  When Mrs. Clinton testified before Congress, the lawmakers, obviously flustered and awed, barely asked her a single serious question. A few days later, when Donna Shalala, the secretary of health and human services, testified on the administration’s plan, she met a withering cross fire of hostile questions that more than made up for the solons’ truckling before Mrs. Clinton. There were apparently many flaws in the health plan concocted by Hillary and her commission. But I wonder if subterranean resentment at her empowerment also played a part in the way Congress unceremoniously discarded it.

  Empowering Mrs. Clinton has also aroused the ire of conservatives in the hinterlands. The right-wing think tank, the American Policy Center, has assailed the reign of “Empress Hillary,” and the American Conservative Union announced the start of something called “Hillary Alert,” a newsletter that will supposedly keep the nation up to date about the latest usurpations in the White House. Needless to say, these diatribes invariably end with a plea for donations to rescue the country from this horrendous threat.