Hillary

by Sara Marshall

  In 1979, Hillary was made a partner at the Rose Law Firm. That same year, she became pregnant. When it came to commodities investing, she wrote, “I lost my nerve for gambling. The gains I had made suddenly seemed like real money we could use for our child’s higher education. I walked away from the table.” She quit just ahead of a market slump that cost others, including Jim Blair, much of their profits.

  Bill surprised much of Arkansas by attending Lamaze birthing classes. The baby was born on February 27, 1980. She was named Chelsea, as Bill and Hillary had vowed on a stroll in London when they heard someone playing Judy Collins’ “Chelsea Morning.” The governor’s mansion provided a support system for the baby, with a nursery and servants. The Rose Firm gave Hillary four months of maternity leave. Mother and daughter bonded happily. Bill, Hillary wrote, showed off the baby as if “he had invented fatherhood.”

  Clinton ran for re-election in 1980, and his success was anything but assured. The increased car-registration fees were still a sore point with voters. Some were saying he was out of touch with Arkansas. He won the primary with two-thirds of the vote, but the opposition had made its case. Jimmy Carter’s problems on the national scene were making themselves felt across the country. The national recession still pinched, particularly in more rural states. Then Cuban dictator Fidel Castro emptied Cuba’s prisons and mental hospitals and sent the inmates to the United States in a flotilla of leaky boats from the port of Mariel. The federal government sent hundreds of them to a “resettlement camp” in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. In late May, the Marielistas rioted, and several hundred broke out of the camp.

  It was a dangerous situation. The Marielistas were clearly capable of violence, but they were not prisoners. The federal troops running the camp had no police authority off the base. County deputies and local residents, understandably fearing a horde of hostile Cubans, bought up all the ammunition in local gun and hardware stores. Signs went up in front of homes: “We shoot to kill.”

  Governor Clinton called out the National Guard to help the state police round up the Cubans and tamp down the panic. Widespread violence was averted. But, in August, breaking his promise to Clinton, Carter sent more refugees to Arkansas from camps he was closing in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. That triggered local resentment, with voters blaming both Clinton and Carter.

  The Clintons got another example of the power of negative campaign advertisements. The Republican candidate for governor, Frank White, ran television ads featuring photos of the Cuban rioters as a voice-over intoned, “Bill Clinton cares more about Jimmy Carter than he does about Arkansas.” On her campaign trips, Hillary began getting questions: “Why did the governor let the Cubans riot?” “Why didn’t the governor care about us more than he did about President Carter?”

  Clinton lost his bid for re-election.

  The family moved out of the governor’s mansion to a comfortable house near their former home, and Bill accepted a job in a Little Rock law firm. But he took the loss hard - and personally. He became obsessed with the question: “What did I do wrong?” He asked it of people in grocery stores, on jogging trails, in restaurants. Hillary was also devastated by the defeat. It was an unexpected pause on the path she had plotted for the pair of them. She was determined to move on.

  Clinton began running to get his job back in 1982. And in due course, he did. One personal decision that his advisors thought worked in their favor in Arkansas: Hillary consented to stop using her maiden name.

  She had been Hillary Rodham all through her law career and Clinton’s first term. Invitations from the Governor’s Mansion came from “Governor Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham.” Chelsea’s birth announcement was worded in a similar manner. In Arkansas, people were conservative Christians; evolution was still a subject of debate, and the tenets of feminism were social heresy. Bill’s backers gently encouraged Hillary to be flexible on this point. Even Vernon Jordan, their old civil rights friend, told her over breakfast one morning to “do the right thing” and change her name. Without fanfare, her cards, letterheads, and all the other tokens of identity were changed. She replaced her glasses with contact lenses and changed her hairstyle. Outwardly, she was a new Hillary. Inwardly, she was the same passionate woman who had defied her father and risked her safety to prove his point about Kennedy’s election in 1960.

  Hillary masterminded her husband’s comeback. Many had advised Bill to wait two years to run again, but Hillary regarded this as poor advice. She took control, and her confidence fueled Clinton’s campaign. He trusted Hillary more than he trusted himself. He needed to change the minds of those who had voted against him, and he tackled this task precinct by precinct, voter by voter. One campaign stop took him on a small plane to the mountain town of Harrisburg just ahead of an approaching storm. Fog obscured the ground, and the pilot advised against landing. But Clinton urged him on, saying, “I understand from the office that I got 150 people there. I’ve got a chance to get some votes.” The plane touched down safely, and, before it came to a stop, Bill swung open the door and hopped out. He didn’t want to keep his voters waiting.

  “I have been given something that few people get in life: a second chance to serve the people of Arkansas,” the former governor said. He won the election and was determined never again to lose another.

  In his second term as governor, Clinton built on the successes of his first. He modeled his reforms on the network of rural health clinics the state had set up after the findings of Hillary’s commission. Governor White had campaigned against Clinton partly on a promise to close them, but when he tried to do so, rural constituents set up such a clamor he had to back off. Now Clinton wanted to make the same impact on education, and he began by naming Hillary head of a similar Education Standards Committee. She objected, arguing that it was an unnecessary and politically risky move. But he insisted, and she took the job.

  “I still believe that until we have a system which guarantees competence in basic learning skills we will never be able to prepare our people for higher level of achievements, I don’t care what else we do,” Clinton said. It was an issue he felt he could rally people around. But it wasn’t going to be easy. “We know it’s a huge task,” Hillary declared, “but we’re very optimistic that we’re going to be able to make a substantial improvement in what our students receive.”

  Education reform touched off a series of bitter battles across the state. Hillary’s fifteen-member committee constructed its program around mandatory testing of both students and teachers, which outraged not only the teachers’ unions but civil rights groups and other pillars of the Democratic Party. Reform would require higher taxes, which pleased no one and antagonized many. Hillary attracted much of the anger as the bill’s guiding force, while her husband avoided day-to-day controversies. That helped get the measure passed in the long run. By the end of Clinton’s second term, the program was so well launched that Terrel Bell, President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of education, praised the state’s reforms and said Clinton had been “a prime leader in education.” But many correctly gave Hillary credit for the achievement. She had been on the front line, meeting with civic and school groups in towns across Arkansas. One legislator remarked, “We elected the wrong Clinton.”

  Clinton was re-elected. Then, in 1986, he won a fourth term. And a change in Arkansas law doubled the length of a governor’s term to four years.

  Democrats began to speculate about Clinton and the presidency in 1987, the year before Reagan’s two terms concluded. He was considered a long-shot against Vice President George H.W. Bush. But Clinton was ready for the challenge. The national media arrived in Little Rock that July, summoned by Clinton for his announcement. But the journalists were turned away. “I need some family time,” he told them. “I need some personal time.” He had decided not to run. The official reason was that Chelsea, at the age of seven, was just too young to endure the strains of a presidential campaign. In fact, it was much more complicated than that.

  The day be
fore the press conference to announce his candidacy, Clinton was presented with a list of women’s names. His infidelity was a campaign issue. His chief of staff, Betsey Wright, asked about each: How many times? Where did you meet her? How likely is she to talk? Clinton tried to dismiss the problem, banking on the discretion of his mistresses. But Wright convinced him the national scrutiny would be intense, and that it would also focus on Hillary and Chelsea.

  “It just became clear that night it was not the time for him to do it,” Wright told a documentary producer. “It just was not the time. He felt for quite a while that, that was probably the last real chance he would ever have to run for president. That was it, it was over. You know, where would he go now that he wasn’t going to run for president? What could he do in the future? I think that over the next few months that became a tough time for them.”

  Hillary was understandably disgruntled. She had known about Clinton’s indiscretions, but now it threatened their mutual goals. Their marriage suffered, but it wasn’t over.

  Clinton got a daunting taste of national exposure when he delivered the nominating speech for Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis at the Democratic convention in 1988. It was a fiasco, too long and altogether too late at night. Long before he finished, delegates on the floor howled at him to wind up. But he was going by a script approved by the Dukakis campaign and had to see it through. He did, however, get a round of applause, with two words: “In closing . . .”

  He redeemed himself a week later by appearing on the Tonight show with Johnny Carson, joking about his long-windedness and playing saxophone. “My sole goal was achieved . . . I wanted so badly to make Michael Dukakis look great, and I succeeded beyond my wildest expectations,” he quipped. He poured on the charm, and again, it worked.

  “He recovers better than anybody I have ever known,” said Wright, his chief of staff. “It’s extraordinary. I mean he can have horrible things crash down upon his head, but he crawls out from under it and keeps going.”

  Hillary, too, saw a chance to get their lives back on track. By 1992, Bush had served a term as president but was vulnerable. At eleven, Chelsea was old enough to understand the demands a campaign would place on her family. She and Hillary agreed that her daddy would make a good president. Clinton had been elected to another four-year term as governor and was a national presence as chairman of both the National Governors Association and the Democratic Leadership Council. At the annual governors’ conference in 1991, a number of powerful colleagues told him that he had their backing. This time, he decided to enter the race.

  As campaigns go, this one went surprisingly smoothly. At first, Clinton was seen as a long shot, too young and lacking in experience to be taken seriously. But he took the nation by storm, “like a country tornado,” according to one newspaper’s assessment of the campaign. He put together a smart, efficient campaign staff, headed by the sharp-tongued Louisiana Cajun James Carville.

  “It was just so clear that he was an exceptionally talented politician from the . . . get go,” Carville said. “His ability to adapt, his ability to walk into a room, to size up an issue, to understand. I’ve never seen a candidate, I’ve never seen a human being who, with the most limited briefing, can understand the dimensions, the parameters, the nuances of everything of any kind of a policy or political problem [like Bill Clinton].”

  Before facing the incumbent George H.W. Bush, Clinton had to win a primary field stacked with Democrats. These included California Governor Jerry Brown, Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey, Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas, and Iowa Senator Tom Harkin. Clinton had no trouble standing out. He was a new kind of Democrat. “People say I’m not a real Democrat,” he would say, “and I say I’m against brain-dead policies in both parties.” The Democrat’s traditional thrust had been entitlement and endowment. Clinton believed in extending opportunities and benefits, but expected something in return: responsibility. “If you want the right to receive welfare benefits, you have to assume the responsibility to get educated, to have job training, and to go to work if you can do it,” he said.

  To the struggling and disenfranchised, he was compassionate. Clinton staged a rally prior to the New Hampshire primary during which a woman approached him. She started to cry as she told him that she couldn’t afford to buy the medication she needed to survive. Clinton dropped to his knees and embraced her. “I’m really sorry,” he said, tears in his own eyes, “it isn’t right, it isn’t right . . .”

  It was the same story in truck stops, diners, and union halls across New Hampshire. Clinton consoled people who were out of work or barely getting by. “Ten years ago, we had the highest wages in the world,” he said. “Now we’re tenth, and we’re dropping.” Bush’s chief handicap was the national recession. Carville kept everyone focused relentlessly on that issue with the reminder posted in his war room: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

  In the way of modern campaigns, the candidate’s slightest gaffe became a news-cycle sensation if not a permanent issue. Clinton told a rally one day that Hillary would be an active partner in his presidency and added light-heartedly, “Buy one, get one free.” The Republicans said it meant she had secret plans to usurp power as his co-president. That allegation echoed past charges that Hillary was too smart, too ambitious, and too “bossy.” The disgraced Richard Nixon, working to be rehabilitated as a political sage, quoted Cardinal Armand Jean Richelieu in an op-ed piece as saying, “Intellect in a woman is unbecoming.” In some minds, Richelieu was right.

  Still, Clinton was in the lead only weeks ahead of the Democratic National Convention. Then the worst fears of his campaign became reality. The first of a series of what became known as “bimbo eruptions” broke when the supermarket tabloids found a model and actress named Gennifer Flowers. She claimed she had had a twelve-year affair with candidate Clinton. She had tapes of her conversations with him, in which he asks her to keep quiet and deny any relationship between the two of them. The press seized on the scandal, as Clinton worked hard to evade their questions. When he did give answers, he framed them as a lawyer would. The press responded by giving him a nickname: Slick Willie.

  There was no avoiding the scandal. Clinton was losing the public trust, and his own confidence was waning. Hillary, sensing another opportunity slipping by, rallied her husband. Always the pragmatist, she decided they were going to face the problem and then move on to the next one. The Clintons appeared on 60 Minutes. He admitted having caused pain and said the voters could decide whether that should rule him out as president. But they declined to discuss adultery or whether they had ever considered divorce. Then Hillary delivered another reverberating line: “You know, I’m not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I’m sitting here because I love him and I respect him and I honor what he’s been through and what we’ve been through together. And you know, if that’s not enough for people, then heck, don’t vote for him.”

  It worked. Hillary’s defense of her husband, and scorn for the press, rescued the campaign. The interview tamped down the Flowers fire. Much later, Clinton would admit he had had one indiscretion with her. He finished a strong second in the New Hampshire primary, winning his first title as the “comeback kid.”

  Clinton’s top campaign aides wanted the American people to identify him another way. They called him “A Man from Hope,” showing a film of that title at the Democratic National Convention in New York. “I was born in a little town called Hope, Arkansas, three months after my father died. . . . I still believe in a place called hope,” Clinton said, pouring on the southern charm. People identified with it. “Don’t Stop,” a rock anthem by Fleetwood Mac, became the theme song of his campaign. It was an appropriate soundtrack for what followed: a newly energized, break-neck-paced sprint through nine states. At points, Clinton could only wave to the crowds, his voice lost in the campaign clamor.

  The attacks on Hillary continued. An old claim that Clinton’s governor’s office had steered business to the Ro
se Law Firm was revived and again disproved. But in the course of defending her career, Hillary got off another unfortunate line: “You know, I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life.”

  Those words were interpreted as an insult to stay-at-home mothers. The GOP right wing labeled Hillary as not just a “radical feminist,” but “the ideological leader of a Clinton-Clinton administration that would push a radical-feminist agenda.” She had become a kind of Rorschach test for modern women.

  In the end, of course, the campaign succeeded in batting down all these issues as petty distractions. Carville’s slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid,” proved decisive, and Clinton’s vice-presidential choice of Al Gore was popular. Gore and his wife Tipper joined the Clintons on a successful campaign tour. On Election Day, Clinton beat the incumbent President Bush by a landslide, 69 to 31 percent.

  “My fellow Americans, on this day, with high hopes and brave hearts and in massive numbers, the American people have voted to make a new beginning,” Bill Clinton said in his inaugural address on a crisp January morning in 1993. The country, in large part, was uplifted. Millions of people had a sense that the future was brighter, that they had elected a president who could face anything. The Clintons, of course, were elated. The presidency was the culmination of twenty years of work. But, for them, it was also a new beginning.

  Clinton had “heroic visions of what he might do as president. He felt that the winds of change were blowing heavily at his back and that he could ride them to great, magnificent victories,” said David Gergen, an adviser. But many still disliked Clinton and could not shake the impression that he was sharp-tongued and weak-willed. For that segment of the nation, the damage done by the airing of the Clintons’ personal problems was irreparable.