Hillary the Pol ...

Hillary Rodham Clinton has navigated difficult territory as Bill Clinton’s full partner, and throughout her career she has shown a remarkable resiliency and a willingness to reposition herself as many times as necessary to get the job done—her way.

During the early months of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s activities on behalf of health-care reform, she took Capitol Hill by storm. Describing a meeting she held with the Senate Finance Committee—a group that will be critical to the passage of any health-care legislation—Lawrence O’Donnell, Jr., the committee’s chief of staff, told me, “Mrs. Clinton came into that room, and she opened the discussion at about four-twenty-five in the afternoon. We were about eighteen minutes into it when she stopped—I remember, I looked at the clock. And what I had just heard were the most perfectly composed, perfectly punctuated sentences, growing into paragraphs, in the most perfect, fluid presentation about what our problems in this field were and what we could do about them.” He added, “And then she held her position in the face of questioning by these senators around the table, many of whom know a great deal about the subject. And she was more impressive than any Cabinet member who has sat in that chair.”

There were some people, as there had been in Arkansas over the years, who found her presence so compelling that her husband’s seemed to pale by comparison. Senator Tom Daschle, of South Dakota, who became one of her most ardent advocates on health-care legislation, has described an issues conference for Democratic senators held in Jamestown, Virginia, in April, 1993, at which Hillary Clinton; Ira Magaziner, the director of the health-care task force; and Judith Feder, a deputy assistant secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services and the head of the task force’s working groups, were to address the senators during the day. “We thought that Ira and Judy would be the primary speakers, and the First Lady would be there to fill the stature gap and impress the senators with the importance of the proposal,” Daschle recalled. “Well, Ira and Judy got lost coming down. And the First Lady said, ‘I don’t know that we have to wait. Let’s get started.’ She had no notes—Ira and Judy had all the materials. And she spoke with such eloquence and conviction and knowledge of the subject. That night, the President spoke. But at least half the senators who were there indicated that it was that morning, when Mrs. Clinton spoke, that was the highlight of the weekend.”

Bedazzled as many in Congress were by the force of her intellect, so evident in these presentations, it was hardly an unknown quantity: her reputation as a formidable lawyer with a first-rate analytical mind had preceded her. What was unexpected, in those early months of her tenure as First Lady, was her sallying forth with the instincts and tactics of a seasoned politician. A person who observed her relations with Congress has since said, “There was a skepticism on the Hill about her role”—as head of the health-care initiative. “Was she a dilettante, not really willing to dirty her hands? But, as it turned out, she was willing to travel to people’s districts, willing to call their favorite radio reporters. She is substantively driven—but she was also engaged in courting, incessantly. . . . A lot of people were surprised that she was working this issue the way someone would who was not the First Lady.” This person added, “The First Lady is a pol.”

Her courtship of members of Congress was no less successful for being so overtly orchestrated. She called on many members in their offices, frequently bringing along a photographer, who would snap pictures of her not only with the senator or representative but with the receptionist and other staff people; several days later, autographed photographs would arrive. (After I attended an event where I shook hands with Hillary, in the course of researching this article, I, too, was sent an autographed photograph.) A member of one representative’s staff remarked to me, “All these egomaniacs—the notion that the First Lady would come to their office! And these were more than courtesy calls. They were so scripted and focussed she could have been working for the C.I.A. These were intelligence-gathering meetings, not chitchat. When she visited my boss, the visit was scheduled for a half hour and she spent an hour and a half. They talked about health care, his home state, kids—everything. She was trying to figure out what these people were about.” And by September, when she went to the Hill to testify at hearings of five different Senate and House committees, this aide added, “she basically had a dossier on everyone, so she could incorporate into her responses something about a member’s personal background.”

When J. J. (Jake) Pickle, a representative from Texas who sits on the House Ways and Means and Joint Taxation Committees, announced that he was going to retire, Hillary was one of the first people in Washington to call him, “thanking him for his service, telling him how much she was looking forward to working with him through ’94,” one person said. Representative John Dingell, of Michigan, the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, revered his father, a representative who had introduced health-care legislation in 1943 and then fought to keep it alive for more than a decade; Dingell himself has introduced similar legislation in every Congress since 1955, when he succeeded his father in the House. In early June of 1993, as Dingell was taking call-in questions on a Detroit radio station, he suddenly found Hillary on the line. “She was calling in to say, ‘Happy Anniversary on your dad’s bill—it’s taken fifty years and we are going to try to pass it,’ ” an aide to Dingell recalled. “And after her father died she wrote him a letter—something very personal, about how she thought of him and his father. He was very touched by it.” Then, when she testified before Dingell’s committee during her public congressional début, in September, she began by invoking the memory of Dingell’s father and the legislation he had urged so tenaciously.

That début—a marathon of back-to-back appearances before five committees—was widely perceived as virtuoso. Referring in general to her appearances to promote health care, of which her congressional testimony was the most sustained and dramatic, Representative Pat Williams, of Montana, said, “We were embarrassed by our surprise, but we were surprised—that in a city that relies on staff and note cards she could travel alone and speak with no notes.”

To those who knew her well, however, the feat seemed characteristic. Always the industrious student, she had immersed herself in the arcana of health care for nine months; she knew her subject cold. And she knew all her questioners. In a speech earlier in September she had noted that as of that date she had met more than a hundred and thirty times with members of Congress to talk about health care, and with more than eleven hundred assorted groups.

The risk that Hillary Clinton faced in her performance was not that she would stumble on her facts or be caught short. It was, rather, a risk that she had been mindful of during her past decade of public life: that her acumen and high competence, unadorned, would narrow her public appeal, and alienate the more retrograde; and also that her steeliness, if it were to show through, would alienate many more. As an antidote, she chose to strike a warmer, softer chord in her opening. It was a chord that she had struck very deliberately during the Presidential campaign, and, for that matter, a chord that President Clinton himself struck, in the first of two recent interviews with me, when, after saying that people mistake her for “this sort of superstrong, brilliant person who seems to be almost mechanical in her power and strength and all that,” he declared, “There’s that whole other more vulnerable, more human side of her.” At the first congressional committee before which she testified, the House Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Representative Dan Rostenkowski, Hillary began by saying, “The official reason I am here today is because I have had that responsibility”—for health-care reform. “But more importantly for me, I’m here as a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a woman.”

Several months ago, before the Whitewater investigation and revelations about Hillary Clinton’s commodities trading had begun to dog her, Betsey Wright, who was Bill Clinton’s chief of staff for many years when he was governor, and remains close to the Clintons, told me, “Hillary is happier now than she’s ever been. She liked practicing corporate law, but she was doing it because she, as the breadwinner, had to do it. Now she gets to do her first love, full time.”

The detour from that “first love”—effecting public policy—which Hillary Rodham took when she moved to Arkansas and subsequently married Bill Clinton surprised some people who knew her and had believed that her aim was to achieve political power on her own, for Hillary Rodham was a strikingly intelligent, notably self-confident and self-contained young woman, about whom there was no suggestion of an adjunct, and her political ambition was plain. Her directedness is what fellow-students recall as having been her most distinguishing characteristic at Wellesley (where she was president of the student government) and, later, at Yale Law School. A classmate of Hillary’s at Wellesley told me, “She was so ambitious. She already knew the value of networking, of starting a Rolodex, even back then. She cultivated relationships with teachers and administrators even more than with students. While she was respected across the board, and she had her circle of friends, I would not say she was popular. She was a little too intimidating for that.” She was marked then, too, by the political pragmatism that has since become famous. After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a group of black students on campus were threatening a hunger strike if the Wellesley administration did not address their demands. It was the kind of situation in which, as a classmate recalled, “Hillary would step in and organize an outlet that would be acceptable on the Wellesley campus. She coöpted the real protest by creating the academic one—which, looking back on it, I think was a mature thing to do. In any event, she was never truly left. Very much a moderate, very much a facilitator.”

At Yale, Hillary Rodham’s progression toward a political career seemed to be continuing apace. One of her women classmates told me, “Most of my friends and I were always agonizing, filled with self-doubt—you know, ‘Why are we here? What are we doing?’ Hillary had no self-doubt. She knew she wanted to be politically influential and prominent. She wanted recognition. And she was there because Yale was the kind of law school where you would think about social policy. That year showed her to be a natural politician. She had a natural charismatic quality—people loved to be around her. She liked studying in groups, organizing social events—and the people around her felt that that was where the action was.” She was also unmoved by much of what was eddying about her, in that tumultuous period of the early seventies. “She did nothing to excess,” this classmate told me. “She didn’t do drugs. She was too cautious, and would never take such a risk. She took no joy in the illicit. The forbidden held no fascination for her—she lacked any self-damaging impulse.” That Hillary Rodham conducted herself in such a no-nonsense—even exemplary—way may have been due mainly to an innate conservatism; but this woman believed at the time that Hillary was also conducting herself as she did with an eye to her political future. “In the years since, she has dissembled about her own ambition,” this woman continued, “but at Yale Law School she did not dissemble about her desire to be an important political figure.”

It was at Yale, of course, that she met Bill Clinton. Classmates recall him as refreshingly candid about his national political ambitions. While he may not have discussed, specifically, a desire to be President, it was not an idea that would have seemed outlandish to his closest friends in Arkansas; a high-school classmate said that whenever she sent Clinton a card she tried to find one bearing a picture of the White House. A friend of Hillary’s commented, “The fact that Bill knew he was going to run for political office was very attractive to Hillary.”

Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton made a powerful combination. People who knew both of them at that time say that the two were plainly crazy about each other, and each saw in the other a partner for the political future. Betsey Wright says, “They both passionately share the sense that they’re supposed to make a difference in this world—and they had that before they met each other.” Some of their friends, however, have commented that Hillary (for all her pragmatism) seemed more messianic than Bill; a friend who knew them in law school says, “With Bill, you felt he just wanted to be President, whereas Hillary was really animated by her sense of what was right. She had this religious zeal.”

Over the years, such an exceptional pair inevitably evoked comparisons between them, and debate about which of them was the brighter. “They both have an extra computer in their brains,” Betsey Wright declared. While it became the fashion later for those who knew the two only casually to say that Hillary was smarter, that was not the prevailing view among their closer associates. Ellen Brantley, who knew Hillary slightly at Wellesley and later as a fellow faculty member at the University of Arkansas School of Law, in Fayetteville, and then in Little Rock as a fellow-attorney, and who was appointed a state judge by Bill Clinton, said of Hillary, “She is clearly highly intelligent, and has succeeded, in part, through the practical application of her intelligence. She is very articulate, very good at communicating her intelligence. I don’t think she is smarter than Bill, though some people will say that. If they were in the same class, she would attend all the classes, read all the assignments, outline her notes, study hard for the exam. Bill would stop by some of the classes, read a couple of the assignments while also reading other, related things, and then write an exam that brought in some ideas that had been introduced in class, some outside—linking them in a very original way. And they’d both get an A.”

In choosing to move to Arkansas and marry Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham was surrendering, at least for the time being, any autonomous route to political power. It was a decision about which she may have retained some ambivalence; one friend recalled her commenting, in the eighties, “Someone from my youth group called and said, ‘It’s great that you’re a governor’s wife—but we thought you would be governor.’ ” And at the time, Betsey Wright told me, she was disappointed at what she viewed as Hillary’s abdication of her own political calling. Wright, who met Hillary and Bill when they came to Texas to work on the McGovern campaign, in 1972, founded an organization to recruit and train women to run for political office and to fund their candidacies, and she was mightily impressed by Hillary. “I’m almost a student of strong women leaders. And she was so unusual, even in that cadre,” Wright said. But what Hillary saw, Wright continued, was that Bill Clinton could be President—she “saw that in him when I first met them.” She added, “I’m not saying that’s why she married him—but it was something she saw. And she’s always seen she could have political power with him—just not elected. It was my shortsightedness that I felt when she married him that she was giving up her chance for political power.”

Hillary Rodham worked for about eight months on the impeachment-inquiry staff of the House Judiciary Committee investigating President Richard Nixon—an extraordinary assignment for a young lawyer—before the move to Arkansas. She was just in time to help Clinton in his ultimately futile campaign for a congressional seat, challenging a popular incumbent. Political campaigns seem to have always been a natural medium for her. In 1972, when she and Clinton went to Texas to campaign for McGovern, she had made a powerful impression on Sara Ehrman, now at the Democratic National Committee. “I remember her as this skinny kid from Yale, wearing brown corduroys and a brown shirt, very earnest and very tough,” Ehrman told me. “In the ambience of San Antonio, nobody got to the point for the first three hours, and she got to the point in the first two minutes. . . ‘Where’s the Anglo vote? Where’s the Hispanic vote? Where’s the liberal vote?’ She was no novice in any respect.”

Many of Bill Clinton’s friends at that time have recalled that their expectations of Hillary were very high, because Clinton had talked about her volubly, with great intensity and deep admiration, for some time before her arrival. Those friends say that they were not disappointed. Rudy Moore, who served as Clinton’s chief of staff in his first term as governor, says of his first impression of Hillary Rodham, “She had done interesting things at an early age—especially, working for the House Judiciary Committee. And she was very confident. She never projected herself as anything other than your equal—male or female.”
Carolyn Staley, who had become a friend of Clinton’s in high school, told me that Hillary represented a break with Clinton’s past as far as women were concerned. “He was everybody’s flame. He had girls everywhere he went—a new girl every weekend.” Staley has remained close to Clinton, and today she considers him her best friend. “I think he fell in love with her mind, and her confidence,” she said of Hillary. “All the other girls fawned on him. But Hillary’s attitude was: I don’t need you. She was going to lead her life. She never drew her identity from him. I remember Virginia”—Virginia Kelley, Clinton’s mother—“saying about Hillary, after she met her, ‘Bill, she’s so different.’ You know, Bill had always had beauty queens. And he said, ‘Look, Ma, I have work to do. I don’t need to be married to a sex goddess.’ ”
During my first conversation with President Clinton, in the Oval Office, the President—a man whose ruddiness and startlingly blue eyes make for a vivid physical presence—disputed the notion that girls had “fawned” on him, and stressed that he had had girlfriends before Hillary who were also bright, independent young women. About Hillary, however, he said, “I just liked— I liked being around her, because I thought I’d never be bored being with her. In the beginning, I used to tell her that I would like being old with her. That I thought that was an important thing—to be with someone you thought you’d always love being old with.”


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