Never before has a First Lady inspired as much avid curiosity as Hillary Rodham Clinton, and never has it gone so unsatisfied. Though Americans were moved by Eleanor Roosevelt’s purposeful humanity and enchanted by Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy’s youthful glamour, nothing has approached the fascination people feel toward the current First Lady, who is carving out for herself a role that attempts to blend the work ethic of Roosevelt, the style of Kennedy, and her own unprecedented political ambitions. As the first working mother in the White House, the first unapologetic feminist, and arguably the most important woman in the world, she wants not just to have it all, but to do it all.
Soon after the inauguration, the president declared that his wife would be the Bobby Kennedy of his administration, and assigned her the vital job of heading the National Task Force on Health Care Reform—to amazingly few objections. But since then Hillary has burrowed deep underground. Her health-care task force began operations in such secrecy that she was sued in federal court and ordered to open the fact-finding meetings. White House aides have been more forthcoming about sensitive relations with Boris Yeltsin or Saddam Hussein than they have about where Hillary Rodham Clinton is and what she’s up to.
The absence of real information has created the perfect breeding ground for gossip. Washingtonians have come to regard the White House as a version of Clue, in which the latest rumor is always a variation of Colonel Hillary in the Library with a Knife. The First Lady has thrown (a) a vase, (b) a lamp, or (c) a Bible; at (a) her husband, (b) a Secret Service agent, or (c) a steward; (a) in the private quarters, (b) at Blair House, or (c) in a limo. When the president comes downstairs one morning with scratches on his face, reporters at the next two press briefings are obsessed with wild, salacious speculation.
As always in the case of wild rumors, there is no evidence to support them and no way to disprove them. But in the absence of good stories to push out the bad, they persist. As Hillary concentrates on the fine print of policy, she seems to be ignoring the fact that politics is as much a function of perception as it is of merit. She embraces those demands that engage her brain, and seems wary of those that might take a chunk of her soul. But for the next four years, the country will be grabbing for everything it can get, and she will have to strike a balance between how much she must give and how much she can hold back. Despite her attempts to keep herself under wraps, the public will slowly find out who she really is. In fact, in her first hundred days in the White House, Hillary has already revealed more than she knows.
Inauguration Day. It’s the wee hours when the Clintons return to Blair House from the Michael Jackson-Barbra Streisand gala at the Capital Centre. Less than 12 hours from now, Bill Clinton will become the 42nd president of the United States. In the upstairs library, where a replica of the swearing-in platform is set up, complete with TelePrompTers, a small group of writers is working through the night so that the Clintons can have a new draft of the inauguration address when they get up in the morning. As always, Hillary will have more influence over the text than any of the speechwriters—spokesman George Stephanopoulos, David Kusnet, Al Gore, media coach Michael Sheehan, and Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and longtime Clinton friend. “We don’t want to throw around words like ‘love,’ ” she warns, always on patrol against flakiness. Hillary likes precision in language—“Call a sacrifice a sacrifice, a tax a tax,” she is always insisting—and she particularly dislikes self-actualizing jargon that debases emotions: no hugging, no “sharing,” no confessing around her. If Hillary catches on, the air kiss could be doomed. The vice president-elect is in on the drafting of the inaugural address, but demonstrates how it is possible to doze off while sitting up straight in a hard, wooden chair.
At 6:30 in the morning, Hillary gets up and edits the speech with her husband as he prepares to go downstairs to take delivery of the box of nuclear codes from National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft. She puts on the round blue hat with the turned-up brim, an afterthought that will get almost as much attention as Jacqueline Kennedy’s pillbox. There remains after three decades greater fascination with what goes on top of a woman’s head than what is in it; Hillary’s headband, the shade of her blond hair, now the brimmed topper, dubbed “the chipmunk hat,” have already eaten up hundreds of column inches.
Governor Clinton is not yet president, but as the couple leave for the eight A.M. church service, the security is fully presidential. As Hillary gets into the car, she looks back at the Secret Service and the “War Wagon,” an omnipresent van, with a rear seat that swings out to allow agents to fire artillery powerful enough to pierce an armored vehicle. “I don’t know how we will keep a normal life in Washington,” she said two weeks before in the living room of the governor’s mansion, where cement bunkers were built the day after the election. They won’t. Much of the first month in Washington will be spent trying to find a middle ground between protection and interference. The Secret Service agents will be removed from the upstairs White House outpost where they hung out during the Bush years, because Chelsea’s room is up there. They are not pleased.
After church, he goes over the speech again, and they end up being late for the ceremonial coffee with the Bushes. As they walk down the stairs, the president-elect snaps at Hillary to hurry up, a frequent reaction when he’s running on Clinton Standard Time. Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, the cochairs of the inauguration (who are always invited to the coffee meeting), have been making small talk with the Quayles for 15 minutes—coldly, since Dan Quayle seems to have confused Linda Bloodworth-Thomason (the creator of Designing Women) with Diane English (the creator of Murphy Brown).
But once Hillary arrives, the room brightens. For all their obvious differences, Barbara Bush has seemed to actually like Hillary since the day in November they met at the South Portico of the White House for a tour of the private family quarters. She was so impressed with Hillary, in fact, that afterward she gushed over the woman whom Republicans had been portraying as Hilla the Hun. Mrs. Bush, who hates the press herself, described Hillary leaning forward, teacup in hand, to ask her what to do about all those pesky reporters. She advised Hillary to ignore them except to correct mistakes where friends are concerned. Hillary takes the “ignore them” part of the advice seriously, avoiding scores of interview requests and inviting only local press into the East Wing.
When the inauguration parade is almost over, Hillary jumps up to leave the reviewing stand, grabbing her husband’s gray overcoat, and the president follows slowly—he never wants to leave where he is—stopping to thank the butlers who bore Diet Cokes on silver trays all afternoon. As Hillary, not the most patient person in the world, makes her way across the jury-rigged blue planks, Bill shouts, “Hey, Hillary, wait up!” She puts her hand out behind her without looking back. He catches up and they run inside together.
This time, there’s no adult supervision, since the Bushes have already left for Houston on Air Force One. The Clintons rush past the chief usher, into the elevator, and out onto the second floor, nearly galloping now, opening doors as they go. They find their bedroom, midway down the yellow hallway, where Hillary doffs her hat like Mary Tyler Moore, kicks off her shoes, and jumps on the queen-size bed they will share for the next four years.
Possessions have been magically exchanged while the transfer of power was going on at the Capitol. Out with the Bushes’ duck decoys and clock radio set to the country-music station, and in with the Clintons’ rocking chairs and quilts and CD player. Clothes and shoes are already waiting in the appropriate walk-in closets, though the family pictures are not yet hung.
Virginia Kelley passes by, on her way to get her hair done. Chelsea and her friends streak down the hall in white bathrobes, getting ready for the hot MTV ball. The president heads to the third floor, determined to find the solarium, where Ronald Reagan recuperated from his attempted assassination. Hillary begins dressing for the balls, donning the lavender-and-lilac inaugural gown designed by Sarah Phillips, while four people attend her, including backup hairdresser Gabriel De Bakey. “This job, it came from God,” says De Bakey, who ran the last block to the White House with two cases of gear. De Bakey does the fussy swept-up dos that Hairdresser Number One, Cristophe, who owns a salon in Beverly Hills with an espresso bar and seaweed treatments, wouldn’t be caught dead moussing. De Bakey is anxious to prove he is up to doing the First Head of Hair. “We are not crazy here, these big pieces of hair going out everywhere,” he says with wild Gallic gestures.
Chelsea and friends are ready to go, and White House photographers start snapping pictures. Like a wedding at which the First Lady is the bride, every permutation is taken. In the middle of this, the Clintons eye Chelsea’s ears, adorned by big green clip-ons, since Chelsea has not been allowed to get them pierced. Though her mother comments, Chelsea makes a clean getaway, jewelry intact.
The balls: they came, they waved, they danced—the same sequence at every one, except for the three where the president played the saxophone. By two A.M. sleep deprivation is beginning to take its toll, and his winning smile gets a little less dazzling. A huge full-length picture of the Clintons, looking as if they are having the first dance at the wedding, immediately goes up in the hallway leading from the pressroom to the West Wing offices.
The open house sounded like a great Andrew Jacksonesque notion when it was announced—but this early in the morning, on three hours’ sleep? Worse, the guards have let in not just ticket holders but all comers. Midway through the long day, an open mike catches Hillary pulling her husband aside to point out that at the rate the line is moving they will be there until it is time to announce the re-election campaign. But even in an unguarded moment on an endless day, she is concerned rather than cranky. Pointing to the crowd outside, she whispers, “We just screwed all these people!”
On Thursday, Hillary has about 30 of her high-school friends from Park Ridge, Illinois, into the Blue Room for a party. The extended First Family drops by. The move to the White House is a big jolt for both families, who lived so close to the Arkansas statehouse that they had dinner together most weekends.
Patriarch Hugh Rodham sits happily in his wheelchair. Hillary does an imitation of her high-school prom date, who insisted she learn to skateboard before he would take her to the dance. One of the guests is speaking on the phone to his wife, who wanted to have the experience of being called from the White House. The First Lady takes the receiver and jokes, “Don’t worry, now, we’ve worked out a way for him to pay for the Ming vase he knocked over.” She is having the time of her life, but unlike her husband, who can’t leave even a dull party, she soon begins moving people out the door with great dispatch.
Finally, the Clintons are left alone with their close friends from Arkansas, the Thomasons, who are, as Linda puts it, “two hicks who will be spending the night in the Lincoln Bedroom.” The foursome raids the kitchen, looking for something to eat without disturbing the stewards. But all the Bushes have left behind are a few spoonfuls of vanilla ice cream and some stale saltines. The president, who loves to order in pizza, can’t because all vendors have to be cleared by the Secret Service. Hungry and trapped, Clinton jokes that they have just moved into “the crown jewel of the federal prison system.”
He grabs his wife and they go hunting for the bowling alley and movie theater. But Hillary, who wants to get some sleep, has programmed the Thomasons to discourage a late night. The new president extracts a few desultory hands of hearts. After midnight, he is pulled back down to the Oval Office to finally withdraw the Zoe Baird nomination. He doesn’t get to sleep till after 2 A.M.
A few mornings later a steward walks into the bedroom while the Clintons are still between the sheets. “We were not up yet and a steward came in,” the president explained. “The guy just honestly thought we were up and we weren’t.”
Where H.R.C. will sit becomes the next big question. The president had mused out loud that he wished he could knock down a wall in the West Wing so that she could be right beside him. Her predecessors, of course, stuck to the East Wing; Mrs. Hoover stayed in the bedroom, spreading out her correspondence on top of the blankets. But location is everything and the difference between the East Wing and the West Wing is the difference between being in the loop and being the loop. The closest she can get without offending the White House curator is the second floor in a small, boxy office. The last occupant, ironically, was Janet Mullins, the James Baker aide who is being investigated for authorizing a search of Bill Clinton’s passport file.
The carpets and drapes are cleaned; Hillary orders a coffeepot and pushes up the blinds to let the light in. Her staff—young ones who look like extras on Beverly Hills, 90210 and others who resemble assistant deans at Smith College—perch on the striped sofa and small table, which is quickly smothered in piles of health-care briefs and correspondence. “We usually meet in my office because the table is bigger and not as messy,” says Domestic Policy Adviser Carol Rasco. Hillary’s management style is collegial and direct. Says Deputy Assistant to the President Melanne Verveer, “She carries her own stuff, writes little notes on sticky paper or right on a letter—‘Let’s do this,’ ‘What do you think about this study?’ ‘Maybe we should get this guy in here.’ We know she’s not our peer now, but when we are working she acts just like another professional around the table.”
Significantly, she has a larger number of senior officials assigned to her than the vice president, and her personal staff is much more powerful than any previous First Lady’s. She has five commissioned officers—that is, assistants to the president—in contrast to one for Mrs. Bush. “Inside the White House culture,” says Anna Perez, Barbara Bush’s former press secretary, “that carries a lot of weight.” Hillary also gets a great deal on real estate, because she keeps the space set aside for the social office in the East Wing and a suite of offices for the rest of the First Lady’s staff in the adjacent Old Executive Office Building.
It is Hillary who decides to restore the small dining room next to the Oval Office—Ronald Reagan had turned it into an office—where meetings can be held and where the vice president and president have lunch once a week. She also decorates the president’s small study, with its stand-up desk, a stereo, an easy chair, and a picture of the tower at Oxford with the American flag flying over it on November 3, 1992, commemorating the first time a Rhodes scholar has ever been elected president. She puts her gift of all his campaign buttons mounted in a frame on the wall just outside the Oval Office. Nearby, he hangs a large portrait of his wife.
Hillary 1, Photodogs 0. They will do anything—hold out catnip, grovel on their stomachs—to get a picture, even if it is only of the family cat. It’s a fullcourt press for Chelsea’s first day of school, but if she were stupid enough to go to the main entrance, where the TV crews, reporters, and photographers have camped out since early morning, she wouldn’t be smart enough to attend Sidwell Friends. Junior-high-school kids don’t like to be taken to school by their parents, but Hillary accompanies Chelsea, keeping the Secret Service and limousines with flags at bay. The request from Chelsea that there be as little fanfare as possible on the part of the driver and others will later be misinterpreted as a dislike for men in uniform and evidence that the Clintons are anti-military. Later, Hillary attends Chelsea’s first soccer game, and manages to avoid causing a stir. Chelsea’s team wins, 4 to 1.
When Hillary enters the Roosevelt Room that afternoon wearing a headband, it’s surprising that reporters don’t race to the phones. The headband has come to be like a mood ring: headband on, she’s the killer lawyer, offering herself during the campaign as the blue-plate special, two for the price of one, and giving intros longer than the candidate’s speech. Headband off, she’s the docile helpmate of the campaign bus trips, demurely in the background. The Nancy Gaze has nothing on the Hillary Nod.
But the president announces that the First Lady will not be the best supporting actress in this administration. She will be running his second-most-important enterprise. He turned to her, he explains, because “she’s better at organizing and leading people from a complex beginning to a certain end than anybody I’ve ever worked with in my life.” He adds that he hopes “she’ll be sharing some of the heat I expect to generate.”
Before the election, aides worried deeply that Hillary would appear to be an “empowered Nancy Reagan,” according to one document. When asked during the campaign whether she would actually be participating in government, she said to look at her record in Arkansas. “I didn’t sit in on Cabinet meetings there, did I? Why would I behave differently in Washington?” Well, for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: it’s where the action is. And, unlike Little Rock, Washington is a city where you can’t work outside the home if home is the White House.
As before, advisers often check with her before approaching the president. “Why wouldn’t you talk to the last person who sees him at night and the first in the morning,” says James Carville, “especially when she is as smart as a whip?” Bruce Lindsey, one of Clinton’s oldest confidants and the White House personnel chief, routinely runs possible appointments by her. Critics say she is slowing down the process. After attorney-general candidate Kimba Wood meets the president, for instance, she pays a visit to Hillary’s office.
Much has been made of F.O.B.’s (Friends of Bill), but there are almost as many F.O.H.’s in the administration. Hillary’s first boss, Bernard Nussbaum, is White House counsel; his assistant, Vince Foster, was her law partner. Her second boss, Webb Hubbell, managing partner of Little Rock’s Rose Law Firm, is associate attorney general. Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala served with Hillary on the board of the Children’s Defense Fund. The president’s top aide, Mack McLarty, says he may be as close to Hillary as to the president, even though he has known the president since Miss Mary’s kindergarten. “I’ve seen a lot more of Hillary over the last 10 years than the president because of our schedules,” he says.
She has walk-in-the-door privileges throughout the building—and others feel free to walk in on her. In the middle of the Zoe Baird nomination going south, White House consultant Skip Rutherford walks into Hillary’s office with a cup of coffee from the White House mess, remarking that there are only Styrofoam cups available for carryout. Hillary cocks her head toward the vice president’s office, joking, “We better get Al on that.” The next day, the Styrofoam is gone in favor of heavy, recyclable paper.
During the first week, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds that the First Lady has a positive rating of 57 percent, up from 46 percent in December; 74 percent think she is a positive role model. In a Washington Post/ABC poll, however, 36 percent are worried that H.R.C. will have too large a role, and only 3 percent fret that she’ll have too small a one. One poll finds that 62 percent think she should stuff the Rodham part of her name.
The name will occupy investigative reporters and talk-show radio for days. According to the best available information, the facts are these: It was Hillary Rodham until 1982, no question. In 1980, her husband’s gubernatorial opponent, Frank White, made a television ad saying that his wife and the mother of his children was proud to call herself “Mrs. Frank White.” Soon, he was calling himself Governor White. Before Clinton launched his campaign to unseat him, Hillary Rodham was answering to Mrs. Bill Clinton. But she was actually going tri-moniker. Like many women, she used her full name some of the time, part of it some of the time, and mumbled something the rest of the time. Her press secretary and her law firm insist that she always signed three names. But in the campaign, press releases and schedules often used just Hillary Clinton. Aides insist she was still H.R.C. when she signed something (one of the more intimidated staffers is sure of this because he always thought it meant Her Royal Clinton). At campaign stops, Bill Clinton introduced his wife as Hillary, and now he introduces the healthcare czarina as Hillary Rodham Clinton. While the polls are against her on this, she will avoid impeachment hearings as long as she forgoes the hyphen.
The Clintons have hardly had time for dinner together; the president has been working in his office every night until one A.M. But together with Mack McLarty they work out a deal where his schedule will allow him to be upstairs for dinner at 7:30. No one likes eating in the imposing dining room, so Hillary has a white table and wicker chairs sent up from Arkansas. In Little Rock, everything happened in the kitchen—potluck suppers, marathon Trivial Pursuit games, the pinochle the Rodhams love. McLarty remembers, “You would be over there and it wouldn’t be surprising if you set the table, pulled the leftovers out of the refrigerator, and cleaned up. And that was after he was elected president.”
The private-quarters kitchen in the White House is too small for that, but it works for family breakfasts and dinners. After dinner, the Clintons read, work, watch television, and make phone calls. It takes weeks to get phones that can direct-dial (the Bushes went through an operator), but now there are his-and-her versions.
The house is filled with guests: Diane Blair (Hillary’s friend from the University of Arkansas) and her husband (the general counsel of Tyson Foods), the Thomasons (Harry several times), Susan Thomases (several times), and all the family. Whenever word gets to Hillary that friends are coming to town, she insists they stay at the White House. “It’s the only way she’s sure she will see them,” says Verveer.
At the end of the week, the Clintons slip off for a private dinner at a friend’s house on 16th Street. The president is given Ross Perot ears, and Hillary is given a black cone-shaped hat and toasted as the Wicked Witch of the West (Wing).
On Tuesday morning, January 26, Hillary catches the 8:30 shuttle to New York, nailing the window seat and eating the cheese and apple in the plastic basket. “She likes to eat and doesn’t gain weight and hardly exercises,” says Verveer. She’s ecumenical but prefers Italian and Mexican. The president fixes her eggs with jalapeño peppers on the weekends. One Christmas she served black beans and chili as part of a buffet. She carries Tabasco sauce wherever she goes.
At P.S. 115 in a poor Manhattan neighborhood, Hillary bends over a child’s desk and recalls how her father quizzed her on the multiplication table. She rewards the winner of a multiplication bingo game with two silver happy faces and a kiss in the middle of his forehead.
After this piece of classic First Lady theater, Hillary races downtown for lunch with Jacqueline Onassis in her apartment across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nibbling salad, they do not talk of hats or headbands. As she departs, Hillary abandons her no-hug policy for an embrace in the lobby.
She moves on to Chemical Bank’s midtown headquarters, where she is to receive the Lewis Hine Award from the National Child Labor Committee. She breaks stride to ask an aide to see if more people can’t be invited to Sunday’s first official White House dinner. Arriving at the plush 50th-floor conference room, Hillary slips away to call Chelsea, whom she had dropped off at school that morning for her second day of eighth grade.
Hillary also squeezes in calls to several members of Congress, including House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski, House Minority Leader Robert Michel, and Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole. Dole had recently fretted over whether the president would be able to fire his wife as he could other aides, and wondered whether there could be a full and frank discussion of ideas around her. Rostenkowski had asked, “Is Mrs. Rodham Clinton starting to take over the White House?” and Michel said, “I could always ask my wife, I guess, to come be my representative.” When Hillary doesn’t make it to Annapolis for a meeting of the Republican caucus, one senator cavils, “We made it out here, why didn’t you?” She explains that neither the local police nor the Secret Service would let her go, because of the heavy snow. When the meeting is rescheduled on the Hill, three times as many people turn out.
On January 27, Hillary holds her first health-care task-force meeting in the Old E.O.B. (steps across a driveway from the White House), in a stifling-hot, standing-room-only office on the second floor. The turnout is excellent, and includes the president and vice president. Warren Christopher or Donna Shalala should be blessed with such attendance. Hillary sets the tone: “I don’t want you to think because I’m the president’s wife it’s not O.K. to tell me what you think. I want everything on the table.”
Consultants to the health-care task force travel to Washington to ponder price controls and bunk in cheap hotels, on pullout couches, and in sublets. They quickly find that a meeting with the president seems like a hoedown compared with the brisk no-frills directness of an encounter with H.R.C. An over-organizer—Hillary read 43 First Lady biographies and several Elliott Roosevelt mystery novels to learn about life in the White House—she has a plan consuming umpteen pages of charts, graphs, calendars, tickler files, and checkoffs, along with a tollgate strategy which requires each group to pass its findings through ever narrowing checkpoints.
Everyone worries about the self-imposed 100-day deadline. One White House aide is sure they’ll make it. “H.R.C. will do as much work as anyone, and she will see that everyone works as hard as she does. With her, you can’t jive, you can’t temporize, you can’t play any games. You do, you’re dead.”
But there is a false drama to the secret deliberations, since a memo to participants says that the job of the task force is to make the argument for a managed-competition plan; a single payer, as in Canada, is not seriously considered. While the oxymoronic “managed competition” means doctors and pharmaceutical companies will take a hit, it more or less preserves the piece of action the powerful insurance companies have, except that they now may be forced to cover people who aren’t disgustingly healthy.
At the end of a bad week—the gays-in-the-military issue exploding on the heels of Zoe Baird’s withdrawal—Hillary suggests a get-together of the whole White House staff in the East Room. It quickly turns into a pep rally. McLarty introduces Tipper Gore, who introduces Hillary, who says, Hey, it’s just been a week. Al Gore rises to boogie, or try to, and jokes about his dancing ability.
When Clinton takes the floor, however, he lights into his aides for leaking information to the press. It’s the reverse of the perception that Hillary always plays the bad cop. In fact, she is more often the mother hen. “Are you getting enough sleep?” she asks the younger staff. “Maybe you should stay home tonight.” She sometimes force-feeds bagels to visitors to her office and urges her staff to go home for birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays. White House consultant Paul Begala says that for almost everyone “it’s much easier to turn to Hillary than the president. She has no temper. I’ve never heard her raise her voice.” When Begala’s wife was eight months pregnant, Hillary and the governor insisted he go home for a month with full pay. “This is the most important thing that will ever happen to you, not the election,” Begala recalls her saying. “The Clintons inspire loyalty because they give it,” he says. “I would throw myself in front of a truck for them.”
January 30. On the first trip to Camp David, Hillary is still upbeat. There is a touchie-feelie quality about the meeting of Cabinet members and top White House aides, with nametags and facilitators and getting-to-know-you stories. The president recalls being teased about being a fat kid. Hillary tries out “Mr. President.” After several references, she stops and says, “This is going to be hard and awkward for me, so let me just say ‘Bill’ when I need to.” But no one has heard the president addressed in public by anyone since as Governor or Bill. “Hillary tells everyone, and I mean everyone,” says Begala, “to call her Hillary.”
The next day, they head back to the White House to watch the Super Bowl with Governors Ann Richards (rooting for Dallas) and Mario Cuomo (for the Buffalo Bills). Chelsea sits on the floor with Socks.
With an official White House dinner that evening, the First Lady has no time for football. Home-ec Hillary goes into high gear: she consults with the kitchen staff and checks out the pink tablecloths, the red Reagan china, the tulips. She is a different First Lady from the one in Arkansas, where she would breeze in at the last minute for an official dinner, moving around name cards, perhaps, but otherwise leaving the arrangements to the pros.
Hillary’s spurt of domesticity comes exactly one year after the wifely performance on 60 Minutes, when she helped rescue the imperiled Clinton candidacy. Then, she came across as a determined, hard-talking, g-droppin’ woman who was standing by her man, though without a lot of charm or grace. Tonight she is Hillary transformed, dressed for dinner in a black turtleneck number by Donna Karan that says, in a sexy whisper, “I am not Barbara Bush.” Since the dress has already been knocked off in ready-to-wear, it also says, “I am not Nancy Reagan.” To the aides who are afraid of her, however, it says, “I am Hillary, hear me roar; I’m more important than Al Gore” (a song that would soon become popular on Washington, D.C., radio stations).
The next day, the First Lady gives her first postinaugural interview, to Marian Burros, a food writer for The New York Times. She has granted the audience on the condition that they keep the talk to household hints and favorite recipes. “We are big broccoli eaters,” Hillary declares. About the president’s much-lampooned eating habits she says, “You know, he gets an unfair rap. An occasional trip to a fast-food restaurant is not the worst of all possible sins.”
A few days after her culinary interview, Hillary is her old self again in a black suit, heels clicking on marble floors as she sweeps past white marble busts of dead white men on Capitol Hill. She doesn’t carry a briefcase but a black purse so large she would be asked to check it at the airport. In the L.B.J. Room, 25 Democratic congressmen listen intently. H.R.C. shares top billing with Senator George Mitchell. Up here in the last pre-feminist stronghold in the land, where men are members and women are wives or trouble, they are having a little difficulty getting used to such a powerful First Lady. There has been a lot of grumbling, especially about Mrs. Rodham Clinton (Dan Rostenkowski’s name for her) calling men by their first names.
Hillary seems to be an irresistible target for unfriendly fire.
The jokes:
Of course, it’s safer to make Hillary the object of the concerns about the presidency. If he turns out to be a jerk, the country suffers; if she does, it’s a good parlor game. And many people may fear having more than one person wearing the pants in a marriage as much as they fear having more than one president, especially men who like the pants-allocation system just the way it is.
Susan Faludi, the author of Backlash, thinks that “the rusting social order has its shorts in a knot over Hillary not because she’s an independent woman but because she is unapologetic about it.” She’s taken off the mask of the demure wife without putting on a hair shirt. She is not a long-suffering Eleanor Roosevelt, an overbearing Edith Wilson, a pill-taking Betty Ford, or an overthin, grandchild-averse Nancy Reagan. She doesn’t sit silently at Cabinet meetings like Rosalynn Carter. She brings her own agenda.
On Meet the Press, Robert Novak, the Prince of Darkness on the Sunday-morning talk shows, blames the two failed attorney-general selections on the First Lady’s insistence that the job be filled by a woman. He fulminates about “the hidden hand of Hillary Clinton trying to play Bobby Kennedy at the Justice Department, but unable to get the job on a de jure basis because of the anti-nepotism law.” Four days later, when asked at his Rose Garden announcement of his nominee for attorney general what influence Hillary had on the selection of Janet Reno, the president answers, “None.”
February 10. The Detroit town meeting. A focus group sponsored by a marketing firm turns knobs during the president’s question-and-answer session. The favorable ratings move steadily upward during an answer by Clinton on health care—until he mentions his wife’s role. Then the dials turn down. They go back up when he starts talking about health care again.
Hillary has spent much of the first three weeks with Chelsea, helping her to adjust to a new city and a new school, to life without her grandparents or friends nearby. Except for those few days when she is traveling, Hillary goes upstairs at 4:30, when Chelsea gets home from school. On a snow day when Chelsea is home, Hillary stays with her all day. Various people come up and join them. Chelsea has introduced her parents to Game Boy, and now Hillary tries to pry it out of her hands.
The family has taken to the movie theater and bowling alley. When Mary Steenburgen, the actress from Arkansas who is a close friend of the Clintons’, stays in the White House to celebrate her birthday, she and Chelsea race downstairs. The whole family has watched Steve Martin in Leap of Faith, plus Groundhog Day, Home Alone 2, Aladdin, Benny & Joon, A Few Good Men, and Falling Down. The White House swimming pool is ignored except by Steenburgen, who gets up at 6:30 A.M. for a swim in freezing weather. As she comes back in, the president is leaving for his jog, and Hillary is seeing Chelsea off to school.
February 11. Hillary and Tipper travel to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a town meeting on health care. As always Hillary is in command of the session, asking pointed questions and giving away little—she keeps details about how the plan is being developed close to the vest. “If her husband plays poker,” says Representative Mike Synar of Oklahoma, “he ought to take her with him.”
The next day, the First Couple visits a clinic in Arlington, Virginia. The trip is a reminder that they are hardly ever together during the day anymore. (Verveer says, “Hillary will stop by the Oval Office on the way back from a meeting if she thinks he might be there, but he’s so fully scheduled there’s almost no time.”) The president takes up the fight Hillary has pre-picked for him with the drug companies for gouging profits out of sick people. They make a good team; the sum of their anger is greater than its parts. They dandle babies to make clear whose side they are on.
A Time/CNN poll of 1,800 adults finds that 56 percent of respondents have a favorable impression of the First Lady. A Gallup poll shows that 67 percent of 1,001 Americans surveyed have a favorable opinion of her—two points better than her husband scores on the same question. No one asks about Al. At the Gridiron dinner, Bob Dole thanks his former Senate colleague for his efforts. “The vice president puts in long hours at the White House working on the environment. And, Al, the lawn looks great.”
February 14. Valentine’s Day at the Red Sage restaurant. Even on a romantic outing, the president can be the date from hell, talking to everyone but the girl he brung, which in this case means attending to the waiter, the Secret Service, the aide with the nuclear codes, and an advance person. Before going to the downstairs dining room, he U-turns into the bar for a round of flesh-pressing. Finally alone, they have “painted soup” and the lamb baked in herbed bread. They exchange gifts and touch each other more in two hours than the Bushes did in four years.
February 17. The president’s State of the Union speech will be delivered and broadcast live tonight at nine. The pressure is intense: after his 10-minute address from the Oval Office two days earlier, the stock market suffered its biggest one-day drop in 16 months. At lunchtime, the president is pre-spinning news anchors over grilled chicken in his private dining room while Hillary works on the speech in the Roosevelt Room.
At this stage, the address is nothing more than scraps of paper scattered the length of the table. “Hillary is making about a dozen different assignments to people,” an aide recalls later. “[National Economic Council head Robert] Rubin’s section is so full of jargon that she has to take him in the other room and do her ‘If it’s a tax, call it a tax’ routine.” Another aide calls Hillary “the detox center for bad writers.” Paul Begala admits his section on health care was too soft and unfocused. “Hillary stitched health care back into the speech as an economic issue,” he says. “She was the calm in the eye of the storm.”
But when the president joins them, one aide notices for the first time a flash of irritation directed at his wife. “It was a small thing—looking a second too long when Hillary was speaking—but she knew enough to back off.” The aide adds that, in addition to being his most ardent cheerleader, Hillary is Clinton’s toughest critic—able to tell him things few people are willing to now that he’s president.
At 6:30, Clinton rehearses the speech in the movie theater on the ground floor. At 8:30, the First Couple climbs into the limo and they pencil-edit the last draft on the way to the Capitol. In front of the camera, he ad-libs about a quarter of the speech. It is hailed as a breakthrough success.
Hillary thought it would be a great idea to invite Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, to sit beside her during the speech. This eye-popping sight attracts almost as much attention as the president’s words. Two days later, Greenspan will testify favorably about Clinton’s economic plan before Congress.
Back at the White House, Clinton gets everybody up to the third-floor solarium for a party. Hillary misses most of it because Chelsea needs help with her homework. When the First Lady arrives around midnight, the president is trying to round up a crowd for a movie, but everyone is too tired. Instead, he talks Hillary into watching a rerun of the speech on C-SPAN.
On February 21, Hillary appears at Alice Tully Hall in New York for a benefit to raise money for a sculpture of Eleanor Roosevelt to be placed in Riverside Park—America’s first memorial to a First Lady, other than the collection of gowns in the Smithsonian. Hillary remarks that she has had many conversations with Mrs. Roosevelt in her head during the past year—“one of the saving graces that I have hung on to for dear life.” She says she asked her predecessor things like “How did you put up with this?” and “How did you go on, day to day, with all the attacks and criticisms that would be hurled your way?” Her comments are a departure from the campaign, when she told Time magazine that she took criticism grounded in fact seriously but not personally and ignored the rest. “If I worried about every time anybody said something nasty about me during the last year, I would be incapacitated.”
In a public appearance in his home state, Wyoming congressman Craig Thomas refers to the First Lady as “Hillary Baby.” When it is reported on network news, he claims, “I meant no disrespect.” A reporter at The Washington Post coins the phrase “Billary,” one president, two heads, one headband. He makes no denial about his intention.
Along with six Cabinet members, H.R.C. is sued in federal court by three industry groups seeking to open the health-care meetings. The White House counsel fights back, arguing that the sunshine laws, which state that government meetings with an outside adviser must be open, weren’t passed to protect the country from the First Lady.
Another First Lady comes to visit. Hillary and Betty Ford talk for two hours about mental health and substance abuse and the small world of First Ladies. They have their pictures taken under Mrs. Ford’s portrait.
The president seems to be thriving, careening from one wildly adventurous project to another—a new town meeting, a new crisis, a new summit. The major aides—Mack McLarty, George Stephanopoulos, Paul Begala, Bruce Lindsey—are tied up with devising the economic plan and getting it through Congress, then with the timber summit, then with the Yeltsin summit. Hillary is left to the single, braincrushing task of health-care reform and its Mission: Impossible deadline.
There is a performer in most elected officials, including First Ladies, a leaning toward the light. Nancy Reagan was an actress, Betty Ford a dancer. They took to their parts. Hillary, on the other hand, is a behind-the-scenes player; she would be happy if she were never on-camera again and never had to sit for another photo shoot, especially if it means sitting still for a makeup artist. She attacks her job with determination and decades of experience. At public hearings for the healthcare task force, she is never at a loss for either information or sympathy. What kind of health insurance do you have? How much do you pay? A rapt student, she has not yet been asked a question that she couldn’t answer. Like most staffs, hers prepares talking points for her, which she almost never uses. Says Verveer, “I ask her, ‘What do you need us for?’ She always comes up with something to make us feel better.”
The Gores and the Clintons relive the salad days of the campaign bus tour by going out together to a Jerry Jeff Walker performance at the Birchmere, a club in suburban Virginia. They eat at RT’s, a Cajun restaurant, where the Clintons order the pasta jambalaya. The veep orders his favorite meal: potato skins stuffed with barbecued chicken followed by pecan-crusted chicken with rock shrimp. The evening raises the question of whether jeans are age-appropriate for a vice president, even when going to a country-music concert and eating Cajun food.
Hillary loses the lawsuit against her. The judge rules that she is not a federal employee, which means that task-force meetings to gather information must be held in public. The White House claims it is “gratified” by the ruling, which is a “stamp of approval,” because they now claim not to have held any meetings which if they had held them would have had to have been held in public. Despite being gratified by the decision, the White House will appeal the ruling several weeks later.
The Clintons have yet to take a weekend off. There’s always something—Zoe Baird, Boris Yeltsin, the economic plan. The president goes golfing twice in Manassas, but it’s so foggy he can barely see the ball. Chelsea has friends over to watch movies and spend the night, and for her 13th birthday, friends from Little Rock fly up. Hillary takes them all out to see a revival of Jesus Christ Superstar at the Warner Theatre.
When Steenburgen visits, Hillary tells her how homesick she is for friends and the ease of her old life. Steenburgen says that, unlike the Hollywood types she knows, the Clintons want to hold on to the prosaic quality of their lives, to avoid the rarefied atmosphere and the dependence that comes when someone is always there to take care of the details. Hillary stops by the grocery store near Chelsea’s school one day to pick up things that used to be in the cupboard in Little Rock, like peanut butter. But she has only $11 cash, and the store doesn’t take credit cards. She charms the clerk anyway, signing an autograph on her way out.
At the health-care meetings, everyone has a woeful tale about getting sick, and Hillary manages to listen to each saga as if it were the first one she’d heard. Just as she seems to be flagging and the discussion starts to drag, she will lift her head off her hand and lob a live one. To a doctor whining about onerous government regulation, she retorts with thinly veiled anger, “Why the medical community in this country can’t help us figure out what will work . . .” Deep breath. “It’s frustrating . . . this is just one example of what really should be solved by the medical community.” For a woman of her control, this is the equivalent of mowing the doctor down with an Uzi.
While the pundits and the medical establishment and men in general seem to enjoy taking potshots at Hillary, the less privileged root for her at clinics in Virginia, farm halls in Iowa, auditoriums in Florida, and hospitals in Pennsylvania. The people who line up after the hearings for a word, an autograph, to shake her hand, and the 100,000 people who have written to say they think she is doing the right thing seem to appreciate her core of unbendable steel. Her husband can be as oversensitive as a car alarm, anxious to please the last person he talked to, split the difference, find a way up the middle. But she acts like someone who will stick to her guns. Says her close friend Steenburgen, “Like all of us, Hillary would prefer to be liked, but she’s secure enough to risk not being liked if that’s what it takes.”
In Slater, Iowa, she allows herself a rare moment of self-reflection, saying that she’s been at the job of drafting a healthcare-reform package for six weeks, but “actually it feels like six years.” Yet she seems indefatigable. One day she has only a single official item on her schedule—a discussion of health care with five female senators—but she holds 30 other meetings.
On March 16, she gives one of many teas in the White House, this one for 10 First Ladies from the Western Hemisphere. The event recalls the exchange she had with Jerry Brown during the campaign. When he attacked her law practice as a conflict of interest in a state where her husband was governor, she shot back, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas.” Less reported was her next sentence: “The work that I have done . . . has been aimed . . . to assure that women can make the choices . . . whether it’s full-time career, full-time motherhood, or some combination.”
The Clintons have taken a very different approach toward their daughter from the Carters, the last First Family that came with a child. When Amy Carter was pawed by the press and overexposed and came across as precocious and pampered, Rosalynn Carter said, “My children have grown up in public life. Amy was two when we were in the governor’s mansion. I don’t worry about it.” Chelsea, however, was kept so sheltered that, during the campaign, some focus groups didn’t think the Clintons had a child.
What Hillary can’t let pass is a segment on Saturday Night Live which made fun of Chelsea’s “awkward stage.” The Clintons try to explain to her that “unkind and mean things are said by people who are either insecure or going for the laugh or going for the nasty remark—whether it’s on a playground or on a television set.”
The Clintons’ pincer movement on the Hill is having an effect. Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole kills press reports that Hillary blundered when she had the temerity to call him Bob. “Last time I checked, that was my name,” he says when asked about it. And he calls her Hillary. On Larry King Live, Dole says he would support changing the so-called Robert Kennedy nepotism law to make an exception for H.R.C. “If the president asked me to try to change the law, I’d probably do it . . . I’m impressed with her.” When asked by a colleague about his softening on Hillary, he says, “Well, I’m used to smart women [he’s married to Red Cross president Elizabeth Dole]. At least Hillary doesn’t ask for blood.”
On Friday, March 19, Hillary is hosting a lunch for 25 campaign and White House staff, laughing her head off as they relive the Keystone Kops sequences of the primaries, when an aide comes in and whispers in her ear that her 82-year-old father has had a stroke. “Her face, which was all smiles and crinkled eyes, went slack,” remembers one guest. “It literally turned to putty.” Hillary asks Melanne Verveer to pack up what she will need from the office. Before leaving, she spends time with the president and McLarty, who realizes for the first time how much she’s been carrying on her own and how tired she is.
Hugh Rodham’s stroke defines the ensuing weeks. “The impact on her is unfathomable unless you know how close the Rodhams and the Clintons are,” says Skip Rutherford, an old friend from Arkansas who hopped on the plane with her and listened to Chelsea and Hillary relieve the anxiety with stories about birthdays and Christmases and softball tournaments.
Everything shuts down as Hillary sits by her father’s bedside in Little Rock. Her mother and two brothers are there, along with Chelsea, who is on spring break from Sid well. The only aide with Hillary is Lisa Caputo, her press secretary, who traveled with her during the campaign and is so close to Hillary that she is like a younger sister. Even though the hospital has set aside a room for the Clinton family and she has access to a phone, a fax, and overnight mail, little work gets done.
Susie May, the Clintons’ Little Rock neighbor and close friend who got hours and hours of Hillary’s solace over coffee after Alzheimer’s disease hit her family, says she let Hillary know she was there if she needed her, but honored her request “to spend the time alone with family.” One of the few outsiders Hillary sees is Harry Thomason, who flies in on a private plane for the day and insists on getting Hillary and her mother away from hospital food for a night. They go to the Faded Rose for dinner and have such a good time that Harry hopes the other patrons don’t misinterpret the momentary relief from grieving.
Hillary was scheduled to throw out the first ball for the Chicago Cubs. But after her father’s stroke, she said it would be too heart-wrenching.
The only other break Hillary takes is to watch the Oscars with the president, who has come for an overnight visit. They have been movie fanatics since their days at Yale, where they patronized a theater in a cineast’s garage. Hillary loves the Liza Minnelli song that is part of Oscar night’s tribute to women, and phones her right then and there. When Minnelli calls back, she tells Hillary she will be in Washington to perform in June, and the First Lady invites her to stay at the White House.
Hillary’s sense of humor is intact. Billy Crystal keeps his invitation to visit the White House on April 14 despite a joke the comedian made at her expense while hosting the Oscars. After the award for best supporting actress had been presented, Crystal cracked, “Now that she’s won the Oscar, Marisa Tomei has asked me to announce that she wants to be known as Marisa Rodham Tomei.”
As her father’s illness drags on, there is pressure on Hillary to give up the vigil. Who knew how long it would last? And she is much the worse for sitting in the hospital 12 hours a day. On April 1, the White House has to announce that the health-care-reform plan is unlikely to make its 100-day deadline.
On April 4, after two weeks in Little Rock, Hillary and Chelsea return to the White House, just before the president comes back from the Vancouver summit with Boris Yeltsin. The next day is baseball’s opening day. If her father hadn’t had the stroke, she would be throwing out the first ball for the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field. No presidential spouse has ever thrown out an opening-day pitch at a major-league baseball game in the 83 years since President William Howard Taft began the ritual, but this was to have been the gift of a child to an ailing father. Hillary tells friends it would be too heart-wrenching to go through with it.
On Tuesday, H.R.C. makes her first trip since her father’s hospitalization, to a long-planned event at the University of Texas in Austin, where she draws an unusually large crowd of 14,000 people (the largest since President Bush spoke there in 1991). Hillary has no prepared speech. She begins by noting the obvious, that she and Ann Richards have on similar outfits, and adds, “I suppose the only thing left for me is to get a hairdo like that. You know, I’m actually due for a new one, and I figure that if we ever want to get Bosnia off the front page all I have to do is either put on a headband or change my hair and we’ll be occupied with something else.”
No one is better at staying on message than Hillary, but rather than talk about managed competition or H.I.P.C.’s, Hillary speaks philosophically of the questions that face the dying: When does life start? When does life end? Who makes those decisions? How do we dare to impinge upon these areas of such delicate, difficult questions?” She quotes from an article she carries around with her, an interview with Lee Atwater, George Bush’s campaign manager, who died at age 40 of brain cancer. “My illness,” he said, “helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me—a little heart, a lot of brotherhood,” and to see that we must “speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.”
One cure for the tumor of the soul, Hillary says, is to “be hopeful again . . . to see other people as they wish to be seen and to treat them as they wish to be treated, to overcome all of the obstacles we have erected around ourselves that keep us apart from one another, fearful and afraid, not willing to build the bridges necessary to fill that spiritual vacuum that Lee Atwater talked about.” Even the Secret Service agents are misty-eyed.
The next night, her father passes away.
She wasn’t kidding when she said she was due for a haircut. Cristophe cuts her hair before she leaves for the funeral in Little Rock. He is taking advantage of his new celebrity to open a branch of his Beverly Hills salon in Washington—much to the dismay of backup hairdresser De Bakey, who sniffs, “This Cristophe, he is trying to take credit for my work.”
During a service conducted by the same minister who married them, the Clintons sit by Hugh Rodham’s flag-draped coffin. When the president rises to speak, he says, “I suppose it is enough to say we got along.” Clinton fondly recalls the debates among the Rodham family. “Lord, they loved to argue. Each one tried to rewrite history to put the proper spin on it. It was a wonderful preparation for politics.” Rodham was a conservative Republican whose daughter started out as a Goldwaterite and ended up a Clinton Democrat. He had been sick for a long time, and the president says how grateful he is that Hugh Rodham got to see his daughter recognized by America. “We thank God for his good last year,” he concludes.
The next day, Hillary’s father is buried in his hometown, Scranton, Pennsylvania. The family goes to Camp David for Easter Sunday, the first day off since the inauguration.
The White House Easter Egg Roll waits for no one, and by five A.M. Monday there are young aides out on the lawn steeling themselves for the event. Hillary has expanded it this year to the Ellipse (the stretch of grass beyond the South Lawn) and restricted staff to only four tickets so that it will be truly open to the public. She is more animated than she has been since the inauguration, but afterward she goes up to the family quarters instead of returning to work in her office. According to a senior aide, Hillary is drained.
In the early morning on Tuesday, the president takes time away from Bosnia and the troubled stimulus package to smell the flowers with his wife. Bill and Hillary can be glimpsed walking through the crab apples and magnolias now in bloom on the White House lawn. On this first warm day of spring, they have lunch together on the patio outside the Oval Office.
Death and taxes are life’s two inevitabilities, and on April 15, waiting to the last minute, the Clintons write a check for the $4,085 owed on their $290,697 income. The president says we “took a pretty good lick,” paying $70,228 in all. In the breadwinning department, the First Couple has traded places. Last year she made most of the money—$203,172 to her husband’s $34,527. This year she will earn nothing, and the president will bring home the bacon with $200,000.
By Friday, Hillary is feeling well enough to travel to Lincoln, Nebraska, and Billings, Montana. She speaks to Native American tribal leaders about health care, and on Saturday she gets up at five A.M. for a meeting with a Great Falls health group so that she can be back to spend the weekend at home.
Health care loses its warm and fuzzy connotations as the enormous bill for keeping more Americans healthy looms. “What about VAT?” is the question of the week after H.H.S. Secretary Donna Shalala blurts out that a value-added tax is being considered to pay for the healthcare program. The administration does its “everything is on the table” routine to cool the discussion. Still, this is the first alarm bell on the health-care tab, which could do a lot more damage to the Clintons than Senator Bob Dole’s filibuster on the stimulus package. In fact, Dole, who had softened considerably on Hillary, goes formal again, complaining about not being consulted sufficiently on health care. “We haven’t heard zip, not since Mrs. Clinton stood right here and talked to 35 of us,” he gripes.
The Clintons plan their first weekend away together that is not to the Little Rock hospital or Camp David, but unfortunately they will not be alone. They will retreat, along with Senate Democrats, to historic Jamestown, Virginia, to consider the fate of the nation. Before they leave, gay leaders, who complain that the Clintons are ignoring them, are placated with a first-ever meeting in the Oval Office with the president, who explains, “Presidents act and decide, they don’t protest or march.”
Back in Washington, Hillary prepares to give her first commencement speech as First Lady, at the University of Michigan on May 1, the 101st day of the Clinton administration. It is an auspicious occasion for reflection and renewal, for the graduates and for Hillary.
She gave her first commencement address in 1969, the first student ever to do so at Wellesley. The college president, Ruth Adams, introduced her by saying of the graduating class, “There was no debate . . . as to who their spokesman was to be . . . Miss Hillary Rodham.” In her speech, Hillary spoke of “the courage to be whole, to try to mold an entire person . . . living in relation to one another in the full poetry of existence.” She concluded with a poem written by a classmate. “And you and I must be free . . . not to kill ourselves with a nameless gnawing pain / but to practice with all the skill of our being / the art of making possible.”
The Coke-bottle glasses and bell-bottoms may be gone but not the lofty idealism. Back then the graduates of Wellesley dreamt that Hillary would go from being president of the student government to president of the United States. Instead, she became the wife of the man who would become president. But she has taken a place at the innermost circle of the White House, and taken charge herself of the most far-reaching social reform since the New Deal—all while coping with the death of her father. In her first 100 days, Hillary Rodham Clinton has already made more of the role of First Lady than anyone could have imagined.
