First Ladies (46 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fusillades about the First Lady as a political partner have tended to obscure Hillary’s role as President Clinton’s wife. In December 1993, the nation got a stark reminder of this reality, when Mrs. Clinton demonstrated anew her readiness to defend the President’s conduct and affirm her devotion to him. In a unique Christmas season press conference, Hillary denounced charges by Arkansas state troopers that they had regularly procured women for Bill Clinton while he was governor. Intermingled with her anger was an almost plaintive plea for the press to drop this unpleasant subject once and for all. “It hurts,” she said. “Even though you’re a public figure, which means apparently in America anybody can say anything about you. Even public figures have feelings and families and reputations.”