Part 9 (2/2)

RECLAIMING THE LEGACY.

The day after his defeat, the governor was puffy-eyed and fragile appearing on the balcony of his mansion, where he glumly received well-wishers who came by to give their condolences. Always susceptible to bouts of self-pity, Bill Clinton slid into a deep depression. He managed to go through the motions of moving into an office in a law firm with Bruce Lindsey, his future right-hand and fix-it man in the White House.

For much of the time, however, the former governor walked about in a funk, wandering the aisles of grocery stores and challenging strangers to tell him why he lost.

Hillary was devastated but stayed on a more even keel. She dealt with the loss not by grieving but by acting. While Bill hashed and rehashed what had happened to him, Hillary put together the comeback plan. She started by ruthlessly weeding out the weaker members of their circle. Hillary's scorn was like ”walking into a revolving air fan,” one early Clintonite told the New Yorker magazine. ”Her att.i.tude about Bill's old friends is, 'Why are you hanging around with these losers? They're not successful, not rich.'”*9 Hillary's campaign to retake the governor's mansion began even while they were still living in it. She organized strategy sessions in the living room and kitchen. Betsey Wright, Hillary's old feminist McGovern colleague from Texas, was persuaded to move from a good job as political director of a government union to live in Little Rock and manage the campaign to retake the governors.h.i.+p.

Betsey arrived in Little Rock before Bill and Hillary had even left the governor's mansion, taking up residence in the guest house. She organized the files of the governor's supporters, creating a system of index cards in which the candidate only had to glance down to see the essentials of his past dealings with the person on the other end of the line.

”It was always important to me that strong political feminists have relations.h.i.+ps with strong male politicians,” she said later. ”And Bill Clinton has no problem with strong women.”*10 In Betsey Wright's case, it led to airing the idea that Hillary would be a better candidate and a better president than Bill.

Now, in order to win, Hillary and Bill would have to do something neither had a knack for doing. They had to humble themselves. How this happened in Hillary's case is a matter of dispute.

”Hillary's gonna have to change her name, and shave her legs,” a powerful legislator had advised during the losing campaign.*11 As president, Bill Clinton told Connie Bruck of the New Yorker that he had never requested that Hillary change her name. In fact, Bill Clinton claimed he was dead set against it. ”Hillary told me she was nine years old when she decided she would keep her own name when she got married. It had nothing to do with the feminist movement or anything. She said, 'I like my name. I was interested in my family.

I didn't want to give it up.'”

According to Bill Clinton's account, Hillary came to him and said, ”We shouldn't lose the election over this issue. What if it's one percent of the vote? What if it's two percent?”*12 Whether Bill and Hillary did or did not have such a conversation, the president's account, as usual, falls short of the truth. In fact, it was such a testy issue between the two that Bill had to go to others to lobby his wife to change her name. He b.u.t.tonholed Webb Hubbell on a golf course, and persuaded him to talk to Hillary about what everyone knew as ”the name issue.”*13 When Bill announced his bid to retake the governors.h.i.+p in late winter 1982, Hillary Rodham was introduced as ”Mrs. Bill Clinton.” The press noticed and questions followed. ”I don't have to change my name,” Hillary demurred with typical Clinton disingenuousness. ”I've been Mrs. Bill Clinton. I kept the professional name Hillary Rodham in my law practice, but now I'm going to be taking a leave of absence from the law firm to campaign full time for Bill and I'll be Mrs.

Bill Clinton.”*14 The Clintons seemed to be learning that a lie was easier than the truth and the public were willing accomplices. To compete with Gay White, Mrs. Bill Clinton ordered a total makeover, from the wisp of hair at her crown to her polished toenail. When it was complete, Hillary looked more feminine, more like a traditional first lady. Her hair had been lightened and she had a new wardrobe provided by a fas.h.i.+on consultant.*15 ”I had been trying to wear contact lenses since I was sixteen,” Hillary said. Suddenly, she was miraculously able to make the change, liberating her face and eyes from the owlish frames.

Hillary's makeover continued for the next twenty years. Hillary read the autobiography of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who wrote that some women should lighten their hair after a certain age. Soon thereafter, Hillary's hair became lighter and lighter. In fact she experimented with so many hair styles that in the 1990s, a Website was dedicated to tracking them all.

As first lady of the United States, Hillary Clinton even went so far as to make fun of her past frumpish appearance. She took an old hippie headband and gave it to the hosts of The Regis Kathie Lee Show, saying, ”I don't need them anymore and thought you might want it for Halloween.”

From the start, Arkansans appreciated the efforts Hillary made to accommodate their idea of what the first lady of the state should be.

It was, in part, because of her willingness to remake herself in these ways that Hillary Clinton was able to preside over a second inaugural in 1983. In perfect character, Mrs. Bill Clinton wore an elegant beaded inauguration gown with Chantilly lace over charmeuse silk.*16 Bill Clinton had other amends to make. He had to make the rounds of the state, apologizing to business leaders for allowing his aides to refer to them as ”corporate criminals.” Candidate Bill Clinton promised to advance their interests in the future. He also had to apologize to the voters, to publicly admit that he had been arrogant in his first term and had learned from the experience.

Clinton, however, is a fast and facile learner and the studied apology (and, as we later saw, repentance) comes as naturally to him as slick evasions. d.i.c.k Morris persuaded the Clintons that Bill needed to make a formal apology to the people of Arkansas. Clinton bridled but agreed to appear in a commercial designed to win back the voters. They flew to New York City, where Clinton looked into a camera, extemporizing much of his script. He spoke of the car license and t.i.tle-transfer fees, admitting they had been ”a big mistake” because ”so many of you were hurt by it.” Bill Clinton skirted using the ”a” word--he could not bring himself to an outright apology.

But he came up with something even better, something only Clinton could devise.

”When I was a boy growing up,” he said, ”my daddy never had to whip me twice for the same thing.”

Morris marveled at the ingenuity of Clinton's phrasing. The immediate reaction to the ad, however, was negative. Bill Clinton plunged in the polls. Morris bucked him up, arguing that the commercial was like being immunized. ”You get a little sick, but you don't get the disease when you are exposed to it for real,” he said.*17 In a few months it was apparent that Morris had been right. When White got around to attacking him ”for real” on the car tags and the Cuban refugee issue, the voters' reaction was negative--against White. Bill Clinton had already apologized for this, they felt--why beat a dead horse?

In this way two cla.s.sic Clinton techniques were born.

First, conventional political wisdom has always held that advertising should be done late, when voters are paying attention and impressions are sure to last to election day. Bill Clinton aired his first campaign ads ten months before the 1982 election. In 1995 he successfully repeated this early and often technique, airing his first commercials to kill the Dole campaign before it even started.

The second cla.s.sic Clinton technique was to speed up the burn rate of a negative issue, making critics look mean-spirited and petty for continuing to harp on it.

White was unable to gain any traction in his attacks on the chastened young man who had seemed to open his heart to the people of Arkansas.

HOLDING PATTERN.

d.i.c.k Morris, Betsey Wright, and the Clintons coalesced into a team to keep the governor's mansion until the time was right to run for president of the United States. Of the four, Hillary was clearly the team leader.

”After he came back, she was going to make sure he never lost again,”

a Clinton cabinet officer observed.*18 Morris did the polling. Betsey Wright, who had brought her organizational skills to managing the database of supporters, now managed the governor's office and his legislative agenda as chief of staff. Bill, of course, was the candidate and front man. But Hillary was much more than just a front; she was the other princ.i.p.al, the behind-the-scenes candidate calling the shots on broad strategy.

She often brought the foursome together to work on scripts, on paid media, on earned media, and on ma.s.s mailings.*19 Hillary managed some of the trickiest issues for her husband during the 1980s. She worked out a compromise on a sticky school desegregation issue that, had it not been resolved, could have harmed Clinton politically. Behind the scenes, she saw to it that the Rose Law Firm represented the Public Service Commission in its dispute with the powerful utility Arkansas Power & Light over who should pay for costly electricity from the Grand Gulf nuclear power plant in Mississippi. She saved her husband from political embarra.s.sment while earning her law firm a cool $115,000 in state business.

Frank White exploited this blatant conflict of interest in a bitter 1986 rematch. A Rose Law Firm press release explained that these fees were ”segregated” from Hillary's income--it was as though a partner would not benefit in ways other than monetary from bringing in a major client. White was never able to make his charges stick.

He never capitalized on the fact that the real conflict wasn't the money, it was the way in which Hillary used her law firm to defuse a dangerous issue for the governor.

When White pressed his attacks, the Clinton campaign fired back with a b.u.mper sticker that said, ”Frank White for First Lady.” Hillary and her people were becoming masters at the martial art jujitsu--of turning the force of an opponent's attack back on himself--a skill they were to refine and perfect against George Bush, Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, and Ken Starr.

A change in the state const.i.tution had lengthened the governor's tenure to four years, giving the Clintons a margin of comfort. Bill Clinton's comfort level with strong women, however, was soon to be tested. The three women--Hillary, chief of staff Betsey Wright, and press secretary Joan Roberts--were satirized in a cartoon by a local wag as Valkyries. For a spell, they ran Bill Clinton's office and they ran his life. Betsey Wright, fearful of the governor's tendency to expose himself to dangerous situations, tenaciously controlled his schedule. It was reported that their fights grew so loud and bitter that the Clintons were forced to move Wright out of the governor's office.

Another key challenge during the long holding period in the governor's mansion was to neutralize John Robert Start, the managing editor of the Arkansas Democrat and the former chief of the a.s.sociated Press's Little Rock bureau. Starr not only edited the news, he commented on it daily with a column that was keen, sharp, and caustic. In the small state, constant pounding from Starr did significant damage to Clinton. His frequent and bitter attacks were one reason Clinton lost his first reelection race. (One is forced to wonder whether any fortune-teller ever warned the Clintons to watch out for men named Start.) In the first term, the Clintons ignored Start. But in 1982 Hillary launched a ”charm offensive,” taking Starr to lunch. She worked to flatter him in the age-old way politicians have always flattered journalists--by soliciting his opinions and appearing to hang on his every word. Back in the office, Betsey Wright instructed Joan Roberts to make her first priority to keep Start happy.

The offensive worked. ”I decided any man married to that woman couldn't be all bad,” Starr said. ”The deal he and I cut after I rea.s.sessed him was that I would not remind everyone what a bad governor he had been and would give him a new chance as long as he kept his campaign clean.”*20 In their regular lunches, Start recalled, ”one of Hillary's frequent sayings was 'Now, John Robert, you and I may disagree on this'--and I would say, 'Hillary, the only thing we disagree on is the worth of your husband.'”*21 MONKEY BUSINESS IN ARKANSAS.

Bill Clinton had served as governor of Arkansas for eight years by 1988. His was a rising luminary in the Democratic party, seen as a centrist southern Democrat with a Kennedyesque flair. The usual route for a sitting governor would be to move on to the United States Senate. However, that route was blocked for the Clintons by inc.u.mbents Dale b.u.mpers and David Pryor.

The time had come to consider going for broke, to go ahead and make a run for the White House. A serious bid to challenge George Bush was studied and debated among the Clinton team. Bill Clinton flew to New Hamps.h.i.+re, where he shared a stage with the Democrat front-runner, Senator Gary Hart of Colorado.

Hart and Clinton shared much of the same appeal. Young and charismatic, they both emulated John F. Kennedy and sought to win over a new generation of voters with a ”third way” agenda that eschewed the old machine politics of the Democratic Party. In 1984, Hart had come close to wresting the nomination from Walter Mondale, a prospect that had worried Reagan campaign advisors.

Now it was Hart's turn to be knocked out of the saddle, this time by his own behavior. He had not appreciated the extent to which the rules of the game had changed since the Kennedy era. After foolishly daring the press to catch him in infidelity, the Miami Herald newspaper reporters took him at his word. The reluctance of the press to report on politicians' private lives, the factor that had protected John F. Kennedy so well, evaporated with this blatant challenge. The Herald staked out the senator's apartment, ultimately reporting the married senator's affair with Donna Rice. Tabloid photos of Hart and Rice on a Caribbean cruise aboard the Monkey Business left little doubt that the senator was a liar and a cheat.

It was over when the American public watched Senator Hart try to regain his viability while ignoring the humiliation he was heaping upon his victimized and helpless wife. Years later, the Clintons learned from this debacle and successfully had Hillary out front to defend Bill's affairs. She never let the American public feel that Bill had humiliated her to the point of silence. She was always front and center as his staunchest defender.

Hart's campaign fell apart and he soon had a brighter future as an entertainment lawyer than as a politician. These events posed an interesting dilemma for the Clintons as Hillary busily a.s.sembled a campaign, bringing in Susan Thomases and Harold Ickes from New York to create the nucleus of a presidential campaign. With Hart out of the race, the pressure grew on Bill Clinton to run. Yet he knew what Thomases and Ickes did not know. Bill Clinton knew the full range of his own indiscretions, and how much reason he had to fear exposure and national embarra.s.sment.

Arkansas-Democrat editor John Robert Starr spoke to Bill Clinton about what was often referred to as a potential ”Gary Hart problem.”

Clinton matter-of-factly confirmed that he did have such a problem.*22 No member of his top team was more aware of the liability Clinton faced than Betsey Wright, who had observed his compulsive and irresponsible promiscuity including his use of state troopers to procure women and cover his tracks. Betsey had often called the governor in the middle of the night just to see if anyone would answer. Often, of course, the phone would just ring into the night.

When the governor mused about the prospect of seeking the presidency, Betsey forced him to make a list of the women. Ali of them. When and where. Clinton did and Betsey looked at the list and told him flatly to stay out of the race.

Hillary, who apparently did not know the breathtaking extent and frequency of her husband's philandering, urged him to run. Betsey, who knew all, promised him he would be slaughtered if he did.

On a summer day in 1987, Bill Clinton called a press conference, alerting the networks to break in on daytime programming. As he spoke, Hillary's face was a mask of stone.

”There are many whom I treasure who have urged me to run again,” the governor said, ”who say that is the thing to do for the state and who are obviously worried about at least one of the alternatives. There are others who say with a great deal of conviction that ten years is a long time. And I can see that there is an argument for that proposition .... And then there is the whole question of the personal toll which is taken on every family, on every life in the public.

The things that make it so wonderful also make it quite difficult from time to time. Ambition always takes its price sooner or later.”

Governor Clinton concluded by saying he would stay in Arkansas for the good of his family, especially his seven-year-old daughter.

As Bill Clinton delivered his letdown, Hillary's stony composure broke and she wept openly. These were tears of fury and humiliation, and of ambition publicly failed.

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