Part 13 (1/2)

Elizabeth McCaughey, an a.n.a.lyst with the Manhattan Inst.i.tute, wrote a devastating critique of the plan in the liberal New Republic.

Republicans gleefully began to call the proposal ”Hillarycare.”

Former Quayle Chief of Staff William Kristol acted as a kind of high-tech Paul Revere, blast-faxing a memo that warned Republicans that the future of their party--and the free economy--would rest on the utter defeat of any version of Hillary's plan.

In truth, it was not much of a contest. The obsessive secrecy of the plan was its worst political shortcoming, one that drew a rebuke early on. In March 1993, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lambeth ruled on a lawsuit filed by the a.s.sociation of American Physicians and Surgeons, finding that Hillary and the top-tier, elve-person task force had blatantly violated ”open-meeting” laws. The White House was in a bind. Hillary could avoid the law if she were deemed a federal employee, but that would const.i.tute nepotism. If she were not such an employee, she and her cohorts were acting illegally. The White House counsel's office chose instead to argue that Hillary was neither fish nor fowl, just the ”functional equivalent” of a federal employee.

Judge Lambeth scolded President Clinton for deliberately ignoring the open meeting laws. ”While the court takes no pleasure in determining that one of the first actions taken by a new president is in direct violation of a statute enacted by Congress, the court's duty is to apply the laws to all individuals,” he said.Even after receiving an order to post advance notice of meetings, the White House chose to disobey. In time, Magaziner (who confided to friends that the secrecy rules were forced on him) became the scapegoat, and lived for some time under investigation and fear of an indictment.*55 The first federal judge to experience the contempt with which the Clintons treat subpoenas and testimony under oath, accused the White House of being ”dishonest with the court.” He added, ”Some government officials never learn that the cover-up can be worse than the underlying conduct.”*56 Hillary went into high spin. She played some defense, ridiculing the notion that her plan was ”socialist,” telling readers of Parade magazine how scared she had been by the visions of Aldous Huxley in Brave New World and George Orwell in 1984. ”I find it so amusing when people think that I'm in favor of big government or big anything, because I'm not.”*57 She sprang into ”war room” mode.

Hillary instigated a mean-spirited campaign of call-in critics to blast Congressman Cooper when he unveiled his own alternative plan on radio talk shows. Hillary allies Senator Harris Wofford and Tom Daschle of South Dakota ridiculed Cooper's plan as ”rock-bottom Wal-Mart.”*58 The Democratic National Committee ginned up a campaign to save Hillary's plan, with Hillary working overtime as an editor of political copy and videotape. Hillary's aides lobbied the House Ways and Means staff so ferociously that Democratic chairman Dan Rostenkowski called them ”paranoids.”*59 Rostenkowski had little patience with Hillary's ”with us or against us” style of negotiating.

Ultimately, Hillary tried to revive her plan with an outright campaign of vilifying insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

Industry, predictably, did not take this lying down.

They produced and aired the ”Harry and Louise” ad campaign that undercut and subtly ridiculed Hillarycare.The ads fomented public opposition far beyond the health care plan itself. It crystallized disgust with liberal Democrats, a building anger that would eventually end their forty-plus years of rule in the House of Representatives, making Hillarycare one of the most self-destructive political maneuvers committed by liberal Democrats in this century.

Hillary handled the growing public reaction against her plan by trying to create a new set of villains. She branded the insurance industry as liars: ”It is time for.., every American to stand up and say to the insurance industry, 'Enough is enough. We want our health care system back.'” She lashed out at Representative Cooper. She flew around the country and was astonished to find hecklers in the audience. At a rally in Seattle, demonstrators carried ”h.e.l.l Hillary” signs. She had to turn up the microphone and shout to be heard over the protestors.

Hillary saw enemies everywhere, and saw any dissent as a Republican put-up job. ”She's a glib speaker,” noted a retired family pract.i.tioner who had seen her up close. ”She can really rattle off the answers. But she doesn't like you to argue with her.”60 When a health insurance agent asked the perfectly reasonable question of what would happen to his job under her plan, Hillary answered, ”I'm a.s.suming anyone as obviously brilliant as you could find something else to market.” Then she added, just for fun, ”I can't go out and save every undercapitalized entrepreneur in America.”*61 It did not seem to occur to Hillary that hecklers were prompted by her own tendency to attack, and counterattack, that her biggest problem was her own thin skin. Hillary's moral standing to take on corporate medicine was also compromised when it was revealed, in the spring of 1994, that she was profiting from her attacks as her hedge fund shorted her health stocks.

It soon became apparent that the health care campaign was a frantic race into oblivion.

Her desperation showing, Hillary now saw opposition to her plan as nothing less than an a.s.sault on American democracy. ”This personal, vicious hatred that for the time being is being aimed at the president, and, to a lesser extent, myself, is very dangerous for our political process,” she said.*62 Without directly repudiating Hillary, Bill Clinton tried to signal that he was ready to compromise. ”Clinton seems to be waffling,” a prominent Oregon Democrat said. ”He puts out this 95 percent, and Hillary says, 'No, universal coverage,' and all of a sudden Bill's saying, 'Yeah, universal coverage.' It's like she hit him over the head with a frying pan.”*63 Bill would praise a Senate bill, and then Hillary would denounce it as an ”untested approach.”

It was George Mitch.e.l.l who performed the act of mercy, sitting down with the Clintons in August 1994 to tell them that no version of their plan could pa.s.s the Senate. A few months later, the American people went to the polls and took out their frustrations on Democratic members of Congress, most of whom were actually opposed to her plan. Democrats not only lost control of the House, but major Democrats like House Speaker Tom Foley, New York Governor Mario Cuomo, and Texas Governor Ann Richards were tossed out of office.

Hillary's poll numbers confirmed that she was at the center of voter dissatisfaction. Five months before the election, an NBC-Wall Street Journal poll found that 51 percent of respondents felt that the first lady had too much influence.

Depressed, Hillary absented herself from political and strategy meetings in the White House. Her co-presidency had slammed into a retaining wall.

”Remind me,” she asked an aide, dripping with self-pity. ”Have I ever done anything right in my life?”*64

NINE.

WHITE HOUSE PLUMBER.

”He knows that all values are relative, in a world of political relativity.”

-- SAUL ALINSKY, RULES FOR RADICALS.

DEATH ON THE POTOMAC.

Hillary's first two years in the White House were a litany of disasters. Her health care initiative was not only a bipartisan disaster, it was exposed as a colossal piece of political knavery.

Hillary's exalted ethical opinion of herself, which she repeatedly invoked to friendly reporters, was not shared by the Was.h.i.+ngton press corps that exposed her early refusal to put her investments in a blind trust.

Numerous White House staff still had temporary pa.s.ses after nine or more months on the job. Many could not receive necessary clearances due to reports of recent drug use and tax problems. Ultimately, the White House had to operate a random drug testing program in order to obtain FBI clearances.

The relentless investigations of Jeff Gerth at the New York Times began to peel off one layer of lies after another on Whitewater, exposing such a tangle of political and business dealings that the appointment of an independent counsel became inevitable. Her role in the Travel Office firings was widely suspected from the beginning.

Her nominees for attorney general had been failures. Her early interest in Lani Guinier ended in a withdrawn nomination and a lost friends.h.i.+p. The new surgeon general, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, was a walking embarra.s.sment who felt it necessary to publicly promote teen masturbation. Her old Watergate mentor Bernie Nussbaum was fired by her husband. Her Rose Law Firm partner Webb Hubbell was indicted on mail fraud and tax evasion charges. Janet Reno was receiving withering criticism over her handling of the Waco-Branch Davidian disaster that left eighty-four people dead and almost ended Reno's Was.h.i.+ngton career before it had begun. The congressional Democrats had marched like lemmings off a cliff to the beat of Hillary's drum.

And there had been much more.

But worst of all for Hillary was the death of Vince Foster in July 1993.

The case is curious, poignant, and, like many suicides, mysterious.

Foster's wife, Lisa, had never wanted to move to Was.h.i.+ngton. She stayed in Little Rock until June, leaving Foster to live alone in an unfamiliar and very tough city.

Foster himself seemed to waver between attraction and repulsion for his new job, with repulsion often winning out. ”No one back in Little Rock could know how hard this is,” Foster told Skip Rutherford, an aide to Mack McLarty. He told an Arkansas lawyer, ”You try to be at work by 7 in the morning, and sometimes it's 10 at night when you walk out just dog-tired. About the time you're thinking, 'What a load,' you turn around and see the White House lit up, and the awe of where you are and what you're doing hits you. It makes you realize it's worth it.”*1 Over time, his characterizations would dwell less and less on how much it was ”worth it,” and more on how he could get out of his job alive. And there was another thing. Webb Hubbell, among others, noticed that Foster appeared depressed by Hillary's lack of attention to him. Foster's relations.h.i.+p with Hillary, always complex, was now strained and fraught with tension.

Foster saw himself as the protector of and counselor to Hillary, sometimes a big brother, sometimes a pseudo-husband, sometimes a calm port in a stormy sea. But no lawyer could have protected her from her mistakes, from the daily pummeling she was getting over health care and the Travel Office. Someone else might have been glad that only Bill Kennedy and David Watkins had been officially reprimanded.

But according to his friends, Foster felt guilty. He was depressed over the lawsuit against the health care task force, worried about problems with the Clintons' tax returns and, some have suggested, depressed at the blood spilled at Waco.

But more than that, there was almost a sense of betrayal. Foster's experience at the White House had turned his self-image upside down.

Foster was not used to having his integrity criticized or compromised, or as being regarded as anything but a top-flight litigator. One of his Rose Law Firm partners was quoted saying that Foster had never suffered a defeat.

Now he felt overwhelmed, even incompetent, to deal with an avalanche of trouble and with Hillary's violent fits of temper about how everything was going wrong. Foster not only dealt with the Clintons'

personal legal affairs, dating back to the tangled webs of Arkansas, but also with the fallout from the seemingly innumerable and unending political scandals.

During the investigation of Travelgate, Foster joined Watkins in denying that the first lady had a significant interest in the Travel Office firings. Foster knew that this statement would soon be tested, in congressional hearings and perhaps even by a prosecutor.

Days before his death, he had called his good friend Jim Lyons about the need for outside counsel for the Clintons. His loyalty to Hillary kept putting him in positions that forced him to choose between compromising his principles or failing to be a stalwart protector of Hillary. Foster knew he had to ”defend” Hillary regardless of what her role might have been.

Then came a Wall Street Journal editorial that asked ”Who Is Vincent Foster?” The White House had made the inexplicable and utterly stupid decision to refuse to supply the Journal with a picture of Foster, so the inset art in the column had a cutout of Foster's face, a silhouette with a question mark in the middle. By this time, Foster had begun to lose weight, subsist on junk food, and take antidepressants.

In another place, his distress might have been more noticeable. He was obviously stressed, but then who wasn't in the battlefield environment of the White House's first year? All seemed well on his last weekend, when he seemed to have enjoyed himself with his wife and the Hubbells. Their host was Nathan Landow, a wealthy donor whose eagerness to please would later allegedly lead him to attempt to buy Kathleen Willey's silence about being groped by the president.

The Tuesday after Landow's retreat, July 20, 1993, Foster left the White House to drive up a beautiful green expanse of the George Was.h.i.+ngton Parkway. He pulled into Fort Marcy Park. He parked his car and stood at a rise where one can see across the Potomac River valley, put a gun to the roof of his mouth, and squeezed the trigger.

TRENCH WARFARE.

Artful and heavy-handed White House damage control began immediately.

Foster possessed many of Hillary's personal records. Hillary was at her mother's home in Little Rock when Mack McLarty called at 9:45 PM and notified her of Foster's death. The President was appearing on Larry King Live that night. Following the call that evening and into the early morning there was a flurry of telephone exchanges between Hillary and Maggie Williams, Harry Thomason, and Susan Thomases.

Thomases paged Bernie Nussbaum at about 8:00 4 the next morning--then more calls between Hillary, Nussbaum, McLarty, Williams, and Thomases. No mention is ever made of a call to Lisa Foster.

By the next morning, Nussbaum was imposing strict restrictions on how Foster's office would be searched by official investigators. It would not be until 5:00 PM that day that an agreement was reached--and not until 10:00 Aw the following morning, July 22, that it actually took effect--to allow investigators into Foster's office.

It was soon revealed that the night of the suicide, Maggie Williams and Patsy Thoma.s.son went into Vince Foster's White House office.