Part 14 (1/2)

President Nixon's ”enemies list” ignited a political firestorm when it became public. But first lady Hillary's creation of a taxpayer-funded political database created scarcely a ripple from watchdogs of civil liberties. When the existence of WhoDB came to light, the White House was ready with a typically benign spin--it was used, we were told, to keep track of correspondence. It was portrayed as a mid-level staff project that was overzealously pursued.

In truth, WhoDB is a cybernetic version of the handwritten index cards started by Betsey Wright for the Clinton's comeback bid in the early 1980s. Its purpose is to keep track of supporters and major donors, a software that correlates perks with donations, in an effort to wring the maximum from supporters. It could also be used as a virtual ”enemies list.”

Such an idea--no less than the raid on Vince Foster's office or the acc.u.mulation of FBI files for a White House blackmail database--could only come from the mind of someone who thinks like Nixon. And it apparently did--from Hillary Rodham Clinton, Nixon's disciple of hardball politics.

”I wanted you to be aware of the fact that the First Lady has set up an appointment to see the software tomorrow at 11:45,” Marsha Scott wrote in a memo to Bruce Lindsey on January 16, 1995, meant to ”keep you and the First Lady informed with progress reports.” She referred to it as Hillary's ”no. 1 project.”*3 In her bid to rise from the ashes of her disastrous first few years, Hillary has resorted to schemes that make the Watergate conspirators look weak for lack of ambition. She masterminded a bold and unashamed obstruction of justice in the office of Vincent Foster.

She politicized the FBI and trampled on the law, giving the most private personal background files to opposition research specialists while simultaneously dismantling the normal White House security clearance system for new employees.

Hillary has indulged a despotic hunger for information on enemies and friends better suited to an Eastern bloc tyrant--like Elena Ceausescu--than to a first lady of the United States. And she did most of these things with a shocking lack of protest from Congress, civil libertarians, and much of the press, despite the controversy stemming from her political activities--from Whitewater to Travelgate and beyond. In her own Nixonian way, Hillary has proved to be as slick as her husband.

TAKE TWO.

Foster's death had a big emotional impact on Hillary. Hillary sent her chief of staff, Maggie Williams, to most high-profile policy meetings. Bill's childhood friend, Mack McLarty, was replaced as chief of staff by OMB Director Leon Panetta, a skillful and cunning former congressman from California. Panetta's power grew, in part, because Hillary had withdrawn, allowing him to discipline and shape the White House staff. He prioritized policies and brought coherence to a chaotic White House that had tried to remake American politics, culture, and economics in the first months of its first year.

Hillary, for a time, was content to let Panetta run the show. But she only withdrew to lick her wounds, to a.n.a.lyze her failure, to regroup. She had dug herself into a hole. Now she had to dig out.

And the hole was deep.

In January 1996 a USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll remarked that 51 percent of the American people disapproved of her. She was the most unpopular first lady in history. Even worse, 52 percent of the American people believed Hillary was a liar, and 68 percent believed she had probably done something wrong or illegal.*4 Hillary worked hard to soften her public image. She even allowed Annie Leibowitz to photograph her in a slinky, almost sultry, pose, wearing a black $975 Donna Karan. The piece de resistance of this kinder, gentler Hillary was the rollout of the rumor that the first couple was thinking of adopting a baby.

While the charm offensive went forward, Hillary kept her distance from the working press and any potential critics. She ordered lists compiled of enemies to be excluded from White House movie screenings.*5 She restricted the movement of the press corps in the white House, and she kept them off the plane as she traveled on a below-radar sweep of gra.s.sroots gatherings from coast to coast.

And then she began to find the ways to redefine her public persona.

She tried out a pink sweater, over a demure black knit skirt and matching high heels. The flavor and image of Eleanor Roosevelt's ”My Day” reflections were recycled and used to humanize her own nationally syndicated newspaper column. And then there was It Takes a Village, the success of which took Hillary from being the nation's power-mad scold to being the nation's thoughtful den mother.

It Takes a Village was used to define Hillary Clinton. It weaves personal anecdotes from her own upbringing, about her daughter Chelsea's birth by caesarian section, and defends the Clinton marriage by coming out strongly against divorce.

Village even plays to conservative sympathies, quoting Bill Bennett on rap music, and advancing the idea of school uniforms (a cause Bill Clinton later picked up). To borrow another of Saul Alinsky's memorable phrases, she had learned not to eat a ham sandwich while trying to organize a community of orthodox Jews.

The sound rejection of her health care plan was enough to convince Hillary that her liberal agenda was far ahead of the American people.

So she dressed up traditional ”family values” arguments once again to put forward universal health care. She praised the comprehensive welfare states of Western Europe, from the French day-care system to the generous leave policies of Germany, without ever noting that these economies suffered double-digit unemployment for more than a decade while the U.S. economy burgeoned.

A minor controversy erupted over the writing of her book. Hillary had claimed to have written the book herself, only to have it revealed that Simon & Schuster had paid a $120,000 advance to Georgetown journalism professor Barbara Feinman, a woman who had worked seven days a week to complete the 278 h.e.l.l TO PAY book. The book contained no word of appreciation to the longsuffering Feinman, who had traveled with Hillary on a Western vacation, undoubtedly with tape recorder in hand. ”All she expected was 'Many thanks to Barbara Feinman, whose tireless efforts were greatly appreciated,'” said Sally Quinn. ”She [Feinman] would have died and gone to heaven.”*6 Hillary actually tried to withhold a fourth of the payment to Feinman as a punishment for talking to reporters. It was a very It Takes a Village crisis, because Feinman was counting on the income to help finance the adoption of a baby girl from China. In the end, Feinman was paid. But Hillary's pique had underlined the most vindictive aspects of her character. She became so defensive about her authors.h.i.+p that she called Time correspondent James Carney to her private study to examine legal pads filled with her handwriting.

One has to wonder why Hillary went to such great lengths to deny that she had help with the book. That is no crime, especially in Was.h.i.+ngton. No one would have denied a busy first lady the right to have research and writing help on a project such as this. In the end the book expressed her ideas. But Hillary can never seem to give anyone else credit, and she can never seem to admit that she is anything less than ”super-woman.” In the end she undermines the very image she works so hard to construct.

When all was said and done, however, the authors.h.i.+p squabbles didn't matter, because they didn't carry much beyond the jaded Eastern corridor of the Was.h.i.+ngton Post Style section and the New Yorker. In America-at-large, It Takes a Village hit the best-seller list and stayed there for twenty weeks. It raised not a few eyebrows when it won Hillary a Grammy for the audiotape version. More important, it gave her the image of a PTA mom and displaced the image of the secretive, power-obsessed woman pus.h.i.+ng behind the president.

HOLDING THE LINE.

No sooner did Hillary begin to bask in the adulation of her book tour than the long-awaited, and dreaded, Rose Law Firm records materialized in the White House residence to contradict virtually everything she had been saying about the matter.

When former Rose aide Carolyn Huber, then in the White House, found the printouts of Hillary's billing records in her private residence, it revealed that Hillary had, in fact, lied under oath when she said she had not worked on the Castle Grande land scam. When Hillary offered the lamest of excuses, claiming she had known the Castle Grande project by another name, New York Times columnist William Safire publicly labeled her a ”congenital liar.”

Safire traced the movement of the records, from their removal from Foster's office on the night of his suicide, to Webb Hubbell's bas.e.m.e.nt, to the president's secretary's personal files, and then Hillary's closet.*7 The president responded to Safire with an indirect second-hand threat to punch him in the nose. This display of manly protectiveness struck the public as very incongruous. When Harry Truman had lashed out at a music critic who had savaged his daughter, he did so by angrily jotting his vituperation in his own hand. Clinton offered his ”en garde” in the form of a studiously clever riposte through an intermediary, White House press secretary Mike McCurry. A patented Clinton ploy to have it both ways, to appear offended and manly, but not really concerned.

Hillary's response was even more to type.

William Safire has earned an enviable reputation for his hard-nosed stance on ethics, taking on old friends like the late CIA director William Casey, and showing no deference to Ronald Reagan and George Bush on Irangate. Hillary ignored this and centered her attack on Safire's service several presidents earlier as a White House speechwriter for Richard M. Nixon.

Hillary chose a friendly format, an interview on National Public Radio, and said she did not take seriously a man who had once worked for Nixon, and ”best I can tell, is still working for him.” She professed complete ignorance of how the papers had come to be so close to her, but did offer journalists an interesting double reverse.

When she was working on the Watergate committee, Hillary said, if missing records under subpoena for two years had come to light, ”we would have been delighted. The problem back then, you'll remember, is that doc.u.ments were destroyed, tapes were missing 18 and a half minutes. The White House was not cooperating .... I think the contrast is so dramatic.”*8 The implication was not concealed: Think about Nixon and all those really bad people. The Clintons on the other hand discovered and produced the doc.u.ments. And please overlook the fact that they were ”found” and produced by a secretary, not by the person who had been holding them during their time in the wilderness.

Also left unsaid, of course, was that any Nixon official who had been caught with doc.u.ments that Leon Jaworsky had demanded by subpoena for two years would have likely been indicted and gone to prison.

CHELSEA: CONVENIENT COVER.

The billing records weren't the only new evidence of deceit surfacing from the Clintons. When the American Spectator magazine and the Los Angeles Times published the revelations of state troopers Larry Patterson and Roger Perry who had guarded Bill as governor, the White House realized it could no longer talk about the Clintons having had a ”pain-in-our-marriage” phase. The reality testified to by the state troopers was of a governor-turned-president who was an out-of-control s.e.x addict and who used law enforcement officials with uniforms and weapons to procure women and to cover his tracks.

These disclosures were a direct threat to Hillary's image as well.

”Lately, I find people who know Hillary better than I do who tell me that the only reason she has put up with Bill's philandering is that she loves the trappings of high office,” John Robert Start mused in one of his Arkansas Democrat-Gazette pieces. ”She likes having taxpayer-financed servants, of whom she has more than 100 in the White House.”*9 Family was the antidote to this unpleasantly frank talk, and for all practical purposes, Chelsea was her family. Hillary writes that she wanted a child in their marriage from the start. Perhaps she saw it as the only way to secure a marriage with a husband who pursued other women with relentless abandon. Perhaps there were ideological reasons. ”You can't be a woman if you don't have children,” she told a friend.*10 Named after the Joni Mitch.e.l.l song ”Chelsea Morning,” the president's daughter had spent almost her entire life living in the governor's mansion or the White House. She seemed to have been raised as much by Bill and nannies as by her mother. ”Mommy go make peech,” she would say at age two.*11 Former Arkansas State Trooper L. D.

Brown--who married one of the Clintons' nannies--paints a picture of Sat.u.r.day night Bill as a loving father, and Hillary as a harsh, neglectful shrew.

As the illusion of a strong and stable marriage began to unravel, the Clintons broke their own rule and resorted to using their daughter, with Hillary appearing more and more with her in innumerable photo ops on foreign trips. Cloying stories began to appear in the press of how the Clintons spent their family time playing word games and doing homework. Later, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, Bill and Hillary invited the world to watch them depart as a family on Air Force One, to take their daughter across the country to attend Stanford. For years, the privacy of their daughter had been the Clintons' genuine concern. In extremism, they used her in a cynical way to stave off impeachment.

TRIANGULATION.

”You know, you have to stop having to be rescued like this,” Morris recalls Hillary telling her husband. ”Last time, I swear,” he replied.*12 The multiple catastrophes of the first term had brought the Clinton presidency to its knees. Clinton had, on a more sophisticated level, reproduced his first term as governor, showcasing a mixture of arrogance, indifference to his legislative allies, and contempt for business interests. As before, he had tried to achieve everything: opening military barracks to gays, enacting universal health coverage, and putting economic and environmental regulation on an aggressive footing.

At home, the agenda was a patchwork quilt. Abroad, Americans watched as U.S. troops were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu and the Navy. had to deal with a gang of rock-throwing Haitian thugs.

Forty years of Democratic rule of the House was broken, and the former governor accustomed to the one-party rule of Arkansas had to work with a Republican Congress equipped with the power of subpoenas.

As the president's reelection began to seem in jeopardy, a curious role reversal took place for Hillary. It was Hillary who now pushed a nore centrist agenda. It was Leon Panetta, the former Republican and Was.h.i.+ngton insider who led the ”liberal” wing of the White House staff, aided by George Stephanopoulous and Harold Ickes, while the president himself grew solemn and withdrawn.

Hillary recognized that Bill would have to mount a comeback bid no less dramatic than the one he had launched to retake the governor's mansion in 1982. Wile this left Clinton on the verge of despair, Hillary quickly grasped that a ma.s.sive course correction was needed, that to retain power he had to run to the center.

And she knew that the right man to lead her husband in that direction was not Leon Panetta or James Carville. It was a sometime-Republican then working for Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, d.i.c.k Morris.

Night show comedians would later joke about the twin s.e.x scandals of the president and his top political advisor. In truth, it is difficult to imagine two people more unalike than d.i.c.k Morris and Bill Clinton. Morris's understanding of the unsentimental uses of power is Machiavellian--deeply grounded in history, and in a penetrating observation of people and current events. He is also Machiavellian in another sense, for Machiavelli was a great a.n.a.lyst of power, but a poor pract.i.tioner. He ended up in penury and alienated from his patrons. Morris is unlikely to end up poor. But for all his touted cynicism, he has served himself poorly. He often shows a disarmingly naive streak and a deep and genuine fascination with power politics that leads him into divulging trade secrets.

Morris seems oblivious to the cynical uses of interviewers who would manipulate his almost scientific interest in his craft.

Morris joined Hillary and her top aides Maggie Williams and Melanie Vereer at secret ”girls club meetings” in the White House solarium to plan the comeback bid.*13 The secret alliance soon led to Morris's writing focus-group-tested speeches for Clinton, which the president, needing to conceal Morris's involvement from his own staff, rewrote by hand to make them look authentically his. When Morris telephoned the president, Clinton was told that ”Charlie” was on the line.*14 Morris offered Clinton the perfect foil for the popularity of the Republican Congress's brilliant ”Contract with America”-which had set out a detailed reform agenda. In Behind the Oval Office Morris reveals how he saw a parallel between Clinton and Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the powersharing in France between socialist President Francois Mitterrand and conservative Prime Minister Jacques Chirac. Rather than paralyzing the government by fighting Chirac, Mitterrand ”fast-forwarded” the agenda of the right and therefore removed any incentive for the electorate to support right-wing candidates, because they had no issues to run on.*15 Morris's ”triangulation” allowed Clinton to do much the same thing to Newt Gingrich. The president embraced the Republican tenets of welfare reform and a balanced budget, leaching these issues of their salience to the Republicans.

To protect himself against the Republicans, Bill Clinton had to jettison many of his closest friends in the social welfare lobby, angering Marian Wright Edelman and prompting her husband, Peter, to resign from his senior post at the Department of Health and Human Services.

”I know the politics, I know the numbers, but it still bothers me deeply,” Hillary told Morris.*16 Morris doesn't say so in his book, but surely he saw the crocodile's tears.

Clinton staked out a place of his own with a ”values” agenda designed to appeal to women voters and showcase Bill Clinton as a compa.s.sionate alternative to the congressional Republicans who allowed themselves to be portrayed as Snidely Whiplashes.