Hillary the Pol

Drawings by Mark Ulriksen

During the early months of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s activities on behalf of health-care reform, she took Capitol Hill by storm. Describing a meeting she held with the Senate Finance Committee—a group that will be critical to the passage of any health-care legislation—Lawrence O’Donnell, Jr., the committee’s chief of staff, told me, “Mrs. Clinton came into that room, and she opened the discussion at about four-twenty-five in the afternoon. We were about eighteen minutes into it when she stopped—I remember, I looked at the clock. And what I had just heard were the most perfectly composed, perfectly punctuated sentences, growing into paragraphs, in the most perfect, fluid presentation about what our problems in this field were and what we could do about them.” He added, “And then she held her position in the face of questioning by these senators around the table, many of whom know a great deal about the subject. And she was more impressive than any Cabinet member who has sat in that chair.”

There were some people, as there had been in Arkansas over the years, who found her presence so compelling that her husband’s seemed to pale by comparison. Senator Tom Daschle, of South Dakota, who became one of her most ardent advocates on health-care legislation, has described an issues conference for Democratic senators held in Jamestown, Virginia, in April, 1993, at which Hillary Clinton; Ira Magaziner, the director of the health-care task force; and Judith Feder, a deputy assistant secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services and the head of the task force’s working groups, were to address the senators during the day. “We thought that Ira and Judy would be the primary speakers, and the First Lady would be there to fill the stature gap and impress the senators with the importance of the proposal,” Daschle recalled. “Well, Ira and Judy got lost coming down. And the First Lady said, ‘I don’t know that we have to wait. Let’s get started.’ She had no notes—Ira and Judy had all the materials. And she spoke with such eloquence and conviction and knowledge of the subject. That night, the President spoke. But at least half the senators who were there indicated that it was that morning, when Mrs. Clinton spoke, that was the highlight of the weekend.”

Bedazzled as many in Congress were by the force of her intellect, so evident in these presentations, it was hardly an unknown quantity: her reputation as a formidable lawyer with a first-rate analytical mind had preceded her. What was unexpected, in those early months of her tenure as First Lady, was her sallying forth with the instincts and tactics of a seasoned politician. A person who observed her relations with Congress has since said, “There was a skepticism on the Hill about her role”—as head of the health-care initiative. “Was she a dilettante, not really willing to dirty her hands? But, as it turned out, she was willing to travel to people’s districts, willing to call their favorite radio reporters. She is substantively driven—but she was also engaged in courting, incessantly. . . . A lot of people were surprised that she was working this issue the way someone would who was not the First Lady.” This person added, “The First Lady is a pol.”

Her courtship of members of Congress was no less successful for being so overtly orchestrated. She called on many members in their offices, frequently bringing along a photographer, who would snap pictures of her not only with the senator or representative but with the receptionist and other staff people; several days later, autographed photographs would arrive. (After I attended an event where I shook hands with Hillary, in the course of researching this article, I, too, was sent an autographed photograph.) A member of one representative’s staff remarked to me, “All these egomaniacs—the notion that the First Lady would come to their office! And these were more than courtesy calls. They were so scripted and focussed she could have been working for the C.I.A. These were intelligence-gathering meetings, not chitchat. When she visited my boss, the visit was scheduled for a half hour and she spent an hour and a half. They talked about health care, his home state, kids—everything. She was trying to figure out what these people were about.” And by September, when she went to the Hill to testify at hearings of five different Senate and House committees, this aide added, “she basically had a dossier on everyone, so she could incorporate into her responses something about a member’s personal background.”

When J. J. (Jake) Pickle, a representative from Texas who sits on the House Ways and Means and Joint Taxation Committees, announced that he was going to retire, Hillary was one of the first people in Washington to call him, “thanking him for his service, telling him how much she was looking forward to working with him through ’94,” one person said. Representative John Dingell, of Michigan, the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, revered his father, a representative who had introduced health-care legislation in 1943 and then fought to keep it alive for more than a decade; Dingell himself has introduced similar legislation in every Congress since 1955, when he succeeded his father in the House. In early June of 1993, as Dingell was taking call-in questions on a Detroit radio station, he suddenly found Hillary on the line. “She was calling in to say, ‘Happy Anniversary on your dad’s bill—it’s taken fifty years and we are going to try to pass it,’ ” an aide to Dingell recalled. “And after her father died she wrote him a letter—something very personal, about how she thought of him and his father. He was very touched by it.” Then, when she testified before Dingell’s committee during her public congressional début, in September, she began by invoking the memory of Dingell’s father and the legislation he had urged so tenaciously.

That début—a marathon of back-to-back appearances before five committees—was widely perceived as virtuoso. Referring in general to her appearances to promote health care, of which her congressional testimony was the most sustained and dramatic, Representative Pat Williams, of Montana, said, “We were embarrassed by our surprise, but we were surprised—that in a city that relies on staff and note cards she could travel alone and speak with no notes.”

To those who knew her well, however, the feat seemed characteristic. Always the industrious student, she had immersed herself in the arcana of health care for nine months; she knew her subject cold. And she knew all her questioners. In a speech earlier in September she had noted that as of that date she had met more than a hundred and thirty times with members of Congress to talk about health care, and with more than eleven hundred assorted groups.

The risk that Hillary Clinton faced in her performance was not that she would stumble on her facts or be caught short. It was, rather, a risk that she had been mindful of during her past decade of public life: that her acumen and high competence, unadorned, would narrow her public appeal, and alienate the more retrograde; and also that her steeliness, if it were to show through, would alienate many more. As an antidote, she chose to strike a warmer, softer chord in her opening. It was a chord that she had struck very deliberately during the Presidential campaign, and, for that matter, a chord that President Clinton himself struck, in the first of two recent interviews with me, when, after saying that people mistake her for “this sort of superstrong, brilliant person who seems to be almost mechanical in her power and strength and all that,” he declared, “There’s that whole other more vulnerable, more human side of her.” At the first congressional committee before which she testified, the House Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Representative Dan Rostenkowski, Hillary began by saying, “The official reason I am here today is because I have had that responsibility”—for health-care reform. “But more importantly for me, I’m here as a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a woman.”

Several months ago, before the Whitewater investigation and revelations about Hillary Clinton’s commodities trading had begun to dog her, Betsey Wright, who was Bill Clinton’s chief of staff for many years when he was governor, and remains close to the Clintons, told me, “Hillary is happier now than she’s ever been. She liked practicing corporate law, but she was doing it because she, as the breadwinner, had to do it. Now she gets to do her first love, full time.”

The detour from that “first love”—effecting public policy—which Hillary Rodham took when she moved to Arkansas and subsequently married Bill Clinton surprised some people who knew her and had believed that her aim was to achieve political power on her own, for Hillary Rodham was a strikingly intelligent, notably self-confident and self-contained young woman, about whom there was no suggestion of an adjunct, and her political ambition was plain. Her directedness is what fellow-students recall as having been her most distinguishing characteristic at Wellesley (where she was president of the student government) and, later, at Yale Law School. A classmate of Hillary’s at Wellesley told me, “She was so ambitious. She already knew the value of networking, of starting a Rolodex, even back then. She cultivated relationships with teachers and administrators even more than with students. While she was respected across the board, and she had her circle of friends, I would not say she was popular. She was a little too intimidating for that.” She was marked then, too, by the political pragmatism that has since become famous. After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a group of black students on campus were threatening a hunger strike if the Wellesley administration did not address their demands. It was the kind of situation in which, as a classmate recalled, “Hillary would step in and organize an outlet that would be acceptable on the Wellesley campus. She coöpted the real protest by creating the academic one—which, looking back on it, I think was a mature thing to do. In any event, she was never truly left. Very much a moderate, very much a facilitator.”

At Yale, Hillary Rodham’s progression toward a political career seemed to be continuing apace. One of her women classmates told me, “Most of my friends and I were always agonizing, filled with self-doubt—you know, ‘Why are we here? What are we doing?’ Hillary had no self-doubt. She knew she wanted to be politically influential and prominent. She wanted recognition. And she was there because Yale was the kind of law school where you would think about social policy. That year showed her to be a natural politician. She had a natural charismatic quality—people loved to be around her. She liked studying in groups, organizing social events—and the people around her felt that that was where the action was.” She was also unmoved by much of what was eddying about her, in that tumultuous period of the early seventies. “She did nothing to excess,” this classmate told me. “She didn’t do drugs. She was too cautious, and would never take such a risk. She took no joy in the illicit. The forbidden held no fascination for her—she lacked any self-damaging impulse.” That Hillary Rodham conducted herself in such a no-nonsense—even exemplary—way may have been due mainly to an innate conservatism; but this woman believed at the time that Hillary was also conducting herself as she did with an eye to her political future. “In the years since, she has dissembled about her own ambition,” this woman continued, “but at Yale Law School she did not dissemble about her desire to be an important political figure.”

It was at Yale, of course, that she met Bill Clinton. Classmates recall him as refreshingly candid about his national political ambitions. While he may not have discussed, specifically, a desire to be President, it was not an idea that would have seemed outlandish to his closest friends in Arkansas; a high-school classmate said that whenever she sent Clinton a card she tried to find one bearing a picture of the White House. A friend of Hillary’s commented, “The fact that Bill knew he was going to run for political office was very attractive to Hillary.”

Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton made a powerful combination. People who knew both of them at that time say that the two were plainly crazy about each other, and each saw in the other a partner for the political future. Betsey Wright says, “They both passionately share the sense that they’re supposed to make a difference in this world—and they had that before they met each other.” Some of their friends, however, have commented that Hillary (for all her pragmatism) seemed more messianic than Bill; a friend who knew them in law school says, “With Bill, you felt he just wanted to be President, whereas Hillary was really animated by her sense of what was right. She had this religious zeal.”

Over the years, such an exceptional pair inevitably evoked comparisons between them, and debate about which of them was the brighter. “They both have an extra computer in their brains,” Betsey Wright declared. While it became the fashion later for those who knew the two only casually to say that Hillary was smarter, that was not the prevailing view among their closer associates. Ellen Brantley, who knew Hillary slightly at Wellesley and later as a fellow faculty member at the University of Arkansas School of Law, in Fayetteville, and then in Little Rock as a fellow-attorney, and who was appointed a state judge by Bill Clinton, said of Hillary, “She is clearly highly intelligent, and has succeeded, in part, through the practical application of her intelligence. She is very articulate, very good at communicating her intelligence. I don’t think she is smarter than Bill, though some people will say that. If they were in the same class, she would attend all the classes, read all the assignments, outline her notes, study hard for the exam. Bill would stop by some of the classes, read a couple of the assignments while also reading other, related things, and then write an exam that brought in some ideas that had been introduced in class, some outside—linking them in a very original way. And they’d both get an A.”

In choosing to move to Arkansas and marry Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham was surrendering, at least for the time being, any autonomous route to political power. It was a decision about which she may have retained some ambivalence; one friend recalled her commenting, in the eighties, “Someone from my youth group called and said, ‘It’s great that you’re a governor’s wife—but we thought you would be governor.’ ” And at the time, Betsey Wright told me, she was disappointed at what she viewed as Hillary’s abdication of her own political calling. Wright, who met Hillary and Bill when they came to Texas to work on the McGovern campaign, in 1972, founded an organization to recruit and train women to run for political office and to fund their candidacies, and she was mightily impressed by Hillary. “I’m almost a student of strong women leaders. And she was so unusual, even in that cadre,” Wright said. But what Hillary saw, Wright continued, was that Bill Clinton could be President—she “saw that in him when I first met them.” She added, “I’m not saying that’s why she married him—but it was something she saw. And she’s always seen she could have political power with him—just not elected. It was my shortsightedness that I felt when she married him that she was giving up her chance for political power.”

Hillary Rodham worked for about eight months on the impeachment-inquiry staff of the House Judiciary Committee investigating President Richard Nixon—an extraordinary assignment for a young lawyer—before the move to Arkansas. She was just in time to help Clinton in his ultimately futile campaign for a congressional seat, challenging a popular incumbent. Political campaigns seem to have always been a natural medium for her. In 1972, when she and Clinton went to Texas to campaign for McGovern, she had made a powerful impression on Sara Ehrman, now at the Democratic National Committee. “I remember her as this skinny kid from Yale, wearing brown corduroys and a brown shirt, very earnest and very tough,” Ehrman told me. “In the ambience of San Antonio, nobody got to the point for the first three hours, and she got to the point in the first two minutes. . . ‘Where’s the Anglo vote? Where’s the Hispanic vote? Where’s the liberal vote?’ She was no novice in any respect.”

Many of Bill Clinton’s friends at that time have recalled that their expectations of Hillary were very high, because Clinton had talked about her volubly, with great intensity and deep admiration, for some time before her arrival. Those friends say that they were not disappointed. Rudy Moore, who served as Clinton’s chief of staff in his first term as governor, says of his first impression of Hillary Rodham, “She had done interesting things at an early age—especially, working for the House Judiciary Committee. And she was very confident. She never projected herself as anything other than your equal—male or female.”

Carolyn Staley, who had become a friend of Clinton’s in high school, told me that Hillary represented a break with Clinton’s past as far as women were concerned. “He was everybody’s flame. He had girls everywhere he went—a new girl every weekend.” Staley has remained close to Clinton, and today she considers him her best friend. “I think he fell in love with her mind, and her confidence,” she said of Hillary. “All the other girls fawned on him. But Hillary’s attitude was: I don’t need you. She was going to lead her life. She never drew her identity from him. I remember Virginia”—Virginia Kelley, Clinton’s mother—“saying about Hillary, after she met her, ‘Bill, she’s so different.’ You know, Bill had always had beauty queens. And he said, ‘Look, Ma, I have work to do. I don’t need to be married to a sex goddess.’ ”

During my first conversation with President Clinton, in the Oval Office, the President—a man whose ruddiness and startlingly blue eyes make for a vivid physical presence—disputed the notion that girls had “fawned” on him, and stressed that he had had girlfriends before Hillary who were also bright, independent young women. About Hillary, however, he said, “I just liked— I liked being around her, because I thought I’d never be bored being with her. In the beginning, I used to tell her that I would like being old with her. That I thought that was an important thing—to be with someone you thought you’d always love being old with.”

In October, 1975, a little more than a year after Hillary moved to Arkansas—and shortly before Bill launched his campaign for Arkansas attorney general, which proved to be almost a walkover—they were married. Hillary had been teaching at the University of Arkansas School of Law, and also oversaw the school’s legal-aid clinic; she was a strong opponent of the death penalty, and helped prepare an amicus-curiae brief in support of an appeal (which was successful) for a defendant on death row. (She subsequently came to support the death penalty, however; Betsey Wright told me that she had changed her position by the time executions became a reality in Arkansas.) When Bill Clinton assumed the office of attorney general, in January of 1977, and they left Fayetteville for Little Rock, Hillary joined the Rose Law Firm, the most strongly establishment, white-shoe firm in town.

Herb Rule, a partner in the Rose firm, recalled that Hillary had had no trial experience when she entered the firm, but that he tried a few cases with her and saw a ready aptitude. “She got to the nut—she’s combative,” he told me. “She’s a person who’s not afraid to be herself. Lots of women are aggressive and competitive, but they hide it. And it was apparently something that came early in life.” He added, “Hillary has an uncommon ability to see herself. At its best, that gives you an understanding of other people’s natures—judge, opponents, witnesses, jurors—that builds your sense of where you are and what you’re doing, and lets you avoid the trap of doing something repetitively, and adjust. The dangerous side of it is that you become captive of what others’ wishes are. You go from activity to activity—changing roles all the time—that other people wish upon you.”

In those days, at least, Hillary Rodham seemed disinclined to modify her persona. She had apparently never considered her appearance a coin in which to trade; she certainly did not rely on it to win others’ affirmation, and she made no concessions to it. She used no makeup; wore immensely thick glasses; occasionally had a perm, though with unhappy results; and seemed to pay little attention to her clothes, dressing in a way that was, at best, unremarkable. Herb Rule, for one, maintains that, despite all this, “she was attractive, I thought,” adding, “But it was a studied plainness: this is me.”

When Hillary appeared in the courtroom (a male bastion throughout the country, but nowhere more so than in the South), her willingness to be herself—a person free of the vestigial handicaps that still afflicted many of her female contemporaries—was especially notable. One lawyer who practiced with her said, “She has a way of possessing and filling up a courtroom, but it is not feminine. It’s just lawyer.”

Eventually, Hillary became good friends with two other lawyers at the Rose firm, Vincent Foster and Webster Hubbell. Professionally, the three lawyers were a tightly meshed team. Diane Blair, who has known Hillary since the mid-seventies and is now probably her closest friend, told me, “They were so great together—like basketball players, where they can pass and don’t even have to look.” The emotional bond, however, was said to be strongest between Hillary and Foster. “Vince Foster worshipped her,” a person who works in the White House told me. “He would have done anything for her.”

In 1978, when the thirty-one-year-old Bill Clinton began campaigning for governor, Hillary Rodham, by this time a veteran not only of the McGovern campaign but also of the 1976 Carter campaign (she was his No. 2 coördinator in Indiana), played a pivotal role, though it was largely behind the scenes. Rudy Moore, who was Clinton’s campaign director, explained to me, “She did not do so much on the campaign trail that year. A woman was expected to smile, and not give speeches. And the name issue”—her use of her maiden name—“was in the forefront.” Clinton’s opponent in the Democratic primary had made an issue of her name, Moore added; the Clinton group did not consider it a big enough liability to try to persuade her to change it, and she argued that it was her professional name. “She did general strategy, and then, in the summer, because it was so clear that he was going to win, she developed policy ideas and brought in people who would be in the administration. So she did policy, strategy, hands-on administration—directing the show.” Part of Hillary’s contribution, Moore went on, was the way in which—because her personality was so different from Clinton’s—she complemented him. “Bill sees the light and sunshine about people, and Hillary sees their darker side. She has much more ability than he does to see who’s with you, who’s against you, and to make sure they don’t take advantage of you. He’s not expecting to be jumped, but she always is. So she’s on the defensive.”

Bev Lindsey, who worked in one of Clinton’s gubernatorial administrations and is married to Bruce Lindsey, now a senior adviser to the President, recalled about that first term, “Hillary was very active in shaping public policy, but not in being a political wife. She thought then that Bill could be governor and she could shape policy and be a corporate lawyer, and not have to do the rest—not have to go to ladies’ lunches, or travel with him and be next to him and not speak.” From that time on, Lindsey added, she became accustomed to “wielding so much power—both as a corporate lawyer and as his political partner, shaping public policy.” Most of what she did was not visible, but one activity was: Clinton appointed her to chair a task force on rural health care.

Hillary Rodham was hard-edged even by Northern standards—she had been considered “intimidating” by her peers at Wellesley, and in high school had been dubbed Sister Frigidaire—so in the warm, modulated, and infinitely discursive (not to mention sexist) environment of Arkansas she came as something of a shock. Tommy Robinson, who was a member of Clinton’s gubernatorial cabinet in his first term, and has a long history of disputes with him, recalled, “She would be at meetings at the Mansion”—the Governor’s Mansion. “She is one very professional tough bitch. I have a great deal of respect for her and I don’t use the word loosely. I give her high marks—but she’s tough. She did not want any screwups of any kind. She was all business.”

In Clinton’s first gubernatorial term, he and his closest aides viewed themselves, at least in some respects, as reformers, and they challenged some of the state’s most powerful corporate interests, including the timber and energy industries. Dick Morris, a political consultant and one of Clinton’s Arkansas strategists, said, “He was very idealistic, not pragmatic at all. There was no focus to his agenda. His first term resembled his first three months as President—a period of learning.”

During Clinton’s campaign for reëlection in 1980, neither he nor Hillary was properly focussed on the effort, several former aides told me. Hillary had many competing concerns: in February of 1979, she had been made a partner in the Rose firm, and a year later their daughter, Chelsea, was born. And Clinton was already provoking the kind of talk about philandering that continued, on and off, for years in Arkansas and ultimately (with the emergence of Gennifer Flowers) endangered his bid for the Presidency. “It’s fair to say there were marital troubles at that time,” Rudy Moore conceded when I mentioned what I’d heard. He added, “Though I don’t know what they were.” A friend commented, “Bill was like a kid with a new toy that first term. The perks, the Mansion, having the most powerful people in the state paying court to you. And he always had a weakness for bleached blondes with big jewelry, in short skirts, their figures shown off to best advantage. Gennifer was credible to us because she looked the part.” Hillary was said to be devastated and humiliated by his behavior during this period, but to have determined that she would not leave the marriage, in which she had invested so deeply.

In any event, Bill and Hillary didn’t awaken to the fact that the election was in jeopardy until it was too late. The defeat was traumatic—not only for Bill, friends say, but for Hillary as well. “It shook both of them right down to their toes,” one friend declared. While the two may have been equally shaken, they responded in very different ways. Clinton, according to some people, seemed to experience losing not just as an electoral defeat but as a personal rejection by a large number of those whom he had courted; he took it so much to heart that he seemed emotionally undone. “It took all the air out of his normal resilience,” Max Brantley, the editor of the weekly Arkansas Times, recalled. “He was going around giving this Hamlet soliloquy—‘All is lost, what can I do?’ ” An acquaintance said, “After Bill lost, it was pathetic.” Recalling Clinton’s early efforts to reintroduce himself to voters, this person continued, “It seemed as if you might find him, almost any hour of the day or night, at this supermarket out on Markham—he’d catch you at the end of the aisle, or he’d be waiting at the register, and he’d say, ‘You know, I used to be governor, and . . .’ ”

Hillary Rodham took charge. This was when Betsey Wright was brought in, to begin strategizing for a comeback. According to one of the Clintons’ advisers, “The experience of watching Bill screw up made Hillary realize she should jump into the breach.” This person added, “She had to—he was so shaken, and was not a particularly good strategist anyway. There was no way he was going to win again unless she came in.” This adviser acknowledged that Bill Clinton is a supremely political animal but maintained that “she is a better political animal in terms of strategy, and the dynamics of a campaign.” Saying that Hillary participated in most strategic meetings in 1981 and 1982, and “injected a dose of realism into Bill’s politics,” this person continued, “Hillary was the strategist and the pragmatist, Bill the intellectual and the candidate.”

That was the critical juncture, for both Hillary and Bill, in their shared political life. It seems to have involved a great deal of letting go for Bill Clinton—both of a degree of idealism and of various people who had been his aides and close friends in his first term. (Stephen Smith, for example, the deputy chief of staff, was one of Clinton’s closest friends, and Clinton was godfather to Smith’s son, but over the next decade the two rarely saw each other.) That so few of the key first-termers were asked to rejoin him when he regained the governorship in 1982 was said by some to have been in large part Hillary’s decision. A member of the first administration said, echoing a widely expressed view, “She became very conscious of political realities. The Bill Clinton of those earlier years, for example, would not have been involved with the D.L.C.”—the Democratic Leadership Council, which Clinton co-founded in 1985—“for anything. But from that point forward they were on a march. They were headed for the White House.”

For Hillary, the accommodation was different. The staff people who were left behind were not her good friends, and the centrist shift in Clinton’s politics probably caused her little, if any, discomfort. Indeed, when Diane Blair first met her, she was struck by how very mainstream Hillary Rodham was. “It’s not true that she is the liberal one,” Blair told me. “She came from that family where—with her father, especially—the idea was that you work for everything. She believes in personal responsibility. Back in the seventies, when we would talk, and I would say that some people cannot do better, look at the lives they live, she did not feel that way.” What Hillary was relinquishing, however, was in its way equally profound: in deference to her marital partnership and the local culture, she surrendered the notion that she could do things in her unvarnished way; and she set about repackaging herself—changing her name, her appearance, and her public demeanor.

For her use of the name Rodham, she had been viewed, in some circles in Arkansas, as alien, and even subversive. One friend recalled standing next to her at a reception at the Rose firm in the late seventies, and seeing a man approach her, jab angrily at the nametag pinned to her blouse, and fairly spit out, “That’s not your name!” The friend added, “She was very cool about it, as she always is.” Phillip Carroll, a senior partner at the firm and a mentor to Vincent Foster, said, “Intelligent people, friends of ours, were just so exercised about her name. They would say, ‘It should be Clinton!’ But she clung to it tenaciously.”

In one of my conversations with the President, he emphasized the point that not only had he not requested her to change her name but he had at first resisted her changing it. “She understood that it was part of a picture that we had painted for the voters that made them feel alienated from us. And she said to me—I never will forget.. . . I respected her so much for this, because she came in to see me, and she said, ‘We’ve got to talk about this name deal.’ She said, ‘I couldn’t bear it—if we’re going to do this, let’s try to win. I couldn’t bear it if this costs you the election. It’s just not that big a deal to me anymore.’ ”

Clinton continued, “And, see, the interesting thing is, 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.’ And she was a young child when she decided that.”

However, he said, “when she came to me and said she wanted to change, I could see in her eyes that she had made the decision to do it. And I said, ‘I do not want you resenting me. I would a lot rather lose the election than lose you.’ She said, ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ I said, ‘I know, but I don’t want you to resent this for the rest of your life. You made this decision when you were a child. I like it. I approve of the decision. I don’t care about it.’ And she said, ‘Look, Bill, we cannot—this is stupid! We shouldn’t lose the election over this issue. We shouldn’t run this risk. What if it’s one per cent of the vote? What if it’s two per cent? You might win or lose the election by two per cent. If you win by ten per cent, it’s twenty per cent of the—’ I mean, she really thought it through. So I said, ‘O.K. My only request is that if you do this we’ve got to be completely honest about it. I want you to tell the people what you told me—that you’re doing it because you think it might bother other people for the First Lady of this state not to have the same name as her husband. And you don’t want something that bothers them so much to prevent us from having the opportunity to serve if they want us to serve otherwise. Do not tell them you’ve had a change of heart. Do not tell them it bothers you. Do not tell them you decided you were wrong, because that is not true, and it won’t wash. If you tell them the truth, maybe it will work.’ ”

And work it did: those Arkansans who had resented her use of her name were pleased. “People really liked it,” the President agreed. “Interestingly enough, they really liked it because it turned out to be that it was part of the picture that people had of us that we were smart, good, honest, and well meaning, but that we spent too much time doing what we wanted to do instead of what they wanted us to do.”

Giving up her name was surely the most costly of the changes that Hillary made; the others were more superficial. One family friend recalled that shortly after Clinton’s defeat Hillary asked her, “What are they wearing?”—a reference to the more fashion-conscious. It was a startlingly uncharacteristic query; this person commented, “It was the first time I ever heard her sounding vulnerable.” Hillary lightened her hair, began wearing contact lenses and makeup, and hired a fashion consultant to help her select a wardrobe. “When she decided to do it, she was going to do it right,” another friend recalled. “It was like an intellectual pursuit—she was going to understand all this.” But, if she at first felt uncertain as she embarked on such alien terrain, the newly named Hillary Clinton seems to have quickly recovered her characteristic self-confidence. Her friend Connie Fails, who runs a dress shop in Little Rock, says that Hillary is the only woman ever to come into her boutique and—as she tried on clothes and stood before a mirror—not lament some perceived figure flaw.

In the 1982 campaign, her new image was introduced to the public in appearances at which she stood by Clinton’s side—mute, smiling, fixing on Bill what Ellen Brantley describes as “the Nancy Reagan gaze.” During this period, too, a warmer, more empathetic Hillary Clinton began to emerge. Sam Bratton, an attorney, and one of the few key staff members of Clinton’s first term to be included in his second, told me, “Hillary can be abrupt, and that can be seen as her being arrogant, rude, uncaring—none of which I think she really is. But that is how she was seen, and that was considered to have been part of the reason for the loss.” Another second-term aide said, “I think Hillary learned that what will kill you in Arkansas is a feeling that you’re detached from the people, that you’re not a regular, ordinary person, that you’re not empathetic. This is a very personal state. Now, for Clinton that empathy is natural. But Hillary learned how to project it.” Bratton, too, agreed that this was “something she learned,” and he remarked, “Hillary is a good learner.”

What Hillary Clinton had been lacking was, essentially, an ability to connect with people far different from her—a lack that could, of course, be fatal to her as a politician, and also one that had no doubt been highlighted by the inevitable contrast with her husband. It was a contrast that did not spring merely from the fact that he was a native Southerner, on his home ground. Dozens of people who have known Bill Clinton over the years maintain that he is genuinely curious about nearly every individual he meets; clearly wants to be liked; and seeks approbation in virtually every encounter. Moreover, he is said to thrive on contacts with a broad range of people, and even seems to require those eclectic contacts in order to feel most himself. Gloria Cabe, who worked with Bill Clinton for years in Arkansas and became his campaign manager in 1990, after Betsey Wright left, commented, “Hillary was not good at meeting and greeting, but later she learned it. With Bill, though . . . He’d go to a festival in a town square, with folks out of the Ozarks, and he’d come back higher than a kite, telling us all the stories people had told him.” Or, as Amy Lee Stewart, Hillary’s protégé at the Rose firm, put it, “A fish fry is not a pleasure for Hillary. For Bill Clinton, a fish fry is a joy.”

Hillary’s ardor to improve the world burned as fiercely as Bill’s—and, some of her supporters would say, more purely. Where they differed was in how the ardor was expressed. One person who has known them for many years said, “Bill Clinton, calculating as he is, genuinely cares about people—he loves everyone, he is a sucker for every individual. Hillary, no. It’s an intellectual thing—she loves the many, not the individual.”

Hillary Clinton was never a shy person. Her political problem was not—as, say, it had been in the beginning for Eleanor Roosevelt, whose aura Hillary strives for—that she was too withdrawn and unsure to open herself to people and show who she was. The problem, in a sense, was showing too much who she was—showing the coldness, or even disdain, that those who did not interest or please her evoked. This side of her was witnessed most clearly by some members of Clinton’s staff and also by some longtime friends of his. One of these friends, who likens receiving the full force of Hillary’s scorn to “walking into a revolving air fan,” said, “Her attitude about Bill’s old friends is: Why are you hanging around with these losers? They’re not successful, not rich.” This person added, “I think she has assigned a usefulness quotient to everyone in her life: Whom do I need to accomplish this? Everyone is part of a team to get from this point to the finished product. She’s very political: Are you wealthy? Are you powerful? Have you written a book I like? Are you a star?”

Even someone who holds Hillary in almost reverential regard—Jan Piercy, an old friend from Wellesley, who worked in the White House and is now waiting to be confirmed as the United States representative to the World Bank—seems to acknowledge this attitude of Hillary’s, though she sees it in a rather more positive light: “Hillary uses different people for different purposes.”

While those whom Hillary Clinton likes and respects are unlikely ever to feel her disdain, even her close friends concede that she has a temper they would hate to provoke. Temper is a trait she and Bill Clinton share, but, while his is said to erupt with the force of a sudden squall and then be spent—leaving him, more often than not, eager to make amends—hers has inspired ongoing fear in some of those who have worked with her over the years. Grown men describe her as being, at such times, “scary.”

“She has a temper like you would not believe,” a male former associate at the Rose firm said. “It’s not so much that she screams—it’s more the tone in her voice, the body language, the facial expressions. It’s ‘The Wrath of Khan.’ ” Some, it seems, are spared. Though Bill Clinton is not among them, Chelsea apparently is. A friend says she has never seen Hillary turn her capacity for verbal assault on her child. And Amy Stewart says, “Hillary with me has always been sweet, gentle, personal—different from what other people see. I’ve never heard an ugly tone.”

In the generalized makeover that Hillary underwent in preparation for her husband’s comeback campaign, she did not, of course, alter her temperament, but she began moderating her public presentation. Piercy remarked that over the years there were indeed times when Hillary—much like her close friend Susan Thomases, who is notoriously abrasive—evoked negative reactions. “But then she thought about it and she developed strategies for combatting it,” Piercy continued. “Hillary uses charm strategically, for a softening effect.” And as the two Clintons prepared for the 1982 campaign, probably no one was targeted for that charm with more premeditation than the Arkansas Democrat’s managing editor and columnist, John Robert Starr.

The Democrat’s politics were conservative, but that was not what Starr’s counterparts at the rival Arkansas Gazette and many citizens of the state held against him. Rather, it was what they considered his abuse of his position: they felt he used his column to carry out vendettas, large and small, specializing in the personal attack—and attacks not just on elected officials and federal judges (though some of those were favored targets) but also on private citizens who were defenseless against him. One Arkansan, who has been a friend of Bill and Hillary’s since their days in Fayetteville, said, “I remember one time Starr’s doctor’s office made him wait.” Eventually, the doctor’s receptionist told Starr that the doctor had left to tend to a medical emergency. “Starr attacked her in his column. That doctor did the right thing—he packed up Starr’s records and sent them to him, and told him he could find another doctor. And then there was a state trooper who was not polite”—while ticketing a member of Starr’s family. “The trooper didn’t know who Starr was. Well, Starr attacked him in his column, then kept going after him, investigating him. Finally, the trooper sold his home and moved back to northwest Arkansas—just to escape Starr.” Starr himself gleefully confirmed this account of the incidents.

Sam Bratton recalled, “In ‘79 and ‘80, Starr was after Clinton almost every day—nasty. Our attitude then was to ignore Starr. But later we decided that that had not been right. Fairly early in the formulation of the ‘82 campaign, the decision was made to make a special attempt to reach out to Starr.” Ernest Dumas, then a reporter on the Gazette, recounted, “Hillary and Betsey Wright decided they had to neutralize the Democrat. They knew that John Robert Starr had a tremendous ego, that he was weak, that they could pander to him. Before long, you’d see Hillary and Starr at lunch over in a corner. We found it nauseating. And for eight years he wrote very little bad about Bill.”

Gloria Cabe later marvelled at Hillary’s capacity for cultivating Starr over a period of many years—something that Cabe said she found herself unable to do, even when it was deemed part of her job as Clinton’s campaign manager. Perhaps it would have been harder for Hillary if she had liked and respected members of the press generally, and had an appreciation of their role; perhaps she would then have been more repelled by Starr’s failings. But the fact that she had apparently long held the press in low regard may have, paradoxically, made this courtship more palatable. Ellen Brantley said, “She has always really disliked the press. Her attitude is ‘We’re the ones who are trying to accomplish some good, we’re doing the best we can, we’re on the right side—so stop taking potshots at us. And, especially, don’t raise anything during a campaign.’ ”

Starr remembers clearly how his relationship with Hillary Clinton began. Early in 1982, “someone gave a roast of me,” he said. “Bill was one of the roasters, and I met her there. I decided that any man married to that woman couldn’t be all bad. The deal he and I cut after I reassessed 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 the campaign clean. He assigned Betsey Wright and Joan Roberts”—his press secretary—“to make sure nothing happened to make me unhappy during the campaign of ‘82. It was as if I were his No. 1 financial supporter.” Indeed, according to Robert Douglas, then the managing editor of the Gazette, Joan Roberts later told him that “her orders were to check with Starr every morning, see what he wanted, and give it to him.”

“I started talking to Hillary quite frequently,” Starr continued. “She and I had parallel ideas. One of Hillary’s favorite 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.’ Hillary always understood that I did what I did for the principle; Bill thought I did it to sell newspapers.”

When the Clintons returned to power in January, 1983, the major initiative that they and their key aides began planning was education reform. It wasn’t merely that both Clintons cared deeply about education; reform was also something that Clinton was forced to address at that moment. The state supreme court had just rejected as unconstitutional Arkansas’s system of financing education, ruling that because of the gap between rich and poor school districts the financing formula had to be rewritten to achieve greater equity. This meant, essentially, that funding for poorer districts would have to be increased—either by taking funds away from the richer districts or by raising revenue through taxes. Clinton decided that he would seek, among other tax proposals, to raise the sales tax by one per cent, thus gaining enough revenue to increase funding in all school districts, across the board. In return, he would promise major improvement in the education offered in Arkansas schools—which had been ranked among the worst in the country in the Alexander report, a study of school financing published in 1978. And to lead the effort, as chairman of the committee that would develop the plan for this new day in education, the Governor appointed his wife.

For Hillary, it was in many ways a golden opportunity. It allowed her to emerge from the largely behind-the-scenes role she had had in his first term, and to do so on an issue that Arkansans would deem appropriate for the wife of their governor. And, not incidentally, it was one that fell within the area—children’s issues—that she had decided to focus on back in the early seventies, when she worked for the Children’s Defense Fund, and had continued to address in various pro-bono activities (for example, as a board member of the C.D.F.). Moreover, she would now be able to connect with the people of the state in a personal way.

For several months, Hillary Clinton travelled the state, attending a number of the seventy-five county hearings, where she listened to parents, teachers, students, administrators, and concerned citizens. When she addressed a group of legislators with the committee’s interim findings, her performance (a foreshadowing of her 1993 congressional testimony) was so masterly that State Representative Lloyd George, a cattle farmer from Danville and a constant critic of Bill Clinton’s, leaped to his feet and uttered a remark that would become legend in Arkansas: “Gentlemen, we’ve elected the wrong Clinton!” (“That was an endearing but sexist statement,” Betsey Wright commented. “They were so amazed that a woman could be so smart.”) It was, in any event, the start of what Max Brantley refers to as “a strong Hillary following, almost a cult,” explaining, “She became a celebrity. People loved her speeches, and her sincerity was believable.”

While this process triumphantly established Hillary Clinton’s bona fides with a considerable segment of the population of Arkansas, that may have been its chief accomplishment. It was designed to look like an exhaustive fact-finding process (hence the seventy-five hearings), which would culminate in the deliberations of the committee and conclude with its recommendations. But Kai Erickson, who was then the executive director of the Arkansas Education Association, explained to me, “Those meetings were set up by the governor’s office. They were political—basically, getting people to agree there was a problem, so that the solutions already devised would be accepted. It was to look like fact-finding. Hillary probably picked up a few things here and there, but not much.”

While ardent Hillary Clinton supporters, like the consultant Dick Morris, go as far as to claim that these recommendations were “in the vanguard of educational reform in this country” (“It’s the key achievement of her life,” Morris told me), experts agree that a number of the committee’s recommendations were substantially similar to an initiative that had been proposed by the Arkansas Education Association in 1979. Not only did the blueprint already exist but the committee—in calling for smaller class sizes, more required courses in every high school, and the establishment of a state-administered Minimum Performance Test to be given in the third, sixth, and eighth grades—was far from the vanguard. Gloria Cabe, who was deeply involved in the education effort of 1983 and also in one in the late eighties, said of the 1983 standards, “It was really just bringing Arkansas in line with the rest of the country. The single greatest outcome of Hillary’s work was that Arkansas began to value education more. It was that, more than any specific, demonstrable improvement.”

The new policy may have been fairly commonplace, but getting it through the legislature with a tax increase required political dexterity. In a television address just before the legislature was briefed, the Clintons unveiled a decision known only to the inner circle: they would introduce a basic-skills teacher test. According to a key member of Clinton’s staff, it was Hillary who proposed the idea. Kai Erickson told me, “There was a great schism. The idea of a teacher test was understood to have appeal to those white parents who felt that black teachers were not competent. The black teachers, though, felt that it was racist.”

The A.E.A. mounted a fierce battle against the test, declaring it to be a gimmick, an attempt at a simplistic quick fix. Max Brantley, then the editor of the Gazette, told me, “The teacher test was a cynical ploy. It was a meaningless test. It did little to improve the quality of teaching. It was clearly done to get the tax increase.” In fact, no one I spoke to in Arkansas had a kind word for the test as a meaningful tool for achieving teacher competency.

The opposition was vehement, but the Clintons were immovable. Some people who opposed the test believed this was due more to Hillary’s resolve than to Bill. “The test was Hillary,” one person declared. “Bill Clinton is more of a compromiser. He’ll try to bring the parties together.”

Starr, for his part, was pleased by the rift that the teacher test caused between Clinton and some of his constituents. “Bill was a little afraid of the political implications, but, because of me and others, he became convinced that it was the price he had to pay,” Starr recalled. “And the next election”—in 1984—“was the easiest one he had. For two or three years, he got rid of the special-interest groups, the A.E.A. and the blacks. He told them to go stuff it. He called me once and said the blacks were on his ass. I told him, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll go after the blacks—I’ll get them so mad at me they’ll forget about you!’ I called them ‘pipsqueak preachers.’ ” Starr chuckled at the memory.

While time and expediency eventually led to a reconciliation between Clinton and the A.E.A., even Hillary’s confirmed supporters, when questioned directly, tend not to defend the teacher test. United States District Court Judge Henry Woods—who presided over the Little Rock school—desegregation case for years and, in 1987, appointed Hillary counsel to a special committee in that case, because, he said, “she has one of the finest legal analytical minds I have ever come across”—looked intently at me for several moments after I said to him that, from everything I had heard, it seemed that the test was meritless and, in addition, was intended to appeal to the racist segment of the population. Then he said, “Well, but they couldn’t have passed the legislation without it.”

While Hillary’s friends—emphasizing that the reforms as a whole benefitted the people of Arkansas—defend the test as an act of political pragmatism, Hillary herself appears to have trouble reconciling this instance of expediency with her sense that she is a person of high moral purpose. When she was hissed by teachers in Arkansas, according to Martha Sherrill in the Washington Post, she told her friend Diane Blair, “It’s heartbreaking, but someday they will understand.”

Hillary Clinton’s experience in education reform was fairly anomalous for her during her years in Arkansas, in that she was playing an overtly political role. More often, her political power was indirect, wielded through Bill Clinton. It was surely a compromise—in which this strong-willed, immensely capable woman had to give up the gratification of being true agent. But, as President Clinton told me in one of our conversations, “A lot of my public life has been our life. We’ve done it together.” This arrangement was very much contingent upon his continuing success; he said, “After I got beat”—in the governor’s race in 1980—“I was concerned about it. I just didn’t know if it was going to be good for her career-wise.” But then, of course, they achieved his comeback together, and “from thereafter I think on balance it was always better . . . than I thought it would be for her.”

Hillary Clinton was navigating tricky terrain: she was her husband’s full partner—who, moreover, appears to have shared his long-range and consummate political goal—and was also a practicing attorney. And her activities as a lawyer at least on some occasions suggest not separation from Clinton’s political ambit but, rather, a fusion of interests.

In what has become the most famous illustration of that apparent fusion, in 1985 she represented Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan before the state securities commissioner, whom her husband had appointed. A state-chartered S. & L., Madison was owned by James McDougal—a financial backer of Bill Clinton and, with his then wife, Susan, the Clintons’ business partner in the ill-fated Whitewater Development Company land venture. For Hillary Clinton, it was a matter in which—even if the canon of legal ethics was not violated—there was at least the appearance of impropriety, because she was representing her and her husband’s business partner before her husband’s appointee. McDougal’s acquisition of Madison also made the Clintons’ involvement in Whitewater even more problematic. More serious questions about Whitewater, of course, have been raised and are now being addressed by the Independent Counsel. (Were any funds improperly channelled from Madison to Whitewater, or to Clinton’s gubernatorial campaign? Did the Clintons benefit at the expense of taxpayers whose money was used to bail out Madison after federal regulators took it over, in 1989?) In any event, the Whitewater deal itself, a supposedly equal arrangement, resulted in the Clintons’ reportedly losing forty-six thousand dollars against the McDougals’ ninety-two thousand. The Clintons have frequently argued that because they lost money on Whitewater nothing unethical could have occurred—as if what seems to amount to the forgiving of a debt on McDougal’s part did not constitute a gift.

Although in the case of Madison Hillary Clinton was willing to represent her and her husband’s business partner before a state commissioner appointed by him, it was a type of conflict she was capable of recognizing in at least one other instance: after Ellen Brantley was appointed a state judge by Bill Clinton, Hillary told Brantley that she would decline to appear before her.

On another occasion, Hillary appears to have recognized a conflict but chose to skirt it with a technicality. A lawyer who has known Hillary since the seventies told me that she was heavily involved in the legal defense of an ethics-in-government initiative that Governor Clinton succeeded in getting approved by the voters in 1988—an act that, among other things, required disclosure of potential conflicts of interest by state legislators but not by the governor and other elected or appointed officials. This lawyer said it became plain to him, “seeing her in and out of this process for some time, how strong she was in guiding the whole thing.” He explained, “There, Webb Hubbell”—one of the three “basketball players” who were so good at passing to one another—“was recruited to chip in. Because she was not going to have her name on the pleadings, but she could turn to Webb.” When the Times reported, in March of 1992, that Bill Clinton and his advisers had “altered” the initiative “so that he and other public officials were exempt from the requirements, imposed on legislators, to disclose potential conflicts of interest,” Hillary denied ever having discussed specific provisions of it with Hubbell.

It was in the Little Rock school-desegregation case, however, that Hillary Clinton’s dual roles—as an independent lawyer and as her husband’s political ally—became most visibly entwined. Through the seventies, the student population of the Little Rock school district had become increasingly black, mainly because white families had been moving to the suburbs. In 1982, Judge Henry Woods found overwhelming proof “that the Housing Authorities, real estate operators, school board members in the defendant districts, and the State of Arkansas had all collaborated to produce a decided trend toward an all-black Little Rock School District.” To reverse this, he ordered the consolidation of a number of districts, but that move was upset by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals—an “unmitigated disaster,” in his view. Between 1982 and 1985, the percentage of black students rose and white flight accelerated. In 1987, Judge Woods appointed a committee to help refine yet another plan proposed by the Little Rock school district, and he appointed Hillary Clinton to the committee. As Woods said, emphasizing the breadth of her role, “I called on Hillary a lot—she was not just functioning as adviser to the committee.”

John Robert Starr went as far as to claim that “that case would never have been settled without what she did behind the scenes. There were a number of us who were in constant phone conversation with each other. And there would be two people who were very far apart, and they’d say, ‘We’re meeting with Hillary this afternoon,’ and then they’d be together—in a way the rest of us could accept. Hillary did that.” Starr added that he did not mean to suggest that he was “officially” part of this group but, rather, that he was “an outside member in touch with every member of the group.”

Beth Deere, clerk to Judge Woods, confirmed that Hillary was “instrumental in getting people to sit down and talk to each other. She was the facilitator, yes.” But she added, “While it’s fair to say she facilitated a lousy plan, she didn’t write it.”

In January of 1989, the parties finally agreed on a six-year student-assignment plan that, in essence, allowed the schools to remain segregated—white schools would remain white, and in return black schools would receive extra funds from the state, and in theory become more attractive to white students. In the financial part of the settlement (which Hillary did not negotiate), the state agreed to pay the mostly black Little Rock school district seventy-three million dollars over ten years—an agreement that was considered a good deal for the state. Had the parties not reached a settlement and the court ruled how much the state had to pay, Deere said, “then it would have been more money.” She added, “An objective person would say, ‘If you can get the state out for seventy-three million, take the money and run!’ ” According to Starr, “The main thing for her”—Hillary—“was to get the state out” for the seventy-three million.

A man who knew the Clintons well said, “Politically, the settlement was a big deal for Bill. . . . He was lobbying for it heavily” in the legislature, where legislators had to vote to apportion the seventy-three million dollars. “It would help resolve all the fighting and finally get the Little Rock school case out of the courts. He was getting ready to run—and he was going to run on education.” From Clinton’s perspective, this man added, some resolution, even one that would not bear close scrutiny, was better than none.

Judge Woods, however, did not agree. He pointed out that the plan would result in “progressive segregation of elementary schools.” He also objected to the fact that two million dollars in fees for the plaintiffs’ lawyers was coming out of the settlement.

According to a friend of Judge Woods, when the judge’s rejection of the settlement was appealed, Hillary Clinton asked the judge if she could argue his position—opposing the agreement she had facilitated—before the Eighth Circuit. When I asked Judge Woods if this was true, he hesitated, and then said slowly, “I don’t recall.”

“Hillary called him and said, ‘Please appoint me to this and I’ll defend your position,’ ”the judge’s friend said. “But Judge Woods was not about to have her do it. He said to me, ‘God damn, she’s not going to argue to put that’ ”—the agreement she had facilitated—“ ‘aside. She’ll argue, but she won’t argue it right. She’s a politician.’ ”

When I asked Judge Woods’ friend how, given the fact that Hillary had helped to facilitate the agreement and, even more important, was married to the Governor, she could have even suggested to the judge that she argue this case, he said, “The only way I can explain it is that she and Judge Woods were such good friends that even though she’s Bill’s wife Henry might let her argue it.” He added that Judge Woods might have been momentarily tempted, because “Henry just hangs the moon on Hillary.” This situation was curious. As counsel to the committee (and adviser to the judge), Hillary was arguably in a position of potential conflict, since she had a political interest (her husband’s) in achieving a settlement and getting the situation dispatched. Indeed, according to Starr, she then assumed a role far beyond her appointed one and became a critical facilitator in achieving agreement among all the parties. To have then sought to argue against (ostensibly) the very agreement she had helped mediate was almost breathtakingly audacious.

In any event, the Eighth Circuit ruled against Woods and upheld the settlement. According to a report issued this year by the Harvard Project on School Desegregation, it has been an abject failure. The hope of attracting white students to the more heavily funded schools has been shown to be a chimera; the programs in those schools were ill conceived and poorly carried out; and the test scores of black students in those schools have actually dropped. The Harvard Project report concludes, “This ‘desegregation’ program was effectively used to avoid desegregation. . . . Today, a separate but ‘more than equal’ program is in place, financially endangered, so far unbeneficial and accountable to virtually no one.”

Because of the priority that Hillary placed on her husband’s political career (she took time off to work on his campaigns) and on her pro-bono activities, she did not earn as much as she could have if she had devoted herself to her law practice full time. However, she sought to compensate for that lost income in other ways, by serving on corporate boards, for example. She also apparently helped to oust the onetime chairman of the Rose firm, C. Joseph Giroir, Jr.—a move that coincided with changes in the compensation system at Rose that particularly benefitted her (intangibles such as “civic involvement” and “reputation” would carry much more weight than before).

Betsey Wright told me, “It was Hillary who decided that she wanted them to be financially secure, and took the steps to accomplish that. Those decisions you wouldn’t expect Bill Clinton to make—he doesn’t care about those things. Bill Clinton would live under a bridge—as long as it was O.K. with Chelsea. He just doesn’t care. But Hillary did.”

Some of the steps she took were quite extraordinary. An article by Jeff Gerth in the Times last March revealed that back in 1978 and 1979 Hillary—with the assistance of James Blair, who was then outside counsel to Tyson Foods, a big poultry-processing company—had made nearly a hundred thousand dollars by trading in agricultural-commodities futures. Here, too, there was, at the very least, the appearance of a conflict of interest; namely, Arkansas’s First Lady (Bill Clinton was elected governor in 1978, soon after Hillary opened her trading account) receiving valuable advice from an individual whose major client stood to gain from favorable treatment by the state. One might argue that Tyson, as one of the largest employers in the state, was likely to receive friendly treatment from Clinton (or any governor) anyway, and, further, that Jim Blair, who married one of Hillary’s closest friends in 1979, would probably have proffered that assistance whether or not he was counsel for Tyson. Still, it created an unseemly appearance.

As more details have emerged, the episode has become more suggestive. Hillary made that sum of nearly a hundred thousand dollars from an initial stake of a thousand dollars. Remarkably, she appears to have made fifty-three hundred dollars in her first day of trading. And, according to a recent New Republic article by James K. Glassman, she apparently did not receive margin calls, most notably in July, 1979, when, by Glassman’s calculations, she should have come up with $117,500 to maintain her positions; she did not, but the market turned, and she emerged a winner.

As Hillary has now acknowledged, James Blair was her frequent adviser, and even placed many of her trades for her with the broker they both used, Robert L. (Red) Bone, in the Springdale, Arkansas, office of REFCO, a Chicago-based brokerage chaired by the freewheeling commodities trader Thomas Dittmer. Bone, a crony of Jim Blair’s, had been an employee of Tyson Foods in the early seventies, when he, Don Tyson (the company’s chairman and C.E.O.), the company itself, and other parties were accused of manipulating the egg-futures market; they settled the case with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 1977, and Bone was barred from trading commodities for his own account for a year. (He was later disciplined by the commission for continuing to trade in defiance of the prohibition and, using a front man, making profits of more than a million dollars.) As the cattle market began to rise in the spring of 1978, the Springdale office, where Bone was a co-manager—and where not only Jim Blair but also Tyson Foods had accounts—was on a roll.

Jim (Doc) Holladay, a broker at A. G. Edwards & Sons, in nearby Fayetteville, told me, “For about a year and a half or so, they”—the brokers in the REFCO office in Springdale—“could do no wrong. Red was known as a plunger”—he had once been a professional poker player. “And he made a trillion dollars for a whole lot of people.” Acknowledging that in the commodities market there is a loser for every winner, Holladay exclaimed, “Nobody in northwest Arkansas was losing! Nobody that was with Red Bone!”

The commodities market is one of the most speculative, highly leveraged, and, therefore, high-risk financial markets; unlike the stock market, where margin requirements generally mandate that the buyer put up fifty per cent of the price of the stock, in the commodities market the margin requirements are roughly five per cent. The allure of leverage is that it allows one to obtain the maximum impact from one’s investment, but it is disastrous when prices begin to fall. “It’s a fool’s game,” Holladay declared. “When people ask Don Tyson whether they should go into the commodities market, he says, ‘If you can take twenty thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills and walk up on a windy hill and tear them up and watch them blow away, and it doesn’t bother you, then you should go into the commodities market.’ ”

But, Holladay recalled, there was a time in 1979 when Jim Blair apparently thought he knew how to beat the odds of this high-stakes game. “He walked in my office and told me, ‘I have finally got the commodities market figured out,’ ” Holladay recalled. “I said, ‘Until now, I thought you were one of the smartest people I ever knew.’ And six months later he said, ‘You were right.’ ” When the market turned in the fall of 1979, Blair was caught; in a lawsuit he filed shortly thereafter against REFCO, reportedly alleging that the brokerage had caused the collapse by manipulating cattle prices, he claimed that his family lost in excess of fifteen million dollars. (The suit was later settled, and the record was sealed. The Wall Street Journal has filed a motion with the court to unseal that record, and Blair is opposing it.)

Hayden McIlroy, a customer of the Springdale office who sued REFCO in 1980—and who was for a time represented by Hillary Clinton—testified that he began trading with REFCO, in May of 1978, in part on the advice of James Blair. “I got the opinion from him that he was high on REFCO,” McIlroy testified. “He thought the concept that REFCO controlled the cattle market, that they were the biggest cattle traders . . . that everybody in the organization traded together would work.” (Blair has denied telling McIlroy that REFCO controlled the cattle market.)

In December, 1979, not long after the market turned, Bone, the pied piper of this group, was disciplined by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for serious and repeated violations of record-keeping functions, order entry procedures, margin requirements, and hedge procedures” while trading in cattle in 1978 and 1979. REFCO, moreover, was fined two hundred and fifty thousand dollars—at that time the largest fine ever imposed on a broker in the history of commodity-futures trading.

It is against this backdrop that continuing questions about Hillary Clinton’s trading have been raised. While she has said that her initial stake of a thousand dollars was something that she felt her family could afford, she would have had to be risking far, far in excess of that in order to achieve her initial, dazzling return of over five hundred per cent in the first day’s trading. John Coffee, a securities-and-corporate-law professor at the Columbia University School of Law, noted that it has been determined by the Wall Street Journal that, given the price movements in the cattle market that day, she would have had to own about seventeen contracts of cattle to get the return she did, and said, “It’s unusual in two regards. First, that a novice trader would make that large an investment on the first day—here, possibly jeopardizing their life savings. And, second, that the broker would have done that without there being significant cash or collateral in the account.”

Coffee went on about that first day’s return, “There are several signs that are associated with familiar kinds of trading abuses. There was Bone’s failure to maintain books and records. That can allow you to allocate trades later”—that is, improperly allocate winning trades to favored customers after the results are known. “And, with Jim Blair’s being a heavy trader, often placing trades for other customers, the broker may have been willing to accommodate him, and not ask much in the way of margin. The logical scenario here is that the person the broker knows says to buy twenty contracts, and then assigns them to friends.” And he added, “It’s legally hard to detect.” (Bone has denied allocating trades, and Blair has denied knowing of any such allocations.)

It seems an aberration: Hillary Clinton, who from her girlhood had her feet planted so firmly on the ground, who even as a young woman did nothing to excess, who was tempted by none of the risk-prone behaviors of her contemporaries, decided to risk a substantial portion of her and Bill’s net worth by entering one of the most high-risk of all financial markets, and by gambling heavily in the course of her first day. It is, of course, possible that she did not know about Bone’s checkered record; possible that she was unaware of many of the irregular practices in which he, and REFCO, were later found to have indulged. But it seems unlikely that she was unaware of the leniency that she was receiving with regard to margin requirements, and even more unlikely that she did not feel, as she was on this particular high wire, that there was some kind of safety net beneath her.

The appearance of the situation has not been helped by the fact that the White House, in response to questions from the press, has given such changing versions of what took place. At Hillary Clinton’s press conference on April 22nd, a reporter said, “Mrs. Clinton, one of the things that has made all of this so controversial is the shifting accounts of what happened. Because initially the White House explained that you were consulting Blair and many others and reading the Wall Street Journal, and then later had to correct that. And we found out that Mr. Blair was, in fact, most often placing your trades for you, phoning the trades in. Why was the account—why did the account have to be corrected? Why was it not explained accurately the first time?”

Hillary responded by referring at some length to the difficulty of reconstructing events of some fifteen years ago, and of trying to piece together records from such a distant period. “Sometimes we’d find part of something. Sometimes we’d then find the rest of it,” she said. “But the fundamental facts have not changed,” she went on. “I mean, the fundamental facts are, as I have said: I opened an account with my money. I made the trades. It was nondiscretionary. I took the risk. I was the one who made the decision to stop trading. And that I did rely on Jim Blair. I used some other advice as well, but he was my principal adviser in this.”

“But that wasn’t a question of documents, that particular fact, the fact that he was really driving the trading for you,” the same reporter pointed out. “I guess I wanted to re-ask that question again. Why— That would be something you would remember or not remember without documentary support, so why was that fact not made clear?” And then—inadvertently giving Hillary an escape hatch—she added, “And were you essentially riding on his coattails when you traded?”

“No, I wasn’t. I was riding on the money I invested,” Hillary responded, thus choosing the second question, with its opportunity for easy denial, and ignoring the primary question—one that she had already sidestepped once and for which there was, seemingly, no presentable answer. Later in the press conference, when a reporter asked, for the third time, about the shifting accounts of Blair’s role, Hillary reiterated that they were her trades, despite the fact that “very often he placed them for me,” and then fell back on what was apparently her last resort—contrition, not for wrongdoing but for having given insufficient attention to the press’s needs. And the reason for that, she pointed out, was that she was so absorbed in working for the common good. “I’m not in any way excusing any confusion that we have created. I think we have created it because I don’t think that we gave enough time or focussed enough. You know, I have been travelling, and I’m more committed to health care than anything else I do. I probably did not spend enough time, get as precise . . . ”

In response to questions about whether she received margin calls when her account was short of money, Hillary responded, “I think Mr. Melamed”—the former chairman of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange—“said, based on his review of the records, there were a couple of occasions when I was under margin. Nobody ever called and asked me for anything—they just, I guess, took the money that I had in the account and closed out the position.” But one person intimately familiar with the workings of the Springdale office at that time says that margin calls were automatically dispatched by mail from the Chicago office. “So when she said that her broker didn’t call her,” this person continued, “she should have been asked, But didn’t you get the letter about the margin call in the mail? And did you disregard it? Or did you call your broker? Or—the third possibility—did you call Blair, and did he take it upon himself to cover it, or to take care of it with Bone?”

Hillary left the market with her hundred-thousand-dollar gain in the summer of 1979, shortly before the rout. Around the same time, this person privy to the Springdale-office workings continued, there was a party at which Hillary and a friend were making rather pious pronouncements about the lax regulation of the commodities market. “They saw it as too laissez-faire. They had more of a leaning toward more government regulation, rules,” this person recalled, saying that they saw it as “not socially acceptable, dealing in such large sums of money, such greed.” This person added, “As I went out the door, I said, ‘Give the money back—I’ll give it to a charity! Give the money back!’ ”

Hillary’s commodities-trading episode seemed to echo the same bedrock question posed by the Whitewater situation: whether the Clintons, once Bill was in public office, knowingly received private financial benefits from individuals who stood to gain from favorable treatment by the state. We may never know whether or not Hillary Clinton’s trading experience benefitted from some form of preferential treatment from Bone, possibly emanating from Blair—or, perhaps, from Tyson through Blair. When she was asked on “Larry King Live” whether she would give permission to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to release trading records that might provide some illumination, she said, “I’ll sure consider that.”

In July of 1987, during a press conference at which Bill Clinton was to announce his candidacy for the Presidency, he announced instead that he had decided not to run, mentioning his commitment to his family, and the fact that Chelsea was only seven—and, standing beside him, the famously composed Hillary Clinton wept. Max Brantley later recalled a conversation he had had with Clinton shortly before that announcement. They were at a softball game, in which Chelsea and the Brantleys’ daughter were both playing. Gary Hart had dropped out of the race a couple of weeks before, after his extramarital escapades with Donna Rice became public. “When the game was over, Bill and I just sort of wandered off,” Brantley said. “He said he had just talked to Gary Hart, and commiserated with him—which set him on to talking about what he would have done, in Hart’s position. ‘I would’ve said, “We all make mistakes, we all have things in our past that we don’t want to talk about, that are between us and our God. We’ve all done things we’re embarrassed about. When are we ever forgiven? When do we leave the past behind us?” ’ Clearly, he was saying he had done things, and he didn’t know at what point it would be safe to run. By that time, there was long-rumored trouble on the women issue.” Brantley went on to say that, in retrospect, “it was clear to me—hearing his voice, seeing how he looked—that it was the major reason for his choosing not to run.”

One adviser to the Clintons pointed out to me that after Bill Clinton’s shattering defeat in 1980 it was Hillary who decided to come to the fore and manage him into a comeback. With the help of Betsey Wright, she had done that. Her determination and her continuing influence were widely recognized. Tommy Robinson, a member of Governor Clinton’s first cabinet, was echoing what seemed a consensus when he told me, “After he came back, she was going to make sure he never lost again.” Her influence is said to have reached into all areas of his life, even to regulating the amount of time he could spend relaxing with friends. “Hillary says I have half an hour,” one friend of Clinton’s recalled his announcing as he arrived at a get-together. To be, in this sense, Bill Clinton’s handler could not have been an easy or a congenial role for Hillary, this person added. “Bill is in the moment, and Hillary is programmed to the minute.”

One aspect of Bill Clinton’s life that must have been insusceptible to her management, however, was his sexual conduct; quite apart from the pain that allegations of his infidelity may have caused her, they were jeopardizing Clinton’s political future. (His staff apparently made an effort at control: one of Clinton’s aides told me that she considered it part of her job to monitor the Governor at parties, interposing herself between him and purposefully flirtatious women, of whom, she said, there were legions.) “She loves him very much. She suffers. She draws closer, pulls back,” one friend told me. “Depending on how he’s treating her, at times she’s happy, at other times, depressed. You can see it.” Such a classic image of a victim did not square with the Hillary Clinton that many Arkansans knew; it was difficult for them to imagine this aggressive, intimidating, intensely self-confident woman allowing herself—even for the sake of an abiding love and the preservation of her family—to be trampled on by anyone. Max Brantley said, “It’s hard even for those who admire and respect and love Hillary not to believe that she made a pact with the devil.”

Though what she has done, in enduring, is plain, how she has done it is a matter of varied speculation even among her friends. One friend recalls that after Bill Clinton’s brother, Roger, was arrested for possession of cocaine in 1984, Virginia Kelley and her two sons went into therapy. “Bill said to me, ‘Everyone overdoes something—drugs, food, sex. Everyone has some area that is out of control, that is an obsession.’ I think that Hillary came to accept it as a problem Bill had.” Others assert that, increasingly, she sought solace in religion.

It is certainly true that she has become more religious. Diane Blair said that when she met Hillary, in the mid-seventies, she was not aware of Hillary’s spiritual side. “Social conscience, yes—that was what drew us together. But by the early eighties she had started saying things like ‘Diane, you have such a wonderful soul—why do you fight it?’ And I would say to her, ‘Hillary, are you going religious on me?’ ” Ellen Brantley, too, who first got to know Hillary well in the Fayetteville years, said that in the eighties she was surprised at how churchgoing Hillary had become.

What is clear is that in more recent years, at least, Hillary has generally not sought to deal with her travails by confiding in friends. Jan Piercy told me, “She is so shrewd. She has known all along that people around them would be placed in a position of being interviewed by the press—and, while she as a public figure has been very schooled in how you protect your privacy, she realized that her friends wouldn’t have that sophistication. So she has kept her own counsel. She has not availed herself of what the rest of us do—crying on someone’s shoulder. She has extraordinary self-possession and discipline.”

Betsey Wright told me that Hillary had, on occasion, confided her personal troubles to her. “Hillary can separate personal emotions from the goal and task ahead in a way that very few women can,” Wright said. “That is part of the investment in the marriage—the ability to keep going when others would have a cry, at the very least, before they go on. She knows it’s there, knows it hurts, knows it’s wrong, but she controls it as a separate thing from what the goal or project is.” To the suggestion that Hillary deals with emotions in a way that is more typical of many men, Wright replied, “I don’t even think men do it the way Hillary does. It is such an extreme extension of self-discipline that it is not even self-discipline.”

This trait is something that Hillary Clinton applies to all aspects of her life, Wright emphasized. “She knows herself so well. I would give anything to know myself as well as Hillary knows herself. She knows what she needs, and she makes sure she gets it. . . . She takes care of herself, physically and emotionally. . . . Even her rest and recreation is purposeful. She knows she needs to laugh, and she gets that for herself. . . . She would just peel herself off the campaign trail when she needed some solitude, or to have time with Chelsea.”

If Wright seems to marvel at Hillary and to wish that in some ways she could emulate her, she is not unique. Several of Hillary Clinton’s friends seem to regard her with a degree of awe—not so much because of her intellect as because of what they see as extreme fortitude (in bearing her private sorrow), a rare ability to shape the events of her life according to her design, and a power of perception which to them is profound. These women seem not to consider Hillary Clinton a peer; indeed, they are, in a sense, more followers than friends. The role of exemplar was one to which even the young Hillary Rodham appeared to be drawn; and it seems to have grown only more comfortable over time.

Several women described utterances of hers—generally about something affecting their personal lives—as though they verged on the oracular. Bev Lindsey, who has known Hillary well for years but does not consider herself a close friend, told me about a situation in which she and her husband, Bruce, were at odds over the question of whether their daughter, Katie, a committed dancer, should pursue an ambitious course involving auditions in various parts of the country and perhaps a summer spent dancing in New York. Her husband favored it, but she was concerned about pushing the child too hard. And one day, as this debate continued, Hillary called her. “She said, ‘I want to talk about Katie’s dancing. I want you to realize that she is a remarkable dancer. And there is a difference between our pushing them and their pushing themselves.’ ” Lindsey went on, “I have at times felt—I don’t want to use the word ‘envious,’ I don’t mean that she has so much and I wish she didn’t and I had it. But she seems to be able to have all these different parts of life. My friends and I talk about it all the time.” She cited the conflicting demands of professional life, children, one’s spouse, and one’s own needs. “And you can’t have it all. But then Hillary seems to.” After a pause, Lindsey added the caveat that she didn’t know what Hillary’s relationship with Bill Clinton really was, or whether she had any true closeness with friends. As for the marriage, “I have seen affection between them when it was not staged,” she said. “Once, I watched them go down a corridor, and they didn’t know that I was there at the end of it, and they were laughing together.”

And so?

“Well, I mean it was striking, that they were going out to run or something, laughing, playful. You almost never see Bill and Hillary at play.”

Hillary’s relationship with her daughter seemed different, Lindsey continued. “With Chelsea, she is warm and tender—and provocative, too, stressing intellect. I remember we spent a day at art galleries in Seattle, and Chelsea could discuss line, form, color, in a way that wasn’t forced. She was interested. And they were playful together, holding hands, skipping across the street. So maybe it’s with Chelsea that she expresses that part of her spirit.”

At least one friend claims that the Clintons’ marital problems reached a new level of intensity in late 1989. This may have contributed to indecision about their political future. Clinton was saying that he was undecided about whether to run for governor again in 1990, and Hillary is said to have been giving some thought to running herself. Of course, it would hardly have been practicable for her to become governor and for her husband to run for the Presidency in 1992, in the middle of her term. (It was one thing for him to leave a lieutenant governor in charge while he campaigned for the Presidency, but it would have been somewhat more awkward for her to absent herself in order to campaign for her spouse.) In any event, for a time neither seemed able to come to a decision. When I asked Dick Morris, Bill Clinton’s Arkansas strategist, whether they had contemplated divorce, he replied, “No comment.” He also declined to say how serious Hillary’s consideration of running for governor had been.

Judge Woods recalled a lunch given by the late Arkansas billionaire W. R. (Witt) Stephens, probably in late 1989, that Bill Clinton had attended. “He was thinking about whether or not to run for governor—because he was also thinking about running for the Presidency. He went around the room. I was next to last, and when he got to me I said, ‘I think you ought to run Hillary.’ I believe Witt said, ‘I agree.’ I know Witt said it to me.”

The idea of Hillary Clinton’s running for governor had been bandied about for years. Those who thought she would make a good governor, Max Brantley said, pointed out that, in contrast to her husband, “she didn’t waffle, she talked directly, she’d make the tough decisions,” and he went on, “There was a wisdom and clarity of conviction imputed to her.” One person Hillary Clinton talked to in late 1989 was her old friend Dorothy Stuck, a publications consultant in Little Rock. After some deliberation, Stuck told me, Hillary stayed on her prior course. “Her position has always been that her career dovetails with Bill’s. I thought that was the right decision.”

By the time Bill Clinton finally did announce his candidacy for governor, in early 1990, a Little Rock businessman named Tom McRae, convinced that Clinton was not going to run, had launched a campaign of his own. Clinton was now running for his fifth term as governor. “Only two people before me had ever been elected to more than two terms, and only two people had ever served more than six years as governor,” the President told me. “So I had already done ten. And to get elected for fourteen. . . I was afraid, too, that people might say— My popularity was very high in the state at the time. But I was afraid people might say, ‘Give this guy a gold watch, he’s done a good job—give him the gold watch!’ ”

As Clinton and McRae were heading for the Democratic primary, “we were really slipping,” a key Clinton strategist recalls. “The big issue was ‘Had Clinton been in too long?’ McRae was running ads with clocks. We decided that we had to engage McRae directly. Bill and Hillary felt that it would be better for Hillary to do it, because if Hillary did she would put him in an impossible position—he couldn’t answer back. Also, Bill didn’t want the negatives that might come with his doing it.”

Hillary Clinton accosted McRae at a press conference he gave. As McRae recalls it, Hillary said she just happened to be walking by and could not let pass the outrageous statements he was making; she unleashed a barrage of charges and he was at a loss to respond. According to the Clinton strategist, the tactic worked exactly as had been planned, and was an illustration of Hillary’s decision to appear publicly at that time as her husband’s “full political partner.” Still, some Arkansans considered it dirty pool; it was unheard of, locally, for someone to interrupt an opponent’s press conference, and, besides, it was Hillary having it both ways—attacking with her no-holds-barred litigator’s skills, as though she were the candidate herself, but being protected against any counterattack by virtue of being not the candidate but the First Lady. It was a gambit that was much repeated, on a far bigger stage, in years to come.

Over the span of her nearly two decades in Arkansas, Hillary Clinton had practiced to perfection this art of having it both ways. She had the satisfactions and the material rewards of her own career as a highly regarded lawyer, but, when the opportunity presented itself, she also used her role as a lawyer to further the Clintons’ political interests. From the time she was a young woman, she had staked out for herself the moral high ground, but she was always singularly adept at doing whatever had to be done politically, whether it meant cultivating Starr, instituting the teacher test, or facilitating the flawed settlement of the desegregation case. She was able to effect public policy through her behind-the-scenes activities, but she was never accountable. And, while she rightly came to be known for her good works, establishing a national reputation, in particular, as a defender of the interests of children (a reputation she would invoke in the Presidential campaign, saying, “I’ve worked very hard on education reform, worked very hard on children’s and family issues—to deal with the problems that are affecting this country”), she apparently did not place these sympathies ahead of what was best for Bill Clinton’s political well-being.

Political solidarity with other women is something Hillary has embraced only in recent years; previously, her attitude appears to have been almost a throwback to that of women superachievers of an earlier generation. Betsey Wright told me, “She was neither intimidated nor inhibited by any barrier or stereotype—so much so that any weakness she might have is a lack of empathy for others, for whom those barriers have been more difficult. Hillary barged through with such force that she didn’t even seem to take note.”

In August of 1987, when Robert MacCrate, then the president of the American Bar Association, asked Hillary Clinton to chair the just formed A.B.A. Commission on Women in the Profession, she hesitated. Lynn Hecht Schafran, a member of the commission, who is also an attorney with the National Organization of Women Legal Defense and Education Fund, told me, “Hillary didn’t see a need for it. I think she was like a lot of women who are very successful, closing their eyes and ears to what is going on around them.” MacCrate persevered anyway, and Hillary ultimately accepted. But she was still a skeptic. And, according to Schafran, who is an ardent Hillary Clinton booster, it was only when the commission held hearings, and, instead of listening to “sour grapes” stories, which were what she had been expecting, she witnessed “a parade of the most successful women in the country” testifying to the wrongs they had experienced, that she was persuaded. Even then, as Herb Rule pointed out to me, she embraced the cause “on a national level—not in Arkansas, where there would have been possible local antagonisms.” In any event, she remained chairman of the commission until 1991, and then resigned to help her husband campaign.

But it is on behalf of children that Hillary Clinton has long been a committed standard-bearer, driven by her unequivocal sense of what is right. She has been a national spokesperson on children’s issues since the seventies, and chaired the Children’s Defense Fund from 1987 to 1992. In 1977, she was one of the founders of Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, a public-policy organization that worked closely with C.D.F. over the years and participated in legal advocacy through partnerships with the Legal Services Corporation (which she had chaired in the late seventies). Marian Wright Edelman, the president and founder of C.D.F., told me, “Hillary is a long-hauler. Who thought about kids twenty years ago? She struggled in the garden when there were very few paths. Now they have become highways.”

Nonetheless, in July, 1991—just as Hillary and Bill Clinton were about to set out on the Presidential campaign trail—a child-welfare lawsuit, led by the National Center for Youth Law, Central Arkansas Legal Services, and Ozark Legal Services (another organization Hillary had helped establish), was filed against the state. Amy Rossi, the director of Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, who assisted both sides with their research, has worked with Hillary Clinton on children’s issues. She explained that the child-welfare system in the state had been insufficiently funded for many years. This problem was not peculiar to Arkansas—it affects many states—but it was particularly conspicuous there. The system had an annual fifty-per-cent turnover in personnel, and the staff was chronically inexperienced and overworked, with many caseworkers handling more than fifty families each. “We had been hearing a chorus from people across the board, through most of the eighties, saying we are going to have something horrible happen,” Rossi said. “There had been commissions and task forces, but they had never put the pins under things in terms of funding. We were documenting what was going on, we were testifying. And then, indeed, we had some really terrible things happen.” One child suffered severe injuries from abuse in foster care, and two others, whose conditions the state was supposed to have been monitoring, died. Rossi said, “These were not the kind of isolated incidents that sometimes occur and can’t be predicted—these were related to the system’s falling apart.”

Both Bill and Hillary Clinton had been apprised of the situation for years, and continued to be through the filing of the lawsuit, Rossi said, and a representative of C.D.F. was brought in to act as an intermediary with the state. Always, Bill Clinton had pleaded the state’s dearth of funds. Before the lawsuit was filed, Rossi continued, “I recall her”—Hillary—“saying to me, ‘These remedies are long in coming—have faith it will get done.’ ” According to Rossi, Arkansas Advocates had a tacit agreement with Hillary that, because of her position as First Lady, she wouldn’t interfere with them and they wouldn’t ask her for special favors.

While Rossi stressed that she understood the financial constraints under which the state operated, she said that more could have been done to find money. “The state was not maximizing federal funds,” she explained. (Funds were available under the Child Welfare and Adoption Assistance Act of 1980.) “In Arkansas, federal dollars are significant, because the state is so poor—you have to be creative and mindful and watchful of every federal-dollar opportunity. Why they didn’t get the federal dollars is the million-dollar question. I cannot tell you why they did not, except that it was a lack of leadership, it was letting other things drive you. The Clintons’ priority was education. The public sentiment was there for that, and the legislative sentiment.” She added, “These kids”—in the child-welfare system—are such a weak constituency.” She also said, “All the work Bill and Hillary had laid out was for education—it needed it. And, if you were going to look at the long-range system, it’s going to affect the largest number of kids. It’s a hard choice—and they made the hard choice.”

Once the lawsuit was filed, however, the politics of the situation changed, and Governor Clinton decided to settle the case. “That seemed to be the mind-set of both of them,” Rossi said, meaning Bill and Hillary. “They didn’t want a trial—couldn’t have stood to have a trial with the campaign going on.”

Immediately after the New Hampshire primary, Bill Clinton returned to Arkansas and, as cameras for the PBS television program “Frontline” recorded his moves, intensively lobbied the legislators to vote to accept a new bill that would settle the lawsuit. Clinton persuaded the legislators to spend fifty-seven million dollars to reform child welfare—though only a few months before he had claimed that the state could spare only sixteen million. After the bill was approved, Clinton said to the legislators, “I want to thank everybody from the bottom of my heart for giving the most troubled children in our state a chance to have a better life.” But the settlement turned out to be meaningless. Five weeks later, the Clinton administration initiated an appeal. The results are still pending.

Some liberals, who initially expected a great deal of the Clintons, eventually came to the conclusion that their political activities were often cynical. “After the 1980 loss, it was ‘O.K., we’ll do it their way,’ ” an Arkansan who has been active in liberal causes told me. “People would say to me, ‘Do they have any values?’ And I would say, ‘Well, yes, but their eyes are on the goal. And both of them will walk over anything to get there.’ This was, from the start, a partnership to save the world. We learned not to expect anything of Hillary. What was the one thing that she would go to the wall for? Bill’s Presidency.”

It was not until the Presidential campaign that any substantive question was raised about the connection between Hillary Clinton’s role as her husband’s partner and First Lady and her role as a practicing attorney. Jerry Brown, in a debate with Clinton before the Illinois primary, accused Bill Clinton—inaccurately—of having “funnelled money to” his wife’s law firm. Brown was alluding to a Washington Post article about Hillary’s representation of Madison Guaranty before the state regulator appointed by Bill Clinton. “That night, we caucused—the issue was what to do with Hillary the next day,” a Clinton campaign aide told me. “Some people said, ‘Keep her in the next day—let’s just protect our lead.’ But her view was that it was her home state, she had campaigned every day—and it would look stupid. So we decided to have her be with the Governor in a controlled setting. She was supposed to get up late, and meet him later. But the next morning she wanted to go to Sophie’s Busy Bee Diner with him. The plan was for him to come in through a back entrance and move toward the front, with the press, meanwhile, kept in the front. And we didn’t want him to, but the Governor strolled over to the press. There was a question about Madison, he turned to her, and she wasn’t prepared and didn’t know what to say. Maybe she should have said, ‘I did nothing wrong, and this is not about me but about my husband.’ Anyway, she had a deer-in-the-headlights look, and she said it.”

This was the moment when Hillary Clinton uttered the famous remark “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies,” which she worked so hard to overcome through the rest of the campaign. “It was under duress,” this aide stressed. “We tried to fix it right away, but she was resistant—and then it was too late.”

In retrospect, it seems illuminating that it was a question about her role vis-à-vis Madison that so unnerved Hillary Clinton, a seasoned campaigner, known for being cool under pressure and fast on her feet. And it is impossible not to wonder whether she feared examination of her roles in relation not only to Madison but also to Whitewater—where it seems plain that, of the two Clintons, she was the one more actively involved. It was she who took out a thirty-thousand-dollar loan to build a model home on the property (Herb Rule recalled her talking eagerly about the construction of a vacation home); it was she who, according to James McDougal, in 1987 requested that all Whitewater documents be sent to the Governor’s Mansion. On more than one occasion over the last several years, McDougal is said to have commented to friends, referring to the Clintons’ involvement in Whitewater, “Bill Clinton couldn’t balance a checkbook, but he has a wife who sure can.”

Hillary’s cookie blunder was also striking in that—in its all too evident expression of disdain—it created a small fissure in the façade she had created over the years. Ever since Bill Clinton’s comeback as governor, in 1982, she had been, in public, an increasingly empathic presence; indeed, she had a capacity for investing herself in the role of a character whose emotions and concerns corresponded to those of her audience.

She had begun to project this empathy in her touring of the state to promote education reform, and it became more compelling with time. Phillip Carroll, a senior partner in the Rose firm, told me that his wife, Diane, often recalled an occasion in the mid-eighties when a group of lawyers’ wives asked Hillary to speak at one of their meetings. “Diane said Hillary had spoken for about an hour, and one of her themes had been how important it was for women”—that is, women who had made such a choice—“to stay home and take care of their children. Hillary made all these women feel so good about their role in life,” Carroll told me. Similarly, Connie Fails recounted how, in the mid-eighties, she and her husband, Leslie Singer, had been attending a hairdressers’ convention in downtown Little Rock where Hillary was speaking. They listened for a while, and then, Fails recalled, “Leslie turned to me and said, ‘I think I want to be a hairdresser.’ Listening to her, all those hairdressers felt, I’m sure, ‘I chose the right job. I’m validated.’ ” And this skill was clearly demonstrated in Hillary’s recent press conference, where she appeared so respectful of the reporters’ role, so pleased, even, to be there, responding to their concerns.

The cookie statement, recalling an earlier, more arrogant and dismissive persona, was probably her single major misstep in the campaign. Most of the time, her instincts and her experience served her well—not surprisingly, because the campaign was, in a sense, the test for which she had been preparing during most of her adult life. The “war room,” commanded by James Carville and George Stephanopoulos, was, according to Carville, partly her inspiration. Though she balked somewhat at her makeover (“I hate this Ivana look,” she is said to have protested at one point, as her hair was turned ever lighter), she acceded to it; it was, after all, only a more successful version of what she’d undertaken in 1982. She resisted, to some degree, further repackaging attempts: she seems to have thought she was good enough at giving speeches not to need coaching; and, having worked for years at projecting a warmer, more caring personality, she could not have been pleased by a staff memo to Bill Clinton about the need to emphasize her human side; for example, it included a suggestion for “joint appearances with her friends where Hillary can laugh, do her mimicry.” Ultimately, however, she accepted such direction.

Still, the one episode in which no amount of coaching could have saved the day—when everything hinged on what Hillary could call up from within herself—began when Gennifer Flowers made her appearance, supported by audiotapes. Hillary and Bill Clinton were campaigning separately when the Flowers story broke. Bill Clinton returned to Little Rock. As he was waiting for Hillary to arrive at the Mansion, he seemed, one of his friends told me, suffused with dread. Whatever may have passed between them in private, though, Hillary Clinton’s public performance was a tour de force. She declared feelingly, on “60 Minutes,” “I honor what he’s been through”—words that came to seem especially strange in the light of later allegations about the nature and scope of Clinton’s sexual behavior. And when she appeared on ABC’s “PrimeTime Live,” with Sam Donaldson, she showed her mettle even more:

SAM DONALDSON: If the transcript is correct, she signs off a conversation saying, “Goodbye, darling,” and he says, “Goodbye, baby.”

HILLARY CLINTON: Oh, that’s not true. That’s just not true.

DONALDSON: That didn’t happen?

CLINTON: No, of course not.

DONALDSON: Or he says, you know, “They don’t have the pictures.”

CLINTON: Well, I’ll tell you what. This was a woman who at least pretended that her life was ruined because somebody had alleged that she had a relationship at some point with Bill Clinton. Anybody who knows my husband knows that he bends over backwards to help people who are in trouble and is always willing to listen to their problems

In someone with less self-confidence and authority than Hillary Clinton, these words might have seemed blatantly evasive and disingenuous. Gary Hart’s wife, Lee, who had looked so vulnerable, could never have delivered such lines successfully. But Hillary, by the force of her personality, succeeded in convincing the American public that, whatever had gone on, if its resolution was good enough for her it ought to be good enough for the public. And, with that, she salvaged her husband’s bid for the Presidency.

In January of 1993, having come to her husband’s rescue, and attained the White House, Hillary Clinton decided to lead health-care reform. It would enable her to connect with the American people on a subject that mattered, in a real and very personal way, to virtually everyone; and not only would it be the major legislative initiative of Clinton’s term but—if it succeeded—it would be, arguably, the most far-reaching social legislation since the New Deal.

One friend of hers told me recently, “Hillary believes that if you’re not in control of events, events control you. Remember all that East Wing–West Wing talk?” This was a reference to stories in the press in the early days of the Clinton Administration about the fact that Hillary, unlike former First Ladies, was to have not only the traditional East Wing office but also one in the West Wing, upstairs from the Oval Office. “You don’t hear that talk anymore. You say ‘Hillary’ and you think, Health care. You don’t think, Was she writing the State of the Union Message? Was she making the decision on Lani Guinier? Was she making other appointment decisions?. . . People aren’t asking these questions. But if she didn’t have health care you couldn’t define her. There would be a sense of corrosive mystery about who she was and who she wasn’t.” But in fact, this person claimed, “she is doing those broad things.”

In one sense, her greatest success came in the early days of the project, before any plan was presented, as she courted members of Congress with a diligence and a resourcefulness reminiscent of her earlier cultivation of John Robert Starr. Back in Arkansas, too, Hillary had always made the personal gesture; people who did not consider themselves particularly close to her recounted having received a call or a note from her at times when they were anguished, and said that they were both surprised and moved by her kindness and thoughtfulness. Now, in Washington, those gestures of hers seem to have multiplied. One congressional aide told me, “A friend of mine wrote a note to Hillary after her dad died, about having made a contribution to his favorite charity. Hillary sent a note of thanks, and made a point at the White House Christmas party of coming over and telling her how much it meant to her. There is always the personal touch.”

Much as she had done in Arkansas, she travelled to town meetings, now throughout the country, where she listened as citizens—selected and screened but genuine—described their plights: underinsured, uninsured, uninsurable, and all in the face of some debilitating or catastrophic illness. She nodded, as she does so often when listening (“It’s an absorption technique,” Betsey Wright says), and responded with empathy and promises for change. She filed away story after painful story, to be retrieved for future use—for, like her husband, she learned long ago always to put a human face on an abstract problem. Her chief of staff, Margaret Williams, told me, “She really listens to people. It is her hallmark—how she deals with people personally and professionally. There will be a policy discussion on September 14th, and come December 14th she will say, ‘But remember when you said such-and-such?’ People say, ‘Is it a photographic memory? Is there some gimmick?’ No. It’s that she really listens. She can be in Pennsylvania, working a rope line, and she’ll run into a nurse or a parent who says, ‘This is what happened to me.’ And then she’ll be sitting with experts and professionals, and she will say, You know, I respect what you’ve said, I’ve read what you’ve written—but I spoke to this person, and she said it’s not that way.’ And then she will describe what that person told her.”

In the dozens of speeches that she delivered, often without notes, through the spring and fall, at colleges and medical centers, before organizations that were supporters, like Families U.S.A., and others, like the American Medical Association, that she was trying to win over, her signal traits were reflected. She seasoned her presentation with dire stories of people she’d encountered. And—whether she was speaking to a hairdressers’ convention or a group of lawyers’ wives—she took on the coloration of her audience. She might criticize the medical establishment in another setting, but when she spoke to the A.M.A. there was nothing adversarial or threatening in her approach; she gravitated, seemingly instinctively, to common ground.

Manifest, too, was her strong political intuition about how to sell the idea of universal coverage; she made clear that it was a matter of achieving security for every American. She said in a speech organized by Families U.S.A., in May of 1993, “Don’t just think about it in terms of the uninsured; we cannot win the national debate if that is the focus. The uninsured deserve to have security so that everybody will be more secure.” You may think you are secure, she would say time and again to her mainstream audiences, but take another look in the mirror: you could lose your job, you could change your job, and in the course of that flux you or a family member could develop an illness that would make you uninsurable. Having raised the spectre, she would drive home the point in the slogan “Until all people are secure, no one is.”

Her empathy was much in evidence as she recounted vignettes of personal tragedy, but laced with that empathy was, perhaps, a penchant for teaching others how they should live. In one story that she told many times, about a woman whose doctor had discovered a lump in her breast and had been told by a surgeon that since she had no insurance he would not biopsy it but, instead, “watch it for a while,” Hillary stressed as a preamble what a model of personal responsibility the woman had been. She worked, but her employer provided no insurance. “She was a single woman who had raised a child, and she went every year to have a physical exam. She tried to read what she needed to read, to eat the right things. She said to me she even tried to start exercising a few years ago and tried to walk every day.”

While the anecdote is probably intended to refute the widespread conservative view that there is no health-care crisis—that if the poor would only behave responsibly then many of their problems, brought on by themselves, would disappear—it seems to carry a troubling subtext: that it is the virtue of the sick that causes us to feel compassion for them. For Hillary, virtue seems to be the constant correlative, the springboard for her most ready sympathies.

Many people who have known Hillary over the years comment on the clarity and orderliness of her thought processes, and how accurately those qualities are reflected in her speech; it has even been suggested that there is in her spoken words a feeling for composition that a writer might envy. This is not always the case, as evidenced in her famous speech on the “politics of meaning” in Austin last year. But when she is speaking about a body of information in which she is well versed—as she was in the health-care presentations—she often does achieve an extraordinary fluency. And there are also occasions when she attempts to draw those larger connections of which she has always been enamored—in this case, between health care and a sense of community—and does so with eloquence.

She told a crowd assembled in Great Falls, Montana, in April, 1993, “Health care touches us at our most basic human-experience level. There’s nothing like the birth of a baby, or the death of a loved one. There’s nothing like walking those long hospital corridors or going out and seeing the joy on a person’s face when you tell them that everything is going to be all right. That’s how we really, at the very most basic level, understand what it means to be a human being; understand what it is about life that connects us from generation to generation; makes us reliant in a most fundamental way upon each other. We’ve gotten away from that. We’ve watched bureaucracies and paperwork and red tape and distance between people replace that human caring that needs to be at the root of any health-care system. And we can’t wave a magic wand and reverse time.

“But we can try—as you work here on Health Montana and as we work on trying to take this system and make it human again—to remember what is really important in our lives and those moments when we are so dependent upon each other. That’s what I hope—that in a few years we will not only have a streamlined system, will not only have a better distribution of health-care professionals, and have more primary and preventive-health-care physicians, and nurse practitioners, and physician assistants, will not only have better access but we’ll feel better about ourselves. Not just because we’re healthier, but because we’re part of a community of caring again. And health care can be the start of that if we do it right.”

Hillary Clinton’s testimony before the congressional committees in September was the triumphal climax of nine months in which her formidable political strengths—as advocate, proselytizer, marketer, and strategist—had been deployed to advantage. But this was prologue, because the battle had not yet been fully joined; the Clinton plan was still being formulated, and would not be disclosed in its gargantuan, thirteen-hundred-and-sixty-four-page entirety until the end of November. In the course of that substantive process—and also in the battles that began once the plan was presented—other, less salutary traits of Hillary’s came into play.

Hillary and Ira Magaziner, who had been chosen to manage the health-care effort, had first become aware of each other when both were featured in a spread in Life about student speakers—Hillary for her commencement address at Wellesley, Magaziner for his at Brown. His friendship, however, had really been with Bill, starting when they were both at Oxford as Rhodes Scholars. After a quixotic attempt to transform the small working-class town of Brockton, Massachusetts, into a model of social democracy, Magaziner had turned to more easily accomplished transformative pursuits: he became a highly successful management consultant for major corporations, was the co-author of three books about American industrial-competitiveness, and, in 1990, oversaw the writing of a report sponsored by the National Center on Education and the Economy. A few months later, Hillary was brought in to help implement that report’s recommendations. (She resigned in the fall of 1991 to start the campaign.) So she and Magaziner had worked together.

Magaziner had far more than his unquestionable loyalty to the Clintons to recommend him. Even his critics acknowledge the strength of his intellect, his capacity for total immersion in a subject, his delight in the myriad strands of interconnectedness that might seem to others an opaque curtain of complexity. It was also true that he had no proved strength as an administrator of a large-scale project and no Washington experience; indeed, he was the archetypal outsider. However, one person who worked on the health-care task force pointed out that that seemed exactly what the Clintons wanted. “There was concern that the health-care project would be taken over by the agencies,” this person said, and a “real concern at the White House that this be the President’s initiative, and he wanted to control the process. . . . The phrase used about Ira was that he had ‘sharper elbows’—he would keep the agencies from taking it over. So Ira was the proxy for the Clintons.”

Hillary and Ira became, in the words of one congressional aide, “the operative couple” for health-care reform. They are in some ways very different personalities, and those differences were no doubt meant to be complementary. “Ira kept saying he didn’t know anything about politics, and he didn’t care about politics,” one person who worked with him recalled. So in the early days, while Magaziner labored in his labyrinth in the Old Executive Office Building, Hillary Clinton began working the Hill. While health-care reform might be critical to Hillary’s political résumé for the future, Magaziner would not be drawn to the limelight, and would not seek to claim credit for the sake of his own aggrandizement. Another person who worked on the task force commented, “One thing you have to say about Ira—he is self-effacing, he serves the President.”

But there were other ways in which Hillary Clinton and Ira Magaziner were far more alike than different. Each had long evinced an extraordinary self-confidence (coupled with a tendency to be dismissive of others) and a conviction that no social problem, however complex and seemingly intractable, could resist his or her applied power to solve it. Without some measure of confidence both in one’s abilities and in the solvability of social problems, of course, one would never have either sufficient courage or decent motivation for political life. Ira and Hillary, however, not only possessed these qualities but were vivified by them; and this project provided the greatest opportunity either one had ever had to give full expression to them.

Together, then, they set out on the historic mission. The task force itself, which Hillary chaired and Ira directed, also comprised six Cabinet secretaries and several top White House advisers. The real labors, however, were carried out by a separate, elephantine structure of working groups, which Magaziner told me he developed in close and constant consultation with Hillary. The groups had more than five hundred members, drawn from congressional staffs, agencies, and experts in every aspect of the health-care system from around the country. Excluded were representatives of organizations that were perceived to have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, such as the American Medical Association.

When I asked Magaziner if there was any analogue of this undertaking in government, he replied, “No. Something like this has never been done before.” Hillary, speaking to the Business Council in Williamsburg, Virginia, in May of last year, was more expansive. Speaking of the project’s over-all scope, she called it “unprecedented,” adding, “It struck the President as a bit odd that it would be viewed in Washington as somewhat unusual to try to bring together in one effort people who cross all kinds of bureaucratic and other lines to work on behalf of a common agenda. But apparently, as I was told the other day, there hasn’t been anything quite like this effort since the planning of the invasion of Normandy.”

In reality, disarray was so endemic that even Magaziner wryly acknowledged it. The theory for a health-care-delivery system that the Clinton plan was drawing on (though it was deviating from it in important ways) was “managed competition.” One participant recalled, “Ira used to joke that the process was ‘managed chaos.’ ”

“It was an irrational process,” another declared, echoing the view of several people I interviewed. “It was not well thought out, not well organized, and its purpose was not clear. Why would you have five hundred people? You get twenty people in a room who are experts in the various areas, and you have them call on other people.”

The attempt to keep the proceedings secret was very damaging to the initiative. For a couple of months, the White House refused to release any details of the plan in progress, or even to release the names of working-group members. It was, of course, impossible to maintain confidentiality in a group of that size; leaks quickly proliferated. Another participant pointed out, “The secrecy was very alienating to the whole country. You’ve got to sell this plan eventually. The ultimate purpose is not to get the perfect plan but to get it enacted. So part of the process should have been to educate the country. Now people are so confused.”

Massive as the effort was, it was cut off not only from the public and the press but largely from Cabinet officers (except for Donna Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services) who were nominally members of the task force, and from political advisers at the White House. “There was internal staff criticism that it was not better coördinated,” one participant told me, saying that the working groups seemed “divorced from the White House decision-making structure.”

In an interview in late February of this year—on a day, in fact, when lawmakers quoted in the Times were declaring the Clinton plan moribund—Magaziner, battered but still resolute (“The bill will be declared dead every week—until it passes. I described it to the President as a roller-coaster ride in a hurricane”), told me that he now believed several aspects of the process to have been mistakes. All, interestingly, related to its extreme insularity. He said he thought that he should have consulted more with members of Congress who are on key committees. He wished that all the Cabinet members on the task force had been included earlier, instead of first being shown a rough draft of the plan in mid-August. And he believed that the attempt at secrecy was a very harmful error. Magaziner volunteered that the decision to conduct a secret process was not his. On being asked whose it was, he said he did not “want to point a finger.”

It is hard to believe that this decision did not emanate from Hillary Clinton, although she may have found support for it from others. She had maximum control of the structure; such a critical decision would surely have been left to no one else. Moreover, it was in keeping with her natural bent. She trusted few, and secrecy was a means of maintaining control; in Arkansas she had held back the revelation of the teacher test until late in the game. And her long-standing disdain for the press had not mellowed with her assumption of the role of First Lady. “She does hate the press,” someone close to the White House told me early last December, as she began to be spotlighted in Whitewater stories. Hillary targeted the press on the health-care speech circuit; in Lincoln, Nebraska, in April of 1993, for example, she referred to “the bane of all people in political life, and that is the unfair, unjust, inaccurate reporting that goes on from coast to coast, north to south, east to west.”

Not included in Magaziner’s litany of acknowledged errors was the decision to draft a full bill rather than send a rough précis to the Hill to be refined and hammered out there. “I promised the President we were not going to suffer the fate of past social legislation,” Magaziner told me. “In the past, legislators passed a skeleton bill, bureaucrats wrote ten thousand pages of regulations—and then there are all these unintended consequences. Like Medicare, which overrode its cost estimates by ten times. So we were concerned to spell out enough in our bill.”

Hence the thirteen-hundred-and-sixty-four-page Health Security Act of 1993, viewed as an albatross by many key members of Congress. John Dingell, the powerful chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, whom Hillary had courted, told me, expressing a view echoed by other allies of the Administration on the health plan, “They should have produced a simple bill, leaving room enough for horse-trading.” This was a view that Democratic members had made plain. Pat Williams, of Montana, commented, “The President rejected—on the First Lady’s advice—our advice that they send us concepts and we draft the bill.”

According to another person involved in the debate at the White House on this issue, Hillary had felt very strongly that they should send a fully drafted bill, and she had had her way. As Magaziner had explained, it was an attempt to keep control of the process, by diminishing the chance for damage by bureaucrats—or, for that matter, legislators. But this approach proceeds from the same sort of attitude that was expressed in Hillary’s statements about her project’s unprecedented scope—that she and Magaziner, notwithstanding their being novices in Washington, would show the watching world how the government should be run, how legislation should be drafted and passed, and that only they could do it right. Moreover, while Magaziner no doubt shared her enthusiasm, it is doubtful whether she considered him an equal. Senator John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV, of West Virginia, the member of Congress who is probably closest to Hillary, emphasized, “Hillary led this process. Ira was subject to the instant changes of anything Hillary Clinton said.”

Hillary’s self-regard seems to cause her at times to see others as fungible—as so many pawns in a grand design. For, just as the seventy-five “fact-finding” hearings in relation to education reform in Arkansas were said to be largely a way of building support for what had already been decided, so here, in health-care reform—on an exponentially larger scale, involving vast expenditures of time, energy, and money—a similar maneuver appeared to have taken place.

In some ways, the Clinton health plan was as much about what it was trying not to be as about what it was. It was not proposing a “single-payer” system, like Canada’s, where money for health care is collected through provincial sales taxes or payroll taxes on employers and a federal income tax on individuals and businesses; each province pays medical bills on behalf of its residents; and an annual health budget controls the price of medical services. The simplicity of that system is attractive, and many of the people who participated in the task force were proponents of it, but Bill Clinton is said to have believed that it was not politically feasible. Senator Rockefeller recalled, “I remember Clinton, on the bus”—during the campaign, that is—“saying, ‘I can’t do a payroll tax. I can’t get it through Congress. I can’t get it through the American people.’ ”

The Clinton plan, therefore, set out to provide universal coverage, to make Medicare more comprehensive, and to absorb Medicaid into the new universal-coverage system, all while minimizing the appearance of increased taxation. In order to do this, it called for, among other things, “employer mandates” (that is, requiring businesses with more than seventy-five employees to pay up to eighty per cent of the premiums for their employees) and new bureaucracies, in the form of “alliances.”

These alliances were a key element of the Clinton plan. There would be one alliance in every region, through which every inhabitant (except employees of the largest corporations) would be insured, and the states would determine their boundaries. Through an alliance, consumers would choose one of three types of insurance plan, which would all offer a standard package of benefits and would vary in price and in the degree to which consumers could choose doctors and additional services. Proponents argued that the alliances would give consumers more clout in bargaining with the insurers; critics replied that the alliances would become ensnared in political battles (as the more well-to-do sought to exclude poorer and more high-risk populations), and corruption would be rife. The alliances would, in any event, be performing such a plethora of functions that they seemed to dwarf any existing domestic bureaucratic entity: the Congressional Budget Office noted in a February, 1994, report on the Clinton plan that alliances “would combine the functions of purchasing agents, contract negotiators, welfare agencies, financial intermediaries, collectors of premiums, developers and managers of information systems and coordinators of the flow of information and money between themselves and other alliances.”

The Clinton plan was an attempt to correlate ideas that have been around in the health-care field for some time: essentially, the principle of “managed competition”—a theory, advocated by a group of academics and health-industry professionals known as the Jackson Hole Group, of blending market and regulatory forces to control health-care costs—and the mechanisms of the massive alliances and “global budgets,” or limitations on over-all spending. But when the plan was finally unveiled it was probably the promoters of the managed-competition approach, the Jackson Hole Group, who felt the most disappointed—as though their ideas had been transmuted into a malproportioned knockoff, imitative but all wrong. The Clinton plan, they say, borrowed their rhetoric of market-based competition, but it added elements such as caps on insurance premiums, the alliances (which they consider too large and regulatory), and certain tax provisions (which, they argue, encourage neither employers nor employees to be sensitive to health-care costs).

Sara Singer, a special assistant to Alain Enthoven, who is a professor of management at Stanford University and a trustee of the Jackson Hole Group, said that Enthoven met with Hillary Clinton and Ira Magaziner a number of times but that eventually “it became clear that, while they seemed receptive, the next day Alain would hear from someone else with totally opposing ideas that they had seemed equally receptive to them.” Singer went on to say, “I think what they were doing was creating the illusion of participation. Yes, there were the five hundred, but there was really a core group who wrote the thing and there’s little evidence that anything changed. I guess the more they heard, the more sure they were right they became.”

Magaziner’s account of the evolution of the Clinton plan seems not inconsistent with what critics have alleged: that, as had been true of education reform in Arkansas, the end point was known from the beginning to those at the very top of the pyramid. Bill Clinton, Magaziner told me, had heard him speak about health care at a Renaissance Weekend, and when Senator Bob Kerrey began campaigning on health care in the New Hampshire primary in January of 1992, Clinton—who had no clearly articulated position on the subject—asked Magaziner for a memo. The memo that Magaziner said he had provided laid out a plan that would provide universal coverage, with a comprehensive benefits package, and it called for an employer mandate and global budgets. “This memo was very similar to where the Clinton plan is today,” Magaziner said. “Some of the explicit competition mechanisms didn’t come until later—but it was very close.” In the late summer of 1992, Magaziner invited, among others, the Princeton sociologist Paul Starr, who had written a history of American medicine, and Walter Zelman, a special deputy for health issues to California’s insurance commissioner, to advise the campaign on health-care reform. In November, Starr and Zelman, at a conference at Princeton, presented papers that added a key element, the alliances (called in the papers “health insurance purchasing cooperatives”), to what Magaziner had sketched earlier. (These papers were published in the journal Health Affairs, Supplement 1993.) With the Starr and Zelman papers, “it was really all there,” Magaziner said. “But there was a general sense that we should not get too specific in the campaign. Clinton was already way ahead of Bush on health care—and when you get into the details it becomes more divisive.”

In complexity, one senses, Magaziner finds his element. He pointed with unmistakable pride to the manifest scope of his labors in the Clinton bill. “We have sixty pages on benefits; in other bills, benefits are only one or two pages,” he said excitedly. “We take a hundred pages to describe subsidies.” While Hillary Clinton probably does not revel in complexity as Magaziner does, she is certainly undaunted by it. And the complexity of the Clinton plan—not just in its layers of detail but in its over-all structure—may be its most serious flaw. In an Op-Ed piece in the Times last December, Paul Ellwood, the president of the Jackson Hole Group, wrote of the Clinton plan, “In the intricacies of his proposal may lie mechanisms that can achieve national goals, but even those of us who have spent our careers pursuing health care reform cannot fully comprehend it.”

One participant in the working groups told me, “They did not calculate the cost of its complexity. How can people go to the barricades for something that they cannot understand?”

Hillary Clinton brought to her health-care mission the campaigner’s instincts that she had honed over the years. According to a person close to the White House, around the time the President’s economic-stimulus package was defeated in Congress, a year ago, she told Maggie Williams, her chief of staff, that she wanted to have a “war room” (the same kind of quick-response, computerized-communications hub that she had helped devise for the Presidential campaign) created for health care. “It became known as the economic guys’ idea,” this person said. “But it was Hillary who set it up.” And, as fiercely as though she were in a campaign, Hillary targeted the enemy. To the surprise of many on Capitol Hill—and of some political advisers at the White House—she began denouncing a rival health-care proposal drawn up by Representative Jim Cooper, a Democrat from Tennessee, who is currently running for the Senate seat vacated by Vice-President Al Gore. Cooper, who adheres closely to the key precepts of the Jackson Hole Group, had been working on legislation in this area for a couple of years (an earlier version of his bill was introduced in the last Congress, in 1992), and likes to refer to his bill—which he introduced in the House, and which was introduced in the Senate by John Breaux, of Louisiana—as “Clinton Lite.”

It offers “universal access”—a guarantee that reasonably priced health insurance would be available to everyone—instead of universal coverage, and it does not include two heavily criticized aspects of the Clinton plan: price controls on insurance premiums and the employer mandate. While Cooper’s plan does rely on alliances (an aspect of the Clinton plan that seems to have little chance of survival in its present form), his alliances would be non-governmental and far smaller, because participation would be mandatory only for companies with fewer than a hundred employees, while Clinton’s plan requires enrollment for companies with fewer than five thousand. Cooper would provide subsidies to families with incomes up to twice the poverty level, to help them pay for coverage, and he would cap tax deductions that employers can take for contributing to employee health plans—a cardinal principle for the Jackson Hole Group, and one that the Clinton plan would not implement for another decade, and in a modified form. Essentially, Cooper’s bill calls for a phased-in approach. It would first reform insurance markets and seek, through managed competition, to bring costs under control; then, he argues, after a few years’ experience with managed competition Congress could pass a second bill to cover those Americans who were still without insurance.

At a Senate Finance Committee hearing on May 4th, Robert Reischauer, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, delivered his report on the Cooper bill, saying, among other things, that it would cover fifteen million people who now have no insurance, bringing the number of insured from eighty-five per cent of the nation’s population to ninety-one per cent. While there were problems—the C.B.O. concluded that if the benefits package were as generous as the one proposed by the Clinton Administration the plan would not raise enough money to pay all the subsidies promised, and it would result in a three-hundred-billion-dollar increase in the federal deficit over ten years—some lawmakers seemed favorably impressed by it. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, chairman of the Finance Committee, and a critical figure on health-care legislation, was quoted in the Times as saying, “With this fairly minimal bill, 90-plus percent of the population would be insured within eighteen months. That’s pretty impressive.” And Senator Bob Packwood, the ranking minority member of the Senate Finance Committee, pointed out, in questioning Reischauer, that even Hawaii, which has an employer mandate, covers only an estimated ninety-three to ninety-seven per cent of its population. “I have supported mandates,” Packwood said. “But if you can get what we pretty much all agree is universal coverage—none of us think we are going to get a hundred per cent . . . why have the compulsion?”

Hillary apparently had seen the menace in Cooper as a rival for the bipartisan middle ground almost from the outset. Participants in a meeting on Capitol Hill in early 1993 recalled that Cooper proffered his proposal as one that the Administration should adopt, and that the First Lady’s response was chilly. Cooper met with her and Magaziner in June to inform them that he would be moving forward with his bill, and in January, 1994, described their reaction to the Times: “It was not a happy response. I think there was some shock and surprise that a junior member of Congress would presume to say there was trouble with one of the Administration’s top priorities.”

The middle ground was the prized territory; whoever could claim it would probably win the day. Magaziner explained to me, “We had to bridge the chasm between pure managed competition and . . . single-payer, and to place ourselves in the middle—without irrevocably alienating both sides. We knew that from the beginning. My first memo, in January of ’93, laid that out.” By the fall of 1993, as the various bills emerged (including one proposed by Representative Jim McDermott, of Washington, which is a single-payer proposal and has ninety-one co-sponsors in the House), it was plain that Cooper was gaining some of that ground.

Health care had been launched by the President before a joint session of Congress on September 22nd, and that event was followed shortly by Hillary’s bravura performance before the congressional committees; but then health care was effectively put aside at the White House so that everything could be geared to passing the North American Free Trade Agreement, in November. This is said to have caused Hillary considerable consternation. According to one person, a debate had been carried on for a couple of weeks in August over whether the President should go forward with NAFTA at all. “The First Lady said, ‘Look. We have postponed health care until after the budget—we can’t hold it up any longer!’ There were those who felt you could abandon NAFTA—you could say, ‘The Mexicans are not doing enough.’ There were reasons that you could present if you wanted to walk away from NAFTA. . . .

Hillary was convinced that NAFTA would hurt health care—but Maggie Williams gentled along the idea that it would help.” This person added that Williams had probably not told the First Lady this “outright”—that “gentling along” tended to be the more effective approach with her.

NAFTA, of course, went forward. But on two occasions in the intensive NAFTA period Hillary took actions that seemed, at least to two White House strategists, to come from left field and to risk undermining their NAFTA efforts. On November 1st, roughly two weeks before the House vote on NAFTA, Hillary, in a speech before a friendly audience at the American Academy of Pediatrics, in Washington, launched her much publicized fierce counterattack on the insurance industry, in which she accused the industry of lying in its television advertisements. “One of the great lies that are currently afoot in the country is that the President’s plan will limit choice,” she declared. “To the contrary, the President’s plan enhances choice.” Insurance companies “like being able to exclude people from coverage because the more they can exclude, the more money they can make,” she went on. “Now, they have the gall to run TV ads that there is a better way—the very industry that has brought us to the brink of bankruptcy because of the way that they have financed health care.”

One person close to the White House told me that “it was NAFTA time,” and people realized they “should shut up on health care. . . . The last thing you wanted was to focus on health care at that moment, because our leading opponents on health care were our NAFTA proponents.” This person went on to say, “Hillary was in the car on the way to that speech with Melanne”—Melanne Verveer, her deputy chief of staff. “She’s moaning about the commercials. And Melanne, instead of just saying, ‘It’s important we keep this to ourselves,’ says, ‘Yes!’ . . . And Hillary got up and fired!” Melanne Verveer denies that the conversation occurred.

If the displeasure felt by some members of the White House staff was communicated to Hillary—and it is possible that no one had the courage to undertake that job—she was unchastened. A week later—on November 8th, just nine days before the House NAFTA vote—at a rare briefing for health reporters she not only continued to attack the health industry but launched her strongest broadsides against Cooper’s plan. The headline in the Times the next day read, “HILLARY CLINTON ATTACKS HEALTH PLANS OFFERED BY CONSERVATIVE DEMOCRATS.” Commenting on the attack, one person involved in the NAFTA effort told me, “I did not know that it was coming. And we needed his vote. The President invited him to play golf after she did that. . . . Those two events were not unrelated.”

This person expressed a view, echoed by many members of Congress, that, in general, Hillary’s attacks on Cooper were “ill advised”—that “she created him, by focussing so much attention on him.” Her attacks on Cooper and the insurance industry were conceptually different: she attacked Cooper because she saw his proposal as a rival, and she attacked the insurance companies because they are obvious villains and attacking them can be seen as a way to achieve points with the public in a populist campaign. But both attacks underscored the seeming autonomy with which Hillary made moves that could affect contemporaneous and critical White House initiatives; if she needed to be reined in, and prevented from following her instincts, there appeared to be no one up to the job. This was not really surprising, given her sometimes glacial demeanor. Referring to some of Hillary’s younger staff members, one congressional staff person who has had dealings with her said, “They are terrified of her. They are very loyal—they would attack anyone who said something derogatory about her—but they are scared to death. They are so intimidated they think she will fire them if they tell her the truth.”

In the early months of 1994, as the Clinton health plan was being increasingly criticized as an ill-conceived farrago, one congressional lobbyist commented, “Ira is becoming the scapegoat—which is too bad. He’s a policy nerd, and brilliant . . . but you don’t send policy nerds to the Hill. . . . He’s Professor Corey! . . . You should put him in a room and close the door, and let him write a memo. Half of it would be brilliant, and the other half you’d rip up. The political types”—in the White House—“should have seen to that, but they were kept away.”

Another person who was involved in the process on the Hill pointed out that members felt free to complain about not only the plan but Magaziner’s personal characteristics—mainly his being “arrogant” and “so sure he’s right”—in a way that they would not about the First Lady, even though consummate sureness was a trait shared by them both. “They will go on about how awful Ira is—but her, no. Even though he was created and is controlled by her.”

Still, in interviews with me in the early months of 1994 some members—though they all stressed their admiration for the First Lady’s talents and for her success in raising public consciousness about health care—expressed uneasiness about certain of her actions and attitudes. Senator John Danforth, of Missouri, a Republican, told me, “I have been surprised at the vehemence of the Administration in doing a job on Cooper,” and he also criticized Hillary’s attacks on the health industry as an attempt to “demonize.” Senator John Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, who has proposed a health-care bill that offers universal coverage in a more gradually phased-in approach than the Clinton plan, and who admires Hillary, nonetheless agreed with Senator Danforth about her attacks on the health industry. “I deplore those attacks on the pharmaceutical and insurance companies,” he told me. “They”—the companies—“are not evil. They are in business in a game where the rules have to be changed . . . and the insurance companies that have come in here are prepared to change.” And Senator Max Baucus, of Montana, a Democrat and a strong Hillary booster, said, “I know that there is a tendency in the White House to develop a siege mentality. I think there is, first, that tendency institutionally, and then I think there is that in her personally. I was surprised, coming back on the plane”—from Montana, where Hillary had given a couple of speeches on health care—“at some of her comments: how partisan, how negative, how quick to judge.” Baucus paused, then added, “She’s a very smart person, of course, so she forms judgments very quickly.”

The Senate is, as everyone knows, an intensely collegial club, where members of widely divergent views generally manage to coexist in an atmosphere of tolerance and mutual respect. That a member adheres to a particular conviction is not correlated with virtue or the absence of it. And even those who might be seen, especially by an outsider, as the black sheep of this body are not excluded from the circle of general good will. But, according to Lawrence O’Donnell, of the Senate Finance Committee staff, this is something that Hillary and those who work closely with her seem not to apprehend; for them, the world is divided into friends and enemies. “I would suspect that if Mrs. Clinton and her health-care advisers saw me laughing with Al D’Amato,” O’Donnell declared in an interview before D’Amato’s attempt to lead the charge on the Whitewater investigation, “they’d think I was consorting with the enemy. But Congress is a place that is animated by ‘Live and let live.’ ”

Referring to the mind-set of Hillary’s people, O’Donnell went on, “There is a religiosity to it. When Moynihan said there should be a special prosecutor”—on Whitewater—“I did not get a single call” from the White House. “There has been no more intense criticism of the President than Moynihan’s on the Bosnian situation. Nobody called up. But I get panicked, anguished, desperate, grief-stricken phone calls: ‘How could Moynihan have said there’s no health-care crisis?’ On health care, if you say anything—like ‘I don’t think this construct is going to work as you’ve described it’—you get an unthinking response. You get great surprise that you’d be saying this at all—and you get fear. It doesn’t feel quite so much like fear of you as fear of reporting back. But what you don’t get is an exchange. Panetta, for example”—Leon Panetta, the Administration’s budget director—“comes in here with some scheme, and if that’s shot down he comes up with another idea. He’s very professional, easy-going. We laugh about it, he doesn’t think I’m obstructionist, and that’s how it’s supposed to feel.”

Just as some of the women close to Hillary seem more like followers than like friends, so in health care, too, those who are her closest allies speak of her in essentially reverential terms. Senator Rockefeller, upon whom Hillary has come to rely greatly, and who is, of all her congressional allies, by far the most passionately devoted, told me, “I feel myself so close to Hillary Rodham Clinton.” Rockefeller, who has been referred to on Capitol Hill as Senator Phil Donahue (for the readiness with which he discusses his emotions and urges others to do the same), was sitting in his office in the Hart Senate Office Building one evening in late February, munching on carrot sticks. “She has fundamentally given of herself, physically, emotionally, to this subject of health care, to an extent unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” he said. “She drives herself so hard.” He went on, “She would hate my telling this, but it should be said. Many times I’ve been in a meeting with her, other people would leave, and, the second the door closes, she goes into sixty or ninety seconds of incessant yawning. Then the door opens again, and not a trace of it. But she is in a state of constant fatigue.” Rockefeller recalled an occasion when Hillary had met with a group of veterans who were frightened about what would happen to their coverage under the Clinton plan. They had come to see her in the White House several days after her father, Hugh Rodham, died. “One of them, especially, had been kind of hostile. Then, toward the end, one said, ‘We’re really sorry about your father.’ And she said one of these amazing things. It was very soft, barely audible—there was nothing contrived about it. ‘I would have been proud had my father died in a veterans’ hospital.’ ”

In late January, President Clinton, in a closed White House session with governors during a National Governors Association conference, had made several comments that signalled far more flexibility on health care than either he or Hillary had expressed before. Governors told the press he had indicated that he was not so committed to global budgets, and that it might be possible for the alliances to be voluntary, not mandatory. After Clinton’s comments were reported in the press, Rockefeller responded that the President’s sending those signals was a mistake; and Clinton then said that Rockefeller had made a bigger mistake in believing news reports of his statements, which, he said, had been misinterpreted. Concerning this contentious exchange, Rockefeller commented to me, “I chose to do it publicly, not privately, and I got smacked back. That’s O.K. I take this issue very seriously.”

When I remarked to one of Rockefeller’s aides that the Senator seemed intensely protective of Hillary, the aide replied, “He really does see himself as her protector. Sometimes, when he feels the White House is not looking out for her, he just goes storming around here, he is so upset by it.”

In this instance, of course, the person before whom he appeared to have interposed himself as her protector was the President.

“It’s as if there were two different governments,” declared Michael Bromberg, a powerful Washington lobbyist for the health industry, who has sparred with Hillary on more than one occasion, but who has also said emphatically that “she deserves enormous credit for bringing this issue to the fore the way she has.” He now went on to say, “He told the governors that he wished he didn’t have to put price controls in.” Bromberg continued, “She says there are no price controls.” Bromberg then described a meeting in late January of this year that Hillary held with about thirty C.E.O.s of major organizations. “She was lecturing, sort of strident.” The C.E.O. from the Mayo Foundation, he said, complained that institutions would have difficulty raising money with the price controls in the Clinton plan. “And she said, ‘There are no price controls.’ I said, ‘How are we going to reach a compromise if we can’t even agree on what the facts are? It seems we have a language barrier.’ She stiffened so noticeably—her body language was angry. She is so thin-skinned; she really believes that if you criticize one page of a thirteen-hundred-and-sixty-four-page bill you’re the enemy.”

Sometimes when Hillary Clinton is challenged, her charm quickly evaporates. Bromberg recalled a meeting he had with her last September, which his most important patron on Capitol Hill, Representative Dan Rostenkowski, had reportedly persuaded her to hold. “I told her I’d been a staff person” in Congress, Bromberg said, “and the biggest lesson I learned was always to try to put my boss in a win-win position. I said, ‘Any bill that passes Congress will be a credit to you. But if you say, “This must be in there,” and then that goes—then it will be perceived as a loss.’ She said, ‘Bill and I didn’t come to Washington to play the game as usual—and to fuzz the difference between universal coverage and access.’ And she said something to the effect that ‘it’s universal coverage that will mean the place in history.’ ”

On two occasions, Bromberg continued, she had told him that, rather than see an incremental bill such as Cooper’s pass, she and her husband would go on the attack on the issue in the midterm congressional elections, this November. “ ‘We know how to run a populist campaign,’ she said,” Bromberg recalled.

Another person, who has known both Clintons well for many years, said that Hillary’s penchant for attacking on this issue bore the telltale marks of her personality, not Bill Clinton’s. “It is not his style to attack. His style is not to box people in but, rather, to leave room for them to change their minds, so that later something can be worked out. Particularly on an issue this big, today’s enemy is tomorrow’s ally. That’s what he’s done for the past fourteen years.” Hillary, this person added, did seem to be engaged in a fierce defense of the Clinton plan, as written, but when Clinton said, as he has said a couple of times, that he had “no pride of authorship” in his plan and was open to compromise, that was believable, because it was consistent with his approach in the past.

As observers watched the two Clintons moving on what some of them, at least, considered divergent tracks, one question that arose was whether they were engaged in a good-cop, bad-cop scenario. This longtime friend of theirs, however, vigorously disputed that possibility. “Bill Clinton doesn’t do that. He doesn’t calculate in that way. And they did not do that in Arkansas.” More than suggesting a good-cop, bad-cop routine, this person said, their actions lead one to wonder, Are they talking to each other? “All of it makes no sense—unless they’re just not in synch.”

The situation was odd, in a way, because of Hillary’s long-standing reputation for pragmatism, for being perhaps even more pragmatic than her pragmatic husband: the one more capable of making the hard decisions, of cutting losses and ties, of doing what needed to be done to achieve the end. And she has apparently been pragmatic about some provisions of the health-care plan, if not about its over-all structure. In its standard-benefits package, for example, there is coverage for “pregnancy-related services”—which, Hillary has stated, include abortion. That stand has won the Clintons some strong advocates: many women’s groups have come out in favor of the Clinton plan and lobbied against rival plans that do not specify those benefits. However, I was told that at a strategy meeting at which the question of abortion came up, Hillary said, “We’re going to put it in the bill. Then it will go up to the Hill. They’re going to take it out. And we will be back to where we are now. But we are not going to lose health care over this.” (Her apparent willingness to trade this issue would probably come as a surprise to Representative Louise Slaughter, of New York, a Democrat, who described herself as “a great fan of Hillary Clinton,” and had told me when I asked about the provision on abortion in the Clinton plan, “It’s got to stay.” And when I asked her how resolute Hillary would be on this issue Slaughter responded warmly, “She’s with us—I know she is!”)

One friend of Hillary’s explained to me, “She is pragmatic, yes—but in achieving her goal. She always has a goal. Before, it was to get Clinton elected President. Now it’s to pass health care.” This friend continued, “Health care is her deal. She thought it through every step of the way. . . . She is so invested in this product. She is so sure this is right—she will fight for it and push for it, putting herself on the line. The public education on this issue is as much of a victory as the specifics of the legislation, but I worry that, because she’s fighting so hard, she could win but lose.” The passage of a rival plan “could be perceived as her loss,” the friend felt.

According to this friend, those who focus on Hillary’s pragmatism tend to lose sight of her idealism, which is a strong competing trait. “She cares terribly about her contribution to the betterment of mankind, and her place in history is very important to her. . . . She has both the idealism of Mme. Mao and the pragmatism of Machiavelli. She’s a combination of the two.”

This is the first time Hillary has wielded direct influence over an endeavor so large, the first time that her place in history is at issue. Her personal investment is enormous. And that may explain why health care has been dealt with in a somewhat anomalous way within the famously pragmatic Clinton Administration. “The fundamental criticism of this whole endeavor is that they’re not pragmatic enough,” a Capitol Hill regular said. “It’s really surprising. This is the guy who would do anything, who flew home from campaigning to kill Rickey Ray Rector!”—an Arkansas death-row inmate who had shot himself in the head and had been left with the mind of a child. “He’ll kill, but he won’t compromise on the employer mandate?”

Clinton, of course, threatened in his State of the Union Message to veto any health-care bill that did not provide universal coverage—and, inasmuch as universal coverage appears to require mandates, the President’s non-negotiable position is said to extend to an employer mandate as well. While a number of congressmen maintain that the President has allowed himself “wiggle room,” and might end up accepting a much more gradually phased-in approach under the rubric of universal coverage, others have taken the threat quite seriously and have worried that it could eliminate the chance for tremendously beneficial, if incremental, reforms. And there has been much speculation that Hillary was behind this inflexibility. “I looked up at her in the gallery when he said it,” Representative Pat Williams recalled, “and she smiled.”

When I asked President Clinton whether Hillary had felt strongly about the veto, he replied, “You know, I don’t remember, but she must have, just because she cares so much about it.” He went on to say that he believes it was the right thing to do—in order to simplify for Congress and also for the American people what his bottom line is. “To me, if we’re not going to fix that, then we’re not really going to fix the problem, and we shouldn’t pretend to. . . . There are some fundamental institutional problems with the health-care system in America, that no one. . . who’s studied it really believes that you can seriously address until we join the ranks of all the other advanced countries in the world and provide a way to cover everybody—and we haven’t done that. I feel very, very strongly that unless we do something that not only is symbolically but really capable of making a difference—that is, providing security to people—that the rest of this stuff won’t work. For example, I basically don’t think you can stop cost shifting—from the people who pay to those who don’t—unless you cover everybody. I have serious questions about whether these insurance reforms can be fully implemented unless you find a way to cover everybody and also find a way for small business to buy on the same basis that big business does. These things all relate to one another.”

Warming to the subject, he told me he now recalled what Hillary had said at the meeting where the veto was discussed. “I remember how strongly Hillary felt about this. I don’t remember who suggested it. You know, sometimes when I have these meetings there have been twelve meetings beforehand, so when I get a recommendation it’s never possible for me to know whose idea it was originally. But I remember that I told everybody—we were sitting around here talking about the speech—that this is something you have to be extremely careful about, because sometimes even your own allies will recoil at a veto threat, because they think you’re taking part of their job away from them—which is, namely, what the final bill looks like. And we debated that . . . and Hillary argued that since we all felt that we wouldn’t have done it right if we didn’t do this, that in this case it was worth making the veto threat. And to the best of my knowledge, it’s the only time I’ve done it since I’ve been President.”

To the questions about Hillary’s role—essentially, the degree and scope of her influence and authority—there is a nagging subtext: the nature of the ties that bind the Clintons. It seems plain that his indebtedness to her must only increase with each new allegation of sexual impropriety. When I asked President Clinton how he deals with the pain these allegations must cause his wife, he said, “Well, we deal with it. And I don’t think I should talk about it.” He paused. “I mean, I think, you know, the whole thing has been— Someday, I may even talk about it,” he said with a soft chuckle. “Just, well, there is a story there and not the one that’s been told, and maybe someday it will be, but I . . . I’m President, I have to do my job, I have to deal with America’s business now . . . and that’s what I’m doing.”

How free the President is to deny his wife what she seeks is a corollary question. And, while it is Hillary’s leadership of health care that naturally is most visible, she has hardly been exclusively relegated to that area. One person who has worked with her told me that she has indeed been “a player on any major issue,” and recalled that during the budget process “she would say, ‘Where’s the plan? Where’s the plan?’ ” This person added, “The President works you hard, but he doesn’t drive you that way. He didn’t call three times a day and say, ‘Where’s the plan?’ ”

The debacle involving the firing of all seven employees of the White House travel office last spring—a debacle for which President Clinton eventually accepted responsibility—has since been shown to bear Hillary’s fingerprints, not his. Although the travel office was carelessly managed, the White House ultimately conceded that the dismissals had been engineered by friends and a distant cousin of President Clinton’s, who had wanted the travel business for themselves. The President has the authority to appoint and dismiss White House officials, but an attempt nevertheless was made to justify the dismissals, by stating that the employees were under investigation for possible criminal wrongdoing, and the White House pressured the F.B.I. to get involved in the case. A recent report by the General Accounting Office depicted Hillary’s role as far more active than an earlier White House report did. The G.A.O. report said that after a senior official, David Watkins, briefed Hillary on mismanagement in the office “he said that she urged that action be taken to get ‘our people’ into the travel office.” (Hillary has said that she does “not recall this conversation with the same level of detail as Mr. Watkins.”) In this instance, it appears that her eagerness to make the hard decisions (firing career bureaucrats with White House service of between eight and thirty years) significantly contributed to a situation that paralyzed the Oval Office staff for a week and, at least for a certain period, was damaging to the President.

And in one of Clinton’s most ill-advised moves—resisting the appointment of an Independent Counsel for the Whitewater investigation and capitulating only when it became plain that the appointment was inevitable—Hillary’s influence may have been decisive. Bev Lindsey told me, “It was Hillary who made the decision. She is the practicing lawyer in the family; Bill is the theoretical lawyer, but she is the practicing one. And I think they both felt that they could tell people there was nothing there and people would believe it. The staff realized it was not working. So all they could do was keep bringing it up . . . but that angers her—and each time they brought it back to her, there was more tension.” Lindsey said she understood the position of those advisers (including her husband), because she had dealt with Hillary’s fixedness, though on less momentous issues, when she was doing scheduling for her during the Presidential campaign. “She will not revisit a decision. She’s very sure of herself, and she does not want to have something brought up again.”

In the end, that sureness about her own judgment—at its extreme, a sense that she alone is wise—is probably Hillary’s cardinal trait. When one talks to her friends and her husband, one hears it described in varying ways, but they are all facets of the same intensely insular and unbending characteristic. Connie Fails speaks admiringly of how when Hillary decides that something is fair or not fair, right or wrong, it’s done. “Once she scripts it out, that’s it!” Fails says. Jan Piercy says that Hillary “does not waste time on regrets, does not waste time on ambivalence,” and that “she is impatient with people who dwell on what might have been,” for “to her it’s a waste of time.” Another friend says, “When you give her advice, you feel you can influence her maybe ten per cent—the other ninety per cent, no. She is very sure.” And President Clinton told me, “You know, once in a while she’ll come in and say, ‘I want to talk about such-and-such.’ And, you know”—he gestured toward the massive oak desk in the Oval Office—“I might as well try to lift that desk up and throw it through the window as to change her mind.”

That Bill Clinton had a faith in her judgment which may have equalled her own and that they have throughout their marriage shared an overarching goal must have eased the strain on him of living with such absolutism. During my interview with the President, he stated repeatedly that he had to “give her credit for” the insight she had had that for him 1992 would be the year of opportunity. “She always thought that the right kind of Democrat would have an opportunity to be elected in ’92—always. I mean, from the beginning of his”—George Bush’s—“term, when he took office, she told me that,” the President said. “And when he got up to seventy per cent and then ninety per cent or whatever in the polls after the Gulf War, she never wavered in her conviction that ’92 was a good year for the right sort of Democrat to challenge the established orthodoxy of the Democratic Party, and also challenge the incumbent President. It was amazing”—Clinton spoke emphatically. “And I’ve got to give her credit for that. That’s one where her instinct was right, and I didn’t feel that way for the longest time. . . . She thought that in ’88 we still had a reasonably good economy and that the adverse consequences of Reaganomics were not fully apparent to most voters; and that by ’92 they would be. And she always believed that. And she never changed her opinion. . . . It was quite amazing. She was really right about that. She had a sense about it. Once I got out and around the country in ’91, I began to feel it . . . but she sensed it just from her reading of events, and her feel for it.” She is possessed of “a sixth sense,” Clinton said warmly—bringing to mind what the former Arkansas Gazette reporter Ernest Dumas has called Clinton’s “mystical faith” in Hillary’s political judgment, and underscoring how much he must have always depended upon it.

But since that common goal has been achieved, with their entry into the White House, the equipoise has shifted, and what, one wonders, is Hillary’s goal now? As one person has said, she always has a goal; apparently, setting goals is for her both a habit of mind and a way of life. Some friends have suggested that her goal now may well be to become President herself. Betsey Wright told me last December, “There are a great many people talking very seriously about her succeeding him. Their staff will say, ‘We have to do it this way and that way, and then we’ll be here at least twelve years.’ And it’s not just the staff. Friends, Democrats, people out across the country think it is a very viable plan of action.”

Some are careful to frame the basis of a possible Hillary Clinton Presidency as an exercise of virtuous obligation and self-sacrifice—the way that she herself has long been wont to define her political role generally. Amy Stewart stated firmly, concerning the prospect of Hillary seeking the Presidency, “The only way I think she would seek it is if, after eight years, she felt she had to, to protect what he had put in place. But it would not be because it was her ambition.”

Though Hillary was not available to be interviewed for this article (Maggie Williams spoke of the time pressure on Hillary’s schedule), I was, oddly, allowed to speak to the President for a total of nearly two hours. It may be that in this instance, as in the larger scheme of their lives, Hillary chose to use him as her vehicle, rather than to negotiate her own way. If she were to run for President, of course, the scenario of their lives would be radically altered. And when I asked the President what sort of President he thought Hillary would be, he quickly responded, “Oh, she’d be great at it. But I don’t think she’d ever run—not in a hundred years!”

Why was that?

“Because she just always told me that the one thing she was not interested in was being in elected office—and she’s always said that publicly.”

But I reminded the President that in 1990, when he was undecided about running for governor himself, she was said to have considered running.

The President backed up. “Oh, Judge Woods desperately wanted her to run for governor, and it got out and around the state, you know, a little bit, and I looked at her one night and said, ‘If you would promise me definitely that you would run if I didn’t, then I will not run,’ ” he said, with a laugh. “Yeah! I asked her, ‘Can you tell me for sure you would do this?’ And she said, ‘Oh, no, I can’t do that. I have no idea whether I would or not.’ Because she always had very mixed feelings about running for public office. She loves public service—she’s always loved it. And she’s always been happiest, I think, doing it. But, primarily, she’s never seen herself as an elected official.”

The President went on, “I think she’d be very good at it,” and then—focussing on what is, of course, the most serious of many reasons that any Presidential ambition of Hillary’s could not be acknowledged by either of them, whatever their private thoughts—he said, “But I also think once I got elected President—I think she didn’t think about that sort of thing, in no small measure because she has such an enormous regard for Al Gore, and for what he’s done here, and how much of a difference he’s made to our common endeavors.”

The notion of Hillary Clinton as a Presidential candidate is an interesting one. She is almost an icon for many women today; Diane Blair says she thinks Hillary sees herself as “the new American woman,” in trying to balance multiple personal and professional roles, and the often conflicting demands on time and energy that they entail. This note naturally strikes a responsive chord with millions of American women. Hillary is, of course, attempting the feat on a singularly elevated platform, in full public view. Still, while most women simply occupy these disparate roles, and struggle to perform them well, Hillary uses them to achieve a desired effect—invoking her familial roles to soften her presentations before congressional committees, giving interviews to stress the domestic side of her life after, at one point, unleashing a particularly vociferous attack on the health industry. There is much that has been groundbreaking in her time as First Lady, and much to be admired, but nothing has been more conspicuous (or distracting) than the barrage of changing images of Hillary.

Indeed, if politics has become to some degree the art of packaging, Hillary is a grand master. She reached her zenith, to date, at her press conference in April, where she manifested sympathy for the reporters’ concerns, and, of course, contrition—however narrow. But all this seems contrived—some of the images do not align, the moral exemplar does not fit with the person who carries out tough political acts—and there is a compulsion to camouflage. What are we meant not to see? A hard, ambitious, oversure intellect ready to make political deals that the more squeamish might shrink from—a real pol, and yet one who, particularly as a woman in an age that is still in many respects sexist, might have little political appeal?

What seems plain, to one watching Hillary Clinton as First Lady, is that she is always learning, and that the makeover never stops. And, notwithstanding the President’s denial, if her goal is, as friends have suggested, to fashion her own place in history, or to become President herself, then that means that for the first time since she decided to throw her lot in with Bill Clinton she is no longer merely an adjunct. There are vestiges of such a role, since at this moment her power is still dependent on and largely protected by his. But the bedrock premise of their partnership may be altered; for what is best for him politically is no longer necessarily best for her.

In this ongoing division of interests, the potential for competition looms large, and traces of it do seem discernible. Hillary became reconciled to the President’s pursuing NAFTA (and putting health care aside) only after several days of debate, and of being “gentled along” by Maggie Williams; and, even after she agreed, she took actions in the pre-NAFTA period which, whether she was conscious of it or not, had the potential for undermining NAFTA’s passage. And, although some members of Hillary’s staff are said to be frightened of her, they are also worshipful, proud of the spirit of solidarity that infuses their group. Jan Piercy emphasized the perfect diversity of Hillary’s staff—Williams is black, and her scheduling director, Patti Solis, is Hispanic—and said, rather pointedly, “In Hillary’s staff there is a camaraderie and professionalism unequalled by any staff in the White House.” Connie Fails, referring to the cohesiveness of Hillary’s staff, said, with a laugh, “It drives Bill crazy!

In the late fall, Hillary introduced the subject of crime into at least one of her speeches. A friend said that crime would be a sequel to her health-care effort, but a person close to the White House exclaimed, “It cannot be. It has to be his issue! Gergen”—David Gergen, counsellor to the President—“will not allow it!” In late February, when the Clinton health plan was an object of widespread scorn and derision, the famously ingenuous Senator Rockefeller remarked to me, “I think, although I can’t prove this, that she may be pulling back a little now—that she wants this to be seen as the President’s plan.” That there was at this time an emerging strategy to put some distance between her and the beleaguered plan was further suggested when one of Hillary’s strongest partisans tried to persuade me that I ought not to focus on health care in my examination of Hillary’s time as First Lady. But surely, I said, that has been her major effort. “She’s done a lot of other things that are very important,” this person told me. “For example, she’s redone the White House. Not enough attention has been paid to that.”

While it remains true that Hillary Clinton and the President will rightly receive credit for any health-care legislation that passes, the chances of its bearing much resemblance to the Clinton plan seem increasingly remote. Senator Edward Kennedy’s proposed modifications to the Clinton plan seek to make it more palatable by, among other things, exempting small, low-wage businesses from the employer mandate. But in the last couple of weeks Senate Republican opposition to any kind of mandate, individual or employer, has seemed to harden. Almost two weeks after Robert Reischauer’s testimony before the Senate Finance Committee on the Cooper-Breaux bill, Senator Packwood—who had earlier supported the idea of a mandate—told reporters that mandates were dead. A day later, on May 15th, Senator Robert Dole—who had been a co-sponsor of the Chafee bill, which has an individual mandate (that is, individuals would be forced by law to purchase health insurance)—said, “Individual mandates aren’t going to pass.” If mandates were to fall, that would leave any one of the various competing bills—or, more likely, an amalgam, such as one combining Cooper-Breaux and Chafee—as an alternative. But when George Mitchell, the Senate Majority Leader, and a strong supporter of the White House on health care, was asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” whether he would recommend that the President veto a bill such as Cooper-Breaux, which takes care of ninety-one per cent of the population, Senator Mitchell said yes.

The health-care debate on Capitol Hill is today in such a state of flux that almost anything might happen. But one thing seems certain: a large bipartisan coalition—something that Moynihan, among others, has been intent on achieving since the start of this legislative process—will be necessary to pass any significant health-care-reform package. And, as Senator Packwood told me, while it is still possible that the Senate Finance Committee (with eleven Democrats and nine Republicans) might find enough votes to pass something that resembled the Clinton plan—with an employer mandate, premium caps, some form of alliances, plus entitlements—“it simply couldn’t pass on the floor of the Senate.”

A large bipartisan coalition could enable its members to steer a bill through the legislative process with the necessary speed and some degree of control, as opposed to the free-for-all that otherwise would take over—what one person on Capitol Hill referred to as “the last way that you would want legislation that you really cared about to be handled.” This would be an ironic dénouement for the architects of the Clinton plan, who were so intent on controlling their product that they insisted on fully drafting their thirteen-hundred-and-sixty-four-page bill. But, whatever happens, this could still turn out to be Hillary Clinton’s victory. Just as in Arkansas, where the education reforms were modest but she succeeded in bringing the issue to the fore—and re-creating her persona—so here, too, even if the reforms are modest (and the President finds a way around his threatened veto) her political capital will have greatly appreciated.

In the last several months, the shifting equation between the two Clintons has been additionally complicated by another element. Ever since the early eighties, Hillary has been a powerful asset to Clinton; the Republicans attempted to turn her into a liability in the Presidential campaign but failed. Except for the press’s brief examination, during the campaign, of her role in representing Madison Guaranty, her integrity had never been seriously questioned; it was, rather, Bill Clinton’s integrity that was the issue, and she who was placed in the role of defending her husband. Part of the reason for this situation, of course, was not that Hillary’s conduct was so irreproachable but that she was never the candidate, and thus escaped close scrutiny. Recently, however, with the spotlight of the Whitewater investigation focussed more on her than on him, and with the revelations about her commodities trading, their roles in this regard were reversed, and now it was Bill Clinton who had to defend his wife.

It seems likely that over the years he grew accustomed to the inevitable dynamic, in which he, apparently, caused pain and she, more or less, forgave—in which the moral high ground was always hers, not his. In an interview in People last December, when President Clinton was asked whether their daughter, Chelsea, was more like him or like Hillary, he responded, “I think she’s more like Hillary, though in some of her habits she’s more like me. She’s incredibly energetic. She likes to have large numbers of her friends over. She hates to go to bed, which is just the way I was when I was young—and still sometimes am. . . . But down deep, she’s a lot like her mother. She has her mother’s character, her mother’s real strong sense of what’s right or not.” He might have a talent for life, he seemed to be saying, but character and integrity were Hillary’s domain. And with me he emphasized again his image of Hillary as someone who is animated by her moral zeal. He told me, “Her instincts—this is not an intellectual thing. It’s not because she’s real smart. I mean, she’s real smart, but this has nothing to do with being real smart. She has a visceral, intuitive, almost irrepressible desire to try to find and do the right thing.”

That Clinton honestly perceives and admires this trait in his wife—whom he referred to at one point as “an astonishing person”—seems beyond question. But one can also imagine that he might enjoy a respite from such rectitude—that he might sometimes tire of being the one perennially at fault, beset with human flaws, who must exist in proximity to such exemplariness and forbearance. Perhaps he heard about a speech she gave recently at the National Prayer Luncheon, in which she was reported to have said, “I know in the Bible it says they asked Jesus how many times you should forgive, and he said seventy times seven. Well, I want you all to know that I’m keeping a chart”—a comment that brought the house down.

There seemed, in any event, more than a hint of satisfaction as President Clinton, who agreed that they were engaged in something of a role reversal, talked about her travails, and stressed that he—who has been through such things many times before—has tried to draw the right lessons from it all for her. “It’s been really hard for her,” he declared. “I mean, it’s hard reading things about yourself when you think you’re being turned into some sort of cardboard cutout. Or, as our friend James Carville said, we’re being turned into America’s piñata. And when you know it’s wrong, it’s tough.”

He had first experienced this sort of thing in his campaign for Congress in 1974, Clinton continued, when a false story was circulated about him that may have caused his defeat. “So I’m used to that sort of thing. There’s just something about me that infuriates people that aren’t for me, you know. I’ve always had people that really loved me and people that really hated me. And I’m used to it. Hillary was always able to occupy a different sort of position, partly because she wasn’t an elected official and partly because of the way she was and the way she did her business. . . . I don’t want to kid you, it’s been tough on her.”

But, Clinton added, he has learned from his own experience and has tried to impart to her that “when you’re confronted with a deal like this, it’s not just whether you rebound from it politically, externally.” He explained, “I mean, internally it has an impact on you. It either shrinks you up and makes you narrower or it makes you bigger and better and you grow from it. We were talking a month or so ago and I pulled our family Bible off the shelf, and I said, ‘Look here where St. Paul says he thanks God for putting a thorn in his flesh so that he would not become exalted in his own eyes.’ And I said, ‘Maybe this is the thorn in our flesh, and we should be thankful for it.’ She said, ‘Well, that’s a stretch—but I get the point.’ ” ♦