On January 26, 1993, six days after becoming First Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton paid a private visit to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The encounter took place at Onassis’s Fifth Avenue apartment, where lunch was served in the living room, overlooking Central Park. The two women had met only a few times before, but Clinton had sought out Onassis as one of the few women in America who could understand what she was going through. They talked for two hours about, among other things, the dangers faced by charismatic leaders and the challenge of raising children in the public eye. Eventually, the conversation turned to clothes. Nearly everything that Clinton had done in her first days in the White House had been criticized, from her decision to move into an office near the President’s to her choice of hats. (The derby-like creation that she wore to her husband’s swearing-in made her look, according to one news account, as if a flying saucer had just landed on her head.) Clinton asked Onassis whether she should hand herself over to a team of fashion consultants, as many had urged. Onassis responded with horror. “You have to be you,” she told the First Lady.
The advice seemed obvious, but no sooner had Clinton returned to Washington than she ignored it. She had already been named to head the President’s task force on health-care reform, an unprecedented appointment for a First Lady, and dozens of journalists were competing to land the first interview with her in her new position. Instead of granting it to a political columnist, or even to a medical reporter, Clinton chose to sit down with a food writer, Marian Burros, of the Times. The Times ran Burros’s piece, which focussed on the First Lady’s decision to shift the emphasis of the White House menu from French to American-style cuisine, on the front page. Clinton posed for the accompanying photograph in a high-fashion, shoulder-baring Donna Karan evening gown.
There are not supposed to be any second acts in American politics. Either because voters are impatient or because they are simply inattentive, a perception, once fixed in the public imagination—Michael Dukakis in a tank, Gary Hart on the Monkey Business—tends to crowd out the possibility of all others. A reputation for disingenuousness would seem to be particularly damaging, since any attempt to dislodge it is bound to be construed as another piece of insincerity.
Depending on how you reckon, Clinton’s second act began either three years ago, with her election to the United States Senate, or somewhat further back, with the revelation of her husband’s infidelity. It reached a triumphant peak this summer, with the publication of “Living History,” her extended meditation on the tribulations of being First Lady. Such is Clinton’s treatment of her subject, which is to say herself, that when trouble arises it is almost always from a surfeit of good intentions. “With Jackie’s tacit permission, I determined to continue having fun,” Clinton writes of her encounter with Onassis, and she ascribes the flap over her dress to the narrow imagination of her critics: “I cared about the food I served our guests, and I also wanted to improve the delivery of health care for all Americans.” The memoir has sold nearly a million and a half copies in the United States alone, more than recouping the eight million dollars that Simon & Schuster paid for it. (It has also been published abroad in thirty-five languages.) In a circular sort of way, its sales have no doubt benefitted from, and at the same time contributed to, the recent state of speculation about Clinton and the Presidential race.
How Hillary Clinton, whom many members of her husband’s Administration still credit with some of the worst decisions of his tenure, could have pulled off such a remarkable recovery is mysterious in many of the same ways that her earlier difficulties were. One possible explanation is that Clinton has far better judgment when it comes to her own career than when it comes to her husband’s. Another—the one Clinton proposes in “Living History”—is that her troubles as First Lady were all just the result of a terrible misunderstanding.
Senator Clinton and her staff occupy the same L-shaped suite, on the fourth floor of the Russell Senate Office Building, that her predecessor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and his staff worked out of for twenty-two years. Clinton’s office, which is at one end of the L, is spacious and airy, with a marble fireplace that holds four decoratively stacked logs. The room is painted a pale shade of daffodil, with drapes and upholstery to match, and projects what might best be described as reserved femininity. On the chairs, there are little needlepoint pillows, one stitched with a copy of the cover of Clinton’s 1996 book, “It Takes a Village,” another with the words “Senator Hillary.” Like most politicians’ offices, Clinton’s is filled with photographs, but instead of the usual shots of the senator posing with luminaries, her collection includes a picture of Robert Kennedy, who also served as a senator from New York even though he wasn’t from the state; a moody portrait of her husband, with his back to the camera, gazing out the windows of the Oval Office; and a composite picture of her sitting with Eleanor Roosevelt. The suite is not considered particularly desirable—Moynihan had many opportunities to upgrade, but chose not to—and Clinton ended up with it because, under the elaborate rules governing seniority, when she first entered the Senate she ranked below several other lawmakers who had entered on the same day. (Extra points go to those who have previously served as governors or congressmen, but the system gives no credit to former First Ladies.) After Moynihan retired, he came back to visit the office and pronounced the place a lot more yellow.
One morning in late May, I went down to Washington to spend a day with Clinton. When I met up with her, at around 9:30 A.M., she was sitting in her office, sipping some sort of frozen coffee concoction through a straw. Clinton is not at her best early in the day, and she looked as if she were struggling to wake up when a group of entrepreneurs-cum-environmentalists called E2 was ushered in. The group included Robert Fisher, a former president of the Gap, and its concerns ranged from overfishing of the world’s oceans to the Bush Administration’s legislative agenda. Clinton, sipping her coffee, agreed with the group’s gloomy views about aquatic life and the President’s proposals—“The Administration is taking every opportunity they can to weaken the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act,” she said—and, finally, voiced the hope that “this will be the first of many such meetings.” Then she excused herself to attend a press conference outside the Capitol.
The press conference dealt with the 2004 defense authorization bill, which was still working its way through Congress. A few months earlier, Clinton had won a seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. When I asked her why she had wanted the assignment, she said, “I concluded that the war on terrorism is a long-term challenge, and that it will be important to understand what our military response will be and to satisfy myself we’re as well defended as we need to be. It’s also clear that this Administration has a strategy to starve the federal budget of everything but defense. I think that it’s a mistake to turn our backs on so many of our important domestic and international priorities, but since that is the direction that these deficits and this huge debt load are taking us, I wanted to have some understanding and influence over how that money was going to be spent.” Others, including many other Democrats, put the matter more succinctly. Clinton, they say, is trying to fill the gap in her résumé under national defense.
Because she is so junior, Clinton usually speaks last at Senate press conferences, and at the conference on the defense bill, which dealt with an amendment to allow National Guard members and reservists to buy into the military’s health-insurance system, she had to wait through remarks by the amendment’s co-sponsors, Senator Patrick Leahy, of Vermont; Senator Tom Daschle, of South Dakota; and Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina. Experienced politicians often seem to zone out while their colleagues rehearse the inevitable platitudes, in this case about doing right by the men and women risking their lives to serve their country; Clinton, in contrast, always seems to be paying rapt attention. She nodded vigorously as Daschle and Leahy and Graham emphasized and reëmphasized the importance of assuring Guard members and reservists access to health care. When, finally, it was her turn to speak, she said, “What this bill basically says is that ‘you’re too valuable a resource for our country for us to treat you like this.’ ” Then she thanked her colleagues, especially Graham, the quartet’s only Republican, who, she noted, had himself served in the National Guard.
By the time the press conference broke up, it was almost noon. Clinton had three events in three different parts of Washington to attend over lunch—a surprise party for a friend, a meeting with the Senate’s Democratic caucus, and an awards ceremony organized by a group called Girls Inc. That afternoon, there was going to be a vote on the defense-bill amendment, and while Clinton was being ferried around the city her press staff was trying to arrange another news conference, this one with Graham alone. In 1999, Graham, then a congressman, served as one of the thirteen House managers who presented the case against Bill Clinton to the Senate during his impeachment trial. (“He was told to abide by the rules of litigation, and he cheated, and you’ve got to put him back in bounds,” Graham said at the time, referring to the President. “Remove him.”) From a public-relations perspective, there was an obvious appeal in bringing the old antagonists together, and after the amendment had been approved, 85-10, Clinton and Graham climbed up to the Senate Press Gallery and plopped down next to each other in a pair of leather chairs. About a dozen reporters wandered over. One woman was wearing a bright-pink outfit. Clinton, who was dressed in one of her trademark black suits, called out, “Love the fuchsia, girl!”
Clinton’s extraordinary celebrity is the unspoken but determining condition of all her interactions. Sitting next to her, Graham seemed at once excited and vaguely embarrassed, like a kid who has been caught showing off. “Well, this is, I think, the first thing I’ve ever had passed,” he announced. “I’m going to try to talk more with the senator from New York.” He appeared to be at a loss for what to call the former First Lady, at one point referring to her simply as “she.” Clinton, for her part, kept referring to Graham as “Lindsey.” She seemed completely relaxed, and if she was aware of Graham’s discomfiture—presumably, she was—she apparently found it gratifying. One reporter asked about the amendment’s prospects in the House.
“We’re about to start working on that,” Clinton said. “I think both of us are a little surprised that we got it through here in a week.”
“I’m shocked,” Graham interjected. “I’m awed and shocked.”
Clinton laughed. “That’s right,” she said. “I think it’s because people were so awed and shocked by us working together that they just basically threw up their hands, you know, and said, ‘O.K.!’ ”
When Clinton was first elected, she was often asked how she thought she would fare in the Senate, given her and her husband’s history with that body. Clinton professed herself unconcerned. “I think I will get a very positive reception,” she asserted at her first postelection news conference, in Manhattan. “I have worked with a number of the Republican members in the past. I’m looking forward to working with them on a bipartisan basis on issues that affect their states, as well as New York, and of course our entire country.” The same day, speaking in Mississippi, Senator Trent Lott, then the Majority Leader, declared, “I tell you one thing, when this Hillary gets to the Senate, if she does—maybe lightning will strike, and she won’t—she will be one of a hundred, and we won’t let her forget it.”
To a large degree, Clinton’s confidence now appears to have been justified. In addition to the amendment to the armed-services budget that she sponsored with Lindsey Graham, Clinton has co-sponsored measures with Gordon Smith, Republican of Oregon, to promote careers in nursing; with Don Nickles, Republican of Oklahoma, to extend unemployment benefits; and with John Warner, Republican of Virginia, to assist people caring for elderly or disabled relatives. (A measure that Clinton co-sponsored with Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Republican from Texas, to establish a program to recruit professionals as teachers, was approved as part of the education bill that passed the Senate in 2001.) Some former Clinton detractors, like Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, now go so far as to refer to her as a friend. At the top of a voluminous pile of documents that Clinton’s staff sent to me was a compilation of flattering quotes, including several from congressional and Senate colleagues, many of whom had wrangled with her in the past or voted in favor of throwing her husband out of office, or both.
“I think she’s doing fine,” Senator Lott was now quoted as saying. “I think she’s trying to dig in and do her homework, trying to lower her profile a little bit.”
As it happened, Clinton’s next meeting of the day was with Asa Hutchinson, Under-Secretary for Border and Transportation Security at the Department of Homeland Security. Hutchinson, who is from Arkansas, is a former congressman and, with Graham, served as a manager in Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. Senator Clinton had requested the meeting, which took place in her office, to discuss topics like security at small airports. As it was breaking up, Hutchinson turned to her and said, with what seemed to be genuine admiration, “Congratulations. It’s just an amazing feat what you have done.”
“I’m having the time of my life,” Clinton responded. “I pinch myself every morning.”
Clinton’s journey to the Senate began, more or less officially, on July 7, 1999, with the announcement that she was forming a campaign committee. As the site for the announcement, Clinton chose Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s farm, in the tiny upstate New York town of Pindars Corners. She conferred with the Senator in a one-room schoolhouse, then walked down the road with him to a newly mown hayfield where risers had been set up for the cameras. Clinton pronounced herself “very humbled and more than a little surprised to be here.” She raised the concerns that, she supposed, were on everybody’s mind—“Why the Senate? Why New York? And why me?”—and, finally, she took a few questions from the press, which she didn’t so much answer as try, not always successfully, to parry.
The consensus on the hayfield that morning was that Clinton would have her work cut out for her—the sort of judgment that has a tendency to be self-fulfilling. I had brought along a friend who lived near Pindars Corners, and, as one of the few locals available for comment, he immediately found himself besieged. A television reporter asked him whether New York “needed” the First Lady. Not understanding where things were heading, he replied, “New York doesn’t need Hillary Clinton, but I think most New Yorkers welcome her candidacy.” He appeared on the evening news delivering only the first half of his remark.
Beyond the obvious blunders—the donning of a Yankees cap, the embrace of Suha Arafat—Clinton’s campaign was, from the beginning, troubled by the old, unresolved questions of identity. On the one hand, the First Lady was clearly running on who she was; on the other, who she was was precisely what was at issue. To a surprising degree, Clinton’s public image had been improved by the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the subsequent impeachment of her husband. Still, many, including some of Clinton’s closest friends, argued that the sympathy extended to a long-suffering wife was a treacherous basis on which to build a candidacy. The Senate race seemed sure to prompt a reëxamination of the multifarious scandals associated with the Clinton Administration, starting with Whitewater, and to summon up all the most unflattering impressions of the First Lady. (“Lady Macbeth in a headband” was a much-repeated formulation.) At one point, Clinton’s campaign staff, disturbed by her lack of support among suburban women, convened a series of all-female focus groups in Westchester County. (Tapes of the sessions were leaked to a columnist, Michael Tomasky, who subsequently published a book about the campaign, “Hillary’s Turn.”) Among the words that the participants used to describe Clinton were “cunning,” “savvy,” “pushy,” and “cold.” One woman complained, “She’s afraid of showing a weakness to us.” Another said, “We really don’t know who Hillary Clinton is.”
The Clinton campaign’s response to the question of “who Hillary Clinton is” was to turn the question on its head. With her “listening tour”—an elaborate show of humility to the citizens of New York—she offered the inverse of a typical campaign; instead of presenting a set of positions to voters, Clinton travelled around the state soliciting views from others. (As a former campaign aide put it to me, explaining the theory behind the tour, “People wanted to know that it was about them, and not about her.”) When, eventually, the First Lady began to put out position papers—something that toward the end of the campaign she took to doing almost every day—she continued to focus on topics of local (and profoundly noncontroversial) interest, like rural communities’ need for better Internet service.
While journalists fumed about the anodyne nature of her agenda—one reporter accused her of having undergone a “controversectomy”—voters seemed unfazed. They were usually flattered, which clearly was the point. Here was a woman who could be doing anything, and what she wanted to do was to expand broadband access in Cattaraugus County. In the course of the campaign, I followed Clinton to at least a dozen events. One trip to Buffalo began with her being asked on live radio whether she had ever slept with Vince Foster. The interview left her staff deeply rattled, but Clinton proceeded to work the lunch crowd at a local senior center, pausing at every table to shake every hand, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. One woman rambled on incoherently to her about something having to do with a house foreclosure; Clinton listened patiently, then thanked the woman for bringing such an important matter to her attention. A second woman complained about the difficulty that young people had finding jobs in the area, a lament that Clinton had doubtless heard hundreds, if not thousands, of times before. “While you’re talking, she’s actually listening to what you’re saying,” the woman remarked to me afterward. “She doesn’t just want to get away.”
Whether this sort of attentiveness would, in the end, have been enough to defeat Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is hard to know. During his phase of the tag-team campaign, Giuliani never really bothered to engage Clinton as a serious rival. When he mentioned her at all, it was usually to make fun of her—for pretending to be a Yankees fan, a New Yorker, a sincere person. The Mayor implied, and many others explicitly stated, that Clinton’s only interest in the Empire State was as a stepping stone to further power. “If she wins in New York, it will only be a matter of time before she announces for President,” William Powers, chairman of the state G.O.P., declared.
Rick Lazio, the Long Island congressman who replaced Giuliani in the race after the Mayor was found to have prostate cancer, tried to adopt a similar approach—“I put my Mets hat on when I was six years old,” he declared in his announcement speech—but, lacking Giuliani’s stature, and his instinct for savagery, he never could quite pull it off. Even many Democrats believe that it was Lazio’s weakness as a candidate, more than Clinton’s appeal, that finally decided the race. In an obviously scripted confrontation at a debate in Buffalo, Lazio marched over to Clinton and demanded that she sign a pledge to ban so-called “soft money” contributions from the campaign. “When Lazio walked across that stage, that was every husband walking across that kitchen with a threatening tone in his voice” is how one prominent New York Democrat recalled the incident. “They did for her what she couldn’t do for herself. They made her sympathetic.”
The Senate is a body governed by laws and by traditions, to the latter of which belongs the freshman visit to Senator Robert Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat. Byrd has served in the Senate for fifty years—longer, as he likes to point out, than all but two of the members who have passed through the chamber since it was created—and is widely acknowledged to be the world’s reigning expert on its rules. By the time of Clinton’s election, she and Senator Byrd were already well acquainted—too well, one might say. Their most consequential encounter occurred in 1993, during Clinton’s disastrous tenure as head of the President’s task force on health-care reform. The First Lady wanted the legislation that the task force had drafted, which ran to more than thirteen hundred pages, tacked onto the so-called budget-reconciliation bill. The justification for this was, substantively speaking, thin, but procedurally it offered a critical advantage. The budget-reconciliation bill practically has to pass—if it doesn’t, the entire appropriations process gets bollixed up—and debate in the Senate is limited. Clinton needed Byrd, who was then the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, to approve the move, something he refused to do. His decision had the effect—intentional or not—of killing off the legislation and, with it, Clinton’s hopes of introducing universal health insurance.
“I had seen her a few times through a glass darkly, as the Scripture says,” Byrd told me recently when I met with him in his office in the Capitol. “I would say she did not necessarily start out as one of my favorites, if I might use that term. But she is one of my favorites now, because I like her approach. I like her sincerity. I like her convictions.” Byrd said that he was particularly impressed by Clinton’s hard work and deference, which, he had advised her on the occasion of her freshman visit, in November, 2000, would be among the qualities her fellow-senators would judge her on. “I think she has been the perfect student,” he said.
The first piece of legislation that Clinton introduced in the Senate was a package of seven bills designed, in her words, “to spur job growth in upstate New York and around the nation.” The package, which fulfilled a campaign promise, called for, among other things, the creation of “technology bonds” to promote broadband access in rural communities. When Clinton introduced the package, on March 1, 2001, she handed her colleagues customized briefing packets with color-coded maps showing how each of their states would also benefit from her initiatives.
In general, Clinton has received high marks for her inaugural legislative efforts. This is not because they are particularly far-reaching, or even original—on the contrary. Like most junior senators, Clinton has spent her first years in office largely trying to funnel federal dollars to her state. She has, for example, successfully worked to maneuver a new, hundred-million-dollar border-crossing station in Champlain, New York, through the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, of which she is a member.
“People thought, Well, gee, she’s the First Lady, she’s probably going to be very insulated,” Garry Douglas, the president of the Plattsburgh-North Country Chamber of Commerce, who worked with her on the project, told me. “But not only does she take our phone calls—on occasion she calls us.” Douglas also said that he was “remarkably impressed” with Clinton’s staff, an assessment that I heard repeated from many sources. Other officials observed that there was almost no economic-development project too small-bore for Clinton to show an interest in. Last year, for instance, in an effort to promote local agriculture, she organized an event in the Capitol called New York farm day. At the event, which she repeated last month, she served only New York-grown products. “She is a true missionary for New York food and wine,” Jim Trezise, president of the New York Wine & Grape Foundation, told me.
All the lawmakers who spoke to me on the record about Clinton—a self-selected group, to be sure—praised her in much the same terms as Senator Byrd. They noted her faithful attendance at committee hearings, her deference to more senior colleagues, her general willingness to fade into the background. “When she goes to meetings—you know, we have New York delegation meetings—she just sits there, the same as anybody else,” Peter King, a Republican congressman from Long Island, told me. “She’s not trying to jump out front and grab an issue from you, because she knows she’s going to get the coverage anyway. Now, that may sound almost self-evident: of course Hillary Clinton can get her face in the paper. But the thing is, a lot of people, no matter how much publicity they get, they still don’t have the confidence to know they can get it.”
A few weeks after Clinton and Graham’s amendment was passed, I went down to Washington again. The day was given over to the Homeland Security Appropriations bill for 2004. Ever since the September 11th attacks, Clinton has, for obvious reasons, devoted a great deal of time to homeland security and, in particular, to obtaining more funds for New York. Working with the state’s senior senator, Charles Schumer, with whom she does not always enjoy the best relations—the pair have had at least two semi-public shouting matches—Clinton was instrumental in getting twenty billion dollars for New York in the days immediately following the disaster. This past winter, after months of lobbying, Clinton helped secure an additional ninety million dollars to track the health effects of the attacks on rescue workers.
“This was an issue where she might have said, ‘Listen, this is bogged down someplace,’ but she stayed with it,” Peter Gorman, the president of the Uniformed Fire Officers’ Association of New York City, which represents the F.D.N.Y.’s superior officers, told me. “That’s the amazing thing about her. She’s really a woman who is not afraid to get involved in any issue that’s important to us.”
The Homeland Security Appropriations Act finances the Department of Homeland Security. It also provides the states with security funds, using a formula based almost entirely on population. Clinton wanted to change this formula, by directing the Secretary of Homeland Security to take other factors into account, such as the risk of attack. To explain her proposal, she had had a series of charts made up. At one point, she went down to the floor of the Senate, propped the charts up on an easel, and was about to launch into her spiel when she was informed that a vote on two other amendments had been scheduled, and she would have to wait. She trekked back to her office to meet with members of the New York Farm Bureau, who were concerned about dairy prices and Canadian imports, then walked back to the Capitol to await her turn to speak. It came at about six in the evening. There were only two other senators on the floor, not an unusual number for a routine legislative matter.
“Now, this is obviously a bit confusing and arcane, because it has to do with formulas and percentages, but it is a very important issue,” Clinton began, speaking to the mostly empty chamber. “There is an absolute clear consensus among security experts that a better formula must be devised,” she went on. “I said the other day that if we were to determine our defense posture, our projection of force around the world, on some kind of per-capita basis, we would be placing soldiers in Canada and Sweden, because, after all, they are there. Well, obviously, it is nonsensical. We don’t do that. We look at the threats. We try to design our weaponry and other responses to take account of all of the threats that military forces might encounter, and we should be doing the same here.” Midway through Clinton’s remarks, Susan Collins, the chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee, rushed onto the floor; evidently, she had been advised that it would be unwise to let Clinton’s comments go unanswered. After Clinton was done, Collins, a Maine Republican, stood to oppose her amendment, pointing out that the Governmental Affairs Committee had been trying to draft legislation to deal with precisely the same issue. She offered to work with the senator from New York on this legislation, because, as she put it, “I’m very sympathetic to what a high-risk, high-vulnerability state the Senator so ably represents”—at which point Clinton withdrew her proposal from consideration. Although it might have appeared that she had wasted the entire afternoon waiting around to offer her amendment, only to drop it at the crucial moment, Clinton was upbeat. By the unwritten rules of the Senate, she told me, the exchange with Collins had been filled with significance.
“Actually, it turned out better than I expected,” she said as we walked back to her office. “When she said, ‘You have a lot of good points, you have a special concern about New York that I want to work with you about,’ that is a wonderful invitation to pull down your amendment and engage in a discussion based on that kind of comity. It’s really the way things get done around here.”
Clinton wrote “Living History”—with a team of ghostwriters—nights and weekends when her senatorial schedule allowed. Once, I asked her how she had managed to remember everything she recounts in the book—whether she had kept some sort of diary she could refer back to. She turned to me and said, matter-of-factly, “No. Because it would have been subpoenaed.”
“Living History” begins with Clinton’s childhood in the quiet town of Park Ridge, Illinois—“My dad was a rock-ribbed, up-by-your-bootstraps, conservative Republican and proud of it,” she writes—and briefly describes her falling in love at Yale Law School with a fellow-student who “had a vitality that seemed to shoot out of his pores.” Most of the book’s five hundred and thirty-four pages, though, are devoted to Clinton’s years as First Lady, in chapters that discuss, in turn, her efforts to overhaul the nation’s health-care system, to improve the lives of women around the world, and to deal with the various scandals that were constantly cropping up. Clinton addresses virtually every allegation, usually in order to point out where her actions were misconstrued. Discussing the ten-thousand-per-cent profit she made during her nine-month foray into cattle-futures trading, in the late seventies, for example, she writes, by way of explanation, “I was lucky enough to lose my nerve and get out before the market dropped.”
Whitewater takes up one whole chapter and parts of several others. The story of the Clintons’ land deal with Jim McDougal, who was later imprisoned for ransacking a savings and loan, Madison Guaranty, that Clinton herself had done legal work for does not lend itself to an edifying telling. “I’ve been asked how I could have been so ignorant of McDougal’s actions,” she writes. “I’ve asked myself that too.” What is arguably the story’s climax—the discovery of Clinton’s Madison Guaranty billing records, which had mysteriously gone missing—becomes, in Clinton’s version, simply a matter of poor housekeeping: “It was difficult to convey the disarray we had lived with ever since moving into the White House.”
By far the most often cited section of the book, of course, is the section dealing with the Lewinsky scandal, and with Clinton’s reaction to her husband’s confession of infidelity. The story of the President’s affair with Lewinsky broke on January 21, 1998, and on that day, Clinton relates, the President woke her up early to say, “There’s something in today’s papers you should know about.” Bill denied that there was any truth to the charges, and six days later Hillary went on the “Today” show. “The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it,” she told Matt Lauer, “is this vast rightwing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for President.” For the next seven months, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, Clinton continued to believe, she maintains, that her husband was the victim of politically motivated slander. Then, on the morning of August 15th, the President woke her up early again, this time to inform her that, as she puts it, there had in fact been “inappropriate intimacy.”
“Gulping for air, I started crying and yelling at him, ‘What do you mean?’ ” Clinton recalls. “ ‘What are you saying? Why did you lie to me?’ ” A week before the book was released, the Associated Press got hold of a copy and put Clinton’s recollection of this scene out on the wire, guaranteeing the book huge publicity in the days leading up to its hugely publicized release.
To an extent unusual for an author in her position, Clinton actively marketed “Living History”—first, in appearances in New York, Washington, and Philadelphia, and later, during the summer recess, in appearances in cities like Little Rock and Seattle. (By the end of the tour, she had autographed some forty-five thousand copies.) I went to an early book signing, in the Clintons’ adopted home town of Chappaqua, in Westchester County. The event, which took place at the local public library, was limited to those with tickets, but more than a hundred people had shown up without them and were waiting in the parking lot. Also hanging around outside was a man in a bright-red devil’s suit, waving a sign that said “I sold my soul to Hillary.” Inside, Clinton recognized several people she knew and waved to them enthusiastically. She read a few excerpts from the book—one about a trip she had taken to South Asia as First Lady, and one about dropping Chelsea off at Stanford. Then she turned to the book’s penultimate chapter, “Dare to Compete,” which deals with her decision to run for the Senate.
It is the peculiar conceit of “Living History” that this decision was not in any way an expression of—or even influenced by—personal ambition. Clinton portrays herself as drawn into a candidacy entirely as a result of the efforts of others, among them Charles Rangel, the Harlem congressman, who suggested the idea in a phone conversation, and Senator Bob Torricelli, of New Jersey, who was asked about it on “Meet the Press.” Nita Lowey, a congresswoman from Westchester, gave her another nudge by dropping out of the race, Clinton says, neglecting to mention that Lowey dropped out only because Clinton had made it clear that she wanted in. By Clinton’s account, the decisive push came from, of all unlikely people, a high-school basketball player named Sofia Totti. Clinton had agreed to a promo appearance for an HBO special entitled “Dare to Compete,” at which Totti had the honor of introducing her:
As I went to shake her hand, she leaned toward me and whispered in my ear.
“Dare to compete, Mrs. Clinton,” she said. “Dare to compete.”
Her comment caught me off guard, so much so that I left the event and began to think: Could I be afraid to do something I had urged countless other women to do? Why am I vacillating about taking on this race? Why aren’t I thinking more seriously about it? Maybe I should “dare to compete.”
For all its traffic in intimate material—the scandals, the early-morning bedroom encounters, the self-doubts—“Living History” is not, finally, a record of a life; it is a political act. It offers an account of Clinton’s actions that, however bowdlerized, she can refer back to if, as seems almost inevitable, questions about them arise on a future occasion. Like the “listening tour,” it is a response to constraints that to any ordinary person would have been paralyzing.
On the Friday before Labor Day, Clinton had just wrapped up the last phase of her book tour and was midway through an upstate swing when a rumor about her began to circulate. According to this rumor, which surfaced online in the Drudge Report, Clinton had called a meeting with her top advisers, among them her husband, to discuss whether she should run for President. At a press conference in the Finger Lakes, Clinton denied that any such meeting was planned—she said that she was simply hosting a “thank-you dinner” for supporters—and insisted that, “for the nine-hundred-and-seventy-fifth time,” she was ruling out the Presidential race. A few hours later, she denied the report again. This did not do much to dampen the speculation, which continued over the weekend and by Monday had made its way onto the front page of the Post. In a story headlined “My Girl” and labelled “exclusive,” the Post quoted former Governor Mario Cuomo saying that if Clinton did decide to run he “would support her in a flash.” The dinner, a week later, turned out to be as Clinton had described it; nevertheless, it set off a whole new round of rumors. Clinton told her supporters—jokingly, she later insisted—how important their help would be for her next campaign, “whatever that may be.”
The recent surge of interest in Clinton’s plans is in part a response to the weakness of the current Democratic field. Voicing a widely held view, Cuomo has referred to the candidates vying for the Party’s nomination as a “babble,” and Bill Clinton is reported to have told his wife’s supporters that there were “two stars” in the Democratic Party—General Wesley Clark and Hillary. When Clark subsequently announced his candidacy, there were so many reports that the Clintons were backing him—perhaps as a “stalking-horse” for Hillary—that Bill reportedly felt compelled to call several of the other candidates to deny this. (Hillary, for her part, told reporters at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor that claims that the Clintons were supporting Clark were “an absurd feat of the imagination.”)
At the same time, the speculation is clearly being driven by the old assumption that Clinton didn’t come to New York just to work on broadband access. Notwithstanding her sedulous attention to local issues, she has made several moves over the last year or so—including writing her memoir—which, if they do not conclusively demonstrate Presidential ambitions, are certainly open to that interpretation. (According to a Marist College poll taken just before the book was published, twenty-eight per cent of New York voters thought that Clinton’s primary motivation for writing “Living History” was to set the stage for a national race, while twenty-seven per cent believed that she just wanted to tell her side of the story.) This past January, after only two years in office, Clinton assumed the chairmanship of the Senate’s Democratic steering committee, a position that officially makes her part of the Senate’s Democratic leadership and gives her a prominent role in shaping the Party’s message. Clinton has emerged as one of the Democrats’ most active—and successful—fund-raisers, hosting events for fellow Democratic senators at her Washington residence, a fifty-five-hundred-square-foot house near Embassy Row, and also writing checks to Democratic officials around the country from her political-action committee, HILLPAC, which, in the first six months of 2003, raised more money than any other Democratic leadership PAC. Just recently, Clinton launched a Web site-cum-fundraising operation (friendsofhillary.com), which chronicles how “Hillary is making a difference” in areas ranging from “agriculture” to “women” and has prominently featured letters importuning her to run for President. As Clinton likes to point out, she is the first New York senator ever to serve on the Senate Armed Services Committee, an appointment for which she had to give up her seat on the Senate Budget Committee. When I asked one longtime New York political operative whether he could think of an explanation for this choice aside from national aspirations, he claimed to be stumped: “You got me. For the Long Island defense contractors who all moved to Texas twenty years ago?”
Clinton has also been influential in setting up a new liberal think tank called the Center for American Progress, headed by Bill Clinton’s former White House chief of staff John Podesta. The institute is not supposed to be explicitly partisan, but many Democrats are clearly hoping that it will come up with a more compelling agenda for the Party—if not by 2004, then at least by 2008. (One friend of the Clintons told me that Hillary would not run for President next year, although, as he noted, she has “very pointedly not ruled out” running in any other year.)
I asked Clinton about the state of Democratic politics one day when she was waiting to go onto the Senate floor. “I think it’s been hard for our party to deal with both the loss of the White House and the loss of Congress,” she told me. “That hasn’t happened in the memory of anyone here.” She went on, “I’m fundamentally optimistic, because I think that the policies of this Administration are distinctly wrongheaded, and that, after the photo ops are over, the facts and evidence actually count as to how people are experiencing their lives. And I believe that time and evidence are on our side.”
Clinton voted in favor of authorizing the use of force against Iraq, and she has been careful not to question Bush’s military judgment. On just about every other issue, though, including the handling of the aftermath of the war, she has been critical of the President. Referring to Bush’s request for a supplemental appropriation to finance ongoing operations in Iraq, she said recently, “For me, the eighty-seven billion dollars is not just a bill for Iraq—it’s a bill for failed leadership.” Last week, in spite of her own experience with special prosecutors, she called for the appointment of one to investigate Administration leaks revealing the identity of the covert C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame. Clinton frequently faults Bush for his stewardship of the economy. “I’m absolutely convinced that the Administration’s policy is the wrong medicine,” she told me. “They have the same diagnosis and treatment for everything: it’s tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts.” Meanwhile, she argues, the Administration’s shortsightedness on domestic security has left the country deeply vulnerable to another September 11th-like attack. “I alternate between frustration and outrage mixed with head-slapping amazement that we’re not doing more,” she told me. “Maybe we’ll get really, really, really lucky and nothing bad will ever happen again. But I can’t in good conscience operate from that assumption.”
Clinton’s criticism of the Bush Administration parallels that of most other Democrats, including most of the Democrats running for President. Occasionally, though, she veers off in a direction of her own.
One afternoon in the spring, I went to hear Clinton give a speech to a group of nurses at Roosevelt Hospital, in Manhattan. “You know, some of us need more help and guidance and support than others,” Clinton told them. “Some of us are born healthy and others are not. Some of us have traumatic, terrible accidents or events or diseases that affect us. None of us know what will happen to any of us tomorrow, and therefore I think we are all bound together in a web of relationships where we do—not only for religious reasons or moral reasons but practical reasons—have an obligation and opportunity to support one another.”
Clinton went on to say that she was worried that the nation’s priorities were “getting misplaced.” She emphasized the importance of sacrifice—“I think that’s what makes a stronger country”—and introduced the concept of “future preference,” under which tomorrow takes precedence over today. By the end of her speech, she was calling into question that most basic of American values—self-reliance. “I hope we don’t forget that the idea of the rugged individual is a great idea for films, for books, but there are very few people who go through life without needing anyone, without having to make any sacrifice for anyone else,” she said. “In fact, it’s kind of an impoverished life, if that’s the attitude.”
At the same event, Clinton referred to the hospital’s interim president. “I like the name ‘interim president,’ ” she said. “I like the name ‘president’ even better.”
As it happened, I was supposed to interview Clinton the day after the item on her Presidential plans appeared in the Drudge Report. The interview, the second of two that she agreed to, was scheduled to take place in her car, during a drive from the town of Skaneateles to the New York State Fair, just outside Syracuse. I spent the night before the interview in a hotel, and when I was about to check out I couldn’t find my room key. After rummaging under the bed and through my suitcase, I still couldn’t find it, so I told the man at the desk that I was sorry, but I had to go because I had an appointment to interview Hillary Clinton. He asked if I meant the Hillary Clinton, and I said yes.
“Now, don’t get all nervous and competitive,” he told me. “Just be yourself.”
By Clinton’s reckoning, “millions of words” have been written about her; her memoir adds another two hundred thousand to the total. Even the best and most exhaustive of these accounts seem somehow incomplete—and this is certainly true of “Living History.” One of Clinton’s own pieces of campaign literature from the Senate race put the problem this way: “We know everything—and nothing—about her.”
In our first conversation, I tried to talk to Clinton about how her life had changed since she left the White House. A friend of hers had told me that she thought Clinton felt “liberated” by having her own political office. I asked Clinton if it was true.
“I wouldn’t use that,” she said. “You know, before Bill ran for President I had my own office, I had my own job.” She went on to say, “There’s nothing comparable to being First Lady. It’s not a job; it’s a role or a position. It is remade every time someone fills it, because of the election, up until now, of a husband as President.
“It was a hard adjustment for me,” she said. “So for me this is more like a return to what I had done before those eight years. It has a definition; it has responsibilities. There are certain things you are expected to do. You do them to the best of your ability. So I’m very comfortable having this job, which it is. It’s a job. The other is not.”
I asked her how her views had changed since she moved from the White House to the Senate. “I feel like I’ve been really lucky to have those different perspectives, because it has informed my understanding of a lot of issues and how to approach them,” she told me. “I learned so much about Washington and national politics and the legislative process during the eight years of my husband’s two terms. I made a lot of mistakes. I learned from those mistakes. At least, I hope I did.” Then she steered the conversation back to the complexities of her former role. “I don’t know that anything can prepare you for ending up in the White House,” she said. “It is just so many light-years apart from any other experience.”
The ill-defined demands of the First Lady’s office are a recurring theme in “Living History.” “I was navigating uncharted terrain—and through my own inexperience, I contributed to some of the conflicting perceptions about me,” Clinton writes at one point. “I was still learning the ropes and still discovering what it meant to be America’s First Lady,” she observes at another. While it is probably true that every First Lady has to tinker with the role, Clinton was the first to imagine that it fell to the President’s wife to reinvent the American health-care system. What is missing from her account is, not coincidentally, what is left out of her account of the Senate race—any mention of her own ambition.
The closest Clinton comes to acknowledging what was really at issue is some broad generalities about gender roles. “We were living in an era in which some people still felt deep ambivalence about women in positions of public leadership and power,” she writes. Even in these self-abstracted terms, though, she doesn’t carry the argument nearly as far as she could. Surely it is unfair that the same ambitions that are admired in a man are in a woman considered repellent. But to complain about this double standard would be to acknowledge precisely what Clinton has worked so hard—and, as the Senate seat she now occupies demonstrates, so successfully—to repress.
The second time I interviewed Clinton, I decided to try to see if I could push beyond her vague statements about women in power. First, I asked her if she would give different advice to a young woman entering politics from what she would give to a young man. “There are lots of little inconsequential but apparently important matters, like hair style and wardrobe and the height of one’s heels on marble floors, that you have to be aware of,” she said.
Would she advise Chelsea to go into politics? “I would never talk about what I advise my daughter to do.”
Was she treated differently in the Senate because she is a woman? “I really have been impressed at how collegial the atmosphere is,” she replied.
Shortly before the interview, I spoke to Dwight Jewson, a marketing consultant who had been hired by Clinton’s Senate campaign to investigate why she was polling so poorly among certain groups—particularly suburban women—that she needed to win. “When you’re a strong, powerful woman, you’re seen as one of two types of person,” Jewson told me. “You’re either our mother, because our mothers are strong powerful women we love, or you’re a manipulative, opportunistic bitch.” I asked Clinton what she thought of Jewson’s assessment.
She paused for a split second. “I think we’re getting beyond that,” she said. “I’m sure there are some people, just as there are people who have never accepted the civil-rights revolution and the equality of all kinds of human beings, who live with and act on stereotypes, but I just don’t see that as pervasive anymore.”
Finally, as we were pulling up at the New York State Fair, I asked her whether she ever wished she wouldn’t have to read another word about Hillary Clinton. She smiled. “That does cross my mind.”
Ever since entering the Senate, Clinton has hosted an annual invitation-only lunch at the State Fair. Her guests include community leaders and elected officials from central New York, along with an assortment of people who somehow fit in with the lunch’s annual theme. Last year’s was agriculture, and the guests included several dairy farmers. This year’s was the military. Clinton had a private meeting beforehand, so I went over to the lunch ahead of her. It was a steamy day, and many of the guests, especially those in uniform, had arrived early to escape the heat on the fairgrounds. Rhea Jezer, the former chairman of the state’s Sierra Club, was sitting with her husband, Daniel, a rabbi. “When my mother died, when I had a foot operation that got infected, Hillary called,” Jezer told me. “She really cares. Yet the press says that she’s cold. I don’t understand that.”
Jezer introduced me to the Onondaga County executive, Nick Pirro, a Republican, who apparently had been invited out of a spirit of bipartisanship. He looked as if he were having second thoughts about his decision to show up. “There’s no middle ground on Hillary,” he told me. “People are either very for or very against her. There are a lot of people who believe she really is in this to run for President.”
That morning, in a brief item, the Syracuse Post-Standard had announced that Bill Clinton would be accompanying his wife to the State Fair, as he had done several times in the past. Hundreds of fairgoers began to line up in the heat outside the building where the lunch was being held. Hillary’s staff had expected Bill to show up, but the former President had decided that he was too busy working on his own memoir to make the trip upstate.
Just how much of a role Bill plays in Hillary’s career at this point is hard to say. The two appear together in public only occasionally; I saw them both just once, at a book party for Hillary at the Four Seasons, in Manhattan. Bill told the crowd at the party that “Living History” was “an accurate, true account of the person I believe did more good for more people in the position of First Lady than any person who ever served in that position.” Hillary said, “At the end of the day, I would not have lived the life I’ve lived or become the person I am, for all that means, without my husband.” I made repeated efforts to interview Bill Clinton for this article, finally sending him a list of questions via e-mail. Several weeks later, the answers arrived, also via e-mail. To a query about whether he was surprised in any way by his wife’s Senate career, the former President wrote, “My only surprise is that she’s doing even better than I thought she would, which is saying something.” In response to a question about what his wife brought to the Senate, he offered the following list:
She likes people and cares about their problems;
She knows how to make good policy;
She’s brilliant and works very hard;
She fights for what she believes in and doesn’t give up;
She’s always reaching out for new allies, including Republicans;
She loves her country and her state;
She’s always thinking about what life will be like for our children and their children.
By the time Clinton got to the lunch at the State Fair, there was not a single empty seat in the room, which had been set up for more than four hundred people. Clinton began her remarks by saying that it was a “great honor” for her to serve on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and she related how she had teamed up with Senator Graham to try to provide health insurance for members of the National Guard and reservists. “Some of you may recall Senator Graham and I have some significant differences,” she said, prompting titters from the audience. “But on this we are absolutely united.” Finally, to much cheering from the crowd, she vowed to fight the proposed closing of a V.A. hospital in nearby Canandaigua.
“That really raises an over-all issue, and that is: What are our priorities as a nation?” Clinton continued. “What is it we are going to focus on and value, and what is it we are willing to pay for? I am very disappointed that in just two and a half years we have gone from surplus back into huge and growing deficits. And I just have to respectfully disagree that the economic policies pursued by the Administration are working. I don’t see the jobs being created; in fact, we have the worst job-creation record since Herbert Hoover, and that was not exactly a good time for our country.”
After the lunch, Clinton made her way over to a neighboring building for a press conference. The place was packed with people, many of whom still seemed to be under the impression that they were going to see both Hillary and Bill. A microphone had been set up behind a display of apples and apple products, and a girl in an orange taffeta gown with a sash that said “Williamson Apple Blossom Queen” was waiting beside it. It was so hot that people began to help themselves to the apple-juice boxes. Clinton announced a program under which General Mills, in return for labels from New York apples, would donate money to the state’s schools.
“We have the most delicious apples in the world, and we have the best students and kids in the world, so it’s a perfect combination,” she said. She took a few questions from the press, including one about her husband—“He just couldn’t make it this year,” she said curtly—and then began to work the crowd. People kept asking her to pose for pictures or to sign things—mostly copies of “Living History,” but also baseballs, brochures from the fair, and scraps of used paper and envelopes. One man handed her an old copy of Time magazine with a menacing-looking picture of her on the cover and the headline “The Truth About Whitewater.” Clinton looked nonplussed, but signed it anyway. “When am I going to get to vote for you for President?” one woman asked her. “You are such an inspiration,” another one said.
Eventually, Clinton worked her way over to a building known as the Center of Progress, where her Senate office had a booth of its own, next to a booth for the state comptroller. It consisted of tables covered with pamphlets, including one for kids that asked, “Did You Know. . . New York has the longest Toll Expressway in the entire world? (Governor Thomas E. Dewey Thruway is 559 miles long.)” Hundreds more people had lined up to see her, and they grabbed the pamphlets and handed them to her to sign.
Unlike her husband, Clinton does not appear to draw energy from huge crowds of people. Such is her self-discipline, though, that, as she is beaming into the camera or scribbling her name for the umpteenth time, she is almost always able to convey the sense that there’s nothing on earth she’d rather be doing. The effort she puts out doesn’t resolve the contradictions of her career—ambition and self-sacrifice are never fully interchangeable—but it can make them blur together. One woman I met at the “Living History” reading in Chappaqua put the point this way: “Anyone who is willing to do what she’s done to be in public service is a hero.”
After about half an hour at her booth, it was time for Clinton to head over to a Friends of Hillary fund-raiser. On her way out of the building, she paused at the comptroller’s booth, where she posed for a picture with the staff and signed more autographs. During her time at the fair, in addition to her Secret Service detail, Clinton had been guarded by a dozen or so state troopers, and they lined up to say goodbye to her at the door. She thanked them and, before getting into her car, shook hands with every single one. ♦
