We’re sitting together at one end of a long mahogany table in the Map Room, on the ground level of the White House. A little awkwardly, the table is set up for twelve, with a White House notepad by each chair; it seems that nobody has been around to pick up since the President held a meeting here just before Christmas. Half a century ago, the American conduct of the Second World War was largely overseen from this room; here President Roosevelt could send messages to commanders around the world and receive up-to-the-minute reports from the battlefields. More recently, the once top secret room had fallen into disuse; Hillary Rodham Clinton tells me that its restoration was one of her pet projects when she first arrived. A red damask sofa stands off to one side, and there are half a dozen pleasant, undemanding oils and engravings on the walls. But what draws your eye is a map of Europe, hand-labelled “Estimated German Situation,” which was prepared and posted on April 3, 1945. Areas under Nazi occupation were outlined in red, with blue arrows to indicate invading enemy troops. It was the last situation map seen by President Roosevelt, who died nine days later.
All these years after, the map still lends an aura of the war room—of tactical maneuvers against desperate odds, of moves and countermoves. In the light of the First Lady’s embattled position, it may also lend the comfort of control, the assurance that V-E Day is around the corner. You’re almost tempted to stick different-colored pins in the thing, the way generals in old war movies mark enemy battalions: over here, a Senate panel and an independent counsel clustered together; over there, a Times columnist; and, in scattershot formation, a Fifth Column of disaffected ex-supporters. Maybe it isn’t war, but it is hell. “I wouldn’t wish this on anybody,” she says. This morning’s William Safire column happens to be the one that pronounces her a “congenital liar.” She has just been out taking a long walk by herself—which, given the recent blizzard, shows real determination, or maybe need.
Actually, the strain isn’t visible. With nearly flawless skin, she defies all logic by looking younger than she does in photographs. She’s in what you might call her civvies: she’s wearing a purple turtleneck and a blue St. John’s knit suit (“It’s great to travel in, you can crumple it, and it doesn’t show wrinkles,” she offers, in a hints-from-Heloïse spirit), and her hair is pulled back with a black velvet headband. I’m impressed by her equipoise. She explains that she’s been trying to practice something called “the discipline of gratitude,” and refers me to a book by a Jesuit priest, Henri Nouwen. “The discipline of gratitude,” Father Nouwen wrote, “is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.” She points to a bowl of pink roses on the table and says, “I mean, you look at those flowers and you think, My gosh, if my life were to end tomorrow, how lucky I’ve been that nearly all my life I’ve been surrounded by flowers.” If you are Hillary Clinton, the discipline of gratitude means reminding yourself that you are not a Bangladeshi peasant foraging for grains of rice—you are the First Lady and there are fresh-cut flowers in every room of your house. As with any mental discipline, however, concentration sometimes wavers and the press of daily life intrudes. These days, what with one thing and another, Bangladesh may not be entirely without its attractions.
Earlier, I had asked Maggie Williams, who has spent the past three years as the First Lady’s chief of staff, whether she would do it all over again, knowing what she knows now. It wasn’t something she had to stop and think about. “Absolutely not,” she replied, lolling her head. “Are you kidding?” I put the same question to Hillary Clinton, whose daily schedule now has to accommodate things like depositions with Kenneth Starr, the Independent counsel for the Whitewater investigation. “Absolutely,” she says, and she speaks of the sense of adventure. “I wake up every day just wondering about what’s going to happen next.” She’s not the only one.
Like horse-racing, Hillary-hating has become one of those national pastimes which unite the élite and the lumpen. Serious accusations have, of course, been levelled against the President’s wife, but it’s usually what people think of her that determines the credence and the weight they give to the accusations, rather than the reverse. At times, she herself sounds at a loss to explain the level of animosity toward her. “I apparently remind some people of their mother-in-law or their boss, or something,” she says. She laughs, but she isn’t joking, exactly.
The remark chimes with something I’ve been told by the redoubtable Sally Quinn, who—in part because she’s a frequent contributor to the Washington Post, in part because she’s the wife of the Post’s legendary editor Ben Bradlee—must herself count as a figure in the so-called Washington establishment. “There’s this old joke about the farmer whose crops fail,” she says. “One year, he’s wiped out by a blizzard, and the next year there’s a rainstorm, and the next year there’s a drought, and so on every year. Finally, he’s completely bankrupt—he’s lost everything. He says, ‘Why, Lord? Why, why me?’ And the Lord says, ‘I don’t know. There’s just something about you that pisses me off.’ ” She pauses, then says, “That’s the problem—there’ s just something about her that pisses people off. This is the reaction that she elicits from people.”
Well, from many people, anyway. “A lot of Americans are uncomfortable with her self-righteousness,” Arianna Huffington says. “I think gratitude is great if you can communicate it, but if you have to keep telling people how grateful you are . . .” William Kristol, a Republican strategist and, since September, the editor and publisher of The Weekly Standard, puts it this way: “She strikes me as a sort of moralistic liberal who has a blind spot for actions that are in her own interest. These are exempt from that cold gaze that she casts over everyone else’s less than perfect actions.” On the whole, though, he’s one of the more dispassionate voices you’re likely to hear on the subject. Peggy Noonan, who came to prominence as a speechwriter for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, speaks of “an air of apple-cheeked certitude” that is “political in its nature and grating in its effects,” of “an implicit insistence throughout her career that hers were the politics of moral decency and therefore those who opposed her politics were obviously of a lower moral order.” She adds, “Now, with Whitewater going on, nonliberals are taking a certain satisfaction in thinking, Uh-huh, you were not my moral superior, Madam.”
Some of this glee relates to a discomfort with Hillary’s political identity. In the 1992 campaign, her husband presented himself as a different kind of Democrat. Many people who wanted a different kind of Democrat to be President fear that the President’s wife is not a different kind of Democrat. (In Ben J. Wattenberg’s “Values Matter Most” —the book that prompted Bill Clinton’s infamous midnight-of-the-soul telephone call to the author—Hillary is identified as “a lady of the left” and compared with Mikhail Suslov, who was for years the Kremlin’s chief ideologist.) Of course, if you ask why they fear she is not a different kind of Democrat, the answers are less than entirely satisfying. It’s true that she served on the board of a liberal advocacy group, the Children’s Defense Fund, but then many C.D.F. members regard the First Lady with heartfelt disappointment. It’s also true that the Clinton health plan, which she spearheaded, involved significant government oversight, but then congressional conservatives routinely pass complicated bills in which government has a complicated role. (Consider, even, the tort-reform movement, which Vice-President Dan Quayle spearheaded, and which sought to vest the federal government with new powers to regulate product liability and other civil litigation.) But if you want to understand how conservatives perceive Mrs. Clinton these matters are ultimately a distraction. For they recognize her, almost on a gut level; in a phrase I’ve heard countless times, they “know the type.” In a word, they look at Hillary Clinton and they see Mrs. Jellyby.
Mrs. Jellyby, you may recall, is the Dickens character in “Bleak House” who is as intent on improving humanity as she is cavalier toward actual human beings; thus she heartlessly neglects her own family while high-mindedly pursuing charity abroad—“telescopic philanthropy,” in Dickens’ classic phrase. Mrs. Jellyby is a pretty, diminutive woman in her forties with handsome eyes, Dickens writes, “though they had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off” (“As if,” he adds, “they could see nothing nearer than Africa!”) And, in Mrs. Jellyby, Dickens’ achievement was to have captured everything that people would come to detest about a certain strain of do-gooding liberal: the zealous reformer with a heart as big as all Antarctica. However much you may protest that you are not Mrs. Jellyby—however un-Jellybylike you in fact may be—once she has been attached to you by the adhesive of archetype, there is not much you can do to banish her.
In the sixties and seventies, neoconservatives liked to talk about the ascent of “the New Class,” consisting of highly educated professionals who were, in Norman Podhoretz’s words, “making a serious bid to dislodge and replace the business and commercial class which had on the whole dominated the country for nearly a century.” Podhoretz ascribes to Irving Kristol (father of William) the insight that the New Class “represented itself as concerned only with the general good, the good of others (especially the poor and the blacks), but what it really wanted was to aggrandize its own power.” As the only First Lady thus far to have come from its ranks, Hillary Clinton has suffered the fluctuating fortunes of the New Class itself. Among her peers, you’ll hear, variously expressed, a very basic sentiment: finally, a First Lady who’s one of us. “It was just as if we’d known each other all our lives,” says Carly Simon, who has spent time at Martha’s Vineyard with the First Lady; when Hillary admired a naïve Haitian painting in Simon’s house, Simon made a present of it. “It was an easy, Ivy League kind of camaraderie. Like, ‘You went to Wellesley? Oh, I went to Sarah Lawrence.’ And, ‘Oh, you like that kind of art? I like that kind of art.’ ” But if you do not feel part of that “us”—if, indeed, the very idea of Haitian folk art on the Vineyard makes you shift uneasily—you may feel the tug of an answering sentiment: that this First Lady is one of them. The writer and social activist Letty C. Pogrebin (who must herself count as New Class, if you see the world in such terms) was at a White House lunch on a day when the papers had carried a story about testimony given by a messenger at the Rose Law Firm. “And Hillary said, ‘How could they believe a messenger and not me?’ “Pogrebin recalls. “For me, that was such a real human reaction. It’s like, ‘I have a history here, I’m a hardworking, caring person, I’ve worked on behalf of good things and good causes, I’m a trained lawyer. How could your first assumption be that he’s telling the truth and I’m lying?’ Her reaction was such pure, authentic surprise. It says a lot about her.” Well, yes, but if you ask what it says, you find yourself in the realm of Rorschach.
Hillary Clinton’s supporters have their own theories about the slings and arrows, many of which have to do with her role as a prominent working woman, and hence a symbol of feminism at a time when feminism is under siege. Gloria Steinem offers the canonical feminist explanation: “She and the President are presenting, at a very high, visible level, a new paradigm of a male-female relationship. And that is very much resented.” Mandy Grunwald—a consultant who worked closely with the Clintons in 1992, as media director of the campaign—notes that women in politics often make other women uncomfortable: “They feel threatened—they’re looking at a woman who is close to their age and has made totally different choices.” Hillary, she says, “forces them to ask questions about themselves and the choices they’ve made that they don’t necessarily want to ask.”
Hillary herself identifies a cultural component of her difficulties. “I don’t want to get grandiose,” she says, “but I believe that we’re going through a significant transition—economically, politically, culturally, socially, in gender relations, all kinds of ways—and so someone as visible as I am is going to get a lot of attention. I think if the spotlight were turned on many of my friends in their own private lives somebody could make out of it what they would: ‘My goodness, she didn’t take her husband’s name,’ or ‘She’s the one who travels while her husband stays home and takes care of the children,’ or ‘She has a very traditional role—does that mean that she’s sold out her education?’ There could be questions like that raised about nearly every American woman I know. It’s just that I’m the one in the public eye right now, and so a lot of the issues that are being talked about around kitchen tables or office water coolers or in college classrooms get focussed on me.”
Nothing goads her detractors more than the claim that her travails have anything to do with gender relations—”the ‘strong woman’ bogey,” as one of them refers to it. “That’s nonsense, that’s old, it’s not true, and it no longer applies,” Peggy Noonan says, with her usual diffidence. “And for her to suggest that her problems stem from the fact that there are many Americans that just can’t stand a strong woman is infuriating to people, because she’s hiding behind charges of ‘You are a sexist,’ and they think she is trying to divert attention from the real problem, which is who she is and what she’s doing.” Sally Quinn, too, is impatient with such explanations: “I do not think that was an issue with the press, because half the people who are covering her are working women, and the other half are men whose wives work.”
It’s clear enough that many of Hillary’s most severe critics, especially in the mainstream media, are women; it’s less clear what to make of that fact. When I broach the subject with her, she says, vaguely, “Maybe it’s something that has to do with the insecurity people feel about their own lives and the roles that they find themselves in and how that is changing.” Ann Lewis, who was recently named deputy campaign manager and director of communications for Clinton/Gore ‘96, is more plainspoken. She sees it, basically, as a way for a woman reporter to prove she’s one of the boys: “There are women in the business of communications who are striving very hard by what they think of as impartial standards, and they prove that by being as hard on women who run for political office as the guys. In your head, you think that the way to succeed is to win acceptance by that crowd, and those are their standards. But I have got to tell you, I have worked for a lot of women candidates and—guess what?—there is nothing impartial about those standards.”
Speaking more generally, a close friend of the Clintons’ brings up yet another theory: “The President thinks that they are treated so harshly because he is ‘white trash,’ as he puts it. The way somebody put it is, Imagine Washington as a country club, and Clinton as the golf pro. They think he’s perfectly competent at what he does, they think he is a good guy. You want him to have a drink at your table with you and your friends, and maybe even come to dinner. But the golf pro is never ‘one of us,’ never a real “member.”
None of this lets the golf pro’s wife off the hook, of course. For the historical role of the First Lady has always involved the more delicate reaches of social diplomacy. And it’s in the practice of these exquisite arts that Mrs. Clinton is widely believed to have faltered. Mandy Grunwald, who during the two years following the election was an adviser to the White House, tells me of a sense of exhaustion after a bruising campaign requiring constant interaction with the media: on some level, she thinks, it was as if the Clintons “thought they could close the door.” They’re still living with that mistake. “There were people who covered the campaign who were ideologically sympathetic to the President, who were essentially the New Democrats of the press corps,” Grunwald says. “And they were not cultivated by the Clintons, and that was silly. Certainly there were people who could have been friends, who didn’t go to dinner, who could have and should have and wanted to, and who drew conclusions about having been cultivated and then essentially dropped after the campaign—drew conclusions about the Clintons’ sincerity which were unnecessary.”
“She hates the press, and that’s not smart,” a senior official in the Bush Administration tells me. “You can see the tightness around her mouth. That’s where you really see it. And in the eyes. Even when she’s smiling, you can see that tightness.” One consequence is that people who have met her socially always talk about how different she was from what they’d expected, in a way that people who met Barbara Bush, say, did not. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., had lunch with his friend Jacqueline Onassis on a day when he had been invited to have dinner at the White House. He mentioned to her that he’d never met Hillary and that he assumed she was very bright but also stern and humorless. “Jackie said, ‘Not at all—she’s great fun, she’s got an excellent sense of humor, and you’ll like her very much,’ ” Schlesinger recounts. “At the dinner, I found myself placed next to her and, indeed, Jackie was absolutely right. She’s a charmer.” What’s remarkable isn’t that she can be funny, spontaneous, and mischievous, and has a loud, throaty laugh; what’s remarkable is the extent to which she has sequestered her personality from the media.
Indeed, when it comes to handling the press Hillary Clinton sometimes seems to have a positive talent to annoy. Her troubled relationship with Sally Quinn, some argue, is itself a revealing example of diplomatic failure: the wages of well-meant counsel spurned. “I have watched First Ladies for thirty years, and it just seemed to me that Hillary could be potentially very damaging to him if she went about things in the wrong way,” Quinn tells me. “And so I literally said, ‘Here is what I have learned over the years from observing First Ladies and here are some mistakes not to make.’ ” Today, Quinn’s coolness toward Mrs. Clinton is a popular topic of Beltway conversation. A longtime friend of both women puts it this way: “It’s like the blond girl in the class—you don’t even know why you hate her.” Whatever the roots of Quinn’s disaffection, her assessments of both the Clintons do tend to be unsparing. “I just think that, time after time after time, they have responded to things with no class,” she offers tartly. “It would appear that there is sometimes a certain lack of loyalty.”
The list of Clinton friends and supporters who now feel abandoned is a long one. Lani Guinier wrote mordantly in the Times Magazine about encountering Hillary in the West Wing at a time when her nomination to head the civil-rights division of the Justice Department was beginning to look doomed: Hillary, whom she’d known since law school, had breezed by with a casual “Hi, kiddo,” announcing that she was late for lunch. Then, there is the tale of Michael Lerner, who is the editor of the magazine Tikkun and the inventor of the “politics of meaning,” which seeks to meld progressive politics with spiritual values. That was a phrase, and an idea, that the First Lady started to introduce into her speeches shortly after she arrived in Washington. Lerner met her at the White House in April of 1993, at a ceremony for the opening of the Holocaust Memorial Museum. “And when she was introduced to me,” he recounts, “her first words were ‘Am I your mouthpiece, or what?’ I said, ‘Well, we seem to be talking a similar language,’ and she said, ‘Well, we are completely on the same wavelength.’ And ‘When can we get together and talk?’ ” As he goes on, he sounds like a wounded soldier reliving a combat experience. When the two did get together at the White House, Lerner says, Hillary made a point of explaining that the so-called politics of meaning wasn’t anything he had introduced her to—that it was really just a way of talking about the things she had learned as a Methodist when she was growing up. “And I said to her, ‘Absolutely right—this is an attempt to speak Biblical values in a nonreligious language,’ ” he recalls. “And she said, ‘Yeah, that is why I love it.’ So I have no sense of exaggerating my importance or anything like this. I was giving her permission, in a way—the politics of meaning gave her a vehicle through which to say things that she already believed.”
Their intellectual comity did not last. Some people point to letters that Lerner sent to a small group of Tikkun supporters, sprinkled with turns of phrase like “Hillary and I believe . . .” It was a presumption that the White House couldn’t be expected to warm to, and especially not in the light of several caustic articles that portrayed him as her guru—alternately Svengali and Rasputin. Lerner thinks the attack was led by people whose allegiance was really to Vice-President Al Gore and who were unhappy that Hillary was playing the role in shaping domestic policy that they’d sought for Gore. “They wanted Hillary’s influence to decrease and Gore’s to increase, and thus theirs to increase, because they were coming into the White House through Gore,” he says. What really incensed Lerner, though, was her response to the bad press: “The second she was attacked, she backed completely away.” The final straw came when Hillary, in a later effort to dissociate herself from him, referred in print to his cherished White House meeting as a mere “courtesy call.” “So here is Safire saying this woman is a ‘congenital liar,’ ” Lerner adds, sounding not at all displeased by it. “I am sure glad he didn’t know about all these things, because he might have been able to use them to bolster his case.”
The truth is that the bristly Michael Lerner was not cut out to be a Camelot companion. And plenty of others now departed from the charmed circle have themselves to blame. But the traditional standard of politesse involves never giving offense intentionally, and Hillary hasn’t always met it. Indeed, it’s become a Washington commonplace that when Mrs. Clinton arrived in the White House she failed to understand that being the First Lady was itself a job. Marilyn Quayle says, “It was a basic misunderstanding of the power and importance you can have in what some might call a traditional role of First Lady—a lack of understanding that this wasn’t just cutting ribbons. My presumption is that she was given advice or pushed by feminists to the point where the traditional role of First Lady was denigrated.” But, even to the most apt pupil, the culture of Washington—and, indeed, of the White House—can be daunting. Susan Porter Rose, who was the director of scheduling for Mrs. Nixon and Mrs. Ford and the chief of staff for Mrs. Bush, is a savant on the subject, and she addresses the question with Jeeves-like discretion. “The place has its own sociology, and it’s filled with banana peels and land mines,” Porter Rose says. Another member of the Bush Administration talks about the shortage of “seeingeye dogs” on the Clintons’ staff and goes on, “You have to remember that, in Washington, real estate and titles are everything. They are how you draw distinctions—one of the few ways, really. They serve notice. Mrs. Bush came in with one commissioned officer. Mrs. Clinton, on the other hand, came in with three—Maggie and two others. What this means is this: Going in, she told the world, ‘This is a new day.’ Not everyone was pleased.” And Jan Piercy, an old friend of Hillary’s from Wellesley who now sits on the board of the World Bank, hints, “There was also a kind of resistance in parts of the White House itself: a sort of ambivalence about Hillary’s role.
When it comes to the subject of social diplomacy—to her performance in the “charm offensive,” the tablecloth front—Hillary offers only a partial defense of her record. “Part of the urgency that my husband felt about the agenda he brought with him to Washington made all of us rush in and try to do things before we really understood how Washington worked, she says. “It’s one thing to stand outside, as we did, and to look at it and to criticize it, but there really is a culture here, and it is something that I certainly did not understand, and would have spent more time trying to understand, and would have tried to figure out better how to do what I wanted to do.” Now, she says, “I would have gone at it differently. I would not have made some of the mistakes that I think we made, that got us on the wrong side of some of the perceptions from the very beginning.” Still, Hillary clearly thinks that this culture has a lot to answer for, too. “I suddenly came to a place where perception is more important than it had ever been in my life—where I was being, I thought, painted in ways based almost on tea-leaf reading,” she says. “But I finally realized that this was serious business for the people who cover politics in this town and think about it, and so I had to pay at least some attention.”
Certainly I’ve met Washingtonians who wonder whether Hillary the New Woman hasn’t shortchanged Hillary the hostess. She’s slightly nettled by the idea, and invokes the priorities of a mother. “I regret, for example, that I haven’t had as much time to socialize or spend with friends. I don’t get out a lot in Washington and I didn’t get out a lot in Little Rock, because when I have time that is not spent on my work and my public activities I want to be with my family. I think that’s one of the reasons people say, ‘Well, who is she? We don’t know her.’ I don’t get out as much as many people do, because these years of child rearing go by so fast—I mean, Chelsea’s going to be gone. I can go to dinner parties from now to kingdom come when she’s in college and when she’s grown up.” She sounds philosophical. “You know, you pay a price no matter what decision you make.”
As a working mother in the White House, Hillary says, “it has been very hard, because there wasn’t any blueprint. I really didn’t know what to do or what was expected. I really did feel that I was pretty much having to make it up as I went along. I made lots of mistakes. But by and large I think it was a necessary ‘learning experience’—at least, for me.” She laughs at the euphemism. “I think for the country, too—we still seem to be learning together.”
At the same time, she maintains that if she has come up short in the charm offensive it hasn’t been for lack of trying. “I’ve tried to do all those things—we’ve tried very hard to be as hospitable as we can, we’ve entertained more people than anybody has ever entertained in the White House before.” She shakes her head. “I think if there were something that I would do differently it would be to try earlier than I have to rezone my sense of privacy, so that I could give people a broader view of who I am and what I do.” Part of the trouble, though, is that who she is and what she does is itself hopelessly ill-defined—not so much divided as multiple.
She often refers to the book “Composing a Life,” by the anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, who is the daughter of Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. Reading it, I’m struck by a passage that must have had particular resonance for Hillary. “There has been a tendency to look ahead to some sort of utopia in which women will no longer be torn by the conflicting claims and desires that so often turn their pathways into zigzags or, at best, spirals,” Bateson writes. “It would be easier to live with a greater clarity of ambition, to follow goals that beckon toward a single upward progression. But perhaps what women have to offer in the world today, in which men and women both must learn to deal with new orders of complexity and rapid change, lies in the very rejection of forced choices: work or home, strength or vulnerability, caring or competition, trust or questioning. Truth may not be so simple.”
Now Hillary Clinton has published a book of her own, “It Takes a Village,” that is all about parenting and politics, but, though Chelsea makes an appearance in its pages, Hillary has been resolute about shielding her daughter from the glare of public politics. Mandy Grunwald, the media consultant, tells me of an inspiration she had for the 1992 Democratic National Convention. After the presentation of the short film “The Man from Hope,” Clinton’s campaign biography in documentary form, the hall would go completely dark. Then, out of the darkness, there would be a single spotlight on Chelsea, who would say, “I want to introduce the next President of the United States—my dad, Bill Clinton. It had everything: not only drama but also, implicitly, an affirmation of family values. It would remind viewers at home that, whatever else he might be, this man was somebody’s daddy. The crowd at Madison Square Garden would go wild. Home viewers, already softened up by an inspirational biopic, would get just a little misty. It was a surefire, time tested device, a perfect realization of the lump-in-the-throat magic of political theatre: And a little child will lead them. Mandy Grunwald explained her brainstorm to Chelsea’s mother, who got it at once, and didn’t hesitate to deliver her verdict. “Absolutely not,” Hillary said. “I would never put my daughter in that position.”
“And I felt horrible, crass, manipulative—everything people think of political consultants,” Mandy Grunwald tells me. “Bad politics, good parenting” is how she describes the trade-off.
If you’re as serious about it as Mrs. Clinton, being a mother, especially in the White House, demands a lot of time and energy. (“I wish Africa was dead!” Mrs. Jellyby’s poor daughter is finally moved to exclaim.) But then so does being a wife. Can you really be both policy wonk and helpmeet? Barbara Bush says, “I had to have priorities, and my priorities were things in the private sector.” By that, she means providing her husband with the sanctuary of a real home and also serving as her husband’s sounding board and confidante: “safe” is the word she uses. “I think every person, man or woman, needs someone who is a safe person to talk to,” she says. “In order to get that trust, you have to be safe, and I think I was that for George Bush.” If all this sounds, to modern tastes, a bit Kinder, Kirche, Küche, you can argue that the role isn’t gender-specific. Washington, Noonan reminds me, “is increasingly full of women who are in power and important, and married to men who are tough critics and advisers. It is wrong to think that this is necessarily a sexist setup.”
And, while Hillary may not be “safe,” in Mrs. Bush’s sense of a neutral, non-partisan sounding board, few doubt the intimacy of the Clintons’ political relationship. “She is the intellectual half—the person he can always bounce ideas off,” Ann Lewis says. Actually, I saw something of this dynamic last month, at a dinner where President Clinton was soliciting themes and ideas from a group of academics, mostly political theorists. You could tell when something was said that he took to be valuable, because he’d make eye contact with Hillary and nod, as if to say: make a note, let’s discuss it afterward.
Maggie Williams puts it this way: “I used to think that she would be a great President, before I took this job, and she’s certainly smart enough to run the country. But Hillary’s intelligence is specific and concrete—she’s task oriented, she’s a great problem solver. The President, on the other hand, is vision-oriented—he’s obsessed with the grand design. They depend upon each other.”
A onetime friend of theirs from law school says, “She and the President have a private arrangement that is based on power sharing—she is his equal and he acknowledges it. But they realized that the American people weren’t ready for that, and so they are trying to do it without telling people. And that is what is creating this sense that they are hiding something.” Williams, for her part, emphasizes the simple fact of companionship: “He doesn’t have a Haldeman. Leon Panetta is doing a brilliant job, but I don’t believe they are close like Nixon and Haldeman were close. I think it’s difficult for the President to have friends the way we have friends. He has a best friend, though, and that best friend is Hillary.”
Of course, the nature of the Clintons’ personal relationship has itself long been the subject of scrutiny and conjecture, some of it uncharitable. One fixture of the Washington scene says, “She was the one who was always right and always superior—he was the fuckup,” and argues that Hillary’s troubles have marked a change in the dynamic: “When Bill Clinton came out to make a comment at that press conference about Bill Safire he looked like a happy man. He didn’t look mad. He was really thrilled: ‘My wife’s screwing up again and I get to be the good guy, I get to be the morally superior one in this relationship.’ ”
The view is different from inside. People who have spent a lot of time around the two speak of moments both of tension and of tenderness. Maggie Williams admits, “Sometimes I’m embarrassed to be in the same room with them. They are very affectionate with each other. Sometimes the President will call different members of her staff throughout the day and ask, ‘How’s my girl? How’s my girl doing?’
“A former close associate of theirs tells me, “All her friends are going to work in New York and Washington law firms, she’s a hot-shot lawyer, she goes to Arkansas? There is one, and only one, reason for it: she’s crazy-ass in love with him—and it is still true. And, if you see them together, you know. She gets that goofy look on her face. She lights up around him. It’s the thing people don’t understand about her at all—they just don’t see that side.” I’ve noticed it, too. Hillary reminds me of the girl in high school who was brainy and pretty, friends with the cheerleaders but not one herself; the nerds all admired her, but she was into the jocks. In Bill Clinton, Hillary found a big, lumbering guy who happened to be an intellectual equal. One law-school friend talks of it as “a magic combination.”
But if Mrs. Clinton were simply the President’s private counsellor and public hostess she would not have become the lightning rod she is. The fact remains that the First Lady’s greatest reversal of fortune occurred not in the realm of the salad fork and the demitasse but in the rough-and-tumble of the political arena, where the Administration’s health-care plan met its demise. If Hillary Clinton is a wife and a mother, she is also a working woman, with an office suite in the Old Executive Office Building To pay a visit there is to be reminded that Mrs. Clinton is a professional—a fact that has proved both her greatest asset and her greatest liability.
In Hillary’s offices—Suite 100 on the first floor of the O.E.O.B.—an item evidently clipped from the personal ads has been blown up, mounted, and hung on the wall:
It’s a clue to the ethos of the place. Fifteen of the sixteen people who work for Hillary are women, and, despite the sixteen-foot ceilings, there’s an almost dorm-room air of camaraderie in Suite 100. Both on and off the record, members of Hillary’s staff are quick to acknowledge it; many have their own theories about the merits of what they view as a female managerial style.
Earlier, I had breakfast with Maggie Williams, at the Hay-Adams Hotel: she had her hair in a great rope coiled around her head, like a Yoruba headdress, and was wearing a blue turtleneck, sweat pants, and black snow boots “She allows you to be a woman in the modern way but also in the traditional way,” Williams told me. “Like my mother always says, there is just something basically different between women and men. She’s the one who’ll lend you jewelry for that special date.” Another woman close to Hillary says, “Hillary’s the sort of friend who’d undo an extra button on your blouse when you are about to go on a date. She wants to know who you’re going out with.” Ideally, a single Jewish attorney, thirty-one, who is bright, witty, sincere, and cute.
“She’s a real girl,” Mandy Grunwald says. “There’s a part of her that is constantly commenting on whether you got your hair cut, how it looks, your clothes.” And sometimes she plays Emma Woodhouse. Grunwald recounts, “Hillary and I were talking about a man I knew who worked for the Senate, and she said, ‘He’s really good-looking. Does he go out with any one?’ And I told her that he did. She said she was disappointed, because she was thinking about him for one of the single women on her staff She was matchmaking.”
“Hillary’s approach is closer to circle or matrix management than to hierarchical management,” Ann Lewis, who has been walking me through the cluttered O.E.O.B. suite, says. “Women have a different management style. You encourage people to sit around the table and contribute and she will do that. She will sit around the table, too, and listen and take suggestions from people and give suggestions back.” And while Hillary’s staff is known to be fiercely loyal, Maggie Williams suggests that this, too, may be a sex-linked trait: “I think women tend to be loyal I just think we work differently; I think we’re more task-oriented, more coöperative. And she’s a big delegator. I mean, she’s got people that she trusts. Not that we’re a bunch of lemmings.” It’s a phrase she has used before. Williams has been threatened by Senator Alfonse D’Amato, who is chairman of the Senate Whitewater Committee, with perjury charges; one witness told the Senate panel that shortly after Vincent Foster’s death Williams had removed folders from his office, and she testified that she hadn’t. So when she says she isn’t a “lemming” she means that, all loyalty aside, she isn’t someone who would perjure herself to protect her boss. (Amid her own recent travails, Williams, too, has been trying to practice the discipline of gratitude. She explains, “I try and be grateful for the fact that there is an Al D’Amato. Having him at such a distinct extreme from everything that I am or want to be or that my people are—that brings a certain peace to me when I see him.”)
The Hillary Clinton that Williams describes is more den mother than martinet. ‘We all have our disagreements with Hillary, on policy and on procedure and all kinds of things,” she says. “And you can disagree with her.” Williams previously worked with Marian Wright Edelman at the Children’s Defense Fund, and remains devoted to her, despite a certain froideur between the Edelmans and the Clintons these days. Still, she finds the contrast in executive styles to be instructive. “Marian tends to know how she wants to solve a problem—she’s very fixed on it,” Williams says. “Hillary wants the opposition view, always, because she might even adopt some of it. She can be convinced. She can be convinced even when it comes to things she thinks she knows everything about.”
So Williams’ experience does seem to complicate Hillary’s bad-cop reputation “The interesting thing is that people need to box her and have her be one way for all time,” Williams says. “But the idea that she is the enforcer is based on, one, her having concerns about things, two, speaking her mind, three, having people call and ask her opinion about things. Now, I think that Harold Ickes—I mean, who would mess around with Harold Ickes? I think that people are more afraid of Harold than they are of Hillary.”
Besides, would Harold Ickes, a deputy White House chief of staff, ever help you preen for a date? I’m struck, somehow, by that detail about the unbuttoned blouse. It’s an image of Hillary, I realize, that runs counter to many of the stereotypes people have of her—and, sadly, to many of the stereotypes people have of feminists in general. Understandably, the true nature of feminism is a subject that both Hillary and most of her associates have strong feelings about. Ann Lewis says to me, with some indignation, “To this day, I read articles by women who say, ‘I’ve always stayed home and taken care of my family, and I don’t like to be put down by the women’s movement.’ And I think, Hey, I’m the women’s movement. It would never occur to me to put down a woman who takes care of a family. I spent years of my life at home with children. That’s hard work.” And Maggie Williams says, “This is about choice, isn’t it? Let’s face it—when white feminists were talking about getting jobs and being in the workplace and coming out of the home, my mother was saying, ‘God, I wish I could stay home.’ Maybe this is the maturity of both the country and its movements, but they should be about choice.” Hillary herself tells me of a phrase she picked up when she was in Belfast, meeting with women who had been working to unite people across the religious divide. “One of the women said she considered herself a ‘family feminist.’ I loved that phrase, because I believe that, if you are a human being, one of your highest responsibilities is to the next generation. I mean, I have fought all my life for women to have the right to make the decisions that are best for them, and for me that included getting married, having a child.”
Yet Hillary is, demographically speaking, a white upper-middle-class female baby boomer, which is to say that feminism has carved out the very contours of her life. For feminists, moreover, the sixties and seventies were a time of laying tracks, not coasting down the rails. Or so she quickly came to recognize. We’re talking about Yale Law School, where she got her law degree, and where I was briefly enrolled not long afterward. “When I went to take the law-school admissions test, I went with a friend of mine from Wellesley,” she recalls. ‘We had to go in to Harvard to take the test, and we were in a huge room, and there were very few women there, and we sat at these desks waiting for the proctors or whoever to come and all the young men around us started to harass us. They started to say, ‘What do you think you’re doing? If you get into law school, you’re going to take my position. You’ve got no right to do this. Why don’t you go home and get married?’ ” She sits up very straight. “I got into Harvard and I got into Yale, and actually I went to a cocktail reception at the Harvard Law School with a young man who was, I think, a second-year Harvard Law student. And he introduced me to one of the legendary Harvard Law professors by saying, ‘Professor So-and-So, this is Hillary Rodham. She’s trying to decide between us and our nearest competitor.’ And this man, with his three-piece suit and his bow tie, looked at me and said, ‘First of all, we have no nearest competitor, and, secondly, we don’t need any more women.’ And that’s how I decided to go to Yale.”
In the early seventies, Yale Law School was itself no enclave of feminist enlightenment. In those days, for instance, the law-school film society was famous all over the campus for its soft-porn evenings, and though I never made it to the screenings myself, I somehow can’t imagine the law school playing host to an event like that today. I remind her of that bygone porn festival, since it might be taken as at least one measure of a changing social climate.
“I never went,” the First Lady says, straight-faced. “You and Clarence Thomas must have gone.” I’m just about to protest when she starts laughing.
There’s a small shelf of books in Suite 100 of the O.E.O.B. where you’ll find some titles that are almost comically appropriate: “Public Like a Frog,” by Jean Houston; “The Pursuit of Love & Love in a Cold Climate,” by Nancy Mitford; ‘The Norton Book of Women’s Lives,” edited by Phyllis Rose; “All That She Can Be,” by Carol J. Eagle and Carol Colman; and “First Ladies,” by Margaret B. Klapthor. Just two books—“The Logic of Health-Care Reform,” by Paul Starr, and “Making Managed Healthcare Work,” by Peter Boland—betray what was the all-consuming project of Hillary’s first year in Washington. Her plan for health-care reform began as triumph and ended as ignominy; and, like investigators at the scene of a high-tech disaster, political analysts are still trying to sort through the wreckage.
These days, when Hillary refers to the health-plan debacle she speaks of the missteps she made. Indeed, for someone often accused of being obnoxiously self-certain (“She has not once said, ‘I made a mistake,’ there’s never a sense of her being a fallible human being,” Arianna Huffington maintains), she can sound practically Chinese in her self-criticism. “Certainly here in Washington one of the big mistakes was going along with the recommendation that we shouldn’t brief reporters even off the record, in part because there was a legitimate concern, from both people in Congress and here in the Administration, that trying to put together a health-care plan to meet our original date, which was May 1st, was a huge undertaking. Everybody felt that was going to be hard under even the best of circumstances, and they worried that talking about it as we went along would create all kinds of false expectations or misunderstandings. But I think in retrospect that was the wrong call—we should have gone ahead and risked whatever problems might have come from that, in favor of having a much more open relationship with the press from the very beginning. You know, you follow the advice you get, trying to make sense of it, but when you’re in a new environment, as we were, you don’t really know the players and you don’t understand the history and the nuance.”
Some fault the complexity of the proposal, which made it hard to represent to voters and easy to misrepresent to them. Ironically, its complexity was a result of its essential conservatism: the constraint of leaving intact, as much as possible, preëxisting structures of health care and insurance. Others blame not the plan itself but the way it was created: out of the head of Zeus, so it seemed, rather than the loins of the legislature. Even Brooke Shearer, who was Hillary Clinton’s aide during the 1992 campaign and now directs the White House Fellows program, points to a certain neglect of political courtship: “I think that, when you do something as large as that, you would probably want to try and speak to individual constituencies first to get their support.” Less sympathetic voices portray Hillary Clinton as having sabotaged it through her own crusading intransigence.
In truth, had the Administration done nothing other than win the fight for universal, or near-universal, health coverage—no matter how it calibrated the mechanisms of employer mandates, business alliances, managed competition, and spending caps—it could have rested on its laurels. That one measure would have gone some distance toward addressing the other high-profile items on the Clinton agenda—reducing the deficit and reforming welfare. (Bringing medical spending under control would have made it easier to arrive at a balanced budget in the foreseeable future. And research had shown that for many welfare recipients a major barrier to employment is the forfeiture of medical coverage, which they would otherwise not be able to afford.) By the same token, Republican strategists swiftly figured out that passage of the Clinton plan, however modified, might have devastating electoral consequences: as William Kristol wrote in an influential memo, the plan would “strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.” A receptive atmosphere quickly soured as Republicans scrambled to enlist the fire power of business interests, some of which had earlier been sympathetic to reform. “In an odd role reversal,” the political journalist E. J. Dionne, Jr., observes, “conservative Republican leaders lobbied the business lobbyists.” The rest is an unedifying chapter in the history of negative advertising.
Both Hillary Clinton and her detractors are correct in pointing to mistakes she made—in the planning phase at the O.E.O.B. and in the lobbying phase on the Hill. Yet so nearly perfect an alignment of partisan and industry interests is hard to defeat in the best of circumstances; and to view the outcome as a referendum on Hillary’s character is to indulge either vanity or spite. “Every President who has touched it has got burned in one way or the other because the interests involved are so powerful,” Hillary points out.
Maggie Williams is blunter. “Any time you start down the road of messing with people’s money, they have to kill you,” she says. What she’s talking about is, among other things, character assassination. In her view, the failure was in no small part related to the politics of perception: “First of all, health care defined her instead of her coming out and defining who she was.” What should they have done? “I probably would have done three or four months of people just getting to know her, who she was, people getting a sense of her and her complexities.” William Kristol—who has been variously praised and deplored as the man who did more than anyone else to derail the proposal—believes that Hillary “actually helped get their health-care plan off to a stronger start than it might have had if it had just been championed by some Cabinet Secretary.” In his view, “she has gotten an easier ride than she deserved as the Administration’s main spokesman on health care—at least, for the first few months.” Ironically, Kristol’s remarks dovetail with something Ira Magaziner—who worked closely with Hillary on the health-care plan and shared much of the public blame for its failure—tells me about those first few months. “She impressed the heck out of everybody, and you could see alarm bells going off all over town, in terms of the opponents of this plan saying that as long as her popularity remains that high and she is that impressive, we’re not going to beat it,” he says. “All sorts of stories began to get back to us about meetings among the opposition about how to discredit her. And the Whitewater thing and the commodities thing and so on were, in part, the means that were used.”
If a year of intensive research, legislative draftsmanship, and political lobbying failed to result in health-care reform, it did much to promulgate the so-called Hillary problem. William Kristol says, “There is a problem with asking your wife—who has not been elected, who has not been selected for the staff, can’t be fired, hasn’t been confirmed—to take charge of a huge policy area. I think that hurt in some way it is hard to put one’s finger on.” He adds, “It was too monarchical—it was like the Queen gets to do stuff because she’s married to the King.” And Marilyn Quayle says, “You’re not breaking ground by being appointed by your husband to a quasi-Cabinet-level position—that’s just getting an office through your husband.”
Mrs. Bush, too, takes a dim view of the situation, though she seems to see it as departure less from the Constitution than from political etiquette. “If you take on a job, you’ve got to be accountable for it,” she says. “And obviously that was a great mistake, because nothing happened and it caused great ill will. And there were other people who were appointed and confirmed by the Senate to do that very job. I would think that you would be already causing friction with the people who were hired for the job. I would never have done that, nor would George have asked me to.”
He might well have asked Elizabeth Dole, though. Mrs. Dole is someone who, like Hillary, is an accomplished professional and, like Hillary, has been seen as more of a political animal than a domestic one. She has announced her determination to stay on as president of the American Red Cross if her husband is elected President. But there’s no comparison between the role she imagines for herself and the one Hillary has taken on, Mrs. Dole observes: “Hers involved what percentage of our G.N.P.? Quite a large percentage. It was the whole health-care system for America, and it was very much a different focus. It was inside the White House.” She adds, ‘’You see, I’ve served as a Cabinet member in two Presidents’ Cabinets—I don’t want to sit in on Cabinet meetings.”
And yet the Hillary problem does have the air of something slightly factitious. It’s easy to point to previous First Ladies who have wielded significant power (and Hillary notes that “you can go back and find Mrs. Taft consulting with Cabinet members, Eleanor Roosevelt doing everything, Mrs. Carter appointed to chair a commission”). More to the point, perhaps, is the fact that voters do not elect a President’s friends, either, yet they often have an incalculable sway over the President’s Administration. Nor is the position of White House Chief of Staff, arguably the most powerful one in most Administrations, subject to Senate confirmation. Hillary’s sex may well prevent us from seeing how familiar the role she plays really is in Presidential history. As Garry Wills has argued, the best parallel is with such Presidential companions as F.D.R.’s confidant Louis Howe or Dwight D. Eisenhower’s brother Milton. Then, too, it isn’t so obvious that, as the familiar claim goes, “you can’t fire her,” when one could argue that this is, in effect, just what the President did.
To judge from the way many conservatives talk, what they’d really like to do is impeach her. Some Republicans who weathered the Senate hearings of the Nixon era may have decided that one good scandal deserves another. Watergate, of course, had all the hallmarks of the modern scandal: it was, in essence, not about the precipitating illegality but about the act of covering it up. Whitewater, in turn, is the perfect postmodern scandal: the latest and most serious charges allege an act of covering up an act of covering up, while so far nobody has unearthed an original sin.
It was in the 1992 primaries that the Jerry Brown campaign first raised the question about a possible conflict of interest posed by Hillary Clinton’s having represented Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan before a state agency. You’ll recall that it prompted her most notorious comment of the campaign: “I suppose I could have stayed home, baked cookies, and had teas, but what I decided was to fulfill my profession.” (With some asperity, Marilyn Quayle tells me, “If the press had done its job when Jerry Brown first brought it up, we wouldn’t be in this position.”) And yet you might argue that from the perspective of modern feminism a practicing attorney married to a governor is in something of a double bind. On the one hand, Mickey Kaus, writing in The New Republic, has accused Bill Clinton’s wife of being a “false feminst” for hitching her star to his. On the other hand, if you are an attorney and you continue your professional career in a poor Southern state where your husband is the chief executive (and where the prospects of patronage are, let us say, loosely bounded), you will have a difficult time avoiding, at the least, the appearance of impropriety. Political candidates and officeholders can be expected to accentuate the positive and minimize the unseemly; but was a line crossed? It would be one thing if Hillary were found guilty of criminal misconduct. The findings, however, are likely to be far more equivocal. We are, alas, all fallen creatures, and politicians are more fallen than most. (It would be hard to explain to a Martian why what PACs do, for instance, isn’t just a form of legalized bribery.) So at the end of the day you need to decide not only how much of the opposition’s case is true but also how much it matters. “Follow the money,” the old muckraker’s shibboleth has it. But one place the money trail leads is to right-wing millionaires like Richard Scaife, who have lavishly funded “investigative journalism” into the Clintons’ finances, Vin cent Foster’s death, and the like.
Now, for all we know, Hillary Clinton may be guilty of everything she’s accused of and more. You might say the point is that we ’t know. And it’s in those dark gaps in our knowledge that the political unconscious makes itself felt: you can’t tell a gun from a cigarette by the smoke alone. Which inference you prefer depends on which story you prefer—assuming you’ve been given one. (What’s with those mysteriously rematerialized files, anyway? Some free advice from Aristotle’s Rhetoric: “A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility.”)
If you’re a Republican, of course, you may find poetic justice in the Senate hearing, the subpoena, the federal investigator, the independent counsel. A conservative friend of mine sees instructive similarities in the prosecution of Michael Deaver. Starting in 1986, Deaver, as a prominent member of the Reagan Administration who subsequently cashed in as a high-powered lobbyist, found himself the subject of a House investigation into whether he had violated “revolving door” rules meant to discourage profiteering from public service. There’s real doubt whether, technically speaking, he had actually violated any such rules, but there’s no doubt that he let himself be pictured on the cover of Time in a lavish-looking limousine, and holding a cellular phone to his ear. Deaver had become the symbol of a hated political class—of the get-rich-quick culture of Reaganism—and it was for the collective guilt of that class that he had to be punished. (The original charges remain unproved, though Deaver, having been flushed into a self-serving fib, was ultimately convicted of lying to Congress and a federal grand jury.) It’s true that Deaver, by playing fast and loose with the ethics rules, made himself vulnerable to the inquisition in the first place. But it’s also true that Mike Deaver, in the end, went down for being Mike Deaver. Without granting any moral equivalence, you can accept the claim that Hillary Clinton—by, for example, her relationship with people like Jim McDougal—made herself vulnerable to the toxic combination of an instinctively adversarial press and the conservative attack machine, and yet you can also recognize that Hillary Clinton, New Class hero, has been targeted because she is an emblem of an élite that so many wish to humble and bring low. Senator D’Amato’s zeal stems from the perfectly transparent, and understandable, desire to proclaim, “See—they’re no better than us.
“Modern liberals like Hillary thought Republicans were hounded by special prosecutors for twenty years because Republicans were bad and deserved it,” Peggy Noonan tells me. “I truly feel she did not have the wit to understand that the prosecutorial atmosphere that she and her friends unleashed and encouraged would engulf them, too. You know, for twenty years now I’ve been seeing Democrats torment Republicans. Remember when Ray Donovan, the Labor Secretary, was exonerated of all charges and came out with the great statement of the eighties: ‘Where do I go to get my reputation back?’ “For a moment, I hear a flicker of compassion in her voice: “I can see her as a woman, and I have a sense of horror for her—for what she’s going through. I just think it’s awful.” Then she pauses to consider. “I don’t mean it’s unfair.”
Hillary’s latest bouts of bad press do suggest someone whose sense of public relations is less than finely honed. Take the miscalculation that led to what Katha Pollitt has dubbed “Thankyougate.” It started with the decision to hire Barbara Feinman to help out with the research for and writing of “It Takes a Village” (and not since Clark Clifford’s memoirs has the publication of a book had such exquisitely bad timing). Feinman was a journalism instructor at Georgetown who had previously worked on books by Ben Bradlee and Bob Woodward, among others; but although her involvement in the project was announced publicly last spring, Hillary Clinton decided not to name her—or anyone else—in the book’s acknowledgments. Sally Quinn says, “All she expected was ‘Many thanks to Barbara Feinman, whose tireless efforts were greatly appreciated.’ She would have died and gone to Heaven.”
In fact, Thankyougate was only the unhappy outcome of a less than smooth collaboration. The manuscript’s original due date was Labor Day. At that point, about eight or nine chapters—which Feinman had helped to organize, draft, and edit—were submitted to the publisher. According to Feinman, she was told that her work was satisfactory, and she subsequently left for a three-week vacation in Italy. A White House aide says that Hillary was appreciative of Feinman’s efforts but was not fully satisfied with the direction of the book, and the bulk of the writing, revising, and editing took place after Labor Day—that is, after Feinman’s involvement with the project had largely ceased. Then matters got a little stickier. There were discussions between Simon & Schuster and Feinman’s agent about whether Feinman would be paid in full. “She was absolutely distraught,” Sally Quinn says. “For one thing, she is planning to adopt a baby by herself, because she’s thirty-six. So she’s saving up all this money to go to China and adopt a baby girl. That was part of this little nest egg that she had.” (Other associates of Feinman reject any suggestion of financial extremity.) In the end, Feinman was paid when the final manuscript was delivered. Even so, it would be understandable if Feinman felt that she hadn’t been treated with the dignity that a writer and researcher with her credentials was entitled to; and it would be understandable, too, if the failure to thank her by name might have added insult to injury.
“It Takes a Village,” we should be clear, really is Hillary’s book. Nobody denies that its themes and subjects have preoccupied Hillary for far longer than she’s had a publishing contract; whatever its failings, this book isn’t something that could simply have been sent out for, like Chinese food. But it’s also hard to argue when Sally Quinn says, “Hillary versus Barbara Feinman is a big loser, P. R.-wise.” She goes on, “Barbara is a single woman, who lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment off Dupont Circle. Not only that, but she has been a reseacher at the Washington Post, and all her best friends are journalists. Everyone loves her, and she knows every journalist in town. This is what I’m saying about Hillary being book-smart and street stupid.” Indeed, out of all the writers and researchers for hire in the world, why choose one who is closer friends with your critics than with you? Was the choice meant, in fact, to be a conciliatory gesture, a peace offering—giving a plum and profitable assignment to a favorite of the Post’s illuminati? If so, the attempt went disastrously wrong.
It would, of course, be absurd to look for the source of the First Lady’s plight as if it were the Nile: some of her troubles have been created or else wildly amplified by the formidable machinery of the right-wing media; some of them are, as she admits, of her own making; some of them are, no doubt, the result of well-meant actions by friends; and some reflect the mischief of personal (rather than ideological) antagonists. You might say it takes a village to demonize a First Lady. And demonized she has been, even in the mainstream press: a recent Newsweek story suggested that, to Mrs. Clinton, Madison and McDougal “must have looked like Banquo’s ghost,” which would make her Macbeth. In the Harvard library, you can find at least three books on each of the past four First Ladies, but only Hillary is the subject of a book entitled “Big Sister Is Watching You.” (The helpful subtitle: “Hillary Clinton and the White House Feminists Who Now Control America—and Tell the President What to Do.”) A recent issue of a New York weekly describes the First Lady as “a scumbag, a hand job and knife-in-the-back Babbitt from the depths of the American horror.” Then, there was that Safire column.
All this has led some to wonder whether there is a qualitative difference at least in the tone of the coverage Hillary Clinton has received. And yet she is plainly not the first wife of a President to suffer such treatment. William Safire on Hillary Clinton is tame stuff compared to the columnist Westbrook Pegler on Eleanor Roosevelt. And Peggy Noonan says, “I thought Nancy Reagan was damned for everything. They said she had fat legs, they said she was a bad mother, they said she had an affair with Frank Sinatra—on the front page of the Times. They said she manipulated her husband, they said she had a political agenda, they said she fired Don Regan, they said she was a bully and a cheat.” Hillary Clinton herself prefers to speak of broader trends: “I don’t think there’s anything that has happened to me that is, frankly, very new, but I think that the environment in which it’s happening is significantly different, even different from the nineteen-eighties.” And she cites a study of Presidential press coverage by the political scientist Thomas Patterson, who found that in 1960 seventy-five per cent of the evaluative references to Kennedy and Nixon were positive, while in 1992 only forty per cent of the references to Bush and Clinton were positive. Elizabeth Dole tells me, “I think there’s a point where there are excesses. You don’t want to drive talented, capable people away from public service, and I think that probably is happening in some cases today.”
But the negativity also reflects the stresses of ideological realignments, of which Clintonism may be the most visible sign. When Hillary Rodham was still an undergraduate, a friend and mentor of hers from home wrote her a letter questioning whether “someone can be a Burkean realist about history and human nature and at the same time have liberal sentiments and visions.” Journalists have occasionally noted her response: “It is an interesting question you posed—can one be a mind conservative and a heart liberal?” The question these days is how to be a mind liberal and a heart conservative—how to be a technocrat with values. To judge from Hillary Clinton’s pronouncements, you do that by reviving a tradition of civic republicanism which has been in partial eclipse for the past half cenmry. In “It Takes a Village,” for example, she writes with sympathy about “character education,” about William Bennett and C. DeLores Tucker’s campaign against violent lyrics, about teen-age abstinence, about civic responsibility and the virtues of voluntarism. In conversation, too, many of her points of reference are social scientists whose findings tend to affirm civic culture as against rights-based liberalism. She’ll talk, fluently, about the psychologist Claude Steele (and his theory of stereotype vulnerability) or the feminist educator Carol Gilligan (and her work on the gendered nature of moral epistemology) or the political scientist Robert Putnam (and his neo-Tocquevillean research on “social capital” and democracy). So when Mrs. Clinton called herself a “conservative in the true sense of the word,” she wasn’t necessarily playing word games. The Clinton Administration is often described as soft, floating, indistinct, unformed—predicates that do a rather good job of describing the amoeba, that protean creature which kills by engulfing and assimilating its prey. I’d guess that to its unicellular fellows the bloblike amoeba must seem a silly thing—until they discover they’re inside it. This is the politics of preëmption, and if you are its target you must find it profoundly unnerving. It’s why the enmity among ideological disputants can escalate even as their political differences narrow (and it’s why the Administration’s moves toward the right are experienced by Republicans not as conciliation but as coöptation: they see not an outstretched hand but the covetous pseudopod of an amoeba).
Still, there’s no politics without people; and, wherever those broader trends are leading, this particular First Lady really does seem an especially inviting target, as all the comments about her “air of moral superiority” suggest. It’s true that she can sound sappily pious, but then her job wasn’t supposed to be First Ironist; we have Letterman for that. When I raise, inevitably, the subject of coping, she touches on her developIng spirituality, on the role of religion in her life. It’s just the kind of talk that makes journalists groan inwardly; but I sympathize, since I’m religious, too, though I try to keep quiet about it. (In Cambridge, where I work, religiosity is accounted one of those conditions that suggest some lapse of hygiene on the part of those afflicted, as with worms or lice.) Still, few spectacles are more satisfying than paragons of sanctimony getting their comeuppance And then that spectre of Mrs. Jellyby has followed her around like a ghostly afterimage on a cheap TV set.
It is often said that in ancient times a man who stood accused of breaking an urn that he’d borrowed from a neighbor was permitted to make the follow ing tripartite defense: that it was already broken when he borrowed it, that it wasn’t broken when he returned it, and that he never borrowed it in the first place. The popular prosecution of the First Lady’s character has availed itself of a similar latitude. In the course of a single conversation, I have been assured that Hillary is cunning and manipulative but also crass, clueless, and stunningly impolitic; that she is a hopelessly woolly-headed do-gooder and, at heart, a hardball litigator; that she is a base opportunist and a zealot convinced that God is on her side. What emerges is a cultural inventory of villainy rather than a plausible depiction of an actual person. George Orwell once wrote, with some wisdom, “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proven innocent.” At times, it seems that Hillary Clinton has been labelled a saint in order that she may be found guilty. The cover of a recent newsweekly emblazoned “SAINT OR SINNER?” under her photograph. Are those really the choices?
“When we say, ‘Tell me what So-and-So is really like,’ ” the literary critic Harold Bloom has observed, “what we generally mean is ‘Tell me the worst that can be said of that person.’ ” It’s a phenomenon that is easier to identify than to escape, and it suffuses not only journalism but the culture that journalism serves. And the journalist’s profound fear of being gulled only confirms him in his dualist creed—his dark conviction that character is a matter of surfaces and depths, appearance and reality, and that the “deepest” layer flatters least. So he offers the skull beneath the skin and wonders why Americans blench and say they hate politics. In Thomas Mann’s story “Felix Krull,” there’s an episode in which the young Felix is taken by his parents to see a famous actor perform on the stage. He’s the perfect leading man—captivating, graceful, surpassingly handsome, an image of perfection—and the audience gazes upon him “rapt in self-forgetful absorption.” Afterward, Felix is brought backstage to meet him. Without the artful lighting and thick makeup, the actor turns out to be repulsive in every way—sweaty, charmless, and carpeted with “horrible pimples, red-rimmed, suppurating, some of them even bleeding.” Felix is devastated. Then, mulling things over, he comes to realize his error in thinking that he has seen through the veil to the reality beneath. “For when you come to think about it,” he muses, “which is the ‘real’ shape of the glowworm: the insignificant little creature crawling about on the flat of your hand, or the poetic spark that swims through the summer night? Who would presume to say?”
Granted, the First Lady neither sparkles nor suppurates, but why are we so certain that reality is always to be found behind her public persona, her stated political views, opinions, and values? Why are we so certain that the truth is what has been concealed, and not, like the purloined letter, what’s in plain sight? “I don’t think you can ever know anybody else,” Hillary Clinton has said “And I certainly don’t think you can know anybody else through the crude instruments available to us of exposing bits and pieces of somebody’s life.” Indeed, is it so obvious that the wheeler dealer (and breadwinner) at the Rose Law Firm is more authentic than the woman who spoke so movingly at the women’s conference in Beijing this fall? Which better represents the content of her life?
If you fear and loathe the press, it will sense that and punish you for it. At the same time, good will as a mental discipline strikes me as little more plausible than gratitude as a mental discipline. Logan Pearsall Smith, the great Quaker aphorist, once declared, “If we treat people too long with that pretended liking called politeness, we shall find it hard not to like them in the end.” To complete the thought: you can then hope that the liking becomes reciprocal. It’s advice that might have profited another Quaker aphorist, Richard Nixon. Work on appearances, and hope that the rest follows. I’m always brought up short when people talk about Hillary’s feelings toward the press as a “mistake”—the implication being that affect, too, is just a matter of strategy.
Try putting yourself in her place. During the 1992 campaign, the mainstream press attends closely to the issue of “bimbo eruptions” while the super market tabloids cover the story of your husband’s supposed black progeny and Gennifer Flowers discusses his sexual prowess in a magazine with a circulation considerably larger than this one’s. Months after you become First Lady, you spend two weeks with your dying father, and television reporters stake out the hospital, turning a personal crisis into another media spectacle; a prominent political commentator calls colleagues to spread the rumor that you’ve been spotted in the White House making love with a female veterinarian; you appear on “20/20” to find yourself closely interrogated about whether you hurled a lamp, or possibly a Bible, at your husband; a best selling roman à clef depicts the steely wife of a Clintonian candidate enjoying a one-night stand with a campaign aide. And that’s just a sampler. Wouldn’t you be entitled to wonder why your involve ment in a mammogram initiative that will save many thousands of lives gets scant coverage, while, say, your trading in cattle futures fifteen years ago takes center stage? Hillary Clinton can’t help sounding utterly self-serving when she tells me she’d like people to look at her “and say, you know, what really matters is that for twenty-five years she’s cared about kids and that’s been a consistent theme, and maybe I should learn about that, instead of ‘Omigosh, she’s changed her hairdo again.’ ” But she may well have a point.
“I’m heartsick about what I’m wàtching now,” Jan Piercy tells me. “We achieved something that I will be proud of until the day I die, and I’m watching how quickly it comes apart. I know profoundly, in ways now that I will never forget, just how deeply divided we are.” Piercy was struck by an argument Hillary made when the Gennifer Flowers scandal broke: “She was saying, ‘There have got to be boundaries.’ It’s even truer now. We’ve got to talk about holding people in public life accountable but allowing them their private life. There have got to be boundaries, some standards, a civility.”
The larger problem is that our political discourse contains a stark contradiction: we continue to regard symbolism as subterfuge, even while acknowledging it as an essential instrument of politics. We recognize that politicians, in part, govern by their utterances, the values they promulgate, the image they project. (In dim light, it’s hard to distinguish between George Will’s statecraft-as-soulcraft and Michael Lerner’s politics of meaning.) At the same time, for us village explainers image is less to be seen than to be seen through. Politics is for other people.
“Some of the personal attack levelled against me is a not very veiled attempt to undermine the positions that I have worked on and stood for,” Hillary says. “The people who hold the view of exalted individualism and think that the market can solve all our problems are not so confident in their position that they don’t feel it necessary to attack anyone who has a contrary point of view. And then I’ve made mistakes and I’ve engendered some criticism, I think justifiably, for things that I said or did or didn’t handle well. So it’s a combination of all that.” Her gaze drifts off toward the map, with its color-coded demarcation of the liberated zones and the Axis-controlled holdouts. ‘We’re becoming, as a culture, very hard, very cold and sterile in lots of ways, partly because of technology and global competition. So, no matter how one defines one’s political or ideological identity, I think all of us have to reach down and redefine our human identity first and foremost.” The alternative, after all, is that others will define our human identity for us.
Elsewhere in the building, policy papers are being drafted and redrafted, numbers are being crunched and massaged, speeches are being punched up or toned down. Here we sit in the gloom of the late afternoon, and Mrs. Clinton, by way of demonstration, is looking with willed gratitude at the bowl of pink roses on the long mahogany table. The discipline of gratitude requires noticing things you normally wouldn’t, and not noticing things you normally would. “I don’t even read what people mostly say about me,” she maintains, in her best pack-up-your-troubles tone. “I figure that’ll all wash out historically, and a lot of this kind of day-by-day stuff doesn’t amount to very much. And, in fact, I look at each day’s news and I try to think, What will be important in five years, or fifty years?” Not those roses, which, on close inspection, are already beginning to fade. History vindicates, of course, but it can equally condemn, ignore, equivocate. Much depends on who writes it. ♦
