Chapter Thirty-seven

EMPIRE STATE

In the midst of Bill Clinton’s worst year in office, there had been flashes of a bright future awaiting Hillary Rodham Clinton.

In the summer of 1998, a few weeks before the president’s grand jury testimony, she toured upstate New York as part of a campaign to promote historic preservation. The reception was more like those of her overseas travels. Thousands awaited her appearance in the small town of Auburn, in New York’s Finger Lakes region, when she visited the Harriet Tubman house. The next day, on a sweltering morning in Seneca Falls, the crowd was even larger to hear the first lady mark the anniversary of the Women’s Rights Convention held there 150 years earlier. The modern generation of women, she implored, needed to “finish the work” of feminist pioneers like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

From the moment she moved to Arkansas, Hillary Clinton had experienced a persistent paradox. One of the most ambitious and intelligent women of her generation, she stirred her greatest controversy when she tried to give expression to those traits; she received her greatest public acclaim when she played the loyal wife who persevered to keep her dignity and marriage intact in the face of her husband’s disloyalties.

That upstate tour had been the first indication that she might finally be able to marry the public adoration and her personal feminism as a senator from New York, the Empire State. The idea at first blush seemed absurd—running for office in a place she had never lived. But one unexpected consequence of the Lewinsky humiliation and the public sympathy it engendered was that the first lady had at last been liberated to pursue her own political career independent of her husband’s.

The juxtaposition was even more obvious on February 12, 1999—the same day the Senate acquitted the president in his impeachment trial. All that day, she had been meeting with her old friend Harold Ickes, their conversation in the White House residence interrupted by occasional reports on the latest vote tallies. Ickes’s account with the Clintons was the same as ever: the man to deliver hard truths. With both of them, Ickes had always enjoyed license to express unvarnished opinions of the sort that less familiar advisers would dare not utter. On this occasion, the first lady had summoned Ickes, a New Yorker, for an appraisal of what it would take to successfully run in New York. In his usual blunt fashion, Ickes laid out all the problems. For all the public sympathy that had accrued to her during impeachment, there was no telling what the backlash would be once she actually began running in a state where she had not lived. One had to assume the carpetbagger factor would be formidable, he warned, and possibly insurmountable. Then there was Hillary herself. “You might not be any good as a candidate,” Ickes warned. He reminded her that as a candidate she would have to deal regularly with reporters. The first lady took the advice as dispassionately as he gave it. Her deliberations about running would continue for weeks more, but during the session with Ickes the main current of her thinking was obvious: She was going to run.

Among those most surprised, and troubled, by this were her closest aides. The first lady’s chief of staff and old friend, Melanne Verveer, had urged her not to. So did Verveer’s predecessor, Maggie Williams, who remained a close confidante. Hillary Clinton was already an international figure, with a voice and reputation that carried around the world, they reasoned. Why plunge into partisan politics, especially in a race that she could conceivably lose? Several people who raised objections felt a chill from her that lingered long after their conversations. It was clear she was looking for people to give her reasons to get to yes, and she seemed impatient and even dismissive of those who were repeating the reasons to say no. Still, the loyal sorority that made up the first lady’s circle remained full of foreboding. No one who really cares about you, Williams pleaded, wants you to do this.

There was a prominent exception. Bill Clinton was enthralled with the idea of his wife in the Senate. Always in awe of her abilities, he had thought she belonged there from the first days of their relationship. Beyond that, in the wake of the Lewinsky ordeal, in the long-running balance sheet of their relationship he was now deeply in debt. Whatever she wanted, he wanted. A few days after the Ickes meeting, reporters covering his state visit to Mexico asked him about her potential candidacy, an idea that in public was still being treated like a lark. The president enthused, “She would be great if she did it.”

By July she was unabashedly running. The 2000 election promised a titanic clash, pitting arguably the planet’s most famous woman against the larger-than-life mayor of New York City, Rudolph Giuliani. Her announcement of a statewide “listening tour,” an obvious preface to a candidacy, was remarkable in part for where it occurred: at Moynihan’s farm upstate in Pindars Corners. There had been no love lost between the senator and the Clintons over the previous seven years, and Moynihan’s wife, Liz, who was the senator’s political majordomo, had even less affection for the Clintons. Yet Moynihan also had a sense of history and vanity alike about his Senate seat, which had previously been held by another newcomer to New York, Robert F. Kennedy. He believed his seat should be held by a large and consequential figure. Hillary Clinton certainly qualified. Moreover, he knew the political world would be watching and judging him by what he did to help her. Still, he could not muzzle all his ambivalence. In an interview about her candidacy, he sang her praises by noting the “Illinois-Arkansas enthusiasm” she would bring to the Senate—not exactly helpful words for a candidate facing accusations of carpetbagging.

The moment it was clear she was running, public sympathy for her as a loyal and long-suffering political wife curdled in an instant into skepticism about her motives. What looked like loyalty in 1998 now looked to many like opportunism. And so the other contradiction: A candidacy Hillary Clinton hoped would give her a political base of her own, independent from her husband, was, for the moment, inextricably linked to him. This prompted questions that had little to do with her Senate qualifications, but everything to do with who she was as a person: What was it that kept the two of them together?

This question seemed to weigh especially on women. Mark Penn’s polls in New York showed her running lower than historic voting patterns with the women’s vote, which in turn was causing her to underperform with Democrats generally. Interviews and focus groups made it clear the reservations were not political but personal: Women simply did not understand what made Hillary Clinton tick, and remained deeply skeptical about her marriage and her motives in coming to New York.

This was the subject on the table in the White House residence during a political meeting at which the president, now playing the role of campaign consultant, was vigorously participating. Perusing the polling data, he turned to his wife and observed, “Women want to know why you stayed with me.”

There was an awkward pause in the room. Marital troubles were not the usual stuff of campaign skull sessions. But Hillary Clinton did not seem embarrassed. Instead, a half smile crossed her face. “Yes,” she responded. “I’ve been wondering that myself.”

The president gave his answer: “Because you’re a sticker! That’s what people need to know—you are a sticker. You stick at the things you care about.”

This was true. Perseverance was among her most admirable traits, as it was his. But it only partly answered the mystery: Why did she stick with him through so many trials? What was the glue?

Even the cynics in the Clinton fold almost invariably arrived in the end at the same noncynical answer: She loved him, and felt loved by him in return. Over the course of a decade covering the Clintons, one found very few people who worked or socialized closely with them who did not in the end believe this. Their marriage, like many enduring marriages, was built on romance. That they had a genuine love affair did not mean, of course, they had a conventional one. It was exotic in its passions and daily routines. Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton shared a powerful love of politics, and they loved also the sense of shared mission that a career together in public service gave them. In important ways, politics was the heat for this relationship—and never more so than in 1999 and 2000.

Her Senate campaign provided a project upon which they could rebuild their marriage and remind themselves anew what it was that drew them to each other. They had been happiest together when they had separate endeavors, and unhappiest, as on overseas trips, when ceremony or public expectations forced her to play a secondary role to him. Now, they were like a couple that had separated. She was on the road in New York most nights; they might get an evening a week together. Yet the affection between them was more evident than it had been in years. She lit up when he called her while she was on the road. Her draft speech texts would fly back and forth between New York and Washington.

“B—what do you think of this?” she would write at the top.

He would fill up the margins with comments and suggested edits, and at the end write a note: “I love you, B.”

This melding of work and giggly banter suggested the dynamic that propelled their marriage. Maggie Williams once tried to explain it to a dumbfounded Ickes. Hillary was a more traditional girl than people realized, Williams said. She’d been the hard-working class brain with thick glasses, with a crush on the most popular boy in the class.

The relationship, by some reckonings, rested on mutual astonishment. He truly believed that she was a better and smarter person than anyone else he had ever known—more committed, more passionate, more idealistic. She truly believed that he was the most impressive leader of his generation—a handsome and energetic man with a gift at human connection that to her mind was beyond comprehension. Paul Begala told friends he had figured out the secret of their relationship: Hillary and Bill both looked at each other and could not believe that the other person had married someone so undeserving.

Ickes, in fact, felt certain that her appreciation for her husband grew during this period. There were certain things he was good at—getting up in front of a crowd at the end of a fourteen-hour day, walking off a stage into a throng of reporters—that she had come to take for granted over the years. She told Ickes: “I never realized how good Bill was at this until I tried to do it.”

She was good, too—eventually.

At the beginning, she was a novice candidate with a problem that no office-seeker had ever confronted: how to handle a controversy-generating spouse who happened to be president. There were clumsy moments. He issued clemency to sixteen convicted Puerto Rican terrorists, apparently out of a belief that this would help her with a critical Empire State constituency. The move backfired with a barrage of negative publicity, prompting her to repudiate the president’s action and assert that they had never discussed the matter before—despite her claim in an interview that “we talk in the solarium, in the bedroom, in the kitchen; it’s just constant conversation.”

As 1999 turned to 2000, she learned to avoid these kinds of stumbles. More than that, she began to show actual grace on the campaign trail. She no longer avoided the press pack, as she had in the White House years, or seethed at their impertinent questions. She faced the supposedly fearsome New York press corps daily, and handled the encounters well. There was likewise an interesting change in her interaction with crowds. For her, large audiences demanded an emotional and physical energy that left her depleted. Bill Clinton was the rare person who actually drew energy from crowds. During the White House years, when the Clintons appeared onstage with each other, she would usually retreat to the limousine and wait—sometimes for an hour or more—while he hopped down from the stage and shook hands. In New York, however, she, too, learned the art of working a rope line—perhaps not with his ease, but with striking results even so. The results were most dramatic in upstate New York. This was historically Republican territory, but with nearly constant visits she was soon running nearly even with Giuliani here. This was partly a reflection of the mayor’s snobbery; he did not like leaving the city for the upstate backwaters. But it was even more a reflection of her gift at human connection. People in the economically dying small towns of rural New York, as well as in the decaying industrial cities like Buffalo, appreciated the attention of a bona fide celebrity, and she soon managed to convince them that her interest was genuine.

Once, her loyal aide Patti Solis Doyle exclaimed, “You could be in Paris! Why do you want to go to Poughkeepsie?”

“I like Poughkeepsie,” she responded, with feeling.

As she grew more comfortable, there was a subtle reversal of roles between the Clintons. She still cared about his advice, but was becoming less dependent on it. Accustomed to thinking he knew the most when it came to politics, the president did not realize at first that he was becoming something of a fifth wheel in his wife’s campaign. “He just did not understand what was going on as well as she did, and so at times his presence was more of a nuisance,” recalled a close political adviser to her. “Sometimes there would be a political meeting scheduled at the White House when she was home on weekends, and we’d all roll our eyes and stall and say, ‘Let’s just have it in New York.’ It’s not that he wasn’t brilliant; it’s just that what he had to say was less relevant.”

This seemed to pain him a bit, but he took it manfully. In May 2000, as she was to speak to the Democratic nominating convention in Albany, her campaign was paralyzed for days over the question of what to do with the president. At one level, it would be a lot easier if he would stay home: Presidents have a way of overshadowing everything. The decision was made and he accepted it, with obvious disappointment. Only the day before the event did Hillary Clinton change her mind. She wanted him there. Howard Wolfson, her steady, taciturn press secretary, had encouraged the reversal. In any normal marriage, of course, the spouse would be present for a partner’s big day. It looked weird for Clinton to be absent. It’s a rare event for a president to get on a public stage and say nothing, but that was what happened.

Whether he spoke or not, the fact was that her campaign was made in his image. This surprised some people close to her. Many of them had believed that the two of them represented distinct poles in the Clinton enterprise. In this formulation, she was the ideologue, eager to win but motivated principally by the higher cause. He was the compromiser, eager to do good but motivated principally by the imperative of victory. The New York race revealed that, after eight years in the White House and the debacle of the health care reform effort, her brand of politics was in spirit and practice the same as his. She was a liberal, though not a liberal crusader. Like her husband, she placed pollster Mark Penn at the center of her operation, and practiced a steely brand of centrist politics that was designed to advance progressivism but do so in modest steps. After eight years in Washington, she had become ever alert to the perils of overreach.

One way that she was not like her husband was in how she responded to the rigors of political combat. Criticism might make him indignant in the moment, but he regarded it as part of the game; he was resilient. She, however, was sensitive. Beneath a tough exterior, criticism was personal and painful to her. During one sordid moment in summer 2000, a character from the president’s Arkansas past surfaced, leveling charges of anti-Semitic utterances by Hillary Clinton. The alleged episode was more than a quarter century old, from Clinton’s unsuccessful 1974 campaign for Congress. Hillary Rodham, not yet married to Clinton, supposedly hurled the epithets at a campaign staff aide in an argument. An angry dressing-down was certainly plausible; crude religious epithets were not. After denying them heatedly in public, she privately began to sob to an aide, “Why do I keep having to prove to people that I am not a liar?”

She pushed on. Her perseverance, along with some good luck, had produced a remarkable effect. A campaign that was supposed to be high drama had become almost boring. A bout with prostate cancer and a slew of personal and political problems had persuaded Giuliani to drop out of the race almost at the last minute. No longer a battle of titans, the race now featured Hillary Clinton, running a cautious by-the-numbers campaign, against a pleasant but hardly commanding congressman from Long Island, Rick Lazio. Voters faced a choice between a large and controversial Democrat and a bland and life-size Republican. At least in a state like New York, with its clear Democratic tilt, such a contest favored Hillary Clinton.

She grasped control of the race for good one September evening in Buffalo. It was the first televised debate between her and Lazio. Buffalo native Tim Russert, the NBC newsman, was on hand to moderate. It was a crackling evening of charge and countercharge, of the conventional political sort, when Russert took the debate in a personal direction. He recalled the day, nearly three years back, when she had blamed the newly erupted Lewinsky scandal on a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Since the Lewinsky allegations had turned out to be true, he asked her, did she regret having misled the nation? Seemingly taken aback by the bluntness of the question, she grabbed a breath and slowly and deliberately answered. “That was a very painful time for me, my family, and our country,” she said. “Obviously, I didn’t mislead anyone; I didn’t know the truth. Obviously, there’s a great deal of pain involved with that.”

Lazio thought he had an opening. Her conduct before and answers after, he said, revealed how she believed “it only matters when you get caught,” and reflected a penchant for “blaming others every time . . . when you have responsibility.”

But this moment was not an opening for Lazio; it was a trap. His taunts, and Russert’s effrontery, had delighted the throng of reporters covering the debate in a large holding room adjacent to the studio but caused a backlash with actual voters. While Russert asked the question that many New Yorkers were curious about, that did not mean they wanted it asked in a televised debate. Hillary Clinton came off the stage nervous, and uncertain of how she did. Within minutes, Penn’s instant polls showed that she had won overwhelmingly, particularly with women voters. The evening was the past three years in microcosm: She prospered by maintaining dignity in the face of humiliation.

A little after 11 p.m. she was on the phone to the White House. Clinton had been watching the debate on cable television. “You did great!” he told her.