American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power

I don’t quit.

I keep going.

—Hillary Rodham Clinton

S
he is, quite simply, the most famous, most controversial, most complex, most loved-hated-admired-reviled woman—perhaps person—in America. And, whether she fulfills her life’s ambition or not, she can already lay claim to being the first woman ever considered a serious contender for the presidency.

Yet most of what we know about Hillary Rodham Clinton is strictly seen in the context of her marriage to the forty-second President. Indeed, they were the ultimate power couple—he the drawling, fatally charismatic Bubba with Falstaffian appetites, she the brilliant lawyer and consummate political strategist who put her own dreams of high office on hold to focus on capturing the Oval Office for her husband. When it came to her husband’s philandering, Hillary had always been willing not just to look the other way, but to go on the offensive—as she did when news of Bill’s affair with Gennifer Flowers threatened to derail Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. “I’m not,” she famously told CBS’s
60 Minutes
at the time, “some Tammy Wynette, standin’ by her man.”

Of course, that was precisely what Hillary was, had always been, and would continue to be—particularly if it meant that she could serve, as Bill Clinton himself put it, in the role of “co-President.” Hillary may have been an ardent feminist and an accomplished career woman, but the fact remained that whatever power she wielded was derived from her husband—the born political animal who, by sheer force of his formidable personality, could so effortlessly seduce voters. At the same time, it is difficult to imagine that he would ever have made it out of Arkansas were it not for having Hillary—the consummate strategic thinker, cheerleader, string puller (“Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain!”), and excuse maker—guiding him every step of the way. “Theirs was a union of brains and sex appeal,” explained one longtime ally. “Her brains and his sex appeal.”

Neither her political acumen nor her impressive grasp of the weightiest issues would figure much in helping Hillary establish a political beachhead of her own. Ironically, it was in the role of the ultimate wronged woman that Hillary would shine. By the time her husband’s historic impeachment trial ended with his acquittal in February of 1999, Hillary was riding an unprecedented wave of public sympathy that would later sweep her into the United States Senate—and position her for her own presidential try.

The oft-told story goes more or less like this: The Clintons are out for a drive and pull into a gas station. Hillary points to the attendant and says to her husband, “I used to date that guy.” Bill laughs and says, “If you’d married him, you’d have been stuck here instead of married to the President of the United States.”

“No,” replies Hillary. “If I’d married him,
he’d
be President.”

It is a bit of Clinton apocrypha that nevertheless has the unmistakable ring of truth. Not only did Hillary act as her husband’s chief political strategist and policy sounding board, but she also played an
invaluable role as lifeguard. Time and again, Hillary blew the whistle around her neck, grabbed a life preserver, and dove headfirst into the waves—rescuing her husband just as he came up for air one last time.

“She doesn’t know,” Clinton adviser Mandy Grunwald said at the height of the Monica Lewinsky affair, “whether to kill him or save him.” In truth, there was never any real doubt. Even when Hillary seriously considered packing up and leaving her husband, their
partnership
and her faith in it remained stronger than ever.

Hillary’s physical, intellectual, and emotional investment in that partnership was still paying dividends in 2004, as polls showed more members of her party favoring Senator Clinton for President than all the other declared Democratic candidates combined. Even after Massachusetts Senator John Kerry secured the Democratic presidential nomination and began to mount what appeared to be a serious challenge to incumbent George W. Bush, speculation concerning Hillary’s plans for a future presidential run of her own—either in 2008 or in 2012—continued unabated.

Whenever Hillary makes her announcement, there will be the inevitable comparisons to Argentina’s legendary Eva Perón—an ambitious, strong-willed woman who engineered her husband Juan Perón’s rise to the presidency, used her position as Argentina’s First Lady to wield enormous political power, and in the process became one of history’s most admired, hated, feared, and revered women. Sex, power, money, lies, scandal, tragedy, and betrayal were the things that defined the public lives of both women. Yet more than a half century after Eva Perón’s death at age thirty-three, millions regard her as nothing less than a saint—and have long lobbied the Vatican to officially make her one.

Even Hillary would concede that, in her case, sainthood seems highly unlikely. Whatever the ultimate judgment of history, the ongoing saga of Hillary Clinton’s inexorable rise to power continues to stir passions—and to fan the flames of controversy that make her the
American Evita.

The White House
Friday, January 19, 2001

H
illary Clinton was furious. Furious at the U.S. Supreme Court for handing the presidency to George W. Bush. Furious at George W. Bush for pushing his obvious advantage in Florida (where his brother was governor) to wrest control of that state’s decisive electoral votes, and furious at Al Gore for blaming his defeat on the Clintons’ own scandal-stained reputation.

In these waning days of their administration, the one person she was not furious at—for a change—was her husband. Throughout their marriage, it had always been Bill who screwed up and Hillary who came to the rescue. She had chosen to overlook his myriad past indiscretions as governor of Arkansas, and during their eight years in the White House stood squarely with Bill in the face of Whitewater and Travelgate and Filegate and Vince Foster and
Paula Jones and the mother of all Clinton scandals, Monicagate. Hillary, in fact, went far beyond merely standing by her man. It was the First Lady who confronted each crisis head-on, masterminding legal strategies and mounting counterattacks to debunk charges and discredit those with the audacity to have made them.

Now it was Bill’s turn, and he did not have to be told what was expected of him. For years, White House staffers had been murmuring about “The Plan,” the long-standing agreement that, once the Clintons left the White House, they would reverse roles: in return for all the sacrifices Hillary had made over the years—all the dreams and ambitions put on hold, not to mention the heartache and searing humiliation she had had to endure because of his rampant womanizing—Bill would throw himself behind his wife’s political career. If all went according to The Plan, he would return to the White House as America’s first First Gentleman. Hillary had already taken a step toward making The Plan a reality; just sixteen days earlier, she had been sworn in as the junior United States senator from New York—the only First Lady ever elected to office.

It would be hard to overstate the potential historic significance of The Plan. After all, only the first half had been implemented thus far. If all went according to schedule, Hillary would serve two terms in the White House—a combined total of sixteen years during which the Clintons would share power in the Oval Office. That would far outdistance the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, who was elected to serve sixteen years but died after twelve. Constitutionally, there was nothing to prohibit a continuation of the informal, his-and-hers “co-presidency” the Clintons had always practiced.

In the meantime, there were some pressing issues to contend with—foremost among them the President’s eleventh-hour deal to avoid prosecution in the Monica Lewinsky case. In secret meetings with independent counsel Robert W. Ray, Bill had hammered out an arrangement whereby he would admit to wrongdoing, pay
a $25,000 fine, and agree to have his Arkansas law license suspended for five years. Hillary worked with her husband on the characteristically contorted wording of his so-called confession. “I tried to walk a fine line between acting lawfully and testifying falsely,” he admitted, “but I now recognize that I did not fully accomplish this goal and that certain of my responses to questions about Ms. Lewinsky were false.”

Neither Hillary nor Bill gave the slightest indication that, behind closed doors at the White House, they had been negotiating with Ray for weeks in a desperate effort to stave off indictment. During that time, Hillary and Bill had smiled gamely through countless farewell parties, pumped the hands of hundreds of staff members and supporters, and churned out a steady stream of heartfelt thank-you notes. Tonight, their last in the White House, they would drag themselves to one last, emotion-charged function—this one an engagement party for her longtime press aide Kelly Craighead. “He could barely stand up, he looked so tired,” said a guest. “But Hillary, even though she had bags under her eyes and had been working just as hard as he had, well, she looked energized.”

Hillary looked so energized, in fact, that when several aides fantasized about playing some sort of practical joke on “W” and his incoming administration, Hillary nodded her approval. “Wouldn’t it be hysterical,” she said with a wry smile, “if someone just happened to remove all the
w
’s from the computer keyboards?” Taking Hillary at her word, outgoing staffers dashed from office to office plucking the offending
w
keys from scores of keyboards. Others went much further, pouring coffee into file cabinets, overturning desks, leaving X-rated messages on voice-mail machines, soiling carpets, tinkering with computers, and drawing obscene pictures on office walls. (Unlike Hillary, Tipper Gore would later apologize for the vandalism of government property and the disrespect shown toward the incoming president and his family.)

While younger staffers carried out what they believed to be the First Lady’s wishes, Bill, who had insisted on packing up the Oval Office himself, raced to meet the deadline. Hillary, as organized and punctual as her husband was chronically tardy (for eight years the administration ran on what was derisively known as “Clinton time”), spent what little time remained walking the halls of the residence. The walls leading to the third-floor solarium, a glassed-in room on the south side of the building, were papered with framed family photographs: a tutu-wearing Chelsea fresh after her performance in
The Nutcracker,
the Clintons sitting at a picnic table, Hillary and Chelsea sharing a hammock. Hillary looked out over the pink geraniums on the terrace, toward the Washington Monument. Next to Chelsea’s Beanie Baby collection were several colorfully painted Russian nesting dolls, each fashioned in the image of the Reagans, Bushes, and the Clintons.

The First Lady lingered in Chelsea’s rooms, trying to hear in her mind, Hillary would later recall, “the laughter of her friends and the sound of her music. Many of her memories growing up in the White House as the daughter of a President were happy,” Hillary added, as if trying to convince herself the good outweighed the bad. “I was sure of that….”

It was around 2
A.M
. Saturday when Hillary barreled straight past Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe and into the Oval Office. McAuliffe, a staunch defender of both Clintons who had raised tens of millions of dollars for their various campaigns, was recording the historic final moments of the Clinton administration on a camcorder.

In a matter of hours, the Bushes were to arrive, as was the custom, for coffee with the incumbent before driving off to the Capitol for the inauguration ceremonies. But there, at 2
A.M
., stood Bill, crimson-faced and bleary-eyed, surrounded by cardboard boxes and giant rolls of bubble wrap. Despite the fact that his voice was hoarse with exhaustion, Hillary’s husband regaled anyone in
earshot with the story behind each memento as he tossed them, one by one, into boxes marked
WASHINGTON
,
LIBRARY
, and
CHAPPAQUA
. Whatever didn’t go into the boxes was placed on a long table to be picked over by staff and friends. “It feels like a 7-Eleven around here,” observed one of the stewards, who watched in amazement as aides and secretaries examined items left out by the President as if they were at a yard sale. In the end, only a pair of presidential pajamas would remain stretched out on the table, too personal an item for anyone to touch, much less take home as a souvenir.

“For God’s sake, Bill,” Hillary said, interrupting her husband as he continued to wax nostalgic, this time over a photo of him and Hillary taken with Jacqueline Onassis in Martha’s Vineyard. “Stop talking and get some sleep!”

The President, shaking his left hand in the air as he winced in pain, ignored his wife. “Man, that hurts,” Bill said, grimacing. In this final packing frenzy, the President had managed to slice open his index finger on one of the boxes. Old Arkansas buddy Harry Thomason, who was helping Bill sort through the debris, had tried to close the wound with Super Glue.

“Super Glue?!” Hillary said in amazement, rolling her eyes. It was the just the kind of bizarre and not altogether rational stunt Bill might be expected to pull when he got too tired. Hillary was, in fact, alarmed at just how drained her husband looked—more exhausted than she had ever seen him. Shunning sleep altogether and subsisting on a diet of éclairs, hot dogs, and pizza, Bill had vowed to pack the work of an entire third term into his few remaining days in office. If he could accomplish this, he told Hillary, “it would feel like four more years.” Toward that end, in addition to the deal with the Independent Counsel, he made scores of appointments, nominated nine new federal judges, wrote thousands of pages of new federal regulations, and approved the creation of eight new national monuments.

With Hillary’s help, Bill also used his last remaining hours in
office to compile a list of drug traffickers, fugitives, tax cheats, embezzlers, armed radicals, friends, and relatives who would be granted presidential pardons. That list, along with the hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of gifts and furnishings they were improperly spiriting out of the White House, would later threaten to bury the Clinton legacy once and for all.

As the administration of William Jefferson Clinton wound down to its final few days, Hillary had watched as her husband wallowed shamelessly in nostalgia, alternately euphoric and melancholy as he passed out coffee mugs emblazoned with the presidential seal, pens, hats, golf clubs, and other souvenirs to anyone who dropped in to say good-bye.

On the Clintons’ last night in the White House, Thomason asked if he and the President might do what they did on their first night there in 1993—bowl in the basement alley that had been installed by President Nixon. But that idea was nixed by Hillary. The First Lady, fresh from hosting her press aide’s engagement party, wanted to screen the new David Mamet film
State and Main
in the White House theater instead.

After the Clintons watched the movie, Bill went to the kitchen with Thomason and polished off several helpings of apple cobbler. Then the President returned to the Oval Office to resume packing with the help of several junior staffers. He was, they observed, still “running on empty”—so obviously wrung out they feared he might simply collapse.

It was nearly dawn when Bill packed away the last paperweight and the last framed photograph. Hillary had been in bed for hours, but Harry Thomason, who along with his wife, Linda Bloodworth Thomason, had been with the Clintons for their last Thanksgiving and their last Christmas in the White House, stayed up to keep his friend company. In return, Clinton gave Harry his favorite putter.

“Well, better get to bed,” Bill sighed to no one in particular. “Last night in the White House…” He thought about what he had said
for a moment and smiled. Then, trying for Arnold Schwarzenegger but sounding more like Elvis, he quipped, “We’ll be
back.
”

Six hours later, Hillary stepped into the Grand Foyer with her husband. Ringing the foyer was the permanent household staff, there to bid the Clintons good-bye. From the beginning of their tenure here, the Clintons had rubbed many staff members the wrong way with their lack of punctuality, their oddly imperious manner (at first Hillary instructed staffers not to make eye contact when she passed by), their hair-trigger tempers, their unpredictable hours (Hillary and Bill often rang up the staff at 2 or 3
A.M
. to demand something), and their unnerving penchant for shouting Anglo-Saxonisms at the tops of their lungs—at aides, and at each other.

Rankling most of all among old-timers was a lack of decorum that contrasted sharply with the patrician style of the Clintons’ predecessors, George H. W. and Barbara Bush. One veteran steward recalled the night eight years earlier when Linda Bloodworth Thomason and another Clinton friend, television actress Markie Post, jumped up and down on the Lincoln bed shouting, “We’ve made it! We’re in the White House now!”

But on this occasion emotions ran high as Hillary moved down the line thanking everyone, from the kitchen staff to the grounds-keepers to the maids, for “taking such wonderful care of us each and every day.”

The President enveloped each staff member, male and female, in a crushing bear hug—“more of a body-slam, really,” observed one breathless recipient of Bill’s affection. “I’m really going to miss you,” chimed in one of the stewards, “but I hear the next people go to bed at nine.” Hillary laughed, then gave White House butler Buddy Carter a lingering embrace that morphed into a waltz. Bill cut in, and the First Couple twirled down the hallway toward the Blue Room. (Still, a number of household staffers would throw their own “good riddance” party to celebrate the Clintons’ departure.)

When George and Laura Bush arrived, their predecessors greeted them warmly. “Bush really connects,” Bill would later say of this meeting. “It’s a mistake to underestimate him.” Hillary was not about to make that mistake, now that she would be dealing with Bush from her own position of power on the Hill. At one point, W spotted Chelsea across the crowded room, trying hard not to be noticed as she wiped a tear from her eye. He sidled over to the Clintons’ only child and wrapped a reassuring arm around her shoulders. Chelsea beamed and quickly regained her composure. What kept her from breaking down entirely, Chelsea later told a fellow student at Oxford University, was the conviction that her mother would recapture the White House for the Clintons.

As the two first families headed toward the door, they passed a member of the Marine Band seated at a piano in the Grand Foyer. Bill stopped, slid onto the bench next to the musician, and swayed dreamily to the wistful strains of “Our Love Is Here to Stay.” Hillary looked at her husband, her features hardening for one fleeting moment, then walked on.

Her collar turned up against the cold, Hillary squinted into the sun and shivered as George W. Bush took the oath of office. Even as a twenty-one-gun salute thundered across the National Mall, workers swarmed over the Oval Office, giving it the “thorough scrubbing” Bush had promised it would get in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.