One evening in the winter of 1998, Bill and Hillary Clinton invited a small
group of friends to watch a movie at the White House. Everyone gathered
outside the luxurious screening room in the East Wing, grabbed some soda and
popcorn and then settled themselves for a welcome respite from weeks of
headlines about the president’s involvement with Monica Lewinsky, the White
House intern.
The film was a three-year-old comedy, Something to Talk About, starring Julia
Roberts, Dennis Quaid and Kyra Sedgwick. It began promisingly enough, with
scenes of domestic bliss in a southern town, among them the bantering and
early morning rituals of Grace Bichon (Roberts), her husband Eddie (Quaid)
and their young daughter Caroline. But the plot took an ominous turn when
Grace and Caroline drove through town and saw Eddie kissing a beautiful
blonde and walking away with her, arm in arm.
Observing her mother’s fury, Caroline asked: “Is Daddy in trouble?”
“Big trouble,” said Grace. “You marry a guy whose nickname in college was
Hound Dog,” said Grace’s sister Emma Rae (Sedgwick). “What did you think was
going to happen?”
In the inevitable confrontation the next day, Emma Rae kneed Eddie in the
groin and called him a “lying sack of shit”, while Grace told him: “You
don’t know how it feels to be made a big, fat fool of.”
Grace’s revenge, from a recipe invented by her eccentric aunt Rae, was a
dinner of salmon with mint mustard sauce laced with emetics.
“It’s not lethal,” explained Aunt Rae. “It will, however, make him sick as the
dog that he is . . . I call it homeopathic aversion therapy . . . Sometimes
a little near-death experience helps them put things in perspective.”
On cue, Eddie fell violently ill, retching and screaming in agony as Grace
rushed him to the hospital.
Afterwards, in the White House family theatre, “Bill and Hillary were
completely silent. We all wanted to slide under our chairs”, recalled Mary
Mel French, the chief of protocol. A friend of both Clintons from Arkansas,
she had been through a bruising divorce several years earlier.
“Nobody said anything as we all got up to leave. I happened to be next to
Hillary when we were walking out. She slipped her arm through mine and
whispered to me, ‘I’ll tell you what. We should have that concoction. You
should mix it up first and give me a portion.’ We burst out laughing and
couldn’t stop.”
Hillary Clinton’s ability to laugh at such a moment of peril for her marriage
– and her husband’s presidency – not only signalled an awareness of her
husband’s philandering but showed that “she was trying to make the best of a
lot of things”, French recalled. “She knew my circumstances, and I knew some
of hers.”
That moment offered a revealing glimpse into a relationship that has
fascinated and often mystified the American public. The intensity of the
Clintons’ ambitions and the complexities of their marriage and political
partnership had a profound impact on his presidency.
The Clintons’ temperamental differences and the tensions in their marriage
intruded on policy, politics and personnel in their presidential years. The
Lewinsky episode was the most egregious instance, but disquieting
undercurrents were evident from the beginning. “There is a saying, ‘If
Mama’s not happy, nobody is happy’,” said one top administration official.
“You could read her weather forecast on his face.”
Had the Clintons divorced, they would have been more fathomable. Instead, as
French noted, “The Clintons are complicated because they stayed together.”
Bill was 46 years old when he entered the White House, and Hillary was 45.
They declared themselves the baby-boomer version of Franklin and Eleanor
Roosevelt, but the way they operated was more akin to John F Kennedy and his
brother Bobby, who served as attorney-general and operated as a de facto
vice-president while serving as the president’s eyes and ears and closest
adviser.
“Eleanor Roosevelt was strong but she did not try to beat men at their own
game,” observed Arthur Schlesin-ger, a former Kennedy aide and biographer of
Roosevelt. “Hillary does.”
The Clintons came to the presidency with a long history of consulting each
other on virtually every consequential policy and political decision. This
pattern continued in the White House years, especially in areas in which
Hillary had a strong interest.
Mickey Kantor, a longtime friend who served as US trade representative and
commerce secretary in the Clinton administration as well as an informal
counsellor when the Clintons were embattled by scandal, said: “Their lives
had been so entwined, both personally and professionally, it has always been
hard to distinguish who played what role. In the end, she had the first and
last word when it was something important . . . There was no issue I was
around that she wasn’t critical to.”
Hillary considered Bill a “force of nature”. Yet nearly everything about him
was contradicted by something else. His wide-ranging intellect could be
overridden by lapses in everyday common sense. He was by turns empathetic
and self-absorbed, focused and undisciplined, cerebral and priapic,
idealistic and cynical, honest and evasive, inspiring and mortifying. Above
all, he was intuitive.
Bill also had a propensity to dissemble that earned him enemies across the
political spectrum. But he yearned to please people and win their approval,
and he had a gift for conciliating and placating. Even friends who shunned
him after the Lewinsky revelations eventually relented. “For six months I
didn’t speak to him,” said Tunky Riley, the wife of the secretary of
education. “Then he got me again. I forgave him.”
With her cool manner and formidable will, Hillary had to work harder to win
people over. Her extreme earnestness conjured up images in the press of a
high-school “hall monitor” and the “Salvation Army sister” in Guys and
Dolls. Early in the 1992 campaign, The New Yorker ran a cartoon of a woman
shopping for a new jacket and saying: “Nothing too Hillary.”
Many men were put off by her give-no-quarter nature. The pollster Frank Luntz
once said: “She reminds most men of their first wife – or mother-in-law.”
She was as unsentimental as Bill was mushy. She once wrote to a college
friend: “Unthinking emotion is pitiful to me.” When Jacqueline Kennedy
Onassis sent a cheque to Bill’s presidential campaign in 1992, he
immediately said: “We can’t cash this.” Hillary’s reply: “Make a copy, and
then cash it.”
Said Ann McCoy, a friend from Arkan-sas: “You get a hug from Bill and a
solution from Hillary.”
Hillary’s powers of concentration and self-discipline became legendary. “You
can see her sometimes almost censoring the first, the second and the third
thing that comes into her head,” said her longtime friend Diane Blair.
Even Hillary has acknowledged having an “obsessive personality”. One close
friend referred admiringly to her “tunnel vision” – the ability to focus on
a problem, analyse it and make a firm decision. Her husband noted in the
second year of his presidency, with a wave towards his large Oval Office
desk: “I might as well try to lift that desk up and throw it through the
window as to change her mind.”
Nor did Hillary feel compelled to explain her certitude – or much else about
her thoughts and emotions. “She could be moody, but she would never stop
moving forward,” said Ann Stock, who served as White House social secretary.
“Hillary has complex layers. What you see is not what you get.”
This confounding opacity alienated the press and fuelled a perception that she
was withholding information during numerous investigations. In fact, the
role of “hidden hand” was one she enjoyed playing.
“She was extremely Machiavellian, a master of doing things that could
not be traced back to her,” recalled one close colleague. “She would say,
‘Do this, but don’t leave any finger-prints’.”
Hillary’s mother once observed: “She just does everything she has to do to get
along and get ahead.” In some ways they were an unlikely couple: the earnest
Methodist overachiever who freely acknowledged “I don’t do spontaneity” and
the instinctively affable and loquacious charmer who made everything look
easy.
“They are very different except in their values and interests,” said one of
their oldest friends. “There are countless couples where opposites attract,
but that is not what I would say about them. They just have different styles
and manifestly intelligent and deeply political natures.”
In the years since Bill survived his impeachment trial, a curious amnesia
seems to have set in. The tragic events of September 11, 2001, and the
ensuing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq eclipsed the traumas of the
Clinton years, which underwent a revision in the country’s emotional
imagination, shedding their tawdry aspects and becoming a halcyon interlude.
After leaving the White House, Hillary became a serious-minded senator and
wrote a bestselling memoir.
Bill followed with a bestselling memoir of his own and took on the role of
international celebrity, the Muham-mad Ali of politics, leading good causes
and dispensing advice to Democratic politicians and world leaders.
But as Hillary weighed her presidential prospects, a kind of reckoning
approached. As the Clintons knew only too well, a bid for the presidency
would dredge up the past in ways that promised to be painful and
diminishing. The press would reexamine old scandals and yellowing
depositions, and thousands of bloggers, unfettered by the conventions of
traditional journalism, would let their imaginations wander into the Oval
Office in the mid1990s and then wonder online what Bill really did with his
cigar and Monica Lewinsky.
The American people would have to ponder a most unpresidential question: did
they really want Bill Clinton let loose in the White House, doing heaven
knows what and influencing his wife in ways that could only be imagined?
Even if Bill and Hillary end up switching roles, their collaborative habits
are deeply rooted, and their years in the White House offer strong clues as
to how they would conduct themselves if they returned to 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue.
After Bill published his memoirs in 2004, he came close to defining their
marital dynamic in a discussion with a radio interviewer, Terry Gross, about
the marriage of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, who worked in tandem in the
White House but led separate private lives after she learnt about his affair
with Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd.
Musing about Roosevelt, Bill Clinton said: “It is fascinating . . . how he and
his wife had a very complicated relationship. They loved each other very
much. They had a bunch of kids, but they had big pockets of estrangement
between them, and pain, and they rendered enormous service to this country
because they stuck with what they had in common.”
Years earlier, after Hillary told her friend Ann Henry that Eleanor Roosevelt
was her role model, Henry replied: “That’s right, but Eleanor never found
her voice until after that marriage was over – until she didn’t care about
the marriage.”
The key to understanding them is in their shared love of politics – the
intellectual and emotional bedrock of their relationship. From 1974 onwards,
they have been united in a common quest: to win – and keep winning –
political office.
He savours the sheer joy of the political game, the energy he gets from the
outstretched hands, the connections with people of every sort, the
validation of a triumphant campaign, the ability to affect events, the
applause and adoration that come with being a political star. For Hillary,
politics has long been more utilitarian: a means to gain power and enact
programmes she believes would make a difference.
Politics may seem an odd foundation for a marriage, but for the Clintons it
has served as the defining factor not only of their careers but also of
their friendships, their dinner-table conversations, their intellectual
interests and, to outsiders at least, their emotional lives.
While questions endure about whether the Clintons love each other in the way
of most happily married couples, there is no doubt about their shared
commitment to public affairs and the Democratic party – and, ultimately, to
the pursuit of political power.
Extracted from For Love of Politics: The Clintons in the White House by
Sally Bedell Smith, published by Aurum Press on March 1 at £25. Copies can
be ordered for £22.50 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on
0870 165 8585
Does any of this matter? I think the main point of the article is that, despite whatever personal problems each may have, they are dedicated to improving the country. That's all one can ask of any public servant.
Andy, East Lansing, MI, USA
"In the years since Bill survived his impeachment trial, a curious amnesia seems to have set in. The tragic events of September 11, 2001, and the ensuing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq eclipsed the traumas of the Clinton years, which underwent a revision in the country’s emotional imagination, shedding their tawdry aspects and becoming a halcyon interlude. "
"which underwent a revision in the country’s emotional media,..."
Fixed.
Mr. Forward, New Buffalo, WI
"Power-couple" is the phrase that best describes them.
I think the Clinton's are so fascinating because Hillary is so enigmatic.
J Rhinehart, SC, USA