Sally Bedell Smith - For Love of Politics: Bill and Hillary Clinton: The White House Years

IN ALL HIS GLORY

REFLECTED GLORY

DIANA IN SEARCH OF HERSELF

GRACE AND POWER

Copyright 2007 by Sally Bedell Smith

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

R ANDOM H OUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Smith, Sally Bedell.
For love of politics : Bill and Hillary Clinton: the White House years / Sally Bedell Smith.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-696-2
1. Clinton, Bill, 1946 2. Clinton, Hillary Rodham. 3. Clinton, Bill, 1946 Marriage. 4. Clinton, Hillary RodhamMarriage. 5. PresidentsUnited StatesBiography. 6. Presidents spousesUnited StatesBiography. 7. Married peopleUnited StatesBiography. 8. United StatesPolitics and government19932001. I. Title.
E886.2.S555 2007
973.9290922dc22 2007019606
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Front-matter photographs: Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images ()

: Robert McNeely/William J. Clinton Presidential Library

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I N M EMORY of
M ARJORIE W ILLIAMS

The truth is most politicians are not candid with people. They try to act like they hate politicsand oh, this is a burden, I just had to do it. When the truth is most of them love it and wouldnt do anything else on a dime if they could avoid it.

Bill Clinton

beige upholstered seats.

Typically, the Clintons showed films that were about to open in theaters, making guests feel like insiders. But on this night, the film was a three-year-old comedy, Something to Talk About, starring Julia Roberts, Dennis Quaid, and Kyra Sedgwick.

The President and First Lady sat in two of the four large armchairs in the front row, and the guests settled themselves for a welcome respite from weeks of headlines about the Presidents involvement with Monica Lewinsky, a twenty-four-year-old White House intern. Five days after the story had broken on January 21, Bill Clinton had stood before television cameras, wagged his finger, and emphatically denied having had sexual relations with resurfaced following the Monica revelation, recalled Mary Mel French, the Chief of Protocol, one of the guests that evening.

Something to Talk About began promisingly enough, with scenes of domestic bliss in a southern town, among them the bantering and early-morning rituals of Grace Bichon (Roberts), the manager of her familys prosperous horse farm; her husband, Eddie (Quaid), a real-estate developer; and their adorable preteen daughter, Caroline. But the plot took an ominous turn when Grace and Caroline drove through town and saw Eddie outside his office building, kissing a beautiful blonde and walking away with her, arm in arm. Observing her mothers fury, Caroline asked, Is Daddy in trouble? Big trouble, said Grace.

You marry a guy whose nickname in college was Hound Dog, said Graces 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 dont know how it feels to be made a big, fat fool of. Graces revenge, from a recipe invented by her eccentric Aunt Rae, was a dinner of salmon with mint mustard sauce laced with emetics. Its 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.

Afterward, in the White House Family Theater, Bill and Hillary were completely silent. We all wanted to slide under our chairs, recalled French, a friend of both Clintons from Arkansas who herself 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, Ill tell you what. We should have that concoction. You should mix it up first and give me a portion. We burst out laughing and couldnt stop.

HILLARY CLINTON S ABILITY to laugh at such a moment of peril for her marriageand her husbands presidencynot only signaled an awareness of her husbands philandering but showed that she was trying to make the best of a lot of things, recalled French. She knew my circumstances, and I knew some of hers.

force multipliers. Hillarys mother suggested that for them, one plus one equaled a third kind of entity. Both had trained as lawyers and were equally versed in public policy. As President, Bill was the principal, and Hillarys designated role as First Lady was to serve his interests. But they were equals in their personal relationship, and she had her own policy agenda, with sufficient resources and staff to pursue it. This created the impression, particularly in the first two years of the Clinton Administration, that the White House was the site of a copresidency, with overlapping agendas.

The Clintons temperamental differences and the tensions in their marriage intruded on policy, politics, and personnel in their presidential years. The Monica Lewinsky episode was the most egregious instance, but disquieting undercurrents were evident from the beginning. There is a saying, If Mamas 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 Mary Mel French noted, The Clintons are complicated because they stayed together.

Bill was forty-six years old when he entered the White House, and Hillary was forty-five. 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 Presidents eyes and ears and closest advisor. Eleanor Roosevelt was strong, but she did not try to beat men at their own game, observed former Kennedy aide and Roosevelt biographer Arthur M. Schlesinger. Hillary does.