Hell To Pay Part 11

Hillary positioned herself to play coy defense.

"Well, I don't understand why uncorroborated rumors and all of the stories that are being promoted command as much attention as they seem to," she told the press. "So from my perspective, I am bewildered by the kinds of press attention they've generated."*40 Then came the whopper: "I feel very comfortable about my husband and about our marriage."

She also played offense, throwing the war room into full gear. In 1988 both Clintons had expressed exasperation with Michael Dukakis's inability to respond to Bush's attacks. Now the Clintons were responding to the Bush campaign themselves.

Hillary set out to level the playing field by slipping into her interviews mentions of the unsubstantiated rumor that George Bush had had an affair with a former aide. "I don't understand why nothing's ever been said about a George Bush girlfriend," Hillary said in a Vanity Fair interview. "I understand he has a Jennifer, too," she said coyly.*41 The war room kept up the a.s.sault on the Bush White House from every angle. Bill Clinton, the man of many shady deals, denounced the straightlaced George Bush as a trafficker of sleaze while promising to deliver the most ethical administration in history. Clinton attacked Bush's China policy while teaching the Democratic Party how to use John Huang and Charlie Trie and their Communist Chinese handlers as ATM money machines.

"The enemy," Alinsky wrote, "properly goaded and guided in his response will be your major strength."*42 The Bush campaign was goaded into overreacting where it should have ignored attacks, underreacting when its vital interests were at stake. Under the thrall of the notoriously fickle Office of Management and Budget Director Richard Darman, the Bush people spent an inordinate amount of time worrying about their inability to acknowledge the existence of the recession, while hoping that Clinton's past would yield a silver bullet that would put him away for good.

In this way, Bill Clinton became the forty-second president of the United States. It was a presidency won and operated in large part by Hillary Rodham Clinton, one of America's shrewdest campaign bosses since Mark Hanna.

Hillary had reorganized Bill's comeback victory after he lost the governorship through sheer inept.i.tude. During his long tenure in office, she solved problems for him from the school desegregation order to the costly energy from the Grand Gulf nuclear plant. She neutralized enemies like John Robert Starr and helped her husband recover from his disastrous 1988 speech in Atlanta.

Hillary Clinton never shied away from putting herself on the line, ripping into candidate Tom McRae and now the Republicans. In her 60 Minutes interview, Hillary explored new levels of public humiliation and victimhood.

In short, Hillary has enabled Bill Clinton to escape his fate, Houdini like, again and again. She has come through. Now it was time to collect. The gangly student activist wanted to become the co-president of the United States. It was only the beginning for Hillary Rodham Clinton.

EIGHT.

THE BLUE LIGHT SPECIAL.

"Effective organization is thwarted by the desire for instant and dramatic change, or as I have phrased it elsewhere, the demand for revelation rather than revolution."

-- SAUL ALINSKY, RULES FOR RADICALS.

During the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton showcased his ambitious and brainy wife as one of the advantages of electing him, saying, "Buy one, get one free."

Hillary would sometimes add, "People call us two-for-one. The blue light special."*1 At a campaign stop, Bill Clinton added: "I think what we will do if I am the nominee and if I am elected, we will try to decide what it is she ought to do, then discuss it with ourselves and then tell the American people, and give them time to get adjusted to it. It would be unusual, there has never been a .... "*2 He never finished that thought. He didn't have to. The direction the candidate was heading was unmistakable. Bill would become the President of the United States, known by the acronym POTUS, and Hillary would become the Co-President of the United States (to be known, perhaps, as COPUS). On the morning after the election, Bill Clinton woke up, looked over at his wife, and they both started laughing. "Can you believe that this happened to us?" he asked.

She told Time magazine, "A friend of ours said it's like the dog that keeps chasing the car and all of a sudden catches it."*3 It did not take Hillary much time to settle into the role of co-president. By the time of the election, it was apparent to most economists that the 1992 recession had been relatively shallow and the country was building toward a recovery of ma.s.sive proportions.

This was a good news/bad news scenario for the president and co-president. An administration lives or dies by the economy, and the Clintons certainly did not want to meet the same fate as George Bush. Yet, in another sense, the timing of the recovery was politically inopportune. They needed to show that somehow the Bush people had almost driven America off the cliff and the new Clinton Democrats were the rescuers. They needed the recession to linger a bit longer if they were to portray the Bush years as a grim and dark depression, with George Bush cast as Herbert Hoover and themselves as the Roosevelts.

But the recovery was already under way. They merely had to jump in front of the parade and appear to be leading it. The Clintons quickly organized an economic conference in Little Rock, one that would position them to take credit for the economy.

At the economic summit in December 1992, Hillary signaled to the world where she stood in the administration. As the nation's leading economists came to Little Rock to offer their advice, Hillary sat at the table with her husband, diligently taking notes, showing the world that she would take a major role in shaping policy.*4 This was not the first time a first lady had boldly exercised power.

For a month after Woodrow Wilson's devastating stroke, Edith Wilson and the president's physician were the only people allowed to see him. Mrs. Wilson guided her husband's unsteady hand in signing major bills. She would disappear into his bedroom and come out, like a female Moses walking down from the mountain, to issue edicts.

Whether the decisions came from Woodrow or Edith Wilson is still a guessing game for many historians.

Florence Harding was at least as instrumental in the rise of her husband, Warren G., as Hillary would be to Bill. Rosalynn Carter sat in on Jimmy Carter's cabinet meetings, stirring a great deal of resentment in Washington. During the Reagan years, Nancy Reagan kept a watchful eye on her husband's staff and was blamed for engineering the dismissal of Chief of Staff Don Regan. Even Barbara Bush, caricatured by the Clinton minions as a hopeless, antifeminist housewife, was known by insiders as a shrewd judge of character and a prescient unofficial political advisor to the president.

As with Rosalynn Carter and Nancy Reagan, though, some Americans did not like the idea of Hillary Clinton, an unelected official, becoming, in essence, a second vice president, and one of dubious const.i.tutionality. "If Hillary makes a stupid suggestion, who's going to want to call her on it?" asked Ben Wattenberg, former aide to President Lyndon Johnson and an American Enterprise Inst.i.tute fellow.*5 Hillary was denounced by Margaret Thatcher's former press secretary Sir Bernard Ingham as the "unacceptable face of nepotism."*6 Still, for the most part the "blue light special" was tremendously popular. It presaged a willingness--even a hunger--among American voters for outward signs of equality. And this aura of goodwill allowed the Clintons to make a dramatic departure from the Wilsons and the Hardings. The Clintons were open about the nature of their power-sharing arrangement. They advertised it and made a point of it among women voters. It was only later, that some started asking whether Bill was enthusiastically sharing power with a spouse whose intellect he respected or rather a dangerously exposed politician making a craven deal with someone who had the power to stop him cold.

Once in Washington, Hillary knew enough about the White House to appreciate that physical proximity to the Oval Office directly reflects political power. First ladies traditionally occupy an office in the East Wing of the White House to be closer to the family residence quarters.

With the help of her friend Susan Thomases, Hillary soon a.s.signed herself prime s.p.a.ce in the West Wing, strategically located where she could keep an eye on the domestic policy advisors running up and down the stairwell to see the president below. "we were looking at this floor plan," a White House aide said, "and presto, she had a layout it would have taken an industrial engineer weeks to figure. Not everybody was happy, but she got it right."*7 In an early bid to show the White House staff "who's boss," her portrait was placed more prominently than Vice President Al Gore's.*8 Even more pointed was her attempt to relegate Vice President Al Gore to the Old Executive Building.

If there were going to be two vice presidents, she was going to be the senior one, close to the ear of the president. As recounted by Bob Zelnick in his book Gore: A Political Life, Hillary's advisor Susan Thomases "arrogated to herself the role of 'official office s.p.a.ce designator' for the new administration. She suggested that Gore would be able to function perfectly well from a fine suite of offices in the Old Executive Office Building"--across the street from the White House--"leaving the one about eighteen strides from the Oval Office for Hillary Rodham Clinton." it was a power grab that would be thwarted, but not without a fight.

Even though she lost the office s.p.a.ce battle to the vice president, she did secure a prime position in the office s.p.a.ce pecking order at the West Wing. Her office had a bird's-eye view of the stairs and was across from Vince Foster's office.

"I can see [my husband] any time I want to," she told the Ladies Home Journal in 1993. "I can look out the window and see Bill." She boasted that her husband called her twelve times a day, leading everyone to presume it was for policy advice and direction on personnel.*9 THE CO-GOVERNOR.

By the time she had become first lady of the United States, Hillary had considerable experience sharing executive power with her husband.

For the past four years in Arkansas she had virtually been co-governor of Arkansas.

"I was one of those who sincerely believed the wrong Clinton was occupying the White House," said Arkansas Democrat managing editor John Robert Starr. This was an opinion held by many in Little Rock where, from 1983 to 1987, Hillary Clinton dabbled in Arkansas government constantly, leading an education reform effort that became a prototype for the Clinton blitzkreig way of governing in the project to remake America's health care system.

The education reform effort began when the governor was ordered by the state suprene court to equalize funding of Arkansas's school districts. This ruling put him in extreme jeopardy. Clinton could either take money out of wealthier school districts or he could raise taxes for poor school districts. Either way, it was an invitation to political suicide.

Another potentially fatal element was added to this toxic c.o.c.ktail of issues: the state's abysmal reputation in education. Arkansas business leaders were horrified that Arkansas schools ranked nearly lowest in the nation, discouraging hopes for attracting new business to the state.

Governor Clinton had little choice but to undertake immediately education reform as the centerpiece of his agenda. In 1983 Hillary asked her husband to put her up front, in the glare of the cameras, as chairwoman of the state commission to fix education. It was the first time Arkansans had a chance to see her at work, and they had liked the picture they were shown.

Hillary made a great show of diligence. She visited every one of Arkansas's seventy-five counties, sitting in nine hours of committee meetings on a typical day.*10 While she made a drawn-out public drama of listening to the people, a "listening" game she was later to replay with the voters of New York, Governor Clinton worked the Little Rock power circuit, inviting business leaders, journalists, and key legislators to the mansion. Hillary charmed the Good Suits Club, a kind of Business Roundtable of Little Rock leaders, enlisting them in the cause of education reform.

In short, it was a textbook campaign. The Clintons spent a great deal of time "listening" to the people, from local educators to Fortune 500 CEOs. As with so many of their efforts, the town hall meetings and backyard shindigs were sheer public relations, window dressing for an agenda that was already decided. But Arkansas fell for it.

As with the Watergate House Judiciary staff under John Doar, there was an outside effort and an inside effort. The public tour was the outside effort. Since the court had left Clinton with no other option than to deal with the education issue, then the challenge of the inside effort would be to make it a winning issue. The Clintons used education to launch the booster phase of their perpetual campaign for the rest of their years in Little Rock and ultimately to set the stage to run for the presidency.

Hillary's appearances before Arkansas legislators were full of virtual substance and self-depracating humor. She made frequent references to her small family and spoke with pa.s.sion of Arkansas's future. Hillary wowed them, as she would do a decade later when testifying about health care before Congress.

When the recommendations of her commission were released, they were chock-full of the education reform ideas in vogue at the time. Cla.s.s sizes would be reduced. The school year would be lengthened.

Kindergarten would be made mandatory. In a state in which many schools simply did not teach foreign languages, such courses would become a requirement. Math, social studies, and science would be given greater emphasis. Students would be regularly tested and held back for remedial work if they failed to meet minimum standards.

The plan had teeth. If 85 percent of students failed in a given district, it would be decertified.

There were also two other requirements. One, predictably, was a penny increase in the state's sales tax. The other, announced by Governor Clinton on a statewide television address, was the result of a high-risk inside political calculation made by Bill, Hillary, and d.i.c.k Morris. This element--mandatory teacher testing--shocked the education bureaucrats.

In virtually every state, there is no lobby more powerful or more dedicated to protecting and advancing the liberal agenda than the teachers' unions. This time the Arkansas Educational a.s.sociation (AEA), the Clintons's most loyal allies, were utterly and completely betrayed.

This would not be the last time the Clintons were to catch their natural allies off-stride. The Clinton solution to the court mandate was a work of sheer political calculation, an early version of the Clinton/Morris triangulation strategy.

At one corner of the triangle was a state electorate desperate to shed its image as a rural backwater. At the other corner were teachers, many of them unqualified.

The Clintons held their position at the apex of the triangle, appearing to taxpayers in one corner as reformers and to the educrats at the other corner as betrayers who might yet be willing to cut an inside deal. This put them in a position of great potential power.

At a time when Ronald Reagan was starting to ride high late in his first term, and tax increases were about as popular as sour milk, the Clintons also took the sting out of their tax increase by linking it to a notably conservative proposal.

There was also a subliminal racial appeal in the strategy, since the least qualified teachers tended to be found in the most poorly financed school districts, which tended to be black. It was an early version of Bill Clinton's 1992 harangue against Sister Souljah. He lost some allies and old friends, but Clinton solidified his hold on the electorate by seeming to stand up to a powerful special interest.

If the education reform campaign had all the trappings of a political campaign, that's because it was. A finance committee raised $130,000 for radio and television advertising. Another group raised funds to distribute a quarter-of-a-million brochures. Each brochure included a postcard that a presumably indignant citizen could mail to their state legislator in support of the reforms.*11 When the AEA recovered from its shock and fought back, Hillary was ready at every turn with crisp reb.u.t.tals.

The hostility aimed at the Clintons by the teacher's union was palpable. After she was hissed at, jeered, and booed, Hillary told friend Diane Blair that "it's heartbreaking, but someday they will understand."*12 Far from being a problem, the spirited opposition of a teachers' union extended and deepened the governor's popularity.

The more the union attacked, the more support the governor received from around the state. He projected the image of being so committed to the well-being of the children of his state that he'd take on the most powerful element in his own party.

SVinning in the legislature was a dicey proposition. It took late night arm-twisting and personal appeals from Hillary to get recalcitrant legislators to sign on the dotted line. In the end, most of the Clinton package pa.s.sed, including the added one-cent sales tax that promised $185 million in new education monies. Bill and Hillary celebrated in the mansion with champagne. And when they finished the bottle, they opened another one. As a result of this early experiment in triangulation, Bill Clinton's 1984 election was the easiest victory he had ever won. The education campaign rolled throughout the rest of the new term, building steam for the elections ahead.

"For two or three years, he got rid of the special-interest groups, the AEA and the blacks," John Robert Start told the New Yorker. "He told them to go stuff it. He called me once and said the blacks were on his a.s.s. I told him, 'Don't worry, I'll go after the blacks--I'll get them so mad at me they'll forget about you!' I called them pipsqueak preachers."*13 With the reform firmly in place, the state could dissolve or annex any school that failed to meet its standards. This forced schools to teach state-approved education guidelines, a multicultural curriculum that watered down American studies and Western civilization and extolled the virtues of African civilization.

Blair Hurt of the Wall Street Journal found that the twenty pages of the Education Standards report that the reform legislation was based on, included 124 "shalls." All school districts were forced to bow to Hillary's "shalls" including a multicultural agenda on history lessons. In 1984, eighty-four of Arkansas's 367 school districts facing the threat of dissolution were forced to bow in another way.

They were forced to increase local taxes.

School districts remained under the constant threat of abolition if their students failed 85 percent of the Minimum Placement Test. The result, Blair Hurt reported in the Wall Street Journal, was widespread cheating--students left alone in a cla.s.sroom with the answers or given the answers outright.

Worse was the onerous burden Hillary's reforms placed on the schools that honestly chose to comply. Benny Gooden, superintendent of the Fort Smith school district, found that it took eleven pounds of paperwork to prove his district had complied with Hillary's bureaucratic, top-down standards. Some school districts were also forced to increase local taxes to avoid dissolution.

Nor was teacher testing the panacea that it had been advertised to be. Remedial training and a generous willingness to allow teachers to retake the test over a period of years kept 97 percent of Arkansas teachers in place. In time, the education establishment would "understand," just as Hillary predicted. They didn't like being used as a political pinata, but in the end they saw that not much had changed. In fact, they had reason to be delighted with Bill Clinton for raising hundreds of millions of additional tax dollars for education.

Eventually, everyone seemed to benefit on the surface. The governor burnished his popularity. Hillary got a chance to exercise power as a princ.i.p.al, not merely as an adjunct to her husband. The AEA got a payback in the form of tax money and teacher tests that were irrelevant. Everyone was better off except for the children of Arkansas and their tax-paying parents. In truth, the Clinton campaign did not improve Arkansas's educational standing. The Wall Street Journal reported that test scores for high school seniors on the American College Test (ACT)fell in 1986. The ACT test scores went up in 1992, but with a new test that inflated scoring. When adjusted according to the pre-1992 scoring, Arkansas students again came near the bottom of the twenty-eight states that use the ACT. In 1993, 57 percent of all Arkansas college freshmen had to take remedial cla.s.ses in reading, writing, or math.*14 For all the sound and fury, very little had changed. Very little had been accomplished, except for two things.

The Clintons maintained their hold on power. And Arkansans paid more of their earnings to their government.

After the Clintons left for Washington, Betty Tucker, wife of Clinton's successor Jim Guy Tucker, began getting calls from the state Department of Education asking her permission to make the most minuscule of decisions. Reportedly, the governor's office was asked by districts if it could hire a teacher or add a janitor's slot.

"The suspicion was," David Brock was told, "that the department had been micromanaged out of the governor's bedroom."*15 Hillary's education reform brought every district in the state under her thumb--and kept it there.

THE CO-PRESIDENT.

Hillary's co-presidency began on a note of disappointment. She had wished to follow fully in the footsteps of Robert F. Kennedy. Being attorney general allowed RFK to be a presidential sidekick in whom enormous power and confidence would be invested. There was loose talk among Hillary's admirers about her serving as White House chief of staff, or perhaps holding a cabinet position.

It remained just that--talk. No one had bothered to research the possibility. An official appointment for Hillary would have been impossible. Call it LBJ's revenge. In 1967 Lyndon Baines Johnson, still miffed that Robert Kennedy had served as attorney general, made it impossible for presidents to appoint a relative to a position "over which he exercises jurisdiction."

To her grave disappointment, Hillary could not become an official member of the Clinton team.

She could, however, exercise informal power. The co-presidency would have to be understood, implied, "virtual," but not made official.

Hillary would exercise the power, but could hold no t.i.tle. The federal nepotism law would be honored, at least literally. But she had to have the authority. And everyone would have to know it.

That is why there was so much emphasis on cosmetics, why it was so important to give her portrait such a prominent place. That is why she went to a policy retreat at Camp David at which cabinet spouses had been pointedly excluded. That is why she allowed the staff to see her correct her husband in front of them.

"How could you be so d.a.m.ned stupid?" she barked at him in front of staff. "How could you do that?"*16 "The President sits in the middle of the table, the Vice President right across from him, and Hillary wherever she wants," a Clinton aide said. "And the refrain we have all gotten used to is, 'What do you think, Hillary?'"*17 She quickly recognized that the speechwriting process was a central policy function in the White House. It was not long before she was calling to add last minute changes, or to get down on her hands and knees when need be to cut and paste drafts of major addresses herself. *18 "What's it like to govern?" Bill Moyers asked Hillary at an Austin event that included Texas governor Ann Richards.

"It's been exhilarating, frustrating, eye-opening .... " Later in the conversation, Hillary caught the slip and said, "Just to set the record straight, I'm not really governing either."

"If you believe that," the sa.s.sy Texas governor retorted, "I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you."*19 Hillary's ostentatious show of power generated little opposition and a great deal of media flattery.

In the first ten weeks of 1993, some fifty-seven minutes of network time were devoted to Hillary Rodham Clinton. Vice President Al Gore attracted four minutes.*20 "If we could be one-hundredth as great as you and Hillary Rodham Clinton have been in the White House," Dan Rather gushingly told the Clintons by satellite at a meeting of CBS affiliates, "we'd take it right now and walk away winners .... Thank you very much, and tell Mrs. Clinton we're pulling for her."

This national anchorman who made his reputation by standing up at a White House press conference to talk back to Richard Nixon could not have made it plainer that he was pulling for Hillary, her husband, and for Hillary's health care plan, and that his news program would lead the Clinton cheering section.*21 Nor was Dan Rather the only journalist to be transformed into a quivering groupie by the Clintons. The reporting of Newsweek's Eleanor Clift was embara.s.singly obsequious. Laura Blumenfeld of the Washington Post became a symbol of the lengths to which much of the national press fawned over the Clintons. She actually wrote that Roger Clinton's life was made more difficult by his brother's spectacular success.

"If your brother is Christ, you have a choice: become a disciple, or become an anti-Christ, or find yourself caught somewhere between the two."*22 A few journalists rebelled but found themselves under attack if they did, especially if they were male. "There was a kind of political correctness that applied to writing about her," complained Fred Barnes, then the White House correspondent for the New Republic.

"The pieces were adoring: She was a wonderful mother, one of 3anerica's 100 best lawyers, politically shrewd. She had no flaws, except maybe her choice of husband."*23 When Nancy Reagan borrowed a dress to wear to a public function, she was splashed with media vitriol and the Internal Revenue Service was sent to conduct an audit. Hillary was the toast of the town when she was photographed in the black bare-shouldered Donna Karan dress that Candice Bergen (a.k.a. Murphy Brown--how's that for politically correct?) had worn to the Emmys. Hillary's ever-mutating hairstyle became shorter, lighter, more layered under the talented fingers of Frederic Fekkai, known as "King Cut" among celebrity clients like Demi Moore, Emma Thompson, Jodie Foster, and Maria Maples.*24 A woman who ten years before had to be persuaded to shave her underarms and wear deodorant now accepted $2,000 in fees and airplane travel costs for a photo shoot that put her on the cover of the May 1993 Family Circle.*25 Nor was her husband immune from fashion fever. It was in the first, error-p.r.o.ne spring of the Clinton presidency, an avalanche of gaffes that included the gays in the military fiasco, that Clinton sat in Air Force One on a Los Angeles runway, holding thousands of people hostage in the sky so he could receive his $200 haircut from Cristophe. (A White House spinmeister suggested, absurdly, that the commander-in-chief wanted to give the business to Cristophe to a.s.suage the hairdresser after his wife took her business to Fekkai.) As the Clintons remade themselves, they also remade the White House.

They brought in Little Rock decorator Khaki Hockersmith to redo the Oval Office. Out went the Bushes' tasteful champagne-and-cream sofas and chairs, and the pale blue curtains. In came bold red stripes, red pillows, and a gold curtain with a blue laurel leaf motif, the slightly rakish suggestion of a Hot Springs bawdy house.

The White House changed in other ways. Gary Aldrich--an FBI agent a.s.signed to do background checks on White House employees--described the new decorum in "the people's house." Aldrich often remarked to me how "shocking" it was to see the dress of the new Clinton White House when he was accustomed to the formality of the Bush staff. "It was Norman Rockwell on the one hand and Berkeley, California, with an Appalachian twist on the other."

And there were many other testimonials, to the change in att.i.tude and respect for the White House with the change of administrations.

"Reagan would not take off his jacket in the Oval Office out of respect for what he called 'the people's house,'" one Republican White House aide told me. "During the Bush years, we dressed every day as if we were attendees at a wedding." Young Clintonites flooded in with miniskirts, hair spikes, and T-shirts.

Before moving into the White House, Hillary's staff put out the spin that she read no fewer than forty-three White House biographies.

(Slightly better than one every other day between the election and the inauguration for those gullible enough to believe the story.) She made a point of meeting with former first ladies, having tea with Jacqueline Kennedy Ona.s.sis at her Fifth Avenue apartment.*26 For all her preparation, however, in the first half of the first term Hillary was too busy being co-president to worry much about the formal duties of actually being a first lady. Months went by before the first state dinners were held. Congressional leaders and powerful committee chairmen and their wives waited for White House invitations that never came. After bringing order to Clinton's life as governor, she allowed him to show up two-and-a-half hours late for the reception for the U.S. Holocaust Museum, standing up Polish President Lech Walesa and House Speaker Tom Foley. Some of the guests were Holocaust survivors, who were left to mill about in a tent as a hard rain turned the ground beneath them to mush.

Making people wait is standard procedure for the Clintons. A whole book could be written on stories of late arrivals and irritated guests. Years later, Bill and Hillary would leave the king and queen of Norway to stand at the landing of the White House on a frigid night, a scene that played over and over again on Norwegian television. This outraged the whole country, but was little noticed in America. In a sense, the Clintons allocated their time shrewdly.

How many electoral votes does Norway have?

PARANOIA STRIKES DEEP.

Hillary arrived at the White House after years of humiliation at the hands of state troopers who acted as procurers and protectors for her husband. This was undoubtedly painful for her, the constant presence of the troopers a visible reminder of Bill's other life. Yet she forced herself to live with the enablers of her husband's infidelity.

What she could not live with was the presence of subordinates with political disloyalties, real or imagined.

In the governor's mansion Hillary had once tried to install a swimming pool, arguing it would be good for Chelsea. d.i.c.k Morris advised the Clintons that this would be a fatal mistake. Pools may be common features among the friends of Hillary in places like Scarsdale or Beverly Hills. In Arkansas, it would be taken as a sign that the Clintons had settled in as royalty. Hillary was dissuaded from installing the pool only by fierce and unrelenting opposition from two other Valkyries, Betsey Wright and press secretary Joan Roberts.

Now she was in the White House, the second most powerful person in the United States, perhaps the world. She would remake the White House and its staff in her own image, and this time no one would have the power to restrain or correct her mistakes.

She started with the official staff, a blunt exercise in power based on an astonishing ignorance of the folkways of the White House. Her paranoia would become a self-fulfilling prophecy, fed by her own mistakes and mistreatment of subordinates.

The Clintons themselves say it began one morning soon after the inauguration when a staffer walked into their bedroom to wake them up. To the Clintons' astonishment, staff members followed them around wherever they went, even in the residence. The Clintons found this disconcerting, which, to be fair, would be a typical reaction for most Americans.*27 It wasn't long, however, before the Clintons became paranoid about the constant hovering staff, a fear that extended to a press corps that also seemed to appear in too many sensitive places. In short order, Hillary ended the practice of allowing reporters to stroll unescorted to press secretary Dee Dee Myers's office.

"She made it clear what she thought about reporters roaming around,"

a Clinton insider told the Washigton Post. "She said the press were sc.u.m. That they would be standing around trying to read papers upside down on people's desks and doing gotcha interviews and just trying to make us look bad." A Democratic campaign official said, "She freaked. She could not abide the idea of having spies in her own home. She puts just an enormous store in having people around whose loyalty she trusts. Much more than he does. She really does have a feeling that if you are not with us, then you are against."*28 "Hillary feels like she's walking into Washington with her arms wide open and smiling, but she's watching on both sides," said Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, putting her friend's behavior in a more charitable light. "She's not a fool. She knows that Washington is treacherous."*29 The Secret Service almost immediately became the focus of the Clintons' suspicions. Their silent, watchful, professional mien was incomprehensible to Bill, who was used to being surrounded by jovial fellow travelers and good ole boys like L.D.

Brown and Larry Patterson. Their constant presence in the living quarters, a policy that began after the near a.s.sa.s.sination of Ronald Reagan, was deeply resented by the Clintons. They soon had them moved. Camera positions in the private residence were moved or eliminated as well. For their part, the agents felt mistreated by a first lady who openly regarded them as servants, asking agents to carry luggage, a humiliation for law enforcement officers and a distraction for agents who needed to keep their eyes on the surrounding crowds and hands free to act.

A widespread rumor had it that Hillary had once thrown a Bible at an agent for driving too slow. Another version had it that she had thrown a briefing book at her husband and hit an agent instead.

There were also numerous reports of the Clintons openly bad-mouthing and violently chastising the Secret Service. The fits of cursing from the Clintons not only betrayed a deeply ingrained disrespect for law enforcement but a complete contempt for the men and women ready to throw their bodies in harm's way to protect them.

The Secret Service was proud of its reputation for lifelong confidentiality. It took only a few months of exposure to the Clintons to wear away at that tradition. First, the Bible-throwing story made its way into print. Then, more disastrously for the Secret Service, the Chicago Sun-Times and Newsweek reported that Hillary and Bill had one of their knock-down, drag-out fights in the residence, with the first lady throwing a lamp at the president.