Hell To Pay Part 12

Some a.s.sumed that the source must have been in the Secret Service.

Hillary retaliated against Newsweek for reporting the story by canceling a scheduled interview.*30 Things quickly grew worse. Unaware of the statutory role the Secret Service plays in protecting the president, the Clintons naively asked Harry Thomason to investigate the possibility of replacing them with private security guards or the FBI. Former bar bouncer and the Clintons's director of White House security Craig Livingstone told an FBI agent: "I wrote this memo, this four page memo, and I recommended that the Secret Service be dumped in favor of the FBI .... Someone got a hold of the memo, leaked it to the Secret Service, and they went ballistic." The project of "privatizing" the Secret Service function was mercifully short-lived.

"From the start, there was an atmosphere of chaos and paranoia, and it started with Hillary Clinton," a White House aide told the press.*31 After Hillary's old Watergate a.s.sociate, Bernie Nussbaum, was brought in as White House counsel, he asked the cooks and gardeners to fill out a form with thirty-three questions, including questions about their political affiliations.

The paranoia extended to the White House telephone system. In his first days as president, Clinton was annoyed that operators came on every line. New lines were installed through a rush grant of a sole source contract that allowed him to place his own calls (this would later give him the false sense of security he needed to call Monica Lewinsky for phone s.e.x and, undoubtedly, countless other equally willing a.s.sociates). To ensure the president's privacy, it wasn't good enough to remove the outmoded telephone system at a cost to the taxpayers of more than $27 million. The Clintons removed the switchboard operators as well.

The paranoia extended to the official staff, the nonpartisan civil servants who kept the White House operating smoothly. Marsha Scott, self-described former "hippie girlfriend" of Bill's in the 1960s and now White House appointee as director of correspondence, summarily fired the ladies in the White House correspondence office. The official excuse was to live up to the promise to trim the White House staff by 25 percent.

"Of all the things the Clintons did, this was perhaps the most sickening," a Bush White House aide said. "Most of them had been there for many years, some were close to retiring. They were hard-working, dedicated, and good-humored. It was like beating up the town librarian." Soon mail was piling to the ceiling, and there were tales of mail being thrown out by the bushel. But room had been made for patronage employees, people who could be trusted.

HILLARY'S GUILLOTINE.

The reign of terror proceeded into the White House kitchen. White House chef Pierre Chambrin was asked to leave, along with sous-chef John Moeller, a.s.sistant chef Sean Haddon, and dishwasher Adam Collick. Gone, too, was Milton Pitts, the barber who had trimmed the hair of numerous past presidents.

Chris Emery, one of four White House ushers, got the axe. His firing offense? He had spoken to former First Lady Barbara Bush on the phone about a computer he had programmed for her. There was nothing unusual in this; White House staff often took calls from former first family members. In this one act, Hillary revealed not only pettiness, but the inner workings of her own mind. She actually believed that it was possible that Barbara Bush was snooping and collecting dirt on her, using a valet as a spy.

In truth, it was a small act of courtesy, if not a part of Emery's job description. For answering that phone call, Emery lost the job by which he supported his wife, an eight-year-old daughter, and three older stepchildren.*32 In all of these acts of vindictive housecleaning, Hillary and Bill showed one of their most striking traits. They are able to project great empathy to the stranger who has lost a house to a natural disaster, touching his shoulders and kneading his arms. They have immense compa.s.sion for humanity at an abstract level, and can tear up at the story ofa Kosovar family's plight. But they are callous, even coldly cruel, to subordinates.

Worse yet, the Clintons's fear of the staff can't just be chalked up to a desire for privacy. Their overreactions to rumors betray the truth of those rumors.

That they fear being spied upon through absurd channels--cooks, gardeners, ushers--betrays their own experience with "opposition research" and private detectives. Previous presidents and first ladies had no problem with the White House staff, which prompts the question: What are the Clintons saying and doing that requires so much concealment? Monicagate provided one answer. But the reality goes deeper than that.

h.e.l.l TO PAY.

The purge of the White House staff led to co-president Hillary's first big public relations disaster: the White House Travel Office.

After the election, campaign worker Catherine Cornelius, blonde and pretty, was brought into the White House to work at the White House Travel Office. It wasn't long before the White House started putting out the story that Cornelius was Clinton's cousin, as a peculiar and peculiarly Clintonesque way to explain her frequent appearances with the president on the road and trips to the Oval Office.

Once in the Travel Office, she began to conspire against her superior, Billy Dale, whose job she expected to take--because she was a Clinton loyalist and Dale and his crew were apolitical careerists of the sort the Clintons treated with contempt and as possible spies.

Cornelius handed David Watkins--a former Little Rock ad man and now the White House director of administration--reports of bad record-keeping, poor money management, and sloppy handling of vouchers, all of which enabled her to help set Billy Dale and his fellow workers up for a claim that they had sticky fingers.

As Cornelius undermined Dale from the inside, Clinton friend and campaign supporter Harry Thomason--who, in addition to being a Hollywood producer, had an interest in an air charter broker called TRM--made a direct a.s.sault from the outside. Anxious to obtain a White House contract for TRM, Thomason built on Cornelius's suspicions and brought them directly to the Clintons. The first lady was "pressuring" Chief of Staff Mack McLarty to act. Watkins describes "pressure for action" from Mrs.

Clinton. White House counsel Vince Foster's notes disclose the continuing pressure over the Travel Office and that "the first lady was concerned and desired action." Foster wrote that he had to "defend HRC role whatever it is, was in fact, or might have been misperceived to be" in July 1993. Watkins and Foster were sent to investigate.

There was a nexus of motives that made the firing of the White House Travel Office seem like the proverbial killing of multiple birds with a single stone. One was to award business to friends. ("These guys are sharp," the president wrote in a memo after hearing of Thomason's plan to take over White House travel.) Another was to extend Hillary's purge, opening seven new jobs for loyal and trusted people.

(David Watkins recounts his phone conversation with Hillary five days before the firings: "We need those people out--we need our people in--we need the slots.") Another was desire for good publicity at a time when the White House was under fire for the "gays in the military" controversy. Harry Thoma.s.son is credited with stating that the firings would showcase the profligate ways if not outright stealing that had been tolerated under the Republicans and would favorably cast the White House as defenders of the taxpayer. He felt it would "be a great story," showing "Bill Clinton cleaning up the White House" after the Bush administration.

An accounting review by Peat Marwick was commissioned, and it did show careless record-keeping (including the commingling of personal and office accounts by Dale). But it revealed no graft. No matter.

Dale was fired after thirty-two years on the job. He and his staff were given little more than an hour to clean their desks and were driven out in a windowless van under the watchful eyes of uniformed Secret Service.

In this act of gratuitous spite, Hillary had finally overreached.

The White House worked hard, too hard, to make a felony case against Dale and his people. William Kennedy III --a Rose Law Firm partner, now in the White House counsel's office--called the FBI and set them loose on the Travel Office staff like dobermans to destroy Billy Dale's reputation and justify the firings. As Kennedy told the FBI: It came from "the highest level."

The error was compounded when press secretary Dee Dee Myers was sent out to tout what was meant to be a good news story about the Clintons' ferreting out corruption. But Myers did not know that a cardinal rule of the FBI was never to reveal the targets of an investigation until an indictment is about to be presented. In one clumsy move, the White House revealed that it, and not a disinterested FBI investigation, had initiated the firing of Dale.

Soon the White House was working furiously to contain the damage.

New employees--from Worldwide Travel, which handled the Clintons'

campaign flights--were in place in the White House and then released, so the White House could take back five fired Travel Office staffers who had had no role in money management.

After an internal investigation, Bill Kennedy and David Watkins were officially reprimanded. Dale, after offering to plead to a misdemeanor to keep his legal bills down, was prosecuted for a felony, and after a brief deliberation was found not guilty by a D.C.

jury in a 1995 trial in which celebrity supporters of the Travel Office staff, like ABC news reporter Sam Donaldson, came to Billy Dale's defense.

One casualty from the Travel Office was David Watkins, who was ostensibly fired for using a White House helicopter for a trip to a golf course. But Watkins--a Clinton loyalist who had been instrumental in keeping the Clintons' campaign financially afloat in 1992--felt that he had been set-up to take the fall for Hillary's Travel Office fiasco.

In January 1996 a memo Watkins had written to Chief of Staff Mack McLarty surfaced. It had never been sent, for it was the kind of letter one puts in a file to get a set of facts on record in the event of an investigation or indictment.

"On Friday, while I was in Memphis," Watkins wrote, "Foster told me that it was important that I speak directly with the First Lady that day. I called her that evening and she conveyed to me in clear terms her desire for swift and clear action to resolve the situation. She mentioned that Thomason had explained how the Travel Office could be run after removing the current staff--that plan included bringing in WorldWide Travel to handle the basic travel functions, the actual actions taken post dismissal, and in light of that she thought immediate action was in order.

"At that meeting you explained that this was on the First Lady's radar screen. The message you conveyed to me was clear: immediate action must be taken .... We both knew that there would be h.e.l.l to pay if, after our failure in the Secret Service situation earlier, we failed to take swift and decisive action in conformity with the First Lady's wishes."

Linda Tripp worked in the counsel's office at this time as an executive a.s.sistant. She was later deposed by Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch and asked about the Travel Office firings. Tripp testified that she saw a handwritten memo from Hillary demanding that the Travel Office staff be fired and replaced with "our people."

Long before Watkins's memo surfaced and Tripp was deposed, rumors about the first lady's involvement started to leak out. When the White House believed it could still contain the truth, Hillary put out a statement attesting that she "had no role in the decision to terminate the [Travel Office] employees."*33 Hillary repeated this statement under oath to questions by the General Accounting Office and to the twenty-six questions presented to her in my investigation.

She denied having "first-hand knowledge" and did "not recall" most other information. These questions were signed by Hillary Rodham Clinton on March 21, 1996, under penalty of perjury.

That denial proved to be very much like Bill Clinton's finger-waving denial of having had s.e.xual relations with Monica Lewinsky: categorically false. But if, as Clinton's defenders a.s.serted, that it is only natural to lie about s.e.x, perhaps Hillary's defense is that it's only natural to lie about the unpleasant business of firing people for no better reason than to replace them with "our people."

The Travel Office fiasco showed one more thing about Hillary Clinton and her husband. They had every right to replace the Travel Office empoyees. They did not have to smear them or lie about why they were being replaced. But it has become second nature to do both. The abuse of power, the destruction of people who are in the way, the lying, even when the truth might be entirely acceptable--these are the Clintons' modi operatdi.

TROJAN WOMEN.

"She has a huge cadre of friends and knows where she wants them in the administration," a White House aide told the press.*34 Hillary quickly fixed her imprint on the president's cabinet, subcabinet, and staff. The men she brought in were, conspicuously, the lawyers--Bernard Nussbaum, Webster Hubbell, William Kennedy III, and Vincent Foster. Elsewhere she exercised her veto authority to keep other white men out of jobs.

One of her early hires was a favorite of Marian Wright Edelman, Dr.

Johnetta Cole. Dr. Cole was a former president of Spellman College, brought in to head the transition team's education cl.u.s.ter, making her a Secretary of Education-in-waiting.

Articles on Dr. Cole's past soon began to appear in Forward, a leading Jewish paper, and the New York Post. It turned out that Dr.

Cole had maintained extensive ties with the Venceremos Brigade, an adjunct of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), dedicated to the Havana government. She had founded a CPUSA front organization, the U.S. Peace Council.

Dr. Cole applauded Castro's military adventure in Angola, and was given to saying that American blacks need to "stand in solidarity with the Cuban Revolution." She was one of many notorious far-left activists (including Angela Davis) who denounced Joan Baez for signing an ad in the New York Times that criticized the Communist Vietnamese government for its human rights violations. "Some 400,000 servants of the former barbaric regime were sent to re-education camps," said the letter signed by Dr. Cole. "Should they not be reeducated?"*35 The prospect was mind-boggling. A woman who took a public stand in favor of Communist reeducation camps was Hillary's first choice for America's Secretary of Education. It did not take long for the magnitude of Hillary's mistake to sink in. Before the nomination had been officially referred, the Clintons realized that sending Dr. Cole to a Senate confirmation hearing would be like tossing a T-bone into a den of starving rottweilers. They quietly dropped her.

Hillary would have to look elsewhere to make her mark. A natural place, of course, was the Department of Justice. The Justice Department transition team was firmly in her hands, led by an old friend, Peter Edelman, husband of Marian Wright and a law dean at Georgetown. One of their nominees was Lani Guinier, an old friend of the Clintons from Yale, to head the department's civil rights division.

Of all the embattled Clinton nominees, Guinier was one of the most embarra.s.sing. The American Jewish Congress, which opposed Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, found Guinier unacceptable, saying that her ideas would lead to "bad public policy."

"Crowning a Quota Queen?" asked Newsweek in a headline. The term stuck, and was used to great effect by Clint Bolick, a conservative legal scholar, in the Wall Street Journal.

What made the Guinier nomination remarkable was that no one stood up for her. Columnist Mark Shields wrote that Clarence Thomas "had a staunch, unflinching champion in Senator Jack Danforth and a supportive White House." Guinier "had n.o.body on Capitol Hill for her, and the White House was distracted, disorganized, and in disarray."*36 And, one might add, unwilling to commit to anything but polls.

With Guinier getting little visible White House support, even Carol Moseley-Braun, the liberal firebrand on the Senate Judiciary Committee, refused to meet with her.

Guinier was left, in the unforgettable phrase of an earlier administration, to twist slowly, slowly in the wind. What made the matter worse was that the very people who had put her in this embarra.s.sing spot were thought of as friends. "We had known each other for a long time, after all," she wrote in her book Lift Every Voice. "When we were in law school, Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham were directors of the Yale Barristers Union. They came to my rescue after another student supervisor neglected to recommend me for inclusion in the Prize Trial Compet.i.tion."*37 Now Bill claimed to have never read her work, implying that he was surprised by how radical she was after he had nominated her. Insult was added to injury when Hillary ran past her old friend with a dismissive, "Hi, kiddo" and walked on by.

If the Guinier nomination was an embarra.s.sment, the long, problem-plagued attempt to secure a female attorney general was a farcical catastrophe.

It all began, of course, with the one person who most wanted the job---Hillary herself--being unable to have it as a matter of law.

Hillary settled for deciding who would be second best. The person would have to be loyal and discreet, sufficiently liberal, and, of course, a woman.

The New York Post reported that Judge Patricia Wald, a U.S. Appeals Judge, had turned down the post because it was made clear that she would be expected to rubber-stamp the Clintons choices for deputy attorney general, a.s.sociate attorney general, and solicitor general.*38 Judge Wald proved to be very wise as the Justice Department was ultimately stocked with Clinton cronies and relatives of friends.

So the opening went to Zoe Baird, a wealthy corporate lawyer making $650,000 a year. Her nomination did not last long when it was discovered that she had not paid Social Security taxes for her nanny, an oversight that looked more than a little awkward for the nation's chief law enforcer. Then there was Judge Kimba Wood, the liberal scourge of Michael Milken. As with the other interviews, there was no mistaking who was going to make the call. Hillary interviewed Judge Wood for ninety minutes, twice as long as her husband did.*39 Judge Wood, too, had a nanny problem in that her Trinidadian babysitter was undoc.u.mented. As with Guinier, the Clintons lost their nerve and refused to risk any of their political capital on Judge Wood, even though it was shown that Judge Wood had violated no law.

The job finally went to Janet Reno, a Dade County, Florida, prosecutor who had made a name for herself by losing high-profile cases and for pressing dubious charges of child abuse.

Janet Reno had all the right qualifications--for Hillary Clinton, that is. She was loyal. She was liberal and warmly regarded by Marian Wright Edelman. And she was a woman, though Camille Paglia would say what everyone thought--that Reno was "the most masculine Clinton appointee."

Above all, Reno had a great desire to get and keep the job, which made her pliable. One condition of Reno's appointment was to accept a trusted Hillary ally--and soon-to-be-convicted felon--Webb Hubbell, who was made a.s.sociate attorney general and the de facto attorney general. Another apparent condition, played out soon after Reno took office, was to fire all ninety-three U.S. attorneys. This was a break with the tradition of disinterested jurisprudence. Past presidents had replaced prosecutors gradually, preventing any disruption to their ongoing cases.

Reno's heavy axe cleared the way immediately for ninety-three Hillary appointees, including many friends from Wellesley. One appointee, Kris Olson, served as a deputy U.S. attorney in Oregon. There she intentionally wrecked the prosecution of a former Black Panther on a weapons charge. She had been fired for advocating the decriminalization of street prost.i.tution. Now she was in the top spot as U.S attorney in Oregon. Olson celebrated her swearing in with a rendition of a Grateful Dead song by the Gay Men's Chorus.*40 There was another reason for such haste, of course. Firing the U.S.

attorneys stymied a potential fatal line of inquiry into all the a.s.sorted scandals that were clinking around in Arkansas.

HILLARY'S VULCAN MIND MELD.

Ira Magaziner holds the distinction, along with Judge Robert Bork, of having his last name transformed into an active verb. To "bork"

someone means to vilify a nominee with preemptive and baseless character attacks. In Washington today, to "magaziner" is to study an issue to death, then issue a report detailing a solution that can only be described by charts of inputs and outputs that resemble a Rube Goldberg contraption. Ira Magaziner, simply through the exertions of one remarkable career, ought to put to rest forever the excessive adulation accorded to Rhodes scholars in our society.

Magaziner got to know Bill Clinton at Oxford, but his real White House patron was Hillary. They did not merely hit it off: they locked onto each other with the intensity, of a Vulcan mind meld, sharing the same corporatist, managerialist, quasi-socialist view of the world.

Hillary and Ira Magaziner served on the board of the nonprofit project, the National Center on Education and the Economy, which in 1992 proposed that the Clinton administration enact a utopian scheme for national training. Government would guarantee three years of schooling beyond a basic "competence certificate" at age sixteen. It proposed a mandatory 2 percent levy on American business to pay for this training program. An NCEE experiment in the Rochester schools involved the fastest learners in the mentoring and the teaching of their slower-learning peers. Predictably, this resulted only in a dumbed-down curriculum. It also slowed down the progress of the fast learners. The Rochester experiment was an abject failure. Worse, it was described by biographer Joyce Milton as "corporate fascism--a partnership between government and big business to create a planned economy--with, of course, multiculturalism replacing the more traditional nationalism, racism and antiSemitism as the unifying ideology."*41 In 1990 and 1991, NCEE spent more than $100,000 in New York State grant money to pay Rose Law Firm for lobbying activity, with Hillary as the designated person to carry out its activities.

Several interesting questions come to light. One is the propriety of a first lady's being a paid lobbyist. To lobby the legislature? To lobby her husband across a pillow? The other is the fact that Hillary was paid not by the taxpayers of Arkansas (which alone would have been a scandal), but, in part, by the taxpayers of New York State.

When the payments came to light, New York Governor George Pataki reacted with indignation, "To pay $100,000 to an Arkansas law firm out of scarce state education dollars where it seems no vital services were performed is an outrage."*42 HEALTH CARE COLD FUSION.

A particular meeting of minds occurred over the issue of health care.

James Carville could attest to the power of the health care issue, having used it as a keystone of Pennsylvanian Harris Wofford's successful campaign for the U.S. Senate against former U.S.

Attorney Richard Thornburgh.

Another health care advisor with a profound impact on Hillary's thinking was Vincente Navarro, professor of health policy at Johns Hopkins University. "Has Socialism Failed?" is the t.i.tle of a Navarro article published in the International Journal of Health Services in 1992. You might guess the answer was obviously "yes!"

But not to Dr. Navarro, who wrote "contrary to what is widely accepted today, the socialist experience (in both its Leninist and its social democratic traditions) has been, more frequently than not, more efficient in responding to human needs than the capitalist experience."

With advisors like Magaziner and Navarro, Hillary was determined to sweep aside the best medical delivery system in the world and to reshape 14 percent of America's economy by enacting a national health care plan.

She announced that the plan would be put together within one hundred days. The president pledged to pa.s.s it into law in 1993. That seemed like plenty of time. After all, the Lord had taken only seven days and had even rested on the seventh.

The effort began as soon as the Clinton White House opened for business. President Clinton immediately named his wife to head his Health Care Reform Task Force, and Ira Magaziner was brought in as director.

Hillary's task force grew to gargantuan size but operated in near total secrecy and without partic.i.p.ation from private-sector health care companies, which were consciously excluded.

The task force experts were joined, however, by more than two hundred detailees from executive branch positions. The amalgamation of policy "wonks" eventually swelled to five hundred. Partic.i.p.ants were not available to be interviewed; indeed, the White House refused to release their names lest they be compromised somehow by exposure to the American people. Not even a directory of members was published; someone would surely leak it to a conspiring world.

It was not long before the task force got bogged down. Snafus of every sort developed. They began with the simple logistics of holding meetings, and ended with management practices that explored the outreaches of asininity.

Task force members found themselves waiting in long lines to be cleared in by the Secret Service, day after day. There were meetings, which led to consensus conclusions, that were painstakingly reviewed at "tollgate" meetings that could last half a day, during which time Magaziner would review, evaluate, and correct recommendations before letting them proceed onward. One such tollgate lasted past 2:00 AM on a Sunday morning. One member of the task force revealed to Time that this was "Ira's own heuristic process. This is the way Ira decides things. He gets as many people in a room and talks as long as everyone can stand."*43 When challenged to reduce the plan to a two-page memo, Magaziner refused. There was too great a danger, he said, that details would leak out. This plan had to spring fully grown from Hillary's forehead.

Meanwhile, Hillary lobbied Capitol Hill to the applause of Democratic representatives flattered by the first lady's attending on them. The tone of press coverage was no less spellbound.

"In the midst of redesigning America's health care system and replacing Madonna as our leading cult figure, the new first lady has already begun working on her next project, far more metaphysical and uplifting," gushed the Washington Post hagiographer Martha Sherrill.

"She is both impersonal and poignant with much more depth, intellect, and spirituality than we are used to in a politician .... She has goals, but they appear to be so huge and far-off grand and n.o.ble things twinkling in the distance that it's hard to see what she sees."*44 The pages of the Post seemed not nearly large enough to write of Hillary's charisma, genious and prodigious output. Others had difficulty "seeing what she sees," but for entirely different reasons.

Right off the bat, she showed no deference to opposition leaders, or even potential allies, never a wise move in pushing a major agenda.

d.i.c.k Armey, the powerful Republican congressman from Texas, had once referred to Hillary's health care plan as "a Dr. Kevorkian prescription" for American jobs. When they came face to face, Armey tried to make nice, without compromising his stance.

"While I don't share the chairman's joy at our holding hearings on a government health care system," Armey said, "I do share his intention to make the debate as exciting as possible."

"I am sure you will do that, you and Dr. Kevorkian," Hillary spat back.

Armey got in the last word. "The reports of your charm are overstated, and the reports of your wit are understated." The next Republican to speak started by saying, "After seeing how you impaled my colleague .... "*45 It soon became apparent on the Hill and to Clinton's cabinet that the only real function of the task force was to feed facts into Ira Magaziner's head like a stream of digits flowing into a supercomputer. Otherwise, it was utterly superfluous. As with the series of school reform meetings held by Hillary in Arkansas and as with much of the Watergate staffwork under John Doar, it was all so much window dressing.

"Ira Magaziner has mesmerized Hillary," complained Donna Shalala, Secretary of Health and Human Service.

"How can I advise the president on a plan Ira Magaziner won't let me see?" asked Robert Rubin, then chairman of the National Economic Council.*46 Sara Singer, aide to health task force advisor Alain Enthoven, said that Hillary and Ira Magaziner would seem receptive to an idea, then "the next day Alain would hear from someone else with totally opposing ideas that they had seemed equally receptive to them. I think what they were doing was creating the illusion of partic.i.p.ation."*47 Whenever trouble erupted, Hillary diligently went to the Hill. Her talent for soothing egos and smoothing over disagreements was undermined by her absolute unwillingness to negotiate. She refused to come to terms with Democratic Congressman Jim Cooper and Democratic Senator John Breaux, who had plans of their own, and who were supported by moderate Democrats and some Republicans.

In truth, Congressman Cooper offered Hillary a great vehicle--congressional support that would have allowed her to negotiate from a position of strength and receive much of what she wanted. Saul Alinsky advocated asking for 100 percent, and settling for 30 percent in the knowledge that this is 30 percent more than you have. Hillary made it clear that 99 percent was unacceptable. "You can't fix part of this problem," she told d.i.c.k Morris. "If you do this over here, it causes this bad reaction over there. You've got to do it all or nothing."*48 From start to finish, Hillary refused to acknowledge that compromise was possible. Rather than negotiate with Cooper, Hillary tried to marginalize him, just as she had marginalized Bill Clinton's cabinet.

"We were met with a cold shoulder," Cooper said, in words not too different from the complaints of Shalala and Rubin, which they tactfully directed at Magaziner.*49 When cabinet secretaries were finally allowed to see a rough first draft of the plan in mid-August, they had reason to be aghast. It filled more than 1,300 pages. It proposed to expand Medicare and absorb Medicaid in a new system of universal coverage. Employer mandates would open a rich new vein of wealth transfers, making American jobs as expensive to maintain as European jobs, without explicitly raising taxes (though the admitted costs would be tagged at $400 billion over a few years).

The centerpiece of the plan was a system of bureaucratic regional alliances from which consumers would have to choose their insurance plans. The alliances would, in the words of the Congressional Budget Office, serve as purchasing agents, contract negotiators, welfare agencies, financial intermediaries, collectors of premiums, developers and managers of information systems, and coordinators of the flow of infornation and money.

This level of control would necessarily involve public policy makers in the minutiae of medical care, with Ira Magaziner at the apex personally counting out the number of cotton swabs per jar. "I have never read an official doc.u.ment that seemed so suffused with coercion and political naivete... with its drastic prescriptions for controlling the conduct of state governments, employees, drug manufacturers, doctors, hospitals, and you and me," concluded the University of Virginia's Martha Derthick.*50 "What happens when you cross the worst management consultant blather with paleoliberal ambition?" asked the New Republic. "For starters, 268 boxes of paper and 1,300 pages of a health care bill."*51 The "Jackson Hole Group" of congressional moderates, who had entered into the task force deliberations with great enthusiasm, now bitterly denounced the plan.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a liberal Democrat and a man who had, through the various twists and turns of a brilliant career, proved himself to be Congress's most prescient thinker, was clearly astonished by what Hillary and Ira Magaziner had thrown in front of the Congress.

In a lecture before the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in 1997, Moynihan described his reaction in candid terms.

"By the time the first session of Congress was coming to a close, we still had not received a bill," Moynihan said. "On November 23, the day before we 'went out,' as our phrase has it, I finally was able as Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee to introduce, on request, a 1,362 page bill. I suspected it was not quite complete--it was not--but saved the honor of the task force to have got its work done in one year."*52 Moynihan criticized the plan for proposing to limit the supply (hence the costs) of medicine by cutting the number of doctors by 25 percent and the number of specialists in half.

"if you have fewer doctors you have fewer doctor bills," Moynihan said. "But you don't a.s.sociate it with improving medicine."*53 Worse yet was the devastating effect the plan would have had on New York's teaching hospitals. "The university presidents were right to have been incredulous at this proposal," the senator said, calling it the "deliberate dumbing down of medicine."*54 "Working in secret," Moynihan said, with regard to Hillary's methods, "[is] an abomination where science is concerned and [is] no less an offense to democratic governance." Soon, the long knives were out.