Rewriting History Part 4

I found it odd that Hillary had made the call; it was the first inkling I had that she was taking an interest in her husband's career. Though I warned her that it was probably too late to save things, I agreed to come and do what I could.

From the moment I stepped off the plane in Little Rock, it was evident that the Clinton team was under new management. Suddenly, Hillary was calling the shots. She greeted me at the airport and briefed me personally on her husband's looming defeat. She made sure I saw all the polls and the ads Bill and his opponent, Frank White, were running, and she solicited my opinion about the race.

Clinton's ads were pathetic. They were all about how Bill was making people proud to come from Arkansas again. But the voters of Arkansas weren't proud; they were furious over the tax increase. The only thing that might have put them in a mood to celebrate was retribution at the voting booth - in other words, Clinton's scalp.

I told Hillary that Bill was sure to lose unless the Clinton campaign made a sharp change of direction and started running some negative ads against Frank White. But Bill, proud to the end, refused to believe that he was losing, and would not stoop to attack ads. "It will only give White credibility," he argued. Hillary was frustrated by Bill's refusal; she fought in vain for hard-hitting commercials going after the Republican candidate. I shrugged and took the next plane home. Frank White kept up his attacks, and Clinton's numbers dropped by the day.

Hillary watched as White's campaign dismembered Clinton's reputation. She saw how his refusal to answer the attacks cost him the election. And from this lesson in the power of negative ads, the Hillary Doctrine emerged: Answer attacks. Always, always, always, always answer. No matter how low the blow - or, for that matter, how truthful the criticism - always answer.

Bill lost on a Tuesday. On Wednesday my phone rang - it was Hillary summoning me once again. "Bill's in terrible shape and he needs you. Right now."

"But the election isn't for two more years," I pleaded, anxious to begin my post-election hibernation.

"He needs you now!"

I went.

The Clintons' world had come crashing down. Re-election in Arkansas for a second two-year term was considered almost automatic. Voters generally believed their chief executive was ent.i.tled to four years to make his mark, and they regarded any new governor's first race for re-election as a kind of midterm exam. That they made an exception for Bill Clinton - expelling him before the final - was a testament to his poor performance, not their impatience.

In the long term, though, the most interesting by-product of Bill's defeat was Hillary's emergence as a major player in his political career. It seemed clear to me that Hillary stepped in to save Bill's career because she had come to see how intertwined her goals and life were with those of her husband. She couldn't get ahead unless he did. Her legal career was hostage to his political status. When Bill lost office, Hillary lost power.

Hillary's deep involvement in the final weeks of Bill's losing campaign - and in his successful 1982 comeback bid - signaled that she had made a fundamental decision: If she wanted Bill's career to be run right, she would have to do it herself. In a few weeks, Hillary had gone from being a self-involved lawyer with her own life and career, to becoming her hapless husband's manager, controller, director, and overseer.

In his seminal biography of Bill Clinton's pre-presidential years, First in His Cla.s.s, David Maraniss describes this transition: "During her early years in Arkansas, [Hillary] often deferred to Clinton's judgments about people; but that had changed forever after his defeat in 1980, when she thought that he had been ill served by poor advice and by his own amiability and that she needed to take a more direct role in his career."

It's easy to imagine the humiliation Hillary must have felt being dragged down by Bill's failures. Just as her legal career was on the rise, just after she'd made partner in the Rose Law Firm, she had to divert her attention from her own life and come running to save Bill. His defeat was like a sharp tug on her leash, reminding her that any sensation of independence she might have felt was illusory. In her newly adopted state of Arkansas, she was nothing if he was out of office. For the rest of his time as governor, she took regular leaves of absences from the Rose Law Firm to work for his election and his policies.

By 1982, Hillary Rodham had changed her name to Hillary Rodham Clinton - and switched careers from law to politics.

n.o.body felt Bill's lapses and failures more keenly than Hillary. "He's too much of a boy scout," she told me. "He never wants to fight with anybody." She knew better. She had no illusions about human nature; from then on she was determined to hit back hard - and to strike first if possible. She liked me because I had advocated going negative while her husband plummeted, catalyzing a relationship that lasted two decades. I was the consultant who was tough enough to satisfy her - the one she felt they needed.

From Hillary's very first days in politics, I saw that toughness was the characteristic she most admired; it was welded onto her political personality by the heat of Bill's first defeat. In that moment, she had learned the importance of strength in politics. And as Bill's career eventually took flight, I watched her personal aggressive streak turn into a chilling ruthlessness. With Hillary around, Bill Clinton would never again be permitted to lose an election by being too nice.

Like boxers who never forget the times they were knocked out, politicians never forget a defeat. Only a handful of our presidents had ever lost a race before becoming president. Some recovered easily from their defeats: George H. W. Bush brushed aside his loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980 to serve loyally and happily as his vice president. Bill Clinton learned lessons from his Arkansas loss, and came to see it as a bad dream from which he had emerged stronger and wiser. But Johnson and Nixon could not get over their losses to John F. Kennedy in the 1960 election (LBJ for the Democratic nomination, Nixon in the general election). In each man, the defeat engendered a bitterness and animosity that clouded his horizons even after he had triumphed and become president.

Hillary's trauma at the loss of 1980 sank just as deeply into her psyche. The lesson she took away from the experience was Leo Durocher's: "nice guys finish last." To prevent the same mistakes from happening again, Hillary imported Betsey Wright, a Texan and close friend, to be Bill's campaign manager. She hired me back as his pollster and strategist. And through both of us, she worked her will on the campaign.

But sadly, Hillary rewrites the story of her own life in Living History with no mention of her transition from lawyer to campaign supervisor - one of her most important crossroads. She avoids taking the credit she is due for her pivotal and vital role in the subsequent turnaround in Bill's fortunes - and hides instead behind a facade of domesticity, downplaying her part in Bill's 1982 comeback campaign, which she describes as "a family endeavor."

Like a mother right out of the pages of Redbook, she writes: "we loaded Chelsea, diaper bag and all, into a big car ... as we drove around the state." Her account of the campaign is short on strategy and long on travelogue. "We started in the South, where spring had snuck under the pine trees, and ended in Fayetteville in a snowstorm. I've always liked campaigning and traveling through Arkansas, stopping at country stores, sale barns, and barbecue joints." She seems eager to leave readers with the impression that her role in the campaign was to meet and greet people: "with Chelsea on my hip or holding my hand, I walked up and down streets meeting voters."

Of course Hillary campaigned for her husband, like all politicians' wives (and, these days, not a few husbands). Unlike those others, though, she was also the Clinton campaign's manager, advisor, co-coordinator, and everything else. Far from the campaign trial, she spent much of the 1980 campaign - and all Clinton's other Arkansas races - sitting right next to me as we worked together writing the negative ads that propelled Bill to victory.

One ad we worked on together attacked Clinton's primary opponent, Congressman Jim Guy Tucker, for his poor congressional attendance record. Tucker's slogan was that he followed "the Arkansas Way," a slap at the Georgetown- and Yale-educated Bill Clinton. Our ad featured four country boys around the breakfast table discussing how many votes Tucker missed in Congress. I remember how Hillary laughed out loud at the tagline: "The Arkansas way is to show up for work when they're payin' you."

Each time I proposed a negative ad, Bill would squirm - but Hillary would giggle. From the start, she showed a feel for attack politics equaled by few consultants I've known, let alone candidates.

The skill, energy, and dedication she devoted to her husband's campaigns were certainly unique in my experience of working with candidate spouses (who more often intrude with amateur musings while the campaign staff is trying to get work done). Hillary Clinton was a valued colleague and a collaborator.

She should be proud of her real role. And she probably is. But she hides it... and for a very good reason, one that goes to the heart of the difference between candidate and campaign manager. Hillary's decision to portray her part in the campaign in chatty, anecdotal terms - entirely alien to her real contribution as the mastermind of her husband's comeback - reflects the determination of the HILLARY brand to avoid being seen as what Hillary, the person, truly is: one of the best and most hard-nosed political strategists and tacticians in politics today.

Hillary did everything she could to get Bill back in power . . . which brings us back to the subject of her name. After the 1980 defeat, in the first of a long series of Darwinian adaptations - to survive as the fittest in politics - she left Hillary Rodham behind and became Hillary Clinton.

At first, Hillary had refused to change her name; she had planned to be independent of her husband's career, crafting her own way in a one-couple/two-careers world. But when Bill lost the governorship, she realized that she needed him to win. And so - to the relief of the tradition-minded voters of Arkansas, who had bristled at her rejection of her husband's name - she swallowed her feminist pride and became Hillary Clinton.

Those voters were probably as amused as I was to read the new account of the change offered in Living History. Now she claims she chose not to use the Clinton name early in her marriage in order to avoid the perception that she was trading on her husband's prominence. It was "to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest" that she never changed her name from Rodham to Clinton.

Was there anyone anywhere in Arkansas who didn't know that Hillary Rodham was married to Bill Clinton, first the state's attorney general and then its governor? Could merely using her maiden name truly mitigate the potential conflict of interest inherent in practicing law in a small state where your husband was governor?

It doesn't really matter. Upon closer examination, her story glides over one critical fact: Her decision not to change her name had been made long before her husband became a statewide elected official. She married Bill on October 11, 1975, keeping her own name from the start. At the time, he held no public office at all, much less one that would have generated conflicts of interest. He was just a defeated candidate for Congress. It was not until 1977, more than two years later, that he became state attorney general. At the time of their marriage, Bill and Hillary were both law school professors. So it's hard to know just what kind of impropriety she was trying to avoid; perhaps she was simply trying to avoid any confusion among law students during finals week.

It is to Hillary's credit that she kept up her law practice, braving the charges of conflict of interest to do so. But why must she conceal her real motivation in not taking Bill's name? What would be wrong with admitting that she liked her own name and ident.i.ty and decided to keep it after her marriage? Why must she pretend that it was neither feminism nor personal preference but a desire to "avoid the appearance of conflict of interest" that impelled her to call herself Rodham after her marriage?

Whatever Hillary's reasons for keeping her own name in 1975, by 1982 she had determined to eliminate it as an issue. But it was scarcely the only issue confronting the campaign. As Bill Clinton confronted the challenge of running for the office he'd lost two years before, a key question loomed over his strategy sessions: How would he account for his failures during his first term? With stiff-necked pride, he refused to admit he'd made any mistakes, and certainly was in no mood to apologize. "I lost because Frank White ran negative ads and I didn't answer them," he insisted.

But the polls told a different story: The voters liked Clinton, and were shocked that he lost. They had wanted to teach the young man a lesson, not to kick him out of office. The people of Arkansas worried that this Ivy League governor, in whom they had invested such hope, couldn't appreciate their problems or understand how close to the margin so many of them lived. They wanted some indication that Bill Clinton got the message before they would forgive him and give him back the power to raise their taxes again.

It was Hillary who understood that Bill must say he was sorry. Though she was not from Arkansas, she grasped the voters' concerns in a way her husband did not. In all the strategy sessions and the seemingly interminable debates on the subject, Hillary pushed Bill to apologize. "Bill," she pleaded, "they didn't want to throw you out - they just wanted to make sure you knew how they felt. Put aside your d.a.m.ned pride and show them that you get it."

On a cold, snowy day in December 1981, Bill Clinton strode confidently into the office of New York media guru Tony Schwartz and announced that he was ready to film his first ad. "Will he apologize?" I wondered. "Can I go through the script with you?" I said out loud.

"Don't worry," he replied haughtily, "it'll have what you're looking for."

Facing the camera, Clinton began: In a few days, I will formally announce my candidacy for governor. But before I do, I want to speak directly with you, to share some of what I've learned not only as governor but from my defeat in the last election. All across this state, many of you have told me you were proud of some things I did as governor. But you also think I made some big mistakes, especially in increasing the car-license and t.i.tle-transfer fee. When I became governor we had serious problems with our streets and roads, and I did support those increases to try to solve the problems. But it was a mistake, because so many of you were hurt by it. And I'm really sorry for that. When I was a boy growing up, my daddy never had to whip me twice for the same thing. And now I hope you'll give me another chance to serve as governor because our state has many problems and opportunities that demand strong leadership. If you do, I a.s.sure you I won't try to raise the car licenses again . . . [emphasis added].

Wow, I thought. What a line: My daddy never had to whip me twice for the same thing. I was amazed at the performance. It was better than I had ever hoped, more deft and effective than if I'd tried to script it myself. It conveyed that he was sorry, without ever quite saying the words, and expressed his contrition in terms so folksy that no one could doubt its veracity. It had all the elements of the mystery that was Bill Clinton: his commitment to exculpation from blame at all costs, his rural southern penchant for pathos, his uncanny charm.

The apology ad ran as scheduled, and it shocked the state's political establishment. Cartoonists began drawing Clinton in sackcloth with ashes. Confident, I took a tracking poll to find out how we were doing . . . and found that we had dropped twenty points. It looked as though our ingenious strategy had backfired ma.s.sively.

Hillary picked me up at the airport, and together we rode to a nearby rally where Bill was speaking. "How are the numbers?" she asked.

"Um, not quite what I had hoped," I replied trying to put the best face on them.

"The ads didn't work?" she pressed.

"They backfired for the moment," I answered. "We dropped in almost every category because we reminded them that Bill had raised taxes." Then I ventured a theory I had begun to believe was true. "It's like with an injection. You get a little sick. You get cowpox so that you don't get smallpox later. You get inoculated. You trade off a small short-term drop for long-term immunity to negatives."

"You think so?" she asked doubtfully.

"Absolutely," I answered, hoping my theory was as valid as I stated it was.

As we waited in the car for Bill to finish his speech, I marveled at his effortless, fluid delivery. "He really could be president," I mused to Hillary.

"We have to get re-elected first," she shot back pointedly.

To my vast relief, the apology ad eventually began to work. Really work. It gave Clinton the immunity we had hoped for, and he bounced back. Clinton won the primary, the runoff, and the election, propelled by his mea culpa. Whenever his opponents attacked him, people would tell the pollsters it made no difference. "He already said he's sorry," they would say.

It was due to Hillary's badgering, then, that Bill took the fundamental step he had to in order to win: He apologized. How I wished that this side of Hillary Clinton - the part of her that recognized how effective an apology can be in politics - had remained dominant in her persona as first lady. Back in 1982, she grasped what eluded her in the late 1990s: that an apology can work where stonewalling and prideful refusal to admit wrongdoing does not. By the time Hillary reached the White House, the bitter partisanship of national politics had driven the idea of a mea culpa out of her playbook. In the ruthless politics of the 1990s, no quarter was asked and none was given; any apology seemed like surrender.

Looking back, it's hard not to wonder which part of her 1982 self Hillary is trying to hide in Living History: the emotionally perceptive human being who understood the virtue of contrition, or the savvy political mind who knew a smart campaign tactic when she saw one. But my guess is the latter. The HILLARY brand embraces a number of different personalities, but "campaign strategist" isn't among them. Whether it's her own instincts - or someone in a focus group - telling her as much, Hillary seems convinced that the American people would recoil at the prospect of voting for a professional politician. And so in Living History we get only HILLARY, the dutiful wife who spends two paragraphs touring rural Arkansas with her husband before his miraculous re-election.

HILLARY FOR GOVERNOR?.

As the 1980s came to a close, Bill Clinton was a restless man, having decided not to run for president in 1988 - out of fear that his extramarital relationships would erupt into scandal - he felt his career might be at a dead end. He was bored being governor of Arkansas, but hadn't settled on his next move.

Should he run for re-election to a job that he found repet.i.tive and tedious? Did he need to stay in office to help bide his time until he felt he could run for president?

As his plans to run for president in 1992 grew serious, he was increasingly inclined to bow out and not seek a fifth term as governor in 1990. Haunted by the memory of Mike Dukakis, who was forced to return to Ma.s.sachusetts to raise taxes right in the middle of his 1988 presidential campaign, Clinton was inclined to kiss Arkansas goodbye. He was encouraged by the example of Jimmy Carter, who had left the Georgia State House in 1974 to concentrate on campaigning for the 1976 Democratic nomination. He didn't want to be stuck governing in Arkansas when he should have been campaigning in Iowa or New Hampshire.

As it came to seem less likely that Bill was going to run for governor, another lost chapter in Hillary's life transpired: The first lady of Arkansas decided that she would try to become governor. Having led the state's education reform, Hillary now saw her chance to step out of her husband's shadow and become the leader she wanted to be. With a giddy expectancy, she began planning her own run for office.

The first couple summoned me to the Governor's Mansion to discuss the idea, and Bill was clearly going overboard in encouraging her to run. "She's always deferred to my career," he told me. "I don't make much money as governor and she's having to support the family while I'm out campaigning. It hasn't been fair to her, and I want to give her a shot at her own political career." They asked me to conduct a poll to a.s.sess her chances of winning, and I agreed.

But the results that came back were devastating, and they would have a crucial impact on Hillary's political development: According to the poll numbers, she couldn't win. It wasn't that people didn't like her. In fact, she was quite popular. But voters just didn't feel she could be her own person as governor. They worried that she would just be a placeholder for Bill, a warm body to keep the governorship in the family - who would step aside should her husband's presidential race fall short.

There was some precedent for the idea - but it was the wrong kind of precedent. When Alabama's term limits law had made Governor George Wallace retire in 1966, he persuaded his wife, Lurleen, to run in his place. After she died in office (and her term was completed by the state's lieutenant governor), he came back for eight more years in office. Now, as we discussed Hillary's potential candidacy, I made a big mistake: I referred to the Arkansas voters' reaction as "the Lurleen Wallace factor."

"Hillary is no Lurleen Wallace!" Bill screamed, red-faced and furious. "She has her own record, her own career, her own accomplishments." He pounded the table with his fist. "It's ridiculous for people to see her just as my placeholder." Hillary sulked in her chair and let her husband rant on. They actually insisted that I take a second poll, reminding the respondents more explicitly of her achievements (which Bill listed for me at tedious length). But it was no use. The voters just refused to see Hillary as anything but Bill's puppet.

Hillary was especially disappointed that education reform, her signature achievement in Arkansas, had redounded more to her husband's credit than to hers. The poll served to underscore that, despite all her efforts to raise educational standards, it was still his governorship, his administration, and his record of accomplishment. Hillary was eager to strike out on her own and seek office in her own name (sort of) - until she discovered, to her chagrin, that her legitimate slate of achievements just didn't matter to the voters. To them, she was still a subset of him.

In the short term, her rejection in those opinion polls wounded Hillary's self-image and scuttled her intentions of running for governor. But the incident also made a far deeper impression on her, one that lasted long after the initial shock wore off. In short, she resolved never to repeat the same mistake: If Bill ever got elected president, she would be her own person - and she would make sure the public knew it. Back in 1981, when she had made the crucial career move from law to politics, she had hoped that her focus on education reform would win her a const.i.tuency of her own in her adopted state. But when the poll dashed those hopes, she realized that she could only succeed in politics in her own right if she crafted a separate ident.i.ty for herself, with her own agenda, supporters, and allies. It was at this moment that Hillary made the critical decision to embark on creating an independent image, with an eye toward running for public office. Of course, circ.u.mstances would prevent her from withdrawing permanently as Bill's de facto campaign manager; at critical moments in the coming years, she would be forced to step in and make sure the trains were running on time - or at all. Whenever she could, though, she gladly left administrative matters to others while she embraced a life of advocacy.

Unfortunately, Living History is silent on this significant chapter in Hillary's life. She seems almost afraid to tell us how she became the person she is, preferring instead that we believe that HILLARY sprang, like Athena, fully armed and clothed from the head of Zeus.

THE 1992 CAMPAIGN.

When Bill decided to seek the presidency, Hillary felt that she and her husband were on their way at last.

The election campaign of 1992 was, of course, a seminal event in Hillary's emergence as a politician. On the national stage for the first time, she had to grapple with the way she would be received by a national audience. Finally able to campaign by herself - although not yet for herself - Hillary loved the direct thrill of adoring crowds, and the adrenaline rush that comes with personal appearances. The legendary Clinton/Gore bus tours that began immediately after the Democratic convention - featuring Bill and Hillary, Al and Tipper - gave her a taste of big-time campaigning, and the joy of it never left her.

But the 1992 campaign was also a baptism by fire for Hillary. She had a.s.sumed that the national media would be more feminist, more receptive to her as an aggressive, independent woman, than the Arkansas press had been. But she was soon disappointed. In 1992, while campaigning, she told me, "I always thought that I had to watch myself in Arkansas because it was such a male-dominated culture and outspoken women were not accepted. I a.s.sumed it would be different on the national level. But really, it's just the same. Or worse."

Not only did she discover that her abrasive feminism worked no better than it had in Arkansas; she also found herself sucked ever more into Bill's gravitational pull - and in the worst way possible. When Bill was accused of adultery by Gennifer Flowers, she had to rush to his defense, overlooking her feelings as the victim of his conduct to become, instead, his chief defender.

And soon she had a scandal of her own. Early in 1992, a detailed investigative article by Jeff Gerth in the New York Times laid out for the public the facts of the Clinton/McDougal Whitewater investment, and of her legal representation of Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan. Forced to defend Bill with one hand and herself with the other, Hillary was suddenly facing an inauspicious beginning for her first venture into national politics.

If defending against these charges was difficult and demeaning, Hillary found her other role even more galling: With her clumsy remarks about baking cookies and her aggressive feminism, it soon became apparent that she presented an irresistible punching bag for the Republicans. George Bush Sr. may have seemed distant and out-of-touch compared with the younger, more dynamic Bill Clinton, but Barbara Bush - a grandmotherly figure beloved by the entire nation - stood up quite well alongside Hillary Clinton. Forgetting who would eventually appear on the ballot, the GOP directed its fire, relentlessly and remorselessly, at Hillary.

But there was a utility to this new role: Hillary was serving as the cla.s.sic lightning rod, drawing to herself the blows that might otherwise have landed on Bill. During the 1992 Republican National Convention, speaker after speaker lambasted Hillary, attacking her for Whitewater, her career conflicts of interest, and her seeming scorn for stay-at-home moms. The Republicans seemed to forget about Bill and zero in on Hillary instead. They ranted on, racking up points against the wrong Clinton.

In phone conversations with the Clintons during the summer of 1992,1 tried to get them to see the silver lining within this new cloud. "Hillary has gotten the Republicans so nutty about her that they can't help themselves," I told Bill. "They end up attacking her and forget about you!"

"They're just vicious in the way they go after her," he agreed, genuinely angry at the attacks on his wife. "They keep hitting and hitting and hitting her. Pounding on her, day after day."

But their attacks were misdirected, I rea.s.sured him. "They have to spend four days (the length of the convention) attacking somebody," I said. "It's a lot better - "

" - if they go after her than me," Clinton interrupted, finishing my sentence.

The Republicans were falling into a trap of their own making. "They didn't gain anything from their convention," Hillary announced triumphantly in a phone call in early September 1992. Even though history suggested that the average convention catalyzed a ten-point gain for its party's candidate, the polls showed no rise in Bush's numbers after his convention.

"Because they attacked you and not Bill," I said.

"They sure did that," Hillary said ruefully.

By the time the votes were counted in 1992, Hillary had been through a campaign of humiliating experiences. Not only did she have to defend her husband against charges of adultery and herself against accusations of financial misdeeds in Whitewater, but she had to sit there taking shots until the Republicans so exhausted themselves. .h.i.tting her that they had nothing left for Bill. And when the Clintons finally prevailed, it was time for Hillary's reward . . .

Hillary's hand was in evidence again after the 1992 election, as she and Bill began planning their administration. It was clear that Hillary would be at the center of the action: As Bill considered his cabinet, sub-cabinet, and staff appointments, the opinion that counted most was Hillary's.

Three of her law partners made it into the administration: Vince Foster and Bill Kennedy to the White House staff, and Webster Hubbell to the Justice Department. (None of them came to a good end: Kennedy was forced out, Hubbell went to jail, and Foster committed suicide.) Her former mentor, New York lawyer Bernie Nussbaum, became counsel to the president. (Nussbaum, too, left prematurely after criticism about his handling of the Vince Foster and the travel office matters.) Moreover, Hillary had the key voice in a number of other appointments, including the embarra.s.singly difficult effort to find an attorney general. In succession, Zoe Baird, Kimba Wood, and finally Janet Reno were required to meet with Hillary to ensure that they pa.s.sed muster with the incoming first lady. Baird and Wood were shot down. Reno, unfortunately, made it to the cabinet. Hillary made particularly sure that women would be well represented in the new cabinet - and that they would be her women, responsive to her political agenda and willing to defer to her when necessary.

And yet, once again, Hillary makes little mention of her critical role in the formation of the new administration. She says almost nothing about how she proposed, vetted, killed, or approved most of Bill's major appointments. Instead Living History describes the crucial period between the election and the inauguration in almost exclusively domestic terms - as if we cared more about the details of housekeeping than we do about how the cabinet was chosen.

Hillary adopts the perspective of a sitcom wife trying to cope with a chaotic household - as if somehow the term "cabinet" led her by free a.s.sociation to think about kitchens. "Within hours, the kitchen table in the Governor's Mansion became the nerve center of the Clinton transition," the harried housewife tells us. "In the next few weeks, potential cabinet nominees came in and out, phones rang around the clock, piles of food were consumed ..." Bob Woodward has reported that it was with the help of "Hillary, [Warren] Christopher, [Al] Gore, and Bruce Lindsay [that] Clinton would pick his cabinet." In her own account, Hillary mentions Christopher, Mickey Kantor, and Vernon Jordan, but omits the key player: herself.

Instead she focuses, in excruciating detail, on the domestic challenges of moving to Washington - the housewife at work. "We were also facing the more mundane challenges of any family changing jobs and residences. In the midst of forming a new Administration, we had to pack up the Governor's Mansion, the only home Chelsea remembered. And since we didn't own a house of our own, everything would come with us to the White House. Friends pitched in to organize and sort, piling boxes in every room. Loretta Avent, a friend from Arizona who had joined me on the campaign after the convention, took charge of the thousands of gifts that arrived from all over the world, filling a huge section of the large bas.e.m.e.nt. Periodically, Loretta would shriek up the stairs. ..." And so on.

Back then, however, Hillary was not at all shy about feeding media speculation about the potential extent of her influence. First Ladies had so often been confined to the "pink ghetto" of the East Wing; Hillary welcomed coverage that suggested that she had real power and was not afraid to wield it.

Eleanor Clift and Mark Miller extolled Hillary's behind-the-scenes prominence in a Newsweek article shortly before the inauguration. "If another Democrat had won the White House," they wrote, "Hillary would be on his (or her) short-list for the cabinet. But in the Clinton administration, Hillary has a wider role to play. The expectation among friends and aides is that she will act as an unofficial chief of staff . . . she will find a way to oversee everything. . . . Hillary Clinton is Bill's Day-Timer, the gentle lash who keeps him focused, who doesn't mind making decisions and refereeing disputes when Clinton would rather stall."

Hillary's power and role ranged far and wide during the first years of her husband's presidency. Before her wings were clipped by her failure on health care, she worked inside the White House to shape foreign as well as domestic policy, military as well as civilian.

Hillary and I spoke frequently about various names under consideration for the cabinet. We agreed, for example, that giving Walter Mondale a cabinet appointment might trigger concern that the administration was filled with Carter retreads. I warned her that it would be a mistake to appoint Federico Pena as secretary of transportation, because of lingering controversy about his role in the construction of the Denver airport. We spoke at length about bringing in a Republican to give the administration a more bipartisan appearance, a plan that came to fruition only in Clinton's second term.

Hillary became Bill's de facto chief of staff. The nominal chief, Clinton boyhood buddy Mack McLarty, was a kind, dear soul who posed no threat to Hillary's power base. That attribute may, indeed, have been a key factor in his selection - otherwise one wondered why a president with no Washington experience, and his wife, whose time in the capital comprised a few months on the Watergate Committee - would choose to be guided by a chief of staff who was similarly unfamiliar with the ways of the city. It was the blind leading the blind through a maze.

I visited the Clintons in Little Rock during the first week of December 1992. Hillary was not packing, or doing the dishes, or even whipping up one of her favorite recipes. She was sitting right across the small breakfast table from Bill, focusing intently on our conversation. As we discussed his cabinet, the inaugural address, his relations with Congress, and strategies for injecting a bipartisan note into the administration, I was struck by how little had changed since the days before Clinton's election. It was the same scene I had seen a hundred times before: a strategy meeting with Bill and Hillary in which each partic.i.p.ated equally - a scene that appears nowhere in Living History.

Hillary's attempt to find a place for herself in the administration had begun practically the day after Bill's victory. While I was vacationing in Paris in November, Hillary had called for my take on media speculation that she might become her husband's chief of staff - a leak she may well have orchestrated herself as a trial balloon. "What do you think of the idea?" she asked.

"You can't be chief of staff," I objected. "A president has to be able to fire his chief of staff when things go wrong. It's like a baseball owner being able to fire the manager. He can't very well fire all twenty-five players, or fire himself, so he needs to fire the manager. Bill can't fire you."

In Living History, Hillary does discuss the Clintons' concern over how their tradition of equal partic.i.p.ation would travel from Little Rock to Washington, noting that Clinton couldn't name her to the cabinet because of an anti-nepotism law pa.s.sed in the wake of President Kennedy's appointment of his brother Bobby as attorney general.

Before Clinton's staff came up against the anti-nepotism law, though, Hillary was h.e.l.l-bent on securing a position in her husband's cabinet. At one point, she called me and asked whether she should become attorney general. I advised her to take a second-tier cabinet post, like secretary of education, during the first term, and then move up to attorney general in the second. "That way the accusations of nepotism won't be so loud," I counseled. I also warned her of the dangers of accepting any position that required Senate confirmation. Though the Democrats held the majority, I warned that the confirmation hearings wouldn't be pretty: The Republicans would be sure to rehash all the accusations about Whitewater and the Madison Bank scandals they'd been airing since the campaign. Since they had enough votes to block any attempt to shut off debate, they might even filibuster the confirmation - leaving Hillary to twist embarra.s.singly in the wind.

During my early December visit, Hillary told me she'd found her niche. "I am going to have the t.i.tle 'counselor to the president for domestic policy,'" she told me. It would be a new position, the domestic equivalent of the national security advisor - the post made famous by the likes of Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice.

Then came the shock. Dispatched to scout out any roadblocks to appointing Hillary to the cabinet, Bill's staff concluded belatedly that the law prohibited a president from appointing his wife to a position in the administration.