Rewriting History Part 6

In fairness to Hillary, firing 10 percent of the teachers in Arkansas was no easy task. But here the Clintons held firm. While the failing teachers got remedial courses and more chances to pa.s.s the test, eventually a lot of them lost their jobs just as Hillary had promised. But the teacher test was not the objective affair the Clintons had portrayed.

Does it detract from Hillary's laudable efforts to reform Arkansas education that they were impelled by the court? Does the Clintons' decision to adjust the pa.s.sing grade on the teacher test besmirch her courage in urging the examinations in the first place? To some extent, of course, the answer to both questions is yes. A full-throated idealist would have focused on education reform without having to be driven by the courts to do so. And adjusting pa.s.s/fail scores to account for public expectations certainly reflects a level of political expedience. But neither fact diminishes Hillary's foresight and courage in her efforts to reform schools.

Obviously, however, this is a side of her education reform efforts she would rather not expose to public view. It doesn't fit the HILLARY brand.

Even so, as Hillary battled for education reform, she was never finer. In those days, I never thought of Hillary as a liberal. During this, her first foray into public policy, Hillary adopted a distinctly moderate tone, combining a liberal generosity toward education with an insistence on high standards - a foreshadowing of Clinton's "New Covenant," coupling opportunity with responsibility. During her husband's second term as governor, Hillary was very much a "New" Democrat.

It was also during these years that Hillary discovered how much she relished the chance to take the stage as a public figure in her own right, making her own proposals and developing her own ideas. It was a heady experience, and it left her with a taste for the spotlight's warm glow that never left her.

And yet, when Hillary tried to recreate the experience on the national stage, the results were a memorable disaster.

THE HEALTH CARE REFORM FIASCO.

The health care reform drive that became so thoroughly a.s.sociated with Hillary began in Bill Clinton's mind, as an exercise in controlling health care costs. Originally, the president saw it as more of a conservative than a liberal initiative. Worried that health care was consuming an ever-larger part of the nation's wealth and undermining our compet.i.tiveness abroad, he was determined to rein in spending. As Bob Woodward reports, Clinton felt "the explosion in the federal debt was largely attributable to skyrocketing health care costs. The health system was wasteful and irrational, and reforming it would be a priority for him as president."

In his first State of the Union Address, in 1993, Clinton made clear that cost control was his central goal: "In 1992, we spent 14 percent of our income on health care, more than 30 percent more than any other country in the world; and yet we were the only advanced nation that did not provide a basic package of health care benefits to all its citizens. Unless we change the present pattern, 50 percent of the growth in the deficit between now and the year 2000 will be in health care costs."

Hillary brought huge reservoirs of hope, enthusiasm, effort, and skill to her solo policy debut in the new Clinton Administration - and had she approached it with no preconceptions except for the need to reduce the looming deficit, she might well have succeeded. But Hillary's liberal health care gurus quickly persuaded her that health care costs could only be controlled if everybody had health insurance, as part of a managed care system structured by the government.

The reasoning went like this: To control health care costs you had to bring all Americans into managed care, where medical decisions would be checked and balanced by budgetary considerations. But you couldn't contain health costs if many people were uninsured, and therefore outside the system. When they got sick or injured, their treatment costs, which were not reimbursed by any insurer, had to be absorbed by the hospital or other health care provider, driving up the costs of medical care for everyone else.

Not only did the liberals around Hillary hijack the cost-cutting initiative and transform it into a campaign for universal health coverage; they also persuaded Hillary that incremental change was impossible. Either the entire system would be fixed, or nothing at all would be accomplished.

As Hillary once explained it to me: "If you clamp down on costs in one area and not in another, the costs in the other area will soar. If you control hospital costs, your outpatient fees will rise. If you clamp down on emergency room charges under Medicare, Medicaid costs will go up." For the system to work, you had to regulate all the health care providers and all the patients. It was like a balloon, clamp down on one area and the other just inflated more. Hillary describes this all-or-nothing approach in Living History: "We wanted a plan that dealt with all aspects of the health care system rather than one that tinkered on the margins."

By 1994, Hillary's reforms were being described as offering health security to all Americans.

Of course, as no one needs reminding, Hillary and Co. badly misread the historical moment. The health care system had already begun to reform itself as the compet.i.tive realities of the marketplace convinced large corporations and labor unions alike of the need for managed care. This would have happened even if Hillary had never embarked on her health care reform crusade. Furthermore, the demand for universal health insurance did not turn out to be as widespread as Hillary's liberal advisors imagined.

As a case in point, consider CHIP. In 1997, as part of his balanced budget deal with Congress, Bill Clinton established the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) as a way of offering health coverage to all kids who didn't have it already. Speaking to the Democratic National Convention in 2000, Hillary described how it worked: "Now, you may remember, I had a few ideas about health care and I've learned a few lessons since then, but I haven't given up on the goal, and that's why we kept working step-by-step to insure millions of children through the Children's Health Insurance Program."

CHIP set out to fund insurance for all uninsured children in the United States, but there was only one problem - the program couldn't find enough kids to cover. Forty of the fifty states had to admit defeat and send money back to Washington. Forty-five percent of the $4.2 billion allocated for CHIP went unused - because the states couldn't find enough noncovered kids to enroll. Either the parents didn't want to sign up their children, or there weren't that many uninsured children in the first place. Even liberal California proved unable to find children needing coverage; they were obliged to return half a billion dollars to the Feds.

Worse yet, a large proportion of the children who were signed up for CHIP turned out to be eligible for Medicaid all along. Their parents had just never bothered to enroll them. Like her original abortive attempt at reform, Hillary's latter-day health care program was based on a perceived need, deeply rooted in liberal gospel, that turned out to be largely illusory.

How did Hillary let herself be brainwashed?

When she first took control of health care policy for the administration, she admits, she had no clue where to begin. In Living History, she writes: "I didn't fully realize the magnitude of what we were undertaking." She was intimidated enough that she reached out for experts to guide her through the immensely complicated field of health care, with its myriad providers and multiple interest groups. Most significantly, she brought in Ira Magaziner, an Oxford college buddy of Bill's, to serve as her executive director on the health care task force. She held huge meetings and collected volumes of data. When the task force began, President Clinton had promised results after 100 days. That goal quickly became impossible, as Hillary moved from recommending improvements to calling for a total redesign of the system. The task force eventually grew to include vast numbers of people; the bill it produced ran to more than a thousand pages.

In 1993, President Clinton had asked Hillary to serve as a liaison with me to sound out my political advice. She was also anxious to discuss her health care initiatives, so we spoke a few times each month by phone. As these conversations progressed, it became clear that Hillary was unsure of herself as she traveled through the health care maze, and was slipping more and more under the influence of Magaziner and others who were pushing for total reform. It was quite a change from her confident handling of education in Arkansas. There she had focused on specific steps to improve schools, while leaving the basic system in place. Faced with the enormous health care labyrinth, however, she grew convinced that everything must be changed.

Hillary's advisors also convinced her that the key to true reform was to slay the villains who profited shamelessly from the present system. Her universe became peopled by enemies: insurance companies and brokers, the medical establishment, unscrupulous hospitals, and the like. This division into good and evil, us versus them, fit Hillary's worldview, and appealed to her increasingly partisan instincts. She became more strident in defending health care reform and attacking those who opposed her.

When I warned her about antagonizing the nation's hundreds of thousands of insurance brokers, she was unmoved by the advice.

"They are the best field force in politics," I told Hillary in a phone conversation late in 1993. "There is an insurance broker in every small town and every neighborhood in the United States. They each have their clients, all of whom are voters. If you cut them out of your system, you'll send them up and down their neighborhoods rallying support against you. It won't just be a media campaign by the insurance companies. That you can rebut. But the one-on-one attacks from brokers will be too much to handle."

"But they are the problem," Hillary scolded me. "It's the money they take out of the system that is driving up costs so much. We need to cut out the middlemen to keep the costs in line. We don't want to raise taxes to pay for universal health coverage, so we have to generate internal savings and this is a very good way to do it." "But you will antagonize the h.e.l.l out of them," I persisted. "Then so be it," she answered.

The task force itself became a point of controversy, as doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, and other special interest organizations tried to disrupt the reform effort at its inception. Hillary played into their hands. The same arrogance that caused Hillary to dismiss I the consequences of antagonizing the insurance brokers also led her to insist that the meetings of her task force be held in secret - a policy that led to a lawsuit. She describes the suit in Living History as "a blow that none of us antic.i.p.ated."

Those opposing Hillary's task force contended that she was not a i public employee and, hence, could not chair the task force. Hillary ; notes that "if I was allowed in the meetings, the lawsuit claimed, government sunshine laws required that the closed meetings be opened to outsiders, including the press."

Federal law did allow government agencies to deliberate in secret .. . providing that only public employees were involved. Once private citizens were invited to partic.i.p.ate, the meetings must be opened to the public and the media.

Was Hillary a public employee or a private citizen? If the former, she could chair the task force. If the latter, she had to step aside.

The entire issue would have been avoided had Hillary simply agreed to open the meetings to the public. But so intense was her commitment to secrecy that she ran afoul of federal law. The entire scandal was a consequence of Hillary's fanatical need for secrecy and obsessive fear of leaks.

Worst of all, the secrecy was being enforced selectively. Ira Magaziner had to admit that many private citizens - including representatives of foundations, German health care officials, employees of California's Kaiser Permanente managed care organization, and other "outsiders" - had attended some of the task force's meetings. Angered, U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth ruled that Magaziner had "intended to deceive the court" when he a.s.serted in a sworn statement that only federal government officials were members of the health care task force. Calling Magaziner's conduct "reprehensible," Judge Lamberth wrote: "The Executive Branch of the government, working in tandem, was dishonest with this court, and the government must now face the consequences of its misconduct."

The government was ordered to pay a $285,000 fine because of Magaziner's misconduct. (Those who enjoy irony will relish the way Senator Hillary Clinton has criticized Vice President d.i.c.k Cheney for refusing to open meetings of his energy task force to the public.) Hillary's health care reform program fell under withering fire. Her proposal to hold down costs through managed care and use the savings to offer universal health insurance coverage became distorted into a plan to eliminate the right to choose our own doctors. All Hillary had really done was to antic.i.p.ate the growth of private HMOs and seek to impose the new system all at once - a system to be orchestrated by Washington. But her ideas did not go down well with the American people, and not merely because of the aggressive television ad campaigns mounted by the initiative's opponents.

In a sense, Hillary had learned the wrong lessons from her successful education reform efforts in Arkansas. Consider a story Bob Woodward reports in The Agenda. Speaking with her husband's newly appointed cabinet and top White House staffers at Camp David shortly after the inauguration, she explained what she saw as the reasons for her education victory in Arkansas: According to Hillary, her team had succeeded because "they had devised a simple story, with characters, with an objective, with a beginning, middle, and end. And it had all come from a moral point of view."

It was her very obsession with seeing health care as a moral issue that ultimately prevented Hillary from reforming the system successfully. For while the question of health care unquestionably has a moral dimension, what confronted Hillary was ultimately a legislative battle, not a spiritual crusade, and her att.i.tude did little to engender the spirit of compromise that was vital to the pa.s.sage of any reform program. As Woodward writes, "a number of staffers noticed an increasing self-righteousness in Hillary. She acted as if she had seen the light." He quotes Hillary as saying "I believe in evil and I think that there are evil people in the world." And a lot of them were opposing her health care plan.

Bristling at the norms of Washington, Hillary became both defiant and arrogant. Woodward describes how she insisted on telling a group of senators that her new plan would cost $100 billion, a number sure to set off alarms throughout Capitol Hill. "I don't care how !' they do things here," he quotes her as saying. "If they can't take the truth, at least they're going to get it from me. . . . That [the $100 billion cost] is the truth and they'd better get used to it."

For his part, President Clinton came to take a curiously detached view of the process. The health care task force became increasingly c.u.mbersome and unpopular. Sued to open its meetings to the public, berated by critics for taking more than a year to make recommendations, and finally derided as an effort to introduce socialized medicine and eliminate freedom of choice in medicine, the project became radioactive. What had started as a New Democratic safety net was becoming a noose around the neck of the administration. And in our conversations, I noticed, the president was becoming almost dismissive of her efforts. After a press item appeared that Clinton was planning to raise taxes to finance his wife's health care proposals, I had an Oval Office meeting with the president. He was furious. "I'm not going to raise taxes for that - believe me," he said contemptuously.

But as Hillary's health care proposals dropped in popularity and faded in the Congress, the common understanding that Hillary was the pragmatic one while Bill was "the boy scout" (Hillary's phrase) underwent a dramatic reversal. Hillary had always been the one who watched Bill's back, who made sure he wasn't knifed. But now the tables were turned. Bill was learning how to be president and doing an increasingly good job. He had pa.s.sed his tax package, NAFTA, and his crime bill. It was Hillary who was mismanaging her a.s.signment: Health care reform was going down in flames.

Hillary didn't know what to do. She sensed that her efforts were imploding, but the solution seemed to elude her. The key problem was that, having constructed an interlocking system of new measures, each dependent on the other, she could not deconstruct it to compromise on its component parts.

After her bill died in committee in the Senate, never to see the light of day on the floor, I suggested that she regroup in the closing days of the session and endorse another piece of health care reform legislation, known popularly as the Dole Bill. This proposal, introduced by Republican Minority Leader Bob Dole as an alternative to Hillary's reforms, closely resembled the Kennedy-Ka.s.sebaum bill that ultimately pa.s.sed in 1996. It allowed insurance beneficiaries to take their policies with them when they switched jobs, and barred a patient's new insurance company or his employers from excluding as "pre-existing" those conditions that were covered under their previous employers' insurance.

Dole had sponsored the bill back in 1993, when Hillary's initiatives seemed unstoppable. Now that her bill was fading fast, Dole probably didn't really want his program to pa.s.s either. But he had introduced it, it bore his name, and, I told Hillary, he would have to let it pa.s.s. "He can't very well kill his own bill, without seeming disingenuous." Pa.s.sing this incremental improvement, I told her, would avoid the sting of failure, and allow the Clintons to cite a concrete accomplishment in the realm of health care.

She rejected the idea completely. Either the entire package had to be approved at once, or nothing could - or even should - be done. "You don't understand," she lectured me. "Everything in the health care field is interrelated. If we just fix one part of the problem, we throw something else out of whack." It was like talking to a Trotskyite.

"If we pa.s.s the Dole Bill and do nothing else," she continued, "we'll drive up health insurance premiums to cover the extra cost of the new benefits. Do you want us to have to run for re-election in 1996 with a record of increases in health insurance costs?"

Her argument was identical to the specious one that would be advanced two years later by conservatives trying to kill the Kennedy-Ka.s.sebaum Bill. And it was just as wrong. "How do you know what the situation will be in 1996?" I asked, incredulous at her inability to think clearly. "There could be high inflation. There could be deflation. There could be a war. Anything can happen. Pocket this achievement now so you don't have to go away humiliated and empty handed."

No dice. Hillary had been programmed to believe that it had to be all or nothing.

In 1994, she opted for nothing. But notwithstanding her resistance to the Dole Bill, in Living History Hillary takes credit for the pa.s.sage of the Kennedy-Ka.s.sebaum legislation two years later. But she doesn't mention that workers would have had the right to take their health benefits to their new jobs much earlier if Hillary herself hadn't been so stubborn about her own initiative - and the Democrats might well have held onto Congress in the bargain.

Hillary's liberal dogmatism - which one might have thought she'd left behind at Yale - re-emerged during the health care fiasco. I was shocked at the change. Her pragmatism of the 1980s seemed to have disappeared, along with the capacity to think for herself; instead, she followed the progressive creed wherever it led. Her innate skepticism was replaced by a blind faith in her liberal advisors. It was as if an old friend had fallen under the spell of some cult.

Hillary's eventual, inevitable defeat was a crushing blow. It cost her dearly in self-esteem, and gave even the president doubts about her political savvy. As she slowly emerged from the almost hypnotic spell Magaziner and his crew seemed to have cast upon her, it was clear that she needed deprogramming.

In her memoir, Hillary attributes the defeat of health care reform to "my own missteps and because I underestimated the resistance I would meet as a first lady with a policy mission." In truth, though, being first lady had nothing to do with it. In fact, the thing most voters liked about health care reform was that it was the product of an activist, outspoken first lady "with a policy mission." The reasons that Hillary's health care reform initiative died were many, and they were clear: It was too ma.s.sive a change; it drew the opposition of most doctors; it was discredited by Hillary's attempts at secrecy; it would have forced Americans into managed care and limited their medical choices. It failed, in other words, on its merits.

Once again, though, Hillary's account in Living History is all about branding. Hillary may be capable of making mistakes - who isn't? - but HILLARY is incapable of admitting them. If HILLARY failed, it must not only have been in a n.o.ble cause - universal health security - but have been caused by an ign.o.ble opposition to an activist first lady.

But the lessons Hillary did learn in the health care defeat were deep and profound. Never again would she ignore polls in public policy formulation. From now on she would confine her advocacy to the possible, and leave her idealistic friends to spin their theoretical webs. Idealism, she realized, must always be checked by practicality.

But did Hillary learn the larger lessons of the health care debacle?

Her moralistic denunciations of the special interests who opposed her health care plan were among the factors that led directly to its defeat. Has she absorbed that making enemies is no way to make public policy?

Not likely. Hillary still sees public policy in terms of friends and enemies, good and evil. She is inclined to oppose the positions held by people she thinks are ill-intentioned, reflexively embracing the other side. The idea that there are good people and bad people, not just good ideas and bad ideas, remains fundamental to her worldview. To Hillary, who matters more than what.

Bill Clinton is largely immune to this habit of thinking. At a White House strategy meeting I attended in 1996, he was considering a proposal to let employers offer their workers compensatory pay or extra vacation for overtime work. The unions opposed the idea because they felt the bosses would coerce the workers into taking the vacation days because they were cheaper. "I don't think that employers are evil," Clinton told us. "I think that they are good people and will try to do the right thing. I don't think you have to pa.s.s laws to stop people from taking vacation time if they wish because you are afraid that management will be evil and will try to game the system. It just doesn't work that way."

As dangerous as it is to let your enemies' positions define yours, it is even more hazardous to adopt the positions of your advisors uncritically. Has Hillary learned to distrust gurus? Has her experience with Magaziner and the leftists who led her astray made her more suspicious of those who have all the answers?

One wonders.

The very evolution of the HILLARY brand itself - formulated by her handlers, pollsters, market researchers, media advisors, speech-writers, makeup and hair people, and advance people - suggests that she has not lost her susceptibility to gurus. Is the woman who turned her face and image over to the experts as she ran for the Senate the same one who let Magaziner and the health care liberals throw off her political compa.s.s in 1994?

And how about her reliance on dogmatic liberals? Is she over that?

Maybe not. When Senator Clinton voted to oppose the Bush prescription drug benefit under Medicare, her position suggested that she may still be in their thrall.

After months of negotiation, Bush and the congressional Democrats had reached agreement on the scope of the benefit package. Their only disagreement was that the Republicans wanted to designate ten metropolitan areas as demonstration projects, to test whether the benefit could be better administered by private insurance companies outside of the traditional Medicare program. Ted Kennedy rose in anger, calling the plan the opening wedge to the destruction of the Medicare system. His reflexive refusal to give the experiment a trial - in which he was followed loyally by other liberal ideologues - reminded me of the conservatives' habit of invoking the bogeyman of "socialized medicine" whenever liberals tried to extend health care benefits.

The liberal orthodoxy maintained that privatizing the drug benefit would lead to the day when insurance companies would skim off the youngest, healthiest, and richest of the elderly and give them private coverage, leaving the rest to the mercy of the government. Then, their argument goes, they would cut public spending, knowing that they were punishing helpless, poor, sick, old people who weren't going to vote to protect themselves.

If that sequence of events seems a bit farfetched, even conspiratorial, the United States Senate rejected those scenarios and overwhelmingly pa.s.sed the prescription drug bill. Yet Hillary thought enough of the liberal arguments to vote against giving the elderly lower cost prescription medicine, joining only thirty-four other Democrats in opposing the bill.

But at least and at last, the ideologue within Hillary had been shocked into remission by the 1994 congressional defeat. In 1995-1996, as her husband ran for a second term, Hillary embraced the idea of incremental policy initiatives with increasing enthusiasm. Cured of her Utopian all-or-nothing approach to issues - or perhaps just scared off by her failure - she pushed hard on individual initiatives.

THE NEW STRATEGY: FOREIGN TRAVEL.

As Hillary gradually recovered, and stopped dreaming of the dead Democrats who had lost their seats in Congress as a result of her mis-cues, she needed to figure out how to get on with her life.

In 1995, my polling had suggested that returning to her old behind-the-scenes role in the White House was not a good idea; it would only reawaken the idea that her weak husband was allowing her to "wear the pants" again.

Besides, the job of de facto chief of staff was no longer open. Hillary had begun to wear out her welcome with Bill, who was smarting from the first political defeat for which she bore any amount of blame. The usually infallible Hillary had proven quite fallible indeed.

In any case, Bill had replaced the kindly but ineffectual Mack McLarty with former California Congressman Leon Panetta, a savvy insider with smiling face and cutthroat moves who knew how the Washington game was played. Panetta would be his own chief of staff; Hillary would just have to settle for playing first lady.

So, after the polling confirmed that public issue advocacy would play well for her and for the administration, Hillary remade herself again, this time as an outspoken advocate for women and children.

Her decision to adopt a new role involved two changes. First, she had to move her focus from health care to education, wiping out the memory of her failure and returning to the grounds of her earlier success. The new HILLARY brand would be about women and children, not doctors and insurance companies.

But she also had to move off the news pages and into the feature section of the newspaper. No longer would she make "hard" news by proposing concrete legislation, holding hearings, writing bills, or lobbying for pa.s.sage of her ideas. Instead, she would make speeches and publish articles urging greater emphasis on the needs of women and children.

But after the media got wind of the new HILLARY strategy, it stopped covering her. If she was no longer a power broker behind the scenes in the White House, or proposing specific legislation or executive action in the public sphere, she was of no further interest to them. Once the hottest story in town, suddenly she was a media afterthought. "I have to be strident or partisan or harsh to attract coverage," she complained to me during this transition time. "If I do that, they cover it in a minute. But just to go around making positive proposals on women and children doesn't bring any media coverage."

It's not that she couldn't attract local media wherever she went. If the New York Times and the Washington Post weren't going to cover her speeches, the Jackson Clarion Ledger or the Memphis Commercial Appeal would. But Hillary didn't give a d.a.m.n about that kind of local coverage. She wanted the big spotlight, big coverage on the national stage.

Hillary and Bill Clinton both suffer from a variety of attention deficit disorder (ADD): When they don't get enough attention, they become disordered. Hillary seethed at the lack of coverage. So she hit on a three-part strategy - a weekly newspaper column, a best-selling book, and foreign travel.

Knowing how strongly she wanted to emulate Eleanor Roosevelt, I joined others in suggesting that Hillary write a weekly newspaper column, which could be syndicated to get her ideas into print nationwide.

The column gave Hillary visibility without having to pa.s.s through the prism of newspaper reporters and editors. It was a way of speaking directly to the people. In her columns she could focus on specific, tangible, incremental initiatives, rather than limiting herself to projects grand enough to attract national media attention. "The exercise of putting my ideas on paper," she writes in Living History, "gave me a clearer sense of how to recast my role as an advocate within the Administration as I began to focus on discrete domestic projects that were more achievable than ma.s.sive undertakings such as health care reform. On my agenda now were children's health issues, breast cancer prevention, and protecting funding for public television, legal services, and the arts."

Hillary also auth.o.r.ed a book ent.i.tled It Takes a Village. A melange of very specific thoughts on child-rearing, education, prenatal care, preschooling, and the like, her book was an exercise in just the sort of incremental post-health care reform advocacy that the polling had indicated would be most popular. And popular it was: The book became a New York Times bestseller, selling hundreds of thousands of copies.

The name Barbara Feinman Todd does not appear in Living History, nor did it make the acknowledgments page of It Takes a Village. Todd had been hired as a ghostwriter to help pen Hillary's book. But she had rough sledding in getting credit for her work. Hillary may need ghostwriters, but the HILLARY brand won't permit their recognition. The weekly Washington newspaper The Hill reported that "[Todd's] contract to help Clinton with It Takes a Village called for an expression of thanks and a payment of $120,000. All went well until just before the book was published, when Todd learned her name didn't appear in the acknowledgments. Then she began hearing talk that she'd been fired from the project, which was untrue. Later, when it was time to collect the final $30,000 installment of her collaboration fee, she was told the White House didn't want her to be paid. A few phone calls to Simon & Schuster - Hillary's publisher - from powerful Washington friends . . . finally got Todd a check for her work. The publisher also agreed to pay her Clinton-related legal bills. Afterward, said Todd, she continued receiving Christmas cards from the Clintons but her name was always misspelled."

The book, and her columns, helped Hillary stake her claim on the comparatively forgiving turf of children's issues and education. Since education and child welfare policies were largely controlled by state and local governments, there was no call for her to propose specific national programs or legislation. Instead, she could simply make suggestions and hope they would be picked up by local school boards or child care agencies. When she urged funding for prenatal services or called for higher school standards, localities could implement her ideas as they saw fit. No harsh fights in Congress. No push and pull of const.i.tuency groups. And if a question was too tough politically, she could just pa.s.s on to new issues.

By writing her own book (sort of) and working with her staff on her weekly columns, Hillary was going over the heads of the media, in a sense replicating the work of Bill Clinton's paid television ads - bypa.s.sing the press and going directly to the people.

But it was the third part of the emerging post-health care reform strategy that proved the most successful: foreign travel.

Hillary was right that she could only get center stage attention at home by saying things that would get her into political trouble. Abroad, though, it was a different story. There, her every move was covered. Reporters were a.s.signed to travel with her and had to file stories every day if only to justify the expense of sending them. Once a paper anted up the funds for a reporter to travel with the first lady, it was very likely to print the stories they had paid top dollar to get. As she writes in Living History, the media was "a captive audience." In foreign countries, Hillary could get the coverage she needed and avoid political risk.

As Hillary's scandals at home multiplied, and questions about her role in Whitewater, the Rose Law Firm, the disappearance of the billing records, the Webb Hubbell hush money, the FBI file scandal, and the Commodities Market trading all got louder, she adopted the patented formula of all presidents in trouble: She left the country. HILLARY was about to become a world traveler.

This is not, of course, how Hillary remembers the decision to travel. In Living History, she once again invokes the name of a celebrity, writing that it was Mary Catherine Bateson, the anthropologist daughter of Margaret Mead, who first explained to her how travel could have symbolic significance. As Hillary writes, "I understood her point and I soon became a convert to the view that I could advance the Clinton agenda through symbolic action."

Advance the agenda? Or dodge the negative publicity at home while having a great vacation? Likely a combination of both.

In fact, in Living History, Hillary usually couches her decision to travel as a response to a request. After all, HILLARY doesn't court publicity or covet exciting travel. Rather, she does her duty when asked. Her first trip after the congressional defeats of 1994, for example, came in March 1995, when "The State Department asked me to visit the subcontinent [India] . . . because neither the President nor the Vice President could make a trip soon."

She went to Bosnia in March 1996 because "The State Department asked me to go."

Why did she go to Eastern Europe in the summer of 1996? "I was asked to represent Bill ..."

Obviously, the State Department "asked" her to go because she wanted to be asked. The Department was certainly given at least a hint that she would welcome such an invitation. The president couldn't go, to be sure. But if Gore finessed Hillary out of a trip by going himself, he'd be scalped on his return to the White House.

Her most significant trip was to China in 1995 to address the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, as the honorary chair of the U.S. delegation. In conversations with me at the time, she made it plain that she was very eager to go. I didn't think it was a good idea; I was worried that she would be held accountable for all the actions of the Chinese government - particularly their arrest of human rights activist and American citizen Harry Wu, who was in jail for filming the Chinese "gulag" labor camps to expose their deplorable conditions.

After Wu's arrest in July 1995, Hillary was under intense pressure to cancel her visit to China. The State Department had announced that she would not attend if Wu were still in jail. But Hillary wanted desperately to go. She craved the attention, the stage, the audience, the platform. The opportunity was too good to pa.s.s up.

In late August 1995, however, Wu was freed, even though a show trial had sentenced him to fifteen years in prison. The way was cleared for Hillary's visit.

In her memoir, Hillary says Wu gave her credit for springing him from prison. "Some media commentators, and Wu himself, were convinced that the United States had made a political deal with the Chinese: Wu would be released, but only if I agreed to come to the conference ..."

Hillary also writes that she was anxious to free Wu because she had been moved by a personal letter from Mrs. Wu.

Harry Wu himself, though, begs to differ. He has said plainly that Hillary "overstated her role" in his release.

Did he believe Hillary made any kind of deal for his release? Wu says: "I never believed that. I never said that. I don't know why she put [those words] in my mouth. ... I never had that kind of idea at all."

Wu also disputes whether Mrs. Wu's letter had any effect on Hillary's thinking. "When I was detained in China and facing the death penalty . . . my wife sent a letter to Mrs. Clinton. The pet.i.tion was just described as a woman-to-woman, wife-to-wife [request] to help."

"But we never got any single word of response from Mrs. Clinton. [We] never [heard] anything from her."

To Wu, Mrs. Clinton's att.i.tude seemed to suggest that "she does not care about human beings' lives, human beings' fate. She just cared about attending the women's conference as a political obligation."

Nor were there many "media observers" who claimed that her decision to go to China was instrumental in Wu's release. Most media coverage attributed it instead to the forthcoming visit of Undersecretary of State Peter Tarnoff to negotiate with the Chinese government over Taiwan, trade, and human rights.