White House Civil War
Promised real power as Bill Clinton's vice president, Al Gore found he had a rival for that role: the First Lady. And when Hillary decided to run for the Senate, a tense competition got ugly. In an excerpt from her new book about the Clinton White House years, the author reveals how conflicting agendas—the triangle of a scandal-ridden lame-duck president, the wife he'd betrayed, and his designated successor—sapped Gore's 2000 campaign as the bond between two couples dissolved into distrust, anger, and resentment.
by Sally Bedell Smith November 2007
Excerpted from For Love of Politics—Bill and Hillary Clinton: The White House Years, by Sally Bedell Smith, to be published this month by Random House, Inc.; © 2007 by the author.
During the 1992 campaign, Bill and Hillary Clinton took several successful bus trips with vice-presidential candidate Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, where they bonded to such an extent that Tipper called Hillary her "long-lost sister." "If there is a subject under the sun that we haven't discussed, I don't know what it might be," said Al. So it seemed fitting that the four of them again boarded a bus three days before Bill Clinton's inauguration, this time for a 120-mile ride from Charlottesville, Virginia, to Washington, re-enacting the trip that Thomas Jefferson had made in 1801.
After conducting an interview with Bill and Hillary, NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw lingered while the two couples sat around a table in the kitchenette in the front of the bus. "It struck me like a college-dorm bull session rather than an incoming administration," Brokaw recalled. "Hillary was not leading, but she was like a junior partner. It was Gore to Bill Clinton, and Hillary was gracefully part of the conversation."
Eight days later, Bill appointed Hillary head of the health-care task force, which was charged with developing a plan to re-structure the health-insurance system. The move took nearly all his top officials by surprise, including Al Gore. Bill had invested Gore with considerable responsibility, but his failure to confide in his vice president was a telling sign of the real pecking order.
Bill and Hillary's joint decision-making at the beginning of his presidency was as overt as it would ever be in the White House. "He would say, 'Hillary thinks this. What do you think?'" said White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum. "They really were a partnership. She was the absolutely necessary person he had to have to bounce things up against, and he was that for her. I sensed a tremendous need for each other. They didn't have to see each other, but they would talk continually every day." In deference to her continuing role as Bill's "closer," staff members called Hillary "the Supreme Court." "We would always say, 'Has the Supreme Court been consulted?'" recalled Dee Dee Myers, the president's press secretary for two years, now a V.F. contributing editor. Whenever Bill said, "Let me think about it," aides knew he intended to call Hillary.
Gore was the one most affected by Bill's reliance on his wife. It was a given in the White House, as Chief of Staff Mack McLarty said, that everyone would "just have to get used to" the fact that Hillary, along with Bill and Gore, had to "sign off on big decisions." But having what Clinton domestic-policy adviser Bruce Reed called "three forces to be reckoned with" added yet another layer of perplexity and rivalry to the West Wing, where advisers and Cabinet officers knew they could lobby either the First Lady or the vice president to reverse decisions by the president. David Gergen, counselor to the president in 1993 and 1994, called the "three-headed system" a "rolling disaster."
The early conventional wisdom about the relationship between the president and vice president shifted from adoring descriptions of generational bonding to the prevailing media view that Gore's influence would "inevitably diminish" now that his "Dudley Do-Right" image was no longer necessary to take the curse off "Slick Willie." An account in The New York Times Magazine shortly before the inauguration set out the new interpretation, noting that "Al Gore hasn't yet realized there is going to be a co-presidency but he's not going to be part of the co," and that, according to the Clintons' close friend and adviser Susan Thomases, Gore "would have to adjust to a smaller role." The article came out of the blue, and the Gore camp detected the veiled handiwork of Hillary in its slant. It was an open secret that some of Hillary's advisers, Thomases in particular, nurtured dreams that Hillary, not Gore, would follow Bill in the presidency. "There are a great many people talking very seriously about her succeeding him," Betsey Wright, Bill's chief of staff in Arkansas, admitted during her former boss's first year as president.
much more...
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/11/clinton200711
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