How She Would Govern

Hillary Clinton arrived in Washington with a sense of righteous purpose. Her husband would be the first baby-boomer president; like the Kennedys, Bill and Hillary were carrying the torch for a new generation of Americans. Five days after his arrival in the White House, the new president announced that his wife would lead an effort to provide government-funded health insurance for all. It was a massive undertaking for a First Couple so new to the ways of Washington. No president since Lyndon B. Johnson had forced a new entitlement program through Congress. The health industry had already marshaled millions of dollars to block any effort at reform. But the president's wife was confident that a near-perfect bill was possible. No problem was too big for the heirs of Camelot to solve.

In developing her policy, the First Lady was clinical and unflinching. "She was going to push it as hard as she could and was not willing to compromise," says Leon Panetta, Bill Clinton's director of the Office of Management and Budget at the time, "because she felt that if you compromise now you get very little at the other end." Charged with presenting a plan to Congress at the end of Clinton's first 100 days in office, she and her policy partner, Ira Magaziner, set up a shadow White House of outside advisers to hash out the policy details. Clinton's team was at once unwieldy (it consisted of some 500 consultants) and undemocratic (team members were forbidden to make photocopies of draft documents or bring writing instruments into some meetings).

No one but Clinton and Magaziner knew the full thrust of the president's plan, not even the congressional Democrats responsible for its passage. Early in the Clinton term, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the senior Democratic senator from New York, questioned whether the health-care system really required dramatic reform. Clinton's aides were unamused. "We'll roll right over him if we have to," one told NEWSWEEK at the time. As the powerful chairman of the Finance Committee, Moynihan was not the sort of man to be rolled over. Privately and publicly, he predicted that a massive reform bill could not pass the Senate without enough Republicans to garner a filibuster-proof 60 votes. To get that kind of margin, the Clintons had to be willing to compromise. The First Lady listened politely but did not heed the senator's advice. Moynihan, who'd had a hand in every major domestic-policy initiative since Nixon, simply didn't understand.

To many in Washington, Clinton's refusal to compromise reflected a broader, annoying moralistic streak. Early in her husband's term, she banned smoking from the White House and gave low-fat American recipes to the White House's French chef. She worried about a "spiritual vacuum" abroad in the land and expressed a hope that "the politics of meaning" might return. "The meaning of the politics of meaning," wrote the journalist Michael Kelly in The New York Times Magazine, "is hard to discern under the gauzy and gushy wrappings of New Age jargon that blanket it."

The politics of politics were easier to sort out. The president presented his plan to Congress in the fall of 1993. The outlook was not promising. Press leaks suggested Clinton's own secretary of the Treasury and OMB director had major concerns about the First Lady's plan. Soon there was a huge insurance-industry ad blitz and cries of "socialized medicine." Hillary's plan was too big, too unwieldy. The centerpiece of the president's first-term agenda seemed doomed.

There was one remaining hope: strike a compromise with Tennessee Democratic Congressman Jim Cooper, who had proposed a more moderate, but still progressive, approach. But Hillary would not hear of it; Cooper represented more of the same to her. At the end of a meeting with key senators in the health-care fight, Clinton urged participants to publicly denounce Cooper. One participant in the meeting, who would not be identified for fear of alienating the Clintons, says Clinton had brought a political aide with a video camera so they could record their denunciations on the spot. Hillary "wanted to ruin my political career," Cooper recently recalled.