How She Would Govern

Soon, though, it was Hillary, and her husband, whose political careers seemed ruined. By the end of that summer, the president's health-care plan was officially dead; that fall, the Democrats lost control of both houses of Congress. Hillary the purist had learned that in Washington, nothing is total except defeat. Some veterans of the health-care wars shudder at the notion of "President Hillary." One former Democratic senator who attended the meeting in which Clinton denounced Cooper and would speak only anonymously for fear of angering Clinton says he is still "astonished" by Hillary's conduct in the health-care drama. "Those instincts and impulses are just not the ones you want in the Oval office."

But Clinton had a more powerful instinct her critics couldn't yet see, that of self-preservation. Saving herself meant an honest accounting of her mistakes. In the darkest days after the failure of the plan, Clinton reflected on her errors in the health-care debacle with Panetta, who'd taken over as her husband's chief of staff. "Like a good lawyer, she learned why she had lost the case," Panetta says. "She herself said that she had become the lightning rod." Chastened and defeated, Clinton plotted a retreat from the front page.

She would not get the chance. Just as Clinton was stepping off center stage, her husband's presidency was consumed with questions about the Clintons' involvement in the Whitewater scandal. The president felt distracted and put upon; his wife felt persecuted. In many senses, she was. Years before she would coin the phrase, an anti-Clinton right-wing conspiracy had already grown vast. The billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife funded dirt-digging expeditions into the private lives of both Clintons. A generation of blond conservative pundits was born on the cable airwaves, counting the ways in which Hillary did not speak for them. The scandals changed—Whitewater became Filegate became Monica Lewinsky became Impeachment—but Hillary was always near the center. (The Clintonites had a back-to-the-future moment last week when Norman Hsu, a bundler for Hillary's campaign, was arrested on a 15-year-old grand-theft charge.)

As First Lady, Clinton sometimes acted paranoid and saw enemies where they did not really exist. One eternal villain was the press. Washington reporters had it in for the Clintons, the First Lady told aides, in part because they resented the couple's success; permanent Washington, according to the view from the Clinton White House, thought of the Clintons as unsophisticated Arkansans who did not quite belong at the highest levels. Hoping to ease the tension, White House aides organized off-the record summits with editors and reporters where Hillary could show that she had nothing to hide in the Whitewater affair. When Len Downie, executive editor of The Washington Post, asked her if she had documents that proved the Clintons hadn't made money on the Whitewater deal, Hillary felt trapped. In his book "Spin Cycle," the Post's Howard Kurtz described the scene: "That was the day she knew she was screwed with The Post, she told a colleague afterward. To expect her to have all the documents at her fingertips was just unreasonable." (NEWSWEEK is owned by The Washington Post Company.)

The hunted Hillary put a high premium on loyalty. To the predominantly female coterie of aides who staffed the First Lady's office, Clinton was a giving, generous boss who always remembered birthdays, always wrote encouraging "job well done" notes, always called when a loved one died. Her husband's West Wing devolved into the petty jealousies of boys on the playground. But Hillary's aides in the East Wing kept their mouths shut. To this day, no close Hillary aide has written a tell-all memoir.

The protective cocoon around Hillary insulated her from her attackers, but it also cut her off from the world. The public soon came to accept a narrative of growth in Bill Clinton: chastened by the failure of health care and the election of the Republican Congress in 1994, Clinton had learned to believe in change through small-bore initiatives like midnight basketball programs for inner-city youth and school uniforms. With each new revelation of weakness, the president seemed more real. His wife, however, only seemed more remote. By the time her husband had been cleared of impeachment charges and she set out on her quest for the Senate from New York, it was unclear if Hillary had learned anything about the presidency, her husband or herself.