How She Would Govern

What no one could see was that the First Lady had been taking stock all along. Clinton launched her campaign for the Senate in July 1999 at Moynihan's farm in upstate New York. (The elder statesman was retiring from the Senate; he died in 2003.) The symbolism was clear: this new Hillary would work for common cause with reasonable people, whether they agreed with her entirely or not. Early in the campaign, some in New York's Democratic Party concluded that the candidate was too polarizing to make headway in conservative upstate New York and should focus solely on boosting her margins in New York City and its surrounding suburbs. But Clinton was eager to wade into unfriendly territory. Howard Wolfson, Clinton's senior communications adviser then and now, recalls her turning to him after a positive reaction from an audience on an early trip upstate. "We should be spending more time up here," she said. She was right; Clinton won her Senate seat with 55 percent of the vote, thanks in part to the long hours she'd spent talking about small issues upstate. Searching for Capitol Hill office space with Tamera Luzzatto, her new chief of staff, Clinton learned that a stately open suite in the Russell Senate Office Building had belonged to Moynihan. Luzzatto and Clinton looked at each other and said, "Karma—we've got to go for it."

The new Hillary even found ways to make use of her old nemesis, the press. As she geared up her Senate campaign in the summer of 1999, a persistent and uncomfortable question hung over the First Lady's candidacy: Why had she stayed with Bill?Manhattan journalist Lucinda Franks would soon tell the world the answer. Franks knew Hillary from Martha's Vineyard, where they both spent summer vacations; they'd clicked at dinner parties, and Clinton told Franks to let her know if she ever wanted an interview. Following the Lewinsky impeachment drama, Franks approached Clinton's press handlers with a request to interview the First Lady. After numerous rejections from Clinton's staff, Franks tried her luck with a friend of the First Lady's. Soon enough, she was invited to join Clinton on a trip to the Middle East. She was crammed in with the rest of the press corps, and barely caught a glimpse of her subject. Finally, on the last leg of the trip, she got her moment alone with Hillary, who'd just woken up from a nap. "She dragged herself out of bed, circles under her eyes," Franks recalls. "I think it was another reason she was so open."

Open indeed. Franks published her conversation with Clinton in the debut issue of the glossy magazine Talk. In it, Clinton described the president's transgressions as "sins of weakness." His actions had their roots in childhood, where Bill had lived through "terrible conflict" between his mother and grandmother. "A psychologist once told me that for a boy being in the middle of two women is the worst possible situation," Clinton was quoted as saying. "There is always the desire to please each one."

The article, published in the run-up to Clinton's campaign announcement, caused a stir—and then some. But Clinton herself said nothing. Walking on a desolate Vineyard beach later that summer, Franks saw a familiar face coming out of the fog. Her heart raced; it was Hillary. But the First Lady was laughing: "Well, we certainly made headlines." The Franks piece helped Clinton transform her public image from The Woman Scorned to The Woman Who Forgave. "I'm convinced she knew what she was doing," says Franks. "She wanted to explain this somehow."

Life as a senator set Hillary free. Days spent in the upper chamber of Congress are often arduous and dull; senators sit through endless committee meetings and staff briefings on small pieces of legislation, many of which will never make it into law. Other executive-branch veterans who'd found second homes in the Senate, like Robert Kennedy, had quickly tired of all the drudgery and quaint traditions. Clinton loved it. Having paid the price for acting too boldly and quickly, she was eager to dive into the small-detail stuff.

Just how minute the detail sometimes surprised her staff. From her first days in the Senate, Clinton told her staff she wanted to be kept abreast of matters big and small. Each weekend she pores over "weekly reports" prepared by her legislative office in Washington and her constituent office in New York. The reports are eight to 40 pages and range from updates on pending legislation to responses to Clinton's "Dear Colleague" letters to the names of New Yorkers killed that week in Afghanistan or Iraq. Reading the reports on airplanes or at home in Washington or Chappaqua, N.Y., Clinton marks up the margins with comments: "Great work," or "Let's discuss," or "Is it resolvable?" Once Clinton has finished marking up the reports, she gives the completed copies to her executive assistant, who makes a PDF and distributes it to the senior staff. Aides view the musings in the margins as windows on the senator's mind.