Hillary’s Hidden Hand

The First Lady also participated in screening nominees for the federal bench through her chief of staff Melanne Verveer, who met each week with representatives from the Justice Department, the president's staff and the White House Counsel's Office. She interviewed cabinet nominees and prospective senior presidential advisers. Hillary tracked down and interviewed Robert Rubin, her husband's choice to head the National Economic Council, while he was on vacation in the Virgin Islands.

Hillary's most visible job was leading a major overhaul of the nation's health-care system in 1993 and 1994. She has spoken of the "scars" she bears from her failure to enact the reforms she wanted, but she hasn't conceded the plan's substantive or structural defects, or the way her temperament and leadership style affected the outcome. Nor has she touched on the most sensitive topic of all: how the Clintons' marital tensions complicated the health-care debate at crucial moments.

Hillary was widely criticized for making the health task-force deliberations secret, insisting on pushing her proposal as an all-or-nothing package and targeting the health-care establishment as "the enemy" to be fought with a "war room." When Bill tried to make the plan more flexible, he had to defer to her, in part because of their implicit marital bargain, in which Bill ceded her power as a trade-off for his history of infidelity. In July 1994, he was urged to accept a compromise plan with less than the universal coverage that Hillary wanted. When he unexpectedly told a group of governors in Boston that he would be willing to take 95 percent, Hillary immediately called her husband. "What the f––– are you doing up there?" she screamed, according to a West Wing adviser who was in her office at the time. "I want to see you as soon as you get back." The next morning the president not only recanted his statement but apologized.

At other times Hillary showed a willingness to yield. In the summer of 1993, she tried to sink the North American Free Trade Agreement, which the Bush administration had negotiated. Hillary opposed the treaty because she believed it would take jobs away from American workers. She also worried that a campaign for the treaty's passage could divert the nation's attention from her health-care-reform efforts. Yet she relented after Mickey Kantor, the Clinton administration's trade representative, described NAFTA's political advantages. "I said, 'If you want to drop NAFTA, we can kill it, but we shouldn't'," Kantor recalled. The treaty's ratification that November became the major bipartisan success of the first Clinton term.

Her influence over foreign policy is less clear. When asked in a debate in early December whether she had advised her husband on foreign matters, Hillary replied, "I certainly did." Recently Bill Clinton said that in 1994 Hillary urged him to send U.S. troops to stop the slaughter in Rwanda. He never did, and still regrets it. Yet if she did exhort him privately, she evidently failed to persuade him.

On other important foreign-policy decisions he took her advice, particularly when her suggestions focused on practical politics. In May 1993 the president wanted to intervene to stop the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. He initially agreed to bomb Serbian military positions and help the Muslims arm themselves, but quickly reversed himself when NATO allies balked. The key factor in the president's shift was Hillary. She viewed the situation as "a Vietnam," recalled a Hillary friend. But two years later, after more than 250,000 deaths, Hillary became "an advocate for the use of force in Bosnia," according to one of the president's advisers. Her change of heart was partly political. A senior State Department official convinced her that the bloodshed overseas could grow worse and become an issue for the president in his run for re-election in 1996. That summer, Bill Clinton finally took action, combining airstrikes against Serbian military targets with intense diplomacy that led to a ceasefire and the partition of Bosnia.