A Woman in Charge by Carl Bernstein

Author:Carl Bernstein
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307268488
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-10-02T16:00:00+00:00

HILLARY WAS THROWN more off-balance than the president in the first months of the administration. Her attention lurched without apparent method from one problem or issue to another. Her seeming disorientation was not without cause. More than Bill, she seemed to recognize early on the seriousness—even intractability—of some of the problems they were already up against, and the interconnectedness of so many seemingly disparate factors that would determine the administration’s success or failure. She comprehended, beyond the budget mess and health care, that lethal dangers lay ahead (partly because she had superior knowledge of some of the troubling matters lurking in the past, aside from his womanizing). She recognized earlier that they were under attack from very powerful forces who would use that past to undermine the Clinton presidency.

According to Webb Hubbell, both he and Vince Foster formed the impression by early spring that Hillary feared her health care agenda could become an unintended casualty. Though she felt blindsided by her own economic team, the opposition from Republicans, outside lobbying interests, and a nasty chorus on talk radio felt to her not like criticism on a single issue, but a first strike against “Clintonism.”

After five months in the White House, she was under constant strain, still grappling with the death of her father, unable to get the time or space to grieve in private. More than Bill, she was physically exhausted; she lacked his stamina and was losing weight. A newspaper story noted archly that Hillary “looks thinner than ever, even though she confesses that her exercise regimen has gone the way of the middle-class tax cut since she moved into the White House.” On trips to the Hill, her aides noticed how she would perform perfectly during an appointment, then immediately afterward begin yawning and then collapse in the car on the way back to the White House. Bill would stay up to two or three in the morning, looking at the pictures in the halls, or reading, especially about the presidency, playing cards, picking up the phone at any hour to discuss some matter of strategy. She spent tiring hours each afternoon and evening trying to help Chelsea with her own difficult adjustment, and the extraordinary attention accorded the daughter of a president.

Not surprisingly to those who knew her best, and without calling any public attention to it, Hillary turned to prayer under duress.

On February 24, three weeks before her father suffered his stroke, Hillary and Tipper Gore had been invited to a luncheon of a Christian women’s prayer group at the Cedars, a grand estate on the Potomac maintained by the Fellowship, sponsor of the National Prayer Breakfast movement and hundreds of prayer groups under its auspices. They were a surprising group, among them Susan Baker, the wife of James Baker, the Bush family’s grand retainer and former secretary of state; Joanne Kemp, wife of former Republican congressman Jack Kemp, who would run for vice president in 1996; Grace Nelson, wife of Democratic senator Bill Nelson of

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