With red lips, blue eyes and big blond hair, a former newscaster and lounge singer named Gennifer Flowers had talked to a supermarket tabloid about how she had been presidential candidate Bill Clinton’s mistress for 12 years. It was up to his wife to fix it. So on Sunday, January 26, 1992, on 60 Minutes on CBS, in a time slot immediately following the Super Bowl, Hillary Clinton responded fiercely to questions about her husband’s reported infidelity and the nature of their marriage—by invoking the name of a country music star.
“You know, I’m not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette,” she said, wearing gold earrings and a black headband, perched next to him on a couch in a hotel suite in Boston and waving her clenched right hand. “I’m sitting here because I love him, and I respect him, and I honor what he’s been through and what we’ve been through together. And you know, if that’s not enough for people, then heck—don’t vote for him.”
This was America’s introduction to Hillary Clinton, and it worked—for her husband. What she did on 60 Minutes saved his candidacy and his political career. Most agree he would not have become president without it.
For her, however, it came at a steep cost. In 10 minutes of television, she projected a set of complicated, even conflicting images—forthright but defensive, feisty but dutiful—triggering the set of skeptical, antagonistic feelings that have defined her with a share of the American public ever since.
Now, as she gets closer to the presidency than any woman ever has, she is struggling with unfavorable ratings that would be historically high if it weren’t for her opponent’s being even higher. There are substantive reasons, as with any politician with a long public record, but underlying them are the same frictions that came to the fore in that 60 Minutes interview—sentiments that, fair or not, have grown only more pronounced with Clinton’s perennial, awkward and generally unsuccessful efforts to re-introduce herself, to redefine herself.
It didn’t have to be this way.
Some of her key staffers from the ’92 campaign said in interviews with Politico that they feel deep, lasting regret about this legacy. There was so much to work with, they explained—her education reform, her advocacy for children, her role as a mother, as opposed to the harder, more threatening persona of an ambitious corporate attorney or do-anything operator—and yet “there was little strategic thought given to how to present her to a broader audience,” according to Richard Mintz, her staff director during that campaign. This, he and others said, was because of time constraints, and because the Clinton bid early on was seen as a long shot, and because everybody was understandably more worried about how to package him, not her, and because staffers saw her as so intelligent and capable that it didn’t dawn on them that she would need political help herself. In retrospect, though, there was one chance to help her make a first impression, they said. And they blew it.
“It’s one of the great regrets, seriously, of my life,” Mintz said.
“Certainly I feel like we could have done, and should have done, a better job. There is a lot of regret in me,” said Patti Solis Doyle, the veteran political strategist who was a young senior adviser to Hillary Clinton in that campaign. “There was never any, ‘Oh, Hillary could be a problem …”
There was, though, a problem—albeit one that wouldn’t be fully understood for years to come. Because of the dire circumstances under which she was forced to enter the national glare, the enduring paradox of Hillary Clinton was cemented before the Super Bowl champion Washington Redskins had flown home. The appearance on 60 Minutes amounted to a mandate to come off strong enough to help him but not so strong as to hurt him, an almost impossible balancing act. Even as she was putting up an effective unified front, she was presenting to an estimated 50 million viewers a tangle of contradictions. She wanted to show her independence—a quality that ended up alienating a whole set of traditionalist voters—but she was standing by her man—a decision that still today alienates younger people who see it as a kind of surrender. She had her own career, but she was also the “wife of.” It was a continuation of the fundamental tension that had underscored her almost two decades living in Arkansas—but now this knotty push-pull was laid bare in the harshest of national spotlights.
That image of an assertive, outspoken woman was reinforced seven weeks later when on March 16, 1992, she responded to questions about the appearance of conflicts of interest between her work as a partner at one of the most prestigious law firms in Arkansas and her husband’s position as the governor of the state by unleashing a headstrong remark many women found insulting.
“I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas,” Clinton snapped to reporters at a restaurant called the Busy Bee during a campaign stop in Chicago, “but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life.”
These two sound-bite snapshots and the time between turned Clinton into a Rorschach test through which people from coast to coast wrestled with a woman’s role at home, at work and in politics. She became a contentious issue in the coverage of the campaign, which led to a too-little, too-late effort to amend the approach and “soften” the look of the highest-profile surrogate, which led to the initial round of discussion in the national media about who she “really” was and whether her marriage was true love or a calculating political partnership.
Here heading into the last month and a half of this mad, hinge-of-history election, and as Clinton prepares for another high-stakes TV moment—the hotly anticipated first debate against Donald Trump—her former staffers and longtime friends can’t help but look back to the 60 Minutes interview and the comment about “cookies” and “teas” and see the unmistakable roots of her penchant for stilted caution and the public’s implacable suspicions.
“Boy,” said Nancy Wanderer, who’s been friends with Clinton since they were classmates at Wellesley College. “Two short little sentences that packed a lot of punch. … I just said the other day, ‘When did this business start, when people began to not like her, not trust her?’ And I think it’s the 60 Minutes interview.”
“There was this way of seeing her in a certain light,” said Jan Piercy, another close friend from Wellesley, “that she couldn’t shake.”
“The great tragedy is that we lost the thread that was at her core,” said Mintz, her staff director. “It’s probably one of the great political missed opportunities of all time.”
***
He always needed her more than she needed him.
“Hillary doesn’t have to stay with Bill Clinton,” her friend Linda Bloodworth-Thomason said in 1992. “She could get to the Senate or possibly the White House on her own—and she knows it.”
“She had more choices than any woman in America,” her friend Susan Thomases said the same year. “But she chose this and chose to make her life with him.”
And the choice was forged from an essential compromise: A whip-smart, aggressive, Yale-prepared attorney, she had left behind opportunities in East Coast power cities and moved to rural, out-of-the-way Arkansas to marry one of the most promising political talents of her generation.
Her almost two decades in the state spooled out as a series of assertions of independence—rural health care reform, state education reform, helping to start the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families and the state’s first neonatal nursery, national recognition for her work as a lawyer, seats on boards—but also concessions. She did corporate law, which wasn’t her passion, instead of children and family law, which was, because it allowed her to be a better provider—to make a salary three to four times what her husband made as the governor. She took off her glasses and put in contact lenses. She changed her hair. She changed her clothes. She changed her name. For her own career, she wanted to be Hillary Rodham. For her husband’s career, she had to be Hillary Clinton.
“I think that people who are married to politicians are under a tremendous strain,” Clinton said back in 1979, in an interview on local TV weeks into her time as the wife of a governor, “because unless you have a pretty strong sense of your own self-identity, it becomes very easy to be buffeted about by all the people who are around your husband.
“She had to do this, she had to do that—and she acquiesced,” said Ann Henry of Fayetteville, who’s been her friend for more than 40 years. “Because that’s what they wanted her to do, OK? That’s what Arkansas wanted her to do!”
“I said, ‘Hey, wait a minute, this is the woman that rose to the top at Wellesley, that was president of our college government, because we thought she was so competent and intelligent,’” Wanderer said.
“The person she was,” Wanderer said, “wasn’t going to be acceptable down there. It was a huge sacrifice.”
The sacrifices continued. The fall before the 60 Minutes interview, in a trip to Chicago shortly after her husband had announced his presidential candidacy, she spent a night with Piercy, another college friend.
“She said to me, ‘You know, Bill’s been attorney general and governor, and we’ve been in the public eye for years now—but there’s something that’s absolutely a different universe when you step into this running for the presidency,’” Piercy said. “It really was a moment of stepping across a line, and it worried her.”
It is only with the benefit of hindsight, of course, that everybody agrees Bill Clinton wouldn’t have been president without what Hillary Clinton did on January 26, 1992. It took a second-place finish in the New Hampshire primary some three weeks later, after which he practically declared victory by dubbing himself “the Comeback Kid.” It took a faltering economy. It took a vulnerable incumbent in George H.W. Bush. It took, in the end, a win in November that made him the 42nd president of the United States.
He hadn’t announced he was running until October of the previous year, and in those first few months, another former staffer said in an interview, “the campaign leadership was focused on Bill Clinton and had not yet fully considered Hillary’s role.” But all of a sudden, with the eruption of the Flowers story, it couldn’t have been more clear: “We bet a whole campaign on a single interview,” communications director George Stephanopoulos would write in his memoir—and Hillary Clinton, not Bill Clinton, was by far the most critical cog.
“We were under pressure from the stories that had been printed in the trash tabloid,” campaign chairman Mickey Kantor said in an interview. “We thought the best person to address these, of anybody, was her.”
As top strategist James Carville would say later: “No her, no go.”
“Did she want to do that interview,” Doyle said. “Abso-frickin’-lutely not. This was survival. She was going to fight. She was fighting for her husband, for herself, for their political careers.”
So in the post-Super Bowl interview on CBS, Hillary Clinton used the phrase “zone of privacy,” and he “acknowledged wrongdoing” and “causing pain in my marriage” but stopped short of an outright denial he couldn’t give without lying. But what elicited what became the most unforgettable comment from either one of them was a question from 60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft in which he expressed the notion that their marriage was “an understanding,” “an arrangement.”
“Wait a minute,” Bill Clinton said. “You’re looking at two people who love each other. This is not an arrangement or an understanding. This is a marriage.”
At which point Hillary Clinton piped up and said what she said about Tammy Wynette.
“I wish I had let him have the last word,” she would write a little more than a decade later.
Still, at the time, what came across on the screen, at least to her friends all over the country, was … authentically her.
“That was my friend,” said Little Rock’s Skip Rutherford, who watched at a Super Bowl party turned Clinton viewing. “That was my friend Hillary.”
***
She called Doyle the night it aired. “She called me to ask how I thought it went,” Doyle said. “I told her I thought she was really strong, really forceful, and appeared really committed to her husband and to her family.” Clinton thanked her.
“She was definitely pleased,” Doyle added. “She was happy with it because she was truthful. She said what she had to say. I love this guy. I respect this guy. Very matter of fact.”
And in many corners of the press, she was praised. The Economist called her “sharp-tongued” and “attractive.” “Tough woman, this Hillary Clinton,” wrote a columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News. The TV critic at the Washington Post said Bill Clinton “looked like a scared kid. Not a presidential image. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, appeared impressively impervious, suggesting perhaps that the wrong Clinton is running for office.”
She was lauded even by a leading New Hampshire Republican.
Said Tom Rath, then a George H.W. Bush appointee as a director of the Legal Services Corporation and now a POLITICO Insider, to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution the day after 60 Minutes: “The big winner was Hillary Clinton. I think he’s got a problem still.”
But she also drew some fire from outside the pundit class.
“Tammy’s madder than hell,” Wynette’s fifth husband told USA Today.
Wynette wrote a plainspoken open letter in which she actually cut right to the crux, demanding an apology and portraying the aspiring West Wing spouse as an elitist enabler riding her husband’s coattails. “I believe you have offended every person who has made it on their own with no one to take them to the White House,” the singer said. She challenged Clinton to “stand toe to toe with me. I can assure you, in spite of your education, you will find me to be just as bright.”
Told of Wynette’s reaction during a meeting with the editorial board of a small newspaper in Grand Junction, Colorado, Clinton rolled her eyes and slapped her forehead, according to an account from the Associated Press. “I didn’t mean to hurt Tammy Wynette as a person,” she said. “I happen to be a country-western fan.”
But Clinton couldn’t find the right tone and stick with it. She seemed to vacillate between apologetic and apoplectic. She said sorry to Wynette, again, two nights later on national TV on ABC’s Primetime Live—in a lengthy feature in which she also offered up a withering dismissal of Flowers, calling her a money-grubber, a fame-chaser, “some failed cabaret singer who doesn’t have much of a resume to fall back on.”
And the world offered its critique. Even Richard Nixon weighed in.
“If the wife comes through as being too strong and too intelligent, it makes the husband look like a wimp,” the former president told the New York Times a week and a half after the 60 Minutes interview. Nixon cited Barbara Bush as the model wife—somebody who has her own opinions but doesn’t upstage her husband.
By March, a new narrative had emerged. Said the Washington Post: “Hillary Clinton, Trying to Have it All; Lawyer, Author, Activist, Strategist, Mother, Political Wife … and Now, Political Problem?”
Further complicating matters for her: the first story in the Times about the money-losing real estate deal in Northwest Arkansas that ultimately would metastasize into the Whitewater scandal and an article in the Post headlined, “The Uncertain Intersection: Politics and Private Interests; Hillary Clinton’s Law Firm is Influential With State.”
Jerry Brown, the governor of California and an opponent in the presidential primaries, brought up the Post article in a debate, accusing Bill Clinton of funneling money to his wife’s firm—a false representation. He responded to Brown’s charge of “corruption” by calling him a liar and saying he “ought to be ashamed” for “jumping on my wife.”
The next day, the day before the Illinois and Michigan primaries, with stress mounting, reporters approached Hillary Clinton at the Busy Bee.
“Back then,” said Jim Cullinan, a staff aide doing her advance work, who was there, “it was much more casual in terms of the press being close to her.”
Out came the comment about “cookies” and “teas.”
“Exasperation,” said Piercy, her friend. “Complete exasperation.”
“Just pure frustration,” said Jody Franklin, her chief of staff on that campaign.
“I think this country wasn’t ready for a professional, strong, highly competent, feminist first lady—I think the country was not ready for that, and the campaign didn’t understand that,” Franklin said. “And there she was, getting humiliated on 60 Minutes, saving him—and then she gets shit for it. And then she gets shit for … working, for simply having a job.”
***
The Clinton brain trust knew immediately “cookies” and “teas” would be a big problem.
“As soon as I heard that,” Paul Begala, a chief strategist for the campaign, would say in 2000, “I thought, ‘People are going to take that out of context. They’re going to suggest she doesn’t care about stay-at-home moms.’ So I went up to her and I told her that. I pulled her aside, and I said, ‘You know, Hillary, you’ve got to go restate this. People are going to think that’s an attack on stay-at-home moms.’ And she had the most wounded and naïve look on her face. … She had no idea that might be taken out of context. She said, ‘No one could think that.’ She said, ‘I would have given anything to be a stay-at-home mom. My mother was a stay-at-home mom. I just didn’t have a choice because Bill was making $35,000 a year and we needed to support the family.’ I said, ‘I know that.’ And she said, ‘Oh, you worry too much.’ I mean, it was unimaginable to her that that would be a firestorm. I was certain it would be.”
So outside, on the sidewalk in the cold, she tried to clean it up.
“The work that I’ve done as a professional,” she explained, “as a public advocate, has been aimed in part to assure that women can make the choices that they should make—whether it’s full-time career, full-time motherhood, some combination, depending upon what stage of life they are at.”
It didn’t help.
The next day, her husband won the primaries in Michigan and Illinois, closing in on the Democratic nomination—but headlines were about her. “Hillary Clinton Law Career Brings Up Spouse Role Issue,” said the Los Angeles Times. “Hillary Clinton is fair political game,” said the Chicago Tribune. “Hillary Clinton defends herself,” said the Boston Globe.
And on NBC, making a connection that would calcify from there, correspondent Lisa Myers tied “cookies” and “teas” to 60 Minutes. “Hillary Clinton’s strong performance during the Gennifer Flowers episode helped save her husband’s candidacy,” Myers reported. “But now, she may be fast becoming an issue herself.”
Times columnist William Safire gave it a name: “The Hillary Problem.”
Gloria Cabe, the campaign’s congressional liaison and the manager of its office in Washington, worried that it had the potential to be “fatal.”
“We got lots of phone calls,” Cabe later said. “And it was apparent to me that not only were we hearing from traditional women who had chosen, for whatever reason, to stay at home with their children, but we were inundated with calls from professional women who felt it had insulted them, who had made the decision to take a few years off—and many of them talked about baking cookies.”
The campaign devised a course shift—the sort of Hillary-specific strategy her advisers say hadn’t totally existed up until that point—and it happened quickly.
“Hillary Clinton,” Newsweek noticed in late March, two weeks post-Busy Bee, “has clearly lowered her profile on the campaign trail.”
Bill Clinton pulled back his “buy one, get one free” stump-speech catchphrase, which had prompted talk of a kind of “co-presidency,” and Hillary Clinton started talking less about policy and more about family. She agreed to participate in a cookie bake-off sponsored by Family Circle magazine. She agreed to an interview for a puffy People profile about their friends, family and faith. She got her hair styled. She took off her unfussy professional woman headband.
In May, she gave the graduation speech at her alma mater, 23 years after she spoke at commencement as a student.
“As women today, you face tough choices,” she told the Wellesley College Class of 1992. “You know the rules are basically as follows,” she said. “If you don’t get married, you’re abnormal. If you get married but don’t have children, you’re a selfish yuppie. If you get married and have children, but work outside the home, you’re a bad mother. If you get married and have children, but stay home, you’ve wasted your education.
“So you see,” she concluded, “if you listen to all the people who make these rules, you might just conclude that the safest course of action is just to take your diploma and crawl under your bed.”
She didn’t do that. But she did agree to adjustments—the latest in a sequence that had started with her acquiescences in Arkansas.
“My recollection is that after the convention,” said Franklin, her chief of staff, “there was a very significant, purposeful shift in strategy.”
It included appearances like a stop at a vocational school, Doyle remembered, to stage a photo-op of her getting her nails done by the cosmetology students. “She was like, ‘Really? This is what I’m doing now?’”
“After those situations”—Tammy Wynette, “cookies” and “teas”—“the campaign … decided to use her to rally the base, a broad Democratic base who adored her. But that was like putting her in a box,” Franklin said. “She was put in a box for the rest of the campaign—and it worked.”
“The political image makers are hard at it this year,” Tom Brokaw said on NBC News in early August, a few weeks after the convention. “They worried that Hillary Clinton was coming off as too bright, too outspoken, too upfront. So, they asked her to warm it up a bit.”
It wasn’t lost on everybody—including some in the press—that her principal transgression actually seemed to be that she was a woman who said what she thought instead of quietly receding into the conventionally accepted political staging.
“Politicians in both parties like to say that this is the Year of the Woman,” correspondent Andrea Mitchell pointed out in her Brokaw-introduced report. “But that doesn’t necessarily apply to the politician’s wife.” She compared the Hillary Clinton of the primaries with the Hillary Clinton of the general election. “When the wives are introduced these days,” Mitchell said, referring to Hillary Clinton and running mate Al Gore’s wife, Tipper, “it’s to take a bow and step back.”
Throughout the summer and fall, a shorthand tag developed among newspapers, news magazines and the TV networks. “The Hillary Factor,” they started calling it. “Is She Helping or Hurting Her Husband,” Time asked on its cover in September.
“But the real Hillary Factor,” argued Deborah Tannen, then a fellow at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, in an op-ed in October in the Times, “is the double bind that affects all successful or accomplished women—indeed, all women who do not fit stereotypical images of femininity: women who are not clearly submissive are seen as dominating and reviled for it. Women who do fit the images are not taken seriously. Like Hillary Clinton, you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”
***
That November, obviously, Bill Clinton won—but his wife discovered that the tightrope she had walked in the 60 Minutes interview just kept going.
She walked it as she took her place as a policy advisor with an office in the West Wing instead of the customary first lady quarters on the other side of the White House. She walked it as she led health care reform—and then stumbled, necessitating another recalibration, another “softening.” She walked it in 1998 through the Monica Lewinsky scandal, returning to national TV to mount another defense of her husband that he ultimately didn’t deserve—this time on The Today Show on NBC, this time alone, this time talking not about Tammy Wynette but a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” sparking echoes of 60 Minutes and bolstering the skepticism about their marriage, that it was mostly a union of political expedience.
She walked the tightrope out of the White House, too, her eye on a political prize of her own—which she won. In the Senate, she walked it still, the world-famous former first lady who tried at the start to be head-down, back-bench anonymous, the aisle-crossing policy wonk who attempted to show a stern side with her vote to support the invasion of Iraq.
And she walked it in 2007 and 2008, through her first presidential bid, beating Barack Obama in the New Hampshire primary only after she cracked just a tad at a campaign stop at another eatery—16 years after the Busy Bee—and almost cried.
“Re-Re-Re-Reintroducing Hillary Clinton,” the New York Times Magazine headlined a story last summer at the outset of her current campaign.
The “issue of her political authenticity,” University of Maryland communications professor Shawn J. Parry-Giles wrote in her 2014 book Hillary Clinton in the News: Gender and Authenticity in American Politics, has been a “preouccupation” of the press that has “dogged” Clinton “from 1992 onward.”
“I don’t know that Mrs. Clinton has ever fully recovered from the difficulties of the early stages of that campaign,” said Russell Riley, a professor and co-chair of the University of Virginia’s presidential oral history program.
“All these questions—Why is she so stiff? Why is she so scripted? Why is she so cautious? Why is she so secretive?—I think it all goes back to 1992,” said Tannen, now a professor of linguistics at Georgetown.
That interview plus “cookies” and “teas,” said Wanderer, her friend from Wellesley, added up to “an odd introduction, because I think both of those moments represented her trying to explain who she really is. But instead of saying what she actually is—a person dedicated to making positive changes to move the country forward in what you might call a progressive way—I think she felt very defensive about it, like this wasn’t going to be acceptable.”
I’m not sitting here, some little woman …
I suppose I could have …
“Is she guarded all the time?” Franklin, her chief of staff in that ’92 campaign, said this week. “I think she is. And I understand why.” In both the 60 Minutes interview and the comment at the Busy Bee, Franklin said, “she was herself, she said what she believed, and with personality. But it was misinterpreted. And she got screwed for it.”
To Doyle, one of Clinton’s closest advisers throughout that campaign, it all started with the 60 Minutes interview—about which, she said, there are two great truths.
The first? “He would not have been president had she not defended him, period, end of story.”
And the second? “There was no way for her to win in that situation, no way for her to win there, as a woman.”