It is the most closely guarded secret of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, says one longtime Clinton insider: If she wins the presidency, what role will Bill Clinton play in his wife’s White House? The subject is so delicate, it may not have been discussed in detail by anyone but her innermost circle of advisers (that is to say, her husband and daughter, Chelsea, themselves).
That stems partly from a reluctance to be seen as presuming the outcome of the election, but also from a hard-won recognition that any inkling about how the new first gentleman—the nation’s first—would handle his job would set off divergent and potentially damaging political reactions, just as word of Hillary Clinton’s plans as first lady did more than two decades ago.
But perhaps we can get some guidance from what happened when the tables were turned—in other words, what the candidate herself did in 1993, before she could set about reshaping one-seventh of the national economy as head of her husband’s presidential task force on health care reform. When she entered the White House upon her husband’s inauguration, Hillary Rodham Clinton also had to reshape something much smaller but no less groundbreaking: the architecture and infrastructure of the modern first lady’s office.
From the start, the results were precedent-shattering: While most first ladies had confined themselves to the East Wing—or the residence and social spheres—Hillary Clinton created an office for herself on the second floor of the West Wing of the White House (before that, the sole province of presidential aides). She also set up a suite with 16-foot-high ceilings on the first floor of what was then known as the Old Executive Office Building for a professional policy staff that would come to number more than 20 and rival that of Vice President Al Gore.
The model that Clinton created didn’t outlast her tenure in all its particulars (in the George W. Bush administration, Karl Rove took her old office, and Barack Obama’s senior adviser, Valerie Jarrett, has it today). But it’s safe to say that neither Laura Bush nor Michelle Obama would have been able to pursue their interests in global literacy or child nutrition in quite the ways they did without benefit of the path Clinton blazed.
Other first ladies had taken prominent roles, of course. Eleanor Roosevelt was her paralyzed husband’s eyes and ears, and his bridge to every kind of liberal cause through 12 years of the Great Depression and World War II. Jacqueline Kennedy undertook a historic renovation that transformed the White House into a world-class mini-museum, while Lady Bird Johnson, who’d run her family’s broadcasting business in Texas, forever moved the needle on preservation of America’s natural beauty. Pat Nixon set a record for foreign travel, Betty Ford broke the taboo on discussing breast cancer in public and Rosalynn Carter attended Cabinet meetings.
But Clinton took things to an entirely new level, using the dedicated budget and secure staff slots of the first lady’s office in service of her husband’s policy priorities in new and expanded ways, establishing a precedent that would leave her successors freer than ever to chart their own course—and hard to ever completely unwind.
Now, if she wins the White House, the institution that Hillary Clinton built a quarter century ago will be inherited by another pioneer: the nation’s first laddie, if you will. Bill Clinton’s prospective role in that historic role is the subject of at least as much excited speculation in Washington (and maybe more) as her choices for Cabinet officers, or her posture toward Vladimir Putin and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
“It’s the $64,000 question,” says Melanne Verveer, who started as Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff in the first lady’s office, and later served as her chief of staff, then as global ambassador for women’s issues at the State Department. “There is no road map for this. For the role of first lady, there’s no job description. Everybody has a view of what that person should do, and those views are largely in conflict. It’s not an easily definable job for even the women who’ve held it historically—much less for the first man.”
Noelia Rodriguez, Laura Bush’s first White House press secretary, adds, “It’s all new and uncharted territory. I think it’s a great time to redesign what a presidential administration could look like. I do think there could be some awkward moments, like when someone in the East Room says, ‘President Clinton,’ and it’ll be like being in a grocery store when someone yells, ‘Mom!’ There will be a very low learning curve, but a high rate of firsts.”
Clinton herself has offered only the barest clues this year as to how she might deploy her husband. She may have given a more unintentionally revealing hint in a 1993 interview with the journalist Donnie Radcliffe for her book, Hillary Clinton: A First Lady for Our Time.
“What I hope is that each woman, and someday men in that position, will be free to be who they are,” she said then. “If that means being a full-time career person not involved in the issues of the day but very much wrapped up in his or her own career, that should be a choice that we respect. If it’s a more traditional role in which the primary focus is in supporting the family that is there and the person who holds the office, that is the position we should respect. If it is a more active public role, then I think we ought to be very happy about that.”
Another longtime Clinton aide says there is only one certainty: Bill Clinton would be an indispensable—and unavoidable—part of his wife’s administration.
“I think people have this weird fantasy that somehow he is going to be marginalized or sidelined in a way that sort of renders him silent and less important and less influential than the people around her,” this adviser says. “He’s never going to be marginalized that way, because he is the closest person to her on this stuff. The two of them are like a massive mind-meld and a life-meld, and now, they know more about what this is going to be like than any two people in the world.”
In Clinton world, the notion of what would be the best portfolio for the first-ever first gentleman has become a running parlor game. One veteran staffer suggests the presidency of the World Bank. Another floats the notion of making him a special economic adviser with offices in the Treasury Department, or a special diplomatic envoy, operating out of the State Department. Yet another says he should establish his beachhead in the East Wing, where first ladies have long had an established suite overseeing the White House Social Office. Or he could take space in what’s now known as the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where some of the aides overseeing Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity efforts have worked.
“I feel he’s such a larger-than-life presence that having him around in the hallways of the West Wing would not be an easy thing,” one former Clinton White House staffer says. “He’s very mindful that he not compete for attention. He knows, he’s self-aware in that regard. And he doesn’t want to be a diversion or a distraction. To me, that argues to put him physically in a department, with a set of offices and staff.”
One reality is indisputable: Bill Clinton could not be appointed to any post requiring Senate confirmation, owing to the anti-nepotism law that was passed by Congress in the wake of John F. Kennedy’s selection of his brother Robert as attorney general. The situation is further complicated by the fact that Bill Clinton would be entitled by law not only to the staff set aside for the spouse of the president—in recent years a staff earning a total of more than $1.5 million—but to the government-paid staff that runs his office as a former president, which now operates in New York.
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No one knows better than Hillary Clinton herself the risks and rewards of assigning a substantive policy portfolio to a member of her family, unelected by any voter and difficult to fire. But it was a prospect she eagerly embraced in the midst of her husband’s first campaign, and during the 1992 transition, her chief of staff-to-be, Maggie Williams, successfully argued for the West Wing office, and the sizable staff suite in Room 100 of the adjoining Old Executive Office Building. (Williams herself became the first chief of staff to a first lady to hold the commissioned rank of assistant to the president—her predecessors had been deputy assistants—and attended the daily meeting of the president’s senior staff).
"It was extremely intentional and deliberate,” says Lissa Muscatine, who joined Clinton’s staff as the first White House speechwriter assigned specifically to a first lady in June 1993. “Part of it was she needed the infrastructure to support what she was actually going to be doing—this unprecedented and prominent policy initiative. She was going to need a greater infrastructure than any previous first lady had ever needed, and that was part of the rationale for having a presence in the West Wing and the OEOB. She was going to have people who were integrated into the policy and speechwriting and scheduling operation, and there would have to be a certain amount of communication and coordination that hadn't been necessary before."
In her first memoir, Living History, Clinton proudly recounts the ethos of what soon came to be known as “Hillaryland.” “We were fully immersed in the daily operations of the West Wing, but we were also our own little subculture within the White House,” she writes. “My staff prided themselves on discretion, loyalty and camaraderie, and we had our own special ethos. While the West Wing had a tendency to leak, we never did. While the president’s senior advisers jockeyed for big offices with proximity to the Oval Office, my senior staff happily shared offices with their young assistants. We had toys and crayons for children in our main conference room and every child who ever visited knew exactly where we stashed the cookies.”
Some others saw a much tougher side. “Look, there’s no question that she was smart, she was dedicated, she understood the issues and people were intimated by her,” former White House chief of staff Leon Panetta says in Inside the Clinton White House, a newly published oral history of the administration by Russell Riley of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “There were several meetings where she basically walked in and let everybody have it, very different from what the president would do. If she thought something was going wrong, she’d say it. She was much more confrontational in that sense.”
Panetta adds, “She served as what I would call a chief of staff-in-waiting. In the sense that if she felt the chief of staff or whoever was not doing the job, she was prepared to protect the president. And she was very good at that.”
After the debilitating failure of her health care initiative in 1994, Clinton took some time out of the spotlight, then retooled herself as an international advocate for the rights of women and girls, promoting micro-credit loan programs in the developing world, while successfully pressing for new health insurance coverage for children.
Apart from the controversy inherent in her adoption of an unprecedented definition of her job, Clinton suffered early in her tenure from the scattershot, split-personality way she was sometimes covered by a Washington press corps that itself didn’t seem to know quite what to make of her. No dedicated cadre of reporters was assigned to the first lady beat.
"I remember the first health care hearing on the Hill, when she testified,” says her first press secretary, Lisa Caputo. “I remember being shocked because the Washington Post sent its congressional reporter, the New York Times sent its policy reporter and somebody else sent a style reporter. The coverage the next day was six different types of story. So it was a challenge to communicate a single message when you had six or seven different angles coming at you at the same time."
Another lesson that Clinton well knows is the political importance of the White House social and entertaining arm. Since no one expects Bill Clinton would spend much time fussing over flower arrangements and table settings, there would be a special premium on appointing a skilled and trusted White House social secretary to handle those tasks.
Ann Stock, who held the social secretary’s job at the start of Bill Clinton’s first term, told Clinton biographer Sally Bedell Smith how closely Hillary Clinton and her friend and adviser Susan Thomases had grilled her when she interviewed for the post. Stock said that Clinton explained that while some people considered the social secretary’s role a “soft job,” she considered it “one of the most political jobs … like running a small advertising agency and taking the day’s message and translating it into events for the president and first lady.”
Clinton herself confessed in her memoir that even after her West Wing operation was up and running, “my East Wing duties were still giving me the jitters,” since just 10 days after the inauguration, the White House had to host its annual dinner for the National Governors Association. In the early months of the administration, social activities took something of back seat to policy priorities, for which Clinton sometimes suffered.
“Their view was the president had been elected and had a job to do, and they both rolled their sleeves up and went to work,” Caputo recalls. “It was the policy and the substance piece that took priority over the entertainment piece in the beginning—not to say that the social piece wasn’t important, because it was, but it wasn’t at the top of the priority list. There was a time when some of the Washington establishment was not happy about that, and she paid a price for it.”
Jeremy Bernard, who served as the Obamas’ second White House social secretary, says that the aspect of the job that most surprises people is just how much contact—virtually daily—the social office staff has with the president, who is constantly being briefed on upcoming ceremonies and events. He says the Clintons already understand how everything in the White House works, “from the light switches to knowing how you’re going to change the nature of the job.”
In fact, just as his wife did, Bill Clinton would have an opportunity to redefine yet again what it means to be a presidential spouse. Just how he would go about that remains to be seen, but it would doubtless be a riveting show.
“I’ve given lots of thought to this,” says Carl Sferrazza Anthony, perhaps the dean of historians who study first ladies. “Knowing not just history but the Clintons, I have a vision of Nov. 9 of reporters rushing the former-president-married-to-the-future-president asking what he now wants to be called, and his quipping with a sly wink, ‘Oh, you all decide that. I’m just Hillary’s husband.”