Will the real Hillary please stand up?
A confidant’s letters provide a window into her friend’s values, frustrations and determination to remain true to herself
HILLARY Clinton was first lady when an influential legal journal featured her in its spring volume, drawing tributes from such luminaries as Elie Wiesel, Senator Edward Kennedy and the Queen of Jordan.
But the most intimate portrait came from Diane Blair, a woman Clinton befriended in Arkansas and who had not held elected office.
After 30 years of friendship, Blair knew more than perhaps anyone about Clinton’s private struggles as she became the governor’s wife, moved to the White House and transformed herself into the most famous woman in American politics.
In her tribute to Clinton in the 1995 Annual Survey of American Law, Blair portrayed her friend as a woman crusader, setting an example at great personal cost.
“When I was a schoolchild I was fascinated and horrified by stories of the canaries who were carried down into the mines as early warning systems for the miners… I wonder now whether Hillary is playing the risky part of national canary for the women of America,” Blair wrote.
Clinton wrote back to Blair in the summer of 1995, calling her a “fellow canary”.
“We flap our little wings harder and harder, while chirping as loudly as our voices permit about what’s happening around us,” she said. “Sometimes we even are heard outside our cages!”
Blair did not seek the limelight, but she became one of Clinton’s closest confidants as the first lady wrestled with what she saw as a legion of political detractors and a hostile press. Clinton turned to Blair with her fears that her husband was “ruining himself ” and the presidency because he had no strategy to fight back when his enemies struck at him.
Blair, who died of cancer in 2000, left a written record of their friendship that today offers one of the most comprehensive portraits of the lawyer who last month became the first woman presidential nominee of a major American party.
Blair’s papers, archived at the University of Arkansas, include public statements and policy memos, as well as private correspondence and journal entries.
They show Clinton as being determined, with Blair’s help, to craft a positive image before she left the White House in an elaborate attempt to negate years of bad publicity.
In Blair, Clinton found a collaborator who shared her belief that women remained constricted, if not caged, in American politics.
Hillary Rodham and Diane Kincaid were both outsiders in the small university town of Fayetteville, 320km north-west of Little Rock.
Diane arrived in 1963 from Washington with her first husband, attorney Hugh Kincaid.
“She thought she was moving to the end of the world. And, to some extent, was,” said Diane’s second husband, Jim Blair. “You couldn’t buy a bagel anywhere in Fayetteville.”
Diane earned a master’s in political science from the University of Arkansas, where she took a teaching job.
Soon she met Bill Clinton, who had joined the faculty fresh from Yale Law School and whose girlfriend, Hillary, was in Washington, DC, working on the House Judiciary Committee’s Watergate investigation.
Bill persuaded Hillary to move to Arkansas in 1974, and they were married the following year.
Hillary taught at the law school and met Jim Blair, then the outside counsel to Tyson Foods and a one-time professor.
They played tennis and had lunch, and as Jim and Diane became involved, the two couples double-dated.
The two women immedi- ately connected, Jim Blair said.
Hillary founded a legal aid clinic and was “dealing with the judges who… didn’t have much sympathy for a woman lawyer”, he said. Diane chaired the governor’s Commission on the Status of Women.
She married Jim Blair in 1979, and then-governor Bill Clinton officiated.
“On this day, the day of your marriage, you stand somewhat apart from all other human beings,” he told them. “You stand within the charmed circle of your love.”
The couples remained close, and when Bill Clinton decided to run for president in 1992, Diane Blair was an adviser. After he was elected, she travelled frequently to Washington.
As she wrote in 1992: “It was my job to catch the grenades being hurled in non-stop, from all sides, and toss them back out again before they exploded in BC’s face.”
She said it was a “dirty job”. But, as she wrote in a letter: “I know how necessary it was to keep them from ever scoring a fatal hit on BC or Hillary, and I guess I was uniquely qualified to do it.”
Diane dwelled in particular on Hillary Clinton’s role. “The world is going to find out just how smart a smart woman can be,” she wrote.
Hillary Clinton was appreciative.
“One of the best gifts I’ve ever received was the love you’ve given me – through good times and recently,” Hillary wrote to the Blairs in November 1994.
“You and Jim are two of the reasons I’m glad that fate led me to Fayetteville in 1974,” she wrote to them in August 1995, just as the infrastructure for her husband’s re-election campaign – which Blair again joined – was falling into place.
In the spring of 1994, Hillary was pondering how she would be remembered.
The administration had been besieged by troubles. The death of White House deputy counsel Vince Foster, Hillary’s friend and Little Rock law partner, had been devastating.
An independent counsel was probing the Clintons’ investments, subjecting the couple to unrelenting scrutiny.
Clinton asked Blair to reconstruct her “first hellacious year” in the White House. Blair’s account, which she called “Hillyear”, is a dizzying report on a woman pushed close to the brink, juggling family responsibilities with high-level political battles.
She was concerned with her teenage daughter, her parents’ health and the hunt for an “appropriate wardrobe”.
But she had also assumed an unprecedented role in public policy, leading a task force to transform the healthcare system.
Although she had read 43 biographies of her predecessors, Hillary was unprepared for the blowback she would face for her healthcare plan. The early work had been conducted in secret, an approach that incensed the opposition. Hillary felt she was “being watched” and “listened to”, Diane wrote.
Her plan was defeated in 1994.
“She was “baffled” by DC ways.”
In March, Hillary’s father, Hugh Rodham, had a stroke and died.
Bill Clinton, meanwhile, was “really on (the) theme of being spied on, taped, watched, imprisoned”, Blair wrote. He regretted his inattention to his wife, a sense that “he hadn’t had time to really take care of her”.
Hillary blamed some of her travails on the media, and Diane fed her disdain, often railing against journalists for their portrayals of the Clintons.
By January 1995, Diane and Hillary were discussing a project to exert more control over the record. The friends pondered “how history can ever be written when those who do the contemporary stuff are so wrong”.
Hillary told Diane there was hardly a news story “she couldn’t totally refute”, Blair wrote.
Her concern was, “How does one arrive at the truth?”
Hillary’s longing for an oral history conducted by Diane was due in part to her view that the people working for her husband were “just not good enough”, Diane wrote.
This included staffers who had started out with the president in Arkansas or on his campaign, but who had “exceeded their capacity”.
Among them were Mack McLarty, the White House chief of staff, and Dee Dee Myers, the White House press secretary.
Diane remained in the Clintons’ inner-circle, but Betsey Wright, who had been Bill Clinton’s chief of staff for seven years while he was governor and deputy chairwoman of his 1992 campaign, became a problem, the papers show.
Wright told Diane she wondered whether she could forgive Bill for his “behaviour” with women and for “never learning his lesson”.
Diane’s papers offer insight into how Hillary dealt with the public fallout from his relationship with the intern Monica Lewinsky.
As Bill admitted in grand jury testimony to having had an inappropriate relationship with the White House intern, Hillary fell silent.
For days, she didn’t return Diane’s calls.
When they finally spoke, they discussed books – John Banville’s The Untouchable and Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha.
They talked about Diane’s planned trip to Washington. Finally, they addressed the scandal.
Diane said Hillary partly blamed herself: “She thinks she was not smart enough, not sensitive enough, not free enough of her own concerns and struggles to realise the price he was paying.”
She wouldn’t leave him, Blair wrote: “Partly because she’s stubborn; partly her upbringing; partly her pride… she really is okay.”
Part of Hillary’s frustration was that the White House was not hitting back hard enough at detractors, Diane said.
On the congressional front, where they were “getting killed”, Blair wrote, Hillary was “urging hardball”. She was angry that the North American Free Trade Agreement took legislative priority over healthcare. She said most senators were “diseased from egomania”.
She refused to tolerate incompetence or dissimulation. She was “dumbfounded by people who look her in the eye and lie to her”.
Month after month, Hillary was “in despair” that no one in the White House was “tough and mean enough”.
Throughout the White House years, Hillary gained a greater sense of her own strengths. She shared with Diane her frustrations with her lack of “real power”.
She told Diane: “I’d be happy in a little office somewhere, thinking up policies, making things happen, refining them.”
She said this during a phone conversation in which the friends were musing about the role of the first lady and its association with a “healing, mourning, empathetic presence”.
What the Clintons presented was a “role reversal, with Bill supplying empathy” and Hillary being “seen as the harder, tougher disciplined one with an edge”, Diane wrote.
She said Hillary told her in one conversation: “I’m a proud woman… I’m used to winning, and I intend to win on my own terms.”
“On her deathbed,” Diane wrote, her friend “wants to be able to say she was true to herself ”.
Diane’s notes reflect the oft-expressed claim among Hillary’s inner-circle that only her close friends truly understand her.
The two women remained close until Diane’s death, her final months buoyed by a daily phone call from Hillary, Jim Blair said.
“Like everybody else in America, I have some strong opinions about HRC,” Diane wrote in a typeset document with the heading, all in capitals, “Building a First Ladyship to the 21st Century”.
The portrait of Hillary as a “malevolent, power-mad, self-aggrandising shrew” was “mystifying”.
“Few of us have the luxury of choosing this or that, homemaker or professional, wife or worker.
“We are all those things, because they all must be done.”
Hillary was merely the first woman to claim this complexity “so openly, and, well, and without apology”.
“Hillary, like most of us,” her friend wrote, was something “in between”. – The Washington Post