Hillary Clinton was both revered and reviled during the campaign. As the first professional woman to become First Lady, Mrs. Clinton is about to embark on the ultimate juggling act, a balance between her professional goals, her family obligations and society’s still-evolving traditions. “After he’s elected she can be Eleanor Roosevelt,” a close friend said last summer. “Right now, she’s got to be more like Marabel Morgan.” With the total-woman phase behind her, Hillary is finally free to be herself. How she does it could rewrite the First Lady’s job description.
Her first efforts last week reflected the caution she honed on the campaign. “I want to think about what I do before I talk,” she told aides, refusing interviews and staying out of the public eye. Like any family celebrating a major event, the Clintons spent the days after the election surrounded by relatives from out of town. Hillary’s briefing papers went untouched, perhaps the last breather she would dare take. Friends invoked a “no-comment policy” on her evolving plans. “I’m trying to be a little bit protective,” said Marian Wright Edelman, an ally on children’s issues. However hard Hillary struggles to keep her role substantive, there’s also the style side of the White House. Socks, the family cat, is the subject of numerous inquiries. Mrs. Clinton’s press secretary confirmed the cat’s sex (male) but refused reporters’ entreaties to call the governor’s mansion to ask if he had been neutered or declawed.
If Bill Clinton is another JFK, then Hillary is his RFK. She won’t be attorney general (although she could handle the job). But just as John Kennedy relied on his brother Robert, Bill Clinton looks to Hillary for political advice. Hillary will take on the hostessing duties of a First Lady with style and grace, as she did in Little Rock. But she has the soul of an activist and will want to carve out a policy role either in education or children’s issues. Rosalynn Carter was criticized for sitting in on cabinet meetings. Hillary Clinton didn’t do that in Arkansas-though she did travel to every county in the state to pressure legislators to pass her husband’s education program-and she probably wont in Washington. She won’t chair some blue-ribbon commission, either. “I’m sick of commission, she said recently. She wants to be held as accountable as her husband. Months ago she told an interviewer that in four years she wanted to be asked “what I’ve accomplished.”
Hillary’s activist past has made her a target for conservatives and even for some Democrats who worry that she will unleash the party’s liberal interest groups. Just as there are FOBs (friends of Bill), there are FOHs (friends of Hillary), most of them unapologetically liberal. Edelman, who heads the Children’s Defense Fund, a nonprofit lobbying group, goes back 20 years with Hillary. She recalls her friend showing up at a board meeting the day after the New Hampshire primary. “That’s a testament to the kind of grit she has,” says Edelman. Mrs. Clinton’s brain trust draws on her years of service with public-interest groups like the Legal Services Corporation, the Children’s Television Workshop and the National Women’s Political Caucus. Susan Thomases, a New York lawyer and Hillary’s closest adviser, is likely to play a strategic role in the new administration. Sharp-tongued and assertive, Thomases has a reputation for setting people on edge. She pushed Bill Clinton to make a major AIDS speech five days before the election, a move other advisers thought was risky. When Thomases insisted, aides tried to time the speech to get less coverage.
The transformation from activist to public symbol has been rocky for Hillary. Next to her husband’s easy bearing, she sometimes seems stiff and formal. The clothes and hair she never thought much about got so much scrutiny on the campaign trail that she submitted to a mini-makeover by the elves who work for Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, the producer of “Designing Women” and an FOH. Now women are taking cues from the big sweaters, straight skirts and black tights she favors. On the campaign trail, she endured the photo ops. But her trips were always built around what aides called “message events,” a visit to some promising program usually having to do with children. In Arkansas, she pioneered a Home Instruction Program for Youngsters (HIPY), modeled after a course she had seen in Israel that teaches parents to be their childrens first teacher.
It’s fair to say that Hillary Clinton got as rough a going-over as her husband did in the campaign. She found refuge in reading about other First Ladies. “Nobody has walked into this with eyes more open,” says longtime friend Diane Blair. Indeed, Hillary is in many ways Barbara Bush’s natural heir. The difference between them is 20 years of changing times when it comes to society’s expectations of women. When most families have either two parents working or one parent struggling to do it all, Hillary may have an easier time making the transition to Washington than her campaign scars would suggest.
