Interview with Gail Sheehy
FL:
Could you describe the whole landscape from which he came -- which is not only
Hot Springs, it's also the situation at home. What were the defining
qualities?
Sheehy:
Well, I almost think of Bill Clinton as like the character in East of Eden,
who's standing on the edge of something that was fascinating, compelling, but
dangerous and repellent. And I think he had a kind of two step reaction to all
of that. On the one hand, he saw how things were never what they seem, that
there are always back room deals, that there's always another side that isn't
as pretty, and what you have to do is put a spin on your whole life, and he has
been putting a spin on his whole life with the help of Hillary to make a heroic
story out of what was really a rather sad and depressing story in terms of his
own family background. But also, I think there was a big impact by being
raised by a mother who was both extremely forceful and flamboyant, but very
demanding in a narcissistic way of constant attention from him and, a child who
is constantly being demanded of by a narcissistic parent, has very little
opportunity to show his own distress, his own anxiety, his own temper. He had
to keep the lid on in an explosive situation because the parents were acting
like kids. And as he told me later, his mother was trying to keep peace, and
never explain. Nobody ever explained, what's the cause of all of these
eruptions, of this violence, of this bizarre behavior. And I think he then
never developed really any very good outlets for his own anxieties and
tempestuous feelings, emotions, very emotional man. So they came out later on,
both in explosions of temper, which his aides have recounted, and in behaving
like the eternal boy. Philandering, you know, betraying people who loved him
and trusted him, cheating on them, and acting like the bad boy in a way that
he'd seen so many people in Hot Springs act like bad boys and girls.
When Bill Clinton's campaign was really in a downspin, after New Hampshire, I
had another long talk with him and I asked him about what kind of defense has
he developed to deal with this explosive situation at home, because kids can go
one of two ways. Either they can copy the immature habits of the adults
they've seen in a narcissistic household or they can become premature adults,
and that seems to have been his pattern. And he told me, some of the mistakes
I made later in life were rooted in all those things that were never explained
when I was growing up. My mother, he said, was trying to keep peace in an
explosive situation and nobody ever said what was really going on. And the
aftermath of that, he said, really had a big impact on how he lived his life.
And I think, part of that, is a parent who needs constant narcissistic
gratification from a child because she can't get enough elsewhere, doesn't
give, leave him any outlets to express his own distress, his own anger. And so
Bill Clinton acted like the good husband for many years, kind of keeping the,
control, keeping some peace in a family, protecting his brother, protecting his
mother, acting as his mother's surrogate husband when she kicked his abusive
stepfather out of the house. Didn't have time to be 16 when he was 16. And as
he told me, you know, I guess I was 40 when I was 16 and I always hoped I
wouldn't have to be 16 when I was 40. But as it turned out, he actually did
act pretty much like 16 when he was 40, that was the period after which he had
lost, he, pulled back from entering the election in, in '88 because it was
thought that his, the stories of his philandering would, would sink the
campaign. And at the last moment, on the steps of the state house, when he and
Hillary were about to announce, he pulled back because he realized he just, he
hadn't grown up enough, and he didn't know how to sell the story.
FL:
He was self-described to you as a fat kid...but look what the political life
gives someone like that, with that image of himself. How important was that in
the future Bill Clinton...
Sheehy:
One of the constants with presidential characters I find is that they're so
often, really overcompensating for some things that happened in the past and, I
think, for Bill Clinton part of it was that he did, as he told me, think of
himself as a fat, slow kid, not an athlete, no particular social station or
money in his background, and here's the life of politics where people express
love for you all the time, and constantly wanting to be with you, rub shoulders
with you, women are throwing themselves at you and you know, from his early
campaigns that was one of the revelations, that women just couldn't, you know,
get enough of a handsome political candidate. And I think what Bill Clinton
identified as the great attribute that he had was charm. He was from an early
age able to seduce both men and women with his charm. And a large element of
that charm was not just his looks and his humor but his capacity for empathy,
which was real. And, as he told me, I could always connect with people, I
could always draw them out, I could always find some common ground. And we've
seen him develop that and parlay that all throughout his career, to the point
where, perhaps the Oklahoma bombing was some kind of a turning point in his
presidency when he began to take on the role of older brother for the country,
because there was this complicated love-hate relationship that most voters had
with Clinton when he was first president. On the one hand, we liked the
eternal boy, everybody wants to be Peter Pan in this country it seems like.
But we also expect our Presidents to act like father. And Clinton wasn't
father. He was initially, seemed rather like the younger brother. Nice, you
love him but, he's always getting into mischief. And at the time of the
Oklahoma bombing, when he was able to comfort people and speak for the whole
country eloquently, with his capacity for empathy, I think he graduated to the
status of older brother.
FL:
You write about his mid-life crisis.....
Sheehy:
Well, Bill Clinton did speak about his mid-life crisis, he takes it seriously.
This is the first all-therapy presidency where both President and
Vice-President have discussed openly, talking to therapists. That was a period
when everything kind of broke loose. Roger Clinton was busted on drugs,
Governor Clinton had to take the fall for him in a way. Virginia Clinton was
brought into therapy with Hillary and a lot of those secrets and a lot of that
explosiveness of his childhood was out on the table. He also lost an election
at that time and was devastated. And, began acting out the adolescence that he
really never had. Hillary, during that period, and this is the 4 years before
he declared for the presidency, never gave him the option of divorce. They
worked it through. Painfully, torturously, but, I think, with Hillary pretty
much, you know, leading the team, and being the strong one.
FL:
Hillary. And Virginia . The way in which you think they're alike...and every
conversation you had with Virginia and Hillary about that relationship...
Sheehy:
I think the greatest similarity between Hillary Clinton and Virginia Kelly, who
would otherwise seem to be polar opposites, is that they both adore Bill
Clinton. That they were both completely captivated by his southern charm, and
we read in both fiction and non-fiction accounts of the explosive relationship
between Bill and Hillary that he can have just done the naughtiest thing of
all, he can just have you know, been with another woman, and all he has to do
is kinda, wink and pinch and tickle and all of a sudden Hillary kind of falls
back into loving this adorable, southern man.
Well, Virginia Kelly was also completely captivated by Bill Clinton and made
him the center of her life. I mean, he had to represent almost all the things
that her four husbands couldn't. He was the golden boy. She, as we know,
decorated whole rooms with his trophies, and dedicated herself entirely to
building his confidence and moving him ahead, and so has Hillary. Giving up
what might have been a stellar career in politics or business or law of her own
to advance Bill Clinton.
You know it's interesting, the first time I interviewed Hillary, I met her on a
tarmac to get into a small plane and I told her I just spent a day with her own
mother, and she said, well you've got to meet Virginia Kelly, she's really
something. She never lets anything stop her. And I could see that that was
where the respect, the mutual respect actually met between these two otherwise
very disparate women. Because Hillary never lets anything stop her. The
difference is that Virginia Kelly used alcohol, gambling, outrageous behavior,
depression, a lot of poor defenses, I mean, life hammered at her as it did so
often. Hillary just holds it all in. Hillary has to be right. Hillary has to
be right.
FL:
You spent a lot of time with Hillary...describe what you learned about her.
Sheehy:
I had the rare experience of sitting in a little 6-seater charter plane with
Hillary Clinton in the week that she brought her husband back from the
political dead. She had just been on 60 Minutes with him the night before we
began to travel together, and, it looked like things were smoothing out. All
of a sudden, we dropped into a motel room in Pierre, South Dakota, she walked
in, turned on the television and there was Jennifer Flowers, this lounge act,
describing her husband's conversations with her in the most devastating detail.
And I was standing right next to Hillary. There wasn't a flicker of personal
reaction. That's how defended she was from the most devastating kind of
revelation before the whole world. She immediately began to go into attack
mode. She disappeared for a while, changed clothes, went to a pork rib feeds,
a dinner. Her aide was put in her ear, altering that with Jennifer. I saw
this shrug of defeat go down her face. She made a b-line for the pay phone,
she got on the phone, I couldn't hear what she was saying but she was chewing
somebody out, and it turned out it was Bill Clinton.
We got on the plane, we're sitting knee-to-knee, and she began to think about
how to get out of this situation, and her first fury that exploded was against
Jennifer Flowers. If I had her on the stand, she said, I would crucify her.
She was paid. And she went through the whole litigating circumstances she
would use. Next she went to how she was going to persuade Bill Clinton to take
this seriously. Because he had never really taken seriously the political blow
that she knew was always going to come. So she began rehearsing how she could
talk to him. How the Republicans had started an attack machine in 1988, and
now in 1992 it was turning into character assassination, and yeah, this is
Willie Horton II, she said. And Bill Clinton just won't understand that this
can break him, I've got to tell him he's got to fight back! And you could see
that she was the real fighter. She was the real, offensive player in this
duel.
And the next thing you know, we land at a tarmac in God-knows-where in South
Dakota, she's off the plane, across that tarmac, in there ordering everybody
around, get me a conference call, I want Little Rock and Washington on the
phone. She's on the phone and she dictated this strategy of the campaign at
that point, which was, pound the press and go up against the Republican attack
machine. And that became literally the strategy for the rest of the campaign,
and in many ways, a strategy that continued throughout the presidency where,
that really comes essentially from Hillary's need to project on everybody else
the pain and the personal humiliation that she must have felt, in having these
revelations about her marriage made public before the whole world.
I think by training and by temperament, Hillary is a prosecutor, a litigator.
She argues, she defends, she admits no wrongdoing. She doesn't give, at all.
And so her response to this event and to the fact that it would torpedo the
entire career, and her chance to be part of a presidency, was to immediately go
into attack mode, but psychologically we would also call that projection.
There's no fault here. She can't look at what her husband did to her, and to
their family, so she looks at what the press is doing by revealing what he did,
or what the Republicans are doing by making hay on what he did. And she's
perfectly right, an attack machine had developed, and it has now become very
well-oiled, and, essentially Bob Dole, through the surrogate of Al D'Amato and
his Whitewater committee has been doing exactly what Bob Dole did successfully
when he first attacked Lyndon Johnson and brought attention to himself as a
young congressman.
FL:
In conclusion about Hillary and Bill, how would you describe that
relationship...the ways in which they complement each other, the ways in which
they relate to each other, and, the way in which she reveals him...
Sheehy:
I think Hillary Clinton is Bill Clinton in a tighter container. She's the more
controlled, more disciplined, more intellectually tart of the two. They're
both brilliant. He's the more emotional, the more able to relate to other
people, the more empathetic, and the more intellectually curious, and
emotionally unguarded. So I think, Hillary over the years has been the Jimminy
Cricket sitting on his shoulder, the conscience, which he didn't really have
growing up, in a situation in Hot Springs and in a family where the rules were
always double.
Hillary I think has operated as the conscience, the superego, kind of keeping
him, trying to keep him on the straight and narrow. Sometimes it works,
sometimes it doesn't. And he often has been in her debt and dependent on her,
after all, she saved his neck after the New Hampshire primary in the
campaign.
But there was one moment during the campaign when the roles switched, it was
very interesting. In my interviewing with Hillary, she had made a blunder in
her own thinking, she revealed to me conversation that she had had with Ann
Chambers, the publisher of the Atlanta newspapers about the other Jennifer,
that is the Jennifer that was in George Bush's life. And, when I revealed
this in the Vanity Fair piece, there was a headline on the Daily News saying
Babs Bites Back, about Barbara Bush snapping back at Hillary Clinton for
talking about a mistress that George Bush supposedly had. All of a sudden you
saw on television, Bill Clinton, stepping in front of Hillary and apologizing
for his wife, for having said, stepped out of line. And it, he was at almost a
smile of slight satisfaction because for once he was the good boy. He was the
moral arbiter of the two.
FL:
What does it reveal about Clinton, that Hillary is his wife?
Sheehy:
I think it says a lot of good things about Bill Clinton that he chose Hillary
Clinton. I mean, she is a formidable person. She, can make a speech without
saying ah. She got better marks than he did. And, you know, she's, can be
beautiful. She is a policy wonk, that is his equal. And he has never been
threatened by her which is quite extraordinary. He did have a very strong bond
with his mother, he has often been, you know, slaved by strong women, so it's
not unusual for him to be attracted to a strong woman but this is a strong
woman among strong women. And I think that they became, early in their
courtship, symbiotic. I mean, they did the moot court together. They did the
governorship together. And when I talked to Bill Clinton about what their
partnership would be like in the White House, he was very open, this was before
there was any Hillary hating and said, it will be an unprecedented partnership.
It will be more than Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt. We will do everything
together just as we always have.
