I liked most of what I saw in private, too. They really were complete partners, businesslike in meetings, often childlike with each other. Hillary adored him despite herself, giving him a Nancy Reaganesque gaze when he tightened his tie and talked nonstop about his upcoming speech, or later, when he loosened it with his arm around her and laughed about the evening’s events. She could soothe him, too. One night, after a particularly useless debate prep during which Clinton was hoarse and cranky, I went up to their suite with the next day’s schedule to find her on the couch with him, legs laid over his lap, feeding him lemon slices dipped in honey. In playful moments, Clinton called for her in baby talk: “Hee-a-ree, Hee-a-ree.”
Of course, they fought, too, and it wasn’t fun to watch. She lit into him when she thought he wasn’t being tough enough on himself or the people around him. One morning during the New York primary all I saw as I walked in their door was her standing over him at the dining-room table, finger in his face, as he shoveled cereal into his mouth, his head bent close to the bowl. I backed up without turning around and quietly shut the door.
They expressed their anger at the rest of us in different ways. When Hillary was angry, you didn’t always know it right away–a calculated chill would descend over time. Clinton’s anger was a more impersonal physical force, like a tornado. The tantrum would form in an instant and exhaust itself in a violent rush. Whoever happened to be in the way would have to deal with it; more often than not, that person was me. I guess Clinton figured that I could fix whatever problem was causing his frustration, and he must have sensed that I didn’t take his temper personally. The trick was to have a kind of thin skin–to understand that Clinton didn’t really yell at you; he yelled through you as the rage passed through him.
He was always protective of Hillary. In 1992, when she was under fire for Whitewater and “tea and cookies,” James Carville and I were reviewing campaign research with Clinton at a Holiday Inn in Charleston, W.Va. Part of the presentation was the videotape of a “dial group,” where voters are hooked up to handheld meters and asked to respond to news reports, TV spots and tapes of speeches to gauge what works and what doesn’t. The results are superimposed on the screen in real time, so you have an instant analysis of voter response.
When a shot of Hillary speaking was played, the line on the screen dropped like a downhill ski run.
“Oh, man,” said Clinton, demonstrating both husbandly concern and his capacity for denial, “they don’t like her hair.”
Nobody said a word, but Carville started grinding his fist into my thigh. That pressure and the laughter building up inside me made me double over until James mumbled something and burst out of the room. I was right behind him. We collapsed in hysterics the second we hit the corridor. From then on, whenever I wanted to make James laugh, all I had to say was “They don’t like her hair.” To him, it was the single most memorable line of the campaign. To me, it was just a sweet moment.
