Hillary on the Hill: The memoir she didn’t write

Serving as one lawmaker among 100, and at the will of a hostile Republican majority, hardly seemed enticing. Clinton’s close friend and adviser Maggie Williams had called the idea of running for Senate “kooky,” Clinton once wrote. Another close adviser, Harold Ickes, put it more bluntly. “Why in God’s name would you want to do this?” he asked Clinton.

At an event announcing she would run for Senate, Clinton acknowledged those “questions on everyone’s mind: Why the Senate? Why New York? Why me?”

But, as she rattled off her connections to New York and her credentials, Clinton forgot to address the first question — or perhaps she didn’t have a convincing answer. Why the Senate?

It’s still a question on the margins, one she has never fully attempted to answer.

Of the more than 1,300 pages Clinton has written in her two memoirs, Living History (2003) and Hard Choices, only a small fraction touch on her Senate career. Since her new book came out earlier this month, Clinton has toured the country touting her experience as secretary of state, but her eight years in Congress rarely come up.

Which is unfortunate, because Clinton’s Senate career was uniquely formative. “She wouldn’t have been the secretary she was if she hadn’t been in the Senate,” one former aide said.

More than just a stepping stone, running for Senate was, for Clinton, a declaration of independence — from her husband’s administration, but also from her eight years as first lady. Clinton had never been satisfied with what she called the “derivative” power of that role.

Her transition was unsubtle and swift. “Not just a first lady,” a narrator said of Clinton in one of her campaign’s TV ads.

Once Clinton won, she had to convince her new colleagues of that, too — an altogether different challenge.

“She went in as a celebrity, and celebrities who go into the Senate either go big and go flashy, or they put their heads down and go to work,” said one Democrat with ties to Clinton. “She did the latter.”

In keeping with the mores of the Senate, which were even more pronounced then than now, Clinton made courtesy calls on the “lions” of the chamber, such as Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.V., who had served for more than four decades. If one of the lions had written a book, Clinton would cite passages from it as an ingratiating way to make conversation.

Clinton also reconnected with her friend Sen. Dianne Feinstein. The two women had forged a bond years earlier when the Clintons invited the Californian, a brand-new senator marking her 60th birthday alone in Washington, to the White House for dinner and cake.

Now, Clinton was the rookie, and she turned to Feinstein for advice — but about the unglamorous minutiae of running a Senate office, like sorting mail.

“We get anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 pieces of mail a week. How do you answer them? How do you categorize them? How do I get the information?” Feinstein said. “And I shared all of this with her.”

Clinton, a celebrity lawmaker from a large state, was thinking small. When she sketched out her legislative goals with aides, Clinton did not mention sweeping priorities like gun control or immigration reform, but instead honed in on micro-issues like commerce in upstate New York.

“She was a workhorse, not a show horse,” former aides and lawmakers say today of Clinton in the Senate, reciting the worn cliché, without variation, like a well-loved song lyric.

The “Hillary Clinton model” has since been adopted by other senators who won their seats as high-profile candidates, such as Al Franken: Work hard; don’t seek out national media attention; defer to senior colleagues. That approach has more recently been upended by upstarts like Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, to the chagrin of longtime senators.

Clinton understood that her star power invited close scrutiny — and harsh criticism. As a defense, Clinton adopted a down-to-earth, deliberate style. Senators recall her work with adjectives better suited to a personable robot than a high-profile lawmaker: To Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., Clinton was “extremely prepared”; Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, described her as “hardworking.”

In February 2001, Clinton stood on the Senate floor to deliver her first speech. Awkwardly, she spoke directly to the C-SPAN television camera, as if imitating a presidential address.

When Clinton’s legislative director, Ann O’Leary, met her afterward, Clinton stopped abruptly. O’Leary was alarmed.

“As a staffer, I thought, ‘Oh no, what went wrong?’ ” O’Leary recalled. “And then she said, ‘Oh my gosh, I forgot to tell my mother to watch C-SPAN.’ ”

Those private humanizing moments disarmed many Republicans who had demonized Clinton during the ‘90s.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., had managed Bill Clinton‘s impeachment in the House. But in the Senate he developed a lasting rapport with Hillary Clinton, whom he found funny and likable. They teamed up to expand health care for national guardsmen; today, Graham still credits Clinton with making it possible.

“She was a high-profile person who kind of blended in,” Graham recalled. “She didn’t use her celebrity status in an awkward way. She did her homework, she reached out to people, tried to do things, and a lot of people came to her because she was a popular senator.”

Clinton’s allies point to that spirit of bipartisanship, and her focus on New York, as key legacies in the Senate. Some of Clinton’s other legacies from the Senate, however, were more thrust upon her than sought out.

In September 2001, the 9/11 terrorist attacks prompted Clinton to chart a new course. After she helped secure relief funding, she took a more pronounced role in national security issues, with a seat on the Armed Services Committee and with votes in favor of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Only in recent weeks did Clinton for the first time disown the Iraq war vote, her most controversial as a senator, and one that dogged her during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary.

“I thought I had acted in good faith and made the best decision I could with the information I had,” Clinton wrote in Hard Choices. “And I wasn’t alone in getting it wrong. But I still got it wrong. Plain and simple.”

In 2006, Clinton overwhelmingly won re-election to the Senate and weighed an all-but-certain presidential bid. With her national ambitions doubtless in mind, she opposed a surge in Iraq. She formally announced her candidacy in January 2007.

With the 2008 presidential election on the horizon, partisan tensions were at the boiling point — and Clinton was met with nagging echoes of her husband’s presidency. In the summer of 2007, as senators neared the end of a marathon session on education funding, the Democratic majority forced a roll call vote on a “sense of the Senate” amendment instructing President Bush not to pardon Scooter Libby, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff. The non-binding amendment passed.

Republicans, furious, responded by demanding that the Senate weigh in on President Clinton’s controversial pardons, including some for clients of Hillary Clinton’s brothers.

One longtime Republican aide recalled that Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., rushed to Clinton on the floor. “As soon as she heard, the whole exercise was immediately shut down,” the aide said.

The second vote didn’t happen, and, in a rare move, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid erased the first vote from the congressional record.

Moods had calmed when, one year later, Clinton returned to the Senate, hoping to re-establish regular order in her career after her failed presidential bid. On her first day back, Clinton met with Reid off the Senate floor.

“She made it very clear to him that she was back to be a regular member of the Senate, and didn’t expect any special treatment, nor did she want any,” said Jim Manley, then an aide to Reid. “She was back to do her job.”

Shortly thereafter, President Obama tapped Clinton to head up the State Department, and her Senate career wrapped up in a hurry. Among frenzied staff, there was no talk of a memoir to chronicle Clinton’s tenure on the Hill.

Others would have to tell that story.

Less than one year into Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, in September 2009, Bill Clinton stood in the Old Senate Chamber, helping to unveil the official portrait of Lott, his wife’s first Senate foe.

“I’m here speaking for two people in my family,” Bill Clinton said, “because, after you and Hillary got off to a rough start in the Senate, she said that she never liked doing anything more than working with you on Katrina.”

That measure, for funding to rebuild a rail line after Hurricane Katrina, had been approved by a single vote — and, because Lott had backed relief funding after 9/11, Clinton had offered her support in return. As she passed Lott after the vote, he tapped Clinton’s arm.

“And I said, ‘Thank you for the vote, Hillary,’ ” Lott recalled. “And she just stopped, and she said, ‘You were with us after 9/11.’ And off she went.”

“There are moments like that,” Lott added, “that you remember forever.”