Perhaps one reason I didn’t trust my instincts enough is that the administration was being hammered hard in Washington and I was being second-guessed at every turn. After a great initial appearance on Capitol Hill, Hillary was being criticized for the closed meetings of her health-care task force. Since they were consulting with hundreds of people, nothing they did was secret; they were simply trying to move with dispatch over many immensely complicated matters to reach my overly ambitious goal of presenting a health-care plan to Congress within one hundred days. The task force heard testimony from over 1,100 groups, had more than 200 meetings with members of Congress, and held public meetings all around the country. Its reputation for being secretive was exaggerated. In the end, the task force operation proved too unwieldy and was allowed to expire, and we couldn’t make the hundred-day deadline anyway.
As if all this weren’t enough, I also suffered the defeat of my short-term stimulus package, which was designed to create 500,000 jobs by getting money out quickly to cities and states for infrastructure projects. The economy was still growing slowly, it needed the boost, and the modest nonrecurring expenditures wouldn’t have made our deficit problem worse. The House passed the bill handily and the Senate was for it, too, but Bob Dole had more than forty Republican senators who were willing to filibuster it. After the first filibuster vote, we should have tried to negotiate a smaller package with Dole, or accepted a less ambitious compromise proposal offered by Senators John Breaux and David Boren, two conservative Democrats. Senator Robert Byrd, who was handling the proposal, was adamant that if we didn’t bend, we could break the filibuster. But we couldn’t, and finally admitted defeat on April 21, two days after Waco.
In my first term, the Republicans resorted to the filibuster to an unprecedented extent, thwarting the will of the congressional majority, out of either conviction or a desire to prove that I couldn’t lead. Senator George Mitchell had to have twelve votes to break filibusters just in my first hundred days. On March 19, we suffered a personal blow that put politics in perspective when Hillary’s dad had a massive stroke. Hillary rushed to his bedside at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Little Rock, with Chelsea and my brother-in-law Tony. Dr. Drew Kumpuris, Hugh’s doctor and our friend, told Hillary that her father had suffered severe brain damage and was in a deep coma from which, in all probability, he would never emerge. I got there two days later. Hillary, Chelsea, Dorothy, and his sons, Hugh and Tony, had been taking turns talking, even singing, to Hugh, who looked as if he was just sleeping peacefully. We didn’t know how long he would last, and I could stay only a day. I left Hillary in the good company of her family, the Thomasons, Carolyn Huber, who had known Hugh ever since her days as the administrator of the Governor’s Mansion, and Lisa Caputo, Hillary’s press secretary and a favorite of Hugh’s because like him she came from eastern Pennsylvania, near his hometown of Scranton. The next Sunday, I flew home again for a couple of days. I wanted to be with my family, even though there was nothing to do but wait. The doctor told us that Hugh was essentially brain dead. Over the weekend, the family decided to take him off the machine that was breathing for him, and we all said prayers and good-byes, but Hugh didn’t go for it. His strong old heart just kept beating. Though I had been able to attend to most of my duties in Arkansas, I had to return to Washington on Tuesday. I hated to leave, knowing it was the last time I’d ever see my father-in-law. I loved Hugh Rodham, with his nononsense gruffness and fierce family loyalty. I was grateful that he had accepted me into the fold twenty years earlier, when I was scruffy, penniless, and, worst of all, a Democrat. I would miss our pinochle games and political arguments, and just knowing he was around.
