Clinton's Crisis: Enablers And Enforcers: The Two White House Cultures

From the first days of the first term, the Clinton White House has been two places. On one side is the First Lady's operation, which includes Hillary and her immediate staff, a buttoned-down culture in which meetings are brief and businesslike, hallway encounters are pleasantly reserved, and there is regular family time in the evening. And then there's Bill's Big Easy. The President is more orderly now than in his first term, when he favored rambling meetings and corridors crowded with young aides. But he's still Bill Clinton. Even after Hillary has turned in for the night, he's prone to drift to the West Wing offices--the presidential equivalent of a walk on the wild side--for late-night bull sessions.

All of which means there has always been plenty about Bill's White House for Hillary's White House to keep an eye on, a slightly unbuckled atmosphere in which sex, if not exactly a certainty, is not exactly unthinkable. When he went to the White House in 1993 as one of the youngest American Presidents ever, Clinton attracted a flock of aides and interns just out of college: males who regarded mild flirtation as harmless fun, females who seemed to enjoy the attention. And whatever lessons he drew from the Gennifer Flowers embarrassment, Clinton has never felt it necessary to pretend that good-looking women are beyond his notice. Within the first months of his first term, the West Wing was crammed with them, pretty young interns "who had nothing better on their resumes than their good looks," says a woman who served in a senior policy job. "This is a President who appeals to groupies."

Some Clinton advisers now wonder if they should have done more to keep a lid on things. For a man with Clinton's lively libido, the West Wing presented a garden of temptation. Did it lead him over the edge? "It wasn't that aides arranged this [environment]," says a former official. "It's that they didn't do much to stop it. They didn't want to get cut out or lose their standing, or they feared his blue-temper rages."

In that provocative climate, the No. 1 keeper of good order was Evelyn Lieberman. A Hillary operative in Bill's world, she went to the White House in 1993 as the First Lady's assistant, then moved up three years later to become Clinton's deputy chief of staff. Until she left that job in December 1996 to head the Voice of America, her White House duties could include anything from arranging furniture to making sure aides had the President's briefing papers ready. But Lieberman also put a brake on the freewheeling Clinton kids. She would regularly upbraid interns for wearing open-toed shoes or using the upstairs rest room that she wanted reserved for guests. Under her regime, hemlines fell among female interns, and blouses were buttoned. Says an aide: "Evelyn was the enforcer."