Because She Can: Hillary cashes in

National Review, Jan 22, 2001 by Byron York

In late 1982, Reagan-administration PR man Michael Deaver had an idea to write a book called The White House Diet. Earlier in the year, several top presidential aides had organized a weight-loss contest, and Deaver dropped 35 pounds on a diet of fish, vegetables, and apple juice. After a few favorable mentions in the newspapers, Deaver signed a contract with William Morrow & Company. The publisher gave him a $9,000 advance, to be followed by another $9,000 on delivery of the diet manuscript.

The White House counsel's office okayed the project, but Deaver soon ran afoul of public opinion when New York Times columnist William Safire wrote not one but two columns condemning the deal. Eventually, The White House Diet ended up at the Office of Government Ethics, which ruled that Deaver could do the book, but only if he met certain requirements. Among the concerns of the ethics officers was "whether the advances against royalties are so large or of a nature to suggest that [Deaver] would not have received them except for his current position."

Whatever other questions the deal might have raised, that was a no- brainer. Why else would anyone buy a diet book by Mike Deaver, except that he worked at the White House? In time, Deaver, under pressure from above, dropped the project and gave back the $9,000.

A few years later, President George Bush, no fan of Deaver-style dealing, used his first executive order to set up a wide-ranging review of executive-branch ethics rules. In April 1989, Bush imposed a total ban on outside income for top White House staff, ordering that "no employee who is appointed by the president . . . shall receive any earned income for any outside employment or activity performed during the presidential appointment." No wiggle room there; in the future, senior White House figures would have to leave the government before cashing in.

Until now. Hillary Rodham Clinton's $8 million book contract with Simon & Schuster-444 times larger than The White House Diet deal-raises ethical questions similar to those in the Deaver case. But it's not getting the same treatment; this time, the Office of Government Ethics is not investigating. In fact, what criticism the deal has sparked has focused mostly on whether the new senator from New York has violated any Senate ethics rules. Seemingly forgotten is that, at all times during the book negotiations and until January 20, Mrs. Clinton is First Lady, a powerful policy-influencing figure in the administration. Would her book bonanza pass even the most minimal White House ethics test?

No, according to several top officials from earlier administrations. "I think we never would have permitted it," says C. Boyden Gray, White House counsel during the George Bush years. "If Ronald or Nancy Reagan, on the eve of their departure, had accepted an $8 million book contract, the dome would have gone off the Capitol, with threats of hearings," says David Martin, former chief of the Office of Government Ethics. And Charles Cooper, who headed the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel from 1985 to 1988, asks simply, "Should someone in a position of such enormous potential influence be beholden in that kind of substantial financial way to any corporate interest?"

But while these men and others question the book deal's propriety, they point out that there is no law forbidding the First Lady from signing the contract and taking the money. Even though there are dozens of ethics rules governing the White House, many of them do not apply to the president or First Lady. The president is exempt because he is elected by the people, and will be held accountable politically if he violates the public trust. The First Lady, on the other hand, is exempt because she is a private citizen.

But is Hillary Rodham Clinton really a private citizen? It's a question that has dogged the White House since Inauguration Day 1993. And for much of that time, the Clintons have argued-sometimes in court-that the First Lady is not only not a private citizen but is actually a de facto government official.

The issue first arose in connection with Mrs. Clinton's health-care task force. The First Lady wanted to keep her group's meetings a secret, but federal law required that any gatherings that included people from outside the government had to be held in public. When a doctors' group sued to open up the meetings, the White House argued that all involved, including the First Lady, were federal officials, and therefore the meetings could remain secret. "The spouse of the president is hardly a private citizen or a regular member of the public," administration lawyers argued. Mrs. Clinton, they said, was "functionally equivalent" to a federal employee.

After her health-care failure, the First Lady went into a kind of public hibernation, during which White House aides often suggested that she was not involved in policymaking. But in 1999, when she began to consider a run for the Senate and was eager to highlight her accomplishments, Mrs. Clinton revealed that she in fact played an important role in all sorts of White House policy decisions-only without the fanfare of her earlier initiative. "I continued to work on all the issues I'd always worked on, including health care," she told the New York Times. "But I did not assume an additional title and a specific responsibility for an overall policy as I had before."