Everyone knows the capital’s First Jogger is President Clinton. Far fewer people know of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s efforts to stay in shape by walking around the White House grounds, where she is shielded from public sight by a plot of tall, flowering plants.
“They’re the tallest flowers you’ve ever seen,” said one White House imagemaker who asked not to be named. “They’re like cornstalks.”
Though Mrs. Clinton’s press secretary, Lisa Caputo, denies it, the imagemaker said the flowers were planted last spring around a fountain on the South Lawn to protect Mrs. Clinton’s privacy when she dons a baseball cap and exercise gear and heads out for some laps around the executive jogging track.
The flowers are emblematic of the Clintons’ efforts to draw a curtain around some portion of their lives, blocking out the ever-prying eyes of the press and public as they live at the nation’s most conspicuous address.
Though all first families try to retain privacy, the Clintons seem to have been more successful than most, particularly when it comes to their daughter Chelsea.
“Sometimes I just like to be an ordinary citizen,” Clinton recently told a group of children in Houston who asked him how it felt to be surrounded by Secret Service bodyguards. “I just wish that I could take my wife and daughter and walk down the street and go to the movie or go to a restaurant or go in a shop and go shopping and just be alone. But it’s not going to happen for a few years.”
The Clintons issued a firm order to the media when they arrived here regarding their 13-year-old daughter: Leave her alone.
Unlike the avid tabloid photographers in London who dog the royal family, the Washington press has largely acquiesced. Chelsea’s many activities, from school to soccer games to ballet lessons, have been out of bounds.
The White House has taken pains to protect her from the sort of intense scrutiny in the 1970s on Amy Carter, whose first school day in Washington became a choreographed media event. For Chelsea, Clinton aides last year were dispatched to keep curious onlookers at bay while whisking her inside her private school.
Chelsea attends only those events she might enjoy or find interesting. And when the president and first lady were photographed for the White House Christmas card last year, Chelsea was conspicuously absent.
“I have to say that the media overall has been really, really respectful of the Clintons’ wish to maintain Chelsea’s privacy,” Caputo said.
Another area the Clintons have kept intensely private is the state of their marriage. Despite aides’ remarks about family closeness, allegations of Clinton’s marital infidelities in Arkansas have fueled speculation that the couple’s political bonds have outlasted romantic ones.
After the charges were first made during the campaign, Clinton admitted to causing pain in his marriage. But the couple insisted that the subject was their business and no one else’s.
Since then, rumors of marital discord behind closed doors have gone unsubstantiated. And in the public eye, at least, the Clintons are physically affectionate and generous in their praise for one another, displaying no outward signs of tension.
Information and activities under the control of the first lady are another private niche in the Clinton White House. Frequent, lavish social events were treated as big media photo opportunities by the Reagan, Bush and Carter administrations. But the Clintons have barred working reporters and photographers from most of their parties, which tend to be more intimate gatherings.
The names of the first family’s dining companions are not public fodder. The White House, for example, never confirmed or denied the widespread reports that bankers Robert Altman and Clark Clifford, exonerated in the BCCI scandal, lunched with the president. And when a movie star drops by, whether it’s Barbra Streisand or Mary Steenbergen, it’s their press agents, not the White House, who plant news items in the gossip columns.
Mrs. Clinton’s immediate predecessors threw the mansion’s doors open to let photographers record the redecorating of the private quarters that comes with new administrations. Only three media outlets got even a small glimpse of the elaborate changes Mrs. Clinton made.
At home in the White House
Although it may appear that the president is on TV all the time, in reality only carefully chosen and staged glimpses of his activities are recorded, and over the course of his first year in office Clinton has learned to marshall his image better so each appearance carries more impact.
Inside the White House, meanwhile, the family can disappear for hours or even days at a time without being viewed by the public or press. While the movie theater, outdoor swimming pool, butlers and maids hardly make the living routine, this is where they can be Dad and Mom and Chelsea.
“On the second floor, they turned the butler’s pantry into a family kitchen, a regular working kitchen, with a table and four chairs where the three of them will have dinner. The kitchen is one of their most favorite places to sit around and talk,” Caputo said. Sometimes they cook for themselves.
Clinton has admitted to feeling a little cloistered in the White House, lamenting recently, “I wish it weren’t so.”
Traveling outside the White House grounds provides no respite because the seclusion is replaced with the scrutiny of a pool of reporters and photographers that is on call 24 hours a day to accompany Clinton’s every move, and it has taken some getting used to by the president.
Chatting recently with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Clinton related his travails with the ever-present shotgun microphone, a powerful weapon that has caught his off-the-cuff remarks more than once.
“A couple of years ago I was running in Chicago,” Clinton told Kohl, “and they (the press) were running two blocks ahead of me. And the guy who was running with me said, `Why do they keep running with us?’ and I said, `They just want to be here in case I drop dead!’ They were two blocks ahead of us, and the (sound) guy screamed, `No, we don’t feel that way.’
“They picked it up with the boom mike!” Clinton chuckled.
The audio man’s protestations to the contrary, one purpose of the press pool-a small rotating group of reporters and photographers from the major media-is indeed to keep a watch on presidents when they are in public places in case of emergency.
Despite his gregarious image, Clinton more than once has displayed discomfort with the press bubble surrounding him from his early morning jog until aides are assured he’s in for the evening.
Clinton has been known to take delight in jogging the wrong way up one-way streets in order to lose the press pool, assigned to follow him in White House-supplied vans, comically trying to find him by shouting to tourists if they’ve seen the president.
Keeping things private
Like his recent predecessors, when Clinton goes golfing or out with the family to dinner or a friend’s house, it’s in a small, discreet motorcade-no flags, no sirens, no motorcycle escort-virtually indistinguishable from numerous others that weave through official Washington.
When it serves their political interests, the Clintons have used the privacy issue to keep certain matters out of the public eye.
In defending the closed-door meetings of Mrs. Clinton’s health-care task force, the administration said she is a private person, therefore the papers of her task force were private too. The first family also said their financial dealings are private, refusing to make public their papers regarding the Whitewater real estate deal in Arkansas. Recently, however, they did turn over the files to Justice Department investigators.
Political tempests aside, aides say the Clintons have resisted the confining nature of their new lives in what the president has called “the crown jewel of the federal prison system.” It’s hard, for instance, to be impulsive when going out for a walk can become a staged event requiring aides, security personnel and the press (the latter by gentleman’s agreement) to be alerted well in advance.
On their wedding anniversary last October, the Clintons decided on the spur of the moment to take a 9-mile bicycle ride to Mt. Vernon, George Washington’s historic home in Virginia, without notifying the press pool. This frustrated members of the media, who felt they had been deprived of a rare opportunity to capture the Clintons at leisure.
“The idea that they can’t go out for a walk because it takes an hour to assemble the pool is unacceptable to them,” said Steve Rabinowitz, a former White House events planner.
Letting the press watch
While the Clintons are not reclusive-the president and his daughter joined other Renaissance Weekend participants playing touch football in Hilton Head, S.C., over New Year’s-some presidents made more calculated use of their leisure time to help their images.
Ronald Reagan was well aware that long lenses could record him clearing the brush or horseback riding at his California ranch, contributing to the image of a vigorous man.
Reporters served as playmates for George Bush when he wanted company for horseshoes and fishing expeditions. Bush would invite them up to the family residence on the top floor of the White House, even showing off the presidential bedroom there, and at his summer home in Kennebunkport.
Clinton has golfed a couple of times with favored reporters, but they are far from being his playmates. He prefers to surround himself with old friends. While in Arkansas, he joined two old pals in making a nostalgic stop at their former high school in Hot Springs without the media being alerted.
“But the press found me,” Clinton recalled later. Cameras were kept outside.
“Clinton didn’t go there to contrive a photo opportunity showing what a normal, reminiscing guy he is,” Rabinowitz said. “He went there because he wanted to and he couldn’t care less if people saw it.”
