Of all the West Wing aides who felt uncomfortable about Hillary Clinton’s outsize role in her husband’s administration, no one was more vocal than (the very vocal) Rahm Emanuel, then a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton.
“I wanted to kill him because he was such a jerk,” Susan Thomases, one of Mrs. Clinton’s closest confidantes, said years later of Mr. Emanuel. “He was from Chicago, and if you’re not from Chicago,” she paused. “He is what he is.”Now, Mr. Emanuel is the mayor of Chicago and is embroiled in an uproar over his handling of the death of a black teenager shot by a white police officer and the delayed release of a video that showed the killing.The crisis facing his administration, unrolling against the backdrop of Mrs. Clinton’s focus on criminal justice overhauls and race relations in her presidential campaign, has proved the latest twist in the decades-long relationship between two of the biggest personalities in Democratic politics. Mr. Emanuel is now relying on the support of the former first lady, with whom he clashed in the White House and whom he scorned by not endorsing in the 2008 Democratic contest against Barack Obama, for whom he later went to work.
That puts Mrs. Clinton, who is famously loyal to old friends, in the tricky position of protecting a longtime, but not always obliging, one. Asked at a news conference on Wednesday, as calls for his resignation intensified, whether he had Mrs. Clinton’s support, Mr. Emanuel told reporters, “I don’t know. You’d have to ask her.” He added, “The question of whether I continue to have her support is up to her, but I feel pretty confident that I do.”
Hours later, under intense pressure to denounce the city’s handling of the shooting of Laquan McDonald, a “deeply troubled” Mrs. Clinton broke with Mr. Emanuel and called for a Justice Department investigation into the police department’s tactics. “He loves Chicago, and I’m confident that he’s going to do everything he can to get to the bottom of these issues and take whatever measures are necessary to remedy them,” Mrs. Clinton told reporters on Friday.
Republicans jumped to accuse Mrs. Clinton of not forcefully denouncing Mr. Emanuel’s handling of the situation because of her longtime relationship with the mayor, but the friendship is more nuanced than that.
Mr. Emanuel first worked on Mr. Clinton’s 1992 campaign in Little Rock, Ark., and he and Mrs. Clinton have orbited each other ever since, as he went on to have his own political career as a member of Congress. He remained neutral in the 2008 primary, but then became White House chief of staff in the Obama administration, where he played a crucial part in persuading Mrs. Clinton to serve as secretary of state. “He was making it impossible for me to say no,” she has said.
Nearly a year before Mrs. Clinton made her current presidential campaign official, Mr. Emanuel got a head start in praising her potential candidacy, endorsing a “super PAC” that encouraged her to run. “Hillary is smart, she’s determined and, most importantly, she is a champion for the American people,” he said in a statement.
In her 2014 memoir, “Hard Choices,” Mrs. Clinton, who is from the Chicago suburbs, called Mr. Emanuel a “creative thinker, an expert in the legislative process and a great asset to the president,” referring to Mr. Obama. On a visit to Chicago in June to promote her book, Mrs. Clinton said, “I go back a long way back with the mayor,” whom she called “his own form of an energy source.”
Then, she told the story of how Mr. Emanuel tried to stop her from delivering a controversial 1995 speech about women’s rights in Beijing that became one of the most pivotal moments of Mrs. Clinton’s career. She joked that he was among the White House aides who told Mr. Clinton: “There she goes again. Can’t you control your wife, Mr. President?” Now, it is Mr. Emanuel who is facing a pivotal moment in his political career, and Mrs. Clinton who wields much control. Adding to the pressure on Mrs. Clinton is her emphasis on criminal justice overhauls. In the spring, she devoted the first major policy speech of her campaign to addressing the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of white police officers, saying the shootings “tear at your soul.” On her last visit to Chicago, she met with the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and other black youths who had been killed by police officers or in gun violence. Mr. Emanuel was seeking re-election in October last year when a white officer shot Mr. McDonald 16 times. Video of the episode was not released until last month, prompting accusations that it had been suppressed for political reasons. Mr. Emanuel has said that the video could not be released earlier because of concerns it could have tainted a federal and state investigation.
And while Mr. Emanuel said “mistakes” had been made in the handling of the episode, he said a call by the attorney general of Illinois, Lisa Madigan, for a Justice Department review into police tactics was “misguided.” He later said in a statement that he was “open to anything that will help give us answers.”
Mrs. Clinton’s decision to take Ms. Madigan’s side and call for a federal investigation did not go far enough for many in the Black Lives Matter movement. The activists, with whom Mrs. Clinton has assiduously tried to connect in her campaign, have pushed for Mr. Emanuel’s ouster. Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton said she was not calling for Mr. Emanuel’s resignation. Her main Democratic rival, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, unencumbered by an old friendship, had terse words for Mr. Emanuel on Friday. “Any elected official with knowledge that the tape was being suppressed or improperly withheld should resign,” Mr. Sanders said in a statement, without specifically naming the mayor.
As pressure on Mr. Emanuel mounts and Mrs. Clinton continues to try to assure voters of her commitment to criminal justice overhauls, she might have to take the approach her former confidante Ms. Thomases adopted all those years ago in the White House. In an oral history of the Clinton administration conducted by the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, Ms. Thomases, herself a divisive figure in the administration, said she supported Mr. Emanuel’s run for Congress, but when she clashed with him she would proceed with what she thought was best for Mrs. Clinton, despite any objections.
“I don’t care what Rahm Emanuel thinks,” she recalled saying.
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