Ever since 1992, when a young campaign staffer answered a phone call from Hillary with the greeting "Hillaryland," the future first lady and her devoted, mostly female aides have embraced the cutesy sobriquet as a way to describe their unique, un-Bill (and sometimes anti-Bill) sorority. In the 1992 campaign, it described a small corner of office real estate in
Little Rock where her staff toiled. In the Clinton White House, Hillaryland grew into an
influential but often frustrated power center inhabited by dutiful staffers whose first allegiance was to the first lady, not the president. "We were also our little subculture within
the White House," Hillary writes in her memoir. "My staff prided themselves on discretion, loyalty and camaraderie, and we had our own special ethos. While the West Wing had a tendency to leak, Hillaryland never did. While the president's senior advisers jockeyed for big offices and proximity to the Oval Office, my senior staff happily shared offices with their young assistants." Bill Clinton staffers regarded the dwellers in Hillaryland as Kool-Aid drinkers with awful political judgment. Hillarylanders saw Bill's people as showboats and referred to them dismissively as the "
white boys." Hillary "took a dim view of many of her husband's West Wing advisers," writes
John Harris in The Survivor, his excellent account of the Clinton
years, "who she regarded as too immature and too worried about currying favor with the Washington press." Hillaryland was different.
