• First wave of thousands of papers made public for first time • Documents reveal healthcare struggles and plans for Senate run

Hillary Clinton was warned as she embarked on her own career in politics that she needed to appear more authentic to the public, in a candid memo from a senior adviser that was released on Friday.



Mandy Grunwald, an influential consultant who later became head of media relations on Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, told Clinton at the start of her “listening tour” in July 1999 that she should “be careful to ‘be real’.”

The criticism was delivered just as Clinton began her transition from the wife of the 42nd president to a candidate for US senator from New York 15 years ago, but has continued to echo through her career ever since.

Grunwald’s memo was among a tranche of 3,000 previously withheld pages released on Friday by the Bill Clinton presidential library in Arkansas. Some 30,000 more pages, which Republicans hope will contain disclosures that could damage Hillary Clinton’s prospects for a second White House bid in 2016, are to be published in all.

The newly released records also include private advice from the former first lady’s press secretary, Lissa Muscatine, and documents related to her failed efforts at healthcare reform. Other topics covered in the first wave of disclosures include documents relating to the 9/11 Commission Report, which are said to detail the earlier US “responses to al-Qaida’s initial assaults”, and papers from a number of White House speechwriters and national security staff.

Papers released in the coming weeks may also touch on controversial chapters in Clinton history, such as the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Titled “key points to remember for the trip”, Grunwald’s memo coincided with Clinton’s first campaign tour around New York state after beginning a campaign to replace the veteran senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was retiring.

Grunwald told Clinton that she had managed to appear “real” during a recent interview with Dan Rather, the veteran CBS broadcaster, in which she acknowledged that the previous year, which had been dominated by disclosures about her husband’s infidelity with Lewinsky, a White House intern, “was rough”.

“Once you agree with the audience’s [or] reporter’s reality like that, it gives you a lot of latitude to then say whatever you want,” she wrote.

“It’s important that your tone stay informal and relaxed and therefore not political,” wrote Grunwald. She advised that Clinton remain “chatty, intimate, informal” and said: “Don’t be defensive. Look like you want the questions.”

“Look for opportunities for humour,” she said. “It’s important that people see more sides of you, and they often see you only in very stern situations.”

The memo showed that Clinton was also warned she tackled questions from the media with “good manners, but bad politics”, by having “a tendency to answer just the question asked”.

“Take every opportunity you can to shift your response to an area you want to talk about and then be really expansive on that part of the answer,” Grunwald wrote.

US healthcare reform

The documents also reveal the scale of the first lady’s failed efforts to drive healthcare reform through Congress. She ran what amounted to a parallel White House legislative department in 1993 to try to persuade reluctant senators and congressmen, and encountered many of the same obstacles now dogging Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act.



Clinton advised Democrats against adopting a so-called “individual mandate” – the requirement forcing people to take out health insurance which is proving so divisive in Obamacare.



“If the Republican alternative, as it appears now to be shaping up, at least among the moderate Republicans in the Senate, is an individual mandate, we have looked at that in every way we know how to... that is politically and substantively a much harder sell than the one we’ve got – a much harder sell,” the first lady said.

“Because not only will you be saying that the individual bears the full responsibility; you will be sending shock waves through the currently insured population that if there is no requirement that employers continue to insure, then they, too, may bear the individual responsibility.”

News of her blunt criticism of the individual mandate principle may complicated any stance on Obamacare that Clinton chooses to adopt in the coming months.

Trying to push healthcare reform through Congress, her staff assembled a “war room” to track every member and expressed repeated concern about their alleged ignorance of healthcare policy.



“In the recent history of the US Congress, it has been virtually impossible to pass any large and potentially controversial initiative without identifying, getting to know, educating, stroking and responding to an ideologically diverse and ego-sensitive Congress that, individually and collectively, has become more and more independent,” wrote Clinton’s adviser Chris Jennings.



But the team also discussed freezing out groups outside Washington that were considered a waste of time.



“We could end up wasting a huge amount of staff time ‘receiving input’ that would not accomplish very much toward actually building the coalition that will help us pass health care reform,” said one memo. “With literally hundreds and hundreds of groups wanting to give us input, we could assign 10 full-time staff people to do nothing but be in meetings all day everyday for four months, and we would still have groups we didn’t have time to meet.”



One document from the first lady’s press office pointed to a danger that may yet sink Obamacare, which has been criticised for depriving some patients of existing insurance cover.



“President [Bill Clinton], from the very beginning, has said to us, ‘This plan cannot leave people who are insured worse off,’” said Hillary in a private speech to Democratic lawmakers. “This plan has to leave them either the same or better off than they would be if the current system continued. It may be an unpleasant fact for some of us Democrats to face, but the argument is not going to be won on bringing in the uninsured.”



Foia restrictions expired

The documents are being released after the expiration of legal protection from freedom of information requests.

“The individual pages … were previously withheld by NARA in response to Foia requests that were processed during the first 12 years after President [Bill] Clinton left office, because they were exempt from disclosure under the Presidential Records Act restrictions concerning appointments to federal office and confidential advice among the president and his advisors,” said a National Archives spokeswoman.

“When those restrictions expired, NARA then provided notification of our intent to disclose these presidential records to the representatives of President Obama and former President Clinton in accordance with Executive Order 13489, so that they may conduct a privilege review of the records. As they complete their review, NARA is able to make the records available.”

Clinton’s camp has had to deal with recent disclosures from the period via the archive of a close friend and confidant, Diane Blair, which was released separately earlier this month.

However, the deluge of fresh material now may actually be advantageous for Clinton, at least regarding its timing, as it may clear the air well before any formal run at the Democratic presidential nomination is announced.

The release of the documents was welcomed by Judicial Watch, the conservative pro-transparency campaign group that has long pressed for their publication. It accused both the Clinton and Obama White Houses of orchestrating an “inexcusable delay”.



“The Clinton administration was rife with secrecy and corruption, so any new bits of information may be important,” Tom Fitton, the group’s president, said in a statement. “We’ve been battling for some of this material for nearly a decade.”

Another memo in the files showed that Hillary Clinton’s aides had been seeking new ways to improve her image for several years. A 1995 memo from Lisa Caputo, her press secretary, floated the idea of an online chat co-ordinated with People magazine.

“Internet has become a very popular mode of communication,” Caputo wrote. “Hillary could speak to young women through internet.”



While acknowledging that it seemed like a “wild idea”, Caputo also suggested that Clinton accept an invitation to appear on sitcom Home Improvement, then the most popular television show in the US. The appearance never came to pass.