American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power Read online

  Hillary made it abundantly clear to her husband that, while he pursued other women, her own needs were not being met. Trooper Roger Perry, a member of the governor’s security detail, saw Bill virtually every day for seven years. One Sunday afternoon, Perry was standing next to an intercom outside the kitchen when he clearly heard Hillary tell her husband, “Look, Bill, I need to be fucked more than twice a year.”

  At one point, Bill’s cheating pushed Hillary over the edge. After learning that her husband had led the daughter of a major contributor to believe he would marry her, Hillary had what some described as a nervous breakdown. She began hyperventilating, and an ambulance rushed Hillary to the hospital for observation.

  Understandably upset over Bill’s egregious philandering—and concerned about how it could derail their plans for conquering the White House—Hillary took out her frustrations on the governor’s partners in crime: the troopers. She called them “shit-kickers,” “rednecks,” “hicks,” and “white trash,” and ridiculed them for being overweight. She also resented their constant presence and the loss of privacy that entailed. At times, a simple “Good morning, Mrs. Clinton” could provoke an attack. “Fuck off!” she would bark. “It’s enough that I have to see you shit-kickers every day. I’m not going to talk to you, too. Just do your goddamn job and keep your mouth shut.” She went so far as to instruct Trooper Patterson not to utter a word when they went out in public. “You sound,” she explained contemptuously, “like a hick.”

  Hillary felt much the same way about Arkansans in general, even though she did a masterful job of concealing her contempt from the general public. L. D. Brown remembered driving Hillary to “the state fair, and there she was chatting up the guys in their bib overalls and the ladies in their gingham dresses—good, decent people, you know?—and they were just thrilled out of this world to meet her. Then Hillary would get in the car and say, ‘My God, did you see that guy? He was like something out of Deliverance! Get me the hell out of here.’ ”

  Like members of her husband’s senior staff, the troopers were for the most part terrified of Hillary and took pains not to cross her. Only veteran officer Ralph Parker was willing to risk invoking her wrath. When Hillary received an award as Mother of the Year, Parker and other members of the Clinton entourage waited outside the Governor’s Conference Room where the ceremony was about to take place. “ ‘Mother of the Year’?” sneered Parker, who knew how little time Hillary had actually spent with her only child. “How about ‘Motherfucker of the Year?’ ” The rest of the staff, said one eyewitness, “looked as if they had been struck by lightning. They were scared shitless that Hillary might have heard. It was a truly great moment.”

  Hillary had more than her husband’s constituents, her security detail, and Bill’s womanizing to contend with. Several of her law partners were complaining that Hillary’s billings had slipped, that she wasn’t living up to her initial promise as a big earner for the firm. Worried that she might be ousted from Rose Law if she did not perform up to expectations, Hillary asked her Whitewater Development partners Jim and Susan McDougal to send some business her way—namely, she asked to be put on retainer as the counsel for the thrift they owned, Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan. In that capacity she would, among other things, represent the savings and loan in its dealing with the Clinton-appointed state securities commissioner. It would be years before Hillary’s billing records, which mysteriously disappeared as federal regulators were closing in, just as mysteriously materialized in her White House office—affirming that she hid her involvement from the FDIC and other agencies.

  What Hillary may or may not have known was that the McDougals engineered a series of fraudulent real estate deals to siphon off $17 million for themselves and a few select friends. Madison Guaranty finally collapsed in 1989, triggering the investigation that would ultimately lead to the McDougals’ conviction on charges of mail fraud and conspiracy.

  For the first time, Hillary came under heavy attack for these and other conflicts of interest during the 1986 election campaign. There were also rumblings that former Governor Frank White, who had again been chosen by the Republicans to unseat the Clintons, would for the first time make an issue of Bill’s philandering.

  Now that Chelsea was six, Hillary worried that she might be traumatized by the things that were being said about her parents. Chelsea had always been, according to family friend Carol Staley, a “precocious child—perfect manners, with a vocabulary far beyond her years. Her parents were away a lot, so when they were around she was eager to please them.”

  Hillary had always been able to control what Chelsea saw or heard about her father. Now, just as what promised to be a particularly nasty campaign began to heat up, Hillary thought it was time to begin Chelsea’s political indoctrination.

  Over dinner one evening, Hillary announced that if Daddy lost the coming election, the family would have to pick up and leave. If Daddy won, they could continue living in the only home Chelsea had ever known. Chelsea had to be prepared for the fact that Daddy had “enemies” and that they would say “terrible things” about him. “They might even lie,” Hillary told her daughter, “just so people will vote for them instead of Daddy.”

  Hillary suggested they play a game in which Chelsea played her father on the campaign stump. “My name is Bill Clinton,” she said proudly. “I’ve done a good job and I’ve helped a lot of people. Please vote for me.”

  Chelsea was unprepared for what happened next. While the little girl waited for her parents to tell her she had done a wonderful job stating her father’s case, Daddy glared at her. “Well, Bill Clinton, I think you’ve done a lousy job,” he barked. “You’ve raised taxes and you haven’t helped people at all. Why, you are a very mean man, and I am NOT voting for the likes of you.”

  Chelsea burst into tears, but Hillary’s “role-playing” continued. Over the next few weeks, both parents fired off questions and pelted her with insults until she was inured to anything negative that might be said about Mommy and Daddy.

  These dinnertime drills “helped Chelsea to experience, in the privacy of our own home, the feelings of any person who sees someone she loves being personally attacked,” Hillary explained. What was important, she went on, is that Chelsea achieved a “mastery over her emotions” that—in theory, at least—made her impervious to attack.

  For years, Hillary spoke of these grueling indoctrination sessions with pride—until she realized that some people regarded them as a form of psychological child abuse. In her memoirs, Hillary would dispense with the subject in two brief sentences.

  Hillary also drummed it into Chelsea’s head that Republicans—Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush in particular—were mostly “rich people who just don’t care” about the problems of average Americans. On a trip to Washington during the Reagan administration, Chelsea asked her mother if they could take a tour of the White House. Absolutely not, Hillary replied. “We’ll have to wait until someone decent lives there.”

  As a practical matter, both Hillary and Bill were far too busy to spend very much time with their daughter. In 1987 Hillary, more determined than ever to maintain the alliances she had forged over the years with a wide range of “progressive” groups, took over as chairman of the Manhattan-based New World Foundation. During the two years Hillary headed up New World, the number of left-wing organizations supported by the foundation jumped dramatically. Hillary personally signed off on generous grants to such sterling organizations as the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), which financed El Salvador’s Communist guerrillas, and the Christic Institute, a radical fringe group that advocated “legal terrorism” against retired military and intelligence officials. Perhaps most alarming was the New World Foundation’s contribution of $15,000 to Grassroots International, which then channeled the money to two groups affiliated with an organization that Hillary still apparently viewed favorably: the PLO.

  In an attempt to appear more centrist, Hillary w
ould later downplay her involvement at the New World Foundation. But back in 1988, she boasted in the group’s 1988 report that New World had “turned increasingly to the support and development of progressive activist organizations.” Moreover, she described her strategy of making “mostly general support grants, rather than project grants, so as to provide core support for organizers and advocates.” In other words, more freedom for the El Salvador guerrillas and PLO affiliates to spend the money however they saw fit.

  Notwithstanding her involvement in a wide range of organizations across the country, her work at Rose Law, and her responsibilities as Arkansas’s First Lady, Hillary’s main focus was still on Part One of The Plan. Opportunity knocked in May of 1987, when Democratic front-runner Gary Hart withdrew from the presidential race after the Miami Herald ran photographs of the married senator with Donna Rice in his lap aboard the prophetically christened yacht Monkey Business. Ironically, with Hart no longer in the race, many eyes in the Democratic Party turned toward Bill.

  Clinton’s first visit to New Hampshire as a potential candidate was a huge success, and reports from other primary states were equally encouraging. Hillary would later claim that she had opposed Bill’s entry into the 1988 race on several grounds: Republican vice president George H. W. Bush, heir to the Reagan legacy, would be virtually impossible to beat; Hillary’s father had suffered a stroke, and he and Dorothy Rodham had moved to a condo in Little Rock so the Clintons could help take care of them; Bill was too young, untested.

  In her memoirs, Hillary went so far as to say that Bill was on the fence until Chelsea asked him about their upcoming vacation plans. When her father said he might be too busy running for President to take a vacation, Chelsea replied, “Then Mom and I will go without you.” That, Hillary would declare in her revisionist autobiography, “sealed the decision for Bill.”

  In truth, Hillary pressured her husband to run for President in 1988, and was frustrated over his reluctance to throw his hat in the ring. She had purchased the condo for her parents so that Chelsea’s grandparents could care for her while Mom and Dad were on the road.

  According to Dick Morris and others, the events that literally overnight brought an end to Gary Hart’s career filled Bill with dread. Without letting on to Hillary, he began to quiz friends, advisers, even lovers on the subject of extramarital sex and the impact it might have on a candidate.

  Nearly everyone Bill talked to was aware that he had cheated on Hillary—he went so far as to admit it to several of them. But only a handful knew the magnitude of Bill’s faithlessness. One who had an inkling was the governor’s chief of staff, Betsey Wright.

  Like Hillary, Wright had a reputation for being abrasive; she routinely yelled at and swore at underlings because “sometimes it’s the only way to get people’s attention.” Most important, she was someone Bill could count on to give him her unvarnished opinion. A few days before the July 14 deadline he had set for himself to make an announcement, Wright confronted her boss with a list of his rumored lovers. There were at least twelve women on the list, and for the next four hours Wright grilled Bill about his relationship with each one of them. She did not even bother to bring up the subject of his many one-night stands, the nagging question of Danny Williams’s paternity, and his alleged dalliances with the prostitutes on Spring Street. Wright’s inevitable and sobering conclusion: Bill could not run in 1988.

  When Clinton told his wife that Wright had talked him out of running, Hillary was livid. She demanded to know what Wright could possibly have said to make Bill change his mind. Wright hemmed and hawed, unwilling to hurt her old friend by going into specifics. It was enough that Bill admitted to her that he had committed adultery with not one woman à la Gary Hart, but with several.

  “These women are all trash,” was Hillary’s startling reply. “Nobody is going to believe them.” She would see to it that nobody believed them. The problem was manageable. There was no need to panic like Hart.

  Bill knew better. Now, so soon after the Hart scandal, every candidate’s sexual life would be under the microscope. In a run against a candidate as strong as Vice President Bush, it was the kind of scrutiny Bill simply could not survive.

  Hillary stood next to her husband and wept as he announced to a roomful of stunned reporters that he had decided not to run for President. He waxed poetic about Chelsea, and how he owed it as a father to be there for her. Hillary, her eye already on 1992, had no intention of letting on that their grand plan had been momentarily sidetracked by her husband’s sleazy sexual escapades. As far as the public was concerned, Hillary wanted her husband to make this noble sacrifice for the sake of his young family.

  She was, in reality, seriously considering divorce. As she faced turning forty, Hillary felt betrayed in a way that she never had before. It was not so much the women, but the fact that her husband’s unbridled libido had forced a change in their schedule. They would have to wait another four years before reaching for the ultimate prize. “Hillary had been co-governor for years,” said a longtime Arkansas supporter. “She couldn’t wait to be co-President.”

  There was another, more personal issue that now rankled Hillary. As angry as she had been at Betsey Wright for talking her husband out of running, the growing list of Bill’s partners was a wake-up call for Hillary. In light of Bill’s long-standing aversion to wearing a condom, Hillary now worried that he was putting her health at risk in this age of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. She demanded that he be tested for HIV.

  Dorothy Rodham, Diane Blair, and others close to Hillary worried that Hillary was indeed on the verge of ending the marriage. In the end, Hillary, keenly aware of the psychic pain suffered by children of divorce, opted to stay. The shouting matches persisted, however, and Dorothy Rodham worried about what impact the Clintons’ pitched battles were having on Chelsea. According to a Rodham family friend, Chelsea, after listening to her mother smash things and scream “bad words” at Dad, sometimes cried herself to sleep.

  On those many nights when Dad was nowhere to be seen, Chelsea often heard Mom chatting with her coworker Vince Foster. At times it seemed as if Hillary was spending more time with Foster, a childhood friend of Bill’s, than she did with her own husband. A secretary at Rose Law said that as far back as the 1970s, Hillary and Foster behaved “like two people in love”—an observation made by many who knew them.

  L. D. Brown was in a unique position to observe what transpired between Hillary and Foster, whom she kiddingly called “Vincenzo Fosterini” because she thought he looked like a suave Mafia consigliere. A particular favorite of Bill’s, Brown was engaged at the time to Chelsea’s nanny Becky McCoy, daughter of the mansion’s administrator Ann McCoy. Bill took an almost fatherly interest in the young trooper, and would later be instrumental in getting Brown a job with the CIA.

  According to Brown and other members of the Clintons’ security detail, no sooner would Bill leave the mansion than Foster would show up to spend time with Hillary. Often, he would not leave until the following morning.

  In a sentiment echoed by many others, Brown was “just amazed at how public they were about their affair. All their friends knew exactly what was going on.” On one occasion, Vince and his wife, Lisa, were leaving a restaurant with the Clintons and another couple. While the others walked ahead, Hillary and Foster lagged behind. Brown, walking directly behind them, saw Foster groping Hillary’s behind. “He’d be kissing her—and I mean real heavy, open-mouthed, tongue-down-the-throat stuff—and then he winked at me. They didn’t care who knew.”

  At another Little Rock restaurant—this time to celebrate Hillary’s birthday—Hillary was seated at the bar when, according to Larry Patterson, Foster grabbed Hillary’s behind with both hands and squeezed. Then he gave Patterson a wink and made the “okay” sign with his thumb and forefinger. Moments later, Foster placed his hand over one of Hillary’s breasts and again winked at Patterson.

  Brown, who was exempt from much of the verbal abuse Hi
llary heaped on the troopers because of his relationship with Chelsea’s nanny, was convinced that Foster and Hillary were not just lovers. “Hillary and Vince were two people who were obviously deeply in love,” he said. “I saw them locked in each other’s arms, necking, nuzzling…. Vince was a great, great guy, and he was just totally devoted to Hillary in a way that Bill never was.”

  According to numerous sources, the affair intensified following Bill’s decision not to run in 1988. Now the troopers were driving Hillary and Vince to the mountain resort of Huber Springs, where their law firm owned a cabin. There the couple spent hours alone while the troopers waited outside. “I guess Hillary figured that if we did this for her husband,” Brown said, “then we damn well better keep our mouths shut and do it for her.”

  Revenge played a role in Hillary’s relationship with Foster, certainly. “Here was Bill screwing all these women right under her nose,” said a former employee of Rose Law who worked with Hillary, “and what was she supposed to do, nothing? Vince and Hillary had a very warm friendship and intellectual respect for each other to start with. There was always affection there, but it probably wouldn’t have gone to the next level if it weren’t for all the crap she had to put up with from her husband.”

  There was considerable speculation concerning Lisa Foster, mother of Vince’s three children. “Lisa loved Vince,” said a neighbor, “but there had to have been some jealousy there. Vince and Hillary were around each other at the law firm, and on top of that he ran to the Governor’s Mansion whenever she snapped her fingers. Would any wife be happy having to put up with that?”