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

  In an unguarded moment, Hillary apparently felt compelled to explain her relationship with Foster to Brown. “There are some things you have to get outside your marriage that you can’t get in it,” she told him. “L.D., sometimes you just have to make a leap of faith.” (Years later, after Vince Foster’s death, Barbara Walters asked Hillary point-blank, “Were you lovers?” Hillary hesitated. “I miss him very much,” she answered, never denying the assertion. “And I just wish he could be left in peace, because he was a wonderful man to everyone who knew him.”)

  Hillary never allowed her own extramarital activities to cloud her political judgment, however. Hillary had seen to it that Bill threw his weight behind the candidate who would go on to clinch the Democratic nomination, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. Now it looked as if the Clintons would be going to the 1988 convention in Atlanta after all, to deliver the prime-time nominating speech.

  As Hillary and Bill stepped up to the podium to essentially make their debut before a national audience, she wondered aloud if the houselights would go down as they had for previous speakers. They wouldn’t. She asked if Dukakis’s floor leaders would ask delegates to listen. They didn’t. And she worried that the speech, expanded and approved by the Dukakis camp, was too long. It was.

  For thirty-three unbearable minutes, Bill prattled on as the crowd booed, hissed, and hollered for him to get off the stage. Hillary smelled conspiracy—instantly. Was this, she wondered, a preemptive strike against a Democrat who might give Dukakis competition in the future? “It was one of the most agonizing moments in my life,” she said, blissfully unaware of all that was to come, “because I knew we had been misled, and I couldn’t figure out why.” There was thunderous applause for only one line in Bill’s speech: “And now, in conclusion…” Backstage after the speech, Hillary watched in wide-eyed silence as her husband accused “that little Greek motherfucker” Dukakis of sabotaging him.

  Crushed, Betsey Wright flew home to Arkansas, certain that she had just witnessed the annihilation of her boss’s career. Hillary, in a state of shock, returned alone to the Clintons’ hotel. Bill lingered on and, according to Larry Patterson, groped an attractive young woman before slipping into a room with her and locking the door. “Sex was his drug,” he said. “Hillary had to have known that.”

  Searching for a way to undo the damage, Hillary enlisted the help of their TV producer friends Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth Thomason. Eight days after the convention debacle that had made him the laughingstock of the country, Bill went on Johnny Carson to make fun of himself and play the saxophone. “Yet another comeback,” declared Hillary, beaming.

  Hillary grew impatient as the 1990 governor’s race approached and Bill, bored and edgy after a decade in office, refused to commit to running for a sixth term. Hillary and Dick Morris thought he should. It would be easier to run for President as a sitting governor in 1992 than as a private citizen, they argued, and if he lost he could always return to the Governor’s Mansion and wait for the next opportunity.

  Betsey Wright, however, quarreled bitterly with Hillary over this issue; she believed that Bill’s sex life was a time bomb waiting to explode, and that as governor he would only invite scrutiny by the press. Wright’s brusque style had alienated many key figures in Clinton’s administration, but it apparently took this falling-out with Hillary to send her packing.

  Hillary might not have agreed with Wright’s doom-and-gloom prognosis, but she suffered nonetheless. Things came to a head when her husband met and fell in love with a stunning blond divorcée named Marilyn Jo Jenkins. An executive with the Arkansas utilities company Entergy, Jenkins was connected by marriage to one of Arkansas’s wealthiest families. Bill and Marilyn Jo would later deny that theirs was anything more than a close friendship, though there was much evidence to the contrary.

  When he wasn’t visiting her at her apartment at the Shadow Oaks Condominium or spending hours talking to her on the phone, Bill was sneaking Jenkins into the mansion—even as Hillary slept upstairs. One of the troopers, Danny Ferguson, would later swear under oath that Clinton confessed his love for Jenkins. “It’s tough,” he told Ferguson, “to be in love with both your wife and another woman.”

  Betsey Wright viewed Clinton’s relationship with Jenkins as “profoundly disruptive.” Hillary certainly felt so, and she confronted her husband about this new threat to their marriage. In a dispassionate call to Dick Morris, Bill conceded that his marriage was faltering and wanted to know what impact divorce would have on his political future. “He didn’t sound particularly upset, not at all,” Morris remembered. “Just very cool, very analytical.”

  Bill’s reluctance to run in 1990 and the emergence of this new threat in the form of Marilyn Jo Jenkins pushed Hillary to the edge of despair. In a last-ditch attempt to save their marriage—and force Bill to deal with what he would later concede was his sexual addiction—Hillary convinced him to go with her for counseling from a Methodist minister. Bill was reluctant at first, until he overheard a comment Chelsea made to her mother while wrapping Christmas presents. “Mommy,” she asked, “why doesn’t Daddy love you anymore?”

  For Hillary, the entire period between 1983 and 1989 had apparently been so painful that she either blotted it out of her memory or consciously chose to ignore it. Out of the 562 pages that make up her autobiography, fewer than five pages are devoted to these six crucial years.

  The Methodist marriage counselor apparently worked wonders; Hillary emerged after several emotional sessions to proclaim that she and Bill had recommitted themselves to the marriage. She had no inkling that almost immediately Bill would be back on the phone to Jenkins, and over the course of just three months sneak her into the basement of the Governor’s Mansion no fewer than four times.

  Still, Hillary managed to convince herself that they were back on track—politically as well as maritally. She also saw a clear road ahead in the quest for the presidency. But first, she would have to deal with her husband’s reluctance to run for a sixth term as governor.

  Before she was banished from the Clintons’ inner circle, Wright had actually floated the idea that Hillary would make a superb governor. Hillary would later claim she had no interest in pursuing the governorship, or any other elective office, for that matter. “I don’t want to run for office,” she told a reporter. “I had dozens of people call me and tell me to run. But it just wasn’t anything I was interested in.”

  In reality, Hillary was eager to run, and told her husband and his staff she intended to do so if he didn’t. Dick Morris was asked to do a poll, and the results were unmistakable: a vast majority of voters did not approve of Hillary running. Disbelieving, Hillary insisted that a follow-up poll be done. Again, voters nixed the idea.

  Even when Bill did grudgingly agree to run yet again, it was Hillary who went out to do battle with his foe in the primaries, Rockefeller Foundation policy analyst Tom McRae. As television cameras recorded the encounter, Hillary crashed a McRae press conference and then proceeded to upbraid him for unfairly attacking her husband. The supposedly spontaneous debate—Hillary insisted she was just passing by—had not only been carefully planned but rehearsed by the governor’s wife.

  Hillary’s bold move did little to help her husband, and for a time it looked like he might not even win his party’s nomination. Once again, Hillary watched as Bill lashed out at his subordinates and advisers for failing him. In May of 1990 he accused Dick Morris of talking him into running and then abandoning him. “You’re screwing me!” he bellowed at Morris, who replied with “Go fuck yourself” before storming out of the room. Hillary, realizing how valuable Morris could be in a presidential race, pleaded with Bill to calm down. Instead, he lunged at Morris and pulled him to the floor. Then, Morris recalled of the incident, Clinton “cocked his fist back to punch me.”

  At that point Hillary, shouting for Bill to get control of himself, pulled her husband off Morris. As Morris got up and tried to make his escape, Hillary chased
after him. “He didn’t mean it,” she pleaded. “He’s very sorry. He’s overtired…. He hasn’t slept well in days.” Then she put her arm around the shaken adviser and together they walked the grounds of the Governor’s Mansion. “He only does that,” she told Morris, “to people he loves.” (Two years later, at the height of Clinton’s presidential campaign, it looked as if the story of Clinton’s assault on Morris might find its way into print. Hillary instructed Morris to “say it never happened.”)

  Hillary made certain Morris was kept in the loop throughout the 1990 election. But when it was time to consider a run for the presidency, Morris recommended to Hillary that they hire James Carville to manage the campaign.

  To get reelected, Bill followed Hillary’s advice and pledged not to run for President in 1992. Bill would, the Clintons both vowed to the people of Arkansas, serve out his four-year term as governor. Yet even before her husband trounced his Republican opponent, Little Rock lawyer Sheffield Nelson, Hillary was mapping out a strategy to win the nomination. “She always thought,” Bill later said of his wife’s early determination, “that the right kind of Democrat would have an opportunity to be elected in 1992—always.”

  Not even George H. W. Bush’s 90 percent approval ratings following the Gulf War were enough to dampen Hillary’s enthusiasm. “It was amazing,” Bill recalled. “That’s one where her instinct was right and I didn’t feel that way for the longest time.”

  Hillary was rightly convinced that President Bush was vulnerable on domestic issues in general and health care in particular. While they were seated next to each other at a dinner, Bush had expressed shock when Hillary informed him that the U.S. placed nineteenth in terms of infant mortality, behind such countries as France and Japan. The next day, he passed a note to Bill. “Tell Hillary,” it read, “she was right.”

  “HRC”—or “Herc,” as she was sometimes referred to—quickly assembled a campaign staff made up largely of friends and classmates from Wellesley and Yale. “It was her team, all right,” said one volunteer, “right down to that horrible Susan Thomases.” A partner in the prestigious New York law firm of Wilkie, Farr & Gallagher and Hillary’s most influential staff member, Thomases was described by others inside and outside the Clinton team as tactless, profane, and demanding. A Washington Post reporter covering the primaries walked into Clinton headquarters to find a campaign worker holding a phone receiver aloft so Thomases’s shrieked obscenities could be heard clearly by everyone in the room.

  Hillary also called on Maggie Williams, who had worked with her on the Children’s Defense Fund, and Brooke Shearer, the wife of Bill’s Oxford roommate (and future deputy secretary of state) Strobe Talbott. These women would form the core of what would be known by friend and foe alike as “Hillaryland.”

  In the company of these well-educated, like-minded liberal women, Hillary was pleasant, even laid-back. This would be in stark contrast to the way she continued to treat the unfortunate men whose task it was to protect her. On Labor Day morning 1991, Hillary was pulling away from the Governor’s Mansion when she noticed that the troopers had not yet raised the American flag. She turned the car around, jumped out, and yelled, “Where is the goddamn fucking flag? I want the goddamn fucking flag raised every fucking morning at fucking sunrise!”

  By then, of course, the pressure was getting to her. To head off the inevitable charges of infidelity, Hillary had accompanied Bill to the Sperling Breakfast, a regular gathering of influential Washington journalists. Together, they admitted their marriage had not been perfect, but insisted that they intended to be together “thirty or forty years from now.”

  What no one in the room—including Hillary—realized was that, just a few months earlier at Little Rock’s Excelsior Hotel, Bill had unzipped his pants and demanded oral sex from a twenty-four-year-old secretary named Paula Jones. There had been so many Paula Joneses in Bill Clinton’s life, he did not suspect that this one would have far-reaching consequences for his marriage and his presidency.

  Hillary also worried that Bill would be slammed for breaking his promise to the citizens of Arkansas that he would serve out his term as governor. Again at Hillary’s urging, he barnstormed the state for a week, apologizing to voters for breaking his pledge but explaining to them that as President he could better the nation—and bring federal projects and the jobs that went with them back home to Arkansas.

  Scarcely a month after Hillary watched her husband announce his candidacy for President, their campaign was hit with its first sex allegations—and from a source that no one in the Clinton camp anticipated. In a Penthouse article entitled “Confessions of a Rock ’n’ Roll Groupie,” Little Rock’s Connie Hamzy described her sexual encounters with the likes of Don Henley, Keith Moon, and Huey Lewis. She also revealed that in 1984 Bill Clinton was giving a speech at a Little Rock hotel when he spotted her lounging by the pool. Hamzy claimed Clinton made a pass, saying “I want to get with you,” and some mutual “fondling” ensued. To prove her version of events, Hamzy later submitted to a polygraph test—and passed.

  Amazingly, prior to the magazine’s publication, Hamzy tipped off Hillary through a mutual acquaintance at the Rose Law Firm. This gave Hillary time to grill her husband on what transpired. Bill made light of the incident, claiming that it was Hamzy who approached him, pulling down her bikini top to reveal her breasts.

  Hillary was not amused. “We have to destroy her story,” she said bluntly, asking if there was anyone who would debunk Hamzy’s version of events. Within hours, Hillary had lined up a state legislator who was willing to go on record as saying that he was there, and that Hamzy was lying.

  Hamzy was furious at the campaign to discredit her, and promised to deliver the full story in her memoirs. Conveniently for the Clintons, Hamzy’s autobiography never made it to bookstores after an unidentified group of Little Rock “investors” hastily acquired the rights.

  With their first official “bimbo eruption”—a memorable phrase coined by Betsey Wright—behind them, the Clintons hit the campaign trail together. From the start, they sold themselves as a team. “If you vote for my husband, you get me,” she told crowds. “It’s a two-for-one blue plate special.”

  Not everyone was charmed by the idea of Hillary selling herself as “co-President.” Richard Nixon, whom Hillary still viewed as “evil,” told the New York Times that “if the wife comes on as too strong and too intelligent, it makes the husband look like a wimp.” Hillary, confident that Americans loved the idea of a husband and wife sharing power in the White House, dismissed Nixon’s cautionary observation. “Tricky Dick” was a bitter old man, she told campaign staffers, who was merely trying to take revenge on one of the people who had helped bring down his presidency.

  Nixon was to be the least of her worries. While Hillary was campaigning in Atlanta, she received a call from Bill telling her that “a woman named Gennifer Flowers” was saying they had had a twelve-year-long affair. The story was out in that day’s edition of the Star. She asked him if the story was true. He said no.

  Just a week earlier, Gennifer had acquiesced to Bill’s wishes and denied the rumors. Now, Bill told his wife, it appeared Flowers had taken money to change her story. “Then we have nothing to worry about,” Hillary said. “No one will believe her.”

  Trouble was, Flowers claimed she had audiotapes of their phone conversations to substantiate her story. At campaign headquarters in Little Rock, James Carville and Deputy Campaign Director George Stephanopoulos were desperate, and would have been more so had they known that Bill had actually phoned Flowers after the first tabloid story hit the stands.

  Hillary’s husband seemed oblivious to the fact that his campaign staff was going into a free fall. That same day, she arranged for a conference call from Atlanta and exhorted the troops to “get back to work.”

  But there was no way to sweep the Gennifer Flowers story under the carpet. Soon Hillary, who years later was still dismissing her husband’s affair with Flowers as “a whale of a
tale,” reached the conclusion that something had to be done before the New Hampshire primary.

  Hillary huddled with the Clinton team—including Harry Thomason, political strategist Paul Begala, Stephanopoulos, and Carville—and it was agreed that they appear on CBS’s 60 Minutes to deal with the Gennifer Flowers story head-on. The interview would be conducted that Sunday morning at Boston’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and air that evening right after the Super Bowl.

  The interview with CBS’s Steve Kroft had barely begun when a heavy light pole began to collapse. Bill pulled Hillary out of harm’s way just as the pole smashed to the floor. Hillary, shaken but also keenly aware that this dramatic moment was being captured on tape, clung to her husband as he lovingly reassured her that she was okay. “I’ve got you,” he whispered to her. “Don’t worry. You’re okay, I love you.”

  “It was a tense moment,” remembered a CBS crew member. “But was Hillary milking it? Absolutely.” Later, she complained when the network decided not to air footage of the accident. “I wish they had,” she told her friend Diane Blair. “It would have shown everyone how much we really do love each other.”

  What CBS did air was Clinton’s masterful parsing of words, a technique that allowed him to appear to deny the allegations without actually denying them.

  Hillary had agreed with their advisers that the best way to handle the situation was simply to admit that there had been problems in their marriage, and that they had overcome them. But as Kroft kept gently probing for specifics about Flowers, the candidate’s wife grew noticeably more impatient.

  Kroft asked if Flowers was a friend, an acquaintance. “Does your wife know her?”

  “Oh, sure,” Hillary interjected.

  “Yes,” Bill said, looking sheepish. “She was an acquaintance, I would say a friendly acquaintance….”