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

  Later, Hillary joined in. “When this woman first got caught up in these charges, I felt as I’ve felt about all of these women [all of these women?]: that they…had just been minding their own business and they got hit by a meteor…. I feel terrible about what was happening to them. Bill talked to this woman every time she called, distraught, saying her life was going to be ruined, and…he’d get off the phone and tell me that she said sort of wacky things, which we thought were attributable to the fact that she was terrified.”

  Hillary, who had delivered a thinly veiled threat to Juanita Broaddrick and repeatedly vowed to destroy the credibility of any woman who came forward, managed to make Flowers seem sympathetic if slightly deranged.

  Kroft again asked if Bill was categorically denying an affair with Flowers. “I’ve said that before, and so has she,” Bill replied. In other words, previously they had both categorically denied the affair—not that he was actually denying it now.

  “The problem with the answer is it’s not a denial,” Kroft continued.

  Bill continued to squirm, and was fumbling for an answer when Hillary interrupted again. “There isn’t a person watching this who would feel comfortable sitting here on this couch detailing everything that ever went on in their life or their marriage. And I think it’s real dangerous in this country if we don’t have some zone of privacy for everyone….”

  Hillary did not speak up again until Kroft said that he thought it was “admirable” that the Clintons had come to some sort of “arrangement” in their marriage. Protesting the use of the word arrangement, Hillary said, “You know, I’m not sitting here—some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I’m sitting here because I love him, and I honor what we’ve been through together. And, you know, if that’s not enough for people, then heck, don’t vote for him.”

  Hillary’s “Stand by Your Man” reference was a misstep; Wynette wrote an angry letter to Hillary, and Hillary was forced to publicly apologize to the Nashville legend for offending her and countless country-western fans. Otherwise, Hillary’s performance was convincing enough to save her husband’s candidacy.

  Steve Kroft, for one, had no doubt who was guiding the direction of the crucial 60 Minutes interview. Hillary, he recalled, “was in control. Hillary is tougher and more disciplined than Bill is. And she’s more analytical.”

  A sense of euphoria swept over the Clinton camp, but it didn’t last long. The next day, Hillary was sitting in her hotel suite in Pierre, South Dakota, watching Gennifer Flowers play tapes of her conversations with Bill at a televised press conference. The voice was unmistakably Bill’s, and the conversations were hushed, intimate.

  Hillary—calm, collected, analytical—called Bill and talked strategy. Flowers had reportedly been paid $100,000 to tell her story to the Star, and Bill was counting on that fact alone to discredit her. “Hillary, who’s going to believe this woman?” he asked.

  Of course, none of this could disguise the fact that it was Bill’s voice on the tapes—that had been authenticated by an independent laboratory—and that, in addition to the many whispered confidences between them, Bill affectionately called Flowers “baby.”

  The fact of Bill’s infidelity, not to mention his shockingly inept handling of Flowers, were of no concern to Hillary. She arranged for another one of her famous conference calls and roused the troops to action. It was too bad she couldn’t get Flowers on the witness stand, Hillary complained. “I’d crucify her,” she said.

  While Bill flew off to Little Rock to escort eleven-year-old Chelsea to a father-daughter dance, Hillary led the attack on ABC’s Prime Time Live, where she ignored all the evidence and lamely insinuated that the tapes had been faked. Dolly Kyle Browning, meanwhile, was being warned that she would be “destroyed” if she accepted a similar six-figure offer from the tabloids.

  After their brief falling-out, Betsey Wright had been brought back to ride herd on the scandals that threatened to overtake the campaign. Chief among her responsibilities was to nip any more “bimbo eruptions” in the bud. Several private investigators were put on retainer to help out, most notably the San Francisco–based husband-wife team of Jack Palladino and Sandra Sutherland.

  First on Palladino’s list was former Miss Arkansas Sally Perdue. He contacted dozens of friends and relatives until he unearthed one eager to go on the record attacking her virtue. Palladino was not Perdue’s only problem. She was also receiving threatening letters, including one that read, “Marilyn Monroe got snuffed.” When the rear windshield of her Jeep was shattered by a shotgun blast, Perdue fled the country.

  The skillful use of private detectives, opposition researchers, and other covert operatives would become part and parcel of Hillary’s modus operandi. Eventually, Dick Morris observed, Hillary built up a “secret police” for the purposes of conducting a “systematic campaign to intimidate, frighten, threaten, discredit, and punish innocent Americans whose only misdeed is their desire to tell the truth.”

  Hillary was not surprised that Bill’s girlfriends would constitute a major—if not insurmountable—problem. She was blindsided, however, by the release of Bill’s 1969 letter to Colonel Holmes thanking him for “saving me from the draft.” Clinton denied the Wall Street Journal’s allegation that he had actually received an induction notice before pulling strings to get into the ROTC. Hillary believed him. So did James Carville and George Stephanopoulos—until a copy of the induction notice was unearthed. Although Stephanopoulos would later say he was so upset by the notice that he went to bed and hid under the covers, Hillary shrugged it off.

  Although Hillary and Bill seldom traveled together during the campaign, she kept a watchful eye on the company he kept. The attractive flight attendants aboard Longhorn One, the chartered Boeing 727 that served as the Clintons’ campaign plane, had been instructed to wait on the plane while the candidate disembarked. “It is important,” she said, “that Bill not be photographed leaving the plane with a stewardess—or any woman, for that matter.” To his chagrin, Hillary also ordered the staff to make separate sleeping arrangements for the flight crew. “I don’t want these women staying at the same hotel,” she said.

  That did not stop Bill from continually making passes at the flight attendants—fondling one, Cristy Zercher, while Hillary snored loudly just a couple of yards away. When the stories about what went on aboard Longhorn One began to percolate years later, Zercher was contacted by the White House and asked not to talk. Not long after, someone broke into her apartment and stole just two things: Zercher’s diary, and photos she had taken of Bill Clinton aboard the plane.

  Bill always seemed to find time for his “hobby,” in large part because Hillary was, as Vince Foster said, “doing all the heavy lifting.” With good reason. With the Clintons’ ironically named “Truth Squad” out to vilify any woman who dared to go public about Bill’s sexual escapades, Hillary was now a lightning rod for criticism.

  While the candidate remained aloof on the subject of Whitewater—the term used to describe both the failure of Madison Guaranty as well as the land development deal itself—Hillary was left to explain that Whitewater had left them $68,900 in the red. “If we did something improper,” she said, “then how come we lost money?”

  No sooner had the Tammy Wynette flap begun to die down than she came under fire for alleged conflicts of interest stemming from her work at the Rose Law Firm. Chief among these was the $115,000 fee paid to Hillary’s firm to represent the Arkansas Public Service Commission in the state’s nuclear power dispute with Louisiana. The commissioners, it turned out, had all been appointed by her husband. “You know,” she shot back, “I suppose I could have stayed at home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession….”

  Backpedaling furiously over the next few weeks, Hillary tried to explain that she was not attacking stay-at-home moms. Still, there was no disguising the fact that Hillary had always surrounded herself with professional women and had frequently vo
iced contempt for “those women like Barbara Bush.”

  By the spring of 1992, polls were showing that Hillary—whose stump speeches often made it sound as if she were the one running for office—had become a major liability to the campaign. Two thirds of voters disapproved of a First Lady sharing power with her husband, and 26 percent just flat-out didn’t like Hillary. That sentiment was reflected in the hundreds of disapproving letters Hillary was receiving. One went so far as to brand her “The Antichrist.”

  “I adopted my own mantra,” Hillary later said of this baptism by fire. “Take criticism seriously, but not personally.” In reality, no one took criticism more personally than Hillary. “By the time this is over,” she warned her daughter, “they’ll attack me, they’ll attack you, they’ll attack your cat, they’ll attack your goldfish.”

  In stark contrast to Barbara Bush, who adamantly refused to alter her appearance in any way to cater to public tastes, Hillary enlisted the Thomasons’ help to revamp her image. Arriving in Los Angeles to campaign for the California primary, Hillary willingly placed herself in the hands of Cliff Chally, who did the costumes for Designing Women, and the hairdresser Christophe Schatteman (better known simply as “Christophe”).

  Hillary emerged from the first all-day makeover session with a new wardrobe of pastel power suits and a shorter, honey blond coif. Gone forever were the trademark headbands that seemed to peg Hillary as a humorless, drab, power-hungry career woman.

  Hillary would undergo many transformations over the years; the changes in her coiffure alone would spawn an immensely popular “Hillary’s Hair” Web site. But the new, more feminine and sophisticated-looking Hillary also had a new line. Gone were all references to power sharing. At least for the time being, Hillary’s most important role was that of wife and mother. (Tellingly, Hillary was not pleased when the new stationery—blue letters on a cream background—came back with HILLARY CLINTON emblazoned across the top instead of HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON. After absorbing Hillary’s wrath, a hapless campaign aide placed a new order reinstating Hillary’s maiden name.)

  When it came time for her husband to accept his party’s nomination at New York’s Madison Square Garden, Hillary looked on with the kind of adoring smile practiced to perfection by another powerful woman behind the scenes, Nancy Reagan.

  Now, with vice presidential candidate Al Gore’s wholesomely appealing wife Tipper at her side, Hillary posed for photographers sipping tea at the Waldorf, and even competed against Barbara Bush in a cookie bake-off. Hillary gushed appropriately when she won, but failed to mention that she didn’t actually bake her cookies. A friend’s cook did.

  Away from the prying cameras and microphones, it was a very different Hillary who acted as the campaign’s chief strategist, head cheerleader, and, when necessary, high executioner. Though she would later shy away from taking credit for it, it was Hillary who first called Clinton’s campaign nerve center—which took up the entire third floor of Little Rock’s old Arkansas Gazette Building—“The War Room.” And she meant it. “Hillary is strictly a take-no-prisoners kind of person,” said one top aide. “The world to her is divided into two groups: our friends and the people we want dead.”

  Hillary valued loyalty above all else, and did not shy away from coming down hard on even senior staffers if she felt they weren’t working all-out for the cause. Not even Bill was immune. Hillary nagged him mercilessly about his weight (“For God’s sake, try and exercise a little self-control, Bill”) and scolded him constantly for not demanding enough from his staff. Oblivious to the presence of others in the room, Hillary often stormed up to Bill, shoved her finger in his face, and let fly with a string of paint-peeling epithets.

  Yet, as the election drew near, Hillary and Bill portrayed themselves as the very picture of marital bliss. “If there was a camera within a thousand yards,” said one campaign worker, “Hillary would squeeze his hand or whisper in his ear. Once I was standing close enough to make out what she was saying. ‘Just keep smiling until these assholes get their pictures.’ She never stopped smiling….”

  The minute they were out of camera range, “Hillary didn’t just let go of his hand. She practically threw it back at him. You didn’t get the feeling he liked the lovey-dovey stuff any more than she did.”

  To be sure, there was the occasional tender husband-and-wife moment witnessed by members of the Clintons’ inner circle. “I saw them nuzzling a couple of times,” said one, “and he even talked baby talk to her. But even then you had to wonder if this was for our benefit, too.”

  The affectionate embrace seemed genuine enough when, at 10:47 P.M. on Election Day, all three television networks declared Bill Clinton the winner with 43 percent of the popular vote (Bush received 38 percent, and independent candidate Ross Perot 19 percent). Sitting at the kitchen table in the Governor’s Mansion—now master control for the President-elect’s transition team—Hillary weighed in on every major appointment, starting with the selection of Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen as treasury secretary.

  Hillary resigned from the Rose Law Firm and began “grappling,” as she put it, with what her role would be in the new administration. Early in the campaign she had talked to Bill about a cabinet post—until it was pointed out that antinepotism laws passed after JFK appointed his brother Bobby attorney general made such an appointment impossible. Hillary then told her husband she wouldn’t mind being his chief of staff, the job that, in effect, she had been doing ever since he went into politics. But Dick Morris and others pointed out that this would put Bill in a difficult position, since he had to feel free to fire his chief of staff if necessary. Hillary then asked if he would appoint her chief domestic policy adviser. But Bill’s senior staff, reluctant to see her appointed to any formal position, quickly shot that down as well. (No matter. Hillary’s longtime aide, Carol Rasco, got the job. Rasco made certain that Hillary was kept very much in the loop.)

  Hillary resigned herself to, as she put it, “having a ‘position’ but not a real job.” There were, she hastened to add, “no laws to prevent me from continuing my role as Bill Clinton’s unpaid adviser and, in some cases, representative.”

  And, in other cases, his probation officer. During the staged farewell ceremony at Little Rock Airport, Hillary noticed that Trooper Patterson had ushered one of Bill’s girlfriends onto the tarmac. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” she asked Patterson. “I know who that whore is…. Get her out of here!”

  Tensions between Hillary and Bill mounted once they arrived in Washington. On the eve of the inauguration, members of the staff at Blair House cringed as the next President and First Lady argued loudly about office space. Hillary had been led to believe that she would be getting the West Wing Office traditionally occupied by the Vice President. Not surprisingly, Al Gore protested, and Bill reneged on his promise to Hillary.

  Yet Hillary was not about to settle for dominion over the residential and ceremonial East Wing, traditional First Lady territory. If she couldn’t have the Vice President’s office, then she insisted on and got one next door to the White House counsel’s office—and directly above the Oval Office. The First Lady would also maintain a large suite in the Old Executive Office Building. In previous administrations, portraits of the President and Vice President were displayed side by side. But like Evita, Hillary decreed that her portrait—rather than Al Gore’s—hang next to the President’s.

  The strain was especially evident the next morning at Blair House, when for the first time Hillary—not the chronically tardy Bill—was holding up the show. As he waited outside, Bill shook his head and muttered to himself, “That fucking bitch.” The comment was not picked up by microphones but clearly audible to those standing nearby. So was Hillary’s reply, delivered as she slid into their waiting car, “You stupid motherfucker!”

  A few days after the inauguration, Hillary flew to New York to get some advice from another First Lady driven to the brink of divorce by a philandering spouse. Jacqueline Kennedy Onas
sis had been enamored of the Clintons ever since she saw the footage of a sixteen-year-old Bill shaking JFK’s hand in the Rose Garden. Now, over lunch at Jackie’s elegant Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum, Hillary took pointers on how to deal with her loss of privacy, and how to go about giving Chelsea something approaching a normal childhood.

  “You’ve got to protect Chelsea at all costs,” Jackie said. “Don’t let her think she’s someone special or entitled. Keep the press away from her if you can, and don’t let anyone use her.”

  For Chelsea, the adjustment to life inside the White House was remarkably smooth—in large part because of the constant presence of her live-in nanny and companion Helen Dickey. The First Daughter invited friends for sleepovers, ordered take-out food from the local Domino’s, rode her bike around the White House grounds, and gobbled down popcorn as she watched first-run features in the White House theater.

  The public outcry was predictable when Hillary, that self-proclaimed champion of public education, sent Chelsea to Sidwell Friends, a Quaker private school. It was the only way, Hillary claimed, they could protect Chelsea from intrusive journalists and paparazzi.

  Taking Jackie’s advice to heart, Hillary went further, essentially barring the press from any access to Chelsea. The ploy worked. For the next four years, levelheaded, even-tempered, well-adjusted Chelsea would not only survive life in the White House fishbowl, but flourish.

  Chelsea’s mother and father would have a much less easy time of it. Just days after the inauguration, respected White House physician Dr. Burton Lee refused to give the President an allergy shot without first seeing his medical records. Hillary ordered Dr. Lee fired on the spot, and gave him two hours to clear out his office.

  The abrupt dismissal of Dr. Lee raised questions about Clinton’s medical history that would never be fully resolved; during his entire tenure in the White House, he would never open his medical records for scrutiny, as so many of his predecessors had. It also sent a message that the new First Lady demanded nothing less than total loyalty—and blind obedience.