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

  Unlike other First Ladies, who downplayed their influence, Hillary went to considerable lengths to let people know that, with the exception of her husband, she wielded more power than anyone in the executive branch. She insisted that her chief of staff, Maggie Williams, also be named special assistant to the President—in essence the First Lady’s personal emissary at all high-level meetings.

  Williams, who had done work for the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), and domestic policy adviser Carol Rasco were not the only FOHs (Friends of Hillary) to occupy key posts in the administration. Former CDF Chairman Donna Shalala was tapped by Hillary to be the new secretary of health and human services, while Hillary’s Wellesley pal Eleanor Acheson was put in charge of all nominees for the federal bench and FOH Margaret Richardson was named head of the Internal Revenue Service.

  Hillary also rewarded her two closest colleagues at the Rose Law Firm: Webb Hubble, given the number three spot at Justice, and Vince Foster, who as deputy White House counsel would occupy the office next to Hillary’s. At first Foster, whose roots were deeply planted in Arkansas, declined. But Hillary’s pleas were so impassioned (“We need you, Vince. I need you”) that he ultimately relented. It was a decision he would almost immediately regret.

  More senior White House aides were assigned to Hillary than to Al Gore—and with reason. She sat in on staff meetings, controlled the President’s schedule, and interviewed job candidates. The First Lady “has in many cases served functionally the way a Chief of Staff would in terms of accountability and discipline,” a top administration official told noted Washington journalist Elizabeth Drew. “She has made the point openly in his presence. What she does privately I can only imagine.”

  Her own no-nonsense management style notwithstanding, Hillary would veer along with her husband from one fresh scandal to another. Even before the Clintons moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, they had to contend with the “Nannygate”—the disclosure that Bill’s attorney general designate, Zoë Baird, hired illegal aliens for her household staff and then failed to pay their Social Security taxes despite a $500,000 annual income. The Clintons’ next candidate for the job, Playboy-bunny-turned-New-York-jurist Kimba Wood, withdrew her name when it was revealed that she had also hired an illegal immigrant. Janet Reno, the dogged chief prosecutor of Dade County, Florida, finally passed muster, fulfilling Hillary’s wish that a woman hold the nation’s top law enforcement job.

  Increasingly, it became clear that Hillary was in fact the source of many of Bill’s problems during that first year in office. Bill ran into trouble again when he followed Hillary’s advice and lifted the ban on gays in the military. When she summoned her hairdresser to Los Angeles Airport to give Bill a $200 haircut aboard Air Force One, the President was criticized for causing an air-traffic tie-up.

  Hillary also concocted the plan to fire longtime White House travel staffers and replace them with Catherine Cornelius, a distant relative of Bill’s, and an agency owned by their Hollywood pals the Thomasons. She also launched an investigation into allegations—which later proved baseless—that the Travel Office holdovers from the Reagan and Bush administrations had been taking kickbacks.

  When someone questioned the wisdom of axing reputable White House staffers for the apparent purpose of diverting government business to their cronies, White House assistant to the President David Watkins warned there would be “hell to pay if we failed to take swift and decisive action in conformity with the first lady’s wishes.”

  “Travelgate” would trigger yet another investigation into the administration’s motives and methods. It would also ultimately claim the life of someone Hillary loved dearly.

  It was one thing for Hillary to summarily dismiss the entire Travel Office staff, and quite another to impose her will on the Secret Service. Not that she didn’t try. During the transition, members of the Secret Service detail assigned to guard the President-elect (code name: “Eagle”) were shocked by the Clintons’ behavior. Unlike the state troopers who had done his bidding for years, the agents were not willing to participate with Clinton in rating women, much less approach them on his behalf. Nor were they willing to caddy, go on shopping errands, or carry baggage—tasks that might prevent them from concentrating on their principal job: to protect the President. When an agent explained this to Hillary (code name: “Evergreen”) after their plane touched down in Arkansas, she looked him over carefully. “If you want to remain on this detail,” she said, “get your fucking ass over here and grab those bags.”

  The agents were equally disturbed by the Clintons’ predilection for squabbling in public. William Bell, a former member of the White House detail, recalled yet another pitched battle as Bill and Hillary rode together in a limousine—he in the front, she in the back. Once again, an enraged Hillary flung a briefing book at Bill, inadvertently hitting the agent behind the wheel in the back of the head.

  Things only seemed to get worse in the White House, where early on Secret Service agents watched in amazement as Hillary picked up a lamp and hurled it at her husband. Fortunately, she missed. When word of the incident was leaked to the press, Hillary banished not only the Secret Service but the domestic staff from the residential floors when members of the First Family were there.

  Although Hillary claimed she was barring staff from the residence to afford Chelsea (Secret Service code name: “Energy”) a level of privacy—something that hadn’t concerned them during their twelve years in the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion—she suspected that many of the agents resented their new bosses. To some extent, she was right. Several viewed Clinton as a draft dodger and antimilitary, a spoiled baby boomer given to childish, self-indulgent tantrums. Hillary was seen as equally foul-tempered, with the kind of longshoreman’s vocabulary they found unbecoming in a First Lady.

  Then there were the scores of Clinton employees whose criminal records, histories of drug use, and otherwise shady back-grounds would have normally made them security risks and ineligible to work in the White House. Circumventing long-standing screening procedures and FBI background checks, the White House counsel’s office gave permanent passes to more than one hundred Clinton appointees who had been denied them by the Secret Service. Fully twenty-one of those asked to take drug tests failed—a number that included top aides to both Bill and Hillary. Instead of being fired on the spot, they were simply asked to undergo testing twice a year—at a time of their choosing.

  Hillary had agreed with the counsel’s opinion that drug abusers suffered from a disability and thereby had a right to employment at the White House. This was in keeping with her role as Hillaryland’s resident mother hen. In that capacity, the First Lady regularly popped into her staffers’ offices to compliment them on their appearance, quiz them about their families, and share gossip. She also presided over birthday parties and baby showers, and at times took obvious pleasure in playing matchmaker.

  “It doesn’t sound very liberated,” said a junior staffer, “but these were her girls. She genuinely cared about them so long as she was convinced they were totally loyal to her and the President. If you wavered for just a second, you were dead. Not fired. You just ceased to exist in her eyes and in her mind. We started calling it ‘Hillary’s Alzheimer’s.’ She’d be looking right at you, but you weren’t there as far as she was concerned. Disloyalty—or anything that could remotely be interpreted that way—was the one unforgivable sin.”

  How Hillary viewed her husband’s disloyalty was another matter. It was not as if he had changed his ways. Now that he resided in what he called “the crown jewel of the federal prison system,” Bill surrounded himself with attractive women who, it was widely assumed, went beyond their job descriptions in serving the President. One of the flight attendants aboard Clinton’s campaign plane, Debra Schiff, landed in the West Wing as a receptionist. A “knockout,” as chief White House steward Mike McGrath described her, Schiff favored a working wardrobe of short skirts, tight sweaters, and high heels. Schiff, who would eventually de
ny having an affair with Clinton, nonetheless spent twenty minutes with him alone in the Oval Office study every morning. Why? “You figure it out,” she replied. Secret Service agent Gary Byrne didn’t have to; one morning he stumbled upon Schiff and the President enjoying each other’s company.

  Schiff was by no means alone. The equally blond and stunning Catherine Cornelius, who was only nineteen when she joined the White House Travel Office, not only accompanied the President when he traveled without Hillary but had unusual access to the Oval Office.

  White House aide Robin Dickey denied having an affair with Clinton, although members of Bill’s Little Rock security detail swore under oath that she admitted to them that she had. Dickey raised eyebrows when she repeatedly showed up at the Oval Office to massage the President’s back.

  Of all Bill’s alleged White House paramours, none was more problematic for Hillary—at least during the Clintons’ first term—than Marsha Scott. The daughter of Philadelphia Eagles football star Clyde “Smackover” Scott and a former Miss Arkansas, Marsha liked to refer to herself as Bill’s “old hippie girlfriend.” Scott, now director of White House correspondence, would eventually admit to spending many nights alone with the President in the family residence.

  The occasional blowup aside, for the most part Hillary turned a blind eye to her husband’s indiscretions. There were, after all, other, more pressing demands on her time. To sell her plan for universal health coverage linked to cost control and preventive health care, Hillary held public hearings, huddled with legislators, and barnstormed the country denouncing the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

  Hillary, who insisted that much of the process take place behind closed doors and away from scrutiny by the press, quickly came under attack for violating sunshine laws. She also refused to invite input from special interest groups, whose support would be needed if there was any hope of getting her Task Force on National Health Care Reform through Congress. This, coupled with Hillary’s blanket refusal to compromise, eventually doomed the Clinton health care package.

  More than a humiliating defeat for Hillary, the gradual implosion of her highly touted health care initiative would embolden those who had vocally opposed the Evita-like concept of a husband-wife co-presidency. Now she faced more inquiries about Whitewater and the collapse of Madison Guaranty. Amid talk of a possible indictment, Hillary broke down during a meeting of Bill’s inner circle. “I know everybody’s looking out for Bill,” she said, choking back tears, “but nobody’s out there fighting for me.”

  No one sympathized with Hillary’s Whitewater woes more than Vince Foster, who suffered an anxiety attack when Zoë Baird bowed out of contention for the post of attorney general. Foster blamed himself for failing Hillary, and slid deeper into depression as the scandals piled up.

  Nevertheless, according to Secret Service agents assigned to protect the First Family at the time, the affair between Hillary and Vince Foster continued at the White House. One claimed to have seen them locked in a passionate embrace inside Foster’s office; another would only acknowledge that he had witnessed enough to convince him that “it was still going on between them, definitely.” The relationship between Hillary and Vince was the subject of endless gossip and speculation among women at the White House, who voted Foster the staff member they would “most like to have an affair with.”

  In addition to the plethora of scandals, Hillary was dealt another blow in March of 1993 when Hugh Rodham suffered a massive stroke. While she was at her father’s bedside in Little Rock agonizing over whether or not to take him off life support, Bill was entertaining his friend Barbra Streisand at the White House. It was only after her father died two weeks later and she returned to Washington that Hillary learned that Streisand had spent the night in the Lincoln Bedroom.

  Hillary was upset that her husband was spending time with one of Hollywood’s biggest stars while she kept a vigil at the bedside of her dying father. The day Hillary returned to Washington, a steward who had been summoned to the second floor made a hasty retreat when he heard shouting and the unmistakable sound of slamming doors. At the following morning’s news briefing, reporters peppered Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers with questions about the wounds clearly evident on the President’s face and neck. Before she ever saw the claw marks, Myers told reporters that Clinton had simply cut himself shaving. “Then I saw him,” Myers later admitted, alluding to the fact that the First Lady was clearly disturbed by Streisand’s presence alone with her husband in the family quarters. “It was a big scratch, and clearly not a shaving cut.”

  Apparently, no one had made it clear to the President which story they were going with. Only hours later, Clinton claimed he had injured himself “rolling around” with his daughter on the floor. Hillary, meantime, barred Streisand from staying at the White House.

  Over the years, the President would suffer numerous unexplained bruises and abrasions, including a sizable goose egg on his forehead. His explanation: “Walked into a door.”

  Presidential handlers laughed off any suggestion that their boss’s wounds might have been the result of anything other than an innocent mishap. But privately, they also wondered aloud if Hillary, whose penchant for aiming objects at her husband’s skull had been well established, was actually capable of spousal abuse.

  Even if the First Lady was battering her husband, there were those who felt he well deserved it. Frankly, Betsey Wright observed, “Hillary’s tolerance for some of his behavior just amazes me.” As dependent as Bill was on Hillary’s decisiveness and her organizational skills—the First Lady’s influence was “overwhelming,” said Clinton’s then-adviser David Gergen—the President made little effort to disguise his feelings of resentment toward her. George Stephanopoulos recalled how the mere mention of Hillary’s name was like “the flipping of a switch.” Aides had no trouble telling when the President was parroting his wife’s opinion, which was often. “Even if he was yelling,” Stephanopoulos said, “his voice had a flat quality, as if he were a high school debater speeding through a series of memorized facts.”

  Early in the day, Gergen observed, the President would be upbeat, “even chipper…. As we started to work, his mood would darken, his attention would wander and hot words would spew out. WHAT, I would wonder, had she said to him now?”

  Bill was not the only one whose mood changed in Hillary’s presence. According to several staffers, Hillary often cut off discussions with “I don’t recall asking your opinion,” or simply, “Who in the hell asked you?” Veteran Clinton watcher Joe Klein observed that, if someone questioned a strategy of Hillary’s, “the First Lady would, with cold fury, tell the questioners to stuff it—Hillary’s plan was THE plan. Bill sat quietly as she bludgeoned respected members of the administration into silence.”

  Still, at her father’s funeral, an emotional Hillary leaned heavily on the two most important men in her life: Bill Clinton and Vince Foster. She would continue to grieve for months, occasionally breaking down in the middle of a staff meeting or a speech.

  Just as often, Hillary’s grief turned to rage. She felt that her aides—especially the friends and associates she brought along from Little Rock—were letting her down. In much the same way that her tantrum-prone husband vented his frustrations on Stephanopoulos virtually every morning, Hillary now complained bitterly and often to forty-eight-year-old Vince. At a May 13, 1993, meeting she snapped at him, “What’s going on? Are you on top of it?”

  In his notes from the meeting, Foster attributed Hillary’s foul temper to “general frustration” that was “aggravated by grief” over the death of her father. She was apparently less concerned with her friend’s well-being, failing to notice that since moving alone to Washington (his wife Lisa remained behind in Little Rock so that their youngest son could finish his junior year in high school), Foster was lonely and suffering from overwork.

  Vince was becoming increasingly afraid that he had failed Hillary, and actively feared that he might be called to
give testimony that would damage the First Lady—either that, or lie under oath to protect her. He also came to believe that his own reputation was being sullied in the process of defending his old Arkansas friends. A colleague described him as becoming “frantic” when the Wall Street Journal ran a piece titled “Who Is Vince Foster?” and illustrated it with a question mark inside a silhouette. Where Hillary lashed out at her attackers, Vince tended to internalize everything. Each article was, as far as he was concerned, a politically motivated attack on his character. “Before we came here,” he said of the Clintons’ Arkansas friends, “we thought of ourselves as good people.”

  There were personal pressures as well. The Foster marriage was shaky, mainly because of Vince’s intense relationship with Hillary. Lisa Foster had agreed to relocate to Washington if that’s what it would take to save her marriage. But by the time she finally joined him in early June, Vince was physically and emotionally wrung out, and on the verge of resigning his White House position.

  Comic relief of a sort arrived on Father’s Day, when a man named Henry Leon Ritzenthaler told the Washington Post that he was the President’s long-lost half brother. William Jefferson Blythe, it seemed, had been married at least twice before he met Bill’s mother—something no one in the family had known. A few months later, Sharon Pettijohn stepped forward to say she was Clinton’s half sister by yet another of Blythe’s wives. These paled in comparison to Bill’s stepsister Diane Welch, whose father was Virginia’s third husband, Jeff Dwire. Welch was a convicted drug dealer and bank robber, and her son, a convicted forger, was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

  With every new revelation about her husband’s twisted family tree, Hillary cringed with embarrassment. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Vince Foster commiserated when Hillary told him about Ritzenthaler.