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

  To further complicate matters, the Chinese government had arrested Chinese American activist Harry Wu and charged him with espionage. Human rights groups pressured Hillary to boycott the conference in protest, but she had no intention of missing this golden opportunity to make her debut on the world stage. A week before Hillary was to arrive in China, Wu was tried, sentenced to fifteen years in prison, and deported to the U.S. In return, it was presumed that Hillary might tone down her criticism of the Chinese government’s human rights record or forgo mentioning it altogether.

  Her hosts, as it turned out, were in for a rude shock. In her speech to the conference, Hillary delivered what amounted to a stinging indictment of Beijing’s human rights violations, which included forced abortions and forced sterilization. Hillary was interrupted several times by standing ovations, and when she was finished, thousands in the audience rushed to the stage to congratulate her. To celebrate Hillary’s “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights” speech, the First Lady joined hands with other members of the U.S. delegation to form a circle, then led them in a rendition of “Kumbaya.”

  Even before she left for China, the First Lady had begun planning the fund-raising effort that would bankroll her husband’s reelection campaign. While Bill’s advisers insisted that it was important that she return to keeping a relatively low profile, they did not dispute the fact that no one was more adept at finding ways to raise cash than Mrs. Clinton.

  Commerce Secretary Ron Brown was one of those who did not approve of the Clintons’ practice of literally selling seats on the Commerce Department’s foreign trade missions for $50,000 apiece. Before his death in a plane crash while on a trade mission to Croatia, Brown complained bitterly about the First Lady’s involvement in trying to squeeze dollars from any available source—and her insistence that he accommodate fat-cat contributors. He told his business partner and mistress, Nolanda Hill, that he was tired of being “a motherfucking tour guide for Hillary.”

  Hillary’s greatest fund-raising tool was the Executive Mansion, and the trappings of the presidency itself. On a scale that was heretofore unimaginable, she masterminded the scheme to make everything that the White House had to offer available—for a price. Contributors who had never actually met the Clintons could stay in the Lincoln Bedroom, attend a state dinner, sit in the Oval Office while the President read his weekly radio address, screen a movie in the White House theater, or sit in the presidential suite at the Kennedy Center.

  For $10,000, a campaign contributor could join a small group for coffee with the President, or a larger group for dinner. Those who forked over a six-figure contribution were invited to sit at the President’s table. At Hillary’s urging, the President also gave personal tours to some donors, and went golfing or running with others. Even the compulsively gregarious Clinton occasionally grew tired of the endless “meet-and-greet.” Unimpressed, an exasperated Hillary lit into her husband while staffers looked on nervously. “You’re getting your ass out there,” Hillary said, “and you’re doing what has to be done. We need the money.”

  One of the more distressing examples of Hillary’s blatant influence peddling involved the Riadys, Indonesian billionaires who owned the LippoBank of Los Angeles. For a time in the 1980s, James Riady was president of Arkansas’s Worthen Bank, and it was in that capacity that he befriended Hillary and Bill. James Riady and his wife gave $465,000 to Bill’s 1992 presidential campaign, making them the Clintons’ largest single contributor at the time.

  Lippo executive John Huang, who escorted Hillary and Bill on a tour of Hong Kong in 1985, would also give generously to the Clintons. Once their friend was elected, Huang and Riady each gave $100,000 to the Clinton inaugural.

  This was just the tip of the fund-raising iceberg. Additional money poured into the Democratic coffers from the Riadys’ friends, relatives, and business associates. As a result of their largesse, the Riadys and Huang, now their top-ranking U.S. executive, were allowed to roam the halls of the White House almost at will.

  In June, Riady and Huang were among guests invited to the President’s Saturday radio broadcast, and after it was over they remained behind closed doors with the President. Two days later, a Riady-owned Chinese company issued a $100,000 check to Hillary’s embattled friend Webb Hubbell. The same day, Huang was appointed to a sensitive position at Commerce. In that capacity, Huang was given CIA briefings and ready access to top secret intelligence documents—several, a Senate investigation would reveal, would have cost the lives of CIA operatives in China had they been leaked to the wrong people.

  Trouble was, the Riadys and Huang had close ties to Beijing and especially to the Chinese intelligence community. By the 1990s, the Riadys had invested more than $8 billion in various Chinese projects, from banking and electronics to real estate and tourism. To protect their interests, they relied heavily on their relationships with several high-level Communist Party officials—many of whom were escorted by Hillary’s friend John Huang to the White House for coffee with the President. All in all, Huang would visit the White House more than seventy times during the Clintons’ first term—always with Hillary’s blessing, if not the Secret Service’s.

  Huang was not alone. Hillary was also very fond of Southern California businessman Johnny Chung. Often described as a “Hillary groupie,” Chung sent a letter of condolence to the First Lady following her father’s death, and thereafter was basically given carte blanche to hang around Hillaryland. Chung racked up more than fifty visits to the Executive Mansion, bringing his well-connected Chinese friends to various functions, including a couple of White House Christmas parties.

  When Chung asked Hillaryland staffer Evan Ryan if he could bring some friends—all top officials of the People’s Republic of China—to meet the First Lady and dine in the White House mess, Chung claimed he was told Hillary needed to raise $80,000 to pay off a debt to the Democratic National Committee.

  Chung eagerly volunteered to help, and returned with a check for $50,000. Within hours of receiving the check, a beaming Hillary met with Chung (“Welcome, my good friend”) and his Chinese associates.

  A few days later, Chung and company showed up to watch the President deliver his Saturday radio address. For his part, Bill was concerned about the obvious presence of Chinese Communist Party officials in the Oval Office—not because they posed a security risk, or even because their presence implied tacit U.S. approval of the ruthless regime in Beijing. The President told Hillary he was worried about “how it’s going to make me look” when photos of Chung and his friends posing with the President in the Oval Office were released.

  Unlike Al Gore, who got into trouble for raising $166,750—$55,000 of that laundered through monks and nuns—during a John Huang–organized visit to the Hsi Lai Buddhist Temple in California, Hillary kept a relatively low profile. Yet no one doubted that she was the mastermind behind soliciting donations from special interests outside the U.S. “That’s just right-wing bull-shit,” she said when questions of national security were raised. Regardless of where it came from, she reminded the Clintons’ inner circle, “money is money.”

  That January, Hillary once again found herself confronting the ghost of Whitewater when her long-lost Rose Law Firm billing records inexplicably materialized on a table in the White House residence. The records showed that, contrary to Hillary’s insistence that she had not been involved with negotiations between the McDougals’ Madison Guaranty and state regulators, she had in fact done sixty hours of work on the matter. As for Castle Grande (a.k.a. Whitewater), which she also claimed to know nothing about, the records showed she had racked up thirty billable hours of legal work.

  The revelations sent Hillary’s point man Harold Ickes, the dyspeptic son and namesake of FDR’s interior secretary, over the edge. Ickes was most concerned that Hillary’s office and the Arkansas securities commission get their stories straight. “If we fuck this up,” he told them, “we’re done.”

  As inconceivable as it seemed, the First Lady of
the United States was now fingerprinted so that investigators could determine which documents she had handled and which she hadn’t. “That struck me,” said Jane Sherburne, one of the attorneys brought in to handle the case, “as another indignity she had to endure, but part of the process.”

  With the possibility of an indictment still hanging over her head, in January 1996 Hillary was called to testify before the grand jury investigating Whitewater. “Cheerio!” she said to her team of lawyers as she left the White House to testify. “Off to the firing squad!” After answering questions for more than four hours, Hillary stepped outside the courthouse and fielded a few more from the press. The First Lady remained calm throughout the ordeal, but she confided to friends that she found the experience both “demeaning” and “scary.”

  Hillary resolved to maintain a low profile during her husband’s reelection campaign against Kansas Senator Bob Dole. Yet behind the scenes, she pulled the strings of the Clinton reelection effort with Oz-like dexterity. Helping her in this effort was WhoDB, the computer database locked away in the old Executive Office Building that contained detailed information on more than 350,000 people—and illegally obtained secret FBI files on nearly one thousand officials from the Reagan and Bush administrations.

  “Big Brother,” as the database was known to the few White House staffers clued in to its existence, was originally conceived by Hillary as the cyber equivalent of the card file the Clintons had always kept on each contact made during their climb to power. Hillary quickly discovered, however, that the same technology could also be tapped to provide the Clintons with a database that would make Nixon’s infamous “enemies list” seem laughable.

  In the past, the FBI had shared such sensitive and highly personal information—including criminal and medical records, financial information, and reports on sexual activity and preferences—only for security clearance purposes and with the strict understanding that it would remain highly confidential. Toward that end, those White House officials put in charge of handling these personnel files were usually longtime government employees whose ethics were above reproach.

  Hillary had something different in mind. Though she would later testify that she did not even know the man, the First Lady insisted that well-known campaign dirty trickster Craig Livingstone be appointed director of the White House Office of Personnel Security. A former bouncer best known for dressing up in a chicken suit and trailing President George H. W. Bush around during the 1992 campaign, Livingstone had complete access to Big Brother and all the potentially damaging information it contained. Hillary, who met with him several times in the family residence, also assigned Livingstone to perform several sensitive tasks—most notably, identifying Vince Foster’s body and helping to tidy up Foster’s office.

  Incredibly, Hillary would brush off Big Brother’s existence with two sentences in her memoirs. A “midlevel” staffer had “blundered” by referring to “an outdated list to order FBI file summaries for current staff, and had inadvertently been sent files on some security pass holders from the Reagan and first Bush administrations. But it was neither a conspiracy nor a crime.” Filegate, she boasted, “was a dry hole.”

  Largely unaware of the key role Hillary played behind the scenes as a cunning strategist, the public was still warming to her new, softer, less officious persona. When Bill turned fifty, she showed up at New York’s Radio City Music Hall to praise him as the best man she had ever known—and to gloat over the $10 million that one event raked in for the Democrats. After his landslide 1996 election victory, Hillary once again took to the dance floor at each of the fourteen (up from eleven in 1993) inaugural balls. And with each new State of the Union Address, Hillary was there, applauding her husband from the balcony.

  Even as she postponed her own ambitions, The Plan was never far from Hillary’s mind. “There was a lot of talk about ‘The Plan,’ ” recalled a junior White House staffer. The Clintons “joked around about it in a cloak-and-dagger way, but you could tell they were serious.” After Bill Clinton left office, “their entire focus was going to be on getting Hillary back in.”

  Indeed, there was also talk of how the Clintons might extend their influence well into the twenty-first century. As a child, Hillary was repeatedly told by her mother that she would someday sit on the United States Supreme Court. Assuming she could win back the White House in 2008 or even 2012, Hillary might well be in the position to appoint a chief justice—assuming that Rehnquist, who would turn eighty-four in 2008, stepped down or died during her term in office.

  However, having been denied an official position in her husband’s administration because of antinepotism laws, Hillary wondered if she would be legally permitted to appoint her husband to the bench. A test case presented itself in late 1995, when Bill appointed William A. Fletcher to be a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the same court his mother, Judge Betty Fletcher, had served on since 1979.

  In an opinion requested by Assistant Attorney General for Policy Development Eleanor Acheson, Hillary’s old Wellesley pal, the counsel to the President concluded that the prohibition “does not apply to presidential appointments of judges to the federal judiciary.” Without arousing public suspicion, the First Lady had her answer: Hillary could, were she to occupy the White House in the future, appoint Bill to the Supreme Court—ideally to replace Rehnquist, who had already served on the court for thirty years. (Under those circumstances, Bill would not be the first person to have headed two of the three branches of government. After one term as President, William Howard Taft served as chief justice of the Supreme Court for nine years.) Of course, there was no way of knowing at this point—when he seemed to be enjoying unprecedented popularity with the electorate—that the President’s future actions would make any such scenario impossible.

  For the time being, it was Hillary, not Bill, whose political future hung in the balance. There was a growing fear inside the White House that the First Lady might be indicted as a result of either the Whitewater or Travelgate investigations. Not long after the McDougals were convicted of bank fraud, Bill asked Dick Morris what he thought of offering Hillary a blanket pardon. Having just been handed a mandate by the American people, the President wondered if now wasn’t the time to take action to spare Hillary.

  Morris replied that such an act would almost certainly be seen as arrogant. He also told Clinton that “if he tried it,” he would go down in history alongside Gerald Ford, whose pardon of Richard Nixon cost him reelection.

  When Morris phoned the First Lady and asked what she thought of Bill offering her a preemptive pardon, Hillary “flew into a rage,” Morris said. If Whitewater Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr decided to “play that way,” she went on, “I will fight it with all that I’ve got! I don’t want any pardon. I won’t take any pardon!”

  Clearly, Hillary was feeling the pressure. It didn’t help that she was also facing up to the realization that she and Bill would soon be losing the single most important person in their lives—the one who defined them as a family: Chelsea. It was doubly hurtful to Hillary that Chelsea chose to put a continent between her and her parents by enrolling in Stanford University.

  As crestfallen as she may have been over Chelsea’s departure, Hillary scarcely showed it as she prepared to celebrate her fiftieth birthday on October 26, 1997. Widely acclaimed as the hero of middle-aged women everywhere, she appeared on the cover of U.S. News & World Report and Time, and was the subject of several television specials. Remembering the $10 million take at one of her husband’s fiftieth-birthday parties, Hillary made sure she cashed in on several of her own. There was a gala at Washington’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, another at the White House, and yet another in Chicago, where Oprah Winfrey told Hillary—and a nationwide audience of millions—that she had never looked better.

  Hillary was indeed radiant—in part because her 60 percent approval rating in the polls was the highest she’d had since 1993. But she also relied increasingly on the experts—most
notably her hairstylist Christophe, designer Oscar de la Renta, and Vogue editor Anna Wintour—in completing her transformation from fashion frump to sleek urban sophisticate. George Stephanopoulos echoed the sentiments of all who knew her when he observed that never before had Hillary looked so…happy.

  At the annual White House Christmas party that year, Hillary stood next to her husband in the reception line, smiling and shaking hands with party functionaries, contributors, and the occasional old pal from Arkansas. One of the guests, New York Democratic Party Chairwoman Judith Hope, lingered for a moment to chat with the First Lady. Hope did not think incumbent Democratic Senator Patrick Moynihan was going to run for a fifth term, and she wanted the First Lady to consider replacing him. “A lot of people,” she told Hillary, “think when you leave the White House, you ought to run for U.S. senator from New York.”

  Hillary laughed off the suggestion at the time. But once she returned to New York, Hope quietly championed the idea among party leaders. Not so fast, said incumbent Democratic Senator Patrick Moynihan. Talk of floating the names of possible replacements was premature, the senator said; Moynihan had every intention of serving out the remaining three years of his term before retiring.

  The White House pressured Hope not to continue, and Hillary was personally so distraught at the prospect of being at the center of another controversy that she personally asked the New York State Democratic chair not to mention the idea again. Although she later claimed that at this point she thought the idea was “far-fetched” and even “absurd,” Hillary was already on the case. She was, however, unhappy that Hope was tipping her hand too early in the game.

  There was another catch: John F. Kennedy Jr. had approached Hope earlier in the year and told her he was interested in running for Moynihan’s seat in 2000. John hesitated, concerned that his hypersensitive wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, might not be able to hold up under the strain of a political campaign. But for a time it would remain uncertain whether he would throw his hat in the ring.