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

  Hillary was fond of John Kennedy, and like many women somewhat in awe of his devastating charm and matinee-idol looks. She also appreciated the hard political reality that Kennedy, should he choose to seek the Democratic nomination, would be difficult to beat. Not only was he both heir to the Kennedy magic and People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive,” but John was the consummate New Yorker, a resident of the city since the age of three. If she did decide to run, Hillary, who had never spent more than a few days at a time in Manhattan, would be branded a carpetbagger. While he had yet to run for office, it was clear to anyone who had heard JFK Jr. give a speech or field reporters’ questions with grace and humor that he was a natural politician.

  For Hillary, there were other, more personal reasons not to go up against JFK Jr. for the New York Senate nomination. Beginning with Bill’s prescient handshake with JFK in the Rose Garden and running through their friendship with Jackie, Hillary felt a special attachment to the Kennedys—especially to John and to Caroline, who had become a confidante of Chelsea’s.

  “She was really torn,” said one of the few friends Hillary had from New York. “She liked John and hated the idea of running against him, and she also felt he would be impossible to beat on his home turf. It was Bobby Kennedy’s seat, and she felt if he wanted it, John should have it.” If John Kennedy decided to run, Hillary was now saying, then she would not.

  John Kennedy’s possible entry into the Senate race hung over Hillary’s head for months—ending only with his untimely death in July 1999. Until that point, said a friend, “she was always looking over her shoulder, a little worried that he might change his mind.”

  There would be plenty of other distractions in the meantime. Just a few weeks after Judith Hope uttered the first quasi-public words regarding a Hillary Clinton for Senate campaign, Bill Clinton gave a six-hour deposition in the Paula Jones case. For the first time, he was asked under oath if he had ever had sexual relations with an intern named Monica Lewinsky—an accusation he flatly denied. Then he rushed home to tell Hillary his version of events: that his secretary, Betty Currie, had this friend who was going through a rough patch personally, and that he tried to console the young woman on a few occasions. In the course of those chats, he claimed, this mentally unbalanced intern—her friends called her “The Stalker,” Bill said—somehow began imagining that they had some sort of relationship….

  Just like all the other women, Hillary thought to herself. A tramp. Not just a tramp, but a delusional tramp. This time, Hillary would have to work hard at convincing herself of this. The Clintons canceled their plans to dine out, and spent the weekend, she later said without a trace of irony, “cleaning out closets.”

  On January 21, Hillary woke to Bill sitting on the edge of her bed. In his hand was a copy of that morning’s Washington Post with a front-page story about the President’s alleged affair with Lewinsky—and charges that he had urged her to lie about the affair to Paula Jones’s lawyers. Hillary went ballistic, but quickly pulled herself together. Swinging into action as the President’s chief strategist, she told Bill he would have to ignore the screaming headlines and go ahead as planned with his schedule.

  Hillary would do the same, boarding a train for Baltimore, where she was scheduled to speak at Goucher College. During the ride, the President would call her on her cell phone three times—and each time she would refuse to take the call. Later, when it was revealed that Bill had given Monica a number of gifts, including a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Hillary became noticeably upset. “He gave me the same book,” she told an aide, “on our second date.”

  Still, Hillary stood beside him and nodded enthusiastically as her husband delivered his famous, finger-wagging “I did not have sex with that woman” denial. The following morning, Hillary was equally forceful as she backed up her husband on the Today show. As she had so many times before, Hillary refrained from assigning any blame to Bill. When interviewer Matt Lauer refused to let her get away with characterizing the scandal as the result of “rumor and innuendo,” she pointed an accusing finger at “the vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.” Hillary would later tell White House lawyer David Kendall that, while she was fishing for just the right words to say in her husband’s defense, two simple words kept running through her mind: “Screw ’em!”

  5

  Politics is conflict.

  So is marriage.

  —Hillary

  Never get a divorce.

  Endure everything.

  —Dorothy Rodham, Hillary’s mother

  I have to kick his ass every morning.

  —Hillary, on Bill

  She could cut your heart out with her tongue.

  —Thomas Mars, a colleague at Hillary’s Little Rock law firm

  Even after she learned that Bill had been lying to her and to the nation all along, Hillary would never abandon the notion that nefarious forces were at work to destroy her and her husband—“an interlocking network of groups and individuals,” she wrote in 2003, “who want to turn the clock back on many of the advances our country has made.” These forces, she continued, use “money, power, influence, media, and politics to achieve their ends.” These were the true masters, she insisted, of the “politics of personal destruction.” Certainly Hillary, who had so skillfully masterminded the smear campaigns directed at her husband’s female accusers, knew something about the politics of personal destruction.

  If anything, Hillary’s appearance on Today—and the “right-wing conspiracy” comment—poured gasoline on the fire. More than ever, she was concerned about the effect all this was having on Chelsea. Hillary called her daughter several times at Stanford, warning Chelsea not to pay any attention to the stories about her father. Now they asked her to fly to Washington for a show of family unity at Camp David. As convincing as Chelsea’s performance was, Hillary knew that she was having a hard time coping with the seamy headlines. The First Lady told Chelsea to follow her lead and simply stop reading the newspapers.

  Chelsea took her mother’s advice, but it would soon become impossible for anyone to avoid the torrent of sordid details. Starting in May, Chelsea was rushed to the Stanford campus hospital no fewer than four times with stress-induced stomach pains.

  Hillary tried to keep up her daughter’s spirits with daily phone calls—at this point neither woman was talking to Dad—but she was finding it increasingly difficult to keep up her own. There was the occasional bright spot: On April 1, while the Clintons were in Senegal as part of a twelve-day tour of Africa, U.S. District Court Judge Susan Webber Wright dismissed Paula Jones’s case against the President on the grounds that Jones could not prove she had suffered any actual harm even if she had been sexually harassed by Clinton.

  Hillary cheered the news, and she and her husband celebrated the surprise decision with several staffers by polishing off several bottles of Dom Pérignon in the Clintons’ hotel suite. Then Hillary, whose Sunday-morning talk show warriors had done so much to portray Paula Jones as lying “trailer trash,” smiled as Bill lit up a cigar and started pounding on a drum that had been given to him by an African chief.

  In the end, the Clintons would pay Jones $850,000 to keep her from appealing the decision. No matter. The Lewinsky scandal had long since taken on a life of its own, spewing out one squalid image after another as it spun out of control that spring and summer of 1998. Among them: the semen-stained navy blue dress; oral sex in the Oval Office (once while Clinton talked on the phone with a congressman about deploying U.S. troops in Bosnia); phone sex; thong underwear; a cigar used by Bill to violate Monica. Then there were Lewinsky’s nicknames for Bill: “The Creep” and “The Big Creep.” Hillary would later learn that Monica had a nickname for her, too: “Baba,” an abbreviated form of the Russian babushka.

  “I’ve got to believe my husband,” Hillary kept telling her friends and her husband’s lawyer, David Kendall. “I’ve got to believe him�
��. He’s done lots of lousy things, but,” she added with a straight face, “he has never lied to me.” Hillary did what she always did in situations like this: she channeled whatever rage she may have felt over this all-too-familiar predicament not at Bill, but at her husband’s accusers—and the press.

  That would abruptly end on August 13, 1998, when Hillary was again stirred awake by Bill. Rather than sit next to her on the bed, Bill kept a safe distance, pacing the room as he confessed that he had “done some things I shouldn’t have” with Lewinsky. Not sex per se, he continued to insist, hewing to his definition that sex meant only intercourse. But “intimacy” that was “inappropriate.”

  Hillary began hyperventilating, much as she had done that time back in Arkansas—the night when she was rushed to the emergency room with a panic attack. This time, she screamed obscenities at Bill at the top of her lungs. “What do you mean?” she yelled as Bill turned vermilion. “What are you saying? Why did you lie to me? You stupid, stupid, stupid bastard!” Hillary leaped up and slapped Bill hard across the face.

  Bill’s chronic infidelity—he would confess to Dick Morris that his sexual addiction had led him into relations with hundreds of women—was something Hillary had always been able to “box off.” But so long as their political partnership was to work, she counted on her husband to be candid with her when they faced a genuine crisis. Hillary didn’t know if their marriage “could—or should—survive such a stinging betrayal.” It was, she allowed, “the most devastating, shocking and hurtful experience of my life.”

  That Sunday, on the eve of Bill’s grand jury testimony, Hillary summoned Jesse Jackson to the White House residence to have a heart-to-heart talk with Chelsea. Both women hugged Jackson and listened to him talk about the great biblical figures who had succumbed to temptations of the flesh. Taking Chelsea aside, the Reverend Jackson reassured her that God forgave men “in their weakness,” and that the Clinton family needed healing from the Lord.

  Conveniently, Reverend Jackson neglected to mention that, at the very time he was giving spiritual guidance to the Clintons, he was having an extramarital affair with a young woman on his staff named Karin Stanford. Months later, Stanford (“From what I understood about Rev. Jackson’s marriage is that it was basically a political marriage”) would give birth to Jackson’s child, touching off a scandal in his ministry and forcing the reverend to make some heartfelt apologies of his own.

  Still furious at her husband and—more to the point—unwilling to hear the sordid details, Hillary stayed upstairs in the family residence while Bill was in the Map Room giving his grand jury testimony over closed-circuit television. Although she still wasn’t talking to him, when Bill emerged from the Map Room four hours later, she felt a twinge of sympathy. He looked both spent and furious. Realizing that it could not have gone well, Hillary instructed Bill’s staff to call Democratic leaders in Congress and reassure them that it had.

  Hillary never made a secret of the fact that she, more than anyone, loathed Ken Starr. At a strategy session held in the White House solarium, Paul Begala, James Carville, the Thomasons, and a few others gathered to determine what the President should say that night in his televised apology to the nation. Hillary broke her silence long enough to say that she wanted him to go after Ken Starr. But others—including Give ’em Hell Carville—cautioned him to be contrite and not appear combative. When Bill turned to Hillary to ask her what she thought, she pushed back her chair and got up to leave. “Well, Bill, this is your speech,” she said. “You’re the one who got yourself into this mess, and only you can decide what to say about it.”

  In the days before her husband came clean, Hillary had already helped put into motion one series of events conveniently timed to distract the public from the Lewinsky affair and at the same time make her husband look, well, presidential. She had already pointed out that Saddam Hussein’s refusal to allow UN weapons inspectors into Iraq might require military action. But then, just two weeks after Al Qaeda’s bloody bombing attack on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, intelligence reports put Osama bin Laden and his deputies at a training camp in Afghanistan. Hillary concurred with Bill’s foreign policy team that now was the time to strike.

  The convenient timing of the missile strike seemed truly remarkable, especially since, on several other occasions when U.S. intelligence had pinpointed bin Laden’s whereabouts, no action had been taken. “It struck a lot of us as odd,” says a retired Pentagon official, “that the President had suddenly awakened to the threat of terrorism and was willing to take bold military action. Word filtered down that Mrs. Clinton kept saying that her husband should do something because ‘the President of the United States should not appear weak to the rest of the world.’ That wasn’t exactly consistent with what she’d been saying for the last thirty years.”

  Just hours after the President attacked Ken Starr—much to Hillary’s delight—in his noticeably less-than-penitent four-minute speech to the nation, missiles were launched on the Al Qaeda training camp where Bin Laden was supposed to be hiding. But by then, bin Laden had gotten word of the assassination attempt and moved on.

  In her zeal to launch a counterattack on Starr, Hillary had badly misjudged the mood of the nation. On the Hill, Republicans and Democrats instantly voiced their disappointment over the President’s failure to show remorse. Even former members of his own administration—most notably Stephanopoulos (who had left to join ABC News in January of 1997) and ex–Presidential Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers—expressed regret that Clinton had blown “this one chance,” as Myers put it, “to make things right.”

  Before they left the next day for their previously scheduled vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, Bill sent a message to Hillaryland asking if the First Lady would issue a statement to the effect that she had forgiven him. Barely able to contain her rage, Hillary made Bill wait until the next morning for her answer. In a statement that she had worked on for hours, Hillary insisted that she was committed to her marriage, and described her love of Bill as “compassionate and steadfast.”

  At the same time, Hillary made it clear that she, too, had been led astray by Bill—and that, in previously defending him, she had never knowingly lied to the American people. It was a stance that, for the moment at least, she had to take—if for no other reason than to preserve her own credibility. “Bill may not have liked it,” said a law school classmate and frequent White House guest, “but if he was going down, she had no intention of going down with him. Hillary wanted to play a role in public life after they left the White House, and I know it was always in the back of both their minds that she would run for President down the line.” As Hillary herself put it, “Right now I don’t know if he has a future, but I intend to.”

  It was no small irony that, as a direct result of her husband’s atrocious behavior, Hillary’s standing in the polls soared. She was the ultimate wronged woman, exhibiting a kind of grace under pressure that surprised even her harshest critics.

  Not that she wasn’t hurting—and deeply. In an obvious attempt to make small talk at a Vineyard party, CBS newsman Mike Wallace asked Hillary if she had ever had a stress test. “I’m having one now,” she answered.

  “Her stoic exterior,” Dick Morris observed, “masks enormous pain.” This latest act of betrayal had left her deeply scarred emotionally. But it was also true, Morris would point out, that Hillary “is never happier than when she can rescue him.” The reason: “Because then Bill invests her with even more authority, and the balance of power shifts in her favor.”

  If, as she claims, Hillary did a great deal of soul-searching before deciding to forgive her husband, it was certainly accomplished with lightning speed. Two days day after he confessed that he had been lying to her and the nation all along about his relationship with Lewinsky, Hillary had set in motion a plan for Bill to seek divine guidance in his quest for redemption—and in the process send a message to the electorate that he had seen the error of his ways. Hillary’s three-man �
��God Squad” (which included Gordon MacDonald, who had been tossed out of his ministry after having an affair with a member of the congregation) arrived at the White House each week to make a show of praying and reading Scripture with the President.

  As calls for the President’s impeachment grew louder, Hillary found the rationale that would allow her to reenter the fight. “As his wife, I wanted to wring Bill’s neck,” Hillary later recalled. “But he was not only my husband, he was also my President….”

  Just as she had buried her head in the sand by not reading published accounts of her husband’s infidelities, Hillary also refused to read the Starr Report when it was released in September 1998. Still, she labeled the 110,000-word report—as opposed to the shocking behavior it described in cringe-making detail—a “low point in American history.”

  Despite Hillary’s professed “compassionate and steadfast” love for Bill, the Clintons kept their distance from each other on their long-planned trips to Russia and Ireland that September. “She couldn’t even look at him, much less hold his hand or whisper in his ear,” said a reporter who covered both trips. “The tension between them was palpable.”

  There was also considerable speculation that Hillary was intent on protecting her own political future by distancing herself from Bill—a process that would, one assumed, culminate in divorce. But Hillary soon realized that she was getting more mileage out of being the slighted partner than she ever got out of being a full one.

  She may not have read the Starr Report, but Hillary paid close attention to what they were saying about her in the press. And she liked what she read. The outpouring of public sympathy for her predicament came not only from Democrats but from conservative Republicans, who now viewed her as the hapless victim of an unscrupulous cad.