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

  Sympathy was one thing. Pity was quite another. Determined not to appear defeated, Hillary jumped at the chance to pose for the cover of Vogue in an elegant burgundy Oscar de la Renta gown. At about the same time, she was working out a way to capitalize on her newfound popularity.

  With the threat of impeachment hanging over their heads like a sword of Damocles, Hillary realized that the 1998 congressional elections would be viewed as a referendum on the Clinton presidency. She also understood that, if Hillary Rodham Clinton was to have a viable political future, she would have to accumulate some IOUs from Democratic candidates across the country. While Bill agreed to stay put in Washington, Hillary hit the road for the Democrats.

  For the next several weeks, Hillary campaigned exhaustively for Democratic candidates across the country while, for the most part, the President holed up in the White House. Hillary’s daring election strategy worked. Democrats held their ground in the Senate, and in the House, where they were expected to lose thirty seats, they actually picked up an additional five.

  Just a few days later, Patrick Moynihan announced that he would not seek a fifth term in the Senate. Within hours, Harlem Congressman Charlie Rangel was on the phone to Hillary, urging her to run for Moynihan’s seat. Both Rangel and Hillary were well aware that any Democrat would likely be facing one of the most formidable candidates imaginable: New York City’s phenomenally popular mayor, Rudolph Giuliani.

  While she good-naturedly brushed off Rangel’s suggestion that she run (“We have a few other outstanding matters to resolve right now”), Hillary had in fact never stopped weighing the pros and cons of a Senate race. “We all knew she wanted it so bad she could taste it,” said one state party official. “But she knew it would never happen if President Clinton was run out of office in disgrace.” Saving Bill would be an important first step in launching herself as an independent political entity.

  The Democrats’ Hillary-driven 1998 election victory had yielded an unexpected bonus. The First Lady was overjoyed to learn that, as a direct result of the Republicans’ stunning defeat, Newt Gingrich was stepping down as speaker and giving up his seat in Congress. For a moment, she allowed herself to think that Gingrich’s departure signaled an end to impeachment efforts.

  She was wrong. As Congress continued its march toward impeachment, Hillary once again took it upon herself to play Joan of Arc. Strapping on her armor, she went to Capitol Hill and exhorted the party faithful to hold the line against those dark forces that had been trying “from Day One” to run Bill Clinton out of office. Her stirring performance had the desired effect. As the congressmen filed out of the room, each stopping for a moment to embrace America’s embattled First Lady, there was a growing realization that Hillary—far more than her husband—was in control of the nation’s political future. “That was the first time,” said one of those present, “that a lot of us got our first up-close view of how she does business.” It was also the first time congressional leaders “started seeing Hillary as presidential material.”

  Inside her marriage, things were not quite so rosy. Away from the cameras, Hillary barely spoke to her husband. She still acted, Bernie Nussbaum observed, “like someone had died.”

  There were also reports from White House employees that, once again, Hillary could be heard shrieking at her husband behind closed doors. On a trip to the Middle East just a few days before the scheduled impeachment vote, the President reached for Hillary’s hand only to have her shrink from him in disgust.

  By this point, impeachment was a foregone conclusion. In what was yet another remarkable Wag the Dog coincidence, intelligence experts were supposedly telling the President that now—just as the impeachment debate was about to begin in the House—was precisely the right time to order air strikes on Iraq. This, despite the fact that Saddam Hussein had been defying the UN on weapons inspections for years.

  Bill’s advisers knew full well that he would be criticized for putting the lives of American pilots at risk just to divert attention from impeachment. But Hillary, now very much back at the fulcrum of both domestic and foreign policy, insisted that her husband seize any opportunity to appear strong and presidential. One adviser felt Hillary seemed “almost too eager” to see her husband give the order to launch an attack.

  Reaction, as predicted, was swift. Joel Hefley echoed the sentiments of his fellow Republicans in the House when he blasted the President’s use of the military as a “blatant and disgraceful” attempt to distract the nation from what was about to take place in the halls of Congress.

  Hillary had expected a backlash, but none so ferocious as this. The President, on the verge of impeachment, could ill afford a further erosion in his credibility. Over the next six months, there would be no fewer than three opportunities to take out Osama bin Laden—in the Afghan city of Kandahar that December, at a hunting camp in western Afghanistan in February 1999, and again in Kandahar three months later. In each case, officials either doubted the accuracy of the intelligence they were getting, feared that civilians would be killed, or both. “We had a round in our chamber,” former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey would later say, “and we didn’t use it.”

  While Hillary did not sit in on Oval Office meetings with the administration’s counterterrorist coordinator Richard Clarke, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, CIA Director George Tenet, and other high-level officials, her influence was palpable. Bill had never tried to conceal the fact that he valued Hillary’s opinion on matters both domestic and foreign, and it was no secret that she did not hesitate to give it to him. Countless Clinton staffers over the years had braced themselves as soon as Bill began a sentence with the familiar words “Hillary says” or “Hillary thinks.” It was understood that, regardless of the topic at hand, the First Lady’s input was to be taken seriously. After all, as the President was also fond of saying, “Hillary is the smartest woman—the smartest person—I have ever known.”

  It was Hillary who pushed her husband for more involvement in South Asia after visiting India in 1995, and who, two years later, publicly condemned Afghanistan’s repressive Taliban regime in a speech before the UN. Teaming up with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Hillary also pressured her husband to focus on getting rid of the Taliban.

  To some extent Bill Clinton had always pursued a “Hillary Says” foreign policy, just as he had employed a “Hillary Says” approach to politics at home. When advisers split on the question of whether or not to launch air strikes against bin Laden in late 1998 and early 1999, it was Hillary who tipped the scales. She warned her husband that, with his presidency hanging in the balance, the political risk was just too great.

  On December 19, 1998, the House voted to impeach the President on charges of perjuring himself before the grand jury and obstruction of justice. Following the vote, Hillary and Bill met a delegation of two hundred congressional Democrats in the Rose Garden. The Clintons smiled and waved along with their supporters, doing their best to look as if they did not have a care in the world. Even Senate Democrats were outraged at what West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd called a “display of egregious arrogance.”

  Hillary sat in on meetings with her husband and his legal team over the course of the five-week trial in the Senate, but she scrupulously avoided watching it on television. On February 12, 1999, the Senate voted 55–45 to acquit the President of perjury and split evenly on obstruction of justice—falling far short in both cases of the two-thirds majority needed to convict.

  Even as the senators decided her husband’s fate, Hillary was busy contemplating her own. The same day the Senate verdict was handed down, she held a marathon meeting with her old friend and former Clinton adviser Harold Ickes in the White House family quarters. More than a half century earlier, Ickes’s father had urged then–First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to run for the Senate from New York. Eleanor instantly declined, arguing that she could be a more effective catalyst for social change if she remained a free agent. Her role model notwithstanding, Hillary
felt the opposite was true in her case. “I want independence,” she said. “I want to be judged on my own merits.”

  Hillary, who had been playing coy with New York Democratic leaders Judith Hope and Charlie Rangel on the subject of running for the Senate, now wanted an expert opinion. What were her chances, she asked Ickes, of actually winning?

  Hillary trusted the abrasive and congenitally crafty Ickes, a battle-scarred veteran of rough-and-tumble New York politics, to be blunt. Ickes unrolled a map of the state and spread it out on a table. Like a general explaining his battle plan, he outlined the difficulties Hillary the candidate would face in taking her case to 19 million New Yorkers spread out over fifty-four thousand square miles. From Syracuse, Buffalo, Albany, and Rochester to the north, to downstate New York City and its sprawling suburbs, Hillary would first have to familiarize herself with local issues and personalities. Even without a rival as formidable as the homegrown Mayor Giuliani, Hillary would face the daunting task of dealing with New York City’s powerful political factions and interest groups.

  When the President peeked in to say hello, Hillary did not invite him to stay. “The most difficult decisions in my life were to stay married to Bill,” Hillary later said, “and to run for the Senate from New York.” These were her decisions to make, and while The Plan was still very much in effect, this was a decision she had to make alone.

  Bill Clinton didn’t need to be asked his opinion about Hillary getting into the race. “The President was right in there, cheering her on—before she even knew she was on the team,” Charles Rangel said. “He was the one who asked the most questions about how she could win. You could see the guilt written all over his face. Any man would do anything to get out of the doghouse he was in.”

  Neither Ickes nor Hillary spent much time debating the obvious: that she was not a New Yorker, and had never spent more than a few days there at a time. “I have been one of the three or four New Yorkers who she has known in her life,” Dick Morris said. “Never, never did she comment on the state of the city to me, ask any questions about it, or show any interest in its people, culture, or politics. Not once.”

  No matter. New York Democrats, desperate to hold on to Moynihan’s Senate seat, were scrambling for a candidate strong enough to take on Giuliani. Moreover, New York’s residency requirements were virtually nonexistent, and the state had a history of welcoming carpetbaggers—especially famous ones.

  Four days after the Senate vote acquitting her husband, Hillary had her office issue a statement acknowledging that she was considering a Senate run. She had, in fact, already launched her campaign effort. Phone in hand, Hillary ran down the list of one hundred well-connected—and mostly wealthy—New Yorkers prepared for her by Ickes. Lining up support from former Democratic mayors Ed Koch and David Dinkins, as well as both Moynihan and the state’s other Democratic U.S. senator, Democrat Chuck Schumer, Hillary then summoned Clinton fund-raising impresario Terry McAuliffe to the White House to talk cold, hard cash. It would take $25 million to mount a winning campaign, he told her. “No problem,” she replied.

  Nor was there likely to be any competition. The only other Democrat who had expressed interest in running, Congresswoman Nita Lowey, would quickly withdraw once Hillary made known her true intentions. And the only other Democrat who could possibly cause her trouble, John Kennedy Jr., was now telling friends that if he ran for office, it would probably be for governor of New York. Still, Hillary actively worried about young Kennedy, seeking assurances from state party officials that he would not be a last-minute entry into the race. “People love John,” she conceded, “more than they love me.”

  Hillary would maintain her high profile as the President’s emissary abroad, making a state visit to North Africa in March. Back home, Bill was under fire again—this time over the rape of Juanita Broaddrick twenty-one years earlier. Once again, Serb dictator Slobodan Miloševic presented the President with an opportunity to use the American military for purposes of distraction. “I urged him to bomb,” Hillary admitted, comparing Miloševic’s attempts at ethnic cleansing with the Holocaust. “You cannot let this go on….”

  Meanwhile, Bill kept nudging his wife in the direction of running. “He wants to run my constituency,” Hillary said. “Meet the people and all.” But she made it clear that she wanted him to “stay behind the scenes” while she laid the groundwork for a campaign on her own terms. “The tables,” she said, “were turned now, as he played for me the role I had always performed for him.”

  Clinton was also willing to use the presidential pulpit to launch not-so-thinly-veiled attacks against his wife’s likely opponent in the Senate race. In early 1999, four undercover New York City police officers gunned down unarmed African immigrant Amadou Diallo when they mistakenly believed he was reaching for a gun instead of his wallet. While Mayor Giuliani urged citizens not to rush to judgment in the case, Hillary asked her husband to devote his weekly radio address to the issue of police brutality. The President told his audience that he was “deeply disturbed” by “recent allegations of serious police misconduct and…racial profiling that have shaken some communities’ faith in the police.” Bill then announced an $87 million federal program aimed at encouraging police recruitment of minorities and putting an end to racial profiling.

  To further establish her foreign policy credentials with New York voters and remind them that she had in effect been co-President for eight years, Hillary toured Albanian refugee camps in Macedonia. One of the camps she visited, Brazde, was just ten miles from the Kosovo border—within easy range of Orkan (“Hurricane”), a Serbian weapons system developed with the assistance of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Orkan was capable of firing hundreds of small rockets with deadly accuracy. While Hillary walked among the refugees who were victims of Slobodan Miloševic’s “ethnic cleansing,” she repeatedly denounced the Yugoslav dictator as “evil.”

  According to Yugoslav Army Chief of Staff Nebojsa Pavkovic, Hillary narrowly escaped assassination during the visit. Orkan was aimed at the camp, and field commanders awaited Miloševic’s orders to use it. They never came.

  However, just weeks before, Miloševic did order Pavkovic to assassinate Tony Blair by blowing up the British prime minister’s Puma helicopter at Petrovac Airport in the Macedonian capital of Skopje. Fearing massive retaliation, Pavkovic did not carry out Miloševic’s orders.

  Two months later and light-years away from war-ravaged Kosovo, Hillary chose Patrick Moynihan’s bucolic nine-hundred-acre farm in Pindars Corners to announce that she was forming an official campaign committee. This was tantamount to a formal declaration of her candidacy. Senator Moynihan was there, along with his wife and more than two hundred reporters from around the world. Bill was conspicuously absent. He had wanted to come, but Hillary said no.

  That same day Hillary, who had alienated many in New York’s large Jewish community by calling for an independent Palestinian state, wrote a letter to Orthodox Jewish leader Mandell Ganchow declaring her belief that Jerusalem was “the eternal and indivisible capital of Israel.” She also stated her support for relocating the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to the Holy City.

  Scarcely a week after announcing her candidacy, Hillary was with Bill at Camp David when aides informed them that Hillary’s only potential rival for the Senate nomination had vanished over the Atlantic. Days later, John Kennedy’s Piper Saratoga was lifted from the bottom of the sea, along with his body and those of his wife, Carolyn Bessette, and Bessette’s sister Lauren. Hillary, who had been among the mourners at Jacqueline Onassis’s funeral, now attended the memorial service for Jackie’s only son at New York’s St. Thomas More Church—accompanied this time by the President and Chelsea.

  Now the Democrats’ only viable candidate for Moynihan’s Senate seat, Hillary was soon off on another of her “listening tours” to drum up support. Before embarking, the First Lady was spotted ducking into the Park Avenue offices of celebrity plastic surgeon Cap Lesesne, sparking rumors that she was nipp
ed and tucked in preparation for her Senate run. Lesesne would neither confirm nor deny the reports, saying only that he counted a number of noted political figures among his patients.

  Hillary, whose office denied the plastic surgery rumors, crisscrossed the state in a Ford conversion van promptly dubbed the “HRC Speedwagon.” She was photographed chugalugging coffee with the morning regulars at diners from Niagara Falls to the Finger Lakes, marching down Fifth Avenue in the Puerto Rican Day Parade, visiting a pediatric ward in Rochester, and wolfing down kielbasa at a deli on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

  “I knew Hillary would do well on the campaign trail,” state Democratic Party chief Judith Hope later said. “But I was really kind of taken aback by just how good she was.”

  Hillary’s approach to connecting with voters was, like everything else she did, methodical. Before meeting a group of contributors, she would ask for thumbnail sketches of each person she was going to be introduced to—including names of family members, where their children were going to school, vocations, interests, and accomplishments. Recalling a get-together of twenty-five contributors who gave a total of $100,000 to Hillary’s campaign, Long Island fund-raiser Marsha Laufer said that, having committed her thumbnail sketches to memory, Hillary “put everyone at ease immediately. With each person, she’d break the ice by asking a question about the college their child was going to, or where they’d just been on vacation.” Walking up to one guest who happened to be a theoretical physicist, Hillary broke the ice by asking about a recent breakthrough in his field. “As you can imagine,” Laufer said, “he was just over the moon.”

  Yet Hillary was shrewd enough to realize that fund-raising dinners and photo ops were not enough. In closed-door meetings at the White House, she and her advisers brainstormed about ways to harness the power of the presidency to win over New York’s all-important racial and ethnic voting blocs. Any actions on Hillary’s behalf would have the added benefit of aiding Vice President Al Gore in his run for the White House.