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

  Bill was eager to do whatever he could to help. “Our entire lives, she has always been there for me,” he said. “I owe everything to her.” Now, added one FOB, “it was payback time.”

  At Hillary’s urging, the President stunned Justice Department officials by granting clemency to sixteen Puerto Rican terrorists who had been sentenced to prison following a wave of bombings from 1974 to 1983 that took the lives of six Americans and wounded scores of others. Incredibly, the terrorists had not even asked for clemency.

  The bloodiest of these attacks took place at Manhattan’s historic Fraunces Tavern, where in 1783 George Washington bid an emotional farewell to his officers. On January 24, 1975, a bomb planted by the militant Puerto Rican nationalist Group FALN, the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (Armed Forces of National Liberation), exploded at the height of lunch hour, hurling body parts into the street and killing four people.

  When her husband handed out pardons to the FALN leaders, Hillary kept a low profile, careful not to appear as if she had been involved in the process. But neither she nor Bill had anticipated that the terrorists, unwilling to apologize or express any remorse for what they had done, would initially balk at accepting the clemency offer. They feared that, by accepting a presidential pardon, they would be giving up their cherished status as martyrs to the cause.

  Over the next three weeks, Hillary pressed her husband to find some way to convince the terrorists to change their minds. The delay, she complained to a longtime Arkansas confidante, “really looks bad.” Once satisfied that they had made their point, the FALN leaders accepted the President’s offer and walked out of prison to the cheers of their supporters—all the while insisting that they had no regrets for what they had done.

  Former U.S. Attorney Joseph DiGenova was among those who branded the FALN pardons as “despicable…. Let me say categorically, the Puerto Rican terrorists were pardoned because they were a political benefit to the president’s wife. Make no mistake about it.”

  No one was more outraged than Joe Connor, whose father was killed in the Fraunces Tavern bombing. “My dad…didn’t have any qualms with the Puerto Rican people. He was just a working guy. He was eating lunch with friends and his life was valued less than that of the president’s wife and Al Gore. It’s disgusting…They believed that by giving clemency this would rally the Puerto Rican vote for Hillary in New York.”

  Connor, who along with other victims’ relatives was not informed of the terrorists’ impending release, also made a chillingly prophetic remark at the time—nearly two years before September 11. “The world is a much less safe place,” he said, “and this country is a much less safe place, as a result of letting these people out. Certainly, other terrorists might be thinking about attacking us. It will send the wrong message to people who may be planning something.”

  FBI Director Louis Freeh opposed the pardons, as did the Justice Department, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and even New York’s other Democratic senator, Charles Schumer. So did Puerto Rico’s popular former governor, Carlos Romero-Barcelo, who pleaded with the President not to release the bombers. “How can we responsibly set them free?” he asked. “What if they kill somebody else? What do we say, ‘Too bad’?”

  Initially, Hillary claimed she had not been involved in the President’s decision and was not familiar enough with the case to comment on it. However, she did express support for her husband’s actions. Hillary had understood that the late John Cardinal O’Connor had supported clemency for the Puerto Rican terrorists, and she told her husband’s advisers to use that information to defend the pardons. No sooner did the White House float that idea than it was shot down by the Archdiocese of New York, which claimed the cardinal had never supported clemency. In the end, the Senate would vote 95–2 to condemn the FALN pardons.

  As public outrage grew, Hillary did an abrupt about-face, claiming that she now opposed the pardons. By having it both ways, Hillary momentarily silenced her critics while at the same time leaving no doubt in the minds of New York’s Puerto Rican community that Hillary had done something for them.

  Until now, the Clintons had made little use of the President’s clemency powers. Over the first six years of their administration, Bill had granted precisely the same number of pardons—74—doled out by his immediate predecessor in a single term. The FALN pardons, however, opened the Clintons’ eyes to the ways in which this particular constitutional power could be used to achieve a political—and in Hillary’s case, personal—advantage. This President, unlike all who had gone before him, was willing to ignore the Justice Department altogether in the granting of pardons. To the Clintons’ unalloyed delight, they could empty the jail cells of their choice and, by merely claiming that it served the interest of justice, suffer no lasting consequences.

  In another blatant ploy to curry favor with one of New York’s largest voting blocs, Hillary’s camp let slip the fact that she had Jewish relatives. Dorothy Rodham’s mother, Della, had divorced her husband in 1927 and married Max Rosenberg six years later. Together, they had a daughter—Hillary’s aunt Adeline. The Forward, a weekly Jewish newspaper, described Hillary’s grandmother Della Rosenberg as “the feisty wife of a Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrant,” and suggested that it would enhance her standing with Jewish voters.

  Not everyone was convinced, especially since Hillary had never mentioned her Jewish stepgrandfather until this propitious moment. “OY VEY!” proclaimed the New York Post on its front page. HILLARY’S ALMOST JEWISH. Former New York Mayor Ed Koch, one of Hillary’s biggest boosters, said, “I’m a proud member of the Jewish faith, and it would be wonderful if Hillary were Jewish. But she’s not.”

  The freed FALN terrorists and her newfound Jewish relatives aside, Hillary also had to attend to some rather mundane matters. For purposes of establishing residency in the state, she soon found herself house-hunting. In late August, she and Bill settled on a $1.7 million, 110-year-old, three-story Dutch colonial at 15 Old House Lane in the Westchester County town of Chappaqua, about fifty minutes north of New York City. The five-thousand-square-foot white clapboard house, which boasted a swimming pool and an octagonal screened porch, was situated on a cul-de-sac. While huge Victorian, Federal, pseudo-Tudor, neo-Gothic, and Norman-style mansions loomed on the hill directly behind them, the half-dozen homes on Old House Lane were far from grand. Just a few houses down from the Clintons’, there was a bus stop at the intersection of Old House Lane and busy Route 117. Beyond that was Horace Greeley High School, the global headquarters of Reader’s Digest, and, not far up the road, Mount Kisco Country Club.

  After spending eighteen years in government housing—the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock and the White House—Hillary was not quite prepared for the Clintons to take the real estate plunge entirely on their own. They turned to Terry McAuliffe, who was rewarded for his fund-raising wizardry by being named Democratic National Committee chairman, to guarantee their $1.35 million mortgage. McAuliffe could well afford it; he had just reaped an $18 million windfall from a $100,000 investment in the fiber-optics network Global Crossing. After this cozy real estate deal was widely condemned in the press as well as by the Office of Government Ethics, the Clintons got another mortgage—this time sans sugar daddy McAuliffe—with the PNC Bank Corporation.

  Her listening tour and the Chappaqua house notwithstanding, many New Yorkers still viewed the First Lady’s motives with suspicion. It didn’t help matters when well-known Chicago Cubs fan Hillary Clinton posed wearing a Yankees cap right after the team’s 1999 World Series victory. “When I saw that,” said L. D. Brown, “I was totally disgusted. Hillary was totally, completely devoted to Chicago—the Cubs and the White Sox. She never once mentioned New York fondly at all during the years I knew her in Arkansas, but Hillary always talked about how much she loved Chicago, how she wanted to live there someday, the whole bit.”

  Around the time she proclaimed herself a Yankees fan, Hillary made what could have been the biggest gaff of her campaig
n during an official visit to the Middle East as First Lady. At one point, she nodded in approval as Suha Arafat, wife of PLO leader Yasser Arafat, accused Israel of, among other things, using poison gas on Palestinians. Then Hillary marched to the podium, embraced Mrs. Arafat warmly—and kissed her.

  Hillary would later try to explain that she had not actually understood the translation of Mrs. Arafat’s poison-gas remarks, but backpedaled when the translation was released. Clear and precise, it left no room for doubt as to what Mrs. Arafat was saying. Hillary, suggested an Israeli official who was present, “looked as if she was caught up in the moment. It was definitely a very warm exchange between Hillary and Suha Arafat. A lot of us were shocked.”

  It should have come as a shock to no one, given Hillary’s long-standing support of the Palestinian cause in general and the PLO in particular. During the Senate campaign, pains would be taken to downplay the fact that Yasser Arafat had been invited to the White House more times than any other world leader. Hillary also prayed that no one would notice that Arafat was so pleased with the treatment he had received from the Clintons that he had given them $12,000 worth of gold and diamond jewelry—rings, bracelets, and necklaces that Hillary quietly consigned to the National Archives with other offerings from world leaders.

  Hillary’s overt display of affection toward Arafat’s wife was only one of several incidents that aroused suspicion in New York’s Jewish community. Later in the campaign Paul Fray, who had managed Bill’s first, unsuccessful bid for Congress back in 1974, would confirm stories that Hillary once called him a “fucking Jew bastard.” State Trooper Larry Patterson would add that this was nothing new: he often heard Hillary and Bill call each other “Jew bastard” and “Jew motherfucker.” In Hillary’s case, Patterson said he had heard her make anti-Semitic slurs “at least twenty times” in the heat of anger.

  “It did not happen,” Hillary responded to Paul Fray’s allegation. “I have never said anything like that. Ever. Ever.”

  In fact, Paul Fray conceded that Hillary’s alleged remark “had a lot less to do with religion and a lot more to do with how much Hillary hated me.” Five years later, however, Hillary’s capacity for making ethnically insensitive remarks surfaced again—at yet another fund-raiser, this time in St. Louis. Managing to both insult one of history’s towering figures and reinforce a painful stereotype for many Indian immigrants, Hillary cracked, “You know Mahatma Gandhi. He ran a gas station down in St. Louis.” Following the inevitable uproar over the comment, Hillary apologized for what she called a “lame attempt at humor.” For those who actually heard her deliver the line, however, it was not just the comment itself. “It was the way she said it,” commented an audience member. “It was nasty, mean-spirited. And it was done quite naturally, as if she didn’t have a clue why anybody would take offense. I was shocked.”

  Back in 1999, when Paul Fray accused her of calling him a “Jew bastard,” Hillary was not about to rely solely on her denials to defuse the scandal. In keeping with her tried-and-true practice of discrediting her accusers, Hillary instructed an aide to send a memo to Clinton’s “Jewish Advisory Committee” outlining ways in which to cast doubt on the credibility of the three people who allegedly went on record as hearing Hillary make the anti-Semitic slur: Fray, his wife Mary, and 1974 Clinton for Congress campaign worker Neil McDonald. The same memo urged Hillary’s Jewish backers to come forward and claim they had never heard her make an anti-Semitic remark, but not to mention that they had been asked to defend her. Instead, Hillary’s memo instructed them to say they were stepping forward on their own because they were “outraged with what was said about her.” New York’s other Democratic senator, Chuck Schumer, did just that, along with seven other Jewish members of Congress, who within hours of receiving their marching orders from Hillary held a conference at the Democratic National Committee offices to defend her.

  “We’re talking about something that occurred 26 years ago, but here again,” Paul Fray said at the time, “it’s indicative of her style of approach that she’s going to deny it until it’s proven otherwise.” Hillary’s denials were, in fact, enough to convince voters that she could never have intentionally uttered an ethnic slur or an anti-Semitic remark.

  These were the kinds of mistakes lifelong New Yorker Rudy Giuliani was not likely to make. Indeed, Hillary complained bitterly that the New York press was clearly playing favorites, lying in wait for the carpetbagging First Lady to make her next gaff while giving the hometown boy a free pass. Hillary, who in the early months of her campaign restricted press access largely to staged events and carefully circumscribed interviews, also suffered in comparison to the media-savvy Giuliani.

  For months CBS talk-show host David Letterman had bombarded Hillary’s communications director, Howard Wolfson, with requests for an interview—a campaign that, as time went on, became a running gag on the show. Giuliani had charmed Letterman’s audience on several occasions, and the longer Hillary stalled, the more awkward the talk-show host’s on-air importuning became. Concerned that she would be “skewered” by Letterman, Hillary agreed to do the interview only if she knew the questions in advance. To make things even easier, comedy writers provided Hillary with a couple of snappy one-liners. Asking about her new house in Chappaqua, Letterman cracked that “every idiot in the area is going to drive by honking now.”

  “Oh, was that you?” Hillary shot back. The scripted line left the audience howling. She then went on to astound viewers with her in-depth knowledge of New York State as Letterman quizzed her on the state flower, the state bird, the state tree, the state motto, and more. What viewers did not know, of course, was that Hillary had been given the questions—and the answers—well ahead of time. (In her 2003 memoirs, Hillary would take full credit for the witty retort, and not mention the quiz—or the prepping for it—at all.)

  On January 19, Martin Luther King Day, Hillary went to Harlem to speak at the headquarters of the Reverend Al Sharpton’s National Action Network. The First Lady–turned–Senate candidate could always count on a warm welcome in New York’s black neighborhoods, where her husband was still widely regarded as a great man. Referring to “the tragic murder of Amadou Diallo,” Hillary affirmed that “what every community, but particularly the African American community, wants is to be respected and protected. The process has already started to bring this matter to the attention of the federal authorities,” she continued, being none too subtle about her willingness to have her husband pressure the Justice Department to intervene. “And if there is a role for the federal government, I will certainly encourage and urge that that occur.”

  One month later, the four officers—who were never tried for murder—were acquitted on manslaughter charges by a jury that included blacks, whites, and Hispanics. It was only then that Hillary, now coming under heavy fire for unfairly criticizing the police and facing the possibility of being sued by the officers for slander, apologized for blithely calling the four innocent men murderers.

  Yet when police killed another unarmed black man in March 2000, Hillary once again journeyed to Harlem to condemn New York City police officers and the mayor who stood behind them. When undercover cops approached Patrick Dorismond outside a bar and asked if he had drugs to sell, Dorismond became angry and a fight ensued. In the struggle, one of the officers shot and killed Dorismond. In a move that could only be described as indefensible, Giuliani, again under siege, released Dorismond’s juvenile arrest record. It showed, the mayor said, that the victim was “no altar boy.”

  Hillary pounced on Giuliani’s misguided attempt at defending his beleaguered police department. “I do not believe bad relations with the police are necessary to keep our streets safe,” she told 1,100 congregates crammed into Harlem’s Bethel A.M.E. Church. “New York has a real problem, and we all know it. All of us, it seems, except the Mayor.” Hillary would later savor the moment. “The packed sanctuary,” she recalled, “erupted in cheers and hallelujahs.” This was, she said, the turning
point in her campaign—the moment she gained “traction.”

  Hillary had wasted no time in playing the race card. While slamming Giuliani for his “divisive rhetoric,” she hammered away at what she portrayed as the mayor’s callous disregard for the rights and safety of New York’s black population. She preferred to ignore the fact that, under Giuliani, New York’s crime rate had plummeted. So, too, had police shootings. Under Giuliani’s Democratic predecessor, David Dinkins, an African American and a close political ally of Hillary’s, there were 212 police shootings in 1993 alone—a number Giuliani had reduced by 77 percent. “I didn’t see the Justice Department investigating David Dinkins in an election year,” Giuliani said, pointing to the fact that as a result of his administration’s crackdown on crime, the city’s murder rate had dropped from 2,100 a year in the early 1990s to 600 in the year 2000—a decline that was most evident in the city’s minority neighborhoods. Instead of investigating New York’s Finest, the mayor added, “the Justice Department should be giving them a medal.”

  A number of Hillary’s supporters clearly did not share that sentiment. At the state Democratic Party’s convention in Albany that May, they jeered and spat on an Albany police honor guard carrying the American flag. Some of the convention delegates, who would later formally vote to nominate Hillary as their party’s candidate for the Senate, pelted the officers with insults. “It’s Giuliani’s Third Reich!” one protester screamed at the honor guard, which had been invited to participate. Others simply yelled, “Nazis!”

  Hillary would later write a letter of apology to Albany Police Chief John Neilsen. She condemned the actions of the few cophaters in no uncertain terms, but showed no signs of comprehending that her intemperate antipolice rhetoric may have inflamed her supporters.