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

  Over the spring, Hillary crept up in the polls as Giuliani found himself caught up in his own extramarital scandal. While she would later claim to have sympathized with the mayor’s plight, at the time Hillary was, said a campaign volunteer, “thrilled about the whole sordid mess. I watched her reading a story about Giuliani’s affair in the Daily News, and at one point she just howled with laughter.”

  That was nothing compared to the reaction at Clinton headquarters when Giuliani announced on May 19, 2000, that he was withdrawing from the race to battle prostate cancer. Behind the campaign’s solemn public face, there was “jubilation,” said another Clinton volunteer. “Hillary knew that Giuliani was the only one who stood even the slightest chance of beating her. She didn’t want to look as if she was happy he’d gotten cancer, but some of the other people in the campaign made no secret of their hatred for Giuliani.” Hillary said nothing when one of her most trusted advisers reacted to the news with “Cancer? Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.”

  Few doubted that Hillary would trounce Giuliani’s replacement, a fresh-faced but little-known congressman from Long Island named Rick Lazio. But then Hillary was, in the words of her own mother, “never one to leave things to chance.”

  Hillary was confident that she enjoyed a significant lead in New York’s black and Hispanic communities. But because of tensions between the black and Jewish communities, the kiss she gave Mrs. Arafat, her support for a Palestinian state, and her reputed “Jew bastard” remark, she worried that she might lose New York’s significant Jewish vote.

  Just to be safe, Hillary made a concerted effort not to be seen in any situation that might make her appear to be sympathetic to the Arab cause. That was going to be tricky, since several individuals and organizations with ties to Arafat, the PLO, and other anti-Israel organizations had already promised to contribute large sums to her Senate campaign.

  Exactly one week before Giuliani bowed out of the race, Hillary asked Yasser Arafat’s friend Hani Masri to host a secret fund-raiser for her at his Washington home. The Masri family poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into Democratic Party coffers just as the Clinton administration was pondering a $60 million government loan to Masri’s Capital Investment Management Corporation. The two-hour-long reception at the Masri mansion netted a tidy $50,000 for Hillary’s campaign.

  The following month, Hillary showed up at another event to collect $50,000 from the American Muslim Alliance, an organization that advocates the use of force against the state of Israel. Later, Hillary claimed to have been unaware that the alliance had sponsored the fund-raiser. But then a thank-you letter written on White House stationery and bearing Hillary’s signature turned up, as did a photograph of a smiling Hillary posing with a plaque the organization had bestowed on her. Things only got worse when it was revealed that a donation from another questionable group, the American Muslim Council, was disguised in the campaign’s records as a contribution from the American “Museum” Council. “A typo,” Hillary commented with a shrug. The only typo, it turned out, in the campaign’s extensive list of donors submitted to the Federal Election Commission.

  That June Hillary was, in the words of a state party official, “thrown into a panic” when crowds booed her as she marched up Fifth Avenue in New York’s annual Israel Day Parade. Later, at a “Solidarity for Israel” rally in front of the Israeli consulate in Manhattan, she was booed off the stage.

  Polls were showing Hillary and “Little Ricky,” as she now referred to Lazio, as dead even. Convinced the race would be decided by a hairbreadth, she was more determined than ever to do whatever she could to win over Jewish voters. Not long after the “Solidarity for Israel” debacle, Hillary’s handlers briefed her on the situation in New Square, a tiny Hasidic enclave about thirty miles northwest of Manhattan. There, four prominent members of the Orthodox Jewish Skver sect had been convicted in 1999 of bilking government aid programs to the tune of $30 million and funneling the cash back into New Square’s yeshiva.

  New Square had voted as a bloc in previous elections, and Hillary’s advisers suggested she make a campaign stop there. She was also warned that four of the community’s leaders were serving time in a federal prison for stealing millions of taxpayer dollars, and that the rabbis had been lobbying aggressively to have the four men’s sentences commuted. Giuliani refused to help, as did Lazio.

  A campaign staffer cautioned Hillary that the issue of a presidential pardon might come up. “So?” the candidate asked incredulously.

  On August 8, 2000, Hillary made her pilgrimage to New Square, following Hasidic custom by covering her head with a scarf before sitting down to talk with village leaders. Positioned across a coffee table from the rabbis and talking through a tall flower arrangement that served as the Hasidims’ traditional screen between the sexes, Hillary calmly spelled out what she was willing to do to improve New Square’s health care services. The subject of pardons, both Hillary and her hosts would later insist, was never raised.

  Six days later, on the opening night of the Democratic convention in Los Angeles, Hillary thanked the party faithful “for your support and faith in good times—and in bad.” Surrounded by Democratic women senators Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Blanche Lincoln, Mary Landrieu, Barbara Mikulski, and Patty Murray, Hillary seized the opportunity to position herself as a figure of national importance in her own right. “Bill and I are closing one chapter of our lives,” she declared, “and soon we’ll be starting a new one.” When Bill followed her onstage to chants of “four more years,” the Clintons smiled and subconsciously nodded in agreement. If all went according to The Plan…

  The rabbis of New Square, meanwhile, would have to wait for several months before Hillary sent them a signal. The day before the election, a letter from the President was posted in the entrance hall of New Square’s main synagogue. In it, Bill Clinton said he was looking forward to visiting the village in the near future. Once the votes were tallied the next day, New Square delivered Hillary the biggest victory margin of any community in the state—1,359 votes to only 10 votes for her opponent, Rick Lazio. In contrast, the two neighboring Hasidic villages, where the issue of a presidential pardon played no role in the election, voted 3,480 to 152 against Hillary.

  “We had very strong support in the Jewish community, particularly in the towns surrounding New Square,” Lazio said. “But from the very beginning, we were told not to come to New Square itself. They’d say, ‘Don’t bother to send anyone, there’s nothing you can do…. We’re terribly sorry.’ We didn’t know what it was at the time. Of course, we found out eventually.”

  Three days before Christmas 2000, Grand Rabbi David Twersky and several other New Square leaders would meet with Bill and Hillary in the White House Map Room. Sobbing, the grand rabbi begged the President to pardon Kalman Stern, Jacob Elbaum, Benjamin Berger, and David Goldstein.

  Hillary would later tell federal investigators that she did not express an opinion at the meeting, and that at no time did she ask her husband to intervene. She knew, of course, that she didn’t have to. “I don’t believe that, before the election, anyone was dumb enough to say, ‘Hey, we’ll trade this for this,’ ” observed another New Square rabbi, Ronnie Greenwald. “But post-election, I think they took advantage of a quid pro quo and said, ‘We helped you, we went all-out for you. If you can help us…’ ” Not surprisingly, the New Square embezzlers would get their commutations from the grateful candidate’s husband.

  Hillary would later express anger at Al Gore for distancing himself from Bill Clinton and the Clintons’ much-debated legacy during the presidential race against George W. Bush. But no one understood better than Hillary that many lingering resentments over Bill’s behavior could cost her crucial swing votes upstate and in the suburbs. Determined to disentangle her political career from her husband’s, Hillary kept Bill’s appearances on her behalf to a minimum.

  Yet the President did play a key backstage role. While he did not attend most staff mee
tings, he worked the phones on her behalf, tinkered with her speeches, and—most important—used the power and prestige of his office to make the hard deals that would reap dollars and votes for his wife.

  She did not want Bill around—he made her too nervous—as she prepared for the first of three debates with Lazio. Not that she needed his help. During the first debate, Lazio left his podium to invade Hillary’s personal space, waving papers in her face and demanding that she sign an agreement forswearing soft-money contributions. She refused at the time, but that did not resonate with voters. What did make a lasting—and decidedly negative—impression was Lazio’s perceived bullying of the First Lady.

  “That’s how it was spun,” said Lazio, who claimed that at the time Hillary (“She’s a bare-knuckles politician”) looked anything but frightened when he stepped up to her. “Hillary despises being challenged. I remember looking at her and you could see she was thinking, ‘I can’t believe this guy is challenging what I have to say.’ ” Lazio went on to dismiss the notion, put forward by Hillary’s camp in the days following the debate, that she somehow felt physically threatened when he stepped up to her during the debate. “It’s the most ludicrous idea,” Lazio said, “that she was this fragile flower, very vulnerable and passive. They really felt it was pure effrontery to contradict this woman who is very aggressive, very tough, and more than willing to throw a punch.” What of the newer, gentler Hillary? “People don’t change,” Lazio said. “You are who you are. You don’t become a patient, kind, ethical person if you weren’t that beforehand.”

  Lazio was unable to overcome his late start in the campaign—not to mention Hillary’s star power. “She’d fly into these little upstate towns aboard an Air Force plane, with this Secret Service entourage, and out steps the reigning First Lady,” Lazio said. “It was pure Hollywood.”

  On election night, Hillary knew she would win, but not by how much. While her supporters waited for her in the ballroom of New York’s Grand Hyatt Hotel, Hillary, swathed in a terry-cloth robe, was being tended to by her hairdresser and makeup artist when Chelsea burst in with the news. Hillary had won by a staggering 12 percent, 55 percent to Lazio’s 43 percent. In the end, the victory had less to do with issues than it did with name recognition. “New Yorkers want someone bigger than life,” noted Time magazine’s Margaret Carlson, “and Little Ricky was no match for a vanity candidate like Hillary.”

  While mobile confetti guns showered the crowd with red, white, and blue confetti, Hillary thanked the multitude. “We started this great effort on a sunny July morning in Pindars Corner on Pat and Liz Moynihan’s beautiful farm,” she began, “and 62 counties, 16 months, three debates, two opponents, and six black pantsuits later, because of you we are there.” She went on, in typically ponderous and penitential Hillary Clinton fashion, to remind her supporters of all the hard work that lay ahead.

  Having carefully stage-managed her own celebration, Hillary stood between Chelsea and her Senate colleague Chuck Schumer, with Bill pushed off to one side. Red-faced and puffy-eyed, the President dabbed at tears of pride. Hillary was all business. “After eight years with a title and no portfolio,” she said triumphantly, “I was now ‘Senator-elect.’ ”

  She would have to be, if Republican Majority Leader Trent Lott’s reaction was any indication. “I tell you one thing,” Lott said, “when this Hillary gets to the Senate, if she does—maybe lightning will strike and she won’t—she will be one of one hundred, and we won’t let her forget it.”

  Hillary’s opponent in the Senate race had no doubt that she intended to pursue higher office. “I don’t think she ran simply to grow old in a Senate seat,” Rick Lazio said. “She’s somebody who enjoys power, and when you’ve tasted the sort of absolute power she’s accustomed to…”

  Hillary’s victory was upstaged by the seesawing results of the presidential race, closest in the nation’s history. For the next “36 days from hell,” as Laura Bush’s staffers would call it, the Gore and Bush legal teams battled it out all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. At stake were Florida’s twenty-five electoral votes, and the presidency.

  Hillary was enraged when, despite the fact that Al Gore had won the popular vote by more than a half-million ballots, the Supreme Court voted 5–4 to stop recounting votes in Florida. Slamming the decision as “indefensible” and a “blatant abuse of judicial power,” she pledged to back a constitutional amendment that would eliminate the electoral college altogether. Few of her colleagues, however, would have the stomach for such drastic measures. By the time George W. Bush was sworn into office, Hillary had stricken the issue from her repertoire.

  Yet even before she was actually sworn in, Hillary began pulling the levers of power, calling on her old friends in the Senate to help her land spots on key committees. Hillary wisely courted Robert Byrd, the man who had repeatedly denounced the Clintons for their “egregious arrogance,” and was rewarded with a seat on the Budget Committee. Nevada Senator Harry Reid offered her a spot on the Environment and Public Works Committees, and Ted Kennedy made room for her on his HELP (Health, Education, Labor and Pensions) Committee. Later, Hillary would also land a seat on the Armed Services Committee.

  Just as she pulled strings to land the kind of committee assignments that would never go to a freshman senator, Hillary later lobbied for a Capitol Hill office befitting her stature. “She’s not just another senator, no matter what they say,” noted one awestruck Capitol Hill intern. “She’s American royalty, more like a queen.” After a six-week stint in the basement of the Dirksen Senate Office Building—the customary habitat of most newly elected senators—Hillary, who ranked ninety-eighth in seniority, was nevertheless catapulted to the majestic top-floor office suite previously occupied by Senator Moynihan in the Russell Building. On the walls hung portraits of New York senators who preceded her, ranging from Aaron Burr and Martin Van Buren to Bobby Kennedy. If its soaring ceilings and pink marble fireplace weren’t indication enough of Hillary’s stature, one only had to look at the man who occupied the similarly grand office next door: then–Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott.

  Similarly, Hillary would insist that her Manhattan offices one block from the Waldorf-Astoria not only be more than twice as large as her fellow New York senator’s—7,900 square feet to Chuck Schumer’s 3,900 square feet—but that they cost the taxpayer more than twice as much. While Schumer paid $209,532 a year for his offices, the rent on Hillary’s suite was $514,148 annually—far and away the most spent by any U.S. senator on office space.

  Yet Hillary’s Manhattan landgrab paled in comparison to her husband’s. When Bill announced that he would be spending $800,000 a year to rent the entire fifty-sixth floor of Carnegie Hall Towers on Central Park South—three times what had been spent on the offices of any other ex-President—a public outcry ensued. Eventually, Clinton backed down, choosing instead to move into offices at 55 West 125th Street in the heart of Harlem. Nevertheless, his offices would—at a yearly rent of $300,000—still cost the taxpayer more than those of any of his peers.

  Since her aspirations extended beyond the Senate, Hillary also had to maintain a residence in Washington that made it possible for her to host large groups of powerful people. By Christmas, she had put a down payment on a “Whitehaven,” a $2.7 million, gabled, three-story brick Georgian manse with circular drive just off Washington’s Embassy Row on Whitehaven Street. The spacious rooms, decorated in shades of yellow and pink by the same interior design team that did the nearby British embassy, would soon be filled with power brokers of every conceivable stripe. “She is always warm and gracious,” said one frequent guest, “and she has a self-deprecating humor, and that hearty laugh—like a man’s—can be startling.” But he also likened his meetings with Hillary, all of which had a very specific purpose, to “calling on the Godfather.”

  On January 3, 2001, Bill, Chelsea, and Dorothy Rodham watched from the visitors’ gallery as Hillary took the oath of office on the Senate floor. “In a classic Washingt
on tableau of power-worship, hypocrisy and redemption,” New York Times reporter Allison Mitchell observed, “the Senate took on the look of a receiving line, as a parade of senators came to welcome Mrs. Clinton, air-kissing, back-patting, and handshaking….” The pièce de résistance came courtesy of ninety-eight-year-old South Carolina Republican Strom Thurman, who unnerved the First Lady senator with a disquietingly ardent embrace. This display of obeisance, taking place just out of TV camera range, left little doubt as to who was now the most powerful force in the Democratic Party. “There was a whole lot of ring-kissing going on,” said one observer. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews agreed that Hillary was “the number one Democratic senator right now. She’s the boss. Hillary is calling the shots.”

  Of course, no one actually believed Trent Lott’s assertion that she was just one of one hundred senators. Gallop polls showed that Hillary easily beat out Oprah as America’s most admired woman—a position she would still be holding in 2004. Then there were the Secret Service agents who trailed Hillary—and would always trail her—wherever she went, creating consternation and envy among her status-conscious peers.

  Still, Hillary was careful to start off her Senate career by flattering, cajoling, flirting with, and essentially catering to her fellow legislators’ fragile male egos. “My gut is she’ll handle it pretty well,” said Connecticut Democrat Christopher Dodd. “She’s smart. Smart is understanding that people are waiting here for any false move to jump all over her.”

  As far as the swearing-in ceremony was concerned, once was not enough for Hillary. She would reenact the solemn moment twice more for her supporters. The final reenactment would take place several days later at Madison Square Garden, where union executives and state party leaders watched as Al Gore administered the oath of office. Gore, who received several standing ovations, congratulated Hillary “not only on winning, not only on all the votes you received, but on getting your votes counted….”