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

  It was a strained moment for the Gores and the Clintons. Not long before, the two men had had a famous confrontation behind closed doors. Gore blamed his defeat on the outgoing President and the stink of scandal that trailed in the Clintons’ wake. Clinton slammed Gore for betraying the Clinton legacy by not running on the administration’s record. The acrimony would spill over to their wives. Hillary had always dismissed Tipper as an intellectual lightweight, and Tipper regarded Hillary as, in the words of an aide, “grasping.” After Gore’s defeat, the two women who had barnstormed the country on behalf of their husbands in 1992 and 1996 refused to speak to each other.

  Once back in Washington, Hillary reminded Bill that this would be the last time he would be able to issue presidential pardons—a power that, they had both discovered, could be used to their political advantage. At Hillary’s urging, he cast about for criminals worthy of executive clemency.

  On January 15, the day the Clintons closed on the purchase of their Embassy Row house, Hillary was ebullient but her husband was plainly exhausted. There was no time for him to relax and enjoy his last few days in office, he told one of the lawyers present at the house closing, because he had to plow through a mountain of requests—nearly five hundred in all—for commutations and pardons. A few days later, returning from a quick trip to Arkansas aboard Air Force One, the President strolled into the plane’s press section and drawled, “You got anybody you want to pardon?”

  The Clintons’ eagerness to pardon, though politically motivated, was also fueled in part by their hatred of special prosecutors in general and Ken Starr in particular. Hillary, who saw herself and her husband as the victims of Starr and his overzealous minions, said she was now more sensitive than ever to the fact that “lots of people are wrongly persecuted.”

  During the Clintons’ last forty-eight hours in office, the White House ordered the Justice Department and the FBI to do background checks on scores of possible candidates. There was only one exception: Bill’s younger brother, Roger, who had been convicted of trafficking in cocaine in 1985. Bill was well aware that the problematic Roger (Secret Service code name: “Headache”) was the target of several FBI inquiries into alleged influence peddling. He was also highly resentful of the FBI’s dogged pursuit of investigations into a number of Clinton scandals. The President wanted Headache’s pardon handled by more Clinton-friendly higher-ups in the Justice Department.

  Roger wanted more than just a pardon for himself; he was also actively lobbying to have his brother pardon six of his buddies. But Roger was not the only family member deeply involved in the process. Hillary’s Brobdingnagian younger brother Hugh Rodham, now a Florida lawyer, was pushing hard to have the President pardon drug kingpin Carlos Vignali and Almon Glenn Braswell, an herbal-remedy magnate convicted of perjury and mail fraud.

  Bill and Hillary knew that Braswell was worth millions, and that Vignali’s family had contributed heavily to the Democratic Party since Carlos’s imprisonment in 1994. But Hillary would later claim she had no idea that “Hughie,” who had stayed at the White House so frequently that he now required more packing crates than Chelsea, stood to collect $400,000 in fees for securing the pardons.

  Hillary would later deny it, but in those last few days in the White House, she conferred several times with her husband about who would and would not appear on the list of pardons he was preparing. “Hillary was involved from the get-go in making sure that several pardons went through,” insisted a longtime Arkansas friend with an intimate knowledge of at least four of the clemency cases from the President’s home state. “Hillary brought him names, pushed them along, and followed up with phone calls. In other cases, he ran names by her because he didn’t want anything he did to backfire and cause her grief. But obviously they both figured that after the whole Bush–Gore election battle…the pardons would just slide by and nobody would notice.”

  At least two were foregone conclusions: Roger, and the Clintons’ ex–Whitewater partner Susan McDougal, who served two years in prison—first for fraud in the land deal, and then for refusing to testify against Bill. Apparently unperturbed by Susan’s alleged affair with her husband, Hillary would go on to salute McDougal’s loyalty in her autobiography.

  Nearly all who made the final cut were recommended by family, friends, or fund-raisers. Longtime Clinton pal Jesse Jackson, who had just tearfully confessed that he had fathered a child out of wedlock even as he counseled the Clinton family during the Monica Lewinksy mess, successfully sought clemency for two aides and former congressman Mel Reynolds, sentenced to six and a half years for wire and bank fraud (after serving a two-year term for having sex with a teenager). Harry Thomason helped win pardons for two Arkansas tax evaders, and Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe convinced Clinton to pardon lobbyist James Lake, convicted of masterminding an unlawful campaign contribution scheme.

  Clinton advisers William Kennedy III, David Dreyer, and James Hamilton asked for and got clemency for various cocaine traffickers, tax cheats, and money launderers. For obvious reasons, Bill sympathized with his former Housing and Urban Affairs Secretary Henry Cisneros, who made secret payments to his mistress and then lied to federal agents about it; Clinton pardoned Cisneros and his mistress.

  Portly New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler, one of Bill Clinton’s most vocal defenders during the impeachment proceedings and a major booster of Hillary’s Senate candidacy, interceded on behalf of 1960s radical Susan Rosenberg. A member of the violent Weather Underground, Rosenberg was arrested in New Jersey in 1984 with 740 pounds of dynamite and a machine gun in her car. She was also a suspect in the 1981 robbery by Weather Underground radicals of an armored car that left a Brinks guard and two police officers dead. Overriding Justice Department objections, Clinton pardoned Rosenberg just as he had pardoned the FALN terrorists the year before.

  Another pardon application was of particular importance to New York’s newest senator. Wealthy Manhattan socialite-songwriter Denise Rich had written to the President pleading for him to pardon her ex-husband, notorious white-collar fugitive Marc Rich. The Belgian-born billionaire, charged in 1983 with evading $48 million in taxes and illegally trading with Iran during the hostage crisis, had fled to Switzerland with Denise and his business partner, Pincus Green.

  For years the glamorous, well-connected Denise had ranked as one of the Democrats’ most generous donors, contributing more than $1.5 million out of her own pocket to the party, another $450,000 to the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, and $70,000 to Hillary’s campaign. She was best known for the fund-raisers she threw in her lavish, twenty-five-thousand-square-foot penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue.

  Not surprisingly, Denise quickly became an intimate of both Clintons. “They hug and are very close,” another friend, actress Jane Seymour, said of the relationship between Denise and the First Couple.

  Beth Dozoretz, former finance chief of the Democratic National Committee, was also backing Rich’s pardon. Rich had taken the added step of hiring former Clinton White House counsel Jack Quinn as his lawyer, but Denise and Beth Dozoretz—who, according to Secret Service logs, racked up ninety-five White House visits between them—were, as Marc Rich boasted to a friend, “the ones who have really got Hillary’s ear.”

  The President would wait until the morning of this last day in office and then, over strong objections from the Justice Department and all of his own top aides, add Rich’s name to the list. “He did it,” one of Bill’s closest advisers would later explain, “for Denise.” And, by virtue of the money she would continue to funnel Hillary’s way, for New York’s freshman senator.

  In coming weeks, the scandal over “Pardongate” would assume a life all its own. At first, Hillary would do what she had always done: claim total innocence. She had nothing to do with the pardons, she insisted. Nothing at all. As federal investigators closed in, however, she was forced to concede that she “may have” played a part in the selection process. “When it became apparent
around Christmas that people knew that the President was considering pardons, there were many people who spoke to me, or you know, asked me to pass on information. You know, people would hand me envelopes, I would just pass them….”

  Weeks later, Hillary would be sitting in a Washington theater watching Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon when an aide called on the senator’s cell phone to tell her about Hughie’s $400,000 payday. Publicly, Hillary would only admit to being “very disappointed…and deeply saddened” by Hughie’s lucrative deal. She called for her brother to return the money.

  Privately, Hillary raged at Hughie Rodham, who was staying with the First Family during those final days in the Executive Mansion and yet had said nothing to his sister about the payoff. “How could you,” she demanded to know, “be so goddamned stupid?”

  Democratic Party leaders would soon be asking the Clintons the same thing. Even the Clintons’ staunchest allies conceded that Bill and Hillary had gone too far this time. New York Times editorial writers branded the pardons as nothing less than an “inexcusable abuse” of executive power. Jimmy Carter broke the code of the presidential brotherhood by calling Clinton’s pardon of Rich “disgraceful.” Hillary’s fellow New York senator, Chuck Schumer, also condemned the Marc Rich pardon.

  Even as Denise Rich and Beth Dozoretz pled the Fifth Amendment at hearings before the House Government Reform Committee, Terry McAuliffe admitted the Rich pardon was simply “wrong.” And West Virginia’s courtly Robert Byrd, Hillary’s mentor in the Senate, would claim to be “disgusted” by the President’s last official actions in office. Byrd characterized them as “malodorous.”

  In their final days at the White House, however, the Clintons had not the slightest inkling of the controversy that awaited them. Instead, Hillary devoted a considerable amount of time to mapping out the family’s financial future.

  Hillary now set her sights on, as she told friends, “finally having some nice things we can call our own.” Even before giving up her lucrative Little Rock law practice to become First Lady, Hillary had frequently complained of the sacrifices she had had to make so that Bill could pursue his presidential ambitions. It had been years since Dick Morris warned Hillary that her plan to put in a swimming pool at the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock might be resented by voters in a state as impoverished as Arkansas. “Why,” she shouted at Morris in reply, “can’t we live like normal people?”

  Hillary was well on her way to living well when, in mid-December, she began auditioning publishers in the White House Diplomacy Room. It was vital that she ink a deal before January 3, 2001, when, upon being sworn into office, she would have been required to run it by the Senate Ethics Committee.

  Hillary later justified this apparent scramble for a stratospheric book deal by pointing out that the First Couple faced more than $4 million in legal fees stemming from the various investigations into their conduct. But she also knew that several defense funds were already well on the way to covering the entire amount with hefty contributions from wealthy FOBs and FOHs.

  While industry insiders speculated that she would be offered a $5 million advance for her memoirs, she ended up accepting Simon & Schuster’s $8 million—just $500,000 shy of Pope John Paul II’s record-shattering advance. Even after signing on the dotted line, Hillary was worried that Senate watchdogs might do something to prevent her from collecting all the money she was due. “She was pushing hard,” recalled someone close to the negotiations, “to get the whole advance up front.”

  Few remembered that, just six years earlier, Hillary and Bill had both denounced Newt Gingrich’s $4.5 million book deal, even though at the time there were no limits on what a congressman might accept in the way of payment. Nevertheless, a chastened Gingrich gave back the $4.5 million and agreed to accept an advance of only $1. But when a staffer reluctantly showed Hillary an editorial in the New York Times condemning her $8 million contract, she merely shrugged. “Screw ’em,” the First Lady said yet again, then returned to her paperwork.

  Hillary also made certain that Bill would be doing his part. “Bill was happy to go out on the lecture circuit and make some big money,” a former staffer remarked. “But he wanted to take it slow at first and be selective about which offers he accepted. Hillary said, ‘No way, buddy, you’re doing it all.’ ” Weeks before the Clintons exited the White House, speaking engagements were being booked for the soon-to-be ex-President at fees ranging from $100,000 to $450,000. One postpresidential payday Bill seriously considered was vetoed by Hillary as “just too tacky”: $2 million to appear in a Super Bowl commercial.

  (Bill was already well aware of his earning potential and determined to exploit it to the fullest. Although he was vocal in his public opposition to George W. Bush’s planned tax cuts, Clinton applauded them in private. Over dinner one evening with Oxford Professor Alan Ryan, Clinton said Bush’s cuts would be “good for people who are as rich as I’m about to be.” Said Ryan: “He made it quite clear he expects to make a colossal amount of money very fast.” As it turned out, Clinton would earn $9.2 million in speaking fees alone his first year out of office—and end up breaking the pope’s record by signing a $12 million book deal with Alfred A. Knopf.)

  After eighteen years in public housing—first at the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion and then at the White House—Hillary was finally prepared for the transition to the Embassy Row and Chappaqua houses. Over the previous year, she had relied on her old Arkansas-based interior decorator pal Kaki Hockersmith to help transform the relatively modest Chappaqua house into a residence befitting a United States senator and her spouse, the ex-President.

  Hillary had, after all, become accustomed to a certain lifestyle. At one point that final week, she was escorting a guest through the family residence when she stopped to admire a gigantic spray of yellow roses and chrysanthemums in the East Sitting Hall. “This is one of the great things about living in the White House,” she said with a sigh. Moving on down the cavernous Center Hall, they passed the Cézanne and then the de Kooning before stopping in front of Mary Cassatt’s painting of a woman and two children. “When we go to our house in New York, we take out things and I think, ‘Doesn’t that look nice?’ And then I come back here,” she said, “and there’s the Mary Cassatt.”

  Hillary would later write that, during these last few days in office, she took the time to take a stroll through the White House Children’s Garden with Chelsea, and to wander “from room to room making mental snapshots of all my favorite things.”

  As it turned out, she didn’t plan on leaving all that much behind. At one point, Hillary walked the halls of the family residence with a clipboard-toting aide, pointing to the items she intended to take with her. In the solarium, Hillary plopped down on the $6,000 English-style sofa that had been a gift to the White House from Manhattan businessman Steve Mittman. “We’re taking this,” she told the aide, who hastily jotted down a description of the piece on a yellow legal pad. “And those,” Hillary said, nodding toward four oversize club chairs—each valued at $2,843—that had also been a gift from Mittman.

  As they moved on to the Yellow Oval Room, here were the two Henredon sofas worth $3,000 each, and the rattan chairs in the solarium, and the Aubusson rug in the First Lady’s Sitting Room, and the kitchen table, oh, and of course the $7,375 worth of designer tables and chairs from our dear friend Denise Rich…

  “On behalf of the Clinton Family,” Hillary had written to Mittman and the others when they first donated the furnishings, “I want to express my sincere gratitude for your generous contribution to the White House.” But now that the Clintons were departing, Hillary preferred to look at these pieces of furniture—$28,000 worth in all—as her personal property.

  Not that this accounted for more than a small fraction of the items needed to furnish her two sizable residences. Hillary waxed nostalgic to Ladies’ Home Journal reporter Meredith Berkman about what it was like unpacking old family treasures. “I don’t even know where to start,” Hillary g
ushed. “Old rocking chairs, old tables, old clocks, just everything…a lot of old pictures, knickknacks, memorabilia.”

  Away from reporters, she lamented the fact that, after nearly two decades of living in taxpayer-funded splendor, “all we’ve got to call our own is some old junk.” Always adept at finding an angle—tax records show the Clintons had actually taken a deduction for donating used underwear to charity—Hillary was searching for a way to finance the furnishing of her new homes without drawing fire from the press.

  After brainstorming with decorator Hockersmith, Hillary came up with a novel solution. Rather than asking for cash contributions outright, why not quietly register for gifts at a department store. “Like a bride!” Hillary said, cornflower blue eyes widening. Then she cut loose with her trademark, window-rattling laugh.

  Hillary went ahead with her plan and registered with a suitably low-profile store, Borsheim’s, in Omaha. On a fund-raising trip to Nebraska that December, she ducked into the store to peruse the merchandise. Again, she wanted to take advantage of the small window of time between her election to the Senate and her swearing-in, when she would be barred from accepting any gift valued at more than fifty dollars.

  On January 19, 2001, Hillary watched from an upstairs window as two twenty-six-foot-long vans pulled up to the White House. Pushing dollies through the broad corridors of the second-floor residence, movers hauled away all the items Hillary had tagged—which now also included three television sets, a DVD player, a china cabinet from insurance tycoon Walter Kaye (who happened to be the man who first delivered Monica Lewinsky to the Oval Office), two Dale Chihuly glass sculptures worth $60,000, two Lenox bowls valued at over $50,000, $22,000 worth of china (Spode), $18,000 in silverware (Fabergé and Stafford), as well as individual decorative objects fashioned by Tiffany, Cartier, and Waterford.