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

  Hillary flailed away at the Republicans’ alleged insensitivity toward working-class Americans, though on those rare occasions when she had to pay for something out of her own pocket, she seemed somewhat less than generous. After taking actress and longtime Democrat Lauren Bacall to lunch at New York’s Russian Tea Room, Hillary picked up the $300 check. As they left, Bacall was reportedly stunned to see that Hillary had left only $15—5 percent—for the tip. As Hillary chatted with fans on the way out of the restaurant, Bacall made her way back to the waitress and slipped her $100. “The Senator,” she said by way of an apology, “must have made a mistake.”

  On September 11, 2001, Bill was collecting a $150,000 speaking fee in Australia and Hillary was in Washington preparing yet another attack on George W. Bush. Hillary was on the phone shortly after 9 A.M. when an aide came running into her office and told her to turn on her television set. Only minutes before, an airliner had crashed into one of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Like millions of other Americans, Hillary sat, mouth agape, watching as a second airliner slammed into the other tower. “Bin Laden did this,” she said, then stiffened as it suddenly dawned on her just how close to home bin Laden had struck. “Oh my God,” she murmured, her face turning ashen.

  “What’s wrong?” the aide asked.

  “Chelsea. She’s in New York….”

  6

  Winning that election

  was liberation day for Hillary.

  —Don Jones, Hillary’s youth pastor and friend, on her Senate win

  Does she plan to run for President?

  Of course.

  —Ed Koch, former New York mayor

  I want to run something.

  She was not born in New York. She had never lived there. She did not attend school there, and none of her ancestors hailed from there. She had, in fact, never spent more than a few days there before deciding that she wanted to use one of New York’s two Senate seats as a springboard to the presidency.

  Now, as one of New York’s highest elected officials, Hillary would be tested—completely on her own—in a way she had never been tested before. Her first thoughts, understandably, went to Chelsea. As she would later tell Katie Couric on NBC’s Dateline, Chelsea “had gone on what she thought would be a great jog. She was going down to Battery Park, she was going to go around the towers. She was going to get a cup of coffee and—that’s when the plane hit!”

  Not quite. When she first learned of the terrorist attacks, Chelsea was actually staying at the Union Square apartment of her best friend, Nicole Davison—over thirty blocks from Ground Zero. Davison, who had already gone to work, called Chelsea to tell her about the first plane hitting the north tower. At that point, Chelsea later recalled, “I stared senselessly at the television,” watching the second plane hit.

  Alone and afraid, Chelsea tried to get through to her mother, but her phone was dead. Suddenly overcome by “panic,” she bolted out of the apartment and started walking downtown—toward Ground Zero—in search of a working pay phone. As people, many covered in ash, streamed by her in the opposite direction, Chelsea became disoriented, confused. Suddenly there was a deafening roar, and someone told her that one of the towers had fallen. Chelsea would later say that at the moment she feared for her life. She wasn’t sure where she was at the time, but based on the landmarks she described, friends told her she must have been a dozen or so blocks from Ground Zero.

  Given the inconsistencies in Chelsea and Hillary’s stories, there were those—including some New York Democrats—who doubted their veracity. The earliest news reports did not put Chelsea so perilously close to the World Trade Center. Members of Charles Schumer’s staff even suggested that, the more the press kept reporting that Schumer’s daughter Jessica was just five blocks away from Ground Zero at Stuyvesant High School, the closer Chelsea got.

  Strangely, Chelsea would have no trouble reaching her father in Australia; it would take hours for her to finally touch base with Hillary, who by then was strategizing with staffers about how the junior senator from New York should respond to attacks on her constituents. How she handled the next few days would, Hillary quickly realized, have a profound impact on her future presidential prospects.

  At the time of the attacks, President Bush was speaking to schoolchildren in Sarasota, Florida. Rather than return immediately to Washington, he followed the advice of those who feared for his safety and spent ten hours zigzagging from one air base to another aboard Air Force One. Predictably, a number of Democrats seized on this fact to criticize Bush, implying that the commander in chief had behaved in a less-than-heroic fashion.

  Hillary was not one of them. Despite her reputation as one of President Bush’s harshest and most outspoken critics, Senator Clinton now became one of his strongest supporters. Giving a speech on the floor of the Senate the day after the attacks, Hillary expressed her “strong support for the president not only as the senator from New York but as someone who for eight years has some sense of the burdens and responsibilities that fall on the shoulders of the human being we make our president. It is an awesome and oftentimes awful responsibility for any person.”

  She later told reporters that she was “100 percent behind Bush’s handling of the terrorist attacks,” and thanked the President for his pledge of federal help in the massive search-and-rescue effort that still lay ahead. “We will stand united behind our president,” she said, “to make very clear that not only those who harbor terrorists but also those who give any aid or comfort whatsoever face the wrath of America. You are either with America in her time of need, or you are not.”

  Not all of Hillary’s supporters were so willing to drop partisan differences for the sake of the country. One New Yorker who had contributed to Hillary’s Senate campaign breathed a sigh of relief on 9/11 when, after frantically trying to reach his wife, he finally located her safely ensconced in her midtown Manhattan office. In the same conversation, Hillary’s supporter was informed that conservative commentator Barbara Olson had been among those killed aboard the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. “Well,” he snickered, “I can’t say I’m sorry.”

  Two days after the attack, Bush called Mayor Giuliani and New York Governor George Pataki from the Oval Office to pledge his support. That same day, the President and his national security team met with Hillary and Schumer. Although she would later claim on many occasions to have fought hard for $20 billion in federal money for the city, Bush had made up his mind to back the request the minute he heard it. “Before we could say much of anything,” Hillary later recalled of the meeting, “the President told us he would support the $20 billion in federal aide we had asked for.”

  Over the next several days, Bush and Giuliani—two of Hillary’s political archenemies—rose to the task of pulling the nation together in a time of national crisis. Hillary praised Giuliani in particular for his courageous leadership during New York’s darkest hour. At the same time, she fully appreciated the fact that 9/11 had made Giuliani, now being hailed as “America’s Mayor,” that much more formidable. “If she wanted to run for president in 2008, Giuliani could be the GOP nominee,” observed a political analyst who had done work for both Clintons. “Or at the very least, he could go up against her when she runs for reelection. Anything that built up Rudy Giuliani’s reputation—or for that matter Bush’s—had to be a bad thing, as far as Hillary was concerned.”

  At times, Hillary had a difficult time concealing her true feelings about W. During the President’s address to a joint session of Congress just days after the attacks, television cameras caught Hillary rolling her eyes and shaking her head. Her aides would later claim that the disapproving gesture had nothing to do with what the President was saying. But not long after, New York Times correspondent Frank Bruni watched her react the same way at a Budget Committee hearing. According to Bruni, Hillary “silently and reflexively shook her head and rolled her eyes almost every time one of the economists who were testifying mentioned Bush’s tax cut.�
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  The occasional slip aside, Hillary made a concerted effort to appear as if she was solidly behind the President in the immediate wake of 9/11. Two days after the attacks, she flew with the President to New York aboard Air Force One. (Chuck Schumer was reportedly peeved that Hillary took a seat next to the President and remained there the entire flight.) The state’s two Democratic senators joined Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki at Ground Zero, where Bush talked to rescuers over a bullhorn. When someone in the audience yelled that he couldn’t hear the President, Bush replied without hesitation, “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” The crowd then began chanting “USA! USA!”

  Firefighters, police, and rescue workers swarmed over Bush, Giuliani, Pataki, and Schumer. But when Hillary stepped forward to share in the moment, they withdrew. “Nobody even wanted to shake her hand,” said a firefighter on the scene. “She’d been badmouthing cops from the beginning, and the uniformed services didn’t like that. So when she walked up and stretched out her hand, several rescue workers just folded their arms and turned away. Hillary got the message.”

  Hillary did not earn any extra points with police when, on October 14, her unmarked black Ford van blasted through a security checkpoint at Westchester Airport and headed for her waiting jet. Fearing that the van might contain terrorists, Westchester County police officer Ernest Dymond hurled himself against the car, pounding on the windows as he shouted for the driver to stop. Instead, the van containing Hillary, who was on her cell phone the entire time, barreled one hundred yards beyond the checkpoint before finally coming to a stop, injuring the officer.

  Hillary never left the van. After Dymond was taken to the emergency room with an injured shoulder, his wife, Deborah, said she hoped Senator Clinton would call the hospital to check up on his condition. Either that or apologize. Hillary did neither.

  It should have come as no surprise to Hillary, then, that many cops and firemen had come to despise her. Senator Clinton suffered her most humiliating rebuke on October 20, 2001, during Paul McCartney’s nationally televised Madison Square Garden concert honoring the 343 firefighters and 87 police officers killed on 9/11. The five-hour concert, which also featured such performers as Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Elton John, Billy Joel, and James Taylor, raised more than $30 million for the victims’ families.

  The crowd cheered when Rudy Giuliani stepped onto the stage, and offered a warm welcome for the Democrats’ leader in the Senate, Tom Daschle. But when Hillary walked to the microphone to introduce a short clip by comedian Jerry Seinfeld, the throng erupted in a chorus of boos. “Get off the stage!” yelled one firefighter in the front row. “We don’t want you here!” Stunned, Hillary tried to be heard over the jeers by shouting into the mike. After a few minutes, she was forced to beat a hasty retreat. Although millions watching the live broadcast on VH-1 witnessed Hillary being booed off the stage, the tape was doctored so that during subsequent airings the jeers were disguised by general crowd noise.

  The audience went wild, however, when firefighter Mike Moran, whose brother was among those killed, dared Osama bin Laden to “kiss my royal Irish ass.” He felt similarly disposed toward Hillary. “When things are going well, people will sit there and listen to the kind of claptrap that comes out of her mouth,” Moran said. But in rough times, he added, people were “not about to put up with her phony remarks…. She wants to get up and spew her nonsense—she doesn’t believe a thing she says. She says whatever she thinks will fit the moment. I think it comes through, and in serious times, people don’t want to stand for it.”

  Hillary later tried to shrug off the politically damaging incident. “I’ve gotten used to being in situations in political life,” she said, “where that just happens sometimes.” Calling the mortifying incident “part of the healing process” following the 9/11 attacks, Hillary said the police officers and firefighters “can blow off steam any way they want to. They’ve earned it.”

  In truth, Hillary was afraid that she might be booed again, and instructed her staff not to schedule any appearances in front of large groups of firefighters or police officers—at least not while tempers were still running high. She did deliver the eulogy at the televised funeral of New York City Fire Department Chaplain Father Mychal Judge, as well as appear at emotion-charged memorial services—also televised nationally—at Yankee Stadium and at Ground Zero. “These were no-brainers,” said a member of Schumer’s staff. “She had to go and be seen. It would have been political suicide not to go.” But, with a final death toll of 2,749, there would be hundreds of funerals stretching out over the next several months—services that were not covered by the networks and were therefore of no particular political value to a senator with national aspirations.

  Hillary attended not a single one. While Schumer showed up at a dozen funerals and Giuliani and Pataki paid their respects literally hundreds of times, Hillary avoided the possibility of being heckled by hunkering down in Washington.

  Working with victims’ families was another matter, or so Hillary repeatedly claimed, that consumed much of her time. When she heard that the author and journalist Steven Brill was writing a book on the aftermath of 9/11, she actually approached him during a ceremony at Ground Zero. Since Brill had been one of the Clintons’ most ardent defenders during the Lewinsky affair and subsequent impeachment proceedings, Hillary indicated that she would cooperate.

  Hillary began by saying that she had spent countless hours consoling the victims’ families and doing anything she could to help. To back up that claim, her office provided what Brill called “an elaborate story, with an elaborate subtext of memos and phone calls—a long, long story.” Brill was not surprised. “I think she has begun every statement she’s ever made in her life about the families of the victims,” Brill observed, “by saying she’s spent innumerable hours with the families of the victims.” Moreover, Hillary told Brill that it was she, and not Chuck Schumer, who was responsible for scoring billions of dollars in federal aid for New York.

  Brill was surprised to discover that “none of it turned out to be true.” Hillary’s staff had given him “documents and phone calls and things like that which just plain never happened.” A case in point was the family of 9/11 victim James Cartier. The Cartiers tried time and again to arrange a meeting with Hillary, only to be told that they needed to write a detailed memo first. “We don’t meet with any families,” Hillary’s staff members said, “unless they write to us first and tell us what they want to meet about.” The Cartiers finally gave up, convinced, Brill said, “that the only time families can meet with Hillary Clinton is if it’s at a press conference.”

  By contrast, the Cartiers, who wanted to search for their relative’s remains at Ground Zero and the Fresh Kills recovery site on Staten Island, had no difficulty arranging private meetings with both Schumer and Rudy Giuliani. The two men worked in concert to provide the Cartiers and all victims’ families access to both sites.

  Brill was astonished that, “in the cause of shooting down Chuck Schumer getting a bunch of pages in a book,” Hillary would go to such trouble inflating her own record of service to victims’ families. “What stunned me is that one person would try to steal away the credit from the other person, especially when everything I was hearing from the families is that Schumer” was more accessible. “It sort of takes your breath away.”

  “Brill’s accusations are completely false and an obvious last-ditch effort to jump-start anemic book sales,” responded Hillary’s spokesman Philippe Reines, perhaps best known in New York political circles for reportedly streaking through the offices of his previous employer, unsuccessful New York mayoral candidate Peter Vallone, on a dare. “It’s hard to imagine why Mr. Brill would choose to exploit such a horrible tragedy in this manner.”

  Chuck Schumer, for one, had no trouble at all believing it. Every time he stormed into her offices to accuse Hillary of up-staging him—on more than o
ne occasion his shouting could be heard in the hallway outside Clinton’s Senate offices—Hillary apologized and promised it would never happen again. But by early 2002, the escalating feud between New York’s two senators was fast becoming, as Washington columnist Robert Novak put it, “the talk of Capitol Hill.”

  In the wake of 9/11, Hillary had other concerns. She was still haunted by her early advocacy of a Palestinian state—not to mention the fond embrace she gave Suha Arafat. In February 2002, Hillary grabbed headlines back in New York by traveling to Jerusalem and proclaiming her undying support for the state of Israel. Just as important, she took every opportunity to denounce Arafat. “Yasser Arafat bears the responsibility for the violence that has occurred,” she declared during a visit to a pizza parlor where fifteen Israelis were killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber. “It rests squarely on his shoulders.”

  The fate of the Democratic Party in the 2002 elections often seemed to rest on Hillary’s shoulders. The day she returned from Israel, Hillary helped raise $150,000 at a Manhattan fund-raiser for New York Congressman Greg Meeks. The day after that, she was back in Washington hosting a fund-raising dinner for Iowa’s Democratic Governor Tom Vilsack. The following evening, she appeared at a $4.5 million fund-raiser honoring Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords, who bolted the GOP to become an independent and shifted control of the Senate back to the Democrats.

  At the same time HILLPAC, which like other political action committees quieted down in the aftermath of 9/11, was back in full swing. The fund-raising operation was key to Hillary’s building the kind of national power base she needed for a presidential run in 2008 or beyond. “Each and every one of the congressmen and senators and governors she helps out now will owe her big-time,” said a onetime beneficiary of Hillary’s largesse. “She’s a very smart lady. She knows it’ll pay off for her down the road.”