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

  While Hillary focused on making The Plan a reality, her husband traveled the world giving speeches—and contributing to an annual income that now easily topped $12 million. He had also, she would learn through the grapevine, reverted to his old ways.

  Bill had once told one of the women in his life, “We’re all addicted to something. Some people are addicted to drugs. Some to power. Some to food. Some to sex…”

  Few women had more insights into Bill’s character—and the reasons for his rampant womanizing—than his “Pretty Girl” Dolly Kyle Browning. Over the course of their off-again, on-again twenty-year affair, Dolly monitored Bill’s wildly fluctuating weight and concluded there was an inverse correlation between his weight and his sexual activity.

  According to Dolly, Bill was “an addictive personality” who, when he wasn’t active sexually, replaced his admitted addiction to sex with his admitted addiction to food. His weight soared, Dolly said, whenever Hillary “had him on a tight leash or he was in the doghouse.” Weight loss was “a sure sign that he’s up to his old tricks.” Over the three-year period after leaving the White House, six-foot-two-and-a-half-inch Bill would slim down from 225 pounds to a comparatively svelte 190.

  For months, Bill’s New York office had been posting notices in the political science departments at Columbia, New York, and Fordham universities advertising for students to intern at Clinton’s Harlem offices. The criteria for judging applicants was exposed by three young women who mailed their résumés to Clinton’s office and waited for a reply that never came. When the applicants called, they were told that the positions had been filled.

  At that point, one of the women—a buxom redhead named “Katy”—dropped into Clinton’s office in February 2002 and resubmitted her résumé, this time with a photo showing her in a tight sweater. According to her résumé, Katy had never gone to college, but she did say in her cover letter that she knew “enough to be deferential and follow directions. I keep my mouth shut when people who know what they’re talking about are there. I listen. I’m smart. Please give me a shot.”

  Within three hours, Katy received a call from the former President’s office asking her to come in as soon as possible. Her cover letter, said one of the staffers in charge of bringing candidates to Clinton, “really stood out.”

  Left to his own devices, Bill would, in fact, be linked in the press to more than a dozen women between 2001 and 2004. Reporters speculated about old friends like former Miss Arkansas Lencola Sullivan, whose Columbus Avenue apartment was only a quick jog from the former President’s Harlem offices. Bill threw an impromptu party for Sullivan in his office when she married a Dutch security specialist. But even after she moved with her new husband to Amsterdam, the still-striking former beauty queen kept her Manhattan apartment and continued to see Bill whenever she was in town.

  As for stunning Park Avenue socialites rumored to be involved with the ex-President, billionaire Revlon Chairman Ron Perelman’s ex-wife Patricia Duff was not alone. Lisa Belzberg, thirty-eight-year-old wife of Seagram’s heir Matthew Bronfman, became the object of speculation after she attended a Super Bowl party Bill threw in his Harlem offices. “There was a chemistry between them, no doubt about it,” another guest later recalled. Bill, who reportedly pulled Belzberg toward him and murmured off-color jokes in her ear, apparently agreed. “She married a guy worth $6 billion,” he boasted, “but she still likes to flirt with me.”

  By late February, Bronfman and Belzberg had separated. Over the next few months, Bill visited her home on several occasions, and was spotted cozying up to Belzberg at several charity events in Manhattan.

  Belzberg would eventually reconcile with her husband, but Bill’s plate was still full. Clinton was also allegedly meeting up with an unidentified blond woman on a weekly basis at New York’s trendy Hudson Hotel, always arriving separately in the afternoon and spending a couple of hours in the hotel’s penthouse suite. The pattern followed Bill’s penchant for midday rendezvous with paramours in hotels and apartments. “It is absolutely his MO,” said one.

  At about the same time, he was spotted flirting with Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the late British press lord Robert Maxwell. She, in turn, brought Clinton together with mercurial supermodel Naomi Campbell in April 2002. Not long after, Campbell, who had just broken up with fifty-year-old Benetton tycoon Flavio Briatore, accepted Clinton’s invitation to join him at the Austrian ski resort of Ischl. When she arrived from Milan, Bill, who was surrounded by other dignitaries attending the World Summit for Youth and Economic Development, did his best to appear surprised. “What’s she doing here?” he asked in feigned disbelief before whisking her off to the town’s exclusive Panorama Restaurant.

  Campbell would also deny any romantic involvement with Clinton, but one eyewitness to the rendezvous marveled at how “totally comfortable they were in each other’s company. Lots of laughing, heads together, whispering to each other. Obviously, a very warm relationship…”

  Charlotte Dawson, the statuesque blond host of Australian television’s top-rated How’s Life? show, also admitted “dating” Bill when he visited New Zealand in June 2002. They were spotted rushing out of the Auckland Hilton together after Clinton delivered another $200,000 speech—this one launching the new BMW-7 series. After their secret late-night rendezvous, Dawson, the ex-wife of Olympic silver medalist swimmer Scott Miller, insisted Bill was “a really nice bloke, and very charming.” But, she added in a rather unfortunate choice of words, “nothing went down.” The man who introduced Bill to Charlotte, Australian promoter Max Markson, went on record as saying the former President spoke “very highly” of her following their evening together.

  Another attractive young woman who did not deny that she “enjoyed dates” with Bill Clinton was twenty-nine-year-old, six-foot-tall actress, socialist, feminist, and former model Saffron Burrows. Burrows’s marriage to fifty-three-year-old film director Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas) was ending when she first began seeing the former President.

  “I’m Bill’s bodyguard,” the British beauty liked to joke, admitting that he was a “close acquaintance” of hers. Burrows also conceded that, while Hillary was hard at work on Capitol Hill, she went out on numerous occasions with Bill in London and in New York. “He has,” she said slyly, “a great sense of fun.”

  To make matters even more interesting, Burrows was an outspoken bisexual who went on record years before she met Bill saying that she had a crush on Hillary. “Bill found that rather funny” when she told him, Burrows said.

  At about the same time, Hillary learned of Bill’s questionable trip to Rio. It was enough, given the upcoming midyear elections in which she had invested so much time and energy, for Hillary to once again pull in the reins. “There was a showdown in Chappaqua,” said one of their oldest friends in Arkansas. “Hillary basically told him that she didn’t like what she was hearing and to cool it. She had done so much for him, she said, the least he could do was keep his pecker in his pants. Or words to that effect.”

  Despite constant speculation in the tabloid press that Hillary was on the verge of divorcing her husband, nothing was further from the truth. “What surprised me about Hillary Clinton to this day,” said talk-show host and longtime Hillary supporter Rosie O’Donnell, was that “I assumed as soon as she was elected senator she would divorce. I am shocked that she did not. I told all my friends, ‘As soon as she’s in the Senate seat she will be a single senator.’ ”

  But there was already heavy speculation that, since Hillary was far and away the most popular Democrat in the country, she would seek the presidency as early as 2004. Senator Clinton insisted that she had no interest in running for President—especially not against George W. Bush, whose poll ratings had soared in the wake of 9/11. But when she did seek the office, she would be running with a loyal spouse at her side. Hillary, who believed Al Gore had made a fatal error by distancing himself from the record of the first Clinton administration, intended to trumpet what she viewed
as the Clintons’ stellar domestic and foreign policy record. “Hillary sees herself as Eleanor to Bill’s FDR,” said a longtime FOH. “The Clinton legacy means a great deal to her. She is not going to do anything to compromise their place in history. No matter what she says about having to agonize over whether or not to stay with him during the Monica thing, she never seriously thought of divorce. And she never will. It’s just not going to happen. Period.”

  Besides, New York’s junior senator was too busy leading the charge against the Republicans. Hillary pounced on a report that the CIA had warned the Bush administration in August 2001 about Al Qaeda’s plans to hijack American airliners. “I am simply here today on the floor of this hallowed chamber to seek answers to the questions being asked by my constituents,” she intoned, pointing to the front page of the New York Post. “Questions raised by one of our newspapers in New York with the headline BUSH KNEW. The President knew what? My constituents would like to know the answer to that and many other questions….”

  Now clearly on a roll, Hillary also demanded to know “why we know today, May 16, about the warning he received. Why did we not know this on April 16 or March 16 or February 16 or January 16 or August 16 of last year?”

  But she already knew the answer to that question. By this time, the White House had already explained in Senate briefings that the warnings did not include any mention of the possibility that the airliners themselves might be used as weapons against targets on the ground.

  Still, the Senator made no effort to conceal the pleasure she took in hurling grenades at the party in power. “I never shy away,” she made a point of saying, “from a fight.”

  Hillary received an unexpected gift in late June when, without explanation, U.S. Attorney James B. Comey closed the New Square clemency case. In the wake of 9/11, the investigation into Bill Clinton’s decision to drastically reduce the prison terms of four Hasidic Jews who bilked the government out of tens of millions of dollars had simply lost steam—aided in no small part by President Bush’s desire to “move on.”

  Similarly, the investigation into Clinton’s decision to pardon fugitive financier Marc Rich would languish even after Rich’s ex-wife Denise was granted immunity for cooperating with authorities. Oddly, the Bush administration would help the Clintons out again by refusing to release documents related to the pardons under the Freedom of Information Act. Invoking the doctrine of presidential privilege, the White House kept more than 4,340 pages of Pardongate documents under lock and key. U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler, a Clinton appointee, would later uphold the Bush administration’s argument that all records related to the Clinton pardons should remain secret.

  George W. Bush had made it clear that he did not have the stomach for seeing any President dragged into court. In accordance with his boss’s wishes, U.S. Attorney James Comey gave Bill and Hillary a pass.

  One of Hillary’s closest friends and allies would not be so lucky. Comey had been a protégé of Rudy Giuliani, who as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York made a name for himself prosecuting Mafia dons and the much-despised hotel queen Leona Helmsley. The same week he made the decision to drop the Justice Department investigation into New Square, Comey charged ImClone CEO Sam Waksal with insider trading—and implicated Hillary’s longtime pal Martha Stewart in the process.

  Friends of the domestic diva were convinced Martha Stewart had been sacrificed for Hillary Clinton. “Everybody was squeamish about going after a former First Lady,” said someone close to the case. “But along came Martha….”

  For more than a decade, Stewart had been one of Hillary’s most outspoken champions and contributed over $170,000 out of her own pocket to the Clintons and the Democratic Party. In 2000, she gave $1,000 to Hillary’s Senate campaign, the maximum allowable to a single candidate under campaign finance laws. Like Denise Rich, Stewart hosted several high-profile events—including one at the Connecticut home of Miramax movie mogul Harvey Weinstein—that netted Hillary hundreds of thousands of dollars.

  In return for her loyalty, Hillary invited Stewart to the White House on several occasions. Toward the end of their administration, the Clintons invited Stewart to bring television cameras into the Executive Mansion and film a segment for her series Martha Stewart Living. Stewart had even moved from Connecticut to Bedford in Westchester County, in part to be closer to her friends’ Chappaqua home.

  Their mutual friend Sam Waksal was also a major Hillary contributor to the tune of $63,000, all but $7,000 of that made to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. When he was charged by a federal grand jury with insider trading, obstruction of justice, and bank fraud, Hillary adamantly refused to join other Democrats who either returned Waksal’s contributions or gave them to charity. But after heavy criticism, she reversed herself and donated the $7,000 she directly controlled to charity.

  Hillary’s kinship with Martha had everything to do with blond ambition. Both women believed they had suffered from the classic American double standard: a man who exuded confidence, strength, intelligence, and chutzpah was a leader. A woman who possessed these same qualities was more often than not branded a bitch. It was a designation that had, rightly or wrongly, been frequently applied to both Stewart and Senator Clinton over the years. “You know, with Martha and me,” Hillary said of her friend, “it’s kind of a mutual admiration society.”

  However strong the bond between them, Hillary’s relationship with Martha would be exceedingly problematic. The day after Sam Waksal’s arrest, Hillary canceled a $1,000-a-head Democratic fund-raiser Martha was throwing at the Manhattan headquarters of her Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia empire. Hillary’s oft-used excuse for the sudden and inexplicable change in plans: “Scheduling problems.”

  Hillary had decided to hold on to the $1,000 Martha gave her for the time being—“she has not been found guilty of any wrongdoing,” Senator Clinton argued—and went so far as to call her friend with words of encouragement. “She was one of the first people to call me,” Stewart later recalled, “and very nicely say, ‘You know, you just have to hang in there. It’s the process.’ ”

  Once word of the phone call was out, however, Hillary began circling the wagons. The senator simply “made a call to a friend,” Hillary’s spokeswoman Karen Dunn said, “and has not commented on the ongoing investigation.” Was Hillary supportive? “I wouldn’t say either way,” Dunn replied.

  Martha Stewart’s once-tidy world would come undone over the next two years. Briefly a billionaire after her corporation went public in 1999, she lost control of her company and hundreds of millions of dollars as the federal case against her dragged on. Many believed Stewart was being unfairly prosecuted because, like Hillary, she was a powerful, ambitious, often abrasive woman in the male-dominated world of business. The very same qualities that made Hillary an object of fear and loathing now threatened to put Martha Stewart behind bars.

  After that early phone call, Hillary was nowhere to be seen. At first, according to friends of both women, Martha understood that Hillary could ill afford to be tied to a Wall Street scandal. There was little tolerance for corporate greed following the horrific collapse of Enron and WorldCom. So, as she plotted her own legal strategy, Martha resigned herself to the fact that she wouldn’t be hearing from either Clinton. “I think she felt it wasn’t important that Hillary gave her the silent treatment in the beginning,” said one doyenne of Manhattan society. “Martha is very savvy politically, and she didn’t want to harm Hillary’s career in any way. ‘I think Hillary would make as good a President as Bill—better, actually,’ she once told me. But I know she was confident Hillary would back her up if things got really tough.”

  Meantime Hillary, who still ordered Secret Service agents to carry her bags as she shuttled between Washington and New York, continued to raise millions for her fellow Democrats running for office in 2002. Since taking up residence there eighteen months earlier, Senator Clinton had held no fewer than twenty-eight fund-raisers at White
haven, her mansion off Embassy Row. On two separate occasions, she held back-to-back receptions on the same night. Whitehaven had become, the New York Times declared, “a conveyor belt of fund-raising dinners and receptions that Democratic candidates are clamoring to climb aboard.” Hillary was doling out more money to Democrats across the country than any other senator, methodically shoring up support for her own run in the more distant future.

  Giving the keynote address that July to the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, Senator Clinton eclipsed all of the 2004 presidential hopefuls in attendance—including Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, North Carolina Senator John Edwards, Connecticut Senator (and former vice presidential candidate) Joe Lieberman, and House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt. In recent months, Hillary had held off on attacking the current occupant of the White House. Under Bush’s leadership, Operation Enduring Freedom had brought an end to Taliban rule in Afghanistan, and the U.S. was aggressively prosecuting its war on terrorism at home and abroad. But the declining economy and a rash of corporate scandals—Enron chief among them—had left W vulnerable, and Hillary seized the moment.

  Without mentioning Bush by name, Hillary made the all-too-familiar populist argument that Republicans were friends of the rich and special interests. She also implied that the Bush administration, which was aggressively prosecuting several insider-trading and accounting-fraud cases, was somehow responsible for the rise in corporate corruption. The Republicans’ attitude toward insider trading was, said Hillary, “Don’t ask, don’t tell…GOP used to stand for Grand Old Party, but more and more, it stands for Gloss Over Problems and pretend nobody notices!” The crowd leaped to its feet, applauding and cheering wildly.