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

  To another guest, Hillary pointed out that she would be needing additional money—lots of it—for a campaign “somewhere down the road.” One major backer of the Clintons later assured her fellow guests that they “were not hallucinating.” Hillary’s playful attitude, as well as her husband’s provocative asides, had left everyone scratching their heads.

  Ten days later, Wesley Clark entered the race with a campaign team that included many familiar names from the Clinton administration. Clark announced at the time that Senator Clinton had promised to sign on as co-chair of his campaign—a statement that Hillary’s camp refused to confirm or deny at first.

  Like Bill, Clark was an Arkansas-bred Rhodes scholar who zoomed to the top of his chosen profession at an early age. Clark had led the successful military operation in Kosovo, but nevertheless was reportedly relieved of his command by envious superiors at the Pentagon. Then-President Clinton went along with Clark’s sacking at the time, though he later claimed to have known nothing about it. Now, four years later, it looked as if Bill and Hillary, who had been chatting up General Clark as a possible candidate for months, were about to make amends by getting behind a candidate they thought could win.

  Or were they? On the eve of Clark’s announcement, Bill told an audience in California that he thought the general would do fine in the short run. “Whether he can get elected president,” Clinton added, “I haven’t a clue.” Instead, he again touted Hillary’s chances of winning back the White House for the Democrats. “I was impressed at the state fair in New York, which is in Republican country in upstate New York,” he said, “at how many New Yorkers came up and said they would release her from her commitment [to serve out her Senate term] if she wanted to do it.”

  This was precisely the same grassroots argument that Clinton himself had used in 1992 to justify breaking his promise to Arkansans that he would serve out the remainder of his final term as governor rather than run for President. Hillary had urged her husband to break his pledge not to run back then, and she had no trouble reneging on her own Shermanesque declaration in 1997 that she would never seek elective office.

  At this point, looking at a watered-down field of ten candidates—none of whom came within fifteen points of George W. Bush in the polls—Bill was pushing Hillary harder than ever to get into the race. He argued that Bush was now especially vulnerable: Conditions in Iraq, where American occupation troops were under fire from insurgents, were chaotic. None of the “weapons of mass destruction” that had been used to justify the war had yet been found. And, most important, unemployment was up and the economy was still struggling.

  “He is really after her to do it,” one of the Clintons’ closest Arkansas confidantes said at the time. “But the bottom line is that she isn’t sure Bush can be beat. She trusts her own instincts more than she trusts Bill’s.”

  As it turned out, Bill was not the only member of their tight-knit family urging Hillary to run. Chelsea had returned from her studies at Oxford—where anti-Bush feelings ran high—harboring a bitterness toward the President that transcended her parents’ own disdain. Chelsea, now ensconced in New York and earning six figures as a consultant with McKinsey & Company, tried to convince her mother that she was the only person who could “rescue” the country from the Republicans.

  By late September, pundits were speculating that the Clintons had backed Wesley Clark simply to foil the then front-runner, Vermont Governor Howard Dean, and set the stage for a last-minute entry by Hillary. She dismissed this as “an absurd feat of imagination, I guess….” In fact, she was quick to point out, Hillary and Bill had not endorsed Clark. To drive home that point, the former President phoned three of the candidates and assured them neither he nor his wife was endorsing anyone.

  On September 24, it was clear that Hillary had finally made up her mind to stick with her original plan and focus on running for President in 2008. No longer indulging in playful asides, she told some sixty journalists at a Washington breakfast meeting that she was not running in 2004—not once but a dozen times.

  She was not relinquishing her role, however, as Democratic Party hit man. For an hour, Hillary blasted Bush’s “shocking failure of leadership…I am convinced totally that four more years of this administration would be an overwhelming setback for our country. And,” she was careful to add, “I will do everything I can to elect whoever emerges from this process.”

  For Howard Dean, John Kerry, North Carolina Senator John Edwards, Joe Lieberman, and the rest, it might have been enough that Hillary now seemed to be bowing out once and for all. But that did not mean she would cease being a factor in the 2004 elections. Of all the Democratic candidates, it was Kerry who feared Hillary the most. The Massachusetts senator had been allied with the Clintons both personally and professionally for over two decades, and was well aware that Hillary had plans to recapture the White House. “John doubted that she’d jump in,” says a Boston politico who has known Kerry for over a quarter century. “But he sure as hell knew she didn’t want another Democrat to beat Bush, no matter what she said.”

  Kerry blanched during CNN’s “America Rocks the Vote” special in early November 2003, when moderator Anderson Cooper read an e-mail from a viewer asking Kerry what he thought about polls showing Hillary Clinton 20 percent ahead of “all you guys.”

  “Well, it all depends on which poll you look at,” Kerry replied. “I saw a poll the other day that showed me about 15 points ahead of her.”

  Pressed to identify the mystery poll that showed him ahead of Hillary, Kerry came up dry. After a few days, an aide to the Massachusetts senator conceded that Kerry “misspoke.” To be sure, polls now showed him trailing Hillary by a whopping 35 percent. Hillary shook her head when a staffer told her about Kerry’s quasi-admission that he had lied. “Poor John,” she sighed.

  As much as Hillary’s staff enjoyed watching Kerry and the rest of the Democratic field squirm, they took even more pleasure in the predicament faced by Hillary’s longtime nemesis Rush Limbaugh. That autumn the conservative commentator, who had advocated stiff prison sentences for drug offenders, confessed that he was battling an addiction to the painkiller OxyContin. Limbaugh’s admission would trigger an investigation into how the drug was obtained.

  “You have got to be kidding!” Hillary squealed when she first learned of Limbaugh’s drug use. She was careful not to gloat in public, but according to one longtime resident of Hillaryland, “you could tell she enjoyed watching Rush twist slowly in the wind.”

  Hillary had officially removed herself from consideration in 2004, but that did not mean she intended to step aside. A major event of the primary season was the Iowa Democratic Party’s Jefferson-Jackson fund-raising dinner, where candidates made their case to 7,500 party activists. What was said at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner could well determine the outcome of the Iowa caucuses the following January.

  By agreeing to moderate the dinner, Hillary made it clear she was not about to relinquish her position as the Democrats’ super-star. While the six candidates who chose to attend smiled through gritted teeth, Hillary, looking demure in lace collar, lace cuffs, and Barbara Bush pearls—an outfit she would recycle at several high-profile events in the coming months—railed against Bush and the GOP. Outside the hall, demonstrators waved placards urging Iowans to vote for Hillary in the Iowa caucuses. “Senator Clinton’s ability to outshine and overshadow the Democrats running for president,” observed Republican National Committee spokesman David James, “is further evidence of the weakness of the Democratic field.”

  With her focus on running in 2008, Hillary could campaign for the party’s 2004 nominee secure in the knowledge that he had little chance of winning the national election. Two weeks later, she again felt free to say to a foreign audience what she would never say at home. When a reporter for the German magazine Bunte said people were disappointed that she wasn’t running for President, she replied, “I know. Well, perhaps I’ll do it next time around.”

  One
area where Hillary sought to distance herself even further from the pack was foreign policy. Unlike the then front-runner, Howard Dean, who had always opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Hillary had taken a decidedly hawkish stance at the outset. That did not keep her, however, from criticizing the Bush administration for its management of the war. She claimed to be “bewildered, surprised, disappointed by the failure of the administration to create conditions for greater international support,” and slammed Bush as “the first president who has ever taken us to war and cut taxes at the same time. I view that as incredibly irresponsible. But the happy talk continues….”

  John Kerry had also voted to give the President authority to send troops to Iraq, and was now taking every opportunity to bash Bush for the government’s failure to find the elusive WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) that had been used to justify the war against Saddam Hussein in the first place. Of all the candidates, in fact, only Kerry, a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee, boasted a foreign policy background that could rival that of Bill Clinton’s well-traveled co-President.

  So when Hillary announced she would be paying a Thanksgiving holiday visit to U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, Kerry was understandably—according to a former Democratic congressman from his state—“fucking mad. It was All Hillary All the Time. Everything she did was designed to keep things static, so the guy with really no chance of beating Bush—Howard Dean—would get the nomination.”

  “I am honored to have the opportunity to spend the Thanksgiving holiday visiting with the men and women who have put their lives on the line for all Americans,” Hillary said in a press release that sounded…presidential. Before she left, Hillary went a step further and aired a televised message to the nation paying tribute to the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan for their sacrifice. “I want to thank all of our brave men and women who are serving our country,” intoned Hillary, seated in front of an American flag and sounding more like a commander in chief than just one of a hundred senators. “And I want to thank and honor the service of all of you who have been wounded during all of these conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere defending our country, fulfilling your mission and making us all very proud.”

  Accompanied by Rhode Island Democrat Jack Reed, a fellow member of the Senate Armed Services Committee who had voted against sending American troops to Iraq, Hillary first met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Kabul’s stately presidential palace. Later, they cut to the head of the line in the linoleum-floored army mess hall at Bagram Air Base and loaded up their cardboard trays with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, yams, and pumpkin pie.

  After she left the dining hall, Hillary learned the stunning news: President Bush had made an unannounced, lightning-swift trip to Iraq, where he served Thanksgiving dinner to American troops before chowing down with them. For security reasons, the top-secret mission remained under wraps until the President was safely on his way home. Back in the U.S., video of the President’s surprise visit—and his emotional reaction when the troops leaped to their feet to cheer him—preempted virtually all television programming for hours. It was a major news event, and an undeniable coup for the President. Hillary put on a dignified front in front of the troops, but when she thought she was out of earshot she mumbled her reaction to Bush’s preemptive visit: “Son of a bitch.”

  The White House dismissed the notion that Bush had undertaken the trip to undercut Hillary; the President’s Thanksgiving surprise had actually been in the works for months. “But,” said a lifelong friend from Texas, “skunking Hillary made it that much sweeter.” When he asked the President about Hillary, Bush feigned surprise. “Was she there, too?” he asked.

  Trumped by W, Hillary nonetheless soldiered on. Before embarking on her whirlwind tour of the region, she had said that its principal purpose was to boost morale. But after arriving in Baghdad on the President’s heels, her comments were something less than encouraging. She told the troops that while “Americans are proud” of them, “many question the administration’s policies…the obstacles and problems are much greater than the administration usually admits to.”

  Echoing a phrase that hearkened back to the Vietnam era, Hillary also stressed that “it’s no longer enough for our military, the most powerful in the history of the world, to win the battle—they have to also win the war for hearts and minds.”

  Hillary, who accused Bush of being “obsessed with Saddam Hussein for more than a decade,” also called for more UN involvement—and for more American soldiers to be sent to Iraq. “The Pentagon tried to make do with as few troops as possible,” she said, “as light a footprint as they could get away with. Now we’re playing catch-up.”

  Undeterred by the fact that Bush’s Thanksgiving surprise had shoved her off front pages across the country, Hillary went to all three network Sunday-morning news shows to report on her trip to Afghanistan and Iraq. When she was asked why she would tell troops stationed in Iraq that Americans were questioning the war and that its outcome was “not assured,” Hillary froze. Once again, she reverted to the “vast right-wing conspiracy” argument to defuse legitimate inquiries from the hosts of NBC’s Meet the Press, CBS’s Face the Nation, and ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos.

  “You know,” she told Tim Russert of Meet the Press, “I find this so interesting that this has now become an issue, and largely fueled by a lot of the talk shows and the other sort of right-wing apparatus.” On Face the Nation, she went so far as to deny that she had ever made the statements questioning U.S. policy while visiting the troops. She now dismissed the controversy over her remarks as “the latest flaming charge from the right wing.”

  More than ever, Hillary felt under siege. She was sitting in the kitchen of the Chappaqua house listening to a radio talk show when someone called in to say the Clinton administration had barred members of the military from entering the White House wearing their uniforms. She picked up the phone and called the station to deny the story.

  “Literally, I have been accused of everything from murder on down,” Hillary told Brian Lehrer’s listeners on WNYC Radio. “And it’s hurtful and personally distressing when it first happens but when it continues…”

  The next surprise came not from the right but from the left, and it would take place right under Hillary’s nose. Just down the street from Bill’s Harlem office, Al Gore announced that he was endorsing Howard Dean. The former Vice President praised Dean for opposing the war in Iraq (“a catastrophic mistake,” Gore said) and declared that the centrist Democratic Party that had been dominated by the Clintons for over a decade needed to be “remade” as “a force for justice and progress and good in America.”

  Hillary viewed Gore’s endorsement of Dean, delivered deep in the heart of Clinton country, as nothing less than a betrayal. When asked if she agreed with Gore’s claim that the party needed to be pulled back to the left, Hillary offered a terse reply: “No.”

  To be sure, the endorsement cost Gore nothing. Like the Clintons, he was convinced that Dean was too strident and too unknown to beat Bush. But Gore needed to seize control of the party from the Clintons for his own run in 2008, and to accomplish that he wanted Dean’s energized young activists in his corner.

  “This was not Al Gore taking a shot across Hillary Clinton’s bow,” said University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato. “This was him putting one right into the solar plexus of both Clintons.”

  Hillary got the message. But it did not radically alter her view of Clinton’s once-loyal VP. By this time, said one New York State party official, Hillary “already thought Al Gore was an ungrateful putz.”

  There were times she felt the same way about her husband. With Bill almost constantly on the road making speeches, the Clintons seldom saw each other more than once or twice a month. Hillary volunteered that they spoke on the phone daily, and while they needed to stay in contact to strategize and maintain their hold on
the Democratic Party apparatus, they often went a week or longer without speaking to each other.

  Yet in January 2004, the phone lines between Chappaqua and the Embassy Row house were buzzing over gossip that Bill was now involved with another attractive young blonde—Canadian billionaire Belinda Stronach. At thirty-seven, Stronach was president and CEO of Magna International, the $13 billion Ontario-based auto-parts empire founded by her father, Frank Stronach.

  Bill had met Belinda three years earlier, over a round of golf at the Magna course outside Toronto. Since then, they’d gotten together on numerous occasions. In September 2002 Bill and Belinda, invariably swathed in designs by Prada, Armani, and Gucci, attended a birthday party in Toronto for rocker Ronnie Hawkins. They then ducked out early to share a quiet dinner at one of Toronto’s tonier restaurants, Truffles. The following year, they dined together again at the Democratic Governors’ Conference in Baltimore and at a California fund-raising event before meeting up at the Preakness Stakes—Belinda’s father owned the legendary Maryland racetrack—in May 2003.

  That same month, Belinda divorced her second husband, Norwegian Olympic speed skater Johann Olav Koss, sparking what the National Post of Canada called a “wildfire of rumors in Toronto society” concerning the cause of the breakup. The paper went on to say that the rumors “all start and end with one word: Bubba.”

  In November 2003, Stronach was being given a humanitarian award at Toronto’s Beth Shalom Synagogue when suddenly Bill’s voice came over the intercom. Hillary’s husband was just calling—from China—to congratulate Belinda, and to tell her how sorry he was that he couldn’t be with her.

  By this time, Bill had taken an active interest in Belinda’s political career. At Bill’s urging and with his help, she was now planning to take over as leader of Canada’s Conservative Party—a move that would make her prime minister if her party won the next general election.