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

  Juanita tried to free herself from Hillary’s iron grasp, but the candidate’s wife did not release her grip for several seconds—enough for Hillary to feel certain that she had gotten her point across.

  “She was looking me straight in the eye and I understood perfectly what she was saying,” Juanita recalled. “I knew exactly what she meant—that I was to keep my mouth shut.”

  In that split second Juanita realized that Bill had confessed to Hillary, and that “she was not going to let that get in the way. At that moment I knew what Hillary was capable of doing. And I could see in her eyes that she wasn’t doing it for her husband. She wasn’t even doing it for them. She was doing it for Hillary Rodham.”

  When Hillary moved on to the other guests, Juanita retreated to a hallway, where she became physically ill. “I was so upset,” she said, “all I could think of was ‘Oh God, I’m going to throw up.’ ”

  Five months later, Bill and Hillary stood before hundreds of jubilant supporters in the ballroom of the Camelot Hotel—the same hotel where he allegedly assaulted Juanita Hickey—to claim a decisive victory in the governor’s race.

  Back in Van Buren, one of Bill’s earliest and most ardent fans—a lifelong Democrat who had been active in the party for years—was trying to take it all in on television. “It was just…you know, surreal,” said Juanita, who paid special attention to Hillary “laughing and waving to the crowd. She was just so pleased with herself. I kept thinking, ‘What kind of woman is this? What kind of woman?’ ”

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  This is a woman whose future is limitless. She could be anything she decides to be.

  —Bill Clinton

  Take a good look at her. She’ll probably be the President of the United States someday.

  —Nancy Wanderer, Wellesley class of 1969

  It’s not so much she screams—it’s more the tone in her voice, the body language, the facial expressions. It’s The Wrath of Khan.

  —A colleague at the Rose Law Firm

  Sometimes, the devil’s in that woman.

  —The Clintons’ cook at the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion

  Money means almost nothing to Bill Clinton,” Hillary would say. It was left up to Ms. Rodham—Hillary still had no intention of taking her husband’s name or softening her image—to “build up a nest egg. It was a pretty substantial burden on me personally….”

  But one, it seemed, she was eager to take on. Hillary intended to use her newfound status as Arkansas’s First Lady to make money, and lots of it. “She had a taste for the finer things,” Dick Morris observed. “She craved luxury.” Even before he took the oath of office, Hillary complained that his annual salary as governor was a meager $35,000. She left out the fact that she would now be living rent-free in the stately Governor’s Mansion, a two-story redbrick Georgian-style mansion set on six acres in Little Rock’s historic Quapaw quarter. There were other perks as well: a small army of gardeners, maids, housekeepers, cooks, and security guards to keep things running smoothly at the mansion, access to several chauffeur-driven limousines, even a $51,000 annual food allotment. In the end, the governor and his wife would cost Arkansas taxpayers more than $750,000 a year.

  This was not enough for Hillary, however. Now that her husband was governor and responsible for doling out lucrative state bond work to Arkansas’s law firms, she was more valuable to Rose than ever. Gradually, she would use her influence to be appointed to a number of corporate boards—and in the process collect a small fortune in director’s fees.

  At various times during her decade-long stint as Arkansas’s First Lady, Hillary served on the boards of Wal-Mart, the French chemical company Lafarge, the Little Rock–based national yogurt chain TCBY, and the Southern Development Bancorp. TCBY was a loyal client of Rose during Ms. Rodham’s tenure on the board, paying upward of $750,000 in fees to the firm. Southern Development paid the firm an estimated $200,000 in fees.

  Within a decade, Hillary would be earning a little over $180,000 annually in salary and director’s fees—none of which would have to be expended on rent, food, transportation, health care, or any of the other costs that must be borne by the average citizen. But Hillary wanted more.

  In the months leading up to the election, Jim and Susan McDougal approached their friends with a proposition. They asked Hillary and Bill to form a partnership with them for the purpose of buying 203 subdividable lots overlooking the White River. The property, which would cost only $202,000, was perfectly situated for anyone seeking to build a retirement or vacation home.

  “Nothing worked better at putting Bill to sleep than business talk,” McDougal said. “But Hillary was all ears. She asked a lot of questions, and by the time we finished explaining it all to her, boy, did she want in.” The two couples formed the Whitewater Development Corporation, borrowed $20,000 for the down payment, and financed the rest. Throughout the negotiations, the Clintons never bothered to visit the land—and they never would.

  The McDougals’ glowing sales pitch notwithstanding, the market for the lots never materialized and the deal quickly went south. In the end, Hillary and Bill lost over $60,000 on their investment—and unwittingly began a chain of events that would threaten to bring down a President.

  The ink on the Whitewater deal was scarcely dry when their old friend and Tyson corporate attorney Jim Blair approached Hillary with yet another moneymaking scheme. He claimed to have made a killing investing in cattle futures, and introduced Hillary to his longtime trader at the Refco brokerage house, Robert L. Bone.

  “Red” Bone was a high-stakes gambler, and for that reason alone he may have been perfectly suited to the risky commodities game. With wildly fluctuating markets and margin calls that could bankrupt an investor in seconds, commodities trading—the buying and selling of contracts in such staples as corn, cattle, wheat, and hog bellies—was not for the faint of heart.

  Eventually, Bone would be suspended for three years by market authorities for “serious and repeated violations” of trading procedures, and Refco would pay a $250,000 fine—at the time the largest in the history of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Certainly his client Hillary seemed to be playing outside the rules. To begin with, commodities contracts are highly leveraged. Even though the minimum purchase required just to open a trading account was $12,000, Hillary was permitted to buy ten cattle futures for only $1,000.

  Hillary would later claim that, simply by reading Barron’s and the Wall Street Journal, she became an overnight whiz at commodities trading. And despite her claim that she was merely following Blair’s advice and riding the bull market in cattle futures, she actually sold short—bet on the market price going down—on her first day of trading. This was only the first of scores of sophisticated trades extending over the next nine months.

  What made things a bit easier for Hillary—aside from the fact that she never put more than $l,000 on the table—is that the dreaded margin calls that wiped out other speculators during this period never seemed to apply to her. At one point, Hillary’s account showed a deficit of $20,000, and if she were any other investor, she would have been subjected to a margin call of $117,500—and therefore forced to cough up $137,500. Instead, the margin call was never made, and Hillary rebounded the next day after making a phenomenal series of perfectly timed trades. Curiously, the records of two of Hillary’s most profitable trades vanished.

  Hillary claimed she made all her trades herself. In truth, there was no proof that she ever made the transactions that, in the opinion of most experts, could only have been made by a seasoned insider. During several of her biggest transactions, Hillary was actually presiding over meetings in Washington as chairman of the Legal Services Corporation.

  In the end, Hillary left the table with $100,000—a 10,000 percent return on her investment. “I was lucky,” she said with a shrug when asked to explain her spectacular good fortune. How lucky? The Journal of Economics and Statistics studied Hillary’s trades and came to the conclusion that, without the interv
ention of her strategically placed pals, the odds of her pulling this off were 1 in 250 million.

  Hillary stopped playing the commodities game in July 1979, at about the same time she told Bill she was pregnant. “I lost my nerve for gambling,” she said, explaining that the profit she had made suddenly seemed like “real money we could use for our child’s higher education.” Yet, since Hillary had been insulated from the rules and virtually assured by her well-placed friends of an eye-popping return on her tiny investment, it remained to be seen how much nerve it really took.

  According to Hillary, the Clintons had been trying to have a baby for two years, and were just about to talk to a fertility specialist when she conceived while vacationing in Bermuda. Hillary and Bill were both elated at the news for more than the obvious reason: the baby would be arriving just as Bill’s campaign for a second two-year term swung into high gear.

  Hillary talked Bill into going to Lamaze classes with her, but beyond that made no adjustments in her hectic schedule. More intent than ever on becoming partner at her firm, she insisted on maintaining her normal caseload. The strain became evident as she approached her March due date, and Hillary’s obstetrician ordered her not to accompany Bill to Washington for the annual White House dinner honoring the nation’s governors. A frustrated Hillary sat at home and fumed.

  When Bill returned, Hillary’s water broke and she went into labor—three weeks early. She was rushed to Little Rock’s Baptist Medical Center, where it was quickly determined that the baby would have to be delivered by cesarean section. Up until that point, no fathers were permitted to witness cesarean births. But Hillary and Bill were both adamant that he could handle it; Virginia was a trained nurse anesthetist, and had taken Bubba to witness a number of operations as a child.

  The doctors relented, and Governor Clinton was standing by in scrubs when Chelsea Victoria Clinton arrived on February 27, 1980. Hillary and Bill had arrived at the name back in 1978, while vacationing in England during the Christmas season. They were strolling through London’s Chelsea district when they heard Judy Collins’s version of Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning.” At that moment, they both agreed that if they ever had a daughter, that’s what they’d name her: Chelsea. The name they selected for a boy was less imaginative—and predictable: William.

  After taking a four-month maternity leave, Hillary turned the day-to-day care of Chelsea over to a live-in nurse and returned to her office. There would be no more children; doctors warned that another pregnancy might jeopardize the lives of both mother and child.

  Hillary threw herself back into her work, confident that her husband would handily defeat his Republican opponent, political newcomer Frank White—so confident, in fact, that she continued to rebuff her husband’s repeated pleas that she append his name to hers. Hillary also turned a deaf ear to friends who complained that they did not like receiving printed invitations from “Governor Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham.”

  As it happened, 1980 was turning out to be a challenging year for the nation as a whole. Interest rates were up, the economy was down, and the Iran Hostage Crisis became a focal point for wide-spread frustration over the Carter administration’s seemingly ineffectual foreign policy.

  Neither Hillary nor her husband was prepared for Jimmy Carter’s decision to relocate twenty thousand Cuban refugees—primarily mental patients and convicts who had been shipped by Castro to the U.S. as part of the notorious Mariel boat lift—to Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, for resettlement. A political bombshell was in the making. Furious that they had been betrayed by their friend from Georgia, Hillary urged her husband to call the White House and demand that they rescind the order. When they refused, Bill flew into one of his legendary purple-veined tantrums.

  Publicly, the Clintons said nothing about their tiff with the Carter administration. Hillary believed it was important that, with their sights already on the White House, Bill not appear to break ranks with the national leadership.

  Just how high a price the Clintons would have to pay began to come into focus in June, when nearly a thousand young Cubans protesting their confinement broke out of the camp and swarmed toward the neighboring town of Fort Smith. Bill called out the National Guard to round up the Cubans and restore order.

  A few days later, Hillary insisted on accompanying Bill as he went to confront Fort Chaffee’s commander, General James “Bulldog” Drummond, and demand federal help in containing the prisoners. But, on orders from the White House, none would be forthcoming.

  When the dust had settled later that summer, Hillary was confident Arkansas voters would see her husband as the man who took action and contained the violence. But the Republicans took advantage of the fact that Bill had not openly criticized his friend the President. Frank White’s campaign ran a series of TV ads showing footage of rioting Cubans with the voice-over: Bill Clinton cares more about Jimmy Carter than he does about Arkansas.

  The Clintons did not buy airtime to refute White’s allegations. “The charges were so ridiculous,” Hillary said, “we didn’t think we had to answer them.”

  The Cuban problem was only one of several the thirty-four-year-old governor faced. Bill’s decision to raise car license fees proved wildly unpopular. There were also those who were highly critical of the brash young governor’s style. Bill’s chronic lateness, the unshorn locks that tumbled over his ears and shirt collar, and the scruffy, laid-back style of his youthful staff rubbed many churchgoing voters the wrong way.

  Hillary, who in the past could always be counted on to grab her husband by the lapels—literally—and make him face the political realities, had absented herself from the process. “Hillary was so involved in her work at the law firm, and in trying to make up for Bill’s lousy salary, that she just didn’t focus,” Arkansas Times columnist Ernest Dumas recalled. “Neither one of them thought much of White, who’d never run for office before and just struck them as sort of an oddball.”

  In the final days of the campaign, Hillary finally woke up. She had been the one who convinced Bill to fire New York pollster Dick Morris after Morris had helped them win in 1978. Now she was on the phone begging Morris to rescue Bill. Unless he denounced Carter, Morris said, Bill would be going down to defeat.

  Hillary was with her husband at the Camelot Hotel when exit-poll results came in showing that Bill had been reelected by a wide margin. The Clintons were thrilled—Morris had been wrong. But as the returns began to trickle in, the incumbent and his First Lady grew more and more somber. By the end of the evening, it was clear that Clinton had been defeated by just thirty-one thousand votes.

  Bill was crushed by the defeat, and spent the next several days, in Hillary’s words, “wallowing” in self-pity. Springing into action, Hillary called Dick Morris in New York and again pleaded with him to help. Then she convinced her husband to call their old friend Betsey Wright in Washington and persuade her to help him relaunch his career. Just ten days after his defeat, Wright, who still felt that Hillary was the more impressive politician of the two, agreed to take on the challenge.

  Bill signed on with a Little Rock law firm, Wright, Lindsey and Jennings, and the Clintons moved into a yellow Victorian house in their old, upscale Hillcrest neighborhood. At Hillary’s urging, however, he devoted himself essentially full-time to recapturing the state house.

  Toward that end, Clinton made it his personal mission to apologize to nearly every voter he encountered—whether it was at church, on the street, in the supermarket checkout line, or over scrambled eggs at a local coffee shop—for “losing your trust.”

  Hillary grudgingly accepted the need for this mea culpa–thon, though she found it more than a little demeaning. “If that’s what people want to hear,” she acknowledged with a shrug, “then by all means give it to ’em.”

  Bill went so far as to invite local clergymen to come to the mansion prior to his departure and pray for him—a tactic he would later employ to help save his presidency. He did not always wear a hair shirt, however
. Occasionally he’d pick up the phone in the middle of the night and blast a member of the press for, as he put it, “fucking me over.” Suffering from the combined effects of rage alternating with abject contrition, Bill became increasingly depressed—and Hillary became more and more concerned.

  Dick Morris remembered that, during this period, Bill Clinton was “walking around in a daze, shell-shocked—a very sad, confused man.” When he wasn’t apologizing to friends and total strangers—or spewing invective at hapless reporters over the phone—Bill was spending more and more time with Flowers, Kyle, and a half-dozen other women stashed around Little Rock.

  At their new home, life became a series of knock-down, drag-out screaming matches. Bill wanted Hillary to comfort him, and Hillary demanded that he stop feeling sorry for himself. “Get off your ass,” she yelled at him, “and do what you have to do to beat Frank White.”

  Hillary was also willing to do what she had to do to get back into the Governor’s Mansion. When the Clintons held a press conference on Chelsea’s second birthday to announce Bill’s candidacy, it also marked the unveiling of Hillary’s new look. Gone were the thick glasses, replaced by soft contact lenses. Her dull brown hair, which had pretty much had a life of its own, was now styled in a flip and dyed a honey blond. Gone were the baggy jeans and the shapeless peasant dresses, replaced by form-flattering skirts and blouses in a variety of pastel shades. And, while she was still registered to vote under the name Rodham, Hillary declared that henceforth she would be known as “Mrs. Bill Clinton.” Hillary explained that she felt it was “more important for Bill to be Governor again than for me to keep my maiden name.”

  There were other, covert steps Hillary took to ensure Bill’s election to a second term. She worried about the rumors of rampant infidelity—in part because she was hurt by them personally, but mostly because she knew stories like these could derail Bill’s chances of a political comeback. In early 1982, she contacted a private investigator named Ivan Duda to compile a list of the women Bill had allegedly been seeing. One of the eight women Duda identified was, as it turned out, on the staff of the Rose Law Firm.