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

  Duda, who said he met once with Hillary in a restaurant parking lot but communicated with her for the most part by phone, was surprised at how coolly she responded when he read the names off to her. Clearly, the purpose of Duda’s investigation was damage control—to be prepared for any allegations that might be aimed at them during the next campaign.

  The main goal had been to project a candidate who was more mature and less arrogant. Toward that end, Bill taped a television spot apologizing to the people of Arkansas for raising car license fees. Hillary did her part to convince voters she wasn’t really the pushy Yankee feminist they had been led to believe she was. Going door to door with Chelsea perched on her hip, Hillary now spoke with a faint twang and peppered her conversation with y’alls. As soon as Hillary was back home and away from the press and the voters, Chelsea was handed over to the full-time nanny the Clintons had brought with them when they moved out of the Governor’s Mansion.

  Behind the scenes, Hillary cracked the whip whenever Bill stepped out of line. After she learned that her husband had gone out drinking with aides following a campaign swing through the northern part of the state, Hillary fired off a blistering stream of obscenities. While staff members cringed, she reminded Bill that their teetotaling opponent was having a field day with rumors of substance abuse in the Clinton camp. “His face was turning bright pink,” said one of those present, “and Hillary was leaning into him and screaming. The message was: Hillary was sick and tired of saving his ass every time he fucked up, and he better start taking this shit seriously.”

  With Hillary dogging his every step as well as playing the role of wife and mother to the hilt, Bill shaped up enough to win. The Hillary who walked back into the Governor’s Mansion in 1983 bore scant resemblance to the Hillary of old. The contacts, the new, more flattering hairstyle, and the suburban wife wardrobe all but erased the memory of the ill-kempt campus radical–turned–First Lady of Arkansas.

  Inside, of course, nothing had changed. Hillary was more committed than ever to making her mark as the first woman partner at Rose Law Firm, and to making as much money as the law would allow. She also continued to see herself and her husband as the joint architects of social change. During Bill’s first term, Hillary had asked to be put in charge of health care reform, and as chair of the Rural Health Committee spearheaded efforts to recruit more doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals into remote parts of the state where little or no medical care was available.

  Bill, who continued to praise Hillary as “the smartest person I’ve ever known,” had no qualms about his wife’s ability to handle the most daunting assignments. Nor did Hillary. Besides, The Plan, which required that Hillary would hold off on pursuing her political dreams until Bill had realized his, also carried with it the explicit understanding that power would always be shared—regardless of who actually held office.

  Now Hillary asked her husband to give her another high-profile assignment—one worthy of a “co-governor.” She wanted to take on the task of spearheading the court-ordered reform of Arkansas’s abysmal public education system, which virtually tied with Mississippi as the worst in the nation. Hillary immediately determined that a full 1 percent hike in the sales tax would be needed to finance the $185 million in improvements she had in mind, though selling any tax increase to the voters was going to be tough. The Clintons would have at least to give the appearance of standing up to that powerful ally of the Democratic Party, the teachers’ union. By calling for mandatory testing of teachers, Hillary would distract the electorate from the hefty boost in taxes.

  With the hard decisions made and a strategy in place, Hillary struck out on one of the “listening tours” for which she would become famous. Visiting all the state’s seventy-five counties, Hillary conducted marathon committee meetings in high school gyms, living rooms, and town halls. She invited educators and corporate executives alike to air their views over tea at the Governor’s Mansion—all designed to create the impression that Hillary cared about what they had to say.

  When she finally did spring the mandatory teacher testing proposal on the public, the union reacted according to plan—with outrage. Hillary was booed and jeered by teachers, but she stood her ground, arguing that it was time to weed out teachers who did not make the grade.

  Hillary’s call for accountability resonated with the vast majority of Arkansans, but not all the state’s legislators were willing to go along with the plan. Hillary took it upon herself to call up law-makers and cajole, persuade, or harangue them until they fell into line.

  It would become evident in later months that Hillary’s so-called hard-line stand against the teachers’ union was, in the words of one Little Rock politico, “just for show.” As it turned out, the testing system was so lax—teachers would be allowed to take remedial training and then be tested and retested over the years until they passed—that less than 3 percent of Arkansas teachers would be removed from the classroom.

  Meantime, Hillary’s plan forced schools to adopt strict state education guidelines—including a new emphasis on “multicultural” studies at the expense of traditional American history courses—or be shut down. The new state-mandated rules were not only costly—many districts had to raise local taxes just to keep up—but time-consuming for administrators. Sitting atop the Everest of paperwork was Hillary, who now ruled unofficially from the Governor’s Mansion as the state’s new education czarina.

  Over the years, Hillary would repeatedly boast of her courage in holding teachers accountable. She would fail to point out that, as a practical matter, teachers were not held accountable, and that the result was a bloated state bureaucracy. What of the children? In 1986—the first year Hillary’s mandated changes were fully in effect—American College Test (ACT) scores actually declined. As of 2004, in terms of academic performance Arkansas’s children still remained at or near the bottom of the pile.

  “Hillary saw herself as co-governor,” said the Clintons’ longtime friend Guy Campbell, “and hell, for all intents and purposes, she was.” That, as well as wife, mother, law partner, guardian of her husband’s political future, and major breadwinner.

  It was in the role of political guardian that Hillary stepped in when Bill was informed that police suspected his aspiring rock-singer brother of dealing cocaine. Roger Clinton, who had been using cocaine since the 1970s and now sold drugs to support his four-gram-a-day habit, was videotaped as part of a sting operation. An arrest, drug enforcement authorities told the Governor, was imminent.

  Bill’s first inclination was to intervene, but Hillary refused to let him. She told him that if he interfered in any way, their enemies would use it against them in their upcoming bid for a third term. “And we’ll lose everything,” she warned him.

  Bill let the investigation run its course, and Roger was arrested in August of 1984. Both Roger and their mother were furious that Bill had not warned his brother, until Hillary explained the political ramifications to them. She also took advantage of the situation to persuade all the Clintons to get family counseling. Hillary took the lead during these sessions, suggesting that Roger Clinton Sr.’s alcohol-fueled rages against their mother had permanently scarred both Clinton boys. Hillary would later say that her husband finally faced up to the fact that his stepfather’s alcoholism “and the denial and secrecy that it spawned” would “take years to sort out.”

  For all the soul-searching, Hillary was the first to realize that Roger’s arrest could only redound to her husband’s benefit. Arkansas voters, many of whose family’s had been touched by the drug problem, could sympathize with the pain the governor was going through. Moreover, by not interfering in the investigation, Bill proved that he was a man of principles, unwilling to use his influence even to save his own brother. It came as no surprise to Hillary when they were swept back into office in 1984 by a margin of two to one.

  There were other, potentially more dicey ramifications stemming from Roger’s arrest. Roger was sentenced to tw
o years at the Fort Worth, Texas, federal prison, but only after agreeing to testify for the prosecution in other drug cases. One of those who went to jail because of Roger’s testimony was Dan Lasater, a flamboyant racehorse owner and investment banker who contributed heavily to all of the Clintons’ campaigns. When it came to drugs, Lasater flouted the law, openly serving cocaine at parties attended by some of the state’s wealthiest and most influential citizens—including Hillary and Bill. While she worried that Lasater was a bad influence on her husband—several eyewitnesses would step forward over the years to describe Bill’s own marijuana and cocaine use—she nonetheless went along for the ride when Lasater offered to fly the Clintons to the 1983 Kentucky Derby as his guests.

  For Lasater, the relationship with Bill and Hillary proved lucrative indeed. Under the Clintons’ watch, his bond trading firm, Collins Locke & Lasater, was chosen to underwrite $637 million worth of state bond offerings—for a grand total of $1.7 million in fees.

  It was not the last favor they would do for Lasater. When the First American Savings and Loan Association of Oak Brook, Illinois, went under, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation sued Lasater and his firm for $3.3 million. The Rose Law Firm represented the FDIC in the action, and Hillary—who never divulged her relationship with Lasater to the FDIC—worked out a settlement that let him off the hook for a mere $200,000.

  The governor, meantime, pursued his favorite hobby with a vengeance. His confidence restored after the 1983 election victory, Bill had embarked on what amounted to a nine-year-long sexual binge. Several state troopers who had been assigned to protect the governor would later testify under oath that they had been used as virtual procurers, making it possible for him to—by his own tally—have sex with “hundreds of women.”

  In sworn affidavits, troopers Larry Patterson, Larry Douglass Brown, and Roger Perry recalled approaching several women per week for their boss. Whenever someone caught the governor’s eye—whether it was at a reception or merely standing on a street corner—the troopers would be expected to contact the woman, get her phone number, and arrange for an assignation.

  Sometimes the trysting place was the Governor’s Mansion itself. Patterson and Perry claimed that they sneaked women into the residence while Hillary and Chelsea slept upstairs, then stood guard at the bottom of the staircase to warn Bill if his wife woke up for any reason. “Hillary Watch,” they called it. At other times, Clinton would pick up someone at a bar or nightclub and drive back to the mansion, where they would park in the driveway and have oral sex in the back of the governor’s official limousine.

  While it is doubtful that she would have tolerated such behavior in such close proximity to their daughter—at one point Bill actually had late-night sex in the parking lot of Chelsea’s elementary school—she was not entirely in the dark. She not only knew several of Bill’s paramours, but was friendly with some of them. Jim McDougal was convinced his wife Susan was having an affair with Bill, and though she denied it, Bill confided in L. D. Brown that they were lovers. Years later, when he was subpoenaed to testify in a Whitewater-related case, Bill told Dick Morris he didn’t know how to respond if he was asked whether he had sex with Susan McDougal. Fortunately for Bill, no one asked.

  Bill also indulged his passion for beauty queens. In 1983, he began an affair with former Miss Arkansas Sally Perdue, who claimed that during one of their trysts he climbed out of bed and serenaded her with his saxophone—clad only in one of her black negligees. During his bid for a third term the following year, the governor set the rumor mill into overdrive as he pursued former Miss Arkansas Lencola Sullivan. Hillary chose to dismiss the stories as false, but she agreed with her husband’s advisers that talk of such an interracial romance would sabotage his chances for reelection. Sullivan packed up and left the state.

  Hillary had no idea at the time that her husband was also in hot pursuit of Miss America 1981, Bonneville, Arkansas, native Elizabeth Ward Gracen. The former Miss Arkansas met Bill at a benefit in 1983, and he gave her a lift back to her apartment in his limousine. According to Gracen, several days later they had sex in her apartment—rough sex, during which he bit down on her lip and caused it to bleed. The painful encounter, so reminiscent of his attack on Juanita Broaddrick, would leave Gracen feeling frightened and confused. Before Hillary had a chance to discover that her husband had once again placed them both in political jeopardy, Gracen flew off to New York. Bill called her repeatedly, pleading to take up where they’d left off, but Gracen held firm.

  That same year, Hillary would learn of yet another affair that had the potential of sinking her husband’s career—one that would be grist for Joe Klein’s bestselling roman à clef, Primary Colors. In late 1983, Bill was jogging along his regular route near the Governor’s Mansion when he encountered twenty-four-year-old Bobbie Ann Williams, one of the young black women working the stretch of Spring Street known as “Hookers’ Row.” She claimed that she had sex with him on thirteen separate occasions over the next several months, including one evening when she brought along two other prostitutes to fulfill Bill’s ménage à trois fantasies.

  Williams told a tabloid that Bill “just laughed” when she told him she was pregnant with his baby. And so did Williams’s own family—until she gave birth to Danny Williams in 1985. Williams’s son was white, and with each passing year his resemblance to Clinton grew stronger. After Bobbie Williams was imprisoned on prostitution and drug charges, Danny went to live with her sister, Lucille Bolton, in one of Little Rock’s poorest neighborhoods.

  When the boy was three, a local activist and self-styled provocateur named Robert “Say” McIntosh began distributing pamphlets claiming Danny was Bill Clinton’s “love child.” Upset by the publicity and hoping to strike a deal with the Clintons, Bolton called the Governor’s Mansion and managed to get through to Hillary.

  Bolton had expected Hillary to sound upset, but instead she was calm, businesslike. “Is it true,” Hillary asked almost matter-of-factly, “that he has this illegitimate child?” When Bolton told her the stories were true, Hillary put her in touch with a private security company that specialized in squelching such talk. “Don’t worry,” she told Bolton. “These people know how to stop rumors.”

  But they didn’t. A few months later, Bolton returned with Danny. This time, Hillary refused to see her. At that point Bolton, furious that Hillary and Bill would let the governor’s son grow up in soul-crushing poverty, began a campaign of her own. Periodically, Bill or Hillary would look out into an audience and see someone holding a sign demanding that Clinton provide JUST ONE DROP OF BLOOD to prove paternity.

  Bill simply shrugged off the rumors, but Hillary recognized them for what they were—a growing threat to his presidential prospects. During one meeting with party leaders in Chicago, Clinton angrily denied that there was any validity to the stories. So why not simply provide a blood sample and put the rumors to rest? someone asked. Bill shook his head and changed the subject. At no point, in fact, would Bill willingly provide the blood sample that supposedly would have established that he was not Danny’s biological father.

  While they viewed Bobbie Williams and Lucille Bolton as little more than a nuisance, the Clintons regarded McIntosh, who had a talent for making headlines, as more of a threat. In staff meetings, Hillary grew increasingly impatient with her husband’s unwillingness to do anything about the rumors. “This is dangerous, Bill,” she told him. “People are starting to believe this crap. We’ve got to do something.”

  In exchange for no longer championing Danny Williams’s cause, McIntosh hinted that Hillary had promised him $25,000—an amount he would later sue to collect. He also claimed that Bill had promised to shorten the fifty-year prison sentence of his son Tommy McIntosh, who had been convicted of cocaine distribution. The other shoe would drop on January 20, 1993—the day Bill Clinton was sworn in as President. It was also the day that Arkansas Acting Governor Jerry Jewell signed pardon papers for Tommy McIntosh that had been prepared b
y Clinton before he left Little Rock for Washington. “If there was no deal, how did this happen?” Say McIntosh later asked. “How did my son get out of prison eighteen years before he was eligible for parole?”

  The Star would announce that it had finally settled the issue in January 1999, when it compared a blood sample from Danny Williams with the profile of Bill Clinton’s DNA made public by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. The tabloid claimed the data proved Danny was not Bill’s son—a finding other DNA experts contested on the grounds that there was insufficient information in the Starr Report to make any valid comparison.

  Even as tongues wagged about this and other gubernatorial peccadilloes, the mask of domestic equanimity never slipped. Hillary gazed at her husband adoringly when he spoke, and praised him for his vision and leadership whenever the opportunity presented itself. In return, Bill acknowledged her brilliant legal mind, her contributions toward health and educational reform in the state, and—most important to Arkansas voters—her parenting skills.

  Privately, the picture was not so pretty. Hurt and humiliated, Hillary frequently lashed out at her husband within earshot of the staffers. Once, after returning from one of his nocturnal expeditions in the early morning hours, Bill was surprised to find Hillary waiting for him in the kitchen. With several staff members standing just outside the door, the Clintons shrieked at each other to the accompaniment of shattering glass and slamming drawers. When it was over, staff members cautiously pushed open the door to reveal broken glass, smashed dishes, and a cupboard door ripped off its hinges.

  To be sure, Hillary had continued her habit of hurling objects at her husband—yellow legal pads, files, briefing books, car keys, Styrofoam coffee cups—often in the presence of the governor’s aides. Pitched battles—always instigated by Hillary, said eyewitnesses—frequently occurred in the governor’s limousine. “They’d be screaming at each other, real blue-in-the-face stuff,” one of their drivers said, “but when the car pulled up to their destination it was all smiles and waving for the crowd.” Other times, they would sit in the car for as long as two hours without ever uttering a word.