American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power (15 page)

Tensions between Hillary and Bill mounted once they arrived in Washington. On the eve of the inauguration, members of the staff at Blair House cringed as the next President and First Lady argued loudly about office space. Hillary had been led to believe that she would be getting the West Wing Office traditionally occupied by the Vice President. Not surprisingly, Al Gore protested, and Bill reneged on his promise to Hillary.

Yet Hillary was not about to settle for dominion over the residential and ceremonial East Wing, traditional First Lady territory. If she couldn’t have the Vice President’s office, then she insisted on and got one next door to the White House counsel’s office—and directly above the Oval Office. The First Lady would also maintain a large suite in the Old Executive Office Building. In previous administrations, portraits of the President and Vice President were displayed side by side. But like Evita, Hillary decreed that
her
portrait—rather than Al Gore’s—hang next to the President’s.

The strain was especially evident the next morning at Blair House, when for the first time Hillary—not the chronically tardy Bill—was holding up the show. As he waited outside, Bill shook his head and muttered to himself, “That fucking bitch.” The comment was not picked up by microphones but clearly audible to those standing nearby. So was Hillary’s reply, delivered as she slid into their waiting car, “You stupid motherfucker!”

A few days after the inauguration, Hillary flew to New York to get some advice from another First Lady driven to the brink of divorce by a philandering spouse. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had been enamored of the Clintons ever since she saw the footage of a sixteen-year-old Bill shaking JFK’s hand in the Rose Garden. Now, over lunch at Jackie’s elegant Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking
Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum, Hillary took pointers on how to deal with her loss of privacy, and how to go about giving Chelsea something approaching a normal childhood.

“You’ve got to protect Chelsea at all costs,” Jackie said. “Don’t let her think she’s someone special or entitled. Keep the press away from her if you can, and don’t let anyone use her.”

For Chelsea, the adjustment to life inside the White House was remarkably smooth—in large part because of the constant presence of her live-in nanny and companion Helen Dickey. The First Daughter invited friends for sleepovers, ordered take-out food from the local Domino’s, rode her bike around the White House grounds, and gobbled down popcorn as she watched first-run features in the White House theater.

The public outcry was predictable when Hillary, that self-proclaimed champion of public education, sent Chelsea to Sidwell Friends, a Quaker private school. It was the only way, Hillary claimed, they could protect Chelsea from intrusive journalists and paparazzi.

Taking Jackie’s advice to heart, Hillary went further, essentially barring the press from any access to Chelsea. The ploy worked. For the next four years, levelheaded, even-tempered, well-adjusted Chelsea would not only survive life in the White House fishbowl, but flourish.

Chelsea’s mother and father would have a much less easy time of it. Just days after the inauguration, respected White House physician Dr. Burton Lee refused to give the President an allergy shot without first seeing his medical records. Hillary ordered Dr. Lee fired on the spot, and gave him two hours to clear out his office.

The abrupt dismissal of Dr. Lee raised questions about Clinton’s medical history that would never be fully resolved; during his entire tenure in the White House, he would never open his medical records for scrutiny, as so many of his predecessors had. It also sent
a message that the new First Lady demanded nothing less than total loyalty—and blind obedience.

Unlike other First Ladies, who downplayed their influence, Hillary went to considerable lengths to let people know that, with the exception of her husband, she wielded more power than anyone in the executive branch. She insisted that her chief of staff, Maggie Williams, also be named special assistant to the President—in essence the First Lady’s personal emissary at all high-level meetings.

Williams, who had done work for the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), and domestic policy adviser Carol Rasco were not the only FOHs (Friends of Hillary) to occupy key posts in the administration. Former CDF Chairman Donna Shalala was tapped by Hillary to be the new secretary of health and human services, while Hillary’s Wellesley pal Eleanor Acheson was put in charge of all nominees for the federal bench and FOH Margaret Richardson was named head of the Internal Revenue Service.

Hillary also rewarded her two closest colleagues at the Rose Law Firm: Webb Hubble, given the number three spot at Justice, and Vince Foster, who as deputy White House counsel would occupy the office next to Hillary’s. At first Foster, whose roots were deeply planted in Arkansas, declined. But Hillary’s pleas were so impassioned (“We need you, Vince. I need you”) that he ultimately relented. It was a decision he would almost immediately regret.

More senior White House aides were assigned to Hillary than to Al Gore—and with reason. She sat in on staff meetings, controlled the President’s schedule, and interviewed job candidates. The First Lady “has in many cases served functionally the way a Chief of Staff would in terms of accountability and discipline,” a top administration official told noted Washington journalist Elizabeth Drew. “She has made the point openly in his presence. What she does privately I can only imagine.”

Her own no-nonsense management style notwithstanding, Hillary would veer along with her husband from one fresh scandal to another. Even before the Clintons moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, they had to contend with the “Nannygate”—the disclosure that Bill’s attorney general designate, Zoë Baird, hired illegal aliens for her household staff and then failed to pay their Social Security taxes despite a $500,000 annual income. The Clintons’ next candidate for the job, Playboy-bunny-turned-New-York-jurist Kimba Wood, withdrew her name when it was revealed that she had also hired an illegal immigrant. Janet Reno, the dogged chief prosecutor of Dade County, Florida, finally passed muster, fulfilling Hillary’s wish that a woman hold the nation’s top law enforcement job.

Increasingly, it became clear that Hillary was in fact the source of many of Bill’s problems during that first year in office. Bill ran into trouble again when he followed Hillary’s advice and lifted the ban on gays in the military. When she summoned her hairdresser to Los Angeles Airport to give Bill a $200 haircut aboard
Air Force One,
the President was criticized for causing an air-traffic tie-up.

Hillary also concocted the plan to fire longtime White House travel staffers and replace them with Catherine Cornelius, a distant relative of Bill’s, and an agency owned by their Hollywood pals the Thomasons. She also launched an investigation into allegations—which later proved baseless—that the Travel Office holdovers from the Reagan and Bush administrations had been taking kickbacks.

When someone questioned the wisdom of axing reputable White House staffers for the apparent purpose of diverting government business to their cronies, White House assistant to the President David Watkins warned there would be “hell to pay if we failed to take swift and decisive action in conformity with the first lady’s wishes.”

“Travelgate” would trigger yet another investigation into the
administration’s motives and methods. It would also ultimately claim the life of someone Hillary loved dearly.

It was one thing for Hillary to summarily dismiss the entire Travel Office staff, and quite another to impose her will on the Secret Service. Not that she didn’t try. During the transition, members of the Secret Service detail assigned to guard the President-elect (code name: “Eagle”) were shocked by the Clintons’ behavior. Unlike the state troopers who had done his bidding for years, the agents were not willing to participate with Clinton in rating women, much less approach them on his behalf. Nor were they willing to caddy, go on shopping errands, or carry baggage—tasks that might prevent them from concentrating on their principal job: to protect the President. When an agent explained this to Hillary (code name: “Evergreen”) after their plane touched down in Arkansas, she looked him over carefully. “If you want to remain on this detail,” she said, “get your fucking ass over here and grab those bags.”

The agents were equally disturbed by the Clintons’ predilection for squabbling in public. William Bell, a former member of the White House detail, recalled yet another pitched battle as Bill and Hillary rode together in a limousine—he in the front, she in the back. Once again, an enraged Hillary flung a briefing book at Bill, inadvertently hitting the agent behind the wheel in the back of the head.

Things only seemed to get worse in the White House, where early on Secret Service agents watched in amazement as Hillary picked up a lamp and hurled it at her husband. Fortunately, she missed. When word of the incident was leaked to the press, Hillary banished not only the Secret Service but the domestic staff from the residential floors when members of the First Family were there.

Although Hillary claimed she was barring staff from the residence to afford Chelsea (Secret Service code name: “Energy”) a level of privacy—something that hadn’t concerned them during
their twelve years in the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion—she suspected that many of the agents resented their new bosses. To some extent, she was right. Several viewed Clinton as a draft dodger and antimilitary, a spoiled baby boomer given to childish, self-indulgent tantrums. Hillary was seen as equally foul-tempered, with the kind of longshoreman’s vocabulary they found unbecoming in a First Lady.

Then there were the scores of Clinton employees whose criminal records, histories of drug use, and otherwise shady back-grounds would have normally made them security risks and ineligible to work in the White House. Circumventing long-standing screening procedures and FBI background checks, the White House counsel’s office gave permanent passes to more than one hundred Clinton appointees who had been denied them by the Secret Service. Fully twenty-one of those asked to take drug tests failed—a number that included top aides to both Bill and Hillary. Instead of being fired on the spot, they were simply asked to undergo testing twice a year—at a time of their choosing.

Hillary had agreed with the counsel’s opinion that drug abusers suffered from a disability and thereby had a
right
to employment at the White House. This was in keeping with her role as Hillaryland’s resident mother hen. In that capacity, the First Lady regularly popped into her staffers’ offices to compliment them on their appearance, quiz them about their families, and share gossip. She also presided over birthday parties and baby showers, and at times took obvious pleasure in playing matchmaker.

“It doesn’t sound very liberated,” said a junior staffer, “but these were her girls. She genuinely cared about them so long as she was convinced they were totally loyal to her and the President. If you wavered for just a second, you were dead. Not fired. You just ceased to exist in her eyes and in her mind. We started calling it ‘Hillary’s Alzheimer’s.’ She’d be looking right at you, but you weren’t there as far as she was concerned. Disloyalty—or anything
that could remotely be interpreted that way—was the one unforgivable sin.”

How Hillary viewed her husband’s disloyalty was another matter. It was not as if he had changed his ways. Now that he resided in what he called “the crown jewel of the federal prison system,” Bill surrounded himself with attractive women who, it was widely assumed, went beyond their job descriptions in serving the President. One of the flight attendants aboard Clinton’s campaign plane, Debra Schiff, landed in the West Wing as a receptionist. A “knockout,” as chief White House steward Mike McGrath described her, Schiff favored a working wardrobe of short skirts, tight sweaters, and high heels. Schiff, who would eventually deny having an affair with Clinton, nonetheless spent twenty minutes with him alone in the Oval Office study every morning. Why? “You figure it out,” she replied. Secret Service agent Gary Byrne didn’t have to; one morning he stumbled upon Schiff and the President enjoying each other’s company.

Schiff was by no means alone. The equally blond and stunning Catherine Cornelius, who was only nineteen when she joined the White House Travel Office, not only accompanied the President when he traveled without Hillary but had unusual access to the Oval Office.

White House aide Robin Dickey denied having an affair with Clinton, although members of Bill’s Little Rock security detail swore under oath that she admitted to them that she had. Dickey raised eyebrows when she repeatedly showed up at the Oval Office to massage the President’s back.

Of all Bill’s alleged White House paramours, none was more problematic for Hillary—at least during the Clintons’ first term—than Marsha Scott. The daughter of Philadelphia Eagles football star Clyde “Smackover” Scott and a former Miss Arkansas, Marsha liked to refer to herself as Bill’s “old hippie girlfriend.” Scott, now director of White House correspondence, would eventually admit
to spending many nights alone with the President in the family residence.

The occasional blowup aside, for the most part Hillary turned a blind eye to her husband’s indiscretions. There were, after all, other, more pressing demands on her time. To sell her plan for universal health coverage linked to cost control and preventive health care, Hillary held public hearings, huddled with legislators, and barnstormed the country denouncing the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

Hillary, who insisted that much of the process take place behind closed doors and away from scrutiny by the press, quickly came under attack for violating sunshine laws. She also refused to invite input from special interest groups, whose support would be needed if there was any hope of getting her Task Force on National Health Care Reform through Congress. This, coupled with Hillary’s blanket refusal to compromise, eventually doomed the Clinton health care package.

More than a humiliating defeat for Hillary, the gradual implosion of her highly touted health care initiative would embolden those who had vocally opposed the Evita-like concept of a husband-wife co-presidency. Now she faced more inquiries about Whitewater and the collapse of Madison Guaranty. Amid talk of a possible indictment, Hillary broke down during a meeting of Bill’s inner circle. “I know everybody’s looking out for Bill,” she said, choking back tears, “but nobody’s out there fighting for
me.
”