Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine (10 page)

Of course, the Clinton camp—and for that matter the Congel camp—denied any quid pro quo. “Mr. Congel and Philippe Reines, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, both said there was no connection between his donation and her legislative work on his project’s behalf. Mr. Reines said Mrs. Clinton supported the expansion of Carousel mall ‘purely as part of her unwavering commitment to improving upstate New York’s struggling economy, and nothing more.’ ”
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Taking on the right—via CAP and Media Matters—and finding future money streams to help achieve future political aspirations was only part of Hillary’s planned offensive. She would also spend a considerable amount of time trying to seduce people on the right. In that, she took lessons from the master charmer himself, her husband, Bill Clinton, who in the first years after his presidency was building his own entourage and set of institutions.

As he worked to establish his postpresidential gravitas, Clinton could count on the usual hangers-on. One was longtime advisor Paul Begala, who would use his perch on various cable news channels to defend his former boss. And of course James Carville, the bald, serpent-eyed Cajun with a reputation for acidic barbs against Clinton enemies. A man who, like Clinton, was born poor and has used his political connections to become a multimillionaire.

Carville’s memoir about Clinton’s 1992 election victory, called
All’s Fair
, was coauthored with his wife, Mary Matalin, who was the political director for the George Bush reelection campaign. The book came with a $700,000–800,000 advance, and along with Carville’s $15,000 speaking fee—today it’s at least twice that amount—it was an early indication after the 1992 election that Carville would never need to run another political campaign. He could instead become a millionaire by, in his words, “being me.”
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With a net worth now estimated at around $5 million, Carville has been known to give more than a hundred speeches a year, has published ten books (most of them bestsellers), appeared in more than a dozen movies, sitcoms, and TV dramas (often playing himself), and made a host of commercials with Matalin for everything from Maker’s Mark to Alka-Seltzer. He was a cohost of CNN’s
Crossfire
, is now a cohost with Tim Russert’s son Luke of a sports show on XM satellite radio called
60/20
(a reference to the hosts’ respective ages), and is a Fox News contributor. He also, having once flunked fifty-six hours’ worth of college classes, teaches political science at Tulane. As the
New York Times
put it, “Carville, largely by dint of energy and personality, has blended politics, entertainment and celebrity into a lucrative empire with a single product to sell: James Carville.”
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Carville had also benefited handsomely from Bill Clinton’s financial largesse—Clinton has, according to someone knowledgeable of both Clinton’s and Carville’s dealings and of the field, helped Carville secure lucrative contracts to serve as a “political consultant” to foreign political leaders who Clinton warns really could use Carville’s help.

The Clinton entourage also included various Hollywood celebrities, with the assorted rumors and gossip that seemed to follow him. It wasn’t exactly new—and almost everyone who had any real access to Bill Clinton knew about his reckless, Kennedyesque attachments to women. Even in the White House he all but flaunted his assignations in front of Hillary and everyone else around him, seeming to get a thrill by what would be forgiven or excused.

Then, of course, there was Lencola Sullivan, the first African American Miss Arkansas, whose name first arose during the Lewinsky investigation as another alleged Clinton mistress.
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The relationship began in 1978, when Clinton was attorney general of Arkansas, and Sullivan’s job, as the beauty pageant winner, was to take dignitaries around.

In a recent phone call, Sullivan tells me she’s still good friends with Bill Clinton and the rest of his family. “My friendship with the entire family extends over thirty years and I don’t have any desire whatsoever to be a part of any publication—because there’s been so many negative things that have been talked about and written about the entire family, specifically both Hillary and Bill, that I wouldn’t want to be a part and drag them through something more negative because that doesn’t serve anybody.”

When I make the point to Sullivan that President Clinton is an historical figure—and that, therefore, his relationships with anyone are worth exploring, she responds with snark. “I’m keenly aware of how my name has kind of been dragged around with this historical figure.”

And when I remind Sullivan that there have been previous reports linking her “romantically” with Clinton, she says, “You read the papers,” and laughs heartily. “That’s what they say. No one has talked to me. I have not talked to anyone.”

“Right,” I say, “so I’m talking to you now.”

Sullivan declines numerous attempts to confirm or deny a “romantic” relationship, often objecting to the line of questioning. (Yet she confirms to me another previously reported on fact: that she dated singer Stevie Wonder. “We’re very good friends,” she says of that former boyfriend.)
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“I’m not going to be involved in any kind of negative press regarding [the Clintons]—because I don’t see where this is relevant. The line of questioning where you’re going—I don’t see how that is relevant to what’s going on today. Right now. I mean, because this whole interview is supposedly based on the fact that Mrs. Clinton may possibly run for president. Is that correct or not?”

It’s not, and after explaining my idea for this book, Sullivan says she likes that it’s about how the Clintons came back and overcame “adversity.” But dredging up the past is not something she wants to be a part of. They’ve come back, she maintains, because “they’re sincere people. I mean, they’re honest and sincere. They care about their relationships.” That’s how they went from the low of leaving the White House to the relative high where they are today.

“I think it’s more important to talk about where they’re going,” rather than talk about the scandals or relationships of the past, Sullivan maintains. She refers me to Bill’s and Hillary’s memoirs for “powerful” accounts of their history. (For the record: she’s not mentioned in them.)

In 2002, Clinton held an engagement party for her at his Harlem office. Her future husband, Roel P. Verseveldt, was a Danish citizen, a former actor and model, and had a degree in business economics, as well as being a graduate of the Special Branch of the Danish Police Academy. The prospective groom was also co-owner of a security agency and risk management firm.
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The party was attended by friends from Arkansas, New York City, and, perhaps most pleasing to the former president, by other former Miss America contestants. Of course, the question on everyone’s mind, according to attendees, was an obvious one: Did the man she was about to marry know about her purported relationship with Bill Clinton? No one knew the answer.

But Sullivan answered it in her phone call with me. “I keep no secrets from my husband at all,” she insists.

And even today, Lencola Sullivan makes an effort to see her dear friend President Clinton.

“If he’s anywhere around where I am, of course, I do my best to try to see him. Of course he has an extremely busy schedule. So that can be very challenging, of course.” Sullivan says she’s “very self-sufficient” in contacting organizers of European conferences or meetings where the former president will be speaking—and that’s how she gets in touch with him these days.

Clinton’s involvement with various celebrities also had long been rumored—Eleanor Mondale, daughter of the former vice president; actresses Gina Gershon and Elizabeth Hurley; and even the singer Barbra Streisand.

A close Clinton friend, who’s hit the links with him and worked for him, met me in a low-key and secluded Washington, D.C., eatery and spoke only on background. He offers a sympathetic defense. I rattle off names and ask about the various stories, from the more outlandish rumors that almost certainly have been exaggerated to the multiple affairs confirmed to me by those in the Clinton inner circle. “Everybody you think he fucked, he did—and the more dangerous the better,” he says, mentioning various celebrities. “All genius is flawed. The great artists are addicted, whether to alcohol or they’re drug addicts or whatever. His addiction is pussy.”

Former president Gerald Ford, whose wife, Betty, had become an expert on addiction through the Betty Ford Center, once reached the same conclusion. “Betty and I have talked about this a lot,” Ford told biographer Thomas DeFrank in 1998 (DeFrank published a collection of his conversations with the deceased president in a 2007 book titled
Write It When I’m Gone
). “He’s sick—he’s got an addiction. He needs treatment.”
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Clinton also found a new friendship that would have an outsized role in his postpresidential life. At least for a while. Ronald Burkle was a billionaire in the supermarket industry who got his start as a bag boy at one of his father’s grocery stores. Labeled the “billionaire party boy” in the tabloids, he formed a close relationship with Bill Clinton in Clinton’s postpresidential life. (They first had met in 1992.) Each used the other—Burkle showed Clinton how to make money and put him on his payroll as a paid advisor to Burkle’s group of investment funds. Meanwhile, Clinton gave Burkle access to Clinton’s network of A-list celebrities, CEOs, and politicos. Clinton was happy to make connections for Burkle while giving himself, as the
New
York
Times
put it in 2006, “the potential to make tens of millions of dollars without great effort and at virtually no risk.”
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The two flew around the world together in Burkle’s private plane—a Boeing 757 that, according to an exposé on Clinton in the July 2008 issue of
Vanity Fair,
was privately labeled “Air Fuck One” by aides for its reputation of being close to a flying brothel. The magazine reported one scene in Paris involving Clinton and Burkle, whom the magazine described as “Clinton’s bachelor buddy, fund-raiser, and business partner.” Burkle, the magazine noted, had come to an event “with an attractive blonde, described by a fellow guest as ‘not much older than 19, if she was that.’ ” Burkle was devoted to Clinton, according to a wide variety of sources. While the duo had many surface similarities—they were of the same generation, from modest beginnings, and of course enjoyed reputations as womanizers—the Burkle-Clinton friendship, like many others in Clinton’s life, was not destined to last.

Burkle aside, no one person was more important to Clinton’s postpresidential life than Doug Band, water-carrier, fixer-upper, and all around consigliere. In the third episode of
The West Wing
, Charlie Young learns that he’s being considered for a job as the president’s body man. It’s “traditionally a young guy, twenty to twenty-five years old,” Josh Lyman tells Charlie during an interview, “excels academically, strong in personal responsibility and discretion, presentable appearance.”

When the actor who played Charlie Young, Dulé Hill, was researching his role, he asked for advice from Doug Band, who had recently become President Bill Clinton’s body man. Band had arrived at the White House in 1995 as an unpaid intern straight out of college, where the fratty English major—with, in what might later be seen as an irony, a minor in ethics—had been president of the University of Florida’s council of fraternities. Unlike many starry-eyed twenty-somethings, Band arrived in Washington without any appearance of an ideology or agenda, other than an ambition to be around powerful people. When his fellow intern Monica Lewinsky invited Band to the White House Congressional Ball, he accepted the invitation. He wasn’t so much interested in Lewinsky as in the chance to be around so many movers and shakers in one place.

After Band’s internship, the tall, dark-haired, and friendly-faced Floridian was hired by the White House counsel’s office. He started taking night classes at Georgetown’s law school, and his colleagues assumed he’d aim for a job as a lawyer after graduation. But Band had his eyes on backrooms, not courtrooms. He turned heads when he applied for a job on the White House advance team—which came with an office in the West Wing, not in the Old Executive Office Building, like the counsel’s office—and by 2000, he was Clinton’s body man.

Band was finally where he wanted to be: at Bill Clinton’s side. When the administration ended and Goldman Sachs offered him a high-paying job in New York, Band turned it down. Clinton was establishing the William J. Clinton Foundation, and Band had big ideas about what it could do for Clinton—and for Band.

They hit the road together. For the next decade, Clinton and Band were almost inseparable. He certainly saw his young male aide far more often than his wife. Those most familiar with Clinton’s activities estimate that since leaving office, the former president spends around 320 nights a year on the road—a number so staggeringly high, it’s really hard to say that he even has a place he can call home. It’s hotel room after hotel room. Fund-raiser after fund-raiser. One global awareness event (for AIDS or climate change or any liberal cause) after another.

He and Band traveled together to approximately 125 countries and two thousand cities. They met with titans of industry and heads of state. They played cards late into the night and flew around together on Ron Burkle’s plane. Clinton once said he “wouldn’t be able to get through the day” without Band,
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and he seemed to confirm his trust and dependence on Band in 2004 when the Clinton Foundation’s chief of staff, Maggie Williams, tried to fire Band for evading her authority. She was tired of Band acting like he was in charge of Clinton’s schedule, the foundation’s employees, and its multibillion-dollar agenda, but with Clinton’s support, Band stayed at the foundation. Williams didn’t. “That’s when I realized,” a Clinton associate told the
New Republic
, “this guy has got it figured out—he’s never going to go away.”
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