Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine (12 page)

To some observers of the Clintons, there was a psychological element to Hillary’s unusual outreach. As former California congressman Jim Rogan, a Republican who was one of the managers of Bill Clinton’s impeachment, put it during our interview, “They seem to miss their enemies more than they miss their friends.” That was doubly true for Bill Clinton, who in his years out of office set out on a charm offensive of his own.

Upon the death of Nelson Mandela in 2013, Clinton claimed that the former South African president provided the inspiration for forgiving his enemies.
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Just as Mandela forgave those who had oppressed and imprisoned him during apartheid, so too could Clinton forgive his enemies. Left largely unnoticed was that Clinton was comparing himself favorably to the famed African hero and Republicans to white racists.

Whether Mandela really had anything to do with Clinton’s overtures—or whether the former president was just looking for a convenient and timely anecdote—is unknowable. What is known is that Clinton, by many accounts a classic narcissist, craves approval and praise.

A former senior aide recalls Clinton’s time as a young Senate intern, probably around the time he worked for Senator Fulbright. “He used to take three or four showers in the morning because he wanted to run into as many [other interns] as he possibly could,” the aide tells me. It was his way of meeting all the other pages in the prestigious program, because he was certain he would go on to do great things. A former Clinton roommate at Georgetown recalls that Clinton used to attend two or three different church services on a Sunday morning in order to meet more people. “I don’t know what your college experience was like,” the former Clinton aide tells me. “That’s
crazy
.”

The need for attention, love, and approval seems especially keen with Clinton’s enemies. As one Clinton confidant told me, “If you want Clinton to pay attention to you, act like you don’t love him anymore.”

Former Democratic senator Joe Lieberman told me about his “fascinating” experience with Clinton shortly after he was chosen to be Al Gore’s vice presidential running mate in 2000. Lieberman had publicly chastised Clinton for his behavior with Monica Lewinsky, winning widespread coverage as he blasted the president for “willfully deceiving the nation.” Lieberman was unsparing, noting that “The president apparently had extramarital relations with an employee half his age and did so in the workplace in the vicinity of the Oval Office. Such behavior is not just inappropriate. It is immoral. And it is harmful, for it sends a message of what is acceptable behavior to the larger American family—particularly to our children—which is as influential as the negative messages communicated by the entertainment culture.”

Shortly after the speech, the Connecticut senator received a call from Bill Clinton himself. Clinton, known to have a volcanic temper, was instead contrite. “‘Joe, I can’t say that I disagree with a single word you said,’” Lieberman quoted Clinton as saying.

“It was kind of an apology,” Lieberman told me. “He talked about how he was seeing not one minister but two for counseling.”

A Clinton confidant tells the story of a senior deputy in the administration who left to pursue other interests. A few months later, when a more senior job opened up, Clinton approached his former aide to get him to come back. The aide politely refused, telling the president that he was enjoying his new work. As the confidant tells it, “Clinton pursues, and pursues, and pursues, and pursues, and pursues, and finally gets him. And the guy comes back and Clinton ignores him. It’s like you’re in college and you’re pursuing this girl and you gotta have her, gotta have her, gotta have her, and you finally get her and you’re like, ‘Yeah, didn’t need that. Did I really want her after all?’ But Clinton’s like that with
everybody
.”

Psychology aside, it is hard to ignore the fact that Clinton’s outreach to Republicans had a component of naked self-interest. If his harshest critics could say nice things about Clinton, an obsessive poll watcher, then the public would likely feel the same. In his postpresidential life, by the accounts of many people I spoke to, Clinton has used that charm to advance a single aim: to win over, and ultimately neutralize, his and Hillary’s most potent enemies. This is the less well known aspect of Clinton’s obsessive legacy building. And in that effort, absolutely no Republican is off-limits.

His rapprochement with Richard Mellon Scaife is just one remarkable example. Scaife, a billionaire, had financed most of the anti-Clinton attacks during his administration. With Scaife’s support, the conservative magazine the
American
Spectator
launched a years-long effort to take down President Clinton. It was the
Spectator
that uncovered Paula Jones, the woman who was allegedly sexually harassed by the then-governor of Arkansas. Jones’s allegations, because of the Violence Against Women Act, which Clinton himself signed into law in 1993, made Clinton’s other sexual dalliances relevant—which of course led to Monica Lewinsky, which in turn led to the president’s historic impeachment.

Scaife was the main moneyman behind these devastating attacks. And yet, when Scaife fell ill, a source close to Scaife tells me, Clinton made amends through phone calls, conversations, and letters, like this one, which I obtained, on letterhead with the presidential seal and his name, William Jefferson Clinton. The former president wrote:

Richard M. Scaife

One Oxford Centre

Suite 3900

301 Grant Street

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15219

Dear Dick:

I’m so sorry to hear that you’ve been going through such a difficult time. I want you to know that I’ll be praying for your strength and comfort.

Hang in there—I’m pulling for you.

Sincerely,

Bill

Scaife was touched, a friend of his says. Whether this effectively moderates any 2016 activity for the Republican moneyman is yet to be known. But it’s safe to say that Scaife feels much warmer to Clinton now than he did in the 1990s. And that is only going to be a help for the Clintons.

“I talk to him once a year,” Newt Gingrich confirmed over a year ago about his former nemesis. “Whatever’s on his mind. Last time he called me to talk about the ‘fiscal cliff’ and how we could solve it and all that stuff.” Gingrich’s view of both Clintons has also softened—or been softened up—over the years, to the point that even he offers praise for their abilities, in tones he did not use when he went to battle against them early in his speakership. President Clinton is even said to have called Gingrich, according to an aide to the former Speaker, the night his mother died in 2003 to offer his condolences and to let him know that he was thinking of him in his time of mourning.

Gingrich once labeled the Clinton White House the “rough equivalent of the
Jerry Springer Show
”
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and called Clinton’s impeachment effort “very simply about the rule of law, and the survival of the American system of justice. This is what the Constitution demands, and what Richard Nixon had to resign over.”
7
As Speaker of the House he once vowed, “I will never again, as long as I am Speaker, make a speech without commenting on this topic,” referring to the Lewinsky scandal.
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Today the former Speaker comes close to offering a defense of the Clintons and their tawdry behavior. “First of all, you have no idea what their lives are like,” he says. “None of us do. They kept their marriage together. They seem to have a good relationship with their daughter.”

Gingrich goes so far as to leave open the possibility that Hillary Clinton might be a good president. “Who knows?” he responds, when I ask him that question. “Compared to what? She would be a methodical, an intelligent, an extraordinarily experienced, very tough-minded liberal. She would be marginally more conservative than Obama. And dramatically more liberal than any Republican. That’s who she is. That’s who she’s been for her whole life.” He also suggests that she would be an effective president. “I mean partly because she just knows so much, she’s been around so long, she’s done so many favors. She would be instinctively more bipartisan than Obama because she’s been here so long.”

As a U.S. senator from Texas, Phil Gramm was one of the Clinton administration’s most vigorous opponents. The staunch conservative almost single-handedly halted Hillary Clinton’s health-care reform plan by vowing it would pass the Senate over “my cold, dead political body.”
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He excoriated Bill Clinton over his various scandals and voted without reservation for his impeachment. In fact, Gramm was ranked by his former colleagues as one of the most enthusiastic and effective antagonists the Clinton administration had ever known.

But that was then. Now Phil Gramm is all smiles when it comes to the Clintons. Labeling the former president “a great communicator” on par with Ronald Reagan, Gramm says, “I think he is a people person. I think he’s capable of having warm feelings toward people that don’t necessarily agree with him.” In our interview, the former senator gushes, “I always was impressed by how prepared he was, how quick he was.”

What accounts for the change of attitude? Bill Clinton has spent years working his former political enemies by using what he uses best—ingratiation and flattery. He knows well the benefits that come from small, cost-free gestures. Gramm is a Clinton fan for life, apparently, and for one primary reason: “Any time we are on a program together or if he sees me in the audience,” Gramm, who now works in finance in New York City, tells me, “[Clinton] goes out of his way to say nice things about me.”

Clinton has also maintained a close and personal relationship with Trent Lott, the former senator and Senate majority leader from Mississippi. “He and I still talk,” Lott admitted a few years ago at a public Hudson Union Society event. “You know, when he had a heart attack, I really got worried about it. I was afraid he was going to kill himself. I called him and told him so.”

Lott continued, “You know, I had my little disaster—I was talking before I put my mind in gear one time and I wound up having to leave the majority leader’s position. Unceremoniously, you know, a lot of my friends—including the president at the time, George Bush—pulled the rug out from under me. But it was a rug that I should have had pulled out from under me. But I didn’t go away and pout and sulk about it, I stayed. I hung in there and kept doing my job, I kept doing my job, and four years later, back in the leadership. Again as majority whip. And what was one of the first calls I got? Bill Clinton. He said, ‘Well, I guess I’m going to have to give you my moniker as the Comeback Kid.’ ”

Lott’s comments that got him in trouble—the ones that didn’t seem to hurt his relationship with President Clinton—were about his support for Strom Thurmond, the Democratic senator from South Carolina who had run for president in 1948 on a “Dixiecrat” segregationist platform. “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years, either,” Lott said. It would result in his fall from Senate leadership.

Lott’s audience laughed at the anecdote of Clinton calling him the “Comeback Kid.”
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And then he launched into only a semi-defense of impeachment, saying that the votes were “never there” to remove Clinton from office, suggesting his role was only to marshal the will of people but without getting too hostile and too acrimonious.

“I thought we got through it pretty well,” he said. “And I talked to Bill Clinton, not much during the proceedings, of course, but as soon as they were over,” he says, shrugging his shoulders, “we went right back to work. And did some more things for our country.”

A similar tone is offered by Mike Huckabee, who, as governor of Arkansas, worked frequently with Clinton during his presidency. “Clinton was extraordinarily attentive to governors in general, and to me in particular, and if I were to call and request a conversation with him about something, I’d generally get a call back within half an hour,” Huckabee tells me in an interview. “You couldn’t get that kind of attention from the Bush White House.”

Huckabee, like Gramm, was susceptible to Clinton’s small gestures. He tells me of a visit that he and his wife made to Toronto. Mrs. Huckabee noticed that Bill Clinton was in town for a book signing and suggested that they go and see him. “Well, of course, there was a huge line and they said no photos, you can’t say anything, just get your book signed and move on,” Huckabee says. “So she just got in the line, went through, and when he saw her he looked up and stood up from his seat and said, ‘Janet, what are you doing here?’ Well, it disrupted the whole thing and he gave her a big hug and they talked a minute. You could tell that all the people looking were just aghast, you know, ‘Who is this person who’s disrupting the whole thing?’ I’m sure they’d have a fit to find out it was the wife of a Republican governor, but that’s Bill Clinton. That’s just who he is.”

As with Hillary, the men who led the effort to impeach Clinton weren’t off-limits, either. Clinton has exchanged warm letters with Jim Rogan, the former impeachment manager. In our conversation, Rogan declined to release the letters, but acknowledged that “[w]e’ve corresponded back and forth over the years. It’s been very friendly.”

“Did he ever try to win me over?” Asa Hutchinson asks. “Every time we met. I mean that was the level of his engagement. He was always trying to make those connections and he generally did.”

“President Clinton tends to hold you in a man grip that’s just a little too close for comfort and he doesn’t let go,” Utah Republican congressman Jason Chaffetz says with a laugh. He met the former president at a wedding reception for Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner. (The event was hosted at the Clintons’ Washington residence.)

“I think the thing that I admire really about President Clinton is he’s mature enough not to hold against somebody like Ray LaHood,” says LaHood in an interview for this book. LaHood, a Republican congressman from Illinois who later served as Obama’s secretary of transportation, noted that he voted for four articles of impeachment while in the U.S. House. “It would be very easy for [Bill Clinton] to turn and have a cold shoulder toward me as a Republican who served during the time of his impeachment. He’s a mature enough individual that we had a good relationship.”