Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine (3 page)

Thus it is pretty clear why less powerful figures inside Clinton, Inc. insist on anonymity. The panic among Clintonites, past and present, is palpable. “Don’t fuck me,” one well-known Clintonite once begged me after our interview, despite my repeated assurances of anonymity. “You aren’t going to fuck me, right?” He asked this multiple times, on more than one occasion.

Clintonites are known to scour through magazine articles and books to try to decipher blind quotes and tie them to a suspect. For example, a well-known Clinton aide, Jay Carson, was fingered as a source for gossip on Hillary’s 2008 campaign and ire toward Obama in the bestselling book
Game Change.
Former press secretary Jake Siewert was tsk-tsked for being quoted on the record in a 2008 book about Bill’s activities called
Clinton in Exile.
As a result, Siewert is reluctant to be quoted elsewhere.

Adding to the paranoia, Clinton associates are masters at cultivating an aura of knowing everything before others do. One author of an unauthorized book on the Clintons, Sally Bedell Smith, tells me of attending a party with veteran Clinton hand (and now Virginia governor) Terry McAuliffe, whom she had interviewed. McAuliffe, a Washington fixture and fierce Clinton partisan known for his overcaffeinated, staccato style, came up to Smith to say hello and drop a bit of news.

“You know he has your book,” McAuliffe said.

“He has my book?” she asked.

“Yeah, the president has your book.”

Smith was shocked—and rattled. The manuscript was not yet released to the public and had been tightly held by the publisher so its details would not be leaked. “That can’t be,” she protested. “There aren’t any copies out. There are no galleys.”

“He’s got it,” McAuliffe said, delivering a message with an intimidating glance. “I saw him, he’s read it, and he was devastated.” (True to ClintonWorld code, when the details of this encounter leaked to a reporter, McAuliffe denied the conversation ever took place.)

When another book that touched on the Clintons was set to be published in 2013, Clinton operative James Carville got in on the act. Claiming to be good friends with the book’s author, Carville asked the publisher for an advance copy. The author in question had neither met Carville nor worked with him. The conversation between the publisher and Carville had been a simple ruse to allow ClintonWorld to get an early edition of the book—so they could try to discredit the contents ahead of time, in the event that there was damning stuff about the Clintons in the pages. The manuscript turned out to be relatively harmless.

Even my reporting for this book has not been immune to curious activities in recent months. A top executive at Knopf, the publisher of Bill Clinton’s memoir,
My Life
, has quizzed editors in New York about this book and whether it was “legitimate.” I’ve received a phone call from James Carville’s office asking whom I might be reporting on. Reporters from Democratic-leaning publications, such as media reporter Dylan Byers of the Virginia-based trade publication
Politico
and Michael Calderone of the left-leaning website
Huffington Post
, called me up well in advance of the publication of this book to ask about its sourcing. They told me that they have been hearing I haven’t been able to get access. Who might be spreading these rumors? The reporters following up on gossip won’t say.

Reporters, Washington reporters especially, have a keen sense of self-preservation. Indeed, many of the things described in this book are well known among Washington journalists, and have been openly gossiped about in private settings. But much of this has never been shared with the general public, for fear of Clintonian retribution.

If they print stories that reflect negatively on the Clintons, they know that any access they have will instantly vanish. Sources inside the Clinton camp have to be extremely careful about who they talk to. For someone most Beltway reporters think will be the next president of the United States, dishing on the Clintons and divulging stories—even ones that are common knowledge among Washington insiders and yet never find their way into print—is career suicide.

One former Clinton lawyer tried to discourage me from writing too negatively because he said it could affect my career. A CNN producer said she could never have my book on her program for fear that the Clinton people would punish the network by denying them access. In an interview with me, Howard Dean made the case that there isn’t anything new about Hillary that can be written. “There’s nothing anybody’s going to write about Hilary Clinton that either isn’t true or isn’t already well known,” Dean told me.

I knew something of this when I wanted to write a piece for the
Weekly Standard
, where I work, and ran afoul of Hillary Clinton’s spokesman Philippe Reines.

In response to my query about Mrs. Clinton’s release from a hospital after her December 2012 collapse, he sent me a pointed reply. “You and I have to come to an understanding,” he wrote. “This routine of you only checking in when you need something isn’t working and isn’t the way it’s supposed to work.” It was his attempt to strike a deal with me—a deal on how Clinton would be covered. I never responded. And he never answered my question.

If there is a coldhearted, capitalistic nature to many of the Clintons’ transactions, it is not inadvertent. For the Clintons, politics is just business and one they happen to be very good at. But it is made clear to anyone joining this entity that it exists for the sole protection of Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea. No one else is a member for life. No one else is indispensable, and those who leave the company or expose trade secrets risk punishment while others who prove inconvenient or insufficiently loyal are expendable. Perhaps this is why so many sources keep right on talking to reporters like me. They feel the need to unload. They feel a sense of unfairness and entitlement in how the Clintons deal with their friends—and those who threaten them.

In short, for such reasons, most of my sources were afraid of crossing the Clintons. To alleviate their fear, I promised to protect their anonymity. In their recklessness toward others, they harkened back to a memory of another famous fictional couple, brought to life by F. Scott Fitzgerald. “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into . . . whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

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Hillary’s Redemption

“Sick but brilliant.”

—a senior Clinton aide on the Bill and Hillary relationship

“The most difficult decisions I have made in my life were to stay married to Bill and to run for the Senate from New York,” Hillary Clinton once wrote in her bestselling memoir, discussing the aftermath of her husband’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.
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In retrospect, neither of those statements appears to be true. Even as her husband was facing the biggest scandal of his life, Mrs. Clinton’s mind was not on divorce but political survival. Hers, not his.

On February 12, 1999, the very day the Senate was voting on whether to impeach her husband on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice stemming from his lying about an extramarital relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, Hillary Clinton huddled with her longtime confidant Harold Ickes, the thin-haired deputy chief of staff to her husband, to plot her course. If the Clintons were a business enterprise, this would be Hillary’s chance to launch a brand of her own.

The First Lady and Ickes met in the residence at the White House, where Ickes sold her on a New York run, a state where she had never actually lived, but which offered lots of promise.

The Clintons’ private residence was decorated with personal touches. Framed pictures of the Clintons lying together in a hammock, or enjoying a lunch with Chelsea. Board games, such as Boggle, and a deck of cards. And there were other touches that seemed a bit tackier: Russian nesting dolls that featured the Clintons, a Beanie Baby collection on display. In one of the Clintons’ bedrooms was an embroidered pillow that quoted Albert Einstein: “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” (Bill and Hillary, according to at least one biographer, hadn’t shared the same bedroom in seven years.)
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White House servants occasionally loitered in and out. The majority of them never much cared for the Clintons, whose haphazard and chaotic scheduling often left the official White House staff scrambling to attend to their whims. The Clintons stood in sharp contrast to their beloved predecessors, the Bushes, who had long experience in dealing with servants.

Seated together, Ickes explained to Hillary the intricacies of what would soon become her “home state”—its politics, its divisions and unions, and her (likely) opponent, New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. It was all foreign to her—but native to Ickes. They talked much of the morning and when they moved into the private dining room for lunch, they were briefly joined by Bill Clinton, who was wearing a sweat suit and trying out lines that he’d be using in a couple of hours when he would address the nation after his all-but-certain acquittal in the Senate’s impeachment vote. “Hillary rolled her eyes and indulged him briefly before turning the conversation back to upstate electoral tallies,” biographer Sally Bedell Smith details.
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“I remember that moment when the Senate was voting on whether to impeach Clinton, her husband, and she was sitting up in the East Wing with Harold Ickes, plotting out her Senate strategy, and somebody came in and said the motion to convict was defeated, and she just sort of said, ‘Thanks,’ and kept moving with her own plans,” a close observer of the Clintons tells me as she thinks back to this moment.

Ickes, who had led the Bill Clinton presidential campaign effort in New York in 1992, was determined to be by her side for this effort. (“A longtime friend and confidant of Clinton’s, Ickes has been surrounded by scandal, misconduct, abuse of office and questions of virtue,” the Republican National Committee had claimed in a briefing book designed to portray President Clinton as “Shameless.”)

It was Ickes who told her that the Monica scandal was playing well for her, though that was already obvious. As pollster John Zogby said at the time, her rebound in public approval was “a sign of the public’s support for her handling of the Lewinsky issue.” Americans, particularly women, felt sorry for her. She had become the world’s most famous jilted wife and she would work it for all that it was worth. The one true thing that even her enemies granted Hillary Clinton was that she was the loyal, aggrieved spouse blindsided by her husband’s adultery.

Contrary to the popular notion that she never had political aspirations of her own—“I don’t think she even fantasized about that for herself,” says law school friend Michael Medved, now a conservative radio host, in an interview for this book—Hillary’s own ambitions were never far from her mind. In 1988, when Bill first considered a run for the presidency, he and Hillary had also considered the idea that she replace him as governor of Arkansas. By the time of his first inaugural four years later, the White House clearly was in her sights. This was part of the understanding she always had with Bill Clinton. He’d get his turn. She’d put up with his crap. And then she’d get her chance. And he’d do what he could to help her. Clinton aides told me they were astonished after Bill’s taking office, at a time when Mrs. Clinton was viewed by a significant segment of the country as a shrill, polarizing radical, that this idea was such an active notion in the administration.

“Hillaryland was always, always, always a force,” a senior Clinton aide recalls in a wide-ranging interview for this book. He worked within steps of the Oval Office during the administration and, like pretty much everyone else who hopes to have a career in Democratic politics, will speak only without attribution. “If you fucked up and were found out by [Bill] Clinton, you got a promotion. If you fucked up and were found out by Hillary, your throat was slit and you were left on the tarmac with no ticket home. It was brutal.”

In those early days, Clinton critics were demanding the release of Hillary Clinton’s records from her days as a partner at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock as part of the investigation of a now largely forgotten early scandal known as Whitewater. Mrs. Clinton was reluctant to release documents or to comply with the requests of the special prosecutor in the case.

One aide approached the First Lady’s press secretary, Lisa Caputo, then in her midtwenties. “Why doesn’t she just come fucking forward and release them? The president had no business in the matter. It won’t hurt him.”

“We can’t,” Caputo replied. “Hillary’s got her own ambitions.”

“What do you mean?” he asked. “It doesn’t get better than First Lady.”

“Well, there’s ’04. Or ’08.”

It’s always been known that Mrs. Clinton had political ambitions, but never before had an aide confirmed with such assurance that she was envisioning the presidency for herself, even as her husband was just settling in. Hillary Clinton wanted the keys to the White House herself and, as a former aide put it in an exclusive interview for this book, conjuring images of the popular movie
The Shawshank Redemption
, “She was willing to slog through all of [his] shit” to get there.

Hillary has been “the one to always play a long game, and she started playing that long game at the end of the second term, and I think she thought the Senate would lead directly to her own presidency in 2008,” another close observer of the Clintons tells me, again insisting on anonymity.

As her husband’s second term came to a close, the question was: Where to start? She was born in Illinois, went to college in Massachusetts, law school in Connecticut, had brief stints in California and Washington, D.C., and had moved to Arkansas to be with her future husband, Bill Clinton. Now she was back in Washington, D.C.—the nation’s capital, living in the White House. Along the way Hillary had picked up friends and networks across the country and even a pronounced southern accent that she mysteriously lost shortly after she arrived in Washington in 1993. In other words, she had no strong roots anywhere—which, she believed, gave her license to represent people as an elected official from . . . just about anywhere.

When Hillary and Harold Ickes first strategized about her Senate run, both knew at least in the back of their minds that she couldn’t win the election simply by being the shattered wife. As the
New York Times Magazine
wrote, “[F]or four hours, as she and Ickes—a scarred veteran of New York politics and a former aide to her husband—moved from the living room to lunch in the family dining room and back to the living room, she plumbed the risks of a race for the Senate seat that Daniel Patrick Moynihan had decided to vacate. Would she really want to be one of a hundred senators? Could she survive a street fight with a nasty opponent? Could she stand the pawing of New York City’s feral reporters?” How did she counter the sentiment, as one reporter covering the campaign summarized it to me years later, that her candidacy was “naked in its political ambition—the fact it came after Lewinsky.” That, in other words, she was in fact using Bill’s humiliation as justification for being in the Senate.

As Ickes and Hillary conspired, one thought kept coming back to them. The “bottom line” of the First Lady’s run for Senate, as first reported in the book
Hillary’s Choice
, was “for redemption.”
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From what? Take the scandals: There was Whitewater, the investment deal in which they lost a fair bit of money—and probably should’ve lost more had it not been for their good friends James and Susan McDougal. The documents surrounding this mysterious deal—and Hillary’s insistence on fighting to keep them sealed—led to the appointment of Special Prosecutor Ken Starr in the first place, whose portfolio would grow and grow—and finally led to embarrassing allegations of her husband’s sexual misconduct toward an Arkansas state employee, Paula Jones, which then led to revelations about an alleged cover-up of the president’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.

While the president remained politically popular due to a robust economy, on a personal level the Clinton brand was increasingly viewed by the public as unethical, immoral, and just plain icky. A Senate election would erase all that—it would not only salvage the Clinton brand, but give Hillary a chance to be the kind of leader she was destined to be. No longer would she have to suffer in comparison to Bill, or deal with his crap. This would be her achievement and her chance to show the world what she could do. On her own. And so Hillary did what she always did. She went to work.

One way she decided to counter the expected criticism of her bid was to play the reluctant candidate for as long as possible—a stance she will likely echo in her 2016 presidential run. One story leaked out that it was a veteran New Yorker, the outspoken African American congressman Charlie Rangel, who in October 1998 first mischievously suggested to Hillary that she run for a Senate seat. Hillary, according to the reports, laughed the idea off. But, as I’ve learned in my reporting, there’s more to the story. Hillary in fact had been looking at the race ever since she’d heard rumors of Moynihan’s retirement. Long before that chance conversation with Rangel, she had spent more time than was necessary that year campaigning throughout New York State in the 1998 midterm elections, getting to meet the major party figures and donors.

One member of Clinton’s senior administration happened to cross paths with the First Lady during a retreat at Camp David and shared his encounter with me. As he recalled it, the First Lady, still playing Hamlet in the New York media, pulled the official aside.

“What do you think?” she asked. “Should I run for the Senate?”

“No,” he replied. “I think you should be a college president, head of a foundation. I think you’ll have more of a platform.”

The First Lady looked stricken, and quickly turned away.

“She was pissed at me for that advice,” says the former high-level official, who believes Hillary holds his honest advice against him to this day. She didn’t want his opinion, he says, unless it was to tell her what a great senator she would be.

Further assisting the “reluctant candidate” narrative, reporters from the
New York Times
wrote any number of stories about state Democrats who were “begging her to run.”
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That too was an exaggeration. New York Democrats in fact already had a suitable candidate for the job, a woman who’d been waiting her turn—Representative Nita Lowey of Westchester County.

Among the real power players in New York politics there was a noted lack of enthusiasm for a Hillary bid—particularly among Senators Chuck Schumer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the man Hillary would replace. Moynihan was an intellectual giant in the United States Senate, a former aide to Kennedy, LBJ, and Nixon who was respected on both sides of the aisle. From the outset, the wry, bespectacled legislator seemed reserved, at best, about the idea that Hillary Clinton might replace him. “He had not much use for the Clintons,” one reporter who covered that race tells me bluntly.

Although they have since mended fences, at least superficially, Schumer secretly opposed Hillary’s political career from its start, as she eyed a bid for a New York U.S. Senate seat in 2000. Like most every other political observer, Schumer was initially shocked by the audacity of a first lady from Arkansas, who was born in Illinois, deciding she was entitled to a seat held by such a heavyweight as the retiring Democrat Moynihan. And in Schumer’s state, too. Where she’d never lived.

“Schumer is a man of great ambitions,” a Senate colleague tells me with obvious understatement. “I’m sure that living in the shadow of Hillary Clinton wasn’t the most pleasant position for him.”

Michael Medved recalls a dinner between the then-senators where he observed the interaction between Schumer and Clinton. “I will tell you what was evident was a lot of eye rolling,” he said, on both of their parts.

With Moynihan’s retirement, Schumer was to become the state’s senior senator. That title—which means something, at least, within the clubby otherworldliness of the U.S. Senate—would be severely undercut if his junior colleague were Hillary Clinton. She would outshine him and outdo him. She was a celebrity, after all, who wouldn’t need Schumer’s help to shine—and wouldn’t need him to be her lodestar in the U.S. Senate. She would steal New York newspaper headlines without even trying. She’d only have to show up. Schumer at best would be her understudy. Chuck Schumer, man of destiny, didn’t care for that one bit. And like many other Democrats, he wondered if the country really owed her a Senate seat from a state she never lived in simply because her husband couldn’t keep his pants on in the Oval Office.