Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine (35 page)

Foreign spies weren’t the only ones who knew about the couple’s phone sex. Monica’s friends heard plenty of juicy details directly from Monica. “Let me ask you this,” she once said to a friend. “If a man calls a woman for phone sex, don’t they usually ask what the woman’s wearing?” Referring to Clinton, she replied, “Well, he would say what he was wearing.”

As Monica told it, the president of the United States would describe his clothing, over the telephone, while pleasuring himself. That uniform would usually consist of a gray University of Arkansas sweatshirt and what he called his “blue tighties.”

He made similar calls like this to women while on presidential trips, such as one visit to the Seychelles. This was yet another of Clinton’s reckless moves when it came to womanizing, since the British government ran eavesdropping operations on the island and Clinton’s indiscretions might easily have been overheard.

In October 1998, Clinton met with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in a high-profile effort to move the Middle East peace process forward. The series of meetings, held at the Wye Plantation near Wye River, Maryland, also led to another negotiation, sources say. A negotiation kept well away from the headlines.

At one point, Netanyahu reportedly pulled Clinton aside to press for a pet cause for the Israelis—the release of Jonathan Pollard, an American spy for Israel who was sitting in prison. Netanyahu pressed Clinton to release Pollard, which in itself was not an unusual request. But the Israelis present at Wye River had a new tactic for their negotiations—they’d overheard Clinton and Monica and had it on tape. Not wanting to directly threaten the powerful American president, a crucial Israeli ally, Clinton was told that the Israeli government had thrown the tapes away. But the very mention of them was enough to constitute a form of blackmail. And, according to information provided by a CIA source, a stricken Clinton appeared to buckle.

Intelligence officials in the United States or Israel will of course not confirm on the record the extent or substance of Israeli eavesdropping. Such a matter is of the highest sensitivity, since Israel is a close ally of America’s and heavily reliant on American aid. In 2000 the conservative magazine
Insight
, after a one-year investigation by a team of reporters, claimed that the Israeli government had “penetrated four White House telephone lines and was able to relay real-time conversations on those lines from a remote site outside the White House directly to Israel for listening and recording.”
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At the time, an Israeli spokesman responded to the Associated Press, which confirmed that an FBI investigation was under way, that the claim was “outrageous.” “Israel does not spy on the United States.”
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Of course one need only consider the long history of allies spying on one another—including the Americans on the Germans and Brazilians in 2013—to find such allegations plausible.

In any event there is ample evidence to support the Lewinsky story about an Israeli-U.S. confrontation. On November 11, 1998, for example, the
New York Times
reported that Netanyahu and Clinton had indeed discussed Pollard’s release at Wye. And that the Israelis had told the president something that opened up the possibility of Pollard’s release, something Clinton had explicitly ruled out during the first six years of his presidency. A White House spokesman told a reporter for the
Times
simply that Clinton was newly “impressed by the force of Mr. Netanyahu’s arguments.”
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So impressed was Clinton that he brought the notion to the attention of CIA director George Tenet. Tenet, according to a number of news reports, vowed to resign on the spot if the administration acceded to the request.
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Faced with widespread outrage from his national security team, Clinton dropped the idea. He did, however, reconsider it one more time before leaving office.

That’s not all the Monica files include. In postpresidential life, aides and White House servants to the Clintons talk about the former president’s use of the White House theater, only steps away from the first lady’s traditional offices in the East Wing, and which was said to double as a forum for presidential dalliances with various women. As long as their identities could be concealed, these aides were willing to be open about what transpired and how they were open secrets in the boys’ club that was the Clinton West Wing. There were any number of young staffers who caught the president’s eye, or hand, or “inadvertent” touch. An advisor to Monica Lewinsky was told a secondhand story, which he related to me, of a young woman along the campaign trail whom Clinton invited to “work out” with him at the Little Rock YMCA, and another to whom he slipped a private White House phone number. At Richard Nixon’s funeral, Clinton was said to have made a pass at the wife of one of the former president’s pallbearers.

A number of sources mentioned to me the former flight attendant whom, in true Kennedy style, Clinton had brought onto the White House staff, where she worked alongside another of his purported mistresses, this one a woman named Marsha. “She’s a great character,” one of her friends tells me at a lunch where she insists on anonymity.

During his first term in office, around 1994, Clinton is said to have called up his close confidant David Pryor of Arkansas to brag. They had known each other well since Clinton’s days in Arkansas, and Pryor, who was then a U.S. senator representing Arkansas, had helped Clinton with his political rise in more ways than one.

The story goes that Clinton looked up to the politician and called to tell Pryor about a major accomplishment. He had been with a pop icon. Pryor, a reserved and conservative gentleman, was shocked. It was not just that Clinton would do something like that while president of the United States; it was that Clinton would go around and brag about it.

Pryor figured he couldn’t really tell Clinton off. But he could try to put an end to the high-profile fling that endangered the president. Pryor called the singer’s agent to pass along the message that she had better knock off the dangerous affair. The agent replied, “I don’t tell [her] what to do.”

Even back at Yale Law School, where he met Hillary, Clinton was known to have control issues. But in those days, his addiction was to food. “Ever hear of the phrase ‘gone in sixty seconds’? That was Bill Clinton with a large pepperoni pizza,” a fellow student at Yale Law School recalls.

Friends point to his election as Arkansas attorney general at the age of thirty-one as being the time when, as one puts it, “the Lothario business kicked in.” Suddenly the budding, young, attractive politico was finding women throwing themselves at him. “When I was in high school, I was a fat kid in overalls,” Clinton remarked to his childhood friend Mack McLarty. “And now all the women want to fuck me!” For a man whose appetites had been indulged his whole life, the women were irresistible. “It was like putting ten pizzas in front of him,” says the fellow Yalie.

Hillary, then, was herself a little different. She was, perhaps, a bit more relaxed. “I think she’s acknowledged it, and if she hasn’t acknowledged it everybody else will tell you: She was an enthusiastic pot user,” says one of her friends from law school. “Oh, really,” I say, surprised at the revelation. “How often, would you say?”

“I don’t know, I’m not in the position to say that,” says the friend, who wasn’t a big pot smoker. “But it was just, she was known to be one of the people. And please don’t cite me on this by name . . . if you talk to other people who knew her reasonably well in law school they will tell you that most people at that time, an undergraduate or in law school, would have been pot users, ranging from the casual and social to the enthusiastic. I think she would have been more enthusiastic, certainly more than Bill.” As for Hillary’s use of other drugs while at Yale, the friend is less forthcoming. “I don’t know, I have heard second- and third-hand but I don’t want to comment.”

Bill had famously admitted to saying he had smoked pot but didn’t inhale, a line that was roundly mocked for years. Indeed, even in 2013, Bill Clinton was still trying to walk back that line. “Well, that—like many things in the press, that whole thing has been totally twisted to try to make something untrue. I was sort of joking about something had to be true. A very distinguished English journalist named Martin Walker said—and then all the other press covered it up, because it messed with the story. He said, “‘You know, Bill Clinton told the truth. He literally didn’t have the ability to do that.’ I didn’t say I was holding it in now. I said, ‘I tried.’ I didn’t deny that I did anything,” Clinton told Hispanic TV host Jorge Ramos. “I never denied that I used marijuana. I told the truth. I thought it was funny. And the only journalist who was there said I told the truth.”
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As for Hillary, her relationship with former aide and law partner Vince Foster is again being reexamined by political opponents. These days, if he’s remembered at all, former White House deputy legal counsel Vincent Foster conjures up notions of a right-wing obsession with the Clintons. Perhaps most famous was the effort by Republican congressional chairman Dan Burton, an Indiana congressman, to prove that the White House aide, who committed suicide in 1993, was actually the victim of a murder. To prove his conspiracy theory, Burton took the same type of gun that had killed Foster and shot bullets into a pumpkin. Much was made of the effort by Clinton aides to clean out Foster’s office and remove files. An alleged suicide note, which had been torn up into pieces, was found at the bottom of his briefcase. It read, in part, “I was not meant for the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport.”
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There was something about the Clintons that made Republicans look wild-eyed and deranged. The Foster death became a metaphor for the Clintons’ alleged history of dirty deeds. Many sought out the most notorious motives—that Foster knew about other Clinton murders, or that he was covering up some great crime.

To former Clintonites, the explanation for the man’s death was far simpler. He was a sad and troubled human being whose inner motivations and thoughts would always be a mystery. Simple too was the explanation for why White House aides were scurrying through his files—to see if he’d left behind any evidence about his affair with Hillary Clinton.

The relationship between Vince Foster and Hillary Clinton has long been an open secret among mainstream Washington reporters, but somehow hardly ever found its way into their reporting. It is beyond dispute that the married Foster and the married Clinton were extremely close (outside of her family members, no person is mentioned more often in Hillary’s memoirs than Foster). As law partners in Arkansas in the 1970s and 1980s, the duo frequently lunched together, along with another lawyer, Webster Hubbell, at an Italian restaurant called the Villa. Her closeness with Foster “raised some eyebrows,” Hillary once acknowledged. “In Little Rock at that time, women did not usually have meals with men who were not their husbands.”
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That the married Foster and the married Clinton were involved romantically was an open secret in Little Rock, according to journalists who were there at the time. It was well known that they were “boyfriend-girlfriend,” a former Clinton official says. “He really was infatuated with her.”

A former reporter from the
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
says that nearly everyone in the newsroom was aware of the relationship. One editor even claimed to have seen the two kissing. “A lot of people there knew [Foster] well, of course,” he says, “and to a person they said he was having an affair with Hillary Clinton.”

In the 1970s, when Mrs. Clinton was appointed to the Legal Services Board by President Carter and had to travel frequently to Washington, she is said to have shared a suite with Vincent Foster at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington that was paid for by the National Steel and Shipbuilding Corporation.

According to those I spoke to, certain investigative reporters were examining the relationship in the days before his suicide.

Regardless of the validity of the allegations, the Foster affair—if rekindled—would raise more uncomfortable questions about the Clintons’ marital relationship. It’s another indicator that even if her nomination is “inevitable,” Hillary is in for a bumpy ride.

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The Road to Coronation

“[Y]ou can’t fire your daughter. I mean, this is unexplored territory here because all of a sudden, the person running the ship . . . you can’t get rid of her.”

—a longtime Clinton family associate

Chuck Schumer came to Iowa prepared to make news. That was not at all that unusual for the flamboyant senior senator from New York. The media-loving politician is known to have press releases at the ready on almost any issue discussed on that morning’s news shows, and long has been known to introduce legislation to fit any conceivable headline—waging “war” on a potentially hazardous caffeine-laced malt liquor drink, Four Loko, that suddenly became trendy; getting federal subsidies for Greek yogurt when the snack became popular; and seeking a ban on certain bath salts when they were the subject of an alleged act of cannibalism in Florida. Schumer even boasted of inventing a media-friendly family in his head—the Baileys—who advise him on the day-to-day struggles of the working class. “Though they are imaginary, I frequently talk to them,” he once said. The aggressive senator is the perennial punch line for that favorite D.C. joke: What’s the most dangerous place in Washington? Between Chuck Schumer and a TV camera.

Schumer’s Iowa appearance, on November 2, 2013, was timed almost three years to the date before the 2016 presidential election. He was speaking before the ever-important Democrats in the state who will trudge through snow and ice to vote in the nation’s first presidential caucuses, which will help set the course of the next election, and which mortally wounded Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign when she lost Iowa to a hardly known man who’d been in the U.S. Senate for what seemed about fifteen minutes. The victory didn’t seal Obama’s bid for the Democratic nomination, but it sure made his candidacy, and the threat he posed to the front-running and so-called inevitable Clinton, suddenly seem more plausible.

Schumer, whose hair recedes to almost the middle of his head, took the stage wearing a dark suit and a light blue tie. His thick-rimmed glasses rested securely at the end of his nose. His left hand rested on his prepared remarks to help him keep his place as his eyes darted toward the 750-person crowd—and the cameras.

“I am urging Hillary Clinton to run for president,” Schumer said in his nasal New York accent, as he pumped his right hand into the chilled air. TV cameras swept the applauding crowd, who by and large remained seated. “2016 is Hillary’s time!” he announced.

He shuffled his upper body back and forth to try to get momentum or perhaps to feign excitement. “Run, Hillary!” Schumer punched the air again with his right hand. “Run! If you run, you’ll win! And we’ll all win!”

The unexpected announcement, odd for a number of reasons but perhaps mostly because it came so many years before the actual race, received the hoped-for response. “Schumer Endorses Clinton for President in Iowa Speech,” read a headline in the
New York Times
.
Politico
, the influential Virginia-based trade publication, highlighted the New York senator’s remarks with the following headline: “Chuck Schumer in Iowa: ‘Run, Hillary, Run.’ ”

In addition to satisfying his attention fix for the day, Schumer made the announcement for larger strategic reasons. To show the Clinton team that he was their guy. A man who could make things happen for them. A man whom future president Hillary Clinton ought to support for the Senate majority leader’s post, which just might be opening up, conveniently enough, in 2016, when Harry Reid is expected to retire.

The announcement also came with a complex backdrop, since the Clintons knew what tabloids such as the
New York Post
had speculated for years: Chuck Schumer hated Hilary Clinton and had worked against her from the outset of her time in elected office. So did most of the Democrats who worked with her in the Senate and went out of their way to humiliate her by endorsing Barack Obama in 2008. But that, as they say, was then.

The emerging story of the 2016 campaign is the careful, quiet, behind-the-scenes coronation that the Clintons are arranging for themselves. It’s a feat reminiscent of what advisors did for Texas governor George W. Bush in the years preceding the 2000 election, when scores of Republican big thinkers and politicians began coalescing around a seemingly reluctant, torn candidate who hadn’t even declared for the White House. As with Bush, the approach is working. Careful efforts are made to avoid the mistakes of 2008, when Hillary put herself forward too soon, failed to raise enough money, and underestimated her potential rivals.

“Hillary Clinton met with a handful of aides for a detailed presentation on preparing for a 2016 presidential campaign.” That was in the summer of 2013, a good year before any campaign would really begin, and nearly three and a half years before Election Day 2016. “Three officials from the Democratic consulting firm Dewey Square Group—veteran field organizer Michael Whouley, firm founder Charlie Baker and strategist Jill Alper, whose expertise includes voter attitudes toward women candidates—delivered a dispassionate, numbers-driven assessment. They broke down filing deadlines in certain states, projected how much money Clinton would need to raise and described how field operations have become more sophisticated in the era of Barack Obama,” reported Maggie Haberman of
Politico
.
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Key to their restoration are the pledges of fealty from people like Chuck Schumer, among the many prominent Democrats working to absolve themselves of their Great Sin—supporting, directly or otherwise, the man who stole Hillary’s presidency away from her. Any number of those who cast their lot with Obama gambled that the 2008 defeat would rid them of the Clintons forever as a national political force—a wager they obviously lost.

“I endorsed Obama for two reasons,” says one nationally known Democrat in an interview with me, echoing many others. “I thought he was something special and then the second reason was I was concerned that if Hillary was elected all the old Clinton people would come back. And to make a long story short, Obama brought all the old Clinton people back anyway.”

The Democrats overestimated Obama, and they underestimated his most famous “frenemies,” the Clintons. So now it is time for errant Washington, D.C., Democrats to make their amends. In addition to the shameless, and seemingly pointless, Schumer shout-out, all sixteen of his female Democratic colleagues in the Senate have circulated a letter endorsing Hillary for president.
2
The list includes a woman often mentioned as posing a possible primary challenge from the left—newly elected Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren. The early and enthusiastic embrace contrasts notably with 2008, when Hillary’s Senate Sisters were largely silent or quietly rooting for Obama. The most notorious rebuff came from Missouri’s Claire McCaskill, whom Hillary had lobbied furiously. Endorsing Obama, McCaskill poured salt into the wound by saying she had chosen Obama because he, not Hillary, had inspired her daughter. (Her daughter, McCaskill famously said, would not be allowed to go near Bill Clinton.)

To further demonstrate their fealty, many former foes like McCaskill have glommed on to any vehicle available. For the moment, that vehicle is a once-obscure super PAC called “Ready for Hillary,” founded by a professor whose acquaintance with Hillary appears rather tenuous.

“Although I just met Hillary—we can’t remember if it was ’90 or ’91, but it was before the campaign—I have known about her since ’76 and ’77,” founder Allida Black says. “Do I trust her the same way I trust a close friend? Yes. Can I laugh with her? Yes. Do I want to bother her, the way I bother a close friend?” She laughs. “No.”

Black is not anyone’s idea of the polished political operative. She explains her tardiness for an interview by stating that her dog had thrown up that morning. Her voice is a bit gruff, her hair short and a little uneven, and she’s dressed like a liberal academic, in a Native-American- style, zigzagged, loose-fitting shirt. A scholar of Eleanor Roosevelt and editor of books such as
Modern American Queer History
, she’s quick to point out that she’s “not some gazillion-dollar donor.”

“I mean, look at me,” she says, proudly holding out each of her fingers. “I don’t have an eighteen-thousand-dollar ring.”

The group’s mission has been endorsed by such notables as Donna Brazile, Al Gore’s former campaign manager; perennial Clinton cheerleader and TV pundit Paul Begala; California lieutenant governor Gavin Newsom; and Minnesota governor Mark Dayton. Even billionaire George Soros, a major funder of liberal causes (and a ringleader of the donor class), has pledged $25,000 to the group—the maximum the group is accepting right now. “It’s just beyond our wildest expectations,” Black says. “The enthusiasm, the response we’ve gotten, our Facebook and Twitter accounts, and Instagrams, have just exploded.”

Others have gotten into the act to a notable, if not embarrassing, degree. ABC News labeled 2013 “The Year Everyone Gave Hillary Clinton an Award”—from the Pentagon to the Elton John Foundation’s Founder’s Award to something called the Michael Kors Award for Outstanding Community Service. The city of Little Rock opened up the Hillary Rodham Clinton Children’s Library and Learning Center. In 2012, the Little Rock airport’s name was changed to Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport.

Yet all of this activity pales against the actual Hillary Clinton presidential campaign—behind the scenes, mostly below the radar, and now decades old.

“They’ve kept their network very much alive that they cultivated when he was running for president the first time, even before he was running for president,” says one of Clinton’s former press secretaries. “Look at some of the fund-raising he’s done for state and local candidates and even getting involved in races from time to time, that you wouldn’t necessarily think he’d get involved in. It’s pretty extraordinary.”

Their permanent campaign “has been never ending, never stopping, always on the ballot, always pushing, always driving forward,” says another former Clinton aide. “Which is pretty insane.” It’s a candid reflection that they’ve been going in national politics for the last thirty years, an unheard-of commitment at such a frenetic pace.

Yet another offers his former employers praise that in retrospect sounds rather sad. “Look at the fucking hits that they’ve taken. Anybody else would’ve just fractured and gone away. Right? But they don’t,” he says. “Working and campaigning is all they know. That is their life.”

The Clintons already have blunted one of the most formidable potential challengers, New York governor Andrew Cuomo, smart and telegenic, with access to New York money. As a former Clinton cabinet secretary, his ties to both Bill and Hillary are long-standing. His office in Albany, for example, is decorated with Clinton memorabilia.
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Two decades ago, as both Bill Clinton and then-governor Mario Cuomo, Andrew’s father, considered seeking the 1992 Democratic nomination, the families famously feuded. But if any bad blood still exists, it’s not visible.

A few months after Hillary Clinton stepped down as secretary of state, a Cuomo administration insider, described as having “direct knowledge of the situation,” informed the
New York Post
that the governor “has quietly told associates that he is resigned to the fact that he can’t run for president in 2016 if Hillary Rodham Clinton enters the race, as is widely expected.”
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Generally speaking, potential presidential candidates do not like to offer such unequivocal statements, especially three years before the next presidential election. Why Andrew Cuomo would go out of his way to make such a statement—and so early—says more about the fears he has about the Clintons than any they have about him.

A Clinton advisor offers one benign explanation. “Andrew won’t run because he already ran against [African American Carl] McCall [for governor] and he pissed off the entire black community,” he says. “So he’s not gonna go piss off every woman for the rest of their lives” by challenging Hillary.

There was, however, a more urgent explanation for Cuomo’s unusual move. Since her days as New York’s junior U.S. senator, both Clintons have worked to build a financial juggernaut in the Empire State.

Cuomo went further to assure his loyalty. Not long after the
Post
article appeared, he and Hillary marched together in a Memorial Day parade in Westchester County, where the governor took every opportunity to kiss her ring. “It was a pleasure to be with Hillary Clinton today,” he said. “I served eight years in the Clinton administration, so it was a pleasure to be with her and reminisce.” Onlookers viewed the scene as confirmation of the
New York Post
story: He was going to stand down in 2016 to Hillary—in return, he received their warm embrace for governor.

If they weren’t both running from the same state, they almost looked like ideal running mates. But Mark Warner might have something to say about that. The fifty-nine-year-old Virginia senator’s vice presidential aspirations are an open secret in Washington. The action-oriented Warner, a former governor and business executive up for reelection in 2014, had actually considered retiring from the gridlock-laden Senate but changed his mind in part to remain a plausible Clinton running mate. On paper he is ideal—youngish, attractive, and ambitious with business savvy. And hailing from Virginia, he may help hold a swing state that would be crucial to the Clintons’ electoral math.

Bill Clinton already has given considerable thought to the vice presidential selection, which is crucial considering Hillary’s age. (She would be sixty-nine years old on Inauguration Day in 2017, the second-oldest president in history—just a little younger than Ronald Reagan was when he became president in 1981.) He is known to favor the unorthodox approach. For his own running mate, he shied away from traditional consideration of age, experience, and regional balance in favor of someone who looked—on paper at least—just like him. Al Gore was another young, good-looking southerner who fancied himself as a moderate. Campaigning together with their wives and children, the duo conveyed a perfect image—of young, dynamic, reform-minded leaders. Similarly, in 2000, Clinton urged Gore to make an equally unorthodox choice—Maryland senator Barbara Mikulski, a four-foot-eleven-inch, unmarried liberal dynamo. It was a choice so seemingly unpolitical that it might have made the plodding, overly cautious Gore look something close to bold. Clinton’s influence might have persuaded Gore to make his ultimate decision, which was another “outside the box” choice—Senator Joseph Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew and critic of Clintonian ethics. At the time Clinton called the Lieberman selection “brilliant.”