Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine (4 page)

As for the carpetbagger charge, Hillary was convinced she could overcome it through sheer endurance and persistence, long underappreciated qualities that are the Clintons’ hallmarks. The state was too perfect a choice for Hillary to do otherwise.

In an expansive interview for this book, Mrs. Clinton’s eventual opponent, Republican congressman Rick Lazio, summed up the advantages the state offered her: “A solidly Democratic state, big union organizations, big cities with machine politics where you could turn out the vote, and the biggest media stage maybe in the world.

“It was a pretty compelling case that they come to New York,” Lazio recalls, “although she had absolutely no attachment to New York before that. She had never lived there, she had never worked there, she never paid taxes there. But New York is a very forgiving place. I think Hillary and their team knew that they would be able to get over on that hurdle, although there might be some resistance to that.”

There was also a greater attraction for the overly ambitious Hillary: Assuming she became a senator from New York she’d be connected to arguably the richest and most powerful Democratic base in the country (with the possible exception of California). Which is to say, in order to win, she’d have to raise money, which she would do from New Yorkers. These rich and powerful New Yorkers would form an ideal financial base for a presidential run.

The final rationale for her campaign—and its secret driving force—was largely mystical. Harold Ickes was a junior. His father, Harold Ickes Sr., was a cabinet officer for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and, far more important, an advisor to Hillary’s idol, Eleanor. It was the senior Ickes who’d urged Mrs. Roosevelt to seek a Senate seat in New York, an idea she’d considered and then dismissed. As other biographers have noted, Hillary could not resist the parallel, except in this story she’d fulfill the mission meant for Eleanor. The Hillary-Eleanor comparison was so strong in the First Lady’s mind that some Clinton aides told me they referenced Eleanor’s example to get Hillary to do what they wanted. Clinton, for example, once decided to write a column, titled “Talking It Over,” thereby, as she put it, “following once again the footsteps of Eleanor Roosevelt.”
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Because of the Eleanor connection, the Senate run appeared to be destined. But not to every keeper of the Roosevelt flame. After Hillary visited Eleanor’s childhood home, Val-Kill, in Hyde Park, New York, and another round of Hillary-Eleanor stories appeared in the press, one veteran Democrat had had enough. “Her trying to coyly cuddle up to Eleanor Roosevelt is obscene,” said Richard Wade, who ran Robert F. Kennedy’s 1964 Senate race. “It’s like comparing a thoroughbred race horse and an ordinary jackass.”
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It was perhaps a cruel irony that Monica Lewinsky was one of the best things that ever happened to Hillary Clinton. Until the revelation that her husband had been carousing with a twenty-two-year-old woman, just a few yards from their bedroom in the White House, the growing caricature of the First Lady was that of a congenital liar.

It didn’t help that, in the words of the well-respected independent counsel Robert W. Ray, Hillary made “factually inaccurate” statements to the investigators about her involvement in the controversial Arkansas land deal known as Whitewater. The
New York Times
columnist William Safire, in a January 1996 op-ed titled “Blizzard of Lies,” cited a series of instances of dishonesty and alleged obstruction of justice on the part of the First Lady. “Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady—a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation—is a congenital liar,” he wrote.
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The writer Christopher Hitchens, no right-wing partisan, would title a book on the Clintons
No One Left to Lie To
.

That image was fading now—at least a bit—after Monica. The First Lady was receiving sympathetic looks from reporters who’d come to challenge her every assertion, and friendly receptions from people who used to hate her. Everything she said had a renewed power just because she was saying it. Just because she was still standing. She took a joy in it. Her close friend Diane Blair, who died in 2000, revealed in a collection of papers that the First Lady was almost taking joy in the predicament. “[Hillary] sounded very up, almost jolly,” wrote Blair. “Told me how she and Bill and Chelsea had been to church, to a Chinese restaurant, to a Shakespeare play, greeted everywhere with wild applause and cheers—this, she said is what drives their adversaries totally nuts, that they don’t bend, do not appear to be suffering.”
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At the same time, she milked the victim role. At an appearance before six hundred New Yorkers at Buffalo State College, when she was still an unannounced Senate candidate, she took questions for an hour from her largely female fan base. She couldn’t resist engaging in quintessential Clinton pandering, at one point mentioning, “You know, ever since I first came to Buffalo when I was a young girl . . .”
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Clutching a microphone, she delved into a wide range of policy issues. At one point, she touched awkwardly on the subject of divorce. “I know that there are problems,” she said. “I mean, marriage is hard. It is hard work, and I’d be the first to tell ya.” She smiled and the audience rewarded her with sympathetic cheers. When they were again silent, she added one more killer line. “When you have a child,” she said, “you have a special obligation.” The crowd responded with tears and more applause for the woman wronged. The wounded mother who persevered and held her family together. But despite the many carefully dropped hints, public and private, that she might be contemplating divorce, that was never really on the table. All throughout the Lewinsky ordeal, Hillary was far more concerned about her own career than her marriage.

In the late summer of 1998, as he prepared to confess his affair with Monica Lewinsky in a live address to the nation, Bill Clinton was out of his element. Strikingly so. As eyewitnesses recalled the scene for me, the president’s complexion was gray, his speech unusually slow, his demeanor almost disoriented. He was “practically carried into the room” by longtime Arkansas friends and Hollywood producers Harry and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, one observer recalls. Absent from Bill Clinton’s moment of ultimate humiliation was his wife, his daughter, and even his press secretary, Mike McCurry, who, according to a reporter he spoke to, was so disgusted with his boss’s behavior that he could barely look at him. In an email, McCurry claimed to me that he was present, but admits to having been “frustrated” with the president. “I was not central to deciding what he should say because that was not my role,” McCurry disclosed, a somewhat bizarre statement for a president’s communication director. “But some part of me said, ‘You got to handle this on your own, big guy, because it is about you and not about the White House, the presidency, or our country.’ ”

Propping up the president by holding his arms, the Thomasons bucked up their fellow Arkansan much as a manager would a wounded prize fighter. “You can do this,” they reassured the gray and sedate president. “You can do it.”

And so Bill Clinton finally did what he almost never had to do in his life: admit he had lied repeatedly and been caught red-handed. For months the president had blamed everyone and everything for the Lewinsky affair. The Republicans had been mean to him. His mother died. Vince Foster died. Yitzhak Rabin had been assassinated. Newt Gingrich and the GOP’s “Contract with America” had defamed him. The “mean-spirited” investigations of his own conduct and of Hillary’s. And, as his staff did, he tried to frame Lewinsky as the problem—the unstoppable predator who pulled a reluctant president into a tawdry affair. He felt sorry for himself, and as such could sometimes be a pathetic sight. “I just cracked,” he told friends. “I just cracked.”

After the speech, the first family headed to Martha’s Vineyard for a family vacation and what appeared to be a very public flogging of the president by a furious wife and daughter. News cameras showed the president walking with only his dog, Buddy, at his side, while Hillary and Chelsea visibly shunned him. Aides let it be known that Mrs. Clinton and her family were doing their best to start “healing” over the revelations—with the not-so-subtle implication that if they could deal with this, then so could the country.
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Among the leaders of the “let’s move on” caucus were feminists, who all but ignored the president’s workplace seduction of a woman barely out of her teens. They applauded their icon Hillary Clinton for standing by her man.
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At the time, there were endless stories about the fate of the Clintons’ marriage, many seeming to originate from sources close to the First Couple. Bill was left to sleep on the couch. His family wouldn’t talk to him. Bill spent hours talking to his dog as if he were a real person. At his 1999 State of the Union address, the president offered a long tribute to his wife and her good works. As he looked up at her in the visitors’ balcony of the House chamber, and on camera, he mouthed the words “I love you” to Hillary. She sat impassive.

This of course was the official story—shame, then forgiveness, then eventual redemption. It’s what the country was meant to see. But others in the Clinton orbit tend toward the cynical. Most of the drama between the two was for public consumption. It wasn’t really what was going on behind closed doors.

“They understand that politics is all about narrative,” a senior Clinton aide tells me. It was Bill Clinton who orchestrated his own public whipping, “the chief scriptwriter,” as the aide describes him. Recalling the scene with Clinton alone with Buddy, an aide laughs. “He had to go to the doghouse—literally,” he says, smiling at the mastery. “That wasn’t spontaneous!” To one friend of Hillary’s, the only believable aspect of the Bill Clinton pity party involved his dog. “The most emotional relationship in Bill’s life was Buddy the dog,” he says without a hint of a grin.

Though it was to her advantage to stick with Bill, Hillary would’ve done it in any case and for a larger rationale. It was the same reason that led her to give up a high-powered law career in New York or Chicago more than two and a half decades earlier to toil in remote Little Rock and gamely fake a southern accent in the backward towns of the Ozarks to appeal to the Bubba vote. She was still, even then, deeply in love with her husband. Hillary felt the same thrill as when she first came across him as a student at Yale Law School, where she overheard a bearded, unkempt young man bragging about the watermelons in Arkansas as “the biggest . . . in the world.”

“Who is that?” she asked a friend.

“That’s Bill Clinton. He’s from Arkansas and that’s all he ever talks about.”
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“He’s really a difficult person, you know, and certainly difficult when you’re going to be a woman who is totally focused on him,” says Michael Medved, the conservative radio show host, who back then was an unapologetic liberal and a friend of Hillary’s in law school. He was among a number who begged Hillary not to date the guy, whom they saw as a brilliant but self-important ass. “She had the world’s most enormous crush on him,” Medved says. “You couldn’t say anything against him. Bill is without any question the love of her life. Attraction is mysterious.”

Years of his adultery did tend to make Mrs. Clinton a little less goo-goo eyed about her husband, however, and she was anything but a wild-eyed romantic. Diane Blair was Hillary Clinton’s best friend, going back to the 1970s. (Blair died in 2000 of lung cancer at the age of sixty-one.) A friend of Blair’s recalled for me a story in the 1990s in which Mrs. Clinton became almost obsessed with the book
The Bridges of Madison County.
The book, by Robert James Waller, was a nationwide bestseller and would later become a film starring Meryl Streep. The First Lady’s interest in the book seemed unusual, but she kept prodding Blair to read it. Finally, Blair agreed while staying overnight at the White House. At two or three in the morning, according to this friend’s account, the First Lady burst into Blair’s bedroom.

“Did you finish it yet?” she asked.

“Yes,” Blair replied.

“Well, what did you think?”

Blair didn’t want to disappoint the First Lady, but responded truthfully that she didn’t really think the book was that well written.

Hearing the news, Hillary grinned, satisfied. “I
knew
it was a piece of shit,” she said.

Though long aware of Bill’s limitations in the husband department, the First Lady seemed to have made a sort of peace with them, through willful ignorance. “[T]he Clintons must carry many scars between them, but we found the marriage anything but loveless,” recalls Clinton biographer Taylor Branch, who recounted a conversation with longtime Clinton associate Strobe Talbott. “Their private partnership still seemed warm and eager, never cold, with a spark from somewhere if not libido. This struck Strobe and me as an abiding mystery.”
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In what should have, but didn’t, shock her feminist supporters, Hillary shared her husband’s tendency toward blame shifting and justification for his sexual misconduct. After the Lewinsky disclosures, Hillary’s close friend Blair recorded the First Lady as saying, “Ever since he took office they’ve been going through personal tragedy ([the death of] Vince [Foster], her dad, his mom) and immediately all the ugly forces started making up hateful things about them, pounding on them.”
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The First Lady also indicated to Blair that her husband’s unhappy, fatherless childhood played a role. She insisted on the creation of an “enemies list” of all those out to get her husband.

Hillary in short was still trying to protect him, and take control of his life, whether he liked it or not. A senior aide offers perhaps a fitting metaphor for the relationship. During the White House years, at a public event, Hillary would often depart ahead of her husband, waiting for him in their motorcade. After several minutes passed, the First Lady would send someone back into the event to urge her husband to get moving. The president, in response, would stay an extra fifteen minutes longer. The aide’s point: She was seeking to control him and he wouldn’t let her, which would make her want him even more. “That’s really the crux of the relationship,” the aide tells me. “She was basically the one always in the car trying to get him to come to her. He won’t until he decides it’s time.” How Bill handles Hillary, as the aide described it, is “sick but brilliant.”