Unlikeable: The Problem With Hillary (2 page)

PROLOGUE
PROLOGUE

“CALL OFF YOUR DOGS”
“CALL OFF YOUR DOGS”

I've worked for four presidents and watched two others up close, and I know that there's no such thing as a routine day in the Oval Office.

—Former vice president Dick Cheney

H
illary sent word to the White House that she wanted to speak with Barack Obama.

Alone.

Just the two of them in the Oval Office. Without the intrusion of Valerie Jarrett, the president's consigliere and chief political strategist, or Michelle Obama, who frequently meddled in such Oval Office meetings.

Hillary didn't like or trust Jarrett and Michelle, and she knew that the feeling was mutual.

And so Hillary stipulated that she be allowed to see the president
privately
.

According to people who spoke directly with Hillary about the proposed meeting, she believed that Jarrett was behind the recent spate of damaging press leaks about foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation, Hillary's use of a private e-mail account, and her back-channel e-mail exchanges with Sidney Blumenthal.

When she discussed the matter with Bill Clinton, he opposed the meeting with Obama. He told her that it would accomplish nothing, and that Obama couldn't intervene to help her even if he wanted to, and he clearly didn't want to.

“He has a visceral dislike of me, and only a slightly less dislike of you,” Bill said, according to sources close to Hillary who were interviewed for this book.

The Clintons then had one of their usual knock-down, drag-out shouting matches, and, as so often had happened in the past, when it was over Hillary chose to ignore Bill's advice.

She waited anxiously for word about the meeting from the White House.

According to an entirely different set of sources—in this case, people who spoke directly to Valerie Jarrett—
Obama dreaded the prospect of being alone with Hillary.

Obama had had it with Hillary, these sources said. As far as he was concerned, Hillary had ignored his explicit warnings about her use of a private e-mail account, had breached a written
agreement regarding foreign donations to the foundation, and had allowed the detested Blumenthal to poke his nose into State Department business.

Insulted and outraged, Obama had given Jarrett the green light to leak stories to the press about Hillary's crimes and misdemeanors. And Jarrett had gladly embraced her role as leaker in chief. Her explicit intention was to sabotage Hillary's chances of winning the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.

Obama had no doubt that Hillary wanted to confront him about these matters. He told Jarrett and Michelle that he was tired of listening to Hillary vent. The White House had allowed that to happen far too many times over the past several months. He didn't want to put himself through that ordeal again.

His answer to Hillary's request was a flat
No
.

There would be no meeting.

Eventually, however, Jarrett persuaded Obama to grant Hillary an audience.

“One way or another, you can't dodge her and you can't stall,” she told him, according to the sources. “And there's nothing she can say that will change anything.”

And so, bitterly and reluctantly, Obama agreed to meet with Hillary.

But only on one condition.

He wanted Jarrett with him in the Oval Office as a buffer when Hillary arrived.

Unlike most people who were about to meet with the president of the United States, Hillary wasn't the least bit intimidated by the aura of the man or his office. She had lived in the White House for eight years, had been in the Oval Office hundreds of times, was married to a president, and knew that he put his pants on one leg at a time just like every other man.

Jarrett, on the other hand, was used to people who acted obsequiously when they arrived to meet with the president, and she found Hillary's attitude to be imperious and condescending. In a bit of gamesmanship, she purposely kept Hillary waiting for more than a half hour.

“At first, Hillary pretended not to care that she was kept waiting,” said a source who later spoke to Jarrett. “But when Hillary was ushered into the Oval Office, she was shocked to find Valerie standing next to the president, who was sitting behind his big oak desk.”

“What can I do for you, Hillary?” Obama said.

He did not get up to greet her.

Hillary tried a friendly approach. She asked Obama for his advice on how to handle her troubles.

She didn't think she had done anything wrong, she said.
She was being persecuted for minor, meaningless violations.

Obama acted as though he didn't know what she was talking about.

“He was almost being deliberately dense,” said a Clinton source who spoke with Hillary shortly after the meeting and was later interviewed for this book. “It really angered her.”

Everyone, including the president, knew that Hillary had a self-righteous side and a ferocious temper. She told friends that her father had been volcanic and that she, unfortunately, had inherited the trait.

Now, she lost the struggle to contain her composure.

“What I want for you to do is call off your fucking dogs, Barack!” she said, according to both Clinton and Jarrett sources, who independently confirmed the wording of Hillary's outburst.

Hillary later said that she regretted blowing up—not because she had been disrespectful to the president, but because she had revealed how much the charges against her had upset her. She let her antagonists see her vulnerability.

For a brief moment, Obama looked stunned. Then he stood up, turned his back on Hillary, and stared out the tall windows overlooking the Wilson Rose Garden.

Jarrett later said that she was afraid the president had been rendered speechless, something that rarely happened in all the years she had known him.

But before Jarrett could intercede, Obama spun around and looked directly at Hillary.

“There is nothing I can do one way or the other,” he said. “Things have been set in motion, and I can't and won't interfere.
Your problems are, frankly, of your own making. If you had been honest. . . .”

Hillary interrupted him.

“There are always haters out to get the Clintons,” she said.

Later, Hillary told friends that she should have listened to Bill and not gone to the meeting. Now, however, all she wanted to do was get out of the Oval Office as quickly as possible.

She stood up, waved good-bye, and murmured “thank you” as she walked out, leaving the door of the Oval Office open behind her.

PART I
PART I

A HELL OF A MESS
A HELL OF A MESS

Cut to now, holy wow When did everything become such a hell of a mess? Maybe now, maybe now, can somebody come and take this off my chest?

—Pink, “Are We All We Are”

CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 1

“MORE GOLDA THAN MAGGIE”
“MORE GOLDA THAN MAGGIE”

[Hillary is] about as likeable as elective surgery. Every time she speaks, an angel shoots a cherub.

—Greg Gutfeld, cohost of Fox News'
The Five

H
illary was taking lessons on how to be more likeable.

She was doing it for Bill, not for herself.

It was all his idea.

One evening while they were having drinks with friends, he turned to Hillary and said, “Let's ask Steven for help.”

Their old Hollywood buddy Steven Spielberg could supply Hillary with acting coaches to help her when she had to give a speech.

Hillary didn't think she needed help.

“I get $250,000 to give a speech,” she said, according to one of her friends, “and these Hollywood jackasses are going to tell
me
how to do it!”

But Bill insisted.

“Your policies and talking points are solid,” he told her. “You can use Charlotte [Chelsea's baby daughter] to emphasize how you're all about women and children. Now the challenge is to repackage you in 2016 as a strong but loveable older woman—more Golda than Maggie.”

Hillary didn't see the resemblance to Golda Meir or Margaret Thatcher, and she said, “I'm not going to pretend to be somebody I'm not.”

But she carried on with the likeability lessons anyway.

Partly to please Bill.

But mostly to shut him up.

She hired an assistant to run a video camera in the den of Whitehaven, her home in the fashionable Observatory Circle neighborhood of Northwest Washington, D.C. It was just the two of them, her and the camera guy, who had to sign a confidentiality agreement so he couldn't blab to the press.

Later, after the recording session was over, she watched herself on the TV set. She sat in the dark, dressed in a blue muumuu that she'd recently purchased online at
Amazon.com
, and scrutinized her facial expressions, her hand gestures, the pitch of her voice, and her use of eye contact.

She told Bill she found the process tedious.

He said, “This could mean votes. Voters make decisions, even unconsciously, on how likeable a politician looks.”

But it wasn't only the tedium that bothered her. She didn't like the results she saw from the Whitehaven video sessions.

For comparison, she screened videos that had been recorded live by her people when she was on the road and gave one of her six-figure speeches.
*
*
From the collection of videos, she selected the ones she liked and sent them off to Steven Spielberg's office, with a reminder that everyone involved in the project was sworn to secrecy.

Not that she had any reason to mistrust Steven. He'd always been more than generous to her.
Spielberg let her use his corporate apartment in the Trump Tower on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue when she ran for a Senate seat from New York in 2000. Hillary felt right at home in the lavish surroundings, and she crashed at Spielberg's pied-à-terre more than twenty times. Accustomed as she was to being treated like royalty, she asked the management of Trump Tower to give her the exclusive use of one of its elevators. The management refused. She had to share an elevator with the skyscraper's other millionaire peons.

When the Hollywood coaches sent back their critiques of Hillary's video sessions, they noted that she looked irritated and bored.

Most times, after she glanced at the printout of their notes—she called them “notes from La-La Land”—she tossed them in the wastepaper basket.

There was one thing about the process that she thought was worthwhile: working on her facial expressions.

If she got the facial expressions right, she believed the rest would fall into place. But as she pointed out to friends, she could just as easily work on her facial expressions in front of the bathroom mirror without having some Hollywood schmuck tell her what she was doing right or wrong.

“Sometimes they're helpful,” she told the friends, “but just as often they're full of shit.”

The truth was, Hillary Clinton did not take kindly to criticism. Let alone constant criticism.

It made her defensive and angry.

Which was her default expression when she spoke in public.

Which was her problem to begin with.