American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power (12 page)

In an attempt to appear more centrist, Hillary would later downplay her involvement at the New World Foundation. But back in 1988, she boasted in the group’s 1988 report that New World had “turned increasingly to the support and development of progressive activist organizations.” Moreover, she described her strategy of making “mostly general support grants, rather than project grants, so as to provide core support for organizers and advocates.” In other words, more freedom for the El Salvador guerrillas
and PLO affiliates to spend the money however they saw fit.

Notwithstanding her involvement in a wide range of organizations across the country, her work at Rose Law, and her responsibilities as Arkansas’s First Lady, Hillary’s main focus was still on Part One of The Plan. Opportunity knocked in May of 1987, when Democratic front-runner Gary Hart withdrew from the presidential race after the
Miami Herald
ran photographs of the married senator with Donna Rice in his lap aboard the prophetically christened yacht
Monkey Business.
Ironically, with Hart no longer in the race, many eyes in the Democratic Party turned toward Bill.

Clinton’s first visit to New Hampshire as a potential candidate was a huge success, and reports from other primary states were equally encouraging. Hillary would later claim that she had opposed Bill’s entry into the 1988 race on several grounds: Republican vice president George H. W. Bush, heir to the Reagan legacy, would be virtually impossible to beat; Hillary’s father had suffered a stroke, and he and Dorothy Rodham had moved to a condo in Little Rock so the Clintons could help take care of them; Bill was too young, untested.

In her memoirs, Hillary went so far as to say that Bill was on the fence until Chelsea asked him about their upcoming vacation plans. When her father said he might be too busy running for President to take a vacation, Chelsea replied, “Then Mom and I will go without you.” That, Hillary would declare in her revisionist autobiography, “sealed the decision for Bill.”

In truth, Hillary pressured her husband to run for President in 1988, and was frustrated over his reluctance to throw his hat in the ring. She had purchased the condo for her parents so that Chelsea’s grandparents could care for her while Mom and Dad were on the road.

According to Dick Morris and others, the events that literally overnight brought an end to Gary Hart’s career filled Bill with
dread. Without letting on to Hillary, he began to quiz friends, advisers, even lovers on the subject of extramarital sex and the impact it might have on a candidate.

Nearly everyone Bill talked to was aware that he had cheated on Hillary—he went so far as to admit it to several of them. But only a handful knew the magnitude of Bill’s faithlessness. One who had an inkling was the governor’s chief of staff, Betsey Wright.

Like Hillary, Wright had a reputation for being abrasive; she routinely yelled at and swore at underlings because “sometimes it’s the only way to get people’s attention.” Most important, she was someone Bill could count on to give him her unvarnished opinion. A few days before the July 14 deadline he had set for himself to make an announcement, Wright confronted her boss with a list of his rumored lovers. There were at least twelve women on the list, and for the next four hours Wright grilled Bill about his relationship with each one of them. She did not even bother to bring up the subject of his many one-night stands, the nagging question of Danny Williams’s paternity, and his alleged dalliances with the prostitutes on Spring Street. Wright’s inevitable and sobering conclusion: Bill could not run in 1988.

When Clinton told his wife that Wright had talked him out of running, Hillary was livid. She demanded to know what Wright could possibly have said to make Bill change his mind. Wright hemmed and hawed, unwilling to hurt her old friend by going into specifics. It was enough that Bill admitted to her that he had committed adultery with not one woman à la Gary Hart, but with several.

“These women are all trash,” was Hillary’s startling reply. “Nobody is going to believe them.” She
would see to it
that nobody believed them. The problem was manageable. There was no need to panic like Hart.

Bill knew better. Now, so soon after the Hart scandal, every candidate’s sexual life would be under the microscope. In a run
against a candidate as strong as Vice President Bush, it was the kind of scrutiny Bill simply could not survive.

Hillary stood next to her husband and wept as he announced to a roomful of stunned reporters that he had decided not to run for President. He waxed poetic about Chelsea, and how he owed it as a father to be there for her. Hillary, her eye already on 1992, had no intention of letting on that their grand plan had been momentarily sidetracked by her husband’s sleazy sexual escapades. As far as the public was concerned, Hillary wanted her husband to make this noble sacrifice for the sake of his young family.

She was, in reality, seriously considering divorce. As she faced turning forty, Hillary felt betrayed in a way that she never had before. It was not so much the women, but the fact that her husband’s unbridled libido had forced a change in their schedule. They would have to wait another four years before reaching for the ultimate prize. “Hillary had been co-governor for years,” said a longtime Arkansas supporter. “She couldn’t wait to be co-President.”

There was another, more personal issue that now rankled Hillary. As angry as she had been at Betsey Wright for talking her husband out of running, the growing list of Bill’s partners was a wake-up call for Hillary. In light of Bill’s long-standing aversion to wearing a condom, Hillary now worried that he was putting her health at risk in this age of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. She demanded that he be tested for HIV.

Dorothy Rodham, Diane Blair, and others close to Hillary worried that Hillary was indeed on the verge of ending the marriage. In the end, Hillary, keenly aware of the psychic pain suffered by children of divorce, opted to stay. The shouting matches persisted, however, and Dorothy Rodham worried about what impact the Clintons’ pitched battles were having on Chelsea. According to a Rodham family friend, Chelsea, after listening to her mother smash things and scream “bad words” at Dad, sometimes cried herself to sleep.

On those many nights when Dad was nowhere to be seen, Chelsea often heard Mom chatting with her coworker Vince Foster. At times it seemed as if Hillary was spending more time with Foster, a childhood friend of Bill’s, than she did with her own husband. A secretary at Rose Law said that as far back as the 1970s, Hillary and Foster behaved “like two people in love”—an observation made by many who knew them.

L. D. Brown was in a unique position to observe what transpired between Hillary and Foster, whom she kiddingly called “Vincenzo Fosterini” because she thought he looked like a suave Mafia consigliere. A particular favorite of Bill’s, Brown was engaged at the time to Chelsea’s nanny Becky McCoy, daughter of the mansion’s administrator Ann McCoy. Bill took an almost fatherly interest in the young trooper, and would later be instrumental in getting Brown a job with the CIA.

According to Brown and other members of the Clintons’ security detail, no sooner would Bill leave the mansion than Foster would show up to spend time with Hillary. Often, he would not leave until the following morning.

In a sentiment echoed by many others, Brown was “just amazed at how public they were about their affair. All their friends knew exactly what was going on.” On one occasion, Vince and his wife, Lisa, were leaving a restaurant with the Clintons and another couple. While the others walked ahead, Hillary and Foster lagged behind. Brown, walking directly behind them, saw Foster groping Hillary’s behind. “He’d be kissing her—and I mean real heavy, open-mouthed, tongue-down-the-throat stuff—and then he winked at me. They didn’t care who knew.”

At another Little Rock restaurant—this time to celebrate Hillary’s birthday—Hillary was seated at the bar when, according to Larry Patterson, Foster grabbed Hillary’s behind with both hands and squeezed. Then he gave Patterson a wink and made the “okay” sign with his thumb and forefinger. Moments later, Foster
placed his hand over one of Hillary’s breasts and again winked at Patterson.

Brown, who was exempt from much of the verbal abuse Hillary heaped on the troopers because of his relationship with Chelsea’s nanny, was convinced that Foster and Hillary were not just lovers. “Hillary and Vince were two people who were obviously
deeply
in love,” he said. “I saw them locked in each other’s arms, necking, nuzzling…. Vince was a great, great guy, and he was just totally devoted to Hillary in a way that Bill never was.”

According to numerous sources, the affair intensified following Bill’s decision not to run in 1988. Now the troopers were driving Hillary and Vince to the mountain resort of Huber Springs, where their law firm owned a cabin. There the couple spent hours alone while the troopers waited outside. “I guess Hillary figured that if we did this for her husband,” Brown said, “then we damn well better keep our mouths shut and do it for her.”

Revenge played a role in Hillary’s relationship with Foster, certainly. “Here was Bill screwing all these women right under her nose,” said a former employee of Rose Law who worked with Hillary, “and what was she supposed to do, nothing? Vince and Hillary had a very warm friendship and intellectual respect for each other to start with. There was always affection there, but it probably wouldn’t have gone to the next level if it weren’t for all the crap she had to put up with from her husband.”

There was considerable speculation concerning Lisa Foster, mother of Vince’s three children. “Lisa loved Vince,” said a neighbor, “but there had to have been some jealousy there. Vince and Hillary were around each other at the law firm, and on top of that he ran to the Governor’s Mansion whenever she snapped her fingers. Would any wife be happy having to put up with that?”

In an unguarded moment, Hillary apparently felt compelled to explain her relationship with Foster to Brown. “There are some things you have to get outside your marriage that you can’t get in
it,” she told him. “L.D., sometimes you just have to make a leap of faith.” (Years later, after Vince Foster’s death, Barbara Walters asked Hillary point-blank, “Were you lovers?” Hillary hesitated. “I miss him very much,” she answered, never denying the assertion. “And I just wish he could be left in peace, because he was a wonderful man to everyone who knew him.”)

Hillary never allowed her own extramarital activities to cloud her political judgment, however. Hillary had seen to it that Bill threw his weight behind the candidate who would go on to clinch the Democratic nomination, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. Now it looked as if the Clintons would be going to the 1988 convention in Atlanta after all, to deliver the prime-time nominating speech.

As Hillary and Bill stepped up to the podium to essentially make their debut before a national audience, she wondered aloud if the houselights would go down as they had for previous speakers. They wouldn’t. She asked if Dukakis’s floor leaders would ask delegates to listen. They didn’t. And she worried that the speech, expanded and approved by the Dukakis camp, was too long. It was.

For thirty-three unbearable minutes, Bill prattled on as the crowd booed, hissed, and hollered for him to get off the stage. Hillary smelled conspiracy—instantly. Was this, she wondered, a preemptive strike against a Democrat who might give Dukakis competition in the future? “It was one of the most agonizing moments in my life,” she said, blissfully unaware of all that was to come, “because I knew we had been misled, and I couldn’t figure out why.” There was thunderous applause for only one line in Bill’s speech: “And now, in conclusion…” Backstage after the speech, Hillary watched in wide-eyed silence as her husband accused “that little Greek motherfucker” Dukakis of sabotaging him.

Crushed, Betsey Wright flew home to Arkansas, certain that she had just witnessed the annihilation of her boss’s career. Hillary, in a state of shock, returned alone to the Clintons’ hotel. Bill lingered
on and, according to Larry Patterson, groped an attractive young woman before slipping into a room with her and locking the door. “Sex was his drug,” he said. “Hillary had to have known that.”

Searching for a way to undo the damage, Hillary enlisted the help of their TV producer friends Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth Thomason. Eight days after the convention debacle that had made him the laughingstock of the country, Bill went on Johnny Carson to make fun of himself and play the saxophone. “Yet another comeback,” declared Hillary, beaming.

Hillary grew impatient as the 1990 governor’s race approached and Bill, bored and edgy after a decade in office, refused to commit to running for a sixth term. Hillary and Dick Morris thought he should. It would be easier to run for President as a sitting governor in 1992 than as a private citizen, they argued, and if he lost he could always return to the Governor’s Mansion and wait for the next opportunity.

Betsey Wright, however, quarreled bitterly with Hillary over this issue; she believed that Bill’s sex life was a time bomb waiting to explode, and that as governor he would only invite scrutiny by the press. Wright’s brusque style had alienated many key figures in Clinton’s administration, but it apparently took this falling-out with Hillary to send her packing.

Hillary might not have agreed with Wright’s doom-and-gloom prognosis, but she suffered nonetheless. Things came to a head when her husband met and fell in love with a stunning blond divorcée named Marilyn Jo Jenkins. An executive with the Arkansas utilities company Entergy, Jenkins was connected by marriage to one of Arkansas’s wealthiest families. Bill and Marilyn Jo would later deny that theirs was anything more than a close friendship, though there was much evidence to the contrary.

When he wasn’t visiting her at her apartment at the Shadow Oaks Condominium or spending hours talking to her on the phone, Bill was sneaking Jenkins into the mansion—even as
Hillary slept upstairs. One of the troopers, Danny Ferguson, would later swear under oath that Clinton confessed his love for Jenkins. “It’s tough,” he told Ferguson, “to be in love with both your wife and another woman.”