American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power (17 page)

It would be only a matter of weeks before another political grenade was lobbed at Hillary. This time, the young secretary Bill had allegedly approached for oral sex at Little Rock’s Excelsior Hotel in 1991 was holding a press conference. In one of its Troopergate articles,
The American Spectator
had identified a woman named Paula who supposedly wanted to be then–Governor Clinton’s “regular girlfriend.” The piece also suggested that Paula had been a willing participant in a sex act with Clinton. Claiming that her friends could easily identify her from the piece, Jones opted not to sue the
Spectator.
Instead, she sought an apology from the President for making improper sexual advances toward her.

The mainstream press largely ignored Jones’s accusations, but
that was not enough for Hillary. Dismissing her husband’s less-than-polished accuser as “trailer trash,” she instructed James Carville and the Clinton legal team to do likewise. “Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park you never know what you’ll find,” sniped Carville, not at all self-conscious about his Louisiana bayou drawl or the fact that he worked for a man whose nickname was Bubba.

In keeping with her own lifelong commitment to self-deception, Hillary would never acknowledge that Paula Jones’s allegations were totally consistent with the other charges of sexual misconduct leveled at her husband. Years after the Monica Lewinsky scandal led to Bill’s impeachment and he confessed to being a sex addict, Hillary was still insisting that it was all part of a right-wing plot to destroy the Clintons. “We expected this story,” she wrote in 2003, “to die like the other phony scandals.”

Jones upped the ante on May 6, 1994, when she sued the President for $700,000. Bob Bennett, the high-profile Washington lawyer hired to defend Clinton, went even farther than Carville. Bennett publicly compared her to a dog, and hired private detectives to dig up whatever dirt they could in Jones’s past.

The public was outraged, and Bennett was forced to qualify his remarks. But Hillary was delighted with the lawyer’s over-the-top attacks, and exhorted others on the administration team to follow suit. “These women
are
trailer trash,” Hillary said. “They
are
out for money. Why not tell it like it is?”

For an avowed feminist whose husband hailed from one of the poorest states in the South, it seemed nothing short of astounding that Hillary did not hesitate to brand her enemies “bimbos,” “tramps,” “sluts,” “trailer trash,” “rednecks,” “shit-kickers,” and “white trash.” Nor were her less-than-politically-correct zingers reserved for Caucasian Southerners. Over the years, Hillary reportedly made anti-Semitic, anti-Asian, and anti-Indian remarks.

Observed a friend from Arkansas who was given a job in the
Clinton administration: “This is a huge blind spot of Hillary’s. She would never think of using the N-word or making an antigay remark, but she’s tone-deaf when it comes to the feelings of these other groups.”

His belligerence aside, Bob Bennett did negotiate with the plaintiff’s lawyers for a presidential statement to the effect that Paula had done nothing wrong, and that Bill believed her to be a truthful and moral person. The President, well aware of the facts of the case, found this to be a reasonable compromise and was just about to sign when Hillary weighed in. She insisted that any such statement would be tantamount to an admission of guilt; if Paula Jones was truthful, then her version of events was accurate.

Less than a week after turning down a settlement offer from Bob Bennett, Paula Jones was informed that she was the target of an IRS audit. She was not alone. Under the stewardship of Hillary’s Yale Law School classmate Margaret Richardson, the IRS audited a number of conservative organizations and publications—all of which led to charges that the audits were politically motivated.

Hillary made no secret of loathing radio talk-show host Chuck Harder, who frequently delved into Bill’s sexual escapades on the air. An IRS audit of his nonprofit People’s Radio Network dragged on for over six months, until Harder finally bowed out. Later, when Harder arranged to return to the airwaves with a new radio network backed by the United Auto Workers, Hillary personally called UAW president Steven Yokich and suggested that they hire her brother, Hugh Rodham Jr., to host a talk show instead.

Hillary, meantime, was being warned by her more astute advisers that she had alienated much of the Washington press corps with her closed-door meetings on health reform and her general lack of availability. In April of 1994, Hillary sat down in the State Dining Room for a no-holds-barred press conference. For the next hour she was bombarded with questions about Whitewater,
Madison Guaranty, her 1,000 percent killing in the commodities market, and more.

What impressed everyone more than Hillary’s less-than-illuminating answers was her cool demeanor and her deft wardrobe choice. In the ongoing attempt to soften her image, Hillary wore a black skirt and pink sweater set. Reporters quickly dubbed this calculated attempt at damage control the “Pretty in Pink” press conference.

Things were not so pretty in the West Wing, where White House staffers were now accustomed to being verbally abused by both the President and the First Lady. There was a major difference between the two in this regard: like his idol JFK, the President routinely blew up at aides. But once he had vented his anger, Bill moved on. Hillary, in contrast, was not the sort to forgive and forget. She held grudges. “Anybody that stood up” to Hillary, recalled White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, “was, you know, smashed down and belittled, very personally.” Myers claimed the President did not attack people personally, but “Mrs. Clinton sometimes did…not only would she sort of humiliate you in front of your colleagues or whoever happened to be around,” Myers added, “Hillary tended to kind of campaign against people behind their back, and that was certainly my experience.”

It was also the experience of Abner Mikva, the retired chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia who joined the White House counsel’s office in 1996. He felt that Hillary was largely responsible for the atmosphere of paranoia inside the White House. When Mikva complied with the courts and turned over subpoenaed documents, Hillary showered him with obscenities. The former jurist, unaccustomed to such behavior, resigned.

As time-consuming as the plethora of scandals had become, there were other matters for America’s co-Presidents to contend with. In May, the U.S. was presented with an opportunity to arrest
one of the world’s most dangerous terrorists, Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who had been living in the Sudan. Under pressure from the U.S. and the Saudis, the Sudanese government asked bin Laden to leave. In doing so, the Sudan, which wanted to resume normal relations with the U.S., was essentially inviting the Clinton administration to take bin Laden into custody.

As was his customary practice on matters both foreign and domestic—particularly where matters of law were concerned—Bill consulted his wife. Hillary agreed with the President’s advisers that, since bin Laden had not yet committed a crime against America, they had no legal grounds for detaining the leader of Al Qaeda. “I said don’t bring him here,” Clinton admitted years later, “because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he
wanted
to commit crimes against America.

“So I pleaded with the Saudis to take him,” Clinton went on, “because they could have. But they thought it was a hot potato and they didn’t and that’s how he wound up in Afghanistan.”

That same month, Hillary traveled to South Africa for Nelson Mandela’s inauguration. A few weeks later, she accompanied Bill to England for ceremonies commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of D-day.

Hillary launched an invasion of her own in July, barnstorming the country from coast to coast aboard a bus christened the “Health Security Express.” The tour was aimed at whipping up enough grassroots support to convince Congress to reconsider her health care package. “When these guys see the people out there demanding reform,” she said, “then they’ll get off their asses and do something about it.”

Unfortunately, Hillary wildly misjudged the mood of the American people—and how they felt about her. Thousands of demonstrators showed up at every stop to scream obscenities at the First Lady. In Seattle, angry protesters swarmed her motorcade, rocking her limousine and pounding their fists on the windows. Fearing
for her life, Hillary agreed for the first time to wear a bulletproof vest.

Once back in Washington, Hillary threw up her hands and admitted defeat. Her well-intentioned attempt to provide universal health care coverage had collapsed under the weight of her own overbearing style. In addition to alienating many in the health care and insurance industries, she had run afoul of leaders in both political parties. “I knew,” she later conceded, “that I had contributed to our failure.”

Yet the price for pushing her ambitious agenda as “co-President” was to be far higher than the collapse of the Clinton health care initiative. In November 1994 the GOP, led by Newt Gingrich, recaptured the House for the first time since the Eisenhower administration. Republicans also took control of the Senate and most of the nation’s governorships. Of these, none wounded Hillary more than the decisive defeat of incumbent Texas Governor Ann Richards by George W. Bush. “God,” Hillary muttered as she sat at the kitchen table watching Bush’s face flash across the television screen. “What a jerk.”

The success of Gingrich’s “Contract with America” was a stunning rebuke of the Clinton presidency in general and Hillary in particular. Blaming herself for the Democrats’ defeat at the polls, Hillary sank into a deep depression. Rather than run top-level policy meetings at the White House, she opted out entirely. She told Dick Morris that she no longer trusted her own judgment and that she felt “lost.”

Every week, ten high-powered Democratic women would get together in what came to be known as “Chix meetings” to talk over strategies and policy matters. The Chix, including Maggie Williams, consultant Mandy Grunwald, and Susan Thomases, huddled with Hillary in the White House Map Room—appropriately enough—to map out a strategy for her future.

Hillary’s lip trembled as she apologized to the Chix one by one
for letting them and the party down. It was time, she suggested, for her to retreat from public life. Not surprisingly, the Chix rallied to their leader’s side, insisting that she was a role model for millions of women, and that she owed it to them not to admit defeat. “We all felt,” one of the Chix later said of that meeting, “that Hillary was the one who should have been sitting in the Oval Office, and that someday she would be. But at that point she was being assailed from so many angles that she just wanted to fold up her tent. We gave her the pep talk to keep her in the game.”

Hillary had a role model of her own, and she consulted her with some regularity. With the encouragement of her longtime friend the flamboyant Jungian psychologist Jean Houston, Hillary often sat in her room and launched into long and rambling—albeit decidedly one-sided—conversations with the ghost of Eleanor Roosevelt. As far as her current crisis of conscience was concerned, Hillary imagined that Eleanor would simply have told her to “buck up and carry on.”

Neither the Chix nor Eleanor provided Hillary with all the guidance she needed. In typical Hillary Clinton decision-making fashion, she consulted everyone from New Age gurus Tony Robbins and Marianne Williams to her old Park Ridge, Illinois, youth minister Don Jones before deciding how to go about redefining her role.

In the wake of the Republican midterm election sweep, Hillary decided to return to the issue of children’s rights—and use it to take potshots at the GOP. When Newt Gingrich suggested that the children of some welfare mothers would be better off in orphanages, Hillary blasted the idea in a speech before the New York Women’s Agenda and then in a lengthy article in
Newsweek.
Turning the tables on Newt, she blasted his defense of orphanages as “big-government interference into the lives of citizens at its worst.”

As with everything that appeared in print under her byline, it is highly doubtful that Hillary actually wrote the
Newsweek
piece.
According to former staff members, presidential speechwriters were always called in to craft serviceable articles for Hillary. Still, she would say that, with the publication of the antiorphanage piece, “I had found my voice.”

Once again, Hillary borrowed a page from Eleanor Roosevelt and started writing a nationally syndicated weekly column patterned on Eleanor’s “My Day.” Methodical as ever, she summoned a number of bestselling authors to the White House and picked their brains concerning the best way to go about writing a book—something she had never attempted before.

Shrewdly designed to recast Hillary’s image as a caring wife and mother—as opposed to a shrill and humorless policy wonk—
It Takes a Village
was a collection of wryly amusing anecdotes and homespun advice interwoven with the First Lady’s thoughts on child welfare. Hillary’s utopia, as described in the book, was one in which the state functioned as a third parent for every child, poised to step in at frequent intervals throughout that child’s life.
It Takes a Village
not only became a bestseller—the proceeds were donated to charity—but was also a giant step away from the brittle, autocratic co-President of old.

The nation may have started warming up to the First Lady, but there was a decided chill between Hillary and the ghostwriter she hired to actually do the work. Hillary would brag that she had written the 320-page book in longhand on yellow legal pads. While she certainly did some work on the manuscript, it was actually Georgetown University journalism professor Barbara Feinman who worked feverishly to complete the manuscript on time.

Before she could finish up, however, someone reported to Hillary that Feinman had been talking to the press. Enraged, Hillary tried to block the last $30,000 installment owed Feinman, who had been counting on the money to finance the adoption of a Chinese orphan. Eventually, Hillary came through with the final payment—but only after Feinman reportedly threatened to sue.