Unlikeable (3 page)

CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 2

#GRANDMOTHERSKNOWBEST
#GRANDMOTHERSKNOWBEST

Don't be humble . . . you're not that great.

—Golda Meir

A
couple of weeks after Hillary began her likeability lessons, she invited several women friends to Whitehaven.

It was a frigid day in the middle of January 2015. The clock was ticking down to the first caucuses of the presidential race—the snows of Iowa were just a year away—and yet here was Hillary greeting her friends at the door and looking like a woman who didn't have a care in the world.

Her friends attributed her mellow mood to her surroundings. Whitehaven always put Hillary in a positive frame of mind.

Hillary had lived off the government teat for twenty-two years, starting with the day she and Bill moved into the governor's mansion in Little Rock in 1979. But in recent years, the Clintons'
circumstances had radically changed. Thanks to their unconscionable speaking fees, gargantuan book advances, and shameless sweetheart deals, the Clintons were worth well in excess of $150 million—certainly rich enough to own a place of their own.

And what a place Whitehaven was.

The 5,152-square-foot neo-Georgian brick mansion had six bedrooms, a spacious ballroom, a dining room that could seat thirty people, and a backyard that was big enough for a tented party of several hundred union honchos, Hollywood bigfeet, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Wall Street
machers
, and well-fixed gentry liberals.

Whitehaven's rooms were painted in Hillary's favorite color (daffodil yellow) and hung with her favorite art (Haitian and Vietnamese). The living room featured a painting of Hillary and Chelsea wearing traditional Vietnamese conical hats made from bamboo and dried leaves.

Upstairs, Hillary had set aside a suite of rooms for Chelsea, whose lacerating temper made her more her mother's daughter than her father's.

Hillary had put her stamp on Whitehaven.

She bought the $2.85 million mansion out of the $8 million she was paid by Simon & Schuster for her memoir
Living History
, and she thought of the place as hers and hers alone.

It was
her
home.

Not Bill's.

He was hardly ever there.

The
Game Change
authors, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, called Whitehaven Hillary's
“dream house.”

The
Hill
's White House correspondent, Amie Parnes, called it Hillary's
“fortress of solitude.”

Hillary's friends gathered in the den and snuggled into overstuffed Rose Tarlow sofas. They inquired after Chelsea's daughter, Charlotte Clinton Mezvinsky, who was four months old at the time. Hillary produced photos that showed her beaming with pleasure at her tiny granddaughter.

There was the usual chorus of oohs and ahhs.

Hillary said she planned to take Charlotte with her on the campaign trail as soon as the baby was old enough to travel. Charlotte would help her play the loveable grandmother card and win over women voters. It apparently never occurred to Hillary that she would be exploiting her daughter and the child.
The Barbara Lee Family Foundation, which did research on women running for public office, urged female candidates to use personal experiences to improve their likeability, and Hillary already had an unofficial hashtag to burnish her image: #GrandmothersKnowBest.

When one of her friends noticed a video camera standing on a tripod in a corner of the room, she asked Hillary what it was for.

“Speech practice,” Hillary said, according to the recollection of one of the women. “My coaches tell me I'm supposed to
pretend
when I speak. Pretend that I actually like the audience. I'm supposed to force myself to keep a smile on my face. I'm supposed to think happy thoughts. To think of Chelsea or Charlotte or my
[late] mother. But not about Bill, because even though I love him to death, he makes me tear my hair out.”

That got a laugh from the women.

Her friends often joked (though never to Hillary's face) that the characters of Frank and Claire Underwood in Netflix's Emmy Award–winning series
House of Cards
were a send-up of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Kevin Spacey, who plays the villainous Frank Underwood, might have been mouthing the Clintons' maxim when he said, “In politics, you either eat the baby or you are the baby.”

Like the Underwoods, the Clintons were a perfectly matched pair: they were driven by vaulting ambition; they constantly schemed against their enemies, real and imagined; they were cold-blooded when it came to getting what they wanted; and according to one of Hillary's closest friends, they hadn't shared the same bed in years.

But unlike the fictional Frank and Claire, Bill and Hillary were hardly ever in the same place at the same time. They lived completely separate lives.

They spoke on the phone every day—sometimes a dozen or more times a day—but Hillary rarely knew where Bill was and what he was up to.

He didn't tell her and she didn't ask.

Because she didn't want to know.

CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 3

THE KING OF LITTLE ROCK
THE KING OF LITTLE ROCK

I don't care what you think unless it is about me.

—Kurt Cobain, “Drain You”

E
ven in failing health—gaunt, trembling, hobbled by progressive heart disease—Bill Clinton was an object in perpetual priapic motion.

When the fancy took him, he'd climb aboard a borrowed Gulfstream G650—a sumptuous $65 million twin-engine jet that seated sixteen, had a range of seven thousand nautical miles, cruised at fifty-one thousand feet, and flew nearly at the speed of sound—and take off for another round of pleasures and self-indulgences.

Today, he might be in Los Angeles—caught by paparazzi posing with two prostitutes from the Moonlite BunnyRanch brothel of Mound House, Nevada.

Tomorrow, he might be in Toronto—on his way to dinner with one of his rumored mistresses.

The next day, he might be in Lima, the capital of Peru—traveling with Scarlett Johansson.

Or in Lagos, Nigeria. . . .

Or Port-au-Prince, Haiti. . . .

He was like the Flying Dutchman, the captain of the legendary ghost ship that never made port.

The news media covered his appearances at the meetings of the Clinton Global Initiative. Reporters and TV cameras were on hand for his speeches and TV interviews. But they invariably lost track of him after that.

It was no use sending a reporter to stake out the Clinton homes in Chappaqua and Whitehaven; Bill rarely turned up at either place, and when he did, it was for a quick lunch or dinner, and then he was gone in a flash. He spent most of his downtime concealed from the national press corps in plain sight—in Little Rock, Arkansas.

He had everything a narcissist could possibly want in Little Rock: the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport; the William J. Clinton Presidential Center and Park; the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service; a spacious penthouse apartment with smart TVs in every room and a golf-chipping lawn on the terrace; a catering service from his own four-star restaurant located in the basement of his presidential library; hot and cold running women; and a street named after him.

It was good to be king of Little Rock.

When his Secret Service Escalades trundled down President Clinton Avenue, adoring crowds stopped and waved at him. If he spotted some attractive women on the sidewalk, he got out and pressed the flesh, literally and figuratively. During the day, he went around dressed in a University of Arkansas Razorback T-shirt and SoulCycle shorts. At night, he threw parties atop the library. You could always tell when Bill was holding court from the bright glow that flickered from the windows of his penthouse like the tantalizing light at the end of Daisy Buchanan's dock in
The Great Gatsby
.

But even when Bill was tucked away in Little Rock, he kept Hillary in the dark about his whereabouts and activities.

That, of course, was nothing new.

Throughout their forty-year marriage, Bill's catch-me-if-you-can lifestyle raised questions about his allegiance to his wife. These questions went beyond his famous philandering. There were doubts about the sincerity of his commitment to Hillary's political career. Sometimes he acted as though he felt that his wife's elevation would diminish him.

He said or did impetuous, controversial things that seemed to come out of left field and that embarrassed Hillary and caused her serious political damage. The most famous example of his mischief making came during the 2008 presidential primary season when he angered black voters and turned them against
Hillary by denigrating Obama's victory in South Carolina by comparing it to Jesse Jackson's wins there in the 1980s.

But there were other examples of Bill's political infidelity.

When Hillary said at a press conference that some of the thirty thousand “personal” e-mails she deleted were between her and her husband, Bill let it be known through his spokesman that he had sent a grand total of two e-mails during his entire life. More recently, when Karl Rove suggested that Hillary suffered a serious health episode after fainting and suffering a concussion in 2012, Bill made matters worse by revealing that it took Hillary “six months of very serious work to get over” her injury. Hillary's health, Bill admitted, would be a “serious issue” in the 2016 campaign.

Sometimes, Hillary told friends, she suspected that Bill really didn't want her to become president.

That wasn't true.

But it wasn't far off the mark, either.

According to several of Bill's advisers who were interviewed for this book, he expressed mixed feelings about Hillary's presidential ambitions. He understood her desire to become a historic figure as the first woman president of the United States. And he intended to campaign for her hard; he would give it everything he had.

Yet, at the same time, he had major reservations about Hillary's running for president. As he saw it, her campaign—win or lose—posed a threat to the regal world he had established for himself since leaving the White House.

That world centered on the Clinton Foundation.

“The worst case scenario for the foundation, its allies say privately, would be if [Hillary] lost her presidential campaign in a manner similar to the way she lost her 2008 race to then-Sen. Barack Obama, which at least temporarily tarnished the family's political brand,” reported
Politico
. “Unlike 2008, a losing 2016 campaign would effectively end the political ambitions of Bill or Hillary Clinton. That would thrust responsibility for the [Clinton Foundation's] future squarely into the hands of their daughter. While she is being groomed to take over the family's political dynasty, thus far she has not demonstrated her parents' fundraising prowess or leadership ability.”

Ever since he left the White House under a cumulus of scandal, Bill had focused on one overriding goal: to rehabilitate his reputation. The Clinton Foundation and its glitzy conference offshoot, the Clinton Global Initiative, were the chosen instruments of his redemption. His good works with the foundation were designed to transform him from a president who had debased the dignity of his office into a living national treasure.

However, no sooner did Hillary announce on April 12, 2015, that she was running for president than the foundation came under withering criticism. And this time Bill and Hillary couldn't blame the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy for their problem. Liberal organs like the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
did deep dives into the foundation's pay-for-play activities.
Politico
quoted a former Clinton aide who called it
“a media whack-fest.”

The Clintons hadn't suffered such a battering since the Monica Lewinsky scandal. And they were clearly unprepared to handle it.

When NBC News' Cynthia McFadden asked Bill if he saw anything wrong with accepting $500,000 apiece for speeches while his wife was secretary of state, he came up with a ludicrous answer.

“I gotta pay our bills,” said the man who was rated the wealthiest living ex-president, and who was among the top-ten wealthiest of all time.

He gave an equally ridiculous answer to a question about why the foundation had failed to include tens of millions of dollars in donations on its tax returns.

Everybody makes mistakes on their taxes.

His self-justifying response reminded everyone of Hillary's outlandish claim that she and her husband were “dead broke” upon leaving the White House.

Until the foundation scandal hit, Bill had been flying high in the opinion polls. An NBC/
Wall Street Journal
poll conducted in the spring of 2015 showed that 56 percent of people had a positive view of the former president. That was twelve points higher than either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. With the eruption of the Clinton Foundation scandal, however, Bill's stature as the most popular person in American politics was seriously threatened.

A Niagara of funny money flowed into the Clinton Foundation's coffers from dodgy foreign businessmen, despotic foreign governments, petrostates like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and homegrown special-interest groups that expected a quid for their quo—anti–free trade labor unions, anti-regulation hedge funds, too-big-to-fail Wall Street banks, global-warming billionaires, and American corporations with massive lobbying operations in Washington.

Millions more came from speaking fees earned by Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton, which they transferred to the foundation slyly, like con artists playing three-card monte.
The Clintons failed to report these fees on financial disclosure forms even though government ethics rules clearly stated that “the source, date and amount of payments made or to be made directly to a charitable organization in lieu of honoraria must . . . be disclosed.”

Like everything else that Bill and Hillary touched, the foundation was a sketchy operation that skirted legality and often fell over the edge. With its embarrassment of riches—it had collected $2 billion since its creation—it was able to do a smattering of good work, especially in the areas of healthcare, AIDS, and addressing poverty in Africa. But it spent money indiscriminately, and mostly on itself. According to the Federalist's Sean Davis, for every ten dollars that the foundation took in, it disbursed only one dollar to charitable causes.
The other nine dollars went to euphemisms like “office supplies” and “travel.”

“This data,” wrote Jonathan S. Tobin in
Commentary
magazine, “is a reminder that the main point of the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Foundation is to support its namesakes in a lavish fashion
and allow wealthy donors access to them. . . . Most of the money spent by the foundation is geared toward providing access for the donors to the Clintons via the annual [Clinton Global Initiative] celebrity conference and events at the [Clinton] Library.”

The foundation had a random way of selecting which causes it supported, but basically it came down to whatever Bill wanted. Money went to everything from sustainable farming in South America to saving elephants in Africa.

Often the foundation's goals seemed indistinguishable from those of the hard Left of the Democratic Party. The foundation supported such progressive causes as teachers unions, public service unions, “human-made global warming” education, higher taxes on the rich, and the redistribution of wealth.

The foundation had a huge field organization, which could be transformed with a snap of Bill's fingers into a get-out-the-vote army for Hillary's presidential campaign. Bill treated these foot soldiers with his customary grandiosity; from time to time, he sent out a memo encouraging them to take their spouses to an expensive dinner and charge the meal to the foundation.

Beyond the power and the money, Bill derived personal pleasure from being the top dog of the foundation. It was the means by which he conducted the most fun-filled post-presidency in American history.