American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power

by Andersen, Christopher P.

  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 judgm
ent 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.

  In the end, neither Feinman nor anyone who helped her in the publication of It Takes a Village was mentioned by Hillary in the book’s acknowledgments. “All she expected,” said Feinman’s friend Sally Quinn, “was ‘Many thanks to Barbara Feinman, whose tireless efforts were greatly appreciated.’ She would have died and gone to heaven.”

  Hillary bristled when asked if she really wrote the book herself. “All I can say,” she answered with a smirk, “is that they didn’t pay me $120,000 to spellcheck it.”

  Basking in the unfamiliar warmth of public affection, Hillary patterned her next literary endeavor after Barbara Bush’s hugely successful Millie’s Book. A collection of letters penned to the Clintons’ pets, Dear Socks, Dear Buddy also climbed the bestseller lists, and further burnished Hillary’s image as a homebody.

  In truth, Hillary was finding the traditional role of First Lady more enjoyable than she might have imagined. She threw herself into holiday preparations at the White House, but soon learned that even the mundane-sounding business of decorating the Blue Room Christmas tree—considered the First Lady’s tree—was fraught with the potential for scandal.

  Hillary had invited art students from around the country to design their own ornaments for the Blue Room tree along a “Twelve Days of Christmas” theme, with rather unexpected results. A number of the ornaments were fashioned from condoms, others from crack pipes. One ornament depicted “twelve lords a-leaping”—all displaying erections.

  Perhaps Hillary was too distracted by her pal Webb Hubbell’s indictment on tax evasion and mail fraud charges. Within weeks, Hubbell would confess to overbilling Rose Law Firm clients to the tune of nearly $400,000 and be sentenced to twenty-one months in federal prison.

  Concerned for Webb’s welfare—and perhaps worried that he might spill some additional information regarding her work for the failed savings and loan Madison Guaranty if he felt abandoned—Hillary breathed a sigh of relief when Clinton insiders told her they were banding together to help Webb out. They arranged for Hubbell to be given work as a consultant that would pay him more than $400,000 in fees—“enough,” said a partner in one of the firms, “for him to keep his mouth shut about Hillary.”

  In prison, Hubbell contemplated countersuing his former employer over the amount they claimed he owed. But when he was told that Hillary would pull the plug on White House support if he went ahead and sued the Rose Law Firm, Hubbell backed down. “So,” he told his wife in a phone call from prison, “I need to roll over one more time.”

  Hillary was having far too good a time in her new incarnation as a somewhat old-fashioned First Lady. To sell herself in the role, however, she relied increasingly on Chelsea. The First Daughter had been shielded from the press in a way that none of her predecessors had. Bill and Hillary would not entertain any inquiries from the press about Chelsea, and reporters knew they would be banished from the White House if they dared to ask Chelsea even one innocuous question. After years in the White House, it seemed nothing short of incredible that Chelsea had never uttered a word for public consumption. The average American had no idea what Bill and Hillary’s only child sounded like.

  But Chelsea did serve a very important political purpose. Whenever her parents were under the gun, the First Daughter was often carted out to be photographed laughing with her mom or strolling arm in arm with Dad across the White House lawn.

  Through it all, Chelsea remained remarkably unspoiled, exhibiting qualities of poise and self-assurance that impressed visiting heads of state and Arkansas good ol’ boys alike. In March of 1995, she accompanied her mother on a twelve-day visit to five countries in South Asia. They were photographed laughing as they rode an elephant in Nepal, holding hands at the Taj Mahal, and touring Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Calcutta.

  B
ack in Washington, Hillary was scoring a public relations triumph in absentia. Before leaving on her trip, she videotaped a five-minute parody of the film Forrest Gump to be shown at the annual Gridiron Dinner. Never one to leave anything to chance, Hillary tapped several of her friends in the entertainment industry to make the short video. Saturday Night Live alumnus Al Franken was asked to direct, while Jay Leno enlisted the help of his writers to provide some of the more memorable lines.

  Journalists and politicians howled at the video showing Hillary, on a park bench in front of the White House, spoofing some of Forrest Gump’s most famous lines. “My mama always told me the White House is like a box of chocolates,” she mugged. “It’s pretty on the outside, but inside there’s lots of nuts.” Whenever the camera came back to Hillary sitting on the bench, she was wearing yet another hairstyle—something Americans had become accustomed to as the First Lady tried over the years to find the one most suitable for her.

  Hillary returned from her South Asian tour a few days later, blissfully unaware that while she was away her husband had begun his fatal flirtation with a twenty-two-year-old White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.

  Buoyed by the success of her first official overseas trip without Bill, Hillary journeyed to Beijing in September of 1995—this time to attend the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. It was a trip the President’s advisers did not want Hillary to make. They were concerned that it might appear as if the First Lady were once again trying to act as a surrogate for her husband—this time in the foreign policy area—and that Hillary, whose off-the-cuff remarks had caused so much trouble for the President in the past, might slip once again. Most important, however, was the undeniable fact that the Chinese government would exploit Hillary’s presence as a tacit endorsement of its human rights policies.