White House servants occasionally loitered in and out. The majority of them never much cared for the Clintons, whose haphazard and chaotic scheduling often left the official White House staff scrambling to attend to their whims. The Clintons stood in sharp contrast to their beloved predecessors, the Bushes, who had long experience in dealing with servants.
Seated together, Ickes explained to Hillary the intricacies of what would soon become her “home state”—its politics, its divisions and unions, and her (likely) opponent, New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. It was all foreign to her—but native to Ickes. They talked much of the morning and when they moved into the private dining room for lunch, they were briefly joined by Bill Clinton, who was wearing a sweat suit and trying out lines that he’d be using in a couple of hours when he would address the nation after his all-but-certain acquittal in the Senate’s impeachment vote. “Hillary rolled her eyes and indulged him briefly before turning the conversation back to upstate electoral tallies,” biographer Sally Bedell Smith details.3
“I remember that moment when the Senate was voting on whether to impeach Clinton, her husband, and she was sitting up in the East Wing with Harold Ickes, plotting out her Senate strategy, and somebody came in and said the motion to convict was defeated, and she just sort of said, ‘Thanks,’ and kept moving with her own plans,” a close observer of the Clintons tells me as she thinks back to this moment.
Ickes, who had led the Bill Clinton presidential campaign effort in New York in 1992, was determined to be by her side for this effort. (“A longtime friend and confidant of Clinton’s, Ickes has been surrounded by scandal, misconduct, abuse of office and questions of virtue,” the Republican National Committee had claimed in a briefing book designed to portray President Clinton as “Shameless.”)
It was Ickes who told her that the Monica scandal was playing well for her, though that was already obvious. As pollster John Zogby said at the time, her rebound in public approval was “a sign of the public’s support for her handling of the Lewinsky issue.” Americans, particularly women, felt sorry for her. She had become the world’s most famous jilted wife and she would work it for all that it was worth. The one true thing that even her enemies granted Hillary Clinton was that she was the loyal, aggrieved spouse blindsided by her husband’s adultery.
Contrary to the popular notion that she never had political aspirations of her own—“I don’t think she even fantasized about that for herself,” says law school friend Michael Medved, now a conservative radio host, in an interview for this book—Hillary’s own ambitions were never far from her mind. In 1988, when Bill first considered a run for the presidency, he and Hillary had also considered the idea that she replace him as governor of Arkansas. By the time of his first inaugural four years later, the White House clearly was in her sights. This was part of the understanding she always had with Bill Clinton. He’d get his turn. She’d put up with his crap. And then she’d get her chance. And he’d do what he could to help her. Clinton aides told me they were astonished after Bill’s taking office, at a time when Mrs. Clinton was viewed by a significant segment of the country as a shrill, polarizing radical, that this idea was such an active notion in the administration.
“Hillaryland was always, always, always a force,” a senior Clinton aide recalls in a wide-ranging interview for this book. He worked within steps of the Oval Office during the administration and, like pretty much everyone else who hopes to have a career in Democratic politics, will speak only without attribution. “If you fucked up and were found out by [Bill] Clinton, you got a promotion. If you fucked up and were found out by Hillary, your throat was slit and you were left on the tarmac with no ticket home. It was brutal.”
In those early days, Clinton critics were demanding the release of Hillary Clinton’s records from her days as a partner at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock as part of the investigation of a now largely forgotten early scandal known as Whitewater. Mrs. Clinton was reluctant to release documents or to comply with the requests of the special prosecutor in the case.
One aide approached the First Lady’s press secretary, Lisa Caputo, then in her midtwenties. “Why doesn’t she just come fucking forward and release them? The president had no business in the matter. It won’t hurt him.”
“We can’t,” Caputo replied. “Hillary’s got her own ambitions.”
“What do you mean?” he asked. “It doesn’t get better than First Lady.”
“Well, there’s ’04. Or ’08.”
It’s always been known that Mrs. Clinton had political ambitions, but never before had an aide confirmed with such assurance that she was envisioning the presidency for herself, even as her husband was just settling in. Hillary Clinton wanted the keys to the White House herself and, as a former aide put it in an exclusive interview for this book, conjuring images of the popular movie The Shawshank Redemption, “She was willing to slog through all of [his] shit” to get there.
Hillary has been “the one to always play a long game, and she started playing that long game at the end of the second term, and I think she thought the Senate would lead directly to her own presidency in 2008,” another close observer of the Clintons tells me, again insisting on anonymity.
As her husband’s second term came to a close, the question was: Where to start? She was born in Illinois, went to college in Massachusetts, law school in Connecticut, had brief stints in California and Washington, D.C., and had moved to Arkansas to be with her future husband, Bill Clinton. Now she was back in Washington, D.C.—the nation’s capital, living in the White House. Along the way Hillary had picked up friends and networks across the country and even a pronounced southern accent that she mysteriously lost shortly after she arrived in Washington in 1993. In other words, she had no strong roots anywhere—which, she believed, gave her license to represent people as an elected official from . . . just about anywhere.
When Hillary and Harold Ickes first strategized about her Senate run, both knew at least in the back of their minds that she couldn’t win the election simply by being the shattered wife. As the New York Times Magazine wrote, “[F]or four hours, as she and Ickes—a scarred veteran of New York politics and a former aide to her husband—moved from the living room to lunch in the family dining room and back to the living room, she plumbed the risks of a race for the Senate seat that Daniel Patrick Moynihan had decided to vacate. Would she really want to be one of a hundred senators? Could she survive a street fight with a nasty opponent? Could she stand the pawing of New York City’s feral reporters?” How did she counter the sentiment, as one reporter covering the campaign summarized it to me years later, that her candidacy was “naked in its political ambition—the fact it came after Lewinsky.” That, in other words, she was in fact using Bill’s humiliation as justification for being in the Senate.
As Ickes and Hillary conspired, one thought kept coming back to them. The “bottom line” of the First Lady’s run for Senate, as first reported in the book Hillary’s Choice, was “for redemption.”4 From what? Take the scandals: There was Whitewater, the investment deal in which they lost a fair bit of money—and probably should’ve lost more had it not been for their good friends James and Susan McDougal. The documents surrounding this mysterious deal—and Hillary’s insistence on fighting to keep them sealed—led to the appointment of Special Prosecutor Ken Starr in the first place, whose portfolio would grow and grow—and finally led to embarrassing allegations of her husband’s sexual misconduct toward an Arkansas state employee, Paula Jones, which then led to revelations about an alleged cover-up of the president’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.
While the president remained politically popular due to a robust economy, on a personal level the Clinton brand was increasingly viewed by the public as unethical, immoral, and just plain icky. A Senate election would erase all that—it would not only salvage the Clinton brand, but give Hillary a chance to be the kind of leader she was destined to be. No longer would she have to suffer in comparison to Bill,
or deal with his crap. This would be her achievement and her chance to show the world what she could do. On her own. And so Hillary did what she always did. She went to work.
One way she decided to counter the expected criticism of her bid was to play the reluctant candidate for as long as possible—a stance she will likely echo in her 2016 presidential run. One story leaked out that it was a veteran New Yorker, the outspoken African American congressman Charlie Rangel, who in October 1998 first mischievously suggested to Hillary that she run for a Senate seat. Hillary, according to the reports, laughed the idea off. But, as I’ve learned in my reporting, there’s more to the story. Hillary in fact had been looking at the race ever since she’d heard rumors of Moynihan’s retirement. Long before that chance conversation with Rangel, she had spent more time than was necessary that year campaigning throughout New York State in the 1998 midterm elections, getting to meet the major party figures and donors.
One member of Clinton’s senior administration happened to cross paths with the First Lady during a retreat at Camp David and shared his encounter with me. As he recalled it, the First Lady, still playing Hamlet in the New York media, pulled the official aside.
“What do you think?” she asked. “Should I run for the Senate?”
“No,” he replied. “I think you should be a college president, head of a foundation. I think you’ll have more of a platform.”
The First Lady looked stricken, and quickly turned away.
“She was pissed at me for that advice,” says the former high-level official, who believes Hillary holds his honest advice against him to this day. She didn’t want his opinion, he says, unless it was to tell her what a great senator she would be.
Further assisting the “reluctant candidate” narrative, reporters from the New York Times wrote any number of stories about state Democrats who were “begging her to run.”5 That too was an exaggeration. New York Democrats in fact already had a suitable candidate for the job, a woman who’d been waiting her turn—Representative Nita Lowey of Westchester County.
Among the real power players in New York politics there was a noted lack of enthusiasm for a Hillary bid—particularly among Senators Chuck Schumer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the man Hillary would replace. Moynihan was an intellectual giant in the United States Senate, a former aide to Kennedy, LBJ, and Nixon who was respected on both sides of the aisle. From the outset, the wry, bespectacled legislator seemed reserved, at best, about the idea that Hillary Clinton might replace him. “He had not much use for the Clintons,” one reporter who covered that race tells me bluntly.
Although they have since mended fences, at least superficially, Schumer secretly opposed Hillary’s political career from its start, as she eyed a bid for a New York U.S. Senate seat in 2000. Like most every other political observer, Schumer was initially shocked by the audacity of a first lady from Arkansas, who was born in Illinois, deciding she was entitled to a seat held by such a heavyweight as the retiring Democrat Moynihan. And in Schumer’s state, too. Where she’d never lived.
“Schumer is a man of great ambitions,” a Senate colleague tells me with obvious understatement. “I’m sure that living in the shadow of Hillary Clinton wasn’t the most pleasant position for him.”
Michael Medved recalls a dinner between the then-senators where he observed the interaction between Schumer and Clinton. “I will tell you what was evident was a lot of eye rolling,” he said, on both of their parts.
With Moynihan’s retirement, Schumer was to become the state’s senior senator. That title—which means something, at least, within the clubby otherworldliness of the U.S. Senate—would be severely undercut if his junior colleague were Hillary Clinton. She would outshine him and outdo him. She was a celebrity, after all, who wouldn’t need Schumer’s help to shine—and wouldn’t need him to be her lodestar in the U.S. Senate. She would steal New York newspaper headlines without even trying. She’d only have to show up. Schumer at best would be her understudy. Chuck Schumer, man of destiny, didn’t care for that one bit. And like many other Democrats, he wondered if the country really owed her a Senate seat from a state she never lived in simply because her husband couldn’t keep his pants on in the Oval Office.
As for the carpetbagger charge, Hillary was convinced she could overcome it through sheer endurance and persistence, long underappreciated qualities that are the Clintons’ hallmarks. The state was too perfect a choice for Hillary to do otherwise.
In an expansive interview for this book, Mrs. Clinton’s eventual opponent, Republican congressman Rick Lazio, summed up the advantages the state offered her: “A solidly Democratic state, big union organizations, big cities with machine politics where you could turn out the vote, and the biggest media stage maybe in the world.
“It was a pretty compelling case that they come to New York,” Lazio recalls, “although she had absolutely no attachment to New York before that. She had never lived there, she had never worked there, she never paid taxes there. But New York is a very forgiving place. I think Hillary and their team knew that they would be able to get over on that hurdle, although there might be some resistance to that.”
There was also a greater attraction for the overly ambitious Hillary: Assuming she became a senator from New York she’d be connected to arguably the richest and most powerful Democratic base in the country (with the possible exception of California). Which is to say, in order to win, she’d have to raise money, which she would do from New Yorkers. These rich and powerful New Yorkers would form an ideal financial base for a presidential run.
The final rationale for her campaign—and its secret driving force—was largely mystical. Harold Ickes was a junior. His father, Harold Ickes Sr., was a cabinet officer for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and, far more important, an advisor to Hillary’s idol, Eleanor. It was the senior Ickes who’d urged Mrs. Roosevelt to seek a Senate seat in New York, an idea she’d considered and then dismissed. As other biographers have noted, Hillary could not resist the parallel, except in this story she’d fulfill the mission meant for Eleanor. The Hillary-Eleanor comparison was so strong in the First Lady’s mind that some Clinton aides told me they referenced Eleanor’s example to get Hillary to do what they wanted. Clinton, for example, once decided to write a column, titled “Talking It Over,” thereby, as she put it, “following once again the footsteps of Eleanor Roosevelt.”6
Because of the Eleanor connection, the Senate run appeared to be destined. But not to every keeper of the Roosevelt flame. After Hillary visited Eleanor’s childhood home, Val-Kill, in Hyde Park, New York, and another round of Hillary-Eleanor stories appeared in the press, one veteran Democrat had had enough. “Her trying to coyly cuddle up to Eleanor Roosevelt is obscene,” said Richard Wade, who ran Robert F. Kennedy’s 1964 Senate race. “It’s like comparing a thoroughbred race horse and an ordinary jackass.”7
It was perhaps a cruel irony that Monica Lewinsky was one of the best things that ever happened to Hillary Clinton. Until the revelation that her husband had been carousing with a twenty-two-year-old woman, just a few yards from their bedroom in the White House, the growing caricature of the First Lady was that of a congenital liar.
It didn’t help that, in the words of the well-respected independent counsel Robert W. Ray, Hillary made “factually inaccurate” statements to the investigators about her involvement in the controversial Arkansas land deal known as Whitewater. The New York Times columnist William Safire, in a January 1996 op-ed titled “Blizzard of Lies,” cited a series of instances of dishonesty and alleged obstruction of justice on the part of the First Lady. “Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady—a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation—is a congenital liar,” he wrote.8 The writer Christopher Hitchens, no right-wing partisan, would title a book on the Clintons No One Left to Lie To.
That image was fading now—at least a bit—after Monica. The First Lady was receiving sympathetic loo
ks from reporters who’d come to challenge her every assertion, and friendly receptions from people who used to hate her. Everything she said had a renewed power just because she was saying it. Just because she was still standing. She took a joy in it. Her close friend Diane Blair, who died in 2000, revealed in a collection of papers that the First Lady was almost taking joy in the predicament. “[Hillary] sounded very up, almost jolly,” wrote Blair. “Told me how she and Bill and Chelsea had been to church, to a Chinese restaurant, to a Shakespeare play, greeted everywhere with wild applause and cheers—this, she said is what drives their adversaries totally nuts, that they don’t bend, do not appear to be suffering.”9
At the same time, she milked the victim role. At an appearance before six hundred New Yorkers at Buffalo State College, when she was still an unannounced Senate candidate, she took questions for an hour from her largely female fan base. She couldn’t resist engaging in quintessential Clinton pandering, at one point mentioning, “You know, ever since I first came to Buffalo when I was a young girl . . .”10
Clutching a microphone, she delved into a wide range of policy issues. At one point, she touched awkwardly on the subject of divorce. “I know that there are problems,” she said. “I mean, marriage is hard. It is hard work, and I’d be the first to tell ya.” She smiled and the audience rewarded her with sympathetic cheers. When they were again silent, she added one more killer line. “When you have a child,” she said, “you have a special obligation.” The crowd responded with tears and more applause for the woman wronged. The wounded mother who persevered and held her family together. But despite the many carefully dropped hints, public and private, that she might be contemplating divorce, that was never really on the table. All throughout the Lewinsky ordeal, Hillary was far more concerned about her own career than her marriage.
Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine Page 3