In the late summer of 1998, as he prepared to confess his affair with Monica Lewinsky in a live address to the nation, Bill Clinton was out of his element. Strikingly so. As eyewitnesses recalled the scene for me, the president’s complexion was gray, his speech unusually slow, his demeanor almost disoriented. He was “practically carried into the room” by longtime Arkansas friends and Hollywood producers Harry and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, one observer recalls. Absent from Bill Clinton’s moment of ultimate humiliation was his wife, his daughter, and even his press secretary, Mike McCurry, who, according to a reporter he spoke to, was so disgusted with his boss’s behavior that he could barely look at him. In an email, McCurry claimed to me that he was present, but admits to having been “frustrated” with the president. “I was not central to deciding what he should say because that was not my role,” McCurry disclosed, a somewhat bizarre statement for a president’s communication director. “But some part of me said, ‘You got to handle this on your own, big guy, because it is about you and not about the White House, the presidency, or our country.’ ”
Propping up the president by holding his arms, the Thomasons bucked up their fellow Arkansan much as a manager would a wounded prize fighter. “You can do this,” they reassured the gray and sedate president. “You can do it.”
And so Bill Clinton finally did what he almost never had to do in his life: admit he had lied repeatedly and been caught red-handed. For months the president had blamed everyone and everything for the Lewinsky affair. The Republicans had been mean to him. His mother died. Vince Foster died. Yitzhak Rabin had been assassinated. Newt Gingrich and the GOP’s “Contract with America” had defamed him. The “mean-spirited” investigations of his own conduct and of Hillary’s. And, as his staff did, he tried to frame Lewinsky as the problem—the unstoppable predator who pulled a reluctant president into a tawdry affair. He felt sorry for himself, and as such could sometimes be a pathetic sight. “I just cracked,” he told friends. “I just cracked.”
After the speech, the first family headed to Martha’s Vineyard for a family vacation and what appeared to be a very public flogging of the president by a furious wife and daughter. News cameras showed the president walking with only his dog, Buddy, at his side, while Hillary and Chelsea visibly shunned him. Aides let it be known that Mrs. Clinton and her family were doing their best to start “healing” over the revelations—with the not-so-subtle implication that if they could deal with this, then so could the country.11 Among the leaders of the “let’s move on” caucus were feminists, who all but ignored the president’s workplace seduction of a woman barely out of her teens. They applauded their icon Hillary Clinton for standing by her man.12
At the time, there were endless stories about the fate of the Clintons’ marriage, many seeming to originate from sources close to the First Couple. Bill was left to sleep on the couch. His family wouldn’t talk to him. Bill spent hours talking to his dog as if he were a real person. At his 1999 State of the Union address, the president offered a long tribute to his wife and her good works. As he looked up at her in the visitors’ balcony of the House chamber, and on camera, he mouthed the words “I love you” to Hillary. She sat impassive.
This of course was the official story—shame, then forgiveness, then eventual redemption. It’s what the country was meant to see. But others in the Clinton orbit tend toward the cynical. Most of the drama between the two was for public consumption. It wasn’t really what was going on behind closed doors.
“They understand that politics is all about narrative,” a senior Clinton aide tells me. It was Bill Clinton who orchestrated his own public whipping, “the chief scriptwriter,” as the aide describes him. Recalling the scene with Clinton alone with Buddy, an aide laughs. “He had to go to the doghouse—literally,” he says, smiling at the mastery. “That wasn’t spontaneous!” To one friend of Hillary’s, the only believable aspect of the Bill Clinton pity party involved his dog. “The most emotional relationship in Bill’s life was Buddy the dog,” he says without a hint of a grin.
Though it was to her advantage to stick with Bill, Hillary would’ve done it in any case and for a larger rationale. It was the same reason that led her to give up a high-powered law career in New York or Chicago more than two and a half decades earlier to toil in remote Little Rock and gamely fake a southern accent in the backward towns of the Ozarks to appeal to the Bubba vote. She was still, even then, deeply in love with her husband. Hillary felt the same thrill as when she first came across him as a student at Yale Law School, where she overheard a bearded, unkempt young man bragging about the watermelons in Arkansas as “the biggest . . . in the world.”
“Who is that?” she asked a friend.
“That’s Bill Clinton. He’s from Arkansas and that’s all he ever talks about.”13
“He’s really a difficult person, you know, and certainly difficult when you’re going to be a woman who is totally focused on him,” says Michael Medved, the conservative radio show host, who back then was an unapologetic liberal and a friend of Hillary’s in law school. He was among a number who begged Hillary not to date the guy, whom they saw as a brilliant but self-important ass. “She had the world’s most enormous crush on him,” Medved says. “You couldn’t say anything against him. Bill is without any question the love of her life. Attraction is mysterious.”
Years of his adultery did tend to make Mrs. Clinton a little less goo-goo eyed about her husband, however, and she was anything but a wild-eyed romantic. Diane Blair was Hillary Clinton’s best friend, going back to the 1970s. (Blair died in 2000 of lung cancer at the age of sixty-one.) A friend of Blair’s recalled for me a story in the 1990s in which Mrs. Clinton became almost obsessed with the book The Bridges of Madison County. The book, by Robert James Waller, was a nationwide bestseller and would later become a film starring Meryl Streep. The First Lady’s interest in the book seemed unusual, but she kept prodding Blair to read it. Finally, Blair agreed while staying overnight at the White House. At two or three in the morning, according to this friend’s account, the First Lady burst into Blair’s bedroom.
“Did you finish it yet?” she asked.
“Yes,” Blair replied.
“Well, what did you think?”
Blair didn’t want to disappoint the First Lady, but responded truthfully that she didn’t really think the book was that well written.
Hearing the news, Hillary grinned, satisfied. “I knew it was a piece of shit,” she said.
Though long aware of Bill’s limitations in the husband department, the First Lady seemed to have made a sort of peace with them, through willful ignorance. “[T]he Clintons must carry many scars between them, but we found the marriage anything but loveless,” recalls Clinton biographer Taylor Branch, who recounted a conversation with longtime Clinton associate Strobe Talbott. “Their private partnership still seemed warm and eager, never cold, with a spark from somewhere if not libido. This struck Strobe and me as an abiding mystery.”14
In what should have, but didn’t, shock her feminist supporters, Hillary shared her husband’s tendency toward blame shifting and justification for his sexual misconduct. After the Lewinsky disclosures, Hillary’s close friend Blair recorded the First Lady as saying, “Ever since he took office they’ve been going through personal tragedy ([the death of] Vince [Foster], her dad, his mom) and immediately all the ugly forces started making up hateful things about them, pounding on them.”15 The First Lady also indicated to Blair that her husband’s unhappy, fatherless childhood played a role. She insisted on the creation of an “enemies list” of all those out to get her husband.
Hillary in short was still trying to protect him, and take control of his life, whether he liked it or not. A senior aide offers perhaps a fitting metaphor for the relationship. During the White House years, at a public event, Hillary would often depart ahead of her husband, waiting for him in their motorcade. After several minutes passed, the First Lady would send someone back into the event to urge
her husband to get moving. The president, in response, would stay an extra fifteen minutes longer. The aide’s point: She was seeking to control him and he wouldn’t let her, which would make her want him even more. “That’s really the crux of the relationship,” the aide tells me. “She was basically the one always in the car trying to get him to come to her. He won’t until he decides it’s time.” How Bill handles Hillary, as the aide described it, is “sick but brilliant.”
After Monica, according to a multitude of aides and observers, that dynamic changed. Hillary was no longer the one in constant pursuit of Bill’s love and attention. He now needed her in a way he never did before. She and she alone would determine the fate of his presidency. Though determined to save his political fortunes as well as her own, Hillary finally saw her husband for the lout he really was. The scandal liberated Hillary to pursue her own career and her own future. And it put Bill in her eternal debt. As Gail Sheehy, a sympathetic biographer of Mrs. Clinton, once put it, the decision to stay with Bill was “easy.” Perhaps unintentionally evoking references to a business partnership, Sheehy noted, citing a source, simply that Hillary “had an investment in this marriage and his career.”16
Nonetheless Hillary was “legitimately pissed,” a senior Clinton aide says, about Monica. But not for the reasons one might expect. “It wasn’t that he was fucking someone else. It was that he got caught and so rubbed her nose in it. And she had to appear pissed in public in order to save herself.” That was Bill’s (all but) unforgivable sin.
One source widely known to be very close to Bill Clinton said the former president “is paying the price for the rest of his life.” Hillary, like the classic “scorned woman,” is, according to the source, “still sort of pissed off all of the time.” Whether explicit or understood, the First Couple had a new deal, a new spin on their partnership, from then on out. A close friend of the Clintons told biographer Jerry Oppenheimer her attitude when announcing her plans to her husband: “It’s my turn, my day in the sun. You better support me, or else. And by the way, go fuck yourself.”17 (The psychological effect on the daughter who worshipped them both could also prove long-lasting and consequential.)
The stop in Buffalo, where Hillary waxed poetic about the difficulties of marriage, was before the kickoff of a “listening tour” of the state, a savvy ploy to show New Yorkers, especially the often forgotten upstaters, that she was intent on hearing their concerns and that she would be a good proxy in Washington.
Republicans tried to block her run, introducing legislation in the state to prevent her from “carpetbagging.” The law, which was sponsored by Republican assemblywoman Nancy Calhoun, would’ve required Hillary to have lived in the state for five years before being able to represent it. “I thought carpetbagging went out in the 1860s,” Calhoun told the New York Post. “We have lots of talent in both parties within this state, and certainly our next senator should come from New York.”18
“The word ‘carpetbagger’ has crept into Mr. Giuliani’s speeches as he and Mrs. Clinton crisscross the state, each exploring a run for the same United States Senate seat next year,” the New York Times noted.19
But the paper and other Democrats would do their part to mold Mrs. Clinton as the second coming of Robert F. Kennedy, welcoming the celebrity politician as a token of the greatness of New York.
Yet, despite the sympathy Mrs. Clinton was engendering, the Kennedy example proved an apt one for her. Just not in the way she had been expecting. As the New York Times noted in a piece in 2000, “For Robert Kennedy in 1964, and for Mrs. Clinton today, the label ‘carpetbagger’ was really shorthand for a general condemnation, expressed in startlingly similar terms: they were, according to their critics, ambitious, opportunistic, ruthless (for Kennedy) and untrustworthy (for Mrs. Clinton).”20
Robert Kennedy Jr. reflected to reporters that year on “The intensity of feeling with my father’s race, and the almost inexplicable intensity of feeling toward Hillary Clinton. People who ought to like Hillary Clinton, but don’t, and can’t really explain why, but just kind of have a visceral reaction to her—that’s the same kind of thing that I remember from my father.”21
For the first time in her life Hillary needed to campaign for herself, and the dirty secret was that she wasn’t good at it, especially when compared to her husband.
“I’ve seen her and him in rooms, and she doesn’t have the whirr,” veteran Democratic campaign consultant Bob Shrum tells me in an interview. “Your eyes aren’t constantly drawn to her the way they are to him.”
Similarly, a former Clinton aide compared Hillary to Al Gore, a policy wonk who could be famously stiff and awkward in public settings and whose campaign style Clinton once compared to Mussolini. “Gore hated Clinton because Clinton was everything that Gore wasn’t,” he told me. At the funeral for Democratic operative Bob Squier, a close Gore friend, the vice president watched with envy and resentment as Clinton, who didn’t know Squier as well, delivered the moving, crowd-pleasing eulogy that Gore knew he could never have managed.
“It’s the same thing with Hillary,” said the aide. “She knows that she’s probably better than him on the intellectual stuff—though not a lot—but he blows her away on the retail.”
A former presidential press aide similarly noted the contrast between the nimble Bill and the more programmed Hillary. “He was constantly improvising speeches right up to the very last second even in the middle of the speech,” he recalled during our interview. “There’s nothing like sitting next to him watching him give a speech, and watching a new speechwriter who’s written this thing just flip through the pages and try to find where he’s talking about. She’s written speeches in advance, pretty much has it committed to memory, and wouldn’t improvise a word, frankly much more like Bush or Obama.”
From the start, she faced stumbles. For one, there was the purchase of her house. New York, as one journalist put it at the time, “had a residency ‘requirement’ so lax that it was more of a suggestion.”22 So it was relatively easy for the First Family to find digs that allowed her to comply with state law in a timely fashion.
They settled on Chappaqua, with a population of less than ten thousand, just north of New York City in Westchester County. The house was listed at $1.7 million in 1999. The trouble was the Clintons were broke—owing a fortune in legal fees from the many investigations into their personal lives. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime friend known for allegations of questionable business and legal dealings, offered to front them the bulk of the money, $1.3 million. The loan raised questions as to whether the Clintons were evading campaign and gift laws and made for an unneeded reminder of what the New York Times in an editorial labeled the “ethical sloppiness of the Clinton White House.”23 The Clintons eventually opted for a conventional mortgage.
For the first time in decades the Clintons were not living in public housing, but their personal taste had not seemed to mature with the times. A former White House press aide remembers the house search with a mix of humor and horror.
“We went to look at these houses, and the houses that they liked had shag rugs and gold walls,” the aide tells me. Everything Bill and Hillary favored seemed like it had come from the 1970s, the last time they were ordinary citizens. “It was horrible and I just remember being with the press pool and thinking, ‘Oh God. Do not say out loud how much you like this house,’ ” the aide says. “I think it just says a lot. Can you imagine living in this bubble for so long and then all of a sudden being let out of it?”
Further troubles came when the First Lady got quickly out of sorts with Jewish voters by sitting and smiling through an anti-Israel diatribe by the wife of Yasser Arafat, Suha Arafat, whom Hillary kissed at the event’s close. She also clumsily announced that “I’ve always been a Yankees fan”—which no one believed of a girl from Chicago, who actually grew up rooting for the Cubs.
Bill Clinton, of course, was an enthusiastic booster of Hillary’s fortunes. In part, this was because he always saw h
er in public office. It could also have helped alleviate some of his guilt over Monica. Or perhaps it was because he didn’t have any choice. On the day of her Senate campaign announcement, the president did something unusual, if not unprecedented. He sat onstage for forty minutes and never said a word.
Ever the political analyst, the president was all but chomping at the bit for Hillary to face off against Rudy Giuliani. When Lazio signaled early on that in deference to Giuliani he wasn’t going to join the race, Clinton pulled him aside during an encounter in the Oval Office.
As Lazio recalls in our interview, the president engaged in his usual practice with potential adversaries—flattery. Clinton’s ability for “charm offensives” has long been considered a strategic asset to the Clinton brand.
“You know what the very best day in Hillary’s campaign has been?” Lazio recalls Clinton asking him. “The day you decided to pull out of the race.”
Clearly studying polls of the race, the president assessed Giuliani as polarizing and unlikable. (This was the pre-9/11 Rudy, who as mayor could be an abrasive combatant with his many enemies in the city.) “Giuliani is an easy person to run against,” Clinton told Lazio. “He’s got a lot of negatives.” Lazio, by contrast, was forty-two years old, an attractive and likable Roman Catholic who had built a reputation in Washington as a moderate who won elections by wide margins in his Long Island district.
Lazio thinks back on that encounter and concedes, “Maybe he was just being Clinton and just being charming. I don’t know. Maybe that, in fact, was the way they were thinking. The moderate who was well liked and wasn’t easy to shoot at, there wasn’t much negative that they could say about me. Of course they did end up trying to morph me into Newt Gingrich, relying on media ads and thinking people don’t know that much. Actually, I thought the ads were very cynical but very effective.”
Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine Page 4