Do you understand me? I’m going to really make sure you get it. Then I’m going to get on a plane and I’m going to turn around and come home. So you’d better be ready Friday the twentieth to meet with me. So I’m going to let you know just how I feel about what a rude little pig you really are. You are a rude, thoughtless little pig, okay?
He was caught being Alec Baldwin. So naturally, he blamed someone else, namely Basinger, for leaking the tape to the media in the middle of a nasty custody battle, and causing him to lose all self control. Basinger denies publicizing the tape.
A spokesperson for the actor released a statement that said, “In the best interest of the child, Alec will do what the mother is pathologically incapable of doing…keeping his mouth shut and obeying the court order. The mother and her lawyer leaked this sealed material in violation of a court order. Although Alec acknowledges that he should have used different language in parenting his child”—I’ll say—“everyone who knows him privately knows what he has been put through for the past six years.”
Thankfully, Baldwin never had a chance with his daughter to “straighten you out.” A superior court commissioner temporarily suspended Baldwin’s visitation rights.
As if on cue, Baldwin temporarily stopped blaming Basinger. He publicly apologized to his little girl, whose exact age he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Then he started bashing Basinger again, saying his diatribe was aimed at the wrong female.
* * *
He publicly apologized to his little girl, whose exact age he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
* * *
He was not through. In 2008, he released a book that gives—are you ready?—advice to divorcing dads.
A word of advice to Alec Baldwin: When fighting for custody, refrain from calling your child any type of farm animal. I wish someone would straighten this guy out.
21
Wicked Witch of the West Wing
HILLARY CLINTON
He ran a gas station down in St. Louis…No, Mahatma Gandhi was a great leader of the twentieth century.
—Hillary Clinton joking about the Indian leader at a St. Louis fund-raiser, January 2004
We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.
—Hillary warns well-to-do Democrats that federal tax cuts will end, San Francisco, June 2004
I could hardly breathe. Gulping for air, I started crying and yelling at him, “What do you mean? What are you saying? Why did you do this to me?”
—Confronting Bill’s infidelity in her 2003 memoir, Living History
HILLARY HAS THE HONOR of being the first celebutard to run for president of the United States. One man morphed into celebutardom after losing the White House (Al Gore), and another achieved celebutard status after spending time in the Oval Office (Jimmy Carter). But Hillary stands as the only person, man or woman, who would shamelessly ride her brush with fame (marriage to Bill Clinton) and humiliation (Monica Lewinsky) nearly to the top role in politics even before the ink was dry on her Official Celebutard certificate. Don’t underestimate her.
You’ll notice that I call her Hillary. Not Hillary Rodham, as she was known early in her marriage, not Hillary Rodham Clinton, as she grudgingly renamed herself during her irritating Political Wife phase, and not even Hillary Clinton, as she sheepishly defined herself during the period in which she publicly licked her wounds and played stand-by-your-man.
For a time, I wickedly labeled her “Monica Lewinsky’s ex-boyfriend’s wife,” a phrase I saw reproduced on a bumper sticker.
She is Hillary, a singular creature. Some women in her position would take up hobbies. Others would file for divorce or resort to physical violence. But Hillary’s self control borders on science fiction. She has worked too hard, studied too intensely, and endured embarrassments that would have felled a lesser creature—all in a fiercely focused quest to get to a place where she might stand on her own, wield incredible power, and most importantly, get the last laugh.
Hillary Diane Rodham was born October 26, 1947, in Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of Hugh Rodham, who ran a successful textile business, and Dorothy, a homemaker. She has two younger brothers.
HILLARY ENTERED COLLEGE AS, of all things, a Young Republican, but was rapidly radicalized by her commitment to civil-rights struggles and her opposition to the Vietnam War. In 1969, as she received her bachelor’s degree in political science, Wellesley College made her the first student in history to deliver a commencement address. It would be Hillary’s ticket to fame, leading to a seven-minute standing ovation and a profile in Life magazine. Years later, the speaker who preceded Hillary to the podium, a mild-mannered, Republican African-American Senator from Massachusetts—the only black man in the Senate—Edward Brooke, reflected on serving as the road kill beneath Hillary’s loafers.
Before Hillary stood up, Brooke addressed the students about political dissent. (Coincidentally, Brooke was Barbara Walters’ married lover in the ’70s, she revealed in her 2008 memoir, launching a veritable celebutard daisy chain.) He ended his Wellesley remarks by mentioning that the national poverty rate, which stood at 22 percent in 1959, had fallen to 13.3 percent a decade later. He interpreted that statistic as meaning that society cares about people, but needs to do more. He never saw the freight train coming.
HILLARY TOOK the stage with both guns blazing. She “was not rude but her tone was strident,” Brooke wrote in his 2007 memoir, Bridging the Divide. “She challenged my comment as if we were in a debate.”
Here’s what she said: “What does it mean to hear that 13.3 percent of the people in this country are below the poverty line? That’s a percentage. We’re not interested in social reconstruction; it’s human reconstruction. How can we talk about percentages and trends?”
Thirty-eight years later Brooke, still smarting, concluded, “I think that no matter who the commencement speaker had been that day, or what he or she had said, Hillary Rodham planned to use the situation to her advantage.” He was all the more stunned because Hillary had volunteered for his 1966 Senate campaign. For Hillary, loyalty would not come naturally.
For years, the White House put Hillary’s senior thesis under lock and key, keeping critics awake at night. She wrote it on union organizer Saul Alinsky, who’s been called a Communist. The thesis was dubbed the “Rosetta Stone” which would provide answers to Hillary’s radical ways. Why was the White House hiding it?
The fuss, however, was lifted in 2001, after the Clintons left office and the paper was made available to anyone who could slog through it. Hillary was stupid to have concealed a rather pedestrian paper, written in formal academic language, in which she agrees with Alinsky that the poor are powerless, but writes that the man may actually have hurt unfortunate souls by delaying their entry into the moneyed classes. Hillary got an “A” on the paper. Critics lost their Rosetta.
It was at Yale Law School that the committed feminist began dating the man who would determine her personal and professional future, that charming rascal from Arkansas, Bill Clinton. Several times, she turned down offers of marriage, afraid that hitching her wagon to his would subsume her identity.
She served as a member of the impeachment inquiry staff in Washington, D.C., whose work drove President Richard M. Nixon to resign from office in 1974 before, ol’ Bill wore her down.
The pair wed in 1975, settling down in Arkansas. Hillary kept her maiden name, something that upset both her and Bill’s mother. She became partner in the Rose Law firm, which concentrated within its walls all the power and influence you can squeeze into Arkansas. The Clintons’ perennial good fortune, and their gleeful unwillingness to explain why they were so blessed, would from that day forward go hand-in-hand, like country music, dogs and infidelity.
In 1980, daughter Chelsea was born.
As Hillary moved up the food chain as a Southern player, Bill made his run at political power, getting elected state attorney general, then governor. It was around this time, the early 1980s, t
hat Hillary, ever-grudgingly, sometimes started using the name “Clinton.”
Before Bill was elected president, the bimbos started erupting. First to appear was Gennifer Flowers, an Arkansas lounge singer who held a press conference announcing a twelve-year affair with the governor. With the benefit of hindsight, today we may parse Bill Clinton’s denial, which he made during a 1992 post-Super Bowl appearance with Hillary on 60 Minutes.
STEVE KROFT: She [Flowers] is alleging and has described in some detail in the supermarket tabloid what she calls a twelve-year affair with you.
BILL CLINTON: That allegation is false.
He was telling the truth, Clintonian style. Flowers later admitted that her affair with Clinton did not carry on as long as she initially claimed. But in 1992 Kroft, and the rest of America, had no experience with a man who would one day face the nation on television and declare, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”—and mean that oral sex didn’t count. Apparently, neither did the unorthodox use of a cigar.
HILLARY CLINTON: You know, I’m not sitting here—some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I’m sitting here because I love him, and I respect him, and I honor what he’s been through and what we’ve been through together. And you know, if that’s not enough for people, then heck, don’t vote for him.
She also suggested—in what would become a familiar defense—that Flowers was a complete wacko. It was not the last time the little woman would bail out her miserable husband. And not the first time she ran roughshod over the reputation of someone who got in her way.
Was this payback? Bill Clinton campaigned for president on the promise of “two for the price of one,” meaning Hillary would be in charge, too. On November 3, 1992, he was elected the forty-second president of the United States. Hillary, making good on the co-president threat, took an office in the West Wing of the White House, not the east, where First Ladies normally preside. From the start, it was a disaster.
Fresh from the election, Bill put his wife in charge of concocting a national health-care plan. Why an unelected First Lady should be handed such awesome responsibility was a question he preferred not to address. Hillary attempted to push down America’s throat a monster program that smacked of the old Soviet Union. She operated secretively, claiming, like your mother, to know what’s best.
Critics, shut out of the planning, their views marginalized by Hillary, felt the health care program was too expensive, too big, too centrally controlled. It was abandoned before reaching a vote in Congress. Hillary’s first all-out debacle is considered a chief reason Republicans gained fifty-three seats in the House and seven in the Senate during the 1994 mid-term elections. When it was over, Hillary licked her wounds by talking to the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt, another politically active First Lady whom she felt was also misunderstood. For the first time, people started whispering that Hillary might be a loon.
If Bill Clinton was a likeable character, distrust, even hatred, stuck to Hillary like Velcro. She was dubbed “Lady Macbeth,” the emasculating power behind the throne. In many ways, the title proved accurate.
The Clinton years were scarred by scandals inevitably tagged by the suffix “gate”—echoes of “Watergate”—and Hillary was front and center for every one. “Whitewatergate” questioned Hillary’s conflict of interest in an Arkansas land deal that lost people millions. In “Travelgate,” Hillary was accused of firing the entire White House travel office in order to give business to friends in Arkansas. Vince Foster’s 1993 suicide to this day raises questions about whether Hillary ordered that potentially damaging files related to the Whitewater scandal be removed from Foster’s office. What did he know that was worth dying for?
In “Filegate,” Hillary was accused of gathering hundreds of FBI background reports on former Republican White House employees. Even a $1,000 investment in cattle futures made while in Arkansas, which generated an eye-popping $100,000 profit, came back to bite her—was the profit on the deal really a bribe?
In 1996, world-renowned physician Dr. Burton Lee told me that at the dawn of the Clinton administration he was fired from the White House medical office after he asked to see President Clinton’s health records. “There isn’t any question in my mind that the person who fired me was Hillary,” Lee told me.
Her fingerprints were everywhere, but they vanished like writing in the sand. When the Independent Counsel issued final reports on various Clinton scandals in 2000, they contained insufficient evidence against Hillary.
The mark of Hillary would also vanish from the case that would mark the First Lady’s biggest disgrace, as well as her greatest opportunity: the Monica Lewinsky Mess.
But before Monica, there was Paula Jones.
In 1994, Jones charged that three years earlier, then-Governor Clinton lured her into a hotel room with the help of a state trooper—launching yet another scandal dubbed “Troopergate.” She said he exposed his penis and asked for sex. She turned him down.
This revelation led Clinton strategist James Carville to dismiss her with, “Drag $100 bills through trailer parks, there’s no telling what you’ll find.”
Jones, crude and unpolished, was laughed at. Her husband divorced her. Her lawsuit was dismissed. But she won vindication of a sort after Clinton settled with her for $850,000, money she used for plastic surgery. The floodgates were open.
In 1998, Juanita Broaddrick accused Bill Clinton of raping her two decades earlier. Kathleen Willey accused him of putting her hand on his penis and grabbing her breast. Neither claim ended with charges, but they made for good headlines—Hide the kids! A sitting president was running amok! It would have spelled death to another marriage. But Bill and Hillary hunkered down together, and fought the accusations like professional hit men. Hillary was not giving up her perch, a heartbeat from power, for all the bimbos in the world.
But try as they might to kill it, the Jones affair would not die. And it spawned the event that would linger over his presidency, and, ironically, become the launching pad for Hillary’s political career. Clinton perjured himself in the Jones case. He denied, under oath, that he had sex with yet another woman, Monica Lewinsky, the intern who would soon haunt his every waking minute, and torture his long and sleepless nights.
First came the denials.
“I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” Bill Clinton swore to the nation, live on TV, in 1998. It was a shot heard ‘round the world.
“It is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president,” Hillary fired off on the Today show.
IT HAS BEEN widely reported—and flatly denied by Hillary’s scandal lawyer, David Kendall—that disgraced Hollywood “investigator to the stars” Anthony Pellicano (long before he was convicted in 2008 of racketeering, wiretapping, and running a criminal enterprise) was brought in by Hillary in 1992 to analyze and discredit sexually explicit tape recordings between Bill Clinton and Gennifer Flowers.
WAS HE INVOLVED? Mary Matalin, political director for the first President Bush’s re-election campaign, said on her syndicated radio show in 1997: “I got the letters from Pellicano to [women linked to Clinton] intimidating them. I had tapes of the conversations from Pellicano to the women. I got handwritten letters from the women. I got one letter from one of the women’s dads, saying, ‘This is so horrible. Here’s what they’re going to do to us.’”
One wonders how Monica Lewinsky’s former Beverly Hills High School drama teacher and lover, Andy Bleiler, miraculously appeared on his Oregon porch one day in the midst of scandal, alongside his miserable-looking wife. As if reading from the Clintons’ script, he dubbed Monica a stalker.
Blieiler’s lawyer famously quoted a scheming Lewinsky as having her sights set on servicing Bill Clinton in any way possible.
“I’m going to go to Washington to get my presidential knee pads,” quoth Lewinsky.
I asked Pellicano in 1998 if he had a hand in dredging
up Bleiler. He would not confirm or deny.
He did say, somewhat oddly, “You’re a smart girl. No comment.”
BUT IT ALL UNRAVELED, like the seams on the blue semen-stained dress that Lewinsky carefully put away.
Unfortunately for Bill (or maybe not) Monica Lewinsky had a big mouth. She blabbed of the affair in conversations surreptitiously tape recorded by White House staffer Linda Tripp, who hoped to write a book.
* * *
Unfortunately for Bill (or maybe not) Monica Lewinsky had a big mouth.
* * *
Bill gave unfortunate testimony to a Grand Jury, in which he explained he was telling the truth when he said he isn’t sexing up a lowly intern.
“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” he said. It should be etched on his tombstone.
Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr had been looking to nail the Clintons for financial malfeasance related to Whitewater. But Clinton was prosecuted for lying about Monica. That’s right, the president of the United States, leader of the free world, was impeached for receiving a blow job.
Bill Clinton became only the second president in history to be impeached, charged with perjury and obstruction of justice. (The Senate acquitted him in 1999, as it did Andrew Johnson 131 years earlier.)
For Hillary, life began here. She was transformed into the sympathetic, wounded party. In her memoir, Living History, Hillary shrieked with raw emotion at Bill, whom she exiled to sleep on the couch. The histrionics seemed unlikely from a woman so controlled. But the description polled well with her core supporters: women.
Celebutards Page 17