First In His Class

by David Maraniss

  There was little history of sexual restraint in Bill and Roger’s family culture, no puritanical sense that sexual propriety was the barometer of goodness and morality. Suspicion, gossip, and mystery were always part of the sexual mix. Edith Cassidy constantly accused her husband Eldridge Cassidy of cheating on her, while at the same time she developed a reputation for engaging in affairs with certain doctors in Hope. William Jefferson Blythe may have had five or more wives in his short life, wooing and discarding women with dispatch. Virginia married Roger Clinton even though she knew he was a philanderer. During their tumultuous marriage, Roger was often overcome by jealousy after catching Virginia flirting at nightclubs or hearing the gossip that she had been seen around town with other men. Bill Clinton came out of that environment, and took from it the competing impulses of a youth who had walked to church alone in a city of earthly pleasures. He was, at once, the good boy, the Family Hero, and the inveterate flatterer and flirt, constantly searching for more girls—and later, women—who would be charmed by him and feed his ego.

  His marriage to Hillary Rodham in 1975 seemed to have little inhibiting effect on him. During the 1978 gubernatorial race, campaign manager Rudy Moore had to fire a travel aide who boasted publicly about the nightclubs he had visited with the candidate. Provocative women seemed to find their way to the governor’s office, “hangers-on who could get you in trouble,” as Moore described them. Clinton’s judgment at times was not as good as it should have been, Moore thought, though he believed that “appearances were more than what was going on.” Clinton’s travel aide during his first term, Randy White, said that the governor enjoyed nothing more than to go on the road, especially to Fayetteville, where he would frequent a club in the bottom of the old post office, and dance and hang out “until they threw us out.” Wherever they went, White said, Clinton’s table attracted a crowd of pretty women drawn to the powerful young governor, who enjoyed the attention. “He loved the road,” White said. “He loved it.”

  In more than two years at Clinton’s side, White said later, he saw no evidence that the governor was having extramarital affairs and was not asked by Clinton to conceal his activities. In contrast, several state troopers who worked on the governor’s personal security staff after his return to power in 1983 claimed that Clinton was promiscuous and that he frequently used them to solicit sexual partners. Trooper L. D. Brown, who was on the security staff from 1983 to 1985, alleged that he was asked to try to solicit more than one hundred women for Clinton during those two years. On the matter of how many, if any, of those women acceded to Clinton’s desires, Brown was unclear. He called himself “the go-between, the buffer” for a politician with a voracious sexual appetite.

  • • •

  HILLARY Rodham Clinton and Carolyn Yeldell Staley were on the back lawn of the Governor’s Mansion one summer day, sticking croquet hoops into the grass and talking about their husbands. Carolyn had married a soft-spoken photographer and art teacher named Jerry Staley, who remained in the background, content in his role as the dependable husband and father of two daughters and a son, willing to let his wife be the star of the family as the aspiring singer and longtime friend of the governor of Arkansas. Hillary said she could never marry someone as quiet as Jerry. She liked to spar, she said. She liked to “get into it.” She had to have an equal. Then, pondering the ups and downs of her life with Bill Clinton, she said, “I wonder how history is going to note our marriage.”

  The long haul, the view toward the future and history, was evident in the Clinton and Rodham partnership from its formation. For Clinton, perpetually infatuated with a shining new idea or a fresh face, Hillary was the rare constant, her intellect, resilience, and ambition always there, equal to his. When he had thought about marrying her, it was not so much the sight of the young woman that overwhelmed him as an image of an older version: Hillary, he told friends, was the one woman with whom he could imagine growing old and not getting bored. Her feelings about him seemed more immediate and passionate; she adored him, one friend said, with “a romantic, fifteen-year-old, poetic, teenage love.” By the mid-1980s, those early dynamics were still apparent, although there had been several adjustments in the partnership, most of them made by Hillary. Year by year, in their joint political enterprise, she had taken on more tasks—some that her husband had asked her to do, some that she felt obliged to perform because it was clear to her that he did not want to do them or was not good at them. After ten years of marriage, those tasks were starting to define her.

  One of Hillary’s missions was to protect her husband by being his gate-keeper. During her early years in Arkansas, she often deferred to Clinton’s judgments about people; but that had changed forever after his defeat in 1980, when she thought that he had been ill served by poor advice and by his own amiability and that she needed to take a more direct role in his career. After their return to the Governor’s Mansion, she would tell friends that she understood him better than anyone, better than his sycophants or critics, and that it was her responsibility to allow him to be his true self. One way to do that was to prevent other people from imposing on him if they seemed against his best interests. She said that she wanted him to be free to use his own mind, which she considered creative and even visionary. Although she was naturally skeptical and direct, even hard-edged in her dealings, Hillary’s role as her husband’s protector exaggerated those character traits. Her concerns were largely political, though at times there seemed to be a sexual component to her protectiveness. A male friend of Clinton’s noticed that Hillary was classifying the people around Bill as either “one of the goods or one of the bads. If you were bad, you had to be kept away from Bill, because if he was with the bad guys he would relax and enjoy himself and make comments about attractive women waving at him in the crowd.”

  In her effort to protect Clinton, Hillary was assisted by two women whom she did not consider threats: press secretary Joan Roberts, who insisted on being in attendance whenever Clinton or another member of the staff spoke to the press; and chief of staff Betsey Wright, whose relationship with Clinton resembled that of a bossy big sister. Wright was constantly checking on his whereabouts, sending out scouts to see what he was doing and what his enemies were saying about him, thinking up explanations to put his actions in the best possible light, and trying to keep him away from people she thought wanted to exploit him. These three strong women around Clinton became known in Little Rock as “the Valkyries,” named for the wise and immortal maidens of Old Norse mythology who selected the heroic warriors fit to die in battle and be escorted to Valhalla.

  Clinton both encouraged the defensive cordon put up around him and bristled at the way it inhibited him. “I won’t have it! I won’t have it!” he once shouted at Wright when she insisted that a state policeman escort him on his morning jogs. The almost sibling nature of Wright’s relationship with Clinton at times stretched the boundaries of boss and chief of staff. His habits began to grate on her, and hers on him. Once when he was noisily chomping on an ice cube, his mouth impolitely open, and reached into his cup to get another cube, Wright swatted it out of his hand, which caused him to slap her, reflexively, like a brother hitting his sister. It was only a tap, and it was the only time he struck her, but it was by no means their only fight. She was the aide on whom he vented his frustrations. He staged so many temper tantrums in front of her that he would send her earplugs as an expression of apology. His quarrels with Hillary were even louder and more frequent. But as Hillary told Carolyn Staley that day when they were setting up for croquet on the back lawn, she liked to spar. Mansion workers confided to frequent guests that there were times when they would have loved to disappear while the Clintons screamed at each other.

  Another continuing task for Hillary was that of moneymaker. It had been apparent since the beginning of their partnership that Clinton cared little about money outside the political campaign context, and that she would carry the financial burden for the family. But as they entered the
prime wage-earning years of middle age, the arrangement became lopsided. Clinton’s part of the deal was to be governor and make a national name for himself while bringing home $35,000 a year in salary. Hillary felt the need to build the family savings account at the same time that she was taking on more political assignments that consumed hours she could have been billing law clients. Her dealings in the cattle futures commodities market with Jim Blair in the late 1970s marked the first of several forays into the financial world.

  Roy Drew, then a stock broker at E. F. Hutton in Little Rock, had received a call from Hillary in the spring of 1983, just as she was getting into her work on the Education Standards Committee. She told Drew that she and two of her partners at Rose Law, Vince Foster, Jr., and Webster Hubbell, had $15,000 each that they wanted him to invest. They called their account Midlife Investors. Foster and Hubbell were placid partners while Hillary was constantly checking in with Drew. “I recommended Diamond Shamrock and a movie deal and Firestone,” Drew recalled. “And Hillary would call and say, ‘What’s Firestone doing?’ and I’d say, ‘Well, it’s up an eighth today,’ and she’d say, ‘Why isn’t it doing anything?’ She was used to the fast action of cattle futures. The next day she’d call and say, ‘Where’s Firestone?’ and I’d say, ‘Down a half,’ and she’d say, ‘Oh, no, what’s the matter?’ She’d call three or four times a week.”

  Some people sensed a growing resentment in Hillary that she had to take on so many private duties in the partnership while at the same time she was being asked, unfairly, she thought, to sacrifice material things. In 1985, Hillary told consultant Dick Morris that she wanted to build a swimming pool on the mansion grounds. She said among other things it would be great for Chelsea. “I said, ‘How could you even think of that? You’ll get killed for that!’ ” Morris recalled. “And she said, ‘Well, it’s really not for us, the mansion is for all future governors of the state and they’ll all be able to use it.’ And I said, ‘You’ll never be able to sell that argument. The next time you fly over Little Rock, look down and count the number of swimming pools you see.’ She said, ‘Well, a lot of people have swimming pools.ߣ I got really sarcastic with her and said, ‘On the next poll, do you want me to ask whether people have swimming pools?’ She was really mad. Very angry. She said, ‘Why can’t we lead the lives of normal people?’ I saw in that flash the resentment from a lot of those issues, the sacrifices they were making staying in public life.” Clinton, for his part, lamented to friends that he held a job with little income, one where it was politically impractical to seek a raise. He said he felt bad that he was not living up to his responsibility to support the family. But politics was still his only track.

  Another role that Hillary assumed was related to the first two—protector and financial guarantor. She was her husband’s public relations troubleshooter and legal problem solver. She provided a full range of formal and informal services. As the public relations consultant, she would devote hours to courting John Robert Starr, the managing editor of the Arkansas Democrat, in an occasionally effective effort to persuade him to go easier on her husband. As the lawyer, she would quietly represent Clinton’s interests, working to resolve some of the most politically sensitive issues in Arkansas, including the resolution of the long-running desegregation case in the Little Rock school district and the state’s financial dispute over its disengagement from the costly Grand Gulf nuclear power plant near Port Gibson, Mississippi.

  The Grand Gulf case provoked questions, even from Clinton allies, about potential conflicts of interest involving the governor’s wife’s law firm and state issues. Dick Morris said that when he told his wife Eileen McGann, who was also a lawyer, that Rose Law was representing the Public Service Commission in the Grand Gulf matter, McGann thought it looked like a conflict and said of Hillary, “She’s got to be out of her mind!” On his next visit to Little Rock, according to Morris, he raised the issue with Clinton, who said that he needed Hillary and the Rose firm on the case because “anybody else would mangle it.” Morris said that Hillary reacted angrily when he asked her about it, reminding him that Rose was a respected firm which had been doing business with the state long before she came along. Her solution was to dissociate herself from fees Rose Law received in the case.

  During the 1986 gubernatorial race, in which Clinton prevailed over Frank White in a bitter rematch, White raised the conflict of interest question regarding Hillary and Grand Gulf. In response, Rose Law issued a statement saying that fees from the case “were segregated from other income and were distributed to members of the firm other than Mrs. Clinton so that she in fact received no direct or indirect benefit from the fees.” The question was framed in financial terms, disregarding the larger notion of Hillary Clinton as the private lawyer watching out for her husband’s political interests. The Clinton team’s political response to White was to belittle him for picking on the governor’s wife. They printed bumper stickers and put up billboards with the message: “Frank White for First Lady.” It was another tactic, like the mea culpa commercial of 1982, that worked so well that the Clintons stored it away for future use.

  There were other potential conflicts involving Hillary’s work as a Rose lawyer and institutions with political or personal connections to her and her husband the governor. In one case, Dan Lasater, the bond broker and major Clinton campaign contributor who had gone to jail on a drug conviction, was sued for fraud in the collapse of a savings and loan in Illinois. Hillary, representing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, helped arrange an out-of-court settlement for less than one-tenth of what the government originally sought. In another, she helped represent Jim McDougal when the thrift he owned, Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, sought permission from the state securities commissioner to raise money by issuing preferred stock in an effort to maintain the minimum capital requirements and avert insolvency. The Madison case underscored the professional, personal, and political triangle of interests in the Clintons’ lives during that era.

  At one point of the triangle was Hillary’s corner office on the third floor of the red brick Rose Law building, a handsomely converted downtown YWCA with hardwood floors and an indoor swimming pool. It was from that office that she signed a letter to the securities commissioner on behalf of McDougal and received a “Dear Hillary” letter in reply. It would later be a question of dispute as to how Hillary became McDougal’s lawyer in that matter. According to her account, she was merely helping a young Rose associate who did most of the work. According to McDougal and his wife Susan, Hillary actively solicited the savings and loan’s business, showing up at Madison’s Art Deco-style Little Rock branch office one day and saying she needed new clients and would like the thrift to put her and Rose on retainer. “Hillary came in and was telling us about the problem; the problem was finances and she was not bringing enough in to her law firm,” Susan McDougal later said. “I remember Jim laughing and saying, ‘Well, one lawyer’s as good as another, we might as well help Hillary.’ ”

  At the second point of the triangle was the Georgian-style Governor’s Mansion several blocks south of downtown where Bill and Hillary Clinton kept their personal papers related to their private financial relationship with the McDougals in Whitewater Development Company. The land development enterprise along the White River had never made the money McDougal had promised it would, and now, by the mid-1980s, it apparently had cost the Clintons tens of thousands of dollars in interest payments on the original loans they had taken with the McDougals to buy the property. McDougal was feeling regret that he had lured the Clintons into the deal. It was, he said, “the dumbest thing I had ever done in my life, from start to finish.”

  The final point in the triangle was the governor’s office on the second floor of the Capitol. It was from that office that Clinton, as governor, appointed the securities commissioner who regulated McDougal’s savings and loan. And it was also from that office that Clinton, the politician, operated his permanent campaign, which included the expe
nsive concept of using paid media to advance his legislative and political agenda. McDougal had a connection to that as well. In April 1985, he replenished the coffers of the permanent campaign by holding a fundraiser at his Madison branch office in Little Rock, helping to pay off Clinton’s political debts, including unsecured personal loans from the Bank of Cherry Valley, which was owned by Clinton’s aide and fatherly adviser, Maurice Smith. Clinton and Betsey Wright attended the McDougal fundraiser for “about twenty-five minutes,” Wright recalled. Wright viewed the event as an effort by McDougal to “heal a breach with Bill” that had formed since the disappointment of the Whitewater deal. McDougal later said it was Maurice Smith who asked him to stage the event, and that he and Smith, both nondrinkers, had sat up in his office on the second floor while Clinton made the rounds down below. Wright collected the contributions from McDougal and deposited the checks in Clinton’s campaign account that night.

  Hillary Rodham Clinton, who touched all three corners of the triangle, saw no conflict in her actions. As a lawyer, she said that she was acting professionally, dissociating herself from fees gathered by Rose in its dealings with the state, giving her best advice to clients, whether they were the FDIC or Madison Guaranty. As a wife and mother, she was trying to bring her family financial security. As a political adviser and pro bono public servant, she was devoting her time and intellect to the betterment of the state. Her motives always seemed practical—she was looking for solutions—but there was also a sanctimonious aspect to it that tended to blind her and her husband to the appearances of what they were doing. Clinton considered her the ethical pillar of their partnership. If she handled a matter for him, he assumed that it would be done extraordinarily well; hence his decision to pick her to lead the Education Standards Committee, because she was “the person closer to me than anyone else,” and his statement to Morris that “anyone else would mangle” the Grand Gulf dilemma. He thought she would keep him out of trouble.