Rewriting History Part 10

Perhaps more to the point, it is the scandal for which Hillary is most directly responsible. It was Jim Blair's pursuit of influence that likely led him to entice Hillary into trading cattle futures. Jim McDougal was clearly guilty of a wide array of criminal activity, of which Hillary might have known nothing when she first got to know him. Others may have pushed Hillary to fire the Travel Office employees. Her brothers were at the heart of the pardon scandal. But the gifts were Hillary's own project. No one can imagine Bill caring about what kind of china he had. (To him, the only important China was a country.) This was pure Hillary.

Hillary's brazen solicitation of lavish gifts demonstrates that she is absolutely fearless in doing things that are unseemly at best and corrupt at worst. She obviously knew the gifts would be a problem politically. That's why she delayed taking them until after she was elected to the Senate. But her success at escaping the consequences of her previous scandals seems only to have kindled an arrogance within her that verges on delusions of invulnerability.

Finally, it reminds us that Hillary lies at the center of a network of friends, who are willing to shower her with presents for one of two motives: either deep admiration or consummate opportunism. Some of these gifts may have been tokens of genuine admiration, even affection. But how many were down payments in a campaign to win her favor and gain influence? Can anyone fully insulate him- or herself from the feelings of obligation that must accompany the receipt of each gift? Only a true ingrate could accept such gifts without feeling warm - and indebted - toward the giver.

THE BOOK DEAL: HAVING HER CAKE AND EATING IT TOO.

How ironic that Living History itself should offer one final window onto Hillary's latter-day priorities - not only in its content, but also in the terms under which she arranged to publish it.

As with the gifts Hillary received, the book deal Hillary struck with Simon & Schuster had to be consummated in the narrow but busy window between the election and her inauguration as senator. And for the same reason: Such a deal was unseemly for a Senate candidate, legal for a first lady, but probably illegal for a senator.

During her Senate campaign, Hillary said nothing to let on that she was planning to sign an enormous book deal as soon as she was elected. Indeed, she practiced a particularly Clintonian sleight of hand over the matter, telling Lucinda Franks of Talk magazine in September 1999 that she had "turned down a $5 million book offer" earlier that year.

The implication, of course, was that she would not indulge in writing a get-rich-quick book; instead, HILLARY would focus her full attention on her senatorial duties. Who would have imagined that the real reason she turned down the $5 million was that it wasn't enough?

Ultimately, Simon & Schuster won the auction for Hillary's book, giving the former first lady and future senator an $8 million advance against royalties. While members of the House of Representatives may not accept advances for books - only royalties based on actual sales - senators allow themselves to collect advances on their works as long as they are "usual and customary."

As Gary Ruskin, director of the Congressional Accountability Project put it "an $8 million advance is not a usual or customary contractual term. It's very, very gargantuan."

And who gave Hillary the $8 million up front? Simon & Schuster - part of the Viacom media empire, which includes Paramount Pictures, CBS Television, MTV, UPN, and Blockbuster video stores. As Olson noted, "the entertainment giant has substantial interest in what happens in Was.h.i.+ngton ranging from television station licensing to potential federal regulation of broadcast violence."

Senator John McCain wrote Mrs. Clinton to express his concern that her book might "violate Senate rules regarding conflicts of interest." McCain added "the sheer size of your $8 million book advance raises questions about whether you and Senate processes may be affected by large cash payments from a major media conglomerate. This book contract, with its uniquely lavish advance for an elected official, may be, in fact, a way for that corporation to place money into your pockets, perhaps to curry favor with you."

The Clintons had been quite critical of House Speaker Newt Gingrich for receiving a $4.5 million advance on his book from HarperCollins. Under fire for the contract, Gingrich eventually caved in to the pressure and agreed to forgo the advance, receiving only royalties for the book. Safely ensconced in the more forgiving Senate, Hillary Clinton happily accepted the far bigger advance she was offered - and went on to see Living History become one of the biggest nonfiction bestsellers of its year.

How did this idealistic young commencement speaker at Wellesley College grow to be such an intensely material girl, grasping for money as she exploited technicalities in her quest to square her greed with the ethics regulations of her profession?

As we ponder Hillary's early willingness to cut corners and bend the rules in her own financial interest - and her later use of loopholes to make very big money by soliciting gifts and an enormous book advance - it is the intensity of her desire to get rich that lingers in the mind. Public servants are generally forced to avoid opportunities for personal enrichment, in return for preserving their idealism (or, at the very least, preventing any impropriety, real or imagined). Hillary has succeeded in having it both ways.

As president, would the fact that she and her husband have made close to $20 million writing books diminish her appet.i.te for money? Will his $10 million annual income quench her thirst for security? Or will her sense of ent.i.tlement, and the temptation to use her position to help her friends, still burn so brightly that it might consume a second Clinton presidency as it did the first?

The answer is unknowable, of course - and of course, as the prospectuses remind us, past history is no guarantee of future performance. But Hillary's past performance is also the best information we have.

HIDING HILLARY: THE INQUISITOR.

Hard-nosed politician. Ideologue. Materialist. Each of these personae has been carefully hidden beneath the mask of the HILLARY brand. But none of them is uglier than Hillary in vindictive mode. Of all the disturbing entries on Hillary's White House record, probably the most serious is the way she chose to defend Bill against charges of perjury during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Writing today, all these years after the country was consumed with what more than one political columnist called "Hurricane Monica," one is almost inclined to ask: Who cares? So what? Did any of it really matter? Yes, in effect Hillary actually defended her husband's adultery. And, yes, she knew what she was doing. But is any of this relevant to a possible Clinton II presidency? After all, what else could she do? Even if she knew it was true, she had very few options. She certainly could never tell what she knew. Nor could she publicly chastise him, without endangering his position and hers. Defending him was clearly the best alternative of a bad lot. And if her motives for doing so were self-serving, so were those of Clinton's critics - the people behind the Paula Jones litigation.

But it is not the fact that Hillary defended her husband that should give us pause. It is, rather, the way she did so that calls into question her suitability for the presidency.

When a married couple is in the middle of a personal and political scandal, it's quite natural for them to take a "you and me against the world" att.i.tude, temporarily suspending personal pain in order to get past the a.s.saults of outsiders. That can hardly be easy when the couple in question is the president and first lady, and a Grand Jury investigation is parading their personal pain on the front page of every newspaper. Under those circ.u.mstances, any such couple would find it tempting to blame those who report their mistakes instead of blaming themselves. A personal scandal, of course, never really ends until you accept responsibility for your own flaws. Even so, Hillary's insistence on her husband's innocence was really the only position she could take. She had a right to defend his presidency against the forces trying to oust him, and she was determined to do so.

But defending your husband in public is one thing. Declaring war on the prosecutors, witnesses, and reporters investigating him is something very different. The tactics she used to defend Bill drew out the absolute worst of Hillary Clinton. Hiring private detectives, releasing opponents' confidential personnel files, stonewalling the investigation, and outright lying to save their joint political career, this woman who had helped impeach Richard Nixon came more and more to resemble her former target.

The stakes for Hillary were high. She had re-learned in Was.h.i.+ngton the hard lesson of Little Rock, that her political power was doubly derivative: dependent on both Bill's tenure in office and the survival of their marriage. If either should capsize, her power would disappear. And, in a strange way, even though she must have known the reports of Clinton's personal transgressions were true, her revulsion at the equally low tactics of her husband's enemies permitted her to get past the betrayal and become the leader of .Team Clinton. Her memoirs make it clear that she has a supreme ability to compartmentalize difficult matters, and in this case she clearly did so. With the Clinton presidency on the line, she kept his infidelity inside an emotional box - one she could open and examine when the fire had receded.

But is there, perhaps, a deeper and more self-serving reason that led her to stand by her man so often, and in the face of such difficult and repet.i.tive behavior? In the dynamics of the relations.h.i.+p, did Hillary recognize that doing so could bring her great rewards?

Throughout their history, whenever Hillary publicly came to Bill's defense and pulled him through a crisis, she became more powerful in both their personal relations.h.i.+p and their joint professional one. In the 1992 campaign, when she defended Clinton against Gennifer Flowers (whose charges he later admitted to be true), he showed his grat.i.tude by giving her the health care reform task force to run. After Hillary saved him from impeachment in the Lewinsky affair, he did everything he could to get her elected to the Senate.

But Hillary's star was not always in ascendancy. There were many periods in their marriage when Hillary had far less access to power. One such time was immediately before Bill's race for president.

Gail Sheehy quotes Betsey Wright describing Bill's increasing irritation with Hillary in Arkansas: "I think that there have been many times when [Bill] would have liked to go home and turn on the TV and escape or just read a book. And she would be in with a list of things people had called her about that day or had to be done. And he was like 'Ah, couldn't you just be a sweet little wife instead of being this person helping me be what I'm supposed to be?"

By 1989, the Clintons were considering divorce. David Maraniss describes how "Clinton was broaching the subject of divorce in conversations with some of his colleagues, governors from other states who had survived the collapse of their marriages." He reports that "there were great screaming matches at the mansion. Once a counselor was called out to mediate."

A year before all that, Bill asked me what kind of political impact I thought he could expect if his marriage to Hillary should break up. I told him I thought he could survive it, and offered my home in Key West as a place for him to hang out and think it over.

By whatever narrow margin, the marriage survived. But Hillary was still way out of the loop, so far out that in 1990 she didn't even know if Bill would seek re-election. As Maraniss reports, on the day before he announced his decision to the public, Hillary called Gloria Cabe, her husband's campaign manager, "and asked whether she had any inside information on what Clinton had decided."

Then came the 1992 campaign, and Gennifer Flowers. So valuable was Hillary's contribution to saving his candidacy that Clinton showered power and favor on her. She inherited health care reform, once more taking command of the signature initiative of her husband's administration as she had with education during his governors.h.i.+p.

But after the Republicans won the 1994 elections - in part by excoriating Hillary's health care proposals - the first lady gradually lost her influence, just as she had in the mid-1980s. Having reached dizzying peaks in the two years after her husband's election, her failure on health care reform and her poor political advice eroded the president's formerly high opinion of her abilities. As I was coming into the administration in November 1994, she was clearly on her way out of it, avoiding the appearance - and to a significant extent the reality - of hidden power, and embracing instead foreign travel and her writing to keep her head above the political water.

Through his rearrangement of the White House after the 1994 election, Clinton made it quite clear that he felt that Hillary had lured him too far to the left, letting her liberal ideology get in the way of pragmatic good judgment. But while he was vociferous in his criticism of "the children who got me elected" (Stephanopoulos in particular), he never spoke ill of Hillary. The only tip-off to his true feelings was that he stopped saying good things about her, too. He simply stopped bringing her up at all. Neither she nor her staff came to strategy meetings. Her advice was no longer registering on his radar screen.

The closest Bill ever came to criticizing Hillary to me was in March 1994, after the New York Times published Jeff Gerth's revelations about Hillary's commodities trading. On the night the story appeared, Bill took me aside at a White House social function and asked: "What are we going to do about Hillary?" I was stunned. This was the very first - and would prove the only - time he ever came near criticizing her in front of me.

Later that evening, all the guests were invited to view the latest Coen Brothers movie, The Hudsucker Proxy, in the White House theater. Eileen and I sat directly behind the Clintons. Not once did they even look at each other, let alone speak. The frost between them chilled the room.

I really came to appreciate how far out of the loop Hillary was when she called to ask my help in getting her longtime friend Ann Lewis - a Democratic activist and sister of Congressman Barney Frank - named as White House director of communications.

I wanted to see the job go to Don Baer, a brilliant and articulate political moderate, who wanted the president to move to the center. But Hillary was pus.h.i.+ng Ann. Why does she need my help? I wondered. When she called me about it for the third time, I asked why she was hounding me. "You sleep next to the president every night. What do you need my support for?"

"It would be helpful," was all she said in a chilly reply. When the first lady doesn't have enough clout with the president to get a friend a job, she is in the doghouse. (Eventually, I helped arrange for Ann to become director of communications not for the White House but at the Democratic National Committee, where she could do little damage. Baer, who got the White House job, was essential to Clinton's repositioning.) Just as she had been in the late 1980s, Hillary was out in the cold again. He didn't need her. Indeed, he felt the need to shake her ideologically driven posturing so that he could pursue compromise with the Republicans. And it's no coincidence that it was during Hillary's period of relative disempowerment, from 1995-1997, that Clinton accomplished virtually all of his major achievements as president: welfare reform, balancing the budget, raising the minimum wage, and pa.s.sing portability of health benefits. Hillary, meanwhile, seemed to accept the hand she was dealt: a life of symbolic foreign trips and periodic intervention on issues that mattered to her. No longer the de facto chief of staff, Hillary wasn't even Bill's top advisor.

All that changed, however, when Bill's indiscretions stopped being a private embarra.s.sment and became a public scandal. Just as in 1992, he pulled Hillary back to his side, and gave her all the power, influence - and, one suspects, affection - she ever needed or craved.

In January 1998, when the president was accused of having an affair with an unnamed intern (only later would we learn the name Monica Lewinsky), Hillary's power came back in a rush. The coup was silent and bloodless, but Hillary was back in charge at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, orchestrating the scandal defense, rallying Democrats in the Senate, battling on television and plotting strategy in private, all the time feigning ignorance of her husband's increasingly obvious guilt.

This time, her reward was even more substantial: A year after admitting to a relations.h.i.+p with Monica, Clinton turned the White House over to Hillary to help her gain the Senate seat in New York. No effort was too great; every element of Bill's presidential power was fixed on a solitary objective: electing Hillary.

This pattern of betrayal and reward, too obvious to ignore, likely explains a great deal about Hillary's decision to stay in her marriage despite its obvious drawbacks.

But Hillary also understood that she could not let it appear that power was her true priority. At all costs, she needed to play the role of first lady first and her husband's defender second. To reverse the order would be to cast suspicion on their marriage, and to invite charges that she was just using Bill to get power - charges that could cost Hillary the moral standing she needed to pull her drowning husband to safety.

Hiding her pain at his infidelities was an essential part of this strategy. Later, when denial finally *became untenable, there would be time to showcase her pain - and her ability to forgive. But Hillary's emotions could never trump the need to keep up presidential appearances.

Obviously, it's hard for any outsider to judge the state of a marriage or the emotions of either husband or wife. But my conversations with Hillary over the years lead me to believe that theirs is a genuine love affair, at least on her side. She appears to suffer real pain and grief when Bill strays - or at least when it is so clear that he is doing so that she can't pretend otherwise.

During one phone call, Hillary ended up sobbing: "Why can't anybody understand that I truly love this man? Why don't people get it?" There's no doubt in my mind that she was telling the truth. Just as I have no doubt that the affection isn't always requited in quite the way she would prefer. Hillary may appear far cooler than her husband, but in my observation she actually possesses a normal range of human emotions, from rage to love. Bill, on the other hand, is emotionally stunted. Supremely capable of empathy with every stranger he meets, he finds emotional attachment of any sort difficult.

In public, Bill Clinton always seems very emotional. In fact, that energy merely demonstrates his talent for reflecting the feelings of those around him. Absorbing their joy or pain through his ultrasensitive antennae, he projects the same in return. Like a reflector on a highway that seems to give off light, he only gives back what you send his way. When the car pa.s.ses, the reflector goes dark.

Indeed, if there is one crucial trait that Bill Clinton manifests to all who know him, it is elusiveness. Sometimes he is there - very much there. On top of you, around you, before you, and behind you all at once. When his needs pa.s.s, though, he is nowhere to be found. To be a woman in love with Bill Clinton must be a very frustrating experience. It was hard enough just being his consultant - he never called unless he needed something. The rest of the time, working with Bill reminded me of the Jimmy Buffet song: "If the phone doesn't ring, it's me."

David Maraniss believes that Bill and Hillary had different att.i.tudes toward one another from the very beginning of their relations.h.i.+p: "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 pa.s.sionate; she adored him, one friend said, with 'a romantic, fifteen-year-old, poetic, teenage love.'" Maraniss also notes that "by the mid-1980s, those early dynamics were still apparent." It's often occurred to me that what held Hillary and Bill together was their shared love ... for Bill Clinton. But Hillary had to do a lot - and give up a great deal - to win Bill's inconstant affection, and to gain political power by saving him. The price she paid was huge. But her willingness to pay it gives us a great clue to what sort of president she might be.

At first, Hillary may not have understood how deadly Bill's affairs would be for his political career. In the early 1980s, they were sufficiently discreet - and the press tame enough - that they went unnoticed. Gail Sheehy describes how Hillary "told herself that [adultery] was a very small, unimportant part of her husband's life - a pastime, like when he'd get up in the middle of the night and go down to the bas.e.m.e.nt and hang over the pinball machine for hours. In no way did she see a connection between his s.e.xual escapades and their relations.h.i.+p."

Back then, n.o.body had any idea of the extent of Governor Clinton's infidelities, except perhaps Betsey Wright, his chief of staff. In his statewide races in Arkansas in 1976, 1978, 1980, 1982, 1984, and 1986, his transgressions never surfaced as an issue, though each new primary and election was bitterly contested.

The first time Bill's extracurricular activities really affected his career - or Hillary's - came when he had to forgo a race for president because of his extensive and serial infidelities. The American political world was rocked in 1987 when Senator Gary Hart of Colorado withdrew from the Democratic primary race after the discovery of his affair with Donna Rice. With Hart out of the running, the way seemed open for a young moderate like Bill Clinton.

In describing her husband's decision not to run for president in 1988, Hillary writes: "Much has been written about the reasons for his decision not to run, but it finally came down to one word: Chelsea."

Hillary is right that the decision not to run "finally came down to one word." But the word wasn't "Chelsea." It was "women."

In our meetings to discuss his possible candidacy, Clinton focused obsessively on the possibility that scandal could drive him from the race as surely as it had Gary Hart. He never admitted to having affairs, but he kept philosophizing about whether the American media was ready to accept a candidate who had made personal mistakes. He was clearly trying to convince himself that he could get away with running.

But Betsey Wright soon put a stop to that. David Maraniss describes the scene: "The time had come, [Betsey] felt, for Clinton to get past what she considered his self-denial tendencies and face the issue squarely. . . . She started listing the names of women he had allegedly had affairs with and the places where they were said to have occurred. 'Now,' she concluded, 'I want you to tell me the truth about every one.'" After hearing the sorry tale, Betsey "suggested that he should not get into the [presidential] race."

With Gary Hart's political corpse lying in the street, it's hard to see how Clinton could have managed to run for president. 1988 was clearly not the year the media was going to forgive womanizing by a presidential candidate.

We can only wonder how Hillary must have felt. After all her investment in this man, his personal behavior had prevented him from seeking the presidency. Photos of the announcement of his withdrawal show her wiping away a tear.

But Hillary seemed to emerge from that experience with a coldly calculating new perspective: Instead of making sure that Bill changed his ways, she realized that she must keep his recklessness out of the public eye if either of them wanted to make it to Was.h.i.+ngton.

Years before, Eileen and I had a preview of what was to come. In December 1981, during Clinton's visit to New York to film television commercials for his campaign to retake the Governor's Mansion, Eileen and I invited Bill and Hillary out to dinner at New York's Four Seasons restaurant. At the last minute, Bill told me that Hillary was stuck in Was.h.i.+ngton and couldn't make it, but Bill asked if he could bring a reporter to dinner. I asked if we could talk in front of the journalist. "Oh, it's okay," he said dismissively. "Don't worry."

When Eileen and I arrived at the restaurant, the "reporter" turned out to be a young and attractive woman with hair long enough to sit on.

Of course, she wasn't really a reporter. He had met her during the 1980 campaign, when she was an intern for a media outlet.

The couple held hands and rubbed knees under the table, not much caring if we noticed. Eileen and I were amazed that this man who was desperately seeking re-election would be so reckless in a public place.

As we left dinner, Bill turned to his friend and asked if she had ever seen the Christmas Tree at Rockefeller Center, just five blocks away. On cue, she batted her eyelashes and said "why, no." Bill gallantly offered to take her, turning to say, "I'll drop her off at her hotel later; you don't need to wait for us."

That wasn't the only time. In 1984, Bill came to our Manhattan apartment at 5 P.M. for a poll briefing. Nervously glancing at his watch, he said he had to make the last shuttle flight back to Was.h.i.+ngton at nine. "It won't be a problem," I a.s.sured him.

"But I have a business meeting, first, at 116th and Broadway." n.o.body has a business meeting at Barnard College at night, I remember thinking.

I a.s.sured him it still should work out all right.

When we finished, I showed him upstairs to our bathroom. The phone rang: It was Betsey, trying to locate her charge. I went up to tell Bill, only to find him brus.h.i.+ng his teeth and was.h.i.+ng his chest in the sink to prepare for his "business meeting." He came downstairs to the phone without a s.h.i.+rt, smoking his toothbrush like it was a pipe.

SEND IN THE DETECTIVES.

It was around the time Eileen and I encountered Bill cutting a swath through Manhattan that Hillary first started to run interference for him. As soon as she recognized the need to protect her husband from himself, she formulated her response strategy: She would form an alliance with a sleazy group of men and women who worked as private detectives. These gumshoes - I came to call them the "secret police" - gave the Clintons a set of allies as dangerous to the political system as they were humiliating to their clients.

Nothing is more dangerous in Hillary's political style than her reliance on private eyes. America has a long history of scandals involving inappropriate or illegal government intrusion into the private lives of our citizens - from J. Edgar Hoover's wiretapping tactics, to Nixon's plumbers unit, to the off-the-shelf alternative foreign policy unit in the Reagan National Security Council that led to the Iran-Contra scandal.

When detectives get into the act, they can be hard to stop and harder to control. They push civil liberties boundaries to the limit, and often exceed them. But when their ruthless talents are used to invade the privacy of private citizens, as happened frequently during Hillary's orchestration of her husband's scandal defense, they can be quite terrifying - even more so when they have the power of the presidency behind them.

Hillary reportedly first used detectives in 1981, hiring Ivan Duda, a Little Rock investigator, to compile a list of her husband's infidelities. According to Duda, Hillary hired him not to acquire evidence for a divorce, or even to rein Bill in, but because "she wanted to be prepared for any charges that might come up in the course of the campaign."

In 1990, Hillary hired private detectives once again - this time to dig up negative material on millionaire utility executive Sheffield Nelson, Bill's Republican opponent in the gubernatorial race and a man whose wealth made him a serious threat.

The campaign hired the Investigative Group International (IGI), run by Terry Lenzner, to investigate Nelson's role in a natural gas deal involving the Arkla Company, which he headed. The deal had enriched Jimmy Jones, who later bought the Dallas Cowboys, and there were serious questions about Nelson's role. Since I was creating the negative ads about the scandal to throw at Nelson, I was delighted at the sudden appearance of a constant flow of material to use in attacking the Republican. Until I read about it years later, I had no idea that it was coming from a private investigator rather than from public sources.

Hillary had known Lenzner for years, since he was director of the Office of Legal Services, a federal agency charged with representing poor people in civil suits, and Hillary was chairman of its board. Hillary's relations.h.i.+p with Lenzner became even closer once she was first lady. Brooke Shearer, her close friend and the wife of Strobe Talbott, joined Hillary's staff after leaving a position in Lenzner's firm, where her talents included "dumpster diving" - that is, sifting through other people's garbage.

Lest anyone a.s.sume that such tactics are normal in American politics, they are not. The use of detectives to scour the backgrounds of one's adversaries was not - and is not - common in American politics. Hillary and Bill were pioneers in this seamy pastime.

Then, as scandals threatened Bill's 1992 presidential bid, the campaign hired detectives, at a cost of more than $100,000, to find information to discredit the women who posed potential problems, and to use that information to "convince" them to remain silent.

And Hillary was in it up to her ears. She enlisted Vince Foster to work with Bill's confidant Bruce Lindsay in-setting up a damage control operation. Joyce Milton writes: "Foster farmed out the job of investigating Clinton's affairs to a Little Rock private detective named Jerry Luther Parks." Parks, who had been named by Clinton to the Arkansas Board of Private Investigators, also got a contract in 1992 to handle security for the Clinton campaign headquarters. "Quite soon, Lindsay and Foster had a list" of Clinton girlfriends to work with.

Eventually, the damage control operation grew into an extensive, professional organization. To run it, Hillary called back her good friend Betsey Wright from her teaching post at the Kennedy School of Government in Boston; she would head up the thankless task of protecting Clinton from his own past.

Ever since 1987, when she had talked Bill out of running for president by confronting him with his alleged affairs with other women, Betsey Wright had been the repository of information about Bill's extramarital relations.h.i.+ps. Curious about the potential damage rumors of this sort might inflict on Clinton, I asked Betsey about them.

"He's usually quite careful," she told me. "He usually gets involved with people who have as much to lose as he does, married women and such." How extensive were his activities? Betsey told me about a friend who had just come from a meeting with Clinton and told her how he had fulminated about the stories of his personal life. "I don't know most of the women they're talking about," he screamed. "I don't do what they say I do." Bewildered, she told Betsey: "you know, I began to wonder if he had actually forgotten that we had slept together!"

Betsey was soon overwhelmed. She later told Was.h.i.+ngton Post and Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff that "there have been nineteen allegations from women purporting to have had intimate relations with Bill Clinton." She noted that this "follows seven earlier allegations."

But Betsey was no pro at sleuthing. So she hired someone who, she said mildly, "has the skills as an attorney to interview witnesses that I don't have": Jack Palladino.

As the Was.h.i.+ngton Post reported, Jack Palladino was "a San Francisco attorney who heads a major private investigative firm, Palladino and Sutherland." The paper quoted a 1990 article in the San Jose Mercury News, which called Palladino and Sutherland "one of America's most successful investigative agencies." The Post added, "It operates out of a San Francisco mansion, employs about 10 detectives and charges clients $200 an hour or up to $2,000 a day for the services of its princ.i.p.al partners."

Palladino boasted to Gail Sheehy: "I am somebody you call in when the house is on fire, not when there's smoke in the kitchen. You ask me to deal with that fire, to save you, to do whatever has to be done."

Sheehy reports that "Hillary knew Palladino from the summer she had worked in San Francisco on the Black Panthers case. Palladino had done investigations for Panthers lawyer Charles Garry in defense of Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, and Eldridge Cleaver. He had also helped h.e.l.l's Angels beat drug charges."

Initially the Clinton campaign paid Palladino $28,000, routing the money through Jim Lyons, a Denver attorney President Clinton later named to the federal judiciary. Subsequent payments to Palladino - including federal matching funds - were even larger.

Palladino's job? "Bimbo eruptions," as Betsey told Michael Isikoff for the Was.h.i.+ngton Post. Palladino was to "figure out where and why some of these charges [against Clinton] are being leveled."

One by one, Palladino and Hillary's other detectives interviewed the women, seeking affidavits denying any intimate relations. As Sheehy writes, "When Palladino ran into resistance, he would visit relatives and former boyfriends and develop compromising material to convince the women to remain silent. He would eventually gather affidavits from six of the Jane Does later subpoenaed by Ken Starr." The fact that these affidavits were coerced lies, which the women mostly later repudiated, didn't matter. They were enough to cover Bill Clinton until election day.

The detectives left behind a trail of sleaze, blackmail, and intimidation possibly unique in the annals of presidential campaigns: - In 1994, former Clinton girlfriend Sally Perdue told the London Telegraph that she had been offered a bribe to shut up. If she didn't, a "Democratic operative" told her, he "couldn't guarantee the safety of her pretty little legs." Perdue's car window was broken, and she found a spent shotgun sh.e.l.l on her car seat.

- Loren Kirk, Gennifer Flowers's roommate, reported that Palladino asked her: "Is Gennifer Flowers the sort of person who would commit suicide?"

- Kathleen Willey, who described to a grand jury how she was groped by President Clinton in the Oval Office, said that "her tires were punctured with nails and her cat was stolen - then a strange jogger approached her in her neighborhood near Richmond, Virginia, and asked her about her cat, her tires, and her children by name. 'Did you get the message?' the stranger reportedly asked Willey before disappearing."

- Former Miss America Elizabeth Ward Gracen says she was offered acting jobs through the Hollywood-connected Clinton operative Mickey Kantor in return for denying a s.e.xual encounter with Clinton. She also reports that her hotel room was ransacked - and $2,000 left untouched - in what she suspects was an effort to find incriminating tapes.

- Arkansas state trooper and Clinton accuser L. D. Brown says he was approached in London by Clinton operatives who offered him $100,000 to recant his stories of Clinton womanizing.

- Dolly Kyle Browning, who claims to have had a longtime affair with Clinton, reports that campaign operatives threatened to "destroy you" if she came forward.

But the most serious challenge to Clinton's campaign came when Gennifer Flowers exposed her twelve-year affair with the governor. To substantiate her charges, she released audiotapes of an intimate conversation with Bill. The Clintons had to destroy the credibility of the Flowers tapes. So someone - David Kendall, Clinton's lawyer, denies that it was the campaign - hired detective Anthony Pellicano, who examined the recordings and p.r.o.nounced them doctored and unreliable, thus blunting their impact in the media. (Flowers submitted the tapes to another service, Truth Verification Labs, which found them to be completely authentic.) Pellicano is a hot potato these days, having been accused of using thuggish tactics on Los Angeles Times reporter Anita Busch to stop her from working on a story critical of one of Pellicano's clients. Investigating the charge, the FBI arrested him for illegal weapon possession. They found he had a drawer full of hand grenades and, in the words of one agent, enough plastique to "take out a 747." The police also came across evidence that Pellicano may have used illegal wiretaps.

Did Hillary ever stop to think about the kind of people she was employing? On a campaign for president of the United States? How had this lifelong advocate for the rights of women stooped to employing sleazy gumshoes to intimidate them?

In Living History, Hillary regrets the way the investigations of Clinton scandals "unfairly invaded the lives of innocent people." But she clearly isn't thinking of the ultimate innocents - the women who said yes to Bill, or who - like Kathleen Willey - said no.