Hell To Pay Part 10

Hillary seemed to have been surprised by her husband's announcement.

She had a.s.sembled their bid for national power and Bill Clinton's philandering stopped them cold. Before the 1992 race, Bill Clinton would have to come completely clean with his wife. This was because by then Hillary had thoroughly investigated her husband's life.

And she had come to terms with it.

NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE.

Once Clinton had bailed out, the way was open for another governor to take the Democratic nomination, Michael Dukakis of Ma.s.sachusetts. At the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, Dukakis offered the Arkansas governor a coveted spot. He was to give the nominating address, a chance to connect with a national television audience.

Nominating addresses usually do not last more than fifteen minutes.

Their purpose is to build up enthusiasm for the main event and end in thunderous applause for the candidate. Clinton spoke more than twice as long as he should have, testing the patience of millions of people.

"We have to be here, too," NBC's Tom Brokaw complained. A red light flashed on the podium, which Clinton cheerfully ignored. The audience began to boo, shouting "Get the hook!"

As Clinton droned on, Hillary paced about, bitterly complaining about the bright floor lights and the Dukakis whips who egged on a rambunctious crowd to applaud whenever the nominee's name was mentioned.

The Dukakis people had "set Bill up," Hillary told Webb Hubbell and Vince Foster when she got back to Little Rock.*23 She said that Dukakis himself had urged Bill to give the whole speech. Nor did they dim the lights, a signal that would have told the speaker to wrap it up. In truth, Clinton's embarra.s.sment did Dukakis no favors.

The speech snafu was the kickoff of a notably incompetent campaign.

But Hillary would hear none of these innocent explanations. As she would in 1992, and again and again thereafter, Hillary Clinton saw the hand of conspiracy in every misfortune.

Bill Clinton returned to Little Rock a national joke, the stuff of late-night monologue humor and c.o.c.ktail party chatter. Ridicule can be deadly to a politician, and the jokes heaped on Bill Clinton were killing his career.

Hillary treated this setback as another challenge, as she had treated the loss of the governors.h.i.+p in 1980. She turned to Hollywood producers Harry Thomason, a former high school football coach from Arkansas, and his wife, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason. From their humble origins, this husband-and-wife team had risen to earning an estimated $300,000 a week with television shows like Designing Women and Evening Shade. Joining with Mickey Kantor and his wife, a television anchorwoman in Los Angeles, they persuaded Clinton that he could do more than survive this escapade, he could turn it into positive advertising. But he had to act quick. They helped book the young governor on the Tonight Show, where he appeared with Johnny Carson to make one self-effacing joke after another.

By showing that he could poke fun at himself, Clinton transformed an embarra.s.sment into an image a.s.set. The jokes ended. Hillary had once again helped Bill Clinton save his career. She would get the chance to do it again and again.

ATTACK DOG.

Bill Clinton was only one of three Arkansas governors to have won more than two terms. Only two of his predecessors had served more than six years as governor. In 1990 Bill Clinton had spent a decade in the governor's mansion. Should he go for fourteen?

"My popularity was very high in the state at the time," he said.

"But I was afraid people might say, 'Give this guy a gold watch, he's done a good job. Give him the gold watch!'"*24 So they considered running Hillary. Bill was supportive. Having Hillary in office would keep him alive politically, while sparing him the very real possibility of getting "the gold watch" from the voters.

Hillary herself pined for the race, supported by encouraging noises from potential financial supporters like Jack and Witt Stephens of Stephens, Inc., the Little Rock investment firm whose connections to Mochtar Riady and the Lippo Group--and through them to Communist Chinese funds--would later prove embarra.s.sing. Also supportive was journalist John Robert Starr. But she bridled at the thought that she would be seen as a Lurleen Wallace, a woman known only as a stand-in for a more powerful husband. Polls were commissioned, and they were not encouraging.

Bill Clinton decided that he had to run. The fact was, the mayors of a half-dozen cities have a bigger job than the governor of Arkansas.

Without the prestige of the governor's office, Clinton would be cut loose from power, and have no base from which to launch a presidential bid. He needed to hold on to the governor's mansion if he was to keep the aura of a rising politician and keep his donor base active and interested.

Almost immediately, Clinton faced strong opposition in the Democratic primary. His opponent was Tom McRae, who had been director of the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, a wealthy think tank. To Clinton's surprise, McRae mounted a surprisingly strong campaign, with television ads that showed Clinton at the Little Rock airport on his way to yet another campaign event for his coming presidential bid.

Another ad showed the surrealistic, melting clocks of Salvador Dali, lampooning the stretching of time Clinton spent in office. In short order, McRae made major inroads among voters in the primary. If he defeated Bill Clinton, the governor's run for the presidency would be over.

As usual, Hillary had a plan. She explained it to her husband and to d.i.c.k Morris. They listened patiently, hashed it over, and agreed.

A short time later, McRae held a press conference in the state capitol rotunda, daring Clinton to debate. He was in mid-sentence when a loud voice interrupted him. "Tom, who was the one person who didn't show up in Springdale? Give me a break! I mean, I think that we oughta get the record straight .... "*25 Hillary had crashed McRae's press conference. Local news teams zoomed in. Amid the flas.h.i.+ng, whirring, and clicking of cameras she pulled out old reports McRae had written for the Rockefeller Foundation. "Many of the reports you issued," she charged, "not only praised the governor on his environmental record, but his education record and his economic record!"

Too shocked to respond, Tom McRae stood before her as still and mute as a mannequin. As with the 1982 ad in which the young politician had talked about being whipped by his daddy, the initial reaction was unfavorable. It doubled recognition of McRae's name among voters.

The attack itself was illogical. If the charge was that Bill Clinton was afraid to debate, it was only underscored when he sent his wife out to debate his opponent.

In time, though, Hillary's shock therapy had its intended effect.

The line of attack from this arch feminist was to make a blatant appeal to the voters' s.e.xism. If Tom McRae couldn't stand up to the governor's wife, he had to be a very weak man indeed. An effective series of ads, produced by David Watkins, defended the governor's travels as a way to bring jobs to Arkansas. The tagline was "Don't let McRae build a brick wall around Arkansas" as workmen built a brick wall.

Clinton won the primary. He was still, however, in deep trouble. He won with less than 55 percent of the vote.

The second crisis of the primary campaign occurred in the kitchen of the governor's mansion when a meeting between the governor and d.i.c.k Morris turned ugly, then violent.

"You got me into this race," d.i.c.k Morris recalls Bill Clinton screaming at him in his book Behind the Oval Office, "so you could make some extra money off me. That was the only reason. And now you give me no attention, no attention at all." He accused Morris of turning his back on his client, and screamed, "You're s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g me!"

Hillary tried to calm him down, but Morris responded in kind. "Thank you, thank you, thank you. You've just solved my problem. I'm getting s.h.i.+t from [Lee] At.w.a.ter and s.h.i.+t from [Trent] Lott for working for you, and now I can solve my problem. Go f.u.c.k yourself.

I'm quitting your G.o.dd.a.m.n campaign, and now I'm a free agent. I can be a fifty-state Republican and don't have to take your s.h.i.+t."

Clinton apparently charged at him, wrapped his arms around Morris's torso, and they fell to the ground. The governor soon cooled down and then turned apologetic. Morris stormed out.

Hillary ran after Morris and put her arm around his shoulder.

"Please forgive him," she pleaded. "He's under so much pressure. He didn't mean it. He's very sorry. He's overtired, he hasn't slept well in days."*26 Hillary was instrumental in keeping the channel to Morris open through the election. Morris guided his client in beating Republican Sheffield Nelson in a tight race. Morris did his job, but remained aloof.

d.i.c.k Morris stayed away from Clinton's successful 1992 presidential bid, recommending the "ragin' Cajun," James Carville, for the job of campaign manager. When President Clinton needed rescuing again in the middle of a disastrous first term, it was Hillary who once more made sure that Morris's talent and strategic sense would be at the president's command.

GOING FOR BROKE.

"You almost have to do it," Hillary said to Bill as he awakened one morning in his final term as governor.

The time had come to plan a run for the White House. At the time, George Bush was the victor of the Persian Gulf War, with a stratospheric approval rating. A race now seemed to Bill Clinton and most of his people as a warm-up bid for 1996.

At a morning meeting with their advisors around the kitchen table, the obstacles were discussed. How hard would it be to beat New York Democrat Governor Cuomo? How likely would it be to beat a well-liked inc.u.mbent president?

Bruce Lindsey asked the governor the unthinkable question, "What if we win?"

Hillary answered it. "Then, we serve."*27 "She always thought that the right kind of Democrat would have an opportunity to be elected in 1992--always," Bill Clinton said.

Hillary spotted the weakness of the Bush presidency from the moment he took office. "And when he got up to seventy percent and then ninety percent or whatever in the polls after the Gulf War, she never wavered in her conviction that 1992 was a good year for the right sort of Democrat to challenge the established orthodoxy of the Democratic Party, and also challenge the inc.u.mbent president. It was amazing ....

That's one where her instinct was right and I didn't feel that way for the longest time."*28 As the campaign staff was a.s.sembled, it was clear it would be Hillary's team.

One personnel choice that had a great deal to do with Hillary's good humor on the campaign trail was Brooke Shearer. Brooke had been a friend for twenty years, and was the wife of Bill's friend Strobe Talbott. She is the sister of Cody Shearer who was accused of trying to strong-arm Indian tribes into donating more campaign money to obtain presidential favors. Now she became a near constant companion, traveling with Hillary for nine months. Hillary recruited friends and volunteers from her days as a schoolgirl, her time at Wellesley and Yale. They all moved to Little Rock and shared efficiency apartments to work on the campaign. It was clear that they did this not for Bill Clinton, but for Hillary.

In time, this became a moving road show, sometimes referred to as Herc (derived from her initials HRC) and the girls, or more often as "Hillaryland." In dealing with the governor's staff, especially the state troopers, Hillary was often arrogant, dismissive, overbearing, and vulgar, with four-letter expletives being her all-purpose response. With her own handpicked staff, however, Hillary is described as relaxed and easygoing. Sing-alongs were common, as was the staff's amus.e.m.e.nt at Hillary's cruel and dead-on imitation of critics.

Another key selection to the campaign team was Morris's recommendation of James Carville. Carville had proven himself in the major leagues with Harris Wofford, who took down Bush's attorney general, Richard Thornburgh, in the Pennsylvania Senate race. Now Carville was ready to take on the president himself.

Mary Matalin, the brilliant and witty Bush campaign aide who later married Carville, knows all too well the intensity, of her husband's determination to win. During any given crisis in the White House, James Carville would be up at 4 AM reading all the major newspapers'

reporting on the facts and ready to join a conference call with George Stephanopoulos, John Podesta, and Rahm Emanuel. This allowed them to steal a beat on the day's news and prepare the Clinton rapid response. As soon as the call ended, every major political reporter would have his own anonymous "White House staff" tidbit to report and ample "off the record" spin to turn any negative story into a positive play of events. This routine was repeated seven days a week for as long as was needed.

This pace of business began during the campaign. The Bush people were well-mannered, genteel, professional, and so well versed in the law that they weren't inclined to break it. Many had young families, and they were not adverse to kicking back on the weekends. The people Hillary chose were hungry and obsessive. They had fire in their bellies. It was war and they were going to win, come h.e.l.l or high water.

Two of the campaign regulars were the Hollywood power couple who rescued the Clintons in 1988, Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason. They produced the campaign film A Place Called Hope, a distinctly Reaganesque portrayal of Bill Clinton's life.

Harry created a series of whistle-stop tours that highlighted the Clintons's lighthearted interaction with people. Linda brought in hair and makeup stylists, lightening Hillary's hair even more, and making her look like an appealing middle-cla.s.s housewife.

Another key campaign aide, first recruited for the aborted 1988 run, was Harold Ickes. Son of a reform-minded Interior Secretary in the FDR cabinet, Ickes is driven and choleric, a born hater and intriguer. An organizer of protests against the Vietnam War, Ickes forged a close relations.h.i.+p with unions and their underworld friends as a labor lawyer. "He has done more singlehandedly to destroy the Democratic Party than anyone else," a Clinton insider told Daniel Wattenberg of the American Spectator.*29 We never underestimated the force of Harold Ickes's determination to protect both Clintons during our investigations. I was the one to depose Mr. Ickes in the Travelgate investigation--alone. The other counsels asked to be excluded--one had children and the other a horse. I think they were kidding, but Mr. Carville's reputation had preceded him.

In 1972 George McGovern had tapped Ickes to select delegates. Ickes ignored party rules to push out traditional Democrats and stack the deck with far-left activists. Ickes had also served as the convention manager for Jesse Jackson's campaign in 1988. Now he took his place as the dark prince, this time in a "centrist" campaign that actually had a chance of winning.

Not only was he trusted by Hillary, but Ickes had a long and complex relations.h.i.+p with Hillary's most powerful staffer in the campaign: Susan Thomases.

Camille Paglia characterized Thomases in an effort to see something working beneath Hillary's attempts to soften and feminize her own image. "But her [Hillary] "steely soul remains, the butch substrate that can be seen in the baleful, bloodless face of lawyer Susan Thomases .... "*30 This may be unduly harsh. Then again, it would be very difficult to be unduly harsh in describing the persona of Susan Thomases.

A successful New York lawyer, Susan Thomases seems to think of herself as brisk. In truth, she comes off as curt, rude, obscene, and unduly quick to dismiss any idea that didn't originate with her.

"She is the juice," a Clinton insider told the Was.h.i.+ngton Post.

"She's the juicer too. The Braun automatic."*31 Perhaps she is more like a semiautomatic, leveling people with staccato bursts of profanity. One reporter visited the primary campaign and saw a campaign aide holding a telephone in the air. The sound of Thomases's blue tirade and screamed obscenities was audible at a distance.*32 Susan Thomases is often credited with having "masterminded" the last Senate race of New Jersey's Bill Bradley, in which a powerful and entrenched inc.u.mbent came within a hair of losing. To say the least, Thomases's high regard for her political talents is not shared by her colleagues.

Once let loose by Hillary, Thomases began to try to run every aspect of the campaign. She showed up at meetings and barked orders, and supervised polling, advertising, advance, and policy.

She sided with Hillary to keep the campaign based in Little Rock and not Was.h.i.+ngton, even after Clinton squeaked by in the critical New York primary and became the inevitable nominee. Had the move to Was.h.i.+ngton occurred, the campaign would have been flooded with centrist and conservative Democrats from the Democratic Leaders.h.i.+p Council, which Clinton had led. Hillary's personnel would have been shoved aside.

In June, Thomases finally overplayed her hand. She went to Hillary to kill a poll the political professionals had commissioned. The senior members of the campaign had had it. David Wilhelm, George Stephanopoulos, Eli Segal, and pollster Stanley Greenberg went to Clinton and promised to walk off the campaign if something wasn't done. Hillary's solution was to redefine Thomases's role, putting her in charge of Clinton's schedule. This was a job perfectly suited to Thomases's temperament, in which she could use her forceful manner to reject requests for the candidate's time.

Thomases retained her powerful influence, remaining the "Braun automatic" through Hillary's first four White House years. And she and lckes fanned Hillary's ambitions by encouraging her to run for the Senate in New York.

As different as they are in temperament, Hillary's people have a certain combative quality in common. The sure way to be in Hillary's inner circle, a former White House spokes-person told Gail Sheehy, "is to show a b.a.l.l.s-out, go-to-the-mat mentality about taking on their enemies. Anybody who has a hang-up about fairness is cast out as part of the enemy camp."*33 The result was the Clinton "war room"--an idea cooked up by Carville and warmly approved of and managed by Hillary.

The key players, the ones who had the will to win, would be brought together like generals in a bunker to mau-mau the Bush campaign, a rapid response brigade that would turn every attack into a counterattack. That "war room" has been reconst.i.tuted for Hillary's run for the Senate. It is clear that they will remain her "kitchen cabinet" and political allies--whether in the Senate, the World Bank, or back in the White House.

THE s.e.x WARS.

Chelsea, whose interests were paraded forth as the excuse not to run in 1988, had to learn to live with the increasingly damaging revelations about her father. Ignoring his own role in creating the factual conditions that made the attacks on him inevitable, Bill Clinton piously intoned that Chelsea "is fully aware of what happens in politics. With it comes a lot of the worst that human nature has to offer. We've been telling her that since she was six."

Hillary and Bill had to brace themselves and their child against the impact of the disclosures that they knew were sure to come. Hillary knew how badly they could be embarra.s.sed by revelations about their finances. Bill had other reasons to worry.

When the first revelations of Hillary's dealings with James McDougal became public in the campaign, Bill and Hillary's reflexive posture of indignance gave their denials a credible sound.

"They think of themselves as the most ethical people in the world," a White House aide would later say. "They think everything they do or say is above board and for the good of the country. Therefore they can't understand why someone would doubt their integrity."*34 When, inevitably, details about Bill's reckless personal life began to leak out, their initial response was the same.

Hillary had kept tabs on her husband's indiscretions since the first campaign. One private investigator, Ivan Duda, told a tabloid that "Hillary wanted me to get the dirt and find out who he was fooling with.*35 Duda gave Hillary the names of six women--including one from the Rose Law Firm--as potential bimbo embarra.s.sments.*36 Moreover, Duda said that "Bill was extremely suspicious of Hillary's relations.h.i.+p with Vince. When confronted, she simply denied it was a romance and claimed they were just good friends." According to Duda, Bill hired a private investigator of his own who confirmed that an affair had taken place.

"Bill confronted her with the information and they had several explosive arguments--screaming, shouting, red-faced blow-outs," Duda said. "Hillary is not meek, and while she never confessed to cheating, she aggressively reminded Bill of his numerous affairs and how he not only humiliated her but nearly wrecked their own political career with his behavior."*37 Perhaps an accommodation had been reached by the time Trooper L.D.

Brown witnessed the makeout orgy at the Charlie Trie restaurant in Little Rock. In middle age, the Clintons had settled, if somewhat awkwardly, into Bloomsbury morality and open marriage. Now their arrangement was in danger of becoming more open than they ever intended.

In Little Rock, an aggrieved state employee filed suit after losing a job to Gennifer Flowers. As details about Clinton's long affair with Gennifer Flowers percolated in the tabloid press, Hillary decided the campaign would have to act vigorously to contain the damage. She rejected a bid to appear with the a.n.a.lytical and precise Ted Koppel on Nightline, opting instead to go with an exclusive offer to 60 Minutes. It was agreed that interviewer Steve Kroft's questions would be cleared by the Clintons first--an unusual and generous accomodation from the usually hard-charging producers of the investigative news show. They even agreed to produce it for a special fifteen-minute slot after the 1992 Super Bowl. Once on the 60 Minutes set, Hillary took charge of Steve Kroft and his crew.

"We fiddled around with who should sit on which side, and they fiddled around with chair heights and things like that," Kroft told Gail Sheehy. "If you didn't know she was his wife, you'd have thought she was a media consultant."*38 Kroft's questions made softb.a.l.l.s look like bullets. He did everything but get on his knees. The Clintons sat next to each other, close and supportive, while Bill admitted to having "caused pain in our marriage." There were several big lies told in that interview.

The first lie was Hillary's a.s.sertion that there had been a rough patch in their marriage that was now over. That was untrue. Bill, as she knew from her investigations, was a constant and prolific serial s.e.xual predator.

Kroft framed the issue as adultery, but adultery was not the point.

The issue, never pressed by Kroft, was whether Bill Clinton was self-destructively promiscuous, the sort of man who would risk his career and even endanger the security and reputation of his office and his country to satisfy his insatiable s.e.xual appet.i.te.

There was no hint of the Bill Clinton who sought a quickie from Gennifer Flowers in the mansion while a crowd waited outside for a speech. In the years ahead, Bill Clinton would bring more "pain"

into their marriage. He would later bring a female Arkansas Power & Light executive to visit him in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the governor's mansion four times after his election to the presidency, creeping down to meet her, while a state policeman stood watch against Hillary and Chelsea upstairs. He would bring it again by groping Kathleen Willey and turning his inexhaustible seductive powers on a twenty-one-year-old intern in the Oval Office.

The second lie was that Bill Clinton had never had an affair with Gennifer Flowers. Kroft, like so many interrogators, took it for granted that Clinton would answer him in good faith. When he asked if Clinton had had a twelve-year affair with Flowers, Clinton said no. Of course, Bill Clinton's way with the truth was not yet fully known. It probably never occurred to Kroft that he should have also asked if he had had an eleven-year affair with Flowers or quizzed him about his understanding of the meaning of the word "affair."

When Kroft tentatively began to press him, Hillary interrupted. "I don't want to be any more specific. I don't think being any more specific about what's happened in the privacy of our life together is relevant to anybody but us." Kroft meekly backed away.

Throughout the interview, every time Clinton started to wander into a dangerous digression, Hillary stepped and brought the interview back to rehea.r.s.ed responses.

"Those who were there said that throughout the ninety-minute taping, the tension was so thick that it was not even broken when a row of heavy lights came cras.h.i.+ng down, narrowly missing Hillary's head,"

recounted journalist Meredith Oakley.*39 It was Hillary who won the day, orchestrating the interview and forcing Kroft to eat out of her hand while she appealed to Americans'

natural horror of journalists prying into private lives.

"There isn't a person watching this who would feel comfortable sitting on this couch detailing everything that ever went on in their lives or their marriage," she said, "and I think it's real dangerous in this country if we don't have a zone of privacy for everybody."

Kroft could only nod his head in agreement.

The interview saved Bill Clinton's career, and once again it was Hillary who was the one to pull him out of the fire.

There was only one slight skip in the record. Hillary told Kroft that she was not "sitting here because I'm some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I'm sitting here because I love him and 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 the people, then heck, don't vote for him."

The second half of the statement, the "heck, don't vote for him," was a winning moment. She looked every bit the middle-cla.s.s housewife Linda Bloodworth-Thomason had made her up to be. The first half of her statement was off message. For millions of stay-at-home women, whether they were Tammy Wynette fans or not, there was a hint of condescension in dismissing "some little woman standing by her man."

It was condescension that became more overt when she later told reporters "I suppose I could have stayed home, baked cookies, and had teas, but what I decided was to fulfill my profession .... "

To many women it was deeply offensive to be told that running a household and raising children while their husbands were in the workplace made them simpleton cookie-bakers.

The Yale feminist Crit scholar had thrown away her disguise and Hillary would have to humble herself, once again, by baking cookies for a women's magazine.

The week after the 60 Minutes interview, Gennifer Flowers, backed by a tabloid, released a tape recording of her phone conversations with Governor Clinton. Among other topics, there was admiring talk between the two of Bill's consummate ability to perform oral s.e.x.

The story led all three networks. Many wives would have been driven to hide. Hillary went to a pay phone at a campaign stop in Pierre, South Dakota, called her husband and coolly began to organize a counteroffensive.

Hillary once again saw the hand of conspiracy. She directed all her anger at the Republicans she believed were behind the a.s.sault.