Read The Truth About Hillary Online

Authors: Edward Klein

Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Leaders & Notable People, #Political, #Specific Groups, #Women, #Literature & Fiction, #Genre Fiction, #Family Saga, #Politics & Social Sciences, #Politics & Government, #Ideologies & Doctrines, #Conservatism & Liberalism, #Political Science, #History & Theory, #Specific Topics, #Commentary & Opinion, #Sagas

The Truth About Hillary (10 page)

BOOK: The Truth About Hillary
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What’s more, Hillary believed that Bill had the makings of a Great Man. He offered Hillary something that her father could never give her: the chance for Hillary to transcend her gen- der. As a woman coming of age in 1971—still the infancy of the feminist movement—Hillary knew she could not achieve power on her own. She needed Bill Clinton to take her to the mountaintop.

C
H A P T E R E L E V E N

The Other “Smoking Gun”

A

t the first faint light of dawn, Hillary Rodham emerged from her basement apartment on Dupont Cir- cle. She was twenty-six years old, less than a year out of

Yale Law School, and she was dressed in her customary spinster- lady fashion—opaque black stockings and large brown-tinted eyeglasses.
1
Off in the distance, she could see the Capitol dome brightening as the sun came up on another steamy summer day.

Hillary made her way to the Congressional Hotel, a down- at-the-heel establishment on Capitol Hill. There, she showed a photo I.D. to the guards and passed through two separate secu- rity checks. Inside, the doors had thick steel locks, and the win- dows were covered with iron bars. Each office was furnished with two wastebaskets—one for normal trash, the other for sen- sitive papers relating to the impeachment inquiry of President Richard Milhous Nixon.

Hillary was one of three women on a staff of more than forty lawyers who were looking into President Nixon’s Watergate abuses of power in the late fall of 1974. Her tiny office, which

74

The Other “Smoking Gun”
75

looked out on a back alley, was located near the coffee machine, on which someone had posted a notice:

The women in this office were not hired to make coffee. Make it yourself or call on one of these liberated men to do so.
2

Hillary unlocked a safe and gathered some papers. Then she headed for the office of her boss, John Doar, the special counsel of the impeachment inquiry. As always, the door was closed, and Hillary knocked before she entered.

John Doar kept the window shades drawn in his second-floor office to prevent people from looking in and lip-reading his con- versations.
3
It took Hillary a few moments to adjust to the gloom. First, she saw the immaculate desk. (“A clean desk,” Doar lec- tured his staff, “represents a methodical mind.”) Then, she saw Doar himself, a tall, thin, ascetic-looking man, who was said by his admirers to resemble Gary Cooper in
High Noon
.

Doar first made his mark on the national stage in the early 1960s while working for Deputy Attorney General Burke Mar- shall in the civil rights division of the Justice Department. Dur- ing the racial violence in Montgomery, Alabama, he faced down white mobs and impressed Burke Marshall and President John Kennedy with his physical courage. Later, when Doar became chief of the civil rights division under President Lyndon John- son, he prosecuted the murderers of three civil rights workers— Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney—in Neshoba County, Mississippi.

Despite his impressive résumé, however, John Doar was hardly the incorruptible
High Noon
hero portrayed by his friends. During the Johnson administration, Doar engaged in many of the activities that he now described as “abuses of power” by Richard Nixon. Among other things, Doar had recommended

76 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

the creation of a secret computerized intelligence file on Ameri- can citizens who were considered to be dangerous dissidents.
4
*

Doar insisted that he was nonpartisan in his role as special counsel to the Nixon impeachment inquiry. But, according to writer Renata Adler, who was one of Doar’s closest confidants, that was not the case. As Adler would later write:

“The fact that underlay the [impeachment] ordeal was that most of the work, almost all of the time by almost all of the staff, was a charade. . . . Doar himself was working mainly with a small group of about seven people, five of whom were old friends who had worked with him before and who were not on the regular staff [Adler herself was a member of this group].

“There was never any doubt among Doar and this small group that . . . the object of this process was that the President must be impeached. Doar had, in fact, been the second non- radical person I knew, and the first [nominal] Republican, to ad- vocate impeachment—months before he became special counsel, long before the inquiry began. Doar customarily spoke . . . in terms of ‘war’ and ‘the Cause.’ ”
6

Among his impeachment staff, John Doar was notorious for being stingy with praise. His rare pats on the back were known as “Doar fixes.”
7
But he treated Hillary Rodham differently from all the others. She was his favorite. Though junior in rank, she

*In 1975, a commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefel- ler was created by President Gerald Ford to investigate the CIA. The Rockefeller Commission revealed that John Doar recommended the establishment of “a single intelligence unit to analyze the FBI infor- mation we receive about persons who make the urban ghetto their base of operations.” Other sources of dissident information sug- gested by Doar included the Intelligence Unit of the Internal Reve- nue Service and the Post Office Department.
5

The Other “Smoking Gun”
77

was given choice assignments and invited by Doar to accom- pany him to confidential executive sessions of the full Judiciary Committee.

Hillary had come to Doar’s office this morning to deliver a draft report written by a committee of eminent scholars chaired by the Yale historian C. Vann Woodward. Doar had assigned Hillary to supervise the historians’ work as they investigated the record of past presidential abuses of power.

There was no need for Doar to explain the critical impor- tance of the project to Hillary. As part of Richard Nixon’s de- fense, White House lawyers were prepared to argue that Nixon’s abuses of presidential power were no worse than those commit- ted by other presidents, including John F. Kennedy, who made illegal political assassinations a secret instrument of his foreign policy.
8

“When Nixon entered office, he was very serious about for- eign affairs,” recalled Geoffrey Shepard, a lawyer who worked in the Nixon White House during the impeachment inquiry. “President Nixon immediately began pushing the hell out of [CIA director] Richard Helms, demanding to know who screwed up the Bay of Pigs, who stood by while [South Vietnamese presi- dent] Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated. Those were exactly the kinds of things that Teddy Kennedy did not want explored about his dead brother’s administration.”
9

Indeed, Nixon’s doomsday threat to expose the “crimes of Camelot” posed a serious problem for Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the front-runner for his party’s presidential nomina- tion in 1976. If Nixon was impeached, he was prepared to re- veal what he knew about JFK’s programs to assassinate foreign leaders and illegally wiretap the telephone conversations of Ameri- can citizens.

Such bombshell revelations would not only irrevocably

78 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

tarnish the reputation of John Kennedy, they would likely derail Teddy Kennedy’s plans to restore Camelot in the White House.

The question was: Did Nixon have enough ammunition to carry out his threat against Teddy Kennedy?

The answer was contained in the C. Vann Woodward report that Hillary now placed on Doar’s desk, with its title page fac- ing up:

Responses of the President to Charges of Misconduct Including Accusations of High Crimes and Misdemeanors from George Washington to Lyndon Johnson: An Authoritative History Requested by Counsel John Doar for the Impeachment Inquiry Staff Investigating Charges Against Richard M. Nixon.
10

Less than a year out of Yale Law School, Hillary Rodham seemed an unlikely choice to supervise such a sensitive project. But then, Hillary was no ordinary rookie lawyer.

While Hillary was at Yale Law School, her fiery radicalism had brought her to the attention of Marian and Peter Edelman. They, in turn, had sung Hillary’s praises to Professor Burke Marshall, the former Kennedy Justice Department official who had been one of the first people Teddy Kennedy turned to for help after Chappaquiddick.
11

Now, as the attorney-general-in-waiting of the Camelot government-in-exile,
12
Marshall was the secret éminence grise behind the impeachment inquiry. From his professor’s perch at Yale Law School, he had personally recommended or vetted most of the lawyers who were hired by his protégé, John Doar. Hillary was hired on the basis of Marshall’s glowing reference.
13
Shortly after she arrived in Washington, Hillary received a crash course in the kind of bare-knuckles politics that would come in handy later in Arkansas and Washington, D.C. Among other things, she learned that Teddy Kennedy had used his con-

The Other “Smoking Gun”
79

siderable clout to shield his assassinated brother from embar- rassing exposure.

First, Teddy successfully lobbied for the appointment of an old friend, Harvard professor Archibald Cox, as the Watergate special prosecutor. Cox was a fierce Kennedy partisan; he had been an adviser and speechwriter for John F. Kennedy and served as solicitor general in the Kennedy Justice Department. In addition, Teddy sponsored an amendment to the bill estab- lishing the Senate Watergate Committee. His amendment, which was passed by the Senate, barred the Watergate Commit- tee from investigating past misconduct by the executive branch, the FBI, or the CIA.

In addition, Hillary learned that the lineup of pro- and anti- impeachment forces in Washington was not at all what she ex- pected. Many Republicans, including Senator Barry Goldwater, believed that it would be better if Nixon were impeached sooner rather than later, so that his successor in the Oval Office would have time to reunify and strengthen the Republican Party. The Democrats, on the other hand, had a different agenda: they wanted to keep the fatally wounded Nixon in office as long as possible.

“Don Edwards of California, Robert Kastenmeier of Wis- consin, and other liberals . . . savored the prospect of Nixon re- maining in office twisting in the wind until the end of his term,” wrote Jerry Zeifman, chief counsel to the House Judiciary Com- mittee, and John Doar’s nominal boss. “As they saw it, that would pave the way for a staunch liberal such as Ted Kennedy to win the presidency easily.”
14
*

Among those who agreed with Zeifman’s analysis was Vice President Gerald Ford. He criticized Democrats who were

*Democrats also relished the prospect of running against a badly wounded Nixon in the 1974 off-year election.

80 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

“bent on stretching out the ordeal of Watergate for their own purpose,” and accused a “relatively small group of political ac- tivists” of plotting to “cripple the President by dragging out the preliminaries to impeachment for as long as they can and to use the whole affair for maximum political advantage. . . . [T]heir aim is total victory for themselves and total defeat not only of President Nixon but of the Republican policies for which he stands.”
15

Doar and his ad hoc irregulars, including Hillary Rodham, conferred regularly on impeachment strategy with Burke Mar- shall at Yale. This group devised several ingenious legal strate- gies. They argued that a president was constitutionally shielded from impeachment for acts by his subordinates that he had not personally directed.
16
Under this legal umbrella, it would be dif- ficult, for instance, to prove that President Kennedy was respon- sible for the use of Mafia hit men to assassinate Fidel Castro, because there was no direct evidence that he had ordered some- one to do it.

The Doar irregulars further asserted that a president had neither the right to representation by counsel in an impeach- ment proceeding, nor the right to cross-examine witnesses.
17
This ruling would have prevented President Nixon’s attor- neys from examining witnesses who could testify that the Ken- nedy administration indulged in acts that had been blatantly unconstitutional.

BOOK: The Truth About Hillary
3.16Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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