The Truth About Hillary (12 page)

But Juanita was no longer “taken” by Bill Clinton. In fact, she was dreading seeing him at this night’s event, for the last time they were in the same room, he had raped her.

Just three weeks before, he had come up to her hotel room in Little Rock. “He turned me around and started kissing me,” she said, “and that was a real shock. I first pushed him away and just told him ‘no.’ . . . The second time he tries to kiss me he starts biting on my lip. . . . And then he forces me down on the bed. I just was very frightened, and I tried to get away from him and I told him ‘no.’ . . . He wouldn’t listen to me. . . . He was such a

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different person at that moment; he was just a vicious, awful person.”
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Juanita did not tell her husband about the sexual assault.

“I felt responsible for what happened,” she explained. “You go back to the nineteen seventies and allow a man to come to your hotel room, you feel you get what you deserved. I had ac- cepted this guilt.

“When Hillary arrived with Bill at the fund-raiser, she made her entrance through the kitchen area,” Juanita continued. “And I was going to leave immediately. But she made her way directly to me, making me very nervous. I was dumbfounded that she came straight to me.

“ ‘I’m happy to meet you,’ Hillary said. ‘Bill has talked a lot about you and what you have done for the campaign. And I want you to know how much I appreciate what you do for Bill.’

“I was falling apart emotionally. She would not let me go.

She came close to my face.

“ ‘Everything you do for Bill,’ she said, looking me stern in the eye.
‘Everything.’

“I extracted my hand from hers. And in that instant, I knew that
she
knew. I never thought for a moment there was any possi- bility that she didn’t know that her husband had raped me.”
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A Night to Remember

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t was nearly one o’clock in the morning in June of 1979, and a group of boisterous vacationers were drinking and playing skittles, or nine pins, in the pub of the Hori- zons hotel in Bermuda. Among the collection of thirtysome- things was a couple from Arkansas—Hillary Rodham and her

husband, Governor Bill Clinton.

As the hour grew late, the wives retired to their rooms, leav- ing their husbands, who had met for the first time this night, to demolish what was left of a case of beer.

After a few more beers, Bill Clinton—who normally was not a heavy drinker, and was clearly feeling no pain—made an announcement.

“I’m going back to my cottage to rape my wife,” he said.
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His new friends laughed at his drunken boast, and bid him

good night.

“The next morning, my phone rings at about eighty-thirty, and it is Bill inviting me and my wife for breakfast,” recalled one of the men from the night before, an investment banker from

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New York. “When we get there, the place looks like World War III. There are pillows and busted-up furniture all over the place. Obviously, Hillary’s got pissed off at Bill, and threw a few things across the room. I guess that’s the price he paid for going back to his room and taking the initiative and demanding sex.

“The irony of it is, about two months later the phone rings in my office in Wall Street. It’s Clinton, calling from the gover- nor’s mansion in Little Rock. I’ve heard he’s been hitting up Wall Street a lot. Investment bankers are always targets for gov- ernors looking for a contribution or two.

“Anyway, we talk for a while, and then he says, ‘By the way, Hillary hasn’t been feeling well recently. She went to the doctor, and the doctor called a press conference, and lo and behold, I’m holding the
Arkansas Gazette
reading that my wife is pregnant.’

“That’s the way he learns that Hillary is pregnant with Chelsea—in the newspaper.

“But the fact that his wife didn’t tell him that she was preg- nant before she told a reporter doesn’t seem to faze him one bit, because he says, ‘Do you know what night that happened?’

“ ‘No,’ I say. ‘When?’

“ ‘It was in Bermuda,’ he says. ‘And you were there!’ ”
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At the time of Chelsea’s birth, Bill Clinton was carrying on a sexual relationship with Dolly Kyle Browning, a woman he had known since high school. Their affair, which started in the mid-1970s, would continue for more than twenty years, and as old friends as well as lovers, they indulged in a great deal of can- did pillow talk.

“One time,” Dolly recalled in an interview for this book,
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“Billy told me he wanted to have a baby. I thought he meant with me, and I said, ‘Do you think that’s a good idea?’

“ ‘No, I don’t mean with you,’ he said. “I said, ‘What’s the deal?’

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“He said, ‘It doesn’t look good politically for me and Hillary not to have children, especially given the way Hillary is, and what people think about her.’

“ ‘Why are you telling me about this?’ I asked.

“ ‘Because,’ he said, ‘I was hoping you might pray for me.’ “And I said, ‘Is that what you really want?’

“ ‘Yes.’

“ ‘Okay, then,’ I said, ‘then I’ll pray that you have a baby. But remember, you have to do your part.’

“I said that because I knew that he and Hillary never had much of a sexual relationship. Also, Billy had a low sperm count, and he and Hillary were going to a fertility specialist in Califor- nia. They had been trying for quite a while without any success. “But a month or so after our conversation [and after their trip to Bermuda], Hillary got pregnant. And the thing that shocked Billy was that he literally fell in love with his daughter. He was absolutely nuts about that child. But Hillary didn’t have the mothering instincts, and she couldn’t wait to dump this kid

with a nanny and get back to work.

“And Billy was concerned about Chelsea, because he didn’t think that Hillary was much of a mother. And he asked me, ‘What can I do for my daughter?’

“ ‘Spend time with her and be a good dad,’ I told him. “ ‘What’s the most important thing I can do?’

“And I said, ‘Billy, unfortunately the most important thing you can do for your child is honor and respect her mother.’ ”

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All the Governor’s Women

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fter Chelsea’s birth in February 1980, Hillary de-

voted less time to Bill and his political career.

Now, in addition to a baby girl at home, she had a demanding job as a partner at the Rose Law Firm, and commit- ments to various liberal do-gooder groups—such as the Chil- dren’s Defense Fund and the Legal Services Corporation—which required that she travel outside the state every few weeks.

Bill—ever the needy narcissist—felt abandoned. He was overwhelmed by self-pity and resentment, and he compensated for these feelings by running after women—often in plain sight of his wife.

“At times,” wrote Joyce Milton, “he flirted outrageously with women in front of Hillary, and even in front of the women’s hus- bands. Moreover, now that he was Governor, Clinton had an es- cort of state troopers wherever he went, and he would regale them with lewd comments about the attributes of any attractive woman who happened to cross his path and occasionally ask the

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troopers to get the phone numbers of good-looking women he spotted at political rallies.”
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“He had two levels of women: smart peers who he could tell were having trouble with their spouses, and of course the babes,” said Nancy “Peach” Pietrefesa,
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an ardent feminist who had been Hillary’s best friend during her senior year at Wellesley, and who, after moving to Little Rock, was rumored to be Hil- lary’s lesbian lover.
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“He knows human nature so well, he knows how to lay that little ‘test’ on a woman. Handfuls of women had their feelings hurt. Clinton would come on to them and then be distracted or interrupted. When he came back, he’d look at the same woman like he didn’t know who she was.

“He was fucking a married woman in the bushes in the sum- mer of 1980,” Peach continued. “He’d go jogging and meet her. She was a former campaign volunteer who wasn’t getting along with her husband. Bill would come home and talk about her to Hillary: ‘Don’t you think she’s fabulous? She is such an incredi- ble . . .’ Hillary knew what he was doing and got pissed.”
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Their marriage was on the rocks.

“One Saturday morning a friend stopped by the house and found [Bill] in the den, playing on the floor with Chelsea,” wrote David Maraniss. “Rodham was in the kitchen. As he smiled and laughed with his one-year-old daughter, Clinton sang softly in the lilt of a gentle lullaby, but loud enough for the guest to hear: ‘I want a div-or-or-or-or-orce. I want a div-or-or-orce.’ ”
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As governor, Bill was under constant media scrutiny, but he didn’t allow that to put a crimp in his style.

“Bill was like a kid with a new toy that first term,” a friend told Connie Bruck, a writer for
The New Yorker
. “The perks, the Mansion, having the most powerful people in the state paying court to you. And he always had a weakness for bleached blondes

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with big jewelry, in short skirts, their figures shown off to best advantage.”
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He grew careless and sloppy and self-destructive. He wore his hair long, which did not go over well in his conservative state. He surrounded himself in the governor’s mansion with bearded young aides, who looked as though they had stepped out of a Pink Floyd concert. And he was deaf to complaints about his northern-born, feminist wife.

People in small towns across Arkansas fumed that Hillary used her maiden name, dressed in “unfeminine” clothes, and was seen reading a book at an Arkansas Razorbacks football game. It all went to prove, said his political enemies, that Bill Clinton could “not even control his wife”—a grave sin in a macho south- ern state.
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The chickens came home to roost in the fall of 1980 during Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign. Hillary was too busy flying back and forth to Washington, D.C., for board meetings to be of much help in the campaign. But Bill’s Republican opponent, Frank White, made it a point to be seen everywhere on the cam- paign trail in the company of
his
wife, Gay. A traditional home- maker, Gay sat demurely on the speaker’s platform, staring up at her man adoringly.

The contrast between Gay White and Hillary Rodham was not lost on the voters of Arkansas. And to drive the point home, White made Hillary a campaign issue, portraying her as a “bitch” who refused to take her husband’s name.
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“I was her worst critic over that,” said Richard Herget, Bill’s campaign manager. “I think that issue cost us the election. And boy, if Hillary and I didn’t tangle on that one. . . .

“I made a speech one time to a Democratic women’s club during the campaign,” he continued. “And the average age of the attendee was in the sixties. And I asked this group of ladies,

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afterward, before they opened up for questions, I said, ‘Let me ask you a question.’ I said, ‘How do you feel about the issue of Hillary Rodham, you know, not being Hillary Clinton?’ And, oh God, I wish I hadn’t asked it. They unloaded on me. ‘She’s not good enough to take his name,’ and that sort of thing. You’ve got to remember that this is the conservative South. Hillary just wasn’t that in touch back then.”
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The attacks on Hillary worked. When the ballots were counted, it was revealed that Frank White had upset Bill Clinton with more than 51 percent of the vote.

Bill’s defeat was a tipping point in the Clinton marriage.

“It shook both of them right down to their toes,” said one friend.
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Bill felt guilty that he had failed Hillary. His greatest fear was that she might leave him, not because he had been unfaith- ful to her, but because he was a loser.
Her
greatest fear was that their mutual dream of living in the White House might now be unattainable.

“The experience of watching Bill screw up,” said a Clin- ton adviser, “made Hillary realize she should jump into the breach. . . . She had to—he was so shaken, and was not a particu- larly good strategist anyway. There was no way he was going to win again unless she came in.”
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Hillary made a calculated decision to reorder her priorities. From now on, her career would take second place to Bill’s. Her feminist principles would be scuttled. Even her politics, which were far too liberal for Arkansas, would be toned down. Hillary consciously and deliberately set out to remake herself in the im- age of a conventional political wife.

On February 27, 1982—Chelsea’s second birthday—Bill called a press conference and announced his candidacy for the

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upcoming gubernatorial election. Standing by his side was Hil- lary. She looked completely different. Gone were the thick Coke-bottle eyeglasses, replaced by tinted contact lenses that made her eyes look bluer. Gone, too, was the curly Little Or- phan Annie hairdo, replaced by straightened and lightened hair. She wore makeup, a stylish dress, and sheer nylons rather than opaque black stockings.

“She conformed, eyes batting,” said a Clinton aide. “She hated it, for a while resented it no end, but she became what Arkansas wanted her to be.”
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One of the reporters at the press conference asked Bill Clin- ton if it was true that his wife had changed her name. Bill turned the microphone over to Hillary.

“I don’t have to change my name,” she said defensively. “I’ve been Mrs. Bill Clinton. I kept the professional name Hillary Rodham in my law practice, but now I’m going to take a leave of absence from the law firm to campaign full time for Bill, and I’ll be Mrs. Bill Clinton.”
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