The Truth About Hillary (13 page)

But that disingenuous answer did not satisfy the assembled journalists.

“Did you change your name legally?” one of them asked.
14
Hillary tried to avoid giving a direct and honest answer. “Did you change your name legally?” the reported pressed.

The next day’s
Times-News
of McGehee, a small town in the eastern part of Arkansas, reported: “ ‘No,’ came the ice cold an- swer from Arkansas’ former first lady.”
15
*

“The deal was,” said Peach Pietrefesa, “she gave up her name and her integrity in exchange for his promise to take them where she wanted to go—to be president together.”
16

*It wasn’t until the following May that she registered to vote as Hillary Clinton.

98 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

* * *

Hillary’s makeover went beyond mere window dressing.

She telephoned Dick Morris, the political consultant who had helped Bill win the governorship, and begged him to come back to work on her husband’s next campaign. Morris was skep- tical until Hillary convinced him that she was serious about us- ing attack ads and attack campaigning—techniques that had been devised by communications consultant Roger Ailes to reposition Richard Nixon, and had since been made into a virtual art form by Morris.
17

“Hillary was intrigued by the technique,” said Morris. “Her reaction was not at all ideological, it was purely pragmatic: ‘We need to learn how the bad boys do it.’ ”
18

Hillary’s next phone call was to Texas native Betsey Wright, a tough-as-nails political operative who had worked with Bill and Hill on the McGovern campaign and was now an activist in the women’s movement. Hillary wanted Betsey to move to Little Rock, become Bill’s campaign manager, and put together a whole new political machine—one that would move Bill away from the liberal positions carved out for him by his young, bearded staff and bring him toward the center of the political spectrum.

“Wright wasn’t romantically interested in Bill, so Hillary could trust her around her husband without fear of a sexual rela- tionship,” wrote David Brock. “. . . Wright, a heavyset chain smoker with a famously foul mouth and a temper to match, built the political organization that Clinton lacked.”
19

Hillary’s third phone call was to Ivan Duda, a well-known Little Rock private investigator.

“She asked to see me,” Duda told the author of this book, “and when we met, she said, ‘I want you to do damage control over Bill’s philandering.’ I asked her, ‘What do you mean?’ And she said, ‘Bill’s going to be President of the United States.’ I laughed at that, but she said, ‘No, I’m serious.’

All the Gover nor’ s Women
99

“So,” Duda continued, “I said, ‘What do you want me for?’ And she said, ‘I want you to get rid of all these bitches he’s see- ing.’ I said, ‘Okay, I can do that.’ And she said, ‘I want you to give me the names and addresses and phone numbers, and we can get them under control.’ ”
20

Hillary did not try to stop Bill from philandering; that would have been a fruitless exercise. All she asked of her husband was that he be more discriminating in his choice of women and not do anything to embarrass her in public. With Ivan Duda’s re- ports in hand, Hillary was able to separate the “safe” women from the “trouble makers,” and know who could be intimidated to keep their mouths shut.

On election night 1982, all of Hillary’s efforts paid off: Bill won a resounding victory, garnering 54.7 percent of the vote. At the victory celebration, Hillary stood next to Bill on the stage, her hair blonder than ever, looking feminine in a form-fitting silk print dress. When she spoke, the crowd noticed that she had somehow acquired a southern accent.

“Hillary made her trade-offs early on,” said her friend Jan Piercy, “and I think she steeled herself not to look back.”
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P
A R T I I I
‌

The White House Years

C
H A P T E R F I F T E E N
‌

Her Husband’s Keeper

January 21, 1998

T

he day that the
W
ASHINGTON
P
OST
broke the story of Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky was the most painful day in Hillary’s life. And because she felt

so exposed and vulnerable, she was more determined than ever to fight back.

Late that morning, when she stepped out of a black chauf- feured vehicle onto the pavement in front of Washington’s Union Station, her hair was done in a glamorous shoulder-length page- boy. Her makeup was ladled on thickly for the cameras. And she was dressed in a long dark coat that reached to her ankles and made her look taller and thinner than usual. Despite the bit- ter cold January wind that swept down Massachusetts Avenue, Hillary made an effort to smile.

She did not want to look like a woman who was on the de- fensive. Which, of course, she was. Every twenty-four-hour ca- ble news channel was carrying the story of how Monica Lewinsky had given Bill Clinton blow jobs in the Oval Office; radio talk

103

104 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

show hosts were referring to the Oval Office as the Oral Ori- fice; people were e-mailing each other with Hillary jokes (“After Monica admitted to an affair with the president, Hillary phoned her up and asked her, ‘What was it like?’ ”).
1

“Whenever I go out and fight I get vilified, so I have just learned to smile and take it,” Hillary said. “I go out there and say, ‘Please, please, kick me again, insult me some more.’ You have to be much craftier behind the scenes, but just smile.”
2

Her Secret Service detail escorted Hillary through the sta- tion’s cavernous main hall, and under the barrel-vaulted ceiling. She was greeted by waiting Amtrak officials, who led her to a special car that would carry her to Baltimore. There she was scheduled to give a speech on race relations at Goucher College as a favor to an old friend, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Taylor Branch.

No sooner had Hillary settled into her seat than her cell phone began ringing. The assistant in charge of the phone lis- tened for a moment, then turned to Hillary.

“It’s the President,” the assistant said.

But when she tried to pass the phone to Hillary, the First Lady refused to take it.
3

As the Amtrak train lumbered through the Maryland sub- urbs, the cell phone rang several more times. One call was from attorney David Kendall, who was now feuding openly with Robert Bennett over control of the President’s legal representa- tion. Kendall warned Hillary that Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr planned to expand his Whitewater investigation into the Lewinsky matter, and nail the President for obstruction of justice. Two other calls came from Bill Clinton, who was eager to apologize to his wife, and seek her forgiveness. He could have saved his breath. Hillary wasn’t interested in apologies. She was

searching for a way out of the Monica mess.

* * *

Her Husband’ s Keeper
105

Ironically enough, she had helped create that mess.

In the summer of 1995, Hillary’s office received a phone call from Walter Kaye, a wealthy insurance mogul and Democratic donor who was especially close to the First Lady. Walter Kaye was calling to ask Hillary for a favor: a family friend named Mar- cia Lewis was trying to line up a summer job for her daughter, Monica Lewinsky, who, unlike her mother, had not changed her Jewish-sounding last name. Monica was graduating from Lewis and Clark, a small college in Oregon, and was looking for a job in Washington, D.C.

Walter Kaye carried a lot of weight; he had raised several hundred thousand dollars for the party, and had been an over- night guest at the White House. The First Lady’s office sent a heads-up message to an official at the Democratic National Committee, who was in charge of hiring summer interns.

“I got a call from Walter Kaye asking me to interview Mon- ica Lewinsky,” the official recalled in an interview for this book. “Every summer, we would put five hundred kids in jobs as un- paid interns in the White House and other governmental agen- cies. At least fifty of them came through big donors. It wasn’t a big deal.”
4

But it soon turned into one.

“Monica started working in the White House in November 1995, during the government shutdown,” a high-ranking adviser in the Clinton White House told the author. “That shutdown, which was seen at the time as a brilliant political move by Bill Clinton against Newt Gingrich’s Republican-dominated House of Representatives, turned out to be Bill’s downfall.

“During the shutdown, we had to operate with only essential government personnel,” the adviser continued. “Out of the nor- mal White House staff, only about thirty people were allowed to come to work. Interns like Monica were allowed to work be- cause they were not paid official staff.

106 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

“Everyone had the impression that the government worked better with fewer people. But during this time, Bill Clinton was wandering around the White House unchecked. And the inci- dent in which Monica flashed her thong happened as he was wandering around the office. Normally, when Hillary’s people were there, the President wasn’t
allowed
to wander.”
5

Hillary always kept a sharp eye on Bill. In order to be near her husband, and exercise maximum control, she had refused to be exiled to the East Wing of the White House, the traditional realm of First Ladies, and fought for space in the West Wing. At first, she tried to grab the office earmarked for Vice President Al Gore, and when that didn’t work, she settled for space on the second floor of the West Wing.

She ended up with two offices—a
social
office in the East Wing and a
political
office in the West Wing.

“We never saw her in the East Wing,” said Kathleen Willey, who worked in the First Lady’s social office for several months before she was groped by the President and left the White House in disgust. “All the event planning and state dinners were done in her office in the West Wing. Her social secretary, Ann Stock, would go to Hillary’s office in the West Wing. Hillary was frankly not interested in any of the planning for the social events; she was only interested in being part of policy-making in the West Wing.

“Several months after the Clintons arrived in the White House,” Kathleen Willey continued, “it was time to pick out the Christmas card design, and Hillary couldn’t make up her mind. And I remember one day, I was walking by Ann Stock’s office, and she had just come back from a meeting with Hillary, and she was frustrated by Hillary’s lack of interest. And I remember Ann shouting, ‘I just want to tell her, Hillary, get off your fucking ass and decide!’ ”
6

Her Husband’ s Keeper
107

Hillary’s West Wing staff was so large that it had to be housed in the Old Executive Office Building next door to the White House. This staff, which soon became known as “Hillary- land,” consisted of a group of strong, like-minded women who struck people, including several who were interviewed for this book, as masculine in appearance, dress, manner, and speech.

Hillary’s old Wellesley College classmate, Jan Piercy, took charge of White House personnel and hired a large number of women whose first loyalty was to Hill, not to Bill.

“Hillary gave an ideological edge to Clinton’s general fuzzi- ness when he got to the White House,” wrote the historian Paul Johnson. “She also stuck a feminist finger in the appointment pies, especially of women, sometimes with embarrassing, indeed hilarious, results. Thus Tara O’Toole, nominated assistant secre- tary of energy, turned out to be a member of a Marxist women’s reading circle. Roberta Achtenberg, assistant secretary for fair housing, revealed herself as a militant lesbian who persecuted the Boy Scouts for not allowing homosexuals as scoutmasters. Joycelyn Elders, made surgeon general, after many public rows, had to go when she advocated masturbation.”
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Another Wellesley classmate who worked for Hillary was Eleanor “Eldie” Acheson. Eldie—the granddaughter of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson—lived openly with her lesbian partner. She had served as cochair of the Clinton-Gore cam- paign in Massachusetts, where she minted “Vote for Hillary’s Husband” buttons.
8
Hillary appointed Eldie assistant attorney general.*

Hillary scattered other friends through the Clinton adminis- tration. The First Lady was instrumental in appointing Donna E.