The Truth About Hillary (16 page)

not be defeated politically.”
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With those words—her first public comment on the Monica Lewinsky scandal—Hillary laid the foundation for all the lies that were yet to come.

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Hillary’s Brain

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n times of crisis, Hillary always returned to the same playbook—the simple life lessons she had learned from her father and mother.

Lesson No. 1: Never allow yourself to be a victim.

Lesson No. 2: If somebody hits you, hit him or her back harder. Lesson No. 3: Stay in control of your own destiny.

At some point on her way back from Baltimore, it seemed to have occurred to her that she did not have to be a victim of the Lewinsky scandal. On the contrary, she could turn the scandal to her own advantage. After four years of living in the political wilderness, she had the opportunity to get out there and fight “the neighborhood bully”—in this case, her political enemies on the right.

Upon her return to the White House, Hillary called Sidney Blumenthal. A former journalist, Blumenthal was an influential

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presidential policy adviser who understood the press better than anyone in the White House.

She needed to see him right away, Hillary told Blumenthal.

Sid Blumenthal went back a long way with Hillary. They had worked together on Gary Hart’s doomed 1984 presidential cam- paign, where they discovered they had a lot in common. In col- lege, Blumenthal had been a member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society; in law school, Hillary had worked on be- half of the violence-prone group known as the Black Panthers.

As members of the New Left, both Sid Blumenthal and Hillary Rodham manifested the qualities that historian Richard Hofstadter identified in his 1963 landmark study
The Paranoid Style in American Politics
—“heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.”
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In fact, Hofstadter might have had Sid Blumenthal and Hillary Rodham in mind when he wrote: “Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be eliminated. . . . It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the pro- jection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him.”
2

Jeffrey Toobin, in his book
A Vast Conspiracy
, described Blu- menthal as “perhaps the most partisan member of the Clintons’ circle. . . . In a White House, and a capital, where people tried to slice issues into narrow, achievable objectives, Blumenthal saw the world in a broad sweep of ideological conflict between the Clintons and what he invariably called ‘the right wing.’ . . . Blu- menthal’s predilection for conspiracy theories prompted his col- league Rahm Emanuel to nickname him ‘G.K.’—for Grassy Knoll.”
3

Blumenthal occupied a windowless basement office in a

Hillar y’ s Brain
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room that used to serve as the White House barbershop. From these subterranean Phantom-of-the-Opera depths, he spun what the political writer Joe Klein described as “vast, obscure Mani- chean fantasies about the world outside the gates.”
4

Blumenthal plotted Hillary’s defenses against the sinister forces of the media and the right. His enemies list included the
Washington Post
’s Susan Schmidt, who had broken many Whitewater stories and whom Hillary had tried to get fired.
5
Blumenthal was also behind a smear campaign against Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr and his staff, some of whom he ac- cused of being gay, or of having sex with members of the media.
6
The West Wing reporters bestowed many nicknames on Blumenthal—“Sid Vicious,” “Rasputin,” “the dirt devil.” But the

one that seemed most appropriate was “Hillary’s brain.”

It didn’t take Sid Blumenthal long to make it from his of-

fice in the White House basement to the family residence.

Dressed in pinstripes and French cuffs, Blumenthal cut a dandyish figure. His hair, graying at the temples, fell in carefully arranged curls onto his forehead in the manner of the English actor Hugh Grant. In fact, Blumenthal was such an out-and-out Anglophile that some White House aides joked he spent more time on the phone with Prime Minister Tony Blair’s aides in London than he did with anyone in the Clinton administration.

“[Hillary] explained that this [Lewinsky] story involved Clin- ton’s concern for a person with personal problems, a common occurrence since she had known him,” Blumenthal wrote in a typical example of the Big Lie. “His empathy, she went on, came from his relationship with his mother, an open, compassionate woman, and from Clinton’s own difficult experiences growing up. I knew, of course, what she was referring to: being father- less and poor, the often terrifying battles with his alcoholic, abu- sive stepfather. . . . In explaining what had happened, she relied

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upon her understanding of her husband. I assumed that she had spoken with him and that what she was saying reflected their conversation.

“For her,” Blumenthal continued, “the stakes were greater than for anyone. They encompassed not only everything she had worked on politically for a lifetime, but her marriage. She had to defend both.”
7

Hillary could not admit that she had known about Bill’s es- capades with Monica Lewinsky. That would have only confirmed people’s worst suspicions that her marriage was a political ar- rangement rather than a true love match.

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“This Is War”

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ranklin Roosevelt called it the “Fish Room,” be- cause that was where he displayed his fishing trophies. John Kennedy carried on the nautical theme by mount-

ing a sailfish on one of its walls. Richard Nixon took down JFK’s fish and renamed the room in honor of his hero, Theodore Roo- sevelt. And in the minds of many people, Bill Clinton bestowed yet another name on the room:

The Liar’s Corner.

At 10:35 a.m. on January 26, 1998—six years to the day af- ter he had “absolutely leveled with the American people” on
60 Minutes
about Gennifer Flowers—Bill Clinton entered the small, windowless room. He was wearing a red and yellow neck- tie and a tense expression on his blotchy face. His wife was in the midst of presenting a new federally financed program for after- school care, and the President took a place between her and Vice President Al Gore.

The assembled press, about fifty strong, had been tipped off in advance that the President would address the charges that he

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had had sex with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office, and had asked her to lie about it. Although he had denied under oath having done any such thing, there were reports that Kenneth Starr’s investigators had already succeeded in getting Monica to make a tape-recorded confession.

What could the President say?

As one spectator described it, “The whole room seemed to hold its breath. . . . In six minutes of policy talk, Clinton folded his hands, stuffed them in his suit pockets, gripped the podium, and rifled the pages of his speech. Twice he paused and licked his lips. He glanced left, right and down, but not once did he make eye contact with the reporters or camera lenses watching in- tently from the back of the room.

“Then he spoke the words: ‘But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me.’

“At that, he narrowed his eyes and trained a laser-like glare straight in the eye of the news cameras. Seven times he jabbed his finger. His forehead was shiny with sweat.

“ ‘I’m going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with
that woman
. . . Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie. Not a single time.
Never
. These allegations are false.’ ”
1

It took Bill Clinton just twenty seconds and fifty words to tell one of the most blatant lies in the annals of modern presi- dential history.

Behind him, dressed in a lemon-and-cream-colored suit that picked up the yellow in the President’s tie, Hillary nodded in approval, even though she knew he was lying. The President’s words echoed the advice that Hillary had received (and passed on to Bill) from her Arkansas friend Harry Thomason, who had moved into the White House and joined her war room team.

“We’ve had a slow-motion assassination in process for some time,” Thomason had said. “Once everybody on our side falls in, this is war. Never give them a break. Never give them one inch.

“This Is War”
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Once you finally get that through your head, then you have to get out and fight this every way you can. My grandfather used to say that the Bible said when someone hits you, you turn the other cheek, but after that, you deck him.”
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Dorothy Rodham, Hillary’s mother, couldn’t have said it better.

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“Screw ’Em”

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he next day, an aide woke the Big Girl at five o’clock in the morning in the presidential suite at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria. Normally a late riser, it took

her several minutes to become fully conscious.

After a light breakfast, she got the movie-star treatment from her hair stylist and makeup artist. As her dresser applied the finishing touches—a twisted choker of pearls and a large pa- triotic gold eagle pin with a pearl—her political aides stepped in and began to prep the Big Girl for a seven o’clock interview on the
Today
show.

The interview had been booked months before—back when Hillary was wandering in the political wilderness. At the time, the
Today
show’s producers expected Hillary to address such tra- ditional First Lady topics as historic preservation. But now, with her husband reeling from charges of sex in the Oval Office, Hillary saw an opportunity to return to the thick of battle.
1

Dressed in a brown suit, every last strand of her blonde hair cemented into place, she told her staff that she was ready to rock

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“Scr ew ’Em”
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’n’ roll. She was whisked into a private elevator and down to a waiting limousine for the short ride to Rockefeller Plaza.

“She was very relaxed on the ride over,” said Melanie Verveer, her dark-haired mannish-looking chief of staff, who had worked with Hillary at the Children’s Defense Fund. “Not uptight. Not apprehensive.”
2

Maybe so. But as she climbed out of the limousine in front of the NBC studios in Rockefeller Plaza, Hillary looked tense. The street was lined with a battalion of television satellite trucks, and Hillary flashed a smile for the cameras. However, she could not disguise her deep animosity toward the press. It was evident in the tight lines around her mouth.

Jeff Zucker, the executive producer of the
Today
show, poked his head into the makeup room while Hillary was getting a light powdering to hide the bags under her eyes. Hillary was a huge “get” for Zucker. But his star anchor, Katie Couric, was not pres- ent to exploit the moment; her husband had died of cancer the previous weekend, and she was on leave.

And so, the interview with the First Lady fell to Matt Lauer, who had been summoned back from vacation to handle the biggest political story since Watergate.

Ten minutes before Hillary was scheduled to go on air, she spoke on the phone one last time—to Sidney Blumenthal.

“I suggested that she say, ‘There are professional forces at work whose only purpose is to sow division by creating a scan- dal,’ ” Blumenthal recalled.
3

Once the cameras started rolling, Matt Lauer wasted no time getting to the point.

“There has been one question on the minds of people in this country, Mrs. Clinton, lately. And that is, what is the exact na- ture of the relationship between your husband and Monica Lew- insky? Has he described the relationship in detail to you?”

“Well, we’ve talked at great length,” she answered. “And I

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think as this matter unfolds, the entire country will have more information. . . .”

“You have said, I understand, to some close friends, that this is the last great battle,” Matt Lauer said. “And that one side or the other is going down here.”

“Well, I don’t know if I’ve been that dramatic,” Hillary said. “That would sound like a good line from a movie. But I do be- lieve that this is a battle. I mean, look at the very people who are involved in this, they have popped up in other settings. This is the great story here, for anybody who is willing to find it and write about it and explain it, is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.”
4

Later, Hillary’s attorney David Kendall called to con- gratulate her on her “vast right-wing conspiracy” remark, a phrase that would come back to haunt her.
5

“I heard your words of wisdom ringing through my ear,” Hillary told him.

“And which words of incredible wisdom were you hearing?” Kendall said, going along with the joke.

“Screw ’em!” Hillary said.

“It’s an old Quaker expression,” said Kendall, who was raised as a Quaker.

“Oh,” said Hillary, “like ‘Screw thee’?”
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The Human Bridge

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hanks in large part to Hillary’s vigorous defense of her husband, the President’s poll numbers began to rise. By the spring of 1998, his favorable job rating was

nearing an all-time high. The tide of public opinion appeared to have turned against Whitewater counsel Kenneth Starr, who was increasingly viewed as a puritanical, sex-obsessed prosecutor.