The Truth About Hillary (2 page)

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M

onica Lewinsky hadn’t seen the Big Creep since she was banished from the White House. And now, on this sultry August evening in 1996, she found

herself close to him again—so close she could reach out and touch him.

“He had this big fiftieth birthday party at Radio City Music Hall,” Monica recalled, “and [beforehand] there was a cocktail reception [at the Sheraton Hotel], and when he and [Hillary] came to do the rope line . . . I had my back to him, and I just kind of put . . . my hand behind me and touched him [in the crotch area]. And it . . . was . . . maybe sort of grazing of that area, but . . . it wasn’t how you might imagine it if someone de- scribed this, from a scene from a movie, it wasn’t like that, but it was, you know. . . .”
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For a moment, Monica faltered, and her eyes welled with tears. Then she managed to pull herself together and say in a voice choked with emotion:

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2 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

“. . . I don’t even know if he
remembers
.”
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And that thought tormented her.

She had flown to New York City at her own expense, and fondled the President’s penis in the presence of his wife, who was a few feet away on the rope line and probably saw her do it, and yet Monica couldn’t be sure that Bill Clinton even remem- bered the incident.

Was that
all
she meant to him? And not only that . . .

When Monica reached behind her to touch the President, she glanced over her shoulder and flashed him one of her big toothy smiles—and all at once she noticed that the Big Creep wasn’t wearing the Ermenegildo Zegna necktie she had sent him for his birthday.

“I like it when you wear my ties,” Monica had told him shortly before his birthday, “because then I know I’m close to your heart.”
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So how close
were
they?

She was feeling more than her usual edgy, insecure self as she left the Sheraton New York Hotel after the cocktail reception and hailed a taxi to take her to Radio City Music Hall for the President’s birthday bash.

Manhattan was a ghost town on this Friday evening in Au- gust. But the ticket lobby of Radio City Music Hall was jammed with rich Democratic donors. Many of them had interrupted their summer vacations in the Hamptons or on Martha’s Vine- yard in order to help Bill Clinton celebrate the Big Five-O.

Tonight’s extravaganza was being produced by Jeff Margolis, who had staged several Academy Awards ceremonies. It featured Whoopie Goldberg as emcee, and the usual lineup of liberal stars—Jon Bon Jovi, Aretha Franklin, Kenny Rogers, Nathan Lane, and Rosie O’Donnell.
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Prologue
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At twenty-three years of age, Monica was the youngest per- son in the ticket line. She had gained a lot of weight over the past few unhappy months, and she was bursting the seams on her thin, sleeveless summer dress. She felt conspicuous as she entered the Music Hall’s Grand Foyer, a soaring Art Deco space whose proportions were magnified by mirrors of gold- backed glass. The entrance was dominated by a mural titled
Quest for the Fountain of Eternal Youth
—an appropriate theme for a fifty-year-old president who acted as though he was still a horny teenager.

Entering the vast six-thousand-seat auditorium, Monica checked her ticket stub. For the first time, she noticed that she had been relegated to the cheap seats in the back of the orchestra.

Suddenly, she lost it.

Blinded by all the rage and resentment that had accumulated since she was exiled from the White House the previous spring, Monica turned on her heels and raced back up the crowded aisle, pushing and shoving people out of her way.

“I need to be near him!
”
she shouted.

People stared at her as she dashed into the lobby.

“I need to be near him!”

She disappeared into the ladies’ room.

Nearby, the telephone rang in the office of the Democratic National Committee official who was in charge of the night’s fund-raiser.

“I had an emergency phone call from my deputy that Monica was having a meltdown in the ladies’ room,” the DNC official recalled in an interview for this book. “Monica came unglued. I could hear her over the phone, saying the President’s name over and over—‘Bill!
Bill! Bill!
’ ”
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The official made her way to the ladies’ room and found Monica crying hysterically.

4 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

“Monica had been hired by the DNC to be an unpaid in- tern in the White House,” the official said, “and I was shocked when I heard that she had been promoted to a
paid
job. She had had bad grades in college. She had no skills. A paid job in the White House is one of the most coveted jobs in Washington. Somebody obviously gave her special treatment. I always won- dered who.

“I handed her a tissue, and she told me, ‘I need to be near him! I need to be near him on his birthday!
I need to be up closer!
’

“Suddenly, I put two and two together.
Monica had a relation- ship with the President!
That was the only possible explanation. I had heard that several women in the White House were sleeping with the President, but I was fearful that Monica might be dif- ferent in one respect: she might be a dangerous stalker.

“So I alerted a few people to what was going on. I told the Secret Service agent in charge that I was concerned that Monica would go running up on the stage.

“And I discovered that nobody was surprised about Monica. The Secret Service knew all about her. Everyone I talked to knew she was obsessed with the President. And when I say everyone, I mean everyone—including
Hillary
.”

Hillary Clinton had eyes and ears everywhere in the

White House.

Her main watchdog was Deputy Chief of Staff Evelyn Lieberman, a short, overweight, gray-haired woman, who had befriended Hillary back in the 1980s when they served together at the left-leaning Children’s Defense Fund. In the White House, Hillary assigned her loyal friend the task of monitoring the sexual activity of Bill Clinton—a role that helped earn Evelyn the nick- name “Mother Superior.”

Prologue
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Acting on Hillary’s behalf, Evelyn tracked Monica Lewinsky from the first day the buxom young woman appeared in the West Wing wearing a low-cut blouse and bright red lipstick and nail polish. She repeatedly shooed Monica away from the Oval Office, and when the staff began to catch on to the fact that something was up between the President and the intern, Evelyn transferred Monica to the Pentagon.

If Monica had any doubt about who was behind her transfer, her confusion was cleared up during a twenty-minute telephone conversation with the President on April 12, 1996. During that call, Bill Clinton revealed that Evelyn Lieberman, a.k.a. Mother Superior, had “spearheaded” Monica’s removal from the White House, because he had been paying too much attention to her. Monica didn’t have to be told that Evelyn was Hillary’s chief spear-carrier.
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After Monica’s banishment, it became harder and harder for her to arrange a tryst with the President. By the fall of 1996, Bill Clinton was totally consumed by his reelection campaign, and the President’s private secretary, Betty Currie, had to be extra careful to schedule Monica’s visits when Mother Superior wasn’t around to see the young woman slip into the Oval Office.

However, in early November, Monica managed to gain entry to a fund-raiser for Senate Democrats that was attended by Bill Clinton. She sidled up to the President and had her picture taken with him. This time, he was wearing one of her neckties.

“Hey, Handsome,” she told him, “I like your tie.”
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That same night, Bill Clinton telephoned Monica for some phone sex, and she mentioned that she planned to be at the White House on Pentagon business the next day.
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“Stop by the Oval Office,” the President said.

But when Monica showed up at the White House the fol- lowing day, she spotted Mother Superior standing near the Oval

6 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

Office, keeping an eye on the President for the First Lady. Not daring to defy Hillary Clinton, Monica left without seeing the President.

Once Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica became public knowledge in January 1998, Hillary acted as though she was just as scandalized by the news as the rest of the country.

Many people found that hard to believe. And so Hillary set out to convince people that the
first
First Lady ever to occupy serious real estate in the West Wing of the White House; a woman who interviewed potential White House appointees, oversaw the President’s daily schedule, and ran many important White House meetings; a woman who deployed a legion of loy- alists (not just Evelyn Lieberman) to keep an eye on her sex- addicted husband; a woman who once said, “[Bill] and I talk about everything. Anyone who knows us knows that we worked together on everything”
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—that such an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful woman had been unaware of the existence of Mon- ica Lewinsky.

Hillary worked hard at making the country believe
she could kill Bill.

“The estrangement was vital,” wrote political consultant Dick Morris, “for it helped substantiate the idea that they had a real marriage [to begin with]. And a rapprochement was essential, al- lowing [Hillary] to attract the money and political support she would need to run [for public office in the future].”
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Hillary had been interested in power all her life, but without Monica Lewinsky, she would have remained a scandal-scarred, unpopular First Lady without a promising political future. It was Monica who transformed Hillary overnight into a sympathetic figure and national martyr. And it was Monica who paved the way for Hillary to become a U.S. Senator.

“The great irony of [Hillary’s] life,” remarked Michael

Prologue
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Tomasky, a seasoned political observer, “[was] that she achieved her highest stature, reached her apogee as a public person, not because of widespread admiration for something she had done, but because of public sympathy over something that was done to her.”
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The Big Girl

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The Impossible Dream

January 21, 1998

B

ZZZZZZZZZZ
!

The Big Girl was buzzing for breakfast.

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ZZZZZZZ
ZZZBBBBBBBBBZZZZZZZ!

In the pantry on the second floor of the White House, the harsh metallic noise caught the staff off guard. One of the but- lers glanced at his watch: it was several minutes shy of six o’clock in the morning.
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Something was out of kilter.

As a rule, the President went to bed late and got up early, while the Big Girl—as members of her inner circle called Hil- lary Rodham Clinton—went to bed early and slept in late. Come to think of it, none of the personal staff could recall a single oc- casion when she had gotten out of bed before her husband.
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The senior servants in the White House were intimately ac- quainted with the daily habits of the First Couple. Bill and Hillary Clinton could not have been more different. While the President was erratic and unpredictable, you could set your watch by the Big Girl. She was a
perfectionist
—a woman who had

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12 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

a compelling need to exert iron control over the lives of others as well as her own.

What could possibly have made her alter her routine? BzzzzzzzZZZBBBBBBBBBZZZZZZZ!

The butler picked up a tray with a glass of orange juice, a carafe of coffee, and several morning newspapers, and set off down the long, wide center hallway of the family residence, which was adorned with a Cézanne, a de Kooning, a Cassatt— and a bronze sculpture of President Calvin Coolidge’s pet chow, Tiny Tim. The Big Girl had found Tiny Tim while rummaging through the White House storerooms and had put this piece of kitsch on display (to the dismay of White House historians) as an example of her taste in art.
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The butler made his way across the West Sitting Room to the eat-in kitchen. The Big Girl and the President took break- fast in the kitchen, rather than in their second-floor bedroom suite. Few of the downstairs staff in the West Wing knew what went on inside that bedroom, and as a result, there was always a great deal of water-cooler gossip regarding the Big Girl’s sleep- ing arrangements with her husband.

Was it true they slept in separate beds?

Were there any telltale signs on the presidential sheets that they ever had sex with each other?

For that matter, did the Big Girl have any interest in sex with a man?

Or, as was widely rumored, was she a lesbian?

Some people were offended by such impertinent questions about the First Lady. But Hillary Clinton only had herself to blame for the talk about her sex life. Most women, faced with a chronically unfaithful husband like Bill Clinton, would have di- vorced him long ago. Hillary, on the other hand, not only stayed married to her husband; she displayed a curiously detached atti- tude toward his infidelities.

The Impossible Dr eam
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“It’s hurting so bad,” Hillary once told a friend during the Gennifer Flowers bimbo eruption in 1992.
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But you had to wonder
why
she felt pain.

Was it because of her husband’s breach of faith? Or was it because his breach of faith had become public?

Over the years, a roster of distinguished journalists, biogra- phers, and historians had struggled to answer those questions. Many of them had come to the conclusion that Hillary was more interested in power than she was in sex.

“[Hillary] kept her eye on the real ball,” wrote the historian Paul Johnson. “Each presidential peccadillo led her to demand and get more political say, with her own future political career in mind. . . .”
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