The Truth About Hillary (4 page)

*Hillary feared that Christopher Emery was passing on information to Barbara Bush about the Clintons’ private life, and that Mrs. Bush was behind the embarrassing anti-Clinton rumors that appeared to be originating in Houston, where the Bushes lived.

22 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

worker whose wife, Vali, was a good friend of Hillary’s and worked closely with her on children’s educational issues. “Hillary and Vince’s love affair was an open secret.”
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As the person she trusted most in the world, Hillary often as- signed Vince the sensitive task of cleaning up the political messes created by her careless and corrupt husband. One of the worst messes involved the notorious Arkansas penal system, which had awarded a lucrative contract to Health Management Associates (HMA), a company run by Leonard Dunn, a Clinton crony.

When Michael Galster, who held an orthopedic clinic in the Cummins state prison once every two weeks, discovered that HMA was harvesting tainted blood from prison inmates by pay- ing them $7 a pint, he threatened to blow the whistle. He was prepared to testify that the blood, some of which was infected with hepatitis C and the HIV virus, was being sold with the knowledge of prison authorities and Governor Clinton to bro- kers, who in turn shipped it to several foreign countries, includ- ing Canada.
8

“Vince Foster was then–Governor Clinton’s liaison on prison issues,” Galster told the author of this book. “One day, Foster came to visit me at my office in Pine Bluff. One of the prisoners was threatening to sue HMA over a non-blood issue, and Vince wanted me to get involved and convince the prisoner not to sue. But those HMA doctors were hacks, and I refused to get involved.”

“Vince started bullying me,” Galster went on. “He said, ‘You know what your noncooperation means as far as the state’s re- newing your orthopedic conract, don’t you, Mike?’

“And I said, ‘Yes, I know what you’re talking about.’ And he said, ‘It’s going to be hard for you to maintain your contract with the prison system.’ And I said, ‘I know.’ And he said, ‘I just want to make sure you know how things work.’ And, sure enough,

Tacky Kaki
23

they fired me. And knowing how close Hillary was to Vince, I never had any doubt that she knew all about it.”

After he came to Washington, Vince fell into a suicidal depression once he realized that Hillary, as First Lady, could no longer be his intimate friend—and that he, in turn, could no longer protect her from scandal and her flagrant disregard for the law. He was right. The night of his death, Hillary launched one of the most shameful—and illegal—cover-ups of her entire career.

She sent two of her most trusted White House loyalists— Maggie Williams, the First Lady’s chief of staff, and Patsy Thomasson, who was in charge of White House administration— into Foster’s office to retrieve embarrassing and incriminating documents related to Whitewater and Hillary’s other personal affairs. While White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum barred investigators from entering Foster’s office, Maggie Williams, Patsy Thomasson, and Craig Livingston, Hillary’s director of White House security, removed armloads of files and loose-leaf binders.
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In addition, a White House staffer allegedly tampered with the titles of several memos and removed the First Lady’s initials in an effort to erase her role in improper behavior. For instance, the staffer changed “HRC’s Travel Office Chronology” to “Chro- nological Analysis of Travel Office Events.”
10

In a note found in Vince’s briefcase several days after his sui- cide, he alluded to the huge cost overruns in the White House redecoration project, and wrote cryptically: “The Usher’s Office plotted to have excessive costs incurred, taking advantage of Kaki and HRC [Hillary Rodham Clinton].”
11

“Good morning, Mrs. Clinton,” the butler said. “I hope you

enjoyed a good night’s sleep. It’s twenty-nine degrees outside,

24 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

with a wind-chill factor that makes it feel thirteen. The weather report calls for the low forties, with no rain or snow.”

The Big Girl blew her nose.

“I have to go to Baltimore this morning to deliver a speech,” she said, staring at her reflection in the mirror. “Make sure everything’s ready.”

The butler recognized the steely tone that crept into her voice whenever she was out of sorts. As he bent to place his serv- ing tray on the table, he stole a sidelong glance at her (the staff had strict orders never to look the Big Girl directly in the eye).

Hillary Clinton was the kind of homely woman whose fea- tures seemed to improve with age. She was better looking at fifty than she had been at forty-five, when she first arrived at the White House.

There was an explanation for this remarkable physical transformation. As First Lady, Hillary received the kind of per- sonal care that was available only to A-list stars in Hollywood. Thanks to her pals Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth- Thomason, the husband-and-wife television producers of
Designing Women
,
Evening Shade
, and
Hearts Afire
, some of Hollywood’s top makeup artists came to the White House on a regular basis to improve Hillary’s appearance. In addition, Cliff Chally, the
Designing Women
’s costume designer, helped pull her wardrobe together.
12

According to her friends, however, none of this dolling up altered a basic fact: Hillary still saw herself as an ugly duckling.
13
In particular, she hated her body. A small-boned woman from the waist up, she was squat and lumpy from the waist down, with wide hips and thick calves and ankles.

She had not always been that way. Though Hillary was never a standout beauty, she had had a nice figure in high school and college. Indeed, several of her Wellesley College classmates, who played sports with Hillary, described how she looked in a

Tacky Kaki
25

T-shirt and shorts. They said she had a tiny waist, slim legs and ankles, and small buttocks.
14

However, after giving birth to Chelsea on February 27, 1980, Hillary’s silhouette changed dramatically. Though she never re- leased her medical records, a physician who had observed her at close quarters told the author of this book that he suspected Hillary had contracted an obstetrical infection, which was seri- ous enough to damage the lymphatic vessels carrying excess fluid from her legs back into central circulation. He said that she was left with a condition called chronic lymphedema, an incurable (though not fatal) disorder that causes gross swelling in the legs and feet, which Hillary covered up with wide-legged pants.
15

In private, some of her friends suggested that Hillary’s dis- content with her body type predated her lymphedema, and might have explained her onetime neglect of personal grooming.
16
When she looked in the mirror, these friends said, the perfec- tionist in her saw only faults. As a young woman at Yale Law School and later in Arkansas, Hillary had felt so hopelessly unat- tractive that she did not bother to shave her legs and underarms, and deliberately dressed badly so that she would not have to compete with more attractive women in a contest she could not possibly win.

The one thing she
could
control about her looks was her hair, and she had experimented endlessly with different hairdos. But when Isabelle Goetz started coming to the White House on her motorcycle, Hillary’s hair ceased being a problem—and a source of late-night jokes by David Letterman and Jay Leno.

Now, as Isabelle Goetz set to work with a straightening iron, Hillary reached for the stack of newspapers that had been placed at her side by the butler. She went straight for the
Washington Post
. And there, in big black letters, splashed across the top four columns of the front page, was the reason Hillary Clinton had not been able to sleep in late this morning.

C
H A P T E R F O U R
‌

First Lovebirds

CLINTON ACCUSED OF URGING AIDE TO LIE

Starr Probes Whether President Told Woman to Deny Alleged Affair to Jones Lawyers

Independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr has ex- panded his investigation of President Clinton to examine whether Clinton and his close friend Vernon E. Jordan Jr. encouraged a 24-year-old former White House intern to lie to lawyers for Paula Jones about whether the intern had an af- fair with the president, sources close to the inves- tigation said yesterday
1

For Hillary, it was the worst possible news in a week of bad

news.

Four days earlier, on Saturday, January 17, Bill Clinton had submitted to a secret deposition conducted by the attorneys for

26

First Lovebir ds
27

Paula Corbin Jones.* Though Hillary and the President had tried every legal trick in the book to delay his appearance, the

U.S. Supreme Court had voted unanimously that the Paula Jones case could proceed to trial while Bill Clinton was still in office.
2

The federal judge presiding over the Paula Jones case, Susan Webber Wright, compounded the Clintons’ legal problems by ruling that Paula Jones’s lawyers could put
other
women on the stand in an effort to prove a pattern of sexual harassment by Bill Clinton.
3

These two findings threw open the political floodgates, and as the date for the President’s deposition drew near, Hillary went into full battle mode. The person she turned to for help was her political guru, Harold Ickes, who had managed the Clinton- Gore reelection campaign and had served as the President’s deputy chief of staff.

Harold Ickes (pronounced
ICK-eez
) was a tall, skinny, seedy- looking man with thinning reddish hair. Until he came to Wash- ington, he was best known as a combative left-wing activist on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and as a lawyer who represented labor unions, some of which reportedly had ties to organized crime.
†
In political circles, Ickes was known as “the dark prince,” because of his abrasive, foul-mouthed manner and his instinct for the jugular.

*In her suit, Paula Jones alleged that Bill Clinton asked her for sex in a Little Rock hotel suite in 1991 while she was a state worker and he was governor.

†
Among the unions represented by Ickes’s law firm was the New York City District Council of Carpenters, charged in a 1990 civil racketeering suit with being controlled by the Genovese crime family. The union later agreed to install a federal judge to monitor its operations.
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28 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

An old-style New Deal Democrat (his father served as sec- retary of the interior under Franklin Roosevelt), Ickes had fre- quently backed losing left-wing presidential candidates like Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, and Jesse Jackson. Then in 1992, he signed up with the Clinton-Gore campaign, ran the Democratic National Convention that summer, and found him- self for the first time in his life on the winning side of a national election.

To advance her left-wing agenda, Hillary had planned to ap- point Ickes as White House chief of staff in her husband’s sec- ond term. But Ickes’s reputation was so badly tarnished by his involvement in the administration’s campaign-finance scandal that the President had no choice but to fire him.*

“From the unions to Whitewater and campaign-finance practices,” wrote Micah Morrison, a senior editorial page writer for the
Wall Street Journal
, “Mr. Ickes’ true role, performed bril- liantly, has been as consigliore to the dark side of the Clinton presidency.”
5

Even after his banishment, Ickes continued to serve as Hillary’s secret consigliore. Several months before, Hillary told Ickes that her main concern about the Paula Jones deposition was not Paula Jones’s lawyers, but her own lawyer—David Kendall, the attorney from the white-shoe Washington law firm of Williams and Connolly, who had been defending Hillary and her husband in all their Whitewater legal problems. Kendall might be a skilled attorney, Hillary said, but he didn’t like soiling his hands by dealing with the press—and when he did, he wasn’t very good at it.
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