The Truth About Hillary (6 page)

Then came the
Washington Post
exposé, which was quickly followed by reports on ABC radio and in the
Los Angeles Times
.

36 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

The same morning, George Stephanopoulos, who had once been Bill Clinton’s closest aide and was now a commentator for ABC News, appeared on
Good Morning America
, where he made a shocking prediction.

“I talked to the White House this morning,” Stephanopou- los said, “. . . and obviously these are very serious allegations. And they’re taking them very seriously. But right now, we know two things about this investigation. One, these are probably the most serious allegations yet leveled against the President. There’s no question that . . . if they’re true, they’re not only politically damaging, but it could lead to impeachment proceedings.”
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Celestial Ambitions

T

he “I word”—impeachment—rocked Hillary to

her foundation.

As a young attorney fresh out of Yale Law School, she had worked on the House Judiciary Committee’s impeach- ment inquiry staff, drawing up articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon. She still remembered the day when a delegation of congressional Republicans trooped over to the White House and convinced President Nixon that he had no alternative but to resign from office. Now, she feared that a similar delegation of congressional Democrats would come to visit her husband, car- rying the same grim message.

Her fears were not unfounded. She and Bill Clinton had barely managed to survive an endless series of blunders and transgressions. The sorry record included:

• T
  HE
  $100,000
  CATTLE
  -
  FUTURES WINDFALL
  : At the outset of Bill Clinton’s first term as governor of
  

37

38 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

Arkansas, Hillary invested $1,000 with a disreputa- ble commodities broker named Robert L. “Red” Bone and managed to walk away with $100,000. She claimed she made the $99,000 profit by studying the
Wall Street Journal
. But she lied. At the behest of Arkansas power brokers who wanted to curry fa- vor with the new governor, Hillary was allowed to profit while others would have certainly lost their shirts.

• T
  HE
  G
  ENNIFER
  F
  LOWERS BIMBO ERUPTION
  : In 1992, in the midst of the New Hampshire presidential pri- mary campaign, the lounge singer Gennifer Flowers revealed that she had had a seventeen-year affair with Clinton. At first, Clinton denied her story. But after she released tapes of their intimate phone conversations, the candidate went on
  60 Minutes
  to save his campaign. Seated next to him was Hil- lary, who said: “You know, I’m not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.” But that was exactly what she was doing.
  

• T
  HE HEALTH
  -
  CARE DEBACLE
  : In 1993, President Bill Clinton launched his new administration’s major domestic program—health-care reform—and ap- pointed his wife to head the task force. With typical arrogance, Hillary proceeded to hold secret meet- ings, keep powerful figures in Congress in the dark, and create a comically complex and hugely expen- sive plan that came to be known as Hillarycare. As a result, the program was killed, the Republicans won both houses of Congress in the next midterm elec- tion, and Hillary was politically discredited for the next four years.
  

Celestial Ambitions
39

• T
  HE
  T
  RAVEL
  O
  FFICE PURGE
  : In 1993, Hillary ordered the entire staff of the White House Travel Office to be fired because, she claimed, the office was grossly mismanaged. In fact, she had an ulterior motive: she wanted to funnel the travel business to her Arkansas friends Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth- Thomason, who had an interest in their own travel agency. Hillary denied she had anything to do with the firings—a claim that was contradicted by David Watkins, an assistant to the president for manage- ment and administration, who wrote in a memo that there would be “hell to pay” if Hillary’s Travel Office orders were ignored.
  

• T
  HE PURLOINED
  FBI
  FILES
  : In 1993, Craig Living- stone, a former bar bouncer, dirty trickster, and offi- cial in the White House office of personnel security, collected several hundred FBI background files on Republican opponents. Some assumed that Hillary had directed Livingstone to collect the files. Hillary denied knowing Livingstone—a claim that was dis- credited by a White House intern who testified to having seen the First Lady greet Livingstone warmly in a White House hallway.
  

• T
  HE
  F
  OR
  R
  ENT SIGN ON THE
  L
  INCOLN
  B
  EDROOM
  : Throughout their eight years in the White House, the Clintons turned the place into the most expen- sive bed-and-breakfast in the world. Rich backers— Steven Spielberg, Steve Jobs, David Geffen, and others—who were treated to overnight stays in the Lincoln Bedroom and Queen’s Bedroom donated
  

$4.4 million to Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection cam- paign and other Democratic causes.

40 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

• T
  HE MISSING
  R
  OSE
  L
  AW
  F
  IRM FILES
  : While a lawyer back in Arkansas, Hillary did legal work for a sav- ings and loan institution that backed the Clintons’ investment in a land deal that came to be known as Whitewater. She later denied representing the S&L, and the billing records of her legal work mysteri- ously disappeared. They surfaced conveniently in the White House in 1995—two days beyond the statute of limitations.
  

All of these crimes and misdemeanors paled by comparison with the latest charge leveled against the President. Nothing short of the Clintons’ political survival hung in the balance. Which meant only one thing to Hillary, whose whole life had been built on grandiose dreams of acquiring fame and power.

As a teenager in the early 1960s, Hillary had set her heart on becoming the first woman astronaut.
1
Early space voyagers like Alan Shepard (who became the first American in space in 1961) and John Glenn (the first American to orbit Earth in 1962) were routinely offered the chance to serve in the president’s cabi- net or run for the Senate. A career as an astronaut greased the path to national power faster than any other possible approach, and Hillary was more than willing to risk life and limb for the prize.

But Hillary’s celestial ambitions were thwarted by a catch-22. In order to qualify as an astronaut, you first had to be a fighter pilot, but women couldn’t become fighter pilots because they were banned from combat. Then, of course, there was the minor problem of Hillary’s famously poor eyesight, which ruled her out as a candidate for space travel regardless of her gender.

Barred from applying to the space program, Hillary was de- spondent. To cheer her up, her mother encouraged her to set

Celestial Ambitions
41

her sights on the Supreme Court; she could become the first fe- male justice on the Court. But eventually, Hillary became fixated on an even bigger prize. Whoever occupied the White House, she decided, had the power to affect vast numbers of people through legislation and executive action.

“From an early age, she dreamed of living in the White House,” said Hillary’s first mentor, the Reverend Don Jones, her youth group minister.
2

At Wellesley College, Hillary’s classmates frequently talked about her becoming the first woman president of the United States. At Yale Law School, Bill Clinton joined the chorus of those who believed that Hillary had the right stuff to make it all the way to the White House.

“If she comes to Arkansas,” he said, “it’s going to be my state, my future.
She could be president someday.
She could go to any state and be elected to the Senate. If she comes to Arkansas, she’ll be on my turf.”
3

Nonetheless, Hillary hitched her star to the charismatic Bill Clinton. She followed him back to Arkansas because, as she told several friends, she believed that he was going to be president one day.
4
According to the Reverend Don Jones, Hillary and Bill started plotting his run for the White House as early as 1982— almost ten years before he actually declared his candidacy.
5

During those years, the country’s attitude toward women shifted dramatically under the compelling force of the women’s movement. And this revolutionary change in the status of women allowed Hillary to dream an even bigger dream: suc- ceeding her husband in the White House.

That audacious dream was never far from Hillary’s mind. At times, she found it hard to accommodate her fantasies of power and glory with her carefully cultivated public image as a selfless, holier-than-thou person. But over time, she managed to

42 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

convince herself that she wasn’t a hypocrite, that her dream was pure and untainted, a virtuous obligation, not an exercise in self- ishness. Indeed, she came to believe that the world would be a far better place with Hillary Rodham Clinton as president.

“What Mrs. Clinton seems in all apparent sincerity to have in mind,” wrote Michael Kelly, “is leading the way to something on the order of a reformation: the remaking of the American way of politics, government, indeed life. A lot of people, con- templating such a task, might fall prey to self-doubts. Mrs. Clin- ton does not.”
6

Shortly after Hillary and Bill moved into the White House, her aides in the East Wing put up signs proclaiming: hillary for president!*

West Wing staffers thought it was a joke. But it was no joke.

The cadre of feminists who surrounded Hillary in the White House thought that she had made a big mistake marrying Bill Clinton. Being First Lady was beneath her, they said.
She
should be president, not
Bill
.
7

“Hillary never wanted to be a wife,” said a White House offi- cial who worked closely with her. “She wanted to be president.”
8

Now, as the butler prepared to leave the kitchen, Hillary read the
Washington Post
’s story about her husband’s reckless af- fair with Monica Lewinsky. Although the butler could not tell what she was thinking, he noticed that her hands holding the newspaper visibly trembled.

Hillary understood her husband well enough to know that this latest dalliance meant nothing to him; he never had any em- pathy or compassion for the women he slept with. Yet this affair

*The signs started coming down after the Travelgate and health-care fiascos.

Celestial Ambitions
43

was different from all the others, for it had the potential to derail the Clintons’ copresidency.

She had to save Bill in order to save herself.

Otherwise, everything she had dreamed about since child- hood would come to naught.

P
A R T I I
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The Book of Life

C
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Toughening Up

1958 (Forty years earlier)

I

t was three o’clock in the afternoon, and the fifth- graders in Park Ridge, Illinois, had just been dismissed from class. The schoolyard was a scene of frolicking, screeching children. However, one of the kids, a somber-looking eleven- year-old boy by the name of Jim Yrigoyen, was not in the mood

to play.

He gathered up his courage and approached a girl who was wearing thick round eyeglasses.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” Hillary Rodham replied.

Jim handed Hillary a set of dog tags embossed with his name and address.

“Will you wear these?” he asked in a rather timid voice. “Okay,” she replied nonchalantly, and immediately tied a

knot in the chain as a symbol that she and Jim were going steady. “Hillary and I were both standouts in our class,” Jim Yri- goyen recalled many years later. “She was on every committee

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48 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

and involved in all the activist groups, as well as being a straight- A student and an outstanding athlete.

“While the other girls were jumping rope,” he continued, “Hillary insisted on playing softball or dodgeball with the boys. And she was always picked in the first rounds to be on a team, be- cause she was good and a tough competitor. She was an intimi- dating figure to many of our classmates, but not to me, despite the chance she could haul off at any time.”
1

Hillary’s reputation as one of the toughest kids in Park Ridge—then, as now, a predominately Republican suburb of Chicago—went back to the time when she was four years old and came home in tears complaining to her mother of the treat- ment she had received at the hands of Suzy O’Callaghan, the neighborhood bully.