The Truth About Hillary (9 page)

“I never stated a burning desire to be president of the United States,” said Rupert. “I believe that was a need for her in a partner.”
22

From her days in Wellesley onward, Hillary was often mis-

taken as asexual.

“People who claim that they were born asexual are operating under a false assumption, ” said Dr. Claudia Six, a clinical sexolo- gist. “There is always a psychological reason for their behavior. Chief among these reasons is a fear of losing control, a feeling of vulnerability when one is sexually active with a partner, a deep underlying anxiety about having sex. That fear can be so strong that it leads a woman to shut down all her sexual feelings.”
23

Unlike most college-age girls, Hillary did not come of age sexually in Wellesley. Nonetheless, she retained a feeling of soli- darity with the members of the Wellesley College Class of 1969. In addition to appointing several of her classmates to high gov- ernment posts during her husband’s administration, Hillary in- vited many others for sleepovers at the White House.

Most of the members of her Wellesley class attended a twenty-fifth reunion that was held in 1994 at the White House.

The Radical
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One of these women was Nancy Wanderer. Nancy married in her junior year, but after decades of marriage, she began a sexual relationship with another woman. For a short time, she played musical beds with her husband and girlfriend under the same roof. But she finally divorced, went back to school and became a law professor, and moved into a full-time lesbian relationship with her lover.
24

At the class’s twenty-fifth reunion dinner, Hillary made a point of sitting next to Nancy Wanderer. The two old friends chatted for an hour or so—not about their mutually tumultuous marriages, but about menopause and other middle-age health concerns.

At one point, Hillary leaned toward Nancy and asked if she could touch her closely cropped hair.

After Nancy recovered from her surprise, she gave Hillary permission to go ahead.

Hillary reached out and ran the palm of her hand over Nancy’s butch cut.

“Maybe,” said Hillary, “I’ll get a haircut like this and really shock everyone.”
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The Intern

A

s the summer of 1968 approached, Hillary was look-

ing forward to an internship in Washington, D.C.

Some of her best friends at Wellesley College had already lined up choice assignments. Kris Olson was going to work at the Office of Economic Opportunity on the social, psy- chological, and vocational rehabilitation of indigent defendants caught up in the Washington criminal justice system. Likewise, Nancy Gist would be working for Representative John Conyers, an African American who was active in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the upcoming Poor People’s March on Washington. Cynthia Harrison was assigned to Senator Al- bert Gore of Tennessee. Jan Krigbaum would spend the summer at the Agency for International Development, working on Latin American antipoverty programs.
1

But when Hillary’s assignment was announced, she was crushed. She was being sent to Washington to work on the Re- publican House Conference, the legislative research and plan-

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The Inter n
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ning group that was laboring to help the GOP in the upcoming fall election.

“By this time,” said her old friend Sarah Calvedt, “Hillary had come full circle. She started off at Wellesley as a Gold- water Republican, and had become a fully converted liberal Democrat.”
2

But things worked out better for Hillary in Washington than she had expected. She wound up interning for Representative Charles Goodell, a liberal Rockefeller Republican. And, even more exciting, she was invited by Goodell to attend the Republi- can National Convention in Miami.

“We all stayed at the Fontainebleau Hotel in a room with a bunch of girls, and we took turns trying to grab some sleep,” one of Hillary’s classmates recalled in an interview for this book. “One night, a couple of the girls brought some guys back to the room. They had been drinking, and things got a little rowdy.

“Hillary, who was in bed and apparently asleep, jumped up and stormed out of the room,” her classmate continued. “The surprising thing was that she had been in bed fully clothed— I guess to ward off any unwanted sexual advances by randy politicians.

“She was completely indignant, and refused to come back until the guys were gone. She made it clear she was going to go to Congressman Goodell if it happened again. She was still far too straight for that sort of thing.

“We all got hit on by some of the delegates and congress- men. A couple of times Hillary looked like she was about to haul off and smack some of these guys. They were really grabby and obnoxious. I have to think that she would have come away from that experience feeling that young interns should really be pro- tected from lecherous older guys.”
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Grooving at Cozy Beach

T

he young woman strolling across the campus of Yale Law School in the fall of 1971 was a sight to behold.

She was wearing a sleeveless blouse, black silk pajama bot- toms, sandals, and a pair of thick glasses in red plastic frames. Her hair looked as though it hadn’t been shampooed in weeks. As she bounced along on the balls of her feet, she was shouting at the young man by her side, gesticulating wildly, and revealing that she did not shave under her arms.

The young man towered over her by more than a head. He was a beefy fellow, well over two hundred pounds, and he sported an orange-colored beard, hair down to his shoulders, and a shabby army surplus jacket. Somebody had once told him he sounded like Gomer Pyle.

Hillary Rodham and William Jefferson Clinton were always arguing about something. Today, it was over a speech they had just heard at Trinity Church Parish House in nearby New Haven. It was delivered by a spellbinding orator and one of Hillary’s

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Grooving at Cozy Beach
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heroines—Marian Wright Edelman, a civil rights lawyer and the first black woman trustee of the Yale Corporation.

In her remarks, Marian Wright Edelman criticized liberals who suffered from “issue nymphomania.” And she predicted that the recent orgy of violence at Attica State Prison, where prisoners bludgeoned and slashed each other to death, would happen “all over the country if changes are not made.”
1

These apocalyptic predictions came from a woman who was known by her left-wing followers as “Saint Marian.” She and her husband, a white man who once served as an aide to Robert Kennedy in the Justice Department, believed in big government programs, and were skilled at playing upon white liberal guilt to pass legislation on behalf of poor, mostly black children.

At Yale, the Edelmans were mentors to promising young radical law students like Hillary Rodham. Shortly after Hillary graduated, Marian Wright Edelman founded the Children’s De- fense Fund. Despite its modest-sounding name, the organization had grandiose ambitions. As Marian once confessed:

“The country was tired of the concerns of the 1960s. I got the idea that children might be a very effective way to broaden the base for change.”
2

According to an article in
The New Republic
by Mickey Kaus, Marian’s strategy “requires that [the Children’s Defense Fund] reduce every issue of anti-poverty to a question of ‘protect- ing children who can’t speak for themselves.’ Not only are Head Start, WIC [the Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants, and Children] and immunization cast as chil- dren’s issues, so are welfare, day care, housing and employment.”
3
The issue of children’s rights was custom-made for Hillary.

After all, who could be against children? Better yet, children were hardly in a position to write Op-Ed articles in the
New York Times
pointing out that Marian Wright Edelman and Hillary Rodham didn’t speak for them.

70 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

* * *

Hillary’s passion about such causes fascinated Bill Clin- ton. He had never met a female firebrand quite like her. And that was saying a lot, since he had slept with dozens of women. In fact, women were never far from Bill’s mind; he was addicted to them as surely as his alcoholic stepfather had been addicted to fermented spirits. Normally, Bill was able to juggle several women at the same time.

“Bill’s pattern,” said a fellow Yale Law student, “was seduc- tion and betrayal. The latter seemed to come as naturally to him as the former. He would do anything as long as he got what he wanted from people.”
4

Bill Clinton’s seductions were conducted in his off-campus bedroom, which was located on the second floor of a Victorian house along a wind-swept stretch of Long Island Sound. Be- tween love bouts with women, he took long solitary walks on the beach. Dressed in his heavy army surplus jacket and a ski mask to protect his face from the stinging cold, he contemplated his future.

After he graduated from law school, he planned to return to Arkansas and run for public office. He had already picked out what he thought was a safe congressional district, and had se- cured a $10,000 loan from his uncle Raymond—far more than was customarily spent on such Arkansas contests. Since the age of seven, Bill’s goal had been to become president of the United States. His mother, his teachers, and his friends all told him he was going to make it. The only missing ingredient in his calculus was a wife.

And that was where Hillary Rodham fit in. Years later, Hillary would tell a story about how she and Bill met at Yale. Ac- cording to this tale, Hillary caught Bill staring at her across the room in the law library, and marched over to the moonstruck

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71

Arkansan and introduced herself. The anecdote had a nice femi- nist ring to it: a woman took the initiative and forced the issue.

The only trouble was, Hillary’s story was blatantly untrue.

In fact, Bill first became aware of Hillary through her work as coeditor of a far-left journal called
The Yale Review of Law and Social Action
.
5
In its debut issue in the spring of 1970, there was an article titled “Jamestown 70.”
6
It proposed the migration of like-minded leftists to one of the fifty states for “the purpose of gaining political control and establishing a living laboratory for experiment.” The article rejected working within the established social order. “Experimentation with drugs, sex, individual life- styles or radical rhetoric and action within the larger society,” it stated, “is an insufficient alternative. Total experimentation is necessary.”
7

In a later special double issue of the
Review
, Hillary and one of her former Wellesley classmates, Kris Olson, coedited articles that focused on the violence-prone Black Panthers and the on- going trial of several Panthers for the torture-murder of their colleague Alex Rackley. Hillary and Kris believed that the ac- cused murderers had been denied their full legal rights. In that same special issue, an unsigned article criticizing a New Haven police raid on the Panthers’ headquarters caught Bill Clinton’s eye. It was illustrated by a cartoon depicting the police as oink- ing, hairy, snot-nosed pigs.
8

While Bill Clinton was an admirer of the
Yale Journal of Law and Social Action
, he had serious reservations about lending his name to the magazine, for fear that such a move might come back to haunt him in politically conservative Arkansas. Nonethe- less, he asked Jeff Rogers (the son of William Rogers, President Nixon’s secretary of state) to introduce him to Hillary Rodham. Bill had seen Hillary around the campus, and though she was hardly his physical type, he was interested in meeting her.

72 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

Jeff Rogers was the ideal person to make the introduction. He and Kris Olson, Hillary’s coeditor, lived together in a com- mune called Cozy Beach, which was affiliated with Ken Kesey’s Oregon Hog Farm commune. The Magic Bus riders, immor- talized in Tom Wolfe’s
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
, were regular visitors.

“Jeff Rogers and Kris Olson had [Bill and Hillary] over to their commune for dinner,” a friend recalled. “That meant sit- ting on the floor or on their broken furniture and eating take- out pizza or something. But the introduction was made and they hit it off right away.

“Hillary was soon a regular at Bill’s group house in Milford, and the relationship took off,” this friend continued. “Hillary was clearly smitten. She seemed to hang on him. But Bill was not nearly as enamored. In fact, he continued to see other women, even after they moved into an apartment just off campus.”
9

During their remaining time at Yale, Bill and Hillary often grooved the night away at Cozy Beach, spinning the lat- est Jefferson Airplane platters and eating Kris Olson’s hashish brownies. When Kris’s long-suffering Republican parents finally became fed up with her counterculture ways and cut off the flow from her trust funds, she donned a jumpsuit with her name sten- ciled on the back and produced drug-inspired psychedelic light shows to make ends meet.
10

It was clear to friends that Bill and Hillary had a relationship in which the normal rules of courtship did not apply. Their ro- mance (if it could be called that) was not based on mutual physi- cal attraction. Bill frequently found sexual release elsewhere.
11
And Hillary, who had never placed much store in sex, did not seem to mind.

Bill treated Hillary as one of the boys, and never talked down to her because she was a woman. He reinforced the idea in

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Hillary’s mind, which had been planted there by her parents, that she was a special person, and that there was nothing beyond her reach—including becoming the first woman president of the United States.