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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Knopf vice president and senior editor Jonathan Segal, an incomparable editor in my view, has lent a guiding hand and been a patient teacher since I began work on this book seven years ago. He meticulously read draft after draft of its various sections, commenting on them and gently moving me towards my destination, and edging me onto the narrative path I sought. Once I was on it, he cleared away the obstacles I put in my own way (no matter how attached I was to some of them) and enabled me to better understand the character of my subject and put her story in its present context. He also became a cherished friend.
Four remarkable young assistants helped me with the research and every other aspect of the project. This book could not have been written without them and without the good humor that accompanied their diligence, dedication, and skill. I am indebted to them: Stacy Atlas Kerzner, Amanda Ely, Kristina Goetz, and Carmen Johnson.
At Knopf, I found a group of people who care about books in a way that to me feels unique: dedicated to maintaining the underlying values of a great tradition, and committed to cherished ideals and principles. As I discovered, part of the tradition is familial at Knopf (or, as Hillary might say, it takes a village), and begins with chairman and editor in chief Sonny Mehta, whose extraordinary faith in this project I am deeply grateful for.
I owe special thanks to several people at Knopf: Lydia Buechler, the copy chief, who shepherded the book through the copyediting and proofreading with great care and enthusiasm, and never a word of complaint through seemingly endless hours of work; Anke Steinecke, vice president and associate counsel, for her diligence and rare legal skill that helped strengthen the manuscript; Paul Bogaards and his promotion staff; Nina Bourne, a friend of many, many years who I was never lucky enough to work with until now; Kyle McCarthy, who as Jon Segal's assistant became an integral participant; Carol Shookhoff, who typed the manuscript and made helpful suggestions along the way; Fred Chase, a copyeditor whose skills and great care I came to hold in awe; Carol Carson, Knopf's art director; Avery Flück, the production manager; Virginia Tan, the book's designer; and Carol Janeway, the wonderful foreign rights director.
My agent, Owen Laster, of William Morris, is likewise rooted in the best traditions of his craft; he recently retired, but leaves a standard that is a tribute to his geniality and consummate professionalism.
Special thanks to Louis Plummer, Doug Hill, and Kate Griffin of PhotoAssist; and Dr. John Barrie for his insight and help.
I could not have completed this book without the help and isolation of Yaddo, a remarkable institution that gives writers and artists a contemplative opportunity to proceed and succeed. I was introduced to Yaddo by my friend Suzy Crile. There, I made another great friend for life, Elena Richardson, Yaddo's president. I cannot give enough thanks to Candace Wait, her husband, Charles, and Kathy Clarke, all of whom are dedicated to Yaddo's mission.
For thirty-five years now Bob Woodward and I have conducted an ongoing dialogue about our work and our livesâa source of great satisfaction.
I owe special thanks to my sons, Max and Jacob Bernstein, who had reached the age during my work on this book where their encouragement and criticism were both helpful and loving at the same time; special thanks also go to Thea Stone. My thanks also to my sisters, Mary Bernstein Hunter and Laura Bernstein Ikonen. My parents, Al and Sylvia Bernstein, both died before the book was finished, but their ideals inform all that I believe in. My mother, through the eight years of the Clinton presidency, worked as a volunteer in a group of retired women who sorted and helped answer Hillary's routine mail; she is not the source of a single word in this book. I miss her and my dad more than words can say.
I want to express my love and constant gratitude to Christine Kuehbeck, my wife, at whom I wonder every day. She is the person to whom I look for wisdom I find nowhere else; that has been especially true in every aspect of this book. Christine read these pages with a woman's eye. She raised questions and posed notions that would never have occurred to meâas she always does. She brings unusual insight and perception to all the subjects we endlessly discuss, and brings those qualitiesâand her unabashed enthusiasmâto the whole of our lives together.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carl Bernstein, with Bob Woodward, shared a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of Watergate for the
Washington Post.
He is the author, with Woodward, of
All the President's Men
and
The Final Days,
and, with Marco Politi, of
His Holiness: John Paul II and the History of Our Time.
He is also the author of
Loyalties,
a memoir about his parents during McCarthy-era Washington. He has written for
Vanity Fair
(he is also a contributing editor),
Time, USA Today, Rolling Stone,
and
The New Republic.
He was a Washington bureau chief and correspondent for ABC News. He lives with his wife, Christine, in New York.
*1
Ebeling is Betsy's married name. Her maiden name was Johnson.
*2
How severely Hugh Rodham beat his children has never been directly addressed publicly by Hillary, her brothers, or her mother.
*3
Today Hillary and Oscar Dowdy Jr. do not speak to each other, ostensibly because Oscarâa real estate speculator, like his grandfather Maxâfailed to provide adequate financial assistance to a brother with health problems.
*4
Boxer also sought advice from Bill Clinton, then president, who advised her to stay married and to try to work things out, especially since she and Tony had an infant son.
*5
Over the years the firm went under a variety of names, formally becoming the Rose Law Firm in 1980.
*6
The condition occurs when endometrial tissue, the tissue that lines the uterus and is shed during menstruation, grows outside of the uterusâon the ovaries, fallopian tubes, ligaments supporting the uterus, and other areas in the pelvic cavity.
*7
Part of Wright's workload was assumed by Bill's scheduler, Nancy Hernreich, who, in the White House, became his administrative chief of operations with an office just outside the Oval Office. In the second year of Bill's presidency, when Wright, back in Arkansas, began hearing from the Clinton inner circle that there were “troubles” developing again with Bill, she called Nancy:
“I said, âNancy, there are just too many rumors coming to me about what's going on in the Oval Office. I trust you're not letting him in there by himself with hardly anybody, much less some female, as all the rumors are.' And she said, âWe promised him that he would never live under an iron thumb like yours again.'”
Senior members of Bill's White House staff confirmed that Nancy Hernreich, and others working around her, were indeed operating under just such an understanding; now that Wright no longer sat outside Bill's door, it was felt that the inhibiting and suffocating aura that had come to permeate the governor's office would not be reestablished in the White House.
*8
Lurleen Wallace, wife of George, ran for and won the governorship of Alabama in 1966 when her husband was prevented by state law from serving consecutive terms. She and her husband acknowledged from the outset that he would continue to make the administrative policies and decisions.
*9
“He beckoned the producer to him at one point as he paced and asked as a personal favor that he not be on camera if he happened to be mopping sweat from his face,” Theodore H. White had written of Richard Nixon in the original
The Making of the President.
The “producer” of the Kennedy-Nixon debates was Don Hewitt.
*10
Perhaps better than any other journalist, Klein managed to captureâin fictionâthe appetites and contradictions of the Clintonian character, male and female, in his prescient novel
Primary Colors,
a thinly veiled account of the Clinton ascendancy, ending on election day 1992.
*11
Hillary's primacy was a different sort than that of Edith Wilson, second wife of Woodrow Wilson, who became known as the “Secret President” for the role she played when her husband suffered a prolonged and disabling illness.
*12
Horton, a convicted felon serving a life sentence in Massachusetts for murder, was released as part of a weekend furlough program supported by Governor Michael Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee. On furlough, Horton, a black man, raped and robbed a white woman, and the Bush campaign effectively used the incident in its ads against Dukakis, a classic example of negative campaigning (with clear racist overtones).
*13
After the auditor declared $18,000 of petty cash unaccounted for, Dale came up with $2,800 that he said he found in a drawer (he had also retrieved $2,500 from a personal account the same day). Charged with embezzlement, he attempted to fashion a plea bargain for himself by agreeing to admit to “inadvertent” wrongdoing and by giving $69,000 back to the government. After the prosecutor refused his offer, he was acquitted of embezzlement at trial. The legal verdict, however, did not address the indisputable fact of reckless management of the Travel Office and of the hundreds of thousands of dollars that regularly passed through it.
*14
In Arkansas, the local newspapers had never addressed intimate questions about their marriage until Bill had declared for the presidency in 1992. In fact, their quarrels there were louder and more frequent than in Washington, according to aides. As Hillary told Bill's old friend Carolyn Staley one afternoon during his governorship, she enjoyed some of the back-and-forth, particularly if the arguments had an intellectual component. “I wonder how history is going to note our marriage,” Staley quoted her as saying. Hillary said she could never have married someone as deferential and quiet as Staley's own husband.
*15
Jeff Gerth's original Whitewater story in the
New York Times,
on March 8, 1992, had raised the obvious conflict of interest questions, including whether the governor should have been a partner in a land deal with someone whose business was regulated by the stateâthough in fact McDougal had not been in the S&L business when the Whitewater partnership was formedâand whether it was proper for Hillary to have been paid legal fees for the work she did for Madison Guaranty. The story also said that the Clintons had “improperly” deducted about $5,000 on their personal tax returns in 1984 and 1985 “for interest paid on a portion of at least $30,000 in bank loan payments” that had actually been paid from a business account in the name of their Whitewater partnership with the McDougals. It was the kind of accounting error often made innocently, and sometimes not. The deductions saved the Clintons perhaps $1,000 in taxes, but since the error had occurred more than three years before the story ran, “Internal Revenue Service regulations [did] not require the Clintons to pay.”
Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign had been able to challenge the perception that Bill and Hillary had done something wrong in relation to their Whitewater investment by releasing an independent audit that showed they had ultimately lost about $69,000 on the deal.
â 16
McDougal suffered from manic depression.
*17
Hillary, contrary to the impression created in
Living History
that Kendall's call was the first time she'd heard about the
Spectator
story, already knew through Betsey Wright that the troopers were talking to reporters.
*18
Brock's career as an ideological scourge had taken off during
Spectator
coverage of the Senate confirmation hearings on the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Brock had then written a book about Thomas's accuser,
The Real Anita Hill,
in 1993, and became something of a hero in right-wing circles for both his investigative skill and nastiness of phrase. (He'd dismissed Hill as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.”) In a
New York Times
column in 1994, Frank Rich criticized Brock as a “smear artist” whose “motives are at least as twisted as his facts.”
*19
In the 1992 presidential campaign, President George Bush had made suggestions that Clinton had acted unpatriotically during his Russian trip, and suggested he should disclose to voters “how many demonstrations he led against his own country from a foreign soil.” Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford during the time he'd made the trip, and no evidence has ever developed that he led any demonstrations abroad or did anything of an anti-American nature during his Soviet visit.
*20
She would use it effectively, too, in her presidential campaign.
*21
Dr. Jack Kevorkian was a leading proponent of legalizing assisted suicide.
*22
They tended to do the work at home, on their own time. By now Hillary feared that if it became known she was using her aides for a private project, she would be publicly savaged.
*23
The witness was an old friend who had come to Little Rock for the expected announcement of Bill's candidacy, said Wright. She would not further identify the individual.
*24
Like many people in Washington, Wright sometimes mixed up Bob Bennett with his brother Bill, the former Reagan administration secretary of education and conservative ethical philosopher who was also a secret gambler (with blackjack losses in the millions in surreptitious trips to Las Vegas), and author of a book called
The Book of Virtues.
*25
Chertoff, later President George W. Bush's secretary of homeland security, had been a prosecutor and trial lawyer in New Jersey before becoming D'Amato's alter ego and committee counsel. His objective in the hearing was to build a circumstantial case against Hillary, in particular, the people around her, and by extension the president, and to show “how they withheld information and documents or claimed to forget things in a coordinated effort at damage control.” His tactics were opposed at every turn by the special committee's counsel, Richard Ben-Veniste, who had been one of the Watergate prosecutors.
â 26
Armand P. D'Amato was convicted of mail fraud in 1993, though the conviction was later overturned, according to the
New York Times
.
*27
Sometimes Hillary sounded like the national nanny. She said she believed teenagers aren't ready for the unintended consequences of a sexual relationship, including pregnancy, venereal disease, or abortion. She said Americans should “do everything in our power to discourage sexual activity and encourage abstinence,” adding that a good place to start is to encourage adolescents to value friendships first and to organize events in which young people can participate in supervised activities.
*28
The same day that Safire had called her a liar, the U.S. Court of Appeals in St. Louis ruled that Paula Jones could move ahead with her suit against the president.
*29
There was speculation by some presidential aides that “Foster had written a separation agreement for divorce papers and that's what was in there, and that's what was taken out of there that night after he killed himself,” one of the lawyers said, and did not totally discount it. The existence of such a document was never confirmed.
*30
None of those presentâthey included Mary Catherine Bateson, Barbara Feinman, Lissa Muscatine, Lisa Caputo, and one or two other aidesâregarded the dialogue in the same over-the-top fashion as the press described it. Previously, Hillary had talked publicly about imaginary conversations she conducted with her predecessor about criticism and obstacles. This was before she had met Houston. The dialogue initiated by Houston was followed by a similar two-way “conversation” between Hillary and Mahatma Gandhi. Finally, when Houston had proposed that Hillary talk with Jesus, whose betrayal and martyrdom was a pillar of Hillary's belief, the first lady declined, saying it would be too personal.
*31
Simpson, in a conversation with this author in 2006, confirmed the account of the conversation in the Oval Office in exactly the same way as Styron had related it. Though they were political opponents, Simpson and Clinton had a good relationshipâClinton wroteâ“because of the friendship we had in common with his governor, Mike Sullivan.”
*32
Gingrich, in 1989, had led the successful Republican effort to remove the Democratic speaker of the house, Jim Wright, because he'd sold thousands of copies of a privately published book of his speeches to political supporters as a way of circumventing House rules that forbade taking fees for speaking. Gingrich's conduct was thus particularly offensive to members of the House, even a few Republicans, who recognized he had tried to invent an even more elaborate dodge than Wright to make some money.
*33
Lindsey failed to respond to my inquiries over a period of several years.
*34
In addition, her former friend Julie Hiatt Steele later testified to lying when she corroborated Willey's account of the alleged groping incident and had said that Willey had told her about it on the same day it had supposedly occurred. Steele also admitted before a grand jury that she had actually heard about the purported incident four years later. Starr indicted Steele for obstruction of justice but later dropped the charges.
*35
In September 2005, a Texas grand jury indicted DeLay for conspiracy after a lengthy campaign finance investigation. He and two other associates were accused of illegally directing corporate donations to Republicans in the Texas legislature. He resigned from his position as majority leader in June 2006, and from the House.
*36
In the Jones deposition, Robert Bennett had represented to the judge and the lawyers for Jones that “there is no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form” between the president and Lewinsky.
Now Clinton was asked by a prosecutor, “Wouldn't you agree, this was an utterly false statement?” Clinton smiled. “It depends on what the meaning of âis' isâ¦. If âis' means is and never has been, that's one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.” A few minutes later, he added, “I was not trying to give you a cute answer to that.”