American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power (16 page)

No one sympathized with Hillary’s Whitewater woes more than Vince Foster, who suffered an anxiety attack when Zoë Baird bowed out of contention for the post of attorney general. Foster blamed himself for failing Hillary, and slid deeper into depression as the scandals piled up.

Nevertheless, according to Secret Service agents assigned to protect the First Family at the time, the affair between Hillary and Vince Foster continued at the White House. One claimed to have
seen them locked in a passionate embrace inside Foster’s office; another would only acknowledge that he had witnessed enough to convince him that “it was still going on between them, definitely.” The relationship between Hillary and Vince was the subject of endless gossip and speculation among women at the White House, who voted Foster the staff member they would “most like to have an affair with.”

In addition to the plethora of scandals, Hillary was dealt another blow in March of 1993 when Hugh Rodham suffered a massive stroke. While she was at her father’s bedside in Little Rock agonizing over whether or not to take him off life support, Bill was entertaining his friend Barbra Streisand at the White House. It was only after her father died two weeks later and she returned to Washington that Hillary learned that Streisand had spent the night in the Lincoln Bedroom.

Hillary was upset that her husband was spending time with one of Hollywood’s biggest stars while she kept a vigil at the bedside of her dying father. The day Hillary returned to Washington, a steward who had been summoned to the second floor made a hasty retreat when he heard shouting and the unmistakable sound of slamming doors. At the following morning’s news briefing, reporters peppered Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers with questions about the wounds clearly evident on the President’s face and neck. Before she ever saw the claw marks, Myers told reporters that Clinton had simply cut himself shaving. “Then I saw him,” Myers later admitted, alluding to the fact that the First Lady was clearly disturbed by Streisand’s presence alone with her husband in the family quarters. “It was a big scratch, and clearly not a shaving cut.”

Apparently, no one had made it clear to the President which story they were going with. Only hours later, Clinton claimed he had injured himself “rolling around” with his daughter on the floor. Hillary, meantime, barred Streisand from staying at the White House.

Over the years, the President would suffer numerous unexplained bruises and abrasions, including a sizable goose egg on his forehead. His explanation: “Walked into a door.”

Presidential handlers laughed off any suggestion that their boss’s wounds might have been the result of anything other than an innocent mishap. But privately, they also wondered aloud if Hillary, whose penchant for aiming objects at her husband’s skull had been well established, was actually capable of spousal abuse.

Even if the First Lady was battering her husband, there were those who felt he well deserved it. Frankly, Betsey Wright observed, “Hillary’s tolerance for some of his behavior just amazes me.” As dependent as Bill was on Hillary’s decisiveness and her organizational skills—the First Lady’s influence was “overwhelming,” said Clinton’s then-adviser David Gergen—the President made little effort to disguise his feelings of resentment toward her. George Stephanopoulos recalled how the mere mention of Hillary’s name was like “the flipping of a switch.” Aides had no trouble telling when the President was parroting his wife’s opinion, which was often. “Even if he was yelling,” Stephanopoulos said, “his voice had a flat quality, as if he were a high school debater speeding through a series of memorized facts.”

Early in the day, Gergen observed, the President would be upbeat, “even chipper…. As we started to work, his mood would darken, his attention would wander and hot words would spew out. WHAT, I would wonder, had she said to him now?”

Bill was not the only one whose mood changed in Hillary’s presence. According to several staffers, Hillary often cut off discussions with “I don’t recall asking your opinion,” or simply, “Who in the hell asked
you?
” Veteran Clinton watcher Joe Klein observed that, if someone questioned a strategy of Hillary’s, “the First Lady would, with cold fury, tell the questioners to stuff it—Hillary’s plan was THE plan. Bill sat quietly as she bludgeoned respected members of the administration into silence.”

Still, at her father’s funeral, an emotional Hillary leaned heavily on the two most important men in her life: Bill Clinton and Vince Foster. She would continue to grieve for months, occasionally breaking down in the middle of a staff meeting or a speech.

Just as often, Hillary’s grief turned to rage. She felt that her aides—especially the friends and associates she brought along from Little Rock—were letting her down. In much the same way that her tantrum-prone husband vented his frustrations on Stephanopoulos virtually every morning, Hillary now complained bitterly and often to forty-eight-year-old Vince. At a May 13, 1993, meeting she snapped at him, “What’s going on? Are you on top of it?”

In his notes from the meeting, Foster attributed Hillary’s foul temper to “general frustration” that was “aggravated by grief” over the death of her father. She was apparently less concerned with her friend’s well-being, failing to notice that since moving alone to Washington (his wife Lisa remained behind in Little Rock so that their youngest son could finish his junior year in high school), Foster was lonely and suffering from overwork.

Vince was becoming increasingly afraid that he had failed Hillary, and actively feared that he might be called to give testimony that would damage the First Lady—either that, or lie under oath to protect her. He also came to believe that his own reputation was being sullied in the process of defending his old Arkansas friends. A colleague described him as becoming “frantic” when the
Wall Street Journal
ran a piece titled “Who Is Vince Foster?” and illustrated it with a question mark inside a silhouette. Where Hillary lashed out at her attackers, Vince tended to internalize everything. Each article was, as far as he was concerned, a politically motivated attack on his character. “Before we came here,” he said of the Clintons’ Arkansas friends, “we thought of ourselves as good people.”

There were personal pressures as well. The Foster marriage was shaky, mainly because of Vince’s intense relationship with Hillary. Lisa Foster had agreed to relocate to Washington if that’s what it would take to save her marriage. But by the time she finally joined him in early June, Vince was physically and emotionally wrung out, and on the verge of resigning his White House position.

Comic relief of a sort arrived on Father’s Day, when a man named Henry Leon Ritzenthaler told the
Washington Post
that he was the President’s long-lost half brother. William Jefferson Blythe, it seemed, had been married at least twice before he met Bill’s mother—something no one in the family had known. A few months later, Sharon Pettijohn stepped forward to say she was Clinton’s half sister by yet another of Blythe’s wives. These paled in comparison to Bill’s stepsister Diane Welch, whose father was Virginia’s third husband, Jeff Dwire. Welch was a convicted drug dealer and bank robber, and her son, a convicted forger, was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

With every new revelation about her husband’s twisted family tree, Hillary cringed with embarrassment. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Vince Foster commiserated when Hillary told him about Ritzenthaler.

“So am I.” Hillary sighed. “You know, I’m just so sick of this.”

It was the last time she spoke with Vince. On July 2, two of Vince’s coworkers—William Kennedy III and David Watkins—received official reprimands for the part they played in Travelgate. Vince was profoundly embarrassed that, as a result of his special relationship with the First Lady, he was spared. Vince went to his boss, insisting on taking his share of the blame.

Vince’s mea culpa fell on deaf ears, as did his tacit pleas for help. The First Lady, fuming over the way Travelgate had been bungled, refused Vince’s requests for a meeting and did not return his calls. Foster, who had selflessly done Hillary’s bidding for sixteen years,
felt betrayed and abandoned. He also worried that he, like so many other Clinton associates, would wind up in jail. Foster began referring to Hillary with no small degree of sarcasm as “The Client.”

In early July, Hillary took her widowed mother along as she accompanied Bill to the G-7 summit of leading industrial nations in Tokyo. On the way back, they met up with Chelsea in Hawaii, and then flew on to Arkansas to spend more time with Dorothy Rodham in Little Rock. It was after 9
P.M
. on July 20, 1993, when the phone rang at Rodham’s condominium. Hillary took the call in her mother’s kitchen. White House Chief of Staff Mack McLarty was on the line, and he had terrible news: Vince had killed himself.

When she emerged from the kitchen, Hillary was at first catatonic. Then she began sobbing with such intensity that her press secretary, Lisa Caputo, could imagine only one thing: someone must have assassinated the President. No, but another man Hillary had loved was suddenly dead, and by his own hand.

Even at this traumatic moment, there was a practical question only Hillary could deal with. Bill was, at that very moment, on CNN’s
Larry King Live
from the West Wing and had just agreed to stay on for an extra thirty minutes. McLarty wanted to know if he should let the President finish the show before telling him.

“No, no,” Hillary answered. “He can’t be told while he’s on the air. Have him cut the interview short and tell him right now.” When McLarty did tell Bill, it appeared for a split second that the President might sink to the floor.

She stayed up all night, talking with friends on the phone and weeping. Even though she must have always known the answer, Hillary kept asking it over and over that night and in the days to come: “Why, Vince? Why?”

H
illary went over the events of that day again and again, trying to unravel the mystery of Vince’s death. Vince had lunch at his desk in the White House, then left around 1
P.M
. Then he drove his gray Honda Accord to Fort Marcy Park in McLean, Virginia, got out of the car, sat down on the grass, took out his father’s .38 caliber Colt pistol, put the barrel in his mouth, and squeezed the trigger.

She was crushed and confused, but Hillary did not call Lisa Foster to offer words of sympathy. Instead, just forty-five minutes after McLarty’s call, she phoned Maggie Williams and dispatched her to Vince’s office. If there was anything there that might prove embarrassing to the Clintons—like a suicide note in which he claimed his undying love to Hillary—they had to get their hands on it before the police did. When she opened the door to Vince’s office, Williams saw Patsy Thomasson sitting at his desk. A former assistant to convicted coke trafficker Dan Lasater and now White House aide David Watkins’s deputy, Thomasson was already on the case.

“Do you know anything about why Vince would do this?” Hillary asked Williams. There was panic in her voice. “What’s going on? You know, is there something you can’t tell me? What’s happening?”

Investigators would soon be demanding answers to the same questions. But the careless handling of evidence at the scene, disappearing (then mysteriously reappearing) files, inconsistencies in the testimony of witnesses as well as stonewalling by the White House made the circumstances surrounding Foster’s death all the more suspect.

Conspiracy theories abounded even before associate counsel Steve Neuwirth fished twenty-eight scraps of yellow paper out of Foster’s briefcase nearly a week after his death. Neuwirth and his boss, Bernie Nussbaum, hastily put the jigsaw-puzzle pieces together and then asked for Hillary to make sense of it. “I just can’t deal with this,” she said. “Bernie, you deal with this.” Besides, she pointed out, it would not look good for her to appear to be involved.

In the note, Foster insisted that he had never violated any laws related to Travelgate, and that if he committed any mistakes they were largely the result of overwork. But his most damning words were aimed at the press. “I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington,” he wrote. “Here ruining people is considered sport.”

While Hillary was sobbing with friends over the phone and trying to ferret out whatever information she could, Bill drove to the Foster home to comfort Vince’s widow. Then he returned to the White House, where, White House staffer Marsha Scott would tell David Watkins’s wife Ileene, Scott spent the night “with Bill in his bed.”

At the funeral in Little Rock, Bill comforted Vince’s wife and children in the church sanctuary while Hillary was shunted aside. Waiting by herself in an alcove, she took her seat only seconds before
the funeral service was to begin. Afterward, the funeral procession drove to Hope, where Vince was buried in a cemetery on the outskirts of town. “By then,” she later recalled, “I was beyond words. Numb.” Still, Hillary did not linger with the other mourners.

The obvious rift between the First Lady and the Foster family came as a shock to many mourners present. But not to those who knew how deeply Vince and Hillary had felt toward each other, and how hurtful it had all been for Lisa. “She was the stay-at-home mom,” said a mutual friend, “and here Hillary was this ultimate career woman, burning up the track. Any wife would be threatened by the kind of closeness Vince and Hillary shared.”

Hillary soon learned that Vince had sought psychiatric help and had actually begun taking a prescription antidepressant. This evidence that he had been suffering from clinical depression raised questions about how so many people could have missed the signs. (“Why hadn’t anyone noticed? Everyone said he seemed so happy that last day.”) But it also offered a way out for Hillary. If Vince’s depression was essentially caused by a change in brain chemistry—and not by being suddenly cut off by perhaps the most important person in his life—then Hillary was off the hook. “I will always wish I had read the signs of his despair,” she later wrote, “and could have helped him.”

Lisa Foster, meanwhile, was angry—especially at the Clintons. Whenever the White House flashed on her television screen, she grew “livid. I hated everything,” she later admitted. “I was mad as hell.” At the appropriately named Afterthought, a neighborhood hangout favored by the Clinton crowd, Lisa was overheard railing at Bill and Hillary. But within months she was dating widower James Moody, a Little Rock attorney who had also been a friend of the Clintons. After Vince Foster’s widow and Moody became engaged in 1995, Bill appointed Moody, whose law firm had contributed heavily to Clinton campaigns, to the federal bench. The couple would marry in 1996, on New Year’s Day.

In the aftermath of Vince’s suicide, Lisa had somehow managed to come to terms with the continuing rumors of an affair between her husband and Hillary. She had first had to confront them years earlier, at the height of the Gennifer Flowers brouhaha in 1992. Fearing that some enterprising reporter might dig up the truth about him and Hillary, Foster had gathered his family together and warned them that the inevitable stories that would be coming out about him and Hillary were false. “They’re going to say we had an affair,” Vince said. “I don’t see why,” he added disingenuously, “I can’t be friends with a woman at work without somebody assuming we had an affair.”

Lisa accepted her husband’s denial. “There are certain things I know, because I was there,” she said, “and there are some things I don’t know—that I can never prove one way or the other, except by faith. I just have faith in Vince and faith in Hillary that they did not have an affair.” It was a subject she never discussed with Hillary. “I mean, would you expect her to deny it?” asked Lisa. “What good does denying do?” Besides, she continued about the rumors of an affair, “If they did, who cares now? You know? Who cares? I sincerely believe that they didn’t. But that doesn’t matter to me—Vince is dead.”

Hillary plunged back into work (“I’m an obsessive personality at heart”), giving speeches on health care and trying to salvage her plan by rallying support in Congress. Still trying to come to terms with the deaths of her father and Vince, she was, in her words, “an absolute basket case.” In the middle of one speech, Hillary had to stop to compose herself. Another time, she wiped away tears only seconds before stepping to the podium. But Hillary was just as likely to lash out at those around her. At times, she conceded, she appeared “brittle, and even angry—because I was.”

Hillary managed to escape the pressure in mid-August, when she and Bill vacationed on Martha’s Vineyard. There they spent time with old friends Vernon and Ann Jordan, William and Rose
Styron, and
Washington Post
publisher Katharine Graham. But the high point for Hillary was the time they spent with Jackie Onassis and her companion Maurice Tempelsman aboard Tempelsman’s yacht the
Relemar.
At one point, Bill and Ted Kennedy dared Hillary to follow Chelsea and Jackie’s daughter, Caroline, in jumping from the boat’s highest platform. It took Jackie to persuade her that she didn’t
always
have to do what her husband said.

The vacation in Martha’s Vineyard restored Hillary’s spirits, and she returned to Washington with a renewed sense of purpose. Things seemed finally to be looking up that fall, as unemployment rates fell along with interest rates and inflation. Housing starts were up, and NAFTA, family leave legislation, and the Brady gun control bill had all been enacted by Congress.

Hillary was unaware that for months Bill had been secretly maneuvering to prevent the Arkansas state troopers from telling their story to the press. The President reportedly went so far as to call Trooper Danny Ferguson and suggest to him that high-paying federal jobs were theirs for the asking—if they kept their silence about procuring women for then-Governor Clinton back in Little Rock.

Not that the threat of yet another scandalous revelation about his sexual past was enough to get Bill to change his ways. On November 29, 1993, the Clintons returned to the White House after celebrating Thanksgiving dinner at Camp David. Looking forward to watching her husband sign the Brady Bill into law the next day, the First Lady had no way of knowing that at 3
P.M
. that day Bill would be in the Oval Office study, groping the breasts of a part-time White House volunteer named Kathleen Willey.

On December 17, Hillary was hosting a holiday reception at the White House when she received a call from David Kendall, the lawyer hired by the Clintons to handle the Whitewater mess. Kendall warned her that the
Los Angeles Times
and
The American Spectator
were each publishing articles “full of ugly lies” about
Bill—most notably the Arkansas state troopers’ allegations that they had procured women for him.

“As far as I can tell,” Betsey Wright said after reading the
Spectator
article, “they’re telling the truth.” For Hillary, who now worried that Chelsea was old enough to understand exactly what was being said about her father, it was just one more
thing
to deal with. “I am just so tired,” she said wearily, “of all of this.”

Not too tired to lash out at her husband’s accusers, however. Her husband’s political enemies were behind the “outrageous, terrible” stories, said Hillary. She also cited “financial gain” as a motive—just as she had with Gennifer Flowers—and said it was “pretty sad” when people resorted to such tactics during the holiday season. This “stuff,” as she referred to the troopers’ well-documented, first-hand, and largely corroborated accounts of Bill’s rampant womanizing, “will end up in the garbage can where it deserves to be.”

Once again, Hillary directed her rage not at Bill, but at the press for running with the troopers’ stories—and at what she would eventually describe as a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to bring the Clintons down. According to friends, Hillary figured that she had already forgiven him for the sins committed in Little Rock; the public disclosure of Bill’s pathological skirt chasing did not change that. But she was upset with her husband for being foolish enough to actually call up the troopers hinting at jobs for silence. Done without the knowledge of Stephanopoulos, Carville, or any other senior advisers, it was a particularly sloppy attempt at a cover-up because it could easily be proven using White House phone records. “Shit, Bill,” she said at one point, “even Nixon wasn’t that stupid.”

Troopergate was still raging when the Clintons were awakened in the middle of the night on January 6. Bill’s stepfather, Dick Kelley, had terrible news: the President’s mother had died in her sleep from breast cancer at her Hot Springs, Arkansas, home. Bill’s strong attachment to Virginia (“Ginger” to Chelsea) was not unlike that of Elvis Presley to his mother; it was a parallel Clinton and his
Elvis-obsessed mom often made themselves. Hillary took it upon herself to walk down the hall, wake Chelsea up, and bring her back to her parents’ room so they could both break the news to her.

Hillary had been hit hard by the deaths of her father and Vince only months before. Now, with the loss of Virginia, the Clintons were once again united by grief. “It all had a cumulative effect,” a Little Rock friend said. “He’d been there for her when her dad died, and now she was comforting him while he cried about his mother….” Hillary would later say that “sharing the loss of our parents” was one of the things that cemented their relationship, and made divorce unthinkable.

Even on the day Virginia Clinton was laid to rest next to Bill’s biological father, Bill Blythe, in Hope, there were calls on Capitol Hill for a special prosecutor to investigate Whitewater. Too upset to confront the special prosecutor question, Bill took off on the night of his mother’s funeral for a long-planned trip to Europe to discuss the future of NATO. Hillary, left holding the Whitewater bag, argued forcefully against the appointment of a special prosecutor on the grounds that, among other things, any such investigation would likely drag on for years.

Conversely, most of her husband’s advisers felt that by requesting the appointment of a special prosecutor, the President would look as if he had nothing to hide. To make this happen, however, the President’s staff members knew they had to win Hillary’s backing. Over the course of several days, they actively lobbied Hillary to go along with a special prosecutor, or risk bringing down her husband’s administration.

Unconvinced, Hillary gathered senior staff members together for a conference call with the President in Prague. As she always did, Hillary took charge and, when the meeting was through, wrapped up with a summation of both sides. Throughout, in language that others at the meeting would charitably call “colorful,” Hillary drove home the idea that a special prosecutor would feel
compelled to keep going until he found something. In the end, Bill overruled his wife and instructed her to get the ball rolling. “Why don’t you sleep on it, Bill, and—”

“No!” he shot back over the speaker. “Let’s get this over with.”

Hillary felt she had failed Bill, that she had allowed him to be backed into a corner at a time when he was vulnerable. Worse, she felt powerless to do anything to change his mind. Nevertheless, she went ahead with plans to fly with Chelsea to Moscow, where they would join the President’s party. After landing at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, Chelsea got into a car with staffers for the ride into town while Hillary climbed into an official limousine with Alice Stover Pickering, wife of U.S. ambassador to Russia Thomas Pickering. The motorcade was still wending its way through the city when Hillary leaned over—and vomited on the limo floor. The First Lady later blamed the unfortunate incident on the delayed effects of a bumpy landing at the airport.

The stress did not let up after they returned to Washington. During one highly emotional meeting, she again blasted the President’s senior advisers for not doing enough to protect her interests. Then she broke down as she told them she was “feeling very lonely right now.”