American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power (18 page)

In the end, neither Feinman nor anyone who helped her in the publication of
It Takes a Village
was mentioned by Hillary in the book’s acknowledgments. “All she expected,” said Feinman’s friend Sally Quinn, “was ‘Many thanks to Barbara Feinman, whose tireless efforts were greatly appreciated.’ She would have died and gone to heaven.”

Hillary bristled when asked if she really wrote the book herself. “All I can say,” she answered with a smirk, “is that they didn’t pay me $120,000 to spellcheck it.”

Basking in the unfamiliar warmth of public affection, Hillary patterned her next literary endeavor after Barbara Bush’s hugely successful
Millie’s Book.
A collection of letters penned to the Clintons’ pets,
Dear Socks, Dear Buddy
also climbed the bestseller lists, and further burnished Hillary’s image as a homebody.

In truth, Hillary was finding the traditional role of First Lady more enjoyable than she might have imagined. She threw herself into holiday preparations at the White House, but soon learned that even the mundane-sounding business of decorating the Blue Room Christmas tree—considered the First Lady’s tree—was fraught with the potential for scandal.

Hillary had invited art students from around the country to design their own ornaments for the Blue Room tree along a “Twelve Days of Christmas” theme, with rather unexpected results. A number of the ornaments were fashioned from condoms, others from crack pipes. One ornament depicted “twelve lords a-leaping”—all displaying erections.

Perhaps Hillary was too distracted by her pal Webb Hubbell’s indictment on tax evasion and mail fraud charges. Within weeks, Hubbell would confess to overbilling Rose Law Firm clients to the tune of nearly $400,000 and be sentenced to twenty-one months in federal prison.

Concerned for Webb’s welfare—and perhaps worried that
he might spill some additional information regarding her work for the failed savings and loan Madison Guaranty if he felt abandoned—Hillary breathed a sigh of relief when Clinton insiders told her they were banding together to help Webb out. They arranged for Hubbell to be given work as a consultant that would pay him more than $400,000 in fees—“enough,” said a partner in one of the firms, “for him to keep his mouth shut about Hillary.”

In prison, Hubbell contemplated countersuing his former employer over the amount they claimed he owed. But when he was told that Hillary would pull the plug on White House support if he went ahead and sued the Rose Law Firm, Hubbell backed down. “So,” he told his wife in a phone call from prison, “I need to roll over one more time.”

Hillary was having far too good a time in her new incarnation as a somewhat old-fashioned First Lady. To sell herself in the role, however, she relied increasingly on Chelsea. The First Daughter had been shielded from the press in a way that none of her predecessors had. Bill and Hillary would not entertain any inquiries from the press about Chelsea, and reporters knew they would be banished from the White House if they dared to ask Chelsea even one innocuous question. After years in the White House, it seemed nothing short of incredible that Chelsea had never uttered a word for public consumption. The average American had no idea what Bill and Hillary’s only child sounded like.

But Chelsea did serve a very important political purpose. Whenever her parents were under the gun, the First Daughter was often carted out to be photographed laughing with her mom or strolling arm in arm with Dad across the White House lawn.

Through it all, Chelsea remained remarkably unspoiled, exhibiting qualities of poise and self-assurance that impressed visiting heads of state and Arkansas good ol’ boys alike. In March of 1995, she accompanied her mother on a twelve-day visit to five countries
in South Asia. They were photographed laughing as they rode an elephant in Nepal, holding hands at the Taj Mahal, and touring Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Calcutta.

Back in Washington, Hillary was scoring a public relations triumph in absentia. Before leaving on her trip, she videotaped a five-minute parody of the film
Forrest Gump
to be shown at the annual Gridiron Dinner. Never one to leave anything to chance, Hillary tapped several of her friends in the entertainment industry to make the short video.
Saturday Night Live
alumnus Al Franken was asked to direct, while Jay Leno enlisted the help of his writers to provide some of the more memorable lines.

Journalists and politicians howled at the video showing Hillary, on a park bench in front of the White House, spoofing some of
Forrest Gump
’s most famous lines. “My mama always told me the White House is like a box of chocolates,” she mugged. “It’s pretty on the outside, but inside there’s lots of nuts.” Whenever the camera came back to Hillary sitting on the bench, she was wearing yet another hairstyle—something Americans had become accustomed to as the First Lady tried over the years to find the one most suitable for her.

Hillary returned from her South Asian tour a few days later, blissfully unaware that while she was away her husband had begun his fatal flirtation with a twenty-two-year-old White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.

Buoyed by the success of her first official overseas trip without Bill, Hillary journeyed to Beijing in September of 1995—this time to attend the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. It was a trip the President’s advisers did not want Hillary to make. They were concerned that it might appear as if the First Lady were once again trying to act as a surrogate for her husband—this time in the foreign policy area—and that Hillary, whose off-the-cuff remarks had caused so much trouble for the President in the past, might slip once again. Most important, however,
was the undeniable fact that the Chinese government would exploit Hillary’s presence as a tacit endorsement of its human rights policies.

To further complicate matters, the Chinese government had arrested Chinese American activist Harry Wu and charged him with espionage. Human rights groups pressured Hillary to boycott the conference in protest, but she had no intention of missing this golden opportunity to make her debut on the world stage. A week before Hillary was to arrive in China, Wu was tried, sentenced to fifteen years in prison, and deported to the U.S. In return, it was presumed that Hillary might tone down her criticism of the Chinese government’s human rights record or forgo mentioning it altogether.

Her hosts, as it turned out, were in for a rude shock. In her speech to the conference, Hillary delivered what amounted to a stinging indictment of Beijing’s human rights violations, which included forced abortions and forced sterilization. Hillary was interrupted several times by standing ovations, and when she was finished, thousands in the audience rushed to the stage to congratulate her. To celebrate Hillary’s “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights” speech, the First Lady joined hands with other members of the U.S. delegation to form a circle, then led them in a rendition of “Kumbaya.”

Even before she left for China, the First Lady had begun planning the fund-raising effort that would bankroll her husband’s reelection campaign. While Bill’s advisers insisted that it was important that she return to keeping a relatively low profile, they did not dispute the fact that no one was more adept at finding ways to raise cash than Mrs. Clinton.

Commerce Secretary Ron Brown was one of those who did not approve of the Clintons’ practice of literally selling seats on the Commerce Department’s foreign trade missions for $50,000 apiece. Before his death in a plane crash while on a trade mission to Croatia, Brown complained bitterly about the First Lady’s involvement in trying to squeeze dollars from any available source—and
her insistence that he accommodate fat-cat contributors. He told his business partner and mistress, Nolanda Hill, that he was tired of being “a motherfucking tour guide for Hillary.”

Hillary’s greatest fund-raising tool was the Executive Mansion, and the trappings of the presidency itself. On a scale that was heretofore unimaginable, she masterminded the scheme to make everything that the White House had to offer available—for a price. Contributors who had never actually met the Clintons could stay in the Lincoln Bedroom, attend a state dinner, sit in the Oval Office while the President read his weekly radio address, screen a movie in the White House theater, or sit in the presidential suite at the Kennedy Center.

For $10,000, a campaign contributor could join a small group for coffee with the President, or a larger group for dinner. Those who forked over a six-figure contribution were invited to sit at the President’s table. At Hillary’s urging, the President also gave personal tours to some donors, and went golfing or running with others. Even the compulsively gregarious Clinton occasionally grew tired of the endless “meet-and-greet.” Unimpressed, an exasperated Hillary lit into her husband while staffers looked on nervously. “You’re getting your ass out there,” Hillary said, “and you’re doing what has to be done.
We need the money.
”

One of the more distressing examples of Hillary’s blatant influence peddling involved the Riadys, Indonesian billionaires who owned the LippoBank of Los Angeles. For a time in the 1980s, James Riady was president of Arkansas’s Worthen Bank, and it was in that capacity that he befriended Hillary and Bill. James Riady and his wife gave $465,000 to Bill’s 1992 presidential campaign, making them the Clintons’ largest single contributor at the time.

Lippo executive John Huang, who escorted Hillary and Bill on a tour of Hong Kong in 1985, would also give generously to the Clintons. Once their friend was elected, Huang and Riady each gave $100,000 to the Clinton inaugural.

This was just the tip of the fund-raising iceberg. Additional money poured into the Democratic coffers from the Riadys’ friends, relatives, and business associates. As a result of their largesse, the Riadys and Huang, now their top-ranking U.S. executive, were allowed to roam the halls of the White House almost at will.

In June, Riady and Huang were among guests invited to the President’s Saturday radio broadcast, and after it was over they remained behind closed doors with the President. Two days later, a Riady-owned Chinese company issued a $100,000 check to Hillary’s embattled friend Webb Hubbell. The same day, Huang was appointed to a sensitive position at Commerce. In that capacity, Huang was given CIA briefings and ready access to top secret intelligence documents—several, a Senate investigation would reveal, would have cost the lives of CIA operatives in China had they been leaked to the wrong people.

Trouble was, the Riadys and Huang had close ties to Beijing and especially to the Chinese intelligence community. By the 1990s, the Riadys had invested more than $8 billion in various Chinese projects, from banking and electronics to real estate and tourism. To protect their interests, they relied heavily on their relationships with several high-level Communist Party officials—many of whom were escorted by Hillary’s friend John Huang to the White House for coffee with the President. All in all, Huang would visit the White House more than seventy times during the Clintons’ first term—always with Hillary’s blessing, if not the Secret Service’s.

Huang was not alone. Hillary was also very fond of Southern California businessman Johnny Chung. Often described as a “Hillary groupie,” Chung sent a letter of condolence to the First Lady following her father’s death, and thereafter was basically given carte blanche to hang around Hillaryland. Chung racked up more than fifty visits to the Executive Mansion, bringing his well-connected Chinese friends to various functions, including a couple of White House Christmas parties.

When Chung asked Hillaryland staffer Evan Ryan if he could bring some friends—all top officials of the People’s Republic of China—to meet the First Lady and dine in the White House mess, Chung claimed he was told Hillary needed to raise $80,000 to pay off a debt to the Democratic National Committee.

Chung eagerly volunteered to help, and returned with a check for $50,000. Within hours of receiving the check, a beaming Hillary met with Chung (“Welcome, my good friend”) and his Chinese associates.

A few days later, Chung and company showed up to watch the President deliver his Saturday radio address. For his part, Bill was concerned about the obvious presence of Chinese Communist Party officials in the Oval Office—not because they posed a security risk, or even because their presence implied tacit U.S. approval of the ruthless regime in Beijing. The President told Hillary he was worried about “how it’s going to make me look” when photos of Chung and his friends posing with the President in the Oval Office were released.

Unlike Al Gore, who got into trouble for raising $166,750—$55,000 of that laundered through monks and nuns—during a John Huang–organized visit to the Hsi Lai Buddhist Temple in California, Hillary kept a relatively low profile. Yet no one doubted that she was the mastermind behind soliciting donations from special interests outside the U.S. “That’s just right-wing bull-shit,” she said when questions of national security were raised. Regardless of where it came from, she reminded the Clintons’ inner circle, “money is money.”

That January, Hillary once again found herself confronting the ghost of Whitewater when her long-lost Rose Law Firm billing records inexplicably materialized on a table in the White House residence. The records showed that, contrary to Hillary’s insistence that she had not been involved with negotiations between the McDougals’ Madison Guaranty and state regulators, she had in fact
done sixty hours of work on the matter. As for Castle Grande (a.k.a. Whitewater), which she also claimed to know nothing about, the records showed she had racked up thirty billable hours of legal work.

The revelations sent Hillary’s point man Harold Ickes, the dyspeptic son and namesake of FDR’s interior secretary, over the edge. Ickes was most concerned that Hillary’s office and the Arkansas securities commission get their stories straight. “If we fuck this up,” he told them, “we’re done.”

As inconceivable as it seemed, the First Lady of the United States was now fingerprinted so that investigators could determine which documents she had handled and which she hadn’t. “That struck me,” said Jane Sherburne, one of the attorneys brought in to handle the case, “as another indignity she had to endure, but part of the process.”