American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power (19 page)

With the possibility of an indictment still hanging over her head, in January 1996 Hillary was called to testify before the grand jury investigating Whitewater. “Cheerio!” she said to her team of lawyers as she left the White House to testify. “Off to the firing squad!” After answering questions for more than four hours, Hillary stepped outside the courthouse and fielded a few more from the press. The First Lady remained calm throughout the ordeal, but she confided to friends that she found the experience both “demeaning” and “scary.”

Hillary resolved to maintain a low profile during her husband’s reelection campaign against Kansas Senator Bob Dole. Yet behind the scenes, she pulled the strings of the Clinton reelection effort with Oz-like dexterity. Helping her in this effort was WhoDB, the computer database locked away in the old Executive Office Building that contained detailed information on more than 350,000 people—and illegally obtained secret FBI files on nearly one thousand officials from the Reagan and Bush administrations.

“Big Brother,” as the database was known to the few White
House staffers clued in to its existence, was originally conceived by Hillary as the cyber equivalent of the card file the Clintons had always kept on each contact made during their climb to power. Hillary quickly discovered, however, that the same technology could also be tapped to provide the Clintons with a database that would make Nixon’s infamous “enemies list” seem laughable.

In the past, the FBI had shared such sensitive and highly personal information—including criminal and medical records, financial information, and reports on sexual activity and preferences—only for security clearance purposes and with the strict understanding that it would remain highly confidential. Toward that end, those White House officials put in charge of handling these personnel files were usually longtime government employees whose ethics were above reproach.

Hillary had something different in mind. Though she would later testify that she did not even know the man, the First Lady insisted that well-known campaign dirty trickster Craig Livingstone be appointed director of the White House Office of Personnel Security. A former bouncer best known for dressing up in a chicken suit and trailing President George H. W. Bush around during the 1992 campaign, Livingstone had complete access to Big Brother and all the potentially damaging information it contained. Hillary, who met with him several times in the family residence, also assigned Livingstone to perform several sensitive tasks—most notably, identifying Vince Foster’s body and helping to tidy up Foster’s office.

Incredibly, Hillary would brush off Big Brother’s existence with two sentences in her memoirs. A “midlevel” staffer had “blundered” by referring to “an outdated list to order FBI file summaries for current staff, and had inadvertently been sent files on some security pass holders from the Reagan and first Bush administrations. But it was neither a conspiracy nor a crime.” Filegate, she boasted, “was a dry hole.”

Largely unaware of the key role Hillary played behind the scenes as a cunning strategist, the public was still warming to her new, softer, less officious persona. When Bill turned fifty, she showed up at New York’s Radio City Music Hall to praise him as the best man she had ever known—and to gloat over the $10 million that one event raked in for the Democrats. After his landslide 1996 election victory, Hillary once again took to the dance floor at each of the fourteen (up from eleven in 1993) inaugural balls. And with each new State of the Union Address, Hillary was there, applauding her husband from the balcony.

Even as she postponed her own ambitions, The Plan was never far from Hillary’s mind. “There was a lot of talk about ‘The Plan,’ ” recalled a junior White House staffer. The Clintons “joked around about it in a cloak-and-dagger way, but you could tell they were serious.” After Bill Clinton left office, “their entire focus was going to be on getting Hillary back in.”

Indeed, there was also talk of how the Clintons might extend their influence well into the twenty-first century. As a child, Hillary was repeatedly told by her mother that she would someday sit on the United States Supreme Court. Assuming she could win back the White House in 2008 or even 2012, Hillary might well be in the position to appoint a chief justice—assuming that Rehnquist, who would turn eighty-four in 2008, stepped down or died during her term in office.

However, having been denied an official position in her husband’s administration because of antinepotism laws, Hillary wondered if she would be legally permitted to appoint her husband to the bench. A test case presented itself in late 1995, when Bill appointed William A. Fletcher to be a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the same court his mother, Judge Betty Fletcher, had served on since 1979.

In an opinion requested by Assistant Attorney General for Policy Development Eleanor Acheson, Hillary’s old Wellesley pal, the
counsel to the President concluded that the prohibition “does not apply to presidential appointments of judges to the federal judiciary.” Without arousing public suspicion, the First Lady had her answer: Hillary could, were she to occupy the White House in the future, appoint Bill to the Supreme Court—ideally to replace Rehnquist, who had already served on the court for thirty years. (Under those circumstances, Bill would not be the first person to have headed two of the three branches of government. After one term as President, William Howard Taft served as chief justice of the Supreme Court for nine years.) Of course, there was no way of knowing at this point—when he seemed to be enjoying unprecedented popularity with the electorate—that the President’s future actions would make any such scenario impossible.

For the time being, it was Hillary, not Bill, whose political future hung in the balance. There was a growing fear inside the White House that the First Lady might be indicted as a result of either the Whitewater or Travelgate investigations. Not long after the McDougals were convicted of bank fraud, Bill asked Dick Morris what he thought of offering Hillary a blanket pardon. Having just been handed a mandate by the American people, the President wondered if now wasn’t the time to take action to spare Hillary.

Morris replied that such an act would almost certainly be seen as arrogant. He also told Clinton that “if he tried it,” he would go down in history alongside Gerald Ford, whose pardon of Richard Nixon cost him reelection.

When Morris phoned the First Lady and asked what she thought of Bill offering her a preemptive pardon, Hillary “flew into a rage,” Morris said. If Whitewater Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr decided to “play that way,” she went on, “I will fight it with all that I’ve got! I don’t want any pardon. I won’t take any pardon!”

Clearly, Hillary was feeling the pressure. It didn’t help that she was also facing up to the realization that she and Bill would soon be losing the single most important person in their lives—the one who defined them as a family: Chelsea. It was doubly hurtful to Hillary that Chelsea chose to put a continent between her and her parents by enrolling in Stanford University.

As crestfallen as she may have been over Chelsea’s departure, Hillary scarcely showed it as she prepared to celebrate her fiftieth birthday on October 26, 1997. Widely acclaimed as the hero of middle-aged women everywhere, she appeared on the cover of
U.S. News & World Report
and
Time,
and was the subject of several television specials. Remembering the $10 million take at one of her husband’s fiftieth-birthday parties, Hillary made sure she cashed in on several of her own. There was a gala at Washington’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, another at the White House, and yet another in Chicago, where Oprah Winfrey told Hillary—and a nationwide audience of millions—that she had never looked better.

Hillary was indeed radiant—in part because her 60 percent approval rating in the polls was the highest she’d had since 1993. But she also relied increasingly on the experts—most notably her hairstylist Christophe, designer Oscar de la Renta, and
Vogue
editor Anna Wintour—in completing her transformation from fashion frump to sleek urban sophisticate. George Stephanopoulos echoed the sentiments of all who knew her when he observed that never before had Hillary looked so…happy.

At the annual White House Christmas party that year, Hillary stood next to her husband in the reception line, smiling and shaking hands with party functionaries, contributors, and the occasional old pal from Arkansas. One of the guests, New York Democratic Party Chairwoman Judith Hope, lingered for a moment to chat with the First Lady. Hope did not think incumbent Democratic Senator Patrick Moynihan was going to run for a
fifth term, and she wanted the First Lady to consider replacing him. “A lot of people,” she told Hillary, “think when you leave the White House, you ought to run for U.S. senator from New York.”

Hillary laughed off the suggestion at the time. But once she returned to New York, Hope quietly championed the idea among party leaders. Not so fast, said incumbent Democratic Senator Patrick Moynihan. Talk of floating the names of possible replacements was premature, the senator said; Moynihan had every intention of serving out the remaining three years of his term before retiring.

The White House pressured Hope not to continue, and Hillary was personally so distraught at the prospect of being at the center of another controversy that she personally asked the New York State Democratic chair not to mention the idea again. Although she later claimed that at this point she thought the idea was “far-fetched” and even “absurd,” Hillary was already on the case. She was, however, unhappy that Hope was tipping her hand too early in the game.

There was another catch: John F. Kennedy Jr. had approached Hope earlier in the year and told her
he
was interested in running for Moynihan’s seat in 2000. John hesitated, concerned that his hypersensitive wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, might not be able to hold up under the strain of a political campaign. But for a time it would remain uncertain whether he would throw his hat in the ring.

Hillary was fond of John Kennedy, and like many women somewhat in awe of his devastating charm and matinee-idol looks. She also appreciated the hard political reality that Kennedy, should he choose to seek the Democratic nomination, would be difficult to beat. Not only was he both heir to the Kennedy magic and
People
magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive,” but John was the consummate
New Yorker, a resident of the city since the age of three. If she did decide to run, Hillary, who had never spent more than a few days at a time in Manhattan, would be branded a carpetbagger. While he had yet to run for office, it was clear to anyone who had heard JFK Jr. give a speech or field reporters’ questions with grace and humor that he was a natural politician.

For Hillary, there were other, more personal reasons not to go up against JFK Jr. for the New York Senate nomination. Beginning with Bill’s prescient handshake with JFK in the Rose Garden and running through their friendship with Jackie, Hillary felt a special attachment to the Kennedys—especially to John and to Caroline, who had become a confidante of Chelsea’s.

“She was really torn,” said one of the few friends Hillary had from New York. “She liked John and hated the idea of running against him, and she also felt he would be impossible to beat on his home turf. It was Bobby Kennedy’s seat, and she felt if he wanted it, John should have it.” If John Kennedy decided to run, Hillary was now saying, then she would not.

John Kennedy’s possible entry into the Senate race hung over Hillary’s head for months—ending only with his untimely death in July 1999. Until that point, said a friend, “she was always looking over her shoulder, a little worried that he might change his mind.”

There would be plenty of other distractions in the meantime. Just a few weeks after Judith Hope uttered the first quasi-public words regarding a Hillary Clinton for Senate campaign, Bill Clinton gave a six-hour deposition in the Paula Jones case. For the first time, he was asked under oath if he had ever had sexual relations with an intern named Monica Lewinsky—an accusation he flatly denied. Then he rushed home to tell Hillary his version of events: that his secretary, Betty Currie, had this friend who was going through a rough patch personally, and that he tried to console the
young woman on a few occasions. In the course of those chats, he claimed, this mentally unbalanced intern—her friends called her “The Stalker,” Bill said—somehow began imagining that they had some sort of relationship….

Just like all the other women, Hillary thought to herself. A tramp. Not just a tramp, but a delusional tramp. This time, Hillary would have to work hard at convincing herself of this. The Clintons canceled their plans to dine out, and spent the weekend, she later said without a trace of irony, “cleaning out closets.”

On January 21, Hillary woke to Bill sitting on the edge of her bed. In his hand was a copy of that morning’s
Washington Post
with a front-page story about the President’s alleged affair with Lewinsky—and charges that he had urged her to lie about the affair to Paula Jones’s lawyers. Hillary went ballistic, but quickly pulled herself together. Swinging into action as the President’s chief strategist, she told Bill he would have to ignore the screaming headlines and go ahead as planned with his schedule.

Hillary would do the same, boarding a train for Baltimore, where she was scheduled to speak at Goucher College. During the ride, the President would call her on her cell phone three times—and each time she would refuse to take the call. Later, when it was revealed that Bill had given Monica a number of gifts, including a copy of Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass,
Hillary became noticeably upset. “He gave me the same book,” she told an aide, “on our second date.”

Still, Hillary stood beside him and nodded enthusiastically as her husband delivered his famous, finger-wagging “I did not have sex with
that woman
” denial. The following morning, Hillary was equally forceful as she backed up her husband on the
Today
show. As she had so many times before, Hillary refrained from assigning any blame to Bill. When interviewer Matt Lauer refused to let her get away with characterizing the scandal as the result of “rumor and innuendo,” she pointed an accusing finger at “the vast right-wing
conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.” Hillary would later tell White House lawyer David Kendall that, while she was fishing for just the right words to say in her husband’s defense, two simple words kept running through her mind: “Screw ’em!”