American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power (25 page)

Bill and Hillary knew that Braswell was worth millions, and that Vignali’s family had contributed heavily to the Democratic Party since Carlos’s imprisonment in 1994. But Hillary would later claim she had no idea that “Hughie,” who had stayed at the White House so frequently that he now required more packing crates than Chelsea, stood to collect $400,000 in fees for securing the pardons.

Hillary would later deny it, but in those last few days in the White House, she conferred several times with her husband about who would and would not appear on the list of pardons he was preparing. “Hillary was involved from the get-go in making sure that several pardons went through,” insisted a longtime Arkansas
friend with an intimate knowledge of at least four of the clemency cases from the President’s home state. “Hillary brought him names, pushed them along, and followed up with phone calls. In other cases, he ran names by her because he didn’t want anything he did to backfire and cause her grief. But obviously they both figured that after the whole Bush–Gore election battle…the pardons would just slide by and nobody would notice.”

At least two were foregone conclusions: Roger, and the Clintons’ ex–Whitewater partner Susan McDougal, who served two years in prison—first for fraud in the land deal, and then for refusing to testify against Bill. Apparently unperturbed by Susan’s alleged affair with her husband, Hillary would go on to salute McDougal’s loyalty in her autobiography.

Nearly all who made the final cut were recommended by family, friends, or fund-raisers. Longtime Clinton pal Jesse Jackson, who had just tearfully confessed that he had fathered a child out of wedlock even as he counseled the Clinton family during the Monica Lewinksy mess, successfully sought clemency for two aides and former congressman Mel Reynolds, sentenced to six and a half years for wire and bank fraud (after serving a two-year term for having sex with a teenager). Harry Thomason helped win pardons for two Arkansas tax evaders, and Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe convinced Clinton to pardon lobbyist James Lake, convicted of masterminding an unlawful campaign contribution scheme.

Clinton advisers William Kennedy III, David Dreyer, and James Hamilton asked for and got clemency for various cocaine traffickers, tax cheats, and money launderers. For obvious reasons, Bill sympathized with his former Housing and Urban Affairs Secretary Henry Cisneros, who made secret payments to his mistress and then lied to federal agents about it; Clinton pardoned Cisneros
and
his mistress.

Portly New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler, one of Bill Clinton’s
most vocal defenders during the impeachment proceedings and a major booster of Hillary’s Senate candidacy, interceded on behalf of 1960s radical Susan Rosenberg. A member of the violent Weather Underground, Rosenberg was arrested in New Jersey in 1984 with 740 pounds of dynamite and a machine gun in her car. She was also a suspect in the 1981 robbery by Weather Underground radicals of an armored car that left a Brinks guard and two police officers dead. Overriding Justice Department objections, Clinton pardoned Rosenberg just as he had pardoned the FALN terrorists the year before.

Another pardon application was of particular importance to New York’s newest senator. Wealthy Manhattan socialite-songwriter Denise Rich had written to the President pleading for him to pardon her ex-husband, notorious white-collar fugitive Marc Rich. The Belgian-born billionaire, charged in 1983 with evading $48 million in taxes and illegally trading with Iran during the hostage crisis, had fled to Switzerland with Denise and his business partner, Pincus Green.

For years the glamorous, well-connected Denise had ranked as one of the Democrats’ most generous donors, contributing more than $1.5 million out of her own pocket to the party, another $450,000 to the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, and $70,000 to Hillary’s campaign. She was best known for the fund-raisers she threw in her lavish, twenty-five-thousand-square-foot penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue.

Not surprisingly, Denise quickly became an intimate of both Clintons. “They hug and are very close,” another friend, actress Jane Seymour, said of the relationship between Denise and the First Couple.

Beth Dozoretz, former finance chief of the Democratic National Committee, was also backing Rich’s pardon. Rich had taken the added step of hiring former Clinton White House counsel Jack Quinn as his lawyer, but Denise and Beth Dozoretz—who, according
to Secret Service logs, racked up ninety-five White House visits between them—were, as Marc Rich boasted to a friend, “the ones who have really got Hillary’s ear.”

The President would wait until the morning of this last day in office and then, over strong objections from the Justice Department and all of his own top aides, add Rich’s name to the list. “He did it,” one of Bill’s closest advisers would later explain, “for Denise.” And, by virtue of the money she would continue to funnel Hillary’s way, for New York’s freshman senator.

In coming weeks, the scandal over “Pardongate” would assume a life all its own. At first, Hillary would do what she had always done: claim total innocence. She had nothing to do with the pardons, she insisted. Nothing at all. As federal investigators closed in, however, she was forced to concede that she “may have” played a part in the selection process. “When it became apparent around Christmas that people knew that the President was considering pardons, there were many people who spoke to me, or you know, asked me to pass on information. You know, people would hand me envelopes, I would just pass them….”

Weeks later, Hillary would be sitting in a Washington theater watching
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
when an aide called on the senator’s cell phone to tell her about Hughie’s $400,000 payday. Publicly, Hillary would only admit to being “very disappointed…and deeply saddened” by Hughie’s lucrative deal. She called for her brother to return the money.

Privately, Hillary raged at Hughie Rodham, who was staying with the First Family during those final days in the Executive Mansion and yet had said nothing to his sister about the payoff. “How could you,” she demanded to know, “be so goddamned stupid?”

Democratic Party leaders would soon be asking the Clintons the same thing. Even the Clintons’ staunchest allies conceded that Bill and Hillary had gone too far this time.
New York Times
editorial
writers branded the pardons as nothing less than an “inexcusable abuse” of executive power. Jimmy Carter broke the code of the presidential brotherhood by calling Clinton’s pardon of Rich “disgraceful.” Hillary’s fellow New York senator, Chuck Schumer, also condemned the Marc Rich pardon.

Even as Denise Rich and Beth Dozoretz pled the Fifth Amendment at hearings before the House Government Reform Committee, Terry McAuliffe admitted the Rich pardon was simply “wrong.” And West Virginia’s courtly Robert Byrd, Hillary’s mentor in the Senate, would claim to be “disgusted” by the President’s last official actions in office. Byrd characterized them as “malodorous.”

In their final days at the White House, however, the Clintons had not the slightest inkling of the controversy that awaited them. Instead, Hillary devoted a considerable amount of time to mapping out the family’s financial future.

Hillary now set her sights on, as she told friends, “finally having some nice things we can call our own.” Even before giving up her lucrative Little Rock law practice to become First Lady, Hillary had frequently complained of the sacrifices she had had to make so that Bill could pursue his presidential ambitions. It had been years since Dick Morris warned Hillary that her plan to put in a swimming pool at the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock might be resented by voters in a state as impoverished as Arkansas. “Why,” she shouted at Morris in reply, “can’t we live like normal people?”

Hillary was well on her way to living well when, in mid-December, she began auditioning publishers in the White House Diplomacy Room. It was vital that she ink a deal before January 3, 2001, when, upon being sworn into office, she would have been required to run it by the Senate Ethics Committee.

Hillary later justified this apparent scramble for a stratospheric book deal by pointing out that the First Couple faced more than $4 million in legal fees stemming from the various investigations
into their conduct. But she also knew that several defense funds were already well on the way to covering the entire amount with hefty contributions from wealthy FOBs and FOHs.

While industry insiders speculated that she would be offered a $5 million advance for her memoirs, she ended up accepting Simon & Schuster’s $8 million—just $500,000 shy of Pope John Paul II’s record-shattering advance. Even after signing on the dotted line, Hillary was worried that Senate watchdogs might do something to prevent her from collecting all the money she was due. “She was pushing hard,” recalled someone close to the negotiations, “to get the whole advance up front.”

Few remembered that, just six years earlier, Hillary and Bill had both denounced Newt Gingrich’s $4.5 million book deal, even though at the time there were no limits on what a congressman might accept in the way of payment. Nevertheless, a chastened Gingrich gave back the $4.5 million and agreed to accept an advance of only $1. But when a staffer reluctantly showed Hillary an editorial in the
New York Times
condemning her $8 million contract, she merely shrugged. “Screw ’em,” the First Lady said yet again, then returned to her paperwork.

Hillary also made certain that Bill would be doing his part. “Bill was happy to go out on the lecture circuit and make some big money,” a former staffer remarked. “But he wanted to take it slow at first and be selective about which offers he accepted. Hillary said, ‘No way, buddy, you’re doing it all.’ ” Weeks before the Clintons exited the White House, speaking engagements were being booked for the soon-to-be ex-President at fees ranging from $100,000 to $450,000. One postpresidential payday Bill seriously considered was vetoed by Hillary as “just too tacky”: $2 million to appear in a Super Bowl commercial.

(Bill was already well aware of his earning potential and determined to exploit it to the fullest. Although he was vocal in his public opposition to George W. Bush’s planned tax cuts, Clinton
applauded them in private. Over dinner one evening with Oxford Professor Alan Ryan, Clinton said Bush’s cuts would be “good for people who are as rich as I’m about to be.” Said Ryan: “He made it quite clear he expects to make a colossal amount of money very fast.” As it turned out, Clinton would earn $9.2 million in speaking fees alone his first year out of office—and end up breaking the pope’s record by signing a $12 million book deal with Alfred A. Knopf.)

After eighteen years in public housing—first at the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion and then at the White House—Hillary was finally prepared for the transition to the Embassy Row and Chappaqua houses. Over the previous year, she had relied on her old Arkansas-based interior decorator pal Kaki Hockersmith to help transform the relatively modest Chappaqua house into a residence befitting a United States senator and her spouse, the ex-President.

Hillary had, after all, become accustomed to a certain lifestyle. At one point that final week, she was escorting a guest through the family residence when she stopped to admire a gigantic spray of yellow roses and chrysanthemums in the East Sitting Hall. “This is one of the great things about living in the White House,” she said with a sigh. Moving on down the cavernous Center Hall, they passed the Cézanne and then the de Kooning before stopping in front of Mary Cassatt’s painting of a woman and two children. “When we go to our house in New York, we take out things and I think, ‘Doesn’t that look nice?’ And then I come back here,” she said, “and there’s the Mary Cassatt.”

Hillary would later write that, during these last few days in office, she took the time to take a stroll through the White House Children’s Garden with Chelsea, and to wander “from room to room making mental snapshots of all my favorite things.”

As it turned out, she didn’t plan on leaving all that much behind. At one point, Hillary walked the halls of the family residence with a clipboard-toting aide, pointing to the items she intended to
take with her. In the solarium, Hillary plopped down on the $6,000 English-style sofa that had been a gift to the White House from Manhattan businessman Steve Mittman. “We’re taking this,” she told the aide, who hastily jotted down a description of the piece on a yellow legal pad. “And those,” Hillary said, nodding toward four oversize club chairs—each valued at $2,843—that had also been a gift from Mittman.

As they moved on to the Yellow Oval Room, here were the two Henredon sofas worth $3,000 each, and the rattan chairs in the solarium, and the Aubusson rug in the First Lady’s Sitting Room, and the kitchen table, oh, and of course the $7,375 worth of designer tables and chairs from our dear friend Denise Rich…

“On behalf of the Clinton Family,” Hillary had written to Mittman and the others when they first donated the furnishings, “I want to express my sincere gratitude for your generous contribution to the White House.” But now that the Clintons were departing, Hillary preferred to look at these pieces of furniture—$28,000 worth in all—as her personal property.

Not that this accounted for more than a small fraction of the items needed to furnish her two sizable residences. Hillary waxed nostalgic to
Ladies’ Home Journal
reporter Meredith Berkman about what it was like unpacking old family treasures. “I don’t even know where to start,” Hillary gushed. “Old rocking chairs, old tables, old clocks, just everything…a lot of old pictures, knickknacks, memorabilia.”

Away from reporters, she lamented the fact that, after nearly two decades of living in taxpayer-funded splendor, “all we’ve got to call our own is some old junk.” Always adept at finding an angle—tax records show the Clintons had actually taken a deduction for donating used underwear to charity—Hillary was searching for a way to finance the furnishing of her new homes without drawing fire from the press.

After brainstorming with decorator Hockersmith, Hillary came
up with a novel solution. Rather than asking for cash contributions outright, why not quietly register for gifts at a department store. “Like a bride!” Hillary said, cornflower blue eyes widening. Then she cut loose with her trademark, window-rattling laugh.