American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power (28 page)

“Brill’s accusations are completely false and an obvious last-ditch effort to jump-start anemic book sales,” responded Hillary’s spokesman Philippe Reines, perhaps best known in New York political circles for reportedly streaking through the offices of his previous employer, unsuccessful New York mayoral candidate Peter Vallone, on a dare. “It’s hard to imagine why Mr. Brill would choose to exploit such a horrible tragedy in this manner.”

Chuck Schumer, for one, had no trouble at all believing it. Every time he stormed into her offices to accuse Hillary of up-staging him—on more than one occasion his shouting could be heard in the hallway outside Clinton’s Senate offices—Hillary apologized and promised it would never happen again. But by early 2002, the escalating feud between New York’s two senators was fast becoming, as Washington columnist Robert Novak put it, “the talk of Capitol Hill.”

In the wake of 9/11, Hillary had other concerns. She was still haunted by her early advocacy of a Palestinian state—not to mention the fond embrace she gave Suha Arafat. In February 2002, Hillary grabbed headlines back in New York by traveling to Jerusalem and proclaiming her undying support for the state of Israel. Just as important, she took every opportunity to denounce Arafat. “Yasser Arafat bears the responsibility for the violence that has occurred,” she declared during a visit to a pizza parlor where fifteen Israelis were killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber. “It rests squarely on his shoulders.”

The fate of the Democratic Party in the 2002 elections often seemed to rest on Hillary’s shoulders. The day she returned from Israel, Hillary helped raise $150,000 at a Manhattan fund-raiser for New York Congressman Greg Meeks. The day after that, she was back in Washington hosting a fund-raising dinner for Iowa’s Democratic Governor Tom Vilsack. The following evening, she appeared at a $4.5 million fund-raiser honoring Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords, who bolted the GOP to become an independent and shifted control of the Senate back to the Democrats.

At the same time HILLPAC, which like other political action committees quieted down in the aftermath of 9/11, was back in full swing. The fund-raising operation was key to Hillary’s building the kind of national power base she needed for a presidential run in 2008 or beyond. “Each and every one of the congressmen and senators and governors she helps out now will owe her big-time,”
said a onetime beneficiary of Hillary’s largesse. “She’s a very smart lady. She knows it’ll pay off for her down the road.”

While Hillary focused on making The Plan a reality, her husband traveled the world giving speeches—and contributing to an annual income that now easily topped $12 million. He had also, she would learn through the grapevine, reverted to his old ways.

Bill had once told one of the women in his life, “We’re all addicted to something. Some people are addicted to drugs. Some to power. Some to food. Some to sex…”

Few women had more insights into Bill’s character—and the reasons for his rampant womanizing—than his “Pretty Girl” Dolly Kyle Browning. Over the course of their off-again, on-again twenty-year affair, Dolly monitored Bill’s wildly fluctuating weight and concluded there was an inverse correlation between his weight and his sexual activity.

According to Dolly, Bill was “an addictive personality” who, when he wasn’t active sexually, replaced his admitted addiction to sex with his admitted addiction to food. His weight soared, Dolly said, whenever Hillary “had him on a tight leash or he was in the doghouse.” Weight loss was “a sure sign that he’s up to his old tricks.” Over the three-year period after leaving the White House, six-foot-two-and-a-half-inch Bill would slim down from 225 pounds to a comparatively svelte 190.

For months, Bill’s New York office had been posting notices in the political science departments at Columbia, New York, and Fordham universities advertising for students to intern at Clinton’s Harlem offices. The criteria for judging applicants was exposed by three young women who mailed their résumés to Clinton’s office and waited for a reply that never came. When the applicants called, they were told that the positions had been filled.

At that point, one of the women—a buxom redhead named “Katy”—dropped into Clinton’s office in February 2002 and resubmitted her résumé, this time with a photo showing her in a
tight sweater. According to her résumé, Katy had never gone to college, but she did say in her cover letter that she knew “enough to be deferential and follow directions. I keep my mouth shut when people who know what they’re talking about are there. I listen. I’m smart. Please give me a shot.”

Within three hours, Katy received a call from the former President’s office asking her to come in as soon as possible. Her cover letter, said one of the staffers in charge of bringing candidates to Clinton, “really stood out.”

Left to his own devices, Bill would, in fact, be linked in the press to more than a dozen women between 2001 and 2004. Reporters speculated about old friends like former Miss Arkansas Lencola Sullivan, whose Columbus Avenue apartment was only a quick jog from the former President’s Harlem offices. Bill threw an impromptu party for Sullivan in his office when she married a Dutch security specialist. But even after she moved with her new husband to Amsterdam, the still-striking former beauty queen kept her Manhattan apartment and continued to see Bill whenever she was in town.

As for stunning Park Avenue socialites rumored to be involved with the ex-President, billionaire Revlon Chairman Ron Perelman’s ex-wife Patricia Duff was not alone. Lisa Belzberg, thirty-eight-year-old wife of Seagram’s heir Matthew Bronfman, became the object of speculation after she attended a Super Bowl party Bill threw in his Harlem offices. “There was a chemistry between them, no doubt about it,” another guest later recalled. Bill, who reportedly pulled Belzberg toward him and murmured off-color jokes in her ear, apparently agreed. “She married a guy worth $6 billion,” he boasted, “but she still likes to flirt with me.”

By late February, Bronfman and Belzberg had separated. Over the next few months, Bill visited her home on several occasions, and was spotted cozying up to Belzberg at several charity events in Manhattan.

Belzberg would eventually reconcile with her husband, but Bill’s plate was still full. Clinton was also allegedly meeting up with an unidentified blond woman on a weekly basis at New York’s trendy Hudson Hotel, always arriving separately in the afternoon and spending a couple of hours in the hotel’s penthouse suite. The pattern followed Bill’s penchant for midday rendezvous with paramours in hotels and apartments. “It is absolutely his MO,” said one.

At about the same time, he was spotted flirting with Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the late British press lord Robert Maxwell. She, in turn, brought Clinton together with mercurial supermodel Naomi Campbell in April 2002. Not long after, Campbell, who had just broken up with fifty-year-old Benetton tycoon Flavio Briatore, accepted Clinton’s invitation to join him at the Austrian ski resort of Ischl. When she arrived from Milan, Bill, who was surrounded by other dignitaries attending the World Summit for Youth and Economic Development, did his best to appear surprised. “What’s she doing here?” he asked in feigned disbelief before whisking her off to the town’s exclusive Panorama Restaurant.

Campbell would also deny any romantic involvement with Clinton, but one eyewitness to the rendezvous marveled at how “totally comfortable they were in each other’s company. Lots of laughing, heads together, whispering to each other. Obviously, a very warm relationship…”

Charlotte Dawson, the statuesque blond host of Australian television’s top-rated
How’s Life?
show, also admitted “dating” Bill when he visited New Zealand in June 2002. They were spotted rushing out of the Auckland Hilton together after Clinton delivered another $200,000 speech—this one launching the new BMW-7 series. After their secret late-night rendezvous, Dawson, the ex-wife of Olympic silver medalist swimmer Scott Miller, insisted Bill was “a really nice bloke, and very charming.” But, she added in a rather unfortunate choice of words, “nothing went
down.” The man who introduced Bill to Charlotte, Australian promoter Max Markson, went on record as saying the former President spoke “very highly” of her following their evening together.

Another attractive young woman who did not deny that she “enjoyed dates” with Bill Clinton was twenty-nine-year-old, six-foot-tall actress, socialist, feminist, and former model Saffron Burrows. Burrows’s marriage to fifty-three-year-old film director Mike Figgis (
Leaving Las Vegas
) was ending when she first began seeing the former President.

“I’m Bill’s bodyguard,” the British beauty liked to joke, admitting that he was a “close acquaintance” of hers. Burrows also conceded that, while Hillary was hard at work on Capitol Hill, she went out on numerous occasions with Bill in London and in New York. “He has,” she said slyly, “a great sense of fun.”

To make matters even more interesting, Burrows was an outspoken bisexual who went on record years before she met Bill saying that she had a crush on Hillary. “Bill found that rather funny” when she told him, Burrows said.

At about the same time, Hillary learned of Bill’s questionable trip to Rio. It was enough, given the upcoming midyear elections in which she had invested so much time and energy, for Hillary to once again pull in the reins. “There was a showdown in Chappaqua,” said one of their oldest friends in Arkansas. “Hillary basically told him that she didn’t like what she was hearing and to cool it. She had done so much for him, she said, the least he could do was keep his pecker in his pants. Or words to that effect.”

Despite constant speculation in the tabloid press that Hillary was on the verge of divorcing her husband, nothing was further from the truth. “What surprised me about Hillary Clinton to this day,” said talk-show host and longtime Hillary supporter Rosie O’Donnell, was that “I assumed as soon as she was elected senator she would divorce. I am shocked that she did not. I told all my friends, ‘As soon as she’s in the Senate seat she will be a single senator.’ ”

But there was already heavy speculation that, since Hillary was far and away the most popular Democrat in the country, she would seek the presidency as early as 2004. Senator Clinton insisted that she had no interest in running for President—especially not against George W. Bush, whose poll ratings had soared in the wake of 9/11. But when she did seek the office, she would be running with a loyal spouse at her side. Hillary, who believed Al Gore had made a fatal error by distancing himself from the record of the first Clinton administration, intended to trumpet what she viewed as the Clintons’ stellar domestic and foreign policy record. “Hillary sees herself as Eleanor to Bill’s FDR,” said a longtime FOH. “The Clinton legacy means a great deal to her. She is not going to do anything to compromise their place in history. No matter what she says about having to agonize over whether or not to stay with him during the Monica thing, she never seriously thought of divorce. And she never will. It’s just not going to happen. Period.”

Besides, New York’s junior senator was too busy leading the charge against the Republicans. Hillary pounced on a report that the CIA had warned the Bush administration in August 2001 about Al Qaeda’s plans to hijack American airliners. “I am simply here today on the floor of this hallowed chamber to seek answers to the questions being asked by my constituents,” she intoned, pointing to the front page of the
New York Post
. “Questions raised by one of our newspapers in New York with the headline
BUSH KNEW
. The President knew what? My constituents would like to know the answer to that and many other questions….”

Now clearly on a roll, Hillary also demanded to know “why we know today, May 16, about the warning he received. Why did we not know this on April 16 or March 16 or February 16 or January 16 or August 16 of last year?”

But she already knew the answer to that question. By this time, the White House had already explained in Senate briefings that
the warnings did not include any mention of the possibility that the airliners themselves might be used as weapons against targets on the ground.

Still, the Senator made no effort to conceal the pleasure she took in hurling grenades at the party in power. “I never shy away,” she made a point of saying, “from a fight.”

Hillary received an unexpected gift in late June when, without explanation, U.S. Attorney James B. Comey closed the New Square clemency case. In the wake of 9/11, the investigation into Bill Clinton’s decision to drastically reduce the prison terms of four Hasidic Jews who bilked the government out of tens of millions of dollars had simply lost steam—aided in no small part by President Bush’s desire to “move on.”

Similarly, the investigation into Clinton’s decision to pardon fugitive financier Marc Rich would languish even after Rich’s ex-wife Denise was granted immunity for cooperating with authorities. Oddly, the Bush administration would help the Clintons out again by refusing to release documents related to the pardons under the Freedom of Information Act. Invoking the doctrine of presidential privilege, the White House kept more than 4,340 pages of Pardongate documents under lock and key. U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler, a Clinton appointee, would later uphold the Bush administration’s argument that all records related to the Clinton pardons should remain secret.

George W. Bush had made it clear that he did not have the stomach for seeing
any
President dragged into court. In accordance with his boss’s wishes, U.S. Attorney James Comey gave Bill and Hillary a pass.

One of Hillary’s closest friends and allies would not be so lucky. Comey had been a protégé of Rudy Giuliani, who as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York made a name for himself prosecuting Mafia dons and the much-despised hotel queen Leona Helmsley. The same week he made the decision to drop
the Justice Department investigation into New Square, Comey charged ImClone CEO Sam Waksal with insider trading—and implicated Hillary’s longtime pal Martha Stewart in the process.