American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power (30 page)

Nonetheless, Hillary voted with the majority of Democrats and Republicans to grant the President congressional authority to wage war on Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. “It was the hardest decision,” she said, “I’ve ever had to make.” The U.S.-led offensive to oust Hussein got under way on March 19, 2003, and for the next several weeks, while American troops pressed toward Baghdad, Hillary remained uncharacteristically silent.

By April, however, Hillary and Bill seemed to be everywhere—speaking at seminars and luncheons, doing television and radio interviews, schmoozing with the party faithful at countless events
from coast to coast, and making the kinds of remarks that were certain to keep them center stage. Asked if his wife was going to run for President, Bill started tongues wagging by suggesting that she’d “make a better vice-presidential candidate” in 2004.

This was no accident. The Clintons’ former adviser Dick Morris claimed there was a “conscious effort going on by the Clintons to distract attention from the current field of candidates. They do not want a Democrat to win in ’04.” Indeed, as part of their effort to “trivialize” the other candidates, the Clintons had refrained from giving money to any of them.

Susan Estrich, a longtime Democratic Party strategist and close ally of the Clintons, conceded Bill and Hillary “suck up every bit of the available air. Nothing is left for anyone else. They are big, too big. That’s the problem…. The 2004 candidates need a chance to get some attention. Could somebody please tell the Clintons to shut up?”

Estrich and the rest of the party would be swept away in a tide of Hillarymania with the June 2003 release of her $8 million memoir,
Living History.
Completed on schedule (this time with the help of six ghostwriters), the book landed Hillary on the cover of
Time,
on front pages everywhere, alongside Barbara Walters on ABC, and at number one on the
New York Times
bestseller list.

Much of
Living History
was devoted to Hillary’s midwestern upbringing, her involvement in Bill’s campaigns, her social causes (health care, children’s rights, welfare reform), and her travels abroad. Yet what really captured the public’s attention was Hillary’s mind-boggling claim that she, too, was shocked when her husband confessed about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

For the most part, Hillary’s autobiography had less to do with living history than with rewriting it. Still lashing out at the “vast right-wing conspiracy” supposedly aimed at bringing down the Clintons, Hillary defended her husband even as she vividly described his “stinging betrayal” of their marriage.

Critics, for the most part, were incredulous. “
Living History
is neither living nor history,” wrote the
New York Times
’s Maureen Dowd. “But like Hillary Rodham Clinton, the book is relentless, a phenomenon that’s impossible to ignore and impossible to explain.”

Whatever its literary merits,
Living History
proved to be a potent political tool. By stressing her domestic and foreign policy credentials, and portraying herself once again as the wounded but loyal wife, the only First Lady to win elective office was offering up what amounted to a presidential résumé. “What she has done,” said New York–based Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf, “is create a national constituency for a newly defined Hillary Clinton.” Concurred journalist Joe Klein: “This is the memoir of an active—and very ambitious—politician. The Senator is looking to augment her political viability.”

The result was that Hillary, still proclaiming her desire to see some other Democrat elected to the White House in 2004, remained with her feet planted squarely center stage. “She has commanded more attention,” said another Democratic strategist, Philip Friedman, “than the nine Democratic presidential candidates combined, she has given her version of a scandal that involved her family, and she has begun to move on to a posture as a national leader in the party.” Another Democratic consultant added that the candidates “must be going out of their minds today! They can’t even get on Page A27, but Hillary’s on the front page of newspapers all over the country.”

Then there was the money. Tucker Carlson, the conservative half of CNN’s
Crossfire,
had vowed to eat his shoes if Hillary’s book sold a million copies. When it did after just one month, Hillary showed up on the
Crossfire
set with a chocolate cake in the shape of a shoe. “It’s a right-wing wingtip,” she announced.

While promoting the British edition of the book (
Living History
reached number one in England, France, and Germany), Hillary
uttered the same line over and over to describe the Lewinsky affair: “Well, it should have remained private and personal but it was forced into the public for partisan political purposes which I found deplorable…these people were willing to destroy anyone in order to end my husband’s presidency.” She also repeatedly denied that she had any plans to run for President. “What about 2008?” one interviewer asked. Hillary smiled and answered that “2008 is an eternity in American politics.” However, she added, “You never know what might happen.” She also volunteered that if she were to be elected President, she wanted her husband to be called “First Mate.”

By late August 2003, there were strong indications that the book had gone a long way toward rehabilitating Hillary’s image. Before its publication, someone had pointed out to Hillary that she remained unpopular in large parts of the country. At the time, Hillary grinned broadly and replied, “That’s because they don’t know me!” Now, in the wake of her nationwide blitz to promote
Living History,
a Gallup poll showed that Hillary’s favorable rating had gone from 43 percent to 53 percent.

To maintain momentum—and keep her fellow Democrats in a perpetual state of bewilderment regarding her intentions—Hillary instructed aides to keep posting e-mails on her official Web site from fans exhorting her to toss her hat into the ring. Asked why she was allowing hundreds of such “Hillary for President” e-mails to be posted, Hillary answered matter-of-factly, “Freedom of speech, I guess.”

No politician made more efficient use of the Internet, in fact. “Have you picked up the paper lately or clicked on a cable channel to find someone saying the most outrageous things about Hillary Rodham Clinton?” asked the FriendsofHillary.com home page. “We have! It really steams us that some people would twist the truth or use such hateful language to attack a Senator who is working hard to make life better for the people of New York and
the nation. The right wing is even angrier because they’ve been unable to stop Hillary with their vicious personal attacks. We’re fighting back! Become a HILLRAISER today!”

Another FOH-sponsored site belongs to “Hill’s Angels,” which zeros in on fund-raising. “While Hillary is fighting for the values and policies we care about,” reads the introduction to the Web site, “the right wing is waging a personal attack against her.” Hillary personally signed off on the copy, hence the many references to her “right wing” critics. Meanwhile, Hillary received an endorsement that, given the rocky state of Franco-American relations during the Iraqi War, she might just have well done without. Bernadette Chirac, wife of French President Jacques Chirac, said on French television that “a lot of women hope that one day she will run for the presidency of the United States and that she’ll win.”

Buoyed by her rising poll numbers—numbers that still showed her twenty points ahead of any declared candidate—Hillary went back on the offensive. This time, she charged that the White House had pressured the Environmental Protection Agency to downplay the fact that toxins were swirling in the air after the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11. “I don’t think any of us ever expect to find out,” she said, “that our government would knowingly deceive us about something as sacred as the air we breathe….” She then called for Senate hearings to investigate what she was now calling a “cover-up.” Hillary said she could “see no other way to get the administration’s attention.”

Later, the senator would up the ante by threatening to block the confirmation of outgoing Utah Governor Mike Leavitt as the new head of the EPA. In a statement that revealed more about the way the Clintons operated than Hillary may have intended, she said, “I know a little bit about how White Houses work. I know somebody picked up a phone, somebody got on a computer, somebody sent an e-mail, somebody called for a meeting, somebody in that
White House probably under instructions from somebody further up the chain told the EPA, ‘Don’t tell the people of New York the truth.’ And I want to know who that is.”

Hillary would keep hammering away at Bush’s record, confident that not one of the Democrats lining up for the nomination had any chance of beating him. Six months after American troops entered Iraq, support for the war was hovering around 63 percent. Polls also showed that, for the time being, Bush would easily recapture the White House, leaving the field wide open to Hillary in 2008.

The Clintons continued to ignore Susan Estrich and other party operatives who begged them not to hog the limelight. When CNN’s Judy Woodruff asked if Hillary wasn’t guilty of distracting attention from her fellow Democrats, Hillary shrugged. “Well,” she said, “I don’t see that at all.” Then she argued that the party’s best hope was to keep reminding Americans of “the Clinton Administration and the difference it made in the lives of so many Americans.”

Her hollow denials notwithstanding, Hillary kept dangling the possibility in front of the party faithful that she would jump into the race at any minute. Bill was her co-conspirator in this ongoing effort to keep the rest of the field off balance. On a Sunday in early September, the Clintons hosted a dinner for 150 major donors—people who had contributed $100,000 or more to the Clintons over the past twelve months—at their home in Chappaqua. At one point over cocktails, Bill said the Democrats had only “two stars”—his wife and General Wesley Clark, the retired NATO commander both he and Hillary had secretly approached to enter the fray. Later, Hillary told her dinner partner, Gristedes supermarket chain CEO John Catsimatidis, that “we might have another candidate or two jumping into the race.” Said Catsimatidis, “I didn’t get the impression she had pulled the trigger in her mind about whether or not to run.” He was “left with the impression that there’s always a possibility.”

To another guest, Hillary pointed out that she would be needing additional money—lots of it—for a campaign “somewhere down the road.” One major backer of the Clintons later assured her fellow guests that they “were not hallucinating.” Hillary’s playful attitude, as well as her husband’s provocative asides, had left everyone scratching their heads.

Ten days later, Wesley Clark entered the race with a campaign team that included many familiar names from the Clinton administration. Clark announced at the time that Senator Clinton had promised to sign on as co-chair of his campaign—a statement that Hillary’s camp refused to confirm or deny at first.

Like Bill, Clark was an Arkansas-bred Rhodes scholar who zoomed to the top of his chosen profession at an early age. Clark had led the successful military operation in Kosovo, but nevertheless was reportedly relieved of his command by envious superiors at the Pentagon. Then-President Clinton went along with Clark’s sacking at the time, though he later claimed to have known nothing about it. Now, four years later, it looked as if Bill and Hillary, who had been chatting up General Clark as a possible candidate for months, were about to make amends by getting behind a candidate they thought could win.

Or were they? On the eve of Clark’s announcement, Bill told an audience in California that he thought the general would do fine in the short run. “Whether he can get elected president,” Clinton added, “I haven’t a clue.” Instead, he again touted Hillary’s chances of winning back the White House for the Democrats. “I was impressed at the state fair in New York, which is in Republican country in upstate New York,” he said, “at how many New Yorkers came up and said they would release her from her commitment [to serve out her Senate term] if she wanted to do it.”

This was precisely the same grassroots argument that Clinton himself had used in 1992 to justify breaking his promise to Arkansans that he would serve out the remainder of his final term
as governor rather than run for President. Hillary had urged her husband to break his pledge not to run back then, and she had no trouble reneging on her own Shermanesque declaration in 1997 that she would never seek elective office.

At this point, looking at a watered-down field of ten candidates—none of whom came within fifteen points of George W. Bush in the polls—Bill was pushing Hillary harder than ever to get into the race. He argued that Bush was now especially vulnerable: Conditions in Iraq, where American occupation troops were under fire from insurgents, were chaotic. None of the “weapons of mass destruction” that had been used to justify the war had yet been found. And, most important, unemployment was up and the economy was still struggling.

“He is really after her to do it,” one of the Clintons’ closest Arkansas confidantes said at the time. “But the bottom line is that she isn’t sure Bush can be beat. She trusts her own instincts more than she trusts Bill’s.”

As it turned out, Bill was not the only member of their tight-knit family urging Hillary to run. Chelsea had returned from her studies at Oxford—where anti-Bush feelings ran high—harboring a bitterness toward the President that transcended her parents’ own disdain. Chelsea, now ensconced in New York and earning six figures as a consultant with McKinsey & Company, tried to convince her mother that she was the only person who could “rescue” the country from the Republicans.

By late September, pundits were speculating that the Clintons had backed Wesley Clark simply to foil the then front-runner, Vermont Governor Howard Dean, and set the stage for a last-minute entry by Hillary. She dismissed this as “an absurd feat of imagination, I guess….” In fact, she was quick to point out, Hillary and Bill had not endorsed Clark. To drive home that point, the former President phoned three of the candidates and assured them neither he nor his wife was endorsing anyone.