American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power (8 page)

Hillary was settling comfortably into her new life in Arkansas, but she was still not completely convinced that she should marry Bill and stay. Bill, on the other hand, was more sure than ever that he needed Hillary—and that he needed her as his wife. While Hillary blamed his defeat on failing to exploit his foe’s ties to Nixon, Bill believed he had lost because he was not perceived as a family man. Rumors about his womanizing had swirled around the campaign, and at one point a Baptist minister had publicly upbraided Clinton for “living in sin” with his Yankee girlfriend. If he was going to run for office again, he was going to do it as a married man.

That summer Hillary, still undecided, traveled north to touch base with family, friends, and contacts in Illinois, New York, Boston, and Washington. There was no consensus about what she should do, but Hillary was left with the impression that nothing anyone else could offer would be as fulfilling as her life with Bill.

When she returned to Arkansas, Hillary was picked up by Bill at the airport and driven straight to a little redbrick Victorian on California Street. She had admired the house before she left, and Bill was telling her that he had purchased it. “So now you better
marry me,” he said, “because I can’t live in it by myself.” They walked through the living room with the beamed cathedral ceilings and the dilapidated 1920s kitchen, and when they reached the bedroom Hillary knew what her answer was going to be. Bill had already bought an antique wrought-iron bed and covered it with bed linens from Wal-Mart.

Virginia cried on October 11, 1975—not because she was losing her son to a Yankee, but because his bride was insisting on holding on to her maiden name. Hillary had waited until the eve of her wedding to buy her wedding gown—a Victorian lace dress from Dillard’s department store. The ceremony itself, conducted in the living room of their new house by local Methodist minister Vic Nixon (“Never thought I’d be married by Nixon!”), was a modest affair. Not so the reception, which was held at the home of State Senator Morris Henry and his wife, Ann. Hundreds of friends, family members, former classmates, colleagues, and political contributors crowded into the Henrys’ backyard.

Ann Henry described Hillary as “ecstatic. If she had doubts about making her life in Arkansas they had vanished by that time. She was totally in love with him, and he with her.” That moment would have been shattered had Hillary known that during the reception one of the guests came upon Bill making out with another woman in one of the bathrooms.

Eight months later, Bill scored his first election victory when he won the May 1976 primary for state attorney general. He faced no Republican opponent in the general election, so he was free to take on the task of running Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign in Arkansas. Hillary, meantime, took a leave of absence from the university to become Carter’s deputy campaign director in Indiana. She quickly rubbed the local operatives the wrong way—so much so that at one point during a staff meeting, a slightly inebriated pol reached over the conference table, grabbed her by the collar, and told her to shut up. Hillary removed his hand, told the man
never to touch her again, and stormed out of the meeting. She had complained that Carter’s people in Indiana were doing a sloppy job, and she was apparently right—though Carter won the election, he did not carry Indiana.

Now that the Clintons were moving to the state capital, Hillary resigned from her teaching position and started job-hunting in Little Rock. Since the attorney general’s salary was just $26,500, it was understood that Hillary would have to take up the slack to pay for their new house in the city’s upscale Hillcrest district. Bill told Dolly Kyle, who had resumed her affair with Clinton shortly after he took office, that there was deliberate “role reversal” in their marriage. “Hillary was not interested in living hand-to-mouth, and she didn’t want to be known only as Bill Clinton’s wife. They each had their assignment, and it was spelled out clearly. He was to be the decorative one in the relationship, and she was to be the breadwinner.”

Vince Foster had been a boyhood friend of Bill’s, and hosted Bill’s first big congressional campaign fund-raiser at the offices of his law firm—Little Rock’s prestigious Rose Law Firm—in 1974. Hillary did not get to know him well until she was running the university’s legal aid clinic. At the time Foster was the head of the bar committee that oversaw legal aid.

When Foster offered her a job at the firm, she took it, starting out as an associate at $25,000 a year. Hillary moved into an office adjacent to Foster’s, and they shared a secretary. Tall, courtly, and handsome, Foster quickly became—with the exception of Bill—her closest male confidant. She also grew close to Webb Hubbell, a quintessential good ol’ boy who, like Bill, could talk for hours about nothing in particular. Hubbell was also an expert on some of the more arcane aspects of Arkansas law, and with ease could rattle off case citations reaching back a century or more.

Hillary did not let her conscience get in the way of defending a
canning company against a man who opened a can of pork and beans to discover a rat’s derriere poking up at him. The sight was so nauseating, said the plaintiff, that he could not, among other things, bring himself to kiss his fiancée. Arguing that the rodent parts had been sterilized in the canning process and “might be considered edible” in certain parts of the world, Hillary somehow managed to convince the jury to award the man only a token amount. Hillary and Bill would often joke about her first legal victory for the Rose Law Firm in what she dubbed “The Rat’s Ass Case.”

Not long after, she took on another case that seemed to contradict much of what she had stood for. In her first criminal case, Hillary defended a three-hundred-pound man charged with assaulting his girlfriend. Prosecutors viewed the case as cut-and-dried—police would testify that the woman had been severely beaten—but were blindsided during the preliminary hearing when Hillary convinced the judge to drop the charges on a technicality.

Both “The Rat’s Ass Case” and Hillary’s successful defense of a man accused of brutally attacking the woman he lived with underscored her willingness to compromise her values—if that’s what it took to be on the fast track to partner. “Money was extremely important” to Hillary, claimed Roy Drew, who later managed a number of the Clintons’ investments. Betsey Wright concurred, citing Hillary’s assigned role as Clinton family breadwinner. “Bill doesn’t care about money,” Wright said. “He would live under a bridge…. He just doesn’t care. But Hillary did.”

It didn’t hurt that Hillary was the wife of a sitting state attorney general. Hillary insisted that “steps have been taken” to ensure that no conflict of interest would take place, but the fact remained that Rose represented the most powerful interests in the region—from real estate and retail to banking and manufacturing. Rose counted legislators, congressmen, state supreme court justices—not to mention a former member of the United States Senate—among
its partners. Yet partner Herb Rule had to concede that, as the influential wife of a future governor and President, Hillary stood out as “a prize catch.”

Hillary, for one, thought the arrangement was just fine. In 1977, President Carter rewarded Hillary for her help in Indiana with an appointment to the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), a federally funded nonprofit organization established by Congress. When she was asked during her Senate confirmation hearings whether the Rose Law Firm would recuse itself from cases involving organizations that received money from the LSC, Hillary waffled. In the end, she would not say yes.

While she continued to rack up hefty fees at her Arkansas law firm, Hillary oversaw an LSC budget that swelled from $90 million to $321 million—money that was used, among other things, to try to defeat California’s tax-cutting Proposition 9, get Medicare to pay for a welfare recipient’s sex-change operation, and support legal efforts in Michigan to give standing to “Black English” (Ebonics) as a separate language. In the final days of the Carter administration, the LSC would frantically dole out $260 million in taxpayer funds to various liberal causes in an effort to keep the money out of the hands of incoming Reagan appointees. The General Accounting Office would issue a report on the LSC under Hillary Rodham and conclude that “many of the people associated with it are uniquely reprehensible.”

As she worked her way toward partner at the Rose Law Firm, Hillary was well aware that the new attorney general was being spotted with attractive women all around Little Rock. There was Susan McDougal, the feisty young wife of his old friend James McDougal, and statuesque television-reporter-turned-nightclub-singer Gennifer Flowers. Bill’s torrid affair with Flowers—she called him “baby,” he called her “Pookie”—would last a dozen years, and come very close to bringing an abrupt end to his presidential
aspirations. Flowers laughed when Bill snickered about fooling “Hilla the Hun,” and he complained bitterly to Dolly Kyle about being repeatedly nagged by “The Warden.”

Both Kyle and Flowers marveled at how Bill, now one of Arkansas’s best-known politicians, was willing to tempt fate. He made love to Dolly in a Cadillac El Dorado convertible parked on a public street, with the top down and in broad daylight. Twice. His chauffeur-driven limousine parked directly in front of Flowers’s apartment complex on dozens of occasions, according to the building manager. And when Bill and Gennifer had sex on her sofa, Clinton refused to let her draw the shades.

There were other risks Bill was willing to take. According to several of the women involved with him, Clinton flatly refused to wear a condom. Flowers was also apparently somewhat cavalier about contraception, with the predictable result: in December of 1977 she discovered that she was pregnant. A few days later, she informed the baby’s father—Bill Clinton—that she intended to terminate the pregnancy. He did not object, and the abortion was performed in late January of 1978. Two months later, with Hillary standing at his side, Bill held a press conference to announce that he was running for governor.

According to two longtime Arkansas friends, Hillary knew about Flowers’s pregnancy—and was “devastated” by it. Indeed, they believe it is one of the reasons she seldom speaks of the pivotal 1978 governor’s race—one of the Clintons’ notable early triumphs—and went so far as to actually omit it from her memoirs. Yet there was another, even more compelling reason for Hillary to erase that period from her mind. Her name was Juanita Hickey Broaddrick.

A registered nurse who ran her own nursing care facility in the town of Van Buren, Juanita Hickey was one of the small army of Arkansas women who in 1978 volunteered to stuff envelopes and go door-to-door to help get Bill Clinton elected governor. Not surprisingly, the leggy blond Juanita caught the candidate’s eye, and
he invited her to drop into his campaign headquarters the next time she was in Little Rock. Juanita told Clinton she planned to be in Little Rock for a meeting of the American College of Nursing Home Administrators and would love to swing by.

Juanita checked into Little Rock’s Camelot Hotel on April 25, 1978, with her friend Norma Kelsey. But when she called Clinton, he asked if they could meet at the hotel coffee shop instead. Then he called back and asked if they could meet in her room—the coffee shop, he explained, was crawling with reporters.

Reluctantly, Juanita agreed. No sooner did he step into the room than he grabbed Juanita around the waist, spun her around, and started kissing her. She pulled away. “No!” she stated firmly. “Please don’t do that!”

Disregarding Juanita’s objections, Bill kissed her again. This time, he bit down hard on her top lip. She tried to pull away, but he applied even more pressure with his teeth, drawing blood. Then he pushed her down on the bed. Still biting down on her lip, Bill, according to Juanita, raped her. Violently.

Once it was over, Bill stood up, put on his jacket, and politely said good-bye. “I will never, ever forget that moment as long as I live,” Broaddrick said. “He was just so casual about the whole thing, as if, you know, this was business as usual for him.”

Norma Kelsey would later confirm that she returned to the room only minutes after the attack to find her friend injured and in a state of shock. It would be two days before Juanita told her future husband, David Broaddrick, what had happened. She also described details of the assault to three friends, who along with Norma Kelsey would confirm that Juanita told them she had been raped by Bill Clinton within forty-eight hours of the event.

Fearing more than public ridicule—Juanita also worried that, as attorney general, Clinton had the power to silence her permanently—she did not report the incident to the authorities. “He clearly felt that he was above the law,” she said, “and I knew
from experience that he was capable of violence. I was angry, but I was also ashamed and very afraid. I didn’t want to do anything to provoke him. I just wanted to get on with my life.”

What Juanita did not know was that Bill returned home in a panic. Worried that his victim might go public and derail his campaign, he decided to confide—to an extent—in the one person whose opinion he most valued. According to Bill’s version of events, Juanita was a Clinton groupie who had lured him up to her room under false pretenses and seduced him. He was ashamed and sorry, and begged Hillary to forgive him.

Hillary let fly with the customary expletives, though she was clearly more concerned with the potential political fallout than with the mere fact that Bill had once again cheated on her. Just as it was becoming apparent that Hillary did not view this problem as insurmountable, Bill confessed there was more…

Hillary was ashen once she was confronted with the whole story—or at least Bill’s carefully parsed version of events. But, as the woman who had set up Arkansas’s first rape crisis hotline and had championed laws protecting victims, she almost certainly recognized the confession of a rapist when she heard it.

No one else on the campaign was consulted about this new and potentially explosive problem. But campaign workers did notice a change in Hillary’s demeanor around this time. She was quieter than usual—campaign workers had grown accustomed to her issuing commands in a nasal Midwestern car-alarm twang—and clearly distracted.