Unlikeable (5 page)

Hillary admitted to one of her best friends that she often got “dizzy” and “woozy.”

“But she told me that there was no need for a full-time doctor to travel with her on the campaign trail,” this friend said in an interview. “Bill insisted any way, and he approached Dean Ornish [the founder of the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California] to help find a suitable doctor. Ornish has been close to the Clintons for twenty years. It was he who put Bill on a plant-based vegan diet. And he might become surgeon general if Hillary gets into the White House.”

Bill's worst fear was that Hillary would stumble physically or fall at a critical moment in the campaign and reveal that she wasn't up to handling the job of commander in chief. One night in their bedroom at Chappaqua, he gently approached the question of how the presidential campaign was affecting her health.

“Bill told me that he tiptoed into the dangerous territory of suggesting that maybe Hillary should rethink whether she had the physical stamina to take on the tortures of a presidential campaign,” said one of Bill's closest friends. “Hillary blew up and said, ‘You're acting like a fucking quitter and a loser. You're projecting your own health problems onto me. I'm not dying.'

“Bill raised both hands in surrender and said, ‘Don't shoot,'” the friend continued. “Hillary had a hairbrush in her hand, and Bill was afraid she was going to throw it at him. But she restrained herself with great effort.

“He wants her to be president, but he doesn't want her to kill herself doing it. He told me he has tried to bring up the subject with Chelsea, thinking that she would share his concern about her mother's health. But Chelsea has her mother's determination and passion to go on no matter what the cost. There is no way that Bill is going to get any help from her.”

It was a short distance from the Chappaqua house to Bill's home office, which was located in a converted red barn. However, after the crisis meeting with Podesta, Carville, and Begala, Bill didn't feel well enough to make it to the barn on his own. He climbed into a golf cart and, with Hillary and her friends keeping pace beside him, scootered over to the barn. It was full of his favorite books and souvenirs from his travels, including an incongruous cigar-store Indian.

After a while, another old Clinton hand, Donna Shalala, made an appearance. A tiny, energetic woman with close-cropped hair, Shalala had served as the secretary of health and human services under President Clinton, and then transitioned into a career as president of the University of Miami. She was known as a tough, no-nonsense manager, and Hillary had asked her to take over as the Clinton Foundation's new president and chief executive. The previous president of the foundation had quit in disgust over its dubious practices.

“Donna was one of Hillary's closest friends and most trusted operators,” said a source with knowledge of Shalala's appointment
as head of the foundation. “They had served together on the board of the Children's Defense Fund. Hillary was sorry that Donna had stayed as long as she had at the University of Miami, because Hillary was convinced that the chaos at the foundation wouldn't have happened if Donna had been in charge.

“Hillary hoped that Donna would crack the whip and set things right again,” the source continued. “She was convinced that the Obamas would like nothing better than to see the foundation go down in flames—and her reputation with it. Privately, among a few very close friends, Hillary admitted that things were even worse at the foundation than had been reported in the
Times
and elsewhere. It was a hell of a mess.”

Bill was extremely fond of Donna, too, but he had opposed her appointment. He saw it as an unwanted intrusion into the affairs of his personal enterprise. He didn't make a distinction between himself and the foundation; they were one and the same to him. But Hillary had convinced him that the foundation had to be given a top-to-bottom scouring and that Donna would apply a stiff brush.

Bill didn't hold it against Donna that she had accepted the job. In fact, he couldn't hide his pleasure at seeing her, and he greeted her with a hug and kisses.

Donna was all business. She didn't waste time telling Bill and Hillary exactly what she intended to do as the new CEO of the foundation.

“I'm going to run the place as a
normal
foundation in terms of fund-raising and spending,” she said.

Hillary nodded her head.

Bill snorted when Donna used the word “normal.”

“His attention seemed to wander,” one of the Clintons' friends recalled in an interview, “and in the middle of the discussion, he got up from his chair, walked across the room with his back to Donna, and patted his wooden cigar-store Indian on the head, as though it was a talisman. I got the distinct impression that, no matter what Donna said or did, Bill was going to do it his way.”

PART II
PART II

THE GREAT PRETENDER
THE GREAT PRETENDER

Oh yes, I'm the great pretender

Pretending that I'm doing well

My need is such, I pretend too much

I'm lonely, but no one can tell

—Buck Ram, “The Great Pretender”

CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 5

THE MISANTHROPE
THE MISANTHROPE

Betrayed and wronged in everything,

I'll flee this bitter world where vice is king. . . .

—Moliere,
The Misanthrope

B
ill Clinton's ambivalence about Hillary's political future must have sent chills down her spine, for as the feminist author Camille Paglia pointed out, Hillary had never found a way to succeed
“without her husband's connections, advice, and intervention.”

In fact, it was debatable whether anyone would have heard of Hillary Rodham if it hadn't been for William Jefferson Clinton.

Throughout her marriage, Bill had always been the leader, the brilliant and successful politician, and she had always been the follower and beneficiary of his power and influence:

         
•
    
Hillary was asked to join Little Rock's prestigious Rose Law Firm in the 1970s
only after
Bill ascended to the post of Arkansas attorney general, the chief legal officer who dealt on a daily basis with the state's law firms.

         
•
    
She was made a partner in the Rose Law Firm
only after
Bill was elected governor of the state, with all the patronage and influence that that office possessed.

         
•
    
She was elected a U.S. senator thanks to the wave of sympathy
created by
Bill's dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, which lent Hillary a much-needed aura of vulnerability as the wronged woman.
She also profited from the
votes Bill bought for her
by granting pardons to crooked New York Hassidim and violent Puerto Rican nationalists.

         
•
    
She was appointed secretary of state
in large part because
Barack Obama desperately wanted to sideline Bill Clinton and thwart his plots and intrigues.

         
•
    
Even now, her chief political asset was not herself; it was Bill. No one ever had to give Bill Clinton lessons in likeability.

If Hillary's career was defined by her connection to Bill Clinton, her character was shaped by her parents.

Her father, Hugh Rodham Sr., a former naval drill instructor, was abusive. As I wrote in
The Truth about Hillary
:

Some visitors to the Rodham home recalled Hugh Sr. as a scary figure—a barrel-chested man with a booming voice, who was always criticizing Hillary's posture and telling her: “Head up, chin in, chest out, stomach in!” An acquaintance once described him as “tougher than a corn cob, as gruff as could be.”

“Among both relatives and friends,” wrote Roger Morris in
Partners in Power
, “many thought Hugh Rodham's treatment of his daughter and sons amounted to the kind of psychological abuse that might have crushed some children.”

In her memoir
Living History
,
Hillary strongly suggested that her father was a sadist who humiliated her mother and beat her brothers.

The presence of a warm, loving mother might have assuaged the pain inflicted on Hillary by her father. But Hillary's mom, Dorothy Howell Rodham, was of little help in that regard.

Dorothy had been abandoned at the age of eight by her own mother and sent on a cross-country train ride with her three-year-old sister to Alhambra, California, where her grandparents lived. There, Dorothy was so cruelly abused by her grandparents that she ran away from home.

Scrappy and competitive, Dorothy believed that the world was a dog-eat-dog place. She taught Hillary that she had to
act
as though she were brave even when she
felt
sad or fearful.

“If Suzy hits you,” Dorothy told four-year-old Hillary about a neighborhood bully, “you have my permission to hit her back.
You have to stand up for yourself. There's no room in this house for cowards.”

The need to project an image of power at the expense of one's true feelings is characteristic of narcissistic personalities. And the home of Hugh and Dorothy Rodham was the perfect breeding ground for a narcissist like Hillary, who grew up feeling entitled to get away with things that others could not.

In all cases of narcissism, noted Doctor Otto F. Kernberg, a leading expert on the subject of borderline personality organization and narcissistic pathology, there is “a parental figure, usually the mother or mother surrogate, who functions well on the surface in a superficially well-organized home, but with a degree of callousness, indifference, and nonverbalized spiteful aggression. . . . Sometimes it was . . . the cold hostile mother's narcissistic use of the child which made [her] ‘special,' set [her] off on the road in search of compensatory admiration and greatness.”

Hillary had been traveling that road all her life. She chose a career in politics, despite the fact that in most essential respects she was unsuited for the life of a politician.

When she was nineteen years old and a student at Wellesley College, she wrote a friend and confessed that she was a misanthrope who disliked people and avoided their company.

“Can you be a misanthrope and still love some individuals?” she asked in her letter. “How about a compassionate misanthrope?”

“When the stress of college life became too much, she would fantasize about living a life of ‘withdrawn simplicity,' preferably in some quiet place where she could devote herself to helping others and reading books,” Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta wrote in
Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton
. “But Hillary knew such work required a love of being with people and profound patience, and she was not a natural at either.”

Hillary never cured herself of her misanthropy. In that regard, she resembled other famous liberal misanthropes, such as her heroine Eleanor Roosevelt and the Indian independence leader Mohandas Gandhi.

The British historian Andrew Roberts once described the Mahatma as
“the archetypal . . . progressive intellectual, professing his love for mankind as a concept while actually despising people as individuals.”

That was as good a description of Hillary as anyone had come up with yet.

There was no need to feel sorry for Hillary; many people suffered far worse childhoods than hers. But Hillary's upbringing did provide a clue to why she turned out to be so unlikeable.

“You can argue that there is a repetition compulsion in Hillary's relationship with her husband,” Doctor Robert Cancro, the former chairman of the Psychiatry Department of New York University Langone Medical Center, told the author of this book. “Her marriage to Bill Clinton is a kind of microcosm of her
relationship with her father, who was also a domineering, narcissistic kind of guy.”

“In her personal life, she's always seemed like she had something to hide,” Bill Clinton's former press secretary, Dee Dee Myers, said. “She had a difficult father, and she spent a lot of time trying to create an image of a functional family when she could have just said, ‘It's my family.' The burden of perfection was upon her, and she carried it into her marriage. There's always this fear of letting people see what they already know.”

It was this fear of exposure and humiliation that led one of Hillary's biographers, Carl Bernstein, to note that she indulged in
“subterfuge and eliding.”

Put simply, it helped explain why she lied and always tried to cover up her lies.

And it also explained why all the likeability lessons in the world weren't going to change her and put a stop to those lies.

“When she's alone with a small group of friends she trusts, Hillary can be warm and pleasant,” one of her acquaintances told the author. “But when she has to stand up in front of an audience of strangers, her suspicion and mistrust of people kicks in and her facial expressions and her body language reflect a deep psychological turbulence.”

“She freely admits she's always had anger issues,” another acquaintance said. “When she's annoyed by people, which is often, it shows. She's never suffered fools gladly. As far as she's concerned, politics is all about sucking up to people she considers beneath her and unworthy of sharing her space.

“She looks at her critics as a handful of nuts,” this person continued. “Her outburst during the Senate committee hearing on Benghazi—‘What difference does it make?'—was in total keeping with her pattern of behavior. Something snaps when she's under pressure and emotional stress. As much as anything else, Bill pushed the Spielberg likeability lessons on Hillary in order to avoid another meltdown like Benghazi when she hit the campaign trail.”