Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas (24 page)

“A simple phone call could have ascertained immediately [the cause of the attack],” said Johnson.

Hillary replied that she hadn’t wanted to interfere with the investigation.

Then the following heated exchange occurred:

          
J
OHNSON
(
sarcastic
): I realize that’s a good excuse.

          
H
ILLARY
(
defiant
): No, it’s a fact.

          
J
OHNSON
(
badgering
): We were misled that there were protests and that something sprang out of that. And the American people were misled.

          
H
ILLARY
(
arms flailing, voice raised
): With all due respect, we have four dead Americans. Was it terrorists, or was it because of a guy out for a walk one night? What difference at this point does it make?

The spectacle of Hillary losing her cool shocked many people. After all, Hillary had positioned herself as the levelheaded professional who had the national security chops to keep America safe in a dangerous world. It was an image she had worked long and hard to create in the minds of voters. In the 2008 primary, Hillary ran a TV ad that depicted her as far more dependable under pressure than her opponent, Barack Obama. “It’s 3:00 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep,” a deep-voiced narrator intoned. “But there’s a phone in the White House, and it’s ringing. . . . Who do you want answering the phone?” Cut to a clip of a confident Hillary answering a telephone in a darkened room.

Now, in a frenzied display of anger, Hillary had shattered her carefully constructed image as a steady, self-composed steward of America’s fate. And her behavior resurrected memories of her old reputation as a domineering and bad-tempered woman. It left everyone stunned. Everyone, that is, but Hillary’s oldest friends—those who grew up with her in Park Ridge, Illinois. They, too, were dismayed, but not at all surprised by her outburst at the Senate hearing.

They recalled that Hillary, the daughter of two perfectionist parents, often came unglued whenever anyone dared to criticize or cross her. Hillary’s reputation as one of the toughest kids in Park Ridge went back to the time when she was four years old and came home in tears complaining to her mother that she had been bullied by a girl named Suzy O’Callaghan. “If Suzy hits you,” her mother told Hillary, “you have my permission to hit her back.”

This story, which was legendary among the children of Park Ridge, ended with Hillary bloodying Suzy’s nose. But it was just the beginning of Hillary’s career as a pugnacious child. When her first steady boyfriend, Jim Yrigoyen, gave away one of Hillary’s rabbits to a neighborhood boy, Hillary went bananas. “She hauled off and punched me in the nose,” Yrigoyen recalled years later. “I was stunned. I reached up and found my nose was bleeding. She had really hurt me.” And when Rick Ricketts, one of Hillary’s closest friends, carelessly bumped his bike into hers, she hauled off and gave him a solid punch in the face.

Such incidents might be dismissed as the behavior of an immature child, but as she grew older Hillary continued to have trouble managing her anger. When Bill and Hillary were in the White House, there were endless stories about their arguments turning physical. On February 19, 1993, the
Chicago Sun-Times
reported:

          
Seems first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton has a temper to match her hubby’s. Wicked Washington whispers claim Hillary broke a lamp during a heated late night argument with the president. Not to worry: The lamp in the family quarters belonged to the Clintons and “wasn’t a priceless antique or anything like that,” says a White House source.

And then there was Hillary’s famous eruption during the 2008 primary campaign when, according to CNN, she “jabbed the air with her hands” as she told a crowd in Cincinnati, Ohio, that two Obama mailings “spread lies” about her positions on universal healthcare and the North American Free Trade Agreement.

“Shame on you, Barack Obama,” Hillary barked. “Enough with the speeches and big rallies and then using tactics right out of Karl Rove’s playbook.”

Hillary’s outburst at the Senate hearing went viral on You-Tube, and the editors of the
New York Post
, which is owned by the conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch, indulged in some tabloid fun at her expense. The day after the Senate hearing, the
Post
’s front page featured a photo of Hillary pounding on the Senate hearing table with her clenched fists under the headline: “No Wonder Bill’s Afraid.” In the lower left-hand corner was an insert photo of Bill Clinton, appearing to look up at Hillary in fearful stupefaction.

“I was with Bill in his office in Chappaqua when we watched Hillary on C-SPAN blowing her stack before the Senate committee,” said a member of Bill Clinton’s brain trust. “When Hillary started flailing her arms and said, ‘What difference does it make?’ Bill fell back in his chair and looked like a broken man. His face sunk. He’s never speechless. But that was as close as I’d ever seen him get.

“He told me, ‘The Republicans are going to use that clip of her saying, “What difference does it make?” while rolling footage of the attack on the consulate. Millions of dollars worth of ads. I’d do it if I were them. Hillary’s behavior could cost us the White House. The Republicans will study her reaction and try to badger her during the 2016 election and get her goat.’

“Then Bill clicked off the TV set with a look of disgust,” this person continued. “He couldn’t watch it anymore. He blamed Barack Obama for mishandling the situation in Benghazi. Not paying attention to the job of being president. He thinks most voters would’ve forgotten the incident in Benghazi by election day 2016, but now the Republicans can run the clip of Hillary saying that it doesn’t matter with headlines of four Americans murdered. It will be dirty pool, but that’s what attack ads are about these days, and they are effective.

“I don’t think there is an explicit deal on the table anymore with the White House in exchange for Bill getting Obama elected. But Bill is going to demand that it be put back on the table. I would say that if Obama refuses to go along with Bill’s plans for Hillary, there will be blood in the water.”

Friends of Bill who acted as behind-the-scenes intermediaries between the Clintons and the White House—Doug Band and Terry McAuliffe, among others—wasted no time in conveying the former president’s deep displeasure. Their message, which they communicated in diplomatese so that it wouldn’t appear disrespectful to the newly inaugurated president, was nonetheless clear: Bill Clinton had both the will and the ability to do real harm to Barack Obama’s ambitious second-term agenda, and unless something was done to assuage his anger and give Hillary cover on Benghazi, Bill was prepared to discard all pretense that the Clintons and Obamas were on friendly terms.

This was the kind of raw threat against the president of the United States that no other politician would try to get away with. And the White House was aware that Bill Clinton could make good on such a threat because he and Hillary stood as the most powerful countervailing force to Barack Obama in American politics.

“The implied consequences were several,” remarked a Clinton supporter. “That Bill would continue contradicting the Obama policies whenever he saw fit, and that the White House would face Clintonian headwinds trying to implement policies great and small.

“Bill has always been a practitioner of hardball politics at all levels,” this person continued. “When he’s traveling from state to state and meeting with local leaders, Democratic donors, committee chairmen, and governors, he has a way of influencing these people with a few words, even a gesture. The White House had become aware that Bill was already causing them problems with his political craftiness.”

Faced with the prospect of an all-out war between the Clintons and the Obamas, the president blinked. He called his favorite journalist, Steve Kroft of
60 Minutes
, and offered an unprecedented joint interview with departing secretary of state Hillary Clinton. The result was a slobbering lovefest and an embarrassment to all concerned—not least to the producers of
60 Minutes
, who allowed themselves to be used by the White House.

Seated side by side, only inches apart and in identical chairs, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were presented to the television audience as equals, which had the effect of elevating Hillary’s stature and diminishing Obama’s. He tried to compensate for
this awkward physical proximity by adopting a tone of noblesse oblige. He praised Hillary as “one of the finest secretaries of state we’ve had,” thereby rejecting the Republican narrative that she wasn’t worthy of her office. And he referred to Hillary as a “strong friend.” All that was missing was his presentation of a gold watch to a loyal but superannuated employee.

Hillary was less effusive. She defined her relationship with Obama as “very warm” and “close”—intentionally leaving out the word “friend.” And she underscored their equality by saying, “A few years ago, [our doing this TV show together] would’ve been seen as improbable, because we had that very long, hard primary campaign. But had the roles been reversed,
I
would have desperately wanted him to be in
my
cabinet.”

In the end, however, Obama was prepared to go just so far and no further. When Steve Kroft asked him whether his appearance with Hillary was a sign that he intended to endorse her for president in 2016, Obama pulled back.

“You guys in the press are incorrigible,” he said. “I was literally inaugurated four days ago, and you’re talking about elections four years from now.”

That was exactly what the press
was
talking about, and whether he liked it or not, Obama had encouraged such speculation by doing a television twofer with Hillary. Though most members of the political class judged the
60 Minutes
show to be a shameless wet kiss, it made Hillary look more presidential than ever. As far as she and her image makers were concerned, the optics had all been in her favor.

Bill Clinton was another matter. As he saw it, Obama was still reneging on his promise that he would back Hillary in 2016.
Clinton thought they had a deal, and Obama’s refusal to say anything about Hillary’s qualifications for the presidency was inexcusable. Even if Obama didn’t come right out and endorse her, he could at least have said something positive about her prospects in 2016.

“That [
60 Minutes
] show was an attempt to defang me,” Bill told a friend. “But that shit doesn’t work on me. I do what I think is the right thing, I say what I think is right, and nobody stops me.”

Thus, the TV show, which the White House had intended as a sop to the Clintons, only heightened Bill Clinton’s negative feelings about Obama. As far as Bill was concerned, he and Obama might be stuck with each other as the preeminent leaders of their political party, and they might be forced by circumstances to make common cause, but their relationship was colored by a deep well of mistrust, bad chemistry, and painful memories. Now an additional element had been added to the toxic mix: Bill Clinton’s burning desire to make Barack Obama pay for his deception regarding an endorsement of Hillary. The Clintons and Obamas were engaged in a blood feud.