Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas (33 page)
Read Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas Online
Authors: Edward Klein
B
lood Feud
is a sequel to two of my previously published books:
The Truth about Hillary
(2005) and
The Amateur
(2012). During the course of this time, I have interviewed several hundred people about the Clintons and the Obamas. Some of these people were acquainted with the Clintons and Obamas in the formative years of their lives and were willing to speak on the record about events that were well in the past. Thus, I was able to quote Hillary’s Park Ridge, Illinois, elementary school classmates by name, and to publish an on-the-record interview with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s controversial minister.
Not surprisingly, however, when it came to reporting on current political events—and especially the rivalry and hostility that characterize the relationship between the Clintons and the
Obamas—most people were unwilling to be quoted by name, either because they were not authorized to speak on the record or because they feared losing access to their powerful friends.
As a result, in order to get a candid and accurate picture of the Clinton-Obama feud, the bulk of the interviews in this book, as in many contemporary political books, had to be conducted on what journalists call “deep background.” In practice, this means that I was able to use the information they provided but could not identify them as a source.
Journalists do not like to use anonymous sources unless we have to. As Mark Halperin and John Heilemann wrote in
Double Down
: “In an ideal world, granting such anonymity would be unnecessary; in the world we actually inhabit, we believe it is essential to elicit the level of candor on which a book of this sort depends.” Or as the
NPR Ethics Handbook
puts it: “We use information from anonymous sources to tell important stories that otherwise would go unreported.”
Journalists most commonly use anonymous sources when we report on clashing personalities and ideas. Thus, in a January 16, 2014, front-page story in the
New York Times
about the rivalry between New York governor Andrew Cuomo and New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman, correspondent Susanne Craig alerted her readers: “Numerous people in the two camps were interviewed for this article. None would allow their names to be used when describing the content of such private and sensitive conversations.”
The use of such anonymous sources places an extra burden on an author. Wherever possible, then, I tried to use more than
one source to reconstruct a scene and to double-source dialogue in quotation marks. When that was not possible, I relied on a person who participated in an event or on friends and confidants to whom they spoke contemporaneously while memories were still fresh. Certain people who are close to the Clintons and Obamas were interviewed more than a dozen times to check for accuracy and consistency.
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ABC,
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Academy Awards, the,
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Acheson, Dean,
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Affordable Care Act, the,
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Afghanistan War,
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African Americans,
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Air Force One,
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Alinsky, Saul,
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Allen, Mike,
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Aloha State, the,
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al-Qaeda,
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Amateur
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American Enterprise Institute,
136–37
Americans for Tax Reform,
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Andrews Air Force base,
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Ansar al-Sharia,
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Arlington National Cemetery,
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Assad, Bashar al-,
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Associated Press (AP),
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Atlantic Wire, the,
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Audacity of Hope
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Avenue of the Americas,
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Axelrod, David,
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Axelrod, Susan,
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Bain Capital,
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Baker, Howard,
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Baker, Jim,
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Balz, Dan,
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Band, Douglas (“Doug”),
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Bayou Trilogy
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Because He Could
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Begala, Paul,
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Benenson, Joel,
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Benghazi attack (2011),
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Barack Obama and,
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Hillary Clinton and,
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Benghazi Deception, the,
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Benghazi, Libya,
138–42
Bennett, Dashiell,
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Bhutto, Benazir,
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Biden, Jill,
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2012 presidential election and,
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2016 presidential election and,
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Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation,
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Clinton Foundation
Bill and Hillary Clinton Airport,
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bin Laden, Osama,
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Bird, Jeremy,
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Blair, Tony,
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Bloomberg, Michael,
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Boehner, John,
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Booker, Cory,
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Bosnia,
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Boulton, Nate,
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Brazil,
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Brennan, John,
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Brooke, Edward (“Ed”),
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Bureau of Intelligence and Research (State Department),
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Burkle, Ron,
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Bush, George W.,
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Business Roundtable,
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California State Assembly,
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Cameron, David,
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“Candidate Obama,”
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