Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (69 page)

Like her husband, she felt such confidence in her own probity that she was unable to imagine how others might view her acceptance of enormous sums of money from special interests. She also seemed unable to comprehend how adversaries on the left and right would use her sudden wealth to alienate her from working families still suffering the financial effects of the recession. Her failure to anticipate the appearance of excessive “buck-raking,” especially from her widely despised friends on Wall Street, relentlessly dragged down the public approval ratings that had once soared.

Yet despite Sanders’s spirited challenge, Hillary persevered through the primaries, defeating him in the biggest states and racking up large majorities in the popular vote and delegate count. Within the Democratic Party, which the Vermont independent only joined to run for president, she remained highly popular.

So did her husband—but in organizing the 2016 campaign, her managers were careful to use Clinton sparingly, avoiding any repetition of the 2008 South Carolina fiasco. The question was how to deploy him to the campaign’s best advantage, without allowing him to become a distraction.

Looking toward his seventieth birthday in August, a few weeks after the Democratic convention, Clinton had better and worse days. Reporters covering his campaign appearances would sometimes notice his hands quivering, or describe him as looking frail and elderly; at other times, he seemed as robust and forceful as ever.

Even more than in 2008, his presidential legacy was a double-edged sword. To many voters, he was still the symbol of prosperity and peace. Yet what had once been deemed important legislative achievements,
such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the 1994 omnibus crime bill, had become political liabilities in a new era.

Those laws were routinely denounced not only by Sanders, who excoriated NAFTA in every speech (and tried to ignore his own vote for the crime bill as a House member), but by new movements like Black Lives Matter, whose rhetoric blamed Clinton for the excessive incarceration of young black men. He had to listen—and agree, in part—as his wife carefully distanced herself from aspects of his administration.

On a campaign trip to Philadelphia in early April, Clinton was forced to cope with the new political environment. At a community center on the city’s outskirts, in a largely African American neighborhood, he headlined a rally for Hillary that included local officials, the city’s former mayor, and former governor Ed Rendell, a longtime friend and ally. More than six hundred excited residents had crowded into the center’s gymnasium to hear him, waving Hillary signs and chanting her name as he took the podium.

“Before I came in here,” he said, after the other officials had spoken, “all the kids came out from school and started waving at me, which put me in a good mood—and reminded me that elections are about the future!” He launched into an energetic defense of Hillary as “the most qualified candidate, with the best ideas” for creating jobs, reducing the cost of higher education, and removing the barriers that kept so many Americans from realizing their potential. She had been endorsed by most labor unions, the Congressional Black Caucus, Planned Parenthood, and the American Nurses Association not because she or they were “establishment,” but because she would “show up for work” as president, to “stand and deliver.”

He knew that Americans had been suffering, despite the progress won by President Obama, and he warned against an embittered vote. “Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart,” he said, quoting Yeats, then paused. “Don’t let it make a stone of the head.”

As Clinton continued to argue for his wife, a murmur arose from the center of the crowd and then grew louder. “Hillary is a murderer!” screamed a middle-aged woman in dreadlocks, as she and her male companion began to wave homemade signs marked with that strange slogan. “Hillary is a murderer!” Then she yelled, “Hillary called black
youth super-predators,” a reference to a 1996 speech in which she had used that phrase to describe the most violent young criminals—a statement for which she had apologized.

When others in the crowd tried to calm the woman, she refused to stop screaming until she briefly ran out of breath, shouting over Clinton. But even as he grew frustrated and his face reddened, he told security not to remove her.

“I love protesters,” he said. “I like protesters, but the ones that won’t let you answer are afraid of the truth. That’s a simple rule.” Responding to criticism of the crime bill, he continued, “I talked to a lot of African American groups. They thought black lives mattered; they said take this bill because our kids are being shot in the street by gangs. We had 13-year-old kids planning their own funerals.” He wagged a finger at the woman and her companion, who continued to wave his “Hillary Is A Murderer” sign.

“I don’t know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack, and sent them out in the streets to murder other African American children. Maybe you thought they were good citizens—she didn’t.”

After the rally ended, Clinton thought he had handled the situation well. “I get that kind of thing every week now,” he said. But while those situations rarely drew much coverage, the Philadelphia confrontation became a national story, sparking outrage in the Black Lives Matter movement (although the woman who confronted Clinton was not affiliated with any group). The next day, Clinton said he regretted the confrontation.

Whatever the fleeting cost of that incident, Clinton had quietly performed yeoman service to his wife’s campaign earlier the same day. At Philadelphia’s Convention Center, he had enjoyed an effusive welcome by the nation’s African Methodist Episcopal bishops, who were celebrating their church’s bicentennial in its birthplace. These black religious leaders, mostly but not all men, included some of Clinton’s oldest friends from Arkansas and elsewhere. They threw their arms around him, whispered in his ear, laughed uproariously with him. He had been invited to make the case for Hillary, which he proceeded to do with gusto as he took the auditorium stage.

Recalling her undercover investigation of segregated academies in
Alabama as a young law student, her years at the Children’s Defense Fund with Marian Wright Edelman, and her work to pass the Children’s Health Insurance Program as first lady, he invoked Scripture. “I will show you my faith by my works,” he said. “It’s about making change.”

He spoke about Hillary’s plans and proposals as always, but that didn’t seem altogether necessary. He had showed respect, he had laid on hands, and—quoting a familiar trope from Isaiah 6:8—he had concluded with a peroration: “Whom shall I send? She has said, send me.”

They would send her, and indeed already had sent her millions of votes from their church pews—a substantial part of the massive minority support that had won her the Democratic nomination and promised to win her the presidency. And they had done so, in no small part, out of enduring love for her husband.

In late June, Bill Clinton made the kind of mistake that a former law professor—not to mention a former president—ought to have avoided instinctively. While his plane was parked on the tarmac at Phoenix International Airport, Clinton had learned that Attorney General Loretta Lynch and her husband were in a government plane parked nearby. Merely by walking over to her aircraft, uninvited, to engage Lynch and her husband in social chatter about their grandchildren and other anodyne topics, he had set off an explosion of indignant questions about the integrity of the Justice Department’s email investigation. Republicans darkly warned that this innocent encounter proved that the case against Hillary, which they had predicted for months would result in her indictment, had been fixed at the highest levels.

Lynch apologized publicly and promised to follow whatever recommendation might come from the FBI and prosecutors handling the case. Eight days later, on July 5, FBI director James Comey announced that despite Hillary’s “extremely careless” treatment of highly sensitive information, his agents had found no basis to indict her—after an extensive probe that had concluded on July 2 with a three-and-a-half hour “voluntary” interview of Hillary herself.

Long before Comey’s decision, however, hostile media coverage had focused once more on her husband. Donald Trump, who had clinched the Republican nomination in an extraordinary campaign littered with
offensive, racist, and xenophobic language, again directed his fire not only at “Crooked Hillary,” but at Clinton, the erstwhile friend he attacked in nearly every speech.

This had been Trump’s plan from the beginning. Lurking in his political circle for over a decade was Roger J. Stone, the former Nixon aide and consultant who unabashedly reveled in his notoriety as a perpetrator of dirty tricks and unhinged rhetoric. The conspiracy-minded Stone had spent months locating women whose stories of sexual encounters with Clinton—including Juanita Broaddrick, who had accused him of assaulting her in 1998—and Trump himself had used the word “rape” to defame him at least once.

Among Stone’s contributions was the reintroduction of Kathleen Willey, a Virginia woman who had once worked at the White House and, in 1998, accused Clinton of accosting and forcefully kissing her there. The independent counsel had immunized her as a witness in the Lewinsky case, then immunized her again when FBI investigators found that she had lied to them. Over the years since then, Willey had lodged various improbable accusations against the Clintons and their associates, including a plot to murder her cat.

On a right-wing talk radio show, Stone said he had established a GoFundMe account for contributions to help pay off Willey’s mortgage, “so she can hit the road and start speaking out on Hillary.” He said that Trump himself had donated to help Willey, an assertion denied by Trump and later withdrawn by Stone.

Trump’s plotting with Stone and his ugly descriptions of the Clintons belied his copiously documented, sometimes obsequious efforts to befriend them—with donations to the foundation and to Hillary’s campaigns, with free membership at his golf courses for Bill, and with the praise he had lavished on both of them in previous interviews. He and Clinton had played in foursomes together occasionally at Trump National, his club in northern Westchester, where—until 2016—signed photographs of the former president adorned the clubhouse walls.

But that was then—and now Trump and both Clintons armored themselves for what promised to be the most viciously personal presidential contest of modern times.

The direction and tenor of 2016 campaign coverage began to shift in the weeks after Trump and Hillary clinched the respective nominations of their parties. In the mainstream media, editors and producers appeared to realize how shallow and pointless much of the previous year’s coverage of Trump had been, allowing a demagogic and perhaps very dangerous candidate to win the support of a Republican electorate that knew very little about the seamier aspects of his career.

Major news outlets began to investigate Trump in earnest, applying some of the same scrutiny to his dubious associations, business practices, philanthropic donations, and character that had been focused on Hillary for years. Some of the country’s best investigative journalists—including several who had looked very hard at the Clintons—probed his company’s connections with organized crime figures, his misogynist attitude toward women, his multiple bankruptcies, and his thin record of charitable giving for someone who claimed to be one of the richest men in America. The results were not pleasing to the developer turned TV personality, as he repeatedly maligned reporters and outlets that displeased him—and even banned
Washington Post
reporters from his campaign events.

Having long complained about Hillary’s overreaction to negative coverage, many journalists gained a fresh perspective on her vexed relationship with the press. She had never taunted or banished reporters covering her campaigns.

The shift in media focus toward the vulnerabilities of the presumptive Republican nominee in early May hardly exempted Bill Clinton or the Clinton Foundation from hostile coverage, especially not in conservative and right-wing outlets. On May 12, the
Wall Street Journal
published a story headlined “Clinton Charity Aided Clinton Friends,” which explored the names and relationships behind a $2 million CGI commitment that had been made more than five years earlier.

The parties involved were Kim Samuel, a Canadian investor and philanthropist who had become a CGI member years earlier, and a group of Clinton friends and donors—including financial author Andrew Tobias and souvenir marketer Mark Weiner—who together owned a home energy conservation firm in Nebraska called Energy Pioneer Solutions, Inc.

At the CGI meeting in September 2010, Samuel had made a com
mitment to invest $2 million in the conservation firm, a small business that insulated private houses and allowed the homeowners to pay for the retrofit in their utility bills over time.

The issue raised by the complicated
Journal
story, written by James V. Grimaldi—a reporter who had shared a Pulitzer for his reporting on the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal in 2006—was whether CGI had abused its tax status by assisting a for-profit enterprise. To make that point it cited a section of the IRS website stating that tax-exempt charitable institutions “must not be organized or operated for the benefit of private interests.”

But the reaction of tax and philanthropy experts to this attempted indictment was swift, unfavorable, and, for the Clinton Foundation, entirely exculpatory.

The next day,
Inside Philanthropy
editor David Callahan posted a response on his publication’s website titled “Hit Job: A Closer Look at the WSJ’s Clueless Attack on the Clinton Foundation.” In sardonic tones, Callahan pointed out that “impact investing” in energy conservation was entirely in keeping with the foundation’s stated purposes; that such philanthropic investments, especially in the energy sector, were increasingly common; and that CGI had shepherded the same kind of commitments on many occasions before and since.