The Truth About Hillary (11 page)

These and other procedural rules, which were drawn up by Hillary Rodham and approved by Burke Marshall, had one prin- cipal object: to protect the reputations of John F. Kennedy (and, by extension, that of presidential hopeful Teddy Kennedy).

In the end, of course, Richard Nixon destroyed himself. In the famous “smoking gun” tape that led to his resignation, he could be heard ordering his aides to obstruct justice in the Wa- tergate case.

The Other “Smoking Gun”
81

But there was another, less famous “smoking gun.” This was the report prepared under Hillary Rodham’s supervision by

C. Vann Woodward and a team of twelve scholars. Their report left little doubt that previous presidents, including John F. Kennedy, had engaged in immoral and unlawful abuses of power that were as bad as those perpetrated by Richard Nixon.

After Doar finished reading the report, he turned to Hillary and warned her never to discuss it with anyone, not even with Doar’s boss, Peter Rodino, the chairman of the House Ju- diciary Committee.
18
The report, he said, must remain “top secret.”*

“When Congressman Charles Wiggins . . . insisted that the inquiry’s failure to make such [a historic] study was unforgiv- able,” wrote Renata Adler, “he was never told, nor were any other congressmen, that the project was
already under way
[italics added].”
20

The decision to suppress the C. Vann Woodward report would have a long-lasting toxic effect on the impeachment process. Until Nixon, most constitutional lawyers had been of the opinion that a president who violated the spirit of the law and engaged in “immoral acts” was guilty of “high Crimes” as speci- fied in the impeachment clause of the Constitution. However, af- ter the badly flawed inquiry carried out by Burke Marshall, John Doar, Hillary Rodham, and the “irregulars,” the immoral-acts standard for impeachment became so muddy that the ability to impeach a president was called into serious question.

“Now with our inquiry as a precedent,” Michigan congress- man John Conyers wrote in a separate opinion to the Judiciary

*In fact, all the internal memoranda and papers of the House Judi- ciary impeachment inquiry staff were later sealed for fifty years at Doar’s recommendation.
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82 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

Committee Impeachment Report, “future Congresses may re- coil from ever again exercising this power. They may read the history of our work and conclude that impeachment can never again succeed unless another president demonstrates the same, almost uncanny, ability to impeach himself. If this is our legacy, our future colleagues may well conclude that ours has been a pyrrhic victory, and that impeachment will never again justify the agony we have endured.”
21

Thus, a quarter of a century later, Hillary and Bill were able to argue successfully that President Clinton’s depraved affair with Monica Lewinsky, his effort to suborn perjury, and his ob- struction of justice were not sufficient reasons to throw him out of office.

C
H A P T E R T W E L V E
‌

The Misfit

W

hile Hillary was still in Washington working on the impeachment inquiry, two men in a late-model Cadillac with Illinois license plates pulled into the

parking lot of the Clinton for Congress headquarters on College Avenue in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
1
Hugh Rodham Sr. and Tony Rodham, the younger of Hillary’s two brothers, got out of the car.

“I’m Hillary’s dad,” Hugh Sr. announced.

“Well, how long are you going to be here to visit?” asked Ron Addington, Bill’s campaign manager.

“Hell, I don’t know,” Hugh said. “Hillary told me I ought to come down here and help out.”
2

Though Hugh did not explain what he meant by “help out,” it soon became clear.

“One of the worst-kept secrets at headquarters was that Clinton had become involved in an intense relationship with a young woman volunteer who was a student at the university [and who was known inside the campaign as the College Girl],” wrote David Maraniss in his well-regarded biography of Bill Clinton,

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84 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

First in His Class
. “According to Doug Wallace [the campaign press secretary], ‘the staff tried to ignore it as long as it didn’t in- terfere with the campaign.’

“Aside from the Fayetteville woman, the staff also knew that Clinton had girlfriends in several towns around the district and in Little Rock. Perhaps they could disregard his rambunctious private life, but could Hillary? There was some suspicion that one of the reasons she sent the men in her family to Arkansas was to put a check on her boyfriend’s activities.”
3

It was clear from the way Hillary handled the College Girl problem that she knew about Bill’s womanizing. She did not throw a fit. She did not confront the girl directly. She did not de- mand that Bill stop sleeping around. Instead, Hillary summoned her other brother, Hugh Jr., to Arkansas, and ordered
him
to give the College Girl the rush.

“That’s exactly what he did,” said Paul Fray. “Hughie stalked her every day, every way. She came to me and said, ‘I want you to stop this son of a bitch bothering me.’ I said, ‘You’re old enough to get rid of him yourself.’ By the end of October, she was gone.

She jumped up and married some other guy.”
4

“You should have seen her! No, you should have
SMELLED

her.”
5

The speaker was Dolly Kyle Browning, one of Bill Clinton’s longtime girlfriends in Arkansas. She was describing her first im- pression of Hillary Rodham when she arrived from Washington, D.C., to work on Bill’s race for Congress.

It would be easy to dismiss Dolly’s remarks as the jealous re- action of a jilted lover, if it were not for the fact that a) Bill con- tinued his affair with Dolly long after he married Hillary, and b) Dolly’s portrayal of Hillary was echoed by virtually all of Bill’s friends.

In 1974, appearances meant a lot in a small southern com-

The Misfit
85

munity like Little Rock, with its old families and old money, and Hillary’s looks and behavior came as a shock to Bill’s friends. True, Bill was a self-described redneck; he was from white trash. But southern girls were judged by stricter standards.

Southern girls were supposed to be cute and fun, but Hillary was neither of those things. She did not wear the right clothes. She spoke with a flat Midwestern twang, and preached about race relations, which southerners deeply resented. She had not gone to the right southern schools, attended the right debutante parties, or made the acquaintance of the right people. Even worse, the best families in Little Rock didn’t know
her
people.

Hillary was a misfit.

Bill’s mother, Virginia Kelley—a flashy woman who liked a good time—took an instant dislike to her son’s plain-Jane girl- friend. Virginia had expected Bill to bring home someone more glamorous and sexy—someone, in fact, more like her—and she let Bill know of her disapproval in no uncertain terms.

“Virginia loathed Hillary then,” recalled Mary Lee Fray. “Anything she could find to pick on about Hillary she would pick on. Hillary did not fit her mold for Bill.”
6

But Bill’s mind was made up.

“Listen,” he told Virginia, “I don’t need to be married to a beauty queen or a sex goddess. I am going to be involved all my life in hard work in politics and public service, and I need some- body who is really ready to roll up her sleeves and work for me.”
7
What Virginia failed to appreciate was that she and Hillary were more alike than she imagined. Both women had boundless faith in Bill’s potential for greatness. Both had pledged their lives to help him become president. And both stoked Bill’s ambition, fed his political fantasies—and turned a blind eye to his promis-

cuous nature.

Bill Clinton chose Hillary Rodham for at least two reasons: first, because she was
like
his mother—an enabler; and second,

86 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

because she was
unlike
his mother—a floozy. When he was a child, Virginia had brought strange men home in the middle of the night, traumatizing Bill and his younger brother, Roger.

“You have to remember,” said a longtime Arkansas friend, “that Billy grew up where women who dressed flossy and used a lot of cosmetics were ‘available,’ and he wasn’t ever going to
marry
that kind.”
8

It was during the
1974
congressional campaign that ru- mors first began to fly through Arkansas that Hillary was a lesbian.

In large part, the rumors were founded on Hillary’s tough, aggressive manner, her military barracks vocabulary, and her de- fiant refusal to do anything about her unkempt appearance. To Arkansans, she
walked
like a lesbian,
talked
like a lesbian, and
looked
like a lesbian. Ergo, she
was
a lesbian.

“If you looked at her in that day and age, the sack-o’-seeds dresses she wore, you’d understand that it wasn’t that hard [to create a question about her sexuality],” said Paul Fray.
9

Fray confronted Hillary, and told her that the lesbian ru- mors were hurting Bill’s chances with the conservative voters of Arkansas.

“This rumor has to be faced,” Fray said firmly. “It’s nobody’s goddam business,” Hillary shot back.

Fray stood his ground. He urged her to deny the rumors publicly, thereby putting them to rest.

“Fuck this shit!” Hillary replied.
10

Though Bill Clinton outspent his rival almost two to one, he went down to defeat in his race for Congress. Depressed, he returned to teaching law at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, while he and Hillary considered their next move.

Hillary recovered from the defeat a lot faster than Bill. He

The Misfit
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interpreted his loss at the polls as a personal repudiation. That seemed to take the stuffing out of him. The always-combat- ready Hillary began to wonder about the man for whom she had sacrificed her career. Did Bill Clinton have a glass political jaw?

Teaching bored Hillary. She yearned for the kind of action that could only be found in the public arena. In the summer of 1975, she visited friends back East, and explored her options outside Arkansas. She told her friends that she was considering leaving Bill because of his womanizing.

“I know he’s ready to go after anything that walks by,” she confessed.
“I know what he’s doing.”
11

But Hillary did not really care what Bill did with other women, as long as it did not hurt the Clintons’ careers. The truth was, Hillary considered leaving Bill because she was worried that she had backed a loser.

During her absence, Bill discussed
his
options with Jim Guy Tucker, the attorney general of Arkansas. It just so happened that Tucker was planning to run for the House of Representa- tives in 1976, which would open the attorney general’s slot for Bill. As Tucker later told a reporter, Bill would make a good at- torney general, because he “was capable of understanding what you can and cannot do with the law.”
12

Hillary was delighted to hear that Bill was going to run again for public office. And when she returned to Arkansas, she ac- cepted his proposal of marriage. Thus was sealed the Faustian bargain that would shape the rest of her life: Hillary accepted Bill’s womanizing as the price of political power.

They set a wedding date for October 11, 1975. Dorothy Rodham flew down from Park Ridge, Illinois. Virginia Kelley drove up from Hot Springs, Arkansas. When Bill visited his mother on the morning of the wedding at the Holiday Inn where she was staying, he said he had something to tell her.

“Hillary’s keeping her own name,” he said.

88 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

“Pure shock,” Virginia recalled. “I had never even con- ceived of such a thing. This had to be some new import from Chicago.”
13

At the time, no one saw the irony in Hillary’s decision. She insisted on keeping her maiden name—and feminist credentials— because she wanted to be “a person in my own right” and not a “ ‘sacrificial’ political spouse.”
14
Yet, at the same time, she readily sacrificed her feminist principles and allowed herself to become a doormat to a man who was “ready to go after anything that walks by.”

Hillary being Hillary, she believed she was
entitled
to have it both ways.

In the spring of
1978
, during Attorney General Bill Clin- ton’s campaign for governor, he and Hillary scheduled a joint appearance at a fund-raiser in Van Buren, a small town nestled in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains in Crawford County.

The chairman of the Crawford County Committee for the Election of Bill Clinton was an attractive thirty-five-year-old nursing home owner by the name of Juanita Broaddrick. She had volunteered to work for the young attorney general because, as she explained in an interview for this book, “all the women in this area were taken by his charisma, looks, and personality.”
15