The Truth About Hillary (14 page)

*In 2004, Eldie Acheson became John Kerry’s liaison with the gay community, as well as a member of the Democrat GLBT (Gay, Les- bian, Bisexual, and Transgender) Caucus.

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Shalala, the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, who be- came secretary of health and human services, and Janet Reno, a prosecutor from Miami, who was made attorney general.

“In Clinton’s cabinet,” wrote gay conservative writer Andrew Sullivan, “almost everyone is married or divorced, but for two who aren’t, Donna Shalala and Janet Reno, their orientations are shrouded in deep ambiguity.”
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Another Hillary appointment was Susan Thomases, a tough and ruthless New York lawyer, who was known as the First Lady’s “Red Queen.” Susan Thomases whipped the staff into line through fear and intimidation.

Yet another appointment was the unfailingly loyal Evelyn Lieberman, who was given the title deputy chief of staff, and served as Hillary’s eyes and ears in the White House.

“Evelyn was a force for order, and didn’t believe in members of the White House staff doing their own thing,” said a White House speechwriter. “She knew how she wanted the White House to look, and how people should behave. She exercised very tight control.”
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Short, a little overweight, with grayish hair, Evelyn was pre- cise, even prissy.

“She called one day, and asked if I could come over right away to the White House for a job interview,” said a woman who ended up working for the administration. “I didn’t have a chance to dress for the interview, but I had on a perfectly acceptable business suit. When Evelyn saw me, however, the first thing she said was: ‘We wear stockings in the White House.’ ”
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Evelyn Lieberman was the head of an elaborate damage- control system that was set up by Hillary to keep dangerous women away from Bill Clinton—and Bill Clinton away from them.

“Bill couldn’t have possibly seen Monica more than once or twice without Hillary knowing it,” said the wife of a senator who

Her Husband’ s Keeper
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dealt with the Clintons. “Hillary knew everything that happened in that White House. The only thing that surprised Hillary about Monica Lewinsky was how tacky the whole thing was. The thing that really embarrassed Hillary was that Bill was at- tracted to this trashy girl.”
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“Sexual snobs from the Kennedy era always marveled at the 42nd President’s terrible taste in women—big-haired Gennifer Flowers, skanky Paula Jones, pillowy Monica Lewinsky,” wrote Tina Brown. “But terrible taste is the point. Has Clinton ever been linked to a woman who could remotely threaten Hillary?

“Washington was full of attractive, Harvard-educated, safely married policy babes who would have been far less embarrassing—but to Hillary far more dangerous—diversions,” Tina Brown continued. “Blue dress or no blue dress, the irony is that if Bill had been arguing deep into the night with Monica about NAFTA, Hillary might have divorced him a long time ago.”
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“Bill Owes Me”

H

illary’s hall monitor in the White House, Evelyn Lieberman, a.k.a. Mother Superior, knew when to leave well enough alone.

She adopted a hands-off attitude when Bill Clinton indulged in affairs with women who were labeled “safe” by the First Lady. As a result, several of Bill Clinton’s former girlfriends, who were known as the “graduates,”
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were given cushy jobs in the White House. The most prominent of these was Marsha Scott, who de- scribed herself as “Bill’s girlfriend from our hippie days.”
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Mar- sha was deputy director of White House personnel, but her power was far greater than her title suggested.

“The assumption among the women in the White House was that Bill took Marsha on political trips, and that she stayed with him in his hotel room,” said a high-level White House staffer. “At one point, Leon Panetta [then the President’s chief of staff] tried to fire Marsha, because, as he put it, ‘Marsha’s too close to the President.’

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“Bill Owes Me”
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“Marsha came to me and asked me to help her save her job,” this source continued. “My advice to the higher-ups was to keep Marsha Scott close. The biggest mistake with Monica was to send her to the Pentagon. They should have kept her close, in the White House, where they could have kept an eye on her. Maybe get her a boyfriend to keep her happy. Instead, they threw her out of the nest. That was Evelyn Lieberman’s doing.”
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The President had other rumored girlfriends stashed away in the White House. They allegedly included Catherine Cornelius, a blonde in her early twenties; Debra Schiff, a former flight at- tendant on Clinton’s campaign plane and now a White House receptionist; and Robin Dickey, a former administrator of the governor’s mansion in Little Rock and the mother of Helen

Dickey, Chelsea’s live-in nanny.
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Hillary’s staff was perplexed by her casual attitude toward Bill Clinton’s infidelities. Like everyone else in the White House, they spent endless hours gossiping about it. However, no one could come up with a satisfactory explanation for Hillary’s be- havior. The fact was, Hillary remained a mystery to her close as- sociates for one simple reason: she never confided in anyone.

“She is so shrewd,” Jan Piercy told the
New Yorker
writer Connie Bruck. “She has known all along that people around [the Clintons] would be placed in a position of being interviewed by the press—and, while she as a public figure has been very schooled in how you protect your privacy, she realized that her friends wouldn’t have that sophistication. So she has kept her own counsel. She has not availed herself of what the rest of us do—crying on someone’s shoulder. She has extraordinary self- possession and discipline.”
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Others had a different explanation for Hillary’s mystique. “I’m not sure how many people are close to Hillary at all,”

said a major Clinton campaign donor. “My wife and I have spent

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hours and hours with her, but do I have a clue to what she’s thinking? No. She’s so closed, so guarded, so careful. I don’t know what in her background led her to be that way.”
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It appeared that Hillary operated on the bizarre theory that if she could handle her husband’s betrayals without turning into his victim, then she, not Bill, would come out the winner. Bill Clinton might get a lot of “pussy”—to use one of his favorite words—but every time Hillary came to his defense, he fell deeper and deeper into her debt.

How many times had her aides heard Hillary say, “Bill owes me”?

“Watching [Bill Clinton] was very much like watching a golden retriever that has pooped on the rug and sort of just curls up and keeps his head down and is, like, ‘I can’t believe I did this,’ ” said David Gergen, who served as a senior adviser to Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1994. “And it put him in a situation where he was in the doghouse.”
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Once in the doghouse, the guilty sex offender was at the mercy of his morally superior wife. Would she show tolerance and forbearance? Would she allow Bill to redeem himself ? Would she forgive him? Each time Bill Clinton slipped up sexually and cheated on Hillary, the dynamics of their relationship tilted in Hillary’s favor. In the never-ending struggle for dominance that characterized their marriage, control shifted from Bill to Hillary. Hillary was selective about how she used the club of infi- delity to beat her husband. For instance, she allowed him to keep a virtual harem under the roof of the White House. There were those who wondered whether Monica Lewinsky was in- cluded in this harem, since Evelyn Lieberman never said whether

she informed Hillary about Bill’s affair with the intern.

However, given Hillary’s nearly thirty-year record of track- ing Bill’s relationships with other women—and the frequency of Monica’s visits to the Oval Office—it seemed naïve to believe

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that the First Lady was kept in the dark about Monica by Evelyn Lieberman. After all, Evelyn’s whole mission in life was to keep an eye on Bill for Hillary.

Furthermore, Hillary wasn’t the only one who saw Monica as a danger.

“A Secret Service officer wanted to put Lewinsky on a watch list of people to be banned from the White House because he was concerned about Clinton’s reputation,” wrote the
Washing- ton Post,
“but a commander overruled him, saying it was none of their business.”
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Mother Superior repeatedly scolded Monica for her provoca- tive way of dressing and for spending too much time hanging around the Oval Office. Ultimately, in April 1996, Evelyn— acting on behalf of the First Lady—banished Monica from the White House and transferred her to the Pentagon.

By that time, however, rumors about Monica and Bill Clinton had spread throughout the entire Democratic Party establish- ment. Marcia Lewis, Monica’s mother, attended several Women’s Leadership Forum events that were sponsored by the women’s section of the Democratic National Committee. At these meet- ings, Marcia Lewis lost no opportunity to boast that her daugh- ter was having an affair with the president of the United States.
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Payback Time

“S

he was upset, but not visibly so—just chilly and withdrawn,” said a White House aide who ac- companied Hillary on the trip from Washington to

Baltimore. “It was not an enjoyable train ride.”
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As the train made its way south, Hillary stared at her re- flection in the window. Though no one could tell what was go- ing through her mind, it was a safe bet that she was thinking about her own reputation, which was inextricably linked to her husband’s.

He had let her down again
.

But then, in all fairness, hadn’t she let him down as well?

Early in the 1992 presidential primaries, Democratic Party strategists began to realize that their candidate’s biggest liability was not the “woman problem” as narrowly defined by the media. Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, and Juanita Broaddrick could be handled. The part of the “woman problem” that couldn’t be so easily handled was Hillary Rodham Clinton.

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Payback Time
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“In the spring of 1992,” said a senior adviser to the Clinton- Gore campaign, “I wrote [an analysis] saying that Hillary should take a page out of Barbara Bush’s book. I said Hillary had mis- understood the role of the First Lady. What the public wanted to know was why she, his wife, loved this man.”
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Hillary was a lightning rod for larger questions about the role of women in America. Many men said they didn’t like her because she was a radical feminist. Many women said they couldn’t stand her because she was willing to tolerate abuse from her husband in order to stay in power.

All this was well known to the people around Bill Clinton during the 1992 primary season. But no one on his campaign staff had the courage to confront Hillary. Instead, the staff came up with a roundabout way of getting that message across to their candidate. They conducted a focus group, and then showed the videotaped results to Bill Clinton.

“We were using these dial meters,” recalled Paul Begala, one of Bill Clinton’s chief political strategists. “So we would show videotape, talk about people, and the respondents in the group would dial up if they liked what they heard and saw, and [dial] down if they didn’t.”

“But we were sitting around the focus group, watching these dials,” George Stephanopoulos added, “and until that point they’d been pretty steady. And then this picture of Mrs. Clinton comes on [the screen], and the dial groups go like [way down]— the footage that was used for Hillary was footage from [primary] election night, 1992, in New Hampshire, where she had this elaborate Nefertiti-style hairdo. And Clinton doesn’t miss a beat. He just says, ‘Oh, they don’t like her hair.’ ”

Hair!

Everyone in the room knew it wasn’t Hillary’s
hair
that the focus group didn’t like. It was
Hillary
who turned them off.

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“I stuck my head under the table,” James Carville said, “be- cause I knew I could not look at anybody. And George was kicking me with his foot. And it was like I thought I was going to die because I couldn’t come up for air, and I couldn’t stop laughing.”

“We were just holding it in,” Stephanopoulos continued, “and [ James] is grinding his fist into my thigh. And we finally— we’re not breathing. We finally run out of the room, get into the hallway and just break up laughing.”

“And it was like a sweet thing almost, you know?” Carville said.

“You know,” Stephanopoulos agreed, “looking back, it was kind of sweet that Clinton said that. His instinct was to protect [Hillary]. Like, he’s a smart politician and knew that . . . a lot of people had very strong feelings about Mrs. Clinton. And he was kind of just being protective of her at that moment. We didn’t dwell on it for the rest of the day.”
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“We found out from those focus groups that people actually thought the Clintons were rich and didn’t have any children,” said a party activist close to the campaign. “And after we got the results of those focus groups, Hillary had the first of her many makeovers.”
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In late April
1992
, Bill Clinton’s top aides wrote a confi- dential memo laying out a strategy to rescue his foundering candidacy. The problem was clear: about 40 percent of the voters did not like Bill Clinton. And Hillary had even higher negatives. The memo set out an ambitious political plan to reha- bilitate Hillary.
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