The Truth About Hillary (17 page)

Even Hillary, who was normally the voice of doom and gloom in the White House, began to feel cautiously optimistic. Her standard strategy—lie, deny, parse, stonewall, go on the offense—seemed to have worked again.

Only it hadn’t.

That summer, under mounting pressure, Hillary had to abandon her opposition to an appearance by the President be- fore a federal grand jury. Then in July—less than a month before the President’s scheduled grand jury appearance—Hillary learned that Ken Starr had offered Monica Lewinsky immunity in return for testimony revealing the lewd details of her sexual encounters with Bill Clinton. Monica was ready to testify that

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the President used a cigar to masturbate her, then put the cigar in his mouth.

These were devastating blows. But worse was yet to come. One of Starr’s lieutenants sent a letter to David Kendall, the Clintons’ lawyer, requiring that “President Clinton provide this Office as soon as possible with a blood sample to be taken under our supervision.”
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Nobody had to tell Hillary what that meant. As part of Moni- ca’s immunity deal, she had given Starr’s office a “GAP dress, size 12, dark blue,” as the FBI report described it, and a test re- vealed the presence of semen. The Feds wanted to see if the DNA in the President’s blood matched the DNA in the semen.

“I had some conversations with people in Ken Starr’s office,” said a source close to the Whitewater prosecutor. “When the stain proved to be Bill’s semen, I said to one of the guys, ‘Why the hell did you guys announce that match before Bill went into the grand jury? You could have leaked that it was cheese, and the DNA test had come out negative, and then the sonofabitch would have gone in there and lied like hell.

“The answer was, the test was done in the FBI lab, and the Clintons knew the results before we did. Someone in the Justice Department was leaking to them. The day the FBI got the test results, they trotted them right over to the White House. So, when the President went into that grand jury, he had to know the jig was up.”
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And so did Hillary.

Yet Hillary decided to spin an implausible tale regarding what she knew, and when she knew it. In her memoir
Living His- tory
, which was published two years later, she wrote that on the morning of August 15, her husband woke her up in their bed- room and “told me for the first time that there had been an inap- propriate intimacy” with Monica Lewinsky.

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“I could hardly breathe,” she wrote. “Gulping for air, I started crying and yelling at him.”
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But her version of events was not credible.

Months before, Hillary had taken charge of the White House’s damage-control operation. She ran the meetings that prepped Bill Clinton for his grand jury testimony. She asked Robert Shrum, the highly regarded Democratic wordsmith, to write a mea culpa speech for the President to deliver on national television. She then vetoed Shrum’s speech, because she found it too conciliatory, and instead urged her husband to “come out and hammer Ken Starr.”
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* She saw the headline in the
New York Times
of August 13—two days
before
her husband’s alleged bedside confession to her about Monica—that said: president weighs admitting he had sexual contacts.

The fact of the matter was, Hillary knew everything—and she knew it before anybody else. And yet, she never changed her tune. Even after the truth about Bill and Monica came out, Hillary continued to defend her husband. And while the lurid tale rocked the nation, Hillary recovered from the shock faster than everybody else.

In a gesture that was meant to rally the Clintons’ African American base, Hillary invited the Reverend Jesse Jackson to the White House to “counsel” the First Family. After praying with the Clintons and watching the Superbowl with them, the

*Shrum has the draft of that speech, which the President never de- livered, hanging outside his office to this day. In it, Shrum wrote: “I have fallen short of what you should expect from a President. I have failed my own religious faith and values. I have let too many people down. I take full responsibility for my actions—for hurting my wife and daughter, for hurting Monica Lewinsky, for hurting friends and staff, and for hurting the country I love. None of this ever should have happened.”
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138 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

Reverend Jackson held a press conference, and—perhaps in- advertently, perhaps not—demolished Hillary’s gulping-for-air story.

“Hillary’s not naïve,” Jesse Jackson said. “There was no great explosive shock and surprise moment. Hillary knows her hus- band well and has for twenty-five years. The best evidence of that is that Sunday as the drama was building, she was organiz- ing his testimony, and so she knew what was going on.”
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Nonetheless, Hillary stuck to her lie.

“She had no good options,” said a White House official. “She could either abandon her husband and take herself com- pletely out of power, or she could stick with him and make her- self look like a cold, calculating woman.

“I would have advised her to leave her husband for three months,” the official continued. “She should have stayed with her mother, then had a big reconciliation story with Bill. But Hillary didn’t have the sense of a dramatic story line to do it that way. And nobody around her could or would advise her to do it that way.

“Al Gore and Tipper were furious at both Clintons. They felt betrayed that Bill had lied to Al. And Tipper was disgusted over Bill’s affair with Monica, who was the same age as Tipper’s own daughter. When the four of them went to New York for the premiere of the musical
The Lion King
, Tipper refused to leave her holding room to see the President. The relationship be- tween the two couples was broken over this breach of faith.”
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For a long time, Hillary’s lie went unchallenged by the news media. That was largely because it was overshadowed by the President’s even bigger lie—that he didn’t have sex with Monica—which he sustained for eight long months.

Indeed, if Bill Clinton’s DNA sample had not matched the DNA on Monica’s semen-stained dress, he might still be telling

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the same lie. But unhappily for him and Hillary, the DNA odds against him turned out to be 7.87 trillion to one.

“It was his digging in his heels and stonewalling for an in- credible period of time, and overtly lying to the country, that really got him in trouble,” Dick Morris said. “He could have dodged and weaved around this until the point more or less came out—leak it, get it out, get speculation out—and then have admitted it. In a situation like this, you need soft hands. You need to be able to be subtle about it and gradual, and not just do anything harsh like ‘No.’ ”
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In August, Sidney Blumenthal watched the President’s post–grand jury speech in Rome, where he was traveling with his wife. Ten minutes after the speech was over, the phone rang in his room.

“It was the President, asking what my reaction was,” Blu- menthal recalled. “I told him that it was all right. Hillary asked me what I thought. I told her the same. The President said he was pleased with it. Hillary also approved.”

Then, as the White House phone was handed to James Carville and pollster Mark Penn, Blumenthal continued, “I could hear the President and Hillary bantering in the back- ground. Whatever they would have to do between themselves to get over this episode, they were still working as a team.”
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Their whole effort was now aimed at convincing people that Bill had lied to Hillary, and that the Clintons were an embattled couple. The cheated-on wife was not speaking to the cad of a husband. He had to suffer publicly before she would grant him remission for his sins.

But how were the spinmeisters in the Clinton White House to convey such a complex message to the American peo- ple? The answer came the following afternoon in a brilliantly staged scene on the South Lawn of the White House.

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As they had so many times in the past, the First Couple emerged from the White House and walked across the South Lawn to a marine helicopter, which was waiting to take them to Martha’s Vineyard for a long-planned summer vacation. But this time Hillary, who looked morose despite her TV-friendly turquoise jacket, ignored the television cameras and her hus- band’s outstretched hand.

In front of them, Buddy, the Clintons’ brown Labrador re- triever, tugged on his leash, which the President twisted nervously in his hand. To the right of the President was his eighteen-year- old daughter, Chelsea, who had abandoned her studies at Stan- ford University in Palo Alto, California, to rush home and lend support.

The whole country felt sorry for Chelsea. She was the one sympathetic character in the whole degrading Lewinsky mess. Her presence lent a touch of dignity to the long walk across the South Lawn. Chelsea was stationed between her mother and father. She reached out and took her father’s hand. Then she joined hands with her mother.

America’s favorite daughter was acting as the human bridge between her parents.

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H A P T E R T W E N T Y - T H R E E
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The Wronged Woman

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n the flight from Andrews Air Force Base to Martha’s Vineyard, Hillary was in a jovial mood, laugh- ing and joking with Chelsea all the way. However, the

moment Air Force One touched down at the Edgartown air- port, where TV cameras were waiting to record the embattled First Family, Hillary turned into a different person. When she emerged from the plane, she was wearing a pair of dark sun- glasses and the grim-faced expression of the Wronged Woman.

At the foot of the ramp, she received a consoling bear hug from Vernon Jordan, who was both an FOH (Friend of Hil- lary) and an FOB (Friend of Bill). The towering, handsome Jor- dan was frequently photographed riding with Bill Clinton in the presidential golf cart, puffing on a cigar and laughing at the President’s off-color jokes.

The Clintons’ friendship with Jordan had a serious dimen- sion as well. Hillary believed that the inside-the-Beltway crowd would never accept her and her husband. That made it hard for

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the Clintons to govern in a city where relationships were every- thing, and one hand washed the other. To rectify the situation, Hillary had reached out to Jordan, a respected member of the African American community, a high-powered lobbyist in the nation’s capital, and a member of that exclusive group of Wash- ington wheeler-dealers known as “fixers.”

As a favor to Hillary and Bill, Jordan had tried to fix the Monica mess by arranging a job for the young woman at Revlon, where he was a director. He managed to line up a $40,000-a- year public-relations job for her, and was later summoned to appear before the Whitewater grand jury to explain his behind- the-scenes role in the Lewinsky affair. But like so many FOHs and FOBs whose reputations were tarnished by their association with the Clintons, Jordan did not allow a little criminal investi- gation to get in the way of his friendship with the most powerful couple in the United States.

As Vernon Jordan watched from the tarmac of the Edgar- town airport, Hillary and Bill worked the rope line. Then they climbed into a bronze-colored Chevy Blazer for the ride to the Oyster Bay compound of Richard Friedman, whose house they were borrowing during their twelve-day stay. A multimillionaire real-estate developer, Friedman was a controversial figure in his own right: he had been accused of using his political connections to help him build a hotel in Boston.
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While the First Couple were on Martha’s Vineyard, Hil- lary’s staff held daily briefings for the traveling press corps. And for once, the normally dazed and confused Clintonistas stayed on message.

Hillary, her aides repeated over and over again, was going through a period of “healing.” She and the President were “sleeping in separate beds.” They were hardly talking to each

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other. The only one who was giving the President any face time was Buddy the dog.

It was a great tabloid story, but even reporters from the mainstream press swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.

“There was no late evening singing around the piano with Carly Simon and Beverly Sills, no going out every night till all hours, no golf,” wrote
Time
columnist Margaret Carlson. “The guest house where the President spent most of his time alone was akin to the woodshed.”
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About midway through their vacation, the allegedly es- tranged couple put aside their made-for-the-media differences long enough to go sailing with former CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite and his wife, Betsy, on the Cronkite yacht. Hillary would later claim that the Cronkites had invited the Clintons to go sailing as a gesture of solidarity, but the truth was quite differ- ent. In fact, the Clintons arranged the invitation as a public rela- tions gesture—and made sure that photographers were on hand to record them sailing with Cronkite, “the must trusted man in America.”
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