The Truth About Hillary (18 page)

On another occasion, Bill and Hillary attended a dinner party at the West Tisbury home of investment banker Steven Rattner and his wife, Maureen White, who was a major Demo- cratic Party fund-raiser. The guests—the ubiquitous Vernon Jordan; the writer William Styron and his wife, Rose; Beverly Sills;
Washington Post
chairman Katharine Graham; and Miramax honcho Harvey Weinstein—dined on shrimp and lamb kebab with couscous.

“The Clintons were seated at separate tables,” said someone who was there that night. “At his table, the subject of Monica Lewinsky came up, and he talked about it. But at Hillary’s table, where I was seated, we avoided the subject until the end of din- ner, when someone asked her, ‘Are you okay?’

144 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

“Hillary looked around the table, smiled, and said, ‘So where is everyone going on vacation next year?’ ”
4

Hillary’s decision to avoid talking about Monica and play the Wronged Woman was beginning to pay off. There was an out- pouring of sympathy for the First Lady in newspaper columns, magazine articles, and on TV talk shows. Her favorable poll numbers were beginning to inch up.

“In the first administration, when she was running the White House, she was the queen bee, running around, doing whatever the hell she wanted,” said David Schippers, chief counsel to the House Managers for the Impeachment Trial of President Clin- ton. “She was making policy, and things like that. That fell apart, but then she did a complete change.

“She played the poor wife—she’d been betrayed. Instead of being the crook who went down with Whitewater, she suddenly became the object of sympathy. Suddenly, in the public eye, she became the poor wife just moseying around the White House, while people were doing things behind her back. That’s absolute bullshit. Within the White House—don’t kid yourself—she still ran the show more than ever.”
5

The role of victim did not come easily to Hillary. It flew directly in the face of the life lessons she had learned from her father and mother. Now, in a major turning point in her life, those lessons had to be updated:

Lesson No. 1: Never allow yourself to be a victim
became
Vic- timhood can be a political plus.

Lesson No. 2: If somebody hits you, hit him or her back harder
became
Being emotionally abused by your husband makes a woman a more sympathetic figure.

Lesson No. 3: Stay in control of your own destiny
became
If

The Wronged Woman
145

you’re running for office, voters’ hearts will go out to the poor, helpless wife.

After Hillary left Martha’s Vineyard, she and the President attended two fund-raisers in the Hamptons, the trendy resort community on the east end of Long Island.

“At both shindigs,” wrote Michael Tomasky, “. . . applause for Bill was warm; for Hillary, ecstatic. During the applause at one of these events, at the home of Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, Bill turned to [New York State Democratic Party chairman Judith] Hope and whispered, ‘Wow, they really love her here, don’t they?’

“ ‘Mr. President,’ Hope replied, ‘Hillary
owns
New York.’

“ ‘Maybe,’ Clinton answered, ‘she should run for office from here.’ ”
6

“This is the woman who has gone from being what people described as the Democrats’ greatest liability to their greatest as- set [and then back again] to their greatest liability and to their greatest asset,” said Hillary’s press secretary, Neel Lattimore. “It’s almost like a roller coaster.”
7

That same summer, Hillary launched a “Save America’s Treasures” bus tour that took her to four states in four days. Among the national reporters who followed her was NBC News correspondent Maria Shriver, who, as a born and bred Kennedy, knew a thing or two about politics.

“So, for the first time since she stumped for health-care reform, she took to the road on a bus for four days followed by reporters and photographers from the national press,” Maria Shriver told the
Today
show audience during an inter- view with Hillary. “. . . There’s so much speculation now about what you’re going to do, what Hillary Clinton’s life is going to be like after the presidency. Do you find that that takes

146 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

away from what you’re trying to do? Or do you just like slough it off . . . ?”

“I slough it off,” Hillary replied. “I mean, you know, every- body else can spend their time speculating about my life. They don’t have any more of a clue than I do.”
8

As usual, Hillary was being less than candid about her ambitions.

“The ‘America’s Treasures’ tour got very little publicity,” noted Jay Branegan, a former
Time
magazine correspondent who now worked on the Republican staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “But in my view, that tour planted the seed in her head that she could run for public office. She gave a great speech in apple-knocker country in upstate New York, and she showed great skill in working the rope lines. She really showed a knack for pressing the flesh, speaking high, and speak- ing low.

“I was there, covering her for
Time
,” Branegan went on, “but most of the reporters were women. We rode in the second bus, and during the four days we were on the road, Hillary never came back to our bus. We were a lot of big-time reporters stuck in upstate New York, but she never came back. At that point, I think she was testing her political ability.”
9

P
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The Candidate

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Run, Hillary, Run!

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n Friday, November
6
,
1998
, two venerable New Yorkers sat down to tape a conversation under the scorching lights of a television studio.

One was a swarthy, bantam-sized man with ears that stood out at a sharp angle from his head. This was Gabe Pressman, the veteran WNBC-TV reporter, who had been covering New York politics for as long as anyone could remember.

The other was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the legendary four- term Democratic senator, who was recognized all over America by his shock of white hair and distinctive singsong style of speak- ing. The author of eighteen books, and the recipient of sixty-two honorary degrees, Moynihan had been described as “the best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and the best politician among thinkers since Jefferson.”
1

“How do you feel about running again . . . or haven’t you made up your mind?” Pressman asked Moynihan.

In posing that question, the TV newsman was aware that

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150 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

Democratic Party strategists were complaining about Pat Moyni- han behind his back. They said he loathed fund-raisers, hated them more than going to the dentist. They said he didn’t have a clue who gave and who didn’t give him money. They said he had almost no money left in his campaign coffers, and that he did not seem the least bit interested in waging an aggressive effort to raise the vast sums necessary for reelection.

“Gabe,” Moynihan replied, “Liz [his wife and campaign manager] made up our mind four years ago. I’ll be . . . I’ve served four terms in the Senate . . . let it stay at that. That’s . . . that’s the longest term any New Yorker has ever served. . . .”

“You’re gonna
retire!”
Pressman said.

The newsman was unable to disguise his excitement. As Pressman knew, there had not been an open Senate seat in New York since 1958. Moynihan’s retirement was major political news.

“I am not running for reelection,” Moynihan said flatly.

If it had been left entirely up to Moynihan, he probably would have tried for another term in the Senate. But he was turning seventy-two, and his wife felt he was getting too old for the political hustings. She did not want to see him become an- other Jesse Helms or Strom Thurmond, a decrepit figure lum- bering around the hallways of Congress. In addition, Elizabeth Moynihan was concerned about her husband’s health. Because of some kind of gag reflex, he had trouble eating, and had begun to lose a lot of weight.
2

The interview with Moynihan was scheduled to be aired two days later, on Gabe Pressman’s Sunday morning show
News4orum
, but given the sensational nature of the news, it was hardly surprising that it leaked out.

That same night, Representative Charlie Rangel, the

Democratic congressman from Harlem, called the White House.

Run, Hillar y , Run!
151

Rangel had been telling Hillary that she would be a natural to fill the Moynihan seat if Pat ever retired from the Senate.
3

“I’d like to speak to Mrs. Clinton,” Rangel told the White House operator in his trademark raspy voice.

The operator immediately patched him through to Hillary. “I just heard that Senator Moynihan announced he is going

to retire,” Rangel told the First Lady. “I sure hope you’ll con- sider running, because I think you could win.”
4

From the day Bill Clinton admitted he had had an affair with Monica Lewinsky, the media had wondered: Was Hillary going to divorce him? Would Hillary forgive him? But those turned out to be the wrong questions. Hillary couldn’t leave Bill if she wanted to hang on to power. The only relevant question was: Was Hillary going to strike out on her own and run for office?

Hillary promoted the impression that she was consumed with the state of her marriage and the state of Bill’s presidency. But in fact she had spent the previous fall barnstorming the country stumping for Democrats in the midterm elections. She had piled up a lot of political chits by making public appearances and radio spots. And not incidentally, her approval ratings kept going up, and were now at a comfortable 56 percent.

She was determined to position herself for a berth in the Senate in 2000, and she did not need convincing by Charlie Rangel, or anybody else. Since her home state of Illinois did not have an open seat (and she wasn’t very popular there anyway), she set her sights on New York, where Bobby Kennedy had suc- cessfully tried the same carpetbagger strategy.

As one of the first steps in her New Yorkification, she signed on to help the 1998 Senate campaign of Congressman Chuck Schumer, a staunch foe of her husband’s impeachment. Schumer needed Hillary’s star power to help him defeat a formidable op- ponent, Senator Al D’Amato, the New York Republican who had embarrassed the Clintons by running lengthy televised hearings

152 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

on Whitewater. Schumer’s upset victory of D’Amato encouraged Hillary in her own ambitions.
5

After Charlie Rangel spoke to Hillary, he got in touch with his friend Bob Herbert, the only regular African American voice on the Op-Ed page of the
New York Times
. On November 12, just six days after Moynihan’s retirement announcement, Bob Herbert wrote a column under the headline after moynihan. He urged: “Run, Hillary, run!”
6

To many, Hillary seemed a shoo-in for her party’s nomina- tion. As Charlie Rangel noted, “Nobody’s going to run against the First Lady.”
7

But Hillary had a gigantic problem to overcome: her pen- chant for secrecy and concealment would not sit well with New Yorkers.

If she were going to run for office, she would have to get used to the fact that the New York media wasn’t going to give her a pass because she was the First Lady. Her life would become an open book. Some Democratic strategists wondered if Hillary was ready for the blood sport of New York politics. Could she handle the press? Did she have anything to hide?

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The Education of Hillary Clinton

n Sunday morning, January
3
,
1999
, Hillary Clin-

ton sat down with a cup of coffee in front of a TV set in

O

the White House, and turned on

Meet the Press.

In a

few days, impeachment proceedings against her husband would move from the House of Representatives, which had already voted in favor of four articles of impeachment, to the Senate, where the President was expected to prevail at trial.* Nonethe- less, Hillary wasn’t taking anything for granted. She was eager to hear what the Sunday morning pundits had to say about Bill Clinton’s prospects.

She was in for a big surprise.

*Three months before, C. Vann Woodward, who had compiled a his- tory of presidential misconduct under Hillary’s supervision for the Watergate impeachment inquiry, joined some four hundred other historians in signing an open letter denouncing the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton.

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“Here’s a little mini-bombshell,” Tim Russert, the modera- tor of
Meet the Press
, told his guests, journalists Gail Sheehy and David Maraniss, two seasoned Clinton watchers. “Senator Robert Torricelli of New Jersey . . . told me before the program that if he had to guess, he believes that Hillary Rodham Clinton will run for the United States Senate seat being opened by the retirement of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. . . . Gail Sheehy, does that surprise you?”