The Truth About Hillary (19 page)

Not in the least, said Sheehy. Not at all, Maraniss agreed.
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As the panelists continued to talk, the TV screen filled with a clip of Eleanor Roosevelt, the last First Lady whose name was mentioned in the same breath as that of the U.S. Senate. After the death of her husband, Eleanor was urged to run for the Sen- ate by none other than Harold Ickes’s father. She declined.

Hillary was speechless. When she had sufficiently recovered from her shock, she picked up the phone and called “the dark prince.”

Harold Ickes was the go-to guy in New York, the master of the state’s bare-knuckle, anything-goes style of politics. He al- ways seemed to be operating on the edge of the law. There had been charges—never proved—that Ickes illegally backdated a letter regarding a stock sale by one of his clients, former mayor David Dinkins. And the media went into a feeding frenzy inves- tigating Ickes’s role in Dinkins’s controversial cable television stock transfer to his son.
2

According to the
New York Post,
it appeared that Ickes had “lied” to federal prosecutors during his grand jury testimony. Criminal charges were never brought against Ickes, the
Post
re- ported, “because there was insufficient evidence, but [the prose- cutors] kept hoping for more.”
3

Ickes had memorized the demographic composition and

The Education of Hillar y Clinton
155

voting pattern of nearly every borough, county, city, town, vil- lage, and hamlet in the state. He was on a first-name basis with political operatives down to obscure workers at the precinct level. He drank stale beer and ate cold pizza with the leaders of unions, religious organizations, fraternal associations, ethnic groups, im- migrant communities, and gay and lesbian clubs.

“Well,” Hillary said when Ickes answered the phone, “did you
see
that?”

“Yes,” replied Ickes, who had also been watching
Meet the Press.

“What do you think?” Hillary asked.

“Well, Hillary,” Ickes said, “if you don’t want to do this, don’t fuck around with it. Issue a Shermanesque statement, and that’ll be the end of it.”

“Well,” Hillary said, “that’s not where I am with this.”
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At that moment, Harold Ickes realized for the first time that Hillary was serious about running for the Senate.

The following month, on the very day the Senate was to vote on the articles of impeachment against her husband, Hillary invited Ickes to the White House. He arrived on Friday, Febru- ary 12, carrying a large portfolio. After a warm greeting from Hillary in the family sitting room, Ickes opened his portfolio and removed a large map of New York State, which he spread out on a table. The sun shone through the arched windows, falling on the map, as Ickes began Hillary’s education in the politics of New York State.

“So literally the day that [the senators] were passing judg- ment on her husband, she was trying to figure out how to join them,” said
Washington Post
reporter Peter Baker.
5

“[Harold] offered a running commentary about the obsta- cles I would face,” Hillary recalled. “He pointed to towns from

156 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

Montauk to Plattsburgh to Niagara Falls, and it became clear that to take a campaign to New York’s nineteen million citizens, I would have to physically cover a state of fifty-four thousand square miles. “On top of that I would have to master the intricacies of lo- cal politics, of dramatic differences in the personalities, cultures and economies of upstate New York and the suburbs. New York City was its own universe: a cauldron of competing politicians and interest groups. The five boroughs were like individual mini-states, each presenting needs and challenges different from counties and cities upstate and also from the suburbs or neigh-

boring Long Island.”
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After a couple of hours of this, Hillary and Ickes broke for lunch. They gathered up their maps and took them to the First Family’s private dining room, where they continued their con- versation against the backdrop of the beautiful antique wallpaper that had been installed thirty-seven years earlier by Jacqueline Kennedy.

At the exact moment the Senate was deciding his fate, Bill Clinton walked into the dining room. He had just finished work- ing out in the White House gym, and his T-shirt was stained with sweat.

“He set out a piece of paper on which he had scratched out a statement in longhand about the Senate verdict, a few carefully chosen words that he planned to deliver in the Rose Garden later in the afternoon,” wrote the
Washington Post
’s Peter Baker. “While Hillary Clinton and Ickes chatted about the New York electoral map, the President edited his statement.”
7

Bill Clinton was eager to talk about his impeachment woes, but Hillary and Ickes ignored him. His feelings were hurt, and the President tried to edge into the conversation by pointing out his own strong showing in New York’s Herkimer County in the 1992 and 1996 elections.

The Education of Hillar y Clinton
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After the President left, Hillary and Ickes continued to talk for several more hours.

“Why in God’s name would you want to do this?” Ickes asked her. “You’ve been very sheltered from the press, even though you think you haven’t been. And you’ve got to be more open with them. You’ve got to think of them as people who have a job to do, working stiffs who have to file a story every day. And if they don’t, they get laid off.”
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A few days after winning the impeachment vote, the Clin- tons traveled to Buffalo, a solid union town in western New York State at the eastern tip of Lake Erie. Almost twenty thousand people filled the HSBC Arena. Many of those in the crowd had heard that Hillary was thinking of running for the Senate from their state.

Bob McCarthy, the veteran political reporter for the
Buffalo News,
interviewed a number of the cheering Democrats, who told him they had come mainly because of Hillary.

“Why Hillary?” McCarthy asked.

“Because,” came the answer, “Hillary is the most famous woman in the world.”
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Blowing Them Away

“I

n the winter of
1999
, I was at Camp David with some other major Democratic donors who were close to Hillary, and there was talk of her running for Pat

Moynihan’s Senate seat,” said a prominent Democratic fund- raiser. “At one point, Hillary joined us, and the talk started to drift to the subject of her throwing her hat in the ring. We all started to engage her, but she didn’t want to be engaged.

“And she explained why,” this Friend of Hillary continued. “ ‘I’ve had some pretty tough few years in the White House,’

she told us, ‘and now that we’ve won the impeachment battle, I want to do the work I was sent here for.’

“I was impressed, and I figured she had decided not to run. But a couple of months after that conversation at Camp David, it became clear in a number of ways that she wanted financial sup- port. Hillary operates in a different mode than most politicians when it comes to money. Most politicians have to make pilgrim- ages to people like me, and ask me to help them raise money. Hillary doesn’t have to do that. She doesn’t have to come beg-

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Blowing Them Away
159

ging. She has star power. A lot of rich people are always dying to be near her and give her money.”
1

By late February, Hillarymania was in the air. Both
Newsweek
and
Time
put her on their covers.
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In early March, she sum- moned a handful of New York State’s top Democratic elected of- ficials and operatives to the White House to sound them out on her getting into the race.

All the people around Hillary—Linda and Harry Thoma- son, Susan Thomases, Harold Ickes, Maggie Williams, Mandy Grunwald—wanted to see her step out from her husband’s shadow and run for office. It was high time she stopped focusing on her husband’s political survival, they advised her, and started focusing on her own political future.

That spring, Hillary gathered yet another group of friends and supporters, this time in the Manhattan office of Alan Patri- coff, a wealthy venture capitalist who backed liberal Democratic candidates. The subject was money. If Hillary ran for the Senate, the task of raising the money to fund her campaign would fall to the people in the room. Naturally, they wanted some reassurance that Hillary—whose favorability rating was now an astonishing 78 percent in New York City and 65 percent statewide
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—had thought through the personal implications of running for public office.

“How are you going to handle Monica Lewinsky?” asked one of the women at the meeting.

“I decided because of Kosovo and for the good of the coun- try, I needed to stand by the President of the United States dur- ing perilous times,” Hillary said, reciting an answer she had committed to memory, and that seemed less than convincing even to her supporters. “And we needed to show that the office of the President was strong and intact. And I had to show that what had gone on was between Bill and me.”
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160 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

No matter what she said in public about being undecided, Hillary was now privately committed to running. However, she did not want to look like an arrogant interloper, especially in the eyes of New York State’s influential Democratic county leaders.

There were sixty-two counties in New York State, and sixty- two county leaders to woo. Ten of those counties had significant voting populations, and Hillary’s first order of business was to get the support of the leaders in those counties. These men and women had devoted their lives to the Democratic Party, and they were not eager to welcome a Joannie-come-lately like Hil- lary. Without their support, however, Hillary had no chance of winning the Senate nomination.

“Before she announced the embryonic stage, her campaign staff did a helluva job with the county leaders,” said a Demo- cratic Party activist who was intimately familiar with the state’s politics. “Judith Hope, who was then the Democratic Party chairman, went around the state and told the county leaders, ‘Listen, you may not like Hillary, and you may not like the idea of her running for the Moynihan seat, but do me a favor and wait and see, and don’t say anything yet.’ ”
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Hillary needed to convince the county chairmen that she could beat her likely Republican opponent—New York City’s mayor, Rudolph Giuliani—on his home turf in New York City, and hold her own in the Republican suburbs as well as in conser- vative upstate New York.

That was a big order, and Hillary turned for help to image- maker Mandy Grunwald, a formidable figure both politically and physically. Mandy stood nearly six feet tall and had a boom- ing voice and a thick head of black hair. A bundle of nervous energy, she chain-smoked Marlboros. Some of her Republican counterparts in the political consulting business joked that she looked like the Marlboro man in drag. Mandy didn’t take of-

Blowing Them Away
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fense. She was a fierce partisan, who could give as good as she got.

Though she grew up in a Republican household (her fa- ther, Henry Anatole Grunwald, was the former editor-in-chief of Time-Life), Mandy was a New York liberal to her core. After working on Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign, she stayed on at the Democratic National Committee. But in the wake of the health-care fiasco and the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, she was fired. Her liberal voice in the White House was replaced by the centrist voice of Dick Morris.
6

Mandy had been the Harvard roommate of Pat and Liz Moynihan’s daughter Maura, and she had made television com- mercials for three of Moynihan’s four campaigns. She had a New York state of mind, and she urged Hillary (who had never lived in New York) to embark on a “listening tour” by traveling all over the state, talking to average New Yorkers about their problems.

It was a sophisticated concept, because it deflected the most potent charge against Hillary—that she was a presumptuous out- sider, who knew all the answers and who thought the people of New York owed her a seat in the Senate.

“People wanted to know that it was about
them
, and not about

her
,” a campaign aide told
The New Yorker
’s Elizabeth Kolbert.
7
Mandy set up small, intimate, friendly meetings, where

Hillary—in Oprah-like fashion—could sit on a stage with the president of the local hospital, or a union leader, and talk about access to health care and the economy of western New York State. These meetings would give people the opportunity to see that Hillary did not have horns. Many New Yorkers had read that Hillary was cold, mean, and tough. But when they saw her in person, Mandy felt confident they would find someone who smiled, was funny, had boundless energy, and had knowledge of the issues they cared about.

162 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

Hillary would blow them away.

But there was a hitch. Before Hillary could embark on her listening tour, she first had to get the blessing of the state’s big kahuna: Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. And everyone knew that Pat and Hillary did not get along.

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“Boob Bait for the Bubbas”

F

or years, Pat Moynihan had been suffering from back pain, and in the spring of 1999, he had surgery to correct his spinal stenosis. The operation was a success, but his

recovery was slow, and by May he still did not feel well enough to make an appearance on the floor of the U.S. Senate. How- ever, when Hillary Clinton called to say she would like to drop by for a visit, the gallant senator put on a suit and tie, and per- sonally greeted the First Lady at his front door.
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