The Truth About Hillary (20 page)

Pat and Liz Moynihan lived on Pennsylvania Avenue in a modern condominium apartment that had prime views of the na- tion’s capital. They also had an apartment in New York City and an eight-hundred-acre farm in Pindars Corners in upstate New York, where the senator had written his eighteen books and many of his thoughtful speeches analyzing the ills of American society. Though Moynihan was often portrayed as an intellectual who was above the political fray—he had served both Republican and Democratic presidents before becoming a senator—he was also a shrewd Irish politician who understood power and its uses.

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164 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

To break the ice with the Moynihans, Hillary began by chat- ting about the Dalai Lama, whom Pat and Liz had met when Pat was America’s ambassador to India. Hillary said she was deeply moved by the Dalai Lama’s spirituality. Moynihan was skeptical. From the icy tone of his voice, it was clear that he did not believe that Hillary “got” the Dalai Lama.
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In fact, according to Moynihan’s biographer, Godfrey Hodg- son, the senator’s wife did not hide her impression “that Hillary Clinton ‘didn’t get it,’ meaning that she didn’t understand how either the Senate or the Senator worked.”
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As chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, Moynihan had urged Bill Clinton, after his election in 1992, to tackle the issue of welfare reform, which had many supporters in Congress, before he took on the thorny problem of health care. That way, Moynihan argued, the new president would create a positive legislative record and develop the momentum necessary to push through health-care reform.

The President’s decision to ignore this sage advice cost him dearly. In Moynihan’s view, the reason for the President’s blun- der could be summed up in a single word:
Hillary
. She convinced her husband to go for health care first and, what was an even bigger mistake, to put her in charge of the effort. Moynihan be- lieved that Hillary’s chief motivation was self-aggrandizement; she was determined to seize the favorable attention of the nation in order to enhance her prospects of succeeding her husband in the White House.
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Moynihan had publicly referred to Hillary’s health-care plan as a “fantasy” and “boob bait for the bubbas.”
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And he made no secret of the fact that he found both Clintons impossible to deal with. In his eyes, their worst crime was that they and their staffs had displayed a complete lack of decorum, and had ignored him. “Not a single call,” Moynihan complained to
Time
maga- zine’s political columnist Michael Kramer. “Not from the Presi-

“Boob Bait for the Bubbas”
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dent or any of his top people. I would have thought someone would have gotten in touch by now. I just don’t get it.”
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Not only had the Clintons failed to reach out, but they had also begun as adversaries. The feeling of distrust and animosity was mutual. When it became apparent to Hillary that Moynihan was going to give her a hard time during hearings before his Fi- nance Committee, she sicced one of her aides on the senator.

“Big deal,” the aide said. “Moynihan [isn’t] one of us, and he can’t control Finance like [former Finance Committee chairman Lloyd] Bentsen did. He’s cantankerous, but he couldn’t obstruct us even if he wanted to. The gridlock is broken. It’s all Demo- crats now. We’ll just roll right over him if we have to.”
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No one rolled over Pat Moynihan, and he never forgot that personal slight. Nor did he forgive the Clintons for failing to support his own proposals to reform Social Security. He told friends that he had a long list of people he disliked in the Clin- ton administration, and that at the top of the list was Hillary Rodham Clinton.

On a number of occasions, he had caught Hillary shading the truth. For instance, she once told reporters that Moynihan never held hearings on her health-care plan, when in fact he had held thirty such meetings.

Liz Moynihan shared her husband’s assessment of Hillary as a liar and dissembler. She and Hillary spent a lot of time to- gether while Hillary was trying to decide whether to run for Pat’s Senate seat. Liz told friends that she found Hillary to be one of the strangest people she had ever met. Liz had her own view about what made Hillary that way.

“I believe that she believes that God approves of her, and that therefore she can’t do anything wrong,” Liz told a friend. “I suppose it’s a midwestern Methodist view, the equivalent of Nixon and Quakerism.”
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The Moynihans were deeply disappointed in Bill Clinton.

166 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

They had expected great things from him, and felt that he had squandered an historic opportunity to make a difference. In their opinion, no one in America was better able than Clinton to speak directly to both blacks and whites on the issue of race. Yet, for all his special gifts, Clinton had let the opportunity pass.
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What’s more, the Moynihans thought that Bill Clinton should have resigned the moment the Lewinsky scandal became public, rather than put the country through the trauma of an im- peachment process. And they found Hillary’s defense of her hus- band during the Monica Lewinsky scandal to be nothing short of incomprehensible.
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Distortion

W

hen Hillary had thoroughly exhausted the subject of the Dalai Lama with Pat and Liz Moyni- han, she turned to the real reason for her visit. She

had been doing some polling in New York State, she said, and she was sorely disappointed by the lackluster response by the voters to her candidacy.

Liz Moynihan, who had managed all of her husband’s Senate campaigns, did not put much store in polls. In fact, she generally commissioned a poll only once every six years, during the mid- dle of Pat’s then-current term. The results of the poll were never used to influence how the senator voted, or what he said on any given issue. The results were used purely to make commercials to reach voters who, according to the poll, did not know their senator well.

Hillary found it hard to believe that the Moynihans did not poll as frequently as she and Bill Clinton did—which was as often as twice a week.

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“So,” Liz Moynihan said, “you’re interested in the secret of my success.”
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“Yes,” Hillary said.

“I have a good candidate,” Liz said. “People like him and trust him.”

“Well . . . ,” Hillary began.

“The reason you’re not doing well in New York,” said the straight-talking Liz, “is because Jews don’t like you.”

Hillary was taken aback. No one talked to the First Lady like that.

“Is it because of what they say I said about the Palestinians?” Hillary said.

“The thing that is wrong with
that
statement isn’t what ‘they say’ you said,” Liz said sternly. “It’s what we all
know
you said— that you favor a Palestinian state.”

“Well . . . ,” Hillary stammered.

“In any case,” Liz continued, “it’s not what you said about the Palestinians that has disaffected the Jews so much. It’s health care.”

“Health care?” Hillary said.

“Yes,” Liz continued, “health care. New York has a lot of teaching hospitals, and, according to your health-care plan, you want to close them down. New York has lots of Jewish doctors, and those doctors have lots and lots of wives and relatives and patients, and they don’t like what you want to do.”

“I’m interested in what you say about health care,” Hil- lary said, “because I had a bill that would protect the teaching hospitals—”

“Hillary!” Liz interrupted. “Please! That’s
Pat’s
bill.” “Oh,” said Hillary, “did he have one, too?”

Hillary wasn’t an elected official, and yet she was talking as though she had introduced her
own
bill. And she was looking Liz Moynihan in the eye and comparing herself to Pat Moynihan,

Distortion
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who had one of the most distinguished records in the history of the U.S. Senate.

At that point, Pat Moynihan had had enough.

“You have to excuse me,” he said to Hillary, getting up slowly from his chair, favoring his back. “I told them I would go to the Senate today.”

He left the room. But he did not go to the Senate. He went to an adjoining room and waited for Hillary to leave. He later said that he could not stand listening to Hillary avoid giving di- rect and honest answers.

Liz thought that Hillary would leave as soon as Pat did. But the First Lady stayed on to talk.

“She’s duplicitous,” Liz later told a friend. “She would say or do anything that would forward her ambitions. She can look you straight in the eye and lie, and sort of not know she’s lying. Ly- ing isn’t a sufficient word; it’s distortion—distorting the truth to fit the case.”

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“The Martians Have Landed”

“H

illary understood that it was very impor- tant to keep Pat on her side,” said one of Moyni- han’s chief political strategists. “Otherwise, Pat

could be fatal to her, if he came out and said he didn’t back her.”
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Mandy Grunwald did a masterful job preventing that from happening. She used all the goodwill she had stored up with Liz and Pat to persuade them to support Hillary. Mandy asked for one further favor: would Liz make Pindars Corners, the Moyni- hans’ farm in the rolling hills of New York’s Delaware County,

available for the kickoff of Hillary’s listening tour?

“Liz Moynihan had her doubts about the wisdom of allowing [Hillary] to use her home as the launch pad for a Senate cam- paign,” wrote Godfrey Hodgson. “She drew the line at some of the suggestions made by the First Lady’s overly enthusiastic han- dlers. They wanted a rope line to keep the media at a distance.

“ ‘No rope line,’ Liz said. . . . ‘You’ll have to find another farm!’ Liz went on, ‘I’ve never made a circus for Pat, and I’m

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not going to make a circus for [Hillary].’ Besides, she added shrewdly, you don’t want to dilute [Pat’s] image. ‘It’s worth a million votes upstate.’ ”
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Hillary’s handlers had no choice but to accept Liz’s condi- tions. Still, Liz was upset by all the pre-event hoopla, including the Secret Service and the additional police. In a moment of in- discretion, she confessed to Thomas Mills, the Delaware County sheriff, that she and her husband did not approve of Hillary’s candidacy.

“She’s not even from New York,” Mills quoted Liz as saying.
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In the end, however, Liz relented, and on a hot, sunny day in July, Pindars Corners became the bucolic setting for Hillary’s announcement of her listening tour. Gail Collins, the sardonic
New York Times
correspondent assigned to cover the occasion, described it as “the largest press corps ever assembled for a po- litical event held in a pasture.”
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Some three hundred journalists, some from as far away as Japan, descended on Pindars Corners. As one reporter noted, the journalists spilled more ink and used up more airtime on Hillary “than the presidential race, Kosovo, the stock market, the World Series and Ricky Martin combined.”
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Television camera crews lined the path that led to a white wooden schoolhouse with a potbellied stove, where Moynihan wrote his books. After a while, the door of the schoolhouse opened, and Hillary and Moynihan emerged. As the cameras rolled, the two politicians strolled down the hill to the micro- phones, which were set up in front of haystacks. Hillary, dressed in a navy pantsuit, had on her best Mona Lisa smile. Moyni- han, in an oxford button-down shirt and khakis, looked gaunt and frail, and not at all enthusiastic about being thrust into the center ring of a three-ring political circus.

172 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

“Maybe all of this ceaseless coverage will render the carpet- bagger issue irrelevant,” noted CNN’s astute chief political ana- lyst Jeff Greenfield. “She’ll have a year to run around New York. It will be like she’s been here forever. It already feels like she’s been here for five years.”
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The deep ambivalence that Moynihan felt toward Hillary became immediately apparent when he stepped in front of the microphones and plunged into a long, rambling discourse about how he had mowed the hay field a week early to accommodate all the satellite dish trucks. Then he caught himself.

“God, I almost forgot,” he said with a mischievous grin. “I’m here to say that I hope she will go all the way. I mean to go all the way with her. I think she’s going to win. I think it’s going to be wonderful for New York.”
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For Moynihan, apparently it was easier to say “she” than “Hillary.”

Hillary tried to use some humor as a way of deflecting tough questions from the press.

“I’m really excited about taking these long, beautiful summer days at a leisurely pace—you know, with a few hundred of you— to travel from place to place and meet people.”
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Inside the Moynihan farmhouse, Liz stood at a window, marveling over the dozens of TV satellite trucks and buses, the miles of cable, and the local farm kids hawking lemonade to the reporters and onlookers. The scene outside reminded her of the Steven Spielberg sci-fi movie
E.T.

After a moment, Liz turned to the man standing next to her, Moynihan’s chief of staff, Tony Bullock.

“Tony,” she said, “look at this! The Martians have landed!”
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The Juice

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n late June, Harold Ickes convened a top-secret meet- ing at New York’s Sheraton Hotel. The dozen or so people crowded into the conference room comprised a Who’s Who

of Friends of Bill and Hillary.

The core group included several battle-scarred veterans of past New York political wars, including Samara Rifkin, who was in charge of setting up Hillary’s Manhattan office. This New York nucleus was augmented by a number of out-of-staters, who were part of the Clintons’ far-flung fund-raising apparatus. Har- old Ickes had invited his favorite fund-raising sidekick, Laura Hartigan, who was a partner in the Los Angeles–based consult- ing firm of Hartigan & Associates.
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