The Truth About Hillary (21 page)

A tall, strikingly attractive blonde, Laura Hartigan had earned a controversial reputation as the finance director of the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign. She and her then boss, Terry McAuliffe, who would later become head of the Democratic Na- tional Committee (DNC), were questioned after the election by federal prosecutors and Senate investigators about their suspected

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174 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

role in an unlawful fund-raising scheme. It was alleged that McAuliffe and Hartigan had arranged to funnel illegal contribu- tions to Teamsters president Ron Carey’s reelection campaign in exchange for more than $1 million in Teamsters contributions to state and local Democratic Party coffers.
2

According to the
Washington Post,
a memo laying out this money-laundering plan was “sent under the name of Richard Sullivan, who was the DNC’s finance director [in 1996]. . . . But the memo was actually written by Laura Hartigan. . . .”
3

“I made the call as a favor to Laura Hartigan, who for rea- sons not clear to me was intent on trying to help [the Teamsters’ Ron Carey],” Sullivan admitted. “When [a subordinate] came back and said it was not legal . . . I dropped it.”
4

Although Laura Hartigan was never formally charged with any wrongdoing, she did not dispute the existence of an incrimi- nating memo sent out by her campaign office listing specific states where the Teamsters should direct funds.
5
Nor, for that matter, did anyone ever doubt that Laura Hartigan’s longtime mentor, Harold Ickes—who had made his mark as a lawyer for some unsavory labor unions—was up to his eyeballs in question- able fund-raising practices during the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign.

These were the dubious credentials of Hillary’s top fund- raisers.

Though the Senate election was still nearly a year and a half away—and Hillary had yet to issue a formal declaration of her intent to run—Ickes and company had already signed up Gabri- elle Fialkoff, a former fund-raiser for Pat Moynihan and New York City Council speaker Peter Vallone, to aid in the money chase. They had also drafted a month-by-month campaign bud- get, and were now ready to turn their attention to the crucial matter of creating a campaign war chest.
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“It was clear from the way Harold ran the meeting—and the fact that he brought along Laura Hartigan—that he was going to be in total charge of Hillary’s Senate campaign,” said a New York–based activist who attended the secret meeting. “I found it strange that Hillary, who was going to face the sensitive carpetbagger issue, would choose Harold, who now made his headquarters in Washington, D.C., not in New York, and was seriously contaminated by his alleged connections to so many fi- nancial scandals.

“Let’s face it,” this person continued, “Harold might be a brilliant political strategist, but he’s not a good guy. And he hated Bill Clinton for having fired him. True, Hillary had con- spired with Bill behind the scenes to fire Harold, but she pre- tended otherwise, and was able to good-cop Harold back into her camp for the Senate race. That this seriously compromised guy was her guru said an awful lot about the character of Hillary Clinton.”
7

After everyone had a chance to get reacquainted and settle down, Ickes handed out a sheaf of papers labeled “National Fundraising Strategy Plan Working Document/Confidential— Not for Distribution.” The room fell silent, except for the rustle of paper.

A quick scan of the document revealed two major surprises. First, the plan set a staggering goal of $25 million in direct con- tributions, or so-called “hard money,” to the candidate. This was an unprecedented amount for a Senate race. Second—and per- haps even more striking—the plan anticipated that more than two-thirds of the money would come from
outside
New York.

As far as Ickes was concerned, this was not going to be a
local
race. From the get-go, it would be treated as a
national
effort. The atmosphere in the room crackled with excitement. Ickes seemed intent on turning Hillary’s Senate campaign into a dry

176 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

run for the White House. He had assembled the members of this group to be in on the ground floor of that bold and daring enterprise.
8

“Okay,” Ickes announced, “let’s take a closer look at the plan.”

During the meeting, Ickes got into a nasty argument with Susan Thomases, his old girlfriend. For a time back in the 1960s, Ickes and Thomases had been lovers; they had lived together and worked together on Senator Eugene McCarthy’s presiden- tial bid. Like Ickes, Thomases was a bred-in-the-bone leftist, a

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screamer of obscenities, and a fearless practitioner of the politics of intimidation.
10

“I have a very strong reality principle, and it’s one of the things that gets my mouth in trouble and gets me in trouble— from [the media’s] perspective, gets me in trouble,” Thomases once told a reporter. “I think, of course, it’s the source of my strength.”
11

Others begged to differ. In their view, Thomases’s strength derived from her special relationship with Hillary, which had been forged back in Arkansas during Bill Clinton’s unsuccessful 1974 campaign for Congress.

During that campaign, Hillary Clinton and Susan Thomases discovered they had a great deal in common. For one thing, they both viewed politics through the same lens: as war by other means. More important, although they were both married, they traced their political ideology to “gender feminism.”

Their point of view was summed up by Christina Hoff Som- mers in
Who Stole Feminism?
:

“The leaders and theorists of the women’s movement believe that our society is best described as a patriarchy, a ‘male hege- mony,’ a sex/gender system in which the dominant
gender
works to keep women cowering and submissive. The feminists who hold this divisive view of our social and political reality believe we are in a gender war, and they are eager to disseminate stories of atrocity that are designed to alert women to their plight. The ‘gender feminists’ (as I shall call them) believe that all our insti- tutions, from the state to the family to the grade schools, per- petuate male dominance. . . .”
12

Women like Hillary and Susan Thomases believed that women had to break away from their dependence on powerful men and create an alternative to the “brutal patriarchal system.”
13
They did not see any contradiction between their married status

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and their political philosophy. They could identify with the ideals of gender feminism and political lesbianism without sub- scribing to its sexual component. Indeed, in the world of na- tional politics, they became the preeminent practitioners of that philosophy.

Over the years, Thomases became Hillary’s best friend, alter ego, and chief enforcer. She looked the part. With her frizzy salt-and-pepper hair, frumpy clothes, down-at-the-heel shoes, and expletive-laden vocabulary, Thomases was just the kind of tough, strong-willed, ideologically passionate woman Hillary had always admired. And her admiration was only heightened by the way in which Thomases coped with her medical condition, multiple sclerosis, a progressive and incurable disease.

“They had begun on the same track,” noted one of Hillary’s biographers. “Both were the only daughters in families of boys, both had strong mothers. Hillary went to Wellesley and Yale, and Thomases attended Connecticut College and Columbia University Law School. But by the 1980s, Thomases was a high- powered New York lawyer making a half million dollars a year, while Hillary’s earning power was substantially eroded by her political work for Bill.

“Thomases lived on Park Avenue, had a summer house in Newport, Rhode Island, and was on a first-name basis with the top political figures in New York. She was living in a sophisti- cated world that Hillary, tied down in Little Rock, could engage with only at a distance. Thomases was anything but the tradi- tional political wife: she kept her own name after marrying a carpenter-turned-artist, William Bettridge, who stayed home and took on many of the child-care responsibilities.”
14

During the 1992 presidential campaign, Hillary appointed Thomases as Bill Clinton’s chief scheduler, a role that put her in charge of access to the candidate. Since then, Thomases had be- come what one observer called “the Clinton administration’s

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King Kong Kibitzer—whose advice on everything from person- nel to politics resounds like a mighty roar through the halls of the West Wing.”
15

Nothing seemed to slow Susan Thomases down—not even her decades-long struggle against multiple sclerosis.

“It’s not that she has the juice,” said one White House operative. “She
is
the juice. She’s the juicer, too. The Braun automatic.”
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H A P T E R T H I R T Y - O N E
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Hillary’s Problem

F

rom the beginning of the campaign, Harold Ickes and Susan Thomases wrestled with a perplexing prob- lem. A must-win demographic group—observant Jews—

did not like their candidate. In fact, they despised her.

Normally, a Democratic candidate running a statewide race in New York needed 70 to 75 percent of the Jewish vote to offset the traditional Republican turnout in the suburbs and upstate. But Hillary’s likely Republican opponent, Mayor Rudolph Giu- liani, was immensely popular with observant Jews. He had re- duced crime in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods and made New York City a cleaner, safer, more civilized place in which to live and earn a living.

Giuliani won the hearts and minds of many Jews by heap- ing ridicule and contempt on one of their archenemies: Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian Liberation Organization leader. In a wildly popular move, the feisty mayor barred the terrorist leader from city-sponsored events marking the United Nation’s fiftieth an- niversary, including a concert at Lincoln Center.
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Hillar y’ s Problem
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Even more alarming in the eyes of Ickes and Thomases was the negative reaction of many college-educated women—and not just Republican women—to Hillary’s candidacy. Indeed, her biggest detractors were found among women who resembled Hillary the most—white, professional, upper-middle-class Baby Boomers.

Ellen Chesler, the feminist author of
Woman of Valor
, a biog- raphy of birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger, thought she had found an explanation for Hillary’s problem.

“Many women who hadn’t had it both ways, who gave up ei- ther career or family, were confused or resentful of the fact that Hillary did have it both ways,” Chesler said. “I think as First Lady maybe she didn’t fully understand that.”
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As Hillary began to gain some political traction, her “woman problem,” as it came to be known inside the campaign, continued to bedevil Ickes and Thomases. Finally, after months of dithering, they commissioned a series of focus groups made up of suburban women. Shira Nayman, a psychologist who worked for Strategic Frameworking, a Seattle-based company that specialized in brand marketing strategy, was hired to run the focus groups.
3

When Ickes and Thomases viewed the tapes from these focus groups, they became deeply alarmed. Asked what they thought of Hillary Clinton, the suburban women said:

“Very controlling.”

“Self-serving. She’s very cunning, independent.” “She’s cold.”

“I remember her being on the
Today
show and her saying that they were framing them, and that really sticks in my head because she thought that everyone was out to get them . . . and when something happens they have to blame it on some- body else instead of looking within.”