The Truth About Hillary (24 page)

Lieberman ticket. He faulted Hillary for siphoning off millions of dollars in contributions from outside New York State, which, he felt, should have gone to his campaign.

The “Phenom”
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book deal. And greed was a motivating factor behind two other ill-considered moves by Hillary—to register like a bride for gifts for her newly acquired homes in Chappaqua, New York, and Washington, D.C., and to strip the White House of hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of furniture.

A twenty-six-foot-long moving van was backed up to the White House and loaded with valuable furnishings—two sofas, an iron-and-glass coffee table, an ottoman, a painted TV ar- moire, a custom wood gaming table, and a wicker center table with a wood top. Much of the furniture had been acquired by Hillary’s interior decorator, Kaki Hockersmith, for the 1993 re- decoration project, and therefore legally belonged to the gov- ernment, not the Clintons. When the media blew the whistle on the Clintons, they reluctantly agreed to return some of the items to the White House.
5

No sooner had Hillary finished taking the oath and signed her name in the Senate register than she was approached by an unlikely pair—Senate Republican leader Trent Lott of Missis- sippi, who had helped lead the effort to impeach her husband, and Strom Thurmond, the randy, ninety-eight-year-old south- ern segregationist, who was the Senate’s senior member.

“Can I hug you?” Thurmond asked.

Before Hillary could reply, Thurmond had enveloped her in a bear hug, and was slobbering nonagenarian kisses on her cheek.
6
Other senators followed suit, and soon Hillary was the center of a crowd of lawmakers, many of them Republicans, thumping her on the back, pumping her hand, and kissing her.

“Yes,” wrote Alison Mitchell in the
New York Times
, “there have been Senate celebrities before: Bill Bradley, the Rhodes scholar who played for the Knicks; John Glenn, the modest as- tronaut. But Mrs. Clinton is a phenom the likes of which the staid Senate has rarely if ever seen. . . .”
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204 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

Along with the President, Chelsea, Dorothy Rodham, and Don Jones, Hillary trooped over to the Old Senate Chamber for a reenactment of the swearing-in ceremony. This was a hallowed tradition, permitting the recently elected and reelected senators to pose for photos that were not allowed in the Senate chamber. As a junior senator ranked ninety-seventh out of one hun- dred in seniority, Hillary would normally have had to wait her turn. But she was the only senator who had a full-time Secret Service escort, and as a result, she was whisked to the head of the line for the photo op with Chelsea, who held a Bible as the flash-

bulbs lit up the plush, velvet-draped chamber.

That afternoon, there was a reception for Hillary in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, followed by a party at Washing- ton’s Mayflower Hotel, which was sponsored by none other than Walter Kaye, the New York insurance mogul who had used his influence to get Monica Lewinsky an intern’s job at the White House.

“In a way, it felt like the last of the ’90s,” wrote a journalist who was present at the Mayflower shindig. “There were really smart young women, interesting New Yorkers, loud liberals, fashionable eyewear, gay guys, Harry Connick songs piped in— you know, that jazzy, idealistic hyperdiversity-land where we all used to live—and lots of juicy salmon on serving trays. . . . Wal- ter Kaye . . . took the podium and pronounced the crowd to be ‘bigger than my bar mitzvah.’ ”
8

“It was a wonderful round of parties,” recalled Don Jones. “My old student Rick Ricketts [Hillary’s grammar school play- mate] was there as well. He told me he was staying in the Lincoln Bedroom. . . .

“I said, ‘What’s the deal with that?’ or something to that ef- fect,” Don Jones continued, unable to disguise his feelings of jealousy. “The remark was apparently overheard by one of Hillary’s staffers, because a few minutes later I was told I’d be

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staying in the Queen’s Bedroom, which while not as famous as the Lincoln, is actually quite a bit better.”
9

Commenting on Hillary’s first day as a senator, another Clinton insider said: “Hillary’s mother, Dorothy, had one of the pithiest takes on what Hillary had been through. She com- mented, ‘You can never trust a man with an erection.’

“As to the question of whether Bill will continue to have sexual relations—or whatever he wants to call them—with an- other woman, I believe that if it happened again and became public, Hillary would leave him.

“Look, let’s not kid ourselves. Hillary is aware that some of her base supporters were very disappointed that she chose to stay with Bill. And she doesn’t want to be seen as a doormat. That would be devastating to her image.”
10

Given Hillary’s White House ambitions, that seemed like a reasonable conclusion. But then, one had to ask: when had Hillary ever acted reasonably when it came to Bill Clinton?

No one could predict how the relationship between
Senator
Clinton and soon-to-be
ex-president
Clinton would differ, if at all, from their previous relationship. As a result, the gossip re- garding their arrangements started all over again.

Would Bill and Hill live mostly together or mostly apart?

Would Bill’s new freedom encourage him to indulge his sexual appetites more than before?

Would Hillary rely on private detectives—instead of Evelyn Lieber- man—to keep an eye on Bill?

Could Hillary leave Bill and still become president?

C
H A P T E R T H I R T Y - S I X
‌

“The Perfect Student”

“H

illary walks across the room—and the cam- eras go
click, click, click
,” Representative Anthony Weiner, a Brooklyn Democrat, told a reporter

.

“Hillary pours herself coffee—
click, click, click
. She sits down again—
click, click, click
. It was a sign of what she was up against, and she knew it. There were a lot of people who wanted to say she was in too much of a hurry. . . .”
1

These people predicted that Hillary would repeat the bull- headed blunders in the Senate that she had made in the White House. Even her supporters were worried; they wondered if she could adjust to the courteous, collegial atmosphere of the Sen- ate, which was run like a men’s club.

Hillary, they said, using the jargon of politics, did not have “soft hands.”

What these skeptics failed to take into account, however, was that Hillary had been reared in a household where her parents and brothers treated her like one of the boys. The men’s club at- mosphere of the Senate would not feel unfamiliar to a woman

206

“The Perfect Student”
207

who had been playing with males—and beating them at their own game—all her life.

Nor did Hillary’s friends and enemies understand that she had been tested and tempered by the hardships of the White House. They overlooked the fact that the Monica Lewinsky scandal and Bill Clinton’s impeachment in the House of Repre- sentatives had taught Hillary a valuable lesson: in order to sur- vive in public life, she had to build political coalitions.

Contrary to expectations, therefore, Hillary had no intention of charging into the Senate as if she owned the place. She knew she had to dispel the notion that, as a former First Lady, she would try to dominate the Senate. She also knew that her fellow senators were not going to give her a long honeymoon.

She prepared for her new role in her usual methodical manner. To begin with, she asked a number of White House aides to conduct tutorials for her on the customs and practices of the Senate.

“During the White House years, West Wing staffers who worked for her husband were known by her staff as the ‘White Boys,’ and she treated them with cool distance,” wrote John F. Harris of the
Washington Post
. “Starting last winter, she called those same West Wingers, the ones with knowledge of the Sen- ate, into the White House residence for skull sessions.”
2

Her principal tutor was White House chief of staff John Podesta, an old hand on Capitol Hill, where he had worked as counselor to Senator Thomas Daschle, the Democratic leader. Podesta’s tutorials were supplemented by his chief of congres- sional relations, Pat Griffin, who had learned the Senate ropes as an aide to Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, widely considered to be the greatest living student of Senate procedures and protocol. With the assistance of Podesta and Griffin (and with some kibitzing from the sidelines from her politically savvy husband),

208 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

Hillary devised a plan for her first couple of years in the Senate. In her personal conduct, she decided to model herself after Lyndon Baines Johnson, whose rapid ascent in the Senate was smoothed by his deference to such powerful mentors as Geor- gia’s Richard Russell.

In her legislative role, Hillary modeled herself after Massa- chusetts’s Edward Kennedy. Despite his outmoded liberalism, which had pushed him to the margins of American politics, Kennedy was respected by his colleagues for the work of his top- flight staff.

To the surprise of many, Hillary turned out to be more than equal to the task of winning friends on both sides of the aisle. Like a major-league pitcher, she kept a mental playbook on the strengths and weaknesses of each of her ninety-nine Senate colleagues, and she pitched each of them in a unique way.

Republicans Orrin Hatch, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and Don Nickles all fell under Hillary’s spell during prayer breakfasts conducted by the Senate chaplain, Dr. Lloyd Ogilvie, an evan- gelical Presbyterian minister.
3
But her biggest catch was a Demo- crat, Senator Robert Byrd, who was no friend of Bill Clinton, and had once referred to the President’s actions as “malodorous.”
4

“After a decisive vote,” wrote Gail Sheehy, “[Hillary] makes a beeline for Robert Byrd, the white-domed icon of the Senate, who inevitably will be standing with one arm tucked into his silk vest and the other planted on his desk, Daniel Webster–style. The former First Lady will bow her head and virtually genuflect before him.”
5

“I had seen her a few times through a glass darkly, as the Scripture says,” Byrd told a reporter. “I would say she did not necessarily start out as one of my favorites, if I might use that term. But she is one of my favorites now, because I like her ap-

“The Perfect Student”
209

proach. I like her sincerity. I like her convictions . . . I think she has been the perfect student.”
6

Senators liked working with Hillary’s staff, which did not big-foot around.
7
Her top aide was Chief of Staff Tamera Luz- zatto, a savvy Senate insider who had fifteen years of experience working for Senator Jay Rockefeller as his legislative director and chief of staff. The new senator earned kudos from all quar- ters, even from those conservative Republicans, like South Caro- lina’s Lindsey Graham, who had been in the forefront of the House impeachment of her husband, and who eventually re- placed the deceased Strom Thurmond in the Senate.

“People will attribute motives to her on anything she does,” Graham said. “I feel sympathetic to her situation as a junior member with such a high-profile status. It’s hard because peo- ple get jealous. She has handled this better than I think anyone expected.”
8

“Hillary has demonstrated a stunning flair for bipartisan- ship,” wrote the political reporter Jennifer Senior in
New York
magazine. “In just four years, she’s managed to co-sponsor a bill with nearly every legislator who, at one time or another, professed to hate her guts.

“With Tom DeLay . . . she collaborated on an initiative con- cerning foster children. With Don Nickles, the former Okla- homa senator who breezily speculated in 1996 that Hillary would be indicted, she worked on a bill to extend jobless benefits. With Mississippi senator Trent Lott, who wondered aloud whether lightning might strike her before she arrived at the Senate, she worked on legislation to help low-income pregnant women. A Reuters story from April 2003 noted she’d already sponsored bills with more than 36 Republican senators.”
9

Some senators professed to detect the emergence of a kinder, gentler Hillary. They noted that she never criticized President

210 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

George W. Bush. She even gushed over the inspiring leadership of her New York archenemy, former mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

During her first year in the Senate, no one saw the other side of Hillary Clinton’s face, which she kept carefully hidden behind a mask of collegiality. That other face belonged to the combative pugilist from the suburban streets of Park Ridge, Illinois.

“Giuliani will screw you
every time!
” she hissed in private, even as she was lauding the ex-mayor in public.
10

Asked by a reporter how she thought the American people would react to the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon now that they were on “the receiving end of a murder- ous anger,”
11
Hillary let her façade slip, and gave vent to all her self-pity and narcissism.

“Oh, I am well aware that it is out there,” she said. “One of the most difficult experiences that I personally had in the White House was during the health-care debate, being the object of ex- traordinary rage. I remember being in Seattle. I was there to make a speech about health care. This was probably August of ’94. Radio talk-show hosts had urged their listeners to come out and yell and scream and carry on and prevent people from hearing me speak. There were threats that were coming in, and certain people didn’t want me to speak, and they started taking weapons off people, and arresting people. I’ve had firsthand looks at this unreasoning anger and hatred that is focused on an individual you don’t know, a cause that you despised—whatever motivates people.”
12