The Truth About Hillary (5 page)

*Charles La Bella, the head of the Justice Department’s campaign- finance task force, identified Ickes as the “Svengali” behind every as- pect of the fund-raising scandal.

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Should she stick with Kendall, whom she personally liked, or should she get somebody else? Hillary asked Ickes.

Dump Kendall and get Bob Bennett, Ickes replied without a moment’s hesitation.

Hillary asked Ickes to arrange a meeting for her with Bob Bennett, and to prep him in advance.

Harold Ickes and Robert Bennett had a lot in common. The short, heavyset Bennett was as pugnacious as the tall, skinny Ickes. (Bennett liked to boast that he was a former amateur boxer from the streets of Brooklyn.) And as lawyers, both Ben- nett and Ickes had made their names representing criminals.

A senior partner in the Washington office of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, Bennett was known as one of the best criminal defense lawyers in America. He charged his clients

$475 an hour for his services, and had already represented Ickes and TV producer Harry Thomason in their own tussles with the Whitewater special prosecutor. Like his younger brother, Wil- liam Bennett, the former secretary of education and drug czar, who was among Bill Clinton’s most vocal
Republican
critics, the
Democrat
Bob Bennett was expert at spinning the media.*

“This is an election year,” Ickes told Bennett when they met. “And this case is political. But Kendall is not giving us the kind of political help we need.”
8

*“Shortly after Jones filed her lawsuit,” wrote Jeffrey Toobin, “Ben- nett even invited a [writer for]
The New York Times Magazine
, Ruth Shalit, to his vacation home in Montana, took a business call there in private, then informed the journalist of the (unspecified) coup he had just engineered for a client. ‘That’s called getting intelligence. That’s knowing people. That’s getting the inside track,’ Bennett told Shalit. ‘That’s having inside your head a kind of wiring diagram of how Washington works.’ ”
7

30 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

Several days later, Bennett was ushered into a room in the West Wing, where he met Hillary for the first time.

They spent fifty-five minutes together. Bennett was taken aback by how charming and attractive Hillary was. During their conversation, Hillary asked many questions.

“What would you do? . . . How should we handle this? . . .”

Bennett told her, “You have to treat this as ninety percent political and ten percent legal. It’s not enough to wait to the end of the day, because you could lose the [off-year 1998] election and then everything would be all over.”

Shortly after his meeting with Hillary, Bennett got a call from Lloyd Cutler, the President’s in-house legal counsel. The two men had breakfast at the Four Seasons Hotel in the George- town section of the capital.

“We’d like you to come aboard and have a seat at the table, not merely for Paula Jones, but everything—Whitewater and all the other issues,” Cutler told Bennett.

“The next thing I know,” said Bennett, “I’m being escorted into a room with the President. And that’s how it went—from Ickes to Hillary to Cutler to the President—and I was hired.”

Based on his discussions with Paula Jones’s lawyers, Bennett was confident that Paula Jones would agree to a reasonable cash settlement and a watered-down apology from the President. His advice to the Clintons was simple and straightforward:
Pay Paula Jones to go away.
9

But Hillary vetoed the idea.

Her attitude puzzled Bennett. After all, she had to know that the names of many of her husband’s lovers, including that of Monica Lewinsky, would surface during his deposition. If Hillary had once harbored any illusions about her husband, surely she had wised up by now.

However, Bennett was only slightly acquainted with Hillary Clinton. He did not yet understand that, after years of covering

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up for her husband, Hillary was convinced that candor, honesty, and truthfulness only invited disaster.

Many of Hillary’s defenders had a different explanation for her behavior. They claimed that Hillary lived in a state of de- nial when it came to her husband’s affairs. They subscribed to what might be called the
she-didn’t-know-what-she-didn’t-want- to-know
theory of Hillary’s relationship with Bill Clinton.

“We know things at many different levels,” said a psycho- therapist who supported this theory of Hillary’s behavior. “If our marriage partner is unfaithful to us, we may find it so painful that we choose not to recognize it
consciously,
even though we know it
intuitively
. That seems to be how Hillary’s mind works. When she needs to blind herself to her husband’s infidelities, she creates a fantasy.”
10

Yet, a dispassionate examination of the Clintons’ marriage failed to support that theory. The fact was, Hillary had been
con- sciously
aware of Bill Clinton’s character flaws—and especially his sexual addiction—practically from the day she met him nearly thirty years before.

Prior to their marriage, Hillary dispatched her father and her younger brother Tony to Arkansas to keep an eye on her fu- ture husband, who, as she had heard, was fooling around with other women.

In his biography of Bill Clinton,
First in His Class
, author David Maraniss quotes Paul Fray, a ranking Clinton campaign aide in Arkansas, as saying, “Hillary had put the hammer on her daddy to go down there and make sure everything was hunky- dory. It was her little spying mission.”
11

Hillary didn’t rely solely on her daddy; she did some sleuthing on her own. After she and Bill were married, she “went through Bill Clinton’s desk on a search-and-destroy mission to tear up phone numbers she knew he collected during the day’s

32 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

campaigning,” wrote Barbara Olson. “Most self-respecting women would have left. Hillary chose to stay.”
12

Later, in the early 1980s, Hillary hired private detectives to identify the women her husband was sleeping with, and to in- timidate these women so they would not go public with their stories.
13

“Hillary learned about private investigators in her work [while at Yale Law School] on behalf of the Black Panthers and the Communist apologists Robert Treuhaft and Jessica Mit- ford,” wrote Barbara Olson. “Now Hillary was constantly check- ing up on Bill, not just to learn the extent of his betrayals, but to assess the danger he posed to their joint political career.”
14

As first lady of Arkansas, Hillary used the governor’s chief of staff, Betsey Wright, to fish him out of countless bedrooms all over the state. In 1988, when Clinton planned to run for his party’s presidential nomination, Hillary thought his woman problem could be “handled.” But Betsey Wright knew better, and made him withdraw from the race.

According to David Maraniss, Betsey Wright “said that he was having a serious affair with another woman, and was not even being discreet about it. Everyone knew, she said. She knew, the troopers knew,
Hillary knew
.”
15

In 1992, on the eve of the critical New Hampshire presiden- tial primary, it was Hillary who forced her husband’s handlers to face topic A: the issue of Bill Clinton’s philandering.

“The hired hands still felt queasy discussing the subject in his or her presence in any terms more specific than ‘character,’ ” reported
Newsweek
in its exhaustive postcampaign ticktock,
Quest for the Presidency 1992.
“They needn’t have worried; [Hil- lary’s] tone, when she raised [the topic], was clinical—the atti- tude not of a woman scorned but of an adviser addressing a matter of practical politics. . . .”
16

Upon her arrival in the White House in January 1993,

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Hillary put together a team of aides whose primary job was to keep an eye on her faithless husband. They reported back to the First Lady on any suspicious sexual activity by the President.

Given this well-documented history, it seemed absurd to argue that Hillary didn’t know about Bill’s affairs—or (what amounted to the same thing for a woman in her position) that she didn’t
want
to know.

“The wife who deludes herself about her husband is a cliché,” wrote political commentator Michael Kelly. “But Mrs. Clinton was not only a wife. She was a central figure in her husband’s campaigns and his gubernatorial administrations. She was in a position to know the truth about her husband, and she did know it; and she joined the likes of George Stephanopoulos, Paul Be- gala and James Carville in a cynical and immoral effort to hide the truth from voters and to savage those who told the truth.”
17

Of course, it was in Hillary’s interest to preserve the fiction that she didn’t know the truth about Bill’s philandering. She found many creative ways to circulate the idea that she and Bill were a normal, happily married couple. For instance, she would occasionally drop a tantalizing remark that all was sweetness and light in the presidential bedroom.

“Buddy,” she would say, referring to their dog, “jumped in bed with us this morning.”
18

Two weeks before the Paula Jones deposition, Hillary and the President flew to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands for a brief Christmas vacation. There, despite her negative feelings about her body, the First Lady donned a one-piece bathing suit and led the President onto the beach, where they began slow-dancing. Though they were guarded by the Secret Service, a lone French photographer was allowed to breach the security perimeter. The subsequent photograph of the half-naked First Lovebirds was printed in practically every newspaper in America.

34 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

But such transparent efforts at manipulating public opinion didn’t work. Instead, Hillary’s stubborn refusal to settle the Jones case had disastrous consequences.

“When Bill Clinton went into the deposition,” said David Schippers, chief counsel to the House Managers for the Im- peachment Trial of President Clinton, “he thought he could take care of questions about Kathleen Willey and all the other women. And he also felt that Monica was in the bag. He was smug, cocky, arrogant.”
19

The President wasn’t prepared to be put through the third degree.

“Have you ever given any gifts to Monica Lewinsky?” one of Paula Jones’s attorneys asked him.

“I don’t recall,” the President replied in a tentative tone of voice, sensing that his opponents might possess some physical evidence that could be used against him. “Do you know what they were?”

“A hat pin?” the attorney said.

“I don’t . . . I don’t remember,” the President stuttered. “But I certainly . . . I could have.”

“A book about Walt Whitman?”

“I give . . . let me just say, I give people a lot of gifts,” the President said, “and when people are around I give a lot of things I have at the White House away, so I could have given her a gift, but I don’t remember a specific gift.”

“Did you have an extramarital sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky?” the attorney asked.

“No,” the President lied. “. . . I have never had sexual rela- tions with Monica Lewinsky. I’ve never had an affair with her.”

The deposition dragged on for several hours, during which time the President denied having even met Paula Corbin Jones, or having had sexual relations with her or the other “Jane Does.”

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But he did drop one unexpected bombshell.

“Did you ever have sexual relations with Gennifer Flowers?” the attorneys asked him.

“Yes,” Bill Clinton replied. “On how many occasions?” “Once,” he said.

“After the deposition was over,” wrote Michael Isikoff of
Newsweek
, “the Jones lawyers were ebullient. They felt they had scored some significant points and laid the groundwork for some useful trial testimony. David Pyke [one of the lawyers] ac- tually thought Clinton’s concession on Flowers was the biggest coup. Contrasted with his 1992 denials of a sexual relationship between him and Flowers, he thought it conclusively estab- lished Clinton as a liar on matters relating to his relations with women.”
20

As soon as the President emerged from the deposition, his media-savvy attorney Bob Bennett began putting a positive spin on the event. Everything had gone just as they had planned, Bennett told the waiting reporters.

Privately, however, Bennett was puzzled by the flurry of questions about Monica Lewinsky. He began to wonder if his client had told him the whole truth about his relationship with the White House intern.

Matt Drudge, for one, wasn’t buying Bill Clinton’s story.

At 2:32 a.m. Sunday morning, January 18, Drudge posted a “World Exclusive” item on his Web site. He revealed that the editors at
Newsweek
magazine, after considerable internal debate, had decided to withhold a story from their upcoming issue about the President’s affair with a twenty-one-year-old intern. Drudge correctly described the story as “destined to shake official Wash- ington to its foundation.”
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