American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power (11 page)

Hillary had no idea at the time that her husband was also in hot pursuit of Miss America 1981, Bonneville, Arkansas, native Elizabeth Ward Gracen. The former Miss Arkansas met Bill at a benefit in 1983, and he gave her a lift back to her apartment in his limousine. According to Gracen, several days later they had sex in her apartment—rough sex, during which he bit down on her lip and caused it to bleed. The painful encounter, so reminiscent of his attack on Juanita Broaddrick, would leave Gracen feeling frightened and confused. Before Hillary had a chance to discover that her husband had once again placed them both in political jeopardy, Gracen flew off to New York. Bill called her repeatedly, pleading to take up where they’d left off, but Gracen held firm.

That same year, Hillary would learn of yet another affair that had the potential of sinking her husband’s career—one that would be grist for Joe Klein’s bestselling roman à clef,
Primary Colors.
In late 1983, Bill was jogging along his regular route near the Governor’s Mansion when he encountered twenty-four-year-old Bobbie Ann Williams, one of the young black women working the stretch of Spring Street known as “Hookers’ Row.” She claimed that she had sex with him on thirteen separate occasions over the next several months, including one evening when she brought along two other prostitutes to fulfill Bill’s ménage à trois fantasies.

Williams told a tabloid that Bill “just laughed” when she told him she was pregnant with his baby. And so did Williams’s own family—until
she gave birth to Danny Williams in 1985. Williams’s son was white, and with each passing year his resemblance to Clinton grew stronger. After Bobbie Williams was imprisoned on prostitution and drug charges, Danny went to live with her sister, Lucille Bolton, in one of Little Rock’s poorest neighborhoods.

When the boy was three, a local activist and self-styled provocateur named Robert “Say” McIntosh began distributing pamphlets claiming Danny was Bill Clinton’s “love child.” Upset by the publicity and hoping to strike a deal with the Clintons, Bolton called the Governor’s Mansion and managed to get through to Hillary.

Bolton had expected Hillary to sound upset, but instead she was calm, businesslike. “Is it true,” Hillary asked almost matter-of-factly, “that he has this illegitimate child?” When Bolton told her the stories were true, Hillary put her in touch with a private security company that specialized in squelching such talk. “Don’t worry,” she told Bolton. “These people know how to stop rumors.”

But they didn’t. A few months later, Bolton returned with Danny. This time, Hillary refused to see her. At that point Bolton, furious that Hillary and Bill would let the governor’s son grow up in soul-crushing poverty, began a campaign of her own. Periodically, Bill or Hillary would look out into an audience and see someone holding a sign demanding that Clinton provide
JUST ONE DROP OF BLOOD
to prove paternity.

Bill simply shrugged off the rumors, but Hillary recognized them for what they were—a growing threat to his presidential prospects. During one meeting with party leaders in Chicago, Clinton angrily denied that there was any validity to the stories. So why not simply provide a blood sample and put the rumors to rest? someone asked. Bill shook his head and changed the subject. At no point, in fact, would Bill willingly provide the blood sample that supposedly would have established that he was not Danny’s biological father.

While they viewed Bobbie Williams and Lucille Bolton as little
more than a nuisance, the Clintons regarded McIntosh, who had a talent for making headlines, as more of a threat. In staff meetings, Hillary grew increasingly impatient with her husband’s unwillingness to do anything about the rumors. “This is dangerous, Bill,” she told him. “People are starting to believe this crap. We’ve got to do
something.
”

In exchange for no longer championing Danny Williams’s cause, McIntosh hinted that Hillary had promised him $25,000—an amount he would later sue to collect. He also claimed that Bill had promised to shorten the fifty-year prison sentence of his son Tommy McIntosh, who had been convicted of cocaine distribution. The other shoe would drop on January 20, 1993—the day Bill Clinton was sworn in as President. It was also the day that Arkansas Acting Governor Jerry Jewell signed pardon papers for Tommy McIntosh that had been prepared by Clinton before he left Little Rock for Washington. “If there was no deal, how did this happen?” Say McIntosh later asked. “How did my son get out of prison eighteen years before he was eligible for parole?”

The
Star
would announce that it had finally settled the issue in January 1999, when it compared a blood sample from Danny Williams with the profile of Bill Clinton’s DNA made public by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. The tabloid claimed the data proved Danny was not Bill’s son—a finding other DNA experts contested on the grounds that there was insufficient information in the Starr Report to make any valid comparison.

Even as tongues wagged about this and other gubernatorial peccadilloes, the mask of domestic equanimity never slipped. Hillary gazed at her husband adoringly when he spoke, and praised him for his vision and leadership whenever the opportunity presented itself. In return, Bill acknowledged her brilliant legal mind, her contributions toward health and educational reform in the state, and—most important to Arkansas voters—her parenting skills.

Privately, the picture was not so pretty. Hurt and humiliated,
Hillary frequently lashed out at her husband within earshot of the staffers. Once, after returning from one of his nocturnal expeditions in the early morning hours, Bill was surprised to find Hillary waiting for him in the kitchen. With several staff members standing just outside the door, the Clintons shrieked at each other to the accompaniment of shattering glass and slamming drawers. When it was over, staff members cautiously pushed open the door to reveal broken glass, smashed dishes, and a cupboard door ripped off its hinges.

To be sure, Hillary had continued her habit of hurling objects at her husband—yellow legal pads, files, briefing books, car keys, Styrofoam coffee cups—often in the presence of the governor’s aides. Pitched battles—always instigated by Hillary, said eyewitnesses—frequently occurred in the governor’s limousine. “They’d be screaming at each other, real blue-in-the-face stuff,” one of their drivers said, “but when the car pulled up to their destination it was all smiles and waving for the crowd.” Other times, they would sit in the car for as long as two hours without ever uttering a word.

Hillary made it abundantly clear to her husband that, while he pursued other women, her own needs were not being met. Trooper Roger Perry, a member of the governor’s security detail, saw Bill virtually every day for seven years. One Sunday afternoon, Perry was standing next to an intercom outside the kitchen when he clearly heard Hillary tell her husband, “Look, Bill, I need to be fucked more than twice a year.”

At one point, Bill’s cheating pushed Hillary over the edge. After learning that her husband had led the daughter of a major contributor to believe he would marry her, Hillary had what some described as a nervous breakdown. She began hyperventilating, and an ambulance rushed Hillary to the hospital for observation.

Understandably upset over Bill’s egregious philandering—and concerned about how it could derail their plans for conquering the White House—Hillary took out her frustrations on the governor’s
partners in crime: the troopers. She called them “shit-kickers,” “rednecks,” “hicks,” and “white trash,” and ridiculed them for being overweight. She also resented their constant presence and the loss of privacy that entailed. At times, a simple “Good morning, Mrs. Clinton” could provoke an attack. “Fuck off!” she would bark. “It’s enough that I have to see you shit-kickers every day. I’m not going to
talk
to you, too. Just do your goddamn job and keep your mouth shut.” She went so far as to instruct Trooper Patterson not to utter a word when they went out in public. “You sound,” she explained contemptuously, “like a hick.”

Hillary felt much the same way about Arkansans in general, even though she did a masterful job of concealing her contempt from the general public. L. D. Brown remembered driving Hillary to “the state fair, and there she was chatting up the guys in their bib overalls and the ladies in their gingham dresses—good, decent people, you know?—and they were just thrilled out of this world to meet her. Then Hillary would get in the car and say, ‘My God, did you
see
that guy? He was like something out of
Deliverance
! Get me the hell out of here.’ ”

Like members of her husband’s senior staff, the troopers were for the most part terrified of Hillary and took pains not to cross her. Only veteran officer Ralph Parker was willing to risk invoking her wrath. When Hillary received an award as Mother of the Year, Parker and other members of the Clinton entourage waited outside the Governor’s Conference Room where the ceremony was about to take place. “ ‘Mother of the Year’?” sneered Parker, who knew how little time Hillary had actually spent with her only child. “How about ‘
Motherfucker
of the Year?’ ” The rest of the staff, said one eyewitness, “looked as if they had been struck by lightning. They were scared shitless that Hillary might have heard. It was a truly great moment.”

Hillary had more than her husband’s constituents, her security
detail, and Bill’s womanizing to contend with. Several of her law partners were complaining that Hillary’s billings had slipped, that she wasn’t living up to her initial promise as a big earner for the firm. Worried that she might be ousted from Rose Law if she did not perform up to expectations, Hillary asked her Whitewater Development partners Jim and Susan McDougal to send some business her way—namely, she asked to be put on retainer as the counsel for the thrift they owned, Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan. In that capacity she would, among other things, represent the savings and loan in its dealing with the Clinton-appointed state securities commissioner. It would be years before Hillary’s billing records, which mysteriously disappeared as federal regulators were closing in, just as mysteriously materialized in her White House office—affirming that she hid her involvement from the FDIC and other agencies.

What Hillary may or may not have known was that the McDougals engineered a series of fraudulent real estate deals to siphon off $17 million for themselves and a few select friends. Madison Guaranty finally collapsed in 1989, triggering the investigation that would ultimately lead to the McDougals’ conviction on charges of mail fraud and conspiracy.

For the first time, Hillary came under heavy attack for these and other conflicts of interest during the 1986 election campaign. There were also rumblings that former Governor Frank White, who had again been chosen by the Republicans to unseat the Clintons, would for the first time make an issue of Bill’s philandering.

Now that Chelsea was six, Hillary worried that she might be traumatized by the things that were being said about her parents. Chelsea had always been, according to family friend Carol Staley, a “precocious child—perfect manners, with a vocabulary far beyond her years. Her parents were away a lot, so when they were around she was eager to please them.”

Hillary had always been able to control what Chelsea saw or heard about her father. Now, just as what promised to be a particularly nasty campaign began to heat up, Hillary thought it was time to begin Chelsea’s political indoctrination.

Over dinner one evening, Hillary announced that if Daddy lost the coming election, the family would have to pick up and leave. If Daddy won, they could continue living in the only home Chelsea had ever known. Chelsea had to be prepared for the fact that Daddy had “enemies” and that they would say “terrible things” about him. “They might even lie,” Hillary told her daughter, “just so people will vote for them instead of Daddy.”

Hillary suggested they play a game in which Chelsea played her father on the campaign stump. “My name is Bill Clinton,” she said proudly. “I’ve done a good job and I’ve helped a lot of people. Please vote for me.”

Chelsea was unprepared for what happened next. While the little girl waited for her parents to tell her she had done a wonderful job stating her father’s case, Daddy glared at her. “Well, Bill Clinton, I think you’ve done a lousy job,” he barked. “You’ve raised taxes and you haven’t helped people at all. Why, you are a very mean man, and I am NOT voting for the likes of
you.
”

Chelsea burst into tears, but Hillary’s “role-playing” continued. Over the next few weeks, both parents fired off questions and pelted her with insults until she was inured to anything negative that might be said about Mommy and Daddy.

These dinnertime drills “helped Chelsea to experience, in the privacy of our own home, the feelings of any person who sees someone she loves being personally attacked,” Hillary explained. What was important, she went on, is that Chelsea achieved a “mastery over her emotions” that—in theory, at least—made her impervious to attack.

For years, Hillary spoke of these grueling indoctrination sessions with pride—until she realized that some people regarded
them as a form of psychological child abuse. In her memoirs, Hillary would dispense with the subject in two brief sentences.

Hillary also drummed it into Chelsea’s head that Republicans—Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush in particular—were mostly “rich people who just don’t care” about the problems of average Americans. On a trip to Washington during the Reagan administration, Chelsea asked her mother if they could take a tour of the White House. Absolutely not, Hillary replied. “We’ll have to wait until someone decent lives there.”

As a practical matter, both Hillary and Bill were far too busy to spend very much time with their daughter. In 1987 Hillary, more determined than ever to maintain the alliances she had forged over the years with a wide range of “progressive” groups, took over as chairman of the Manhattan-based New World Foundation. During the two years Hillary headed up New World, the number of left-wing organizations supported by the foundation jumped dramatically. Hillary personally signed off on generous grants to such sterling organizations as the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), which financed El Salvador’s Communist guerrillas, and the Christic Institute, a radical fringe group that advocated “legal terrorism” against retired military and intelligence officials. Perhaps most alarming was the New World Foundation’s contribution of $15,000 to Grassroots International, which then channeled the money to two groups affiliated with an organization that Hillary still apparently viewed favorably: the PLO.