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*3Today Hillary and Oscar Dowdy Jr. do not speak to each other, ostensibly because Oscar—a real estate speculator, like his grandfather Max—failed to provide adequate financial assistance to a brother with health problems.
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*4Boxer also sought advice from Bill Clinton, then president, who advised her to stay married and to try to work things out, especially since she and Tony had an infant son.
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*5Over the years the firm went under a variety of names, formally becoming the Rose Law Firm in 1980.
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*6The condition occurs when endometrial tissue, the tissue that lines the uterus and is shed during menstruation, grows outside of the uterus—on the ovaries, fallopian tubes, ligaments supporting the uterus, and other areas in the pelvic cavity.
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*7Part of Wright’s workload was assumed by Bill’s scheduler, Nancy Hernreich, who, in the White House, became his administrative chief of operations with an office just outside the Oval Office. In the second year of Bill’s presidency, when Wright, back in Arkansas, began hearing from the Clinton inner circle that there were “troubles” developing again with Bill, she called Nancy:
“I said, ‘Nancy, there are just too many rumors coming to me about what’s going on in the Oval Office. I trust you’re not letting him in there by himself with hardly anybody, much less some female, as all the rumors are.’ And she said, ‘We promised him that he would never live under an iron thumb like yours again.’”
Senior members of Bill’s White House staff confirmed that Nancy Hernreich, and others working around her, were indeed operating under just such an understanding; now that Wright no longer sat outside Bill’s door, it was felt that the inhibiting and suffocating aura that had come to permeate the governor’s office would not be reestablished in the White House.
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*8Lurleen Wallace, wife of George, ran for and won the governorship of Alabama in 1966 when her husband was prevented by state law from serving consecutive terms. She and her husband acknowledged from the outset that he would continue to make the administrative policies and decisions.
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*9“He beckoned the producer to him at one point as he paced and asked as a personal favor that he not be on camera if he happened to be mopping sweat from his face,” Theodore H. White had written of Richard Nixon in the original The Making of the President. The “producer” of the Kennedy-Nixon debates was Don Hewitt.
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*10Perhaps better than any other journalist, Klein managed to capture—in fiction—the appetites and contradictions of the Clintonian character, male and female, in his prescient novel Primary Colors, a thinly veiled account of the Clinton ascendancy, ending on election day 1992.
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*11Hillary’s primacy was a different sort than that of Edith Wilson, second wife of Woodrow Wilson, who became known as the “Secret President” for the role she played when her husband suffered a prolonged and disabling illness.
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*12Horton, a convicted felon serving a life sentence in Massachusetts for murder, was released as part of a weekend furlough program supported by Governor Michael Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee. On furlough, Horton, a black man, raped and robbed a white woman, and the Bush campaign effectively used the incident in its ads against Dukakis, a classic example of negative campaigning (with clear racist overtones).
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*13After the auditor declared $18,000 of petty cash unaccounted for, Dale came up with $2,800 that he said he found in a drawer (he had also retrieved $2,500 from a personal account the same day). Charged with embezzlement, he attempted to fashion a plea bargain for himself by agreeing to admit to “inadvertent” wrongdoing and by giving $69,000 back to the government. After the prosecutor refused his offer, he was acquitted of embezzlement at trial. The legal verdict, however, did not address the indisputable fact of reckless management of the Travel Office and of the hundreds of thousands of dollars that regularly passed through it.
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*14In Arkansas, the local newspapers had never addressed intimate questions about their marriage until Bill had declared for the presidency in 1992. In fact, their quarrels there were louder and more frequent than in Washington, according to aides. As Hillary told Bill’s old friend Carolyn Staley one afternoon during his governorship, she enjoyed some of the back-and-forth, particularly if the arguments had an intellectual component. “I wonder how history is going to note our marriage,” Staley quoted her as saying. Hillary said she could never have married someone as deferential and quiet as Staley’s own husband.
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*15Jeff Gerth’s original Whitewater story in the New York Times, on March 8, 1992, had raised the obvious conflict of interest questions, including whether the governor should have been a partner in a land deal with someone whose business was regulated by the state—though in fact McDougal had not been in the S&L business when the Whitewater partnership was formed—and whether it was proper for Hillary to have been paid legal fees for the work she did for Madison Guaranty. The story also said that the Clintons had “improperly” deducted about $5,000 on their personal tax returns in 1984 and 1985 “for interest paid on a portion of at least $30,000 in bank loan payments” that had actually been paid from a business account in the name of their Whitewater partnership with the McDougals. It was the kind of accounting error often made innocently, and sometimes not. The deductions saved the Clintons perhaps $1,000 in taxes, but since the error had occurred more than three years before the story ran, “Internal Revenue Service regulations [did] not require the Clintons to pay.”
Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign had been able to challenge the perception that Bill and Hillary had done something wrong in relation to their Whitewater investment by releasing an independent audit that showed they had ultimately lost about $69,000 on the deal.
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†16McDougal suffered from manic depression.
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*17Hillary, contrary to the impression created in Living History that Kendall’s call was the first time she’d heard about the Spectator story, already knew through Betsey Wright that the troopers were talking to reporters.
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*18Brock’s career as an ideological scourge had taken off during Spectator coverage of the Senate confirmation hearings on the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Brock had then written a book about Thomas’s accuser, The Real Anita Hill, in 1993, and became something of a hero in right-wing circles for both his investigative skill and nastiness of phrase. (He’d dismissed Hill as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.”) In a New York Times column in 1994, Frank Rich criticized Brock as a “smear artist” whose “motives are at least as twisted as his facts.”
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*19In the 1992 presidential campaign, President George Bush had made suggestions that Clinton had acted unpatriotically during his Russian trip, and suggested he should disclose to voters “how many demonstrations he led against his own country from a foreign soil.” Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford during the time he’d made the trip, and no evidence has ever developed that he led any demonstrations abroad or did anything of an anti-American nature during his Soviet visit.
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*20She would use it effectively, too, in her presidential campaign.
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*21Dr. Jack Kevorkian was a leading proponent of legalizing assisted suicide.
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*22 They tended to do the work at home, on their own time. By now Hillary feared that if it became known she was using her aides for a private project, she would be publicly savaged.
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*23 The witness was an old friend who had come to Little Rock for the exp
ected announcement of Bill’s candidacy, said Wright. She would not further identify the individual.
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*24 Like many people in Washington, Wright sometimes mixed up Bob Bennett with his brother Bill, the former Reagan administration secretary of education and conservative ethical philosopher who was also a secret gambler (with blackjack losses in the millions in surreptitious trips to Las Vegas), and author of a book called The Book of Virtues.
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*25 Chertoff, later President George W. Bush’s secretary of homeland security, had been a prosecutor and trial lawyer in New Jersey before becoming D’Amato’s alter ego and committee counsel. His objective in the hearing was to build a circumstantial case against Hillary, in particular, the people around her, and by extension the president, and to show “how they withheld information and documents or claimed to forget things in a coordinated effort at damage control.” His tactics were opposed at every turn by the special committee’s counsel, Richard Ben-Veniste, who had been one of the Watergate prosecutors.
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†26 Armand P. D’Amato was convicted of mail fraud in 1993, though the conviction was later overturned, according to the New York Times.
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*27 Sometimes Hillary sounded like the national nanny. She said she believed teenagers aren’t ready for the unintended consequences of a sexual relationship, including pregnancy, venereal disease, or abortion. She said Americans should “do everything in our power to discourage sexual activity and encourage abstinence,” adding that a good place to start is to encourage adolescents to value friendships first and to organize events in which young people can participate in supervised activities.
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*28 The same day that Safire had called her a liar, the U.S. Court of Appeals in St. Louis ruled that Paula Jones could move ahead with her suit against the president.
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*29 There was speculation by some presidential aides that “Foster had written a separation agreement for divorce papers and that’s what was in there, and that’s what was taken out of there that night after he killed himself,” one of the lawyers said, and did not totally discount it. The existence of such a document was never confirmed.
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*30None of those present—they included Mary Catherine Bateson, Barbara Feinman, Lissa Muscatine, Lisa Caputo, and one or two other aides—regarded the dialogue in the same over-the-top fashion as the press described it. Previously, Hillary had talked publicly about imaginary conversations she conducted with her predecessor about criticism and obstacles. This was before she had met Houston. The dialogue initiated by Houston was followed by a similar two-way “conversation” between Hillary and Mahatma Gandhi. Finally, when Houston had proposed that Hillary talk with Jesus, whose betrayal and martyrdom was a pillar of Hillary’s belief, the first lady declined, saying it would be too personal.
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*31Simpson, in a conversation with this author in 2006, confirmed the account of the conversation in the Oval Office in exactly the same way as Styron had related it. Though they were political opponents, Simpson and Clinton had a good relationship—Clinton wrote—“because of the friendship we had in common with his governor, Mike Sullivan.”
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*32 Gingrich, in 1989, had led the successful Republican effort to remove the Democratic speaker of the house, Jim Wright, because he’d sold thousands of copies of a privately published book of his speeches to political supporters as a way of circumventing House rules that forbade taking fees for speaking. Gingrich’s conduct was thus particularly offensive to members of the House, even a few Republicans, who recognized he had tried to invent an even more elaborate dodge than Wright to make some money.
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*33 Lindsey failed to respond to my inquiries over a period of several years.
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*34 In addition, her former friend Julie Hiatt Steele later testified to lying when she corroborated Willey’s account of the alleged groping incident and had said that Willey had told her about it on the same day it had supposedly occurred. Steele also admitted before a grand jury that she had actually heard about the purported incident four years later. Starr indicted Steele for obstruction of justice but later dropped the charges.
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*35 In September 2005, a Texas grand jury indicted DeLay for conspiracy after a lengthy campaign finance investigation. He and two other associates were accused of illegally directing corporate donations to Republicans in the Texas legislature. He resigned from his position as majority leader in June 2006, and from the House.
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*36 In the Jones deposition, Robert Bennett had represented to the judge and the lawyers for Jones that “there is no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form” between the president and Lewinsky.
Now Clinton was asked by a prosecutor, “Wouldn’t you agree, this was an utterly false statement?” Clinton smiled. “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is…. If ‘is’ means is and never has been, that’s one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.” A few minutes later, he added, “I was not trying to give you a cute answer to that.”
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*37 He said this in the third year of Senator Hillary Clinton’s first term.
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ALSO BY CARL BERNSTEIN
His Holiness:
John Paul II and the History of Our Time
(with Marco Politi)
Loyalties: A Son’s Memoir
The Final Days
(with Bob Woodward)
All the President’s Men
(with Bob Woodward)
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2007 by Carl Bernstein
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Random House, Inc.: Excerpt from Hillary’s Choice by Gail Sheehy, copyright © 1999 by G. Merritt Corporation. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
Simon & Schuster and The Sagalyn Literary Agency: Excerpts from First in His Class: The Biography of Bill Clinton by David Maraniss, copyright © 1995 by David Maraniss. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group and The Sagalyn Literary Agency, on behalf of the author.
eISBN: 978-0-307-26848-8
v3.0
Carl Bernstein, A Woman in Charge
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