Thus what Hillary Clinton pulled off with her Republican Senate colleagues was nothing short of masterful. I spoke to many, if not all, of Senator Clinton’s biggest opponents within the Republican Party during her time as First Lady. On or off the record, no matter how much they were coaxed, not one of them would say a negative thing about Hillary Clinton as a person—other than observing that her Democratic allies sometimes didn’t like her. Their love affair with Hillary—at least in their private conversations—probably says more about their susceptibility to flattery and praise than it does about her personality. But it also demonstrates the difficulty her likely 2016 Republican challengers will face in trying to build a coalition against her. Hillary Clinton has built a virtual dossier of praise and support from Republican colleagues who might publicly denounce her for political purposes but in private seem to downright like her. That work began in the United States Senate.
To the surprise of many observers, Hillary Clinton seemed to work hardest to ingratiate herself to those who only recently had voted to throw her husband out of office during impeachment proceedings. She threw a baby shower for Republican senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, who had adopted a child.2 She attended prayer breakfasts with a mostly evangelical crowd of right-wing Republicans, including Sam Brownback of Kansas, who memorably confessed to hating her and asked for her forgiveness. (She gave it gladly.)3
One of the managers of the Clinton impeachment, Republican congressman Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, was nominated by George W. Bush as administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration. To his evident surprise, Senator Clinton voted in favor of his confirmation. Working with her, Hutchinson told me, was “always a joy. On the homeland security issue she was very supportive of what I was trying to do. And we had a very good working relationship.”
“I was very critical of [Bill] Clinton during the impeachment,” says another Republican Senate colleague, who requested to speak on background so that he could be more honest. “I didn’t go over the top, but I was critical. She didn’t seem to hold a grudge about that.”
“From a personal standpoint—as far as personality is concerned—I think she’s highly regarded by a lot of leaders around the world,” former Republican Indiana congressman Dan Burton, one of the fiercest champions of impeachment, told me recently in an interview. “That doesn’t mean that I think that the decisions that have been made are the right ones.”
“She was a very active member of the Senate and reached out across party lines, for obvious reasons of trying to get bipartisan support but also in a thoughtful way,” Georgia Republican senator Johnny Isakson said during an interview in his Senate office. “I remember, in particular, when we were doing TARP and some of the other things during the depth of the financial crisis, because of my background in housing and the tax credit that we had passed earlier on, she sought me out on a number of occasions, asked some very insightful questions that I could answer because of my experience. She was a very engaged member of the Senate and was a good senator.”
Other Republicans remembered her as sharp and occasionally playful. Jim Nicholson, the former Republican National Committee chairman during the Clinton administration, who was then serving as secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs for George W. Bush, recalls his department’s effort to shutter a veterans hospital in Canandaigua, New York. The facility was in an area of the state Hillary frequented when she was first campaigning for the Senate, and Senator Clinton was determined to lobby him to keep it open.
The duo met on a small love seat just outside the Senate chamber, where Clinton could plead her case between Senate votes. At one point the Senate clock buzzed, indicating an imminent vote, and members began streaming toward the chamber. Many passed the tiny couch, glancing with surprise at the cozy closeness between the Democrat and the Republican publicly known as one of the Clinton administration’s biggest opponents while party chairman.
“She’s sitting here, and I’m sitting here,” Nicholson says, pointing to tiny spaces very close together. “Cheek to cheek,” he says, “cheek to jowl.”
As startled Republican senators walked by, some stopped and gawked.
Hillary thought it was funny. “I’m really going to get you in a lot of trouble,” she said. Nicholson laughed. She also made a dogged case to the veterans secretary that proved to be forceful and data driven. And in the end she won.
“There was not enough political will to close the hospital, so we came up with a plan to make it a center of excellence for some . . . I think traumatic brain injury research,” Nicholson says years later. “So, it’s still open. It’s underutilized, and very expensive, but it’s a lovely facility.”
Other Senate staff members recalled an instance when Senator Jon Kyl, a staunch conservative from Arizona, hosted a press conference for an immigration bill he was sponsoring. The bill sought federal funds to help cover the costs of emergency-room care for illegal immigrants. A number of Democrats had signed on to the bill, including Clinton. None, however, was expected to attend the press conference, particularly since it was being held in the office of the Republican Policy Committee. Populated by brainy conservatives and with a mission to undermine efforts of Democrats, the RPC was one of the more partisan operations in the Senate.
Staff members stood agape therefore when Hillary Clinton walked right through the front door. “She was walking into the Death Star, basically,” one Senate aide recalls. “The ground zero of Hillary hating. People had their mouths open.” Clinton had come to support Kyl’s legislation and say a few words for the cameras. Not a single person in the room had expected her. Nearly all of them had considered Hillary Clinton as Public Enemy No. 1 of the Democratic caucus. And yet there she was.
One senator with whom Clinton became particularly close was the hawkish John McCain. “Hillary and I developed a very friendly relationship,” McCain acknowledges in a conversation in his Senate office. “She’s a very smart person, extremely smart person, and she immediately joined the Armed Services Committee, because that was what was not in her resume, and she went out of her way to have a relationship with me.”
“He respects her,” says longtime McCain advisor Mike Murphy, a Republican consultant and another erstwhile Republican opponent of the Clintons. “And McCain and Hillary like each other. They get along. He respects her. She’s tough. She’s everything that McCain likes. She’s funny. She’s smart. And she respects McCain.”
Almost by necessity, Senator Clinton also befriended another of her husband’s impeachment managers, Lindsey Graham, so close to John McCain that the two are the Senate equivalent of Bert and Ernie. One Republican colleague remembers Graham acting almost fanatical about his latest celebrity friend. “I remember he’d always say, ‘Well, Hillary said this,’ or ‘Hillary said that.’ ”
To McCain’s delight, Clinton also developed a reputation as practical and hawkish, which played well among the entire Republican delegation. She voted for the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq. She even resisted calls in late 2005 for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, prompting the director of the liberal organization MoveOn.org to accuse her of “cowardice in the face of the right-wing noise machine.” But Hillary’s war views appear to have been ones of political calculation, rather than belief. Her colleague in the Obama administration, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, now retired from government service, made headlines in 2014 by revealing that Hillary had confided to him that her opposition to the surge of forces into Iraq in 2007 had been motivated by her presidential aspirations. Gates wrote, “Hillary told the president that her opposition to the surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary.”4
In her ingratiation efforts, Senator Clinton benefited from her stiff and unapproachable public image. Republicans expected the Cruella de Vil of Chappaqua. She startled them instead by appearing knowledgeable, quick-witted, and mischievous. Her personal qualities do not tend to come across in public settings�
�such as speeches and press conferences—but they are an underestimated strength in one-on-one encounters.
Michael Medved, the conservative talk radio host and a fellow student at Yale Law School with Bill and Hillary Clinton, offered similar notes in an interview for this book. “When Clinton was president, the common media portrayal from relatively hostile media was that Clinton was this lovable Bubba who was charming and a rascally rogue who just could manipulate people, but not very bright kind of people. But Hillary was this unpleasant grind, who was absolutely brilliant, with this kind of mega-mind and she was the brains behind the outfit, the ideological commitment behind the outfit. That was the conventional portrayal. . . . If anything, the exact opposite is true,” he told me. “And I think anyone who knew them in law school will tell you that. That Bill was much less likable than Hillary; Hillary was intensely likable,” Medved says. “In fact, to this day I don’t know anyone, literally not anyone, who didn’t like her, find her warm, sympathetic, a manifestly good person, well-meaning person, not full of herself, not puffed up at all, down-to-earth, and a good friend.”
Though neither would welcome the comparison, Medved likened Hillary to Rush Limbaugh. “She is one of those people, the two people that I have been privileged to know where it’s most striking that they are in person much, much nicer than their critics think, are Hillary Clinton and Rush Limbaugh. Rush is also an intensely nice guy and a good guy and somebody who is trustworthy and loyal to his friends.”
Echoing her “listening tour” when she ran for Senate, Hillary made an effort to appear to be trying to hear and understand the views of her political opponents. Michael Novak, a conservative Democrat and well-regarded Catholic writer, recalled for me his appearance at Renaissance Weekend, an annual event that the Clintons attended in Hilton Head, South Carolina, at which gathered policy wonks to debate the issues of the day. Mrs. Clinton, Novak recalled, made a point of putting him and another conservative Democratic colleague, the former speechwriter Ben Wattenberg, right beside her at her table. “I thought it was quite remarkable that out of all the people in the crowd she put two of perhaps the most conservative Democrats in the room [beside her],” he said. “Ben and I both formed the judgment she was much more to the left in her thinking—if not her acting—than either of us thought wise there for the Democratic Party or for her.”
To some observers of the Clintons, there was a psychological element to Hillary’s unusual outreach. As former California congressman Jim Rogan, a Republican who was one of the managers of Bill Clinton’s impeachment, put it during our interview, “They seem to miss their enemies more than they miss their friends.” That was doubly true for Bill Clinton, who in his years out of office set out on a charm offensive of his own.
Upon the death of Nelson Mandela in 2013, Clinton claimed that the former South African president provided the inspiration for forgiving his enemies.5 Just as Mandela forgave those who had oppressed and imprisoned him during apartheid, so too could Clinton forgive his enemies. Left largely unnoticed was that Clinton was comparing himself favorably to the famed African hero and Republicans to white racists.
Whether Mandela really had anything to do with Clinton’s overtures—or whether the former president was just looking for a convenient and timely anecdote—is unknowable. What is known is that Clinton, by many accounts a classic narcissist, craves approval and praise.
A former senior aide recalls Clinton’s time as a young Senate intern, probably around the time he worked for Senator Fulbright. “He used to take three or four showers in the morning because he wanted to run into as many [other interns] as he possibly could,” the aide tells me. It was his way of meeting all the other pages in the prestigious program, because he was certain he would go on to do great things. A former Clinton roommate at Georgetown recalls that Clinton used to attend two or three different church services on a Sunday morning in order to meet more people. “I don’t know what your college experience was like,” the former Clinton aide tells me. “That’s crazy.”
The need for attention, love, and approval seems especially keen with Clinton’s enemies. As one Clinton confidant told me, “If you want Clinton to pay attention to you, act like you don’t love him anymore.”
Former Democratic senator Joe Lieberman told me about his “fascinating” experience with Clinton shortly after he was chosen to be Al Gore’s vice presidential running mate in 2000. Lieberman had publicly chastised Clinton for his behavior with Monica Lewinsky, winning widespread coverage as he blasted the president for “willfully deceiving the nation.” Lieberman was unsparing, noting that “The president apparently had extramarital relations with an employee half his age and did so in the workplace in the vicinity of the Oval Office. Such behavior is not just inappropriate. It is immoral. And it is harmful, for it sends a message of what is acceptable behavior to the larger American family—particularly to our children—which is as influential as the negative messages communicated by the entertainment culture.”
Shortly after the speech, the Connecticut senator received a call from Bill Clinton himself. Clinton, known to have a volcanic temper, was instead contrite. “‘Joe, I can’t say that I disagree with a single word you said,’” Lieberman quoted Clinton as saying.
“It was kind of an apology,” Lieberman told me. “He talked about how he was seeing not one minister but two for counseling.”
A Clinton confidant tells the story of a senior deputy in the administration who left to pursue other interests. A few months later, when a more senior job opened up, Clinton approached his former aide to get him to come back. The aide politely refused, telling the president that he was enjoying his new work. As the confidant tells it, “Clinton pursues, and pursues, and pursues, and pursues, and pursues, and finally gets him. And the guy comes back and Clinton ignores him. It’s like you’re in college and you’re pursuing this girl and you gotta have her, gotta have her, gotta have her, and you finally get her and you’re like, ‘Yeah, didn’t need that. Did I really want her after all?’ But Clinton’s like that with everybody.”
Psychology aside, it is hard to ignore the fact that Clinton’s outreach to Republicans had a component of naked self-interest. If his harshest critics could say nice things about Clinton, an obsessive poll watcher, then the public would likely feel the same. In his postpresidential life, by the accounts of many people I spoke to, Clinton has used that charm to advance a single aim: to win over, and ultimately neutralize, his and Hillary’s most potent enemies. This is the less well known aspect of Clinton’s obsessive legacy building. And in that effort, absolutely no Republican is off-limits.
His rapprochement with Richard Mellon Scaife is just one remarkable example. Scaife, a billionaire, had financed most of the anti-Clinton attacks during his administration. With Scaife’s support, the conservative magazine the American Spectator launched a years-long effort to take down President Clinton. It was the Spectator that uncovered Paula Jones, the woman who was allegedly sexually harassed by the then-governor of Arkansas. Jones’s allegations, because of the Violence Against Women Act, which Clinton himself signed into law in 1993, made Clinton’s other sexual dalliances relevant—which of course led to Monica Lewinsky, which in turn led to the president’s historic impeachment.
Scaife was the main moneyman behind these devastating attacks. And yet, when Scaife fell ill, a source close to Scaife tells me, Clinton made amends through phone calls, conversations, and letters, like this one, which I obtained, on letterhead with the presidential seal and his name, William Jefferson Clinton. The former president wrote:
Richard M. Scaife
One Oxford Centre
Suite 3900
301 Grant Street
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15219
Dear Dick:
I’m so sorry to hear that you’ve been going through such a difficult time. I want you to know that I’ll be praying for your strength and comfort.
Hang in there—I’m pulling for you.
&
nbsp; Sincerely,
Bill
Scaife was touched, a friend of his says. Whether this effectively moderates any 2016 activity for the Republican moneyman is yet to be known. But it’s safe to say that Scaife feels much warmer to Clinton now than he did in the 1990s. And that is only going to be a help for the Clintons.
“I talk to him once a year,” Newt Gingrich confirmed over a year ago about his former nemesis. “Whatever’s on his mind. Last time he called me to talk about the ‘fiscal cliff’ and how we could solve it and all that stuff.” Gingrich’s view of both Clintons has also softened—or been softened up—over the years, to the point that even he offers praise for their abilities, in tones he did not use when he went to battle against them early in his speakership. President Clinton is even said to have called Gingrich, according to an aide to the former Speaker, the night his mother died in 2003 to offer his condolences and to let him know that he was thinking of him in his time of mourning.
Gingrich once labeled the Clinton White House the “rough equivalent of the Jerry Springer Show”6 and called Clinton’s impeachment effort “very simply about the rule of law, and the survival of the American system of justice. This is what the Constitution demands, and what Richard Nixon had to resign over.”7 As Speaker of the House he once vowed, “I will never again, as long as I am Speaker, make a speech without commenting on this topic,” referring to the Lewinsky scandal.8 Today the former Speaker comes close to offering a defense of the Clintons and their tawdry behavior. “First of all, you have no idea what their lives are like,” he says. “None of us do. They kept their marriage together. They seem to have a good relationship with their daughter.”
Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine Page 10
