Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine

by Daniel Halper

  A likely GOP contender, Kentucky senator Rand Paul, already has made clear that the Lewinsky scandal and Bill’s impeachment are fair game in any race that might involve Bill Clinton. Speaking on C-SPAN on a show that aired on February 9, 2014, Paul called the former president a “sexual predator” and argued that candidates should not accept money associated with him.

  “They can’t have it both ways,” said Paul of Democrats accepting Clinton money.8 “And so I really think that anybody who wants to take money from Bill Clinton or have a fund-raiser has a lot of explaining to do. In fact, I think they should give the money back. If they want to take a position on women’s rights, by all means do. But you can’t do it and take it from a guy who was using his position of authority to take advantage of young women in the workplace.”

  Many members of the GOP establishment blanch at such talk, remembering their experience last time with Bill Clinton’s misbehavior.

  The public and media seem to disagree. In early 2014, for example, the conservative media outlet Washington Free Beacon reported on the personal papers of Hillary Clinton’s deceased best friend, Diane Blair.9 The Blair files, decades old, led to a firestorm of publicity, particularly in relation to the Lewinsky affair and Hillary’s contemporaneous reaction. The files were amplified by the popular website the Drudge Report and discussed across the media spectrum for days if not weeks.

  The reaction has opened the door for all sorts of trolling into the Clintons’ personal lives and the scandals of the 1990s. A longtime intimate of the Clinton family tells me about being besieged by various reporters seeking to write about Bill’s extramarital activities or reopen the Monica Lewinsky scandal with new allegations and information. “It could be death by a thousand cuts over the next year,” a source well connected to the Clintons tells me. “I mean, just from what I’m hearing.”

  Associates of Lewinsky’s have what might be called “The Monica Files”—obtained exclusively for this book—hundreds of pages of allegations about the former president of the United States, his former girlfriend Monica, and his wife. These include things as innocuous, if mildly humorous, as the umpteen media requests Lewinsky received from personalities such as Barbara Walters and Larry King to a long list of allegations against the former first couple of seemingly variable validity. All of these are likely to get into the eager hands of reporters and Republican operatives—as part of what might be dubbed the “thousand cuts” operation.

  But there were also a number of more detailed allegations compiled by investigators, attorneys, and other Lewinsky advisors in the event that she might be involved in legal action against the president. Most supported claims of a pattern of sexual misconduct or adventurism by the president.

  One of the more promising and detailed nuggets Lewinsky and her associates kept from Starr was the story of a woman who claimed to have met Bill Clinton decades earlier when she was a student at a California university. The year was unclear, but it was after Clinton returned from his studies as a Rhodes scholar in 1970. After a first date, Clinton arranged to meet with the woman again. Lewinsky’s team were told they went to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, where in a wooded area Clinton knocked her to the ground and attempted to have sex with her. Described by a friend as a “big girl” at about five feet eleven, she “scratched and kicked” Clinton until she was able to run away from him. No charges were ever filed. And the two did not meet again.

  As the story went, the woman heard from a Clinton staffer decades later, when he was governor of Arkansas. The staffer had located her number in California and called to tell her he was running for president and asked if she would “support” him in the race. She was shocked by the call, but told the staffer yes. (She was a hard-core Democrat.) Though she was angry about the assault, she probably voted for him anyway, the friend guessed.10

  And then there was another potential bombshell, never before reported, that Monica shared with representatives on her legal and public relations team and only vaguely with the independent prosecutor investigating the Clintons. According to Republicans, it demonstrated the distraction that Bill Clinton’s behavior could have had on America’s national security.

  On March 29, 1997, Clinton called Monica to the Oval Office because he had something “important” to tell her. This also ended up as their last sexual encounter. The president was on crutches after a fall in Florida under dubious circumstances. The president had been walking down dark steps outside the home of Australian golfer Greg Norman at about 1:20 in the morning. The White House physician denied that Clinton had been drinking. Reporters were not immediately notified.11

  “This was one of those occasions when I was babbling on about something,” Lewinsky told prosecutors, “and he just kissed me, kind of to shut me up, I think.” After another sexual encounter, involving oral sex in the study just outside the Oval Office, the president gave Monica important news: “We may have been overheard.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she replied, with concern. “How would they ever hear us? Who would do that?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Clinton said. He appeared cryptic. “If anybody ever says anything about the calls I’ve made to you, tell them we were just joking.” At the time, Lewinsky told prosecutors that Clinton suggested that “they knew their calls were being monitored all along, and the phone sex was just a put-on.” That is all the Starr Report offers on this encounter. But Monica and her team knew more.

  They found evidence that the British, Russians, and Israelis all had scooped up the microwaves off the top of the White House. Offering some additional support, Boris Yeltsin, the former Russian president, wrote in his memoir that Russian intelligence had picked up on Clinton’s “predilection for beautiful young women.”

  Foreign spies weren’t the only ones who knew about the couple’s phone sex. Monica’s friends heard plenty of juicy details directly from Monica. “Let me ask you this,” she once said to a friend. “If a man calls a woman for phone sex, don’t they usually ask what the woman’s wearing?” Referring to Clinton, she replied, “Well, he would say what he was wearing.”

  As Monica told it, the president of the United States would describe his clothing, over the telephone, while pleasuring himself. That uniform would usually consist of a gray University of Arkansas sweatshirt and what he called his “blue tighties.”

  He made similar calls like this to women while on presidential trips, such as one visit to the Seychelles. This was yet another of Clinton’s reckless moves when it came to womanizing, since the British government ran eavesdropping operations on the island and Clinton’s indiscretions might easily have been overheard.

  In October 1998, Clinton met with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in a high-profile effort to move the Middle East peace process forward. The series of meetings, held at the Wye Plantation near Wye River, Maryland, also led to another negotiation, sources say. A negotiation kept well away from the headlines.

  At one point, Netanyahu reportedly pulled Clinton aside to press for a pet cause for the Israelis—the release of Jonathan Pollard, an American spy for Israel who was sitting in prison. Netanyahu pressed Clinton to release Pollard, which in itself was not an unusual request. But the Israelis present at Wye River had a new tactic for their negotiations—they’d overheard Clinton and Monica and had it on tape. Not wanting to directly threaten the powerful American president, a crucial Israeli ally, Clinton was told that the Israeli government had thrown the tapes away. But the very mention of them was enough to constitute a form of blackmail. And, according to information provided by a CIA source, a stricken Clinton appeared to buckle.

  Intelligence officials in the United States or Israel will of course not confirm on the record the extent or substance of Israeli eavesdropping. Such a matter is of the highest sensitivity, since Israel is a close ally of America’s and heavily reliant on American aid. In 2000 the conservative magazine Insight, after a one-yea
r investigation by a team of reporters, claimed that the Israeli government had “penetrated four White House telephone lines and was able to relay real-time conversations on those lines from a remote site outside the White House directly to Israel for listening and recording.”12 At the time, an Israeli spokesman responded to the Associated Press, which confirmed that an FBI investigation was under way, that the claim was “outrageous.” “Israel does not spy on the United States.”13 Of course one need only consider the long history of allies spying on one another—including the Americans on the Germans and Brazilians in 2013—to find such allegations plausible.

  In any event there is ample evidence to support the Lewinsky story about an Israeli-U.S. confrontation. On November 11, 1998, for example, the New York Times reported that Netanyahu and Clinton had indeed discussed Pollard’s release at Wye. And that the Israelis had told the president something that opened up the possibility of Pollard’s release, something Clinton had explicitly ruled out during the first six years of his presidency. A White House spokesman told a reporter for the Times simply that Clinton was newly “impressed by the force of Mr. Netanyahu’s arguments.”14

  So impressed was Clinton that he brought the notion to the attention of CIA director George Tenet. Tenet, according to a number of news reports, vowed to resign on the spot if the administration acceded to the request.15 Faced with widespread outrage from his national security team, Clinton dropped the idea. He did, however, reconsider it one more time before leaving office.

  That’s not all the Monica files include. In postpresidential life, aides and White House servants to the Clintons talk about the former president’s use of the White House theater, only steps away from the first lady’s traditional offices in the East Wing, and which was said to double as a forum for presidential dalliances with various women. As long as their identities could be concealed, these aides were willing to be open about what transpired and how they were open secrets in the boys’ club that was the Clinton West Wing. There were any number of young staffers who caught the president’s eye, or hand, or “inadvertent” touch. An advisor to Monica Lewinsky was told a secondhand story, which he related to me, of a young woman along the campaign trail whom Clinton invited to “work out” with him at the Little Rock YMCA, and another to whom he slipped a private White House phone number. At Richard Nixon’s funeral, Clinton was said to have made a pass at the wife of one of the former president’s pallbearers.

  A number of sources mentioned to me the former flight attendant whom, in true Kennedy style, Clinton had brought onto the White House staff, where she worked alongside another of his purported mistresses, this one a woman named Marsha. “She’s a great character,” one of her friends tells me at a lunch where she insists on anonymity.

  During his first term in office, around 1994, Clinton is said to have called up his close confidant David Pryor of Arkansas to brag. They had known each other well since Clinton’s days in Arkansas, and Pryor, who was then a U.S. senator representing Arkansas, had helped Clinton with his political rise in more ways than one.

  The story goes that Clinton looked up to the politician and called to tell Pryor about a major accomplishment. He had been with a pop icon. Pryor, a reserved and conservative gentleman, was shocked. It was not just that Clinton would do something like that while president of the United States; it was that Clinton would go around and brag about it.

  Pryor figured he couldn’t really tell Clinton off. But he could try to put an end to the high-profile fling that endangered the president. Pryor called the singer’s agent to pass along the message that she had better knock off the dangerous affair. The agent replied, “I don’t tell [her] what to do.”

  Even back at Yale Law School, where he met Hillary, Clinton was known to have control issues. But in those days, his addiction was to food. “Ever hear of the phrase ‘gone in sixty seconds’? That was Bill Clinton with a large pepperoni pizza,” a fellow student at Yale Law School recalls.

  Friends point to his election as Arkansas attorney general at the age of thirty-one as being the time when, as one puts it, “the Lothario business kicked in.” Suddenly the budding, young, attractive politico was finding women throwing themselves at him. “When I was in high school, I was a fat kid in overalls,” Clinton remarked to his childhood friend Mack McLarty. “And now all the women want to fuck me!” For a man whose appetites had been indulged his whole life, the women were irresistible. “It was like putting ten pizzas in front of him,” says the fellow Yalie.

  Hillary, then, was herself a little different. She was, perhaps, a bit more relaxed. “I think she’s acknowledged it, and if she hasn’t acknowledged it everybody else will tell you: She was an enthusiastic pot user,” says one of her friends from law school. “Oh, really,” I say, surprised at the revelation. “How often, would you say?”

  “I don’t know, I’m not in the position to say that,” says the friend, who wasn’t a big pot smoker. “But it was just, she was known to be one of the people. And please don’t cite me on this by name . . . if you talk to other people who knew her reasonably well in law school they will tell you that most people at that time, an undergraduate or in law school, would have been pot users, ranging from the casual and social to the enthusiastic. I think she would have been more enthusiastic, certainly more than Bill.” As for Hillary’s use of other drugs while at Yale, the friend is less forthcoming. “I don’t know, I have heard second- and third-hand but I don’t want to comment.”

  Bill had famously admitted to saying he had smoked pot but didn’t inhale, a line that was roundly mocked for years. Indeed, even in 2013, Bill Clinton was still trying to walk back that line. “Well, that—like many things in the press, that whole thing has been totally twisted to try to make something untrue. I was sort of joking about something had to be true. A very distinguished English journalist named Martin Walker said—and then all the other press covered it up, because it messed with the story. He said, “‘You know, Bill Clinton told the truth. He literally didn’t have the ability to do that.’ I didn’t say I was holding it in now. I said, ‘I tried.’ I didn’t deny that I did anything,” Clinton told Hispanic TV host Jorge Ramos. “I never denied that I used marijuana. I told the truth. I thought it was funny. And the only journalist who was there said I told the truth.”16

  As for Hillary, her relationship with former aide and law partner Vince Foster is again being reexamined by political opponents. These days, if he’s remembered at all, former White House deputy legal counsel Vincent Foster conjures up notions of a right-wing obsession with the Clintons. Perhaps most famous was the effort by Republican congressional chairman Dan Burton, an Indiana congressman, to prove that the White House aide, who committed suicide in 1993, was actually the victim of a murder. To prove his conspiracy theory, Burton took the same type of gun that had killed Foster and shot bullets into a pumpkin. Much was made of the effort by Clinton aides to clean out Foster’s office and remove files. An alleged suicide note, which had been torn up into pieces, was found at the bottom of his briefcase. It read, in part, “I was not meant for the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport.”17

  There was something about the Clintons that made Republicans look wild-eyed and deranged. The Foster death became a metaphor for the Clintons’ alleged history of dirty deeds. Many sought out the most notorious motives—that Foster knew about other Clinton murders, or that he was covering up some great crime.

  To former Clintonites, the explanation for the man’s death was far simpler. He was a sad and troubled human being whose inner motivations and thoughts would always be a mystery. Simple too was the explanation for why White House aides were scurrying through his files—to see if he’d left behind any evidence about his affair with Hillary Clinton.

  The relationship between Vince Foster and Hillary Clinton has long been an open secret among mainstream Washington reporters, but somehow hardly ever found its way into their reporting. It is beyond dispu
te that the married Foster and the married Clinton were extremely close (outside of her family members, no person is mentioned more often in Hillary’s memoirs than Foster). As law partners in Arkansas in the 1970s and 1980s, the duo frequently lunched together, along with another lawyer, Webster Hubbell, at an Italian restaurant called the Villa. Her closeness with Foster “raised some eyebrows,” Hillary once acknowledged. “In Little Rock at that time, women did not usually have meals with men who were not their husbands.”18

  That the married Foster and the married Clinton were involved romantically was an open secret in Little Rock, according to journalists who were there at the time. It was well known that they were “boyfriend-girlfriend,” a former Clinton official says. “He really was infatuated with her.”

  A former reporter from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette says that nearly everyone in the newsroom was aware of the relationship. One editor even claimed to have seen the two kissing. “A lot of people there knew [Foster] well, of course,” he says, “and to a person they said he was having an affair with Hillary Clinton.”

  In the 1970s, when Mrs. Clinton was appointed to the Legal Services Board by President Carter and had to travel frequently to Washington, she is said to have shared a suite with Vincent Foster at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington that was paid for by the National Steel and Shipbuilding Corporation.

  According to those I spoke to, certain investigative reporters were examining the relationship in the days before his suicide.

  Regardless of the validity of the allegations, the Foster affair—if rekindled—would raise more uncomfortable questions about the Clintons’ marital relationship. It’s another indicator that even if her nomination is “inevitable,” Hillary is in for a bumpy ride.

  11

  The Road to Coronation

  “[Y]ou can’t fire your daughter. I mean, this is unexplored territory here because all of a sudden, the person running the ship . . . you can’t get rid of her.”