Part 1 (1/2)
h.e.l.l To Pay.
By: Barbara Olson.
To my best friend and mentor, my husband Ted, and to the future for our grandchildren, Hayley, Jillian, and Kirstin.
ONE.
HILLARY'S BABY.
”Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life.”
-- SAUL ALINSKY, RULES FOR RADICALS.
Do you remember Hillary's preelection baby? In the summer before the 1996 election, when the Clintons' popularity had waned and it seemed as if the struggle for reelection might not succeed, Hillary Rodham Clinton let journalist Walter Isaacson know that she and the president had ”talked about” adopting a baby. She let it slip that they were ”talking about it more now.” She added, ”I must say we're hoping to have another child.”*1 That baby was never adopted, and the story dropped from sight. It seems the polling numbers weren't so bad after all, and the Clintons'
Republican opponent, Bob Dole, was having trouble simply walking and talking at the same time.
But the baby story had its intended effect. It softened Hillary's image as a cold, steely ideologue in the aftermath of the health care debacle. Along with her book, It Takes a VIllage, the baby story allowed the American people to picture Hillary as a warm and caring person, a potential new mother, a caregiver.
Above all, it transformed her from a liability to an a.s.set in Bill Clinton's bid for reelection to the presidency. To some, she is Saint Hillary. To others, a high priestess of feminism and a manipulator. Of course, Hillary is no Joan, Antigone, or Lady Macbeth, but she has played each role to the hilt.
I have come to know Hillary as she is--a woman who can sway millions, yet deceive herself; a woman who has persuaded herself and many others that she is ”spiritual,” but who has gone to the brink of criminality to ama.s.s wealth and power.
I came to know Hillary Rodham Clinton when I served as the chief investigative counsel for the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, then chaired by the distinguished and gentlemanly William F. Clinger.
For months, five of us investigated the FBI and Travel Office scandals in a tiny windowless secure committee room on the first floor of the Rayburn House Office Building. This room was chosen after early drafts of our doc.u.ments were mysteriously spirited from our garbage can to the press.
We changed our locks; not even the cleaning crews had access to our tiny room. I generally arrived at 6:30 AM and tried to leave for home before 8:00 PM. My colleague Barbara Comstock continued the vigil and wouldn't leave until around 4:00 AM. It was here that I pored over details of Hillary Rodham Clinton's role in several of the Clinton administration's unseemly political maneuvers. It was here that we wrote and rewrote the interrogatories for her to answer under oath and deposed her friends and loyal soldiers--from Harry Thomason, to Abner Mikva, to Bernie Nussbaum, to Bruce Lindsey.
The members of my seasoned investigative staff would each tell you they have never seen anyone better able to keep her stories, however improbable, straight. She was unflappable when presented with d.a.m.ning evidence and was adept at darting nimbly to a new interpretation that put that d.a.m.ning evidence in the best light.
I have never experienced a cooler or more hardened operator than Hillary Rodham Clinton. The investigators working for Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr found, as we did, that in one White House scandal after another, all roads led to Hillary. To investigate White House improprieties and scandals, the evidence necessarily led to her hidden hands guiding the Clinton operation.
We came to see that, essentially, Hillary is a woman animated by a lifelong ambition. That ambition is to make the world accept the ideas she embraced in the sanctuaries of liberation theology; radical feminism, and the hard left. We came to see her as a politician who invented her own strategies of protective coloration, who learned to mask her true feelings and intentions. She has become a master manipulator of the press, the public, her staff, and--likely--even the president.
Only in retrospect have we ever seen the mask slip. Only when we look back and remember the story line of last week, or last year, does the coyness of her soft words seem to be belied by the hardness of her deeds. The real Hillary is visible only when we wonder: What happened to the notion of that baby? Or when we ask ourselves what Hillary knew and when she knew about Monica Lewinsky--was it before or after she accused the Was.h.i.+ngton Post and every major news outlet of serving a ”vast, right-wing conspiracy”?
More than twenty years before my investigation of her, Hillary Rodham sat in a similar room, perhaps with the same safes and creaky dials, to perform a similar investigation: Watergate. Few Americans realize the extent of the role that Hillary, as a Watergate investigator, played in destroying Richard Nixon. Few Americans realize the extent to which she burnished her political skills in the Watergate cauldron, practicing the bare-knuckle tactics of the highly politicized House Judiciary Committee on the Watergate Impeachment Committee.
Nor are many Americans fully aware of the extremes to which she has gone in order to protect and abet Bill Clinton's secret life. The supreme irony is that this 1960s liberal, as a partner to Bill Clinton, has become ever more darkly Nixonian in her outlook and methods--though without Nixon's self-knowledge, statesmanlike substance, and redemptive Quaker conscience.
Still, the ”vast, right-wing conspiracy” was a touch of Nixonian rhetoric--albeit, from the left--for a woman with a Nixonian frame of mind. She has learned the skills of attack and counterattack from the best. White House a.s.sistant to the President for Management and Administration David Watkins wrote that there would be ”h.e.l.l to pay”
if the first lady's orders were not followed in dispensing of the career White House Travel Office employees. And he understated his case.
Over the years Hillary Clinton has a.s.sembled and skillfully used an a.r.s.enal of opposition researchers and private detectives that her one-time mentor, d.i.c.k Morris, now identifies as a ”secret police”
that has been used in ”a systematic campaign to intimidate, frighten, threaten, discredit, and punish innocent Americans whose only misdeed is their desire to tell the truth.”
Hillary is not merely an aider and abettor to this secret police operation. She has been its prime instigator and organizer. In the political life of the Clintons, it was she who pioneered the use of private detectives. It was she who brought in and cultivated the professional dirt-diggers and smear artists. It was she whose obsession with secrecy was so intense that when White House Counsel and former judge Abner Mikva finally bowed to the law and delivered subpoenaed doc.u.ments, she and her White House scandal team lashed at him with such a vicious streak of humiliating profanity that he resigned. And then there is the public Hillary of It Takes a Village--gentle, mother-earth, and caring--sweet-talking the American people into socialism for their children.
Hillary Clinton is a determined, focused leader who rapidly rose to the top ranks of the radical left, and who now seeks to foment revolutionary changes from the uniform of a pink suit. She used Arkansas as a laboratory for her ideas. As first lady, she tried to wield direct power on the national level and failed. Now she is inventing a career beyond her husband's, to make her own place in history--to find a path to ultimate power. But serving as the junior senator from New York will not provide a stage big enough for such ambitions. Like Eleanor Roosevelt before her, Hillary Clinton seeks nothing less than an office that will give her a platform from which to exercise real power and real world leaders.h.i.+p.
TWO.
DREAMS OF POWER.
”It is not enough to persuade them of your competence, talents, and courage--they must have faith in your ability and courage. They must believe in your capacity not just to provide the opportunity for action, power, change, adventure, a piece of the drama of life, but to give them a very definite promise, almost an a.s.surance of victory.”
-- SAUL ALINSKY, RULES FOR RADICALS.
In the yearthat Hillary would marry Bill Clinton, 1975, she entertained the notion of becoming a United States Marine.
She was a Yale law graduate living in Fayetteville, Arkansas, but still well known and well regarded among the liberal luminaries of the East. A year before, as a congressional staffer working on Watergate, Hillary had helped force a Republican president to resign.
Her efforts as a dilettante advocacy laurer on behalf of the Children's Defense Fund and her self-important, soph.o.m.oric writings arguing for a radical expansion of children's rights had established her as a rising star in the liberal policy firmament.
Now she was teaching at the University of Arkansas law school with her future husband. Everyone knew the next act: She would marry Bill, and he would run for statewide office.
Yet one day this lady law professor sailed down to a Marine Corps recruitment office and offered herself up as an officer in the U.S.
Marine Corps. She was rejected, because of her age and her myopia, she says. But she obviously had much more working against her. And why would she want to leave the man she loved, her career, and her friends to join the military? A patriotic desire to serve her country? To prove her worth?
This episode has long been a standing joke among her friends, seen as a moment of fanciful lunacy, perhaps her way of issuing a direct challenge to the very heart of American masculinity: Does the Marine Corps have the guts to take in someone like me? She may even have believed she would have lasted past noon of her first day of Marine Corps boot camp. Or perhaps she sought to give her politically ambitious young husband a layer of defense against future draft-dodging charges. There is, however, another interpretation.
PURSUING POWER.
Perhaps Hillary was looking far off, into the distance, not at her husband's needs and possibilities, but at her own. Perhaps she knew that if she ever ran for office, she would have an invaluable advantage as a female candidate if she had a record of military service that so many of her make contemporaries lacked.
Like so many politicians, the need for elected office had come early to her. She had become vice president of her junior cla.s.s in high school.*1 She was elected to student government twice in college.
The second time as president of her cla.s.s at wellesley, a position that allowed her to make a grandiose, cant-laden commencement speech that transformed her into a radical celebrity.
Now the Ford years had come, and the storms that had ravaged America's campuses were quieting. Vietnam was winding down, and there was little possibility of a war that would take her, as a Marine reservist, too far away from Bill and her new civilian life.
Hillary had already put together quite a resume as a campus leader, a law professor, and an embryonic legal scholar. Imagine how a Marine Corps ring would have rounded out that image? She would have macho credentials that would prove she could run with the boys to balance her blooming feminist and leftist stature.
Hillary has never been a piker in the dream department. As a teenager, she yearned to become the first woman astronaut. Like the marines, NASA rejected her, and it is no coincidence that her husband has made a point of pouring millions of dollars into programs to train women astronauts. As an adult, she now yearns to become the first woman to be elected president of the United States of America.
Why else would she be running for the U.S. Senate? Certainly not for money.
HarperCollins editor Judith Regan offered Hillary $5 million for her memoirs.*2 She could easily pull down $50,000 per speech in lecture fees and honoraria that are forbidden to senators. She could make a senator's salary, in three days as a civilian.