Part 8 (2/2)

Lasater, who had made a fortune selling the Ponderosa steak house chain, was a one-man emblem of the excesses of the 1970s. Fast horses, fast women, and fast times were his hallmarks.

He won the admiration of Virginia Kelley, Bill's mother, for his thoroughbred races in Hot Springs. Not yet thirty, Lasater would back the right horse in the political arena as well.

THE COCAINE CARTEL.

The relations.h.i.+p between Bill Clinton and Dan Lasater began in earnest when Clinton was out of office and down on his luck. Losing to Republican Frank White in 1980, Bill visited Lasater at his Quapaw Towers apartment and forged a relations.h.i.+p that he would use to partially offset the indifference and outright opposition of the Stephenses (they had little use at the time for the boy governor and had supported White in his bid to oust him).

Bill had to have known that Lasater was a dealer of drugs as well as bonds. The very apartment he visited was widely known as the e-ticket to euphoria, the scene of legendary parties that rivaled the groupie rock scene for its outrageousness, with ashtrays br.i.m.m.i.n.g with cocaine, and young women and high school girls offering themselves as party favors. Lasater's private jet, which he had used to fly the Clintons to the Kentucky Derby, was another Arkansas legend, truly a place to get high in the sky. If Bill had not heard about this from the Little Rock rumor circuit--which alone is hard to believe--all he had to do was to ask his half-brother.

Roger Clinton had grown up, haunted by his late father's legacy of booze and wife beating, yet doomed by genetics to repeat some of his father's ways for at least part of his life. A poor student, Roger was moody and wild, a braggart who was not shy about telling near-strangers about how he could use his brother's connections.

By the 1980s, Roger was in the grips of a heavy addiction to cocaine.

By his own account, Roger c.o.ked Up many times in the bathrooms of the governor's mansion, and even threw c.o.ke parties for his friends in the mansion during Hillary's absences. Presumably the governor knew nothing of these parties, or if he did, maintained an uncharacteristic stoic ability to stay away from a good time. (Roger had been caught on tape by a Hot Springs narcotics officer. After snorting c.o.ke for a buy, he said, ”I've got to get some for my'

brother, he's got a nose like a Hoover vacuum cleaner!”)*84 It was only natural that Bill would ask his friend and ally Lasater to look after his little brother. Roger had worked for Lasater as a driver and at a horse farm. But that was just his day job. His work for Lasater likely had more to do with ”mules” than horses, a.s.sisting with his drug connections between Little Rock and New York. (Roger carted cocaine to the East Coast on at least one trip with his brother.) In a sense, Bill had offloaded the role of big brother and protector to Lasater. One day a terrified Roger Clinton came to Lasater saying that drug dealers to whom he owed money were threatening his life as well as threatening to kill his mother and brother. Lasater settled $8,000 of Roger's $20,000 drug debt and sent him to work at a stable in Florida where he could hide out. In short, there was a two-way street between Lasater and the governor, and it was becoming a major Little Rock thoroughfare. Lasater furnished Clinton with a list of possible appointees to the Arkansas Housing Development Authority, which chose underwriters for the state bond business. Between 1983 and 1986, Lasater's company was involved in $637 million worth of state bond offerings.*85 Bill knew that Lasater was under investigation for distribution of cocaine. After all, Lasater had been named in court testimony as a target of a police sting operation. Nevertheless, Clinton awarded a contract to handle a $30 million bond issue to Lasater to upgrade the Arkansas state police radio network. Aside from the obvious irony of buying police radios with laundered drug money, the deal was doubly unusual. Bonds are usually issued for major infrastructural projects, for schools or highways, not for police equipment. And it was rare, even in Little Rock, for a governor to personally lobby the legislature to steer a bond deal to a specified firm. Clinton's largesse allowed Lasater to rake in three-quarters of a million dollars in underwriting fees on that one deal alone.

Tommy Goodwin, lieutenant colonel in the state police, would later tell the Senate Whitewater committee how Clinton had come to him asking about the progress of the drug investigation against Lasater.

The committee reported: ”Colonel Goodwin agreed that Governor Clinton's focus was not on Lasater's use of cocaine [which Clinton knew of]; rather it was directed toward determining whether he was going to be arrested for such use while his company was handling the police radio transaction.”

Not long after Lasater collected the take on the police radio deal, he was sentenced to prison. So was Clinton's stepbrother.

Clinton himself would earn public esteem by seeming to sign off on the very sting operation that sent his brother to prison. The truth is, he was alerted to the sting by the state police and acted as the sting's apparent supporter in order to close off an investigation that could have led to the governor's mansion.

Bill and Hillary saw to it that Roger was well taken care of. His lawyer was William R. Wilson, a criminal defense attorney with whom Hillary had worked on several cases and who would later be appointed to a federal judges.h.i.+p by Clinton. In the 1984 trial, Wilson put on a masterful defense of Roger Clinton that resulted in a remarkably light sentence for someone who possessed and sold cocaine by the pound. He would get out of prison within a year.

Of course, getting busted meant that Roger was forced to turn on his old patron, testifying about the drug debt Lasater had settled and adding other d.a.m.ning details. But governor Clinton repaid Lasater for his friends.h.i.+p, and took the steps necessary to see that a man who undoubtedly knew a whole lot too much would not take his anger out on his former patron. The last act of the Clinton-Lasater connection occurred in 1990 when the governor reached into his heart, saw all the greater good that Dan Lasater had done for the world, and found it necessary to pardon him. All debts had been paid in full.

In fact, Lasater's top aide--who actually ran his affairs while he was in prison--was Patsy Thoma.s.son, later to become the Clinton White House's Director of the Office of Administration. Ironically, she was put in charge of the White House's drug testing program.

STEPHENS, INC., AND THE EARLY CHINA CONNECTION.

Bill had thrown in his lot with the likes of Lasater because the big players in Arkansas, Witt and Jackson Stephens, were adamant in their dislike, even disgust, for Clinton. In time, however, their mutual needs and ambitions would bring them together.

Once again, the ADFA, whose charter had been drafted by Webb Hubbell, was the genesis of a major political relations.h.i.+p. In many states, such official bodies like the ADFA share appointment power with the governor and the legislature. In Arkansas, the governor had the power to appoint all ten of its board members. To make sure that his control would be total, Hubbell also saw to it that the bond proposals approved by the rubber stamp board also had to have the signed approval of the governor. (This was in keeping with the tenor of the times. Webb Hubbell had also drafted the state's ethics-in-government act, which exempted the governor and his appointees from having to report conflicts of interest.) Hubbell's influence over the ADFA paid handsome dividends. For example, ADFA bond issues provided almost $3 million in loans to Park-O-Meter, a parking meter company owned by Hubbell's irascible father-in-law, Seth Ward. (Hubbell, as the father of the Arkansas Ethics in Government Act, was never one to worry too much about appearances; he was both the certifying attorney for the ADFA and Park-O-Meter.) It was only natural and initially not suspicious that Stephens, Inc., a major off-Wall Street investment banker, would become a major ADFA underwriter. But eyebrows were raised when Governor Clinton appointed to the ADFA board two executives from Stephens-controlled concerns, one from the Worthen Bank and another from a Stephens-controlled nursing home chain.

Bill Clinton's arduous courting of the Stephens brothers paid off when the Worthen Bank rescued Clinton's floundering presidential campaign in New Hamps.h.i.+re with a $3.5 million line of credit.

Clinton would return the favor again, making sure that his $55 million in federal campaign funds was deposited in Worthen.*86 What was Hillary's role in all of this? Rose handled much of the legal side of the ADFA business. She did not take payments or commissions, but Hillary was paid in a different currency. Doubts about her value to the Rose firm had disappeared. She had been elevated among her peers to the role of rainmaker. Bill Clinton was remunerated in other ways as well. When he ran for governor, beneficiaries of ADFA loans or business contributed $400,000 to his campaign. When he ran for president, they kicked in millions.*87 Perhaps the biggest favor of all did not take the form of active support of Bill Clinton, but the prevention of what could have been a major headache. This favor occurred in the mid-1980s, when Worthen lost $52 million in state pension money on a bad loan. Despite loopholes that could have spared Worthen the losses, Jack Stephens and another investor agreed to cover them, sparing Bill Clinton a major political embarra.s.sment.

The other major investor was Worthen kingpin James Riady, son of Mochtar Riady, owner of the LippoBank. A CIA report to the Senate investigation led by Senator Fred Thompson divulged that through their extensive holdings in China, the Riadys are intimately connected to elements in the Chinese military and likely act as agents of influence on behalf of Chinese intelligence services.

It was through the largesse of the Riadys that Bill Clinton was spared a setback, one that could have cost him his career. It was through the Riadys's good offices that a Riady executive named John Huang escorted Bill and Hillary around Hong Kong on a leg of their 1985 Asian trade mission.

John Huang later became a key figure in the Clinton Commerce Department--and in its lax oversight of technology transfers to Communist China. In fact, there is evidence that Huang himself was affiliated with Communist Chinese intelligence services.*88 Hillary had gone from Watergate to Whitewater in the span of twenty years, accomplis.h.i.+ng feats of financial and political aggrandizement Richard Nixon would never have dared. And unlike Nixon, her opening to China was not the diplomatic coup of a world-cla.s.s statesman, but the beginning of a Communist Chinese penetration of the Clinton White House with campaign cash.

SEVEN.

THE CAMPAIGN MANAGER.

”Let nothing get you off your target.”

-- SAUL ALINSKY, RULES FOR RADICALS.

”Hillary's keeping her own name,” Bill Clinton informed his mother Virginia over coffee the morning before his marriage. Virginia wept, hurt that her soon-to-be daughter-in-law did not want to carry the Clinton name.*1 ”The reaction of many of Hillary's legal colleagues was not much more measured. She explained that she needed to maintain the Rodham name to keep her own ident.i.ty distinct from the public ident.i.ty of her husband. In the South of the 1970s, older lawyers and judges regarded a ”lady lawyer” as an oddity. The fact that she didn't want to use her husband's name struck many tradition-bound colleagues at the Rose Law Firm as the statement of a 1960s bra-burning feminist.

The public was not much more understanding, despite the approval of her husband. Bill Clinton patiently explained to the Arkansas Gazette that Hillary ”had quite a career for herself as a lawyer,”

and was ”nationally recognized as an authority on children's legal rights.”*2 SERVING THE CANDIDATE.

The fourteen years between 1978 and 1992 witnessed an array of challenges and setbacks for Bill Clinton. His political career and personal life took on the qualities of a Perils of Pauline movie.

Bill and Hillary have always moved swiftly from success to disaster, from the heights of power to the edge of ruin and back again. He won the governors.h.i.+p in 1978 at age thirty-two, only to be soundly rejected by the voters two years later.

Even before the Clintons were evicted from the governor's mansion, Hillary took control of his reelection campaign and planned his comeback. As Bill then held onto the governors.h.i.+p for a decade, Hillary remained ever ready to take a leave from the Rose Law Firm, to step away from her work with liberal lobbies, to keep alive Bill Clinton's shot at the presidency.

Campaign managers and political operatives came and went. But it was Hillary who managed the perpetual campaign. This achievement, however, had a price. A very stiff price.

In order to keep her husband's chances alive, Hillary had to sublimate her ambitions, even her ident.i.ty, to his. In time, she could no longer be Hillary Rodham, activist and attorney-at-law. She became what she said that she despised and sought to avoid at all costs: Mrs. Clinton, the cookie baker and supportive wife.

GETTING STARTED.

Bill Clinton has run in every race like a prime marathoner with a thirty-pound pack on his back. From his very first race, a third of the electorate always had an immediate, visceral reaction against him. Bill Clinton has always excited the greatest pa.s.sion not among his supporters, but among his detractors. His casual way with the truth, his ability to transform his scandals into badges of honor and his setbacks into victories, and his cavalier approach to morals and principles infuriate opponents.

When Clinton ran against John Paul Hammerschmidt, a story circulated around Arkansas that a longhaired protestor at the university who outraged many in the state with his antics while sitting in a tree had, in fact, been Bill Clinton. Twenty years later, a story in the Star tabloid magazine alleged that he had fathered an illegitimate son with a prost.i.tute. Other stories described s.e.xually transmitted diseases hidden in his medical records.

A check on Bill's whereabouts showed he had been at Oxford when the protestor in the tree was arrested. A DNA test ruled out Clinton's paternity of the prost.i.tute's son. And his medical records remain sealed. Hillary refers often to such incidents, especially the tree incident, relis.h.i.+ng the false attacks because they give her the chance to suggest that everything said about her husband is equally false, the imaginings of jealous detractors.

The truth is somewhat more problematic.

Bill Clinton, from his very first race, had to hide the deceitful way he dealt with the draft board and hoped that the maudlin, desperate, and self-congratulatory letter he wrote about maintaining his ”political viability” would never surface. Bill Clinton may or may not have had s.e.x with the mother of the illegitimate child, a prost.i.tute who lived in a run-down complex a few blocks from the governor's mansion. His neighbors, however, had seen the young governor's digressions on his morning jogs, which were characterized as more like the prowlings of a predator than the outings of a fitness enthusiast. As a result, few were able to dismiss the paternity story as categorically untrue.

With Bill Clinton, rumor is the penumbra of fact; the boundary between the two is indistinct. This is the continuing threat that constantly must be managed by his campaign advisors, from Paul Fray to Paul Begala. When the Star's prost.i.tute story hit the headlines, the White House was notably muted in its denials. No one on President Clinton's or Hillary's staff wanted to go out on that limb.

For most campaign aides, treading this line between trusting the candidate and checking up on him is a difficult enough task. For Hillary, the manager of the perpetual Clinton campaign, explaining Bill has been more than a cross to bear. It must seem like a perpetual purgatory. But it is the price that she has willingly a.s.sumed to affix herself to the Clinton roller-coaster. She must have decided that it is worth it.

THE WAKE-UP CALL.

Bill Clinton handily won the governors.h.i.+p in 1978, arriving to take the oath of office with ink-stained hands from the final edits he had made on his inaugural speech in the car. The inaugural party that evening had a 1970s mock-elegant, mock-country theme, ”Diamonds and Denim.” Planeloads of friends came from the East, luminaries from the days of Oxford, Wellesley, and Yale.

It had been a rapid ascent in five years--from being a law student to being the chief executive of a state. It happened because Bill Clinton had shrewdly chosen a path that others had ignored in their quest for federal office. But it was an ascent that came too fast for Bill and Hillary's own good.

From his perspective, it must have seemed more like a coronation of charm and intellect than an election. Bill Clinton arrived in the governor's office with sweeping ambitions to remake the state in his own image, with little appreciation of the obduracy of the bureaucracy, the legislature's appet.i.te for flattery, and the need always to listen to the people.

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