Part 12 (1/2)

Some a.s.sumed that the source must have been in the Secret Service.

Hillary retaliated against Newsweek for reporting the story by canceling a scheduled interview.*30 Things quickly grew worse. Unaware of the statutory role the Secret Service plays in protecting the president, the Clintons naively asked Harry Thomason to investigate the possibility of replacing them with private security guards or the FBI. Former bar bouncer and the Clintons's director of White House security Craig Livingstone told an FBI agent: ”I wrote this memo, this four page memo, and I recommended that the Secret Service be dumped in favor of the FBI .... Someone got a hold of the memo, leaked it to the Secret Service, and they went ballistic.” The project of ”privatizing” the Secret Service function was mercifully short-lived.

”From the start, there was an atmosphere of chaos and paranoia, and it started with Hillary Clinton,” a White House aide told the press.*31 After Hillary's old Watergate a.s.sociate, Bernie Nussbaum, was brought in as White House counsel, he asked the cooks and gardeners to fill out a form with thirty-three questions, including questions about their political affiliations.

The paranoia extended to the White House telephone system. In his first days as president, Clinton was annoyed that operators came on every line. New lines were installed through a rush grant of a sole source contract that allowed him to place his own calls (this would later give him the false sense of security he needed to call Monica Lewinsky for phone s.e.x and, undoubtedly, countless other equally willing a.s.sociates). To ensure the president's privacy, it wasn't good enough to remove the outmoded telephone system at a cost to the taxpayers of more than $27 million. The Clintons removed the switchboard operators as well.

The paranoia extended to the official staff, the nonpartisan civil servants who kept the White House operating smoothly. Marsha Scott, self-described former ”hippie girlfriend” of Bill's in the 1960s and now White House appointee as director of correspondence, summarily fired the ladies in the White House correspondence office. The official excuse was to live up to the promise to trim the White House staff by 25 percent.

”Of all the things the Clintons did, this was perhaps the most sickening,” a Bush White House aide said. ”Most of them had been there for many years, some were close to retiring. They were hard-working, dedicated, and good-humored. It was like beating up the town librarian.” Soon mail was piling to the ceiling, and there were tales of mail being thrown out by the bushel. But room had been made for patronage employees, people who could be trusted.

HILLARY'S GUILLOTINE.

The reign of terror proceeded into the White House kitchen. White House chef Pierre Chambrin was asked to leave, along with sous-chef John Moeller, a.s.sistant chef Sean Haddon, and dishwasher Adam Collick. Gone, too, was Milton Pitts, the barber who had trimmed the hair of numerous past presidents.

Chris Emery, one of four White House ushers, got the axe. His firing offense? He had spoken to former First Lady Barbara Bush on the phone about a computer he had programmed for her. There was nothing unusual in this; White House staff often took calls from former first family members. In this one act, Hillary revealed not only pettiness, but the inner workings of her own mind. She actually believed that it was possible that Barbara Bush was snooping and collecting dirt on her, using a valet as a spy.

In truth, it was a small act of courtesy, if not a part of Emery's job description. For answering that phone call, Emery lost the job by which he supported his wife, an eight-year-old daughter, and three older stepchildren.*32 In all of these acts of vindictive housecleaning, Hillary and Bill showed one of their most striking traits. They are able to project great empathy to the stranger who has lost a house to a natural disaster, touching his shoulders and kneading his arms. They have immense compa.s.sion for humanity at an abstract level, and can tear up at the story ofa Kosovar family's plight. But they are callous, even coldly cruel, to subordinates.

Worse yet, the Clintons's fear of the staff can't just be chalked up to a desire for privacy. Their overreactions to rumors betray the truth of those rumors.

That they fear being spied upon through absurd channels--cooks, gardeners, ushers--betrays their own experience with ”opposition research” and private detectives. Previous presidents and first ladies had no problem with the White House staff, which prompts the question: What are the Clintons saying and doing that requires so much concealment? Monicagate provided one answer. But the reality goes deeper than that.

h.e.l.l TO PAY.

The purge of the White House staff led to co-president Hillary's first big public relations disaster: the White House Travel Office.

After the election, campaign worker Catherine Cornelius, blonde and pretty, was brought into the White House to work at the White House Travel Office. It wasn't long before the White House started putting out the story that Cornelius was Clinton's cousin, as a peculiar and peculiarly Clintonesque way to explain her frequent appearances with the president on the road and trips to the Oval Office.

Once in the Travel Office, she began to conspire against her superior, Billy Dale, whose job she expected to take--because she was a Clinton loyalist and Dale and his crew were apolitical careerists of the sort the Clintons treated with contempt and as possible spies.

Cornelius handed David Watkins--a former Little Rock ad man and now the White House director of administration--reports of bad record-keeping, poor money management, and sloppy handling of vouchers, all of which enabled her to help set Billy Dale and his fellow workers up for a claim that they had sticky fingers.

As Cornelius undermined Dale from the inside, Clinton friend and campaign supporter Harry Thomason--who, in addition to being a Hollywood producer, had an interest in an air charter broker called TRM--made a direct a.s.sault from the outside. Anxious to obtain a White House contract for TRM, Thomason built on Cornelius's suspicions and brought them directly to the Clintons. The first lady was ”pressuring” Chief of Staff Mack McLarty to act. Watkins describes ”pressure for action” from Mrs.

Clinton. White House counsel Vince Foster's notes disclose the continuing pressure over the Travel Office and that ”the first lady was concerned and desired action.” Foster wrote that he had to ”defend HRC role whatever it is, was in fact, or might have been misperceived to be” in July 1993. Watkins and Foster were sent to investigate.

There was a nexus of motives that made the firing of the White House Travel Office seem like the proverbial killing of multiple birds with a single stone. One was to award business to friends. (”These guys are sharp,” the president wrote in a memo after hearing of Thomason's plan to take over White House travel.) Another was to extend Hillary's purge, opening seven new jobs for loyal and trusted people.

(David Watkins recounts his phone conversation with Hillary five days before the firings: ”We need those people out--we need our people in--we need the slots.”) Another was desire for good publicity at a time when the White House was under fire for the ”gays in the military” controversy. Harry Thoma.s.son is credited with stating that the firings would showcase the profligate ways if not outright stealing that had been tolerated under the Republicans and would favorably cast the White House as defenders of the taxpayer. He felt it would ”be a great story,” showing ”Bill Clinton cleaning up the White House” after the Bush administration.

An accounting review by Peat Marwick was commissioned, and it did show careless record-keeping (including the commingling of personal and office accounts by Dale). But it revealed no graft. No matter.

Dale was fired after thirty-two years on the job. He and his staff were given little more than an hour to clean their desks and were driven out in a windowless van under the watchful eyes of uniformed Secret Service.

In this act of gratuitous spite, Hillary had finally overreached.

The White House worked hard, too hard, to make a felony case against Dale and his people. William Kennedy III --a Rose Law Firm partner, now in the White House counsel's office--called the FBI and set them loose on the Travel Office staff like dobermans to destroy Billy Dale's reputation and justify the firings. As Kennedy told the FBI: It came from ”the highest level.”

The error was compounded when press secretary Dee Dee Myers was sent out to tout what was meant to be a good news story about the Clintons' ferreting out corruption. But Myers did not know that a cardinal rule of the FBI was never to reveal the targets of an investigation until an indictment is about to be presented. In one clumsy move, the White House revealed that it, and not a disinterested FBI investigation, had initiated the firing of Dale.

Soon the White House was working furiously to contain the damage.

New employees--from Worldwide Travel, which handled the Clintons'

campaign flights--were in place in the White House and then released, so the White House could take back five fired Travel Office staffers who had had no role in money management.

After an internal investigation, Bill Kennedy and David Watkins were officially reprimanded. Dale, after offering to plead to a misdemeanor to keep his legal bills down, was prosecuted for a felony, and after a brief deliberation was found not guilty by a D.C.

jury in a 1995 trial in which celebrity supporters of the Travel Office staff, like ABC news reporter Sam Donaldson, came to Billy Dale's defense.

One casualty from the Travel Office was David Watkins, who was ostensibly fired for using a White House helicopter for a trip to a golf course. But Watkins--a Clinton loyalist who had been instrumental in keeping the Clintons' campaign financially afloat in 1992--felt that he had been set-up to take the fall for Hillary's Travel Office fiasco.

In January 1996 a memo Watkins had written to Chief of Staff Mack McLarty surfaced. It had never been sent, for it was the kind of letter one puts in a file to get a set of facts on record in the event of an investigation or indictment.

”On Friday, while I was in Memphis,” Watkins wrote, ”Foster told me that it was important that I speak directly with the First Lady that day. I called her that evening and she conveyed to me in clear terms her desire for swift and clear action to resolve the situation. She mentioned that Thomason had explained how the Travel Office could be run after removing the current staff--that plan included bringing in WorldWide Travel to handle the basic travel functions, the actual actions taken post dismissal, and in light of that she thought immediate action was in order.

”At that meeting you explained that this was on the First Lady's radar screen. The message you conveyed to me was clear: immediate action must be taken .... We both knew that there would be h.e.l.l to pay if, after our failure in the Secret Service situation earlier, we failed to take swift and decisive action in conformity with the First Lady's wishes.”

Linda Tripp worked in the counsel's office at this time as an executive a.s.sistant. She was later deposed by Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch and asked about the Travel Office firings. Tripp testified that she saw a handwritten memo from Hillary demanding that the Travel Office staff be fired and replaced with ”our people.”

Long before Watkins's memo surfaced and Tripp was deposed, rumors about the first lady's involvement started to leak out. When the White House believed it could still contain the truth, Hillary put out a statement attesting that she ”had no role in the decision to terminate the [Travel Office] employees.”*33 Hillary repeated this statement under oath to questions by the General Accounting Office and to the twenty-six questions presented to her in my investigation.

She denied having ”first-hand knowledge” and did ”not recall” most other information. These questions were signed by Hillary Rodham Clinton on March 21, 1996, under penalty of perjury.

That denial proved to be very much like Bill Clinton's finger-waving denial of having had s.e.xual relations with Monica Lewinsky: categorically false. But if, as Clinton's defenders a.s.serted, that it is only natural to lie about s.e.x, perhaps Hillary's defense is that it's only natural to lie about the unpleasant business of firing people for no better reason than to replace them with ”our people.”

The Travel Office fiasco showed one more thing about Hillary Clinton and her husband. They had every right to replace the Travel Office empoyees. They did not have to smear them or lie about why they were being replaced. But it has become second nature to do both. The abuse of power, the destruction of people who are in the way, the lying, even when the truth might be entirely acceptable--these are the Clintons' modi operatdi.

TROJAN WOMEN.

”She has a huge cadre of friends and knows where she wants them in the administration,” a White House aide told the press.*34 Hillary quickly fixed her imprint on the president's cabinet, subcabinet, and staff. The men she brought in were, conspicuously, the lawyers--Bernard Nussbaum, Webster Hubbell, William Kennedy III, and Vincent Foster. Elsewhere she exercised her veto authority to keep other white men out of jobs.

One of her early hires was a favorite of Marian Wright Edelman, Dr.

Johnetta Cole. Dr. Cole was a former president of Spellman College, brought in to head the transition team's education cl.u.s.ter, making her a Secretary of Education-in-waiting.

Articles on Dr. Cole's past soon began to appear in Forward, a leading Jewish paper, and the New York Post. It turned out that Dr.

Cole had maintained extensive ties with the Venceremos Brigade, an adjunct of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), dedicated to the Havana government. She had founded a CPUSA front organization, the U.S. Peace Council.

Dr. Cole applauded Castro's military adventure in Angola, and was given to saying that American blacks need to ”stand in solidarity with the Cuban Revolution.” She was one of many notorious far-left activists (including Angela Davis) who denounced Joan Baez for signing an ad in the New York Times that criticized the Communist Vietnamese government for its human rights violations. ”Some 400,000 servants of the former barbaric regime were sent to re-education camps,” said the letter signed by Dr. Cole. ”Should they not be reeducated?”*35 The prospect was mind-boggling. A woman who took a public stand in favor of Communist reeducation camps was Hillary's first choice for America's Secretary of Education. It did not take long for the magnitude of Hillary's mistake to sink in. Before the nomination had been officially referred, the Clintons realized that sending Dr. Cole to a Senate confirmation hearing would be like tossing a T-bone into a den of starving rottweilers. They quietly dropped her.

Hillary would have to look elsewhere to make her mark. A natural place, of course, was the Department of Justice. The Justice Department transition team was firmly in her hands, led by an old friend, Peter Edelman, husband of Marian Wright and a law dean at Georgetown. One of their nominees was Lani Guinier, an old friend of the Clintons from Yale, to head the department's civil rights division.

Of all the embattled Clinton nominees, Guinier was one of the most embarra.s.sing. The American Jewish Congress, which opposed Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, found Guinier unacceptable, saying that her ideas would lead to ”bad public policy.”

”Crowning a Quota Queen?” asked Newsweek in a headline. The term stuck, and was used to great effect by Clint Bolick, a conservative legal scholar, in the Wall Street Journal.

What made the Guinier nomination remarkable was that no one stood up for her. Columnist Mark s.h.i.+elds wrote that Clarence Thomas ”had a staunch, unflinching champion in Senator Jack Danforth and a supportive White House.” Guinier ”had n.o.body on Capitol Hill for her, and the White House was distracted, disorganized, and in disarray.”*36 And, one might add, unwilling to commit to anything but polls.