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Byron York
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June 12, 2007 12:45 A.M.
The Hillary Chronicles: Worse Than You Thought
Two new biographies shed new light on Senator Clinton.
Hillary Clinton wasn’t looking forward to the publication of two new biographies, Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton, by former and present New York Timesmen Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr., and A Woman in Charge, by Carl Bernstein, the lesser half of the Watergate team of Woodward and Bernstein. Senator Clinton is, of course, famously secretive — she probably wouldn’t be happy with any biography unless it were written by, say, Sidney Blumenthal — and she refused to cooperate with either Gerth/Van Natta or Bernstein. Even before publication, her spokesmen had their putdown lines ready. “Is it possible to be quoted yawning?” Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines said to the Washington Post.
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Now we have the books in hand, and in one sense it’s hard to see why Clinton and her flacks were so worried. Neither volume contains the kind of bombshell revelation that dominates the news for days at a time, and neither could qualify as a hit job. Bernstein, in particular, seems well disposed toward his subject, whom he describes as “an intelligent woman endowed with energy, enthusiasm, humor, tempestuousness, inner strength, [and] spontaneity in private.” Even accounting for a few unappealing attributes, such as her talent for retribution and her occasionally salty tongue, Bernstein concludes that Hillary Clinton is filled with “passion — which, down deep, is perhaps her most enduring and even endearing trait.” Not exactly the words of a hit man.
But there’s another sense in which Clinton was right to be concerned. Though bereft of headline-making disclosures, each book contains page after page of new details, some of them so far ignored in the press, that reveal Hillary Rodham Clinton to be even more secretive, even more politically tin-eared, and even more combative than previously known.
For example, we’ve all heard about the famous War Room of the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign. But Gerth and Van Natta reveal that across the alley from the War Room was a more secretive effort, headed by Hillary and known as the Defense Team, that really got into the down-and-dirty stuff. The Defense Team’s job was to knock down any allegation, no matter how well founded, about Bill Clinton’s girlfriends, his avoidance of the draft, Whitewater, Hillary Clinton’s legal work — anything that might hurt the campaign. And to do it by any means necessary, legal or not: Gerth and Van Natta report that on one occasion Mrs. Clinton listened to a “secretly recorded audiotape” of Clinton adversaries talking on the phone about the next possible bimbo eruption. “Bill’s supporters monitored frequencies used by cell phones,” Gerth and Van Natta add, “and the tape was made during one of those monitoring sessions.” Who knew that Mrs. Clinton was an early advocate of warrantless wiretapping?
Fast forward several years, and Gerth and Van Natta tell us about an organization called CREW, which stands for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. It’s a well-known group, a supposedly non-partisan watchdog organization that in fact spends most of its time attacking Republicans (just ask Tom DeLay). The news is that Hillary’s fingerprints are all over it. As described by Gerth and Van Natta, a Hillary operative named Jodi Sakol played a key role in setting up CREW. Sakol told the authors that Hillary was “proactive” and wanted to “beat the GOP at their own game” by setting up a group modeled on Judicial Watch, which had filed lawsuits against the Clintons in the 1990s. (Hillary seems to have forgotten that Judicial Watch did a turnaround and began attacking the Bush administration after the 2000 election.) Hillary helped line up donors for CREW, volunteered ideas, okayed the involvement of her top pollster, Mark Penn, and looked on as her “watchdogs” went out after DeLay and other GOP leaders. Somehow she managed to keep her name out of all this.
Gerth and Van Natta also show Clinton employing secret staffers, in the process sneaking around Senate rules that don’t suit her fancy. They show her threatening a staffer with “You’ll never work in Democratic politics again” if the staffer failed to cover up tax returns showing Clinton’s commodities-trading profits. And they show her directing the operation to stonewall the independent-counsel investigations of her husband.
Bernstein’s book doesn’t dwell on that kind of detail. But with a lot of prime sources in the Clinton camp, Bernstein goes much deeper than Gerth and Van Natta, portraying a Hillary Clinton who was even more closely involved in the running of her husband’s administration than we thought. And not only more closely involved — she was also even less competent and more politically maladroit than we thought.
In a scene from the frenzied Clinton transition after the 1992 election, Bernstein portrays Mrs. Clinton sitting down with top political adviser Dick Morris, musing over what position to take in the new administration. Hillary thought she might make a fine attorney general — until someone remembered the “Bobby Kennedy law” that forbade a president from making nepotism appointments to his cabinet. She thought about becoming White House chief of staff — Bernstein reports that Morris “was one of several people with whom Hillary discussed the question of being chief of staff.” Or perhaps she might be the chief domestic-policy adviser.
She wasn’t kidding. Bernstein also describes Mrs. Clinton’s putting dibs on the West Wing office space that had, in previous administrations, been occupied by the vice president. Roy Neel, Al Gore’s top aide, stood by astonished, finally complaining to Susan Thomases, one of Hillary’s closest operatives. In the end, Mrs. Clinton didn’t get the office, but she did take charge of her husband’s top priority, health-care reform, and made a terrible mess of it.
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