Game Change (6 page)

How the Democratic base would react to these maneuvers was an open question. In mid-June, brave in a hot-pink pantsuit before a rancorous crowd of several thousand progressive activists at the Take Back America conference at the Washington Hilton, Clinton excoriated the Bush administration’s domestic agenda and its handling of Iraq—for having “rushed to war,” “refused to let the U.N. inspectors conduct and complete their mission,” “committed strategic blunder after blunder,” and “undermined America’s leadership in the world.”

But then Clinton raised her hands defensively and added, with a mild quaver in her voice, “I just have to say it: I do not think it is a smart strategy either for the president to continue with his open-ended commitment, which I think does not put enough pressure on the new Iraqi government, nor do I think it is smart strategy to set a date certain. I do not agree that that is in the best interest of our troops or our country.”

The crowd erupted. “Why not?” people yelled amid a cacophony of boos and hisses so raucous that Clinton could barely be heard above the din. Stepping down off the stage, she was serenaded with chants of protest—“Bring the troops home! Bring the troops home!”—as she made her way to the exit.

The antiwar base was sending a fundamental message: Clinton’s front-runner status was rooted in shaky ground. As wary as she was of being stereotyped as a conventional liberal a la Kerry or Dean, Hillary didn’t fully apprehend that her split-the-difference stance was reviving an equally damaging narrative. With it, and with a handful of other moves that smacked of cynicism—her cosponsorship of a bill to criminalize flag-burning was frequently cited—Clinton was breathing new life into perceptions that she had done so much to slay: that she was a calculating, expedient schemer wedded to no great principle other than her own advancement.

For many Democrats, trimming, triangulating, and poll-tested centrism were among the least appetizing features of the Clinton years. But, of course, there were others—as Hillary herself was reminded all the time, in the most unpleasant ways.

WHEN SHE FIRST GOT the word, she was stunned and angry.
The New York Times
was doing
what
? There was just no way it could be true—but it was, she was told by her press secretary, Philippe Reines, and his counterpart for her husband, Jay Carson.

In the spring of 2006, the Paper of Record was in the midst of reporting a story on the state of the Clinton marriage. And from what the flaks could ascertain from their conversations with the reporter, it wasn’t going to be pretty. The thrust of the piece, they believed, was that the marriage was a sham; that Hillary and Bill barely saw each other, rarely slept in the same bed; that their matrimony was a partnership, an understanding, but little more; that Bill’s bachelor lifestyle had the potential to derail her presidential aspirations.

How is this a legitimate story? Hillary wanted to know. And not just a story, but a story in the most esteemed newspaper in the country. “It’s just fucking unbelievable,” she said. “This is my life? I have to deal with this bullshit?”

Carson and Reines suspected that the
Times
’s true intention was more pernicious still: the paper wanted to write about the rumors swirling around Bill Clinton’s alleged infidelities and was using a discussion of the Clinton marriage as camouflage. Within Hillary’s and Bill’s operations, a series of heated discussions ensued about whether to engage with the reporter, Patrick Healy, or simply say, “No comment.” The dominant view inside Hillaryland, with its aversion to the press, was that to participate would do nothing but legitimize the story. Carson and Reines strongly disagreed. Guys, the story is likely to be on page A1 of
The New York Times
, Carson said. It’s already legitimized! Carson and Reines considered Healy an ethical reporter, persuadable by the facts. Weighing in, they felt, could influence the piece, soften it, and at least prevent errors or egregious insinuations from appearing in print.

Carson and Reines prevailed in that debate and spent a frantic weekend pushing back on the story. They pulled schedules to demonstrate that the Clintons spent plenty of nights together—more, in fact, than Chuck Schumer spent with his wife, Iris. The Clintons loved each other, the press guys insisted; this was not a marriage in name only.

When the story appeared, on May 23, the Clinton camps were braced for the worst. But although it was indeed on A1, the effects of Carson’s and Reines’s efforts were evident. The piece was elliptical, full of loaded language and ominous hints, but contained no damaging facts. Even better from the Clinton perspective, the reaction from readers was harsh—a flood of letters denouncing the paper for going tabloid, for slumming in the gutter. (Stung by the criticisms, the
Times’s
public editor felt compelled to devote a column to justifying the article.) Months later, Carson would tell Bill Clinton that the story, for all the agita around it, turned out to be a blessing in disguise. For as long as anyone could remember, Carson thought, reporters had been dying to peek inside the couple’s bedroom. The Clinton people warned them not to do it—there’s a big mean dog in there, they suggested, ready to chew your face off. Now the
Times
had ventured in and come out bleeding. From that point on, for two solid years, not a single reporter approached Clintonworld in pursuit of a similar story.

Yet the Clinton victory, in the moment, was a pyrrhic one. In Washington, the fact that the
Times
—the prudish, starchy, self-important Gray Lady—had been willing to go there, however awkwardly, merely turned up the flame on the burning speculation about Bill’s putative priapism. What had been a slow simmer in 2005 became a roiling boil in the summer and fall of 2006, as the chattering classes theorized about whether and why the
Times
had pulled its punches. Worse, Clintonworld was hearing that a gusher of gossip was flowing from members of the couple’s own inner circle—and in particular from Steve Ricchetti, the longtime consigliere to Bill who had been so keen on Hillary running for president in 2004.

Since his departure from the White House, Bill Clinton had not exactly erred on the side of caution when it came to his personal comportment. Within days of settling into the Clintons’ new house in Chappaqua in 2001, he could be found at Lange’s deli, chatting up the stay-at-home mothers who trundled in after yoga, startling his aides that he already knew all the women by name. He gallivanted around the world with his business partner Ron Burkle, the supermarket magnate and notorious playboy, whose custom-converted Boeing 757 was referred to by Burkle’s young aides as “Air Fuck One.” Clinton’s regular trips to that carnal triptych of Los Angeles, Miami, and Las Vegas struck many of his friends as a recipe, if not for trouble, then at least for undue temptation and embarrassment. But Bill seemed not to care. He was going to do what he wanted to do, appearances be damned.

And yet Bill was ripshit when Carson and Terry McAuliffe informed him of the extent to which tongues were wagging in Washington. Those goddamn people in D.C., Clinton fumed. They don’t have anything better to do than talk about my sex life? Goddamn that city! This is why I hated it from the beginning down there. Everybody’s got boring lives so they just sit around and talk about someone else’s.

All the murmurings about Bill were starting to get back to Hillaryland as well. When Solis Doyle made the rounds of senior party players—members of Congress, major donors, former Cabinet secretaries—to chat about Hillary’s prospective presidential run, she was encountering a troubling pattern. Almost uniformly, the Democratic grandees professed their affection and respect for Senator Clinton. She’s terrific, they said; she’d be a good candidate and make a great president. But then would come the inevitable addendum: What are you going to do about Bill?

What Solis Doyle invariably would say was “We’ve got that under control.” It was a clever answer she had come up with herself, and it seemed to pacify her listeners.

But Patti was rattled by the specificity of the chatter she was hearing. One rumor was that Bill Clinton was having an affair with a dishy Canadian member of parliament, Belinda Stronach; another involved a wealthy divorcee, Julie Tauber McMahon, who lived in Chappaqua; another revolved around the Hollywood actress Gina Gershon; and the list went on.

Solis Doyle was equally unnerved by the caliber of the people indulging in the speculation. One day she paid a visit to Ricchetti, who mentioned without blinking that he’d recently been on a conference call with a handful of big-name Clinton stalwarts, including former treasury secretary Robert Rubin, which devolved into a prolonged discussion of Bill’s supposed indiscretions and the danger they posed to Hillary.

This is a problem
, Solis Doyle thought, and not a small one. These were heavy-hitting Clinton supporters who had Hillary’s best interests at heart, whose intent was anything but malicious, who were actually trying to help. Solis Doyle decided that she needed to tell Hillary, and quick.

She had brought word to Hillary more than once about the rumors hovering around Bill. “It’s not true,” Hillary would say, and in any case, she knew how to handle it. She had some experience in this area, after all, and she had always emerged intact. “We’ll be ready for it,” she said, and then, again, “It’s not true.”

But Solis Doyle needed Hillary to listen this time, to appreciate the implications of what was happening. You don’t understand, she said insistently. They’re having conference calls about this—what he’s doing, who he’s doing it with, how it’s going to damage you.

The mention of conference calls snapped Hillary to attention. She demanded to know who was on the calls. Solis Doyle told her. Hillary reeled, first stunned into silence by the betrayal, then loudly livid about their friends trafficking this crap behind her back. How dare they? They don’t know anything! Who do they think they are?

Hillary had always been adamant that her and her husband’s personal lives were nobody’s business but theirs. She immediately froze Ricchetti out of Hillaryland. (The reaction in Bill Clinton’s world was even harsher; when other staffers asked Doug Band, the former president’s chief counselor, why Ricchetti was no longer included on regular conference calls of old White House hands, Band icily replied, “He’s dead to us.”)

Hillary wasn’t in complete denial about the perils of the situation, however. She had seen the damage that Bill’s bimbo eruptions could inflict and knew that his imputed peccadilloes were among the gravest potential impediments to her reaching the White House. Clinton turned to two aides she trusted with the most intimate matters, Solis Doyle and Cheryl Mills, and Solis Doyle included Howard Wolfson in the circle. Together, the trio formed a war room within a war room inside Hillaryland, dedicated to managing the threat posed by Bill’s libido. Mills, the lawyer, handled delicate matters where attorney-client privilege might prove useful; Solis Doyle was in charge of the political dimension; and Wolfson worked the media side of the equation.

The war room within a war room dismissed or discredited much of the gossip floating around, but not all of it. The stories about one woman were more concrete, and after some discreet fact-finding, the group concluded that they were true: that Bill was indeed having an affair—and not a frivolous one-night stand but a sustained romantic relationship.

This was exactly the scenario that had incited so many members of the conspiracy of whispers to urge Obama into the race—and what everyone who signed up with Hillary feared each waking day. But whatever storm of emotions Clinton herself might have been experiencing she put aside in the interest of survival. She instructed her team to prepare to deal with the potential blowup of Bill’s personal life. For months thereafter, the war room within a war room braced for the explosion, which her aides knew could come at any time.

Yet even without any detonations, the Bill-related rumblings and their reverberations would continue—and be absorbed by Hillary in painful, maddening, and portentous ways. In October, she was scheduled to headline a New York fund-raiser for Claire McCaskill, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Missouri. McCaskill, a plainspoken centrist who held the job of state auditor, had narrowly lost a run for governor in 2004. She’d been expected to take another shot at that office four years later, but had decided against it out of fear that Clinton would be her party’s presidential nominee in 2008. According to a story in
The New Yorker
in May 2006, McCaskill had “told people in Missouri and in Washington that a ticket led by Clinton would be fatal for many Democrats on the ballot, and that a Clinton candidacy would rule out her chance to win the governorship.”

Hillaryland was not amused by the
New Yorker
piece. But McCaskill smoothed things over with the Clintons, apologizing, claiming she’d been quoted out of context. In September, Bill flew to St. Louis and did a fund-raiser for McCaskill, and now Hillary was set to help fill her coffers, though (not coincidentally) nine hundred miles away from the Missouri media.

The day before the New York fund-raiser, however, McCaskill appeared on
Meet the Press
and was asked by Russert if she thought that Bill Clinton had been a great president. “I do,” McCaskill said. “I have a lot of problems with some of his, his, his personal issues.” Russert began to speak, but McCaskill cut him off. “I said at the time, I think he’s been a great leader, but I don’t want my daughter near him.”

Reines was in Chicago to attend a wedding and happened to be watching the show. Mortified, he knew that someone had to inform Hillary before the fund-raiser took place. He emailed the quote around Hillaryland. Everyone was aghast—and no one wanted to tell the senator, so Reines was saddled with the unpleasant duty.

“So what’s going on?” Hillary asked, when Reines reached her by phone.

Oh, not much, Reines replied, running through the day’s news, the guests on the Sunday shows, and then, at the end, sidling up gingerly to McCaskill’s comment.

“She said
what?”
Hillary asked incredulously.