Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine by Daniel Halper Read Free Book Online

White House. At two or three in the morning, according to this friend’s account, the First Lady burst into Blair’s bedroom.
    “Did you finish it yet?” she asked.
    “Yes,” Blair replied.
    “Well, what did you think?”
    Blair didn’t want to disappoint the First Lady, but responded truthfully that she didn’t really think the book was that well written.
    Hearing the news, Hillary grinned, satisfied. “I knew it was a piece of shit,” she said.
    Though long aware of Bill’s limitations in the husband department, the First Lady seemed to have made a sort of peace with them, through willful ignorance. “[T]he Clintons must carry many scars between them, but we found the marriage anything but loveless,” recalls Clinton biographer Taylor Branch, who recounted a conversation with longtime Clinton associate Strobe Talbott. “Their private partnership still seemed warm and eager, never cold, with a spark from somewhere if not libido. This struck Strobe and me as an abiding mystery.” 14
    In what should have, but didn’t, shock her feminist supporters, Hillary shared her husband’s tendency toward blame shifting and justification for his sexual misconduct. After the Lewinsky disclosures, Hillary’s close friend Blair recorded the First Lady as saying, “Ever since he took office they’ve been going through personal tragedy ([the death of] Vince [Foster], her dad, his mom) and immediately all the ugly forces started making up hateful things about them, pounding on them.” 15 The First Lady also indicated to Blair that her husband’s unhappy, fatherless childhood played a role. She insisted on the creation of an “enemies list” of all those out to get her husband.
    Hillary in short was still trying to protect him, and take control of his life, whether he liked it or not. A senior aide offers perhaps a fitting metaphor for the relationship. During the White House years, at a public event, Hillary would often depart ahead of her husband, waiting for him in their motorcade. After several minutes passed, the First Lady would send someone back into the event to urge her husband to get moving. The president, in response, would stay an extra fifteen minutes longer. The aide’s point: She was seeking to control him and he wouldn’t let her, which would make her want him even more. “That’s really the crux of the relationship,” the aide tells me. “She was basically the one always in the car trying to get him to come to her. He won’t until he decides it’s time.” How Bill handles Hillary, as the aide described it, is “sick but brilliant.”
    After Monica, according to a multitude of aides and observers, that dynamic changed. Hillary was no longer the one in constant pursuit of Bill’s love and attention. He now needed her in a way he never did before. She and she alone would determine the fate of his presidency. Though determined to save his political fortunes as well as her own, Hillary finally saw her husband for the lout he really was. The scandal liberated Hillary to pursue her own career and her own future. And it put Bill in her eternal debt. As Gail Sheehy, a sympathetic biographer of Mrs. Clinton, once put it, the decision to stay with Bill was “easy.” Perhaps unintentionally evoking references to a business partnership, Sheehy noted, citing a source, simply that Hillary “had an investment in this marriage and his career.” 16
    Nonetheless Hillary was “legitimately pissed,” a senior Clinton aide says, about Monica. But not for the reasons one might expect. “It wasn’t that he was fucking someone else. It was that he got caught and so rubbed her nose in it. And she had to appear pissed in public in order to save herself.” That was Bill’s (all but) unforgivable sin.
    One source widely known to be very close to Bill Clinton said the former president “is paying the price for the rest of his life.” Hillary, like the classic “scorned woman,” is, according to the source,