In 1988 and 1991 the National Law Journal included among its list of the one hundred most influential lawyers in the country one Hillary Rodham, partner in the Little Rock law firm of Rose, Nash, Williamson, Carroll, Clay and Giroir.
This was an astonishing development for a young lawyer in Little Rock. After all, most lawyers on that list were rainmakers or heavy-hitting partners of powerhouse firms, renowned legal scholars from the Harvard Law School, and attorneys general of the United States.
When American Lawyer actually researched Hillary"s career, it found little--aside from her husband"s political office--to explain how she could have become one of the nation"s most influential lawyers. She had tried only five cases in fifteen years at the Rose Law Firm.
Court reporters said they had seen little of her. It seems that much of her work revolved around copyright infringement for songwriters.*1 One case given to her by Vince Foster was to defend a canning company against a consumer"s claim that the hindquarters of a mouse had been found in his can of pork and beans. The cogency of her defense was highly praised by Foster. But Webb Hubbell claimed Hillary was "amazingly nervous" before the jury.
"She won the case," Hubbell wrote, "but began steering her practice toward nonjury matters."*2 Hillary"s lack of litigation skills or apt.i.tude did not go unnoticed.
Even though she had been a.s.signed to the litigation division at Rose with Hubbell and Foster, Hillary"s colleagues were only too happy to tell journalists from American Lawyer that they were surprised by her ranking among the top one hundred. Some doubted she was even among the top one hundred lawyers in Little Rock.*3 How, then, did Hillary get on the list? She was married to a governor who was a rising luminary in the ranks of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. It was mostly, however, her own growing national reputation not as a lawyer, but as a leading female lawyer activist. Hillary had established herself as a national figure in liberal circles at Wellesley and Yale, then as a bright up-and-comer who had secured one of the coveted spots on the House Judiciary Committee"s investigation of Watergate.
Hillary maintained her visibility on the East Coast the entire time she was in Little Rock, spending several days a month in New York and Washington in the service of a variety of liberal causes.
As the head of the Legal Services Corporation--appointed by President Jimmy Carter--Hillary wielded power on a national basis, ultimately seeking to undermine the policies of the incoming Reagan administration.
She would, however, occasionally have to drop her duties at Rose and her leadership of the liberal lobbies to rescue Bill Clinton from himself, first to get him back into office after losing the governorship following a disastrous first term, then to guide him through a series of policy initiatives that were really part of a perpetual reelection campaign.
The young woman who had disdained the spreading of "walking around money" during her husband"s failed 1974 run for Congress had changed.
Now she unhesitatingly used taxpayer funded Legal Services dollars to support political campaigns. The young woman who had once held "the corporate power structure" in contempt had become a part of it, sitting on corporate boards and parlaying her meager holdings into a tidy nest egg. The young woman who had expressed her dismay at the ethics of her elders arranged to make a quick and highly lucrative killing in cattle futures with the guidance of a lawyer connected to a tyc.o.o.n famous for his hatred of organized labor and his willingness to dump tons of chicken excrement into the rivers and streams of poor communities.
Hillary Rodham had seen what was needed to win, to gain power, and if that meant enriching herself and doing whatever it took to enrich Democratic campaign coffers, so be it.
The transformation of Hillary Rodham had begun before she came to Little Rock. The seeds of change in her life, sowed by the Reverend Jones and Saul Alinsky were nurtured, unwittingly, by Richard Milhouse Nixon.
WATERGATE: LESSONS LEARNED.
Hillary was twenty-six years old when two leading liberal lawyers singled her out for a remarkable a.s.signment.
One of them was her old civil rights professor, Burke Marshall, a former a.s.sistant attorney general for civil rights. Burke was deeply involved in the Democratic establishment. He is best remembered as one of the first to receive a call from Ted Kennedy after the senator weaved off the Chappaquidd.i.c.k Bridge and needed help explaining how and why he had left Mary Jo Kopechne to drown in his car.
Another was John Doar, liberal Republican, a civil rights firebrand who had worked for Burke in the Kennedy Justice Department. Doar was a hero of the civil rights movement, having nudged George Wallace out of a schoolhouse door and having once put himself in harm"s way to stop a riot.
Doar now found himself center stage in a very different kind of political struggle. Watergate had descended upon the nation, with obscure names suddenly becoming the background patter of the times: Haldeman, Dean, Ehrlichman, Segretti. A political firestorm had erupted after Nixon fired Archibald c.o.x, and fresh oxygen was added to the blaze when Vice President Agnew resigned in disgrace over a bribery charge from his days as governor of Maryland.
Doar had been impaneled by Representative Pete Rodino, Jr., to serve as special counsel in charge of the House Judiciary investigation of the president. The investigation, ostensibly, was to be impartial and nonpartisan. Yet Doar had made private references to the investigation as "the war," and "the cause" against Nixon. The choice of a staff, almost uniformly liberal (including a few liberal Republicans like young Willian Weld of Ma.s.sachusetts), belied the investigation"s supposed impartiality.
One of these choices was a young woman Doar had come to know through the Barristers Union at Yale, Hillary Rodham. Hillary"s activities, as campus activist and outspoken critic of Nixon and his "illegal"
bombing of Cambodia, were familiar to those in anti-Nixon circles.
Doar had seen Hillary perform at the Prize Trial at Yale and listened with interest to Burke"s strong recommendation of her. Hillary planned to become a staff attorney with the Children"s Defense Fund (CDF) in Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts, but was captivated instead by Doar"s proposition that she join his team of forty-plus lawyers who were to handle the committee"s inquiry into the possible impeachment of Richard Nixon. She quickly accepted.
Hillary threw herself into the Nixon investigation with enthusiasm, pa.s.sion, and intense determination. She put in twelve- to twenty-hour days, seven days a week, at a desk in a cramped office--permeated with the odor of mildew--in the Congressional Hotel. At night, she went home to a small bedroom rented from Sara Ehrman, a colleague from the McGovern campaign. A close a.s.sociate was Bernie Nussbaum, then a right-hand man to Doar, who was later rewarded by Hillary with his appointment to become White House counsel to President Clinton.
Hillary"s work with the committee began in January 1974. She was only one of two women lawyers on the staff. Her primary a.s.signment was to make sure that the inquiry conformed to legal and parliamentary procedure.
Two years later, an article appeared in the Atlantic Mothly by Renata Adler, a journalist close to Doar and part of his circle of informal advisors. In this remarkable piece, largely overlooked by other journalists and historians, Doar confided that he had meant to use his legal team, dubbed "the faceless forty," as mere legal window dressing.
Their primary mission was to deluge the committee in a blizzard of doc.u.mentation, Adler revealed, to create the appearance of great diligence. Meanwhile, Doar would work with a few select members of the team, a group within the group, to make sure that they reached the only acceptable objective, the removal of Richard Nixon from the White House.
Hillary Rodham"s single-mindedness and ideological zealotry made her a natural member of the inside group. Supported by Doar and Nussbaum, she proposed a gag order on Judiciary Committee members, a measure that would have prevented them from cross-examining witnesses or drafting their own articles of impeachment; all power, in other words, would rest with Doar"s staff. The elected committee members would be mere marionettes in a Doar-Rodham show trial.
The Judiciary Committee members were stunned.
William Dixon, a member of the committee staff, later told Joyce Milton that Hillary "paid no attention to the way the Const.i.tution works in this country, the way politics works, the way Congress works, the way legal safeguards are set up."*4 Hillary"s protocols were so poorly conceived and drafted that Representative Jack Brooks, the populist Democrat from Texas, had no choice but to line up a committee vote to strike them down.
Was Hillary really so incompetent, so ill-suited to the scholarly role a.s.signed to her? It is doubtful that Doar, who did not tolerate messy desks, would have tolerated scholarly incompetence. It seems instead that Doar and his proteges were driven by a secretiveness that rivaled that of the Nixon White House itself; with similar antipathies toward democratic processes. They seemed to believe that an open inquiry could not be trusted to come to the proper conclusion. It would have to be orchestrated by smart young people like Hillary Rodham and her general, John Doar.
One staffer who saw through this gambit was Jerry Zeifman, chief counsel for the Judiciary Committee, who had every reason to feel he was being shut out by his special counsel, Doar. Zeifman later concluded: "It seems to me that Haldeman and Ehrlichman are crude amateurs at arrogance in comparison to the more polished and sophisticated arrogance and deceit of some of Doar"s a.s.sistants."*5 Whatever embarra.s.sment Hillary might have felt, she retained Doar"s confidence. If anything, Doar"s reliance on Hillary grew. Hillary was one of the few researchers allowed to hear what the staff would call "the tape of tapes."
"It was Nixon himself listening to the tapes, making up his defenses to what he heard on the tapes .... You could hear Nixon talk and then you"d hear very faintly the sound of a taped prior conversation with Nixon, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman... and you"d hear [the president]
say, "What I meant when I said that was".... It was surreal, unbelievable."*6 Tom Bell, a Watergate colleague of Hillary"s, told David Maraniss that Hillary"s opinion of Nixon "was more a result of the McGovern campaign and Vietnam and those kinds of issues. I saw him as evil because he was s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g with the Const.i.tution. She came at it with more preconceived ideas than I did...."
"She saw the work as absolutely the most important thing in the world," Bell continued. "I saw it as important but also as a job.
To her it may have been more of a mission."*7 Some might say a jihad.
Hillary tracked the voices on the tapes with the comings and goings of staff and visitors on the White House logs. She reconstructed who spoke to whom, and where. She carefully sifted the evidence and extracted that which was the most incriminating.
Another aspect of her job was to write a scholarly background piece on the law of impeachment, encompa.s.sing four centuries of English and American law. She was to examine the scope of impeachable conduct, from the parliamentary trial of Warren Hastings, to the intent of the American founding fathers, to the impeachment of ten federal judges.
Her specific task was to find an extra-Const.i.tutional rationale for impeaching Nixon over the secret bombing of Cambodia.
Hillary concluded in her report to Doar that "to limit impeachable conduct to criminal offenses would be incompatible with the evidence concerning the const.i.tutional meaning of the phrase... and would frustrate the purpose that the framers intended for impeachment."
These words have an ironic ring years later when her husband"s squadrons of lawyers would have to make--and sell--the opposite case to save him from impeachment.
It is likely that Hillary"s Watergate experience, shaped directly by Doar and indirectly by Richard Nixon, influenced much of her future approach to politics. It is hard to fully appreciate the degree to which she had become a close-in witness to history now that excerpts from the Watergate tapes can be heard on cable channel doc.u.mentaries.
In 1974, being one of the few select investigators allowed to listen in on the Nixon Oval Office, she must have felt as if she were there, hovering over Nixon and his aides, a witness to sinister conduct by an unsavory and distasteful man. She heard Nixon"s dissembling, his private mutterings, his ba.n.a.l obscenities and often coa.r.s.e characterization of others, sensed his suffering through the long sweaty hours of defense, denial, and counterdenial.
In the end, Nixon was his own worst accuser, a man who condemned himself in his own words, with his own voice. Nixon was trapped by his actions and in many ways prosecuted by his conscience. John Connally, the most trusted member of the Nixon cabinet, told Nixon to gather the tapes in the Rose Garden and proudly burn them.
From the standpoint of Machiavellian tactics, of course, Connally was right. Had Nixon burned the tapes he would have been seen by his supporters as standing up for the rights of the presidency, and daring his tormentors to impeach on the remaining evidence.*8 From an amoral perspective of power politics, Nixon made two other critical mistakes. In the last days of his administration, he opted to put the country before his own personal legacy, to resign rather than force the ordeal of an impeachment upon America. But before that, his big mistake was thinking that he could survive by admitting half of the truth.
Hillary witnessed firsthand that such a path could only lead to ruin.
As she and her husband were later to demonstrate, the final lesson of Watergate is that any compromise with a criminal investigation is fatal. They were to prove that if one stonewalls, denies the undeniable, destroys evidence, and attacks the accusers, one may be risking going to prison for the sake of political survival, but if prosecution can be avoided, political viability is also possible. If one cooperates, one may escape prison, but is certain to face political ruin and a lifetime of shame.
For Hillary, her husband, and their defenders, when faced with an impeachment of their own two decades later, this choice would be a no-brainer. As they learned in Arkansas, as they refined during the first campaign for the presidency, and as they perfected during the Kenneth Starr investigation and the impeachment proceedings, when accused, go for broke--and destroy the accuser.
Sh.e.l.l GAME AT LEGAL SERVICES.
As her husband won the office of attorney general, and then governor, Hillary burrowed into the legal establishment, winning her partner-track position with the prestigious "white-shoe" Rose Law Firm. She helped found and chair the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families. More important, she was appointed to the board of the Legal Services Corporation, becoming its chairman in 1978.
Bill Clinton was close enough to President Jimmy Carter"s political operation that he was given control of patronage in Arkansas. Yet it was likely Hillary"s dedicated work as a deputy field coordinator in Indiana in 1976 that brought her to the attention of the Carter White House. Lacking a sufficient number of political volunteers, she came up with an ingenious idea: she worked with local bail bondsmen to get local felons to operate the phone bank.
One of her rewards was an appointment to the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), a federally funded nonprofit organization established by Congress, was an ideal platform for a young lawyer indoctrinated in the ways of Crit activism. Though LSC was born as a Great Society concept, the Ford administration tempered it into a means to equalize access to justice.
Under President Carter, it was transformed back into what many of its founders had intended it to be in the first place, a mechanism for growing and strengthening the social welfare state. Such an a.s.signment might have been invented for Hillary Rodham. It replicated her thinking on children"s rights on a grand scale, allowing her to put together a cadre of committed activist lawyers who, by mau-mauing the system, could use individual cases as levers with which to broaden mandates for social welfare spending, to create new rights needing new programs and public expenditures.
On the House Judiciary Committee, Hillary had shown a mastery of the Crit philosophy, interpreting law as she wished in order to advance a political goal. The LSC was the ultimate playground--and laboratory--for this philosophy. She was in a perfect position to manipulate public policy into a useful weapon to further her political causes.
It is not hard to see how she accomplished her goals. In the words of Warren Brookes, conservative muckraker and chronicler of the failures of the welfare state, LSC had become a grossly illegal "$300 million liberal political action committee."
Hillary Rodham"s Senate confirmation after her recess appointment was initially jeopardized by controversy. As Bill Clinton rose on the state political scene, Hillary became the source of many conflicts of interest for the Rose Law Firm. During the confirmation hearings she was asked if Rose would recuse itself from business with organizations funded by the LSC. Hillary refused to say "yes." In control of another political party, Hillary may have had more trouble but the Democrats controlled the Senate. Thus, the senators reluctantly voted to confirm her.
At a staff retreat at Airlie House in Virginia, Chairman Hillary Rodham wasted no time in putting her stamp on the LSC. It was made clear that while showing a moderate public veneer, the LSC"s activism would be expanded and made more aggressive. Under her leadership, the LSC budget grew from $90 million to more than $321 million.
What she did with the money was a serious scandal, but one which she managed to brazen her way through--like scandals to come. The LSC used public funds to print political training manuals to show "how community organizations and public interest groups can win political power and resources." The LSC contributed taxpayer dollars to a mayor"s campaign in Georgia, as a project to educate clients about their rights in the legislative process."*9 It held training programs that taught political activists how to hara.s.s the opposition, from nailing dead rats to an opponent"s front door, to the black arts of private investigations and dirt digging.*10 The LSC became heavily involved in the referendum politics of California. In 1980 Proposition 9 proposed cutting California"s state income taxes in half. Without a hint that it recognized the irony of using taxpayer money to prevent a tax cut, the LSC illegally diverted public funds to a campaign by five hundred attorneys, led by LSC board member and certified FOH Mickey Kantor, to defeat the ballot initiative. During the campaign, the LSC doled out a special $61,000 "special needs" grant to hire campaign coordinators. The LSC paid for clerical staff, travel, printing, and postage for the campaign.*11 The LSC also sought to return two-thirds of the state of Maine to Indians.*12 It paid Marxist orators and folk singers to try to galvanize oyster collectors who had a grievance with the Louisiana Wildlife Commission.*13 It went to bat in Michigan to define "black English" as a separate language.
The LSC saw drug addicts and alcoholics as "handicapped" and gave a grant for a suit against the New York City Transit Authority to force it to hire former heroin addicts. The reason? Discrimination against former addicts const.i.tuted discrimination against minorities.*14 While most of these cases remained local stories, the LSC"s exploits were starting to attract national attention. One occurred in 1981, when the LSC joined the case of a transs.e.xual welfare recipient who demanded that Medicare pay for a s.e.x-change operation.*15 Hillary could have used the LSC to make sure that poor minority--mostly black--men accused in murder cases received better counsel than the inadequate, court-appointed lawyers they were often stuck with. Instead, she made sure that LSC funds went toward political causes and expanding rights to create new law, to change the system through judicial activism. The activities of the LSC had gotten so out of hand that two leading politicians from Arkansas, Democratic Senator Dale b.u.mpers and Republican Ed Bethune, joined together in a complaint to the Carter administration that the LSC looked "for too many cases which can effect an economic or social outcome."
When challenged from the left, Hillary went on the attack with a vehemence that astonished many of her allies. She vigorously and successfully opposed so-called "judicare," a program in which lawyers would offer discounted services to poor clients and receive reimburs.e.m.e.nt from the government.
But it was in former California governor Ronald Reagan that the LSC saw its most deadly opponent and the coming end of its freewheeling reign. As Reagan began to overtake Carter in the 1980 election, the LSC diverted funds from cases and threw its resources into a frantic effort to use indigent clients in a letter-writing campaign against Reagan.
In a later investigation, Republican Senate aides were astonished to see videotaped training sessions in which staffers spoke openly about how they were organizing the LSC"s national network to defeat Reagan.
As soon as Ronald Reagan was elected, the LSC laundered its money into state-level agencies and private groups. By the time Reagan had taken the oath of office, the LSC had hidden its budget in cookie jars throughout the country. In the last days of the Carter Administration, some $260 million was disbursed so that it would be kept out of the hands of the eventual Reagan-appointed board.
As it turned out, that board would be a long time coming.
When President Reagan set out to appoint a board of his own through recess appointments, Hillary masterminded a lawsuit arguing that such recess appointments were illegal (though she, herself, had been appointed in just this way). Meanwhile, a successful, dirt-seeking opposition research campaign had tarnished the Reagan appointees, accusing them of overcharging their expense accounts and of racial bias. Though the Reaganites would later be cleared, the smear tactics achieved their intended effect, derailing the confirmation process.*16 In 1983 the General Accounting Organization (GAO) investigated the LSC and concluded that the L$C"s activities "and many of the people a.s.sociated with it are uniquely reprehensible .... " Strong words from a bipartisan, congressionally-controlled government watchdog.
Indeed, the GAO said that the LSC "has itself engaged and allowed its grant recipients to engage in lobbying activities prohibited by federal law...."
The creators of the LSC, however, had carefully drafted its charter, including language that would have made the prosecution of Hillary Rodham difficult. There is no doubt, however, that she had spearheaded a deliberate, national plot to undermine the political process with millions of dollars worth of staff work and the diversion of taxpayer money into political campaigns.
As she did on the House Judiciary Committee, Hillary manifested a fierce commitment to the ends she had chosen and showed a remarkable indifference to the rule of law if it stood in the way of undermining "the system" or kept her from fighting the Nixons and the Reagans, who had become the bete noires of her politicized imagination.
LIBERAL LIONESS.
Hillary had kept herself at the fore of liberal activism by flying East to lead many other causes and programs, and by creating miniature versions of those programs in her home state of Arkansas.
Some causes to which she directed money were in the liberal mainstream, from the National a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to the People for the American Way. And she focused much of her activist energies in her new home state. While Bill served as attorney general, Hillary was helping to found the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, meant to be a state version of the CDF. Serving as president of the group"s first board, she lobbied for and won more state financing for Head Start and other programs.*17 On a vacation in Miami, she read a newspaper article about an Israeli child development program that worked with parents, usually mothers, in role-playing exercises to stimulate preschoolers" cognitive development. Within a short time, the Home Instruction Program for Preschool Youngsters, or HIPPY, had reached five thousand Arkansas children.*18 Other causes took her farther afield.
Hillary chaired the New World Foundation from 1982 to 1988, during which time she awarded $15,000 to Gra.s.sroots International,which funneled the grant money to the Union of Palestinian Working Women"s Committees and the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees, both branches of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).*19 The public seems to have forgotten that before the Oslo Peace accords, the PLO had outsavaged the Baider Meinhof Gang, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), and the Red Brigade as the leaders of global terrorism. These were the b.l.o.o.d.y years of Munich, airport ma.s.sacres, and laughing terrorists tossing an elderly, wheelchair-bound Jew into the Mediterranean. This was a time when the PLO was committed to the extinction of Israel and excelled in the arts of a.s.sa.s.sination and mayhem to press its claim. As a lawyer with the Department of Justice in 1989, I volunteered to fly to New York to serve papers to shut down the PLO "emba.s.sy" there to remove a terrorist foothold from our sh.o.r.es.
Other left-wing recipients of Hillary"s largesse included the Committees in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, or CISPES.
CISPES unabashedly sought to bring a Communist revolution to Central America.*20 A grant of $15,000 went to the National Lawyer"s Guild, a Communist front organization. Grants were given to groups with ties to the most extreme elements in the African National Congress.
Hillary also directed a grant of $20,000 to the Christic Inst.i.tute, the looniest fringe group in the loony left, which publicized a number of bizarre conspiracy theories in which virtually every ill on earth could be traced to "secret teams" at the CIA involved in the narcotics trade.
It was not enough for Hillary to support causes dear to the Democratic Party and the American left. While her husband built an image as a moderate, centrist Democrat, Hillary rolled up her sleeves and made sure that American taxpayer dollars were disbursed to people dedicated to terror, disinformation, and violent revolution. She has never expressed a single word of regret for her support for these organizations and causes.
Hillary had also risen in the ranks of her favorite cause, the Children"s Defense Fund (CDF). She spent considerable time back East on behalf of the CDF, chairing the organization from 1986 to 1992 (though many of her colleagues privately complained to the press that she should have resigned as soon as her husband announced for president).
Throughout this time, Hillary sought to hone a reputation as an East Coast liberal while living in Arkansas. She succeeded to a remarkable degree. She also succeeded in pa.s.sing money and moral support to some causes that were ill conceived, others that were inimical to democracy, and some that were conduits to terrorists.
GOING YUPPIE.
In the 1992 election, the Clintons went out of their way to demonize the Reagan-Bush years as a "gilded age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess," and promised to deliver "the most ethical administration in the history, of the Republic"--a boast that soon would become far worse than a bad joke.
For a brief period before and after winning the presidency, Bill Clinton seemed determined to force the American people into apologizing for having tolerating such a pair as Ronald Reagan and George Bush. He portrayed their years in office as a tragic interregnum, one in which the nation lapsed into an orgy of selfishness. His speeches honed the theme that we had lived through a time when the civic tone was set by Gordon Gekko, the unforgettable investment banker portrayed by Michael Douglas in Oliver Stone"s lall Street who crowed, "Greed is good!"
Clinton eventually had to drop this line when it boomeranged after the media investigated the full extent of his wife"s aggressive pursuit of corporate connections and money; and we don"t hear that theme much any more as the Clintons take $1,375,000 in cash from a wealthy friend to finance their post-presidency New York home. But there is always an excuse, a ready and sweetly packaged explanation whenever the Clintons get caught with their hand in one or another of the cookie jars into which they have dipped over the years.
"It was Hillary who decided that she wanted them to be financially secure, and took the steps to accomplish that," according to FOH and former chief of staff Betsey Wright. "Those decisions you wouldn"t expect Bill Clinton to make, he doesn"t care about those things.
Bill Clinton would live under a bridge as long as it was O.K. with Chelsea. He just doesn"t care. But Hillary did."*21 This is the official spin: Bill Clinton, that loveable, goofy, absentminded professor of a public servant, just doesn"t give a hoot about money. It is therefore perfectly understandable why Hillary, forced to live on her husband"s paltry $35,000-a-year governor"s salary, would want to provide for her family.
Roy Drew, who managed some of the Clintons" investments, offered another perspective in a Business Week interview. "She was doing the same thing as all those yuppies who she said represented the decade of greed.... Money was extremely important to the Clintons."*22 The extent of Hillary"s involvement in a spectrum of investments, corporate relationships, and high-risk deals is nothing short of breathtaking. The woman who had so recently and publicly "indicted"
Corporate America was busy consorting with the enemy, drawing down a small fortune in director"s fees.
Alinsky often said that he could persuade a millionaire to subsidize a revolution on a Sat.u.r.day out of which he would make a huge profit on Sunday even though he was certain to be executed on Monday.*23 His young female understudy would prove the point, although in the end it was her ostensible principles that were ma.s.sacred.
In 1990, Hillary joined the board of the French chemical giant, Lafarge, controversial for its toxic waste disposal contracts.*24 She joined the board of TCBY Enterprises, Inc., the yogurt franchise housed in the tallest building in Little Rock. A client of the Rose Law Firm, TCBY paid the firm up to $750,000 when Hillary served on TCBY"s board.*25 The chairman of TCBY was one of Bill Clinton"s most frequent and enthusiastic donors.*26 And of course, no Arkansas resume would be complete without a spot on the Wal-Mart Corporation board, the Arkansas big box superstore retailer that made Sam Walton the richest man in America. Owning $80,000 of Wal-Mart stock, Hillary served on its environmental committee, and launched an environmental education program and a company recycling program.*27 Finally, Hillary served on the board of the southern Development Bancorp, described in a New Republic expose as a "holding company created to give development loans in rural Arkansas." This outfit paid Rose between $100,000 and $200,000 in fees.*28 In 1991 she earned $64,700 in director"s fees. Her Rose firm salary was about $110,000. In all, she earned about $200,000 in director"s fees at the conclusion of the "decade of greed," while at least two of those companies directed almost $1.3 million in legal fees to the Rose Law Firm.*29 But there was more, much more.
In the context of her growing earnings, her husband"s $35,000 salary and government financed home and transportation may be seen as more like a nice supplement to the family income stream than a ticket to the poorhouse. And, of course, being a governor, he had numerous other perks and special funds on which to draw, including state troopers to help him live a spirited social life.
One of the perks was a $51,000 "food allotment" fund. And Lisa Schiffren, in a brilliant investigative piece in the American Spectator, reported that a 1981 audit of the payroll of the governor"s mansion showed that a nurse was employed at the governor"s mansion from 1980, the year Chelsea was born, until Bill Clinton was voted out of office in 1981. The nanny was officially listed as a "security guard."*30 Of course, the mansion with gardeners and servants was free. When he wasn"t jogging, the governor prowled around town in a chauffeured limousine.
Little wonder that by 1990, a family described by Betsey Wright as being in danger of living under a bridge had reached $212,000 in annual income, not to mention all the other benefits. Not at all bad for Little Rock. Hillary had established about $75,000 in stocks for Chelsea. And she had ama.s.sed a fortune in excess of $1 million in shares in Wal-Mart, TCBY, and her partnership in Value Partners, Ltd.,*31 a Little Rock "hedge fund." When her investment fund shorted its $1 million portfolio of pharmaceutical stocks at exactly the same time Hillary was in the White House pushing her national health care plan and publicly running down pharmaceutical companies, causing their stocks to drop by as much as a third, Hillary"s $97,500 stake in the fund soared.*32 Sometimes politics worked as her investment strategy. Sometimes it was no consideration at all. In 1981 Hillary reported a capital gain from the sale of stock in DeBeers, the South African diamond consortium. Hillary"s determination to oppose apartheid and support the African National Congress apparently did not extend to her portfolio.*33 Hillary also made a killing in cellular telephone franchises. In 1984, she joined seventeen other investors, a Who"s Who of Little Rock business leaders and lawyers, in a scheme run by adman and future White House aide--and whipping boy--David Watkins.
Hillary bought a 1.15 percent share for $2,014. Of course, the investors never intended to build a local cellphone network.
Instead, they sold the license to McCaw Cellular Communications, Inc., four years later.*34 In this one deal, for simply having the right friends, Hillary made $45,998. Of course, her friends could do even better. The return on the cellphone franchise pales in comparison to the biggest, sweetest deal of all time--in the form of cattle futures.
CATTLE QUEEN OF ARKANSAS.
"The market was going up dramatically at that time," Vice President Al Gore said in loyal defense of the Clintons when Hillary"s neat little cattle futures profit came to light. "That time" was October 11, 1979, three weeks before Bill Clinton was elected governor of Arkansas. Ten months later, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Governor Clinton made $100,000 in profit on a $1,000 investment. Eat your heart out Bill Gates.
When the story broke of how lawyer and commodities trader Jim Blair helped Hillary Rodham make a fortune in cattle futures, the first response of the White House was to react with feigned indignance.
"Hillary and Jim were friends; he gave her advice," said aide John Podesta, later to become White House chief of staff. "There was no impropriety. The only appearance is being created by the New York Times." Consider the chutzpah of that defense. The mean old New York Times making up nasty things about Hillary Clinton.
"Do they have to go weed their friends out and say they can only have friends who are sweeping the streets?" Podesta asked rhetorically, without a hint of the embara.s.sment he must have felt in making such an absurd statement. "They have friends who are high-powered lawyers. They have friends who write books, who write poetry."*35 In other words, what should we expect among members of the meritocracy? How unfair to deny the Clintons the friendship of poets and commodities traders.
Jim Blair was certainly no street sweeper. He had made millions of dollars himself trading in commodities. The White House could only defend Hillary by adopting an Arkansas perspective on the whole deal.
In the end what did it matter if Blair helped a friend make a little of her own?
The story intensified in April 1994, when the first couple was forced to pay an additional $14,615 in back taxes and interest after it was learned that the first lady had made more money on commodity trades than had been revealed to the public or to the IRS.*36 After trying to hold back the details of the deal, the White House released the facts one by one.