Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine Read online

  Dedication

  To Lauren

  Contents

  Dedication

  Introduction: Brand Management

  1. Hillary’s Redemption

  2. On Their Own

  3. Charm Offensives

  4. Seducing the Bushes

  5. Death Defiers

  6. Out of Control

  7. The Bubble

  8. The Deal

  9. Daddy’s Little Girl

  10. Chasing Hillary

  11. The Road to Coronation

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction: Brand Management

  “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into . . . whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

  —F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Hillary Rodham Clinton was all smiles as she stood on a Pentagon stage in early 2013. Buoyant, almost girlish, she was rocking a shapeless deep red blazer with a Peter Pan collar and four large black buttons, as she prepared to take part in another moment of Clinton mythmaking. It was the kind of exquisite brand reinvention and choreographed stagecraft that had been a Clinton hallmark since their first campaign for national office in 1992.

  Beside her was the colorless General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Leon Panetta, Barack Obama’s jovial secretary of defense. He had served as White House chief of staff for Hillary’s husband in his first term as president and remained fiercely loyal to the family through the hard-fought 2008 Democratic primary campaign against Obama. Dressed in a dark suit with a blue-gray tie, Panetta had extolled the former first lady in ways that might make even the most studied Clintonite blush. The burly and gregarious Italian American gushed that Hillary was “one of the most informed, most passionate, and most dedicated public servants that I’ve had the privilege to serve alongside.” He was, just as one would expect, a close ally of Clinton’s all throughout their time serving at President Obama’s request.

  Panetta bestowed upon her the Distinguished Civilian Service Award, the Pentagon’s highest honor, and then dropped a little news to the reporters gathered. “In many ways, I have to tell you, it was her inspiration that encouraged me to move forward to be able to bring down the last barriers for women in the Department of Defense and to give them the ability to have a chance to engage in combat.” He turned to a beaming Hillary. “I thank you for that inspiration.”

  And so Leon Panetta added another talking point for the Hillary Clinton brand, Version 10 or 12 or 15 by now. The news nugget about Hillary’s then-undisclosed role in allowing women to take on combat roles made headlines in U.S. newspapers and around the world. This time, as she gears up for the 2016 election, the outgoing secretary of state sought to be known as the inspirational crusader for the rights of women. Indeed, ever since leaving the State Department, she has urged a review of “women’s rights” around the world, even partnering with her new best buddy, former first lady Laura Bush. That she paved the way for American women finally to serve in combat was just another sign of the impact she had had. Except for the fact that it wasn’t technically true.

  Contrary to Secretary Panetta’s assertion onstage that February, national security policy in the Obama administration was not managed by the Department of Defense, or the State Department, for that matter—a source of enormous frustration for Secretary Clinton, as well as Panetta and his predecessor as defense secretary, Robert Gates, who in his 2013 memoir noted that Obama’s White House “was by far the most centralized and controlling in national security of any I had seen since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger ruled the roost.”1 Instead, as Gates and other sources within the State and Defense departments have noted, all major policy matters were debated and decided among a small group of Obama loyalists at the White House—who lacked much, if any, substantive national security experience and operated almost totally through a political lens. Their decisions often were presented to cabinet secretaries as close to a fait accompli.

  Also contrary to Panetta’s boastful assertion, the controversial decision to place women into combat roles was not made as some homage to Hillary Clinton. Indeed, it really had nothing to do with Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Panetta, for that matter—both of whom Obama loyalists viewed with suspicion or disdain. One Obama appointee in the Defense Department, for example, denigrated Panetta as someone more interested in returning home to California every weekend than in running the massive Pentagon bureaucracy.

  In 2013 the primary focus of the Obama National Security Council was political, national security sources have told me: reclaiming the House of Representatives in the 2014 midterm congressional elections. Losing the House to the Republicans in 2010 was an embarrassment to the Obama team. Obama’s women-in-combat initiative was conceived to ensure that social issues remained front and center in the news. Moreover, women on the front lines would create a compelling visual as Obama Democrats continued to defend against the so-called War on Women, a rallying cry in the 2012 election that sent single female voters to the polls in overwhelming numbers for the Democratic Party.

  Far more interesting about the Pentagon ceremony that day was not what was said on the platform but the set of questions surrounding it, those that few asked aloud.

  The first, of course, was the state of the honoree’s health. For one of the first times in weeks, Mrs. Clinton’s lively brown eyes were finally freed from the strange greenish glasses she’d donned since her mysterious collapse the previous December. They had been outfitted with Fresnel prisms to help her see straight after what aides claimed was a concussion she suffered during a fall at home. One of the consequences of the strange adulation/suspicion dynamic that existed between the Clintons and the Washington press corps was that a number of reporters didn’t believe the concussion story for a minute.

  For several weeks that December, the U.S. secretary of state had not been seen in public, a time when her own record and that of the administration she uncomfortably served had come under its sharpest attack, as a result of the deaths of State Department personnel on her watch in Benghazi, Libya. Some on the right openly speculated that Clinton had concocted this sudden malady to avoid testifying before Congress about Benghazi. However, as has often happened in the past, some of Hillary’s wild-eyed enemies on the right seized the opportunity to propose a conspiratorial theory—in this case, that she had a drinking problem. The pretext for this canard was an incident in which she was photographed drinking and partying in Colombia—a scene that ABC News said “caused a stir.” (The New York Post ran the story under the headline “SWILLARY.”) After she inexplicably tumbled upon boarding her government plane—a moment repeatedly played on YouTube—right-wing bloggers had a field day. Rumors of her drinking became so pervasive that even President Obama joked about Hillary “drunk texting” him. Others believed her health scare was more serious than was publicly known, so serious that it could threaten her large ambitions.

  Whether by design or incompetence, the Clinton press team did not help douse speculation. First, reporters were told Mrs. Clinton had disappeared from the public scene because she was “under the weather,” as if she had a mild cold.2 Then they said she was severely dehydrated from a stomach bug, which caused her to fall and suffer a concussion.3 Only days later did they report she was being hospitalized for a blood clot in the brain.4 The latter malady, in fact, is a common definition of a strok
e. According to WebMD, those symptoms include “sudden dizziness, loss of balance or loss of coordination . . . trouble with speaking and understanding . . . paralysis or numbness of the face, arm or leg . . . blurred or blackened vision in one or both eyes, or you may see double . . . a sudden, severe headache, which may be accompanied by vomiting, dizziness or altered consciousness.” Concealing these symptoms likely would require a patient to be out of public sight for weeks.

  “She did not have a stroke,” an aide pronounced at one point. Which made reporters familiar with the Clintons believe exactly the opposite.

  “Of course, it was a stroke,” one veteran reporter from a mainstream news network ruminates. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.” Such a revelation, if true, would almost certainly doom the future presidential aspirations of anyone who would be nearly seventy on her first Inauguration Day.

  Reporters point to a number of factors that support their theory. For one, there was the simple fact that she was completely out of public sight for weeks without a convincing explanation. For another, Mrs. Clinton had a family history of stroke, which had killed her father in 1993 at the age of eighty-two. The Fresnel prism glasses she wore for her concussion also are commonly prescribed for stroke patients to improve visual perception. Reporters noted the look of worry, even panic, on Chelsea’s face after visiting her mother at a New York hospital. Days before her collapse, Clinton had canceled a foreign trip, citing a stomach virus—which was the same excuse she used in 2005 after collapsing during a speech in Buffalo, New York.5 Though not unprecedented, fainting is not a common symptom of stomach flu. After she was hospitalized in New York, Mrs. Clinton’s doctors and the hospital delayed releasing a medical statement to the press, allowing not always forthright Clinton aides total control of the flow of information.

  The chief science and health correspondent for NBC News, for example, was among those publicly questioning a statement from Clinton aides that the secretary was being treated with blood thinners. “The problem,” Dr. Robert Bazell said on NBC’s Today show, “is that usually when blood clots come from concussions, they can’t be treated with blood [thinners]. So either it’s not really related to the concussion and she’s got a blood clot in her leg or something, or there’s something else going on that we’re not being told.”6

  Reporters on the Clinton beat knew it was nearly impossible to get actual news, or facts, from Hillary Clinton’s primary spokesman, Philippe Reines, who was known to feed carefully scripted information to favored reporters—a number that could be counted on one hand, such as Amy Chozick of the New York Times, who once detailed her many long lunches with Reines in a lengthy Times magazine piece, and Bloomberg’s Jonathan Allen, who was a staffer for Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz—and then freeze out everyone else. Absent some revelation from Secretary Clinton’s doctors, which medical canons would prevent, this was another of many mysteries about the Clintons destined to remain unsolved.

  The second mystery offered at the Pentagon that day was even more tantalizing to longtime Clinton watchers. While Hillary was receiving such a singular honor, from her husband’s former chief of staff, and on Valentine’s Day to boot, where in the world was her adoring husband?

  Wherever William Jefferson Clinton was—giving a highly compensated lecture under the guise of his foundation, schmoozing with former enemies like Newt Gingrich, or coaching Democrats on Capitol Hill—he was making news. On that day alone, the New York Post was reporting that Bill privately had “confirmed” to a longtime Clinton donor that Hillary was all but certain to run for president in 2016.7 This was only the latest of umpteen stories in which Bill had been caught openly speculating about his wife’s ambitions, whether she liked it or not. (She didn’t.) Meanwhile, the Associated Press was breaking news on a series of secret correspondences between then-president Clinton and his onetime foe Richard Nixon.8 The exchanges, none particularly notable, were yet another example of Clinton’s unrivaled ability to shift his opinions of people as it suited him, to forge useful alliances with the most unlikely of people, and, of course, to steal headlines from his wife.

  For anyone at the Pentagon that day, the conspicuous absence of Bill Clinton offered another chance for one of Washington’s favorite parlor games to begin anew—the usual speculation over what may well be the most talked-about, gossiped-about, history-making marriage since Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. One that may soon accomplish what once seemed an unthinkable, even preposterous, task only a decade or so ago when the Clintons left the White House burdened by scandal: the establishment of the first husband-and-wife presidencies in American history.

  Over the years many metaphors have been used to describe the Clintons. Among the most common is their similarities to the mafia. Former Clinton cabinet secretary Bill Richardson, for example, talks about the perils of breaking the Clintons’ omertà when he endorsed Barack Obama over Hillary in 2008. Similar mafia imagery has been invoked to me by other former senior Clinton aides who fear retribution about being quoted on the record. The writer Christopher Hitchens referred to Bill and Hillary as if they were leaders of a suicide cult. “They act like cult members while they are still under the spell,” he once noted of the Clintonites he’d encountered in his less than impartial biography of the First Family, No One Left to Lie To, “and talk like ex-cult members as soon as they have broken away.”9

  My own reporting and analysis lead me to a different analogy, one that explains the title of this book. It is commonly said that marriages are in many ways like business partnerships. And after thirty-eight years of marriage, that is what the Clintons are these days: dueling CEOs of a multimillion-dollar empire, Clinton, Inc.

  A source who has worked closely with both Clintons for years shares this view. “I think the word partnership has been used before,” he tells me. “It’s a pretty fair word.”

  Like any corporate entity, Clinton, Inc. embarks on a variety of potentially profitable endeavors. The company adjusts strategies and cuts its losses. It fends off rival brands—other Democratic factions or Republican challengers—and sometimes it partners with them to mutual advantage, such as surprising collaborations with the Bush family that until this book have not been fully known. At the upper levels of management there are fierce battles for the attention and patronage of the two CEOs at the top.

  The duo at the top have different lines of authority within the company. For the past decade, for example, Bill was in charge of bringing in the money. His net worth alone is said to be over $100 million. Hillary improved the family’s political fortunes in the Senate and then the Obama administration. These various responsibilities have allowed them to live comfortably, even happily, as well as to lead largely separate lives with different aides, different entourages. Differences in temperament, style, and their involvement in various scandals and indiscretions have tested their partnership, but both concluded that the sum is stronger than its individual parts. Their myriad efforts share a singular goal: to help the Clintons profit, politically and financially, from their various endeavors. To improve, in effect, the company’s value, or its stock price.

  “It’s the most unusual but very productive relationship,” former senator Joseph Lieberman tells me in an interview. Lieberman, of course, was selected as Al Gore’s running mate in 2000 largely due to his very public condemnation of Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The denunciation by the respected Democrat, an Orthodox Jew, allowed a conflicted Gore to put some distance between himself and the scandal. Years later, even Lieberman seems surprised by the strength and endurance of the Bill and Hillary partnership—one, notably, that outlasted that of Al and Tipper Gore. Lieberman tells me of overhearing a phone conversation between the two, during which Bill greeted his wife with “Hi, sweetheart” and they chatted amiably about their respective activities. It seemed a marvel to him, especially after all the scandals, the adultery, the gossip. “You go through different chapt
ers in a marriage,” he notes with a shrug as we sit together in his New York City office. “But they seem very devoted to each other.”

  Former Clinton nemesis Newt Gingrich puts it more clinically when I interview him on the same subject. “She married him because he was going to be somebody,” he tells me in his Arlington, Virginia, office, expressing a common view among Republicans. “And he married her because she’s going to help him be somebody. And they decided to be somebody together. And it’s been a mutually beneficial relationship.

  “They must have at some point had a very tough period of talking through—what the ground rules are, and how they relate to each other. [Daniel] Yankelovich used to have a formula he called ‘the giving and getting strategy’: What do I give, and what do I get for it. . . . Clearly they reached a very clear agreement on how they would operate and what they would do.”

  Ever the college professor—he taught at what was then West Georgia College before entering politics—Gingrich even offered me title suggestions for this book. “I think the title’s already been used, but in a sense, The Power Couple almost begs to be the title of something about the two of them.” Later, he reflected, “He wouldn’t have survived without her. So maybe the title is Mutual Survival, Mutual Prosperity.”

  In this mutually beneficial partnership, only one other person is allowed to cast a decisive vote. As this book will detail, their daughter, Chelsea, over the years has slowly emerged as Clinton, Inc.’s tough and ambitious senior vice president. As her parents age and they look far into the future, Chelsea’s portfolio expands by the day. Recently, for example, she was added to the masthead of the Clinton Foundation, which was rechristened the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation in 2013. She is poised to take over the family business one day.

  After Chelsea comes a large and varied board of kibitzers and advisors who run the gamut from well-known figures such as James Carville, Paul Begala, and Rahm Emanuel to lesser-known personalities such as Maggie Williams, Huma Abedin, and Cheryl Mills. Those who offer total loyalty to the Clintons, defend them in the press, and help them solve problems are rewarded—with attention, financial assistance, connections, and access.