Hell To Pay Part 15

To disparage Jones, the Clinton people resorted to crude stereotypes, and unashamed cla.s.s warfare--pitting middle cla.s.s sensibilities that found it hard to imagine such an accusation could be true, against the underlying prejudice against the white poor, the sort of people who punch, betray, and lie about each other on "trash TV" shows like those hosted by Jerry Springer. Ironically, the same stereotypes that Clinton's upbringing calls to mind.

Hillary's War Room skillfully portrayed Jones as a greed-stricken creation of the radical right. But Jones struggled on with a lonely campaign. When her lawyers urged her to settle for cash, she refused and took new legal counsel. She wanted justice. She got, at a minimum, headlines. The Jones scandal was a shot across the bow of complacent Democrats--if not, ultimately, one that altered the behavior of the president himself.

"He can't play JFK," a major Democrat said. "If he does, it would be a killer. All bets would be off."*3 Hillary had a.s.siduously cultivated a picture of family normalcy in the White House. It Takes a Village spoke warmly of what it was like "to live above the store." Journalists were fed images of a president who, in a memorable 1993 portrait in U.S. News and World Report, "often pads down to the Oval Office wearing jeans, sneakers, and an open-collared work shirt and sits at the big desk that John F.

Kennedy used, doing paperwork and making phone calls. Clinton loves the fact that next door, in the small study where George Bush ran the Persian Gulf War, Chelsea will sometimes do her homework, sometimes shouting a question about an algebra problem to Dad.*4 Time portrayed a family that spent hours gathered around the piano, or on the rug plang Pictionary, Scrabble, and Hungarian Rummy.*5 And they painted a homey portrait of the use of the room adjacent to the Oval Office wildly at variance to what the American public was soon to discover.

Hillary went to great lengths to let no one see the truth, that for her living above the store could sometimes be like living above a brothel. How did she reconcile it? She resorted to another favorite Clinton gambit. Bringing history's greats down to the Clintons's level.

"I remember when I read The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin,"

Hillary recounted in American Heritage in 1994, "I discovered things about Franklin's personal life that at the age of fourteen I was shocked by. I remember going to my English teacher and saying, 'I just can't believe it.' I felt I had been disillusioned about Benjamin Franklin. And I'll never forget my teacher saying, 'But why should you be disillusioned? He was a great man; he wasn't a statue somewhere. Men have faults as well as virtues; the real challenge is to see people in their humanity and then admire them even more because of what they were able to accomplish.'"*6 Bill Clinton could thus be portrayed as another great man like Benjamin Franklin, who also had faults--because Bill Clinton and Ben Franklin were after all just human.

MONICA.

The story the world would know simply as "Monica" broke at the worst possible time for Hillary. Safe in the White House for another four years, the president talked of delegating major responsibilities to his wife. Hillary herself went further, speaking of a "formal" role in welfare policy.*7 But Hillary's bid once again to act as co-president of the United States was overtaken by a new scandal.

When Bill Clinton submitted to questioning from Paula Jones's lawyers in January 1998, he was asked about "Jane Doe Number Six," a zaftig twenty-four-year-old intern from Beverly Hills. He must have known the game was up when the questions turned specific. Did you give her a T-shirt? Leaves of Gra.s.s? Call her at home?

Jane Doe Number Six, of course, was Monica Lewinsky, a by-product of the Clinton White House's solicitous att.i.tude for donors--in this case, Lewinsky's family friend, Walter Kaye. With Monica, the commanders of spin were forced to move into the fog of battle without a good compa.s.s or a map. One line, sold around town by Sidney Blumenthal, portrayed the president as a victim, the "I-was-stalked"

defense.

Why the White House would allow the commander-in-chief and leader of the free world to be victimized by a libidinous s.e.xual predator was never fully explained. The story was simply not credible. The really incredible thing about it, however, was the number of Clinton sycophants and journalistic supporters who not only bought but willingly peddled the story.

The other line could be called the Gladstone defense, after the nineteenth century prime minister who was famous for approaching street prost.i.tutes, and converting them from a life of sin by taking them upstairs and "ministering" to them. In much the same way, the staff (and Hillary herself) trotted out this excuse, speaking of the president's interest in ministering to and counseling a troubled young woman.

"You poor son of a b.i.t.c.h," Morris said to the president of the United States over the telephone in a conversation he recounted for Vanity Fair. "I've just read what's going on."

"Clinton's whole tone between the lines," Morris remembered, "was 'Oh G.o.d, have I f.u.c.ked up this time.'"*8 When all else failed, the Clintons went to straight denial and attacking their enemies. It had, after all, worked before. The line, "I did not have s.e.xual relations with that woman," the rehea.r.s.ed finger wag, likely even Hillary's sun-yellow made-for-television dress, had all been stage-managed by Harry Thomason.

Hillary's signal moment came early, when she appeared on the Today show to denounce her husband's detractors as agents of "a vast right-wing conspiracy." The word "vast" was overdone, the kind of adjective that, in a previous era, had been used to describe Communist purveyors of fluoride in our drinking water. Otherwise, her Today show appearance was dead-on. She was the essence of a moderate and thoughtful woman, a middle-cla.s.s mom with a Midwestern tw.a.n.g and a gentle manner. For those anxious to see no further than what Hillary had to tell them, it was the most effective damage control appearance since Nixon's "Checkers" speech.

But as the months of 1998 marched on, and the facts began to emerge on the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post, it became harder and harder to hide the truth. Worse, what had begun as a s.e.xual indiscretion was now a matter of possible perjury and the beginnings of an impeachment process.

The president's legal defense had to resort to absurd interpretations of conventional words like "s.e.x" or "is."

By many accounts, Hillary was most dismayed by Monica's version as her supporters leaked it to the press that Bill had encouraged her fantasies of dumping Hillary and spending the rest of his life with Lewinsky. "And then I said something about... us sort of being together," she told Starr's investigators. "I think I kind of said, 'Oh, I think we'd be a good team'.... And he... jokingly said, 'Well, what are we going to do when I'm seventy-five and I have to pee twentyfive times a day?'"

If Hillary was angry, hurt, and humiliated by her husband, she was positively seething with hatred at Starr for exploding the myth of the happy family that lived above the store. It was Starr, not Bill, she blamed for splashing the revelation that her husband had admitted to Lewinsky that he had had "hundreds of affairs" earlier in his marriage.

Proven a liar by the presence of his own DNA on Monica's dress, Bill Clinton finally went on national television on August 17 to lance the boil and cut his losses. His brief appearance was a devastating failure, an angry self-pitying whine; an effort at one time to paint himself as a contrite victim, but also to attack his enemies. I was in the green room waiting to appear on Larry King Live while watching the speech. It was painful to watch. Even James Carville looked unusually reserved. It was, as America saw it, a thin-skinned attack on Starr disguised as a national apology.

According to White House spin, it wasn't until just before that speech that a reluctant president, his head bowed, went to his wife and told her the truth. The same woman who had not missed a beat to launch a counterattack on the "vast right-wing conspiracy" was now portrayed as a national victim.

The Clintons then left for a vacation at Martha's Vineyard, one in which Hillary allowed the press corps to see her batting away Bill's hand. Another well-rehea.r.s.ed gesture, probably as carefully orchestrated as the "I-did-not-have-s.e.x" finger wag. The new spin from press secretary Mike McCurry was a kind of amused, boy-he's-in-for-the-spanking-of-his-life story, letting Hillary stand as a surrogate for America's anger. Otherwise, she was to be admired for standing by her man.

"Rather than jump ship or turn on her husband, she turned to him with her daughter and offered love and support when he needed it the most and perhaps deserved it the least," the Reverend Jesse Jackson said after counseling (rehearsing with) the first family. "Many women would have been nursing their wounds or in private solitude. She was in the room helping to chart the plan for his testimony."*9 She also spearheaded strategy sessions on the November congressional elections, and shrewdly allowed aides to see her bark instructions at a meek Bill Clinton.*10 The staff Hillary had a.s.sembled to defend a president who had obviously lied to the American people were unshakable. Only George Stephanopoulos, who was trying to recreate himself as an ABC journalist, denounced the president's abuse of trust. Otherwise, no Clintonites resigned or seriously criticized the president. Only Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala dared to express her disappointment in a meeting in which the president called ostensibly to apologize to his cabinet. She was rudely slapped down by an aggrieved Clinton, who challenged her to answer whether she preferred a president like Richard Nixon with his abuses of power, or a John F. Kennedy, who slept around? Of course, with Bill Clinton she got both. But like a good Clinton cabinet member, she shut up.

By all the political rules of the past, the War Room-style counteroffensive should have been a disaster. But Hillary and Bill have a way of making the world play by their rules. Many of the advisors to the president argued against the attack on Starr in the national apologia speech.

But the president's astute advisors were ultimately proven to be wrong. A direct frontal attack was, perhaps, Clinton's only hope of staving off a forced resignation or removal from office. Here a good offense was not only a good defense, it was essentially the only defense. As she had done before to try to rescue her health care agenda, Hillary went to the Hill. She addressed House Democrats, whipping up a fury against Starr and the House impeachment managers.

She a.s.sured them she was a "wife who loves and supports her husband,"

and was standing firm to keep the vast right-wing conspiracy from "hounding him out of office." She told them that the real fight was not over the impeachment issue, but over whether the Republicans would be allowed to break the back of the Democratic Party.

Hillary even attributed the attacks on her husband to "prejudice against our state."

"They wouldn't do this if we were from some other state," she said, ignoring the fact that Kenneth Starr had lived near the Arkansas border and attended two years of college at Harding University at Searcy, Arkansas.*11 And ignoring also the fact that no one had thought to link perjury, obstruction of justice, witness tampering, and intimidation to the state of Arkansas. But Hillary knew that her only salvation was attack, attack, attack. It mattered less that there was any substance to the attack.

There were the predictable confessions, the prayer breakfast, all the tearful Jimmy Swaggart moments. Hillary actually went public with praise for her husband for his courage and for his willingness to do the right thing. Clinton himself characteristically slipped into self-pity. At one gathering in late August, he recounted a conversation with Nelson Mandela: "You can't make me believe you didn't hate those people," Clinton told the South African leader.

"And then [Mandela] said, 'They could take everything away from me--everything--but my mind and my heart." The implication, of course, was that both men had been unfairly persecuted, as though being imprisoned for decades on Robben Island was the moral equivalent of committing perjury under oath and masturbating in the Oval Office in front of a young intern.*12 If Bill was helpless, Hillary's War Room was gaining ground. The congressional Republicans were effectively portrayed as the ideological descendants of Thaddeus Stevens and the Radical Republicans who had railroaded the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. Senator Joseph Lieberman, a respected centrist Democrat, appeared to turn the tide for impeachment when he lashed out against the president. The appearance was deceiving, however, for Lieberman's attack was based only on s.e.x. It was intended and had the same effect as Hillary's public vacation reprimand to her husband--to inflict some public pain on Bill Clinton and to relieve some of the mounting pressure for him to resign. This was an enormous favor to the president in the wrappings of a rebuke. The Democrats succeeded in defining the issue as wholly about s.e.x, as though perjury under oath were of no consequence.

Meanwhile, the Republicans not only misread the tea leaves, they ignored them all together. House Speaker Newt Gingrich had been warned in late summer by GOP pollsters that the public att.i.tude was turning against impeachment. The American people were disgusted with President Clinton's behavior. Their anger toward Clinton, however, was modified by a horror that the most powerful man in the country (and therefore anyone) could be dragged into a courtroom and subjected to such extensive questioning over the most embarra.s.sing aspects of one's life. They rebelled against the explicitness of the Starr report, and blamed Republicans for dragging the whole country through the mud.

What could the Republicans have done?

They needed to reinforce the fact that Bill Clinton was a victim not just of his own actions but also of his and his wife's Orwellian approach to the law. It was Clinton, after hard lobbying by Hillary, who had signed the Violence Against Women Act and supported other legislation that had allowed s.e.xual hara.s.sment suits to open up a man's whole life to microscopic examination in civil suits. They could have reminded the American people that the independent counsel's office, which the public increasingly agreed with James Carville was out of control, was advanced by the very Watergate lawyers who protected Clinton and was reauthorized by the president himself, with one hundred Republican House members voting against it.

They could have forcefully reminded the public that the whole process had been started by Attorney General Janet Reno.

In short, the Republicans could have portrayed the president as a man pursued by Frankenstein monsters of his own creation. Instead, they proceeded methodically, overriding the Democrats in bitter, contentious proceedings that played right into the "Radical Republicans" stereotype.

Even after all of this, the presidency hung by a thread. There was a brief period in which the senior leaders of the Democratic Party.

seemed to weigh whether it would be better to jettison Clinton and go with an inc.u.mbent Gore. All it would take for that to happen was for the right Senate Democrat to stand up and call on him to resign.

John Glenn could have done it. Joseph Lieberman could have done it.

Patrick Moynihan could have done it. Dianne Feinstein seemed at times to come the closest, unafraid to express her outrage that the president had lied to her, point blank. The Senate Democrats could have played the honorable role that Republicans Howard Baker and Watergate counsel Fred Thompson played during Watergate, going where the facts led them.

But party discipline--and Clinton's brazen defense--reigned over conscience. The Clintons maneuvered senators of stature and conscience into defending him as a matter of const.i.tutional propriety. The national feminist organizations, so certain that Clarence Thomas had been a s.e.xual hara.s.ser, were by now transformed into a kind of Clinton pep squad. At worst, they would issue Delphic p.r.o.nouncements about the slight but ultimately unimportant degree of Clinton's culpability.

Below the surface, Hillary unleashed the secret police. The director of White House records later admitted in a deposition that he ordered a search for "anything and everything we might have in our files on Linda Tripp," the former White House and Pentagon employee whose taped conversations with Monica Lewinsky helped prove that Clinton was lying. Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon likely broke the law by divulging an embarra.s.sing juvenile arrest from Linda Tripp's personal security file.

Meanwhile, the president refused to distance himself from the very public efforts of p.o.r.nographer Larry Flynt, who offered a small fortune for s.e.x dirt on members of Congress, managing to smear House Judiciary Chairman Henry Hyde for a decades-old affair. The president's attorney, even hired Terry Lezner and his private detective firm, IGI, with the implied threat that if the president was going to go down because of s.e.xual improprieties, he was going to take others with him. As it turned out, of course, others would go down, like the new House Speaker Bob Livingston, who sought to do the n.o.ble thing by resigning. But President Clinton would never have followed that course. If the worst thing that could happen to Clinton was also the worst thing that could happen to America, it simply was not going to happen. By slinging dirt and wrapping himself in a "zone of privacy" against Starr and the apparent Puritans of the radical right, Clinton no doubt felt he could beat the rap.

The Clintons had a long history of using private detectives to sniff out vulnerabilities of enemies and keep track of each other's private lives. In 1992 Betsey Wright hired Jack Palladino, San Francisco detective and student of Hal Lipset, who had served as a private investigator in many Black Panther cases. Palladino's job was to ransack the lives of women who could have turned on Clinton during the campaign.

This time round, the focus seemed to be on getting the bimbos to shut up. Kathleen Willey, who would later claim Bill Clinton had groped her, had her tires slashed. In another incident, a stranger jogged next to her in a park and inquired about the health of her cat, calling it by name.

Other inducements were used. Elizabeth Ward Gracen, a former Miss America, got the carrot--offers of acting roles dangled in front of her by FOB Mickey Kantor--and the stick, when someone ransacked her room.

While the Clinton machine worked--allowing the Clintons to claim victory in the congressional elections and to survive the Congress's impeachment proceedings--it had forced the Clinton machine to run to the last dregs of support. And the sweet savor of victory was short-lived. The next Jane Doe would rock the administration, permanently mar the president's image and throw the liberal establishment into crisis.

'EVERYTHING YOU DO FOR BILL'.

The Juanita Broaddrick interview with NBC's Lisa Meyer was a story, to push every feminist b.u.t.ton. As a "police rape," it fit the feminist need to seek out the ideological underpinnings of a crime.

It was the perfect example of how women at that time were reluctant to charge rape, fearing that cross-examination would reveal their most intimate and embarra.s.sing secrets. We have long been a.s.sured by feminists that women do not lie about such things.

But the very same feminists who had so savagely denounced Clarence Thomas for allegedly making off-color remarks to and asking for a date with an employee--an employee who nevertheless followed him to his next job--were willing to give Clinton the benefit of the doubt.

Susan Estrich, herself a rape victim, pointed out on Crossfire with me that the statute of limitations had long pa.s.sed, and that absent any evidence, we were just back to the he said/she said, in which case Clinton had to be considered innocent.

The Broaddrick rape story was met with glacial silence and indifference by Barbara Boxer, Gloria Steinem, and the country's leading feminist icon, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

It is highly doubtful that Hillary believes that her husband is innocent, not with a history like his.

After all that has come to light about Clinton's telling Paula Jones to "kiss it," the groping of Kathleen rilley in the presidential study, and the exploitation of an immature and unsteady White House intern, can Hillary be free of doubts that her husband is a rapist?

Only Andrea Dworkin, a radical feminist, seemed willing to demand that Hillary throw away the shield she had erected for Clinton.

"What Hillary is doing is appalling," she said. "Being a feminist has to mean you don't use your intellect and your creativity to protect a man's exploitation of women."*13 But Hillary's betrayal was of more than a mere abstraction like feminism. It was a betrayal of humanity for power. In an interview with Matt Drudge in August 1999, Juanita Broaddrick claimed that she met Hillary Rodham Clinton at a political rally in the spring of 1978, just weeks after Mrs. Broaddrick was allegedly raped by the then-Attorney General Bill Clinton.

According to Mrs. Broaddrick, Hillary "caught me and took my hand and said, 'I am so happy to meet you. I want you to know that we appreciate everything you do for Bill.'... I started to turn away and she held onto my hand and reiterated her phrase--looking less friendly and repeated her statement--'Everything you do for Bill.'"

ELEVEN.

THE PHILOSOPHER QUEEN.

"Power is the very essence, the dynamo of life. It is the power of the heart pumping blood and sustaining life in the body."

-- SAUL ALINSKY, RULES FOR RADICALS.

GETTING SPIRITUAL.

"You know, I'm beginning to think there must be more to life than this greasy pole, this rat race," Hillary once said to friends in the late 1970s on a vacation to England with Bill to meet his old Oxford friends.*1 Whatever their private compromises with themselves and their consciences, the Clintons continue to project a robust religious life. They worship together in Foundry United Methodist Church, where J. Philip Wogaman, a social-ethics professor and liberal pastor, can be counted on to address topics in such a way as to cause the Clintons no embarra.s.sment.

Hillary's turn to the spiritual intensified in her first year as first lady, when Hugh Rodham suffered a ma.s.sive stroke and slipped into a three-week coma.

The day before his death, Hillary gave the commencement address at the University of Texas, where she made a famous speech on America's "crisis of meaning and spiritual vacuum," and our national "sleeping sickness of the soul."

"We are at a stage in history, in which remolding society is one of the great challenges facing all of us in the West. If one looks around the Western world, one can see the rumblings of discontent, almost regardless of the political systems, as we come face to face with problems that the modern age has dealt us."

These problems, she suggested, were the result of a "lack of meaning"

in individual lives and society. She positioned herself between a market economy, "which knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing" (an unintended description of the Clinton White House approach to the use of the presidency to raise reelection funds), and the "state or government, which attempts to use its means of acquiring tax money, of making decisions to a.s.sist us in becoming a better, more equitable society .... Neither is adequate to address the challenge confronting us." Then she cut to the chase.

"We need a new politics of meaning. We need a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring." This could be attained, she suggested, as millions of individuals "reject cynicism, as they are willing to be hopeful once again, as they are willing to take risks to meet the challenges they see around them, as they truly begin to try to see others as they wish to be seen and to treat them as they wish to be treated, to overcome all of the obstacles we have erected around ourselves that keep us apart from one another, fearful and afraid, not willing to build the bridges necessary to fill our spiritual vacuum."

It was a stylistic and conceptual return to her Wellesley commencement address of 1969. As Michael Kelly pointed out in his astute "Saint Hillary" piece in the New York Times Magazine, the speeches share "all the same traits: vaulting ambition, didactic moralizing, intellectual incoherence and the adolescent a.s.sumption that the past does not exist and the present needs only your guiding hand to create the glorious future."

Many were appalled by Hillary's reference to Lee At.w.a.ter's deathbed regrets--printed in Life magazine--that he had spent his short life as a campaign attack dog for the right. It was a perfect Hillary trope, to weave an attack on an opponent and his ideology into a speech that seemed to have a self-confessional tone.

"Never mind that the limits of materialism are not best learned on somebody else's dime," objected the New Republic's Leon Wieseltier, certainly no apologist for At.w.a.ter, Reagan, or the right. "The politics of meaning turns out to be, negatively, just an ornate rejection of Reaganism. But it is historically incorrect, and politically foolish, to mistake Reaganism for meaninglessness."*2 Perhaps more worrying was Hillary's belief that something was so wrong in Western society that it required not reform, but a thorough "remolding." Re-creation, of course, from the top--by planners, reformers, experts, and the intelligentsia. Reconstruction of society by those smart enough and altruistic enough to make our decisions for us. People like Bill and Hillary Clinton. Hillary, throughout her intellectual life, has been taken by this idea, which is the totalitarian temptation that throughout history has led to the guillotine, the gulag, and the terror and reeducation camps of the Red Guard.

The phrase "politics of meaning" was coined by Michael Lerner, who launched the magazine Tikkun as a Jewish, liberal, intellectual counterweight to Norman Podh.o.r.etz's Jewish, neo-conservative Commentary, one of the most respected and influential intellectual magazines in the country. But it doesn't stack up. To read a copy of Tikkun is to wade through a pool of self-indulgent New Age twaddle and psychobabble indistinguishable from Hillary's worst speeches or It Takes a Village.

Lerner's book, The Politics of Meaning, can readily be sized up by the subt.i.tles of its chapters, "Give Men a Chance: Understanding h.o.m.ophobia and the Desperate Struggle to Prove One's Manliness," or "Overcoming Patriarchy as Family Support," or "The Tyranny of Couples." At his wedding to his first wife, Lerner cut into a cake with the inscription "Smash Monogamy." The couple exchanged rings hammered out of metal from downed U.S. military aircraft.*3 Lerner, who liked to invoke the phrase "Hillary and I believe,"

turned out to have an ideological bottom line in his dealings with the Clintons. As an activist whose left-wing pedigree is una.s.sailable, Lerner soon lost interest in the Clintons when he saw that polling and focus groups were leading into "triangulation,"

welfare reform, and spending cuts.

After Kelly's lacerating "Saint Hillary" piece appeared in the New York Times Magazine --and after another devastating review of Hillary's "politics of meaning" came from columnist Charles Krauthammer--Hillary withdrew from Lerner, and referred to his visits to the White House as mere "courtesy calls." Lerner, unlike most people who are used as Clinton fodder, turned on her.*4 Lerner criticized the Clintons' apologetic triangulation. "So here was one of the most powerful men in the world telling the rest of us that he did not have enough power to pursue his principles, and that instead he must watch out for himself. And this, sad to say, was the same man to whom the rest of the world had listened when he told us in 1992 that we as a community could move beyond self-interest to fight for a common vision of mutual caring."*5 THE SEEKERS.

One would expect a president and first lady to arrive at the White House psychologically and spiritually mature. But Hillary and Bill dealt with national criticism of their first term by turning to, among others, fringe spiritualists. One of them was Marianne Williamson, a Jewish charismatic spiritualist from Texas who sports Armanis and presided over one of Liz Taylor's weddings. Another is Tony Robbins, known to millions of cable TV viewers as the smarmy hawker of expensive self-help videos that can help you "awaken the giant within." And, of course, there was Jean Houston, co-director of the Foundation for Mind Research in Pomona, New York, who believes that her personal archetypal predecessor was Athena. Dr.

Houston--who nisrepresented her doctorate, awarded by Union Inst.i.tute in Cincinnati, as coming from Columbia University--used hypnosis to guide Hillary into a seance/conversation with Eleanor Roosevelt.

The revelation of the Eleanor exercise in Bob Woodward's book The Choice was a major embarra.s.sment to a woman who prided herself on projecting intellectual and moral strength. It was widely compared with published stories a decade earlier concerning Nancy Reagan and her interest in astrology.

Hillary, however, has not fled from the comparison with Eleanor Roosevelt. At a speech at Georgetown University. in December 1998, Hillary noted: Wherever I go as first lady, I am always reminded of one thing: that usually Eleanor Roosevelt has been there before. I have been to farms in Iowa, factories in Michigan, and welfare offices in New York where Mrs. Roosevelt paid a visit more than a half-century ago. When I went to Pakistan and India I discovered that Eleanor Roosevelt had been there in 1952, and had written a book about her experiences.

In the Clintons' communion with Dr. Jean Houston, the president was advised to "deepen the elder in himself."*6 Dr. Houston had a deeper message for the first lady. The human race, she said, was at a five-thousand-year turning point, a moment when women were at the brink of finally achieving equal partnership with men. Joan of Arc had been a vital actor, the one who moved the progress of women more forcefully than anyone else. But Hillary had a special place reserved for her. It was up to her to finish the job, to be a stand-in for all of womankind at the moment of equality.

Dr. Houston told Hillary that if she could do this, Hillary would become the most consequential woman in human history.*7 Finally, a properly ambitious undertaking, but certainly not beyond the reach of someone who had done so much already.

THE CANDIDATE.

At one of her lunches with John Robert Starr at Little Rock's Cafe Saint Moritz in 1989, there was a lapse in the conversation about Bill's ambitions for national office. Starr took the opportunity to ask Hillary what she wanted to do. "She leaned toward me," he recounted, "eyes ablaze, and said in as an intense voice as I have ever heard, 'I want to run something!'"*8 As a young law professor, Bill Clinton had confided in friends that he recognized that Hillary was putting her own political future into escrow by coming to Arkansas. Now the long years of waiting are over. The Monica Lewinsky scandal has, ironically, made Hillary one of the most popular women in the world. She has become a celebrated and sympathetic popular figure in another ironic turn of fate: The most powerful woman in the world cast as a victim. As her popularity rose, as the crowds became larger and more enthusiastic, Hillary could think about fulfilling her ambition for power.

Long before Hillary announced she was considering a run for the U.S.

Senate from New York, knowledgeable Democrats connected to the White House and on the Hill were talking about Hillary's real ambition to run something big. Very big. One possibility. I thought of was the World Bank. Her college roommate and close friend Jan Piercy was already there.

Though a multinational panel governs the bank, the president generally comes from its largest shareholder, the United States.

As president of the World Bank, Hillary would have tens of billions of dollars at her fingertips to effect social experimentation on a global scale. And she could be appointed without having to go through either the nastiness of a Senate confirmation process or the untidiness of a popular election. Of course she could still be appointed after the 2000 presidential election. There still would be time before the next president is sworn in.

But the real question is: Would that be enough?

Hillary in office--any office--will finally be free from the troubled trajectory of her husband's career. She will be free to take back her old name. She will be free to create her own legacy. Divorce or at least some degree of separation will allow her to establish herself as a world stateswoman, as the death of FDR at Warm Springs freed Eleanor Roosevelt to become an international figure in her own right. Then she will "run something."

If not politics, President Clinton could make a recess appointment to the Supreme Court. Her mother's dream would be fulfilled. It has been done before. Justice Brennan was a recess appointment. That would suit Justice Rodham Clinton just fine.

If she has her way, it could be the United States itself that will have the opportunity for rebirth in the hands of Hillary. Indeed there are rumors in Washington, surely untrue, that she is not at all disturbed by the troubles Al Gore is experiencing, because if a Republican is elected in 2000 she can be the Democratic presidential heir apparent in 2004. That is if Al Gore is unsuccessful in 2000.

We already know that in her relentless quest for power Hillary has been as financially acquisitive and ethically agile as any politician. But she also has pursued a politics of vendetta, deceit, and extremist ideology to a remarkable degree.