THE KING OF LITTLE ROCKTHE KING OF LITTLE ROCK
I don’t care what you think unless it is about me.
—Kurt Cobain, “Drain You”
Even in failing health—gaunt, trembling, hobbled by progressive heart disease—Bill Clinton was an object in perpetual priapic motion.
When the fancy took him, he’d climb aboard a borrowed Gulfstream G650—a sumptuous $65 million twin-engine jet that seated sixteen, had a range of seven thousand nautical miles, cruised at fifty-one thousand feet, and flew nearly at the speed of sound—and take off for another round of pleasures and self-indulgences.
Today, he might be in Los Angeles—caught by paparazzi posing with two prostitutes from the Moonlite BunnyRanch brothel of Mound House, Nevada.
Tomorrow, he might be in Toronto—on his way to dinner with one of his rumored mistresses.
The next day, he might be in Lima, the capital of Peru—traveling with Scarlett Johansson.
Or in Lagos, Nigeria. . . .
Or Port-au-Prince, Haiti. . . .
He was like the Flying Dutchman, the captain of the legendary ghost ship that never made port.
The news media covered his appearances at the meetings of the Clinton Global Initiative. Reporters and TV cameras were on hand for his speeches and TV interviews. But they invariably lost track of him after that.
It was no use sending a reporter to stake out the Clinton homes in Chappaqua and Whitehaven; Bill rarely turned up at either place, and when he did, it was for a quick lunch or dinner, and then he was gone in a flash. He spent most of his downtime concealed from the national press corps in plain sight—in Little Rock, Arkansas.
He had everything a narcissist could possibly want in Little Rock: the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport; the William J. Clinton Presidential Center and Park; the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service; a spacious penthouse apartment with smart TVs in every room and a golf-chipping lawn on the terrace; a catering service from his own four-star restaurant located in the basement of his presidential library; hot and cold running women; and a street named after him.
It was good to be king of Little Rock.
When his Secret Service Escalades trundled down President Clinton Avenue, adoring crowds stopped and waved at him. If he spotted some attractive women on the sidewalk, he got out and pressed the flesh, literally and figuratively. During the day, he went around dressed in a University of Arkansas Razorback T-shirt and SoulCycle shorts. At night, he threw parties atop the library. You could always tell when Bill was holding court from the bright glow that flickered from the windows of his penthouse like the tantalizing light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock in The Great Gatsby.
But even when Bill was tucked away in Little Rock, he kept Hillary in the dark about his whereabouts and activities.
That, of course, was nothing new.
Throughout their forty-year marriage, Bill’s catch-me-if-you-can lifestyle raised questions about his allegiance to his wife. These questions went beyond his famous philandering. There were doubts about the sincerity of his commitment to Hillary’s political career. Sometimes he acted as though he felt that his wife’s elevation would diminish him.
He said or did impetuous, controversial things that seemed to come out of left field and that embarrassed Hillary and caused her serious political damage. The most famous example of his mischief making came during the 2008 presidential primary season when he angered black voters and turned them against Hillary by denigrating Obama’s victory in South Carolina by comparing it to Jesse Jackson’s wins there in the 1980s.
But there were other examples of Bill’s political infidelity.
When Hillary said at a press conference that some of the thirty thousand “personal” e-mails she deleted were between her and her husband, Bill let it be known through his spokesman that he had sent a grand total of two e-mails during his entire life. More recently, when Karl Rove suggested that Hillary suffered a serious health episode after fainting and suffering a concussion in 2012, Bill made matters worse by revealing that it took Hillary “six months of very serious work to get over” her injury. Hillary’s health, Bill admitted, would be a “serious issue” in the 2016 campaign.
Sometimes, Hillary told friends, she suspected that Bill really didn’t want her to become president.
That wasn’t true.
But it wasn’t far off the mark, either.
According to several of Bill’s advisers who were interviewed for this book, he expressed mixed feelings about Hillary’s presidential ambitions. He understood her desire to become a historic figure as the first woman president of the United States. And he intended to campaign for her hard; he would give it everything he had.
Yet, at the same time, he had major reservations about Hillary’s running for president. As he saw it, her campaign—win or lose—posed a threat to the regal world he had established for himself since leaving the White House.
That world centered on the Clinton Foundation.
“The worst case scenario for the foundation, its allies say privately, would be if [Hillary] lost her presidential campaign in a manner similar to the way she lost her 2008 race to then-Sen. Barack Obama, which at least temporarily tarnished the family’s political brand,” reported Politico. “Unlike 2008, a losing 2016 campaign would effectively end the political ambitions of Bill or Hillary Clinton. That would thrust responsibility for the [Clinton Foundation’s] future squarely into the hands of their daughter. While she is being groomed to take over the family’s political dynasty, thus far she has not demonstrated her parents’ fundraising prowess or leadership ability.”
Ever since he left the White House under a cumulus of scandal, Bill had focused on one overriding goal: to rehabilitate his reputation. The Clinton Foundation and its glitzy conference offshoot, the Clinton Global Initiative, were the chosen instruments of his redemption. His good works with the foundation were designed to transform him from a president who had debased the dignity of his office into a living national treasure.
However, no sooner did Hillary announce on April 12, 2015, that she was running for president than the foundation came under withering criticism. And this time Bill and Hillary couldn’t blame the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy for their problem. Liberal organs like the New York Times and the Washington Post did deep dives into the foundation’s pay-for-play activities. Politico quoted a former Clinton aide who called it “a media whack-fest.”
The Clintons hadn’t suffered such a battering since the Monica Lewinsky scandal. And they were clearly unprepared to handle it.
When NBC News’ Cynthia McFadden asked Bill if he saw anything wrong with accepting $500,000 apiece for speeches while his wife was secretary of state, he came up with a ludicrous answer.
“I gotta pay our bills,” said the man who was rated the wealthiest living ex-president, and who was among the top-ten wealthiest of all time.
He gave an equally ridiculous answer to a question about why the foundation had failed to include tens of millions of dollars in donations on its tax returns.
Everybody makes mistakes on their taxes.
His self-justifying response reminded everyone of Hillary’s outlandish claim that she and her husband were “dead broke” upon leaving the White House.
Until the foundation scandal hit, Bill had been flying high in the opinion polls. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll conducted in the spring of 2015 showed that 56 percent of people had a positive view of the former president. That was twelve points higher than either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. With the eruption of the Clinton Foundation scandal, however, Bill’s stature as the most popular person in American politics was seriously threatened.
A Niagara of funny money flowed into the Clinton Foundation’s coffers from dodgy foreign businessmen, despotic foreign governments, petrostates like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and homegrown special-interest groups that expected a quid for their quo—anti–free trade labor unions, anti-regulation hedge funds, too-big-to-fail Wall Street banks, global-warming billionaires, and American corporations with massive lobbying operations in Washington.
Millions more came from speaking fees earned by Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton, which they transferred to the foundation slyly, like con artists playing three-card monte. The Clintons failed to report these fees on financial disclosure forms even though government ethics rules clearly stated that “the source, date and amount of payments made or to be made directly to a charitable organization in lieu of honoraria must . . . be disclosed.”
Like everything else that Bill and Hillary touched, the foundation was a sketchy operation that skirted legality and often fell over the edge. With its embarrassment of riches—it had collected $2 billion since its creation—it was able to do a smattering of good work, especially in the areas of healthcare, AIDS, and addressing poverty in Africa. But it spent money indiscriminately, and mostly on itself. According to the Federalist’s Sean Davis, for every ten dollars that the foundation took in, it disbursed only one dollar to charitable causes. The other nine dollars went to euphemisms like “office supplies” and “travel.”
“This data,” wrote Jonathan S. Tobin in Commentary magazine, “is a reminder that the main point of the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Foundation is to support its namesakes in a lavish fashion and allow wealthy donors access to them. . . . Most of the money spent by the foundation is geared toward providing access for the donors to the Clintons via the annual [Clinton Global Initiative] celebrity conference and events at the [Clinton] Library.”
The foundation had a random way of selecting which causes it supported, but basically it came down to whatever Bill wanted. Money went to everything from sustainable farming in South America to saving elephants in Africa.
Often the foundation’s goals seemed indistinguishable from those of the hard Left of the Democratic Party. The foundation supported such progressive causes as teachers unions, public service unions, “human-made global warming” education, higher taxes on the rich, and the redistribution of wealth.
The foundation had a huge field organization, which could be transformed with a snap of Bill’s fingers into a get-out-the-vote army for Hillary’s presidential campaign. Bill treated these foot soldiers with his customary grandiosity; from time to time, he sent out a memo encouraging them to take their spouses to an expensive dinner and charge the meal to the foundation.
Beyond the power and the money, Bill derived personal pleasure from being the top dog of the foundation. It was the means by which he conducted the most fun-filled post-presidency in American history.
But now, it appeared that Bill’s days of wine and roses might be over. He was going to find it harder to solicit donations from his foreign friends—something he enjoyed doing and was very good at. And from now on, he’d have to look over his shoulder before he climbed aboard a G650 private jet with a posse of pretty things.
Life was going to get rough for the old reprobate.
Which made him all the more ambivalent about Hillary’s presidential ambitions.
When it came to Bill Clinton’s true intentions, it was hard to read the tea leaves.
For instance, during one of Bill’s appearances on the Late Show with David Letterman, Dave asked the former president if he would move back into the White House if Hillary won the election in 2016.
“If she wins the election,” Bill replied, “the chances are 100 percent I’ll move back.”
Then he added, “If—wait, wait—if I’m asked.”
“You may not be invited back,” Dave joked.
“My experience is that since I left the White House, when a president of either party asks, you say yes,” Bill said. “So I hope I’ll be invited.”
But according to one of Bill’s trusted legal advisers who was interviewed several times for this book, Bill’s line of thought was not as simple as that.
“Bill told me that if Hillary is elected president, he wasn’t going to give up his other interests and take up residency in the White House, the way first ladies have traditionally done,” the adviser said. “He’ll continue spending a good amount of time at his penthouse in Little Rock. He’ll continue to travel on foundation business. And he’ll spend time in Haiti, which is still a mess and something he very much wants to make right. He is worried about his legacy with Haiti.
“He is also going to travel to Africa on his AIDS initiatives,” the adviser continued. “He’ll personally visit pharmaceutical corporations to work on getting cheaper or free AIDS medications for the worst hit countries. He’ll continue to make speeches. He’s going to lecture at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service.
“It’s a very ambitious schedule that doesn’t include sitting around the White House. Of course, he’ll be there often. He’s going to have a sock drawer there. He’ll attend state dinners when it seems appropriate. But he’s planning to not hover around so that people aren’t sure who is president. He’s going to back off and let Hillary be president.”
If Bill didn’t intend to be a permanent resident in the White House in the event Hillary won the presidency, who would take on the traditional responsibilities of the first lady?
“There is a social function to the first lady’s role, and that will not go away,” said Susan Swain, coauthor of a history on first ladies. “It is important to have somebody in that role. The best guesstimate with the Clintons is that Chelsea Clinton would take over that role.”
So which was it?
Would Bill move back into the White House?
Or stay away for long stretches of time?
Maybe Bill didn’t know the answer himself. He often said things that he didn’t mean but that suited his purpose when he said them. It didn’t matter if he was caught in a contradiction or an outright lie. Like Hillary, he was shameless, a person without a moral center. He could pursue two opposing objectives at the same time without feeling a twinge of guilt. For instance, he could treat Barack Obama as his sworn enemy and deliver a rousing speech for Obama at the Democratic National Convention.
If Hillary became president, Bill might very well refuse to play the game of first gentleman, as his adviser said.
Or he might lay claim to Hillary’s old office on the second floor of the West Wing and renew the Clintons’ warped version of their contract with America: two for the price of one.