“I LOVE YOU, BILLY”“I LOVE YOU, BILLY”
Those of us who follow politics seriously rather than view it as a game show do not look at Hillary Clinton and simply think “first woman president.” We think—for example—“first ex-co-president” or “first wife of a disbarred lawyer and impeached former incumbent” or “first person to use her daughter as photo-op protection during her husband’s perjury rap.”
—Christopher Hitchens
From the window of her Air Force C-32, a military version of the Boeing 757, Hillary could see the towering snow-covered mountain peaks of the Karakoram Range.
She picked up a phone and asked to be connected to her husband, who was thousands of miles away on a flight of his own in a G650 private jet. Their conversation took place on a speakerphone in the presence of Huma and State Department aides. One of the aides was later interviewed for this book.
“What are you up to?” Bill asked.
“I’m sitting here in my green bathrobe and eating cantaloupe,” Hillary said.
Bill laughed and then fell silent.
Hillary was calling Bill about her trip to China. She rarely made a major decision without consulting him. No matter where in the world she might be, she’d pick up the phone and call him. But Bill’s need to cover up his secret life made him cagey, and Hillary always had to drag details out of him.
As usual, he didn’t offer any information about where he was and what he was up to—even though this time he wasn’t up to his usual hijinks. He was headed to a Clinton Foundation conference on drugs used to fight AIDS.
In contrast to Bill, Hillary was open and shared every nuance of her life with her husband. She wanted him to know where she was going and what she was doing. And she wanted his input. Not that she took marching orders from Bill. On the contrary, when they spoke, she’d present the problem, usually get into a shouting match with him over what to do, and then come to her own conclusions.
Bill had given her a policy paper, prepared by a China expert, on Beijing’s relationship with North Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong. It included specific recommendations on trade, human rights, democracy in Hong Kong, and other pressing issues in East Asia.
“I ran the list by the White House,” Hillary told Bill over the speakerphone, “and they haven’t responded.”
“Screw them!” Bill said. “Just go ahead and present the proposals when you get to China. Once you do, they [the White House] can’t very well take them back. Make things happen.”
Bill was outraged by the way people in the Obama White House treated his wife. In his view, they were not only rude and offensive; they were just plain stupid. They were wasting a valuable resource in Hillary. Obama’s team had no idea how to run foreign policy. They had no coherent foreign policy philosophy or comprehensive strategy. They were making things up as they went along. And they were screwing up at every turn.
Bill often expressed his contempt for Obama; it was he who first christened Obama “the Amateur,” a name I adopted for the title of a book. But he was especially scathing in his comments about Valerie Jarrett. He urged Hillary to stand her ground with Jarrett.
But there wasn’t much Hillary could do, since it was obvious that Jarrett was Obama’s avatar.
“Don’t you get it?” Hillary told Bill during their airplane-to-airplane phone call. “The whole idea is to marginalize me.”
“I get it,” he said.
“I wish you were president,” she said.
“I wish you were,” he said.
“I love you, Billy,” she said.
And they hung up.