Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party (27 page)

Thomases knows that passive enabling does not imply inaction; it sometimes requires the enablers to play a theatrical role. When Bill’s abuse of another woman is publicly discovered, for example, Hillary must pretend to be outraged, though in reality she always knew about Bill’s conduct.

She must also refuse to be seen with him, showing her “normal reaction” to his supposed betrayal. Even Chelsea and the family dog must be photographed practicing Bill avoidance. Hillary, Chelsea, and the dog are seen together, and Bill is seen all by himself, with a very forlorn expression. This may be called the “leaving Bill in the doghouse” or “taking Bill to the woodshed” phase.

Finally, the two of them must walk hand-in-hand on the beach, signifying reconciliation. They may even dance a few steps together, the loving couple somehow getting through it all. The press goes along with it, in the sycophantic manner reminiscent of courtiers before the French Dauphin. But no one actually believes it; most people know they are witnessing the pathetic, hypocritical performance of the passive enabler.

But a second possibility—never considered—is that Hillary is an active enabler. She doesn’t just endure Bill’s abuse; she abets it. Of course she didn’t create Bill’s problem, but she sees from the outset how she can benefit from it. She needs Bill not as a husband but as a lifelong partner in crime. And Bill profits from the arrangement because Hillary has agreed to become his collaborator and cover-up artist. His addiction is safe with her.

So Bill has, over time, become dependent on Hillary. That’s why he’s still out there in his dotage, campaigning for her. Otherwise Bill would be long gone at this point. By making Bill reliant on her—emotionally and politically—Hillary has over decades secured a marriage that was never really a marriage. She got Bill for life in exchange for facilitating his behavior and, whenever it became necessary, going after the victims of that behavior.

This theory of Hillary’s active enabling may strike some as outrageous, so let’s test it by looking more closely at some of those sex crimes. I’ll start with the ones that seem minor because they involve consensual sex, but they’re not, because they all involve abuses of power. In this category I would list Bill’s relationships with Gennifer Flowers, Sally Miller, Elizabeth Ward Gracen, and Monica Lewinsky. In every case Bill was the powerful political figure and these women were vulnerable to his power.

Lewinsky, in her early twenties, was the lowliest employee for the most powerful man in the world when he began his “relationship” with her—essentially a routine in which she was smuggled through White House security to give him oral sex and then exit without being observed. The consequence of Bill using his power over her in this way was to make Lewinsky, in her own words, “the most humiliated person in the world.” That’s a lot to endure in your early twenties.

Sure, women like Lewinsky went along; in this respect they consented. But this consent is similar to the young actress who submits to the producer’s couch, or the student who succumbs to the lecherous teacher, or the twenty-something political aide who is fondled by her middle-aged congressman. There is, at the least, a seediness about this that should make everyone, most of all feminists, very uncomfortable.

In the private sector, such behavior gets one reprimanded or even fired. In academia, professors are absolutely forbidden from having even consensual relationships with students enrolled in their classes. Several Harvard professors, for instance, have been reprimanded, demoted, or fired because of sexual relationships with students.

I remember discussing the issue with Harvard’s longtime dean Henry Rosovsky when he invited me to campus to guest-lecture in a class he taught. Rosovsky was dealing with one particular case at the time. Even though the professor insisted the student had consented, Rosovsky argued her consent was irrelevant. “My position,” he told me “is that when power is so inequitably distributed between professor and student, consent is not a defense.”

In the political realm, Republicans could never get away with what Bill Clinton did. South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford was widely castigated within his party for having a love affair with a woman from Argentina. Sanford, unlike Clinton, wasn’t just exercising his sex organs; he was genuinely smitten by the woman. The affair was consensual, and the two of them got engaged, although they subsequently parted ways and never married. Republicans, however, promptly initiated impeachment proceedings against Sanford.

Contrast Republican intolerance for sexual harassment with Democratic approval for it. Democrats ferociously resisted Republican attempts to impeach Bill Clinton. Not only did Democrats pooh-pooh Bill’s conduct but they even excused his lying under oath, insisting that lying about sex should not be counted in this category. Throughout Bill’s career, Democrats have turned a blind eye to his history of sordid behavior toward women.

THEY ALL SAID NO

Consensual affairs, however distasteful, are one thing. But now I turn to the more serious of Bill’s sex offenses. Carolyn Moffet, a legal secretary in Little Rock in 1979, said she met Governor Clinton at a political fundraiser. He asked her to his room. “When I went in,” she said, “he was sitting on a couch, wearing only an undershirt. He pointed at his penis and told me to suck it.” When Moffet refused, “he got mad, grabbed my head, and shoved it into his lap. I pulled away from him and ran out of the room.”

Bill met Paula Jones, a low-level state employee, at an Arkansas trade convention. He summoned Jones to meet him at the Excelsior Hotel, where he was staying. There, according to Jones, he dropped his pants in front of her, and asked her to suck his penis. “And the next thing you know he pulls down his pants. He sat on the couch and he was fondling himself and he asked me to kiss it.”

Jones said, “I jumped up and said, ‘No, I’m not that kind of girl. And I need to be leaving immediately.’ So of course he was embarrassed.
He turned red. He pulled his pants up. And I went up to the door and was trying to get out.”

Then, Jones added, “He momentarily put his hand on the door so I couldn’t completely get it opened. And he said, ‘You’re smart. Let’s keep this between ourselves.’” Jones saw a state trooper with a smirk on his face as she dashed out of the room.
¹¹

A former flight attendant on Bill Clinton’s campaign plane, Christy Zercher, said that Clinton harassed her on an overnight flight from New York to California in early 1992. According to Zercher, Clinton tried to pull her into the campaign jet bathroom while his pants were unzipped. Then he tried grabbing her breast from his seat, while Hillary slept nearby.
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On November 29, 1993, when Bill was president, Kathleen Willey came to him looking for a job. She was in a very awkward situation. Her husband Ed, a prominent lawyer and Democratic fundraiser, had stolen from his clients and was facing prosecution and financial ruin. Willey came seeking full-time employment to relieve her family’s desperate plight.

According to Willey, Clinton said to her, “I’ve wanted to do this since the first time I laid eyes on you.” Then, in her words, “President Clinton put my hand on his genitals, on his erect penis. He then proceeded to overpower me and rub his hands up my skirt, over my blouse and my breasts.” Utterly shocked, Willey was trying to decide whether to slap him or yell for help.

Fortunately for her, at that moment there was a knock on the door. Clinton was late for a meeting with his economic advisors. “I made a dive for the door, yanked it open and burst into the Oval Office,” Willey said.
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Her family situation, however, only got worse. The very day that Clinton assaulted her, Willey found out that her husband went into the woods, inserted a gun into his mouth, and killed himself.

In 1999, Juanita Broaddrick told Lisa Myers of NBC
Dateline
that Bill raped her. The two had met at an industry convention in 1978. Bill proposed a business meeting, and when Broaddrick suggested they have coffee in the lobby of the Camelot hotel where she was staying, Bill said it was too noisy and insisted they meet instead in Broaddrick’s room.

As Broaddrick tells it, Clinton grabbed her and tried to kiss her. She drew back. “Then he tries to kiss me again. And the second time he tries to kiss me he starts biting my lip. I tried to pull away from him. And then he forces me down on the bed. And I just was very frightened, and I tried to get away from him, and I told him, ‘No,’ that I didn’t want this to happen. But he wouldn’t listen to me.

“It was a real panicky, panicky situation. I was even to the point where I was getting very noisy, yelling to ‘please stop.’ When everything was over with, he got up and straightened himself, and I was crying at the moment, and he walks to the door and calmly puts on his sunglasses. And he turned and went out the door.”
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So here we have five women, unconnected with each other, making these allegations. One of them, Jones, filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against Bill. None of these women have a political ax to grind. Moffet, Zercher, Jones, and Broaddrick were not, as far as we know, political people. Willey was a longtime Clinton supporter. All were in a vulnerable position, yet each came forward, taking a big risk in taking on the Clinton machine.

We can see, from the quotation at the beginning of this chapter, that Hillary has said women who allege sexual harassment have a right to be heard and believed. Hillary herself has articulated this position throughout her career. During the Anita Hill hearings, for instance, she insisted that Hill’s allegations against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas should be presumed true, even though Thomas vehemently denied them.

This is the orthodox feminist position. Obviously we can use it to expose Hillary’s hypocrisy, and the hypocrisy of her feminist allies. But is the position valid? I don’t think so. Women have a right to be heard, but not necessarily to be believed. Women sometimes have a motive to lie, and women sometimes do lie. We have to decide each case on its merits.

But look at the merits of the situation here. It’s conceivable that one accuser may be lying, but all five? We know that Paula Jones was not lying. Initially Bill said she was, but we know Bill is a liar. (He lied on national TV about his affair with Gennifer Flowers and he lied under
oath about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”)

In what will surely go down as one of the most bizarre footnotes in presidential history, Jones gave a description of what she termed a “distinguishing mark” on Bill’s penis. Eventually Bill and Hillary gave up: they paid Jones an $850,000 settlement to go away. We can be sure they would not have paid her if they could have exposed her allegations in court as lies.

BLAMING THE VICTIMS

Hillary’s role with each of these women—indeed with all Bill’s women—has been to deride, discredit, and intimidate them. In the White House, Hillary led a kind of war-room strategy which has been described as, “Go after specific things about the story—dates and times. Attack the motives and details.” This seems chillingly reminiscent of how Hillary got her rapist client exonerated on a technicality.

Hillary led the team to handle the Paula Jones case. Here the attack focused on attacking Jones’s motives. Hillary and her team portrayed Jones as a low-class woman who would say anything to get money. The Clintons’ flunky James Carville disparaged Jones. “Drag a $100 bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find.” Another flunky, Betsey Wright, dismissed the allegations of women like Jones as “bimbo eruptions” on the part of “gold diggers.”

After the Broaddrick incident, Hillary personally accosted Broaddrick and whispered in her ear, “I just want you to know how much Bill and I appreciate the things you do for him.” Broaddrick recalls, “I just stood there. I was sort of you might say shell-shocked.” Hillary repeated, “Do you understand. Everything you do.” Broaddrick adds, “She tried to take a hold of my hand and I left.”

Broaddrick said she was terrified because she knew the power of the Clintons. She interpreted Hillary’s remarks to her as something between a plea and a threat. Hillary was saying, in effect, we expect you to keep
quiet about this. And Broaddrick did, for many years, until she felt compelled to speak out.

According to Willey, “My children were threatened by detectives hired by Hillary. They took one of my cats and killed another. They left a skull on my porch. They told me I was in danger. They followed me. They vandalized my car. They hid under my deck in the middle of the night. They subjected me to a campaign of fear and intimidation, trying to silence me.”
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Hillary has never directly addressed the accusations that Bill is a sex abuser and a rapist. She pretends she doesn’t have to. She is supported in this by a compliant media which—with the exception of Lisa Myers of
Dateline
—has generally buried the accounts of these women.

Even in the Myers case, NBC deliberately sat on the interview until after Clinton survived the impeachment vote. Myers interviewed Broaddrick in mid-January 1999. Clinton’s impeachment vote in the Senate was February 12. NBC ran the interview two weeks after Clinton was acquitted. Had the interview run earlier, who knows how it might have affected the outcome?

Progressive journalists have from the beginning tried to protect Bill Clinton from the women he exploits. After the Gennifer Flowers scandal threatened to derail Bill’s presidential bid, CBS producer Don Hewitt of
60 Minutes
staged an appearance by the Clintons. Questions were fed to them in advance. The episode was carefully edited.

Hewitt admitted later that his goal was to save Bill Clinton’s 1992 candidacy for president. He said the Clintons “came to us because they were in big trouble. They were about to lose right there and they needed some first aid. They needed some bandaging. What they needed was a paramedic. So they came to us and we did it.”
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They did it by creating a false tableau of the Clinton marriage. They created a false picture of Bill as the flawed but repentant husband, Hillary as the wronged wife determined to save their relationship. The message was that this decent couple was working out its marital issues by themselves, and the American people should leave them alone.