Inside the Clinton marriage
Excerpts from the book "Bill and Hillary: The Marriage"
By Christopher Andersen
Posted for discussion and educational purposes only. Not for commercial use.
s-t.com
He was an adulterer and a liar, they were saying. And worse: a fool. In the face of rumors that he had been unfaithful to his wife, the charismatic young Democratic front-runner with the Kennedy smile angrily denied the gossip, and to prove he was innocent dared the press to shadow his every move.
The Miami Herald did just that, and in a matter of days reported that a young woman other than the candidate's wife had spent the weekend at his home. Confronted with photographs of himself and a young blonde named Donna Rice cavorting aboard the aptly named yacht Monkey Business, Gary Hart announced on May 7, 1987, that he was withdrawing from the race for the presidency.
It was no small irony that with Hart out of the picture, more pressure was put on Bill Clinton to run -- despite the fact that, in the words of one Clinton advisor, "Bill made Hart look like Billy Graham."
To further compound the irony, Hillary, backed by Dick Morris, was pushing hardest for Bill to fulfill his dream and run for the presidency. Hillary had been clearly energized by the prospect of Bill's becoming the youngest president in history -- younger even than his idol JFK.
Only 10 days after Hart's withdrawal, Bill sought advice from another source: his childhood friend and lover Dolly Kyle Browning.
During yet another tryst, this time at the Hyatt Hotel at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, Dolly broached the subject of her own sexual addiction -- and Bill's -- for the first time.
"At first Billy denied it," she recalled. "He just didn't see how a person could be 'addicted' to sex. But then when I asked why he felt compelled to have sex, if sometimes he wanted to get away from his partner right after having sex, if his extramarital sex was affecting his sex life with 'The Warden,' if sex was in any way jeopardizing his career -- then he understood."
Not surprisingly, it was that last question concerning the impact on his career that Bill found most intriguing. When he told Dolly that he was being pressured to run for president, she cautioned him that a run against Republican Vice-President George Bush could be "suicide." She added, "There's entirely too much trash in your recent past."
"Like what?" he answered without hesitating.
"Bill, please," she said. "Be serious. Look where you are right now ... Get real."
According to Dick Morris, the political demise of Gary Hart had filled Bill with "a tremendous terror." That spring and early summer, Clinton contacted a number of friends and political contacts throughout the country and casually brought up sex as a campaign issue. What was the American public willing to tolerate? Was adultery, if proven, an insurmountable obstacle to getting elected?
At one point, he even grilled Arkansas Gazette editor John Robert Starr -- the man who popularized the term "Slick Willie" -- on the "Gary Hart Factor."
"Well, you haven't done anything like that, have you?" Starr asked Bill.
"Yes, I have."
Starr was stunned. "You mean," he said, "since you've been married to Hillary?"
"Yes," Bill replied. "Do you want to know about it?"
"It," Starr thought. "Do you want to know about it? And I," he recalled, "to my eternal regret, said no."
Betsey Wright wasn't hopeful about Bill's chances for surviving a presidential run in 1988. She conducted an investigation of her own, ferreting out the names of the women Bill was alleged to have been involved with.
Once she had assembled a dossier on Bill's rumored affairs, Wright sat him down in her living room. Before they went over each name, she begged him to tell her the whole truth -- "I've got to know the truth, Bill" -- about his relationship with each woman.
There were at least a dozen women on the list, including Gennifer Flowers, Dolly Kyle Browning, Juanita Broaddrick, Susan McDougal, Sally Perdue, Lencola Sullivan, Deborah Mathis and former Miss America Elizabeth Ward Gracen. He did not tell Wright about the countless one-night stands or the hookers.
They then ran down the list a second time, to determine which of the women he had had affairs with might talk to the press.
When it was over, Wright concluded that he should not run -- if for no other reason than to spare his wife and daughter.
Convincing Bill was one thing. But when Hillary discovered Betsey Wright had talked her husband out of running that year, she accused the governor's chief of staff of overstepping her bounds. Hillary pressed her for details, but Wright would only say that Bill had in fact been "seeing" other women -- lots of other women.
"Hillary," she said, "he admitted it."
But what Wright did not know was that five years earlier Hillary had hired private investigator Ivan Duda to trail her husband. Back then, on the eve of Bill's 1982 comeback election as governor, Duda had come up with a list of eight women he had been sneaking away to meet at all hours of the day and night. Of the eight, she accepted the fact that Bill was probably sleeping with Dolly Kyle Browning and Gennifer Flowers.
Wright could not have anticipated Hillary's response. Rather than expressing anger at her husband, she looked at Wright and asked, "Who is going to find out? These women are all trash. Nobody is going to believe them."
But Wright stood her ground, insisting that the risk was too great in the wake of the Gary Hart Monkey Business scandal.
"Now is not the time," Wright said. "The climate is all wrong. Bush is too strong. Bill has got to wait until next time ..."
On July 15, the ballroom at Little Rock's Excelsior Hotel was filled with reporters, camera crews, and political supporters waiting to hear Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton announce his candidacy for president.
Instead Bill walked to the podium and, with Hillary at his side fighting back tears, dropped a bombshell.
"I need some family time, I need some personal time," he explained. "Politicians are people too. I think sometimes we forget it, but they really are. The only thing I or any other candidate has to offer in running for president is what's inside. That's what sets people on fire and gets their confidence and their votes, whether they live in Wisconsin or Montana or New York. That part of my life needs renewal.
"The other, even more important reason for my decision is the certain impact that this campaign would have had on our daughter ... I've seen a lot of kids grow up under these pressures and a long, long time ago I made a promise to myself that if I was ever lucky enough to have a child, she would never grow up wondering who her father was."
Bill conceded that it had been a painful decision. "You know," he said to his friend Max Brantley, "is there a point in a person's life, a political person's life, when the things you've done in the past are forgotten?"
While her husband waxed remorseful in private, Hillary fumed. It was not so much that her husband had been unfaithful -- this had always been a painful but bearable part of their life together -- but that, for the time being at least, his adultery had cost them their dream. |
