Hooray for Fred! >Hillary Caused WH Civil War
November Edition 2007
Promised real power as Bill Clinton's vice president, Al Gore found he had a rival for that role: the First Lady. And when Hillary decided to run for the Senate, a tense competition got ugly. In an excerpt from her new book about the Clinton White House years, the author reveals how conflicting agendas—the triangle of a scandal-ridden lame-duck president, the wife he'd betrayed, and his designated successor—sapped Gore's 2000 campaign as the bond between two couples dissolved into distrust, anger, and resentment.
Excerpted from For Love of Politics—Bill and Hillary Clinton: The White House Years, by Sally Bedell Smith, to be published this month
The early conventional wisdom about the relationship between the president and vice president shifted from adoring descriptions of generational bonding to the prevailing media view that Gore's influence would "inevitably diminish" now that his "Dudley Do-Right" image was no longer necessary to take the curse off "Slick Willie." An account in The New York Times Magazine shortly before the inauguration set out the new interpretation, noting that "Al Gore hasn't yet realized there is going to be a co-presidency but he's not going to be part of the co," and that, according to the Clintons' close friend and adviser Susan Thomases, Gore "would have to adjust to a smaller role." The article came out of the blue, and the Gore camp detected the veiled handiwork of Hillary in its slant. It was an open secret that some of Hillary's advisers, Thomases in particular, nurtured dreams that Hillary, not Gore, would follow Bill in the presidency. "There are people talking very seriously about her succeeding him," Betsey Wright, Bill's chief of staff in Arkansas, admitted during her former boss's first year as president.
The Clintons resented the Gores because they were products of Washington's prestigious private schools and its social network, on the A-list for elite Georgetown gatherings such as the annual New Year's Eve party hosted by former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and his wife, Sally Quinn. A friend of the Clintons' noted in a journal that Hillary once said with some bitterness, "Gore gets credit because he's a Washington insider and can play the game. Gore is not 'from someplace called Arkansas.'"
Entire article: www.vanityfair.com |
