Dark Side of Hillary Clinton
Avik S. Roy
Hillary Rodham Clinton, Wellesley '69, could potentially be
one of the most controversial Presidential wives in American history.
Her allies portray her as an articulate advocate of feminism; her
opposition shrieks that her professional writings and background run
contrary to "family values." Both miss the point. Mrs. Clinton is no
ordinary politician's spouse: she has been extremely influential in
her husband's presidential campaign, and has been a close advisor to
Bill Clinton during his tenure as Governor of Arkansas.
There is good reason to believe that Mrs. Clinton would wield
sway in a Clinton White House. Thus, her professional conduct is
indeed worthy of scrutiny. But the Republicans, instead of examining
behavior which is relevant to the actions a Clinton administration
might take, appeared to attack Mrs. Clinton under the exclusionary
banner of Patrick Buchanan -- alienating moderates and working women,
and bungling an important campaign issue. Mrs. Clinton's choice to
become a lawyer is an honorable one, and is not in question. However,
it is responsible and indeed important to examine her background as it
pertains to her possible role in the White House.
Most Americans think of Hillary Clinton as an intelligent,
career- minded (albeit ultra-liberal) professional. But while
Americans hear the Clintons rail against the Reagan-Bush "decade of
greed" and its effect on the economy, they don't know that Mrs.
Clinton made several high-risk, short-term speculative stock
investments that brought spectacular financial value to her portfolio.
And while the Clintons wail about pervasive racism, most Americans
don't know that Mrs. Clinton made huge amounts of money from
investments in De Beers, the South African diamond giant, during the
height of apartheid in 1981. While the Clintons speak proudly of how
"we won the Cold War," most Americans don't know that as director of
the New World Foundation in 1988, Hillary Clinton funnelled financial
support to FMLN communist guerrillas in El Salvador.
A few months ago, according to Daniel Wattenberg of The
American Spectator, four top centrist Clinton campaign aides,
frustrated that the far-left faction was running the campaign through
Hillary, threatened that if things didn't change, they would drop out
so "she can run the campaign." According to a Clinton insider, Mrs.
Clinton was instrumental in keeping the campaign headquarters in
Arkansas, away from the New Covenant Democrats in Washington:
"Hillary's probably the only person in this campaign who wanted it to
be in Little Rock. The [moderate Democratic Leadership Council] crowd
and the centrists -- all of Washington -- have basically been left
high and dry."
And even though Bill Clinton has tried to portray scrutiny of
his wife as undignified and irrelevant to the presidential election,
several candidates for judicial appointments in Arkansas told Neil
Lewis of the New York Times that Mrs. Clinton had taken over the task
of screening Governor Clinton's "appointees"; in fact, the candidates
said that they report to Mrs. Clinton and not to the Governor. Bill
Clinton himself beams that by being elected President, the voters can
"buy one, get one free." Thus, while one may or may not agree with
Mrs. Clinton's political and judicial philosophies, it is reasonable
to examine just what we are getting for free.
Perhaps Hillary Clinton's adult life began when as President
of College Government, she was selected by the Wellesley student body
for the honor of being Wellesley's first student commencement speaker.
The year was 1969. The social turbulence of those times remains dear
to our hearts. Mrs. Clinton fondly remembers how she arrived at
Wellesley a "Goldwater conservative," only to evolve into a "right-
thinking" McGovern liberal. The Wellesley administration, reluctant
to allow for a student commencement speaker, finally relented,
provided that her speech broadly represented the student body and that
it did not embarrass the College.
But Hillary, ever so willing to place social justice above an
honest agreement, started her speech by slamming Massachusetts
Republican Senator Edward Brooke, the preceding speaker. According
to a friend's recollection, Mrs. Clinton decided that despite her pledge,
Sen. Brooke's remarks deserved an "extemporaneous critique." She
went on to describe the revelations she'd undergone while at Wellesley,
with a coherence that would make George Bush proud:
Words have a funny way of trapping our minds on the way to our
tongues, but there are necessary means even in this multi-media age
for attempting to come to grasps [sic] with some of the inarticulate
maybe even inarticulable things that we're feeling...There are some
things we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and
competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is
not the way of life for us. We're searching for more immediate,
ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living.
The young, inarticulate Hillary Rodham of 1969 would no doubt
frown upon the acquisitive, competitive Hillary Clinton of 1992, who
sat on three corporate boards: department store giant Wal-Mart, yogurt
franchisers TCBY, and French chemical manufacturer La Farge.
According to an accountant familiar with the Clintons' tax returns,
Mrs. Clinton easily clears six figures in director's fees alone.
Immediately upon graduation from Wellesley, Hillary Rodham
ecstatically penetrated the ivy confines of Yale Law School, where she
met Bill Clinton. At Yale, according to Mr. Wattenberg, she led
"campus protests against everything from the Vietnam War to the
absence of a Tampax dispenser in the women's law school john." She
also served on the editorial board of the quarterly Yale Review of Law
and Social Action, writing sympathetic evaluations of articles
supporting the Black Panthers and other terrorist organizations, as
well as pieces claiming that "a new frontier must be found...
relatively unpolluted by conventional patterns of social and political
organization. Experimentation with drugs, sex, individual lifestyles
or radical rhetoric and action within the larger society is an
insufficient alternative. New ideas and values must be taken out of
heads and transformed into reality."
In her legal writings of the late seventies and early
eighties, Mrs. Clinton began to leave the notorious paper trail that
Republicans have attacked. In a particularly rocky article entitled
"Children Under the Law", originally printed in 1974 and appearing in
the Harvard Educational Review in 1982, she advocated extending to
children "all procedural rights guaranteed to adults" and granting
children the right to sue their parents if they don't see eye-to-eye,
even on who washes the dishes. She continued on to discuss
parent-child relationships, marriage, and slavery:
The basic rationale for depriving people of rights in a dependency
relationship is that certain individuals are incapable or undeserving
of the right to take care of themselves, and consequently, need social
institutions specifically designed to safeguard their position. Along
with the family, past and present examples of such arrangements
include marriage, slavery, and the Indian reservation system.
In other words, the institution which allows parents to care
after their children and guide them to adulthood is merely a way for
parents to exercise unfair and ruthless control over other human
beings. Paradoxically, during her 1992 Wellesley Commencement Address
entitled "Nurturing Our Nation's Children", Mrs. Clinton complained
that "too many of our children are being impoverished financially,
socially, and spiritually."
But Mrs. Clinton's ideological quirks, however fascinating,
are not nearly as important to the 1992 election as is her fraudulent
management of federal and private funds. In 1978, President Jimmy
Carter appointed her as Chairman of the Board of the Legal Services
Corporation (LSC), a Congressionally-chartered and federally-funded
private, non-profit, and explicitly non-partisan corporation that was
to "provide legal assistance to the poor in non-criminal cases."
According to an investigation by the Comptroller General of the United
States (part of the General Accounting Office, or GAO), however, the
$300 million LSC engaged in illegal and corrupt dealings under
then-Hillary Rodham's tenure.
Instead of simply aiding the poor in legal cases, the Rodham
LSC was found by the GAO to have engaged in outright partisan
activism, in violation of its charter. The Rodham LSC contributed to
Democratic political campaigns as "a project to educate clients about
their rights in the legislative process," and published kooky-sounding
activist sourcebooks such as "Tactical Investigations of People's
Struggles" and another on "How Community Organizations and Public
Interest Groups Can Win Political Power and Resources". Such
organizations and groups, regardless of their aims, were not supposed
to be funded by the LSC, since as the GAO observed, "clients' legal
rights are not at issue."
The Rodham LSC heavily funded the Proposition 9 Task Force, a
California group dedicated to defeating Proposition 9, an item on the
1980 ballot which would require the state to cut income taxes in half.
Even though it was illegal for the LSC to engage in such conduct, the
GAO reported that Rodham funded a statewide, "large-scale opposition
campaign to the Proposition 9 ballot measure." Indeed, the LSC did
not even properly account for its expenditures in the campaign, and to
this day, the GAO does not know how many hundreds of thousands of
dollars, if not millions, were sucked out of federal taxpayers to pay
for the campaign.
In 1981 when Ronald Reagan became President, Ms. Rodham
organized the LSC to fight his fiscal policy initiatives, once again
in direct violation of the LSC's charter. Then, Ms. Rodham tried to
prevent Mr. Reagan's appointments from joining the LSC board of
directors, claiming that the appointment procedure was illegal. A
federal judge ruled against her, observing that she and the other
Carter appointees had been placed on the board in exactly the same
legal manner.
There is no reason why a successful, career-minded woman
cannot be a First Lady. But Hillary Clinton's career is not what
makes her important in this election. Her professional conduct and
political outlook will influence the lives of many Americans. Mrs.
Clinton's fraudulent and twisted management of the Legal Services
Corporation belies her lust for power at the expense of taxpayers and
the law. It is quite possible that, in a Bill Clinton administration,
Mrs. Clinton could be appointed to run a federally funded organization
with a budget much larger than $300 million. John F. Kennedy, after
all, appointed his own brother as the United States Attorney General.
If Mrs. Clinton is involved at all in federal judicial appointments,
her legal philosophy will significantly affect constitutional and
federal law for decades to come. The Republicans' inability to focus
on how Hillary Clinton might influence a Clinton White House, "family
values" aside, is a manifestation of the Bush campaign's failure to
clearly define itself and its opposition, a failure which will
probably cost them the election.
|
