Lady and the tramp, page 2 Did you surprise yourself with your portrait of Hillary Clinton? Yes, I also think I surprised a lot of readers. And I surprised the White House (laughs). What did I think going in? Only from what I'd read, I guess I thought that the Lady MacBeth caricature was close to it. And I could point to a couple of presumptions I had that were reversed. One of them would be the idea that, to the extent that she compromised her law practice in Arkansas, one of the things motivating her was to line her pockets — that she was a big rainmaker at the Rose law firm, and that she was abusing her position as the wife of the governor to bring in big clients. The more I looked at that — and I looked at it for a long time, thinking that I would be able to establish that — the less that seemed to be the case. In fact, as you saw in the book, she was the lowest paid partner at the Rose firm. A lot of the time she was away from the firm, doing political work for Clinton. And when she did take on these controversial representations, like the Madison Guarantee representation, there's no evidence (it was for) her financial benefit. I think she made about $20 per month on that account. She may have been doing some things to try to help Bill, help his campaign contributors, things of that nature. But not out of any kind of financial self-interest. And that changes the picture somewhat — to me anyway — about what's driving her. Another misconception would be her public persona. She seems to be cool, maybe even aloof. I would assume she would be very, very difficult to work for. But in fact, the turnover on her staff is the lowest of any recent First Lady, and a lot lower than in the west wing. She has a very loyal staff, so that has to tell you something about what she's like on a one-to-one basis, as far as working for her. You've been accused of a good deal of bad faith in this new book. It's the idea that your sympathetic portrait of Hillary Clinton is a kind of Trojan Horse that's allowed you to sneak in a lot of nasty things about Bill Clinton. I don't know about that. The facts are the facts. Is there an effort to make Bill Clinton look bad? There's no effort on my part to shape the material in any way — other than to get as accurate a picture of Hillary Clinton, and of their relationship as I can. The fact that she's in a flawed marriage to somebody with a fair number of flaws and defects is well-established. There's also this notion that you're trying to redeem your own reputation by redeeming Hillary's. Well, in my opinion, I've always had a good reputation. But it's a fool's errand. A lot of liberals are never going to like me, or say anything good about me, because of my Anita Hill book, because of Troopergate, because of various other things. So if that's what I was thinking, it would have been foolish anyway. The big hurdle was: Was I going to finish this book after I realized it wasn't going to please anybody? And I knew it wouldn't please a lot of people who have this image of Hillary as a demon. Particularly a month before the election. And people who hold Hillary up to be an icon, they're not going to like the book either, because there's a lot of criticism in here. So the question was: Because Hillary Clinton is such a lightning rod, can a book work that's not black or white, that's gray, that's about a real person? I've always had that concern. And the question was just: Was I going to be true to what I found or not? And so I just did it. And right now I have no friends (laughs). I haven't done myself any good in terms of wanting to be liked, I can assure you. I was disinvited to a big conservative party last Friday night here in Washington. So I'm just sort of sitting in my house now. Just waiting to see. I'm interested in your notion of the seduction of Hillary Clinton. You portray her as a woman with very firmly-held political views, and it seems like — politically, at least — she would be a very difficult woman to seduce. There is a contradiction there — some say it's a contradiction in the book. I think it's a dichotomy in the subject. It does seem like, here's a strong, assertive, determined woman — how is she possibly seduced by Bill Clinton? But I just think that there are lots of strong, determined people who do get seduced. If you look at the portrait of what happened when they were at Yale Law School, I didn't talk to anyone who knew either one of them at that point who didn't think Hillary Clinton was in love. And she does a couple things, as you see in the book, that don't necessarily make sense in any other context. One would be staying on an extra year at Yale Law School, when she was a year ahead of him. Kind of putting things on hold for a year. The other one would be moving to Arkansas after the Watergate period, when she really had anything she wanted to do in Washington, she had her choice. She was on a very fast track, and she moved to Arkansas. And there seem to be these periods in '81 and '82, and again in '88 and '89, when there is consideration by one or both of them of divorce, and then she reenters the marriage. I think Bill is the quintessential second chance guy. And as I say at the end of the book, I don't find it that surprising because millions of voters are charmed by Bill Clinton, too. The polls show they don't trust him, but they still want him to be president. I sort of make that analogy ... she certainly knows the full picture at this point, and yet she stays. And I don't think that it's completely a political arrangement, a cynical power grab on her part. That's the other view, and I don't think it's right. You talk to people even today who say, if you look at her, if you look at the way she looks at him — this isn't in the book, because it's all so speculative — that she's still in love with him. Isn't there some sexism in this notion that Hillary is merely a victim, a woman passively seduced by her husband? No. I mean, I just think it's human relations. I don't think it's sexist. The women who've read the book have liked it better than men, in general. Your book paints a very black and white picture of the Clintons -- she's almost entirely good, he's almost entirely bad. Yet on some level, haven't they made a pretty successful team? Oh absolutely. I think if you want to know why he's going to be reelected in three weeks, you have to look at Hillary Clinton. What I found interesting was that when they worked together, they were successful. At the periods when she was disengaged -- like in 1980 when he was running for reelection, and she was pregnant with Chelsea and very busy chairing the Legal Services Corporation, and she wasn't around much -- he lost. Then if you look at the health care battle during his first year in the White House, when she was running the show and he was basically AWOL, you see they also went down to defeat. Some of his instincts, his ability to tap into the public mood, and to hone an agenda that's going to fly with public opinion, and the salesmanship skills, they weren't really there until the summer of '94, which is a year and a half into the whole battle and it was too late. But yes, on the whole, their partnership has been phenomenally successful. And they are almost, as I say at the end, two as one, as opposed to two for one. You are the author of the infamous Troopergate story alleging Clinton's flagrant infidelities while governor of Arkansas. In your new book you seem to argue that Hillary Clinton's willingness to overlook his adultery also led her to overlook other, perhaps more serious things. I think the thing that explains a lot of her behavior in Arkansas, not only on the philandering question but on some of the Whitewater stuff, is a conscious avoidance of the facts — a conscious avoidance of what's going on around her. And so when you look at some of these deals in which she is really only peripherally involved, the question is: She's a smart woman. She either knows what she's doing — and I don't think the evidence shows that — or she's playing a quick cameo role and trying to forget that this stuff is going on around her. And it's later that she gets into trouble, because during the presidential campaign it becomes her role to have to keep all this quiet. People still wonder, why is there all this concealment, why is there all this evasion, when we don't know that there are any crimes committed? And I think it's because she's walking a political minefield every day. She doesn't know, given his history, given the people around him — the McDougals, Dan Lasater, people like this — what's coming up next. So it's almost an overcompensation on her part to give away nothing, to give away no document, to answer the question as technically correct as you can. I think that whole bunker mentality, not only is it from being a lawyer, but it comes from this whole culture of coverup that's surrounded the Clintons for years. Garry Wills called it "the philanderer's secret" -- and I thought that was the best explanation I had seen for this whole thing. In your opinion, does Bill Clinton's promiscuity continue to be an issue? Well, I don't know about continue to be, because I don't have any evidence since he's been in the White House. But up until then, I think it was very indiscreet, and it was at a level that I think it was legitimate to discuss it. Where you draw the line, I dont know. It's a gray area, and there are no rules in journalism about this. But I reached the same judgement that the L.A. Times did on the Troopergate question, which was: Not only was he doing this stuff, but he was exposing himself to letting people have this kind of knowledge of his private activities, and was using people to procure women. My sense of it is that he's basically a sex addict. My guess is that this hasn't stopped since he's been in the White House. It may be at a much lower level, since he's under so much more scrutiny. That wasn't my purpose in the book, to find out if this was still going on. But I'd be surprised if he'd changed his stripes. You're often criticized, from the left anyway, for your use of dubious sources. Some of your book's bigger revelations — that Hillary once hired a private eye to keep tabs on Clinton, for example — don't seem to come from the most credible places either. How did you decide what to include and not include? I think, in general, one of the problems with reporting in Arkansas — and I'm not the only person who's had this problem, you see it in James Stewart's "Bloodsport," for example, which relies heavily on the McDougals, and the McDougals' credibility is open to question — is that a lot of the people in the Clinton circle are themselves compromised. This was a problem with the Trooper story. They might have been badly motivated. And so the only thing you can do as a reporter is, when you have information that raises a question about the material, you put it in there, you acknowledge it. What is it about Hillary that's so endlessly fascinating to people? Part of it is who she is, but part of it is more on a symbolic level — what she represents. There are a lot of people who are threatened by Hillary Clinton for a variety of reasons. And I wouldn't have thought this going into the book. I found that with Hillary Clinton, you can't not consider the effect that she has as a strong woman on some men, and as a professional working woman on some women who followed a more traditional path. The main thing, I think, is her political profile. And that's why somebody like Elizabeth Dole, who has also followed a kind of a feminist path, she doesn't stand for anything different than what Bob Dole stands for. There's no real suspicion generated by her — you know, that she has her own politics and her own agenda. But Hillary Clinton has a long intellectual and political biography of her own, so she's a threat to people who don't agree with her views. And certainly, as we saw when she sort of threw the New Democrats out of the administration in the transition period in 1993, she's a forceful presence. So that's going to make her a lightning rod, I think. There's just nobody else in our politics — maybe Newt Gingrich, but probably not — who's that much of a lightning rod. Is she is a tragic figure? Yeah. I think it ends up being a tragic story. Only because it seems like she is disproportionately paying for all the Clintons' troubles. To the extent that she has been a shock absorber for Bill Clinton on all this scandal stuff, it's done a great deal of damage to her reputation — even if it doesn't go further in the legal process. It just seems to me that she is mostly cleaning up after him, rather than hiding her own misdeeds. And I do think that has a tragic element to it, in the way that this whole relationship has worked. She's the decisive one, she's the person of action, and so she's the one who's going to have to play hide the ball with these documents. That's not something he's going to do. That's my personal opinion, as to whether it's tragedy. Other people can read the book and say she deserves everything and more, and want her to go to jail. I don't have that view. I can't finish this without having some level of sympathy for her. Others will say: She deserves her fate, she made her choices, she should have left him. Speaking of contradictions, you've taken some heat for being a gay man who's writing for a magazine, The American Spectator, that is less than progressive on gay issues. That's never bothered me. First of all, we could go on forever about this. Is The American Spectator anti-gay? I'm not sure what that means. It doesn't strike me that way. And since I publicly talked about being gay two and a half years ago, I've never had any problems with The American Spectator. They encouraged me to do that at the time. On an article by article basis, are there some attempts to poke fun at gays? Yeah. But in my opinion, everyone is fair game for a joke. I haven't seen anything that I consider objectionable in the magazine. And even if I did, I don't see myself as a gay cop at The American Spectator. I'm doing my writing. I'm not editing the magazine, I'm not responsible for everything in it. I'm perfectly happy, so I don't see any problem. Everyone who knew Hillary Clinton at Wellesley and then at Yale clearly thought she was destined for great things. Where do you think she would be now, if she hadn't married Bill Clinton? Well, I don't think she would have run for public office. I think she would have gone more the route of public interest law, and she might have ended up in a position where she was appointed to a presidential cabinet, perhaps the attorney general or something. I think she would have been very successful. I suppose there's a chance she would have gone back to Illinois and gotten involved in politics, but the electoral route ... I think that by the time she was in her mid to late 20s, she really wasn't going to go that route. Although she did have, and continues to have, great leadership potential. So it's hard to say. Will her influence increase in a second term? I think her high point is over. Her high point was the first year of the first Clinton administration. Although the only consistent ideological thread in Bill Clinton's political career is Hillary Clinton, and that's not going to change. Particularly because there will be no countervailing forces -- Dick Morris is out of the picture, for example. So I think she will continue to be influential. He has signaled that she is going to be involved in the implementation of the welfare bill, for example, and that's really something. That takes a direction that's counter to everything she stands for. So I think that will be interesting. She will also continue to be influential in the appointments process and in the composition of the judiciary, because she has always been involved in that. I just don't think, partly because she has been so battered, public-opinion wise, and partly because she will continue to be the subject of this Whitewater investigation, however long it goes, she's ever going to have that moment that she had in the first year, and really the first six months. Because once Vince Foster killed himself, I don't think she ever really recovered. So she's going to be fighting on several fronts, as well as trying to continue to advance an agenda and protect Bill Clinton's place in history. Who knows about her own political future? They're still young. If she avoids all legal problems, who knows, in ten years, whether she wouldn't be a cabinet official in her own right or something. She's obviously very capable. Is Hillary a victim of love? Join the discussion in Table Talk.