RUTHFULLY YOURS

The travel office had been run, loosely, by a well-meaning but hapless bureaucrat named Billy Dale, a 30-year White House employee. The finances were indeed a mess—travel expenses were sometimes paid from a cigar box. Many White House reporters liked Dale, however, and when they inquired about the reasons for his firing, the trademark panic ensued. Soon Dale and his colleagues were being slandered by anonymous officials in newspaper stories. The relationship between the Clintons and the new travel office team was first denied, then discounted, then misstated, and finally admitted. All motives for the firings were purely disinterested, according to White House accounts—merely a blow for good-government efficiency. And whatever else the public might learn about the firing of Dale and his colleagues, one central fact stood above all others: Hillary Clinton was not responsible. She said so herself.

But of course she was. Several years later the White House clarified the matter. In response to an old subpoena, it released contemporaneous notes written by a staffer shortly after an encounter with the first lady. She had told him, the staffer wrote, there would be “hell to pay” if Dale and his staff weren’t immediately dismissed and her friends installed to replace them. Dale was fired within the week.

A cynic might look at the Travelgate story and think: Well, hell—what’s the point of having power if you can’t kick a little business to an old friend? The triviality of Hillary’s bit of cold-blooded cronyism would be amusing, except for the feverish efforts to deny it—and deny even the possibility that she could be susceptible to so crude an impulse. And the consequences weren’t trivial for Dale. His life was turned upside down. Federal prosecutors brought charges against him for his slapdash handling of funds, which they tried to paint as cover for embezzlement. After two years in legal limbo and several hundred thousand dollars in legal fees, Dale was released by a trial jury after less than two hours of deliberation—a free man but a Clinton casualty, broke and unemployed.

Even as Travelgate unfolded, the collection of indiscretions known as Whitewater continued to titillate reporters and keep lawyers busy, in and out of the White House. Whitewater involved not power but money: a failed get-rich-quick real estate deal managed partly by the Arkansas first lady, and the deal’s eventual entanglement with a local savings-and-loan driven to bankruptcy by her shady business partner, an Arkansan rogue named Jim McDougal. He was, writes the biographer William Chafe, “a combination of hustler, reformed alcoholic, and manic depressive.” And an old friend of Bill’s.

The first article about the failure of this unusual enterprise, by the reporter Jeff Gerth, appeared in the New York Times during the 1992 campaign. Then and later, Clinton’s supporters in the press relied heavily on ad hominem arguments to discredit Gerth’s reporting. Gerth, they said, was either the tool of an anti-Clinton conspiracy at the New York Times—let me repeat that in case you didn’t catch it the first time—either the tool of an anti-Clinton conspiracy at the Times or a right-wing toady. For what it’s worth, Gerth got his start as a researcher for the George McGovern campaign in 1972 and now works for ProPublica, the left-leaning “public journalism” outlet.

In 2007, after leaving the Times, Gerth published a Clinton biography with his former Timesmate Don Van Natta, Her Way. Their political sympathy for the Clintons is evident throughout the book. Yet nearly 15 years after his first report, Gerth still couldn’t quite believe how the Whitewater story unspooled. As the pattern dictates, Hillary Clinton’s initial transgressions were surely unflattering and maybe unethical, too—but petty.

She had eagerly joined in the real estate deal in hopes of making a quick killing, and she must have known that McDougal, given his regulatory dealings with the state, inevitably would place her in conflicts of interest—and he did. As a partner in Little Rock’s largest law firm, the Rose Law Firm, she shouldn’t have worked on matters relating to McDougal’s other business—and she did. Later, she shouldn’t have denied doing the legal work—and she did. When her old billing records appeared mysteriously in an upstairs library in the White House, nearly two years after they’d been subpoenaed, they showed that she had indeed billed McDougal’s businesses for a significant amount of lawyering.

But Gerth and Van Natta discover the final, exquisitely Clintonian touch: Hillary probably didn’t do the work she was billing for! In other words, she didn’t do the work she wasn’t supposed to do and got paid for despite having denied doing it. It’s Borges in the Ozarks. (Overbilling was not unheard of at Rose. Her close friend at the firm, Webster Hubbell, went to jail for bilking clients.)

Gerth and Van Natta conclude on a judicious note. “Her likely indiscretions were altogether modest,” they write, “but the scandal that would result from [her] attempts to cover up past sins would be enormous.”

And all of her past sins in Whitewater involved money—in particular, her heedless desire for it. On the campaign trail, when she’s describing this trait in other people, Clinton calls it “greed.” Her own version of greed is a constant in her adult life. James B. Stewart, a former editor for the Wall Street Journal and a staff writer for the New Yorker, undertook a kind of forensic analysis of Hillary’s relationship to money in Blood Sport. Sharing the standard-issue liberalism of economics reporters, Stewart takes the Hillary Paradox very hard. He is clearly admiring of “what she represents,” especially in her young, radical phase, when her anticapitalism was near the surface. As a biographer he grows increasingly puzzled as she enters her corporate-lawyer phase, with her various schemes to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible.

“Hillary’s ideological reservations about capitalism,” Stewart wrote, “were co-existing with an increasingly pragmatic need to make money.”

Darn that old pragmatism anyway! It has kidnapped more than a few budding anticapitalists. Hillary’s “pragmatic need,” Stewart shows, had to do with that head-in-the-clouds idealist husband of hers. Bill Clinton’s otherworldly detachment from material things is a theme in all pro-Hillary literature. Numerous admirers are called in to attest to it. “He just doesn’t care about money,” runs a typical comment, from Sheehy’s Hillary biography, Hillary’s Choice. Bernstein quotes Bill Clinton’s former aide Betsey Wright: “Bill Clinton could live under a bridge as long as it was OK with Chelsea. .  .  . He just doesn’t care.”

This is taken by Bill’s fans as evidence of virtue—his love for the higher things crowding out any concern with the lower. Such an image rests oddly on a man who favors $2,000 suits and French cuffs and handmade ties and the bespoke shirts that are seldom found hanging in the closet of your everyday antimaterialist. It’s possible Bill Clinton’s indifference to money is more complicated than his friends know or admit. Other biographers have pointed to his habit, as a candidate and officeholder, of not carrying money, a practice followed by many public men. From his first campaign in 1974 through his presidency and up to the present, daily expenses have usually been handled by an aide, whether a state trooper in Arkansas or a Secret Service agent or a foundation functionary, who would in turn be reimbursed by another entity, a campaign treasury or a government account or, nowadays, a tax-exempt foundation. Bill Clinton would likely lose his famous indifference to money if the money were suddenly gone. There’s always been plenty of money. It’s just that money is something other people take care of.

For four decades one of those other people has been his wife. Early on she took responsibility for the couple’s daily budgeting as well as their long-range financial condition. When her husband was elected attorney general of Arkansas, Stewart tells us, Hillary signed up with Little Rock’s most successful investment adviser. With their savings she opened two investment accounts. One was a joint account with her husband, the other an account in her own name. “By now, it must also have been obvious that Hillary couldn’t count much on financial contributions from her husband,” Stewart writes.

Her husband’s salary and her partnership at Rose placed them near the top of Arkansas’s income distribution (not a dizzying height). But by the late 1970s, she grew impatient and wanted more. “It was clear she wanted to make money,” Stewart writes, “and earn a return greater than what was available from simple savings accounts or Treasury bonds.” At the time, 10-year Treasury bonds were yielding roughly 9 percent, considered a handsome return by everyday investors. (Today the rate is a little over 2 percent.)

And so she was led into one of her most famous indiscretions. One day in 1978, when Bill was running for governor, Hillary received a call from Jim Blair, a social friend and general counsel for Tyson Foods, soon to be the state’s largest employer. Blair offered to open an investment account for Hillary with a commodities broker specializing in cattle futures. Calculations differ, but Stewart estimates that three out of four investors in the commodities markets lose money, and lots of it, even if initial investments are small. Hillary’s was $1,000.

Blair set up similar accounts for lots of friends, business associates, law partners, and even his children. On Hil-lary’s behalf he dealt directly with the broker, a former Tyson employee named Red Bone. (We’re in Arkansas.) With close contacts throughout the cattle industry, Bone had nearly infallible information on the movement of prices, and he shared it with Blair, who handled his many accounts accordingly. The great threat to any futures investor is the margin call, when the trader suddenly requires the client to cover money borrowed to make a losing trade.

Hillary never saw a margin call. Stewart calculates that at one point she was $117,000 in the hole and would have been wiped out in any brokerage firm other than Bone’s. Instead, after less than a year—by then she and her husband were in the governor’s mansion—she asked Blair to close her account. Her $1,000 investment had grown to $99,000.

Running for president 12 years later, Bill Clinton released a dozen years’ worth of tax returns. He stopped just short of the year in which he and his wife had reported her spectacular gains. The couple and the campaign refused to explain why the release of tax returns didn’t go back further. Nosing around, Jeff Gerth followed the trail to Red Bone, Jim Blair, and the windfall they had bestowed on Hillary. To explain the $98,000 profit, Clinton spokesmen said Hillary had handled the trades according to information she gleaned from her daily reading of the Wall Street Journal. Hillary herself spoke of how much she had learned as a little girl reading the financial pages of the Chicago Tribune with her father. And the spokesmen pointed out that no reporter or investigator had found a—here’s the familiar phrase—quid pro quo among Tyson Foods, Jim Blair, the first lady, and the governor.

Stewart ends his account of these and similar affairs sounding dismayed. “Their handling of these matters,” Stewart writes, “both during the campaign and in the White House, hardly shows the president and first lady in a flattering light.” And the unflattering light is to be avoided whatever the cost.

The Clintons can always count on their admirers, even when the scandals move from power and money to sex. Clintonites long ago stopped denying Bill Clinton’s goatishness. “It never happened” evolved into “It doesn’t matter.” But as always, the transgression is prelude.

As early as the 1980s, Hillary led campaigns to silence the women who claimed to have had, and often did have, sex with her husband. “There could be no question,” writes Bernstein, “that Hillary was Bill’s fiercest defender in preventing his other women from causing trouble.”

The methods employed by her, and by others at her direction, look remarkably dated, especially in light of society’s newfound sensitivity to the victims of sexual assault and harassment.

In the 1980s, long before Bill Clinton ran for president, a political opponent privately threatened to publish a list of the governor’s supposed lovers. Hillary deputized her law partners Webb Hubbell and Vincent Foster to bring the women one by one into the Rose offices. The lawyers offered to represent each of them as legal counsel in case the list was made public. Hillary sat in on at least one of these sessions, according to Sheehy. You can easily imagine the impression Hubbell and Foster, two of the state’s most powerful attorneys, made on the women, brought in from every corner of the state. The women never caused trouble.

A better-known example of Hillary’s efforts involved Betsey Wright, Bill’s gubernatorial chief of staff. Wright has earned her place in history for coining the deathless term “bimbo eruptions.” (Hillary hasn’t used the word “bimbo,” so far as her biographers know. She referred instead to “Bill’s rodeo queens.”) In 1987, as Clinton prepared to run for president, Wright assembled a master list of women rumored to have slept with the future candidate. It was a long list, and it came in handy. Clinton was facing the New Hampshire primary when one former lover, Gennifer Flowers, sold her story to the Star tabloid.

“People have been making these attacks on my husband since he first ran for office,” Hillary told reporters, which was true. (The Clintons use the word “attacks” where others use the word “accusations.” Attacks are accusations about them.) Hillary insisted the campaign hire a private investigator to stop any further eruptions, Sheehy writes in Hil-lary’s Choice. Hillary said she knew just the man.

Jack Palladino had worked for the Bay Area law firm where Hillary had briefly worked as a law student. Palladino’s assignment was to contact the women on Wright’s list. To keep him at least one remove from the presidential campaign, Hillary and Wright arranged to have his retainer of $100,000 paid to a law firm in Denver, which Palladino then billed for “legal services.” (This relationship was first discovered by Michael Isikoff of the Washington Post.)

“I am somebody you call in when the house is on fire, not when there’s smoke in the kitchen,” Palladino told Sheehy. “You ask me to deal with that fire, to save you, to do whatever has to be done.”

And what had to be done? Gerth and Van Natta found a private memo written by Palladino to the campaign in 1992. In it he explained his goal in dealing with Gennifer Flowers: “to impeach her character and veracity until she is destroyed beyond all recognition.” That worked too. Flowers became a national joke. It was later reported that a former roommate who had confirmed Flowers’s account to reporters received a visit from Palladino. “Do you think Gennifer is the sort of person who would commit suicide?” he asked her.

Palladino reported his progress to Betsey Wright, who passed the word to Hillary. And the other women on Wright’s list kept quiet.

Some of the methods have been gentler, if no subtler. In 1994, an Arkansas state employee named Paula Corbin Jones insisted on pursuing her lawsuit against President Clinton, who she said had exposed himself to her in a hotel room when he was governor. Soon, nude photos of Jones taken by an estranged boyfriend mysteriously fell into the hands of the editors of Penthouse magazine, which rushed them into print. As anyone who saw the pictures knows, the intent was embarrassment, not prurience.

Another woman, Kathleen Willey, accused the president of making a similar “pass,” this time in the Oval Office. “With Hillary’s go-ahead,” Gerth and Van Natta write, “the White House then released nine fawning letters that Willey had sent to Bill after the alleged incident.” The letters disproved Willey’s story, reporters concluded.

Mrs. Clinton’s theory here, successful as it was, seems particularly old fashioned: If the survivor of a sexual assault speaks kind or forgiving words about her assailant, then either (1) the assault didn’t occur or (2) the victim agreed to it. The phrase “had it coming” may be too old-fashioned even for Hillary’s team.

We’ve known about all this for a long time—about Hillary Clinton’s blistering campaign to discredit the women who wanted to tell the truth about her husband. But it is seldom mentioned, and when it is, it is old news. Apparently, old news, once we know it, tells us nothing worth knowing.

The Hillary Paradox—that a woman of such excellent character should be capable of such tawdriness and worse—the paradox vanishes if you drop the first part of the proposition. Her reputation for good character, after all, rests largely on simple assertion, on what she says as a public figure, on her politics, rather than on what she’s done. Leave aside the politics, and the shabby behavior is easily explainable: She does what she does because she is who she is.

But renouncing their admiration is precisely what supporters of Hillary Clinton can’t bring themselves to do. Otherwise her enemies might win.

It is odd the things they will swallow, and odd the things they choke on. During her last presidential campaign a group of left-wing women writers put together a book called Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary. Not all the essays were admiring, but I violated my rule and read them anyway. The writers objected to Clinton’s caution, her ideological compromises, her weird devotion to her husband—and, strangely enough, to the “listening tour” with which she opened her first Senate campaign in 1999.

Remember? The candidate was photographed visiting coffee shops, classrooms, and shop floors in every corner of New York state, nodding as her future constituents prattled on. The listening tour was indeed a silly gimmick, executed with effortless smarm—politics as usual.

But to Elizabeth Kolbert, a political writer for the New Yorker, it seemed to expose something especially worrisome.

“That Clinton would engage in such a charade doesn’t make one admire her,” Kolbert wrote. “Women should wish for a more principled candidate. They should wish for one who’s more honest. .  .  .

“Yet one simply has to admire her.”

Yes. One simply has to.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.