Which of Hillary Clinton’s pasts will she want us to pay attention to, if and when she runs for President? And which will she want us to ignore? What will make her supporters say that the press is not giving her proper credit for her tireless public service—and what will they say has already been litigated, is ancient, and reflects badly on journalists even to mention? We got a few clues this week, along with a glimpse of the weaknesses of her candidacy. Another way to ask the question is this: Who better represents the problems for Clinton in 2016: Monica Lewinsky or Victor Pinchuk?
First, Monica. On Sunday night the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative Web site, published what it called “The Hillary Papers.” These were drawn from the papers of Diane Blair, a friend of the Clintons’ in Arkansas, who kept journals describing her conversations with both of them (but especially Hillary) and her work on their campaigns. Blair’s husband had donated the papers to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, and though they became available to the public a few years ago, the Free Beacon’s Alana Goodman was the first to go through them. The Free Beacon dislikes Hillary, and the site undoubtedly pulled papers selectively—it published ones from the 1992 Presidential campaign, the bumpy first years of the Clinton Administration, and from the Monica chapter—none of which reveal anything crushingly awful. But there are parts that are telling and unappealing. Blair often riffs, as well she might when writing about one of her closest friends, about how underappreciated Hillary Clinton is, repeating Clinton’s view that much of the blame lies with the press: a bunch of “complete hypocrites” with “big ego’s and no brai[ns].” Indeed, Clinton seems to think that a lot of people are just dumb, or annoying; she might be forgiven for calling Lewinsky, the White House intern with whom her husband became sexually involved, a “narcissistic looney tune”—they had tried to “manage” her, Blair records, but it didn’t work. It gives one pause, though, to read Blair’s comments on a conversation from December, 1993, in which she and Hillary Clinton “discuss books, movies, packwood”—that’s Senator Bob Packwood, who was accused of Bob Filner-like sexual misconduct involving women who worked for him, some of whom said he had assaulted them. Here is Blair’s note:
(HC tired of all those whiney women, and she needs him on health care) I told her I’d been bonding w. creeps; she said that was the story of her whole past year.
Packwood had to resign from the Senate, in 1995. He was replaced by Ron Wyden (giving this plot line an odd intersection with the N.S.A. story, in which Wyden has played a pretty positive role). More than once in the papers, women’s groups are talked about as bodies to be, like Monica, managed, rather than listened to.
But, Clinton’s supporters would say, that was the nineties—we’ve heard all that, why should we hear it again? Maybe because it was the nineties; there will be people eligible to vote in the 2016 election who were not yet born when the Lewinsky story first came out, in January, 1998. They aren’t exhausted by the whole spectacle. And since they are being asked to put the same two people in the White House, with perhaps fewer restraints on the less disciplined one of the two, why shouldn’t they read up on it? A new generation might also conclude that Bill Clinton’s impeachment was a ridiculous farce. Or that his transgressions matter less than his economic record—or hers, as Secretary of State, on women’s rights at home and abroad. (She has the strong support of women’s groups now, partly as a result of her work and partly out of the sense, right or wrong, that she is this generation’s best chance for a woman in the White House.) But people are allowed to think twice about it without being called haters.
“At least in campaign Betsey and I fought back against sleaze; kept bad things from happening,” Blair writes at one point, referring to Betsey Wright, Bill Clinton’s campaign manager. (There is also a letter in there in which Blair advises Wright to seek psychological help; it’s not clear if it was ever sent.) Who has been fighting back the sleaze since the Clintons left the White House? This is where Victor Pinchuk comes in. He is a Ukrainian steel-industry oligarch. He has some trouble with fair-trade practices. He has also, according to a report by Amy Chozick in theTimes, given the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation about thirteen million dollars. He went to Bill Clinton’s sixty-fifth birthday party. He paid a large retainer to Douglas Schoen, a former Clinton aide who is now a lobbyist; Schoen “arranged roughly a dozen meetings with State Department officials from September 2011 to November 2012 on behalf of or with Mr. Pinchuk”—that is, when Hillary Clinton was in charge of the State Department. Clinton’s spokesman told the Times that he was never “on her schedule,” but the paper reported:
At times those meetings overlapped with Mr. Pinchuk’s other involvements with the Clintons. For instance, in 2012, Mr. Pinchuk took a break from the Clinton Global Initiative to meet upstairs in a hotel suite with Melanne Verveer, a close aide to Mrs. Clinton and ambassador at large for global women’s issues at the State Department.
If the old question about the Clintons was how many women there were, the new one might be: how many oligarchs are out there? The foundation has taken a lot of money; Clinton, as Secretary of State, made a lot of trips and connections. This is her past, not just her husband’s. And inquiries into them aren’t frivolous, “whiney,” or unwarranted—or close to being finished.
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