About Ms. “Charming” Hillary Clinton

“I don’t beleive she said it, and if she said it 26 years ago, so what?” –Ed Koch, former Mayor of New York City, reacting to reports that Hillary Clinton had once called a campain aid a “FUCKING JEW BASTARD”. [New York Post, 15 July 2000.]
HILLARY’S TEMPER: “When you show up in the Senate, you can’t hire, fire, and insult your colleagues if you don’t get along with them.”—Hillary Clinton complaining about Rudy Giuliani during her 1999 listening tour.” It was more than a little odd that Hillary Clinton’s earliest Senate campain attacks on New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani centered on his temperament. He was too abrasive, she said. He didn’t work well with others. His bull-in-the-china-shop style wouldn’t fit into the refined and respectful atmosphere of the Senate, where protocol, deference, and senatorial courteous supposedly reined. “He gets angry quite often,” Mrs Clinton said in December 1999, referring to her then senate opponent’s sharp reaction to the decision by the Clinton housing department to co-opt $60 million in city funding for the homeless. “I can’t be responding everytime the Mayor gets angry about something because that’s all I would do.”[associated press. 22 Dec 1999] While candidate
Hillary pounded away at the notion that Giuliani was too hot tempered to effectively represent New York in the
Senate, the establishment press dutifully reported her every word —without of course, noting her own track record in the temper department.
“She is angry. Not all of the time. But most of the time,” wrote a usually sympathetic Gail Sheehy in her Clinton biography, Hillary’s Choice, which was released just a few months before the first lady began zeroing in on Guiliani’s temper.[Gail Sheehy, Hillary’s Choice{New York Random House,1999}p.11.] The referance was to Sheehy’s first impression of Mrs Clinton, after spending time with her right after the first couple’s triumphant 1992 appearance on 60 Minutes. Long time Hillary aid Carolyn Huber, who saved Mrs Clinton’s buns in 1996 with a convenient cover story about how her mysterious Rose Law Firm billing records magically appeared in the White House book room, described the first lady’s fits of rage to Sheehy as nearly lethal. “The person on the receiving end never gets over it,” Huber remembered, reportedly shivering as she spoke those words.[Sheehy, p.139″] Another former Clinton adviser revealed anonymously that Mrs Clinton “is in a perpetual state of suspended
anger because of all that she has absorbed.”
Others have also noted Mrs Clinton’s rages, though the New York press declined to visit their accounts during her Senate race. During her husband’s 1992 campain, Mrs Clinton once got so mad she threw a breifing book at her husband while the first couple was being chauffeured to church, according to retired Secret Service agent William Bell, who revealed the incident to investigative reporter Ron Kessler in his 1995 best-seller Inside The White House. According to Bell she missed, hitting their Secret Service driver instead.[Ronald Kessler,Inside The White House{New York:William Morrow, 1999}p.231]
HILLARY’S ANGRY PROFANITY: The rages continued even after Mrs. Clinton took up residence in the White House, where she blew up at a Secret Service agent for declining to carry her bags. When the agent explained that he needed to keep his hands free in order to protect her, she replied, “If you want to remain on this detail, get your fucking ass over here and grab those bags.”[Joyce Milton, The First Partner{New York:William Morrow,1999}p.259] According to Richard Gooding, who broke the story of Dick Morris’s fling with a hooker in 19996 for the supermarket tabloid STAR, Mrs. Clinton became so abusive during her husbands impeachment that Secrest Service agents strongly considered filing a formal complaint.
“STAR has learned on nearly a dozen occasions in the last three months, Hillary has viciously lashed out at nemerous Secret Service agents for getting in her way—or for simply doing their jobs…..A young Secret Service officer stationed at the South Portico says he did nothing more than smile and say, ‘Good morning Mrs Clinton.’ Mrs. Clinton brushed by him, actually shoving him out of her way, an imformed source tells STAR. As she did, she snapped at him and cursed, ‘Get Fucked’!” “The officer made a report of Mrs. Clinton’s behavior to his superiors and STAR has learned that about 10 other similarly ugly incidents have also been reported in recent months. In other cases she is reported to have said such things as: ‘Get the fuck out of my way!’ Or, ‘Get out of my face!'” [Star,21 Feb. 2000]. The late Barbara Olson offered perhaps the most intriguing report of Hillary’s volatile temper, one that showed no deference to rank or age. “It was she whose obsession with
secrecy was so intense,” revealed Olson in her 1999 book HELL TO PAY, “that when White House council and former judge Abner Mikva finally bowed to the law and delivered subpoenaed documents, she and her White House scandal team lashed at him with such a vicous streak of profanity that he resigned.”[Barbara Olson, Hell To Pay{Washington,D.C.:Regnery,1999}p.5.]

CLINTON’S PRESS SECRETARY CONFIRMS TEMPER TANTRUMS: Even obstensible allies, like former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers, confirm Hillary Clinton’s penchant for scorching tirades, in an equally revealing account that showed that even Mr Clinton’s top aides weren’t spared from her explosive attacks. Gathering her recollections for a PBS documentary marking the end of the Clinton Administration, Myers recalled the internal administration debate in 1994 over how to handle the then burgeoning Whitewater inquiry. Myers, George Stephanopoulos, and several others in the meeting favored turning all documents from the Clinton’s controversial land deal over the Washington Post. But when Hillary entered the room and demanded to know what was going on, everybody “clammed up.” “Mrs Clinton wanted to know what was going on and she looked at George,” Myers said. “And George began to make the argument that we’d all been making and nobody backed him up. Nobody backed him up.
Everyone just sat there and let George take the beating, you know.” “And Mrs. Clinton got realy angry,” remembered Myers. “She attacked George which everyone knew was coming, which is why I guess nobody was willing to ride in there to the rescue….Here were 12 people in the room who all basically agreed and only one of them was willing to stand up and tell her what she had asked. And that took a lot of courage.”[Dee Dee Myers interveiwed for PBS’s Frontline THE CLINTON YEARS, Jan. 16, 2001, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/clinton/interviews/myers.html%5D
Myers told pbs that Hillary’s penchant for personal attacks could be devastating for anyone on the receiving end. “Anybody that stood up and tried to say this was a bad idea was, you know, smashed down and belittled, very personally,” the Clinton loyalist revealed. “And I mean where I said the president didn’t realy attack people personally, Mrs. Clinton sometimes did…not only would she sort of humiliate you in front of your colleagues or whoever happened to be around,” Myers said, “Hillary tended to kind of campain against people behind their back, and that was certainly my experience.”
HILLARY SCREAMS AT SENATE COLLEAGUE: Throughout her 2000 Senate campain the press kept Hillary’s secret for her, never delving into past accounts of her abusive treatment of both peers and underlings. And even when she exploded at a fellow Senator no one in the media saw it as part of a pattern. In July 2002 incident, Clinton blew a gasket during a closed door Senate meeting, shouting at campain finance reform crusader Senator Russ Fiengold, D-Wis., in an embarassing scene that broke all rules of Senate collegiality and decorum. The former first lady unleashed her notorious temper after Democratic Party campain lawyer Bob Bauer warned Senators that the kind of fund raising tactics Democrats had relied on in past elections could send them to jail under the recently passed McCain-Feingold campain finance law. When Fiengold rose to address the issue, he made the mistake of dismissing the warning, prompting Clinton to “scream,” according to the New York Daily News, “Russ,
live in the real world!…They will be all over you like a June Bug.” Fiengold shot back, “I also live in the real world, Senator, and I function quite well in it.”[New York Daily News, 19 July 2002.] Because it involved another Senator in a debate about an important policy issue, this time the press decided to lift the veil on Clinton’s outburst. A day later she privately apologised to the wisconsin Democrat.
“FUCKING JEW BASTARD”: Only once during her Senate campain did Hillary’s notorously nasty temper ever draw significant media attention. But when it did, the Clinton campain immediately to DEFCON3 damage-control status. The controversy over whether Hillary Clinton had ever called a campain aid a “fucking Jew bastard” is revealing on a number of levels, not the least which was the desperate efforts by news editors to see that the story never reached a mass audience. In fact, months before the news exploded at the height of her Senate campain, the accusers, Paul Frey and his wife Marry Lee, had revealed the toxic tidbit to at least two mainstream reporters. But they promptly deep-sixed the news. A third source who made similar claims about the first lady to NewsMax nearly a year earlier was completely ignored by the mainstream press. The claim that a sitting first lady had used the vile ethnic slur was buried deep inside the pages of State of a Union: Inside The Complex
Marriage of Bill and Hillary Clinton, by veteran author and one time National Enquire reporter Jerry Oppenheimer. In contrast to other much-ballyhooed Clinton books, this one got almost no advance publicity. But Union turned out to have perhaps the biggest political impact of any book of its genre.
“BOOK CHARGES: HILLARY CALLED AID “JEW BASTARD”, “Blared the “Drudge Report” headline on July 14, 2000. “In one particular shocking passage in the book, Oppenheimer quotes a campain official who describes an angry attack by Hillary in which she screams at him, “You fucking Jew bastard!’ Two sourced eyewitnesses confirmed to Oppenheimer that they heard the verbal assault.” In the ensuing days, three more witnesses to the ethic slur—or other incidents like it—came forward with damming accounts. It was, far and away, the most intense moment of the campainand the only one that offered Republican Senate hopeful Rick Lazio a chance to defeat Hillary. A week after the charged surfaced, Lazio was leading was leading Clinton by 7 points, according to a New York Post poll–the only time he held a lead greater than a polls margin of error during the entire campain. The now legendary confrontation with Clinton campain manager Paul Frey took place in 1974 on election night.
With the election results showing that the future president was going to lose his first bid for office against Representative John Paul Hammerschmidt, the mood at Clinton campain headquarters had deteriorated into recriminations. Hillary had not yet married Bill, but but she had ended her stint on the Senate Watergate committee just three months earlier to work with him in Arkansas. Defeating Hammerschmidt would mean she would get an early reprieve from having to take up residence in Arkansas, a place she despised. But as the final returns trickled in, it became clear that Hillary wouldn’t be living the glamourous life of a congressman’s wife in Washington anytime soon. “By three a.m. it was all over,” Oppenheimer reported. “Clinton had lost by a mere six thousand votes. He, Hillary and Fray went back to Fayetteville in their cars…..The minute Paul walked into the back room at the Fayetteville headquarters that night, Hillary hit him between the eyes. She was angrier
than Paul had ever seen her. ‘You fucking Jew bastard!’ she screamed.”[Jerry Oppenheimer, State of a Union{New York:Harper Collins,2000}p.153]
The accusation would have been easy enough to deflect if it had been merely Hillary’s word against Fray’s. But this time there were at least two other witnessess who heard the outburst and two more from the Clintons past who remembered similar outburts. It mattered not that Mr Fray was Jewish. His father was Jewish and the younger Fray was very proud of his roots.
WITNESSES ATTACKED: Still, within days, the Democratic Party and its media hand-maidens began circling the wagons around Mrs. Clinton. At a dramatic press conference on the front lawn of her Chappaqua mansion, Hillary vehemently denied the charge. Taking their clue from Clinton spinmeisters, the press joined in the effort to discredit three of the five witnesses against her. Fray, the Clinton’s crack dirt-diggers immediately learned, had been disbared for altering court records and suffered from memory loss due to a brain hemorrhage. And Neil McDonald, who told Oppenheimer that he’d heard the slur while listening outside the door, was smeared by President Clinton personaly as business failure who had to move to Dallas to work for his brother because “no one else would help him.” “I was there and Hillary never said it,” Clinton insisted in a call to the New York Daily News. It was a risky strategy. Up till now, only the New York tabloids had covered the story, while the
so called respectable press, not wanting to give credence to to yet another set of whistleblowers from the Clinton’s backwoods past, stuck their heads in the sand and hoped the storm would pass. But Clintons personal testimonial on his wifes behalf forced even the New York Times to report the incident, though Times editors declined to point the slur verbatim. “in 29 years my wife has never uttered an ethnic or racial slur against anybody, ever,” the president protested. “She’s so straight on this she squeaks.”[New York Daily News,19 July 2002.] However, Mr. Clinton did concede that Fray might have got part of the epithet right. “She might have called him a bastard,” he explained to the News. “I wouldn’t rule that out. She’s never claimed that she was pure on profanity. But Ive never heard her tell a joke with an ethnic connotation. She’s so fanatic about it. She can’t tell an ethnic joke. Its not in her.”
While the first family succeeded in raising questions about Mr. Frays credibility, his wife, Mary Lee, who also claimed to have wittnessed Hillary’s outburst, remained a problem. “[She] went after him for losing,” Mrs. Fray told the News. “Paul was not an Ivy League person. She could’ve called him a redneck or any putdown. She chose that, amd it was unfortunate.” And there was more.
NOT THE ONLY ETHNIC SLUR: Even before the Fray’s account appeared in print, Arkansas state trooper Larry Patterson, a 32 year law enforcement veteran who helped guard the Clintons from 1986 until they left for the White House, had told a similar story. “It was fairly common for both Clinton’s to tell ethnic jokes and use ethnic slurs about Jews,” Patterson told NewsMax.com in 1999. When asked for the exact words, the trooper responded, “Jew Motherf—r, Jew Bastard.” Paterson later told WABC Radio in New York, “If she disagreed with Bill Clinton or she disagreed with some of the Jewish community in Little Rock–or some of the ethnic community–she would often make these statements.”[Carl Limbacher, “Hillary Slured Jews 10 to 20 Times, Used ‘N’ word Too:Bodyguard,” NewsMax.com, 17 July 2000.] And Dick Morris, the Clinton insider whom Hillary had summoned time and again to rescue her husband’s career, offered another revealing anecdote. “Im Jewish,” he told Fox News
Channel’s “Hannity & Colmes” in November 1999. “And I would often go to the Governor’s mansion and I would often have dinner with them. And it was kind of a joke. Everytime before dinner, Hillary would take me aside and say, ‘Dick, I’m soryy. We’re having pork. I just wasn’t thinking about it’. And I would say, ‘It’s OK, Hillary, I don’t mind pork.’ And the third and the fourth time, I finally said, ‘You’ve asked me this four times. I eat pork. I like pork.’ So we joked about it, we kidded about it.”[Dick Morris, interveiwed on Hannity & Colmes, the Fox News Channel, 4 Nov. 1999] Morris continued: “Then about a year later, I was having a meeting in the breakfest room in the Govenors mansion with Betsey[Wright, Clinton’s then cheif of staff], Hillary, Bill and me. Bill and I were fighting about my fee. I was pushing for more money….And Hillary was upset with the limited income they had to live with and that I was making so much money from their campain. And she was
getting realy annoyed at me for the battle. And she just exploded in anger and I’ll just quote her. “She said, ‘Thats all you people care about is money!’ And I looked up. And I said, ‘Hillary, I assume by “you people” you mean political consultants.’ And she said, ‘Yeah, yeah, thats what I meant, political consultants.'” Perhaps as important as Morris’s story was his revellation that he’d shared the anecdote with Hillary biographer Gail Sheehy for her then upcoming biography, Hillary’s Choice. But when the Sheehy book came out, the Morris “you people ” story about Mrs. Clinton’s money complaint was no where to be found.
PREVIOUS FJB REPORTS QUASHED: Three days after Frays allegation exploded, NBC White House correspondent Andrea Mitchell admitted that the old Arkansas political hand had recounted the incident, including the dynamite charge about Hillary’s anti-simitic slur, during a 1999 interview for the network’s Dateline NBC program. But NBC News editors decided to kill the bombshell report because they doubted Frays credibility, Mitchel claimed.[NBC Nightly News, NBC News Transcripts, 17 July 2000.] Still since Fray’s wife Mary Lee was also a witness to Mrs. Clinton’s outburst, it doesn’t appear that Mitchell or her colleagues tried very hard to confirm the story. Mary Lee Fray shared the blockbuster allegation sheehy for Hillary book. But the author, who has enjoyed special access to Mrs. Clinton over the years, decided not to report the toxic charge. She told Newsday that since Mr. Fray had’nt volunteered his account of the incident during her own conversation with him, the charge
was suspect. Evidently the author decided it wasn’t worth a second call to Fray to see if his wife’s story checked out–even though Morris’s “you people” anecdote would have had any good reporter’s antenna up for such a corroborated tidbit. The media’s obliging indulgence in covering up even the most well corroborated allegations has been the key ingredient in the Clinton’s rise to power and will be indipensible when Hillary makes her bid to reclaim the White House.
HILLAY AND THE JEWS, THE ARABS AND OSAMA: “I don’t beleive she said it, and if she said it 26 years ago, so what?”—Ed Koch, former Mayor of New York City, reacting to reports that Hillary Clinton had once called a campain aide a “Fucking Jew Bastard”.[New York Daily News, 13th Nov. 2000] As a general rule of thumb in New York politics, no Democratic candidate can win statewide office without at least 65% of the Jewish vote. So its a measure of Clinton’s damage control instincts, honed through 20 years of scandal management in Arkansaw and Washington, that she managed to win her Senate seat by a landslide that included a mere 53% of the Jewish vote.
Multiple allegations that Mrs Clinton had used ugly anti-semitic epithet shook her senate campain to its core and might have forced a lesser candidate to withdraw from the race. But within days of the allegations exploding onto the media’s radar screen, a number of prominent Jewish Democrats announced that, in essence, it didn’t matter. Even if they didn’t beleive her denials, it didn’t mean she was an anti-semite. “I don’t believe she said it, and if she said it 26 years ago, so what?” Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch told the new York Post.[New York Post, 15th July 200.] While Koch counts his own Jewishness as one of the things about which he’s most proud, he saw no incongruity in defending Mrs Clinton, even assuming she was guilty as charged. “Did she say it yesterday? he complained. “There must be a statute of limitations.”
Anti-Defamation League head Abe Foxman, who can usualy be counted on to react with outrage at the slightest hint of anti-semitism, also decided to cut Mrs Clinton a country mile worth of slack. “If in fact she said it, that does not make her an anti-semite, because there is a public record of Hillary Rodham Clinton of the past 26 years which has no iota of anti-semitism,” he told reporters.[New York Post, July 15 2000]
Even Clintons opponent Rick Lazio, who suddenly found himself with a 7 point lead over Clinton after two weeks of the controversy, declined to overtly capitalize on what turned out to be his last chance to beat the then first lady. After initially telling reporters he didn’t know whether to beleive the story or not, Lazio even declined to attribute his breakout in the polls to the brewing brouhaha. “I can’t realy say. I don’t know.” he explained to News Max, when asked why Mrs Clintons Jewish support had suddenly taken a disastrous 12-point decline to less than 50%. “All I know is that we had two good appearances this weekend in front of synagogues, one Reform, one sort of ecletic, out on the east end of Long Island. And our reception at both was very very good.” Rather than attribute Clinton’s alleged epithet, Lazio attributed his abrupt success to his reputation for moderation saying, “I think people respond to a mainstream record.”
The rising GOP star, who had built something of a reputation as a giant slayer with his surprise 1994 win over Long Island Democrat Tom Downey, had adopted the tried and true political strategy: Never interfere with an opponent in the process of self-destructing. But like to many Republicans Lazio’s advisers failed to appreciate that the tactic works only for Democrats, who can count on the press to keep ginning up new angles on even the most tipid and stale revellation. Whats more, despite Clinton’s reputation as a ruthless political street fighter, Lazio hadn’t anticipated the lengths to which the Hillary 2000 campain was willing to go to tarnish his image. “WE certainly tried to run a high road campain,” Lazio told News Max two years after he went up against the Clinton’s. “And they had a campain that was reflective of the guy who was realy developing their field operation, Harold Ickles. That was not the kind of person who reflected out kind of values in the campain.
So, they were capable of doing a whole litany of things that we wouldn’t even imagine—and then deny, by the way”.
HILLARY’S HARDBALL PLAYERS: In fact the mere presence of Ickles should have been a major public relations liability for the Clinton campian. Denied an appointment as President Clintons Cheif Of Staff because of his past associations with suspect illegal union activities rendered him unlikely to survive Senate confirmation, Ickles performed all manner of political dirty work for the White House.[Byron York, The american Specter,”Our Guy In The white House,” April 1997]
Fresh from a Senate Whitewater Committee criminal referral that reccomended that he be probed by the Justice Department for possible purgery in his own testimony, Ickles almost immediately cropped up as a central figure in Clintons campain finance scandal.
But Perhaps the episode that tells the most about the son of a top aid to President Franklin Rosevelt had nothing to do with the Clintons. There is, for instance the often alluded to—but seldomed detailed—incident where a young Ickles is said to have actualy bitten another political operative during a particular nasty disagreement. James Vlastro, now a New York City public Relations executive, remembered the attack of more than a quater century ago vividly, in an account to the Associated Press offered during the height of Senator Clintons campain. “I was working with him on a 1973 New York mayoral campain when he got into a knock down fight with the campain manager,” Vlastro said in June of 1999.[Associated Press, 17 June 1999] “I tried to break it up and thats when he bit me. It wasn’t a soft bite either.” Vlastro said he disinfected the wound by pouring vodka on it. Tellingly, though the Associated Press found Ickles’ Mike Tyson like behavior newsworth enough to
report, not a single New York City Daily decided to pick up the story. The kind of hardball tactics practiced by Mrs Clinton’s campain became apparent when the Securities and Exchange Commission in her husbands administration announced that it was launching ans investigation into Lazio’s investments.
More than two years later, the former New York congressman beleives the probe was entirely political. “Absolutely” he told NewsMax.com “[New York State Comptroller and Hillary ally] Carl McCall wrote, among all the other letters he wrote[to the SEC] that they were clearly behind…..There was absolutely no basis for [the SEC probe]. None.”
Lazio explained that the Clinton SEC “did a thorough review and they found that there was no legal basis to believe that there was anything but a proper investment.” He added, “Were talking $10,000, I think. Thats, again, reflective of the [Hillary-Ickles team’s]personal hardball tactics.”[Lazio, 15th Nov 2002] Obviously still stung by the Mrs Clinton’s scorched earth campain style, Lazio complained, “The thing thats disturbing about it is that theres just no limit. Theres no sense of conscience about what kind of impact it has on decent people and their families and the people that are close to them. And so their capable of doing just about anything to win.”
That same commitment to win at all costs had allowed President Clinton to survive a year long sex scandal that exposed him as a perjurer and a sexual predator—and it would see his wife through the revelation of her anti-Semitic slur.
“FUCKING JEW BASTARD” DAMAGE CONTROL: A few weeks after Paul Fray’s allegations hit the press, Adam Dickter, a reporter for the ‘Jewish Forward’, exposed one of Clinton’s campains’s more heavy -handed attempts at damage control. Dickter got his hands on a copy of a memo sent to Clinton’s “Jewish Advisory Committee” by campain aid Keren Adler, which including talking points on how to trash Fray; his wife, Mary Lee; and Neil McDonald–the three witnesses to Hillary’s 1974 anti-Semitic epithet.
While there was nothing particularly unusual about the talking points, distributed to Jewish friends and aquaintances of Mrs. Clinton with instructions to contact the media on her behalf, this particular memo came with a troubling disclaimer. “It is important that you do not say you are calling because the campain asked you to, but because you are outraged with what was said about her….The most important thing is to let them know that you know Hillary and you know that she would never make these kind of anti-Semitic or racist comments.” Mrs. Clinton in other words, was asking her Jewish friends to cover up on her behalf in order to help tamp down the burgeoning scandal.
“I received seven or eight phone calls from people saying that they wanted to go on the record on this subject,” Dickter told WABC Radio. He said he found the rapid succession of the messages left on his answering machine……”suspicious”[Adam Dictker, interviewed by WABC-NY Radio’s Steve Malzberg, 20 July 2000.]