Lying History

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Hillary's Crimes

Christopher Ruddy
Monday, June 16, 2003

I finished reading Hillary's "Living History" this week and was surprised to discover just how paranoid and extreme the former first lady really is.

From the PR blitz it was clear Hillary was "Rewriting History" – creating a make-believe story about her and husband's eight years in the White House.

Last week, I noted that Hillary's book was already a failure. The focus on a White House intern has upstaged her and her book – what should have been a tremendous boon to her presidential chances.

Instead, any Hillary run for the presidency (it may still happen) will go down in disaster as she remains tarred and feathered by her husband's scandals. She'll suffer the same fate as Al Gore.

But Hillary's book does offer new revelations. Reading it, I felt the way Russians must have felt reading Pravda during the Iron Curtain days: I could glean information between the lines.

While I knew Hillary was both liberal and uptight about her opponents, I didn't realize just how extreme and paranoid she really is. Her extremism and paranoia seem to feed off each other, apparent symptoms of her denial of her and husband's wrongdoing.

Hillary's case of acute paranoia begins on the first day in the White House, when she says that her Lincoln Bedroom guests discovered a note tucked under their pillow. It read "Dear Linda, I was here first, and I'll be back" and was signed "Rush Limbaugh."

For Hillary, this was no laughing matter.

She says that upon returning to the White House from a trip, she discovered that furniture had been moved in the private residence. Agitated, she immediately called the usher and discovered that the Secret Service had done a routine sweep for bugs and electronic devices.

Hillary didn't buy the story. She heard from Helen Dickey, an assistant, that when she was away Dickey "was confronted by armed men dressed in black, who ordered her out of the area."

Though Hillary made no mention of seeing black helicopters hovering over the White House, she said the incident sparked a memory: "I suddenly remembered the Rush Limbaugh note placed in the Lincoln bedroom. ..."

While dismissing stories about her "legendary temper" as pure fiction, Hillary says this time she was "ready to explode" – no doubt in a paranoid fit.

To Hillary, her entire years in the White House were about her battle against "them" – the right-wing conspiracy.

Every conspiracy has a wizard. When her health care program was thwarted, that was the result of – you guessed it – a conspiracy. She credits Weekly Standard editor William Kristol as the mastermind of the forces against Hillarycare.

Hillary says Kristol wrote a memo urging Republicans to "kill the plan outright."

Though she tried to nationalize 15 percent of the U.S. economy, Hillary has the gall to describe her opponents as extreme.

In 1994, Hillary says, "right-wing radio hosts with national audiences stirred up their listeners with terrifying tales from Washington. ... If you believed everything you heard on the airwaves in 1994, you would conclude that your President was a Communist, that the First Lady was a murderess. ..."

Hillary says the danger from the right wing to her became palpable. Her extremism fed her paranoia to the point where she felt in danger speaking in public.

Giving a speech in Seattle, Hillary says she "felt in real physical danger." She says she was surrounded by hundreds of "hard core right-wingers: militia supporters, tax protesters, clinic blockaders." She says that when she went into her limousine, "hundreds of protesters swarmed around the limousine." Hillary adds: "I'll never forget the look in their eyes and their twisted mouths as they screamed at me. ..."

Hillary had a similar bad memory of her showdown with independent counsel Ken Starr. She says she lost 10 pounds before her grand jury testimony. (Why worry about telling the truth?) She entered the secret grand jury room to be confronted by Starr and his eight male deputies, who "looked just like him." Of course, Starr's deputies didn't look like him at all.

Hillary continues the vein of paranoia: Starr, she writes, "sat at the prosecutor's table and stared at me." (I suppose if he didn't "stare" at her, she would have written, "He couldn't look me in the eye.")

Starr clones, black helicopters, right-wingers with twisted mouths – it all comes together for Hillary in "Living History."

If Hillary weren't the way she is, she could have used this book to send Ken Starr a huge "Thank you." The inept prosecutor never did indict her and, as her book demonstrates, she was able to gloss over eight years of scandal and crime: Travelgate, Vince Foster, Whitewater, Cattlefuturegate, FBI Filegate, Lippogate, Chinagate, Pardongate.