WHAT THEY WERE SAYING ABOUT HILLARY CLINTON - HCQ ARCHIVES, SPRING 1994.

The following news items were published in the Spring, 1994, issue of the Hillary Clinton Quarterly. Items marked with * were recorded and transcribed by Frank Marafiote, Editor, HCQ.

 

“Hillary Rodham Clinton assailed new allegations of her husband’s marital infidelity yesterday as ‘outrageous,’ charging they were motivated by hope of financial and political gain by enemies of the President. ‘I think my husband has proven that he’s a man who really cares about this country deeply. . . and when it’s all said and done, that’s how most Americans will judge my husband, and all the rest of this stuff will end up in the garbage can where it deserves to be,’ she told Reuters. Mrs. Clinton did not specifically deny the assertions in the story but merely denounced the accounts as ‘terrible.’ Mrs. Clinton also commented on new revelations about the Clinton’s investment in an Ozark Mountain land deal, saying the couple would not release personal data about the investment and its links to a failed savings and loan.”
John Broder
Los Angeles Times

“The damage control has created more damage than it’s controlled.”
Cokie Roberts
National Public Radio, 3/7/94 *

“The Hillary Clinton role in this is very big and she stands to get hurt no matter what happens. She was more deeply involved in Whitewater than her husband was in Arkansas. She was the main person who took care of the family’s finances. . . I think the other problem is that she’s been unable to play the role in this that First Lady’s often do, to take her husband aside and say, ‘Look, we’ve got to give this thing over to a special counsel.’ She was the one, because she was so involved, who was resisting that move and gave the impression the Clintons had something to hide.”
Mara Liasson
National Public Radio, 3/7/94 *

“Like everything else that does not parse in this mess, it makes no sense that Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has brought the job of First Lady into the late 20th century in every other respect, would follow a strictly restricted press diet more appropriate to Pat Nixon. If she were true to herself and spoke up for herself, she might put the brakes on Whitewater-Watergate analogies that increasingly leave the Administration twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.
Frank Rich
New York Times, 3/10/94

“The gerrymandered district of wife-adviser-power broker that Mrs. Clinton carved out over a long marriage both to Bill Clinton and to public life is revealed in all its complications. And the Administration is left to develop a historic and extraordinarily difficult role-under-fire for the first First Lady important enough to be at the center of a major political mess.”
Anna Quindlen
New York Times, 3/9/94

The following exchange took place on Nightline between Ted Koppel and James McDougal, the Clinton’s former Whitewater business partner and former president of Madison Guaranty.
McDougal: I would take a lie detector test and answer this question: do you have any knowledge of anything Bill Clinton has ever done which is illegal, immoral, dishonest, or unethical, and my answer would be ‘No,’ and I would pass the test.
Koppel: If the questions were expanded to include one more question — and I raise it only because there’s an obvious void there — to say, let’s apply all those same tests to Mrs. Clinton, would you give the same answer?
McDougal: I don’t know Mrs. Clinton well enough to give that broad a guarantee.
Koppel: You realize that by not answering that question, you raise very serious questions.
McDougal: Well, I think that... . Ask me another question about it.
Nightline, 2/8/94 *

“If you gauge the President’s reaction to it (appointment of a special Whitewater investigator), he was as bitterly opposed to it as she (Hillary) was. The fact of the matter, however, is that whenever anything involves or touches on the East Wing of the White House where the First Lady has her offices, everybody freezes up. Nobody wants to talk about it. Nobody wants to make an enemy of the First Lady.”
Gwen Ifill
Washington Week in Review, 2/4/94 *

“Mrs. Clinton is beginning to sound like Ross Perot. It is true that paranoids have enemies, but paranoids also make enemies by preemptive attacks, and that’s what she’s done time and time again. . . . She’s always playing hardball, she’s always making accusations against political enemies, against personal enemies, and it begins to look a little crazy.”
Mort Kondracke
The McLaughlin Group, 3/12/94 *

“He spends a lot of time outside — but on a very long rope,’ Hillary Clinton told reporters the other day about the First Family’s cat, Socks. ‘He has friends who come to visit, cat friends, and I want to thank them publicly for bringing a little cat joy into his life.”
Reported by Lois Romano
Washington Post, 12/8/93

“One of the things I like most about all the parties we’ve had is that everybody talks,’ Mrs. Clinton said of the various events. ‘The din in the room is just wonderful. We’ve tried to create an atmosphere wherein people are unafraid to talk.”
Reported by Donnie Radcliffe
Washington Post, 11/24/93

“We love the second floor of the White House,’ Mrs. Clinton said. ‘We are left totally alone. We don’t have the Secret Service people following us and we can tell the staff we will take care of ourselves, so it’s like being in your own house when you are up there. I wanted a kitchen because I knew we needed a private place to have our meals. Even though the dining room is lovely, it’s a big formal space. We use the kitchen for breakfast every day and for lots of dinners when we are not entertaining. We heat up lots of leftovers. My husband might come home from a golf game and I throw something together for him. And Chelsea eats there every night.”
House Beautiful, March, 1994

“Hillary and Chelsea Clinton flew into Moscow this morning, two days behind the president because Chelsea had been finishing her final exams at Sidwell Friends. Whether due to jet lag or the Whitewater investigation or her shock at seeing the worst of socialized medicine up close, Mrs. Clinton was tight-lipped with reporters, ignoring most questions as she made her way from hospital to Kremlin to Red Square and, eventually, back to the Kremlin — where the First Family was to spend the night.”
Fred Hiatt
Washington Post, 1/15/94

“This is such a treat, although I have to correct (Dartmouth College) President Freedman for the second time today. Earlier he introduced me and said I had been back at Dartmouth in February of ‘92 for the first time, and that today was the second time. I told the crowd then, that that doesn’t count all the visits I used to make to Dartmouth when I was at Wellesley back in the distant past. In fact, I remember my very first visit to Dartmouth. I came up for some kind of meeting Dartmouth was holding. I also came for Winter Carnival, but that was later. I came to the meeting, which was organized by Bobby Reich, who is still organizing America, one of your most distinguished alums and the Secretary of Labor. I’ll never forget we had this incredible discussion, and that was before there were women at Dartmouth — at least in the College. So I must say I had never had a better time because there was about 10 of us and about 400 of you all.”
Hillary Clinton
Speaking to Dartmouth College students, 12/2/93 *

“Presidential brother-in-law and Florida Senate candidate Hugh Rodham was certainly chatty on a Washington-to-Miami flight the other day — both to his aide and into a little cellular phone. You’ll be interested in knowing that his sister, First Lady Hillary Clinton, loves hot sauce, and he recently brought her back some ‘Devil’s Breath’ from Jamaica.”
Lois Romano
Washington Post, 3 / 1/94

“In the expanding People galaxy, politicos are now bona fide stars. .. . People put the new First Lady on the cover during Inauguration Week, billing her as a ‘Super Mom’ who is’ humorous, warm, sensitive, intelligent.’ ‘I was euphoric when Hillary Clinton became the bestseller of the year,’ (People managing editor) Jones says. ‘I thought we’d found our new Diana. Diana was starting to disappear from the radar screen. I really need a new Diana.”
Howard Kurtz
Washington Post, 2/28/94

“From your assessment of the Clintons’ first year, it is obvious that Hillary is unquestionably our first woman president. She controls the political agenda, the executive appointments and the workings of the cabinet. Bill, it appears, is her unctuous-tongued salesman, who horse- trades executive favors to a Democratic Congress in exchange for passing the liberal Clinton programs. When your article claims that Hillary intervened to ‘stop the hiring or nomination of white men and insisted that women or minority candidates get certain positions,’ I figure the woman is incredibly biased or stupid or, perhaps, both.”
Eugene Ritter
Letter to the editor
U.S. News & World Report, 3/7/94

Income tax returns and interviews with other lawyers indicate that she was among the lower-paid partners for much of her time at the (Rose law) firm, in large part because the pay scale was based on how many hours a lawyer billed and the clients the lawyer brought in. Her income did eventually grow, however. She made $203,172 in 1992, the year she left the firm... . Partners at Rose say that to avoid any suggestion of a conflict of interest, Mrs. Clinton’s compensation excluded any profits from municipal and state clients.”
Stephen Labaton
New York Times, 2/26/94

“In this Administration,’ said Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, ‘there are so many women at high levels that you can literally move a major policy issue all the way to the president’s desk without ever touching a man’s hands.’ How sweet it was Tuesday night for the record number of top-level female appointees celebrating their first year in office at the Mayflower hotel ballroom. Cheerleading the way with Shalala were Hillary Rodham Clinton, Tipper Gore, three more Cabinet types and several hundred other appointees....”
Donnie Radcliffe
Washington Post, 2/10/94

“Hollywood turned out in force Thursday night to honor First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton for her efforts on health care reform and the battle against AIDS. ‘For the first time in our country’s history, we can imagine a woman president,’ said Barbara Streisand, who commended Mrs. Clinton for being ‘aggressive’ and even ‘pushy’ in the health care fight.”
Washington Post, 1/29/94

“She would always drive and I would always have to sit in the back.’ — Hugh Rodham, Florida (sic) gubernatorial candidate, on the pretend rocket ship he flew as a kid with his sister, Hillary Clinton.”
Newsweek, 2/28/94

“McDougal confirmed that in the mid-1980s he authorized a $2,000-a-month retainer for the law firm that employed Hillary Rodham Clinton, but said he saw it as ‘giving a friend’s wife some work.’ Asked if that might be inappropriate, he replied, ‘I’m not teaching ethics this semester.”
Joel Williams
Associated Press, 1/9/94

 

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