Posted on 05/25/2007 2:04:09 PM PDT by 2dogjoe
Bill Clinton was ready to divorce Hillary to be with one of his lovers, according to a book out next month.
The marriage crisis is said to have ended with his wife talking him out of the move, telling a friend "there are worse things than infidelity".
The story is among a string of revelations in two books detailing Mrs Clinton's rise to the U.S. Senate and her push for the presidency.
Both works document her husband's many affairs when he was governor of Arkansas.
Carl Bernstein claims in A Woman in Charge that the love of the former president's life was business executive Marilyn Jo Jenkins.
According to the Watergate journalist, Miss Jenkins was spirited into the governor's mansion for a final, furtive meeting with him the day he left to claim the White House.
Miss Jenkins is said to have played such a "pivotal role" in Mr Clinton's life that in 1989 he offered to divorce Hillary to be with her.
The ensuing crisis apparently led to Betsey Wright, Mr Clinton's chief of staff, taking him to see a therapist.
Mrs Clinton later told her best friend Diane Blair that she believed the presidency would help her marriage because her husband's "sexual compulsions would be tempered by the White House and the ever-present press corps".
As Mr Bernstein makes clear, in light of the Monica Lewinsky scandal that turned out to be "a flawed assumption".
In the 640-page book, Bob Boorstin, who
worked for Mrs Clinton when she was trying to restructure the nation's healthcare system, blamed her for the collapse of her own plans.
"I find her to be among the most self-righteous people I've ever known," he told Mr Bernstein. "It's her great flaw."
Mark Fabiani, who defended the Clintons as White House counsel, said Hillary was "so tortured by the way she's been treated that she would do anything to get out of the situation.
"If that involved not being fully forthcoming, Mr Fabiani said she would say: 'I have a reason for not being forthcoming.'"
The second book, Her Way by New York Times reporters Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr, claims that Mrs Clinton hired a private detective to investigate one of her husband's mistresses.
According to the book, she ordered the detective to undermine Gennifer Flowers "until she is destroyed".
The incident took place when Mr Clinton was running for president in 1992.
Her Way looks in detail at Mrs Clinton's Senate vote in support of the Iraq war, suggesting she may have been motivated by a desire not to abandon her husband's toughon-Iraq policy and a need "to prove that she was tough".
Both books were leaked to the Washington Post yesterday ahead of publication next month.
The Post said Mrs Clinton emerges as a "complicated, sometimes compromised figure who tolerated Bill Clinton's brazen infidelity, pursued her policy and political goals with methodical drive".
The New York Senator, it said, had "occasionally skirted along the edge of the truth along the way" to power.
It said the books posed "a number of assertions and anecdotes that could confront her campaign with unwelcome questions".
Last night political analysts said the books would damage Mrs Clinton in the eyes of some voters. They added, however, that most would find little to surprise them in the allegations.
One of the most unsettling charges in Her Way is that the Clintons made a "secret plan" when they were in Arkansas in which they would each have two terms as president.
The authors said that even before the pair married, they formulated a "secret pact of ambition" aimed at the White House.
Mr Bernstein said that both Clintons went to great lengths to "keep the lid on his infidelities".
On one occasion Hillary personally interviewed one of her husband's lovers and helped persuade her to sign a statement saying she had never had sex with him.
Mrs Clinton's Senate office dismissed the books as offering no new material.
Her spokesman Philippe Reines told the Washington Post: "Is it possible to be quoted yawning? If past books on Mrs Clinton were cash for trash, these books are nothing more than cash for rehash."
Her campaign spokesman, Howard Wolfson, told the paper: "The news here is that it took three reporters nearly a decade to find no news.
"Two overwhelming Senate victories in the toughest media market in the country demonstrated that voters have put these issues behind them."
# Marilyn Jo Jenkins:
Jenkins, an Arkansas utility company official, and Clinton reportedly had an affair in Little Rock in 1989. State telephone records revealed that Clinton called Jenkins dozens of times. Arkansas State Police claim that Clinton visited her home on a regular basis. Clinton did recall two visits when he gave Jenkins presents for herself and her children before leaving Little Rock for the White House. He also said he met with her several times at her apartment while governor.
Jenkins visited Clinton at the governor’s mansion at least four times between the 1992 presidential election and his inauguration, including once at 5:15 a.m. the day he left Little Rock, according to the testimony of a former Clinton bodyguard.
In sworn statements, Jenkins and Clinton characterized the visits as innocent. In the Paula Jones trial, Clinton did not have to answer in his deposition whether they ever had sex, because it was ruled irrelevant by the judge.
******
Rush Limbaugh:
“The crisis frayed Wright’s relationship with Bill Clinton too, and she told Bernstein that she arranged for the two of them, Wright and Clinton, to see a therapist together. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, turned to her best friend, Diane Blair, obliquely raising the prospect of divorce during a long walk. ‘She was thinking that they had not made much money,’ Blair told Bernstein before her death in 2000, and she was concerned about her daughter. ‘Chelsea was there now. What if she were on her own? She didn’t own a house. She was concerned that if she were to become a single parent, how would she make it work in a way that would be good for Chelsea.’ The Clintons stayed together, but out of ‘anger and hurt’ she considered running for governor in 1990, when he presumably would step down to prepare his 1992 presidential campaign. The idea ended after consultant Dick Morris conducted two polls showing she had no independent identity with Arkansas voters and compared her to George Wallace’s wife, who ran to succeed him in Alabama — an analogy that offended her.”
It goes on to say how “Webster L. Hubbell and Vincent W. Foster Jr., were hired to interview women named in a lawsuit as having secret affairs with the governor. Hubbell and Foster questioned the women, then obtained signed statements that they never had sex with Bill Clinton. On one occasion, Bernstein reports, Hillary Clinton was present for the questioning.” So the more we keep hearing what’s reported about the Democrats and Edwards and Shrum, and now this, the two books on Hillary, and believe me, they are timed perfectly to get them out of the way now. Most of the stuff in these books people have long suspected, and in some cases, known for quite a while.
It was Jan. 16, 1998, the day before Clinton was to give his deposition in the Jones case, and Bennett believed he had located the real problem Clinton faced the next day. It was not Kathleen Willey, the former White House volunteer who claimed Clinton groped her in 1993, because that had never been a relationship. It was not Monica Lewinsky, the former White House intern. It was totally improbable that the president had taken up with a young woman, age 23 or 24, who apparently brought pizza and mail to the Oval Office.
No, Bennett believed, he had smoked out the real liability — Marilyn Jo Jenkins, a beautiful marketing executive whom Clinton had known for more than a decade. Jenkins was a longtime employee of the Arkansas Power and Light Co. Her name had been linked to Clinton in published reports, but only in vague references.
She had met with Clinton in his basement office in the Arkansas governor’s mansion four times in the less than three months between his election in 1992 and his inauguration in 1993. Three of the meetings took place about 5:15 a.m. or 5:30 a.m. Phone records showed that from 1989 to 1991 Clinton had placed 59 calls to Jenkins’s home or office. Arkansas state trooper Danny Ferguson had brought gifts from Clinton to Jenkins.
Clinton had denied to Bennett that he had a sexual relationship with Jenkins. Bennett was not buying it. He noticed that Clinton reacted differently when Jenkins’s name came up. The president paused in a forlorn and wistful way. Bennett couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but Clinton’s manner seemed to be a definite tip-off.
Bennett reminded the President that the judge would make a final ruling the next day at the deposition about the questions relating to women. Supposedly, Clinton was going to be asked only about women who had been state or federal employees, and Jenkins had never worked for either government.
He was going to object, but the judge could rule either way, Bennett said....
At the deposition, the Jones lawyers spent the morning asking primarily about Lewinsky. After lunch, they asked the president about his relationship with Jenkins, but the judge ruled that they could not ask further questions about her — a victory for Clinton....
It was then that profigate Bill was having a “serious” romance with Marilyn Jo Denton Jenkins that threatened a divorce as described in Gail Sheehy’s book about Hillary.
I'd venture a guess that some of those "odd individuals" that she knew back then got good jobs in the WH and elsewhere in the government during Bubba's administration. They'll be coming back again should the nightmare of a Witch administration unfold.
Marry that kind of vindictiveness with the power of the Presidency and hell on earth is within the range...
In 1989 (just three years before he ran for the White House promising a “twofer” presidency with his wife) Bill Clinton was so smitten with Jenkins that he seriously considered asking for a divorce, according to a proof of Bernstein’s Hillary Rodham Clinton biography “A Woman in Charge.”
Jenkins, an Arkansas-bred divorced marketing executive, “was Hillary’s worst nightmare: an attractive, accomplished, rich antagonist with whom Bill believed himself to be in love. He wanted to end his marriage. Hillary refused,” writes the former Washington Post reporter, citing former Bill Clinton confidant Betsey Wright and other unnamed aides as sources.
It paints an especially vivid and disturbing picture of the senator’s father Hugh Rodham, describing him as a sour, abusive husband who exaggerated his accomplishments and withheld affection from his family.
Bernstein was given access to the diaries of Hillary Clinton’s best Arkansas friend, Diane Kincaid Blair, who died of lung cancer in 2000. Blair said Hillary Clinton, apparently distraught over the Jenkins affair, confided her concerns about how a divorce would affect daughter Chelsea.
Yet just three years later, during the 1992 presidential campaign, it was Hillary Clinton who led the political counterattack against Flowers, who had gone public with charges of adultery involving the Arkansas governor.
The first lady oversaw a team of campaign operatives that hired a private investigator to discredit Flowers “until she is destroyed,” according to another Clinton biography soon to be released by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta.
Jenkins, listed as Jane Doe No. 1 in some filings in the Jones case, is an Entergy Corp. official. In his deposition in the Jones case, Clinton said he remembered two visits from Jenkins at the governor’s mansion in Little Rock when he was preparing to leave for Washington and the presidency.
There had to have been more than one private detective hired and more than one of her husband's mistresses "investigated."
One of those private detectives was Jerry Luther Parks, who was a good friend of Foster and was rubbed out mob style in Little Rock in September 1993. (See Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1997).
Sally Perdue, a former Miss Arkansas, was another WJC paramour who was promised a federal job during the 1992 presidential campaign if she remained silent about the three month affair she had with him back in 1983. "The offer was overheard by a witness, who also heard the accompanying threat that 'we can't guarantee what will happen to your pretty legs' if she declined the offer." (Evans Pritchard, p. 359)
There was more than "investigation" by ordinary law-abiding PIs involved. There was racketeering!
Thanks for the ping!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.