Dick Morris
Posted on 06/12/2003 4:25:22 PM PDT by Paleo Conservative
© 2003 WorldNetDaily.com
Bill Clinton's former adviser Dick Morris claims the ex-president physically assaulted him and was prepared to throw a punch before Hillary Clinton intervened during a confrontation in the Arkansas governor's mansion in May 1990.
"Bill ran after me, tackled me, threw me to the floor of the kitchen in the mansion and cocked his fist back to punch me," Morris says in an open letter to Mrs. Clinton published by National Review Online.
Morris wrote the letter to challenge Mrs. Clinton's contention in her book "Living History" that he was reluctant to assist the Clintons in the congressional election of 1994 because of difficulties working with their staff.
The real reason for his reluctance, Morris says, is "that Bill Clinton had tried to beat me up in May of 1990 as he, you, [campaign staffer] Gloria Cabe, and I were together in the Arkansas governor's mansion."
Morris tells Mrs. Clinton, "At the time, Bill was worried that he was falling behind his Democratic primary opponent and verbally assaulted me for not giving his campaign the time he felt it deserved. Offended by his harsh tone, I turned and stalked out of the room."
That's when the governor tackled him from behind and prepared to punch him, Morris says.
"You grabbed his arm," he writes to Mrs. Clinton, "and, yelling at him to stop and get control of himself, pulled him off me. Then you walked me around the grounds of the mansion in the minutes after, with your arm around me, saying, 'He only does that to people he loves.'"
Morris says he continued to work for the governor until the 1990 election out of a sense of responsibility, but "our relationship was never close and never the same."
He claims that when the story threatened to surface again during the 1992 presidential campaign, Mrs. Clinton told him to "say it never happened."
Morris accuses Mrs. Clinton of "inventing a conversation" to back her version of events in "Living History."
The former Clinton adviser says, "You even misquote me as telling you: 'I don't like the way I was treated, Hillary. People were so mean to me.'
"As you know," Morris writes, "I never said anything of the sort. I had, in fact, no experience in dealing with either your staff or the president's at that point, and had not yet met Leon Panetta or George Stephanopoulos. My prior dealing with Harold Ickes had been 25 years earlier."
Morris doesn't explain in his letter why he later was willing to become Bill Clinton's chief strategist, helping the president win re-election in 1996. Morris was forced to resign shortly after the Democratic convention that year, however, after media reported his extramarital affair with a prostitute with whom he allegedly shared White House secrets.
Dick Morris
Bill Clinton
There's something to like about everyone...even Bill Clinton.
Space Herpes!!
Sure could have fooled me. Morris was Clinton's #2 cheerleader, right behind Serpanthead.
I trust your conversion is real; but am waiting for confession, not accusations.
Clinton is very fortunate in the number of people who are willing to "roll over" for him (in Web Hubbell's phrase). Al Capone had the same quality...perhaps for the same reason...
There's something to like about everyone...even Bill Clinton."
Darn, just when I thought I totally hated him, out comes some redeeming item.
He probably said the same thing to Juanita Broderick.
That adviser said this a couple of weeks ago. Morris has apparently just confirmed the adviser's account.
STROTHER: This is one of the -- this is a story that really conflicted me. Toward the end of my relationship with Clinton, Clinton was playing Hamlet. He couldn`t decide if he wanted to run for president or run for governor. And he knew if he ran for governor, he had to say that he wasn`t going to run for president. I mean, there was almost no question about that. So he was conflicted himself.
And we had a heated argument one night -- not argument, but a big discussion, about five of us in the room. It started about 10:00 o`clock at night and went to about 2:00 o`clock in the morning. And Clinton has a ferocious temper and finally was insulting to me. I felt insulted, anyway. Plus, I was tired. And I`m not good after about 11:00 o`clock at night anyway. I get up very early to write.
So I said, Governor, I`m too old to be spoken to like this. And I`m going to go to my hotel, and in the morning, we`ll meet again when we can civilly talk, and I`ll come back. And I got up and walked out, went to bed. I went to my hotel and went to bed.
And about, I don`t know, an hour later, the phone rings and it`s Dick Morris. He`s weeping -- Oh, my God. I said, What`s wrong, Dick? He said, Clinton beat me up. I said, Well, he beat me up, too, I said, but I got up and left. He said, I tried to do the same thing you did, but he beat me up. I said, What do you mean, Dick? He said, He knocked me to the floor and knocked me into a table, broke a lamp and was sitting on me, hitting me. And Hillary had to pull him off.
And he said, What should I do? I said, It`s simple, Dick. Get out of Little Rock immediately. He said, He owes me money. I said, Dick, I said, he owes me money, too, but I wouldn`t go back to the mansion. He`ll pay you the money. Clinton`s a very honorable man about money and all that. That`s -- there was never a question Clinton was going to pay his debt. He said, I don`t know. He said, I can`t do that.
So anyway, I knew at that point that Clinton was not going to sit and have a civil conversation with me the next morning, so I got up very early, went out and caught an airplane back to Washington. And Dick Morris went back to the mansion. He and Clinton sort of made up. But then when Clinton ran for president, he didn`t hire Dick Morris. In fact, he got rid of all of us. Everybody who had been around him before was removed. I don`t know if he did it or the first lady did it. I`m not sure, you know, who did it. But we were all removed.
And Morris needed Clinton. We all need a big name. Clinton becomes president without Morris, but Morris wants back in the White House. And I don`t blame him. You know, that`s the -- that`s the key to everything. You know, you get in the White House, and you become a superstar -- James Carville super, Lee Atwater superstar, Karl Rove superstar. So he wanted back in, but he had this problem that the press had written about him getting beaten up by Clinton.
Well, what he -- what he did was, he wrote a book about Clinton and blamed it on me, said that I`d leaked it to the press. Well, I hadn`t leaked it to the press. The press had called me about it to have me confirm it, and I wouldn`t confirm it.
In fact, I remember Tom Edsall (ph) called me one time, and he said, Will you confirm that you were with Dick Morris and that Dick Morris got beaten up? I said, No, I can`t confirm that. He said, You weren`t there? I said, No, I absolutely was not there. He said, But Dick Morris told you about. I said, I can`t confirm that. I said, If you write that I confirmed it, I will say you`re a liar, Tom. And he`s a friend of mine, you know. We play cards and everything together. And he didn`t -- he didn`t report my name in any way associated with Bill Clinton beating up Dick Morris.
If Clinton was capable of this, he was capable of rape.
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