Charges continue to haunt Hillary Rodham Clinton

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 19, 1996 | by John Elvin

In the end, several members of the committee "revolted" at being kept in the dark, and the staff was ordered to turn over all materials to the committee and to Zeifman, who was the chief counsel, and ultimately Hillary's boss. "When that time came ... Hillary suppressed the report on the long history of tolerated presidential misconduct and did not tell me, did not tell anybody. It is a felony to suppress information from a congressional committee by a nonstaff member; there are no cases that I know of where a staff suppressed information," Zeifman says. Certainly not such vital material.

Why single out Hillary as the culprit? "It was done by Hillary in particular because she was in charge of [the 'prior misconduct'! project," Zeifman says, adding, "In that particular instance she was personally responsible and not simply acting feloniously at the behest of Bernie Nussbaum." Was she taken to task over her misconduct? "We didn't know about all this," Zeifman explains. But his assessment in retrospect is heavy indeed: "I came to regard Doar, Nussbaum and Rodham as somewhat less than honorable lawyers, unworthy of either public or private trust."

The report that might have saved Nixon came to light in a peculiar way. Well after Nixon had resigned to avoid a vote on the House floor and a trial in the Senate, Wiggins discovered a book, Responses ofthe Presidents to Charges of Misconduct, in an airport-terminal bookshop that claimed to have been "prepared for John Doar and the Impeachment Staff of the House." The book was published in 1974 with eminent Yale historian C. Vann Woodward given as principal author; the copyright is held by Delacorte Press.

Wiggins, never having seen the material before and aware of what that meant, wrote to committee chairman Peter Rodino -- who did not deny that the study was done. "No investigation was ever conducted; no one has determined whether Hillary illegally profited," Zeifman says, recalling that, obstruction of justice or not, there was by then no interest in reopening any can of worms related to Watergate.

Fishing for justification, Zeifman observes that nobody knew at the time that Hillary would become first lady. Though, according to one account, she sent Nussbaum into a dither by informing him at the height of the impeachment inquiry that her boyfriend would be president one day.

Is there a once-and-future Hillary behind the masks of changing names and discarded hairstyles who knew from the get-go what she wanted and determined that the end justified the means? One of the books that has aroused a bit more media attention than Zeifman's, Partners in Power: The Clintons and their America, by Roger Morris, provides a quote characterizing her this way: "She rarely, if ever, is described by friends or family members as creative, innovative, emotional, empathetic, intuitive, introspective, sensual. [She seems! unknowable, certainly to others, and perhaps more ominously to herself."

At first glance, the academic all-star and cheerleader for Barry Goldwater who arrived in 1965 at prestigious Wellesley College seemed an unlikely candidate for the role she since has assumed. She came out of Park Ridge, a Chicago suburb. It was a prosperous community well-known as a center of right-wing activism, says Morris, and she had grown up in an environment in which Democrats were considered treasonous and moderate Republicans "Communist dupes." So if there was a time when Hillary either found or lost herself, her biographers are convinced, it was at Wellesley.