Bill's Mary Poppins
Borders, Rebecca
"Bill's Mary Poppins" Betsey Wright is a tough-talking Texan who has been President Clinton's longest-serving and most faithful nanny. It's an honor for which she's paid the price over...
...And directly across the aisle from the governor was one of Jones's daughters-a woman in her early twenties whom Clinton had known since her early teens, when Bill was her neighbor and they used to chat casually over the backyard fence...
...Was she being set up to take the fall...
...She caused him trouble, and he didn't know how to handle the trouble...
...In the January 7,1994 Whitewater reaction team meetings at the White House, according to notes taken by communications director Mark Gearan, White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum talked about the possible repercussions of an independent counsel...
...Wright went over a list of women with whom Clinton had purportedly been involved...
...Since Wright coordinated the Whitewater damage control in the campaign, and Hillary had been intimately involved in the campaign's defense strategy, it is of course inconceivable that either would not have immediately thought of McDougal...
...She starts screaming, "I'm the one who came up with the phrase `bimbo eruptions,' it wasn't her...
...That same day or the next, according to her deposition to the Senate Whitewater Committee, she spoke with Hillary asking how to handle the documents...
...With so many "airplane stories" floating around, Wright could not let Bill go out into the world unprotected...
...So I didn't know whether it was true or not...
...And so no one ever calls you on it...
...I'm sitting there whacking Bush on the economy and all of the sudden Betsey Wright grabs the microphone and says she wants to debate Mary Matalin one on one...
...According to former state auditor Jones, Clinton "wanted her out of his office long before he got her out...
...But there's more...
...But even royalty needs its political fixeruppers, and thus the position of Betsey Wrightwhose alter ego in Primary Colors is described as "a manic, six-foot lesbian who knew where all the bodies were buried...
...Hillary replied tersely: "There is going to be an independent or special counsel...
...Filed with the U.S...
...According to Brown, Wright sent her assistant Kathy Ford to confront Brown several times in Little Rock during the campaign with comments like "You want a job...
...After Mary Matalin of the Bush campaign picked up on the phrase, Wright went ballistic...
...Morgan...
...Though in Little Rock at the time, she stayed away from Clinton's October 1991 announcement of his intention to run for the presidency...
...So we now have additional confirmation that the Clinton campaign knew about the criminal referral a full year before the Clinton White House was officially notified of it...
...They forgot to bring her back any leftovers...
...I took him over to a condo where she was...
...Transforming his little black book and index cards of the names and personal details of political supporters across the state, Wright compiled an extensive computer database that helped put Clinton back in the governor's seat in 1982...
...REBECCA BORDERS, a frequent contributor, is a Washington reporter...
...After the Flowers affair, the worry was that just one more lurid tale could bring down the entire campaign...
...In First in His Class, Clinton biographer David Maraniss writes, "On Thanksgiving Day, Clinton and Rodham took baby Chelsea with them down to Virginia's house in Hot Springs, leaving Wright behind...
...I am aware that he has alleged in right-wing publications that I sent someone to talk to him...
...I don't think I've ever had any lurid incidents with the governor," she said...
...Wright added in her testimony that neither she nor Hillary thought of Madison president Jim McDougal, because, at the time, "I didn't regard him as any longer a savings and loan official...
...Never with me...
...At a casual dinner of several leading Arkansas Democrats in the mid-i98o's, John Brummett, a local liberal columnist, asked Jones if she could confirm what in Little Rock gossip circles was known as the "airplane story...
...Returning to the world of Bill Clinton, however, was a bitter pill to swallow...
...According to First in His Class, "The time had come, she felt, for Clinton to get past what she considered his self-denial tendencies and face issues squarely...
...The reunion was short-lived, however...
...Reached at her Little Rock office, the Democratic activist acknowledged that she sometimes traveled by plane with Gov...
...She first met Clinton and Hillary Rodham while working on the 1972 McGovern campaign, and remained in touch as the couple climbed the Arkansas political ladder...
...In the summer of 1987, with Clinton on the verge of announcing his presidential candidacy, the tough-talking Texan sat her Columnist John Brummett asked Julia Hughes Jones if she could confirm what in Little Rock gossip circles was known as the "airplane story...
...She was at Harvard on a fellowship when the Clintons asked her to come back in March 1992 in the aftermath of the Gennifer Flowers debacle...
...Attorney's office in Little Rock on September 2,1992, just two months before the election, the secret referral was a political time bomb...
...Wright also continued to work informally for Clinton and the White House, most famously in a tireless attempt to quash Troopergate in the fall of 1993...
...After the book appeared, Wright claimed that she had been misquoted...
...Well, the first time I heard about it was in the fall of 1992 and at that point I regarded it, there was no way to verify it," Wright said under oath...
...I now know it was...
...41 The American Spectator • August r 9 9 6 charge down for a heartto-heart talk...
...Wright quickly set about reviving Clinton's political career...
...Jones, who is at work on a book about her years in Arkansas government entitled The White Boys Club, says that Wright "realized that without Clinton's backing she had no power to raise money at all...
...I went scrambling trying to find out what on Earth they were talking about...
...I think he wanted her totally out of the state, if you want to know what my opinion is...
...And me too...
...The Arkansas state troopers were particularly troublesome for her...
...Taking care of Bill exacted a price...
...He owed it to Hillary and Chelsea not to...
...And that is all I was given over the phone...
...What was the reason for going around Wright...
...Needless to say, Bill's wayward ways led to a volatile relationship not only with his wife, but with Wright herself...
...When Bill showed up, others noticed how they exchanged looks and how Jim McDougal had to keep track of his wife's whereabouts the rest of the event...
...But things did not go well in the state party job either...
...His voice was cracking...
...In her deposition Wright said that she took the information she had been given about the referral directly to Hillary Clinton...
...42 August r996 • The American Spectator "The fact was that Bill told me he had a relationship with Susan," L.D...
...A broken Wright was finally forced to go to Bill and ask for his help...
...Then they'd make fun of Jim McDougal...
...You gotta do something, somebody's got to talk to somebody...
...her frequent refrain was, "Keep him out of bars and away from women," according to one of the troopers...
...and "You're not gonna say anything, are you...
...According to Jones's daughter, the young political activist next to Clinton "put her coat on his lap and start[ed] working on him...
...In the book he wrote with Matalin, All's Fair, Carville recalls an incident from the Republican convention in Houston: Betsey Wright was another prominent player down there for us, and very early on I got a phone call from Ron Brown...
...One example will suffice-though readers with a low tolerance for another Clinton sex story should skip the following anecdote altogether...
...Suddenly, the Arkansas "hot shots" and the "White Boys Club," as Jones calls them, came to the party's rescue...
...Wright remains faithful to the last, though one suspects that her heart echoes the words her alter ego addressed to the immature presidential candidate in Primary Colors: "You have never paid the bill...
...About how crazy he was all the time and how he thought he was Franklin Roosevelt...
...Among them, she found several boxes of Whitewater-related documents, and shipped them to Washington to be delivered to the Clintons' personal lawyer, David Kendall...
...Not for the last time, there was something shabby in the way she was treated...
...Her job often entailed chastising the state troopers assigned to the Clintons' security detail...
...See "Filling in the Blanks," TAS, March 1996...
...She was convinced that some state troopers were soliciting women for him, and he for them, she said...
...She went to a storage facility to retrieve campaign documents from years past, the so-called "Betsey Files...
...On a charter flight about a year earlier from Little Rock to Elaine, Arkansas, where Jones and the governor were scheduled to attend a Christmas parade, Clinton was seated next to a young woman active in Democratic circles in the state capital...
...Born in Alpine, Texas on the Fourth of July fifty-five summers ago, Onie Elizabeth Wright has devoted most of her career to serving William Jefferson Clinton...
...Sometimes it would be made by wife Hillary, other times by the governor's chief of staff, Betsey Wright...
...ME the worst...
...I remember I asked Hillary if she was aware of any friend of theirs who was in a savings and loan business who might be under criminal investigation," she said, "and that we couldn't think of anybody...
...This relationship might explain why Susan McDougal subpoenaed Clinton to testify on her behalf during her recent trial, even though he had little to add to the legal merits of her case...
...Man," he said, "you've gotta do something...
...It's royalty...
...She accepted a lucrative lobbying job with the Wexler Group instead...
...Indeed, her latest gaffe occurred not while talking with the press, but in the sworn testimony she gave last April 25 before the Senate Whitewater Committee...
...In Senate Whitewater Committee testimony earlier this year, Wright said she had come back, among other reasons, because of newspaper stories that linked convicted cocaine dealer Dan Lasater to both Clinton and the Arkansas Development Finance Authority...
...Mom," Jones recalled her daughter virtually screaming as soon as they disembarked from the plane, "you won't believe what happened...
...It's an honor for which she's paid the price over and over again-and just may have to one more time...
...She wasn't asked to join the administration, John Brummett wrote in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, "because key campaign aides such as James Carville and George Stephanopoulos had seen her, probably rightly, as overemotional, counterproductive and high maintenance...
...Wright's inspiration in life, she once told the Washington Times, was another fictional character: Mary Poppins...
...Headed by longtime Clinton friend and Democratic operative Anne Wexler, the firm has lobbied on behalf of such clients as ARCO, AT&T, and J.P...
...And nothing that I can recall of that had one iota of connection or relationship to anything within the scope or interest of this committee...
...Never...
...Nussbaum spoke just as Wright was in the middle of a sensitive political errand to Little Rock...
...That is the inference, at least, that can be drawn from a strange coincidence...
...After a particularly bitter fight with her charge in 1989, Wright left to become executive director of the Arkansas Democratic party...
...I had no interest in breaking ground about handjobs in my column...
...That story was well circulated," he told The American Spectator...
...You need to get a lawyer...
...Jones claims that Wright "went seven or eight months without a paycheck herself- she was, you know, distraught...
...The chain-smoking Wright found herself working round the clock, with little if any private life at all...
...He did send me messages back through her...
...In fact, Wright is at once a more devoted Clintonite but destructive presence than even "Anonymous" could capture...
...By January 16, according to notes taken by deputy White House chief of staff Harold Ickes, a senior White House aide was being assigned the task of talking to Wright's boss Anne Wexler...
...Clinton but denied the account...
...After the election, Wright headed to Washington but not to the White House...
...But in about September or October of'92, some RTC official at a cocktail party in Kansas City told somebody who supported Bill Clinton from California who was visiting in town that they had just sent a criminal referral up to the prosecutor in Little Rock...
...Wright and campaign consultant James Carville clashed repeatedly, most notably after she told a reporter her job involved quashing "bimbo eruptions...
...BILL'S YARY ?OPNNS Betsey Wright is a tough-talking Texan who has been President Clinton's longest-serving and most faithful nanny...
...Every time he was out and Hillary knew where he went," says former Arkansas state auditor Julia Hughes Jones, "she would call behind him to see what she needed to do to take care of it...
...Julia Hughes Jones, for her part, ascribes Clinton's behavior to the perquisites of office...
...There was a person who worked for me who did end up talking to him occasionally...
...As her fictional self tells her boss, "My job is to prevent people from hurting you -including you...
...I took him over to a condo where she was...
...Everyone was always so PROUD of you...
...No matter...
...Wright began monitoring the troopers, as well as the national press who flew into Little Rock to try to meet with them...
...By all accounts, these occurred with great frequency...
...Bill told me he had a rela tionship with Susan," Brown said...
...But inevitably, after Clinton had attended a party, Hillary or Wright would ring the host the next morning and pop the question: "Did Bill do anything I have to clean up after...
...And Clinton has become her child...
...Although Wright is better known for trying to protect Clinton on the sexual front, her activity has extended to Whitewater as well...
...Because you're so completely f---ing SPECIAL...
...She was put in charge of managing Clinton's Arkansas record and defending his character-and that meant managing his many scandals...
...I assigned no one to talk to him...
...During deposition questioning by Committee Counsel Robert Guiffra, Wright admitted that she had received word of the referral almost as soon as it was filed in Little Rock...
...Brown said...
...Wright personally lobbied Hillary Clinton on behalf of the American Dietetic Association during the administration's health-care reform effort...
...At the end of the process," Maraniss writes, "she suggested that he should not get into the race...
...The former campaign manager was now just another aide, while a new group of "white boys" were fast becoming celebrities for running the show...
...Then he'd make fun of Jim McDougal...
...She caused him trouble, and he didn't know how to handle the trouble...
...I thought it at the time...
...In a recent interview with The American Spectator, Jones confirmed the tale yet again-and in the process demonstrated just how difficult Betsey Wright's clean-up job could be...
...Yet as the Whitewater scandal began to unroll, it appeared that Bill's political nanny would face the fate of many of his other faithful retainers...
...He set her up to fail because without his help she couldn't raise the money to pay the bills of the party...
...40 August 1996 • The American Spectator To those involved in Arkansas state government in the 198o's, one of the most bizarre phenomena of the Bill Clinton administration was the morning-after phone call...
...Yes, I can," she replied bluntly...
...She's stealing my phrase...
...Julia Hughes Jones remembers a 1982 afternoon campaign event in Russellville, at which Susan McDougal showed up wearing a black cocktail dress and matching black hat with veil...
...The material that might fully explain this apparent concern is missing, or still being withheld from the committee...
...After his devastating defeat at the hands of Republican Frank White in the 1980 elections, Clinton immediately summoned the unemployed Wright to Little Rock, and she moved into the basement of the governor's mansion...
...According to Jones, Clinton "wanted her out of his office long before he got her out...
...What's more, she claimed, "He was looking at me the whole time...
...How childish was the governor's behavior...
...Brown, who had been assigned to the Clintons' security detail during the mid-198o's...
...As Jones says, "Betsey was raised to take responsibility...
...They didn't want me talking about anything," Brown recalled, and he suggested one person in particular was of great concern to Wright: "They didn't want me to talk about Susan McDougal...
...Like a mother and nanny tag-team, Clinton's first lady and his chief of staff- the two most powerful women in his life - would be forced to "fix" the various messes and embarrassments he would create for himself...
...43 The American Spectator . August x996...
...Something mysterious happened to the original Resolution Trust Corporation criminal referral that first named Bill and Hillary Clinton as possible beneficiaries of the suspected crimes of Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan...
...It barely did to me...
...The prosecutor would try to make cases against the president's friends and close associates, said Nussbaum: "Indictments will be Betsey Wright...
...And that's how you should handle these documents...
...On January 6, she called Bruce Lindsey at the White House to describe her find...
...I know, it's sick," she says...
...She was particularly worried about trooper L.D...
...I've never seen anything like this...
...When asked about the offers from Ford during her Senate testimony, Wright denied the allegations...
...In any event, John Brummett never wrote about the incident...
...While Hillary can safely be presumed to have had her own political interests at heart while on clean-up detail, more often than not the task fell to Wright-whose only conceivable motivation to perform the often unpleasant duty was a personal and deeply held sense of loyalty...
...The special relation between Bill Clinton and the wife of his Whitewater partner had already caught the eye of Little Rock insiders...
...Soon enough, she was suffering from what the Washington Post termed clinical depression...
...He set her up to fail with the Democratic Party," says Jones, "and I think it was for a reason...
...If the campaign needs a hatchet woman," Wright told a reporter at the time, "I am more than willing to be it...
...But the circumstances around the illegal notification remain vague...
...She then became his chief of staff, and later ran his successful re-election bids in 1984 and 1986...
...For years, she told friends later, she had been covering up for him...
Vol. 29 • August 1996 • No. 8
