Unflattering Portraits
April 2nd, 2008This is not a pretty picture of a young Hillary Clinton.
As Hillary Clinton came under increasing scrutiny for her story about facing sniper fire in Bosnia, one question that arose was whether she has engaged in a pattern of lying. The now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who supervised Hillary when she worked on the Watergate investigation, says Hillary’s history of lies and unethical behavior goes back farther – and goes much deeper – than anyone realizes. Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of 27-year-old Hillary Rodham on the committee. Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of her former law professor, Burke Marshall, who was also Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair. When the investigation was over, Zeifman fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation – one of only three people who earned that dubious distinction in Zeifman’s 17-year career.
Why?
“Because she was a liar,” Zeifman said in an interview last week. “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.” How could a 27-year-old House staff member do all that? She couldn’t do it by herself, but Zeifman said she was one of several individuals – including
Marshall, special counsel John Doar and senior associate special counsel (and future Clinton White House Counsel) Bernard Nussbaum – who engaged in a seemingly implausible scheme to deny Richard Nixon the right to counsel during the investigation.
I have always said, “Hillary Clinton is Richard Nixon with ovaries.” That means she is brilliant, decisive, foward-thinking — but mistrusting and vindinctive. It isn’t unusual for a politician to have these qualities, but I think Clinton has a lot of undesirable habits that George Stephanopoulos and her handling of the impeachment proceedings (behind the scenes) betray, and I am not sure — her protests to the contrary notwithstanding — she has anywhere near the vision that Nixon had on foreign affairs or domestic policy or the political mood of the country. That said, I continue to prefer her candidacy to the candidacy of platitudes and naïveté that is Barack Obama’s, but I am not optimistic about our chances this year. Obama is, I think, a bubble that will pop once it is removed from the cozy confines of the Democratic primary, and Clinton’s negatives are unforgivably high with independents and Republicans. McCain has a lot going for him but then again, he’s running with the handicap of being Bush’s successor, even if he is able to claim to be a voice for change because he is not with the Administration and has always been a maverick.