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HenchPAC NewsAs first lady, Hillary Clinton had a habit of raging at even senior White House aides, hurling personal insults designed to belittle and humiliate them in front of their colleagues, according to former White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers.
Myers lifted the lid on Mrs. Clinton's long-rumored nasty temper in an amazingly candid interview for a joint production of ABC's Nightline and PBS's Frontline, which gathered the accounts of twenty former White House staffers to commemorate the end of the Clinton years.
One vivid example cited by Myers was the internal administration debate over how to handle Whitewater. Myers, George Stephanopoulos and several others in the meeting favored turning all documents from the Clintons' controversial land deal over to the Washington Post.
But when Mrs. Clinton entered the room and demanded to know what was going on, everybody "clammed up."
"Mrs. Clinton wanted to know what was going on and she looked at George," reports Myers. "And George began to make the argument that we'd all been making and nobody backed him up. Nobody backed him up. Everyone just sat there and let George take the beating, you know.
"And Mrs. Clinton got really angry," said Myers. "She attacked George, which everyone knew was coming, which is why I guess nobody was willing to ride in there to the rescue. ... Here were 12 people in the room who all basically agreed and only one of them was willing to stand up and tell her what she had asked. And that took a lot of courage."
Myers told ABC that when anyone tried to disagree with Mrs. Clinton, her temper could be vicious and more deliberately hurtful than even her husband's notorious purple rages.
"Anybody that stood up and tried to say this was a bad idea was, you know, smashed down and belittled, very personally," the Clinton loyalist revealed. "And I mean where I said the president didn't really attack people personally, Mrs. Clinton sometimes did."
The one-time Clinton spokeswoman said that White House staffers lived in fear of the first lady because her attacks sometimes wouldn't end when her temper tantrums subsided.
"Not only would she sort of humiliate you in front of your colleagues or whoever happened to be around," Myers said, "Hillary tended to kind of campaign against people behind their back, and that was certainly my experience."
"She was not happy with me, but she never confronted me. She would go call [then-White House chief of staff] Leon [Panetta] in and yell at him and then he'd have to call me in and say, 'Mrs. Clinton is really upset about X. You said Y, and she disagrees with that, and you know, she wants you to fix it,' or whatever."
Myers is the first Clinton loyalist to go public with charges that Mrs. Clinton would brutalize White House aides with her rages.
Previous accounts of Clinton's notorious temper were generally dismissed by mainstream reporters as the grumblings of disgruntled former employees.
Nearly two years ago, Hillary biographer Barbara Olson reported that White House counsel Abner Mikva was so incensed over Mrs. Clinton's conduct that he resigned after one profanity-laced upbraiding by the first lady.
Another Clinton biographer, Gail Sheehy - who has spent hours with the first lady since the 1992 campaign - wrote that Clinton seemed to be "in a perpetual state of suspended anger."
Once Hillary even tried to kick an Arkansas state trooper bodyguard who got in her way, according to Clinton biographer Christopher Andersen.
And one-time White House FBI agent Gary Aldrich reported in 1996 that junior White House staffers were ordered not to make eye contact with the first lady lest they anger her.
But during her New York Senate campaign, the media never touched on these and dozens of other accounts about Mrs. Clinton's temper, portraying her instead as a warm and genuinely likable personality.
HENCH adds: Bllggghh! "Warm and likeable?" Only if you're a pit viper, and then it's still just a maybe.
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