Free Game Change by John Heilemann

indiscretions and the danger they posed to Hillary.
    This is a problem , Solis Doyle thought, and not a small one. These were heavy-hitting Clinton supporters who had Hillary’s best interests at heart, whose intent was anything but malicious, who were actually trying to help. Solis Doyle decided that she needed to tell Hillary, and quick.
    She had brought word to Hillary more than once about the rumors hovering around Bill. “It’s not true,” Hillary would say, and in any case, she knew how to handle it. She had some experience in this area, after all, and she had always emerged intact. “We’ll be ready for it,” she said, and then, again, “It’s not true.”
    But Solis Doyle needed Hillary to listen this time, to appreciate the implications of what was happening. You don’t understand, she said insistently. They’re having conference calls about this—what he’s doing, who he’s doing it with, how it’s going to damage you.
    The mention of conference calls snapped Hillary to attention. She demanded to know who was on the calls. Solis Doyle told her. Hillary reeled, first stunned into silence by the betrayal, then loudly livid about their friends trafficking this crap behind her back. How dare they? They don’t know anything! Who do they think they are?
    Hillary had always been adamant that her and her husband’s personal lives were nobody’s business but theirs. She immediately froze Ricchetti out of Hillaryland. (The reaction in Bill Clinton’s world was even harsher; when other staffers asked Doug Band, the former president’s chief counselor, why Ricchetti was no longer included on regular conference calls of old White House hands, Band icily replied, “He’s dead to us.”)
    Hillary wasn’t in complete denial about the perils of the situation, however. She had seen the damage that Bill’s bimbo eruptions could inflict and knew that his imputed peccadilloes were among the gravest potential impediments to her reaching the White House. Clinton turned to two aides she trusted with the most intimate matters, Solis Doyle and Cheryl Mills, and Solis Doyle included Howard Wolfson in the circle. Together, the trio formed a war room within a war room inside Hillaryland, dedicated to managing the threat posed by Bill’s libido. Mills, the lawyer, handled delicate matters where attorney-client privilege might prove useful; Solis Doyle was in charge of the political dimension; and Wolfson worked the media side of the equation.
    The war room within a war room dismissed or discredited much of the gossip floating around, but not all of it. The stories about one woman were more concrete, and after some discreet fact-finding, the group concluded that they were true: that Bill was indeed having an affair—and not a frivolous one-night stand but a sustained romantic relationship.
    This was exactly the scenario that had incited so many members of the conspiracy of whispers to urge Obama into the race—and what everyone who signed up with Hillary feared each waking day. But whatever storm of emotions Clinton herself might have been experiencing she put aside in the interest of survival. She instructed her team to prepare to deal with the potential blowup of Bill’s personal life. For months thereafter, the war room within a war room braced for the explosion, which her aides knew could come at any time.
    Yet even without any detonations, the Bill-related rumblings and their reverberations would continue—and be absorbed by Hillary in painful, maddening, and portentous ways. In October, she was scheduled to headline a New York fund-raiser for Claire McCaskill, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Missouri. McCaskill, a plainspoken centrist who held the job of state auditor, had narrowly lost a run for governor in 2004. She’d been expected to take another shot at that office four years later, but had decided against it out of fear that Clinton would be her party’s presidential nominee in 2008. According to a