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Lazio recalls, “although she had absolutely no attachment to New York before that. She had never lived there, she had never worked there, she never paid taxes there. But New York is a very forgiving place. I think Hillary and their team knew that they would be able to get over on that hurdle, although there might be some resistance to that.”
    There was also a greater attraction for the overly ambitious Hillary: Assuming she became a senator from New York she’d be connected to arguably the richest and most powerful Democratic base in the country (with the possible exception of California). Which is to say, in order to win, she’d have to raise money, which she would do from New Yorkers. These rich and powerful New Yorkers would form an ideal financial base for a presidential run.
    The final rationale for her campaign—and its secret driving force—was largely mystical. Harold Ickes was a junior. His father, Harold Ickes Sr., was a cabinet officer for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and, far more important, an advisor to Hillary’s idol, Eleanor. It was the senior Ickes who’d urged Mrs. Roosevelt to seek a Senate seat in New York, an idea she’d considered and then dismissed. As other biographers have noted, Hillary could not resist the parallel, except in this story she’d fulfill the mission meant for Eleanor. The Hillary-Eleanor comparison was so strong in the First Lady’s mind that some Clinton aides told me they referenced Eleanor’s example to get Hillary to do what they wanted. Clinton, for example, once decided to write a column, titled “Talking It Over,” thereby, as she put it, “following once again the footsteps of Eleanor Roosevelt.” 6
    Because of the Eleanor connection, the Senate run appeared to be destined. But not to every keeper of the Roosevelt flame. After Hillary visited Eleanor’s childhood home, Val-Kill, in Hyde Park, New York, and another round of Hillary-Eleanor stories appeared in the press, one veteran Democrat had had enough. “Her trying to coyly cuddle up to Eleanor Roosevelt is obscene,” said Richard Wade, who ran Robert F. Kennedy’s 1964 Senate race. “It’s like comparing a thoroughbred race horse and an ordinary jackass.” 7
     
    It was perhaps a cruel irony that Monica Lewinsky was one of the best things that ever happened to Hillary Clinton. Until the revelation that her husband had been carousing with a twenty-two-year-old woman, just a few yards from their bedroom in the White House, the growing caricature of the First Lady was that of a congenital liar.
    It didn’t help that, in the words of the well-respected independent counsel Robert W. Ray, Hillary made “factually inaccurate” statements to the investigators about her involvement in the controversial Arkansas land deal known as Whitewater. The New York Times columnist William Safire, in a January 1996 op-ed titled “Blizzard of Lies,” cited a series of instances of dishonesty and alleged obstruction of justice on the part of the First Lady. “Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady—a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation—is a congenital liar,” he wrote. 8 The writer Christopher Hitchens, no right-wing partisan, would title a book on the Clintons No One Left to Lie To .
    That image was fading now—at least a bit—after Monica. The First Lady was receiving sympathetic looks from reporters who’d come to challenge her every assertion, and friendly receptions from people who used to hate her. Everything she said had a renewed power just because she was saying it. Just because she was still standing. She took a joy in it. Her close friend Diane Blair, who died in 2000, revealed in a collection of papers that the First Lady was almost taking joy in the predicament. “[Hillary] sounded very up, almost jolly,” wrote Blair. “Told me how she and Bill and Chelsea had been to church, to a Chinese restaurant, to