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Who Cares Whether Hillary (Maybe) Smoked Dope?

Timothy Noah
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 30, 1999, at 4:08 PM PT

Gail Sheehy's Nov. 29 interview with Stone Phillips on NBC's Dateline alerted Chatterbox that the big scoop in Hillary's Choice, Sheehy's new psychobiography of the first lady, is that Hillary might have smoked some dope in college, but her ex-boyfriend isn't saying for sure.

Stunned by this new revelation, Chatterbox ran to the nearest bookstore and purchased a copy. Sure enough on Page 62, we meet David Rupert, a ruthlessly handsome 'black Irishman' with dark eyes that he used to his advantage. He would become her first real love. ... Rupert says he was 150 pounds of pulsing hormones. Their relationship was a tempestuous one.

This brooding hunk of manly sinew seized Hillary's heaving shoulders at a mixer for Capitol Hill interns during the summer of 1968 and murmured ... that he was working for Charlie Goodell, the liberal Republican from New York. She fluttered her eyes downward and whispered ... that she was working for Mel Laird, the Republican Wisconsin representative who would later be defense secretary under Richard Nixon. Their loins ached with passion.

"We always used birth control," offers [!] Rupert. [This is on Page 69; by now they're both back at college.] "Abstinence is the absolute remedy here, but a fear of getting pregnant did not deter us in our relationship." He often stayed over with Hillary in the suite she shared with three roommates at Wellesley and knew her roommates well.

Mesmerized by the narrative rush of Sheehy's bodice-ripper, Chatterbox almost forgot to look up the business about smoking dope. Here it is (Page 68):

Rupert discovered something unexpected about Hillary: get her away on a weekend, and she could be playful. He vaguely remembers them joining a march on Washington and spending the weekend there together. "Some of us were inhaling," he says with a you-know-what-I-mean smirk. The obvious question is, did Hillary inhale too? "I don't have to go there," says Rupert, "but you can read between the lines.

snip

David Rupert, the first lady's pre-Clinton Yale lover, told Hillary's Choice author Gail Sheehy, "She didn't know how to be comfortable pursuing political ambitions for herself." In fact, it was his own lack of political ambition that ended their relationship.

"I never stated a burning desire to be President of the United States," Rupert told Sheehy. "I believe that was a need for her in a partner."

Dec. 3, 1999 /24 Kislev, 5759
Philip Weiss

Understanding Hillary

snip

Ms. Sheehy has fleshed out her story with excellent reporting. Her most interesting discovery is a trove of remarkably mature letters Hillary wrote as a Wellesley College undergraduate to a friend from high school, John Peavoy. Hillary identified clearly the choices available to her in life: to be an educational reformer, a political leader, "an involved pseudohippie," or "a compassionate misanthrope."

And she understood her detached temperament. "I could spend my life worrying about other people or the state of the world," she said coolly. Hillary chose the world.

Still the world was not enough; she needed status, too. Her first real love affair fizzled out, Ms. Sheehy says, after David Rupert, a Georgetown student, declared that he was going to work for Vista, the domestic version of the Peace Corps. Too humble. But Mr. Clinton’s moxie was so thrilling that Hillary abandoned her own high-flying prospects to move to Arkansas. The book’s tragic theme is that Mrs. Clinton has always been so ruled by her fears—and patriarchal sexism—that she needed to find a male surrogate for her ambitions.

snip

Our heroine often seems confused about her motivation. At one point, she tells a friend she wants to gain the company of "very smart, very competitive, wealthy achievers." And sure enough, she gets her wish. By age 50, she’s dining in Martha’s Vineyard or the Hamptons with Baldwins, Wassersteins, Dershowitzes and Rattners. What happened to changing the world?

Then there’s the character issue. Mr. Clinton may be dissociated, as Ms. Sheehy suggests, but how in touch with reality is his wife? Ms. Sheehy cites a verse that she says has had great meaning to Hillary in explaining her troubles: "As I was standing in the street as quiet as could be/ A great big ugly man came up and tied his horse to me." Ms. Sheehy says that this verse is "a grand self-delusion," and surely it is. Yet she notes that Hillary has trotted it out time and again to explain her difficulties with powerful men, from dad to Mr. Starr. If Hillary really operates with this sort of belief, New York voters ought to know about it.

Sheehy interviews Hillary’s college lover, David Rupert and says they shacked up and smoked dope. More controversial is her assertion that Hillary and her dad became estranged when he didn’t attend her college graduation where she gained national attention for her attack on the main commencement speaker, Republican Senator Brooke. Sheehy’s work is well written and flows. Bill is well covered with original research including an interview with a nurse present at his birth who says that he weighed between eight and nine pounds and that he wasn’t premature. This supports the rumors mentioned by Maraniss that Bill Blythe wasn’t his father. Sheehy tells us that Hillary and Bill almost divorced in 1989 when Bill fell in love with Marilyn Jenkins; that Bill sabotaged Hillary’s health plan and that Hillary refused to let Bill settle the Paula Jones case.

A new love rat

Has Hillary Clinton's college beau been taking lessons from Princess Di love rat James Hewitt?

In Gail Sheehy's upcoming book "Hillary's Choice," excerpted in Parade, Hill's ol' flame Dave Rupert spills the dirt on the first lady as a passionate lover. After meeting as interns in Washington (keep your kneepad jokes to yourself), the two young lovebirds would spend weekends snuggling in a two-room converted barn in Vermont.

Hillary, he says, was hot stuff back then, despite her penchant for "big ugly glasses" and prim buns. Writes Sheehy, "He found the passion beneath the prude."

Thanks. I have the book right beside me, and have read it a few times. It is intriguing to me that a writer who is essentially "with" Hillary has been so candid in the book. I have learned very much in this book.

Here's an illuminating part:

"You know you're a perfectionist, Hillary, and you're just denying it," Rupert would say. "Stop kidding yourself." She didn't like to be questioned, Rupert found that she was unexpectedly vulnerable and sensitive to criticism (NO KIDDING-my insert). "It didn't have to be a vicious attack." he remembers. "It could be any kind of a challenge. She would flush in the face or get angry or mumble about it." Sometimes she would retreat into an icy silence.

Hillary, he says, was hot stuff back then, despite her penchant for "big ugly glasses" and prim buns. Writes Sheehy, "He found the passion beneath the prude."

I can only think her college boyfriend needed new eyeglasses.