Fascinating, juicy, gossipy memoir by a woman who fell in love with Bill Clinton when she was 11 and he was 13 and equally enchanted with her. She skipped two grades and graduated from high school with Bill in 1964. They remained intimate friends and lovers for 33 years, until she had written an autobiographical novel and he threatened to "destroy her" if she said anything about what she knew.
She is a lawyer, apparently a very bright one. She sued him and several of his associates in a RICO suit which went all the way to the Supreme Court; she won, but the Clintons managed to keep it out of the press quite well. Still, she is a hard woman to intimidate, as this book demonstrates.
Maybe the most memorable line in the book is: "The news of Vince Foster's death was being talked about in beauty shops here in Little Rock before his dead body was found in Fort Marcy Park."
Dolly still calls Bill "Billy"as many of his childhood friends do. She met Hillary before the Clintons were married. Hillary knew about his relationship with Dolly. They crossed paths a number of times, and kept a wary distance from each other.
"When I picked up Billy at the airport on that election night of May 28, 1974, I was so completely stunned by his traveling companion's odious appearance, smell, and demeanor that I still didn't believe this could be the woman he had lived with at Yale. Even with free rent [Bill had accepted from her], she was not his type.
"I truly thought that the 'introduction' of Hillary was some kind of a sick joke being played on me by Billy. Hillary, on the other hand, did not have the advantage of being deluded about who I was. I'm sure that she was both shocked and upset (and rightfully so!) to see *me* at the airport that night."
Dolly knew about his many women and never expected an exclusive relationship with Bill. When he was governor of Arkansas, Hillary [whom both Bill and Dolly, as well as the state troopers, referred to as "The Warden"] was often away. The troopers disliked Hillary intensely, and cooperated with Bill's womanizing. The troopers often brought Dolly to the governor's mansion while "the Warden" wasn't there.
Dolly refers to the KKK - the Klinton Krime Kartel. Her list of the "Krimes" runs to 11 pages in one chapter.
The "Krime" I found the most horrible was the bad blood. The Clintons let it be known that they were always looking for "investments" by which they meant income opportunities that required little money or effort from them. These included Whitewater, Hillary's $100,000 return on an investment of $1,000 in cattle futures, and the blood scandal. Inmates in Arkansas prisons were paid $7 to give a pint of blood. Many of the inmates were HIV-positive. American blood banks wouldn't accept this blood. But Bill or Hillary found a way to make it look like the blood had come from a different source and had been screened for HIV, and found a market in Canada at $50 per pint. There is no way to count how many Canadians died of AIDS as a result.
Dolly paints a very clear picture of Bill and Hillary staying together for what each could get from the other in their mutual quest for money and power.
When Dolly found out, during the Paula Jones lawsuit, about Juanita Brodderick and some of Bill's other rape/sexual assault victims, she ended it with Bill. She would have been the primary witness against him in his impeachment trial if there had been one. She regards many of the Senators as craven cowards for not going through with it. She has utter contempt for Hillary for threatening and injuring many of the injured women if they told of their experiences with Bill. All this while Hillary repeatedly talks about how she has always fought for women.
As someone who wouldn't vote for Hillary in a million years, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I hope it hits the best seller list.