What Bill Clinton's Former White House Aides Say He's Really Like
Former president Bill Clinton's personality has often made headlines during his political life. Especially in the wake of the scandal with Monica Lewinsky, Clinton pushed back against the notion that he was anything but proper. "I feel like somebody who is surrounded by an oppressive force that is creating a lie about me and I can't get the truth out," Clinton told The Washington Post in 1998. "I feel like the character in the novel 'Darkness at Noon.'"
The Post reported that even when Clinton ran for office in Arkansas, he was doing everything he could to avoid consequences for private behavior. But what doesn't appear to work with the former president is any attempt to question his behavior. For instance, in 2018 Craig Melvin interviewed Clinton on "Today," and asked the former president point blank if he had ever apologized to Lewinsky for the fallout of the affair scandal.
Clinton told Melvin that he didn't think he owed Lewinsky an apology. If he gets defensive when a reporter asks about his public life, how does Clinton respond when someone who knew him gets more personal?
Clinton and Doug Band had a major falling out
In 2022, Hillary Clinton said in her Apple TV+ series "Gutsy" that her husband, former President Bill Clinton, would have kept his affair with Monica Lewinsky to himself if it hadn't made national news, via The Daily Mail. According to Hillary, he never would have told her. Perhaps that's part of why Bill's longtime aide Doug Band, who worked with him during his presidency and up through about 2020, made a stand. According to Vanity Fair, Band and Bill's relationship never recovered after a confrontation about his marriage.
Gabriel Sherman, who interviewed Band for the VF piece, spoke to Yahoo about their conversation. "Band told Clinton that he believed he was allowing Chelsea to destroy Band's reputation because, deep down, Clinton was guilty for the pain his infidelities had caused the family," Sherman told the outlet. "Then Band said the unsayable: If Clinton wanted to have girlfriends, he should divorce Hillary and move on with his life. Band later told friends he said it was the honorable and right thing to do."
Per VF, the longtime ties between Band and Bill were gone by 2015. Further, the outlet notes that in recent years, Bill has mostly gotten out of the spotlight. Of course, there may be several reasons for that, including his reported business ties to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Aides got stuck dealing with Bill Clinton's messes
During his first run for governor in Arkansas, former president Bill Clinton's political aides had to do a lot of personal clean-up. An anonymous campaign chief told The Guardian in 2012 that they had to handle "25 women a day" who showed up to the offices looking for Clinton. More than that, aide Betsey Wright told the outlet that she had to give Clinton a list of girlfriends to contend with before taking the governorship. Marla Crider, who worked with Clinton in Arkansas and had an affair with him, told the outlet that Clinton "mesmerized" women.
After the Lewinsky affair, Wright said to The Guardian that she and "a lot of people" were hurt because Clinton lied to them about the situation. "Monica Lewinsky gave him something that he needed at that time: to be adored," Crider told the outlet. With so much falling on the shoulders of the White House staff during the affair probe, it put a lot of pressure on them.
In speaking with NBC, former White House Staff Secretary and current congressman Sean Patrick Maloney said, "There were definitely nights when I put my faith in alcohol. It's not fun." The outlet also reported that a lot of staffers had to lawyer up during the affair, too, which made Clinton's choices costly to them.