The most read story on the Washington Post website Thursday was a little number called “Enabler or family defender? How Hillary Clinton responded to husband’s accusers.” As a piece of explanatory journalism it was weirdly imprecise and incomplete.

The Post‘s reporter depicts Clinton as a wife whose political enemies, with their endless accusations about her husband’s ever-failing zipper, left her no choice but to defend him “with steely determination.” An old friend describes the Clintons’ attitude: “These people are not going to run over us.”

But who are “these people”? The Post would have you believe they’re all those ill-tempered Republicans. But the statement is more accurate if “these people” are taken to be the women who have been reckless enough to have sex with Bill Clinton.

Their name is legion. Gail Sheehy, author of the admiring biography Hillary’s Choice, provides plenty of details left out of the Post piece. When, for instance, Bill Clinton first planned to run for president, in 1988, a political enemy threatened to make public a list of Bill’s extramarital lovers. The list was very long. Sheehy says Hillary Clinton deputized two of her law partners, Webb Hubbell and Vincent Foster, to invite the women one by one into the imposing Little Rock offices of their law firm, the largest in the state. There the two lawyers confronted the women and generously offered to give them free legal counsel if the list was made public. Hillary attended at least one of the meetings.

It’s not hard to imagine the intimidation the women must have felt in the presence of such a display of legal firepower. And the tactic worked, as Clinton tactics usually do. None of the women talked. That steely determination comes in handy.

But the problem of Bill’s “rodeo queens,” as Hillary called them, wouldn’t go away. In his equally admiring biography A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the journalist Carl Bernstein writes that Bill Clinton’s closest aide, a woman named Betsey Wright, challenged her boss about his many extramarital affairs as the 1988 campaign loomed. She told him they were likely to become public if he lunged for the White House.

“Specifically,” Wright later told Bernstein, “what I said was, ‘Let’s walk through all the women …’ And of course I was horrified because I thought I knew everybody. And he came up with these people I didn’t know about.” Wright says she convinced Clinton that a national campaign, with its swarm of nosey reporters, might be “devastating to Chelsea.”

Clinton didn’t run for president in 1988. “I need some family time,” he announced. “I need some personal time. Politicians are people too.” Oh, they are.

From this moment on, nobody in the inner circle doubted the threat that Bill Clinton’s goatishness posed to his and Hillary’s ambition, and the threat continued to loom as Clinton decided to run for president in 1992. In the Clintons’ world, the women were no longer simply recipients of Bill’s compulsive amorous attentions; they were now “these people” who wanted to “run over us.” The women had to be controlled. And if they couldn’t be controlled, they would have to be discredited.

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http://www.weeklystandard.com/hillary-and-the-rodeo-queens/article/2004640