On May 12, 1992, Stan Greenberg and Celinda Lake, top pollsters for
Bill Clinton's presidential campaign, issued a confidential memo. The
memo's subject was "Research on Hillary Clinton."
Voters admired the strength of the Arkansas first couple, the
pollsters wrote. However, "they also fear that only someone too
politically ambitious, too strong, and too ruthless could survive such
controversy so well."
Their conclusion: "What voters find slick in Bill Clinton, they find ruthless in Hillary."
The full memo is one of many previously unpublished documents
contained in the archive of one of Hillary Clinton's best friends and
advisers, documents that portray the former first lady, secretary of
State, and potential 2016 presidential candidate as a strong, ambitious,
and ruthless Democratic operative.
The papers of Diane Blair, a political science professor Hillary
Clinton described as her "closest friend" before Blair's death in 2000,
record years of candid conversations with the Clintons on issues ranging
from single-payer health care to Monica Lewinsky.
The archive includes correspondence, diaries, interviews, strategy
memos, and contemporaneous accounts of conversations with the Clintons
ranging from the mid-1970s to the turn of the millennium.
Diane Blair's husband, Jim Blair, a former chief counsel at Tyson
Foods Inc. who was at the center of "Cattlegate," a 1994 controversy
involving the unusually large returns Hillary Clinton made while trading
cattle futures contracts in the 1970s, donated his wife's papers to the
University of Arkansas Special Collections library in Fayetteville
after her death.
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