In the Media:
Susie Buell, Hillary Clinton: Politics makes great fellowship | SF Chronicle | June 24, 2016
Susie Tompkins Buell’s TV is broken, which is probably a good thing given that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has been tearing into Buell’s good friend, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, on the airwaves.
“It’s the lowest of the low,” Buell said. “She’s my friend, and to hear this blithering, crazy narcissist say those things about her is literally appalling.”
Tompkins Buell and her husband, Mark Buell, have turned their Pacific Heights penthouse into a sort of Airbnb for high-profile Democratic candidates. President Obama has been there so often for fundraisers that he joked that he felt as if he lived there. This week Buell hosted Gabby Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman who nearly died after being shot in the head by a deranged gunman in 2011.
“She still has a hard time communicating,” Buell said. “But she is always smiling. She’s like an angel.”
But it’s Clinton with whom she’s formed a bond. The two chat about their kids, plan dinners and chat regularly, in person or on the phone. Clinton, who calls Buell “my free-spirited friend,” is likely to get a text from Buell to point out something like a lovely full moon.
It’s that kind of relationship. Clinton has been criticized for seeming cold and aloof, but she’s clearly embraced the New Agey Buell, who is prone to observations like her feeling that Clinton has maha.
“It’s a Sanskrit word meaning greatness,” Buell said.
Lack of pretense
Most likely, Clinton appreciates Buell’s lack of artifice and pretense. Although she’s a fervent supporter and fundraiser for Democratic candidates and causes — climate change and gun control are two passions — she’s anything but a political wheeler-dealer.
She met Bill Clinton at a dinner in Sacramento in 1991 when he was just ramping up his campaign for president. Buell, who founded the popular clothing lines North Face and Esprit with her ex-husband Doug Tompkins, says she was “going through a divorce and selling my company.”
Bill Clinton was a sympathetic listener at the dinner and, impressed, Buell wrote a check for $100,000 to his campaign. She figured that was that. Then someone from the Clinton organization called with a question:
“What do you want?’ they asked, figuring anyone who made a large donation like that would have an agenda.
“I had no idea you could buy anything,” she said. “I just wanted to help him become president.”
Mark Buell was the 1st
It was only the second political campaign contribution she’d ever made. The first was in 1988, when she donated $500 to a guy she’d known at Lowell High School, Mark Buell. He was running for the Board of Supervisors, and although he lost, he remembered his former classmate.
Buell sent out a form letter thank you, but handwrote at the bottom: “This is a long way from high school.” The exchange sparked a romance, and in 1996 the two were married. Mark, a real estate investor and president of the Recreation and Park Commission, still has the note, framed and mounted on the wall of his study.
“I’m very spontaneous and emotional,” she said. “Mark gives me sound advice. It’s very yin and yang. And it works.”
Although their 12th-story penthouse is a spectacular setting with views of the bay and both bridges, there’s nothing stuffy about it. The lack of formality clearly appeals to Hillary Clinton.
‘Hillary for Congress’
Buell recalls the chilly evening when Hillary Clinton was spending the night and asked her if she had something warm she could wear.
“All I have,” Buell said, “is a ‘Hillary for Congress’ sweatshirt.”
“That’s fine,” Hillary Clinton said. “Then if someone finds me roaming the halls, they’ll know who I am.”
Hillary Clinton also spends time in Bolinas, where the Buells have a home. It’s a place where Buell says the presidential candidate can let her hair down. During one visit, Mark made her a whiskey sour. Buell says she liked it so much she had another.
Some time later the Buells were at the White House and Hillary Clinton walked up holding a glass of white wine.
“Wouldn’t you rather have a whiskey sour?” Mark asked.
“What happens in Bolinas stays in Bolinas,” Hillary Clinton replied.
Hillary a foodie
Hillary Clinton, it turns out, is also a bit of a foodie. Buell says she checks in with her when a San Francisco visit is upcoming and asks, “Can we go out to dinner and have some fun?” She’s taken her friend to ultra-hip State Bird Provisions and a Michelin two-star restaurant, Quince.
If you’re sensing a trend, you’re right. Buell and her buddy prefer cozy, trendy places like the hip, but small and unassuming Liholiho Yacht Club on Sutter Street, where they dined in May.
“She loved it, just cocktails, gossip and fun,” Buell said. “We totally forgot she was running for president.”
Meet one of Hillary Clinton’s biggest donors in California. They hardly ever talk politics | LA Times | June 3, 2016
When Hillary Clinton parachuted into Los Angeles recently, some of the well-heeled donors who swarmed her brought unsolicited campaign advice, while others brought ambitions of White House appointments. Susie Tompkins Buell brought a bag of dry-roasted chickpeas.
It was fitting that Buell, a wealthy San Franciscan who ranks near the top of the sprawling national network of Clinton benefactors, was obsessing about the candidate’s nourishment. Few people in the orbit of the Clintons have done more for their care and feeding than this 73-year-old fixture of Bay Area philanthropy and salon society who wanted nothing to do with politics — she didn’t even vote — until a chance meeting with Bill Clinton well into her adult life.
Buell not only has become a fundraising powerhouse since then. She has also become Hillary Clinton’s soul mate. Theirs is among a handful of friendships that have been key to fueling the candidate’s ambitions, providing emotional and financial sustenance. It reflects the uncanny Clinton ability to build and maintain unyielding loyalty from the people positioned to help them the most – even people, like Buell, who have no business interests or political aspirations the couple might advance. In many cases, the bonds have only solidified through the stresses of scandal, electoral disappointment and Democratic Party rivalries that the Clintons have powered through.
The network has been most valuable in California, where Hillary Clinton is raising more cash than anyplace else. How Susie Tompkins Buell became a hub of that operation is a uniquely California story.
Buell never thought she would be rich. She was but a 21-year-old who had chosen work as a keno runner in Tahoe over college when she randomly stopped by the roadside to pick up Doug Tompkins, a hitchhiking beach bum who, like Buell, had an unexpected mastery of entrepreneurship and getting in front of trends. The two eventually married and together built a fortune and a cultish following around the clothing lines they created: North Face and Esprit.
But it wasn’t until they divorced and Buell found herself at a retreat at the Esalen Institute that she got curious about the Clintons. Buzz about Bill Clinton at that Big Sur haven of mindfulness intrigued Buell. It was 1991, and the fledgling presidential candidate had inspired one of the speakers at the event, New Urbanist architect and thinker Peter Calthorpe, with his ideas on building and strengthening community, a topic of interest to Buell.
So on a whim, and with a stroke of luck in timing, she dropped in at an event for Clinton while passing through Sacramento on her way home from Tahoe.
She quickly found herself at the head table. The conversation was memorable.
“I told him I was getting divorced and how I had worked with my husband all these years,” Buell said. “He really wanted to know what it was like, and he started talking about Hillary and how she was nervous that night because she was giving a speech at Wellesley,” her alma mater. They talked about the crushing poverty Clinton had seen on the campaign trail, Buell recalled, “and how much people were relying on government. I really wanted a president who would look out for them.”
She decided at that moment it should be Clinton. The next day, she wrote him a $100,000 check.
But the Clinton campaign was confused. Such large gifts usually come with requests for face time with the candidate or, at the very least, donor perks like ticket packages to the party convention and star-studded fundraising events.
“They asked me what I wanted,” she said. “I remember saying, ‘I want him to be president.’ I had no idea about how the money part of this worked.” Indeed, the only candidate who had ever received a cent from her before then was Mark Buell, the man who is now her husband and who long ago unsuccessfully ran for county supervisor. He got $500.
The donation to Clinton might have been a one-off but for the relationship that bloomed when Hillary Clinton approached Buell to personally thank her. The women clicked immediately, and Buell grew more enamored when she saw Clinton deliver an impassioned Mother’s Day address at Glide Memorial Church, a hotbed of leftist activism in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district.
“I was attracted to Bill Clinton, but as soon as I met Hillary, it was much deeper for me,” she said.
Buell hasn’t stopped giving to the Clintons since. More than $15 million has made its way from Buell’s bank account to the campaigns and causes of the Clintons. Untold millions more have been raised by her, often at her gorgeous Pacific Heights penthouse apartment, a mandatory stop on the fundraising circuit for prominent liberals. The menu that iconic chef Alice Waters prepared when Bill Clinton dropped by in March 1996 is framed in the kitchen.
“I can’t even count the number of events I have been to at the house,” said Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who first got to know Buell years ago, when he ran a wine shop and was good friends with her daughter. “It is a perfect venue overlooking the bay. There is an austerity to it. It is an opulent building, an opulent view. But the space itself is austere.” The rooms are sparsely but carefully appointed. Pieces worth more than a small condominium share rooms with stylish items plucked from far-flung flea markets. Every window has a panoramic view.
“It is a perfect backdrop to focus less on the surroundings and more on the occasion,” Newsom said.
The occasion is almost always political activism.
“The environment, women’s rights, children’s rights, equality, all of this,” said Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, ticking off in an interview the causes she has been involved in with Buell. “Susie comes through. She doesn’t say, ‘Put my name down,’ and take a back seat.”
As Buell got entrenched in politics, her relationship with Hillary Clinton began to move beyond it. Clinton writes in one of her books about a conversation between the two while the then-first lady was under siege by Congress amid its investigation into her Whitewater real estate investment. “My free-spirited friend Susie Buell said she didn’t follow all the dramas going on back in Washington, but she did have something to say to me: ‘Bless your heart.’ That was all I needed to hear,” Clinton wrote.
Much later, Clinton showed up at Buell’s apartment to meet her dying brother, a prominent surgeon who was staying with Buell while undergoing painful cancer treatments. “Most people would say, ‘I am sorry I never met your brother,’ or send their best. She just goes right into it,” Buell said. “She wasn’t taking advantage of him. They laughed. It was just sweet. It was one of the tenderest times in my life. … Her comfort with the situation was very moving.”
Buell said she regrets how few people see that side of Clinton.
“I remember once saying to her: ‘Can’t you just be yourself, Hillary?’ ” Buell said. “When there are not cameras around, she really lets it fly. She said, ‘You know what happens? They will get a moment of me expressing something and then say, “There she goes again, the crazy.” ’ Experience has trained her to be so cautious.”
But Clinton also sees a side of Buell that many candidates never get to see: the one that doesn’t talk politics.
“I don’t want to be one more thing she has to think about,” Buell said. “She knows who I am, she knows how I feel. We don’t talk shop. … She doesn’t need one more person to say, ‘What do you think about the Benghazi report?’ ”
This is the same donor who showed up at a high-stakes fundraiser for President Obama near the end of his first term and told him to knock off the small talk when he began to genuflect. Then she launched into a scold about his failure to get a landmark climate change bill through Congress.
Newsom, who says Buell “holds your feet to the fire” when candidates get her support, let out a knowing chuckle when asked about her reluctance to push Clinton. As Buell and other climate activists fought for years to kill the Keystone XL pipeline, candidates who did not stand with them were getting an earful from her. Except Clinton, who stayed neutral through most of the battle.
“They have a deep friendship, and that transcends politics in many respects,” he said. “She has a loyalty to the Clintons that is extraordinary, and it is unbreakable.”
It’s not that Buell is star-struck. She is constantly in the company of celebrity. Meryl Streep gushed in an email about Buell’s “open, welcoming mien.” Waters happened to text while Buell was talking with a displaced former California reporter, and at Buell’s behest, recommended where in Washington to dine.
Bill Clinton emailed to say, “Susie has been my friend for almost 25 years,” and express gratitude “for her constant love and support for Hillary.”
And Gloria Steinem has also been Buell’s friend for years. She recalled in an interview coming to speak about feminism to Esprit employees in the 1980s, long before it was fashionable for big companies to try to raise the consciousness of their workforce. Buell’s then-husband vetoed her plans to advertise in the fledgling Ms. magazine, so Buell sidestepped him by writing a check to subsidize subscriptions for universities.
“She is a self-educated person in the best sense,” Steinem said.
Buell stopped selling clothing long ago, but she never stopped marketing her brand. Lately, she has been working on her “Badass for President” project, a more hipster-oriented line of Clinton campaign memorabilia than the less-daring goods sold in the campaign store. A mock-up poster in her office has the logo emblazoned over a black-and-white photo of young Hillary Clinton in stylish ’60s attire and a coffeehouse conversation pose.
The fundraising events she holds are among the fastest-selling tickets in the city — especially when they are at her apartment in the penthouse of a landmark red-tile-roof building on a Pacific Heights hilltop where the views are dreamlike and the history is rich.
Buell says she was one of the lonely Democrats in the old-money-heavy building when she held her first fundraiser for Bill Clinton there. She had to quickly patch together a bunch of linens to cover the picture windows that the president’s detail warned would be a security risk. Clinton joked that it was better to be looking at the linens than shattered glass. The Secret Service once got stuck in the utility elevator there for an hour after too many of the agents piled in.
They know their way around better now. There are at least three other big Democratic donors in the building now, and sometimes they team up to hold multifloor events. Obama once joked that he had been through so many times he was starting to feel like a resident. Buell expects that she and her neighbors soon will be holding another multitiered event in the building for Hillary Clinton soon. The haul from such events is in the millions of dollars.
“It works great,” she said. “As long as the Secret Service is clear that they can’t all pile into the utility elevator at once.”
And what’s next for Buell if Clinton wins? Probably more of the same, she said.
“I am absolutely not interested in getting appointed to something,” she said. “I have the perfect life.”
Meet Hillary Clinton’s Bulldog | Time Magazine | September 21, 2015
Political assassins don’t choke up in front of reporters. But here is David Brock, confessed hit man and wrecker of reputations, the baddest bull in Hillary Clinton’s billion-dollar win-the–White House militia, with his eyes gone bloodshot and filling with tears.
We are sitting at one corner of his sprawling complex of offices, just a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol, where he employs 250 youthful activists to dig dirt on Republicans, plant stories in the press and punish pundits who step out of line. They work for groups with bland names that conceal their importance–Media Matters, Correct the Record, American Bridge, American Democracy Legal Fund, to name a few–on two floors that don’t look anything like a D.C. political office.
Think Cupertino startup meets Buddhist retreat meets the Jetsons, with bright molded-plastic furniture, exposed ceilings, colorful art, the occasional Japanese paper wall. Brock doesn’t look anything like a D.C. operative, either. At 53, he wears his silver hair long and pomaded behind his ears; he likes tailored shirts that fit too tight, pocket squares and skinny ties. When he drafted the office lease, he wrote in a clause for Toby, the pet schnoodle who accompanies him to work.
The question is simple and should be easy. When was the first time you saw Hillary Clinton after you defected from the conservative movement? He’s told the story before; it all happened more than a decade ago, for God’s sake. But his voice is halting. Then it cracks.
It was a Senate lunch in 2002, he says, just after he had published his third book, Blinded by the Right, a confession of all the rotten things he had ever done to liberals–from his “little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” slander of Anita Hill, who had accused then Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, to his discovery of Paula Jones, which forged a trail to Bill Clinton’s impeachment.
In an ornamented room, he told the Democratic leaders about their right-wing enemy, talking for nearly an hour. Clinton, then a Senator, sat in the back, immobile, hard to see over all the balding heads and charcoal suits. “She didn’t say anything, so I was starting to wonder,” he says. “And her hand went up at the very end.” This is where he starts to lose it. “And … she just summarized everything I said. Better than I said it. And it was amazing.”
I ask if something is wrong, if he is really as emotional as he appears. “Yeah,” he says. “It was a big deal.”
Now Hillary Clinton is rising again, along with the scent of scandal and the frenzy of her enemies, and Brock has pledged to fight by her side. To understand his commitment, you must first understand the most bizarre entanglement in modern political history, which has turned Brock into one of the most powerful players in Democratic politics. Among other jobs, he currently coordinates message strategy with the Clinton campaign, leads her rapid-response super PAC, raises money and sits on the board of a separate “independent” super PAC that will pay millions for her TV ads, and has set up the group that creates all the federal Democratic opposition research for the 2016 campaigns.
In total, over a little more than a decade, he has personally raised more than $150 million from rich liberals to fund his sprawling empire, which also includes a group that files mostly spurious ethics complaints against Republicans and another that mercilessly attacks both Fox News and the New York Times. This is no small feat for a reformed liar who has never held political office. And to hear his defenders tell it, he has done it all with aplomb.
“Brilliant,” several of them tell me when I ask about Brock’s talents. “He’s like a minister,” says John Stocks, the chairman of the Democracy Alliance, an umbrella group for wealthy progressives. “He is like an artist in my mind,” explains Susie Tompkins Buell, a progressive activist, Clinton supporter and Brock’s first major donor.
But talent is not all Brock has. His relationship with Hillary Clinton is at the root of everything he has accomplished. Salvation came first to Brock, who in 1994 found himself suicidal, sitting in a running Range Rover in a closed garage in Laguna Beach, Calif., suffering for the lies he had peddled about Anita Hill. He stepped out of the car and into his next project, a takedown biography of Clinton, which had earned him a $1 million advance. But instead of writing what everyone expected, he wrote the truth as he saw it, a glowing tribute to a courageous woman. “In struggling to find Hillary’s humanity, I gradually found my own,” he explains in his latest book, Killing the Messenger, due on store shelves Sept. 15.
Salvation came to Clinton years later, after her husband’s affair with a 22-year-old White House intern became a national disgrace. As the furor grew, Brock, who remained a member of the conservative elite, became her eyes and ears, a secret agent feeding the White House real-time intelligence by way of Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal. Brock detailed it all, from the leaks coming from the independent prosecutor’s office to the secret sources of Internet bad boy Matt Drudge.
When Clinton went on NBC’s Today show in 1998 to warn the country of a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” she was describing a picture Brock had painted. It was Hillary who kept a chaotic White House focused on its tormentors that year, and it was Brock who gave Hillary the ammunition. “Having knowledge restored a sense of normalcy,” Blumenthal would later write of Brock’s contribution to Hillary during those dark days.
Over time, both Bill and Hillary Clinton found they shared something else with Brock: an unnatural focus and fierceness. “What I appreciated from the right wing was you had to have political power before you could make the changes you wanted to make,” Brock explains now. “And I wasn’t afraid of that. There was a culture in the Democratic Party of weakness and nonresponse. I think some of what we did helped change that culture.”
Political knife fighting turns out to be far more complicated than the real thing. The best practitioners conceal not only the knife but also the fighter. They distort the truth without getting caught in a lie. Most important, they submerge their cutthroat instinct in a redemption story, a fight for justice and goodness, which allows people to believe in the cause–and in the need to shed more blood in its name.
Brock has such a story. Last year he traveled to the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Ark., to make his case that the person he used to be still exists in the conservative firmament. The dark enemy would return. “I know from personal experience that the best efforts of the right wing to market political smut did not defeat the Clintons,” he said. “The truth won out in the end. And it will again.”
This time, he promised, the fight will not play out as it did before. If the New York Times stumbles in a Page One story on Hillary’s email scandal, Brock is there, penning a letter demanding an editorial “review” of the paper’s “flawed and fact-free reporting.” If Jeb Bush takes a dig at Hillary for failing to promptly turn over her emails to the government, Brock’s deputy asks the Florida state attorney to open a criminal investigation into Bush for his possibly “knowing and willful” violation of Florida public-records laws. If Trey Gowdy, the head of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, asks for Clinton’s personal server, Brock counters with an open letter to Gowdy demanding the public release of “your own work-related and private email.”
Candidates have long sent kids to track their rivals with video cameras, hoping to capture a public slip-up. But Brock’s operation is the first to have a team of about 30 trackers live-stream the footage back to headquarters so that it can be more quickly cut and sent out to reporters. He has also begun to plot new ways to get his trackers more involved–in asking questions of Clinton’s rivals, perhaps even setting up dummy groups so they can buy their way into fundraising events.
Such undercover work, a trademark of conservative activists since the Nixon era, has lately been frowned on by liberals. “I am very aware of what the Democratic culture will tolerate,” Brock says. By this he means he continues to push for change, though he maintains that he will never return to peddling falsehoods. “If people understand what propaganda is,” he says, repeating a koan of his craft, “it ceases to have an effect over time.”
As time has passed, the Brock trophy case has grown. By creating bursts of outrage, he helped get Don Imus kicked off MSNBC, ended Lou Dobbs’ run at CNN, chased Fortune 500 advertisers away from Rush Limbaugh and organized a boycott of Glenn Beck’s Fox News show before its cancellation. A local Brock tracker was the first to uncover Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin’s bizarre comment about “legitimate rape” in 2012, and his opposition research helped ensure that Tea Party candidate Richard Mourdock won the Senate primary in Indiana, thus ensuring a Democratic pickup in the general election.
Chances are your views on Charles and David Koch, the biggest backers of conservative politics, have been shaped more by Brock’s research machine–which paints the brothers as greedy moneybags with selfish interests–than by their own multibillion-dollar operations. Before he entered the race, Jeb Bush was tripped up on camera over a question on his support for the Paycheck Fairness Act, a Democratic effort to increase wages for women. Brock’s people not only recorded the exchange, they also planted the question. Back in 2010, he even wrote a secret memo proposing the impeachment of Justice Clarence Thomas, a radical idea that Blumenthal forwarded to Clinton. “After the ’13 and ’14 cycle we went back and we measured the TV coverage of any piece of research that was original to us,” Brock says. “And we monetized it as if you went out and bought it as advertising. It was over $225 million in publicity, and we spent $15 million to produce it.”
Ask Brock where it ends–this constant innovation, the institutional expansion–and he gives an ice-cold answer. “The only place it can end is with the defeat of the extreme elements of the Republican Party,” he says. “A third of the Republican base thinks Obama is the Antichrist. You just can’t reason with them.” This is the language of zealots who welcome peace talks only after the total surrender of their rivals. I point out that most liberals would not talk like that. “Probably not,” he agrees.
Last January, some Democratic opponents of Brock attempted a sort of palace coup. They didn’t like his growing power, didn’t like his fundraising methods–his business partner earns a commission on nonprofit donations, an unusual practice–and they wanted to maintain the Obama hold on the party’s richest donors. A disparaging story appeared in the New York Times, detailing the complaints, and Brock abruptly quit the board of Priorities USA, the Clinton advertising effort, threatening a rift in the high-dollar Democratic-donor community. “This is the kind of dirty trick I’ve witnessed in the right wing and would not tolerate then,” Brock wrote in his resignation letter.
Within weeks, Hillary Clinton’s allies stepped in, and Brock won back what he wanted, almost completely. Obama insiders were dispatched and demoted, a Clinton confidant was put in charge of the organization, and Brock was invited back to the board, with the promise of a joint fundraising plan he had long proposed. In the coming months, even as he advises the campaign, he plans to raise millions for a joint fund, which will split its money with the pro-Clinton group he founded. Not much has been raised yet, but hopes are high. “I think we came up with 800 donors who could give $1 million or more,” he says. “That doesn’t mean they will. But they could. So that’s not a terrible number.”
As for the current scandals swirling around Hillary, he refuses to give an inch. On the private email server: “I don’t feel any criticism is due.” On the Clinton Foundation’s raising money from people Bill Clinton helped through public appearances overseas: “The attacks on the foundation are almost the most despicable because of all the good work the foundation does.” Any reason for concern over the creation of a private consulting firm, Teneo, that employed Hillary Clinton’s State Department aides while aiding Clinton Foundation donors? “No. I haven’t seen anything,” he says.
This is David Brock. When he thinks of Hillary, he doesn’t think about an awkward politician with a mechanical laugh who has lost as many public battles as she has won. He thinks of the “deep well of personal integrity” he wrote about in his 1996 book. He thinks about the time she invited him to the Clinton summer rental in Sagaponack, N.Y., when her whole family was there, the siblings, spouses, kids and dogs. He thinks about eating pizza and sipping soft drinks by the pool, then looking up after a couple of hours to see the Secretary of State walking around the yard with a trash bag, picking up garbage. “Just like something my mom would do,” he recalls.
Does that sound like propaganda to you? You could call it that. Or you could call it politics. But for David Brock it is also the truth, a lodestar for the person he has become.
