The conservative Washington Free Beacon published a piece on Sunday about an archive encompassing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s three decades of public life, including her reaction to former President Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
Arkansas-based political science professor Diane Blair, one of Clinton’s “closest friends” who died in 2000, kept memos, correspondence, diaries and records of conversations with the Clintons going back to the mid-1970’s. The Washington Free Beacon accessed those files, which have been open to the public since 2010, at the University of Arkansas and reported on them for the first time.
According to the Free Beacon, Clinton called Lewinsky a “narcissistic loony toon” in a phone call with Blair after her husband admitted to the extramarital relationship. She further defended her husband as being affected by several deaths in the family and, according to one psychologist, potentially compelled to infidelity by his childhood.
“It was a lapse, but she says to his credit he tried to break it off, tried to pull away, tried to manage someone who was clearly a ‘narcissistic loony toon’; but it was beyond control,” Blair wrote, as quoted by the Free Beacon.
Read the files, which also give insight into Clinton’s thoughts on health care and foreign policy, over at the Free Beacon.
This post has been updated.
