Susan Thomases

Susan P. Thomases (born 1944) is a New York-based attorney. She served as personal counsel and an informal adviser to Hillary Clinton during the presidency of Bill Clinton. She was a prominent witness during the Senate Whitewater Hearings in 1995. She served as the model for the character Lucille Kaufmann from the 1996 political novel Primary Colors.

Thomases grew up in Englewood, New Jersey. She earned a B.A. from Connecticut College in three years and her Master's in European Intellectual History from Columbia University. She married William Bettridge, a construction engineer, with whom she had one son. Bettridge died January 5, 2004.

In 1968, at the prompting of her former boyfriend, Harold M. Ickes, Thomases supported Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy's unsuccessful bid to become the Democratic Party's candidate for president.

She met Bill Clinton in 1970, and joined him in 1974 in Fayetteville, Arkansas, to work on his campaign to challenge incumbent Republican congressman John Paul Hammerschmidt. It was here that she met Hillary Rodham, who had just moved to Arkansas after having graduated from Yale Law School the previous year. Rodham had been dating Clinton since 1971. Hammerschmidt was reelected, but Rodham and Thomases became close friends.

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