A Vast Conspiracy (62 page)

Clinton often operated in an atmosphere of barely controlled chaos, but the hours after his grand jury testimony and before his speech to the nation set a new standard for tense improvisation. The plan to leave the speech to the political team—led by Begala, Emanuel, and Doug Sosnik—quickly evaporated as volunteers, chiefly Kantor, injected themselves into the process. The political people, the lawyers, and outsiders like Carville and Linda and Harry Thomason all milled around the solarium—the big room on the top floor of the White House—and contributed thoughts and phrases. “A cluster fuck,” in Clinton White House argot.

After a shower and a quick meal, Clinton himself took charge of the process. Begala and Emanuel had three touchstones for the speech: responsible, accountable, and apologetic. Begala and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason had spent the day refining his draft from the weekend. But the president had a different priority—his outrage at the Starr investigation itself.

“I did wrong—and so did he,” Clinton said. “Dammit, somebody has to say these things. I don’t care if I’m impeached. It’s the right thing to do.”

As the clock inched toward nine, drafts of the speech multiplied. Eventually, though, the controversy centered on how much criticism of Starr the president should include. Kendall and Kantor backed strong words against the prosecutor; the political people, along with the Thomasons, favored a more conciliatory approach. With less than an hour to go, the first lady arrived in the solarium.

Everyone gave her a wide berth, knowing the humiliation to which her husband had just subjected her. On the Starr issue, Mrs. Clinton didn’t take a strong position. At last, she told her husband, “It’s your speech. You should say what you want to say.” Her anger at him flashed when she added, “You’re the president of the United States—I guess.”

When Carville left the solarium to race to the studio for
Larry King Live
, the dispute had narrowed down to whether the speech would include one critical adjective of Starr or two. At around that time, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason told the president that she didn’t like his tie, so he invited her to go up to his closet with him to select another one. There Thomason picked out a bright blue one—and that prompted a smile from Clinton. He might have thrown out a lot of his ties, but this one he had kept. “I wore that one at my inauguration,” he said. (His first, in 1993.)

Clinton kept working on the text until the last minute. In the last half hour, the president posted himself at a small round table, and Kantor started waving his arms to keep everyone else away from him. The speech simply wasn’t finished, and Kantor thought the president himself deserved the final say on the text. With minutes to go, Begala took care of getting the speech on the TelePrompTer. Less than five minutes before the speech was to begin, Clinton walked into the Map Room with Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason standing on either side of him. Linda took a seat in a chair, and Harry sat cross-legged on the floor, just out of camera range.

“Good evening,” Clinton said.

This afternoon, in this room, from this chair, I testified before the Office of Independent Counsel and a grand jury. I answered their questions truthfully, including questions about my private life, questions no American citizen would ever want to answer. Still, I must take complete responsibility for all my actions, both public and private. And that is why I am speaking to you tonight.

As you know, in a deposition in January, I was asked about my relationship with Monica Lewinsky. While my answers were legally accurate, I did not volunteer information.

Kendall had demanded this last sentence. He was not going to allow Clinton to make a public admission that Starr could later use in a prosecution for perjury.

Indeed, I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong. It constituted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part for which I am solely and completely responsible.

But as I told the grand jury today, and I say to you now, that at no time did I ask anyone to lie, to hide or destroy evidence, or to take any unlawful action.

I know that my public comments and my silence about this matter gave a false impression. I misled people. Including even my wife. I deeply regret that.

At this point in the speech, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason had inserted a straightforward apology to the American people. But after she went to change Clinton’s tie, she never followed through on inserting it into the final draft. That night, no one ever considered an apology to Lewinsky or her family.

I can only tell you I was motivated by many factors. First, by a desire to protect myself from the embarrassment of my own conduct. I was also very concerned about protecting my family. The fact that these questions were being asked in a politically inspired lawsuit, which has since been dismissed, was a consideration, too.

Clinton had rewritten almost the entire remainder of the speech in the last half hour or so before delivering it—that is, after Carville left the room.

In addition, I had real and serious concerns about an independent counsel that began with private dealings twenty years ago—dealings, I might add, about which a federal agency found no evidence of any wrongdoing by me or my wife over two years ago.

The independent counsel investigation moved on to my staff and friends. Then into my private life. And the investigation itself is under investigation. This has gone on too long, cost too much, and hurt too many innocent people.

Now this matter is between me, the two people I love most, my wife and our daughter, and our God. I must put it right. And I am prepared to do whatever it takes to do so.

Nothing is more important to me personally, but it is private. And I intend to reclaim my family life for my family. It’s nobody’s business but ours.

At this line, sitting in front of Clinton, Harry Thomason pumped his fist in agreement.

Even presidents have private lives. It is time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives and get on with our national life.

Our country has been distracted by this matter for too long, and I take my responsibility for my part in all of this. That is all I can do. Now it is time—in fact, it is past time—to move on. We have important work to do, real opportunities to seize, real problems to solve, real security matters to face.

And so tonight I ask you to turn away from the spectacle of the past seven months, to repair the fabric of our national discourse, and to return our attention to all the challenges and all the promise of the next American century.

Thank you for watching and good night.

The Thomasons hugged Clinton after he finished the four-and-a-half-minute speech, and the three of them stepped out of the Map Room together. The president went for a brief walk outside, and when he returned, he was met by Rahm Emanuel, who had the early returns from the television pundits.

“It’s getting panned,” he said.

The frustrations of the day welled up in Clinton’s red face. “I said what I wanted to say,” he yelled at his aide, “and I don’t care what those people say—and I don’t care what happens now!”

To an almost unprecedented degree in the history of presidential oratory, Clinton’s speech on August 17 drew unanimous derision in the news media—and for good reason. On a day when he admitted he had “misled” the entire country—in fact, he had outright lied—he chose to devote much of his speech to attacking Kenneth Starr. Even among those who found much to criticize in Starr’s work, many believed that this was a moment for contrition, not calumny, by the president. On this occasion, Clinton was blinded by his self-pity, unable to recognize that this was a day to discuss his own sins rather than those of his enemies. He had never displayed his flaws more clearly or in front of a bigger audience.

And yet two other points stand out about his performance on August 17. First, though he was often accused of being guided more by polls than principle, the president spoke out of conviction on this night. The public never saw greater candor or honesty from Bill Clinton, albeit in service of earlier lies. Second, and more important, Clinton displayed on this evening the skills that made him the most extraordinary politician of his generation. The press rejected his speech; the public embraced it. Notwithstanding the torrent of criticism in the news media, Clinton’s poll numbers hung steady at their high level following his speech. (Mark Penn, who arrived at the White House moments after Clinton finished his speech, did a quick poll that showed clear majorities believed that the speech was “presidential” and that Clinton had apologized; two thirds thought he was “sincere.”) He had an almost preternatural sense that the public agreed when he said, “It’s nobody’s business but ours.” In an intuitive way, he understood what the journalists, for all their prattle about character, did not—that the American people believed there was a difference between his public and private life. Clinton didn’t have a lot of company in this view, even among his own staff, but in this he was defiantly, even courageously, correct.

For all the condemnation of Clinton’s speech in the news media, the prosecution team didn’t take any false optimism out of the events of August 17. In his grand jury testimony, the president had been more careful than in his deposition, seven months earlier. Increasingly, the savvier members of the prosecution staff recognized that their entire case came down to the
sex—whether the president had lied about it in his deposition and then in his grand jury testimony. In light of Clinton’s refusal to answer certain questions, Bittman and Wisenberg had pinned him down as best they could. Before the grand jury, Clinton had repeated his position that as he understood the definition of sexual relations provided to him on January 18, he had not had such contacts with Lewinsky. Clinton had admitted to “inappropriate intimate contact,” which he declined to spell out, but by a sort of process of elimination, he had said he had not “directly” touched Lewinsky’s breasts or vagina with his hands or mouth “with intent to arouse” her.

It was a slender basis on which to make a case. Since Clinton had admitted intimate contact, what difference did it make whether he acknowledged precisely how and where he had placed his hands and mouth? A big difference, according to the clear consensus at the Office of Independent Counsel. If they could prove a falsehood—any falsehood—they were going to make a case, regardless of the subject matter. In a United States Attorney’s Office, where judges and prosecutors were lied to with regularity, prosecutors would weigh the significance of the false statements and consider whether the government’s resources might be better deployed in another way. But in an independent counsel’s office, especially this one, this kind of thinking was anathema. As Starr said in one of his curbside news conferences, “Okay, you’re taking an oath … under God, that you will—‘so help me, God, that I will tell the truth.’ That’s awfully important. Now that means we attach a special importance to it. There’s no room for white lies. There’s no room for shading. There’s only room for truth.… You cannot defile the temple of justice.”

So Starr would pursue the perjury about sex, and that raised a different issue. In her testimony before the grand jury on August 6, Lewinsky had spoken in a general way about her sexual relationship with the president. Now, in light of how the Starr team wanted to parse Clinton’s answers in the grand jury, there would be a need for a great deal more specificity about the mechanics of their encounters. How they chose to conduct that next examination of Lewinsky would itself turn out to be a landmark in the history of American law enforcement.

Women who met Starr for the first time often remarked on his courtliness—opening doors, pulling out chairs, and generally behaving as he was taught
in San Antonio. He was a good listener, too, and his pet phrase “the deliberative process” almost became a joke around the OIC because things sometimes moved so slowly. But no matter how long it took, Starr believed in hearing everyone out. At the end of the process, though, one thing remained the same in any organization Starr had led: he followed the advice of men.