A Woman in Charge (81 page)

I
N MID
-S
EPTEMBER,
Hillary and Bill traveled with Chelsea to Stanford for freshman orientation week. Young Secret Service agents assigned to protect her would pass for students, live in a dorm room near hers, and hang back to the maximum extent possible. Chelsea's room, shared with another freshman woman, was impossibly small, and Hillary tried finding ways to rearrange the furniture to create more space. Bill, improbably, had gotten hold of a wrench that he used to disassemble and reassemble her bed so it could be moved. On the day they departed to return to Washington, Chelsea's parents were suffering from empty-nest syndrome; they were disoriented, teary, nostalgic, sad, and proud. In a month Hillary would turn fifty.

In expectation of an emptier house, Hillary and Chelsea had bought Bill a dog. After studying breeds and looking at pictures, they decided on a Labrador as being the right size and temperament for the White House and the president. For Christmas the previous December, they had found a three-month-old chocolate Lab puppy who loved Bill and vice versa. He was named Buddy, in favor of a slew of other names that included Arkinpaws and Clin Tin Tin.

Now, with Chelsea gone, Hillary and Bill turned to each other. Those who saw them together noted a renewed closeness, and—with some breathing space now that they were almost certain Hillary would not be indicted—a lessening of tension in the White House. Hillary said she still “lit up” when Bill entered the room, that they were best friends. Their confidences to each other were their own, and almost never did they share them with others. Though they had, in her words, “our share of problems,” they continued to make each other laugh. She professed to be certain that their laughter and mutual caring would carry them through the second term.

17

The Longest Season

Starr…would undoubtedly take it as far as he could.

—Living History

T
HE
W
ASHINGTON
P
OST
headline across page one in its editions of Wednesday, January 21, 1998, was shocking: “Clinton Accused of Urging Aide to Lie.” Bill had spent a tense night and early morning on the phone with Vernon Jordan, Bob Bennett, Bruce Lindsey, David Kendall, and Betty Currie, talking about the story and trying to keep his legal ducks aligned. Hillary said later he nudged her awake just after 7
A.M.
and sat on the edge of their bed. “You're not going to believe this,” she quoted him telling her, but there were “news reports” blanketing the Internet and airwaves as well, that he had had an affair with a young White House intern named Monica Lewinsky and had asked her to lie about it to Paula Jones's lawyers. Starr had been granted authority from Attorney General Reno to broaden his already vast investigation to determine if criminal charges against the president were justified. Bill and Jordan had tried to find a job in the private sector for Lewinsky, twenty-four; but Starr was out to prove that this was to buy her silence about a sexual relationship, the existence of which Bill had denied under oath.

Bill explained to Hillary—each would say later—that he had “encouraged” the intern when she came to him seeking job advice, that he had tried to be helpful, and that she had misunderstood or misinterpreted his willingness to help. They had only spoken a few times. There was no affair, nothing untoward. Years later Hillary would write that she had little trouble believing Bill because he had often been accused of such things groundlessly. In
Living History
she wrote that she quizzed Bill over and over on the matter that morning, and Bill continually said he did nothing “improper,” though he could imagine how his actions might be “misread.” We have only the sanitary and skeletal accounts of Bill and Hillary with which to judge the severity of the interrogation.

For Hillary, the investment in the truthfulness of Bill's explanation was nothing less than a lifetime's savings. Everything, including the presidency and their marriage, was at stake; she understood that immediately. She also knew that Bill's staggering negligence meant they were about to endure an inquiry incomparably worse than anything before.

She had to take on an effective and supportive defense of her husband and she settled on empathy: Bill was always reaching out to people he could help, she would make clear. He had told Hillary that he had tried “to minister” to the intern, who was both troubled and needy, and had come on to him.

Later, many friends of the Clintons were incredulous that Hillary could have believed Bill's story—initially and, more incomprehensibly, over the next seven months. But failure to accept Bill's explanation would have meant the total collapse of her world. She had already borne the brunt of six years of vicious pursuit by people like those pushing the Jones case and feeding the Starr investigation; she permitted herself to believe these were just more politically motivated attacks. She wrote that she repeatedly challenged her own assumptions as the “Lewinsky imbroglio,” as she called it, played out.

Later that morning, Bill told a friend that he doubted his presidency would survive the week. He feared a stampede in which Democrats, urged on by the press, would join Republicans in demanding his resignation. If the president shared this assessment with Hillary, it has never become known. But events were moving so swiftly by the time she had left the White House at 10
A.M.
for a convocation speech at Goucher College in Baltimore that she could easily imagine such a scenario. George Stephanopoulos, who had resigned from the White House staff immediately after the November 1996 election, was already talking on an extended edition of the
Today
show about the possibility of the president's impeachment, as was Sam Donaldson on
Good Morning America.
The networks went into special programming as their news anchors, in Cuba to cover a historic meeting between the pope and Castro, hurried to the Havana airport and chartered back to their stateside chairs on the set.

As the pressure intensified, Hillary was already planning how their presidency could be saved. She knew she was once again the key to their potential survival. She understood that everyone would be rigorously examining her words and actions, looking to her for clues. With aides already walking around the West Wing dazed, it was essential that, first, she and Bill be seen carrying on with their daily routines, and second, that it be made clear they intended to fight back. She did not mention it in
Living History,
but as Bill told a friend, he knew his marriage was now at stake, too.

Less truthfully, he told one of his principal aides that morning, “Well, this girl, she kept flirting with me. She kept coming on to me. But it was innocent. I mean I hugged her at events…but that was it.” “And that was the line,” said the aide. “And it stood up pretty well for a while. And a lot of us wanted to believe that that's all it was…. And she [Hillary]wanted to believe it. I mean how could you not?”

Later, Hillary would write: “I will never truly understand what was going through my husband's mind that day.” Only he could explain “why he felt he had to deceive me and others.” He did, in his own memoir: “I was deeply ashamed…and I didn't want [the truth] to come out. I was trying to protect my family and myself from my selfish stupidity.”

The prevarication required for his survival as president and as Hillary's husband was extensive, beginning with the lie he'd already told Jones's lawyers about his relationship with Lewinsky. He didn't have the options that most middle-aged men branded as adulterers had: to work it out in the privacy of the marriage, seek counseling, get a divorce, enroll in a twelve-step program.

Since Hillary's withdrawal from the West Wing, credible rumors about Bill's flirtations with several women had become increasingly frequent, especially in the previous year and a half. Lewinsky was hardly unknown to the president's aides, many of whom had been concerned and suspicious about her easy access to the Oval Office, facilitated by Betty Currie. How far he had gone with the women, however, was strictly a matter of conjecture.

At a 9
A.M.
meeting in the Oval Office, Bill told Erskine Bowles and Bowles's top deputies, John Podesta and Sylvia Matthews, that he'd had no sexual relationship with the intern and denied asking anyone to lie. “When the facts come out, you'll understand,” he said. The meeting was fraught. Bowles, one of Clinton's best friends, had followed the president's orders and asked Podesta to help Lewinsky find a job, knowing little about their relationship. He was repulsed simply by the thought of Bill's alleged behavior, its possibility, and wanted nothing to do with defending him. He would concern himself thereafter with the institutional business of the presidency, speaking to the president only about policy and staff matters.

Around the same time, Hillary phoned Sidney Blumenthal and told him that the president was being falsely accused. She repeated Bill's explanation of events.

In years to come, there would be a lot of learned commentary about how much better off Bill would have been had he absorbed the supposed “lesson” of Watergate: that the cover-up is worse than the crime. Therefore, went this reasoning, a confession by Clinton that day or sometime during the following week would have been accepted within the political system, the president would have been censured by Congress, Starr would have desisted, and the matter would have gradually passed.

But, as Clinton recognized, the idea of transfiguring this principle to his relationship with Monica Lewinsky was absurd. Confess, he was all but certain, and he would be finished as president and as Hillary's husband. The Watergate cover-up had been an essential element of Nixon's larger crimes, far more egregious than approving a single break-in, because it was intended to keep investigators from the explosive cache of “White House horrors” (as his attorney general, John Mitchell, called them), of grievous constitutional abuse of the electoral and national security systems of the country. Bill Clinton confessing to the nation about a predatory affair with a bosomy woman-child employee barely seven years older than his teenage daughter was a different matter altogether. The attitude of the post-Watergate press and Congress, especially Speaker Gingrich's House, did not augur for the confessional, but rather the stake.

Dick Morris called the president at 11:25
A.M.
“You poor son of a bitch,” Morris said he told the president. “I know just what you're going through.” The two hadn't spoken since Morris's resignation.

“I didn't do what they said I did, but I did do something,” Morris, in sworn testimony, quoted Clinton as telling him. “I've tried to shut myself down…sexually, I mean…. But sometimes I slipped up, and with this girl, I just slipped up.” When Morris recommended that Bill ask the country for “forgiveness,” the president suggested he take a poll on the idea, though it was unclear what it was that would be forgiven. Bill met with aides that morning in the Cabinet Room, to discuss the themes of his State of the Union address, scheduled the following Tuesday. He was “ashen,” and altogether distracted, said Mark Penn, who had succeeded Stan Greenberg as the Clinton pollster. There were no discussions about how the scandal might affect the speech. People present were almost whispering; one said later that he wasn't even certain there would be a State of the Union address.

Hillary had been asked to speak at Goucher on civil rights—it was the day after Martin Luther King's birthday—by Taylor Branch, a part-time professor there and the Clintons' good friend since the summer of George McGovern's campaign. Branch's wife, Christy Marcy, worked for Hillary. During the train ride to Baltimore, Hillary and her entourage were in a special parlor car reserved for them. David Kendall reached her there by telephone with more information: he had been called the previous week by journalists asking about another woman whose name had come up in the Jones litigation—a circumstance, Hillary said later, Kendall judged potentially problematical at the time but not cause for serious concern. Kendall told her that on January 16, Janet Reno had written the supervisory three-judge panel recommending that Starr's jurisdiction be expanded to include the Lewinsky matter and possible obstruction of justice.

A logical sequence of events must have fallen into place for Hillary as she processed this information. Bill had been interviewed under oath in the Paula Jones case the previous Saturday, January 17, at the White House, and spent many hours preparing for his testimony. Hillary had wished him luck, embraced him, and then waited in the residence for him to return. He had been upset and worn out when he got back upstairs, Hillary wrote, and made clear to her his resentment and disgust for what he regarded as a farcical process. Though they had plans to take Erksine Bowles and his wife to dinner downtown as thanks for his White House service and to convince him to stay on for the rest of the year, Bill wanted to cancel and, instead, the two of them had a quiet dinner at home. She told a radio interviewer that the next day they both stayed home (in fact, they had gone to church) and that she had busied herself with domestic chores, including cleaning out closets.

Hillary declined to take several phone calls from the president during the train ride after Kendall's call, according to an aide.

Her speech at Goucher was covered by more reporters than Hillary had seen at any of her events since her Pink Press Conference. The mob at the train station was even larger as she prepared to depart Baltimore. She responded unhesitatingly to the reporters who were shouting questions about whether she believed her husband this time. She was calmly assertive, almost matter-of-fact. “Absolutely,” she said.

Hillary was aware that morning that whatever the facts, tens of millions of Americans, and many millions more around the world, were once again discussing her humiliation and (as she described it) asking how she could get up in the morning and be seen in public. She cited Eleanor Roosevelt's observation that a woman in political life must “develop skin as tough as rhinoceros hide.”

Upon her return to the White House in the late afternoon, she went upstairs to the residence and phoned Sidney Blumenthal, who had become a kind of alter ego for Hillary, especially since the death of Vince Foster. Bill had summoned Blumenthal to the Oval Office while Hillary was at Goucher and recounted to him a much more detailed version of the story he'd told Hillary. He'd been obviously nervous, pacing behind his desk. Lewinsky had “made a sexual demand on me,” said the president, and when he denied her advances, she threatened him. He felt like a character in
Darkness at Noon,
the president explained. He said it was hard for him not to try to help people in need.

Blumenthal wanted to know whether Bill had ever been alone with Lewinsky. They had always been within sight or hearing of someone, the president said. He was no longer the straying kind. He had hurt people in the past, but those days were over.

“I had never seen him this off-balance before,” Blumenthal recalled. “I was used to seeing him in the Oval Office as a master of policies, facts, and ideas, the judge of arguments, always in control. Now he described himself as being at the mercy of his enemies, uncertain about what to say or do. In that Oval Office encounter I saw a man who was beside himself.”

Blumenthal said he recognized later that Bill had probably told him such an elaborate tale because “I was close to Hillary and there was nothing more important to him at that moment than protecting his marriage.” Correctly, Bill knew they would compare notes.