A Woman in Charge (85 page)

Four days after Willey appeared on television, Gingrich and Representative Henry Hyde, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, sent a Republican staff delegation to the special prosecutor's office to sift through the evidence and get Starr's judgment on whether there would be enough there to justify an impeachment inquiry.

This was a moment Starr had been waiting for, and he told the delegation that the evidence of obstruction of justice and perjury against the president was mounting and voluminous. Moreover, the details of Bill's assignations with Lewinsky were, in Starr's judgment, demeaning to the presidency to the extent that neither the Congress nor the American people would want him in office, once disclosed. (When some of his deputies questioned the relevance of the lascivious details and language Starr chose to include in his report to Congress, the prosecutor replied, “I love the narrative,” and refused to expurgate it.)

The impeachment locomotive was now gathering steam. Hyde would at various times have doubts about the wisdom of continuing down the impeachment track, especially because Bill Clinton's popularity remained high, but from this point forward Gingrich had no hesitancy. Despite what he had told Hillary at the dinner for the Blairs, he had experienced a change of heart very soon afterward, or hadn't meant what he'd said at the time. And whatever his unease about the possible disclosure of his own marital problems, he subsequently enunciated a distinction: Bill Clinton had lied under oath while Gingrich had merely failed to live up to his own high standards and God's. “The president of the United States got in trouble for committing a felony in front of a sitting federal judge,” he said of Bill Clinton's impeachment. “I drew a line in my mind that said, ‘Even though I run the risk of being deeply embarrassed, and even though at a purely personal level I am not rendering judgment on another human being, as a leader of the government trying to uphold the rule of law, I have no choice except to move forward and say that you cannot accept…perjury in your highest officials.'”

Even the speaker's own aides believed that sheer grandiosity was part of Gingrich's enthusiasm for impeachment, given the nature of his ambitions, whether to take down the president or one day replace him. A bizarre rumor was circulating through the speaker's staff, which was first reported publicly by journalist Elizabeth Drew, and which Blumenthal seized on shortly after Gingrich had received Starr's heads-up. Drew, in an interview with
Salon
magazine, said:

Speaker Gingrich is talking to, and has been talking to over a period of time, close associates about the idea of impeaching both Clinton and Gore. It goes as follows: Gingrich believes that the report will be so tough that Clinton will be impeached [and removed or driven from office]. The thinking then goes that Gore, as his successor, will pardon Clinton. This, of course, leaves Gore in place as the incumbent president, which is not something the Republicans wish to have happen. So once Gore has pardoned Clinton, Gingrich's thinking goes, the Congress will impeach Gore for having pardoned Clinton. As one of these close associates of Gingrich said to me, “You can't have a Clinton strategy without a Gore strategy.”

I know this seems wild…. I'm simply reporting what the Speaker of the House [the next in line for the presidency, under the Constitution, after the vice president] has been talking about.

With Gingrich now known among his colleagues to be relishing the chance to have Clinton impeached, other Republicans felt more comfortable in their extreme advocacy. Senator John Ashcroft said he believed Willey's story was “credible” and that “we are now not just dealing on the basis of rumors and suspected leaks. We have sworn affidavits from a variety of settings.” And Republican whip Tom DeLay, himself as ethically challenged as any leader in the House of Representatives in decades, stated that the “faith the people have put in President Clinton has been violated time and again…. I cannot think of a better way to bring on formal congressional proceedings than to go on hindering, obstructing and belittling the judicial proceedings now under way.”
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Hillary tried to remain calm and in control. She told one friend about a book she had been reading by Myra McLarey on “the earthy stoicism of rural women.”

 

D
URING THE FIRST
five years of the Clinton presidency, Diane Blair would stay at the White House every month or two for several days. That was how she and Hillary kept in touch. Visiting late at night, after the first lady's official duties were over, “We can do gossip. We can do parents. We can do the whole bit,” she explained in 1999. But in the previous year of Lewinsky and impeachment, 1998, Diane spent much less time at the White House, “because I was a coward. There were things I didn't want to discuss with him, and I didn't want to discuss with her. I was upset and I was blue and I was angry. And, I wanted to be a friend, but I wasn't sure what was the best way to be a friend to her.” Diane, unlike Hillary, had made her own supposition early on about Bill and Lewinsky: “That he'd probably done something really stupid.”

Blair was present enough, though, to see that “the joy went out of the White House. You could just feel this, and even though there were denials about particulars, and this, that, and the other, it was clear that something had happened, which was wildly inappropriate, and which was foolish. I'm not even sure at what point Hillary began having darker and darker suspicions about what did and did not occur.” But by spring, her certainty was being shaken. Hillary had stopped reading newspapers “way back, in the early days of the administration,” said Blair. “They made her angry. She found them trivial…. And I was shocked sometimes. I'd come in from Fayetteville, Arkansas, and I would know a lot more about, you know—I read the
Times
and the
Post,
and a whole bunch of other things, that I would know a lot more about certain things that were going on than she did, just because she hadn't read them…. And knowing this, it was a very awkward time to be a good friend because I didn't want to be the one to tell her something that everybody was chatting about on the Internet, that she literally was not aware of.”

Diane was “as open to her as she wanted to be to me during that year. But we never really discussed it. I would ask, ‘How are you doing?' in a general way. ‘How are you feeling? Why don't you come down [to Arkansas]. Let's go take a trip.'…I mean I was trying to do that. But I did not force her to talk about the whole situation because I didn't how much she knew. I didn't know how much she wanted to know.”

Like her mother, Hillary has said, she rarely reveals her innermost feelings to even the closest of friends.

“She would call me,” said Diane, “but she never called and said, ‘What should we do? I'm going insane. I don't know what to believe.' Nothing. And when the other shoe dropped the week of his grand jury testimony—and it was clear that there had been a relationship with Lewinsky…. She could not talk to anyone.” For days.

 

F
RIENDS OF
the Clintons have long noted that when Bill has most needed Hillary's support, his attention and affection toward her flourishes. This was evident during their eleven-day tour of six African nations, starting March 22. Later, Hillary would write about a romantic interlude sitting alone with Bill in the back of a boat floating down the Chobe River in Botswana. They had seen elephants, hippos, eagles, crocodiles, and a mother lion and her four cubs that day. Though some critics denounced the tour as a way to divert attention from the Lewinsky scandal, the trip had been planned well before, and was to be the longest of the Clinton presidency. Bill had wanted to visit sub-Saharan Africa since his youth and now they were traveling to Ghana, Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa, Botswana, and Senegal to talk about economic development, environmental concerns, democracy, and human rights. No president had ever visited any of those African countries while in office.

It was true, though, that both were happy to get away from the internecine warfare of Washington, the unceasing rumor, speculation, and incessant talk of sex. And though Hillary's aides believe her veil of denial was lifting before the trip, she seemed able in this setting to put aside a large measure of the tension and seething. Moreover, they were visiting a part of the world where she had been before, and where her reputation was enormous, and mercifully disconnected from the tribal warfare back home.

On most of their previous foreign trips together as president and first lady, Hillary was forced by tradition to play the role of presidential wife, with each of her days filled with ceremonial tours and meetings that often meant relatively little to her. She frequently chafed at the schedules Bill's handlers arranged for her and was not much fun to be around. Her travels abroad of the past three or four years, without Bill, produced their own unique kind of expectation, excitement, and satisfaction. Now, on this trip, she was able to be a guide to him. As the traveling press noted, he needed her. She was the recipient of his rapt attention, and he was solicitous.

In Senegal, on April 1, the president took a call from Bob Bennett. Judge Susan Webber Wright, whom Bill had appointed to the federal bench but whose handling of the Jones case had won him no measure of comfort, had at last dismissed Paula Jones's suit on the grounds that it lacked legal merit. “This is fantastic,” Clinton said, and though there was consensus that he should not gloat, Fox News managed to film an exuberant Clinton from outside his hotel window, with a cigar in his mouth, beating an African drum.

Bill and Hillary's shared belief about the paramount moral and political importance of human rights was reflected in their itinerary and their discussions with African leaders and ordinary citizens alike. In South Africa, they spent many hours with then president Nelson Mandela, who took Bill to Robben Island, the notorious gulag where Mandela had spent eighteen years imprisoned for sedition, and from which he plotted the liberation of his country. Bill was also insistent on stopping in Rwanda before they left the continent for home, though it had not been on the original itinerary. Clinton would say later that his failure to act to stop the genocide in Rwanda, where almost one million people died in 1993–1994, was his greatest regret as president. At the Kigali airport, where they stopped for a few hours (the only arrangement the Secret Service would permit), he and Hillary met with several dozen people who had come to tell them how their mothers, fathers, children, and siblings had been slaughtered. Bill acknowledged to them that his decisions contributed to the mass killings in the country, and that the international community, and the nations of Africa, had failed a basic human obligation. “We did not act quickly enough after the killing began. We should not have allowed the refugee camps to become a safe haven for the killers. We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide.”

 

T
HROUGH THE SPRING
and during the Clintons' Africa trip, Starr had been thrown on the defensive by intense criticism about leaks from his grand jury investigation. Kendall had filed a motion in court citing fifty broadcasts and newspaper reports that appeared from their attribution to be based on conversations with prosecutors, investigators, and others “close to the investigation.” Starr was also getting little cooperation from Lewinsky's lawyers, and the Secret Service had asserted a privilege claiming that to interview agents who guarded the president would risk the president's protection. And the White House was claiming attorney-client privileges for Bruce Lindsey and other lawyers who had defended the Clintons, as well as for many documents. Starr was furious and decided to squeeze the White House again on the original Whitewater case. To her amazement, Hillary was again called to testify under oath, this time for almost five hours on April 25. “I never spent any significant time at all looking at the books and records of Whitewater,” she said when shown financial documents relating to the investment. Twice she invoked the privilege that allows spouses not to answer questions about discussions with their marital partner.

James McDougal had died on March 8. Vince Foster was dead. Starr decided to put further pressure on McDougal's ex-wife, Susan, and on May 4, she was indicted on charges of criminal contempt for continuing to refuse to answer questions about Bill Clinton. Starr's grand jury also indicted Webb and Suzy Hubbell for tax evasion on $1 million of income Hubbell received before entering prison—charges that were later dismissed in a decision upheld by the Supreme Court, with a single dissenter: the chief justice.

 

B
Y
M
AY
or perhaps June, the Clintons' closest aides noted an obvious change in the couple's interaction, even at official events. There was a chill they'd never seen before. They'd seen Hillary angry at Bill, but this was something entirely different.

In earlier years, the Clintons were demonstrably affectionate with each other in private. “They would hold hands,” said one of Bill's deputies. “They would kiss. In the Oval, she'd come in and…stand and touch…she'd put her arms around him…. Everybody would sort of leave when they got together, just the two of them. There was a lot of affection.”

By the end of July there was no demonstrable affection. In fact her disaffection was particularly notable at a memorial service for two police officers shot to death the previous winter when a deranged antigovernment protester tried to shoot his way into the Capitol. “Whatever part of the room Clinton moved in while we were in the holding room with other people, she moved to the opposite end,” said an aide. “When she did this, it was so obvious. If he was going to go one way, she was going to go the other way. She deliberately did not want to be anywhere near him at all. She wanted nothing to do with him.”