God and Hillary Clinton (20 page)

The president then expressed sorrow for all those he had hurt, from his family to Monica's family to his staff, and asked for forgiveness from everyone. He said he believed that “to be forgiven, more than sorrow is required.” The first step, said Clinton, was the need for “genuine repentance” by the sinner, “a determination to change and to repair breaches of my own making,” to repair “what my Bible calls a broken spirit.” He proclaimed, “I have repented.” That repentance, he conceded, needed to be “genuine and sustained, and if I can then maintain both a broken spirit and a strong heart, then good can come of this for our country, as well as for me and my family.”

This personal purging was met with shouts of amen and hallelujah from those present, as Bill said it was now a “time for turning,” to start “all over again.” This is a “painful” process, said the sinner, which “means saying I am sorry. It means recognizing that we have
the ability to change. These things are terribly hard to do. But unless we turn, we will be trapped forever in yesterday's ways.” In this strikingly candid speech, Clinton then made a vow to these fellow Christian witnesses: He would continue to seek the spiritual counsel of the three pastors with whom he had been meeting, noting that they were assisting him in overcoming “the temptations that have conquered me.”

This was not merely a gathering of Christian men, of promise keepers, Hillary was there also, as was her old pastor from First United Methodist in Little Rock, the Reverend Ed Matthews, who in the past had dealt with questions of Bill's womanizing. Matthews had not lost touch with Hillary, recalling one occasion when she returned to Little Rock for a service after moving to Washington; she alarmed the Secret Service that day when she rose to help pass the collection plate, as she had always done.
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Those were better days. This one on September 11, 1998, was not.

In an interview a year later with Gail Sheehy, Matthews relayed Hillary's emotional reaction to her husband's witness that day. “She had tear-filled eyes,” said Matthews, who had been sitting at the table next to Hillary and immediately went over and knelt next to her as soon as her husband left the podium. He said she whispered to him, “I never heard him say that before. And you know what we've been through.” She and Matthews then talked about that forgiveness that her spouse was seeking. “You know that forgiveness has nothing to do with human logic,” he told her. “Forgiveness has strictly to do with grace. And that's God's gift. I hope you are in touch with that. I'm praying that you are.” Hillary then smiled and said, “I think I'm getting there.”
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In 2005, Matthews talked about the incident again. Matthews reported that Bill and Hillary had talked about the Monica affair the night before, though he could not relay any details. That afternoon, the pastor recalled that it had “felt good” for him to be able to take
Hillary's hand at the luncheon and “let her cry.” Asked if Hillary actually cried to him, Matthews clarified:

Matthews added, “Those of us who understand forgiveness know that it is outside of human economy—it is God's gift—there is no way we can forgive without Him.” He says that Hillary grasps this concept from the recesses of her Wesleyan tradition.

Healing and forgiveness meant getting back to church. On September 20, 1998, for the first time since August 17, when Bill admitted to his momentary lapse with Monica Lewinsky, the Clintons returned to church, arriving for the 11
A.M
. service at Foundry.

They had taken a thirty-four-day hiatus from their normal weekly churchgoing, perhaps figuring the public would view Bill as a hypocrite if he was seen walking in and out of church with a Bible tucked under his arm after admitting his inappropriate relationship with Lewinsky—a misperception often held by people who do not understand that this ever-present tendency to sin is what compels Christians to need to go to church. The Clintons had skipped two weeks of church while vacationing on Martha's Vineyard, and then again avoided services after their return to Washington.
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Apparently the healing process did indeed begin. In his memoirs,
published in 2004, Bill said that he and Hillary “began a serious counseling program,” which occurred one day a week for about a year. “For the first time in my life,” wrote Bill, “I actually talked openly about feelings, experiences, and opinions about life, love, and the nature of relationships. I didn't like everything I learned about myself or my past.” He said that in these “long counseling sessions” and their conversations about them afterward, he and Hillary “got to know each other again, beyond the work and ideas we shared and the child we adored. I had always loved her very much, but not always very well.” He said he was grateful that she had been “brave” enough to participate in the counseling: “We were still each other's best friend, and I hoped we could save our marriage.” Yet, in the meantime, he explained, “I was still sleeping on a couch”—a sofa in the small living room that adjoined their bedroom, where he was confined for at least the next two months or more. Eventually, said the president, he “got off the couch.”
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In the end, the Clintons managed once again to keep their marriage together. Of course, a divorce of a sitting first couple was certainly out of the question, especially for these two partners.
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And the first lady did extend forgiveness, later telling ABC's Barbara Walters that she had forgiven her husband's “sins of weakness.” She had reached peace. “I don't think people know how strong your faith is,” Walters remarked. “It must have helped you.” Yes, Hillary replied. “I've relied on prayer…ultimately I had to get down on my knees and I had to pray and I had to look for answers that only could come to me.”
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The Limits of Forgiveness

Though Bill and Hillary were each relying on the intertwined ideas of faith and forgiveness in ways they never had before, they each had limits to those feelings, and those limits stopped at Kenneth Starr.
For the remainder of 1998, people throughout the administration sought to portray Starr and the special prosecutor's office as being overrun by puritanical Christian fundamentalists who were committed to the demise of the president. Clinton supporter and Democratic strategist James Carville lampooned Starr for his allegedly unsophisticated, embarrassing practice of singing hymns and praying during jogs along a creek near his home. “He goes down by the Potomac and listens to hymns, as the cleansing water of the Potomac goes by, and we're going to wash all the Sodomites and fornicators out of town,” screeched Carville. Likewise, Sidney Blumenthal, a White House aide, said that Starr was a “zealot on a mission derived from a higher authority,” and made similar comments about the independent counsel's staff, such as Starr's chief deputy in Little Rock, W. Hickman Ewing, who was labeled a “religious fanatic.”
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The public mockery of Starr's office was a regrettable component to the White House's counteroffensive during this time. In a telling display of spiritual double standards, the public face of the Clintons portrayed their faith in God as their great stabilizer in this time of turmoil, while behind the scenes their aides were quick to ridicule those on the opposing side who also relied on their spirituality to sustain them.

As Laura Ingraham—a political pundit and author of a book on Hillary—pointed out, the one voice who could have apologized for this behavior in an authoritative way was Hillary the devout Christian. Though she would not have needed to accept all of Starr's arguments, she at least could have become a forceful voice against staff members' caricaturing of Starr as an irrational fundamentalist. Yet she remained silent, allowing the stigma against belief to percolate throughout the administration's public face.
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The point is well taken. She could have risen above the mudslinging, setting a higher standard. The politics would have been brilliant. By then, however, the dogs were so ferocious and the vituperation so strong that cool heads were hard to find.

By countering the special prosecutor's office with accusations of Christian extremism, the Clinton staff offered the American public reasons to disavow Starr's conclusions. While the Clintons might have believed that this would help them dodge political heat, there was another unanticipated result that a moral Methodist like Hillary never could have anticipated: In their willingness to bend over backward to defend their president, and to dismiss Bill Clinton's behavior as merely a Republican attempt to smear the Clinton presidency, many liberals, and many feminists, made the situation even worse, searching for responses that further coarsened what even Hillary judged was an overly sexualized culture. In one defense of Bill Clinton, Nina Burleigh, who covered the White House for
Time
, wrote in
Mirabella
magazine, “I'd be happy to give him [oral sex] just to thank him for keeping abortion legal.” Revealing more than a sliver of journalistic bias toward her subject, Burleigh added: “I think American women should be lining up with their presidential kneepads on, to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.”
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Burleigh was far from the only person to dismiss Bill's behavior because of politics. Mike Nichols, journalist Diane Sawyer's husband, told the
Washington Post
: “If this century has taught us anything, it's that sexuality is uncontrollable…. We expect it to be tailored, controlled, changed…like a pet cat. But it's not going to happen.” Thus, waxed Nichols of his president, “So our charismatic men with high energy…are beginning to say: ‘The hell with this! I'm not going to get in a position where I'll be torn to bits every time I look at a female walking by.'”
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Likewise, actress Emma Thompson, who played Hillary in the film version of a book based on the 1992 Clinton campaign,
Primary Colors
, agreed that Clinton was paving a new frontier for “alpha males.” She said of the Clintons: “powerful, brilliant women have been married to powerful, philandering men for hundreds of years…. You may marry an alpha male—that's what happens. This almost seems natural for any guy in power.” Thompson found it “a very erotic situation.”
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The problem, the cultural mavens were concluding, was not Bill Clinton, but the repressive Victorians complaining about Bill Clinton. So it went that the culture, not the president, was to blame for the response to his behavior. The culture, it seemed, merely needs another dose of 1960s counterculture to free itself from its taboo of adultery.

Many young people around the country—whom Mrs. Clinton and her husband had been trumpeting because of the recent decline in teen pregnancy (a trend for which the Clintons took credit)—suddenly found themselves confused and misled by Bill's suggestion that oral sex might not even be technically considered “sex.” Dana Gresh, an evangelical author who specializes in outreach to young adults, alluded to how this attitude made inroads among conservative Christian teens, who began referring to oral sex as “Christian sex”—a kind of “non-sex” sexual activity that allegedly keeps one pure because it is not true, full intercourse.
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Finally, Bill Clinton's philandering led to ludicrous talk of Mrs. Clinton's husband suffering from a “sickness” called “sex addiction,” a new, modern-day “disorder” particularly unique to Bill among adult males. Hugh Rodham's daughter would almost certainly have been the first to tell her husband that she did not want to hear any nonsense about an addiction. Likewise unfortunate was the defense that “everyone did it,” meaning that “all” presidents had engaged in such behavior, which, of course, was equally ridiculous, and in the process demeaned the presidency even more. As Eleanor Roosevelt's husband once said: “The presidency is preeminently a place of moral leadership.”
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These myriad justifications excusing the president's actions had the cumulative effect of overshadowing much of the actual debate over the morals and the behavior of the president. And the real losers in all this were the American people.

One person who vehemently disagreed with many of these rationalizations was Hillary, as Bob Woodward revealed in his 1999 book,
Shadow
. There he reported that Hillary was “devastated,” “humiliated,” and she even deduced that this must be part of God's plan—it was her time to suffer, her cross to bear. “I've got to take this,” she told a friend. “I have to take this punishment. I don't know why God has chosen this for me. But He has, and it will be revealed to me. God is doing this, and He knows the reason. There is some reason.”
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In addition to the private weight she was feeling, she suddenly found herself compromised in her ability to make a difference on some of her most passionate issues. An embarrassing example of her newfound limitations occurred on July 16, 1998, during the buildup to the Starr Report, when Hillary addressed the 150th anniversary of the first Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. She asserted that women were still fighting for certain things, like better jobs and wages and “respect at home.” At one point during the speech, some wag flew overhead in a private airplane with a giant banner that read, “Who's at home watching Bill?”