Living History (28 page)

The nation was still reeling from the ghastly outcome of the standoff in Waco, Texas, when the Branch Davidians shot and killed four Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents and wounded twenty others as they tried to serve warrants. In the confrontation that followed on April 19, members of the group set the compound on fire, and at least eighty Branch Davidians were killed, including children. It was a devastating loss of life, and though an independent investigation concluded that the Branch Davidian leadership was responsible for the fires and gunshots that resulted in so many deaths, it could do nothing to mitigate the regret we all felt over the violence and death caused by a perversion of religion.

In the former Yugoslavia, Bosnian Serbs were besieging the Muslim town of Srebrenica in a frenzy of “ethnic cleansing.” Another example of the misuse of religious differences for purposes of political power. The news media were sending back horrific pictures of civilian massacres and emaciated prisoners, reminiscent of the Nazi atrocities in Europe. The situation became more agonizing as the death toll mounted, and I was disgusted by the failure of the United Nations to intervene or even to protect the Muslim population.

In the shadow of these events, Bill and I hosted twelve Presidents and Prime Ministers at the White House who had come to Washington for the dedication of the Holocaust Museum on April 22. Some of the visiting leaders were pressuring the United States to get more involved in the U.N. effort to stop the slaughter in Bosnia. The most eloquent messenger of this viewpoint was Elie Wiesel, who delivered an impassioned speech about Bosnia at the museum dedication. Wiesel, a Nazi death camp survivor and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, turned to Bill and said: “Mr. President … I have been in the former Yugoslavia. … I cannot sleep since what I have seen. As a Jew I am saying that.

We must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country.” I had read Night, Wiesel’s chilling account of his experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, the death camps in Poland and Germany. I admired his writing and dedication to human rights, and since that day, he and his wife, Marion, have been friends.

Sitting in the gray drizzle, I agreed with Elie’s words, because I was convinced that the only way to stop the genocide in Bosnia was through selective air strikes against Serbian targets. I knew that Bill was frustrated by Europe’s failure to act after it had insisted that Bosnia was in its own backyard and was its own problem to solve. Bill met with his advisers to consider American involvement in the peacekeeping effort and other options to end the conflict. The situation became more agonizing as the death toll mounted.

We were adjusting to the roller-coaster ride of good and bad news at home and around the world. On the Hill, Republicans had mounted a filibuster in the Senate and defeated the President’s economic stimulus package after the House had passed it. With so much going on, some of the administration’s best moments were eclipsed. To commemorate Earth Day, April 22, Bill pledged to sign an important international biodiversity treaty that President Bush had rejected. The following week, he announced a national service program, AmeriCorps, that would revive the idealism of the Peace Corps and VISTA and direct the energy of young volunteers to tackle the needs of our own country.

Whatever our public demands, Bill and I tried never to lose sight of our obligations as Chelsea’s parents. We went to every school event and stayed up with her while she finished her homework. Bill could still help with her eighthgrade algebra, and if he was traveling out of town, she would fax him her problems and then they would talk over solutions.

We also continued to insist on her privacy, to the dismay of some in the media and on Bill’s staff. The White House Press Office had convinced Bill to let NBC follow him around to film A Day in the Life of the President, which would air in early May. I agreed to participate but said Chelsea was off-limits. Bill’s staff tried to persuade me that it would be good for our image to be seen with Chelsea at breakfast or talking over homework. When that didn’t work, the show’s producer tried to persuade me. Finally, anchorman Tom Brokaw called. To Tom’s credit, when I said, “Absolutely not,” he told me he respected my decision.

We were also in the middle of making the private quarters a real home. This meant painting and wallpapering and installing bookshelves wherever we could. In the midst of the dust, paint and other chemicals used in redecorating, Chelsea developed a frightening respiratory reaction shortly after Easter, and I was more eager than ever to be near her all the time. We tried to keep her condition private, and few people knew how worried I was.

Chelsea recovered as we got the allergies under control. To cheer us both up, I took her to New York to see the American Ballet Theatre perform Sleeping Beauty. That was when my hair got me into more trouble. Susan Thomases told me I just had to try this wonderful stylist Frederic Fekkai. I was game and asked if he could stop by our room at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel before we went out that night. I liked him right away, so I agreed to try something new, a “carefree” cut similar to broadcast journalist Diane Sawyer’s.

It certainly was shorter, and a dramatic change. International headlines ensued.

Lisa Caputo, my press secretary, learned about the haircut in a late night phone call from Capricia Marshall, who was with me in New York.

“Don’t be mad at me,” said Capricia. “She cut her hair off.”

“What!”

“Susan just brought this guy into her hotel room, and when she came out, her hair was gone.”

“Oh, my God.”

The problem for Lisa was not a momentary public relations gaffe―she was used to handling hair stories―but a more complicated media concern. Since my staff once thought that there would be a health care package to present by May, I had agreed to let Katie Comic and her Today show crew trail me around the White House in advance of a major sit-down interview. NBC had spent hours taping me the prior week as a First Lady with a shoulder-length flip. The First Lady about to be interviewed live by Katie Couric had a new look. And there was no way to reshoot the earlier footage so I would look the same throughout the program.

Katie never blinked when she arrived at the White House and found me in my new ‘do. Nor did she complain that my pink suit did not exactly complement her salmoncolored outfit. I had always liked watching her on TV, and I was happy to find that she was as down-to-earth in real life as she seemed on the screen―and a good sport too.

I was still learning the ropes and still discovering what it meant to be America’s First Lady. The difference between being a Governor’s wife and a President’s is immeasurable.

Suddenly the people around you spend a lot of time anticipating what will make you happy. Sometimes those people don’t know you well or misread you. Everything you say is amplified. And you have to be very careful what you wish for, or you’ll get it by the caseload.

I was taking one of my first solo trips as First Lady when a young aide asked me, “What would you like to drink in your suite?”

“You know, I really feel like a Diet Dr Pepper,” I said.

For years afterward, every time I opened a fridge in a hotel suite, it was loaded with Diet Dr Pepper. People would come up to me with frosty glasses of it. I felt like the sorcerer’s apprentice, the Mickey Mouse character in the classic animated film Fantasia: I couldn’t turn off the Dr Pepper machine.

This is a benign story, but the implications were sobering. I had to recognize how many people wanted to do whatever they could to please me and how seriously they might misinterpret what I wanted. I simply could not say, “Well, look into it,” when presented with a problem. Maybe I should have figured that out earlier. But I didn’t, until I was stuck with the consequences of an offhand comment I made after hearing about concerns of financial mismanagement and waste in the White House Travel Office. I said to Chief of Staff Mack McLarty that if there were such problems, I hoped he would “look into it.”

“Travelgate,” as it came to be known in the media, was perhaps worthy of a two-or three-week life span; instead, in a partisan political climate, it became the first manifestation of an obsession for investigation that persisted into the next millennium.

Before we moved into the White House, neither Bill nor I nor our immediate staff had known that there was a White House Travel Office. The travel office charters planes, books hotel rooms, orders meals and generally takes care of the press when they travel with the President. The costs are billed to the news organizations. Although we didn’t know much about what the office did, we certainly didn’t want to ignore or appear to condone allegations of misuse of funds anywhere in the White House. An audit by KPMG Peat Marwick had discovered that the Director of the Travel Office kept an offbook ledger, that a minimum of $18,000 of checks had not been properly accounted for and that the office’s records were in “shambles.” Based on these findings, Mack and the White House Counsel’s Office decided to fire the travel office staff and reorganize the department.

These actions, which seemed like no-brainers to the decision makers involved, ignited a firestorm. When Dee Dee Myers, the President’s press secretary―and the first woman to hold that position―announced the dismissals in her morning briefing on May 19, 1993, we were surprised by the reaction in the press room. The administration was trying to look out for the media’s financial interests, as well as the country’s, while some members of the press were focused on the fact that their friends in the travel office, who serve at the pleasure of the President, had been fired. The Administration was charged with amateurism and cronyism due to the fact that a White House employee, who was one of Bill’s distant relatives and had experience making travel arrangements, was temporarily put in charge of the revamped travel office. Bill Kennedy, my former law partner who also worked in the counsel’s office, had called on the FBI to investigate the case, further inflaming some of the press. I have the highest regard for Bill Kennedy’s honesty and legal skills. Like most of us, however, he was a newcomer to Washington and its ways. He didn’t know that his direct contact with the FBI, asking them to investigate the alleged misuse of funds, would be considered a serious breach of Washington protocol.

After an internal review, released in full to the media, Mack McLarty publicly reprimanded four Administration officials, including Watkins and Kennedy, for their poor judgment in the way they handled the matter. But at least seven separate investigations―

including those conducted by the White House, the General Accounting Office, the FBI and Kenneth Starr’s Office of the Independent Counsel―failed to turn up any illegality, wrongdoing or conflicts of interest by anyone in the Administration and confirmed that the initial concerns about the travel office were justified. The Independent Counsel, for example, concluded that the decision to fire the Travel Office political employees was lawful and that there was evidence of financial mismanagement and irregularities.

The Justice Department found enough evidence to indict and try the former head of the travel office for embezzlement. According to press reports, he offered to plead guilty to a criminal charge and to serve a brief prison sentence, but the prosecutor insisted on going to trial on a felony charge. After several famous journalists testified as character witnesses at his trial, he was ultimately acquitted.

Despite the unanimous conclusion that there was no illegality in the White House’s handling of the affair, it was a disastrously inauspicious first date with the White House press. I’m not sure I’ve ever learned so much so fast about the consequences of saying or doing anything before knowing exactly what’s going on. And for a long time after, I would wake up in the middle of the night worrying that the actions and reactions concerning the travel office helped drive Vince Foster to take his own life. Vince Foster was stung by the travel office affair. A meticulous, decent and honorable man, he felt that he had let down the President, Bill Kennedy, Mack McLarty and me by failing to understand and contain the drama. Apparently the final blow came in a series of spiteful editorials published in The Wall Street Journal, which attacked the integrity and competence of all the Arkansas lawyers in the Clinton Administration. On June 17, 1993, an editorial titled “Who Is Vince Foster?” proclaimed that the most “disturbing” thing about the Administration was “its carelessness about following the law.” For the next month, the Journal continued its editorial campaign to paint the Clinton White House and my colleagues from the Rose Firm as some sort of corrupt cabal.

Bill and I may have been inexperienced in our White House roles, but we were seasoned enough in the rough world of politics. We knew we had to isolate the attacks and focus on the reality of our lives. Vince Foster had no such defenses. He was new to this culture, and he took the criticism to heart. Although we will never know what went through his mind in those last weeks of his life, I believe that as he absorbed each accusation, he was driven deeper into pain and distress. I will go to my own grave wishing I had spent more time with him and had somehow seen the signs of his despair. But he was a very private person, and nobody―not his wife, Lisa, or his closest colleagues, or his sister Sheila, with whom he had always been close―had any idea of the depth of his depression.

The last time I remember speaking to Vince was in mid June, on the Saturday night before Father’s Day. Bill was out of town giving a commencement address, so I made plans to go out to dinner with WebbHubbell; his wife, Suzy; the Fosters and a few other couples from Arkansas. We arranged to meet between seven and eight o’clock at the Hubbels’ house.

Just as I was getting ready to leave the White House, Lisa Caputo called to tell me that the lead story in the “Style” section of the next day’s Washington Post would be about Bill’s birth father, William Blythe. The story would reveal that he had been married at least twice before he met Bill’s mother―something nobody in the family had known-