Living History (35 page)

Hours later the house was still as packed as a church on Easter Sunday, but without Virginia’s presence, it felt as though the whole choir were missing.

There wasn’t a church in Hot Springs big enough to accommodate a lifetime’s worth of Virginia’s friends. The memorial service would have to be held at the Convention Center in downtown Hot Springs. Bill told me, “If the weather were better, we could have used Oaklawn racetrack. Mother would have loved that!” I smiled at the thought of the track filled with thousands of racing fans cheering one of their own.

As the funeral procession drove through Hot Springs the next morning, the roads were lined with people who silently paid their respects. The service celebrated Virginia’s life with stories and hymns, but nothing could capture the essence of this unique woman who had shared her love of life with anyone who crossed her path.

After the service, we drove to the cemetery in Hope where Virginia would be laid to rest with her parents and first husband, Bill Blythe. Virginia had come home to Hope.

Air Force One picked us up at the airport in Hope for the sad flight back to Washington.

The plane was filled with family and friends who tried to lift Bill’s spirits. But even on the day he buried his mother, Bill couldn’t escape being hounded about Whitewater.

White House staff members and lawyers huddled with the President. Everyone was concerned that the drumbeat for appointing a special prosecutor was drowning out Bill’s message, but nobody could predict whether asking for a special prosecutor would quiet the drums. By the time we had landed at Andrews Air Force Base and helicoptered to the White House, Bill was obviously tired of the debate. He had to go back to Andrews to fly to Europe that night for long-scheduled meetings in Brussels and Prague about the expansion of NATO, followed by a state visit to Russia to address President Boris Yeltsin’s concern about NATO’s plans to move eastward. Before Bill left, he made it clear to me that he wanted the Whitewater issue resolved one way or another, and soon.

I had planned to join Bill in Moscow for the state visit on January 13. At Virginia’s funeral, we decided that I should bring Chelsea because we didn’t want to leave her in the White House at such a sad time. I knew a decision about the special prosecutor had to be made before we left. That Sunday, a number of leading Democrats appeared on the political talk shows to voice their support for a special prosecutor. None of them could explain exactly why this step was appropriate or necessary. They seemed to be caught up in the moment and wary of pressure from the press. The momentum kept building, and my own determination was wearing down.

My gut instinct, as a lawyer and a veteran of the Watergate impeachment inquiry staff, was to cooperate fully with any legitimate criminal inquiry but to resist giving someone free rein to probe indiscriminately and indefinitely. A “special” investigation should be triggered only by credible evidence of wrongdoing, and there was no such evidence.

Without credible evidence, a call for a special prosecutor would set a terrible precedent: From then on, every unsubstantiated charge against a President concerning events during any period of his life could require a special prosecutor.

The President’s political advisers predicted that a special prosecutor would eventually be forced on us and argued that it was better to appoint one and get it over with. George Stephanopoulos researched previous independent counsels and cited the case of President Carter and his brother, Billy, who were investigated for a disputed loan to a peanut warehouse in the mid-1970s. The special prosecutor requested by Carter completed his investigation in seven months and exonerated the Carters. That was encouraging. By contrast, the investigation into what was known as “the Iran-Contra affair,” begun in the Reagan-Bush Administration, had continued on for seven years. In that case, though, there was illegal activity by White House and other governmental personnel in the conduct of our nation’s foreign policy. Several Administration officials were indicted, including Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Lt. Col. Oliver North, who worked on the National Security Council.

Only David Kendall, Bernie Nussbaum and David Gergen agreed with me that we should resist a special prosecutor. Gergen considered a special prosecutor a “dangerous proposition.” Bill’s staff trooped in to lobby me, one after another, each delivering the same familiar message: I would destroy my husband’s Presidency if I didn’t support their strategy. Whitewater had to be pushed off the front pages so we could get on with the business of the administration, including health care reform.

I believed that we needed to distinguish between holding our ground when we were in the right and giving in to political expediency and pressure from the press. “Requesting a special prosecutor is wrong,” I said. But I couldn’t change their minds.

On January 3, Harold Ickes, an old friend and adviser from the 1992 campaign, had joined the administration as Deputy Chief of Staff. Bill had asked Harold, a sandy-haired, hyperkinetic lawyer, to coordinate the upcoming health care campaign. Within days he was diverted to organize a “Whitewater Response Team” composed of several senior advisers and members of the communications staff and counsel’s office. Harold was the best advocate to have in your corner during a fight. Like Kendall, he was a veteran of the civil rights movement in the South―in fact, Harold had been so badly beaten while organizing black voters in the Mississippi Delta that he had lost a kidney. Although he had spent most of his early life avoiding his legacy―at one point he worked breaking horses on a cattle ranch―he was the son of Harold Ickes, Sr., one of the most significant players in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s cabinet. Politics pumped through Harold’s veins, and the White House seemed to be his natural habitat.

Harold did his best to keep the Whitewater debate under control, but the turmoil continued in the West Wing. Each news story brought us closer to a fateful decision. The day after I returned to the White House from Hot Springs, Harold told me that he had reluctantly concluded we should request a special prosecutor.

On Tuesday evening, January 11, I arranged a conference call with Bill in Prague.

David Kendall and I met in the Oval Office with a handful of Bill’s top aides for a final debate on the issue. The scene reminded me of a cartoon I had seen: A man stood in front of two doors, obviously trying to decide which one to enter. A sign above the first door said, “Damned if you do.” The other said, “Damned if you don’t.”

It was the middle of the night in Europe. Bill was worn out and exasperated after days of hearing nothing but Whitewater questions from the media. He was also heartbroken about losing his mother, the one steady presence throughout his life and his chief cheerleader, offering unconditional love and support. I felt sorry for him and wished that he didn’t have to deal with such a crucial decision under these circumstances. He was terribly hoarse, and we had to lean in close to the black, batwing-shaped conference phone to hear his voice.

“I don’t know how much longer I can take this,” he said, frustrated that the press didn’t want to talk about the historic expansion of NATO that would soon open the door to the former Warsaw Pact nations. “All they want to know is why we’re ducking an independent investigation.”

George Stephanopoulos opened, calmly making the political arguments for the appointment of a special prosecutor. He said that a special prosecutor would get the media off Bill’s back, that it was inevitable and that any further delay would kill our legislative agenda.

Then Bernie Nussbaum made a forceful last-ditch plea for his position. Like me, Bernie knew that the prosecutors would be under enormous pressure to come up with indictments to justify their efforts. As Bernie kept stressing, we were already turning over documents to the Justice Department, and, because there was no credible evidence of wrongdoing, a special prosecutor could not, under the law, be ordered. We could only request one, which seemed truly absurd. A political circus would be welcome compared to a potentially endless legal process.

After several heated rounds back and forth, Bill, exhausted, had heard enough. I wrapped up the meeting, asking only David Kendall to remain for a few more words with the President.

The room was quiet for a moment, and then Bill spoke.

“Look, I think we’ve just got to do it,” he said. “We’ve got nothing to hide, and if this keeps up, it’s going to drown out our agenda.”

It was time to fold my cards. “I know that we’ve got to move past this,” I said. “But it’s up to you.”

David Kendall strongly agreed with Bernie. They were both experienced criminal lawyers who understood that the innocent could be persecuted. But they were outnumbered by the political advisers who just wanted the press to change the subject. David left the room, and I picked up the phone to talk to Bill alone.

“Why don’t you sleep on the decision,” I said. “If you’re still willing to do it, we’ll send a request to the Attorney General in the morning.”

“No,” he said, “let’s get this over with.” Though he feared, as much as I did, that we were underestimating the consequences of this decision, he told me to go ahead with the request. I felt terrible. He had been pushed into a decision that he didn’t feel comfortable about. But given the pressures confronting us, we didn’t know what else to do.

I walked into Bernie Nussbaum’s office to deliver the bad news in person and hugged my old friend. Though it was late, Bernie began to compose a letter to Janet Reno, relaying the President’s formal request that the Attorney General appoint a special prosecutor to conduct an independent investigation of Whitewater.

We will never know if Congress would eventually have forced an independent counsel on us. And we will never know whether releasing an inevitably incomplete set of personal documents to The Washington Post would have averted a special prosecutor. With the wisdom of hindsight, I wish I had fought harder and not let myself be persuaded to take the path of least resistance. Bernie and David were right. We were being swept up in what legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin later described as the politicization of the criminal justice system and the criminalization of the political system. What had been promoted as a quick fix to our political problems sapped the administration’s energy for the next seven years, unfairly invaded the lives of innocent people and diverted America’s attention from the challenges we faced at home and abroad.

It was Bill’s innate optimism and resilience that kept him going, inspired me and made it possible to implement most of his agenda for America by the end of his two terms. All that, however, was in the future as Chelsea and I boarded the plane to join Bill in Russia.

The descent into Moscow was turbulent, and I felt queasy when I walked off the plane. Chelsea got into a car with Capricia Marshall and I got into the official limousine with Alice Stover Pickering, wife of our Ambassador to Russia, Thomas Pickering. Both had been in numerous Foreign Service postings around the world. Tom Pickering later served with distinction as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs under Madeleine Albright. While driving into town for my meeting with Naina Yeltsin, I felt sick to my stomach. The speeding motorcade, preceded and followed by Russian police cars, could not stop. The backseat of the limousine was totally clean, without a cup, towel or napkin in sight. I bent my head over and threw up on the floor. Alice Pickering appeared totally unfazed and―to diminish my embarrassment―continued pointing out the sights. She never said a word to anyone, which I deeply appreciated. By the time we arrived at Spaso House, the Ambassador’s official residence, I was feeling a little better. After a quick shower, a change of clothes and a crucial encounter with a toothbrush, I was ready to start my schedule.

I was looking forward to seeing Mrs. Yeltsin, whom I had enjoyed meeting in Tokyo the previous summer. Naina had worked as a civil engineer in Yekaterinburg, where her husband had been the regional Communist Party head. She had a hearty sense of humor, and we laughed our way through a day of public appearances and private meals with local dignitaries.

This first visit to Russia was intended to strengthen relations between Bill and President Yeltsin so that they could constructively address issues such as the dismantling of the former Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal and the expansion eastward of NATO. While our husbands held their summit talks, Naina and I visited a hospital, newly painted in honor of our visit, to discuss the health care systems in our countries. Russia’s was deteriorating in the absence of the government support it had once received. The doctors we met were curious about our health care reform plan. They acknowledged the high quality of American medicine yet criticized our failure to guarantee health care to everyone.

They shared our goal of universal coverage but were facing difficulties in achieving it.

I finally caught up with Bill that evening. The Yeltsins hosted a state dinner that began with a receiving line in the newly refurbished St. Vladimir Hall and continued with dinner in the Hall of Facets, a many-mirrored room and one of the most beautiful I’ve seen anywhere in the world. I sat next to President Yeltsin, with whom I’d never had an extended visit, and he kept up a running commentary about the food and wine, informing me in all seriousness that red wine protected Russian sailors on nuclear-powered submarines from the ill effects of strontium 90. I always did like red wine.

Chelsea joined us after dinner for the entertainment in St. George’s Hall, and then Boris and Naina took us on an extensive tour of the private quarters in the Kremlin, where we spent the night. We enjoyed the Yeltsins immensely, and I hoped we would see more of them.

The next morning, as our long motorcade left the Kremlin, Chelsea and Capricia were somehow left behind, standing on the steps with Chelsea’s lone Secret Service agent and one of Bill’s valets. They realized what was happening as they watched the last car pull out and two men roll up the red carpet. The agent and Capricia spotted a beatup white van and raced over to it, determined to commandeer it. The driver, who was delivering sheets, spoke English. Once he understood their story, he loaded the four of them into the back of his van fore mad dash through the barricades to the airport. They made it, only to be refused entrance. The Russian security recognized Chelsea, but they couldn’t figure out why she was not with us inside. While they were trying to sort out the confusion, Chelsea and her party picked up their bags and ran toward the terminal. I didn’t discover that Chelsea was missing until we were ready to board the plane, and they came panting into the terminal. It seems funny now, but at the time I was beside myself worrying. I resolved not to let Chelsea or Capricia out of my sight for the rest of the trip.