Living History (37 page)

Once the story about my commodity trading broke, the White House enlisted experts to review records of my trading. Leo Melamed, the former head of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and a Republican, warned that if we asked for his opinion, he would give it, regardless of the impact. After a thorough review of my trades, he concluded that I had done nothing wrong. The controversy, in his opinion, was “a tempest in a teapot.” I wasn’t surprised by his conclusions. Our tax returns from 1979, which had reported the significant increase in our income from the commodity trades, had been audited by the IRS, and our records were all in order. In fact, the IRS also audited every return we filed for every year Bill was in the White House.

I now realize that the constant accusations had taken their toll on my relations with the press. I had kept the White House press corps at arm’s length for too long. Because I wanted the media to report on health care reform, I offered interviews to correspondents who covered events and speeches around the country. The White House press corps, however, had little access to me. It took me a while to understand that their resentment was justified.

By the end of April 1994, I felt confident enough in David Kendall’s research and in my understanding of Whitewater and the surrounding issues that I was ready to offer the media what they wanted: me.

I called my Chief of Staff and said, “Maggie, I want to do it. Let’s call a press conference.”

“You know you’ll have to answer all questions, no matter what they throw at you.”

“I know. I’m ready.”

I discussed my plan beforehand only with the President, David Kendall and Maggie.

In order to prepare, I confided in Lisa, White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler, Harold Ickes and Mandy Grunwald. I didn’t want a parade of advisers from the West Wing pounding on my door with advice about how to handle this question or that. I wanted to speak as directly as possible.

On the morning of April 22, the White House announced that the First Lady would take questions that afternoon in the State Dining Room. We hoped that a change of scenery would encourage a fresh approach from the media.

I didn’t calculate what I would wear to this event―my choice of clothes is almost always a last-minute decision. I felt like wearing a black skirt and a pink sweater set. A few reporters immediately interpreted it as an attempt to “soften” my image, and my sixtyeight-minute encounter with the fourth estate would go down in history as the “Pink Press Conference.”

I sat in front of a crowd of reporters and camera operators who filled the dining room.

“Let me thank all of you for coming,” I began. “I have wanted to do this in part because I realized that despite my traveling around the country and answering questions, I did not really satisfy a lot of you in having your questions asked and answered. And last week, Helen said, ‘I can’t travel with her, so how can I ask her questions?’ For that reason we are here, and, Helen, you get the first question.”

Helen Thomas got right to the point:

“Do you know of any money that could have gone from Madison to the Whitewater project or to any of your husband’s political campaigns?” she asked.

“Absolutely not. I do not.”

“Actually, on the same theme with your commodities profits―it is difficult for a layman, and probably for a lot of experts, to look at the amount of the investment and the size of the profit. Is there any way you can explain…”

And so I began to explain it. And explain it. And explain it again. One after another, the reporters asked me everything they could think of about Whitewater, and I answered them until they ran out of different ways to ask the same questions.

I was grateful for the questions, which gave me a chance to lay out everything I knew at that point. I was also able to address a problem that had plagued me from the beginning.

I was asked if I felt that my reluctance to provide information to the press “helped to create any impression that you were trying to hide something?”

“Yes, I do,” I said. “And I think that is probably one of the things that I regret most, and one of the reasons why I wanted to do this…. I think if my father or mother said anything to me more than a million times, it was: ‘Don’t listen to what other people say.

Don’t be guided by other people’s opinions. You know, you have to live with yourself.’

And I think that’s good advice.

“But I do think that that advice and my belief in it, combined with my sense of privacy … led me to perhaps be less understanding than I needed to [be] of both the press and the public’s interest, as well as [their] right to know things about my husband and me.

“So, you’re right. I’ve always believed in a zone of privacy. And I told a friend the other day that I feel after resisting for a long time I’ve been rezoned.”

That line made everyone laugh.

After the press conference, David and I had a drink together in the West Sitting Hall as the sun set beyond the window. Though everyone thought I had done well, I felt somber about the situation and as we assessed the day’s events, I commented to David: “You know, they’re not going to let up. They’re just going to keep on coming at us, no matter what we do. We really don’t have any good choices here.”

That night Richard Nixon, who had suffered a stroke four days earlier, died at the age of eighty-one. In the early spring of 1993, Nixon had sent Bill a letter full of insightful observations about Russia, and Bill had read it to me, announcing that he thought Nixon was a brilliant, tragic figure. Bill invited the former President to the White House to discuss Russia, and Chelsea and I greeted him as he stepped off the elevator on the second floor. He told Chelsea that his daughters had gone to her school, Sidwell Friends. Then he turned to me:

“You know, I tried to fix the health care system more than twenty years ago. It has to be done sometime.”

“I know,” I replied, “and we’d be better off today if your proposal had succeeded.”

One of the women in the American Spectator article had taken issue with her portrayal by the Arkansas troopers. Although she was identified in the story only as “Paula,”

she claimed her friends and family recognized her as the woman who supposedly met with Bill in a Little Rock hotel suite during a convention and later told a trooper she wanted to be the Governor’s “regular girlfriend.”

At a February convention of the Conservative Political Action Committee, Paula Corbin Jones held a press conference and appeared to identify herself as the Paula in the article.

Cliff Jackson, who was trying to raise money for a “ Troopergate Whistleblower’s Fund,” introduced her to the press. She said she wanted to clear her name. But instead of announcing a libel suit against the Spectator, she accused Bill Clinton of sexually harassing her by making unwanted advances. Initially, the mainstream press disregarded Jones’s claim, because her credibility was tainted by her association with Jackson and the disgruntled troopers. We expected this story to die like the other phony scandals.

But on May 6, 1994, two days before the statute of limitations ran out, Paula Jones filed a civil suit against the President of the United States, asking for $700,000 in damages.

Someone was raising the stakes in this game. It had moved from the tabloids to the courts.

Washington is a city of rituals, and one of the most faithfully observed is the annual Gridiron Dinner, a white-tie affair in which leading Washington journalists dress up in costumes, perform zany skits and sing songs that make fun of the current administration, including the President and First Lady. Guests at the dinner include the club’s sixty members as well as their colleagues and dignitaries from the political, business and journalistic worlds. The Gridiron Club was slow to change with the times. Women were not admitted until 1975. (Eleanor Roosevelt used to throw “Gridiron Widows” parties for excluded spouses and female journalists.) In 1992, White House reporter Helen Thomas was elected the first female President. Membership in the club remains highly selective, and invitations to the spring event are among the most coveted in town. The First Couple almost always attend, seated on the ballroom dais, being good sports no matter what is said about them. Sometimes they come up with spoofs of their own.

When the 109th Gridiron Dinner rolled around in March 1994, Bill and I knew we had not sold the administration’s health care plan with enough clarity and simplicity to rouse public support or to motivate Congress to act in the face of well-financed, well-organized opponents. The Health Insurance Association of America was concerned that the Administration’s plan would curtail insurance companies’ prerogatives and profits. To raise doubts about reform, the group launched a second round of advertisements, featuring a couple named Harry and Louise. Sitting at a kitchen table, Harry and Louise asked each other cleverly contrived questions about the plan and wondered aloud what it might cost them.

As intended, the ads exploited the fears – pinpointed by focus groups―of the 85 percent of Americans who already had health insurance and worried it might be taken away.

For the Gridiron Dinner, Bill and I decided to stage a parody of the insurance lobby’s TV spot, with Bill playing “Harry” and me playing “Louise.” It would give us a chance to expose the scare tactics employed by our opponents and have some fun. Mandy Grunwald and comedian AI Franken wrote a script, Bill and I memorized our lines and, after a few rehearsals, recorded our version of “Harry and Louise” on videotape.

It went like this: Bill and I were seated on a sofa―he in a plaid shirt, drinking coffee, and me in a navy blue sweater and skirt―examining a massive sheaf of papers, meant to be the Health Security Act.

Bill: Hi, Louise, how was your day?

Me: Well, fine, Harry―until now.

Bill: Gee, Louise, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.

Me: Well, it’s worse than that. I’ve just read the Clinton health security plan.

Bill: Health care reform sounds like a great idea to me.

Me: Well, I know, but some of these details sure scare the heck out of me.

Bill: Like what?

Me: Like for example, it says here on page 3,764 that under the Clinton health security plan, we could get sick.

Bill: That’s terrible.

Me: Well, I know. And look at this, it gets worse. On page 22,743―no, I got that wrong-on page 27,655, it says that eventually we’re all going to die.

Bill: Under the Clinton health plan? You mean after Bill and Hillary put all those bureaucrats and taxes on us, we’re still all going to die?

Me: Even Leon Panetta.

Bill: Wow, that is scary. I’ve never been so frightened in all my life.

Me: Me neither, Harry.

Together: There’s got to he a better way.

Announcer: “Paid for by the Coalition to Scare Your Pants Off”

It was an atypical performance for a First Couple, and the audience loved it. The Gridiron Dinner is supposedly off-the-record, and journalists who attend are not supposed to write about it. But full-blown stories about the songs and skits routinely appear the next day. Our videotaped performance was widely covered, even replayed on several Sunday morning news shows. Although some pundits speculated that the spoof would simply attract more attention to the real Harry and Louise ads, I was glad we raised questions about the tone of the insurance lobby’s campaign and the absurdity of its claims.

Moreover, it just felt good to inject some levity into an otherwise humorless situation.

While our little skit gave Washington politicos and journalists a good laugh, we knew we were still losing the public relations war on health care reform. Even a popular President armed with a bully pulpit could not match the hundreds of millions of dollars spent to distort an issue through negative and misleading advertisements and other means. We also were confronting the power of the pharmaceutical companies, who feared that controlling the prices of prescription drugs would diminish their profits, and the insurance industry, which spared no expense in its campaign against universal coverage. And some of our supporters were losing enthusiasm for the plan because it didn’t fulfill all of their wishes. Finally, our proposal for reform was inherently complex―just like the health care problem itself―which made it a public relations nightmare. Virtually every interest group could find something objectionable in the plan.

We were discovering that some opposition to health care reform, like Whitewater, was part of a political war that was bigger than Bill or the issues we championed. We were on the front lines of an increasingly hostile ideological conflict between centrist Democrats and a Republican Party that was swinging further and further to the right. At stake were American notions of government and democracy and the direction our country would take for years to come. We soon learned that nothing was off-limits in this war and that the other side was far better armed with the tools of political battle: money, media and organization.

Four months earlier, in December 1993, Republican strategist and writer William Kristol, a Chief of Staff to former Vice President Dan Quayle and Chairman of the Project for the Republican Future, had sent a memorandum to Republican congressional leaders urging them to kill health care reform. The plan, he wrote in the memo, is a “serious political threat to the Republican party,” and its demise would be “a monumental setback for the President.” He wasn’t objecting to the plan on its merits; he was applying partisan political logic. He instructed Republicans not to negotiate on the bill or to compromise.

The only good strategy, according to Kristol, was to kill the plan outright. The memo didn’t mention the millions of Americans without insurance.

In line with the Kristol memo, Jack Kemp and former Reagan Cabinet member William Bennett helped the GOP with targeted radio and television advertising against health care reform. In cities or towns I visited to promote the plan, the airwaves in the region would be flooded with ads critical of reform.

Kristol’s memo to the Republican congressional leaders had the desired effect. With the 1994 midterm elections looming in November, moderate Republicans in Congress who were committed to reform began to distance themselves from the administration’s plan. Senator Dole was genuinely interested in health care reform but wanted to run for President in 1996. He couldn’t hand incumbent Bill Clinton any more legislative victories, particularly after Bill’s successes on the budget, the Brady bill and NAFT’A. We had offered to work with Senator Dole on a joint bill and, by extension, to jointly share the credit if it passed. The Senator had suggested that we present our bill first and then work out a compromise. It never happened. Kristol’s strategy was taking hold.