A Woman in Charge by Carl Bernstein
Lloyd Cutler had left the White House, as planned, after six months and a brief transition, coincidentally, with Starr’s appointment. The new White House counsel was Abner Mikva, a former congressman from Illinois who had resigned his seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals bench—on which Ken Starr had also sat—to replace Cutler. He was not a street fighter, but more important, he knew Starr, and they could get along. Harold Ickes would be responsible for the wider strategy and daily mechanics of meeting the assault they were fully expecting on the White House through the 1996 election season.
Before leaving, Cutler had recommended to Ickes that he hire as his deputy Jane Sherburne, a skilled, tough investigations specialist from his law firm, Wilmer, Cutler, & Pickering. She had worked on Cutler’s staff at the White House and knew the territory and the players. She would have just the combination of savvy and skill to put together a rapid-response team. The fact that Sherburne, forty-three, was a woman was not incidental, though nobody said aloud that it was a major factor in the choice. But dealing with Hillary and her staff might be better handled than in the past if there was a legal emissary who was not another white male. And Sherburne had the advantage of already knowing Hillary and Maggie Williams.
Not long before Hillary had left for Asia and Africa in March 1997, Sherburne met with Hillary and Maggie in the West Wing office, now seldom used, of the first lady. As much as anything else, what registered with her was Hillary’s weariness, both generally and in terms of the specific subject under discussion: trying to make the Clintons’ case more sympathetically in public and still resist Starr’s intrusions and the Republicans’ determination to smear them. Sherburne said she wanted to stay in front of the facts. She wanted to put together a team of six or eight people who would handle specific assignments for congressional investigations and relations, Starr, media, subpoenas, and political outreach strategy related to all the inquiries, including reporters. Sherburne would hire these people herself and run the unit as a tight ship. Kendall had already approved and was accepting of the approach, and Sherburne’s leadership. Part of the plan was to appear as forthcoming as possible and not unnecessarily antagonize Starr or the committee chairmen on the Hill. Hillary remained skeptical that yet another new approach was going to make anything better.
Sherburne had already listed some forty avenues of likely investigation, beginning with the obvious: Whitewater (the land deal), Madison Guaranty, Vince Foster, Paula Jones, and problems specific to Hillary’s earlier statements. Hillary said she wanted to be kept well informed.
She was not expecting to get her information from the source of the Clintons’ first post-electoral crisis, however—a biography of Bill, First in His Class, written by David Maraniss of the Washington Post. As was too often the case, the information tore into the domestic fabric, not just the public perception, of Hillary’s world. And it sent Bill and his new handmaiden, Morris, into cover-up mode.
Maraniss’s book, which the White House obtained in galley form in early February before publication, was a masterful work, a broad character study of Bill Clinton before he won the White House, focusing on the forces that shaped him from his boyhood in Arkansas to his decision to enter the 1992 race—where the book ended.
Its biggest revelation was of the meeting between Bill and Betsey Wright in which they discussed the names of women who might come forward if he decided to seek the presidency in 1988, and Wright’s forceful suggestion that he not run. Maraniss’s brief description of the meeting noted that Bill and Wright discussed the fact that the state troopers who chauffeured and guarded Clinton were witnesses to many of his assignations.
Upon reading the offending passages in the galleys of the book, Bill was especially upset because he had never told Hillary about his discussion with Betsey. When she learned of it as the White House was debating how to respond to Maraniss’s book, she was devastated and enraged—at both Betsey and Bill. The three years before he decided to run in 1992 had been among the worst in her life, and had strained their marriage to the breaking point. Now, yet more humiliation was about to be heaped on her, with Maraniss’s confirmation that the troopers quoted in the Spectator article were believable. Moreover, she now had for the first time a clear understanding of why Bill did not run in 1988. She felt betrayed, Wright was sure.
Wright had come to Washington after the 1994 election to join the staff of Anne Wexler, the lobbyist and close friend of the Clintons since the Connecticut senatorial campaign of her husband, Joe Duffey, during the semester at Yale when Hillary and Bill had first met. Wright was on local jury duty in the municipal courthouse in downtown D.C. when Wexler’s driver came into the jury holding room and handed her a cell phone, saying, “You’re supposed to call the White House, and the president asked that we make sure you’re connected by regular [landline] phone. But don’t call him on this phone. This is just so that they can get you if they need you.” Wright made her way to a pay phone and was connected through the White House switchboard to Bill. “And he starts in on me about the Maraniss book,” Wright recalled. “‘Why would Maraniss say that you had met with me?’”
“Presumably because I told him we did,” Wright responded.
“But that didn’t happen,” Clinton insisted, according to Wright.
“And I said, ‘Sure it did, Bill.’ I mean I reminded him who else was there, and there was just this silence.”
Wright did not believe Clinton was deliberately lying, but rather exhibiting a family trait: “He and his mother both have a fabulous ability to lock stuff away…to genuinely forget things.” This tendency was exactly the reason Wright had brought another person to the meeting with Bill in 1987—to have a witness to remind him. *23 She was convinced that the president was not coaching her to disavow something truthful. But she knew from what he was saying that Maraniss’s book posed massive problems for him with Hillary, and for his lawyers as well.
“I never talked to Hillary about womanizing,” Wright explained years after the courthouse phone conversation. “Never, never, never! And it’s something I feel very guilty about. That by calling her my friend I couldn’t warn her before stuff hit her. I didn’t. And it was a confusion between her as a friend, and the fact that I worked for him. There was no point in telling her about all of it…. I clearly took on a role of protecting her from him in his philandering, which certainly was an inappropriate role for a staff person. But I don’t think I would have ever viewed it as inappropriate. It was what I was going to do. Period…. I guess my expectations to some degree differ between them because I worked for Bill at that point.”
As he read the galleys, Clinton wrote in the margins, apparently in preparation for meeting with his lawyers and members of the White House staff who would have to deal publicly with the book’s revelations. “In his handwriting, it said: ‘This never happened.’ Or, ‘I don’t know why she makes this stuff up,’” recalled Wright, who was shown the materials in one of the numerous legal depositions at which she testified over the next five years. But in that first conversation, she held her ground.
Clinton, meanwhile, had summoned Dick Morris.
“Why did you talk to Maraniss? Can’t I trust you anymore? Can’t I trust anybody anymore?”
Morris was dumbfounded. Clinton was railing at him for telling Maraniss that they had worked together on negative campaign ads attacking Jim Guy Tucker. “That was in 1978,” he told the president.
“But he’s now the governor!” Bill shouted.
“What the fuck do you care?”
“He controls the state police!”
That was the other legal problem the lawyers had identified. They feared that some of the troopers might testify that Clinton, as president, had held out the possibility of getting them federal jobs if they either didn’t cooperate with or disavowed their conversations with Brock and other reporters. Serious questions of federal law were involved. It was possible that some of the troopers, who still worked for the incumbent governor of Arkansas
The pages of Maraniss’s book became the urtext that lawyers, prosecutors, reporters, and presidential aides spent hours and hours parsing and studying, poring over the brief passages that dealt with the troopers, and Betsey’s meeting with Clinton. It was pregnant with the possibility of ruinous assertion, testimony, and lines of inquiry: Clinton had correctly identified the biggest problems in his angry conversation with Morris—about the state police, i.e., the troopers, who could talk about alleged offers of federal jobs whether true or not, and the meeting with Paula Jones in such a way that would give her claim a measure of legal (not just gossipy) credence.
Wright could see there was broad agreement among Clinton, Morris, and at least one of Clinton’s lawyers, Bob Bennett, that it was necessary to immediately challenge Maraniss’s version of the facts. But Wright insisted to them that “David Maraniss is one of the most careful researchers I have ever met in my life…. He may have misunderstood me, which is easy to do, but it wouldn’t have been because of sloppy research or writing.” At the time Maraniss had interviewed her, said Wright, “I was in such deep clinical depression that…all the time I talked to him, all I remember was that I was crying all the time…. And I remember nothing I said to him. But I know he didn’t make anything up.”
Bill, Morris, and Bennett, according to Wright, persuaded her to deny the key element of Maraniss’s account: that the Arkansas troopers attached to the governor’s office had solicited women for Bill—despite the fact that, as Maraniss reported, part of the conversation between Wright and Clinton in July 1987 directly touched on the question of women procured by the troopers, according to Betsey.
“Well, there was one thing that they [the president and his lawyers] really didn’t like in [the Maraniss biography] about the role the troopers played in the procuring…. Bill said, ‘That plays right into the Paula Jones lawsuit. What are you talking about?’” Clinton was screaming at her, trying to get her to disavow it, Wright said. On the other end of the phone she could hear Dick Morris and the president “talking to each other, Dick being there in the room with Bill, I could hear him saying, ‘Tell her this. Tell her that.’”
Wright did not have Maraniss’s book with her. Morris and Clinton were reading to her from a text, she said. “I felt I was at a real disadvantage. I wasn’t seeing what they were talking to me about and screaming at me about…. Bill was screaming…. ‘Why did you say this to him?’”
She got off the phone and called Maraniss—immediately after the president had screamed at her. She was upset. Why had Maraniss written about their meeting and what she’d said to him about the troopers? she asked.
“Are they coming down on you?” she said Maraniss asked.
“Yep, they are,” she told him.
“Bill Bennett, Bill, Bob, one of those Bennett boys—Bill’s lawyer Bennett—was very concerned about” what she’d said to Bill’s biographer. *24
Under this pressure “I ended up issuing a statement saying that David Maraniss must have misunderstood me” about the troopers’ alleged role in procuring women. Following her disavowal, “David [Maraniss] has never spoken to me since,” said Wright.
Later, Morris described the event this way: “I was with Clinton in the residence—in the Treaty Room—and we were talking to Betsey on the phone, both of us: we were negotiating a statement in which she would deny what she obviously had said to Maraniss, and which was true, about the state troopers and getting women. Bill was getting unbelievable grief from Hillary about the Paula Jones business and he had told me that, for the first time, Chelsea was mad at him over this and that he was very upset at Betsey for talking to Maraniss. He’d said ‘I don’t care what she knows, I’m finished with Betsey.’
“I said, ‘I think you should be careful about that because she knows everything’…I was saying don’t alienate her totally because she could do you a lot of damage; earlier she had told me she had all the files on all his women; and when I’d cautioned her to move them to a safe deposit box, she said a warehouse would be more like it.
“So in this [telephone] conversation in the White House, with Bill, I was urging Betsey, trying to negotiate a statement she would make in which she would deny saying what she actually said. Clinton was very focused on it, and [Bob] Bennett was involved. I worked with Bennett on it, and Bill was talking to Betsey and to Bennett by phone, working out what Betsey was going to say. While we were working on the statement with Betsey, it went back and forth for several drafts; she was very upset, and so was Clinton; it was a hard situation to handle, Clinton on one hand, Betsey on the other.”
The statement that Wright issued under duress later that afternoon, February 4, 1995, said:
I think that David Maraniss may have misunderstood what I told him about the troopers. What I believe is that some of them solicited women for themselves, exploiting the fact that they worked for the governor. I do not believe that they ever solicited women for the governor, certainly not with his knowledge. My recommendation [that Clinton not run for president in 1988] was based on my fear that in the climate of Gary Hart that liars and gold diggers would come out of the woodwork. What I learned from my conversation with the governor was that the rumors were nothing in reality. My concern was for the impact the rumors would have on Chelsea and Hillary.
My fears were borne out in the 1992 campaign when liars and gold diggers did emerge, and I proudly and truthfully defended Governor Clinton against them. My admiration was strong for his determination to keep his marriage intact, and I became upset that his public acknowledgment of troubles in his marriage then made him more vulnerable to lies. Any so-called cover-up for Bill Clinton was the usual staff role in explaining why he was late for a meeting or couldn’t see someone or couldn’t agree with them.
Maraniss was flabbergasted, and issued his own statement, which accurately described what had happened and the dynamic so obviously involved: “I interviewed Betsey Wright several times for my book and based my account of her dealings with Bill Clinton directly on what she told me during those interviews.” Maraniss said, “Before the book’s release, I met with her and read to her the sections related to her. Her response at the time was that I had fairly and accurately reported what she had said. During the two years I spent working on this biography, I came to understand the complicated love-hate relationship between Betsey Wright and Bill Clinton, which seems to be in evidence again.”
Meanwhile, the Maraniss book caused Hillary to stop talking to Dick Morris, for months, by his account. “She was mad at me because of my telling Maraniss about the swimming pool she wanted to build at the Little Rock mansion,” he said. “She was pissed that I talked about this, and she stopped talking to me. She also, I think, basically stopped talking to Bill because she was mad about Betsey Wright saying to Maraniss that state troopers were used to get women, and also about the list of women in connection with the 1988 race.”
During the first twenty months of the Clinton presidency, Morris had usually communicated with Bill through Hillary, since Bill did not want to be seen or heard speaking to him; nor did the president particularly like talking with Morris. Now, according to Morris, things changed. Hillary wouldn’t speak to him.
“I would talk to Bill constantly about the advice that I’d give Hillary and he would pass it on,” said Morris. “And, I would periodically say to him, ‘Listen, I’ve known you guys for twenty years. Relationships with you don’t work if your wife doesn’t want them to work. And I’m nervous that I don’t get to talk to Hillary.’ And he said, ‘Well, I pass on your advice.’ Or he’d say things like, ‘Well, you know it’s a tough situation for everybody. I mean I’m having problems, too. She’s very mad at both of us for the Maraniss book.’ And then after a few months into it…I complained again about the lack of access and he said, ‘Well, she takes your advice.’ And she did. I had recommended she do a newspaper column, and she was doing that. And I recommended that she talk about the Gulf W
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Truth or Consequences (2)
Anger is not the best state of mind in which to prepare for a grand jury appearance.
—Living History
THOUGH HILLARY had withdrawn from the West Wing and a visible policymaking role, she tightly held the legal reins, consulting and instructing her lawyers almost daily over the next two years.
Shortly before leaving for Asia, Hillary met with Mark Fabiani, the Harvard-educated lawyer and former counsel and deputy mayor of Los Angeles, whom Ickes and Jane Sherburne had recruited. Fabiani was chosen because he had successfully coordinated legal and media strategy for Mayor Tom Bradley during city and federal investigations of his personal and family finances.
Having watched the Clintons’ problems unfold from afar, Fabiani wanted to meet with his prospective clients before signing on. Immediately it became clear to Fabiani that Ickes was recruiting a legal team for Hillary, “not for anyone else.” Ickes had told him, “You should come in and meet the president and first lady.” But “when I came in,” said Fabiani, “the person I met was the first lady, not the president. Hillary had set this [mechanism] up. And Harold was her surrogate in sort of setting it up and then running it.”