A Woman in Charge by Carl Bernstein
It was true, though, that both were happy to get away from the internecine warfare of Washington, the unceasing rumor, speculation, and incessant talk of sex. And though Hillary’s aides believe her veil of denial was lifting before the trip, she seemed able in this setting to put aside a large measure of the tension and seething. Moreover, they were visiting a part of the world where she had been before, and where her reputation was enormous, and mercifully disconnected from the tribal warfare back home.
On most of their previous foreign trips together as president and first lady, Hillary was forced by tradition to play the role of presidential wife, with each of her days filled with ceremonial tours and meetings that often meant relatively little to her. She frequently chafed at the schedules Bill’s handlers arranged for her and was not much fun to be around. Her travels abroad of the past three or four years, without Bill, produced their own unique kind of expectation, excitement, and satisfaction. Now, on this trip, she was able to be a guide to him. As the traveling press noted, he needed her. She was the recipient of his rapt attention, and he was solicitous.
In Senegal, on April 1, the president took a call from Bob Bennett. Judge Susan Webber Wright, whom Bill had appointed to the federal bench but whose handling of the Jones case had won him no measure of comfort, had at last dismissed Paula Jones’s suit on the grounds that it lacked legal merit. “This is fantastic,” Clinton said, and though there was consensus that he should not gloat, Fox News managed to film an exuberant Clinton from outside his hotel window, with a cigar in his mouth, beating an African drum.
Bill and Hillary’s shared belief about the paramount moral and political importance of human rights was reflected in their itinerary and their discussions with African leaders and ordinary citizens alike. In South Africa, they spent many hours with then president Nelson Mandela, who took Bill to Robben Island, the notorious gulag where Mandela had spent eighteen years imprisoned for sedition, and from which he plotted the liberation of his country. Bill was also insistent on stopping in Rwanda before they left the continent for home, though it had not been on the original itinerary. Clinton would say later that his failure to act to stop the genocide in Rwanda, where almost one million people died in 1993–1994, was his greatest regret as president. At the Kigali airport, where they stopped for a few hours (the only arrangement the Secret Service would permit), he and Hillary met with several dozen people who had come to tell them how their mothers, fathers, children, and siblings had been slaughtered. Bill acknowledged to them that his decisions contributed to the mass killings in the country, and that the international community, and the nations of Africa, had failed a basic human obligation. “We did not act quickly enough after the killing began. We should not have allowed the refugee camps to become a safe haven for the killers. We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide.”
THROUGH THE SPRING and during the Clintons’ Africa trip, Starr had been thrown on the defensive by intense criticism about leaks from his grand jury investigation. Kendall had filed a motion in court citing fifty broadcasts and newspaper reports that appeared from their attribution to be based on conversations with prosecutors, investigators, and others “close to the investigation.” Starr was also getting little cooperation from Lewinsky’s lawyers, and the Secret Service had asserted a privilege claiming that to interview agents who guarded the president would risk the president’s protection. And the White House was claiming attorney-client privileges for Bruce Lindsey and other lawyers who had defended the Clintons, as well as for many documents. Starr was furious and decided to squeeze the White House again on the original Whitewater case. To her amazement, Hillary was again called to testify under oath, this time for almost five hours on April 25. “I never spent any significant time at all looking at the books and records of Whitewater,” she said when shown financial documents relating to the investment. Twice she invoked the privilege that allows spouses not to answer questions about discussions with their marital partner.
James McDougal had died on March 8. Vince Foster was dead. Starr decided to put further pressure on McDougal’s ex-wife, Susan, and on May 4, she was indicted on charges of criminal contempt for continuing to refuse to answer questions about Bill Clinton. Starr’s grand jury also indicted Webb and Suzy Hubbell for tax evasion on $1 million of income Hubbell received before entering prison—charges that were later dismissed in a decision upheld by the Supreme Court, with a single dissenter: the chief justice.
BY MAY or perhaps June, the Clintons’ closest aides noted an obvious change in the couple’s interaction, even at official events. There was a chill they’d never seen before. They’d seen Hillary angry at Bill, but this was something entirely different.
In earlier years, the Clintons were demonstrably affectionate with each other in private. “They would hold hands,” said one of Bill’s deputies. “They would kiss. In the Oval, she’d come in and…stand and touch…she’d put her arms around him…. Everybody would sort of leave when they got together, just the two of them. There was a lot of affection.”
By the end of July there was no demonstrable affection. In fact her disaffection was particularly notable at a memorial service for two police officers shot to death the previous winter when a deranged antigovernment protester tried to shoot his way into the Capitol. “Whatever part of the room Clinton moved in while we were in the holding room with other people, she moved to the opposite end,” said an aide. “When she did this, it was so obvious. If he was going to go one way, she was going to go the other way. She deliberately did not want to be anywhere near him at all. She wanted nothing to do with him.”
“I think she handled it as a very personal situation,” said Mary Mel French, a friend of the Clintons from Arkansas and chief of protocol at the State Department during the Clinton administration. During this period, the messages and visits from members of her prayer group were becoming more frequent, though she is not known to have confided in anyone. It was around this time that Hillary learned from David Kendall—neither has ever disclosed the exact date in late July—that Starr had negotiated an immunity deal with Monica Lewinsky to tell her story to the Whitewater grand jury.
Starr had also informed Kendall that he intended to subpoena the president to testify before the grand jury. Kendall and the other lawyers were adamantly opposed to allowing him to testify, on grounds that the target of a criminal investigation should never testify before a grand jury and instead plead his Fifth Amendment rights. Hillary told Kendall and Bill that she believed he had to testify, that the massive “political pressure” left them no choice. As when she had opposed settling with Paula Jones, her vote on this crucial matter would be the one that counted. Hillary later claimed she was not unduly concerned about it, that there was no reason for her to fear what Bill would testify to.
This claim of unconcern is striking given their lawyers’ understanding of the dangers. Starr’s questions to Bill in a grand jury appearance would undoubtedly be difficult. Starr had asked for a blood sample from Bill. Kendall thought it was conceivable Starr was only trying to bluff and unnerve Bill, Hillary wrote. It is hard to believe that by then she did not suspect that the purpose of the blood test was to match Bill’s DNA against the purported stains on Lewinsky’s by-then infamous blue dress.
There was another reason Kendall did not want Bill to testify. If the president evaded Starr’s attempt to bring about his impeachment, Kendall believed the prosecutor would attempt to indict him after he left office. Lawyers did not want their clients to be confronted in court with answers pried by a grand jury with its almost limitless latitude in asking questions. But another midterm election was approaching, in which the chance for Democrats to pick up seats in Congress would surely be adversely affected if, after claiming innocence for seven months, the president were to refuse to testify. A Democratic electoral tide might mitigate against impeachment.
On August 6, Lewinsky told her story to the grand jury under a grant of immunit
Bill went to Linda Bloodworth-Thomason on Friday, August 14, to ask whether she might talk to Hillary first. She flatly declined.
On Friday night, according to Hillary, Bob Barnett came to the White House to meet with her in the Yellow Oval Room on unrelated business, ostensibly, and to see how she was holding up. By then, Barnett was the essential Clinton family adviser, moving easily between Hillary and Bill, strategizing with his law partner Kendall, handling personal and financial matters for the president and first lady, negotiating her book contracts, and, increasingly, trying to get reporters not to write unfavorably about the Clintons, or not write about them at all. He could be intimidating.
Hillary said Barnett asked her if she was worried. What if there was more to the story than she knew?
Hillary said she told Barnett that she didn’t believe there was more to it, that she had continued to ask Bill—over and over again—if he had been truthful with her.
In her telling, Barnett persisted: she had to consider the possibility that some of what Bill had said was a lie.
“My husband may have his faults, but he has never lied to me,” she said she replied.
That statement speaks for itself.
BARNETT HAD prepared the ground that Linda Bloodworth-Thomason had refused to tread. He also did nothing to dissuade the Washington Post and the New York Times from publishing stories in their weekend editions that said the president was considering changing his story: by now Bill’s lawyers wanted him to admit what had occurred, and feared he might, at the last minute, continue to stonewall or perjure himself before the grand jury, to save his marriage, his presidency, or both. “President Weighs Admitting He Had Sexual Contacts,” read the Times page-one headline.
Early on the morning of August 15, a Saturday, Bill woke Hillary. “This time he didn’t sit by the bed,” she wrote. He told her that the situation was “much more serious” than he’d previously admitted, that he now would have to testify that he and Lewinsky had had an “inappropriate intimacy.” What had occurred was “brief and sporadic.” He was pacing to and fro as he talked. Seven months before, he hadn’t told her because he knew how hurt and angry she’d be; and he was ashamed.
Hillary wrote, in Living History: “I could hardly breathe. Gulping for air, I started crying and yelling at him, ‘What do you mean? What are you saying? Why did you lie to me?’ I was furious and getting more so by the second. He just stood there saying over and over again, ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I was trying to protect you and Chelsea.’”
Until then, she insisted, she had believed only that he had acted ridiculously for paying attention to Lewinsky, and that she had remained convinced that he was being treated unfairly. She was now “dumbfounded, heartbroken and outraged that I’d believed him at all.”
“She should have killed him on the spot,” said Sara Ehrman. Later, Sara, Diane, Dorothy Rodham, and Hillary would all speak privately of Hillary’s “heartbreak,” and how it figured in her eventual decision-making: both to try to hold the marriage together and to seek a seat in the United States Senate.
Hillary insisted that Bill tell Chelsea himself that “he had lied to her, too.” Both Hillary and Bill were now aware that their marriage might not survive, that there might be “an irreparable breach,” she wrote. She said his eyes had filled with tears when she’d insisted he tell Chelsea.
There had been days when the Clinton White House was out of kilter, but with the possible exception of the day the Lewinsky story had broken, no one could remember a day as disorienting as the one of the president’s grand jury testimony. Only the lawyers had any idea of what Clinton was going to say in his testimony (and they worried he might go off-script), and no one—including Bill—knew what he was going to say publicly afterward. His speechwriters and other aides had taken the initiative to draft a post-testimony address to the nation, but Bill had hardly looked at it.
Blumenthal, who was in Italy for a European conference on the “Third Way,” the anti-ideological political movement that Bill Clinton and Tony Blair had championed, phoned Hillary. As much as he wanted to respect her privacy, he recognized that they had to be considering the obvious political questions. She agreed. She told him that the president would be “‘embarrassed,’” by having to testify before the grand jury, “but that was for him to deal with.” Blumenthal’s assessment of what had occurred between Hillary and Bill reflected his closeness to her, but was also accurate, if slightly hyperbolic: “Hillary had hoped against hope that her husband had reformed himself, that whatever agony she had gone through earlier in her marriage had been resolved. Now she was discovering that it was not over…. In a way, this blow to her pride made her in the eyes of many a more accessible and sympathetic figure. As she steeled herself, she drew warm concern. Her private relationship with her wayward husband had a magnified effect through her every word and gesture.”
UNSURE WHETHER his marriage would survive, Bill wanted his testimony to do as little as possible to undermine it further. It would be conducted in the White House Map Room, a private sitting room on the ground floor that FDR had used to follow combat reports in World War II. Starr had withdrawn his subpoena after Bill voluntarily agreed to testify, in the presence of his attorneys, with the entire proceedings tape-recorded and with a live feed to the grand jurors in the courthouse. Four hours had been allotted for the session. Bill was determined to run out the clock on his interrogators, and play to the camera—and the country: he did not doubt that, grand jury secrecy notwithstanding, eventually the tape would be made public.
Overreaching as it might seem, he saw the possibility of turning the tables, in the long run, on his tormentors and Starr. He was a master of words, as he would prove once again. They were literalists and flatfoots and haters. His answers were lengthy, and he almost always took the question and turned it upside down. When they mentioned the Paula Jones case, he challenged its relevance and identified its political purpose: “They just thought they would take a wrecking ball to me and see if they could do some damage.” The Jones suit, he noted, had been “funded by my political opponents.”
The first questioner was Starr’s deputy Robert Bittman: “Mr. President, were you physically intimate with Monica Lewinsky?”
What followed led to a presidential locution as famous in its day as “Fourscore and seven years ago” had been: “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is,” said the president. *36
He read from a prepared statement in which he admitted “inappropriate intimate contact” with Lewinsky, which “did not consist of sexual intercourse,” and did not “constitute sexual relations” as defined in a long list of terms he had been read at his deposition in the Jones case in January. He addressed the grand jury, and whoever else would eventually be watching the tape: “I’ll bet the grand jurors, if they were talking about two people they know, and said they have a sexual relationship, they meant they were sleeping together; they meant they were having intercourse”—not oral sex. “In an effort to preserve the dignity of the office I hold,” he told Bittman, looking down at his prepared notes, “this is all I will say about the specifics of these particular matters.”
Literally hours were spent trying to pin the president down on what was sex and what wasn’t, on what kind of sex it was that he’d had with Lewinsky (he kept saying he wouldn’t talk about specifics); he had told Vernon Jordan that “there was no sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, which was true,” and on and on.
He took numerous opportunities to characterize the m
He offered a soliloquy on the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill testimony, concluding “I believed that they both thought they were telling the truth,” trying to demonstrate that there could be two honestly held interpretations of whatever had occurred. The prosecutors kept asking about “touching her breast, kissing her breast, or touching her genitalia.” They did not look or sound good on tape.
Starr was the final questioner, asking three times about the claims of executive privilege the White House had utilized, trying to show a pattern of stonewalling—with only twelve minutes remaining until the 6:30 completion scheduled for Bill’s testimony. Starr had never been a criminal prosecutor before his appointment as independent counsel, and, as had been evident for two years, it showed. Bill filibustered. He did not want to put the presidency at risk of being weakened. “Most of my time and energy in the last five and a half years have been devoted to my job. I have also had to contend with things no previous president has ever had to contend with…. And during this whole time, I have tried as best I could to keep my mind on the job the American people gave me.”