The Breach

by Peter Baker

  Beyond the staff, the president himself was never the same after the Lewinsky story broke. He and his aides went to great lengths to tout his ability to compartmentalizeto focus on his duties while putting concerns over scandal in a box to the side. And Clinton often demonstrated a remarkable ability to ignore his own political peril and concentrate on whatever policy issue might be presented to him. But much of that was for show as well, a poll-tested and focus-group-tested strategy to portray the president as engaged in his job and above the sleaze that obsessed others. In private, Clinton was consumed with the Starr investigation and its collateral damage, sometimes so preoccupied that he appeared lost during meetings. In the months leading up to his August grand jury testimony, aides would occasionally find him in the Oval Office absently moving things around on his desk or playing with the old campaign buttons he kept in the hallway leading to his private dining room. At one meeting with members of the Congressional Black Caucus, the president simply could not answer their questionsit fell to an aide to conduct the meeting while Clinton sat there apparently distracted by his woes. On another occasion, the head of the World Bank left a meeting with the president and later called a senior White House official to say, Its like he isnt there.

  Whatever esprit de corps had once existed in the White House likewise degenerated into political cannibalism, as political advisers intent on saving Clintons administration were shut outand sometimes even lied toby the presidents own lawyers, who insisted that secrecy was the best course for their client. Im going to kill Chuck, John Podesta used to grumble at moments of frustration with Ruff, the White House counsel. Joe Lockhart would storm out of strategy sessions, warning the lawyers, If you guys arent going to shoot straight, Im going to stop coming to these meetings. Mike McCurry actually did stop coming; anytime he showed up, his colleagues knew it was so that he could yell at the attorneys for hiding critical information from him. On several occasions, McCurry threatened to quit if they kept deceiving himonce, early in the year when they misled him about whether they were using private investigators to research Clinton enemies and, more recently, when Ruff refused to tell him whether Starr had issued a subpoena for the presidents testimony. McCurrys protests, though, made no difference. Even after the existence of the subpoena was finally confirmed, David Kendall misled him about whether the presidents testimony would be transmitted live to the grand jury at the courthouse or merely videotaped.

  Even within the legal team, there were subtle divisions, an insane asylum of alliances, as one of the lawyers put it. Kendall and Seligman had been the never-say-die soldiers for the Clintons for years, while Ruff was an outsider more concerned about the impact on the White House for presidents to come. Where Ruffs relationship with the president and the first lady was strictly professional, two other lawyers ostensibly under his command, Bruce R. Lindsey and Cheryl D. Mills, had personal connections to the first couple that gave them authority beyond their rank as deputy counsels. Lindsey had been Clintons friend and consigliere since their Arkansas days, while Mills had earned their loyalty through six years of fiercely defending their interests. Then there were the other outside lawyers widely disliked by the core legal teamRobert S. Bennett, the blustery lead counsel on the Jones case, who scorned Kendall (and vice versa), and Kantor, a longtime Clinton friend whose status as a lawyer on the case appeared designed mainly to cloak him with the protection of attorney-client privilege so the president could have someone to speak with in confidence.

  The revelation that the president really had liedand had sent aides out to repeat his lies on television and to the grand juryfurther embittered a demoralized staff. While more jaded advisers such as Podesta and Rahm Emanuel took it in stride, others were deeply hurt. Paul Begala, who had moved from Texas to Washington to help put together a promising second term, was devastated to learn that Clinton had deceived him and let him publicly lie on the presidents behalf. Begala took his politics personally and sank into a deep depression, to the point where he vowed never to appear on television again defending the presidentand began thinking about whether he should resign altogether. McCurry had never considered himself close to the first family the way Begala did, but he had come into his job as the public face of the Clinton White House with a long career of credibility in Washington and was determined not to sacrifice all that by becoming the Ron Ziegler of his era. McCurry suspected from the beginning that Clinton was not telling the truth, and the press secretary went out of his way to parse his briefings with reporters to leave himself an escape hatch later should his suspicions be borne outas they ultimately were.

  Outside of the Clinton family, though, perhaps no one was more upset than Erskine Bowles. A millionaire investment banker from Charlotte, North Carolina, Bowles was the straight man in the Clinton White House, an upright, no-nonsense administrator who helped banish the political chaos that had dominated the first-term administration. Tall and lanky with a lean, bespectacled, almost owlish face and a lilting Carolinian accent, the fifty-three-year-old Bowles had become the presidents alter ego in his second term, mending his bruised relations with the Republican Congress and keeping him company on the golf course. Clinton had leaned heavily on him to take the job in the first place and then to stay when he was itching to leave.

  Clinton and Bowles had never met before the 1992 presidential campaign, but they forged a quick and deep bond. Both sons of the New South around the same age, they shared a passion for golf and for bringing the Democratic Party back to the political center. For Bowles, the clincher came in a car ride after a fund-raiser when then-candidate Clinton noticed that something seemed to be wrong. Bowles told him his son, Sam, had had a diabetic seizure that morning, and Bowles was angry at President George Bush for vetoing legislation allowing fetal-tissue research that some believed might find a cure. After becoming president, Clinton repealed the research ban in one of his first acts and gave Bowles the pen used to sign the executive order.

  While his own father had once run unsuccessfully for governor of North Carolina, Bowles had never served in government, and yet he abandoned the private sector to come to Washington to work for his new friend, first as head of the Small Business Administration and later as deputy White House chief of staff. He returned home in December 1995, but kept helping out where he could, finding a place in Wyoming for the Clintons to vacation and even handling the delicate assignment of nudging Dick Morris out of the 1996 reelection campaign when reports surfaced about the political consultants illicit relationship with a $200-an-hour prostitute. After the 1996 election, Clinton prevailed on a reluctant Bowles to come back to the White House, but only with the understanding that it would be a short-term venture. Bowles the businessman found the brittle, scandal-obsessed Washington distasteful and sometimes disorienting, his antipathy showcased in a New Yorker cartoon he posted on the wall of his West Wing office. In it, a man roasting in the fires of hell commented, On the other hand, its great to be out of Washington.

  Yet as the months went by in 1997, the White House enjoyed more policy successesand Bowles enjoyed the job more. A fiscal conservative who unlike his White House colleagues got along well with House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, Bowles had made balancing the budget his central political passion and within a few months of his return to Washington had worked out a deal with congressional Republicans to erase the federal governments red ink for the first time since man first walked on the moon some three decades earlier. The president wanted Bowles to stay, and in December 1997, returning on Air Force One from an uplifting thirty-six-hour Christmas-season visit to Bosnia, Clinton and the first lady pressed their case. Whitewater and other scandals seemed to have receded. Now it was time for a fresh beginning, to turn the second term into a season of real progress.

  Bowles returned to Washington from Sarajevo invigorated and dove into the policymaking process that led up to each years State of the Union address. He was confident he could persuade Congress to pass free-trade legis
lation known as fast-track, and the administrations domestic and economic gurus had dreamed up a series of exciting ventures, including expanding Medicare for early retirees and providing child care assistance for hard-pressed young parents. With the budget balanced, Bowles became increasingly determined to use the rare moment of opportunity to fix the long-term generational problems of Social Security and Medicare. And with Congress out of town on recess, the White House seized the agenda by rolling out these proposals one at a time in a carefully orchestrated campaign of announcements and media leaks in advance of the formal unveiling in the State of the Union speech.

  In a fit of optimism, Bowles told Clinton in mid-January that he would stay on as chief of staff.

  Less than a week later, the Monica Lewinsky story broke.

  Bowles had known the Paula Jones case still lurked out there. Indeed, he had been the first top aide to see the president when he returned to the White House from the deposition on January 17, 1998. Clinton walked straight from his limousine into the Oval Office to confer with Bowles about an Asian economic crisis. The president seemed fine. But the first warning sign came a few hours later when Clinton called Bowles and abruptly canceled plans for the two to go out for the evening with their wives. That night, Clinton, worried about the extensive questioning about Lewinsky during the deposition, called his secretary, Betty Currie, at home and asked her to come to the office the next day so that they could compare their stories. When the Lewinsky story showed up in the Washington Post four days later, Clinton was quick to reassure Bowles with a lie. Erskine, he told his chief of staff, I want you to know that this story is not true.

  Bowles had to believe him. It was inconceivable that Clinton had really done this. If Bowles did not accept Clintons word, there was no way he could still work for him. And yet colleagues could see that Bowles was unnerved. Usually an unflappable manager, Bowles liked to tell people that he always tried to stay even-temperedat, say, 55 on an imaginary scale of 100. But he had allowed himself to go up to 75 in the exciting policy-driven days of early January and quickly plummeted to 35 or lower in the aftermath of the allegations about Lewinsky. On the day the story broke, Bill Richardson, then the ambassador to the United Nations, called Bowles because he had offered Lewinsky a job the previous fall at the indirect behest of the president. Richardson planned to disclose publicly what had happened, he said, and started to explain to Bowles. I dont want to know a fucking thing about it! Bowles interrupted. Dont tell me about it! Three days later, during a meeting with other top aides in his office on Saturday, January 24, to plot damage control, Bowles grew sickened at the discussion of the situation. I think Im going to throw up, he said, and abruptly bolted out of the room, never to return to the meeting. Three days after that, he accompanied the president to Capitol Hill for the State of the Union address, the moment Bowles had once anticipated so eagerly. When I walk down that aisle, Im going to be smiling, he told his wife beforehand. But Im going to be dying inside. Dying.

  For the next seven months, Bowles refused to get involved in the political effort to save the president, almost as if he would not let himself even acknowledge the allegationsor the possibility that they could be true. Other officials would find Bowles waiting with the secretaries outside the Oval Office while Clinton consulted inside with his political team about the investigation. Bowles would not even go in the room. If he got drawn into it, he explained to those who asked him to step in, then how could the White House get anything else done?

  By late summer, there was no choice. Bowles had been on vacation in Scotland during the crazed days leading up to the presidents grand jury session and returned to Washington only the night before, Sunday, August 16, making a late appearance at the office to get up to speed. There really was a dress, he was told. Apparently, Clintons DNA was on it. The president was changing his story.

  Bowles was distraught. Clinton had lied to him, lied to his face. He had sent him to the grand jury with that lie. Bowles had sometimes been described in the media as the presidents best friendnot just his best friend in the White House, but best friend, periodand yet clearly he did not even really know the man. The man he thought he knewthe voracious reader who devoured information before making a considered decision, the caring leader who saw hard-luck stories in the papers and asked aides to help out people in distress without disclosing his role, the politician with the vision to imagine things his staff could notwas not in fact the whole picture. Everyone who knew Bowles saw that he was taking the betrayal hard.

  At the White House the morning of the grand jury appearance, though, Bowles did his best to hide it. As he opened the days 7:30 A.M. staff meeting, he told the presidents senior advisers to stay focused on their work and ignore the obvious distractions swirling around them this day. Repeating an aphorism imparted to him during childhood by his father, Bowles reminded the gathering, Its easy to be there for someone when theyre up, but its the good ones who are there when youre down.

  Thomas A. Daschle was driving along a wide-open highway in the middle of nowhere in South Dakota later the same day when the car phone rang. It was Bowles, calling from Washington.

  Can you get to a hard line? Bowles asked.

  Daschle told him he was still quite some distance from the nearest small town with a pay phone. He would have to try calling back later, around 4 P.M.

  Daschle knew without asking what the call was about. As the Senate minority leader, Daschle was the presidents chief liaison to the Democrats there, and he had followed the developments in the Lewinsky investigation carefully. Daschle knew that Clinton was testifying before Starrs grand jury. If it played out to its seemingly extreme conclusion, Daschle realized he could be faced with the prospect of a Senate trial on whether Clinton should be removed from office. At four oclock, he dialed the White House and was put through to Bowles, who asked where he was. Daschle told him and mentioned that he had stopped for an ice cream malt.

  Right now, Bowles sighed, Id give you a million dollars to be there drinking that malt.

  The chief of staff filled in Daschle on what the president was telling the grand jury and the plans for a late-evening speech to the nation. Daschle thanked Bowles for the heads up and moved on to a hotel, where a few hours later he found himself in front of the television watching as the president admitted he had misled people, including even my wife, and went on to decry investigators for prying into personal lives. Daschle called his own wife to gauge her impression and to share hisintense disappointment, both with the substance of the presidents message and the manner of its delivery.

  Like Daschle, nearly every member of Congress was out of town for the summer recess, watching television and digesting the stunning developments in isolation from each other. Yet even without the Capitol Hill echo chamber, the reaction among many of them was strikingly similar. Senator Orrin G. Hatch, a Utah Republican who had been publicly promising the president that the nation would forgive him if only he confessed all, sat in a television studio watching on a monitor. By the time it was over, he was boiling. What a jerk! Hatch exclaimed in frustration. House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt was in Paris, although his staff was refusing to tell clamoring TV bookers where in Europe he was, lest they track him down. When he heard the news the next morning, the Missouri Democrat with the Boy Scout sensibilities could barely contain his disgust and grimly realized that it would soon fall to him to decide whether to try to rescue the president or pressure him to leave for the good of the party and the nation. Senator Joseph I. Lieberman was at a country club in Westchester County near New York City, attending a wedding. Ducking out to search for a television, he found an accommodating waiter who led him outside into the wet darkness and across the street to his own basement apartment so the Connecticut Democrat could watch with his wife. Lieberman immediately thought Clintons tone was wrong and unconvincing; the more he thought about it as the night wore on, the angrier he grew.

  Lawmakers who had been prepared to give Clinton the benefit o
f the doubt such as Hatch, Gephardt, and Lieberman found themselves bitterly dis couraged at his response. In the Capitol office of House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, however, there was never any question of forgiveness. He did not believe for a second that Clinton was genuinely repenting; the president was only confessing because he had been caught. The DNA had forced his hand. For months, DeLay had been denouncing Clinton as a sexual predator and accusing him of providing only the spin, the whole spin, and nothing but the spin. This then, finally, was the moment DeLay had waited for, the moment when Clinton would stand revealed as the liar he always was. He had lied about Gennifer Flowers, about the draft, about smoking marijuana. He had lied to DeLay and other Republicans during the budget battle that led to the shutdown of the federal government in 1995. And now at last was DeLays chance to make him pay.

  It was the waiting that was killing them now. At 5:44 P.M. that Monday, DeLays policy director, Tony C. Rudy, out in California for the congressional recess, sent an E-mail to press secretary Michael P. Scanlon back in Washington to find out what was happening with Clinton at the grand jury.

  still no word? he wrote in that casual internal E-mail style in which capitalization, precise spelling, and proper grammar were optional.

  Hes going to admit it, Scanlon wrote back. the big q is on what levelI still say we need to attack!

  Rudy agreed. we need to force dems to distance themselves from theliar, he replied. He looked into americas eyes and lied.