I pointed out that a declaration that NATO would stop its expansion with the Warsaw Pact nations would be tantamount to announcing a new dividing line in Europe, with a smaller Russian empire. That would make Russia look weaker, not stronger, whereas a NATO-Russia agreement would boost Russia’s standing.
Yeltsin agreed, though he was nervous about his own right-wing domestic opponents—arguably more fearsome than Clinton’s, always ready to prey on the collective Russian historical memory of humiliation. Like most presidents, Clinton didn’t fully appreciate the extent to which Hitler and even Napoleon still loomed over the Russian foreign policy psyche.
* * *
The year 1997 also saw a major development in the administration’s relations with China, as Clinton hosted President Jiang Zemin in Washington for meetings and a formal state dinner. As a candidate, Clinton had—as all candidates do—torn into his predecessor for coddling China and promised that he would get tough on China’s human rights abuses. As president, Clinton had—as all presidents do—come to see that the reality was a bit more complicated. In 1995, China was still only the world’s eighth-largest economy, behind Italy and even Brazil, but its GDP had been growing at 14 and 15 percent per year, and jobs, especially in high-tech manufacturing, were moving to the country from America at an alarming pace. China had to be bargained with.
Hillary Clinton’s human rights speech in Beijing in 1995 had been about as aggressive an assault, albeit a merely rhetorical one, as an American administration had made on China since the first opening under Richard Nixon nearly a quarter century earlier. In time, there were small military manifestations of conflict; in late 1995 and early 1996, after the White House allowed Taiwanese president Lee Teng-hui to visit the United States, the People’s Republic responded by conducting military exercises in the Taiwan Strait, and the Clinton administration sent an aircraft carrier into the region, the first time the United States had done so in seventeen years. But the bulk of the administration’s work on China centered on trade and economic issues. The big breakthrough on that front was yet to come, but at their Washington meeting, Clinton and Jiang announced a deal allowing the sale of nonweapon nuclear technology by U.S. companies to China.
The other major foreign policy development of 1997 came with the election in the United Kingdom of the man who was soon regarded as Clinton’s soul mate, Tony Blair, the new prime minister and the young and charismatic leader of the Labour Party. Like Clinton, Blair had waved good-bye to the paleo-liberalism—actually, in Labour’s case, paleo-socialism—that had been hanging around his party’s neck since Margaret Thatcher’s day, and he led what he called “New Labour” to a landslide win in the May 1997 parliamentary election. What came to be known as the “Third Way”—the political course between conservatism and old-style liberalism that Clinton had embraced in 1992—had gone global. As Sidney Blumenthal wrote: “Clinton felt that he himself was leading an international movement.”
So things stood as 1998 dawned. The economy was thundering along—in early January, Clinton met with aides for their first-ever discussion about what to do with the expected budget surplus. The Republicans on Capitol Hill were comparatively tame. Violent crime was way down, mostly having to do with new policing strategies put in place by mayors such as New York’s Rudy Giuliani, but also having to do with Clinton’s crime bill and those 100,000 new cops. The administration had undertaken a domestic initiative on race relations that, even if it didn’t accomplish much that was concrete, still offered up some national feel-good moments: in May 1997, Clinton apologized to the survivors of the notorious Tuskegee experiments on African American men whose syphilis was studied by the government but not treated.
Sure, there were still problems in the world. One can always count, for example, on the Middle East to provide that. After Rabin’s assassination, Israeli voters had taken a turn to the right, electing Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud leader, as prime minister. Clinton had begun to think that securing an Israeli-Palestinian peace would be a fine capstone to his presidency. And that’s what he was doing on January 20, 1998: hosting Netanyahu at the White House and proposing a new West Bank plan to him, but otherwise enjoying high approval ratings and no big problems, when, suddenly, his presidency and his life nearly caved in.
8
That Woman
The murmurings started, strangely enough, on a Saturday night—a time when even in media-obsessed Washington not many people are following the news. It was January 17, 1998; that day, Clinton, in a first for a sitting president, had testified in the Paula Jones lawsuit, taking questions under oath from her lawyers for six hours, and returning to the White House, the New York Times reported, “to check on the Asian fiscal crisis and on a daylong staff meeting about his State of the Union speech later this month.” That night, the Drudge Report, a conservative online news aggregation site, posted a headline:
NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN, BLOCKBUSTER REPORT;
23-YEAR-OLD FORMER WHITE HOUSE INTERN, SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESIDENT
There was, as yet, no story, just this salacious headline. The next day on ABC’s This Week, Bill Kristol, now the editor of the Weekly Standard, made the first reference to it on national television. That night, Drudge posted the ex-intern’s name: Monica Lewinsky.
Though fairly new, the Drudge Report at that point had already gained a following among Washington journalists, and its proprietor, Matt Drudge, was celebrated on the right and despised by the left. The year before, when Sidney Blumenthal left journalism to join the White House staff, Drudge had published an unfounded and false rumor about him, and Blumenthal had sued him for libel. (The case was settled.) In a different era, that might have finished off a highly partisan publication run by a man with no journalistic background. But the mores and folkways of Washington were such that Drudge’s influence merely grew. When Drudge decided to elevate a story, complete with a graphic of a blaring siren, Washington journalists eagerly picked up on it, seduced by the power of this new medium to spread news and gossip at barely comprehensible speeds.
Sometimes, as in the Blumenthal case, what Drudge promoted was just untrue. Other times, it was factually true but an obvious partisan hit job and dismissible on those grounds. But with this mind-bending headline, it turned out, he was onto something.
In June 1995, Lewinsky, then twenty-one years old, had come to work at the White House as an unpaid intern on the staff of Leon Panetta, the president’s chief of staff. Those who watched her noticed that on those occasions when interns got to meet the president, Monica usually somehow made it to the front of the line. She managed once to introduce herself to Clinton, as the two passed each other in a hallway.
Then, that November brought the first government shutdown. Since some White House staff had to stay home, interns like Lewinsky, who normally toiled in the Old Executive Office Building next door, were imported to the West Wing to answer phones. Thus it was that on the night of November 15, Lewinsky found herself alone with Clinton. She pulled up her dress, giving him a peek at her thong underwear. Matters proceeded as they often do in such cases. She performed oral sex on him, although he stopped her before he reached climax, and even managed to call two members of Congress during the encounter. Toward the end, Clinton flicked at the intern badge dangling from Lewinsky’s neck. “This could be a problem,” he said.
Two nights later, there was another encounter, when Lewinsky brought the president some pizza that had been delivered to the White House. Then nothing for six weeks, by which time Lewinsky had moved into a paid staff position in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs. There was a third assignation on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, three more encounters in January and February 1996 before the president ended the relationship on February 19, and a final moment of weakness on March 31. At that point a White House deputy who understood what was going on had Lewinsky transferred to the Pentagon—a move that would prove in some ways even more fateful than the affair itself.
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Why did Clinton do it? It was unfathomably irresponsible. He knew what kind of enemies he had. He knew that Ken Starr and his deputies would overturn every stone they could to find something on him. He knew that reckless behavior on his part could imperil not just his presidency, but the presidency, as well as, potentially, Democratic and progressive politics for years. And still, he took the plunge. In My Life, he explained his weakness as an effort to lead the “parallel lives” that he had pursued since his childhood, a life of public joy and exuberance but no small amount of inner torment.
I also came to understand that when I was exhausted, angry, or feeling isolated and alone, I was more vulnerable to making selfish and self-destructive personal mistakes about which I would later be ashamed. The current controversy was the latest casualty of my lifelong effort to lead parallel lives, to wall off my anger and grief and get on with my outer life, which I loved and lived well. During the government shutdowns I was engaged in two titanic struggles: a public one with Congress over the future of our country, and a private one to hold the old demons at bay. I had won the public fight and lost the private one.
In so doing, I had hurt more than my family and my administration. It was also damaging to the presidency and the American people. No matter how much pressure I was under, I should have been stronger and behaved better.
But he wasn’t, and he didn’t. It was by any measure selfish and out of control. And while it’s hard to say whether this made it better or worse, the affair was not solely sexual: Clinton and Lewinsky had long phone calls, they shared things; he gave her a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, known for its celebration of things sensual, while she presented him with a copy of Oy Vey! The Things They Say: A Book of Jewish Wit.
When Lewinsky went to work at the Pentagon, she met Linda Tripp. Tripp disliked the Clintons intensely; she was a Republican, but beyond that she was upset at being transferred out of the White House. It was perhaps for that reason that she befriended Lewinsky, who had been similarly drummed out of the inner sanctum and shipped across the Potomac. If Lewinsky had been reassigned to the Interior Department or the Federal Aviation Administration, the whole thing might never have become public. But she wasn’t, and she met Tripp. The two began talking; in time, Lewinsky started telling Tripp about the affair—angrily and in detail. Tripp started writing things down.
Meanwhile, Tripp had hired and befriended a literary agent, Lucianne Goldberg, hoping to sell a dishy book about Vince Foster. (She was one of the last people to see him alive.) Goldberg had a history as a conservative provocateur; she had once posed as a reporter on George McGovern’s campaign while working for the Nixon team. Soon enough, Tripp was conveying the gist of Monica’s story to Goldberg, who suggested to Tripp that she begin taping their phone calls. Tripp resisted at first, but Goldberg persuaded her that if the goal was to nail a sitting president on a sex scandal, hard proof would be vital: “Well, bubeleh, if you’re going to go after the big kahuna, you better kill him.”
And so, in early October 1997, Tripp began recording a series of confessional telephone chats—secretly and, indeed, illegally, since recording a conversation without informing the other party was a felony in Maryland, where Tripp lived. (Goldberg had assured her it would be legal.)
In the meantime, Newsweek investigative reporter Michael Isikoff had spent much of 1996 and 1997 writing various Clinton scandal stories, on Whitewater and on the allegation that Clinton and Gore had accepted illegal foreign donations during their reelection campaign. He had followed and written about the Paula Jones lawsuit from the beginning. But in mid-1997 he was pursuing a story about another woman, Kathleen Willey, who alleged that Clinton had groped her in the Oval Office in 1993. It was in the course of this pursuit that he met Tripp, who had supposedly seen Willey leave Clinton’s office in a state of dishevelment. Tripp did not confirm Willey’s account to Isikoff, but the two stayed in touch. It was also in mid-1997 that Isikoff had a chance encounter with the conservative polemicist Ann Coulter in the green room at CNBC. Coulter, Isikoff wrote later, “kept dropping hints suggesting inside knowledge about Jones’s legal strategy. I remarked on this. Oh yes, she said with a laugh. ‘There are lots of us busy elves working away in Santa’s workshop.’” Isikoff tucked that away, and the next day called the conservative activist lawyer George Conway to learn more about what Coulter meant. Coulter, Conway, and others on the right were obsessed with Jones’s lawsuit and the opportunity it presented to humiliate Clinton.
In October 1997, Tripp played her tape-recorded conversations with Lewinsky for Lucianne Goldberg for the first time. Goldberg then arranged for Tripp to meet Isikoff and play the tapes for him, but Isikoff refused—he felt, he wrote in his book on the scandal, that listening to tape recordings made without one party’s consent went against the standards of journalism in which he was trained. Tripp and Goldberg kept working him, hoping that he would write a story in Newsweek that could potentially lead to a blockbuster book deal for Tripp: I was the president’s girlfriend’s confessor.
As these events were unfolding, the Jones lawsuit took a conspiratorial turn. Back in 1994, Jones’s charges had mostly served as fodder for late-night comics and supermarket tabloids. Then, in late 1996, Stuart Taylor Jr., a respected legal writer—albeit a staunchly conservative one—produced a lengthy article in the American Lawyer taking Jones’s case seriously. Washington followed suit. Then came the Supreme Court ruling that her case could proceed while Clinton was president. Clinton offered to settle, for $700,000—but with no apology. Jones’s lawyers urged her to take the money.
She heard them out, but by now Jones was listening to other people, too—conservatives who saw that her suit presented a chance to discredit or disgrace Clinton. She hired a new public relations person, Susan Carpenter-McMillan, a Los Angeles–based conservative activist who specialized in going on television and denouncing Clinton; the online magazine Slate called her a “first-class media hound, blessed with a savage wit, good looks, and—as one critic put it—‘the tact of a bulldozer.’” In October 1997, the same month that Tripp first played Goldberg the tapes, Carpenter-McMillan urged Jones to refuse the settlement. She did, and, in exasperation, her two longtime attorneys quit the case. Jones hired new counsel from the Dallas law firm of Rader, Campbell, Fisher & Pyke. The firm had connections to a religious-right foundation, the Rutherford Institute, which agreed to help publicize and cover the costs of the suit. Rutherford had been created in 1982 to act as a sort of Christian civil liberties group; its main founder, John Whitehead, wrote a book that year, The Second American Revolution, arguing that the Bible should be the basis for all American law and decision making.
So things stood in the fall of 1997: over here, a politically motivated legal team, trying to find any sexual dirt it could on Clinton; over there, a similarly politically motivated group of people in possession of just such dirt. It didn’t take long for their paths to cross. Jones’s lawsuit was regularly in the news, so Tripp and Goldberg would have read of the new Rutherford association and would obviously have known that they were sitting on information that would be of keen interest to the Jones team. In fact, Tripp had wanted to be subpoenaed by Jones’s lawyers—in that way, she would be going public with the Lewinsky details (laying the groundwork for her book deal) as a matter of legal compulsion and would feel less like she was betraying her friend. In November, Goldberg reached out on Tripp’s behalf to Richard Porter, a lawyer—in fact, a partner of Starr’s at Kirkland & Ellis—and former Republican opposition researcher who was part of the circle of “elves” who were working behind the scenes to help advance the Jones case. “After Goldberg finished telling Tripp’s story,” wrote the journalists Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, “Porter promised to take care of the subpoena.”
Once that connection was made, the Jones lawyers knew the name Lewinsky. On December 5, 1997, they presented their witness list to the president’s legal team. It included her name. Clinton’s lawyers asked him abo
ut the nature of the relationship; he lied to them. The Jones lawyers subpoenaed Lewinsky. In a panic, she telephoned Clinton. Though their physical contact had long ago ended, the two had been talking regularly (and not always happily) because she was seeking to leave government and find a job in the private sector. Clinton had directed her toward his friend Vernon Jordan, a powerful and widely respected figure in the Washington legal community with a long history in civil rights, who would help her in her job search. Clinton told Lewinsky that if she filed an affidavit saying she had no information to contribute about Jones’s allegations, she might avoid having to testify, and so she did it—stating that she and the president had never had sexual relations. She signed it on January 7, 1998.
Now that the Lewinsky group and the Jones lawyers had connected, all that remained was for them to find their way to Ken Starr. This happened at a restaurant in Philadelphia on January 8, when Porter, Jerome Marcus, and George Conway had dinner with Paul Rosenzweig of the independent counsel’s office and told him the whole tale. The next day, Rosenzweig informed Jackie Bennett, a top prosecutor in Starr’s office. After four years of snake eyes, the lucky prosecutor finally rolled a seven—finally had some evidence that could bring Clinton down.
Events moved quickly from there. On January 12, 1998, Starr directed Bennett to begin accepting information from Tripp, who had fired her old lawyer, a Democrat who was aghast that she had violated Maryland’s taping laws, and hired the conservative attorney James Moody. On January 13, Tripp met with Lewinsky, this time wearing a wire supplied by Starr’s office. On January 14, Moody played some of the (illegally recorded) Tripp-Lewinsky tapes for Conway and Coulter. On January 15, Bennett approached the Justice Department—specifically, Eric Holder, the deputy attorney general (and a future attorney general under Barack Obama)—to lay out the situation and to request authority to expand his faltering probe into the Lewinsky matter.
Bill Clinton Page 10
