Bill Clinton

by Michael Tomasky

  Referring to “inchoate criminality,” Bennett told Holder that he suspected that Clinton and perhaps Jordan had urged Lewinsky to perjure herself. He had no actual evidence of this, but his office did gain possession of a so-called talking points memo written to Linda Tripp, coaching her on how to lie to prosecutors. The memo’s authorship was unknown. If it had been written by Clinton or Vernon Jordan, that could be a crime. This charge raised the matter from mere extramarital sex to possible obstruction of justice. The Justice Department, fearful of exposing itself to charges that it was covering up for the president, granted permission.

  On January 16, Tripp met Lewinsky again, at the food court at a northern Virginia mall called Pentagon City. But this time when Lewinsky showed up, she saw that Tripp had company—two FBI agents. “Ma’am,” they told her, “you are in serious trouble. But we would like to give you an opportunity to save yourself.” They led her to Room 1012 of the adjoining Ritz-Carlton hotel and questioned her for hours. When she asked to call her lawyer, they advised her not to. And on January 17, Clinton was deposed by Jones’s lawyers—lying, again, as he had to his own lawyers the month before, on the rationalization that oral sex wasn’t really sex. That was pure Clintonian parsing, a distinction that might hold sway in men’s locker rooms but wouldn’t do for a president.

  Michael Isikoff was moving fast toward publishing a story in Newsweek detailing some of these developments. The night before, Moody had allowed Isikoff and some colleagues to listen to one of Tripp’s tapes. The next day was Saturday, the final deadline at a newsweekly that would hit newsstands on Monday morning. After an internal discussion that lasted the entire day, Isikoff’s editors told him they wouldn’t pull the trigger on something this explosive on such short notice; the story would not run. And that’s when Conway and Goldberg tipped Matt Drudge, who posted that first Saturday night item.

  * * *

  On Tuesday, January 20, Drudge posted a fuller story, explaining that Starr’s office was in possession of “intimate taped conversations.” Either directly or indirectly, Starr’s office leaked information to two of its most reliable media conduits, Susan Schmidt of the Washington Post and Jackie Judd of ABC News. On Wednesday, the story officially broke in the mainstream press: “Clinton Accused of Urging Aide to Lie,” screamed the banner headline in the Post. The most sensational allegation concerned “whether Clinton and his close friend Vernon Jordan encouraged a 24-year-old former White House intern to lie to lawyers for Paula Jones about whether the intern had an affair with the president.” The story quoted anonymous sources as saying that prosecutors were in possession of a tape in which Lewinsky told Tripp that Clinton had instructed her to lie, and also to consult Jordan on what to say. And, of course, there was the talking points memo. If all this was true, it was quite plausibly—indeed almost surely—obstruction of justice and subornation of perjury, which would certainly be impeachable offenses.

  The capital exploded in paroxysms of rage and revulsion. How could he? We knew he was kind of a cad, but this? An intern? In the Oval Office? Almost all the coverage, on television and in print, assumed the worst and assumed that all of it was true. “Starr Appears on Solid Ground” was a representative Post headline. No one in Washington in those first few days stopped to ask some obvious questions. Wasn’t it rather Kafkaesque, the whole business—catching Clinton not having committed a serious crime, but telling someone to fib about a consensual affair, if he’d even done that? Wasn’t it obvious that this was the result of a well-set “perjury trap” laid by a group of people who’d regarded Clinton as an illegitimate president since day one, going back to when Bob Dole declared in 1992 that Clinton had won no mandate? And perhaps most of all, if the leaks from Starr’s office were highly unusual or even unethical, then how did we know about all this in the first place, and shouldn’t someone be asking questions about Starr’s tactics?

  No time for any of that. The frenzy was on. There were predictions—such as the one put forward by ABC News commentator Sam Donaldson—that Clinton’s presidency “could be numbered in days.” George Stephanopoulos, now also with ABC News, mentioned the word impeachment on the air—a big deal coming from a former administration official, which gave others the license to use it as well.

  Meanwhile, inside the White House, Clinton denied the story, and everyone wanted to believe him. He denied it to his family, his staff, his cabinet, his fellow Democrats, and the nation, although not as firmly as his supporters would have wanted. As fate would have it the president had three television interviews scheduled for that very day, originally planned to set the tone for his State of the Union address the following week. The first of these was with Jim Lehrer of PBS, who ditched his State of the Union questions and went straight to the matter at hand.

  Lehrer: You had no sexual relationship with this young woman?

  Clinton: There is not a sexual relationship; that is accurate.

  “Is.” Hmmm. In the two subsequent interviews, he shifted to the past tense, which reassured his staff and supporters, but everyone made a mental note. More parsing.

  Meanwhile, the man was president of the United States. He had work to do—he hosted Netanyahu the day the scandal was breaking, and Yasser Arafat the next day. He also had ceremonial duties to perform. On the schedule for the night of January 21: a black-tie dinner for donors to the White House Preservation Society. This group included Richard Mellon Scaife; incredibly, the money man behind the Arkansas Project, which arguably was where all this had started in the first place, was a guest of the president on the very night the Lewinsky story broke. Hillary Clinton recalled in her autobiography, Living History, that “as the military aide announced his name and a White House photographer prepared to snap his picture, I realized it was Richard Mellon Scaife.… I greeted him as I would any guest in a receiving line,” as did the president, but it had to be a surreal moment.

  The week after the scandal broke was unlike any Washington had seen before. Clinton repeated and strengthened his denials. Starr subpoenaed a raft of White House aides and records. Lewinsky’s attorney, William Ginsburg, who instantly became a ubiquitous television presence, negotiated privately (and publicly) for an immunity deal for his client. Clinton directed deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes and former secretary of commerce Mickey Kantor to run the White House’s Lewinsky scandal response. James Carville vowed to wage “a war” over Starr’s “skuzzy, slimy tactics.”

  On January 26, Clinton issued his most declarative denial yet, at the end of an event at which he’d been trying to talk about day care, class size, and education standards: “I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I’m going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time—never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you.”

  The next morning, Hillary Clinton appeared on the Today show. Of course, she said, I believe my husband. And she went further: “This is the great story here, for anybody who is willing to find it and write about it and explain it, this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.” The phrase vast right-wing conspiracy caught on immediately, but not in the way Hillary Clinton hoped. Instead she was widely mocked, and the phrase became a punch line. Very few people, even among Washington journalists, knew the backstory on the relationships that had brought together Starr’s office, Jones’s lawyers, and the elves. Many who did know dismissed it. And in any case, many observers sniffed, no conspiracy had forced Bill Clinton to accept sexual favors from an intern. (Lewinsky was actually a full-time staffer during most of the liaison, but intern made it so much more scandalous, and the term was true enough, as that had been Lewinsky’s status when the dalliance began.)

  Clinton hoped, somehow, that he could bluff his way through this. But at the same time he knew what he had said to Jones’s lawyers on January 1
7. He had squabbled relentlessly with them over the definition of the phrase sexual relations, said he couldn’t recall whether he’d ever been alone with Lewinsky, and committed numerous other evasions. He hoped against hope that his deposition would never see the light of day. It’s impossible to imagine how he carried on, knowing that he was lying and that he almost surely would be caught out one day—and still having to be the president of the United States. Talk about parallel lives!

  But there was one thought he never entertained seriously: resigning. Even some supporters of his and critics of Starr wondered aloud if he shouldn’t resign simply out of shame, for having sullied the people’s house in such a way, assuming the charges were true. He was having none of it. He may have behaved indefensibly on a personal level, but he wasn’t going to let his personal lapse be converted into political defeat. He certainly was not going to hand his political opponents his own scalp.

  After the story broke, I called [lawyer] David Kendall and assured him that I had not suborned perjury or obstructed justice. It was clear to both of us that Starr was trying to create a firestorm to force me from office. He was off to a flying start, but I thought that if I could survive the public pounding for two weeks, the smoke would begin to clear, and the press and the public would focus on Starr’s tactics, and a more balanced view of the matter would emerge. I knew I had made a terrible mistake, and I was determined not to compound it by allowing Starr to drive me from office. For now, the hysteria was overwhelming.

  It certainly was. Every day brought new revelations, most of them false. In one notorious episode, the Wall Street Journal published a story on February 4, 1998, claiming that the president’s steward, a man named Bayani Nelvis, had told Starr’s grand jury that he’d seen Clinton and Lewinsky alone in the president’s private study and had gone in afterward and picked up tissues with lipstick and “other stains.” One of the story’s authors was on television within minutes of the story going up on the paper’s Web site. Washington was going nuts over it. But nothing about it was true. Nelvis had testified, that much was factual, but he’d said none of the things the Journal claimed. One of the story’s reporters had asked the White House for comment, giving press secretary Joe Lockhart thirty minutes to respond. But the reporter called Lockhart back within minutes to say the story was up; there would be no response. Such was the atmosphere.

  * * *

  Just six days after the scandal broke, Clinton delivered his State of the Union address. The big question: would he address the scandal? Many commentators thought he had to, and indeed it seemed well nigh impossible that he could ignore not an elephant in the living room but a raging Tyrannosaurus. The notion was discussed in the White House but quickly dismissed. No, Clinton and his aides agreed, just go on being president. And thus was fashioned one of the strangest moments in American political history. All the pomp and ceremony of a State of the Union address—the overlong applause, the glad-handing as the president walked down the aisle, the inevitable insistence that “the state of our union is strong,” met by the equally inevitable sustained applause from Democrats—continued as if the scandal didn’t even exist. This, even as half the room, the Republicans, sneered contemptuously at him, and even as many or most pundits believed that Clinton might not be president for much more than another week.

  But it was a lesson in the power of the office—he was still the president, and as much as critics might curse him on television, in his presence custom demanded that they still treat him like the president. And so he used the speech to boast about erasing the deficit: “Tonight, I come before you to announce that the federal deficit, once so incomprehensibly large that it had eleven zeros, will be simply zero,” he said. He then shared his conclusion about what to do with the budget surplus: “Save Social Security first.”

  After those first couple of weeks, the clamor subsided a little, just as Clinton had hoped. It became clear that he was not going to resign, and the White House and its allies found their footing and started turning their guns on Starr. And a funny thing happened: Clinton’s numbers went up, while Starr’s plummeted. The president’s approval rating had risen to 73 percent by early March, while Starr’s was an anorexic 11 percent. Around this time, portions of Clinton’s deposition were leaked and some of Clinton’s evasions revealed, but they didn’t move the needle. The American public had clearly decided that Clinton was a good president who had rescued the economy and, even if he did diddle around with this intern, they didn’t exactly approve of course but it simply wasn’t a high crime or misdemeanor warranting his removal from office. This was quite at odds with the views of Republicans and Beltway arbiters of conventional wisdom such as the Washington Post’s David Broder, the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, and NBC’s Tim Russert. They were now in the position of pursuing a “truth” that the American people had already decided they didn’t care about.

  Over the course of the spring, Clinton turned some of his attention to foreign affairs. On St. Patrick’s Day, he met again with Gerry Adams and David Trimble, the Blair government’s first minister for Northern Ireland, to nudge the parties to that conflict toward peace. The nudging bore fruit a month later, when the Good Friday Agreement was signed in Belfast, ending the historic conflict between Catholics and Protestants. Clinton wasn’t present for the signing, but he was in constant contact with all the parties via telephone, and he called it “one of the happiest days of my presidency.” Also in March, the president and First Lady flew to Africa for an extended trip that highlighted American development assistance and efforts on AIDS. They went to South Africa, where President Nelson Mandela showed them around Robben Island prison, which Mandela had involuntarily called home for twenty-seven years. Clinton asked Mandela how he got over hating his jailers; in fact, he had invited them to his inauguration. Mandela described his thought process: “They have had me for twenty-seven years. If I keep hating them, they will still have me. I wanted to be free, and so I let it go.” Mandela looked at Clinton heavily; the president did not miss the point.

  Also that spring, the administration began work to confront a threat that was relatively new to the United States. The first terrorist bombing of New York’s World Trade Center had taken place in February 1993, but because it didn’t do anywhere near the amount of damage that was intended, it didn’t register in the collective American consciousness with the gravity it might have. Then, in March 1995, members of a Japanese terrorist cult group released sarin gas in the Tokyo subway system, killing a dozen and injuring fifty. And in June 1996, Islamic fundamentalist terrorists detonated a truck bomb near a U.S. Air Force housing complex in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, killing nineteen airmen. Through all this time, U.S. intelligence agencies were tracking a surge in the number of terrorist training camps in the Middle East, and in jihadist rhetoric that targeted America and especially its military bases on Arab land.

  In May 1998, Clinton used his commencement address to midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy to boast that the federal government had broken up terror rings planning attacks on New York’s Holland Tunnel, the United Nations, and “our airlines,” and to lay out a comprehensive anti-terror strategy. He created a national counterterrorism coordinator, naming to the position Richard Clarke, who would later gain attention as a major critic of George W. Bush’s post–9/11 policies.

  As summer arrived, more foreign policy: a lengthy trip to China, where Clinton again jousted with Jiang Zemin over human rights and intellectual property rights, among other issues. And Slobodan Milosevic reentered the picture. Bosnia had been quieted, but now an armed guerrilla group in Kosovo called the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), consisting of ethnic Albanians who wanted to leave Yugoslavia and be incorporated into a greater Albania, began launching attacks on Serbian installations in Kosovo. Milosevic responded with force, and fighting escalated over the spring and summer. Clinton dispatched Richard Holbrooke to the region in July, and Holbrooke read Milosevic the riot act and created an international stir by allowing him
self to be photographed with members of the KLA, which another U.S. envoy had labeled a terrorist organization some months before.

  Then, in August, Richard Clarke suddenly found himself a much busier man than he’d expected to be. On August 7, 1998, terrorist bombs tore through two U.S. embassies—in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya—killing more than 250 people. The original New York Times dispatch on the bombings suggested that the perpetrators might have been “a previously unknown group called the Liberation Army of the Islamic Sanctuaries.” But in short order, suspicion centered on a man whose name was known to intelligence officials but not yet to the wider American public: Osama bin Laden.

  Back in 1994, U.S. intelligence analysts believed that bin Laden, a Saudi national born to immense wealth, was financing at least three terrorist training camps in Sudan. The next year, he set up more camps in Yemen. In 1996, reacting to pressure from the United States and Saudi Arabia, Sudan expelled bin Laden, who moved to Afghanistan, where the extremist Taliban government gave him sanctuary. In 1997, a U.S.-backed multilateral mercenary force tried to abduct or kill bin Laden but failed. In early 1998, he issued a statement that because of America’s military presence on Arab soil, Muslims should kill Americans, even civilians, anywhere in the world. And now came the embassy bombings, which the FBI and CIA confirmed to Clinton were carried out by bin Laden’s group, al-Qaeda (“The Base”).