The story spread quickly. Television pundits postulated it could be the scandal that would at last unravel the Clinton administration. Cabinet officials, caught off guard, refuted the allegations. Labor Secretary Robert Reich said, “I was convinced that Bill Clinton had been set up. He’s got all these enemies who are out to get him. He wouldn’t be so stupid as to jeopardize his entire presidency. For what? No, that was not the Bill Clinton I knew.” The president called in consultant Dick Morris. Morris advised him that the American people may be able to forgive the affair, but not the lie.
For several months, Starr’s investigation seemed stalled. That August, Starr signed a deal with Lewinsky, granting her immunity in exchange for grand jury testimony. The special prosecutor took another approach: He charged the president with suborning perjury by trying to persuade Lewinsky to lie to the grand jury about their affair. He pointed to efforts by White House staff members to get Lewinsky a job in the private sector. President Clinton gave an interview to PBS News Hour host Jim Lehrer, continuing to deny the claims. “I did not ask anyone to tell anything other than the truth. There is no improper relationship. And I intend to cooperate with this inquiry,” he said to a television audience of millions. Hillary appeared on television the next day, clinging to the hope that her husband had been truthful with her. “I just think that a lot of this is deliberately designed to sensationalize charges against my husband because everything else they’ve tried has failed,” she said.
The president had to decide whether to testify before the grand jury. Hillary, believing he had nothing to fear, told him to go ahead. When one of his aides warned her, in a roundabout way, that “something about this might be true,” she told him, “Look, my husband may have his faults, but he has never lied to me.”
Starr now also had more than Lewinsky’s word as proof of the affair. She had presented as evidence a blue dress she had worn during one of her sexual encounters with Bill Clinton. It was stained with his semen. The morning of his deposition, the president again woke up Hillary. He paced the room as he worked up the nerve to tell her it was true. He’d had an affair with Lewinsky. Hillary described her emotions in her memoir – “dumbfounded, heartbroken, and outraged” were three of the words she used, to say nothing of “furious.” It was a betrayal, a humiliation that both Hillary and Chelsea would have to bear. She had put up with Clinton’s infidelity before; the deception stung most. After her husband’s confession, she wrote, she knew their marriage might not survive. But she never gave a moment’s thought to giving in, for either one of them: “Despite the emotional wreckage all around him, Bill had to prepare his testimony and work on a statement to make to the nation.” And when he sat down to that job, Hillary was among his advisers.
Starr’s grand jury interrogated Bill Clinton for a pre-agreed period of four hours. Clinton’s strategy was to run out the clock. He was successful - stretching out his responses, rambling about justice and the American dream, and giving Starr and his team of prosecutors little. He was more forthcoming with the American people. That evening, he gave a televised address: “I must take complete responsibility for all my actions, both public and private. . . . Indeed I did have a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong.” Many on the Clinton staff were hearing the admission, with the rest of the world, for the first time. Betsey Wright said, “Yes, I felt betrayed. He lied to me, yeah. He lied to a lot of people about that, not the least of whom was himself.”
The next morning, the first family took their planned vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. In Hillary’s telling, the trip was an angry, lonely time in which she could hardly speak to her husband. But an unprompted gesture by Chelsea gave the world a glimpse of a family holding together. As the three of them crossed the South Lawn at the White House to board the waiting helicopter, Chelsea walked between her mother and father. The teenage girl took her parents’ hands in her own, and they made their way to the waiting aircraft as a unit.
Politicians and pundits denounced the president’s conduct daily, and he apologized over and over: “I agree with what he said. I’ve already said that I made a bad mistake. It was indefensible, and I’m sorry about it. I’m very sorry about it.” As the days went by, voters seemed ready to forgive the president, Hillary wrote; his rating in the polls remained high, whatever his standing with her.
But Republican horns were sounding for impeachment. Hillary said that, whatever her husband’s personal conduct, he had been a good president, and it would be wrong to strip him of office. Then it emerged that Starr was going to recommend impeachment to the House Judiciary Committee. If the full House voted articles of impeachment, they would go to the Senate for trial, and the president could be convicted.
President Clinton turned to work for solace. He faced a crisis on August 7, 1998, when a then-little-known terrorist group called Al Qaeda bombed U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. The simultaneous attacks killed 200 and injured 5,000. Soon after, the president received an intelligence report on the location of Al Qaeda and its leader, Osama Bin Laden. Clinton’s national security advisers thought it reliable and wanted the president’s approval to plan a missile strike to take out the terrorists. Some advisers cautioned the timing was wrong, saying a strike would be seen by the public as a staged distraction from the scandal in Washington. “[Clinton] snapped,” National Security Coordinator Richard Clarke said. “He just very quickly and sharply said, ‘You don’t think about that. You think about national security. You give me the national security advice you would give me if this were not going on. You let me worry about that.’” On August 20, missiles were targeted at Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and a Sudanese plant believed to be manufacturing chemical weapons. They narrowly missed their main target: Bin Laden. As predicted, many in Congress and the media denounced it as a political stunt.
In September, Starr released a report highly critical of the president’s conduct. The report’s 450 pages contained almost no mention of Whitewater. Rather, it went into sometimes salacious detail about the Lewinsky affair and President Clinton’s actions to keep it quiet. Starr called the report “thorough.” The American people saw it as excessive, and for most, it only confirmed their opinion that the president was being persecuted.
President Clinton addressed the nation again, this time from the White House Rose Garden: “I am profoundly sorry for all I have done wrong in words and deeds. I never should have misled the country, the Congress, my friends, or my family. Quite simply, I gave into my shame. I have been condemned by my accusers with harsh words, and while it’s hard to hear yourself called deceitful and manipulative, I remember Ben Franklin’s admonition that our critics are our friends, for they do show us our faults.” The people, for the most part, seemed willing to forgive him. Hillary, too, appeared to have reconciled with her husband. She made midterm-election campaign appearances where she spoke out in his defense.
With the midterm elections came another sign that the GOP was losing support: The incumbent Democrats retained every seat in the Senate and gained in the House, the first time an incumbent party had done so since 1822. Then the Paula Jones civil suit against Bill was dismissed. But since the case would be appealed, the president chose to settle out of court, paying Jones $850,000.
For Republicans, the thought of Bill Clinton surviving this scandal was appalling. Along party lines, the House Judiciary Committee sent four articles of impeachment to the full House. Two of them, charging perjury and obstruction of justice, were sent on to the Senate. It marked the first time in more than a century – and only the second time ever – that the House voted to impeach a president. But in the Senate, there was no hope of conviction, and thus no semblance of a prosecution. The evidence was all in grand jury testimony and depositions, followed by denunciatory speeches. But the spectacle took five weeks to play out. Republican senators asserted that President Clinton had put himself above the law. “This is not about sex, this is about obstruction of jus
tice,” said Florida Representative Bill McCollum. “This is about a scheme. This is about a lot of lies.” The Democrats argued the opposite. “We are here today because the president suffered a terrible moral lapse, a marital infidelity – not a breach of the public trust, not a crime against society,” said Arkansas Senator Dale Bumpers. The debate ended in an anticlimactic vote in February 1999. Neither charge got a majority, let alone the two-thirds needed for conviction.
The president would be allowed to finish his second term, scarred by the scandal but surprisingly intact. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, was poised to blaze her own trail. The dream she had for the two of them now became focused on her own career. The day of the Senate’s impeachment vote, Hillary met with Ickes in the White House residence to plan a Senate campaign.
Hillary Clinton’s decision to run for Senate was long and agonizing, with months of ambivalence and dozens of consultations with advisers. She had her husband’s best pollster, Mark Penn, hard at work sounding out whether and how she could win. She and the president had decided to move to New York after leaving the White House. In 1999, they bought a $1.7 million, Dutch colonial house in Chappaqua, a suburb of New York City. The deliberations dropped away, and the choice became clear, Hillary wrote, when she attended a promotional event for women’s sports and a young athlete challenged her with the slogan of the day: “Dare to compete, Mrs. Clinton! Dare to compete!”
Hillary started her campaign with what she called a listening tour, traveling across New York for seven months to meet voters and hear their concerns. At first, the crowds that came to see her were curious to see the first lady. It was only after two or three visits to a town that she began to break through and have meaningful conversations with her would-be constituents. Although she was listening, voters liked what they heard.
Hillary’s likeliest Republican opponent was New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. With his reputation as an effective mayor with a tough stance on crime, he would be difficult to beat. But Giuliani decided not to run after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. His replacement, Long Island Congressman Rick Lazio, was an aggressive debater. He ran a late-campaign attack ad implying that Clinton was linked to the recent bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. She enlisted former New York Mayor Ed Koch for her rebuttal advertisement: “Rick, stop with the sleaze already.” She won handily.
Senator Clinton had soaked up enough Washington wisdom to be similarly humble and deferential when she took office. Freshman senators are expected to keep a low profile during their first few years. Hillary took this time to befriend Robert C. Byrd, the senior senator from West Virginia who had dealt the coup de gras to her health-reform package by refusing to make it part of the budget-reconciliation process. He was skeptical: “I thought she would play upon her having been a president’s wife and expect to have a lot of favors done.” But she asked him if he would be willing to teach a group of freshman senators the nuances of parliamentary rules and procedures. To his delight, the sessions in his office lasted for nearly a year. She cultivated her relationship with Byrd all through her time in the Senate. When she and senior New York Senator Charles Schumer needed help in getting federal recovery funds for New York City after the terrorist hijackings and attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in September 2001, she called Byrd. He worked with the Appropriations Committee to secure $21.4 billion.
Hillary Clinton also joined the Senate Prayer Group, a band of about a dozen mostly conservative senators that meets every Wednesday for prayer and discussion. These meetings are private, but there was one leak in early 2001, and it involved Clinton. It was Kansas Senator Sam Brownback’s turn to lead the group, and he intended to talk about his recent cancer scare. But he changed his mind. “I came here today prepared to share about this experience in my life that has caused great suffering, the result of which has deepened my faith,” Brownback said, according to Joshua Green’s account in The Atlantic. “But I’m overcome now with only one thought.” He confessed to having hated Clinton and talked contemptuously about her. Then he asked her, “Mrs. Clinton, will you forgive me?” The junior senator from New York said she would and that she appreciated the apology.
As she settled into her new role, sometimes Clinton played against liberal stereotype, as when she would offer to pour coffee for the older men. Always cordial, she was especially gregarious when traveling with her colleagues on trips to foreign countries, when informal contacts could trump doctrinal differences and lead to friendship. On one trip to Estonia, Clinton was having a casual dinner with three Republicans, Arizona’s John McCain, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, and Maine’ Susan Collins. When the waiter brought out a bottle of vodka and four shot glasses, Hillary poured a round and kicked off a drinking contest, which by all accounts went on for some time. “It’s been fifty years since I’d been in a drinking game,” McCain said. “She can really hold her liquor.”
Senator Clinton could also hold her word. She had promised during her campaign to get 200,000 jobs for upstate New York, and she duly introduced legislation for a seven-part economic program. But under the George W. Bush administration and a Republican Congress, no such bill was going to pass; nor were any other major Democratic initiatives. Hillary employed a style she called her “school of smaller steps.” She created a Farm to Fork program, organizing farmers’ markets in cities around New York State. She sponsored legislation to create a medical center in Syracuse and artists’ lofts in abandoned buildings in Buffalo. And she co-sponsored bills with such unlikely partners as GOP Majority Leader Bill Frist when she could find bipartisan ground that they shared.
Clinton’s “power to convene,” as her people have described it, helped spark ideas, raise possibilities, get projects moving, and overcome obstacles. She boosted sales of New York wine by bringing top-flight New York City chefs on aerial tours of the state’s wineries. She promoted upstate tourism during an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
But Clinton also knew the power of inside-Washington ploys. When bad weather hurt the New York apple crop, she sent Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman a rotten apple from the Hudson Valley along with a plea for disaster funds. And when the Pentagon recommended closing the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station, Hillary used her seat on the Armed Services Committee to fight the loss of New York jobs. Through her Air Force connections, she received a document that showed the claimed savings from the closing had been exaggerated. Then a staffer for her patron Robert Byrd found an obscure 1917 law saying that no National Guard base could be closed without the consent of the state’s governor. New York suffered no closings.
Senator Clinton also took an active hand in the Democratic Party’s efforts to reinforce its intellectual underpinnings. She helped found a think tank, the Center for American Progress. She also advised the Democracy Alliance, a group of some of the party’s wealthiest donors, and a watchdog group, Media Matters for America, which is run by the onetime Clinton nemesis David Brock, now an ally.
When it came time for Senator Clinton’s re-election in 2006, she won with 67 percent of the vote. Her second term was marked by growing hostility to the war in Iraq. At one point, she told General David Petraeus, the senior commander there, “I think that the reports that you provide to us really require a willing suspension of disbelief.” But reelection to the Senate was an opening gambit. Clinton was preparing to run for president in 2008. When she announced her exploratory committee early in 2007, she wasn’t coy about it: “I’m in, and I’m in to win.”
By that October, Clinton was leading the other Democratic candidates, notably John Edwards and Barack Obama. But she stumbled badly in a debate performance. And she had made some crucial mistakes in picking her campaign staff, rewarding loyalty rather than competence. Obama had beaten her to social media and was winning thousands of young voters by using blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. Her message, emphasizing her experience, also seemed less effective than Obama’s appeal to hope and change.
Clinton’s lead in some p
olls evaporated by December. She came in third in the Iowa caucuses, but rebounded to win the New Hampshire primary. Edwards dropped out, setting up a fight between Clinton and Obama in the twenty-two states voting on Super Tuesday, February 5. They split the popular vote, but Obama won more convention delegates.
With Clinton running out of money and her campaign plagued by infighting, her chances ebbed away. She conceded the race to Obama on June 7, 2008 and campaigned for him against the Republican John McCain until Obama’s victory on Election Day. Then Clinton churned out 16,054 personal notes, thanking each of the major contributors to her campaign, whether in money or effort. She got ready to go back to Senate life, asking party leaders for a position in their top councils. She could run for president again, she knew, and if that didn’t happen, there were worse fates than a long, distinguished career in the Senate.
Barack Obama had a post in mind for Hillary Clinton. Their campaign rivalry had occasionally been acrimonious, with Clinton deriding Obama’s lack of foreign-policy experience and Obama dismissing her contacts with foreign leaders as tea-party chitchat. But they had liked and respected each other as colleagues in the Senate, and it turned out Obama had been thinking about Clinton as his secretary of state for some time. Shortly after Election Day, she flew in secret to Chicago, where he asked her to take the job. She turned him down.
That set up a long minuet of complex pressures, considerations, second thoughts, and negotiations. John Podesta, President Clinton’s onetime chief of staff and a principal Obama adviser, urged Hillary to accept; so did her friend Madeleine Albright. Some of the former denizens of Hillaryland rejoiced at the thought of a new home in the State Department, but others among her top aides said she should have no part of it. Bill Clinton wanted her to take the job, and he had agreed to curtail his own activities abroad to eliminate any conflicts of interest. Hillary liked the idea of being the nation’s top diplomat. But she had misgivings about working for Obama, and she wanted to repay some $6.4 million in campaign debts. She had already written off the $13 million of her own money that she had lent the campaign. She wouldn’t be able to raise funds while on the federal payroll.
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