“I want to ask about Ken Starr in a second,” Lauer replied, and then after a few questions about whether Mrs. Clinton knew Lewinsky (“No”), Vernon Jordan’s role (“I just can’t describe to you how outgoing and friendly” he is), and whether her husband would apologize for again causing pain in their marriage (“No. Absolutely not, and he shouldn’t”), Mrs. Clinton had a chance to say what she felt about the investigation.
“This is what concerns me,” she said. “This started out as an investigation of a failed land deal. I told everybody in 1992, ‘We lost money.’ People said, ‘It’s not true, you know, they made money. They have money in a Swiss bank account.’ Well, it was true. It’s taken years, but it was true. We get a politically motivated prosecutor who is allied with the right-wing opponents of my husband, who had literally spent four years looking at every telephone—”
“Spent $30 million,” Lauer interjected.
“—more than that, now. But looking at every telephone call we’ve made, every check we’ve ever written, scratching for dirt, intimidating witnesses, doing everything possible to try to make some accusation against my husband.”
“We’re talking about Kenneth Starr,” Lauer said, “so let’s use his name, because he is the independent counsel.”
“But it’s the whole operation,” she replied. “It’s not just one person. It’s an entire operation.… I do believe that this is a battle. I mean, look at the very people who are involved in this, they have popped up in other settings. This is the great story here, for anybody who is willing to find it and write about it and explain it, is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president. A few journalists have kind of caught on to it and explained it, but it has not yet been fully revealed to the American public. And, actually, you know, in a bizarre sort of way, this may do it.”
The phrase “vast right-wing conspiracy” created an immediate sensation and quickly became probably the best-known utterance by a first lady in the history of the United States. Yet there was nothing new about Mrs. Clinton’s feelings on the subject. In February 1994, just as the Whitewater story was heating up, the first lady gave an interview to Meryl Gordon, of Elle magazine, in which she said, “Look, I know what this is about. This is a well-organized and well-financed attempt to undermine my husband and, by extension, myself, by people who have a different political agenda or have another personal and financial reason for attacking us.” Four years later, she felt the same way.
But was it a fair critique of the president’s adversaries, to call them a “vast right-wing conspiracy”? To the extent the word “conspiracy” suggested illegal behavior, Mrs. Clinton’s remark was not warranted. At that point, there was no evidence that anyone around either Paula Jones or Kenneth Starr broke the law. Nor were the anti-Clinton efforts centrally coordinated. Many of the participants in Mrs. Clinton’s conspiracy—say, Cliff Jackson and the elves, or Lucianne Goldberg and Starr himself—did not know one another at all. As for “vast,” the central players in the effort to bring down Clinton could probably all have fit in a single school bus. Moreover, the claim ignored the fact that the president brought many of his problems on himself, especially by conducting his disastrous relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Parsed in this way, Mrs. Clinton’s famous phrase did not exactly hold up.
But the charge had—and has—the unmistakable ring of truth. The Paula Jones and Whitewater investigations existed only because of the efforts of Clinton’s right-wing political enemies. People who hated the Clintons initiated these projects and sustained them through many years. To put it another way, there was no one of importance behind either the Starr investigation or the Paula Jones case who was not already a dedicated political adversary of the Clintons. There was scarcely, say, a single prominent Democrat or Clinton supporter who was convinced by the evidence to change sides. The evidence simply reinforced existing political orientations. It was, above all, a story of political passions being played out on a legal stage. In this respect, there was indeed a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to get the president.
Still, Mrs. Clinton’s view neglected an important, and troubling, point. Her outrage about the conspiracy presupposed a belief that there was something extraordinary about the use of the legal system to achieve political aims. In a world where, thanks largely to Democrats like the Clintons, the legal system had taken over the political system, the existence of this conspiracy was business as usual. At a time when lawsuits were replacing elections as weapons of political change, it was not surprising that Clinton’s enemies chose to attack him the way they did. All they were doing was using the tools of the contemporary political trade.
Since Mrs. Clinton’s phrase became a piece of Americana, the importance of her adjacent challenge to journalists had been largely forgotten. The reason she was talking about a “vast right-wing conspiracy” was to appeal to journalists to look into Starr’s background and that of his associates. Sidney Blumenthal had not come up with the famous four words—Mrs. Clinton did that herself—but he had urged her to goad the reporters covering the story. The fever of first disclosures was breaking. Something else had to take its place. “This is the great story here,” Mrs. Clinton had promised. Within a few days, Blumenthal made it his mission to midwife that story to life.
After her appearance on Today, though, Mrs. Clinton had to return to Washington and join her husband for the State of the Union address that evening. Her defense of her husband and attack on his pursuers had electrified the Clintons’ staff and friends—and, it appeared, the first lady herself. On the subject of the investigation, the president had been muzzled by his lawyers, reduced, during a photo opportunity with the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, to asserting vaguely that “the American people have a right to get answers. I’d like for you to have more rather than less, sooner rather than later.” Mrs. Clinton, on the other hand, had for the moment replaced him as the political soul of the family—the combatant, the savior, the indispensable ally in the strategy for survival. Mrs. Clinton was still flush from her triumph in New York when she returned on Tuesday afternoon to join Harry Thomason’s vigil in the solarium.
“I guess that will teach them to fuck with us,” the first lady said.
The president’s spirits didn’t respond as quickly as his wife’s. Thomason continued to coach the president, exhorting him to keep after his adversaries. When Thomason walked Clinton to the door of the White House as he was leaving for Capitol Hill to give the State of the Union address, he told him, “Just remember—you’ve got the biggest balls over there. Just go over and kick their butts.”
Which was, more or less, what Clinton did. His pollster, Mark Penn, was standing just out of camera range in the House chamber, waiting for the first thirty seconds of the speech. Penn knew that the president was prepared to deliver a poised and polished address, full of the moderate, poll-tested initiatives that were the trademark of his presidency. Once Penn saw that the legislators would react to Clinton the way they had in previous years, he exhaled. He knew then that Clinton was going to make it.
Unaccountably to many in the scandal-crazed capital, as the story approached its one-week anniversary, independent public opinion polls registered little change in the president’s already high approval ratings. In the year ahead, those polls would provide no end of succor to the White House. Yet there was another key to Clinton’s deliverance, one that also began to emerge on the same tumultuous day that saw the first lady discoursing to Matt Lauer and the president orating before Congress. However, this other favorable augury for the president was visible only to those who had access to the secret proceedings of Kenneth Starr’s grand jury.
From the moment that Starr’s investigators first interviewed Linda Tripp, they knew that Betty Currie would be a central witness in their investigation. She served as the intermediary between all of Starr’s principal targets—between Clinton and Lewinsky, Lewinsky and Jordan, and even, to a l
esser extent, Clinton and Jordan. As Lewinsky described her relationship with the president in the conversations that Tripp tape-recorded, Currie had served as enabler in chief for the commander in chief. Everyone on Starr’s staff knew they had to have Currie as a witness. So, on Saturday, January 24—when Harry Thomason was fortifying the Clintons’ spirits at Camp David—Starr’s investigators took Currie to Room 618 of the Residence Inn Hotel, in Bethesda, Maryland, to begin debriefing her.
Who should lead the questioning of Currie? Not surprisingly, in an investigation that seemed to go from irrelevant to omnipotent in about a week, issues of turf quickly arose for the prosecutors. But Starr had no doubt about which lawyer he wanted in charge of the president’s secretary—Bob Bittman. After all, along with Jackie Bennett and Hick Ewing, Bittman was one of Starr’s three top deputies in 1998. Indeed, while Bennett supervised the work of the independent counsel’s entire Washington office, Starr placed Bittman in direct charge of the first criminal investigation of the president of the United States since Watergate.
Perhaps no lawyer in American history had been given an assignment for which he was less qualified. One of Starr’s original top deputies, Mark Tuohey, had hired Bittman in 1994. At the time, Bittman was thirty-two years old, and his legal career consisted of six years as an assistant state attorney in Maryland’s Anne Arundel County. There Bittman mainly prosecuted street crime in Annapolis. In his most noteworthy case, he tried a high school teacher for having had consensual sex with one of her students. She was acquitted. In Annapolis, as later in Starr’s office, Bittman was renowned for his devotion to his golf game, and he would often stay at his parents’ home, adjacent to the grounds of the storied Congressional Country Club, so that he could squeeze in a game around work. Bittman was also a stalwart Republican.
Bittman worked his way through the ranks of the Starr office. Though hired as a third-level prosecutor, he had stayed long enough to see virtually all of the seasoned veterans who started with him move on to other opportunities. Bittman took over as the sort of chief administrative officer of the Starr operation, running meetings and keeping tabs on various investigations. In office debates about strategy, Bittman (like his fellow deputy Jackie Bennett) invariably took the toughest line with the office’s adversaries. This impressed Starr, who gave Bittman the nickname “Bulldog.”
Bulldog Bittman spent parts of both days over the weekend at the hotel in Bethesda with Currie, her two lawyers, and a pair of FBI agents. The mood was tense, urgent. The FBI had chosen the obscure location so that no one would know Currie was cooperating with Starr. Bittman told Currie’s lawyers that he wanted to bring Currie before the grand jury that very week. Currie’s lead lawyer, Larry Wechsler, an experienced Washington hand and former prosecutor, wondered about the rush. Federal prosecutors usually devote many painstaking hours to preparing key witnesses to testify in the grand jury. But Bittman had talked to Currie for only four hours on Saturday and less than two on Sunday. He wanted her to testify on Tuesday.
By any standard, Currie wasn’t ready to testify. She was emotional; her memory was not good; her dealings with the principal players occurred over many months and involved many separate conversations; the Starr office had yet to analyze her telephone or pager records; Bittman didn’t have any important documents to refresh her recollection. Currie was giving the Starr prosecutors all the time they wanted. They could have taken days, even weeks, to nail down her story. What was the hurry?
The answer revealed a great deal about the future course of the investigation. Bittman argued that calling the president’s secretary as the first witness before the grand jury would be a sign that Starr’s office meant business. He wanted to “lock her in” to her story right away. Starr, who of course had no prosecutorial experience of his own, put much stock in purported “signs” of “strength” and “weakness.” Besides, Bittman argued, the longer Currie remained outside the grand jury, the greater the chance that she would be “love bombed” by the Clinton forces and her testimony spun in ways favorable to the president. Starr wanted the White House to see how fast his investigation was moving. Currie would be his first witness. So much the better that it was Tuesday morning, January 27, 1998, the day of the State of the Union address.
“Mrs. Currie, that water in front of you is yours,” Bob Bittman began at 10:19 A.M., three hours after Mrs. Clinton’s appearance on the Today show and eleven hours before her husband’s speech to Congress. As he stood before the witness, Bittman had never prosecuted a single case in federal court.
“Thank you,” the president’s secretary said.
Currie moved haltingly through her background and her responsibilities as the president’s secretary. She gave a complex description of the routes in and out of the Oval Office, but because Bittman had not arranged for a diagram, Currie’s recital was almost incomprehensible. Quickly, Bittman moved to the subject of Monica Lewinsky. Currie said that she had had some vague awareness of Lewinsky when she worked at the White House, but had become friendly with her only after Lewinsky went to work at the Pentagon.
“How many times since Ms. Lewinsky left the White House has she visited the West Wing of the White House, in the immediate area of the Oval Office, approximately?” Bittman asked.
“I’d only be guessing. I cannot—” Currie sputtered.
“Would it be fair to say that is several times?”
“That would be a good one, sir—several.”
Bittman went on to ask about how often Currie had cleared Lewinsky into the West Wing, and how often the former intern actually saw the president. With more preparation, and with the benefit of White House records that had not yet been produced, Currie might have been prodded to provide a more specific picture of the relationship between Clinton and Lewinsky, but Bittman was left with Currie’s vague disavowals.
After Lewinsky left the White House staff, Bittman asked, did her relationship with the president change?
“I was unaware, sir—not to my knowing,” Currie replied, in another damaging (and rather preposterous) answer for the prosecutor. If she had been confronted with all the phone messages, pager calls, records of visits, and gifts between them, Currie might have changed her mind. But in this rushed appearance, Bittman was stuck with the answer.
The examination meandered to the topic of Lewinsky’s private meetings with the president. Currie could remember only two, though there were more. Bittman then asked a convoluted series of questions about Currie’s phone calls to Lewinsky. He wanted to know whether Currie was calling for herself or for Clinton. But he asked like this: “On the several occasions that you called Ms. Lewinsky at the Pentagon, you told us that you called more than half the time for the president or on behalf of the president?”
In answer to this bewildering statement, Currie could say only, “I don’t know.”
Asked why she and Lewinsky used code names for their messages to each other, Currie said, “I don’t know. It was suggested. Fine.” Bittman left it at that.
Still, the real disaster in Bittman’s examination concerned the president’s single most legally incriminating act in the aftermath of his affair with Lewinsky. Currie testified about how, on the day after Clinton’s deposition in the Jones case, the president had summoned her and made his series of leading statements—“You were always there when Monica was there,” “We were never really alone,” and so on.
But the greatest potential risk to Clinton concerned his second round of leading statements to Currie—and this was where Bittman blundered. This climactic moment in Currie’s grand jury testimony began with a question about a late-night phone call to her from the president on the night of Tuesday, January 20.
“And I was sound asleep at the time,” Currie replied. “And he told me that apparently—let’s see—what story that broke on Wednesday—I think, tapes maybe, whatever—”
Bittman broke in to say, “The story broke on Tuesday morning, in The Washington Post.”
“It was
Tuesday morning?” Currie asked.
“It was Tuesday morning that the story broke in the print media. It was on Monday that it broke in a report called the Drudge Report.”
“Then he may have called me Monday night,” Currie said.
But Currie was right and Bittman was wrong. The story had broken on Wednesday morning, not Tuesday. Bittman was so ill prepared to examine Currie that he was polluting the transcript with his own errors and confusing an already perplexed witness.
“Okay,” Bittman went on. “Did there come a time after that you had another conversation with the president about some other news about what was going on? That would have been Tuesday or Wednesday, when he called you in the Oval Office?”
“It was Tuesday or Wednesday,” Currie said. “I don’t remember which one this was, either. But the best I remember, when he called me in the Oval Office, it was sort of a recapitulation of what we had talked about on Sunday—you know, ‘I was never alone with her’—that sort of thing.”
“Did he pretty much list the same—?”
“To my recollection, sir, yes.”
Here Bittman was questioning a witness about an event of potentially enormous significance, yet he could scarcely have confused matters more if he had tried. If the conversation between the president and Currie took place on Wednesday, as seems likely, that would have been of great importance, because on that day Clinton knew for certain that a criminal investigation was under way. If it was Tuesday, Clinton’s lawyers might have put a more benign spin on it. Bittman didn’t even try to sort it out. And what exactly did Clinton say? That, too, could make or break a case against him for obstruction of justice. But Bittman never even asked, and instead left Currie’s vague characterization—“sort of a recapitulation”—without asking for elaboration. If Bittman had devoted adequate time to preparing his witness, not to mention himself, he might have avoided these problems.
A Vast Conspiracy Page 34
