The Breach
Page 2
Despite the tension of that showdown, little personal animosity had developed between Clinton and Livingston, as it had with Gingrich and other Republican leaders. When Livingston toppled Gingrich as leader of House Republicans after their disastrous midterm election in November 1998, the new Speaker-designate kept an open mind on impeachment. After his ascension, the first time he met with the top House Democrat, Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt, Livingston said he was receptive to the idea of censure as an alternative to be offered on the floor. By his second meeting with Gephardt, Livingston was more wary. DeLay had applied considerable pressure, and the new Speaker hedged his bets. At their final meeting in the days before the debate was to begin, Livingston told Gephardt that censure was off the table. By that point, Livingstons own skeletons were about to burst out of their closetand the embattled Speaker-to-be was telling friends that he had secretly been threatened with exposure by a lobbyist ally of the White House if he blocked censure.
Livingston had thought he had made up his mind a week before the debate began on the floor, when he convened a meeting of the Republican leadership and a few ad hoc advisers. It was the Thursday before what he would later come to call his week from hell, and he went around the room at the Library of Congress soliciting opinions. Look, were down to the wire here and weve got to go forward, he had said. I want an idea of where you all stand.
For the next hour, they went through the pros and cons of censure, talking about the consequences of impeaching Clinton or failing to. In the end, the decision was clearthey would go forward with impeachment. There was only one dissenter, Anne Northup of Kentucky, who had barely won reelection a month earlier and worried about the political ramifications of taking on a popular president.
Only in the days after that meeting did Livingston learn that his own past adultery would definitely come to light. Only after that was the country suddenly thrust into war. The turmoil made Livingston rethink his decision. Barely an hour before his brief turnaround in the cloakroom on the day the impeachment debate opened, Livingston had met with a Republican congressman from Iowa who urged him to step down as Speaker for the good of the party. The congressman was not there on behalf of a group, but Livingston knew he reflected the sentiments of others in the GOP conference. All of this was swirling through his mind.
After Corallo stiffened his resolve again in the cloakroom, Livingston turned his attention back to his speech. He crossed out lines and scribbled in new ones. He crunched up one draft and threw it in the wastebasket. The next draft was better, coming closer to saying what he wanted to say about the presidents behavior and the stakes for the system. Bob Livingston was nothing if not a creature of the system. After a long day of drafting, he met in his office privately with Tom DeLay, who told him to stand strong, that they would get through it together.
Finally, Livingston emerged from his inner office, draft speech in hand, and put on his coat.
I need a punch line, he told his aides as he walked out the door. It really needs a punch line.
That night, around two in the morning, Livingston bolted up in bed. He knew what his punch line would be.
CHAPTER ONE
I dont know howwe can get through this
Hillary Rodham Clinton looked miserable. Her hair was pulled back, her face clear of any makeup, her eyes ringed red and puffy in that way that suggested she had been crying. She stared vacantly across the room. The people who had surrounded her and her husband for the past seven years had never seen her like this. Even in private, she was always perfectly poised, immaculately coiffed, impeccably dressed, and inalterably in control. Now, however, she appeared to have been to hell and back. To see her like this, thought some of the longtime Clinton loyalists who had rushed back to the White House to help in weathering the worst crisis of her husbands presidency, it seemed as if someone had died.
When one of her husbands original political advisers, James Carville, arrived in the Solarium on the third floor of the White House, summoned back overnight from Brazil at her request, Hillary rushed over to him, clutched his hand, and sat him down next to her.
You just have to help us get through this, she said. I dont know how we can get through this.
Neither did anyone else. At that moment, on the afternoon of Monday, August 17, 1998, President Clinton was three floors below them, facing off against Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr in the Map Room of the White House and testifying via closed-circuit television to a federal grand jury about his relationship with a young former intern named Monica Samille Lewinsky and his efforts to cover it up during the sexual-harassment lawsuit filed against him by former Arkansas state clerk Paula Jones. Forced by incontrovertible DNA evidence, Clinton was admitting after seven months of adamant denials that he had fooled around with a woman less than half his age in a private hallway and cubbyhole just off the Oval Office, and he would have to tell the nation later that night. It was not an easy confession to make. Indeed, Clinton had not been able to bring himself to break the news to his own wife. Four nights before, he had sent his lawyer to pave the way for him.
It had to have been the longest walk of David E. Kendalls life, the journey that night, Thursday, August 13, to the residential part of the executive mansion where he had met with the first lady. Kendall, a fastidious yet tough-as-nails attorney from the blue-chip Washington law firm of Williams & Connolly, had represented both Clintons for five years now through every manner of alleged scandal, from Whitewater to Travelgate to Filegate, becoming one of their most trusted confidants. And so it fell to him at that critical moment to play emissary from husband to wife, to disclose the most awful secret of any marriage.
Something had obviously gone on between the president and Lewinsky, Kendall had told the first lady in his soft, understated way. The president was going to have to tell the grand jury about it. Only after Kendall laid the foundation did Clinton speak directly with his wife.
Over the weekend it became clear to others in the White House that the president was about to change his story, and reports citing unnamed sources began appearing in the press, first in the New York Times and later the Washington Post. Clintons political advisers began preparing for the inevitable national television address he would have to give to explain himself. Mickey Kantor, a longtime friend who had served as his commerce secretary and now as occasional damage-control adviser, was pushing to have Clinton preempt Starr by addressing the nation on Sunday evening, the night before his grand jury appearance. The lawyers were horrified. A witness never spoke publicly before undergoing an interrogation under oath, they argued; that would only give the prosecution ammunition and possibly aggravate the grand jurors.
No, it had to be Monday night after the session, or perhaps the next morning, depending on how Clinton felt afterward. With the timing settled, the real question then came down to what should be said and how. Everyone agreed that Paul Begala, Carvilles spirited and tart-tongued former partner who had come on board at the White House as a free-floating political adviser, would be in charge of putting together a speech for the president, even though no one had told him officially what Clinton would tell the grand jury. The consensus was that Begala would have the best feel for the delicate job. Begala solicited a draft from Robert Shrum, the longtime Kennedy family adviser and wordsmith, who faxed it over to the White House. In this version, Clinton would say, I have fallen short of what you should expect from a president. I have failed my own religious faith and values. I have let too many people down. I take full responsibility for my actionsfor hurting my wife and daughter, for hurting Monica Lewinsky and her family, for hurting friends and staff, and for hurting the country I love. While he would maintain that he did nothing to obstruct this investigation, he would not mince words in saying he was sorry. Finally, I also want to apologize to all of you, my fellow citizens, he would say. I hope you can find it in your heart to accept that apology. That would be it. No rationalization. No nimble word games. And no mention of Starr.
Begala spent the weekend coming up with his own passages and phrases intended to have Clinton express his contrition without sacrificing his dignity or antagonizing Starr. In Begalas draft, the president would frankly acknowledge that he had misled the country, would take responsibility for his actions, and would pledge to spend the rest of his administration working on the issues the public cared about to regain the nations trust. On Saturday night, Begala called up a fellow White House political adviser, Rahm Emanuel, at home and read him the latest draft. Emanuel agreed it was the way to go.
Others sent drafts too. Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster who worked for many Democratic congressmen, was asked to sketch out some thoughts. Sidney Blumenthal, a fiercely partisan defender of the Clintons first as a journalist for The New Yorker and then as a member of their staff, faxed in versions from vacation in Europe that would have the president firmly denounce Starrs politically motivated witch-hunt. But the only draft that counted was the one the president scratched out in his own left-handed scrawl on a yellow legal pad over the weekend. On Monday morning, as Clinton was going through his final preparation session with his lawyers, Kantor arrived at a strategy meeting in the office of White House counsel Charles F. C. Ruff, clutching three pages of now-typed remarks, with more notes from Clinton in the margins.
Ive got what he wants to say, Kantor announced.
There was groaning around the room, where most of the presidents political team had gathered, including Begala, Emanuel, Deputy Chief of Staff John D. Podesta, counselor Douglas B. Sosnik, and press secretary Michael D. McCurry. They were flabbergasted. Begala had his latest draft in his coat pocket. When had Clinton had time to write his own speech? Between the long hours of preparations with his lawyers, dealing with his own tortured family situation, and secretly overseeing plans for retaliation against terrorist Osama bin Laden, the president hardly had a lot of free moments. The group decided to have Begala go over the new draft, but it became clear immediately that it was too strident.
Across the building, Clinton was huddling in the Solarium with Kendall and his partner, Nicole K. Seligman, to go over one last time what he would tell the grand jury. Neither Chuck Ruff nor any of the other White House lawyers was allowed to attend because Starr had already shown that they did not have complete attorney-client privilege as lawyers for the government, so it was left entirely to the presidents privately paid legal team. Knowing that Starr had a sample of his blood to compare with a semen stain on a navy blue Gap dress Lewinsky had saved, Clinton recognized he had no choice but to admit the obvious, but he refused to use the actual words. Starrs office had insisted on videotaping the session, ostensibly in case one of the grand jurors was absent, and Clinton had no doubt that the tape would ultimately find its way into public view. Any clip of him saying anything explicit, such as She performed oral sex on me, would be played on television again and again, until it became so instilled in the minds of viewers that it would not only humiliate Clinton but become the single moment defining him in the history books.
The solution he and his lawyers came up with was a prepared statement with carefully chosen words that would make the confession as dignified as possible. Oral sex would be described simply as inappropriate intimate contact. Phone sex would be called inappropriate sexual banter. Everyone would know what he was saying.
Clinton and the lawyers also went over fourteen set pieces they had draftedprepared mini-speeches ranging from four lines to four pages that he could deliver at opportune moments during the session. They knew, for example, that the prosecutors would surely ask the president if it was right or wrong to mislead the Jones lawyers during his civil deposition, and they had rehearsed an answer for him, saying that it was acceptable as long as he was trying to be literally truthful. Normally, lawyers instruct clients to give short answers under oath, but in this case, Kendall and Seligman knew Clinton would never be able to tell his story for the camera unless he talked right over his inquisitors. Besides, having negotiated a strict four-hour limit to the questioning, the presidents team figured he could filibuster long enough to eat up the clock.
The prep session with the lawyers was interrupted when the presidents national security team arrived to brief him on another matter. The attorneys picked up their papers and left the room, unaware of what was so important. Once they were gone, National Security Adviser Samuel R. Berger gave Clinton the latest report on plans to bomb a suspected terrorist camp in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical-weapons facility in Sudan.
***
Around 12:30 P.M., Starr arrived at the White House, where he was met by Kendall, who pulled him aside for a private walk in the woods. Kendall mentioned a weekend newspaper report suggesting that despite their long adversarial relationship, the presidents lawyer actually had great respect for the special prosecutor.
You know all those nice things I was quoted saying about you? Kendall asked.
Yes.
I didnt say them.
I didnt think so.
Kendall went on to tell Starr that the president would make a difficult admission to the grand jury that he did in fact have a relationship with Lewinsky but would not get into the specifics. Kendall warned the prosecutor not to push the matter with intrusive questions. If you get into detail, I will fight you to the knife, both here and publicly, he vowed.
At 12:59 P.M., the president entered the ground-floor Map Room, where Franklin Delano Roosevelt had charted the progress of Allied forces during World War II and where the last map of troop locations that he saw in 1945 before his fateful trip to Warm Springs, Georgia, still hung on the wall more than a half century later. Waiting were Starr and six of his lawyers, a pair of technicians, a court reporter, and a Secret Service agent. Accompanying Clinton were Kendall, Seligman, and Ruff. At 1:03, the cameras were turned on and the oath administered.
From the start, Starrs deputies set a confrontational tone by stressing the importance of the oath and asking Clinton if he comprehended itin effect challenging the presidents basic capacity for honesty before his first answer.
Do you understand that because you have sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, that if you were to lie or intentionally mislead the grand jury, you could be prosecuted for perjury and/or obstruction of justice? asked deputy independent counsel Solomon L. Wisenberg.
I believe thats correct, Clinton replied evenly.
Wisenberg pressed the point. Could you please tell the grand jury what that oath means to you for todays testimony?
I have sworn an oath to tell the grand jury the truth and thats what I intend to do.
You understand that it requires you to give the whole truththat is, a complete answer to each question, sir?
Clinton tried to remain calm. I will answer each question as accurately and fully as I can.
The questioning was turned over to another deputy, Robert J. Bittman, who began by asking Clinton if he was ever physically intimate with Lewinsky. The president said he would read a statement, pulled out some paper from his pocket, and put on his reading glasses. The effect of the glasses, combined with the hair that had grayed considerably in office, made Clinton look like an aging man instead of the vital, vigorous leader who had first emerged on the national stage seven years earlier.
When I was alone with Ms. Lewinsky on certain occasions in early 1996 and once in early 1997, I engaged in conduct that was wrong, he began, reading slowly and deliberately. These encounters did not consist of sexual intercourse. They did not constitute sexual relations as I
understood that term to be defined at my January 17, 1998, deposition. But they did involve inappropriate intimate contact. These inappropriate encounters ended, at my insistence, in early 1997. I also had occasional telephone conversations with Ms. Lewinsky that included inappropriate sexual banter. I regret that what began as a friendship came to include this conduct and I take full responsibility for my actions.
For Ruff, who as the chief lawyer for Clinton in his capacity as president had helped direct his defense for seven months, this was the first time he learned directly that his client had lied to all of them. Ruff had come to the White House the year before to cap a sterling legal career, having served as the final Watergate special prosecutor, U.S. attorney in Washington, chief lawyer for the city government, and defense counsel for such embattled Democrats as Senators John H. Glenn and Charles S. Robb. At fifty-eight, he had spent much of his adult life in a wheelchair after contracting a poliolike disease while teaching law in Africa. Yet never in his career had he been as hampered in representing a client; as a government lawyer without full attorney-client privilege, Ruff had been shut out of the recent grand jury preparations and therefore had never heard the truth from the presidents mouth until just then. By this point, that was hardly a shock, but it meant that from now on, Ruff would always have to wonder if he was being lied to.
Undeterred by Kendalls warning, Starr and his prosecutors spent much of the afternoon deconstructing Clintons opening statement and trying to pin down the president on exactly what he meant and how he could justify his testimony. During the Jones deposition, Clinton had testified he did not recall being alone with Lewinsky except for a few occasions when she brought him papers and the like. Now his first words were when I was alone with Ms. Lewinsky. In the Jones deposition, he said he had no specific recollection of giving her gifts. Now he was well aware of all sorts of gifts and named them in great detail. In the Jones deposition, he had said he did not have sexual relations or a sexual affair with Lewinsky. Now he was admitting that they engaged in some sort of sex play without stating exactly what it was, in effect insisting that he did not actually have sexual relations with Lewinsky because he was merely a passive recipient of oral sex and never fondled her as she testified he did.