Anything Goes

by Larry King

  It wasn’t. It was sex. Lying about sex has taken place since Adam, if he had anyone else to talk to other than Eve. It wasn’t national security. It wasn’t compromising state secrets. Yet House Republicans like Bob Barr and Dan Burton, both of whom I like and enjoy interviewing, continued to insist it was lying, which it was, and he should be impeached, which was ridiculous. This was the line of demarcation. And it had become its own frenzy. Despite the fact Americans didn’t approve of the president’s behavior, most viewed lying about sex as a shallow reason to throw him out of office. Now, if the economy was tanking, the story would have been different.

  That night the White House announced that the president would address the country. I went on the set that night thinking about the phrase “must give the speech of his life,” which I have heard for every president during key moments when opinions needed to be swayed or a consensus made stronger. I knew if there ever was a moment for Bill Clinton to give the speech of his life, it was now. The atmosphere was, to say the least, charged. In studio with me was Congressman Bob Barr of Georgia, who was leading the Republican effort to hold impeachment hearings.

  KING: Do you feel like you’re kicking a downed person if you continue with the impeachment tries?

  BARR: The fact of the matter is that all the talk is going around here as if this were the end of the matter and we have a president that we need to rally behind and so forth, as if there’s been a death in the family or some crisis beyond his control. This is a situation of his own making.

  KING: Yeah but why not forgive him and rally around him in the good ethic of what makes America, the great Judeo-Christian ethic, forgive, let’s go on?

  BARR: Well, what we’ve inherited and what we have an obligation to uphold is the rule of law and accountability in America.

  Also with me was James Carville who had talked with Clinton at the White House just a few minutes earlier, saying the president appeared focused and was making last-minute changes to his address. If a talk show is supposed to bring a listener or a viewer as close as possible to a story, we were doing just that. And I was proud of the entire effort. We were moving toward an unknown—what would the president say and how would it be received—and it made the evening all the more exciting. Of course, Carville can do that on his own.

  CARVILLE: History has taught us that time and time and time again, brilliant, powerful leaders have made errors in judgment when it comes to people of the opposite sex, because it’s harder the first time it happens. What has happened here that I find so disturbing is that we are trying to criminalize this stuff, which is absolutely ludicrous. And it would take a hundred psychiatrists a hundred years to explain why do people with so much to lose—

  KING: No president ever had this happen to him—

  CARVILLE: No—

  KING: Had his sexual life under trial?

  CARVILLE: Had his sex life on trial.

  During the segment, Carville didn’t ask any questions as to how the Orioles might make up some key games, which was proof enough that even he was worried about how the evening was going to turn out.

  Bob Woodward was with me in the studio and offered one more piece of advice about how the speech would be received. He said the word at the White House had always been to look into the eyes of Leon Panetta to gauge how well Clinton does. The former chief of staff was with us by satellite from Monterey. The pressure was now turned up one more notch.

  And then Bill Clinton came on. He spoke four and a half minutes, spent most of it going after Ken Starr and, from my take, bombed.

  I went to James Carville, who said the president apologized and accepted responsibility. But his words weren’t ringing true with me. He was spinning. So I turned to Bob Barr.

  BARR: All the president said was “leave me alone. I’m not going to tell you what really happened. I’m not going to—”

  KING: He said he had an improper relationship. You didn’t want to know all the details, did you? Did you want to know every sex act?

  BARR: I don’t really care about the improper relationship at all. What I care about is obstruction of justice, tampering with witnesses, subornation of perjury, possible destruction of evidence.

  Barr wasn’t going to give an inch. We had a word in Brooklyn when someone was set in their way: grangles. It’s the fingernails-on-the-chalkboard thing. Bob Barr was giving me grangles. He never moved off his position. He was a bright guy but you could sit there all day and talk and he would be using the same line after ten hours that he used the first thirty seconds. He was spinning too. So I went to Leon Panetta and looked in his eyes.

  KING: What did you think, Leon?

  PANETTA:$#8230;The president of the United States acknowledged an illicit relationship in the White House, and he has apologized not only to his wife and his daughter but to the United States of America. You know, this isn’t the end but it’s certainly the beginning of the end.

  He was spinning as well. I didn’t have a White House aide to ask about the read in Panetta’s eyes but I think we were all feeling let down. Now, it can be argued we should be disappointed after all the buildup because great expectations don’t always deliver. I wasn’t subscribing to that logic one iota. Bill Clinton said “I misled people” but, despite what Panetta and Carville were saying, he never used the words “I’m sorry.”

  Bob Shrum watched it from Sun Valley, Utah, where he was winding up a vacation. He had been in conversations with Clinton’s pollster, Mark Penn, at the White House about this very moment and what words the president might use to be politically, legally, and personally accurate all at the same time. With an assurance that Mark would be at the other end of a fax machine, he sent a rough draft for a possible speech. It was never given. It used the words “I apologize.” I talked to him about it off the air a year later.

  I figured he was under a lot of pressure all day long and the biggest mistake was to have given the speech the same day. He needed to wait twenty-four hours and get rid of the anger.

  Bill Clinton left the White House the next day with Hillary and Chelsea to spend a week on Cape Cod trying to put his family back together again. The picture of them walking to Marine One on the South Lawn was poignant. I watched it live on TV and was overcome with the feeling that I shouldn’t be looking at this private moment. And, of course, I stayed with the scene until the helicopter lifted off. Clinton was back within forty-eight hours, though. The United States had launched cruise missiles into Sudan and Afghanistan knocking out a chemical weapons factory and a training facility for terrorist Osama bin Laden. Clinton went back on the air explaining the reasons for the action and later said he had been working on the final details of the plan to attack before he testified in front of Ken Starr. The critics started up saying this was the theme of the movie Wag the Dog, where a president invents a conflict to improve poll numbers, suggesting Clinton wanted to get the public attention off his character. I shook my head while listening to talk radio hosts go rabid one more time. Even if you were, to use the White House term for the opposition, a Hater, you had to understand Bill Clinton was still president. Had he done nothing, they would have said “where was he?” It was lose-lose. And this was the moment I realized whenever and wherever this story comes to an end, there will be no winners.

  Ken Starr sent the House 445 pages detailing every meeting President Clinton had with Monica Lewinsky and what exactly happened during each meeting. The House decided to release the report less than twenty-four hours after receiving it, saying if they didn’t, the White House would put its spin team to work and make the report favorable to the president. It showed up on the Internet, in newspapers, in magazines, and it was a bestseller for a few weeks in bookstores. This was a time when I found myself asking the question, “If the American people were asked, ‘Do you want to spend $50 million on this?’ most would answer no thanks.” There had been numerous convictions, including the governor of Arkansas and the president’s good friend, former justice official Webster H
ubbel. And the question was raised as to whether or not a sitting president can be indicted after leaving office. Today, we’re still debating that one. But in the minds of my lunch friends and many people across America, it was about sex.

  Of course, it depends on how you define sex. Just when I was telling everyone at lunch this whole thing couldn’t get more wacko, we started reading and hearing Bill Clinton say oral sex wasn’t sex. He wasn’t putting anyone on; he believed it. This was fantastic. It was Maureen Dowd who made the astute observation if it wasn’t sex, then it wouldn’t have the word “sex” attached. See, these are the great issues we were facing as the millennium came to an end. I wish I had Bill Clinton’s definition when I was a teenager in Brooklyn because we all thought oral sex, while a rarity, was sex.

  And then came election day. Minnesota voted in a former professional wrestler to be its next governor. Democrats won five seats in the House. A few days later, Newt Gingrich quit. Had you told me when the year began that the president would have an affair with an intern and by year’s end Newt Gingrich would be the one without a job, I’d have politely replied, “That’s crazy.”

  The television show stayed with every nuance in the drive toward an impeachment vote in the House Judiciary Committee. Ross Perot came on and announced he would lead a march on Washington to call for Clinton’s resignation, saying the president had lost the ability to lead. Book agent Lucianne Goldberg talked about her role in having Linda Tripp tape Monica Lewinsky and the major players on the Judiciary Committee appeared to discuss the day’s events. Though the subject stayed the same, I was learning something new every night. Roseanne came on to push her daytime talk show and announce she would pay a million dollars for the first on-camera sit-down with Monica Lewinsky. Monica had signed a seven-figure book deal and the word was out Barbara Walters would have the first interview. I had been making phone calls to Bernard Lewinsky and Monica’s stepmother throughout the year and had called Monica to wish her a happy birthday and to keep us in mind when she was ready to talk. Getting a guest could no longer be done in one letter or one phone call. It involved making a strong case as to what this show could do. And in my case, it meant I wasn’t going to pay Monica one dime because CNN, rightly so, doesn’t operate that way. But Roseanne had a different take about Barbara Walters’s potential exclusive:

  They are going to interview her in February. I know that means sweeps and sweeps means ratings and ratings—each point of ratings is $6 million at least. So the news is for sale and the news is about money.

  Also on the panel that night was First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams and Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz. We took a call from Santa Clara, California, about the yet-to-be-announced Monica interview.

  CALLER: Why do we have to listen to this again?

  ROSEANNE: I don’t think we’ve even heard the beginning.

  ABRAMS: I think the public has had it. The caller speaks for America.

  KURTZ: You know, you don’t need the whole country to watch. All you need is a significant enough part of the audience to keep cable shows afloat and to keep Barbara Walters happy. And I think you’ll get those kind of numbers. If the public didn’t care, we’d be sitting here talking about Iraq.

  At about the time the House Judiciary Committee voted to send all four articles of impeachment to the full House, there was talk about Iraq. A lot of talk. And then it went to the next step. Saddam Hussein had forbid U.N. weapons inspectors admittance to palaces to search for chemical and biological weapons. When he had done the same thing a month earlier, the United States had planes in the air going after Iraqi military targets but U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan stepped in and convinced Hussein to rethink his inspection ban. He did and the planes returned. When inspectors were refused entrance again, Operation Desert Fox began over Baghdad with 210 aircraft and more than 300 cruise missiles. The House postponed the impeachment debate for a day and it now appeared there would be a vote over the weekend.

  ——

  The bombing of Iraq continued into a second night and I had the Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations, Nizar Hamdoon, in our New York studio. In Baghdad with bombs dropping in the background we had CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. Ambassador Hamdoon was furious with the bombing of his country and said an arrangement could be worked out any time Bill Clinton wanted to negotiate. We went to a commercial break as another explosion hit behind Christiane. I looked at Hamdoon and thought to myself, I wonder what it is he can’t tell me? That’s when he started talking.

  “Larry?”

  “Yes, Mr. Ambassador.”

  “When are you coming to New York?”

  “I have no idea, Mr. Ambassador. Especially with all that is going on.”

  “Well, call me when you are making a trip here and we can have lunch.” He was smiling.

  I looked at my countdown clock and saw we only had a few seconds before we came back live. But I’m thinking, this guy has just invited me to lunch and my country is dropping cruise missiles all over his country and we have twenty-two ships on site in the Gulf with aircraft. I quickly thanked him and said when I get a better fix on my schedule I’ll certainly be in touch. And as I’m counted out of the commercial break my mind isn’t on what I’m going to say but, rather, on how, in only a few minutes, the world has become completely crazy. Or was it always like this?

  Two days later I’m at home in California doing a few miles on the treadmill, clicker in hand, newspaper on the tray, and watching CNN. The impeachment vote is under-way in the House and as I’m coming up on the three-quarter-mile mark, a crawl comes across the screen saying Speaker-designate Bob Livingston was resigning because he had an affair during his thirty-three-year marriage. It was the result of Larry Flynt’s earlier offer of a million dollars for information on the sexual history of members of Congress. Yeah, the treadmill stopped. We were going to work again that night and I figured, the way things were moving, we would probably be working nonstop for the rest of the year.

  I picked up the phone and dialed the White House. Wendy had suggested I call the president and suggest he come on and talk about what the day has been like. I gave the president’s personal secretary, Betty Currie, the message and went back to the impeachment vote until the Jets-Buffalo game came on.

  The house voted to impeach Bill Clinton on two of the four counts. This meant it was now in the hands of the Senate. Clinton appeared at the White House with congressional Democrats and cabinet members to vow he would fight to complete his term. I knew this was history. Everyone watching television or listening on the radio that moment knew the same thing.

  Two hours later Clinton was back on camera to announce the bombing of Iraq would end after four nights of air strikes from U.S. and British forces. I watched the statement and clicked to the Redskins–Tampa Bay game underway at Jack Kent Cooke Stadium. It was the third quarter and the Skins were losing. That’s when the phone rang. It was my private line. Nobody had that number other than Shawn and Wendy. I picked it up.

  A man’s voice came on the phone sounding official. “Please hold for the president,” he said.

  I hit the volume control on the clicker. And while I’m doing this I’m thinking, “the president of what?” The volume wasn’t changing. The clicker needed a battery, which meant I was going to buy a new clicker because I have yet to figure out how to put in batteries.

  The voice came back on. “Mr. King, the president is going to the private residence so it will be just another moment or so.” Now I knew what was going on. But it was tough to hear because I couldn’t lower the TV volume. I walked toward the back of the room as far as the phone cord would let me go.

  “Hey, Larry. How you doing?”

  I knew the voice right away. “How are you, Mr. President?”

  There was a pause. “Is that the Redskins game?”

  “Yes sir, it sure is.” The crowd was really getting loud as happens at Redskins games. The phone cord wouldn’t stretch any further. What’s wor
se, the mute button didn’t work either.

  “Who’s winning?”

  “Well, Mr. President, Tampa Bay is ahead 16–7 but the Skins are driving.”

  “Yeah? Who won the Jets game? I’ve been distracted all day.”

  I’m thinking here. This is the president of the United States and he’s asking me football scores. This is the president of the United States and he has just been impeached. This is the president of the United States and no less than ten minutes ago I watched him on TV saying this country is no longer going to bomb Iraq halfway around the world. I had read about his ability to compartmentalize things but not until now did I understand what it meant.

  “Jets won it. They get the division title. Took the Bills 17–10.” I was going to tell him about the seventy-one-yard Vinnie Testaverde touchdown pass to Dedric Ward, but decided, instead, to take advantage of this opportunity. “Mr. President,” I said, “we’ve known each other a long time and this has been a weird day in America.”