by Larry King
Clinton started talking about how sorry he was to see Livingston resign and he didn’t think that was the correct way to go and he should have stayed in and fought. And he talked about how he admired Republican congressman Peter King, who went against his party and voted not to impeach.
I asked him to appear and he thanked me for the offer. And he thanked me for doing a fair show.
“I’ll give you two, three hours. It would be good for you to do and you’re good at it,” I added. Clinton stayed non-committal.
“How is Shawn doing with a baby on the way?”
“Fine. We are expecting him in March,” I said.
“Well, Hillary and I are praying he looks like your wife.”
The president wasn’t the first one to make that observation. We said goodbye and I walked toward the TV to hang up the phone. The crowd was going crazy because the Skins had just scored on a fifteen-yard Stephen Alexander run. No-body at Jack Kent Cooke Stadium was thinking about what had happened in the past six hours. I think everyone in America that day was ready for a football game.
——
Clinton consultant Bob Shrum’s proposed August 17, 1998, speech for Clinton that wasn’t given:
No one who is not in my position can understand fully the remorse I feel today. Since I was very young, I’ve had a profound reverence for this office I hold. I’ve been honored that you, the people, have entrusted it to me. I am proud of what we have accomplished together.
But in this case, 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 actions, for hurting my wife and daughter, for hurting Monica Lewinsky, for hurting friends and staff, and for hurting the country I love. None of this should have happened.
I never should have had any sexual contact with Monica Lewinsky. But I did. I should have acknowledged that I was wrong months ago. But I didn’t. I thought I was shielding my family but I know that in the end, for Hillary and Chelsea, delay has only brought more pain. Their forgiveness and love, expressed so often as we sat alone together this weekend, means far more than I can ever say.
What I did was wrong—and there was no excuse for it. I do want to assure you, as I told the grand jury under oath, that I did nothing to obstruct this investigation.
Finally, I also want to apologize to all of you, my fellow citizens. I hope you can find it in your heart to accept that apology. I pledge to you that I will make every effort of mind and spirit to earn your confidence again, to be worthy of this office, and to finish the work in which we have made such remarkable progress for the past six years.
Clinton’s August 17, 1998, speech from the Oval Office:
This afternoon, from this chair, I testified before the Office of Independent Counsel and the grand jury. I answered their questions truthfully, including questions about my private life, questions no American citizens would ever want to answer.
Still, I must take complete responsibility for all my actions, both public and private. And that is why I am speaking to you tonight. As you know, in a deposition in January, I was asked questions about my relationship with Monica Lewinsky. While my answers were legally accurate, I did not volunteer information. Indeed, I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong. It constituted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part for which I am solely and completely responsible.
But I told the grand jury today and I say to you now that at no time did I ask anyone to lie, to hide or destroy evidence, or to take any other unlawful action.
I know that my public comments and my silence about this matter gave a false impression. I misled people, including even my wife. I deeply regret that.
I can only tell you that I was motivated by many factors. First, by a desire to protect myself from the embarrassment of my own conduct.
I was also very concerned about protecting my family. The fact that these questions were being asked in a politically inspired lawsuit, which has since been dismissed, was a consideration too. In addition I had real and serious concerns about an independent counsel investigation that began with private business dealings twenty years ago, dealings I might add about which an independent federal agency found no evidence of any wrongdoing by me or my wife over two years ago.
The independent counsel investigation moved on to my staff and friends, then into my private life. And now the investigation itself is under investigation.
This has gone on too long, cost too much, and hurt too many innocent people.
Now, this matter is between me, the two people I love most—my wife and our daughter—and our God. I must put it right and I am prepared to do whatever it takes to do so.
Nothing is more important to me personally. But it is private and I intend to reclaim my family life for my family. It’s nobody’s business but ours. Even presidents have private lives. It is time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives and get on with our national life.
Our country has been distracted by this matter for too long and I take my responsibility for my part in all of this. That is all I can do. Now it is time, in fact it is past time, to move on. We have important work to do—real opportunities to seize, real problems to solve, real security matters to face.
And so tonight, I ask you to turn away from the spectacle of the past seven months, to repair the fabric of our national discourse, and to return our attention to all of the challenges and all of the promise of the next American century.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Whatever
January 1999. There was a crisis for Bill Clinton but, compared to other Januarys, this one wasn’t much of a concern, if an impeachment trial in the United States Senate could ever be in that category. I’d spent the holidays in Los Angeles, with a new TV clicker, and nobody mentioned impeachment. There was some talk about Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s modified black robe with the stripes on each sleeve and how he looked like a member of the New York Rangers, but zero on throwing the president out of office.
In Washington, D.C., though, impeachment was still The Topic. And there was something else: Bill Clinton had a State of the Union Address to deliver. People weren’t talking about whether he might go for ninety minutes, as was the usual angst when Clinton and State of the Union were used in the same sentence. Instead, it was whether he should give the speech at all.
The address was to be delivered on Capitol Hill to both houses of Congress. For Bill Clinton, one house had just impeached him and the other was holding a trial that could result in his being removed from office. This wasn’t exactly an audience ready for applause, if you get my drift. So the issue became, should he wait until a decision is made in the Senate before giving the State of the Union? That’s how I explained it to Herb Cohen at lunch one day.
“So what’s the problem?” he asked.
“There is concern about whether he should mention a pending impeachment when he talks to both houses or if he should wait until the trial is over,” I said.
“Larry, is he going to give a State of the Union Address if he gets thrown out?”
“Of course not.”
“So I come back to the initial question. What’s the problem?” Herb was looking at me the way he used to when we were kids in front of Sid’s Pants on 83rd Street. He was a Yankee fan, I was a Dodger fan, and, as a result, there were only two arguments for any issue.
“Should Clinton say anything about the situation if he gives the State of the Union Address as scheduled while the trial is going on?” I asked.
“No.”
I couldn’t let it drop right there, so I started in. “Look, the guy is standing in a charged atmosphere. There are strong opponents in the audience and this is a chance to face them and say I’m doing the business of the people or whatever it is he always says about working for America.”
“No.”
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��It will take the edge off if he faces it right away,” I said, “because the public will see this isn’t a distraction whatsoever.”
Herb looked at me. “I’m going to have the salad with tuna.” We didn’t talk about the State of the Union for the rest of the day.
But it was the topic at an event that evening in Washington attended by the Clintons and the Gores. Shawn and I were invited, and as soon as we arrived, the issue began. Okay, I brought it up. We said hello to Ann Lewis, who had been a deputy campaign manager in the 1996 Clinton–Gore campaign and now worked at the White House. Lewis was one of the many faces we had seen on television, including my show, defending the president over the past year. She was with her husband, Mike Sponder.
“If I were advising him,” I said, “I’d say refer to the impeachment issue. Everyone will be waiting for him to do it.”
Sponder was having none of it. At first he did that Washington thing in which you listen politely while something insane is said, then smile and say, “That’s an interesting idea.” In Brooklyn, I would have heard “What? Are you crazy?” at least three times by now. I pressed on.
“Here’s what I’d say,” I went on. “ ‘You know it’s weird standing here where half this place has impeached me and the other half is judging me, but you know what? I’ve got a country to run.’ That would get the issue behind and show there are more important things to do.”
Sponder smiled. He was going to do it again, I thought to myself.
“Look, Mike,” I said, “he’s got the audience watching and I’ll bet zero of them are waiting to hear what he thinks of gold bullion. They are tuned in to get some kind of nuance.”
Ann Lewis was watching this and enjoying it. I’ve seen her eat opponents for lunch in debates. And I think it’s in the DNA because her brother is Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank, who is one of the best debaters I’ve seen. Sponder smiled again.
“Larry,” he said, “you do what you do very well but your skill is not politics.”
He had me and he did it in one sentence. Obviously, the ability to debate isn’t in the DNA.
I caught Clinton’s eye and he waved for us to come over. “Larry, how you doing?” He smiled. He took Shawn’s hand and asked how she was feeling. The guy was facing a Senate trial and you’d have never caught, as I had just argued, any nuance of concern. Clinton said he had seen me on the Reverend Robert Schuller’s Sunday show and that he enjoyed the segment.
“March, right?” he asked Shawn. He remembered. That’s when Chance was going to be born. Less than seven weeks from now.
He looked at me. “And you’re sixty-five, right?”
“That’s right, Mr. President,” I said.
“And you had heart surgery. But the fact you had the surgery and you are sixty-five and you’re in good shape and you haven’t had cancer, heck you’re going to make it to eighty-three, maybe longer.” He had all these statistics. I run a cardiac foundation and I didn’t know this stuff.
“You know, being a father at your age has got to be just great. Look at George Mitchell over there,” he said nodding toward the former Senate majority leader, who was now leading efforts to find peace in Northern Ireland, “you ought to talk to him. And you ought to talk to Norman Lear. I bet it’s just wonderful. I’d like to be a father at that age.” He wasn’t just making conversation. He meant it.
Clinton started talking to some other people, so I picked up a menu from a nearby table to see what was going to be served. And that was the moment Vice President and Tipper Gore came by. “Larry, you’re my good-luck charm,” he said, referring to the NAFTA debate from six years earlier. We talked about his upcoming presidential campaign.
“If I’m the good-luck charm, then come on the show and announce,” I urged.
Nothing doing. Gore said he was going to announce from his hometown. That wasn’t the answer I wanted but, in these days of satellites where one can talk across countries, it was good to see a candidate choose the real world over the television studio. Of course, when you think about it, today the television studio is the real world.
“And I still remember that show in Nashville,” Gore said smiling. We had been at Vanderbilt University a year earlier and did a live show at Kirkland Hall where the vice president attended a conference on family involvement in a child’s education. Gore had talked about his days there as a law student and Tipper reflected on her master’s program in psychology at Vanderbilt. Gore had gone long on his last answer and I had to jump in, thank them, and promote the next show, which was going to be with the scientist involved in the cloning of Dolly, a sheep in Scotland. And in my headset I had a producer saying “Get out, get out” while a floor director in front of me was doing frantic hand signals. When Gore took a breath, I jumped in and said, “We’re out of time folks, thank you, Mr. Vice President and Mrs. Gore, and tomorrow night we talk to the guy who did the sheep. Good night from Nashville.” It took three seconds. I got out right on time.
Gore was bent over, he was laughing so hard. And then I heard it in my earpiece.
“The guy who did the sheep?”
Here’s what my job is like: I spend an hour interviewing the vice president and now the whole thing is remembered by a three-second miscue. While Gore was still cracking up next to me in Nashville, I sat there thinking either we were going to have great ratings in another twenty-four hours or this was going to become part of the CNN Christmas blooper tape. It was the latter.
So we went through the story one more time. As this is going on, I’m still looking at the menu and I see the entrée is Chilean sea bass. I looked up at Gore and said to myself, “Why not?”
“Does Chilean sea bass really come from Chile?” I asked.
Gore thought for one second and answered, “Larry, how the hell do I know?”
“If you are going to be president, you are going to have to be more definitive,” I shot back.
Gore thought for another second. “No,” he said loudly. People turned their heads to see what had upset the vice president. “If it doesn’t come from Chile then I’m going to investigate because the public is being fooled. Now hear me clearly, this could become a standard of my campaign!” I wanted to applaud.
Bill Clinton is listening to all of this. He looks at me and says, “Who cares?” I could tell the rest of the second term was going to be coasting. And I knew one other thing: The State of the Union Address would be delivered as scheduled without any reference to impeachment. I couldn’t imagine any fool thinking otherwise.
——
The next morning I had a phone call with George W. Bush, the Texas governor, the son of the former president, former part-owner of the Texas Rangers, and the hands-down front-runner to win the Republican nomination to be president of the United States. And for the first minute we talked about the campaign. He told me there were a few issues that had to be addressed before any formal announcement for a run was going to be made. One was the business of Texas. A second was what this campaign was going to do to his family.
“It’s different from being a governor, that’s for sure,” I said. “And you are going to have Secret Service around you, which, from what little I know, can get to you after a while.”
Bush told me the rigors of a campaign was a big issue, and while he was up to it physically, he wanted to make sure his wife and children were prepared for what they were going to have to face. The conversation made me wonder why anyone would want to do this. It just had to be easier when George Washington campaigned. He only had to face John Adams, invent a cabinet to serve with him, design the executive branch of government, and maintain neutrality in the war between Great Britain and France. Piece of cake.
The rest of the conversation was about baseball. While running the Texas Rangers, Bush was the only owner to vote against the wild card team in baseball playoffs. He was against the designated hitter rule. (The DH rule is used in the American League but not in the National League and it’s a perennial argument. Perso
nally, I like seeing the differences between the leagues and the DH rule makes it possible.) He was a purist, which was why he was in the minority. Bush talked about the many times the Rangers came close to getting in the World Series. “We need another pitcher and we’ll make it to the big show in October.” For George W., however, there was a bigger show pending and it was more than a year away. He sounded as though the pitchers were already on board for that one.
There was a more immediate campaign going on. In the Senate, House managers were still trying to convince sixty-seven senators (two-thirds majority) that Bill Clinton deserved to be thrown out of office. It wasn’t going to happen because the fifty-five Republicans needed a dozen of the forty-five Democrats to vote for impeachment. And that math was based on the idea all the Republicans would vote the party line. So the result was known. When people were asked if there should be a trial, most said no. Did they think Clinton was honest and had integrity? No. But when the same people were asked if they liked the job President Clinton was doing, most said yes. This was a scene right out of Fiddler on the Roof where Tevye, the dairyman, is pressed by people in his village about the fact his daughter wants to marry a guy who isn’t Jewish. How could he let this happen, they ask? Tevye answers, “I like him.” I put the question to Senator Robert Byrd (D-WVa) one night: