A Woman in Charge

by Carl Bernstein

  Such outrageous accusations aside, there were eventually legitimate questions raised about whether the first lady and Nussbaum improperly interfered with the police and FBI investigations into Foster’s death and the disposition of documents in Foster’s office about the Clintons’ personal finances and Hillary’s work at the Rose Law Firm that she might have wanted suppressed.

  Almost immediately after McLarty had conveyed news of Foster’s death to Hillary, she called Maggie Williams in Washington, and then Harry Thomason in California. Later, Hillary and those who talked with her testified she called to share her grief.

  The next day, Tuesday, July 21, Nussbaum prevented the Park Police from searching Foster’s office, and told them to come back the following morning at ten. Just before eight on Wednesday morning, Hillary spoke over the phone with Susan Thomases, who was staying at a Washington hotel. Thomases promptly phoned Nussbaum. When the Park Police officers, FBI agents, and Justice Department lawyers arrived, Nussbaum again prevented a hands-on search. He told the investigators they could sit several feet away and watch as he sorted documents and other items from Foster’s office into three piles. The first pile, he said, was for items that weren’t subject to any privilege and could be examined. He designated the second pile for personal papers to be turned over to Foster’s lawyers, who were also in the room. The third pile, he said, was for privileged material belonging to the White House and the Clintons, and was to be taken to the residence and then given to the Clintons’ personal lawyers at the firm of Williams & Connolly. The disposition of matter in that third pile, including billing records of Hillary’s work at the Rose Law Firm, would haunt the Clintons for years to come.

  Hubbell went to see Hillary at her mother’s house as soon as he got to Arkansas. They hugged and went to the bedroom Hillary was staying in.

  “Webb, did you have any idea he was that depressed?” she asked, dabbing her tears. Hubbell answered no. He shared with Hillary some of his recent conversations with Foster.

  “With health care and my dad’s death, I didn’t have time to see him on a personal basis as much as I should have,” Hillary told him.

  Hubbell didn’t tell her that Foster had complained to him about that.

  Hillary asked about Foster’s family, and about the group who had gone to be with them the night he died. She also asked if his face “was messed up” by the bullet.

  “We shouldn’t have asked him to come to Washington, Webb,” she said.

  “It would’ve destroyed him if you hadn’t asked,” Hubbell consoled her. He told her about how he and Foster had agreed that they would both go together to Washington if the Clintons asked them. He shared with Hillary how excited and proud Foster had been to be a part of the administration and how proud he was of her.

  Hillary then changed the subject to ask Hubbell for some help regarding a rumor she had heard that before his death Foster had been investigating a group of assassins who worked for the Navy and made their victims look as though they’d committed suicide. She said that the president had already been approached by a reporter about it. Hubbell said he’d talk to the reporter if he called.

  As they hugged goodbye, Hillary told him, “I know you’re being a rock for everybody else right now. But don’t hold it all in forever.”

  “I could offer you the same advice,” Hubbell replied.

  Hillary smiled sadly at him, promised to talk with him again in a few days.

  The last time Hillary had seen or talked to Vince in person, according to Hubbell, was on June 17, the same day the Journal had published its “Who Is Vincent Foster?” editorial. His fury and hurt had been evident.

  Hubbell was at the White House that day for the announcement of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s nomination to the Supreme Court, which Vince had helped speed through the vetting process. Foster and Hubbell celebrated—then Vince said how concerned he was about the internal review of the Travel Office difficulties and other matters.

  “Hillary saw us and came over,” Hubbell recalled. “She linked arms with both of us, the way we had…so long ago.”

  “When are we going out, guys?” she said. “Let’s go eat Italian.”

  Hubbell and his wife, Suzy, had finally moved in to their house in Spring Valley, a well-to-do neighborhood of large brick homes just inside the D.C.-Maryland line. Everyone should come by for drinks on Saturday, he said, and then they’d go eat Italian in the neighborhood. Bill, Hillary, Vince, Lisa. “Hillary said that would be great, and Vince and I gave her a hug. He seemed genuinely excited now, almost the polar opposite of the way he had been just moments before.”

  The Secret Service arrived Saturday morning to check out Hubbell’s house and the surrounding area for the arrival of the president and first lady. That evening, Vince and Lisa arrived, expectant. Webb showed them around, and they then sat down for drinks in the living room. The phone rang. The White House operator put Hillary through. She said Parade magazine intended to report the next day, Father’s Day, that Bill had a half-brother he’d neither met nor heard of. The Washington Post’s Style section was on to the story. One of a dozen or so boxes of sensitive files that Betsey Wright had turned over to Hubbell after the campaign contained records relating to Bill’s birth father. “Hillary asked if I knew where that file was, and I told her I guessed it was downstairs,” said Hubbell. “I said I would go look and call her back…. Vince and I went to the basement to search through the boxes.” They couldn’t find the file, and called Hillary back to tell her. Webb told her he’d look again and call her back; she suggested the next day would be fine.

  “Webb, you all go on to the restaurant. I’ll still try and meet you. Bill is a little stressed out and I doubt if he’ll be coming,” she said. The president had to reach his mother to tell her there was a story that would reveal that the father recorded on his birth certificate, William Blythe, had had at least two other marriages before he’d met her.

  The Fosters and Hubbells left for the restaurant. Hillary called soon after their arrival, said Hubbell, and told him she couldn’t make it. In her memoir, which is consistent with what she later told investigators, Hillary said she remembered it differently. She wrote that Vince had picked up the phone at Webb’s house.

  “‘Oh, I’m sorry,’” Hillary quoted Vince as saying to her, disappointed that she and Bill wouldn’t be at dinner.

  “‘So am I. You know, I’m just so sick of this [the sensational stories about their lives].’ That’s the last time I remember talking to Vince.”

  At the restaurant, Vince went into what Suzy called a “sulk” and said barely anything through the rest of the evening. He had pulled his chair from the table, and was turned away from the others. “It was so uncharacteristic of him,” she said. Hubbell described him as resembling “a child who had been promised quality time with a parent, only to have the parent renege when business had called him away.”

  When Hubbell called to talk the next day, he recounted, Vince “opened up some about what was bothering him”—Hillary. “It’s just not the same, Hub,” he said, and, for the second time, told him how she’d say, “Fix it, Vince!” or “Handle it, Vince!” He was unhappy they could never talk. To Hubbell it sounded “in the nature of a lament,” rather than anger.

  Foster’s funeral was in Little Rock at St. Andrew’s Catholic Cathedral. The Washington contingent was mixed in among the many people Foster had known since kindergarten and grade school. Clinton gave the eulogy about Foster’s honor, friendship, and service to the country. He quoted from Leon Russell’s “A Song for You”: “I love you in a place where there’s no space or time. I love you for my life you are a friend of mine.”

  Hillary was crying at the church. She spontaneously hugged a mutual friend of hers and Foster’s, whom Hillary herself had never treated with great warmth. The friend thought that perhaps Hillary was literally trying to grasp on to her closeness with Foster.

  HILLARY WAS BACK in Washington when, on July 26, an associate White H
ouse counsel found in Foster’s briefcase what appeared to be the scraps of a torn-up suicide note. They apparently hadn’t been noticed in the initial search of Foster’s office, and in fact were the remnants of the list Foster had written at his wife’s behest to describe his frustrations.

  “I can’t deal with this thing. Bernie, you deal with it,” Nussbaum later said Hillary told him when he tried to show her the scraps of the note.

  Later that day, Hillary walked into the counsel’s suite while Nussbaum and others were piecing together the scraps of paper, but quickly left after she realized what they were doing.

  With Hillary’s knowledge and—investigators suggested—possibly at her command, the White House held on to what they believed was a suicide note for thirty hours before handing it over to the authorities. While they were deciding whether to turn it over at all, Hillary insisted that the president not be told about the note. She summoned Susan Thomases back to Washington.

  The Justice Department and Park Police released the text of Foster’s note two weeks later, as part of their report declaring his death a suicide. There would eventually be four additional inquiries that came to the same conclusion.

  Foster’s suicide, the president told friends and aides, had “destroyed” Hillary. “I think she just bled deep inside,” a close friend of Foster observed. “I don’t think she ever really quite recovered from that.” “She was so far down,” David Gergen said, “you just sort of felt like you wanted to reach out, and say, ‘It’s okay. You’ll be okay.’ Because she opens herself up then, and it’s a very real woman with vulnerability. And there’s nothing false about it. It’s just there.”

  She would be haunted “that the actions and reactions concerning the travel office helped drive Vince Foster to take his own life,” Hillary would later write.

  In Living History, Hillary described going on “automatic pilot” for the six months following Foster’s death, feeling a “private” pain and getting by on “sheer willpower.”

  Hillary had always had a tendency to look at people and events with almost biblical judgment. “She often weighed matters in terms of good and evil,” noted an old friend in Fayetteville, architect Dick Atkinson. After Vince’s death, she “found more to judge as evil,” Atkinson could see. “There seemed to be something basic that was reinforcing her view of good and evil, an element of embitterment there, and the notion of conspiracy. There was no reason to have that so early in her life. But it existed.” Yet Atkinson also believed she was forming “a dangerous attitude—not just with Republicans and enemies, but even toward people like [George] Stephanopoulos: ‘Are you with us or are you against us?’ And that led to more demonizing, more judgment of evil around her. It seemed more potent because of self-justification fueled by these Old Testament judgments of good and evil.”

  IN MID-AUGUST, with health care now finally put on the calendar—there would be congressional hearings in the fall, though there still was no plan—Hillary and Bill took their first real vacation in four years. They spent eleven days on Martha’s Vineyard. Clinton read, jogged, golfed, and took Chelsea horseback riding. Hillary used the vacation as an opportunity to talk to Bill about her health care plans—without his economic advisers present.

  Ira Magaziner and his aides were well along in drafting the legislation, and he and Hillary had told the president that he had to make some final choices about the bill’s content so it could arrive on Capitol Hill when Congress returned after the Labor Day recess. Before leaving, the president had been besieged by Rubin, Bentsen, Rivlin, and Shalala, who continued to warn that the deficit would be in danger of exploding if he listened to Hillary. They saw the plan she was developing as too big and too costly. The Clinton presidency would historically succeed, they advised, only if he would scale back his wife’s grandiose ideas about reform and settle on a more manageable and incremental approach. In frustration, Clinton had said he would reach a final decision after his vacation at Martha’s Vineyard.

  The Clinton family made the social rounds as well. Since the inaugural they had become increasingly attracted to the glitterati, and being on the Vineyard presented many opportunities to further their courtship. The Clintons dined at the homes of Carly Simon and Vernon Jordan, and they sailed around the nearby islands with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, her friend Maurice Tempelsman, Caroline Kennedy, and Senator Ted Kennedy and his wife. Aboard Tempelsman’s $1 million yacht, Hillary continued her dialogue with Jackie about how to raise a child under the White House spotlight.

  The Clintons could reflect on the fact that Bill’s job approval rating was still below 50 percent, as it had been since May. Polls showed that even after the historic passage of Clinton’s economic plan by one vote, Al Gore’s, on August 6, 1993, 48 percent of the country disapproved of the bill. The collective mood of the country was bleak. Seven out of ten people, according to the polls, agreed that the country was “pretty seriously off on the wrong track.” A majority didn’t trust their leaders in government, and thought their tax dollars were being wasted. The Clintons’ mood was nearly as sour. They were exhausted and frustrated with the way the administration’s agenda was moving, even given the economic plan’s approval by Congress. And the dark cloud of Vince Foster’s death had not lifted.

  Hillary now urged her husband to look at the big picture: to consider what to convey to the nation about the deeper goals of his presidency and the legacy he hoped to leave. She told him that he had been elected to steer the car, not to fix everything under the hood.

  The fact that novelist William Styron and his wife, Rose, owned a summer home on the Vineyard may have influenced the Clintons’ choice of vacation spot (the Clintons had originally considered going to Wyoming). Styron had written about his own suicidal depression in his book Darkness Visible, and Hillary had read it after Vince Foster’s suicide. As Hillary and Styron hiked the woods, Styron said he “got the impression the book had helped her understand what [Foster] must have been going through.

  “I recall telling her that I felt it need not have happened, that he got the wrong advice…he was steered in the wrong direction, had he sought counsel, therapy of some sort, he probably wouldn’t have ended up the way he did….

  “Hillary was not teary…. It was nothing as dramatic as that…. She was upset…. It hung over her…. I had the feeling that she just felt grieved by the whole thing…. I was only able to offer my best wisdom as to what had taken place with him….

  “She absorbed what I was saying; I don’t recall her saying anything specific about Washington; but even then she was beginning to be aware of what [later] became evident in large sense, of an unbelievable amount of hostility against them by those people she later accused rightly of being a vast right-wing conspiracy….

  “They were absolutely taken aback by the ferocity of the kind of hostility that was looming around them…. She seemed to be constantly aware of this menace, of what was turning out to be this war against the White House.”

  14

  Not a Crook, Not a Degenerate

  It was too much. I wondered if what Bill was trying to do for the country was worth the pain and humiliation.

  —Living History

  FOR ALMOST TWO DECADES, Hillary, aided by Betsey Wright, lawyers, other friends, and aggressive private detectives, had struggled to keep Bill’s sexual compulsions from contaminating his political viability. Upon the Clintons’ arrival at the White House, both seemed confident that the ugliness was behind them. The notion that their failed $200,000 investment in an old real estate deal would lead to the president’s impeachment for lying about his sexual conduct was inconceivable.

  After their return from Martha’s Vineyard, their administration would become a series of crises, uninterrupted and overlapping, pervaded by a leering special prosecutor and by their past in Arkansas. These crises would define the Clinton presidency and shape Hillary’s character and future even more than her husband’s. The Clintons would be blindsided at times, but they ab
solutely refused to surrender—even when others pronounced them dead politically, or, when it was clear they would survive, condemned them as incapable of rehabilitation.

  The word “Whitewater” came to assume many meanings during Bill Clinton’s two terms as president. First and foremost, if for only a short while, it referred to the details of a once obscure land transaction that the Clintons had consummated in the third year of their marriage, and that, after scarcely a year of the Clinton presidency, launched an unbound inquiry by a special federal prosecutor into every aspect of their lives, galvanized their enemies, and convinced editors and reporters at the nation’s three best newspapers—the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal—that Hillary and Bill were neck-deep in corruption.

  In truth, the “Whitewater story” became overblown almost from the moment the New York Times first wrote about it, during the campaign, in a series of articles and editorials that were increasingly long on innuendo, short on context, and in some important ways unfair to the Clintons. The Clintons’ response was not straightforward, and served only to create more suspicion. The initial Times story was a model of restraint compared with the coverage of “Whitewater” that followed in the press free-for-all during the next eight years.

  Mark Fabiani, the presidential lawyer entrusted by Hillary with the rapid press-response capability for the White House in 1995 and 1996, understood the entire nature of Whitewater as well as anyone in the administration. Fabiani said he was told by Jeff Gerth, the Times reporter who wrote the first Whitewater story, that Gerth believed it was a good “campaign story” that “never deserved to be the subject of years of long independent counsel work.”