A Woman in Charge

by Carl Bernstein

  Gergen and Stephanopoulos continued to argue that it would be better to release the documents while the American public was focused on the upcoming Christmas holidays. “On this issue, Clinton wasn’t commander-in-chief, just a husband beholden to his wife,” Stephanopoulos realized. Hillary had steadfastly defended him against allegations about “bimbos.” Now it was his turn to defend her. Gergen and I didn’t know what was in the Whitewater documents, but whatever it was, Hillary didn’t want it out—and she had a veto.”

  Hillary, indeed, had the greatest influence over her husband’s final decision. A high-ranking aide knew how the first lady’s anger could often transfer to Bill and color his response to situations. “She would get him all riled up in a way that wasn’t exactly his nature. He has this terrible self-pitying anger inside of him, but it’s a slightly different thing when she would get her hand into it. This was an example of where he hadn’t thought the choice was so clear-cut; he could see the political benefit of both sides, including giving up the documents and telling everything he knew to the Post.”

  The decision came down to two points, the aide said. “There was a principle which was, If we give this up, we give up everything, we’ll never be able to claim privacy again. And they were right. They’d put themselves into a precedent-setting situation. They didn’t know how it would come out. There was also this fear that the questions would never end. Because that’s what she kept saying.”

  Hillary never wavered. “These are my papers. They belong to me. I could throw them all in the Potomac River if I wanted to.”

  Some White House aides later speculated privately that Hillary feared continued attention on the Whitewater land deal and the Clintons’ partnership with the McDougals might reveal an affair between Bill and Susan McDougal in the 1970s or 1980s, as gossip in Arkansas had long had it. If the purported motif of Watergate had been “Follow the Money,” Whitewater’s was plausibly “Follow the Women.” In the end, that was really where public, press, and prosecutorial interest seemed to redound most fervently.

  Hillary’s influence in regard to the Whitewater documents was determinate, and further discussion was ruled out. A hand-delivered letter from Lindsey to Downie was sent on December 10:

  As you know, in March, 1992, the Clinton Campaign released a report by an independent accounting firm which established that the Clintons lost at least $68,900 on Whitewater Development Corporation. They received no gain of any kind on their investment. The Clintons were not involved in the management or operation of the company, nor did they keep its records. We see no need to supplement the March, 1992 CPA report or to provide further documentation.

  Now, handed their sheet music by the White House, a Republican chorus on Capitol Hill enthusiastically chanted the familiar stanzas of the oratorio of Slick Willy and His Wife, and thunderously demanded intervention from the prosecutorial gods.

  HILLARY SAID she was hosting a Christmas party in the White House a week later when she took an urgent call from David Kendall, who told her that The American Spectator, a far-right monthly of particular vitriol on the subject of the Clintons, planned to publish a story about Bill’s supposed sexual encounters with a multitude of women while he was governor, based on testimony from state troopers who claimed they had helped facilitate their rendezvous. *17 Kendall’s advice to the White House was to issue no comment; it would only attract more attention to the story. Its author, David Brock, claimed to have spent more than thirty hours interviewing Arkansas state troopers. He said the troopers also told him that Betsey Wright and George Stephanopoulos had “strong-armed” other sources into keeping their mouths shut.

  Two of the troopers, Larry Patterson and Roger Perry, described on the record the ways in which they allegedly facilitated Bill’s affairs. The troopers said the governor asked them to drive him to hotels where he’d visit the women. Or they’d stay on “Hillary Watch” while he was away from the mansion. On one occasion, Clinton instructed a trooper to approach a woman named Paula, who was standing in the lobby of the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock, and ask her to meet with the governor in a room upstairs. Brock’s editors had inadvertently failed to eliminate her name from the story. Eventually, Paula’s identity and her purported encounter with Clinton would be excruciatingly detailed.

  The general allegations weren’t exactly new. But seeing them in print was. Betsey Wright and other aides had been able to contain similar stories during the presidential campaign, and even before. What was unquestionably new this time was that four troopers, two of them on the record, went into detail about whom the former governor met, how, and when.

  Once again, Wright had been dispatched—to Little Rock, by Mack McLarty—to pour water on the fire, before The American Spectator reached the newsstands, but her effort was to little avail. “Basically I think there was a lot of hope that I could get the troopers who weren’t quoted in the article to make public statements that this wasn’t the truth,” Wright said. “That wasn’t possible, and I knew that wasn’t going to be possible. But I did get from Danny Ferguson, who was quoted in the article, an affidavit. That took some real doing. It was most specifically about Paula Jones because…he was supposed to be the trooper who was with Bill when they went back to the hotel.”

  In essence, the affidavit alleged that Jones was a stalker, the same claim (which in its abbreviated form was not untrue) that Bill made to Hillary and to his aides about Monica Lewinsky when it was first alleged that she had boasted of a sexual relationship with him: According to Wright, Paula Jones “was on a major stalking campaign and anytime a trooper would come in and out [of the governor’s office] she would befriend them and talk about when she could get with him…. This was after the so-called incident [at the Excelsior Hotel]. Absolutely. The pursuit was hot and heavy after the incident. People on the staff didn’t know what to do, how to get rid of this woman, who is stalking him. They didn’t know what she was going to end up saying later.”

  Wright believed that some of the troopers told the truth and others didn’t. “They were all bitter,” she said. “They all felt unappreciated, that they had been through a lot of tough times with [Bill], and he just left [Arkansas] and told Buddy Young [his chief of security] to sort of take care of them. He had talked to a number of them about coming to D.C. with him and there was never any follow-up. And so it got to be more and more poison. And I’d get calls from a couple who liked Bill the most. They were saying, You know, we can take care of this, we can head this off if he’ll just come down and have a picnic with them or something, you know, a barbecue, anything just to convey to them that he really appreciates them.”

  Wright said she called Bruce Lindsey a couple of times to relay the message, but nothing ever came of it. “Bruce was not a dialogue person with me. I never got answers.” There was no question, Wright said, that troopers had pulled women out of crowds for the governor at Bill’s direction (and for themselves), but that the situation was more volatile than she had realized. “Bill had told me before he announced [for president] that any indiscretions he ever engaged in were in the presence of only two troopers that he knew he could trust…and that nobody else would have ever been around so there wasn’t anything to say. Well, that was a flat-out lie. I was a little taken aback by it at the time he told me because it was completely unlike him to have that much foresight and care in the situation.”

  Another story (the day after the Spectator’s appeared) ran in the Los Angeles Times—whose reporters had been pursuing the same line of inquiry for weeks—saying that Clinton had recently called the troopers and dangled the possibility of federal jobs in return for their silence.

  The Spectator story and its fallout in the mainstream press represented the convergence of all the avenues of pursuit of the Clintons by a press corps already frustrated with Hillary’s refusal to be forthcoming about the family finances and increasingly convinced of her lack of truthfulness; by their avowed enemies back in Arkansas; by Republicans in Congress and far
-right-wing allies, especially on talk radio; and, eventually, by the law, as represented by a special prosecutor who seemed more than willing to feed and be fed by all of those parties.

  Bob Barnett, the Clintons’ personal lawyer upon entering the White House and, to this day, one of their most trusted friends and counselors—especially Hillary’s—attempted to comfort her, and, judging from Hillary’s own comments later, keep her anger from exploding, whether at Bill or the press. She pointed out that Bill had been elected, not her, and admitted to feeling “very much alone,” something she almost never said, and which signaled she was at her lowest ebb. And Bill, clearly, could be of no comfort.

  Hardly a year had passed since Bill’s election. Her attitude now—frustrated, angry, weary—announced, “I thought we were through with this; and now, here it comes again,” said McLarty. She told him, “It’s going to distort everything that we do.”

  As aides to Hillary and Bill considered how to respond publicly, they were understandably self-conscious about discussing such matters around the president and first lady. Hillary seemed to have absorbed the full force of the story by the time she and Bill attended another Christmas party at the White House, for family and close friends, the next night. Her press secretary, Lisa Caputo, took her aside to tell her that the troopers were now telling their tale on CNN. “My first thoughts were of Chelsea and for my mother and Virginia, who had already been through too much,” said Hillary. The plausibility of at least some of what the troopers were claiming was exacerbating matters.

  It was obvious to White House aides that Hillary was deeply humiliated by the stories, and that Bill “was deep in her doghouse,” in Gergen’s words—“like a bouncy golden retriever who has pooped on the living room rug, he curled up and looked baleful for days.” But Hillary and Bill tried to project a lawyerlike detachment, and when they did explode, their anger was always triggered by some detail of the story they said was wrong, or misinterpreted, and they conveyed a sense that there were higher principles at work here, rarely their own lives. Bill insisted that the troopers were vengeful because they’d wanted jobs in Washington and he hadn’t offered them; Hillary was certain the stories had been carefully timed to sabotage the Clinton agenda.

  The policy implications of what was occurring were of course clear to Hillary, and as distressing as the private hurt. Now, the familiar dynamic of the Clinton marriage in extremis was again in play, but for the first time on the Washington stage. Hillary held the upper hand; Bill would not risk her further ire. He would challenge her on nothing remotely in her purview. As the first anniversary of the Clinton presidency approached, they were moving into the crucial period of the health care struggle. “I cannot recall him publicly confronting her on any health care issue after that,” said Gergen. Her continuing refusal thereafter to compromise with either leaders on Capitol Hill or her husband’s economic team was a major factor in the failure of the Clinton initiative for health care reform.

  THE DETAILS that emerged from the troopers’ stories put the White House in an impossible bind in terms of fashioning a public response. Two of the troopers had been excruciatingly precise in laying out the nature of Bill’s sexual activities. They also alleged that he had offered a third trooper, Danny Ferguson, a bribe, in essence—in the form of a federal job—for keeping silent. It is a violation of federal law to solicit something of value in exchange for promising a government job—in this case a position as regional director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency or U.S. marshal in Little Rock, according to the troopers. Buddy Young, himself a FEMA regional manager in Texas by then, had been a go-between, talking to the president and the troopers about possible jobs. As a state trooper in Arkansas, Young had earned the maximum salary accorded after five years of service, $25,600; at FEMA, he was earning $98,000. Bruce Lindsey, too, had been in frequent touch with Young in the preceding weeks.

  The initial statement issued by the White House, on Sunday night, December 19, in Lindsey’s name, was anything but a convincing denial: “The allegations are ridiculous. Similar allegations were made, investigated, and responded to during the campaign, and there is nothing here that would dignify a further response.” The statement said that no offers of jobs had been made to any of the troopers, but that the president “has had conversations about the fact that false stories were being spread about him.”

  Dee Dee Myers and Lindsey were left to deal with the public response while the president stayed mum. Myers announced that the press briefings for Monday and Tuesday, September 20 and 21, were canceled. Hillary had been scheduled to do interviews Tuesday on ABC, CBS, and NBC, for broadcast during Christmas week. All three network news organizations canceled after Caputo informed them they could only inquire about the observance of Christmas at the White House—“about the crafts and the ornaments and the kind of entertainment the Clintons were having.”

  However, Hillary went ahead with an interview with the Associated Press. Her remarks seemed carefully fashioned to convey outrage and were totally in character. Her heartfelt words—seasonal references notwithstanding—became the leitmotif of her refrain through many of the troubles of the next six years:

  I find it not an accident that every time he is on the verge of fulfilling his commitment to the American people and they respond…out comes yet a new round of these outrageous, terrible stories that people plant for political and financial reasons…. It’s prettysad that we’re still subjected to these kinds of attacks for political and financial gain from people, and that it is sad that—especially here in the Christmas season—people for their own purposes would be attacking my family…. I think everybody forgets that, even if public figures don’t have any protection from these kinds of attacks, you still have feelings.

  Hillary’s conspiratorial notions about the origins of the trooper story, beyond whatever Bill and the troopers might actually have done, were not far-fetched. This, too, should have been a subject of great interest to the Washington reporters covering the Clinton presidency. But it would be years until such reporting was undertaken by major news organizations. The genesis of the American Spectator account was remarkably close to the circumstances she had outlined in her discussions with William Styron.

  The author of the Spectator story, David Brock, *18 in 2001 publicly apologized to the Clintons and chronicled his life—with emphasis on his right-to-left conversion—in a memoir entitled Blinded by the Right. Brock said in the book that while he was on the payroll of The American Spectator, he was also receiving money from Chicago financier Peter Smith, who was a major fund-raiser for Representative Newt Gingrich and, in preparation for the 1996 presidential campaign, bankrolled investigations into a college trip Clinton had made to Russia. *19 Smith had also helped spread rumors—definitively squelched during investigations by the House Banking Committee and the office of the CIA Inspector General—that Clinton, while governor, had ordered state law enforcement officials to ignore a cocaine-smuggling ring.

  Pittsburgh billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, a major source of funding for far-right-wing activities and causes, was particularly impressed and energized by Brock’s article on the troopers, and undertook to finance more such pieces thereafter through a secret operation known as the “Arkansas Project.” Scaife was a pivotal element of Hillary’s “vast right-wing conspiracy”—and on the flow charts of her deputy, Sidney Blumenthal, who monitored it—for good reason: Scaife spent more than $2.4 million gathering intelligence and funding anti-Clinton articles based on it.

  Brock’s much anticipated 1996 book, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, was a shocking disappointment to his old ideological comrades who were expecting an explosive, vicious attack on Hillary. Some parts were surprisingly sympathetic to its subject, not that the book could be interpreted as friendly. Rather, it was the product of some impressive fact-digging, its narrative swathed in a historical dialectic that emphasized the long ideological struggle of left and right in the Cold War years in America, and t
ried too hard to place many of Hillary’s actions in a context of leftist radicalism. As Brock continued to move leftward himself, he wrote another apologia in 1997 for Esquire entitled “I Was a Conservative Hit-Man,” in which he criticized his own reporting in The American Spectator and said his stories about Hillary and others were deliberately distorted for ideological purposes.

  His conversion seemed complete in 2000, when he received funding from a Clinton friend and major contributor—Steve Bing, who had inherited a real estate fortune and who also financed good government initiatives on the California ballot—for a Web site called Media Matters, dedicated to finding and correcting examples of right-wing media bias. By 2007, as the season of presidential campaigning approached, Media Matters had more than fifty employees, and expended a disproportionate part of its effort to correcting stories about Hillary: so much so that the favor with which it treated her suggested it was almost an outlet for her ambitions.

  Later, Elizabeth Drew, the unusually perceptive Washington journalist who wrote for The New York Review of Books, would describe December 20—the day The American Spectator’s story about the troopers appeared on newsstands—as “the most bizarre day thus far in this and perhaps any other administration.” An air of crisis had seized the White House, and men and women who had joined the administration expecting an enlightened battle of ideas were now wrestling in the gutter. Paul Begala walked into the office of George Stephanopoulos and said, “I think I’m going to throw up.” That morning the conservative Washington Times published a front-page story that combined suspicions about Whitewater and the death of Vince Foster to sinister and synergistic effect. The banner headline read: “Clinton Papers Lifted After Aide’s Suicide.” The subhead was equally suggestive: “Foster’s office was secretly searched hours after his body was found.” To ideologues and Clinton enemies who already were proposing the idea that Foster had been murdered (in a government safe house, in some of the versions favored on the far right), the convolution of skepticism about Whitewater and Foster’s death was the ultimate gift. Nonetheless, the basic facts reported in the story were solid.