A Woman in Charge

by Carl Bernstein

  Shortly thereafter, Bill scheduled a prime-time, full-scale news conference, hoping to calm the atmosphere.

  “Have you taken any lessons from this ordeal, whether it’s about the presidency, about the process, about the city, or anything?” he was asked.

  “I think there is a level of suspicion here that is greater than that which I have been used to in the past. And I don’t complain about it, but I’ve learned a lot about it. And that my job is to try to answer whatever questions are out there so I can get on with the business of the country. And I think I’ve learned a lot about how to handle that.

  “I’ve also learned here that there may or may not be a different standard than I had seen in the past, [though] not of right and wrong.”

  The press conference didn’t work.

  Hillary and her advisers decided it was essential for her to have her own press conference, at which she would answer all questions thrown at her. Her $100,000 profit-taking now public knowledge, Bill had agreed to release their tax returns for 1978–1979. The day before her press conference, the latest Los Angeles Times poll showed her approval rating had declined from 56 percent to 44 percent in the three months since January. Bill’s had remained steady at 54 percent.

  “I don’t think she really wanted to do it at the beginning,” said a senior member of her staff, “but it was collectively decided between everybody—the West Wing and the East Wing—that she needed to face the charges. And so we went through this whole thing about trying to put together a press conference, and basically did it in the State Dining Room under the portrait of Lincoln, and she had on this pink suit. That’s why we call it the Pink Press Conference…. And she basically stayed until almost every single last question was answered.” Thirty-four reporters asked questions and follow-ups. All the networks overrode their regular programming to provide live coverage.

  Her answer to the first question about the commodities trading—was it hypocritical to condemn the 1980s as the decade of greed while she was milking cattle futures and investing in speculative land?—was classic Hillary-under-pressure: obsequious, well rehearsed, not quite right. There was a faint echo of Richard Nixon in his famous Checkers speech. Hugh Rodham had read his young daughter the stock tables from the Chicago Tribune, she said, and now Hillary carried on the tradition by studying the finance pages with Chelsea. “You know, I was raised to believe that every person had an obligation to take care of themselves and their family,” she said, preternaturally calm. She continued: “I don’t think you’ll ever find anything that my husband or I said that in any way condemns the importance of making good investments and saving or that in any way undermines what is the heart and soul of the American economy, which is risk-taking and investing in the future. What I think we were saying is that, like anything else, that can be taken to excess—when companies are leveraged into debt, when loans are not repaid, when pension funds are raided. You know, all of the things that marked the excess of the 1980s are things which we spoke out against. I think it’s a pretty long stretch to say that the decisions that we made to try to create some financial security for our family and make some investments come anywhere near there…. We obviously wanted enough financial security to send our daughter to college and put money away for our old age and help our parents when we could.”

  Later, she claimed to have been grateful for the questions, so she could put everything out in the open. She was asked if she believed that withholding information had “helped to create any impression that you were trying to hide something.”

  “Yes, I do,” she answered. “And I think that is one of the things that I regret most, and one of the reasons why I wanted to do this…. I think if my father or mother said anything to me more than a million times, it was: ‘Don’t listen to what other people say. Don’t be guided by other people’s opinions. You know, you have to live with yourself.’ And I think that’s good advice. But I do think that that advice and my belief in it, combined with my sense of privacy…led me to perhaps be less understanding than I needed to [be] of both the press and the public’s interest, as well as [their] right to know things about my husband and me.”

  Did she and Bill “ever look in the mirror and wish that you just never got into this?”—meaning the presidency.

  “No, never, never. This is really a result of our inexperience in Washington,” she insisted. “I really did not fully understand everything that I wish now I had known”—including the need to keep the people informed by answering questions from reporters. (“I’m certainly going to try to be more sensitive to what you all need and what we need to give you.”) In terms of the difficulties of Whitewater, “I feel very confident about how this will all turn out. This is not a long-term problem or issue in any way.”

  The final question was eerie. Richard Nixon, eighty-one, was in a deep coma after suffering a stroke three days earlier. “Considering what you’ve been through, do you have any greater appreciation of what Richard Nixon might have been going through?”

  For the first time since she had entered the State Dining Room in her pink outfit, she seemed to be genuinely emotional. Her tears were visible on television, and her voice broke. “What I think we ought to be doing is praying for President Nixon,” she said. “And from my perspective, you know, it was a year ago April that my father died at the age of eighty-one, and so, you know, I’m just mostly thinking about his daughters right now.”

  It would be the last such full-scale press conference she allowed as first lady. After that, noted Roger Altman, “she essentially reverted to a Reagan approach to the press and benefited every day of the week from doing so.” Reagan had cupped his hand to his ear when he was asked a question by a reporter, and declined to answer on grounds of deafness (he was deaf in one ear). “She started off with one approach of being accessible, or at least fairly accessible,” said Altman. “It’s just too bad…. If they ever ask me again, ‘How should you play the media?’ I’d say, ‘Just follow Ronald Reagan’s playlist, follow it A to Z.’ So, Hillary, I think, changed her mode in that regard, and much to her benefit. I don’t know how many times she was actually accessible to the press after her famous Pink Press Conference. But in terms of the definition of accessible that I would use, not too often.”

  It had been a bravura performance. She had looked pretty in pink, and watching the press poke, probe, and pile on for sixty-eight minutes made her a much more sympathetic figure. Afterward, David Kendall proclaimed that “Whitewater is evaporating.” Bill told the Los Angeles Times that he had simply banned the topic and would permit “no discussion of this in my household, no discussion of this in my office.”

  At dinner that night, Bob Reich sat next to Hillary. “She felt good about the press conference. She had been very effective. That was the word we heard from everyone, all of the pollsters, all the political people, my little free-floating focus group—my wife and sons and friends. Everybody thought she had done very well. She was obviously relieved that that particular press conference was over, but she was also hurt and bewildered, and I think quite pained by Whitewater. It was worse than a distraction. It really seemed to her to be some sort of almost retribution, political retribution. She didn’t understand why, but there was anger directed at her.”

  And there was her anger to consider—at Democrats in Congress, especially. She expressed as much in a conversation with Sara Ehrman. Couldn’t people see that the onslaught against her and Bill was intended to kill health care and undermine Bill’s reelection, to tar both her and her husband to the point where they would be considered pariahs? She couldn’t fathom why Democrats weren’t taking an aggressive stance and attacking the opposition for such patently obvious political and personal persecution. There was no deference to the presidency, not even by their own party. This was beyond acceptable politics to her, yet the Democrats on the Hill, especially the leadership, always seemed to be on the defensive. Even Dick Gephardt, the Democratic leader of the House, sometimes seemed mor
e concerned about his relations with the opposition in the House than with the president. Why weren’t they out there defending the presidency and the Democratic agenda?

  She had even less kind words for the local establishment, the people in Washington who thought that the “politics of personal destruction”—the phrase was Bill’s *20 —were perfectly acceptable and even amusing fodder for dinner table conversation.

  THROUGH THE SPRING and summer of 1994, as Hillary tried to focus and get the country to focus on the merits of reforming the country’s health care system, the Whitewater “madness” continued to do damage. “They are peeling away her ability to be what she is, which is our leader on the health care reform issue,” said David Wilhelm, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He accused Senators D’Amato, Dole, and Phil Gramm, another senator seeking the Republican presidential nomination, of overlooking their own ethics problems, adding that “they can’t stand her success, and that’s why they’re on the attack.” Fortunately for the Clintons, special prosecutor Fiske prevailed on Republican leaders to postpone any latitudinous Senate inquiries until he had finished his own investigation.

  Hillary and David Kendall drew increasingly close. She spent far more time with him discussing strategy and specifics about Whitewater and its spawn than did her husband. She trusted Kendall totally, and there were many things she would share with him that she would not share with the other lawyers, some of whom believed that Kendall carefully parsed out his knowledge to the rest of the legal team, which had expanded as Hillary’s and Bill’s troubles grew deeper. Kendall and Nussbaum had seen eye-to-eye on most questions, so Nussbaum had had a fair (but hardly complete, he later concluded) view of the legal chess-board. But that could not be said of the new White House counsel, Lloyd Cutler, or (even more so) the next heavy-hitter brought into the mix, Robert Bennett. Bennett was at first recruited by Cutler “to have a seat at the table on all Whitewater issues,” said one of the lawyers. “There was considerable discontent at the way Kendall was handling things. David viewed the problems as 80 percent law and 20 percent politics. Ickes, Harry Thomason, and others felt the reverse.”

  Kendall, Barnett, and other lawyers at Williams & Connolly working on matters involving the Clintons were not pleased with Cutler’s choice of Bennett, an experienced Washington litigator and former prosecutor renowned for his tenacity in the courtroom. Cutler intended that Bennett would bring both toughness and some public relations skills to the table, in part to compensate for what many in the West Wing believed was Kendall’s inability to make a sympathetic case for his clients on television. Kendall came off as unforthcoming, argumentative, and prissy.

  The three-year statute of limitations to file a lawsuit in the Paula Jones matter was running out on May 8, 1994, around the time Bennett was brought on board, and Cutler wanted it settled posthaste. There was no percentage in letting that sideshow go on, even if Bill Clinton were to “win” through the courts. He could be ruined in wide-ranging depositions. Cutler overrode the objection of Kendall, who wanted to handle the matter himself. Before signing on—at $475 an hour—Bennett met with Hillary, then with Bill, who told him, “I swear to God, it didn’t happen.” The president also told Bennett, according to those familiar with the circumstances of his hiring, not to discuss the Jones case specifically with his wife. Bennett had already heard from others that Hillary did not want to settle the case; after all, if nothing had happened with this woman, why should Bill settle? She wanted the matter to be made to disappear.

  At the same time, Clinton was being urged to settle with Jones by Jim Blair, Vernon Jordan, and Bruce Lindsey.

  “I begged him and begged him to settle the Paula Jones case and by the time I got him around to my way of thinking it was too late,” Jim Blair recalled. “Had he settled it when I asked him to none of this [Clinton’s lying under oath, in a deposition for Jones’s lawsuit, about Monica Lewinsky] would have ever happened…. Hillary did not want it…. I think he felt like if he did it [settle], he was…telling Hillary something that he didn’t want to tell her.”

  Bennett had reached the same conclusion. He had personally favored settling, even under conditions that would have been more ambiguous than the president seemed to be willing to accept. The risk of a lawsuit proceeding, he felt, was too great. At crucial moments during the negotiation, Clinton had seemed ambivalent, unsure of what to do.

  The Jones matter had been simmering since February, when she showed up at the annual meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference. The event had less to do with a genuine conservative political agenda than with Clinton-baiting and-bashing. David Brock, as yet unreconstructed, was the hero of the hour. Mobbed by autograph hounds, he posed for pictures and, with the state troopers he had interviewed, was canonized by speakers on the program. “Impeach Hillary” T-shirts were hawked throughout the event, as were provocative photographs and postcards doctored to show the first lady mostly nude or in full dominatrix dress. Other first ladies had had detractors, and even enemies. But this was not the kind of thing that Eleanor Roosevelt, Nancy Reagan, or Jackie Kennedy had been subjected to. More than one hundred reporters were in attendance, many of them drawn by the promise of a press conference by Jones, who was in the company of her husband, as well as Clinton’s old nemesis Cliff Jackson.

  “The whole scene screamed ‘setup job,’” said George Stephanopoulos. He and others in the West Wing regarded the matter as another “cash for trash” holdup, not unlike the Gennifer Flowers threat. Jones was seeking book and movie deals, he claimed. To the disappointment of the reporters hoping for more, Jones declined at her press conference to describe in detail the “sexual encounter” she’d allegedly had with Clinton, except to say, “It’s wrong that a woman can be harassed by a figure that high. It’s humiliating what he did to me.” And when Dee Dee Myers responded, “It’s just not true” that Clinton had met with her, and Stephanopoulos referred to her press conference as “a cheap political fund-raising trick,” she proceeded to go on the Jerry Falwell–Pat Robertson Christian television circuit to tell her story, and thereafter make the tabloid TV rounds. “Only after Mr. Clinton and his staff denied that these events had ever happened, and called me ‘pathetic,’ and in effect a liar, did I decide to seek legal relief,” she said, and threatened to file a civil suit against the sitting president alleging sexual harassment and defamation.

  In fact, Hillary had perceived the danger from Jones at the outset and, through Betsey Wright, tried to bury Jones’s story before a lawsuit could be filed. She had phoned, and “she was begging me to stop it,” said Wright. A few weeks before her call, Wright said she had asked Hillary, “‘Do you want me to go down there and try to stop this?’ I was in D.C.” Not long after, Hillary called her back, and Wright began making inquiries.

  Bob Bennett, entrusted with the task of heading such a lawsuit off, entered into negotiations with Jones’s attorneys, who said they wanted nothing more than an admission from Bill that he had been in a hotel room with her and that she had not engaged in any kind of “immoral conduct.” Bennett agreed. But Clinton insisted that Jones, who had been twenty-three years old at the time of the alleged incident, say likewise that he had made no sexual advances or otherwise acted improperly. Meanwhile, having learned from Betsey Wright’s contacts that a former boyfriend had some nude photographs of Jones, and might be willing to attest that she had had many sexual partners, Bennett dispatched a team of attorneys to Little Rock to get a notarized statement from him. In the interim, he told her lawyers that he knew there were nude photos of her.

  This was what lawyering for the president of the United States and his wife had come down to. On May 5, with the deadline for filing a lawsuit imminent, Bennett moved operations into Stephanopoulos’s office, and shuttled between the telephone and the president next door, in the Oval Office, who was calling members of Congress to win support for a cliff-hanger vote on an assault weapons ban.

  Jones’s lawyer had told Be
nnett there could be no deal unless Clinton personally made the statement she was demanding—not the White House press office or his lawyers. Clinton would not agree. Jones’s attorneys were seeking a so-called tolling agreement that would invalidate the statute of limitations for filing a sexual harassment suit under certain conditions—a trap for re-opening the matter as the reelection campaign drew close, the White House believed.

  In this instance, Clinton, through Bennett, had already been informed that such a suit could allege that Governor Clinton had taken down his pants and asked her to perform oral sex, and accordingly, she could identify “distinguishing characteristics” on his penis.

  This kind of thing was Hillary’s nightmare—the humiliating details, the three-ring Clintonian circus. It was the reason she had asked Betsey Wright to try to prevent it. It wasn’t only a question of whether the allegations were true. And, in fact, those who knew Hillary best thought she was disinclined to believe such things. In this case, she wanted to believe that Jones was a stalker, as Wright had maintained all along, and sought affidavits to that effect; that was preferable to believing that anything had actually transpired. But since hearing some of what was on the Gennifer Flowers tapes, and learning what was in the Spectator article, it must have been harder for Hillary to keep denying the plausibility of such an encounter. And she was powerless to work this out in the confines of her marriage. She was hardly the first wife (or husband) to be dragged through a searingly humiliating experience by a spouse. But her predicament was painfully unique on many levels. It was no wonder that her acolytes in Hillaryland marveled at her ability to get up every day and go to work without breaking down.

  The assault weapons ban, despite vigorous opposition from the National Rifle Association, passed by the narrowest of margins, a triumph for the Clinton presidency. The next day, exactly three years after the alleged incident at the Excelsior Hotel, catty-corner to the governor’s mansion, Paula Jones filed suit seeking $700,000 in civil damages, alleging violation of her civil rights and defamation. “This complaint is tabloid trash with a legal caption on it,” Bennett said at a press conference in response. It was “really about trying to rewrite the election results.” By now it was evident that Jones had joined forces with the Clintons’ political enemies, who saw her case as a means to greater triumphs beyond the courtroom.