In Living History, Hillary described the Whitewater response team in terms suggesting that it had little to do with her: Mack McLarty and Maggie Williams as well as other senior staff had recommended its establishment, she said, to “centralize” all discussion of Whitewater.
“Hillary was clearly orchestrating it from the beginning…. She was the conductor of it—the damage control operation,” which meant the legal operation, said Fabiani, “and had been going back to 1992 and the first Whitewater revelation…directing Susan Thomases, directing Webb Hubbell, Vince Foster, to try to structure the Whitewater defense. And she’d been doing it ever since”—to the Clintons’ great disadvantage, in the view of a number of her lawyers. Hubbell confirmed that Hillary had, from the start, taken over the defense. Ickes’s operation, said Mark Fabiani, “was another iteration of her damage control, and it never changed.” In his initial meeting with Hillary, and in a subsequent discussion the same day with Williams on the veranda of her office, “we talked about what this all meant, and how to fix it.”
Hillary’s personal instrument was David Kendall. Over the next two years, Fabiani came to “like him very much,” but “he’s a soul mate of hers in terms of his instinct, in terms of his carefulness about saying anything publicly, in terms of his attitude toward the press. He is very much someone that she’s comfortable with, because he reinforced everything she thought, and she reinforced everything he thought. You never heard them disagree in a meeting.”
Several members of Sherburne’s team, said one, came to believe that Hillary’s “instincts are horrible in terms of politics, in terms of managing a crisis like this, like the one that she was in, like the one [Bill] got in with Monica…. We had a joke that all we had to do was ask her, What would you do? And then do just the opposite, without even thinking about it…because almost always her instincts were wrong, backwards…. And she never surrounded herself with people who would stand up to her, who were of a different mind.”
Until the special prosecutor caught Monica Lewinsky in his sights, Kendall rarely dealt with the president, only Hillary, said Fabiani. “The president wasn’t the client, except in name only, and except when there were a few flare-ups that involved him. But those were rare and…he was easy to deal with compared to her.” In two years at the White House, Fabiani never met with Bill and Hillary together.
It is impossible to know how much Hillary told Bill about her lawyering back in Arkansas on behalf of McDougal and their Whitewater investment, and in defending herself when she came under investigation by reporters, prosecutors, and the Congress. Just as he never told her about his assignations with other women, it seems reasonable from what we know that she never fully told him just how legally exposed her actions might have made her.
“She is so tortured by the way she’s been treated that she would do anything to get out of the situation,” Fabiani realized time and again over the next two years of trying to defend her. “And if that involved not being fully forthcoming [in releasing documents and other materials], she herself would say, ‘I have a reason for not being forthcoming.’” Her reasoning, said Fabiani, followed a linear path: “If we do this [she would say], they’re going to do this to me. If we say this, then they’re going to say this. You know, fuck ’em, let’s just not do that.” Meanwhile, she would “wake up in the morning…saying, What are they going to do to me today? Where are they coming at me today? What do I need to do today.” Eventually Fabiani, Sherburne, Ickes, and the other lawyers on the team came to be known in the West Wing as “The Masters of Disaster.”
The president, said Fabiani, “never seemed to be too concerned about her legal vulnerability. There was never any detectable concern. His concern was, What do I say about it? if an event had occurred that he was going to be asked about.” Bill’s general attitude toward the legal situation was “keep your eye on the ball, get good people who can handle it for you, deal with them only as necessary, and keep trying to move the administration forward.”
Until the president personally became enmeshed in the Lewinsky scandal, Fabiani saw Bill explode only once—“very late in the [investigations] over the treatment of Susan McDougal,” when television broadcasts showed her being taken to prison, shackled, in an orange jumpsuit.
Fabiani underwent a trial by fire. In early May 1995, the Senate had formally authorized, by a vote of ninety-six to three, a resolution creating the Special Committee to Investigate Whitewater Development Corporation and Related Matters, under the auspices of Alfonse D’Amato’s Banking Committee. Democrats, still reeling from the election results of November and many of them now mistrustful of the Clintons’ assurances that Whitewater was a dry hole, had little choice but to go along. Because Democrats were the minority party now, D’Amato and other implacable opponents of the Clintons would control the investigations and—especially moving toward a presidential election year—try to use them as a means of denying him a second term.
D’Amato focused on Vince Foster’s death for maximum publicity; investigating his death would grab more headlines and attention than the minutiae of Arkansas real estate and banking practices. The most probing questions of the investigation would be about Hillary, Foster’s friend and enabler, not the president. From the outset, the rhetoric of D’Amato and his fellow Republicans made clear these would be viciously partisan hearings. The first batch of subpoenas issued by D’Amato’s committee was for information related to the Travel Office, Foster’s death, his duties, and the documents removed from his office—which, D’Amato implied, could lead to the president and his wife.
Fabiani and Sherburne, determined to make an end run around D’Amato, appealed to Hillary to allow leaking to the press—prior to the scheduled start of the hearings on July 18—the relevant documents sought by the committee. These included thirty “personal” files removed from Foster’s office after his death, about one hundred pages of which dealt with his work on Whitewater for the Clintons. Kendall opposed the idea, on grounds that such disclosures might give the committee a roadmap to new leads and an opportunity to contradict old statements by the Clintons. Hillary said the press would, as usual, report the material negatively (some of the contents was embarrassing, but not criminal), but she left the matter in Kendall’s hands.
In this instance, Kendall met with unusually vigorous opposition from the new counsel to the president, Abner Mikva, and virtually the whole legal defense apparatus outside of Williams & Connolly (where many of the records were held in a secured area). Kendall relented. It was decided to let the press present a coherent account, based on the documents, of what had happened both in Whitewater back in Arkansas and on the night Foster died—before D’Amato offered his skewed and selective interpretation. The material was carefully parceled out to reporters, the biggest cache going to Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff, who was known to be very tough on Whitewater matters and the Clintons in general. Isikoff produced a long account titled “The Night Foster Died,” in which he concluded that there was no evidence of a connection between Foster’s death and Whitewater, “no document, memo, note or scrap of paper suggesting that Foster, the Clintons or anyone else was orchestrating a cover-up,” before or after Foster’s death. Foster’s colleagues—who were also his friends, in shock, grieving—had tended to make a jumble out of the materials in his office, but that was all.
But it wasn’t.
Kendall had withheld important documents from the White House lawyers, some of which related to Whitewater tax matters. D’Amato had obtained copies of that material and triumphantly accused the White House of yet another cover-up. The records that Fabiani and Sherburne now demanded from Kendall showed that the Clintons’ claim, during the 1992 campaign, of a $68,900 tax loss from their Whitewater investment had been wrong. Foster had calculated the real loss was only $5,800. The IRS was undertaking an audit of the matter. More ominously, Foster had written in his notes held back by Kendall that Whitewater was “a can of worms you shouldn’t open.”
/> That quotation was in the next day’s headlines and read aloud portentously in D’Amato’s nasal Long Island accent on the evening television news broadcasts.
Among the first witnesses called by the committee were Susan Thomases, Maggie Williams, and Betsey Wright, all of whom expressed degrees of reluctance, forgetfulness, and exasperation as they were savaged by the chairman, the committee’s counsel, Michael Chertoff, *25 and its Republican members. In Thomases’s case, the situation seemed particularly cruel; she was becoming debilitated by multiple sclerosis, and her difficulty in providing quick responses to the questions shouted at her by D’Amato (who called her a liar) was perhaps more a result of her physical condition than anything else.
The basic methodology of the hearings was Chertoff’s, who implied—through his questions and the introduction of White House phone logs showing a series of back-to-back phone calls between Hillary, Thomases, Williams, and Bernie Nussbaum—that Hillary had attempted to delay and prevent investigators from going through Foster’s office before damning evidence could be stashed away or removed.
Wright was on the stand for eight consecutive hours, “bobbing and weaving with Chertoff in her sarcastic and colorful fashion,” as the Washington Post reported. “Go ahead and talk,” she told him at one point, when he tried to frame an unusually elaborate and convoluted question. “And then sometime next week I’ll come back and answer.” As she neared the end of her testimony that day, after providing answers to “nigh on a jillion questions,” as she put it, D’Amato inquired about how she was holding up. “I’m tired and I’m bored,” she said with a sigh.
Williams testified on July 28, during the second week of the hearings. A Secret Service uniformed guard, Henry P. O’Neill Jr., an eighteen-year veteran of the White House detail, had testified that he’d witnessed Williams taking a stack of files from Foster’s office the night of Foster’s death. She denied it, and had undergone two lie detector tests to buttress her account. But her lawyer released the results of only one. She was near tears finally, after being hammered on the stand by D’Amato, whose pre-senatorial reputation as a local politician with deep conflict-of-interest problems of his own, including the prosecution of his brother for mail fraud, †26 was well known. She said she had visited Foster’s office that night only because she had seen a light on and had a momentary “irrational hope that I would walk in and find Vince Foster there.” She had spoken to Hillary perhaps three times in the forty-eight hours after Foster’s death, she said, phone conversations in which they discussed Vince’s apparent torment, the question of where the Clintons’ “personal files” in his office should go, and how to deal with a distraught White House staff, including sending in grief counselors. She’d spoken to Thomases only once, about Foster’s insurance policy, she testified. Aggressively challenged by Senator Connie Mack, a Florida Republican, who said phone records demonstrated that Thomases had called her nine times in forty-eight hours, and that her account made “very little sense,” Williams responded that the records showed only that Thomases phoned the office of the first lady, not that she had reached Williams. “Everything that happened is not some big plot.”
For instance, two days after Foster’s death, she said, she had some of the Clintons’ personal records transferred from Foster’s office to a locked closet in the first family’s personal residence, only because she was too tired to wait for a messenger from the office of the Clintons’ lawyers to pick them up—not (as the Republicans on the committee were intimating) for nefarious reasons. Bernard Nussbaum had asked her to send those records to the attorneys.
Her voice choked up, and she wiped her eyes, when she recalled Hillary’s phone call informing her of Vince’s death. Evelyn Lieberman, Williams’s deputy and later White House deputy chief of staff, was seated at the witness table next to her, and put her arm around Williams to console her.
The Secret Service agent, O’Neill, stuck to his story despite a pounding by Democrats who kept him at the microphone for nearly four hours. He said he told no one about Williams taking the files until he was interviewed by FBI agents in April 1994, in connection with one of the investigations of Foster’s death.
At 10:30 that night, he said, he was on his regular tour accompanying a cleaning crew from office to office in the West Wing. His duties included locking and unlocking offices for the cleaners, and securing sensitive “burn bag” documents for disposal.
O’Neill said his first stop was the White House counsel’s suite, where Foster and Nussbaum had their private offices and aides worked in a common open area with several desks. Around the time he entered the suite, he said, Nussbaum arrived and entered his office. O’Neill and the cleaning crew then left the suite, and in the hallway outside he encountered Howard Paster, the White House liaison to Congress, who told him Vince Foster’s body had been discovered, apparently a suicide. O’Neill then walked back to the counsel’s suite and encountered Williams’s aide Lieberman standing outside the door; she asked him to make sure the counsel’s office was locked properly.
When he returned to the suite a short while afterward, Patsy Thomasson, the White House deputy administrative director who sometimes reported to Foster, was sitting at Foster’s desk, looking down, apparently reading something. O’Neill thought she might be Foster’s wife, so he left. When he again returned to lock up, Lieberman was just coming out, as was Nussbaum. Then, “after a few more seconds, Maggie Williams came out, walked by me carrying what I would describe as folders.” By way of explanation, Lieberman told him, “That’s Maggie Williams, the first lady’s chief of staff.”
O’Neill said Williams walked to her office nearby carrying a stack of folders, which he estimated to be three to five inches high, perhaps with a cardboard box on top. He locked the counsel’s office at 11:41 P.M., and said that he, Williams, and Lieberman went down the elevator together.
WRIGHT’S LEGAL BILLS, in excess of $650,000, were probably the highest of all of Hillary’s and Bill’s aides forced to run a gauntlet between D’Amato’s committee and Starr’s grand jury. Williams’s bills totaled about $150,000.
“I had assurance from both Lloyd Cutler and Bill Clinton directly that they would pay my bill because I was in effect custodian of his campaign papers, and they told me his legal defense fund was being structured in a way that it would be covered,” said Wright. Later, she read an article in the New York Times saying only Hillary and Bill’s fees would be paid by the fund. “I had approached the guy who was the keeper, and he told me he had never been given instructions to pay me; and when I asked him to go back to Bill, he told me that the president had never authorized the payment. That was a little embarrassing.”
Meanwhile, Wright spent hundreds of hours searching through records in her lawyer’s office and at Williams & Connolly that had been subpoenaed by the special prosecutor.
Joe Klein, the author of Primary Colors and a Newsweek columnist at the time, excoriated Hillary in print for failing to aid her beleaguered staff, especially Maggie, who was highly regarded by colleagues and reporters alike. Klein’s column depicted Williams and other aides as the Clintons’ victims, left to fend for themselves. Referring to Bill and Hillary as “the Tom and Daisy Buchanan of the Baby Boom Political Elite,” he asked: “Why hasn’t she come forward and said, ‘Stop torturing my staff. This isn’t about them. I’ll testify. I’ll make all the documents available. I’ll sit here and answer your stupid, salacious questions until Inauguration Day, if need be.’” On the same day that Klein’s column appeared, Webb Hubbell reported to the Federal Prison Camp in Cumberland, Maryland, where he was to serve twenty-one months for mail fraud and tax evasion.
Hillary, meanwhile, told Jane Sherburne that she wanted to testify, to go one-on-one with D’Amato and bury him. Her appearance would demonstrate that she was “a good person,” and maybe once and for all put an end to the whole Whitewater outrage. Others were not sure if Hillary was serious or, more likely, that she knew the lawyers would never all
ow it. The lawyers were indeed unanimous in their opposition, and that was that.
In Hillary’s first newspaper columns, appearing that month, she briefly deviated from her topic of families and children to reflect on her frustration, as first lady, without specifically citing the investigations by Starr or D’Amato’s committee: “The truth is it is hard for me to recognize the Hillary Clinton that other people see.”
Later, she wrote about her inability, for legal reasons, to talk with her friends about their mistreatment by investigators and prosecutors, and the “injustices” dealt them.
OF ALL the foreign policy dilemmas faced by the Clinton administration, the U.S. relationship with China was as vexing as any, a matter of delicate calibration based on the American adherence to the fundamental principles of human rights and China’s status as a superpower.
For months, Hillary had been looking forward to going to China as honorary chairwoman of the U.S. delegation at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, to be held in Beijing between September 4 and 15. The title understated her mission, which was to address, on behalf of the United States government, the most urgent questions of human rights abuses—particularly those of women—to the host Chinese regime and the rest of the world, while not causing a rift in the Sino-American relationship. Like her health care portfolio, this was not the kind of assignment normally entrusted to first ladies. The recent behavior of the Chinese complicated matters: imprisoning a Chinese-American human rights activist charged with espionage (and, on the eve of the conference, releasing him); selling M-11 missiles to Pakistan; and conducting provocative military exercises in the Taiwan Strait.
From Pearl Harbor, where Bill had spoken at the fiftieth anniversary observance of V-J Day, Hillary flew to Beijing, where her advance team was being badgered by the authorities, who wanted a prior look at what she was going to say in her address. Hillary was told that, while the Chinese government looked forward to her presence at the conference, it did not want to be embarrassed by her words, and hoped that she was appreciative of “China’s hospitality.” For most of the fourteen-hour flight across the Pacific she worked on her speech, consulting with the head of the American delegation, U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright, former ambassador to China Winston Lord, and Eric Schwartz, the National Security Council’s expert on human rights in China. She was deciding how far she should go in condemning Chinese and other governments’ and cultures’ abuses. The bureaucrats found her draft tepid, despite her insistence that she wanted to “push the envelope” on behalf of women and girls. They recommended incorporating an affirmation of principles adopted at the recent World Council of Human Rights in Vienna.
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