A Woman in Charge

by Carl Bernstein

  Back home, Hillary’s participation in the Beijing conference had already been attacked. Senators Jesse Helms and Phil Gramm complained that the meeting was “shaping up as an unsanctioned festival of anti-family, anti-American sentiment.” Their view was reinforced by fellow Republicans disinclined to approve of any U.N.-sponsored event. They ignored that meetings such as this one were of great import to the worldwide human rights movement, women’s rights advocates, and Third World governments, which were reluctant—for religious, cultural, or merely authoritarian reasons—to relax feudal policies regarding women and girls, in particular, and human rights in general. The U.S. delegation included Republican Tom Kean, the former governor of New Jersey (and a Catholic), nuns, and a vice chair of the Muslim Women’s League.

  Hillary had learned (or so she said later) from her health care experience that the tone and pitch of her voice often worked against her when she felt strongly about an issue. (She attributed this to women being subject to criticism if they showed too much feeling in public.) The Chinese, ultimately, blacked out her speech on official state radio and television, but her message was startlingly forceful and clear to her hosts:

  It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are girls. It is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution. It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small. It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war. It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide among women ages fourteen to forty-four is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes. It is a violation of human rights when young girls are brutalized by the painful and degrading practice of genital mutilation. It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.

  Her twenty-one-minute-long oration ended with a plea that the delegates return to their countries and demand action to improve opportunities for women—in health, the law, politics, and education. Now there was an agonizingly long delay before the translations were completed (delegations from 189 countries were in attendance). Hillary anxiously awaited the audience response. Suddenly there was something approaching pandemonium as hundreds in the hall leaped to their feet and began a long-standing ovation for the first lady.

  For the rest of her time in China, Hillary was mobbed by those who had heard the speech, both in Beijing and at a huge meeting of nongovernmental organizations in Huarirou, whose conference—to coincide with the smaller official U.N. assembly in Beijing—had been moved by the authorities to a distant city.

  Her speech became front-page news around the world, noted (in countries where its message was consistent with cultural and governmental principles) for its power and eloquence. In the United States, the New York Times editorial page said the speech “may have been her finest moment in public life.”

  “It kind of legitimized her as an ambassador for those issues,” said her speechwriter Lissa Muscatine, who had accompanied Hillary and worked on the address. After two taxing years, and for the first time since her trip to Capitol Hill when she had charmed the committees of Congress that were to consider, and eventually help bury, health care reform, this was the first widespread positive recognition she received.

  The germ of an idea she had first planted in Africa and South Asia a few months before was now firmly rooted. She could see that, no matter how she was treated by politicians and the press back home, she had an international platform from which to preach the ideas and concepts that meant the most to her. Neither D’Amato’s hearings nor Ken Starr’s investigation had paused during her trip to China, but with her own powerful will and determination she had successfully been able to present an alternative Hillary. She—and others—could now see that she was a figure of enormous respect around the world, regarded with fascination and treated as a new kind of statesperson, a first lady who brought a compelling, important message, not just flowers to hand to a king or prime minister. She may have failed miserably at changing things at home, but she could sense her potential to effect change elsewhere. Her message had been skillfully presented in Beijing and would continue to be sharpened: to encourage democratic movements not by insisting on U.S.-style governance and constitutions in other cultures, but by promoting democratic and universal ideals of human freedom. For at least a moment, this felt like a return to her lifelong agenda.

  A BATTERY OF White House lawyers and paralegals labored full-time to meet the demands for thousands of documents sought under subpoenas issued by D’Amato’s Senate committee, a parallel investigating committee of the House of Representatives, and the office of Kenneth Starr. On December 29, one of Jane Sherburne’s deputies, searching a batch of records carted from a federal warehouse in suburban Maryland, found David Watkins’s memorandum with its damning detail about Hillary’s “insisten[t]” role in the Travel Office firings instigated by Harry Thomason. “Foster regularly informed me that the first lady was concerned and desired action—the action desired was the firing of the travel office staff,” Watkins had written.

  If D’Amato were to wave this kind of memo in front of the cameras while reading its perditious words, the suggestion that Foster died because he knew the darkest secrets of the Clinton presidency would become more credible to some, whether his death was suicide or murder. It was already known that he had left a note expressing his worry that Hillary would be held responsible for the firings. It was well established that Foster had really been Hillary’s in-house lawyer, not the president’s. Foster’s death had raised the Travel Office matter, which in any other administration might have been a minor blip for a few weeks, to a matter of national fascination and, with the newly discovered memo, potentially momentous political proportions. The Watkins memo was nine pages long, each making clear Hillary’s centrality to the controversy. Worse, it was filled with the kind of language that D’Amato and others could have a field day with, given Hillary’s persistent denials that she had anything to do with the Travel Office matter.

  Inside the White House, the discovery of the memo sent the lawyers into another spasm of damage control, which lasted days before they finally turned it over to D’Amato. Hillary was set to begin her book tour for It Takes a Village on January 16, the triumphant event in her planned redemptive return to visibility at home. The publisher and author were looking forward to sales in the hundreds of thousands of copies as the first lady barnstormed the country delivering her message about the urgent needs of families and children in distress around the world. Watkins’s memo made her sound neither first lady–ish, nor family-friendly.

  Watkins had written that his memo was a “soul-cleansing…my first attempt to be sure the record is straight, something I have not done in previous conversations with investigators—where I have been as protective and vague as possible.” That hardly improved the situation.

  Watkins’s memo was a classic “cover your ass” document that had not been intended for the White House files where a copy had been left behind (apparently accidentally), but rather was written for his lawyer in the event Watkins would ever be criminally investigated or charged in the matter. Watkins had been fired in 1994 for using a government helicopter to ferry him to a golf course, where he claimed he needed to play a round to scout a golf outing for the president. The helicopter ride had cost the government $13,000. Cronyism. Lady Macbeth. Hidden records. They were back to square one as the president was trying to cautiously approach the election season. The self-serving origins of the Watkins memo did not undermine its recitation of events, and its belated discovery, after months of denials, only underscored its capacity for damage. Hillary had said there would be “h
ell to pay” if Watkins didn’t “take swift and decisive action in conformity with the first lady’s wishes” to replace the Travel Office employees.

  The congressional committees received the memo from the White House late in the day on January 3, four days after its discovery. William Clinger, the chairman of the House investigating committee, declared, “There was a cover-up here,” requiring more hearings by his committee and further work by its investigators. Starr, in contrast to the lawyerly approach that his predecessor, Fiske, had adopted, publicly announced his “distress” at what had happened. “The White House had an obligation to turn this memorandum over to the Office of Independent Counsel as soon as it was discovered,” he said, not several days later. D’Amato noted the “troubling pattern that keeps recurring involving Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

  The lead editorial in the next day’s Wall Street Journal was “Who Is Hillary Clinton?,” aping the headline of the Journal’s momentous attack on Vince Foster.

  According to her aides, Hillary read the editorial. The Journal had devoted 1,600 words to its diatribe, three times the space ordinarily devoted to one of its editorials. The Watkins memo, said the Journal, confirmed D’Amato’s contention that, in the first lady’s case, there was a sinister pattern of denial and delayed discovery of information that contradicted earlier accounts claimed by her and the White House. The “related” matter of Whitewater was part of the pattern. As to whether Hillary had improperly sought state intervention on behalf of Jim and Susan McDougal’s Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, “The Rose Firm’s billing records on the Madison account would, of course, clear up the issue, but the billing records have vanished,” said the Journal. By the time Hillary read the editorial, the records had—disastrously, as it turned out for her—been found.

  The disaster was less in what the billing records actually showed (lawyers, politicians, and bystanders alike would argue that question for years) than the impression of chicanery their discovery created; that eighteen months after their disappearance, with investigators pressing from all directions, the records suddenly appeared, in the office of Hillary’s constant aide Carolyn Huber. The first lady’s fingerprints were found on the records, specifically on a page that dealt with Madison Guaranty. Vince Foster’s handwriting, in red pen, annotated numerous pages of the documents.

  By any measure, this seemed to be damaging evidence.

  They had been found, apparently on the morning of January 4, 1996, the day after public disclosure of the Watkins Travel Office memo, by Huber, who had managed the governor’s mansion in Bill’s first term, then served as the Rose Law Firm’s administrator in the years Hillary was there, and now, ensconced in the White House, paid the Clintons’ bills, maintained Hillary’s and Bill’s personal correspondence, and kept their financial records.

  Huber said she had picked up the records—a half-inch sheaf of folded computer printouts—perhaps as much as ten months earlier, but most likely in the summer of 1995, from a small table in the Book Room, a kind of storage room, in which all manner of personal papers and gifts, including from foreign trips, were kept before being properly sorted. Space had to be created in the Book Room to accommodate Barbara Feinman’s files for It Takes a Village, and things were being constantly moved around. She had not paid attention to what records she had taken; she simply put them into a box with some other items. They had languished in her own office since then, she said, even though subpoenas were issued ad infinitum and White House employees—including Huber—were ordered by the lawyers to search for them.

  Some presidential aides in the White House—including critics of Hillary—found Huber’s story plausible. Others deemed it absurd, particularly given her history as the Rose Law Firm’s administrative manager and keeper of records. However, Huber was known in the White House to be less than tidy and efficient at times, though one would expect someone with her job description to be well organized. Then again, the bulk of records, papers, gifts, and books that kept accumulating from campaign to campaign and from Little Rock to Washington was enormous, and kept being packed and unpacked and moved from one location to another. As Huber told it, the box in which she found the records had been sitting in her office on the second floor of the East Wing for months; she just hadn’t gotten to it yet. The box turned up (on January 4), with several others, when she was disposing of some furniture in her office, to make room for new bookshelves. They’d been under a big table. She’d taken out the sheaf of papers—there was also a coat hanger in the box—and that was when she saw that they were the billing records.

  David Kendall and Jane Sherburne both said that Huber’s hands were shaking when she showed them the boxes and told them the story.

  Kendall, apparently, had heard it once before. He said later that Huber had called him that noontime, asked him to come to the White House, showed him the records, and explained the circumstances. Then, he said, sometime after 1 P.M., he’d gone to the National Gallery to see the Vermeer show, for which he had a hard-to-get ticket. At 5 P.M., he called Sherburne and told her he’d just had a call from Huber “and she says she has found some documents that she thinks that I ought to look at. And so I’m on my way over.” He did not mention to Sherburne having seen the documents earlier in the day. “Well, let’s go see what she’s got,” he apparently told Sherburne when he got to her office in the West Wing. The eleven-by-seventeen-inch pages were labeled “Madison Guaranty: Client Billing & Payment History.”

  The lawyers were aware that, plausible as Huber’s explanation might have been to people who knew her and worked in the White House, it would not fly smoothly in congressional and judicial Washington; with the press, it would never get off the ground. Everything about the story was strange, including Kendall’s apparent withholding from Sherburne that he had seen the records earlier in the afternoon—documents that could cause enormous problems for Hillary—and then had sauntered off to look at Vermeers. Why would one lawyer leave a fellow lawyer under a false impression that he was hearing the story of the crucial witness for the first time? (Kendall refused to discuss the matter with the author.)

  Ken Starr would surely seize on what had happened with the billing records as justification for trying to pin an obstruction of justice charge on someone, and he would use the old prosecutorial tool of squeezing one witness to get at another. And, in fact, as soon as Starr had the documents in his possession, he convened a staff meeting at which the prevailing view of his deputies was that all of Hillary’s actions after Vince’s death seemed intended to conceal, and that she was a likely target for an obstruction of justice charge. The billing records were the most important circumstantial link to date. Starr wanted Hillary’s testimony.

  Sherburne urgently sought a meeting with the president to warn him of the obvious problems for Hillary. Clinton failed to see how the discovery of the billing records, or their contents, made Hillary or anyone else vulnerable: “Why would we be producing them now,” she quoted him, “if we have been trying to hide them and obstruct. That doesn’t make sense. Why would we have been hiding them if it was turning out that they’re helpful or support what we have been saying all along?”

  D’Amato, Chertoff, and Clinger would surely say these billing records were among the documents Maggie Williams surreptitiously removed from Foster’s office, and which Officer O’Neill had seen her carrying.

  Moreover, there was confusion and distrust among some of the lawyers themselves—more than a dozen were involved on behalf of the Clintons and the White House—once they had learned of the day’s events. Some were less confident about what they were being told by their clients—Hillary and Bill—and the people acting on their behalf.

  The records turned over to investigators by the White House later that day showed that in 1985–1986 Hillary billed about sixty hours for work on the Madison-McDougal account—“89 tasks, including 33 conferences or phone calls with Madison officials on 53 separate days.” She had described her work as “very limited,�
�� and mostly supervisory. In two separate government investigations, she had denied working on a McDougal project, undertaken with Webb Hubbell’s father-in-law, called Castle Grande. But the records showed that more than half the hours she billed were for that project. After that disclosure, she said she had known Castle Grande by a different name—IDC—and that her answer had been based on a semantic misunderstanding.

  Kendall had recommended that the White House remain silent on all the questions raised by the discovery of the billing records. But at the insistence of the White House press secretary, Kendall made a statement from his office at Williams & Connolly. The records now turned over to Starr and Congress “confirm what we have said all along about the nature and amount of work done by the Rose Law Firm and Mrs. Clinton for Madison,” said Kendall. “With the public release of these records, yet another set of baseless allegations can be laid to rest.” But he had no explanation for why the billing records had disappeared in the first place.