A Woman in Charge

by Carl Bernstein

  The actual writing experience of working on It Takes a Village with Mrs. Clinton was not extraordinary in any respect [Feinman wrote in The Writer’s Chronicle in September 2002]. Together with our editor, we produced drafts in a round-robin style. We worked well as a team and things went about as smoothly as can be expected when you’re producing a high-profile book in eight months and one of you is married to the leader of the free world.

  The problem came when Mrs. Clinton decided, for reasons still a mystery to me, not to acknowledge my help, or that of anyone else by name. Because the White House had issued a press release early on in the process stating that I had been hired to “help prepare the manuscript,” when it was finished and there was no mention of me in the acknowledgments, the anti-Clinton forces went to town—and began spreading the rumor the book was “ghostwritten.”

  When the “rumors” resulted in numerous news stories suggesting that Hillary had not treated Feinman well and that chapters were ghostwritten, Simon & Schuster agreed to pay the full $120,000 fee.

  HILLARY, in her interview with Barbara Walters, had recited a piece of childhood doggerel to describe her experience in the Whitewater contretemps:

  As I was standing on the street,

  As quiet as could be

  A great big ugly man came up

  And tied his horse to me.

  On January 15, a few hours after Hillary appeared on Diane Rehm’s show, Sherburne telephoned the first lady. She read her a statement in which the White House would concede Hillary’s “mistake” in saying that all her Whitewater records were shown to the New York Times in 1992. Thus armed, the Times would run a front-page news story, in essence calling her a liar—a week after Safire had already called her that on its op-ed page. With the discovery of the billing records, the late-night television comedians were ridiculing her mercilessly.

  Sherburne, now deadly serious, also informed Hillary that the independent counsel intended to subpoena her to testify before his grand jury. Hillary knew that Starr would be keen to have her perjure herself, and would be trying to establish grounds to indict her for obstruction of justice in the disappearance and belated discovery of the billing records. He would be asking her pointed questions about the Travel Office, and her denials to investigators of any involvement in the firings, and about what she had done in the hours and days after Vince Foster’s death. Suddenly Hillary enumerated to Sherburne a litany of the indignities heaped on her over the past week: *28 “I can’t take this anymore,” she said. “How can I go on? How can I?”

  Four days later, Hillary spoke at Wellesley College to promote her book, staying overnight on the shore of Lake Waban at the home of the president of the college. She awakened early and walked the wooded path that surrounds the lake. A quarter-century had passed since the afternoon of her commencement speech, after which she had gone back to her dorm, walked down to the lake, changed into her bathing suit, and gone for a swim to clear her head.

  David Kendall reached her later in the morning, with news that Starr had formally subpoenaed her and was insisting that she testify in front of the grand jurors at the courthouse in downtown D.C., not be interviewed privately under oath at the White House, and a tape made for the jurors, as Fiske had permitted. Starr wanted her inside the jury room unaccompanied by her army of lawyers. This would be the first time in the country’s history that a first lady had been summoned to testify in person before a grand jury. Hillary was traveling with Melanne Verveer, her deputy chief of staff. Though Verveer could see the first lady’s agitation and distress, Hillary told her nothing specific about her conversation with Kendall. For months, Hillary had been reminded by the lawyers not to discuss anything relating to Whitewater with anybody but Bill and her attorneys; anyone she talked to who lacked a legal privilege was a potential witness against her.

  Hillary returned to the White House “discouraged and embarrassed,” worried that “whatever credibility I retained” was now being destroyed, and concerned about what her deteriorating reputation and legal situation were having on her husband’s presidency. The presidential election was eleven months away, and she knew Starr would do everything in his power to find grounds for indicting her before then. In Living History, Hillary said Bill often expressed the wish he could do something to help. Chelsea, obviously concerned, kept close track of developments in the investigation and tried to comfort her mother. Hillary wrote she was unable to sleep and lost ten pounds in the week before her grand jury appearance, scheduled for January 26. She said she was angry, that she concentrated on preparing herself mentally and spiritually, focusing on her breathing (deep), and praying for God’s help.

  As she prepared with her lawyers for her appearance, they did not minimize the dangers she faced. Kendall, Sherburne, Ickes, and Fabiani all believed the odds were in favor of Starr seeking and probably obtaining an indictment. “When I say there was a serious fear that she would be indicted, I can’t overstate that,” said Fabiani.

  The situation was aggravated by the fact that the lawyers could not come to agreement among themselves about what precisely had happened regarding the billing records. Huber’s story kept changing in its details, particularly about when she had moved the billing records from the Book Room to her office. Hillary professed to know nothing about what had happened in regard to their disappearance or reappearance, but she obviously had been less than forthcoming in her past statements about the extent of her work on behalf of Madison and its subsidiaries, which had been recorded on the billing records, and which she had minimized in connection with the Resolution Trust investigation. It was not hard to see how a skilled and determined prosecutor could coax a compliant grand jury into bringing criminal charges—even against a first lady.

  The senior attorneys on Ickes’s team believed that she had gotten herself into a mess over next to nothing, that had she been forthcoming in the first place about events from Whitewater to the Travel Office, none of this would have come to pass. That kind of second-guessing was easy, they knew; it was also easy to see how the Jesuitical lying, evasion, and the stonewalling—about the Whitewater deal and its offshoots, at least—had begun during the first presidential campaign, after Jeff Gerth’s story had appeared. Then matters had to be recast and explained again to loosely fit the version of events already shorn of the truth.

  “Hillary had run everything” in the hours after Vince Foster’s death, noted one of her lawyers. “Then she had denied it. You could see her…getting so intimately involved in…how you handle his office, and what are you going to do with the documents, and who’s going to search the office. You can see her jumping into this.” The discovery of the billing records, however, had changed everything.

  “It was no longer just a political thing,” no matter how serious. “We had seen the D’Amato hearings as a political matter,” noted one of the lawyers. “This was a criminal matter.” Once she had testified before the grand jury, Starr, with an army of FBI agents and federal prosecutors at his command, would spend months trying to tear her story apart, and searching for evidence of obstruction of justice and perjury. Kendall’s holding on to the records for a day without notifying Starr had sharpened Starr’s suspicions and appetite.

  Several of the White House lawyers, including Sherburne, were skeptical of Huber’s account. “Carolyn Huber [initially] called Kendall,” said one. “When Kendall said, ‘Where did you find these?’ she didn’t [immediately] go back to the summer and say, I remember seeing them on the table in the Book Room in the residence. Only later, when pressed by the FBI and then by the D’Amato committee, did she have a recollection of, I remember seeing these. It was sometime in…late July or early August, and I picked them up. I threw them in a box. The new year comes around, I’m cleaning out my office to where the box had been moved, and boom! I find them. I know they’re important.” The timing of their discovery did not inspire confidence, i.e., the day after the D’Amato committee’s flagging investigation had been revived by David
Watkins’s memorandum about Hillary and the Travel Office.

  Some of Hillary’s lawyers believed that she had never wanted the billing records disclosed. Certainly that appeared true at the outset. She had had Foster make a copy of them in 1992, when Gerth had written his original story, apparently to see exactly what they showed—and then declined to give them to the Times. She had told the RTC that she had done virtually no work for Madison. She had always taken the position that as a lawyer she would never work for anybody who had pending business with the state. And, of course, the records turned out to show that she had, on behalf of Madison, the McDougals, and Webb Hubbell’s father-in-law, Seth Ward.

  Several of the lawyers kicked around theories about why Hillary acted as she had. Said one White House attorney, “This really goes to what you think of her…[and] the way she looks at herself, I think. Either she was embarrassed at having dealt with people like McDougal and was embarrassed by these business dealings and just didn’t think they were the kind of thing that you would expect from a Yale Law graduate and one of the finest lawyers east of the Mississippi or west of the Mississippi or whatever in the world it was that people said about her, that it was just professionally embarrassing to be in that kind of a situation. And that it wasn’t so much political damage control because, really, it was never going to be that much of an issue in the campaign. It wasn’t going to be the kind of thing that was going to make people decide not to vote for [Bill Clinton] in a Democratic primary. Really it was personal embarrassment…. Maybe she just didn’t want people to know that this is what her life was…small-time stuff, too. Her law practice, for example. The billing records are embarrassing, maybe for what they show about how she spent her time, which was not in any kind of high-minded or incredibly intellectual pursuit of the law, which is sort of her reputation, but [these were] small-potatoes deals. And a lot of people [on the White House legal team] believed that. I don’t know what I believe about why she mishandled it, except that she was probably very suspicious then of the press and thought that you could gut it out and get through it, and it would go away and life would go on.”

  And then there was her promise when she went to work for the Rose Law Firm not to work for clients who had state business and the Bar Association’s waiver Vince Foster had obtained for her, as the attorney general’s wife, to join the firm. “The billing records are going to show that she did work for…a number of people that had connections: the McDougals. Seth Ward. So, in Foster’s phrase, which he used later, it was a can of worms for her. That…once you let someone into your practice, maybe it turns out that you weren’t quite as careful ethically, or maybe it just turns out that you don’t want people to know that what you did on a daily basis was sort of…crude.”

  The evidence suggested Hillary might not have done some of the work for which clients were billed at her hourly rate, that in fact drafting attributed to her had been done by clerks and junior lawyers at the firm. This suggested to the same lawyer “that she was getting paid because she was the governor’s wife…. The reason why that theory has some currency is she truly doesn’t seem to know anything about [some] of the stuff that she supposedly worked on. Now, a cynical person would say…she’s got a good memory and she remembers a lot of the stuff [but doesn’t want to recall it]. The other answer is she never really did the work…. I think that she probably didn’t do a lot of the work.”

  The D’Amato hearings, now reinvigorated, became the longest-running congressional investigation of a sitting president in history (though most of it had to do with his wife). C-SPAN broadcast them (seemingly endlessly). The ratings spiked briefly only when Vince Foster’s death was on the agenda, and just after the billing records were found. Producers of the network evening news broadcasts thought their audience would be driven off by the accumulation of arcane detail.

  “The biggest mistake D’Amato made in his hearings,” said one of the White House lawyers, “upon the discovery of the billing records, he immediately, for some stupid reason, started to focus on what they said. I mean how many hours she did this. And how many hours she did that. And it’s like wait a minute, Who cares about that? Instead of, Where were they [the records]? Who was keeping them secret? That’s the interesting issue to people. But he immediately lost the focus of the whole thing by talking about how many hours she spent on this or that. We were more than happy to debate that with him because it was all impenetrable to people, and nobody really cared.” *29

  Ken Starr did. He saw the billing records as a great tool for bringing an indictment against Hillary.

  On January 26, rather than unobtrusively entering the U.S. District courthouse for the District of Columbia, she waded through the press mob and their cameras and microphones. Her intent—and effect—in testifying was to appear self-assured, nonconfrontational, and respectful of the jurors. Twenty-one were present, ten of them women, and perhaps 75 percent were African-American. Starr and eight of his deputy prosecutors—all white males who were Starr look-alikes, Hillary said—followed them into the grand jury room.

  As her lawyers had expected and prepared her for, much of the questioning was about the perambulations of the billing records, not their substance. Starr, who seemed constitutionally unable not to exude sanctimony and piety, had on this occasion decided to let one of his deputies ask the questions. Under oath, Hillary testified that she, too, was “mystified” by the sudden appearance of the documents “after all these years.” She might have seen them when they were generated in 1992, during the campaign, she said. How and why they had been taken to the residence from Vince Foster’s office, and what stops they had made in various rooms upstairs she hadn’t a clue, except what she’d been told by David Kendall when he informed her that Carolyn Huber had found the records in her office under a table, in a box.

  Hillary was patient when questions were rephrased, over and over. She was a good witness, and that very skill had been the subject of a meeting in Maggie Williams’s office two days earlier, in which the lawyers debated among themselves (Hillary was not present) whether she should also testify before the D’Amato committee, making a potentially beneficial preemptive strike.

  “Some people made the argument that the only way that she could possibly rehabilitate herself in short order between now and the election would be to go to the Senate,” said one aide. “Give testimony and be open and forthright.” The idea’s chief proponent was Bob Bennett, who saw it as a way—among other things—of overshadowing her sensational appearance as a prospective criminal defendant marching into a federal courthouse. The contrary argument was that Hillary would give D’Amato’s committee credibility it didn’t deserve, and lay down another set of sworn answers that could be used against her for a perjury indictment.

  She marched out of the courthouse at 6 P.M. with her head held high. She stepped into a scene otherworldly even by Washington standards. On a winter’s night, the courthouse plaza was enveloped in garish white light from the candlepower of hundreds of television crews, so bright that it was difficult to see without squinting. Helicopters hovered overhead, casting search beams downward for aerial shots for the networks and local news, the sky buzzing from their rotors and those of police and Secret Service helicopters.

  Above the noise, Hillary’s answer to the most obvious question was perfectly articulated: “I, like everyone else, would like to know the answer about how those documents showed up after all these years. I tried to be as helpful as I could in their [the grand jury’s] investigation efforts.”

  Bill and Chelsea met her with hugs at the White House. Kendall and his colleagues were pleased with her testimony. Hillary, however, was “angry, agitated, worried,” according to one of the lawyers, and ready to go on the attack.

  “It was her against everybody,” the attorney said. “Starr had forgotten about Bill Clinton basically.” Hillary had now seen firsthand that she was fighting for her life.

  “She became very upset that Starr was getting a free ride
from the media,” noted Mark Fabiani. She wanted an all-out offensive. Until Starr had ordered her to the courthouse, Kendall had thought it possible to work with him, and he had noted Starr’s reputation for fairness, based on his record as a judge in cases decided in favor of newspapers. Hillary thought his First Amendment views explained why the press treated him with undue respect. Now, Kendall’s objections disappeared.

  “Starr wasn’t the kind of guy you could chop down in a week or two,” said Fabiani, who was asked to formulate a strategy. “I tried to make a case to her that the best thing to do is try to seed stories out there that were legitimate: Should Starr still be working for his law firm, making a million dollars a year? Shouldn’t he be doing this [the independent counsel’s job] full-time? Should he still be speaking around the country? Should he be representing the tobacco companies? And ultimately people started to write about those things. But she was very frustrated it was so slow…. She said, If we did the kind of things that Starr did, we’d bethrown out of here. Why don’t people focus on that stuff?”

  She initiated a morning conference call with lawyers and aides to review each day’s events and develop assignments. One of the participants recalled, “Every morning at eight or 8:30 there would be a call where she would basically scream about what was in the paper in the morning [She was either reading them or getting summaries of what she needed to know for her own defense now.], and ask us what we were doing about it. She was religious about it. And she got very concerned that we weren’t doing enough.”

  Until her grand jury appearance, only Kendall had Hillary’s permission to deal with Arkansas, Whitewater, or Rose firm matters, with the exception of Bennett, who was handling the Paula Jones case. “The rest of us handled everything that had occurred after they [the Clintons] got to Washington. So, for example, we would do Vince Foster’s suicide documents, but Kendall would do the Whitewater investigation,” said a member of Sherburne’s team. Once, Hillary exploded at Fabiani when he was quoted in a newspaper story about the Whitewater investment. “She just got furious. She said, ‘This is Kendall’s. You don’t talk about that.’” Partly because Kendall disliked doing TV interviews and talking to the press, the arrangement was becoming untenable: “And Kendall was more than happy to let us talk about anything, as long as he was involved in deciding what to say.” Meanwhile, Hillary would spray the lawyers with phone calls throughout the day about something that was being said on TV or a story brought to her attention.