A Woman in Charge
Page 67
“The people who talked to me about doing this job in the first place were Mickey and Bob Reich, and I talked to Hillary before I started. And I didn’t want to do it without talking to Bill because I could tell just from the news and the Flowers business that this would be difficult,” she said. At the time, Betsey was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. She met with Bill during a campaign stop in Manhattan. “We walked through some of the things again,” she said. “One of the things I asked him about was Gennifer Flowers, and again he told me there was absolutely nothing to it. He knew that things he did as governor would be coming under attack, his previous campaigns, both his record in the state as well as questions about his character and women, and he wanted to be able to respond.”
In the first week of April 1993, Betsey moved back to Arkansas and began assembling files in bankers’ boxes for the task ahead. Within a tight circle of the campaign staff, Betsey’s operation became known as “The Defense Department,” and Wright was sometimes referred to as the secretary of defense. As journalists or Republican opponents made new allegations, she would examine the relevant files, determine the facts to whatever extent possible, show the underlying materials to someone in the top command of the campaign, and a response would be fashioned.
After Bill’s election as president on Tuesday, November 3, 1992, “we were told to clear out headquarters in Little Rock by that Friday,” Wright recalled. (Some members of the staff stayed on.) She had been working with about two thousand boxes of materials, she later estimated, and left almost all behind to be sealed up, catalogued, and put in storage with the rest of Bill’s gubernatorial records.
“There were a number of things that I thought too sensitive to be left in those general files and I took them home to my house—about eight or nine big boxes, and a few smaller ones, including my working files on Clinton’s father, on Gennifer, my working files on Whitewater, a bunch of personal letters to Bill, material from detectives, a lot of internal staff memos that could be misinterpreted…anything I didn’t think belonged in the archives. Out of context a lot of that stuff was deadly. I had staff memos [about Whitewater] that had been read by people who didn’t know anything about it, who thought that they [the Clintons] had probably committed crimes unknowingly, and I should have torn it all up. I mean I shouldn’t have kept it. I should have just destroyed it.” She said she sent an inventory of the contents of those boxes—probably fifteen in all—to Bruce Lindsey.
Shortly thereafter, Wright received a call from Lindsey saying that he and Webb Hubbell wanted the boxes turned over immediately to Hubbell. “This is when Bruce and Webb got to be idiots about not trusting me with the files and thinking they had to get them,” she said. Hubbell said it was not about lacking trust in Wright. More likely, Lindsey wanted to be sure that the files were in the custody of a lawyer who could claim privilege as counsel to the Clintons. *33
According to Hubbell, during the holiday season of 1992–1993, “there was a conversation among several people—Mack [McLarty] was involved, Bruce, I’m not sure who else,” about what was to be done with the files. Bill was the President-elect, but caution was in order.
Hubbell was asked to get the files from Betsey, along with four or five handwritten index cards of Betsey’s listing what was in the boxes. There were no records from the Rose Law Firm, said Hubbell, “only what Betsey had accumulated in the nine or ten months she was running this defense department—all from the attorney general’s and governor’s files, and her own research.” Wright delivered the boxes to him at the Rose Law Firm offices. “I then took them to my house and they stayed in my house in Little Rock until all our furniture and stuff and the whole family moved up to Washington in May.” His son, Walter, drove them to Washington, and the files were unloaded into the basement of the Hubbell home in Spring Valley.
Hubbell said he paid no notice to them until Hillary phoned the evening the Clintons, the Hubbells, and the Fosters were to have dinner together, in June. Vince and Webb had been unable to find the records Hillary had phoned about, pertaining to Bill’s father and his only recently revealed marriages to other women before Virginia. After the difficult dinner with the Fosters at the Italian restaurant that night, Hubbell found in his basement the records Hillary was looking for. Hillary had seemed surprised that Hubbell now had all of Betsey’s sensitive files from the campaign, he said.
ON NOVEMBER 5, David Kendall met with Bernard Nussbaum, Bruce Lindsey, Bill Kennedy, Jim Lyons, and the Clintons’ Arkansas counsel, Steve Engstrom. It was decided at that meeting that Hillary and Bill needed a lawyer in private practice to handle Whitewater matters, and Kendall was hired. The Whitewater story had returned to the news with Susan Schmidt’s story in the Washington Post about the RTC’s investigation of Madison and Andrea Mitchell’s reporting.
Hubbell said he got a call in mid-November from Kendall, who said, “‘I understand you have the Betsey files, could you look and see if there is anything related to Whitewater?’” Hubbell recalled. “And I did. I put it in a big envelope. I told him I had those thirteen boxes, or fifteen, and he said, ‘I think we ought to get them.’” Meanwhile, said Hubbell, “we had discussions with Bernie and others about needing to protect the privilege, to make sure they were in the hands of private counsel for the Clintons, and ultimately I was told that Kendall and Barnett had been hired.”
At 2:30 p.m. on November 20—the day Hillary’s health care bill was finally introduced in Congress—Kendall and several young attorneys arrived in two station wagons at Hubbell’s home to take possession of the files. They went into the vault at the Williams & Connolly offices that contained other Clinton material and were logged in: “five larger Banker’s boxes, ten smaller Miracle boxes, and a small metal two-drawer check file.”
Not long afterward, Betsey Wright was asked to come to the vault and explain the contents to Kendall, who developed a considerable appreciation for her judgment and organizational abilities. Over the next five years, some of the material would be given to the special prosecutor’s office and congressional investigators when a subpoena was specific enough to match something in the files; material was denied on the grounds that it fell under the attorney-client privilege. According to lawyers familiar with these matters, Kendall was tenacious about guarding the contents of the files from intrusive investigation.
After Hubbell had been questioned a second time by Starr’s investigators, they began asking questions about “Betsey’s boxes.” “I explained they were with Kendall,” he said. “They were asking the same question in different ways, not that they thought the holy grail was necessarily in there, but they seemed skeptical about the attorney-client privilege.”
According to Betsey Wright, Clinton lawyers, and White House aides, the danger from the files was always the nature of their contents in a volatile political atmosphere far more than any likelihood of criminal liability—though many documents undermined public statements by the White House and by Hillary. Today, the files remain locked in the same vault.
A few weeks after the files had been moved from Hubbell’s basement to Williams & Connolly offices, Hillary had told Maggie Williams—as recorded in Roger Altman’s notes—“I didn’t want anyone poking around twenty years of our lives in Arkansas.” With the records safely in the vault, that would be very difficult.
AFTER STARR had been shamed into staying in his post, his zealous determination to find any criminal wrongdoing by the Clintons became manic. With the likelihood of prosecution of Hillary extinguished, he began an unrestrained inquiry, under Ewing’s direction, into every nook and cranny of Bill Clinton’s sexual past. The logical nexus of his inquiry was the contingent of state troopers who had helped The American Spectator in its story. The FBI agents and prosecutors took the troopers through lists of women who might have had relationships with Clinton. Particular attention was paid to Paula Jones, and the fact that—with her case allowed to go forward by the
Supreme Court—there would be a stream of witnesses giving depositions in the case. The reinvigorated investigation in Arkansas was referred to in the Office of the Independent Counsel as the “Trooper Project.” In Washington, some of Starr’s top deputies were dismayed by the line of inquiry, and the desperation that seemed to be attending it. Hillary’s greatest fear, of course, had always been that Bill—and their journey—would somehow be undone by his assignations with other women from his past.
IN MID-SEPTEMBER, Hillary and Bill traveled with Chelsea to Stanford for freshman orientation week. Young Secret Service agents assigned to protect her would pass for students, live in a dorm room near hers, and hang back to the maximum extent possible. Chelsea’s room, shared with another freshman woman, was impossibly small, and Hillary tried finding ways to rearrange the furniture to create more space. Bill, improbably, had gotten hold of a wrench that he used to disassemble and reassemble her bed so it could be moved. On the day they departed to return to Washington, Chelsea’s parents were suffering from empty-nest syndrome; they were disoriented, teary, nostalgic, sad, and proud. In a month Hillary would turn fifty.
In expectation of an emptier house, Hillary and Chelsea had bought Bill a dog. After studying breeds and looking at pictures, they decided on a Labrador as being the right size and temperament for the White House and the president. For Christmas the previous December, they had found a three-month-old chocolate Lab puppy who loved Bill and vice versa. He was named Buddy, in favor of a slew of other names that included Arkinpaws and Clin Tin Tin.
Now, with Chelsea gone, Hillary and Bill turned to each other. Those who saw them together noted a renewed closeness, and—with some breathing space now that they were almost certain Hillary would not be indicted—a lessening of tension in the White House. Hillary said she still “lit up” when Bill entered the room, that they were best friends. Their confidences to each other were their own, and almost never did they share them with others. Though they had, in her words, “our share of problems,” they continued to make each other laugh. She professed to be certain that their laughter and mutual caring would carry them through the second term.
17
The Longest Season
Starr…would undoubtedly take it as far as he could.
—Living History
THE WASHINGTON POST headline across page one in its editions of Wednesday, January 21, 1998, was shocking: “Clinton Accused of Urging Aide to Lie.” Bill had spent a tense night and early morning on the phone with Vernon Jordan, Bob Bennett, Bruce Lindsey, David Kendall, and Betty Currie, talking about the story and trying to keep his legal ducks aligned. Hillary said later he nudged her awake just after 7 A.M. and sat on the edge of their bed. “You’re not going to believe this,” she quoted him telling her, but there were “news reports” blanketing the Internet and airwaves as well, that he had had an affair with a young White House intern named Monica Lewinsky and had asked her to lie about it to Paula Jones’s lawyers. Starr had been granted authority from Attorney General Reno to broaden his already vast investigation to determine if criminal charges against the president were justified. Bill and Jordan had tried to find a job in the private sector for Lewinsky, twenty-four; but Starr was out to prove that this was to buy her silence about a sexual relationship, the existence of which Bill had denied under oath.
Bill explained to Hillary—each would say later—that he had “encouraged” the intern when she came to him seeking job advice, that he had tried to be helpful, and that she had misunderstood or misinterpreted his willingness to help. They had only spoken a few times. There was no affair, nothing untoward. Years later Hillary would write that she had little trouble believing Bill because he had often been accused of such things groundlessly. In Living History she wrote that she quizzed Bill over and over on the matter that morning, and Bill continually said he did nothing “improper,” though he could imagine how his actions might be “misread.” We have only the sanitary and skeletal accounts of Bill and Hillary with which to judge the severity of the interrogation.
For Hillary, the investment in the truthfulness of Bill’s explanation was nothing less than a lifetime’s savings. Everything, including the presidency and their marriage, was at stake; she understood that immediately. She also knew that Bill’s staggering negligence meant they were about to endure an inquiry incomparably worse than anything before.
She had to take on an effective and supportive defense of her husband and she settled on empathy: Bill was always reaching out to people he could help, she would make clear. He had told Hillary that he had tried “to minister” to the intern, who was both troubled and needy, and had come on to him.
Later, many friends of the Clintons were incredulous that Hillary could have believed Bill’s story—initially and, more incomprehensibly, over the next seven months. But failure to accept Bill’s explanation would have meant the total collapse of her world. She had already borne the brunt of six years of vicious pursuit by people like those pushing the Jones case and feeding the Starr investigation; she permitted herself to believe these were just more politically motivated attacks. She wrote that she repeatedly challenged her own assumptions as the “Lewinsky imbroglio,” as she called it, played out.
Later that morning, Bill told a friend that he doubted his presidency would survive the week. He feared a stampede in which Democrats, urged on by the press, would join Republicans in demanding his resignation. If the president shared this assessment with Hillary, it has never become known. But events were moving so swiftly by the time she had left the White House at 10 A.M. for a convocation speech at Goucher College in Baltimore that she could easily imagine such a scenario. George Stephanopoulos, who had resigned from the White House staff immediately after the November 1996 election, was already talking on an extended edition of the Today show about the possibility of the president’s impeachment, as was Sam Donaldson on Good Morning America. The networks went into special programming as their news anchors, in Cuba to cover a historic meeting between the pope and Castro, hurried to the Havana airport and chartered back to their stateside chairs on the set.
As the pressure intensified, Hillary was already planning how their presidency could be saved. She knew she was once again the key to their potential survival. She understood that everyone would be rigorously examining her words and actions, looking to her for clues. With aides already walking around the West Wing dazed, it was essential that, first, she and Bill be seen carrying on with their daily routines, and second, that it be made clear they intended to fight back. She did not mention it in Living History, but as Bill told a friend, he knew his marriage was now at stake, too.
Less truthfully, he told one of his principal aides that morning, “Well, this girl, she kept flirting with me. She kept coming on to me. But it was innocent. I mean I hugged her at events…but that was it.” “And that was the line,” said the aide. “And it stood up pretty well for a while. And a lot of us wanted to believe that that’s all it was…. And she [Hillary]wanted to believe it. I mean how could you not?”
Later, Hillary would write: “I will never truly understand what was going through my husband’s mind that day.” Only he could explain “why he felt he had to deceive me and others.” He did, in his own memoir: “I was deeply ashamed…and I didn’t want [the truth] to come out. I was trying to protect my family and myself from my selfish stupidity.”
The prevarication required for his survival as president and as Hillary’s husband was extensive, beginning with the lie he’d already told Jones’s lawyers about his relationship with Lewinsky. He didn’t have the options that most middle-aged men branded as adulterers had: to work it out in the privacy of the marriage, seek counseling, get a divorce, enroll in a twelve-step program.
Since Hillary’s withdrawal from the West Wing, credible rumors about Bill’s flirtations with several women had become increasingly frequent, especially in the previous year and a half. Lewinsky was hardly unknown to the president’s aides, many
of whom had been concerned and suspicious about her easy access to the Oval Office, facilitated by Betty Currie. How far he had gone with the women, however, was strictly a matter of conjecture.
At a 9 A.M. meeting in the Oval Office, Bill told Erskine Bowles and Bowles’s top deputies, John Podesta and Sylvia Matthews, that he’d had no sexual relationship with the intern and denied asking anyone to lie. “When the facts come out, you’ll understand,” he said. The meeting was fraught. Bowles, one of Clinton’s best friends, had followed the president’s orders and asked Podesta to help Lewinsky find a job, knowing little about their relationship. He was repulsed simply by the thought of Bill’s alleged behavior, its possibility, and wanted nothing to do with defending him. He would concern himself thereafter with the institutional business of the presidency, speaking to the president only about policy and staff matters.
Around the same time, Hillary phoned Sidney Blumenthal and told him that the president was being falsely accused. She repeated Bill’s explanation of events.
In years to come, there would be a lot of learned commentary about how much better off Bill would have been had he absorbed the supposed “lesson” of Watergate: that the cover-up is worse than the crime. Therefore, went this reasoning, a confession by Clinton that day or sometime during the following week would have been accepted within the political system, the president would have been censured by Congress, Starr would have desisted, and the matter would have gradually passed.