A Woman in Charge

by Carl Bernstein

  But, as Clinton recognized, the idea of transfiguring this principle to his relationship with Monica Lewinsky was absurd. Confess, he was all but certain, and he would be finished as president and as Hillary’s husband. The Watergate cover-up had been an essential element of Nixon’s larger crimes, far more egregious than approving a single break-in, because it was intended to keep investigators from the explosive cache of “White House horrors” (as his attorney general, John Mitchell, called them), of grievous constitutional abuse of the electoral and national security systems of the country. Bill Clinton confessing to the nation about a predatory affair with a bosomy woman-child employee barely seven years older than his teenage daughter was a different matter altogether. The attitude of the post-Watergate press and Congress, especially Speaker Gingrich’s House, did not augur for the confessional, but rather the stake.

  Dick Morris called the president at 11:25 A.M. “You poor son of a bitch,” Morris said he told the president. “I know just what you’re going through.” The two hadn’t spoken since Morris’s resignation.

  “I didn’t do what they said I did, but I did do something,” Morris, in sworn testimony, quoted Clinton as telling him. “I’ve tried to shut myself down…sexually, I mean…. But sometimes I slipped up, and with this girl, I just slipped up.” When Morris recommended that Bill ask the country for “forgiveness,” the president suggested he take a poll on the idea, though it was unclear what it was that would be forgiven. Bill met with aides that morning in the Cabinet Room, to discuss the themes of his State of the Union address, scheduled the following Tuesday. He was “ashen,” and altogether distracted, said Mark Penn, who had succeeded Stan Greenberg as the Clinton pollster. There were no discussions about how the scandal might affect the speech. People present were almost whispering; one said later that he wasn’t even certain there would be a State of the Union address.

  Hillary had been asked to speak at Goucher on civil rights—it was the day after Martin Luther King’s birthday—by Taylor Branch, a part-time professor there and the Clintons’ good friend since the summer of George McGovern’s campaign. Branch’s wife, Christy Marcy, worked for Hillary. During the train ride to Baltimore, Hillary and her entourage were in a special parlor car reserved for them. David Kendall reached her there by telephone with more information: he had been called the previous week by journalists asking about another woman whose name had come up in the Jones litigation—a circumstance, Hillary said later, Kendall judged potentially problematical at the time but not cause for serious concern. Kendall told her that on January 16, Janet Reno had written the supervisory three-judge panel recommending that Starr’s jurisdiction be expanded to include the Lewinsky matter and possible obstruction of justice.

  A logical sequence of events must have fallen into place for Hillary as she processed this information. Bill had been interviewed under oath in the Paula Jones case the previous Saturday, January 17, at the White House, and spent many hours preparing for his testimony. Hillary had wished him luck, embraced him, and then waited in the residence for him to return. He had been upset and worn out when he got back upstairs, Hillary wrote, and made clear to her his resentment and disgust for what he regarded as a farcical process. Though they had plans to take Erksine Bowles and his wife to dinner downtown as thanks for his White House service and to convince him to stay on for the rest of the year, Bill wanted to cancel and, instead, the two of them had a quiet dinner at home. She told a radio interviewer that the next day they both stayed home (in fact, they had gone to church) and that she had busied herself with domestic chores, including cleaning out closets.

  Hillary declined to take several phone calls from the president during the train ride after Kendall’s call, according to an aide.

  Her speech at Goucher was covered by more reporters than Hillary had seen at any of her events since her Pink Press Conference. The mob at the train station was even larger as she prepared to depart Baltimore. She responded unhesitatingly to the reporters who were shouting questions about whether she believed her husband this time. She was calmly assertive, almost matter-of-fact. “Absolutely,” she said.

  Hillary was aware that morning that whatever the facts, tens of millions of Americans, and many millions more around the world, were once again discussing her humiliation and (as she described it) asking how she could get up in the morning and be seen in public. She cited Eleanor Roosevelt’s observation that a woman in political life must “develop skin as tough as rhinoceros hide.”

  Upon her return to the White House in the late afternoon, she went upstairs to the residence and phoned Sidney Blumenthal, who had become a kind of alter ego for Hillary, especially since the death of Vince Foster. Bill had summoned Blumenthal to the Oval Office while Hillary was at Goucher and recounted to him a much more detailed version of the story he’d told Hillary. He’d been obviously nervous, pacing behind his desk. Lewinsky had “made a sexual demand on me,” said the president, and when he denied her advances, she threatened him. He felt like a character in Darkness at Noon, the president explained. He said it was hard for him not to try to help people in need.

  Blumenthal wanted to know whether Bill had ever been alone with Lewinsky. They had always been within sight or hearing of someone, the president said. He was no longer the straying kind. He had hurt people in the past, but those days were over.

  “I had never seen him this off-balance before,” Blumenthal recalled. “I was used to seeing him in the Oval Office as a master of policies, facts, and ideas, the judge of arguments, always in control. Now he described himself as being at the mercy of his enemies, uncertain about what to say or do. In that Oval Office encounter I saw a man who was beside himself.”

  Blumenthal said he recognized later that Bill had probably told him such an elaborate tale because “I was close to Hillary and there was nothing more important to him at that moment than protecting his marriage.” Correctly, Bill knew they would compare notes.

  There followed—in a very personal conversation with Hillary, according to Blumenthal—her root explanation of Bill’s underlying difficulties, and how it figured in his encounters with Lewinsky: the pathology of Bill’s family background. That cumbersome inheritance constantly intruded on his ability to keep out of trouble, she believed; his unrestrained “empathy” was a consequence of his close relationship with his mother, an overly compassionate and open woman, and from growing up “fatherless and poor,” and battling his violent, alcoholic stepfather. Bill was always helping people in difficulty, and his reaching out to Monica Lewinsky was “another example [of] this unusual ability of his to connect,” said Hillary.

  Blumenthal told Hillary that he had spoken to David Brock, formerly the Clintons’ implacable foe who, as she already knew, had of late become Sidney’s secret source of information about what their enemies were doing. “I had been telling her about him all along,” Blumenthal said. “His revelations [of] the lines of influence underlying the scandal, the cause and effect, intent and action” clarified matters. Thus, “on the first day,” according to information supplied by the author of the original Troopergate story, “both Hillary and I knew about what she would soon call the vast right-wing conspiracy.”

  Blumenthal, once a journalist of some distinction, shuttled between the Clintons from the time the Lewinsky story exploded until the impeachment had been overcome, armed with the latest battlefield reports culled from Brock and online databanks of what the other side might be doing, and fitting their machinations into the flow charts of the vast right-wing conspiracy. Presidential aide Rahm Emanuel had given Blumenthal the nickname “G.K.,” for Grassy Knoll, suggesting conspiracy theories on a scale with John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

  Blumenthal first met the Clintons at a Renaissance Weekend in Hilton Head, South Carolina, in 1987. At the time, he was a reporter for the Washington Post and was eager to be introduced to the Arkansas governor. During the weekend, Clinton told Blumenthal about his political ambitions. While covering
the 1992 campaign he began a friendship with Hillary. They were both from Chicago and educated on the East Coast. She told him about her “difficulties” being a working woman and campaigning for her husband. When the Clintons arrived in the White House, Blumenthal was The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent, and his coverage of the administration brought him into its inner orbit. Some of the pieces he turned out were embarrassing, from a journalistic point of view, in their puffery, and many were unusually insightful. Blumenthal left The New Yorker and, not long thereafter, began helping Bill write some of his speeches. In May 1997 Clinton asked him to work directly in the White House, with the title of assistant to the president. Over the ten years Blumenthal had known the Clintons, he had gained the trust and friendship of both. Unlike Vince Foster, his relationship with the first lady was premised on a keen political and intellectual sense. He believed the plot against the Clintons was “a Cataline conspiracy” such as Cicero had put down when Cataline tried to overthrow the Roman Republic.

  While the Clintons’ lawyers were in their offices downtown trying to assemble a plausible legal narrative, Blumenthal was in his corner office in the West Wing, observing the daily chaos. He made notes on the legal activities, the public relations, the comings and goings of aides (including himself ) as they marched to and from their own lawyers’ offices and in and out of grand jury rooms and sweaty interviews with minions of the special prosecutor, the FBI, and even Starr himself.

  Blumenthal’s totally politicized version of what was occurring—a putsch by right-wing forces who had already taken over Congress, the evangelical churches, talk radio, the think tanks, and many other institutions, in his view—became the one Hillary accepted and perfected, and which accorded with all her preconceptions. The two of them spent hours together, fitting together the pieces of the conspiracy. It had the advantage of considerable underlying truth. Bill’s outrageously self-destructive behavior, in this narrative, played right into the hands of Starr, Gingrich, and other powerful right-wingers and their shock troops who had opposed the Clinton presidency and were now at the gates of the White House ready to pull its occupants out forcibly. The Clintons were being attacked even though Bill had not had sex with this latest woman to throw herself at him (at least according to Blumenthal’s and Hillary’s line of reasoning); he’d simply gone too far with his “empathy,” gotten her jobs, given her gifts. Hillary, Blumenthal, the White House staff, the lawyers, the Democrats on the Hill had to demonstrate that this was yet another politically inspired attempt to take advantage of the president’s weaknesses and turn them into further cause for undoing the Constitution and allowing this “independent” counsel to run wild as if the United States were a banana republic. If they failed to make the case, Bill, Vernon Jordan, and Betty Currie (and doubtless there would be others) might well be facing perjury charges, maybe obstruction of justice, and, in the president’s case, the likelihood of impeachment.

  One of their most active opponents, Richard Mellon Scaife, regarded as the Daddy Warbucks of the conspiracy by Sidney and Hillary, was, coincidentally, coming to dinner at the White House that very evening, for a fete the president and first lady were hosting to thank major contributors to the White House Endowment Fund, which had raised $25 million to pay for renovations of the Executive Mansion and preservation of its historical artifacts. She and Blumenthal joked about whom Scaife would be seated next to, perhaps Blumenthal, she suggested.

  That afternoon, the president had been scheduled to do three previously scheduled interviews—with PBS, NPR, and Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper—about his upcoming State of the Union address. The first, with Jim Lehrer, was carried live shortly after 3:30 P.M. by all the networks. Beforehand, Bill had been strategizing by phone with Kendall and vowed not to allow Starr to drive him from office. Bill later said he felt that if he could survive the furor for two weeks, “The smoke would begin to clear,” and Starr’s tactics would then become more transparent to the press and public, enabling “a more balanced” view to prevail. But right then, as he noted, the pressure was unimaginable and “the hysteria was overwhelming.” As Bill sat down to begin the interview, Buddy—still a puppy—refused to move from next to the president’s chair. The broadcast was delayed while Bill pulled Buddy outside and left him in the care of an aide. Inevitably, Lehrer’s first question was about Lewinsky.

  “There is not a sexual relationship, an improper sexual relationship, or any kind of improper relationship,” said the president. To another question, he said, “I did not ask anyone to tell anything other than the truth. There is no improper relationship.”

  Watching in his office on the CBS lot in Los Angeles, Harry Thomason was dumbstruck at how weak the president’s presentation had been. Bill seemed unsure of himself, halting. On air, reporters were already pointing out the president’s use on several occasions of the present tense. Thomason immediately phoned Hillary. She asked how fast he could get to Washington. He caught the first flight out of Los Angeles in the morning and, for the next thirty-four days, took up residence on the third floor of the White House. Bill, meanwhile, had taken immediate note of his present-tense problem, and stated unequivocally in the two interviews following Lehrer’s that there had been no sexual relationship. Still, he had looked less than convincing or steady during the three sessions with the press.

  In keeping with Hillary’s business-as-usual directive, there were no outward signs at that evening’s reception and dinner that she and Bill were overly concerned about the day’s events. Scaife stood in line to shake hands with Hillary and Bill and pose for a photo with the president. The Clintons with great forbearance managed looks of perfect civility. In the receiving line, Hillary extended a spur-of-the-moment invitation to entertainment executive Frank Biondi Jr. and his wife, Carol, to spend the weekend at the White House, in the Lincoln Bedroom. The Biondis were part of Hillary and Bill’s special coterie of New York and Hollywood friends, but they were surprised at the invitation. “My first instinct was just to say, You don’t want to have houseguests,” said Carol, but Hillary acted “just like nothing was going on. And I said, ‘Oh, we’d love to.’”

  At 1:15 A.M. Dick Morris called to tell Bill the results of a poll he’d commissioned. The country’s citizens would not be very accepting of a confession, he concluded. Bill was not surprised. “Well, we just have to win,” Morris said Bill told him.

  The next morning Hillary began calling staff members to shore them up for a fight. She was taking charge of the battle. Part of her strategy was to ensure that most of the president’s aides focused on Bill’s goals for the second term. With her approval, it was decided that the president’s case would be controlled by Kendall, presidential counsel Charles Ruff, who had been one of the senior Watergate prosecutors, and a cadre of lawyers from Williams & Connolly and the counsel’s office. Political aides and the White House press office would no longer participate in legal strategy meetings; they would get their information from the lawyers and Hillary.

  Mark Penn was among the first she contacted. “She called and said to make sure that I would help get the White House moving, not dealing with the scandal per se, but…making sure the White House was focusing on policies and that there was a ‘public opinion desk.’” She wasn’t very specific, but Penn initiated a series of strategy sessions to review “where the public was, how our communication was being received.” They became regularly scheduled weekly events, which the first lady would often attend in the coming months.

  Mark Gearan, who was also phoned by Hillary that morning, took it as “her call to arms…sort of, Let’s go! Put on your armor. People felt good for a moment.” People liked hearing it because it was a weird day.”

  The word “weird” would reappear in the accounts of many White House aides of the coming days.

  IN SPITE OF the fact she had been lied to, it took Hillary less than two days to correctly figure out how events would proceed. She shared her assessment with Blumenthal in the first lady
’s study in the residence, while Bill rehearsed his State of the Union address in the theater, on Saturday, January 24: Starr and the Republicans would push the situation to its ultimate political limit. “Step by step she described the train of coming events,” recalled Blumenthal. “Starr would write a report and refer it to the House, calling for impeachment” the Republicans would follow through with a majority vote to impeach; Bill Clinton would stand trial in the Senate, the outcome dependent on whether he could hold Democratic support. Hillary expressed her regret that she no longer had her notes from working on the Nixon impeachment investigation. She asked Blumenthal if he would “help her,” but what she really seemed to have in mind was that he stay by her side for the struggle ahead. “I replied that I’d be there all the way through,” said Blumenthal. Then she began calling Democratic leaders, letting them know she was behind her husband 100 percent, shoring up their support as well for the fight ahead.

  The State of the Union address could be a great opportunity for the president, or a disaster. During a break in the rehearsal, Bill asked Penn, Harry Thomason, and Blumenthal, who had joined a group of some twenty aides downstairs in the White House theater, whether he should make some sort of statement about the scandal in his address to Congress and the nation Tuesday. They all said no.

  The firestorm outside was beyond containment. Washington had never seen such a media frenzy, in which fact, speculation, gossip, and rumor about a momentous event all seemed to carry equal journalistic weight—on the air, in print, and on the Internet. The seamy subject underneath it all was not just sex, but presidential sex, with the kind of detail that, in itself, could be ruinous, and certainly would leave lasting scars. On Friday, ABC News reported that Lewinsky had kept a blue dress in her closet with the president’s “bodily fluids” on it as proof of their sexual relationship, and that the special prosecutor had taken possession of it. When Erskine Bowles heard of that, he bolted from a meeting saying, “I think I’m going to get sick.” While Bill practiced his speech, out on the White House lawn Wolf Blitzer was reporting on CNN that presidential aides inside were discussing the possibility that Clinton might resign. Hillary was again not watching television, or reading the papers, and when Harry Thomason—who was watching, almost constantly—would hear her footsteps, he’d turn off the TV.