A Woman in Charge

by Carl Bernstein

  When Starr asked for more time, Kendall declined.

  DURING BILL’S TESTIMONY, Hillary remained in the Solarium as aides wandered in and out with drafts of the statement Bill would make on national television later that night. She had asked Harry Thomason that morning if he would get in touch with James Carville, who was in Brazil.

  “Hillary thinks it’s a good idea if you came,” said Thomason. “It’s going to be a pretty tough day…. I think she’d feel better if you were kind of hanging around.”

  Carville went straight to the Solarium. “It was like somebody had died,” he said. Usually when he saw Hillary, she was smartly dressed, her hair nicely styled, and she’d have makeup on. This time, if she had any makeup on, it wasn’t noticeable, and her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. “She’d obviously been crying,” Carville recalled. “She asked me to sit by her…. Just, ‘Come sit with me.’”

  At the end of his testimony, Bill went to the residence to shower and have something to eat. She caught a glimpse of him and she could tell he was infuriated. Otherwise, she avoided him. He went back to talk to the lawyers and speechwriters who were working on his statement. “I don’t think he was anxious to go in that room [where Hillary was],” said Carville. “It was a pretty somber thing.”

  When Carville was leaving about 8 P.M. to appear on The Larry King Show, a draft of a statement for Bill’s speech to the nation was circulated. Hillary did not want to review it. “Her mind was elsewhere,” said Carville. Some members of the staff were debating whether, in his address to the nation, Bill should attack Starr or simply acknowledge his inappropriate relationship with Lewinsky and apologize. Chelsea was listening. Finally “out of habit, maybe curiosity, perhaps love,” Hillary said later, the first lady joined the group working on the statement: Bill, Chuck Ruff (the White House Counsel), Mickey Kantor, Rahm Emanuel, the Thomasons. The television had again been turned off in deference to her. She asked how things were going. It became clear that the president hadn’t yet determined what he should say, that he was flustered and getting angrier. Time had been reserved with the networks for him to go on the air at 10 P.M. Bill saw the chance to attack Starr and the unfairness of the investigation, the unconscionable abuse by Starr of his position, but there were differing views as to how far he should go. He was getting more frustrated. Suddenly, Hillary interjected, “Well, Bill, this is your speech. You’re the one who got yourself into this mess, and only you can decide what to say about it.” That was all the advice she gave before she left the room.

  Though it was a necessity that the speech include an apology, Clinton was anything but sure that he’d taken the wrong tack over the previous months. He told a friend later that he was certain he’d saved his job by lying in the first days.

  Bill began his television address by saying he had testified truthfully to the grand jury, “including questions about my private life, questions no American citizen would ever want to answer. Still, I must take complete responsibility for all my actions, both public and private.”

  He then went on to explain his earlier testimony in the Paula Jones case. “As you know, in a deposition in January, I was asked questions about my relationship with Monica Lewinsky,” he said. “While my answers were legally accurate, I did not volunteer information. Indeed, I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong. It constituted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part for which I am solely and completely responsible.” He continued: “I misled people, including even my wife. I deeply regret that.”

  Bill then launched into an attack of Ken Starr. “This has gone on too long, cost too much, and hurt too many innocent people. Now, this matter is between me, the two people I love most, my wife and our daughter, and our God…. I intend to reclaim my family life for my family. It’s nobody’s business but ours. Even presidents have private lives. It is time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives and get on with our national life.”

  Most of his political advisers thought his harsh words for Starr were a mistake, and the overwhelming commentary of broadcast journalists and politicians, including some Democrats, was immediately negative in the extreme. The consensus was that the president hadn’t been nearly contrite enough. Republicans were demanding that he resign immediately or face impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate. Senator Moynihan called the speech “not adequate” because of the president’s lack of an apology and because he spoke about Starr. “What were we doing hearing about the special prosecutor?” Moynihan said on an Albany radio station.

  About ten minutes after Bill’s speech ended, the phone in Blumenthal’s hotel room rang: it was the president, asking for his reaction. Blumenthal responded, “It was all right.” When Hillary asked, he repeated the words. Clinton said he was pleased with the speech. “Hillary also approved. That was the most important thing of all.” While Blumenthal talked with Carville and Mark Penn, he could hear the president and Hillary “bantering” in the background. “They were still working as a team,” he concluded. “Without that, nothing was possible.”

  Hillary directed her office to issue a public statement affirming her commitment to their marriage and her love for her husband. “She believes in the president and her love for him is compassionate and steadfast, and she’s very uncomfortable with her personal life being made public.” She may or may not have consciously meant all of that, but for the moment it would do. She had to prepare herself for the onslaught ahead.

  The next morning, Hillary, Chelsea, and Bill left for their summer “vacation” on Martha’s Vineyard. Hillary’s eyes were hidden by sunglasses, her face void of expression, as they walked across the South Lawn to Marine One. Chelsea was between her parents, holding hands with each.

  “Chelsea, I think, was taking care of her mom mostly at that point,” an aide accompanying them said. The helicopter ride to Andrews Air Force Base and the plane ride to the Vineyard were tense. The small plane—to accommodate the short airstrip at the Martha’s Vineyard airport—was crowded. Secret Service agents sat between the family and a couple of pool reporters at the rear of the plane. “It was awkward,” said the aide. Chelsea and Hillary talked quietly as the president, seated in front of them, seemed to be contemplative, with good cause: in addition to his personal crisis, a cruise missile strike was being planned against Osama bin Laden and his training camps in Sudan and Afghanistan. The timing of one of the launches was to be in concert with a meeting bin Laden was believed to have called with his lieutenants in Afghanistan. For a while, Bill glanced at a mystery novel he’d brought along.

  A delegation of friends—among them Vernon Jordan, Carly Simon, and real estate developer Richard Friedman, their host—were awaiting them at the airport. Hillary held back while Chelsea and Bill were embraced with hugs all around. She looked numb. Said one of those who had greeted him, Bill “looked at me, his eyes, he’s got those big, soft eyes of his and he looked at me and all of a sudden he choked up and said, ‘You know, it’s been something really bad going on.’…He was sad and serious.”

  Later, Bill recalled, “I spent the first couple of days alternating between begging for forgiveness and planning strikes on al-Qaeda.” Hillary slept upstairs, Bill downstairs on the couch. When she did speak to Bill she was usually in a tirade. She later wrote that she was disconsolate, profoundly sad, disappointed, and angry. She sensed she and Bill both felt abandoned. They had arrived at 5 P.M. on Tuesday and did not venture off Friedman’s expansive property until Wednesday night, for Bill’s birthday dinner at Vernon and Ann Jordan’s home. Every other summer, when they’d been on the Vineyard for his birthday, the dinner had been a huge celebration, with bands, and dozens of friends. This time it was only the Jordans and the Clintons; Chelsea left after dessert to be with her friends. Hillary said she hated being trapped with Bill on the island.

  During the day, Bill either played with the dog or spent time alone when he
wasn’t meeting with advisers in a separate guesthouse on the property that aides used as an office. Usually after a major speech or juncture in his presidency, Clinton would reach for the phone and begin taking a survey about how he’d done. This was no exception. Several times he called Bob Torricelli, the New Jersey senator, in the middle of the night. “[He said] that he was in real pain. I said to him…‘You know, you’ve done a bad thing, but you didn’t kill anybody. You didn’t violate the Constitution. You made a serious mistake. But if you put it into the context of your entire life, the good things you’ve done and the bad things, we’ll all survive.’”

  “Well, when I make a mistake, I make a big one,” the president replied. Torricelli thought Clinton was so far down that it was necessary to reassure him again: “‘You’re still a remarkably good man when you balance the good and the bad.’ He was a man in agony…. He genuinely and deeply loves that woman. He is entirely devoted to her, and worships her. I could hear the pain in his voice, and it wasn’t about politics, it wasn’t about the legal fight that was ensuing. His pain was about what happened to her.”

  Bill gave the final order at 3 A.M. on August 20 to go ahead with the strike against bin Laden, and later that day made the announcement to reporters at a school gym in Edgartown, on Martha’s Vineyard.

  He then flew back to Washington for a televised address from the Oval Office to explain his decision. “Our target was terror. Our mission was clear—to strike at the network of radical groups affiliated with and funded by Osama bin Laden, perhaps the preeminent organizer and financier of international terrorism in the world today.” After Bill’s address, several polls indicated that Americans supported his decision but were suspicious about the timing. To his great disadvantage, a brilliant, dark cinematic comedy, Wag the Dog, about a fictional president ordering the bombing of a convenient enemy state to distract the nation’s attention from his other problems, had been released in 1997 to great success.

  Hillary, meanwhile, said she was touched by the efforts of friends. She had lunch with Katharine Graham (by now retired as the publisher of the Washington Post though still its chairman), which neither woman was known to have discussed afterward. Graham’s late husband had committed suicide in 1963—he had been diagnosed with manic-depression—after having an affair with a young woman who worked for him. But it would have been in character for Graham to be direct in discussing the situation compassionately with Hillary and drawing out a response. Hillary and Chelsea went sailing with Walter Cronkite. Jackie Kennedy had died in 1994; now her companion, Maurice Tempelsman, took Hillary sailing on his yacht one evening. He talked about Jackie, said Hillary, and how much he missed her, and his understanding of how hard the life of the late first lady had often been. He told Hillary he hoped she could forgive Bill, that he really loved her.

  Meanwhile, she called Diane Blair. “She was very apologetic about not having called, and she said she just couldn’t talk about it, but she knew that I was thinking about her, and she was trying to think her way through,” said Diane. Hillary told her that she was aware that “a lot of people thought I just should have thrown his clothes off the Truman Balcony and kicked him out of the house, but you know, it’s just not that easy. It’s just not that easy.”

  Bill returned to the Vineyard on Friday. Hillary was still in no mood for forgiveness, but it was the first time they began talking again. They took some walks together, on woodland paths where they wouldn’t be spotted by photographers. Bill noted later there was only a little “thaw,” and with Chelsea as well.

  Bill Styron described both Hillary and Bill as looking “shell-shocked” through their time on the Vineyard. He said Hillary was “devastated” and “had to fight just to maintain her composure” at a large dinner party one evening at the home of friends. “Everyone sensed the awful strain they were going through,” when they finally ventured out in public. There had been an awkward moment at a reception when law professor Alan Dershowitz proceeded to give the president “a pompous lecture that he hadn’t used his head in the legal sense.”

  “I remember an awful sense of strain and distress,” said Styron. “Yes, she was estranged from him…both were almost play-acting at being together. I was troubled by the fact that I was looking at someone trying to keep her composure in the most intense and restrained way.”

  During his conversations with Hillary, said Styron, she raised the subject of either Bill getting counseling for his sexual compulsions or the two of them having some kind of outside family counseling. “They were struggling with the idea of seeking some kind of help, I mean who wouldn’t?” But the problem was the obvious one: “Presidents in trouble go to see Billy Graham or some such. In America you have to seek counsel from a preacher if you are a president. If it’s not Billy Graham, it’s Jesse [Jackson]. But plainly Clinton was far too intelligent not to know he needed to go beyond presidential preachers…. Given my limited knowledge, they must have struggled so horribly with the sense they needed some kind of outside help from nonreligious sources.”

  Both Hillary and Bill, during the Vineyard visit, talked to Styron about the unrelenting campaign against them by Republicans and the right wing—notably Starr and the network of “that Pittsburgh nut,” a reference to Richard Mellon Scaife, that the Clintons believed was feeding Starr. They were certain that, from the start, Starr’s investigation and the unrelenting efforts of their other enemies were intended to drive them both from the White House.

  Hillary’s bearing and character, especially during this stay on the Vineyard, had made a deep impression on Styron. “She’s plainly a woman of great sensibility and intelligence,” he believed. But it was the whole person of Hillary that so impressed Styron, including her perseverance and her resilience.

  “She is a woman who has seen the depths of human experience. I mean good God, the crisis she went through must have been just stupefying…. It’s just amazing she’s weathered all these incredible storms and survived so well—and maintained this staunch relationship between the two of them, what I assume is this staunch relationship, even today.” *37

  In Washington the calls for the president’s impeachment or resignation had gathered strength and neared crescendo. The fact that the president hadn’t been “contrite enough” in his four-minute address to the nation was chipping away his potential Democratic support. Word was leaking from Starr’s office that the independent counsel was completing his report to Congress and would be sending it soon. Dick Gephardt, the Democratic leader of the House, described impeachment as a real possibility. One Democrat after another took to the microphones to condemn the president’s lying and irresponsibility, and his seeming inability to look at his own actions rather than Starr’s at the crucial moment. The Republicans now seemed dead-set on the impeachment path—if he couldn’t be forced to resign first. Bill’s political aides were trying to put out the fire, calling around town and promising that the president would show more contrition when he returned, that he understood he hadn’t said enough about his own conduct. But they were also looking at, and citing, the polls: the president’s approval rating was holding steady at 62 percent, almost the highest of his presidency.

  By the end of their stay on the Vineyard, said Hillary, they had made some slight progress in their relationship. As hurt as she was, she said later, the hours spent alone over the past ten days had reaffirmed that she loved him. They were returning to “a new phase in a never-ending political war.” She hadn’t yet decided whether she would “fight for my husband and my marriage, but I was resolved to fight for my president.”

  LATE IN THE AFTERNOON of September 9, 1998, the Office of the Independent Counsel formally conveyed its report and a referral on impeachment to the House Judiciary Committee. The TV networks were alerted by Starr’s new deputy for public relations. The official report—445 pages containing 110,000 words, and thirty-six boxes of supporting materials—would be delivered in two vans to the sergeant-at-arms of the House, who would be wai
ting by the Capitol steps at 3:45 P.M. to receive it. The progress of the vans was followed on live TV, from the air and the ground, with solemn commentary by the network anchors.

  Starr’s report suggested that there were eleven grounds for impeachment, including perjury, obstruction of justice, and abuse of office. The word sex was used 581 times in its pages.

  In the case of Richard Nixon, the independent counsel had made no suggestions about impeachment or any other matter entrusted to the Congress under the Constitution. Rather, he had submitted the voluminous factual findings of his investigation without extraneous comment or recommendation.

  John Podesta, the deputy White House chief of staff, worried that defection by someone high in the administration could bring the house down in terms of political support on the Hill and among ordinary citizens. On September 10, Clinton gathered cabinet members and a few selected members of the White House staff in the Yellow Oval Room of the residence to apologize for lying to them and the public. Bill said he would atone for the rest of his life for what he had done. He also talked at length about his enemies. The response from the cabinet was mixed. Some followed Bill’s lead and quoted scripture; others wanted to bolt from the room; still others rebuked the president, most severely Donna Shalala and, obliquely, Madeleine Albright, the two women in the cabinet who had defended him the previous January, saying they believed his explanation.

  According to Albright, Clinton said that “the reason he had done it was that he had been in a rage for the past four and a half years. He had been a good actor and had put on a smile but had been angry throughout. He talked in that vein for some time without making eye contact, with me or anyone else—then stopped. As he spoke I felt lost…. I wasn’t sure he had really apologized…. I also didn’t understand the rage…. It felt weird and typical.”