Bill Clinton

by Michael Tomasky

Meanwhile, the Lewinsky scandal was still dominating the cable channels, even if the action had now largely moved behind closed doors. A parade of Clinton administration officials was called to testify before Starr’s grand jury over the course of the spring and summer—Harold Ickes, Sidney Blumenthal, Bruce Lindsey, secretary Betty Currie, Secret Service agent Larry Cockell, and many others; most testified numerous times, emerging with the legal bills to prove it. Then, finally, on July 26, Starr subpoenaed the president himself to appear before his grand jury. This represented a new stage in the controversy: now, instead of just squeezing aides, Starr and his prosecutors would get to question Clinton himself directly. Clinton did not want the historical record to reflect that a president had been compelled to testify, so he agreed to do so voluntarily. The date was set for August 17. Clinton knew he was about to be asked specific questions under oath that he’d never been asked before. An already impossibly bizarre saga was about to become more so.

  * * *

  On Saturday morning, August 15, 1998, Bill Clinton woke up his wife and told her the truth. He said he was ashamed and sorry, but he couldn’t tell anyone, even her, at the time, because he didn’t want “to be run out of office in the flood tide that followed my deposition in January.” Then he told his daughter. The fates might have decided to hand the president an easier day, workwise, but there was a terrorist attack in Northern Ireland, a car bomb that killed twenty-eight people.

  On the fateful day of the deposition, speechwriter Michael Waldman later wrote, the West Wing was “ghostly”; outside, “it was unnaturally dark, with rain pelting the windows,” as if “a rather uncreative B-movie director had scripted the weather.” Starr’s prosecutors came to the Map Room of the White House; the grand jury, impaneled about ten blocks away, watched via video. When asked whether he was “physically intimate” with Monica Lewinsky, Clinton read a statement acknowledging conduct that was wrong but that stopped short of intercourse and thus didn’t constitute “sexual relations” as he had understood the meaning of the term on January 17. The questioning continued for four hours. Clinton said he never asked anyone to lie. The whole thing wrapped up around 6:30 p.m.

  White House staff had agreed in advance that Clinton would have to address the nation that night. Two speeches were prepared, one that expressed only contrition, and another that did that but added a few whacks at Starr and his tactics. Top aides argued that Clinton should just go full contrition. A stone-faced Hillary told him, “You’re the one who got yourself into this mess, and only you can decide what to say about it.” Clinton was still peeved, so, speaking from the same Map Room in which he’d been questioned, he went with the angry version. “Indeed,” he owned up, “I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate.” Then he pivoted.

  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 my daughter—and our God. I must put it right.… But it is private, and I intend to reclaim my family life for my family. It’s nobody’s business but ours. Even presidents have private lives.

  The polls suggested that most Americans would have agreed, but that night Clinton was savaged by the pundits, who wanted contrition only. The next day, the first family left for their long-planned summer vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. The news cameras lingered on the Clintons’ backs as they walked across the White House lawn toward Marine One, Hillary on the left, Bill on the right, and Chelsea between them, holding both parents’ hands. With his other hand, the president held the leash of his new dog, the well-named Buddy. At least, it was observed, he had one friend in the picture.

  9

  Unbreakable

  It was August 18, 1998, the day the Clintons left for the Vineyard. It was not, to put it mildly, a joyous time. The president slept on the couch. August 19 was, of all complicating things, his birthday. There wasn’t much celebrating.

  But Clinton now had something else on his mind, aside from the scandal and his family’s seething disapproval. Military commanders had located targets for the United States to strike back against Osama bin Laden. There were terrorist camps in Afghanistan, where bin Laden had moved after being expelled from Sudan in 1996, and two targets in Sudan, a tannery in which bin Laden had an interest and a chemical plant that the CIA suspected was being used to produce and/or store nerve gas.

  And so, just days after the national humiliation of having to go on television to confess that he’d lied about Lewinsky, the president left his vacation, flew back to the White House, and announced to his countrymen that he had ordered a bombing raid on the above targets. It seemed to nearly everyone that Clinton had ordered the strikes to divert attention from the scandal. As fate would have it, Hollywood had even provided the script. The year before, the Barry Levinson film Wag the Dog was released, whose plot was based on such a scenario—a president embroiled in a sex scandal and seeking to change the subject by launching a war against Albania.

  In truth, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which approves such missions, would never consent to carrying out a military operation for the sake of saving a president’s domestic hide; and further, the timing of such missions depends on factors ranging from the possession of hard knowledge about the target’s whereabouts to considerations such as the weather and the prevailing winds. This did not stop most pundits and many Republicans from engaging in knee-slapping sport at Clinton’s expense, although higher-level figures refrained. Newt Gingrich, who earlier in the year had said to Clinton’s face, “Mr. President, we are going to run you out of town,” now said, “I think the president did exactly the right thing today.”

  He did—and he didn’t, in that the intelligence wasn’t completely right and the strikes weren’t successful. Bin Laden had fled the training camp where the CIA thought he was; the strikes missed him only by a matter of hours. Far more controversial, even putting the Wag the Dog scenario to the side, was the bombing of the chemical plant; critics said it was not clear that the plant had anything to do with terrorism. Some said the factory produced aspirin. A year later, after an exhaustive investigation, the New York Times found that the truth of the matter, as usual, was complicated. CIA director George Tenet and others had warned that the plant could be linked to bin Laden only by inference, while other officials, led by the national security adviser Sandy Berger, argued that the plant was a legitimate target and more terrorist strikes were in the planning stages. The administration, in Berger’s words, “would have been derelict in our duty not to have proceeded.” Whatever the doubts, two-thirds of Americans supported the strikes, and 61 percent said they considered Clinton to be a “credible military leader.”

  The president returned to the Vineyard, where there was the slightest of thaws in the marital chill, only to the extent that Bill and Hillary socialized together without evident rancor. Returning to Washington, Clinton faced a roiling Asian financial crisis that had now hit Russia, which defaulted on its foreign debt. Clinton (with Hillary) made a quick trip to Russia to meet with Boris Yeltsin and assure him that more International Monetary Fund dollars were on the way, and to Northern Ireland to advance the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement. While Clinton was overseas, Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, a Democrat, sharply attacked the president in exactly the kinds of moral terms the pundits yearned to hear. The president’s behavior, Lieberman said on the Senate floor, “is not just inappropriate. It is immoral.”

  The scandal was, in one sense, winding down—the country certainly wanted to move on. But in another sense it was just heating up, because establishment Washington didn’t want to move on at all, and, more important, neither did Ken Starr. When he announced that he would be releasing a report on the entire matter, most people assumed it would be a pretty standard-issue government report.

  What instead emerged—delivered to Congress on September 9, 1998, released to the broader public on September 11—was a door-stopping 445-page report that accused Clinton of e
leven impeachable offenses and laid out every graphic sexual detail of the Clinton-Lewinsky dalliance. There were discussions of the presidential penis, of when he had and had not ejaculated, of an episode when the president inserted a cigar into Lewinsky’s vagina and then licked it, saying, “It tastes good.” The word sex (or some variation thereof) appeared 581 times; the word Whitewater four times. There was, of course, no public-interest need for all this detail, and its purposes were clearly to humiliate the president and to stoke public revulsion at his behavior. The report was initially made available to journalists and other insiders by the Government Printing Office, but soon enough it was published in book form and became a best seller. It was even translated into several languages.

  Starr appeared before a joint congressional committee to discuss the report, basking in the sycophantic questions from Republicans and deflecting the Democrats’ irate ones. On the day of the report’s public release, Clinton was obliged to speak at the National Prayer Breakfast, an event held annually in Washington since Dwight Eisenhower’s day, and he used the occasion to apologize to Lewinsky and the nation.

  I don’t think there is a fancy way to say that I have sinned. It is important to me that everybody who has been hurt know that the sorrow I feel is genuine—first and most important, my family, also my friends, my staff, my cabinet, Monica Lewinsky and her family, and the American people.

  I have asked all for their forgiveness. But I believe that to be forgiven, more than sorrow is required. At least two more things: First, genuine repentance, a determination to change and to repair breaches of my own making. I have repented.

  The hysteria, which had quieted a bit, mounted again and reached an even higher pitch. More than fifty House members, a couple of Democrats among them, called on Clinton to resign, as did four senators. The talking heads again became screaming heads. And leading the media charge was not the Wall Street Journal or some other conservative newspaper, but the New York Times. The Times’ editorial page editor, Howell Raines, had been thundering away about Clinton’s depravity for months, although the editorial page of the nation’s leading liberal newspaper stopped short of demanding the president’s resignation. Raines worked himself into rages of such ferocity that he couldn’t even recognize the presence in his prose of a glaring misplaced modifier as he congratulated Starr on laying bare the president’s degeneracy: “Until it was measured by Kenneth Starr, no citizen—indeed, perhaps no member of his own family—could have grasped the completeness of President Clinton’s mendacity or the magnitude of his recklessness.” William Safire’s feral columns, as well as those of Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich, who were counted as liberals in the taxonomy of A-level punditry but inveighed regularly against Clinton, completed a kind of anti-Clinton quadrifecta at the Times; only one columnist, Anthony Lewis, trained his fire chiefly on Starr.

  The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Illinois conservative Henry Hyde, moved to release the videotape of Clinton’s testimony to Starr, so that all of America could see for itself the manner of man occupying their great and sacred house. The House Rules Committee set in motion the process that would lead to votes on articles of impeachment. But the videotape changed nothing, and two-thirds of Americans continued to oppose impeachment. James Carville ratcheted up his war on Starr, delivering scathing broadsides on the Sunday talk shows, and liberal groups and unions paid for television ads attacking Starr and defending the president. On October 8, 1998, the House of Representatives voted for just the third time in its history to open an impeachment inquiry against a president. No Republicans opposed the resolution, and thirty-one Democrats joined them in voting to move forward. The vote was 258 to 176.

  The resolution called for an unlimited inquiry, as the Democratic House had done with respect to Richard Nixon in 1974. Indeed, privately, many Republicans saw this as revenge for Nixon—you got one of ours, so we’re finally getting one of yours. But that is not, of course, what they said publicly. The proper public posture was to insist that they were acting with regret, even sadness, but that the imperative of getting to the truth placed this grim responsibility on their reluctant shoulders. The New York Times assayed Hyde’s floor speech thus:

  Representative Hyde sought to strike a lofty tone in opening the Republicans’ side of the hearing by saying, “Today we will vote on an historic resolution to begin an inquiry into whether the president has committed impeachable offenses.”

  Every member, he said, was pulled in different questions [sic] “by many competing forces, but mostly we’re moved by our consciences. We must listen to that still, small voice that whispers in our ear, ‘Duty, duty, duty.’”

  This duty, he added, later in the debate, is “an onerous, miserable, rotten duty, but we have to do it.”

  Hyde’s duty had been rendered more complicated by the revelation just after the Starr report came out that he—one of Clinton’s leading critics—had had an extramarital affair of his own some years before. This story, too, became a huge controversy within the controversy because of accusations that the White House had leaked the story. Hyde at least ’fessed up, trying to explain it away as a “youthful indiscretion,” even though the affair had begun when he was forty-one years old. The contention that forty-one was considered “youthful” was not the only distortion of reality that was going on.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, the 1998 midterm election was barely a month away. The Republicans held a 228–206 numerical advantage in the House, and a ten-seat margin in the Senate. It has generally been the case that midterm elections favor the party opposing the incumbent president, and this pattern is most pronounced in the sixth year of a presidency. Under these circumstances, it was expected that the Republicans would augment their majorities, and probably by a considerable amount. Rarely in politics had anything been so obvious.

  Conventional wisdom in Washington was that voters were going to punish Democratic candidates across the country for the president’s louche behavior. Gingrich spent the fall boasting that he foresaw his Republicans gaining as many as forty House seats, which would have given them a massive advantage. The history certainly said so—turnout normally favors Republicans in off-year elections, because some groups that are strongly Democratic (blacks, Latinos, young people) have a record of voting less heavily than they do in presidential years. The universal assumption was that Democratic base voters would be demoralized and stay home, while their Republican counterparts would be energized to do their small part in sealing Clinton’s fate.

  There was still a nation and a world to attend to. In mid-October, Clinton brought Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to a conference center on the Wye River, on the Chesapeake Bay, in an effort to revive peace negotiations. The purpose of the meeting was to get the two sides to agree to a memorandum enforcing the so-called Oslo II Agreement on the status of the occupied territories, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The airport and seaport in Gaza and secure passage for Palestinians between Gaza and the West Bank were the easy parts. The sticking points centered on the number and type of Palestinian prisoners Israel would agree to release, and Netanyahu’s insistence that the United States release from prison the convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, a move adamantly opposed by the Clinton administration’s national security brain trust. The talks nearly collapsed several times. Clinton pushed the two leaders hard, keeping everyone up and talking with one another for nearly forty hours straight. The memorandum was signed on a Friday afternoon, shortly before the Jewish Sabbath; the parties rushed back to the White House to hold a press conference before sundown.

  Meanwhile, the midterm campaign continued. Clinton did make some appearances—it wasn’t the case that no Democrat wanted him around, because by now the pro-Clinton backlash among Democrats and liberals was considerable. People who’d never supported him or had been lukewarm because of his more centrist positions now decided that what was at stake here was not Clinton’s merits or demerits,
but what they saw in effect as a constitutionalized coup d’état.

  Even so, Bill Clinton was not the star Democratic attraction on the campaign trail that fall. Hillary was. She was having a rough go of it personally; she and Bill were in counseling, and she wasn’t ready to forgive him and wasn’t sure about the future of the marriage. But she was sure that what he’d done was not a high crime or misdemeanor, and so she poured herself into helping elect more people who would agree. In Living History, she records hitting at least eight states. Her efforts on behalf of Charles Schumer, a member of the House from Brooklyn running for the U.S. Senate against the powerful incumbent (and Clinton antagonist) Alfonse D’Amato, were particularly noted, since they happened in the country’s media capital. She visited New York four times on Schumer’s behalf, and he won going away. New York’s Democratic pols took note: she’s gotten pretty good at this, and New Yorkers seem to like her.

  In the end, the experts were about as wrong as they’ve ever been about an election. The Democrats actually gained five seats in the House. In the Senate, the balance of power remained unchanged. Democratic voters, it turned out, were not demoralized—they were furious, and they proved it by voting in much larger than anticipated numbers. Black turnout was especially high for a midterm election. This was a fascinating development. Clinton’s track record on racial questions had been mixed. On the one hand, he’d preserved affirmative action, largely defended civil rights, and appointed many African Americans to high positions. On the other hand, there was the Sister Souljah attack, his signing of the harsh welfare bill, and his defenestration of Lani Guinier.

  The Lewinsky saga brought many black voters firmly into Clinton’s corner, as well as a good percentage of the white liberal-left for whom Clinton had been too corporatist and centrist: if the Republicans hate Clinton this much, went the reasoning, there just may be something compelling about him that we haven’t fully appreciated. In the case of African Americans, there was something, too, in Clinton’s biography. He was not the kind of white person who was remote from their experience, who’d grown up wealthy and gone to prep schools and Harvard; he was the kind of white person they knew in their daily lives. This is part of what Toni Morrison was getting at when, in early October, as the House was marching ahead with impeachment, she called Clinton “our first black president,” a phrase that was immediately celebrated and derided. She argued that African American men in particular could well relate to the moralistic posturing over the president’s sexuality.