by Nancy Gibbs
Clinton began Sunday at the Pentagon, where he reviewed the invasion plans and talked by phone to the operational commanders in the region. In Haiti, meanwhile, Carter, Nunn, and Powell headed for Cédras’s home at dawn to meet his wife and family. Yannick Prosper Cédras sounded just as entrenched as her husband, telling the Americans “we would rather die with American bullets in our chests than as traitors with Haitian bullets in our backs.” It was a stirring piece of bravado but Powell deftly set it aside. “My wife would understand perfectly your loyalty as a general’s wife,” he said, “but I tell you there is no honor in throwing away lives when the outcome is already determined.”
That altered the dynamics and, by noon Sunday, Cédras proposed to step down as soon as a new government was in place. When Carter relayed that offer to Washington by fax, Clinton rejected it as too vague and insisted on Cédras’s departure by October 15. Cédras balked at the timetable and Clinton in return urged Carter and his team to leave the island quickly. The last-ditch mission was now operating several hours past its deadline. The invasion was just twelve hours away, and some forward elements were expected in half that time. Nerves in Washington were starting to fray; the only thing worse than having to invade an impoverished neighboring country was having three sainted American political figures martyred in the crossfire. Military officials put a Delta Force team on standby to rescue the trio in the event it ran into trouble. General Hugh Shelton, who commanded the U.S. operation offshore, was frantically telephoning the White House that afternoon urging Clinton to extract Carter and his team immediately.
Around 4 P.M., Cédras’s top deputy warned Cédras that the invasion was imminent and urged him to leave the building. (Haiti’s generals, whatever the condition of their army, apparently had some spotters near Fort Bragg’s Pope Field in North Carolina—a bit of foreign intelligence that impressed Powell, the former paratrooper. “Not bad for a poor country,” he noted.) Clinton phoned again to tell the three Americans to leave immediately, but Carter begged for still more time. Clinton was skeptical but willing to extend the deadline until the last possible minute, perhaps an hour away.
What Carter did next is not in any Carter Center Peaceful Mediation Handbook.
He wheeled on Cédras and all but shouted, “You must accept this agreement right now or your children will be killed! Your country will be burned!” It was an astonishing change of tactics and Powell recalled being stunned as he watched it unfold. And yet it seemed to work: Cédras was close to capitulating but needed some face-saving political cover for stepping aside. So Carter rolled the dice, proposing to take Cédras to see Emile Jonassaint, the eighty-one-year-old figurehead president named by the generals a few months earlier. Though the United States did not regard Jonassaint as legitimate leader of anything, the Haitian generals did and Carter imagined that if Jonassaint could be convinced to order Cédras to step down, Cédras might just agree to do it. The delegation hurriedly left the military HQ in two cars: Nunn and Carter in one vehicle and Cédras and Powell in the other, along with several hand grenades, which rolled around on the floor of the backseat as they sped through the streets of Port-au-Prince.
By the time they arrived at Jonassaint’s office, Carter had written a one-page proposal that permitted American forces to enter the country peacefully if the ruling junta stepped down by October 15. Jonassaint asked the generals if they could hold out against the Americans. Cédras said no. Two lower-level ministers objected to the surrender and threatened to resign. “We have too many ministers already,” Jonassaint replied. “I choose peace.” As the agreement was being translated into French, Carter called Clinton on an unsecured telephone to make sure that Jonassaint was, considering the urgency of the situation, now an acceptable official with whom to cut the final deal.
Clinton agreed, and soon after Jonassaint signed. When Powell reminded the Haitians that the agreement meant that U.S. troops could not be fired upon, Cédras agreed. “I will obey the orders of my president.” Carter then phoned the White House with the news. U.S. paratroopers were only thirty minutes away when Clinton ordered them back home.
The War Over the Peace
As the U.S. team headed to the airport late that night for the flight back to Washington, it was hard to see how Carter had underperformed. Facing long odds and a ticking clock, he had moved quickly and, at key moments, creatively, to get a deal while sticking for the most part to the White House guidance. He had wavered at times during the negotiations, but came out in the end where he and Clinton could call it a win. And, so far, he had stayed out of public view.
Then, inevitably, he overplayed his hand. The American delegation landed in Washington at 3:30 A.M. and dispersed to get a few hours of sleep. The three men were supposed to regroup with Clinton for breakfast and then hold a four-man press conference to put a nice, tidy bow on the deal. But Carter went AWOL, turning up on CNN at 7 A.M., putting his own spin on the previous seventy-two hours and taking the opportunity to criticize the White House for insisting that Cédras leave Haiti for a third country, while praising Cédras for being willing to step down.
And all this occurred before he had briefed the president on whose behalf he was working.
When Carter got to the White House, he found Clinton in a breathless fury, outraged that Carter had once again taken to the airwaves before talking to the boss. But rather than simply apologize for his misjudgment, Carter gave as good as he got, shouting at Clinton for launching an invasion while the negotiating team was still in Haiti. This must have annoyed Clinton even more, as Carter knew it was the threat of the invasion that had given the negotiators their leverage. The conversation, such as it was, degenerated into a shouting match.
It fell to Sam Nunn to restore order and the quartet somehow made it to the East Room for pictures and questions. Once again, Carter had saved Clinton a lot of trouble, one president coming to the rescue of another. But he had fouled the finish, much as he had in Korea.
In many ways, the prickly yet productive Clinton-Carter relationship was about second chances, a twenty-five-year test of how many times the younger man could forgive the older and whether the older could get over the fact that his protégé turned out to be a better politician. Clinton never gave up. In August 1999, as his time in the White House began to wind down, Clinton flew to Atlanta to award both Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The Medal of Freedom is the nation’s highest civilian award but it is also one that is normally distributed in East Room ceremonies.
Once in Atlanta, the president ran through a long litany of the Carters’ charitable works around the globe. “There have been other presidents who have contributed to the public good once they left office,” Clinton remarked, reaching back to Taft and Jefferson to make clear he had studied the entire record. “To call Jimmy Carter the greatest former president in history . . . does not do justice to either him or to his work.” He made an equally gracious speech about Rosalynn.
Carter, moved by the honor, thanked Clinton right back but with an asterisk. “You still have some months to go before you join our small fraternity of former presidents,” Carter said. “Now, just imagine, Mr. President, you’ll be able to play golf without any television, telephoto lenses, focused on your stroke. Isn’t that great? But I think I have to warn you that there are some downsides to being out of office as well. I understand that golfing partners don’t give as many mulligans to ex-presidents as they do to presidents.”
By 2000, it was practically a club bylaw: even when you were doing Carter a favor, you never knew what you might get in return. But it probably won’t feel good.
22
“Bill, I Think You Have to Admit That You Lied”
—GERALD FORD
The shocking but not entirely surprising news in early 1998 that Bill Clinton may have had sex with a twenty-one-year-old intern sent a scandalized Presidents Club into silence.
Reagan by that time was not making public appearances or stat
ements. Bush had no reason to comment: his eldest son was facing reelection in Texas and mulling a run at the White House. The club’s two closest members, Ford and Carter, agreed during a private conversation that spring not to say anything in public about Clinton’s deepening political problems. A House impeachment probe was certain; a Senate trial was likely. They agreed that their influence, such as it was, might be more valuable if they banked and deployed it later.
But by August, Clinton had admitted to a grand jury—and then on national television—that he had had an inappropriate relationship with Monica Lewinsky. In late September, an incoming Emory University student asked Carter to comment on the deepening mess in Washington. In more than fifteen years, Carter explained, he had never dodged a single question in his annual orientation session with Emory freshmen. And though this might have been an ideal time to make an exception, Carter apparently did not see it that way. He predicted, boldly but accurately, that Clinton would be impeached, but would not be convicted in the Senate. The club’s silence had been broken.
A Moment of Majesty
Within days, Ford had written an op-ed column for the New York Times in close coordination with his longtime friend, historian Richard Norton Smith. Ford felt that Clinton was still not leveling with the public about his own behavior nor showing sufficient shame about what he had done. “Ford believed Clinton needed to show more contrition,” said Smith. “He thought Clinton needed to impress upon the nation that he understood what he had put the country through.”
But Ford had other worries. A House veteran who had risen from obscurity over a quarter century to become his party’s leader in the lower chamber, Ford feared that zealous House Republicans were in danger of damaging themselves were they to follow their instincts and pursue impeachment over a sordid sexual affair. The public, Ford guessed, might punish them for overreaching. Smith suspected that Ford had a third agenda as well. Born in a more genteel era, he said, Ford believed that it was one thing for the public to be obsessed with Clinton’s sex life but it was another for the government to be. Ford had a deep faith in the power of contrition and its salutary effect on the body politic. In pardoning Richard Nixon twenty-five years earlier, Smith noted, Ford had tried to win from Nixon an admission of guilt for his crimes in exchange. But while Nixon had made some minor comments along those lines, he had never really come right out and apologized. Ford pardoned Nixon anyway, but spent some part of his remaining years rationalizing the trade-off. Here, perhaps, was a chance for Ford to prove his case.
And yet what Ford was suggesting in his Times op-ed was highly irregular. He urged members of the House Judiciary Committee to proceed with their inquiry, but suggested the full House resolve the crisis with a parliamentary device that had no name. Clinton, Ford argued, should voluntarily go to the well of the House during a joint session of Congress and receive “not an ovation from the people’s representatives, but a harshly worded rebuke as rendered by members of both parties. I emphasize: this would be a rebuke, not a rebuttal by the President . . . the President would accept full responsibility for his actions, as well as for his subsequent efforts to delay or impede the investigation of them. . . . Let it be dignified, honest and, above all, cleansing. The result, I believe, would be the first moment of majesty in an otherwise squalid year.”
And that was the most important mission: members of the club tend to put protecting the presidency above protecting individual presidents, and the Oval Office, sullied by the whole episode, needed a ritual bath. However appalled they were at Clinton’s private conduct, the former presidents understood the profound but intangible costs of putting him on trial before the United States Senate. A certain amount of the president’s power comes from the “majesty” that adheres to the office; they did not want to see it diminished by the squalor of one individual’s conduct.
But Ford’s proposal seemed almost Edwardian in its quaintness. The notion that the House Republican leadership, a mostly male group led by Newt Gingrich that had developed a seething dislike of Clinton, would somehow limit its yearlong probe was unimaginable. Even the Democrats who had agreed in 1986 not to pursue impeachment against Ronald Reagan after Iran-contra nonetheless opted to continue their investigations for months. “At 85, I have no personal or political agenda, nor do I have any interest in ‘rescuing’ Bill Clinton. But I do care, passionately, about rescuing the country I love from further turmoil or uncertainty.”
When the op-ed was published, conservatives howled. Republicans dismissed Ford’s notion out of hand, and Ford’s aides heard that majority whip Tom DeLay was annoyed at Ford for meddling in what was shaping up to be a constitutional showdown. If Republicans hated Ford’s idea, however, Clinton was intrigued enough to approve a very private follow-up. Sometime in October, longtime Democratic Party insider Robert Strauss called Ford with a question. Acting on White House instructions, Strauss asked Ford if he would consider testifying in the upcoming House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearings on Clinton’s behalf. In fact, Strauss told Ford that the White House was hoping that Ford would serve as the sole witness on Clinton’s behalf at the House hearings.
Even from an old friend like Strauss, this was an astonishing thing to ask: would a former president from a different party take up arms for a sitting president in a free-fire zone against much younger, more conservative, more vengeful Republicans? “I told Bob there was just no way,” Ford recalled. “I mean, can you imagine me, a longtime House Republican, testifying for Bill Clinton before a Republican House?” But Ford didn’t rule out helping entirely. Privately, Ford told Strauss, he could play a more useful role as the crisis unfolded. If the Republicans pushed the matter to a trial in the Senate, Ford said, he would make calls to wavering Republicans. But as a character witness? That was asking too much.
On November 3, midterm elections confirmed one of Ford’s hunches. While leaving the Republicans’ ten-seat Senate margin unchanged, voters handed the Democrats an unexpected pickup of five House seats. That sparked an internal revolt against Speaker Newt Gingrich, who had predicted a six- to thirty-seat gain. Three days later, Gingrich announced he was stepping down as Speaker.
On December 11, the House Judiciary Committee voted along party lines for impeachment. By now, the vast majority of Americans favored some sort of censure over the impeachment and trial, but the House panel had opted to press ahead at all costs. That afternoon, Clinton appeared in the Rose Garden and tried to open the door to a possible censure again. “Should they determine that my errors of word and deed require their rebuke and censure I am ready to accept that.” A week later, the full House approved two of four proposed articles of impeachment on a mostly party-line vote. Clinton became the second president in history to be impeached.
Calling the Club
And that was when the White House really started leaning on the former presidents. After a nudge from Al Gore, who managed the sometimes rocky channel between the West Wing and Plains, Carter called Ford and suggested a second op-ed, again in the New York Times. Let’s make another stab at the censure idea, Carter proposed, and Ford went along. By this time the two men had been conducting successful joint operations at home and abroad for close to twenty years. They traded drafts for a few days—there were six versions in all—before agreeing on a mutually satisfactory version. The commentary appeared December 21, just two days after the House impeachment vote. In it, Ford and Carter argued for a “unique” punishment, one even more unconventional than Ford’s original proposal. “We personally favor a bipartisan resolution of censure by the Senate. Under such a plan, President Clinton would have to accept rebuke while acknowledging his wrongdoing and the very real harm he has caused. The Congressional resolution should contain language stipulating that the President’s acceptance of these findings—including a public acknowledgment that he did not tell the truth under oath—cannot be used in any future criminal trial to which he may be subject.”
The authors had one eye on history and anot
her on the country; once again, they feared, the presidency itself was at risk. “Fortunately, Senate procedures, through their flexibility and freedom, provide the means to end this national ordeal in ways that can uphold the rule of law without permanently damaging the presidency.” The op-ed was titled “A Time to Heal Our Nation,” echoing the title of Ford’s memoir about his own turn in the White House two decades earlier.
Ford and Carter made it sound simple, but their proposal was laced with problems: How, exactly, might the immunity that the two presidents imagined be granted? How might special prosecutor Ken Starr be forced to abide by it? What guarantee existed that the terms of the deal would ever satisfy the president’s lawyers, who by now had a reason to distrust just about everyone at the table, including their own client? And how would the most conservative Republicans, who could practically taste Clinton’s hide in their teeth, ever be convinced to let him go now? The club’s last-ditch effort was as short on time as it was on specifics. The momentum toward a trial was gaining speed, whatever common sense Ford and Carter were hoping to impart.
But the White House continued to explore alternative scenarios. After the second op-ed, White House counsel Charles Ruff called Ford directly. Ruff, who was in charge of the president’s defense team, asked Ford what else he might be able to do to lend Clinton a hand. Ford replied that he could only be of service if Clinton copped to the perjury plea, one of four impeachment counts. Ruff told Ford that Clinton would never agree to that. And so Ford informed Ruff that he could not do any more to help. There was some history at work here: unable to wrest a clear admission of guilt out of Nixon in 1974, Ford was reluctant to embrace a similar deal in 1998.