Hillary

by Sara Marshall

  Only three minor clauses of Gingrich’s Contract with America had survived. In the aftermath, Gingrich himself lost some of his bravado. He kept his title as speaker, but lost influence in the House and was no longer seen as a national party leader. It was a victory for Bill Clinton. The public’s trust in government had been shaken, and the president aimed to restore it. “The era of big government is over,” he said, “but we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.” He put into play initiatives designed to strengthen American values. These targeted issues such as drugs in schools, teen smoking, family medical leave, and dishonesty in advertising. The moderate approach was a departure from the ambitious plans Clinton had pushed until now. “After trying to move heaven and earth, big swaths in his first two years, he started feeding us up small pieces of bills,” said Trent Lott. “And he’d get into our knickers with ideas that we really could not vote against.”

  Throughout the turmoil, welfare reform was a priority for both Clintons. The systems and processes for aiding the poor and helpless in society were a half century old and had become dysfunctional. Since the mid-eighties, an outsized majority of those receiving welfare had been unmarried mothers and their children. But they lacked education and job training to improve their lives. Even if the women found work, it paid a pittance and they couldn’t afford health insurance or childcare during the week. So they had little incentive to stop relying on welfare. In the short run, staying home made sense, but it created a permanent welfare class and alienated the taxpayers who would otherwise support these women. Blue-collar workers were most resentful, many of them angry enough to vote for Republicans who preached initiative and self-reliance.

  Gingrich’s proposal to send out-of-wedlock children to orphanages was a highlight of the GOP welfare proposals. The Republicans passed a reform bill that set strict limits on how long people could remain on welfare; turned the Medicaid, school lunch and food-stamp programs into block grants to the states, allowing state administrators to set their own rules and allocate the money as they chose, and ended all benefits to immigrants, even legal immigrants who worked and paid taxes.

  President Clinton vetoed that bill, and when the Republicans came back with a second bill almost as draconian, he vetoed that one as well. He favored reform that would give people incentives to leave welfare, but as he and Hillary saw it, that must include investments in education and training, subsidies for transportation and childcare, and provisions for healthcare. Hillary warned that she would publicly oppose him if he agreed to sign any bill that did not guarantee healthcare, food stamps, and childcare subsidies – not only for people coming off welfare, but for the working poor in general.

  Congress passed a third bill - supported by most Democrats - that met most of those demands. The Clintons felt it had major flaws, including a five-year lifetime limit on welfare benefits and an end to most benefits for legal immigrants. Even so, the president signed it, and Hillary agreed to accept the law as a good first step.

  That decision enraged longtime advocates of welfare reform, including Hillary’s friend and mentor Marian Wright Edelman and her husband Peter, who resigned as assistant secretary for health and human services in protest. Hillary wrote that she felt terrible about the rift in their friendship and understood that many people felt she had endorsed a measure that would hurt children. But they were advocates who didn’t have to make compromises, while she had crossed the line to become a policy maker who had to make the best deal possible and work to improve it. It was one more painful moment in her political education.

  All through Clinton’s first term, the Whitewater scandal – along with other sometimes related charges – provided a constant drumbeat of criticism, accusations, and personal attacks against the president and first lady. Some, such as the Gennifer Flowers affair, seemed at least partially grounded. The Clintons had dealt with that particular indiscretion by acknowledging that there had been rocky times in their marriage. But others would not be so easily handled.

  At the same time, however, Washington’s conventional sport of hard politics was increasingly intense. “Partisan politicking was nothing new in Washington; it came with the territory,” Hillary wrote. But she was shaken by “the politics of personal destruction – visceral, mean-spirited campaigns to ruin the lives of public figures.” And there was persuasive evidence that right-wing partisans were conducting just such a campaign. It wasn’t aimed at forcing concessions, making points, or teaching lessons. This campaign was to discredit the incumbent, and perhaps the Democratic Party, once and for all.

  Hillary would later call the campaign “this vast right-wing conspiracy.” In reality, it wasn’t vast. It began with Richard Mellon Scaife, a Pittsburgh billionaire, who hired Christopher Ruddy, a freelance journalist, to write a series of articles for Scaife’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review detailing conspiracy theories about Vince Foster’s suicide, implying President Clinton had arranged his friend’s death as part of a Whitewater cover up. Scaife also paid the partisan American Spectator magazine to investigate every Clinton rumor and provide ammunition for conservative groups trying to undermine his presidency. The magazine hired a number of private investigators, a former Arkansas state police officer, and David Brock, a journalist who called himself a GOP “hitman.” Scaife’s crusade became known as the Arkansas Project.

  Ruddy’s stories on Foster offered no evidence, attracting only committed Clinton foes. But, in late 1993, Brock published a story in American Spectator quoting several former Arkansas state troopers – two of them on the record – saying they had procured women for Clinton while he was governor. The scandal immediately earned the predictable nickname Troopergate.

  Then, in February 1994, one of the women identified in Brock’s story only as Paula, appeared at a press conference to identify herself as Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state worker. The American Spectator piece claimed Jones had gratified the governor and told the trooper on her way out that she would be happy to be his “regular girlfriend.” David Jackson, a political enemy of the Clintons, arranged a press conference. Jones, a clergyman’s daughter, maintained she had been escorted to Clinton’s room by the trooper and that the then-governor propositioned her. She refused to provide details of what he had done, but said she was insulted by his request. She distributed affidavits from two friends attesting that she had told them about the incident the day it occurred and that she had been upset and fearful of losing her job.

  Republicans in Congress were eager to name a special prosecutor to investigate Troopergate, along with Whitewater and lingering rumors about Foster’s death. Some in the White House, including Hillary, argued against it, maintaining that there was no credible evidence to warrant an investigation and that it could become a never-ending source of politically motivated attacks and distractions.

  “I said to the president, ‘They’ll investigate you,’” White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum remembered. “‘Somebody did something in Arkansas in the last twenty years. They will try to find that person. Then they will try to get that person to save their neck – to remember something you did in Arkansas in the last twenty years which was illegal. This will last, Mr. President, as long as you’re president and beyond.’”

  But the consensus in the White House was that no one had done anything wrong, that the uproar was overshadowing the real issues, and that a special prosecutor would be the best way to dispose of the endless rumors. “We’re trying to run a presidency and a White House,” Ickes said. “This is not going away. Yes, you can stave it off for a while, but at some point everything is going to come out.”

  Just a month earlier, on January 6, Clinton’s mother, Virginia, had died of breast cancer. The president, exhausted and heartsick, said he wanted “this thing to be done, fully, clearly and to be over with.” He and Ickes convinced Hillary, and U.S. Attorney Robert Fiske was appointed to lead the probe. Clinton later regretted the decision, calling it “the worst mistake of my pre
sidency.”

  Three months later, two days short of the statute of limitations, Paula Jones filed a lawsuit charging the president with sexual harassment. She wanted $750,000 in damages.

  Fiske issued an interim report on June 30 finding that no one in the administration had tried to block the Whitewater probe and that Foster’s death was a suicide. New legislation providing for a special prosecutor was making its way through Congress and toward the president’s desk. Hillary urged her husband not to sign it unless it included a clause grandfathering in Fiske’s appointment. He signed it anyway. Ken Starr, a former federal judge and Republican solicitor general, who had previously been part of the Whitewater investigation, was named to replace Fiske.

  Starr had served as a federal Court of Appeals judge and as solicitor general from 1989 to 1993 under President George H. W. Bush. “The jury was out initially because Starr had quite a sterling reputation,” Ickes said. “He was well known in judicial circles. He was not rabid. He was considered a very good conservative but a very good court of appeals judge, so people were hopeful.” But Starr proved to be a relentless and implacable foe to the Clintons.

  The investigation grew. At one point, Starr’s staff wanted to verify how much work Hillary had performed for Jim McDougal’s Madison Guaranty during the time when she was the billing partner on the account. But the billing records were lost. Then, in January 1996, they turned up in an unpacked box of personal papers in the White House living quarters.

  The circumstances of the discovery, more than the contents, cast suspicion on Hillary at a time when the story had started to fade in the public consciousness. That Hillary had the lost records looked bad. “They weren’t individual records. They were law firm records,” Starr said. “So, why wouldn’t they be [at the law firm]?” The fact that the records backed up Hillary’s account did nothing to quiet the indignant press. William Safire called Hillary a “congenital liar” in The New York Times, and she appeared on the cover of Newsweek with the headline, SAINT OR SINNER?

  And there was simply a good deal of Arkansas in play. As Michael Isikoff, the reporter who delved into the Troopergate story for the Washington Post, was to write, “The political intrigue of Arkansas fascinated me – the bizarre characters, the southern folklore, the strange mix of rumor, fact, and tabloid fantasy. At the time, the Clinton White House seemed like a gothic warehouse filled with endless mysteries and intrigue.” Hillary’s old friend Webster “Webb” Hubbell, a trusted intimate for years and a Rose Law Firm partner who had come to Washington as associate attorney general, was a prime example. He came under suspicion for what he maintained were just sloppy billing records. He resigned until the matter could be cleared up; then he confessed and pleaded guilty to overbilling clients some $394,000 to cover his own debts.

  And so it went, on and on. Hillary, motivated as much as ever to change the conversation, went on a national tour to promote her book on children. But it was interrupted on January 19 when Starr subpoenaed her. Hillary became the only first lady forced to testify before a grand jury. Starr wouldn’t take her testimony in the White House, insisting she appear at the federal courthouse. Some saw it as an attempt to humiliate her. For Hillary, it marked a new battle line.

  By the time President Clinton was running for re-election against Robert Dole in the fall of 1996, there were signs that the scandals were becoming tiresome. Time magazine reported that summer that Clinton’s real opponent was not Bob Dole, but Ken Starr. A sympathy vote was building for Clinton. That November, the president won handily. Republicans, who had been counting on gaining in both Houses of Congress, lost nine seats in the House and two in the Senate. The comeback kid had done it again. Bill Clinton, written off just two years earlier, became the first Democrat to win a second term since Franklin Roosevelt.

  President Clinton had reason to feel confident as his motorcade delivered him from the inauguration at the Capitol to the White House, his home for another four years. The economy was in tremendous shape. New York Senator Al D’Amato ended his Whitewater investigation. The Clintons made a number of changes when it came to staff and cabinet officers, including naming Madeleine Albright the first female secretary of state, and got ready for business. But with Congress still in Republican hands, they planned no major initiatives. It was to be as quiet a term as circumstances would permit. “We have much to be thankful for,” the president said. “With four years of growth, we have won back the basic strength of our economy. With crime and welfare rolls declining, we are winning back our optimism – the enduring faith that we can master any difficulty.”

  Hillary focused on her family, and Chelsea was growing up. For the most part, her privacy had been preserved; she had graduated from Sidwell Friends School and decided to go to Stanford. Hillary spent as much time as she could with her daughter, and the president delivered the commencement address at Sidwell. Chelsea settled in at Stanford, and her parents, as Hillary told it, “went into overdrive as soon as we got into the dorm,” unpacking, organizing, and, above all, lining bureau drawers with crucial contact paper. Clinton took apart a bunk bed. When it was time to leave, he was bereft. “Do we really have to go now?” he asked. “Can’t we come back after dinner?” For weeks, the White House seemed unnaturally quiet. Hillary wrote: “Sometimes I’d catch Bill just sitting in Chelsea’s bedroom, looking around wistfully.”

  At the same time, the president was continuing his affair with Monica Lewinsky. In early 1997, she was working as an assistant to chief Pentagon spokesperson Kenneth Bacon. She was transferred because her supervisors had noticed her spending too much time around Clinton. In the Pentagon public-affairs office, Lewinsky met a coworker named Linda Tripp. The two became confidantes.

  Tripp, a career civil servant, had been transferred from a position in the White House, which she had held through the Bush administration. Though the transfer included a significant raise, Tripp resented Clinton and his White House staff. She had proposed a tell-all book about the Clinton administration to a literary agent named Lucianne Goldberg, but she was not interested. That fall, Tripp called Goldberg with new information. She said she knew a twenty-three-year-old woman who was having an ongoing affair with the president. “It was very much a big sister-little sister, mother-daughter relationship,” Goldberg said. “Monica would tell her everything. Linda genuinely cared about Monica, but there was one overriding emotion, and that was what Bill Clinton was doing. . . . this was an angry woman.”

  At Goldberg’s suggestion, Tripp started to record her conversations with Lewinsky. The transcripts reveal a young woman wrestling with her feelings for a married man. “I don’t know why I have these feelings for him,” Lewinsky said. “I never expected to feel this way about him. And the first time I ever looked into his eyes close up and was with him alone, I saw someone totally different than I had expected to see. And that’s the person I fell in love with.”

  Tripp also phoned Ken Starr. By January 1998, Starr had conceded, three years after Robert Fiske reached the same conclusion, that Vince Foster had committed suicide. With Whitewater reduced to a disentangling of loose ends and petty discrepancies, Starr had no case against the Clintons. Starr at first put little stock in Tripp’s account, finding nothing about a presidential affair to prosecute. But he had been closely following Paula Jones’ sexual-harassment lawsuit against the president. Lawyers were deposing witnesses, and the president himself was to be interviewed under oath. Starr saw an opportunity. If the president denied his affair with Lewinsky under oath, Starr could pursue perjury charges against him.

  The deposition took place on January 17, 1998. The day before, Tripp and Lewinsky met in the food court at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Pentagon City, Virginia. Before they could sit down, FBI agents converged on them and led Lewinsky to a room in the hotel. Starr hoped to convince Lewinsky to secretly tape an encounter with the president. She would not cooperate. It was left up to Paula Jones’ lawyers to trap Clinton on the stand. The lead attorney was James Fi
sher. He was aware of the Lewinsky affair and planned to use it to prove Jones’ case. “I thought it showed President Clinton’s proclivity to make sexual advances to extremely young, low-level employees,” Fisher said.

  In an effort to avoid ambiguity, Fisher started by defining sexual relations according to a federal statute, which did not account for oral sex. It had the unintended consequence of presenting the president with a loophole, which he leapt for. “I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. I never had an affair with her,” Clinton testified. Peppered with questions about the relationship, the president continued to deftly deny it. But as details were brought to light, particularly with regards to gifts he exchanged with Lewinsky, Clinton began to realize the extent of this problem. Someone knew and was talking.

  Hillary wrote that the president came back from the deposition looking uncomfortable. Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff was ready to break the story. His source was Linda Tripp, who he had been talking with for weeks. But editors at the magazine hesitated. Eager to get the story out, Lucianne Goldberg leaked it to Internet political gossip columnist Matt Drudge.

  Four days later, Clinton woke his wife early one morning, sat on the edge of the bed, and told her, “There’s something in today’s papers you should know about.” It was a story claiming that he had had an affair with Lewinsky. He told Hillary that Lewinsky’s name had come up in the Paula Jones suit. In an effort to make Jones’ claims credible, he went on, a woman named Linda Tripp, a friend of Lewinsky’s, had sworn an affidavit attesting to the affair with the intern. Clinton maintained his innocence and said that two years earlier he had taken a friendly interest in Lewinsky and offered her some job-hunting help. Hillary dismissed the story as another fictitious scandal.