A Vast Conspiracy

by Jeffrey Toobin

  All through the week after the Safire column, White House lawyers tried to convince the prosecutors in Starr’s office that the first lady had made an innocent mistake in not providing the documents earlier. By this time, Starr was already almost six months past his self-imposed (and obviously unrealistic) deadline of one year to complete his investigation, and the Whitewater trial of Tucker and the McDougals wouldn’t even begin until the spring. He had come up with nothing against the Clintons, and the frustrations of an already long and inconclusive investigation were starting to weigh on his staff. Moreover, the experienced lawyers on his staff were starting to drift back into private life. The high-handed and contemptuous style of David Kendall, the Clintons’ private lawyer for Whitewater, irritated Starr’s people as well.

  The mysterious reappearance of the documents led to a dramatic confrontation behind the scenes. Starr’s deputy John Bates told Jane Sherburne, of the White House counsel’s office, that Starr was planning to obtain a search warrant for the living quarters of the White House, to look for another box of documents relating to the Rose Law Firm. After heated negotiations, Bates agreed to forgo the search warrant, but in return for this concession Sherburne herself would have to do the search. So Sherburne crawled through every room in the residence, searching everywhere from the bathrooms to the underwear drawers. As required by the agreement with Starr’s office, Sherburne even combed through Chelsea Clinton’s possessions. “After I finished,” Sherburne recalled, “I felt like standing in the shower.” The White House lawyer never found what Starr was seeking.

  White House lawyers pleaded with Starr’s people to take Mrs. Clinton’s deposition in private and spare her the indignity of parading up the steps of the courthouse like any other witness. (In the midst of these negotiations, on January 16, Mrs. Clinton left on her tour to support sales of her new book, It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us. The president took advantage of her departure that night to call Lewinsky for their first round of phone sex.) The Starr team thought the discovery of the documents made the prosecutors look ridiculous, so they were not inclined to cut the lawyers—or Hillary—a break. So on Thursday, January 18, Hillary Clinton became the only first lady in American history to be subpoenaed before a federal grand jury.

  Clinton spent the next weekend preparing for his State of the Union address, which he would give on the following Tuesday. On Sunday afternoon, Clinton and Lewinsky had a genuinely accidental meeting near the Oval Office, and the president invited her in. Before he ushered her into the private office, Lewinsky asked him whether their relationship was “just about sex, or do you have some interest in trying to get to know me as a person?” Clinton assured her that he “cherishes the time that he had with me.” Even Lewinsky thought this remark was a bit excessive considering how little time they had spent together, but it didn’t deter her from another sexual encounter. After a moment commiserating about the first death of an American soldier in Bosnia, Clinton and Lewinsky returned to the private hallway, where she performed oral sex in the manner he preferred.

  After most of their encounters, Lewinsky simply left through the Oval Office. But their January 21 session ended with a scene out of a pornographic bedroom farce. When the president, as was his custom, stopped Lewinsky before completion, the couple faced a dilemma, because there were visitors waiting just outside the Oval Office. (The guests were Jim and Diane Blair, family friends from Arkansas; Jim was the Tyson Foods executive who had set up Hillary’s brief but successful foray in commodities trading.) In order to avoid being seen, Lewinsky tried to leave through the office of Betty Currie, who was Clinton’s personal secretary, but the door was locked. When Lewinsky came back to tell the president that she would have to find another exit, she found him in the office of Nancy Hernreich, Currie’s boss, masturbating. Lewinsky wound up leaving through the Rose Garden.

  The high point of the State of the Union address two days later came when Clinton defended the person the newspapers were calling his “embattled” wife. Turning to Hillary in the gallery above the House chamber, his eyes moist with tears, the president said, “Before I go on, I would like to take just a moment to thank my own family, and to thank the person who has taught me more than anyone else over twenty-five years about the importance of families and children—a wonderful wife, magnificent mother, and a great first lady. Thank you, Hillary!” (Two years later, Betty Currie hid beneath her bed some of the gifts that Clinton gave Lewinsky. Among them was an official copy of the 1996 State of the Union address, which was inscribed, “To Monica Lewinsky, With best wishes, Bill Clinton.”) Three days after Clinton’s speech, on Friday, January 26, Hillary Clinton made her way past the cameras into the United States Courthouse, where she testified before the grand jury for more than four hours.

  The next Sunday afternoon, February 4, Clinton again telephoned Lewinsky to arrange another “accidental” encounter, which ended back in the hallway in the customary way. For the first time, Clinton and Lewinsky had a post-“coital” conversation of some duration, about forty-five minutes. According to Lewinsky, they chatted about her combat boots (“like Chelsea’s,” said Clinton), how they had lost their virginity, and Monica’s mistreatment by an earlier married boyfriend, Andy Bleiler. An actual conversation with Lewinsky may have been the thing that cured the president of his infatuation, because the next time he summoned Lewinsky, two weeks later, it was to break off their relationship. On Presidents’ Day, Clinton invited Lewinsky to the Oval Office and announced that—for her good as well as his—their sexual relationship had to end.

  Their January idyll was over—as was the public crisis for Hillary Clinton. For Starr’s prosecutors, the grand jury appearance itself was really the only form of punishment they could inflict. They had no grounds to make a case against the first lady for obstruction of justice—they couldn’t prove that she had intentionally hid the documents—so the matter of the billing records faded to an inconclusive muddle.

  How, then, to explain the juxtaposition of Clinton’s fling with Lewinsky and his defense of his wife? The most likely answer is that they were simply separate events. Both the president and the first lady shared a passionate desire to defeat the political enemies who had pursued them for years. Even in 1996, before Starr became a mortal enemy, the prosecutor was far from a friend, and the president did not have to muster false outrage in order to stand by Hillary against his (or Safire’s) assault. How then to explain the affair? Pop psychological analyses of the president have often characterized him as a man of split personalities—a good Clinton and a bad Clinton, the policy wonk and the party animal. This explanation seems too facile. Not every adulterer suffers from multiple personality disorder. Clinton had affairs during his marriage, and he had never paid a calamitous personal or political price. Clinton pursued Lewinsky for the same reason he had pursued other women—because, presumably, he enjoyed the excitement and the sex, such as it was. These relationships were simply the way he lived. One part of his life never interfered with the other—as long as he didn’t get caught.

  On May 28, 1996, Governor Jim Guy Tucker and Jim and Susan McDougal were convicted in “the 825 case”—the trial that grew out of the failure of Madison Guaranty. The jury had believed at least some of the testimony of David Hale, who was the star witness for the prosecution. (After making a plea bargain with Starr, Hale ultimately served less than two years in prison for his various crimes.) The president had testified by videotape from the White House, and he had denied ever discussing a loan with Hale in February 1986, but Clinton played a largely peripheral role in the case. Notwithstanding their convictions, the McDougals still stood by Clinton’s version of the facts of the case, so Starr had no way to use his victory to advance his investigation. In any event, Starr soon lost the chance to capitalize on the McDougal convictions. In another case he brought, against a pair of Arkansas bankers for violations in connection with the financing of Clinton’s 1990 gubernatorial campaign, the trial ended
with the jury failing to convict on any count.

  So, coming up on its second anniversary, the Starr investigation was running out of steam—and yet, in the curious manner of independent counsels, it wasn’t slowing down either. A week after the convictions in the Whitewater case, Attorney General Janet Reno gave Starr jurisdiction over “Filegate”—the unauthorized receipt of about three hundred confidential FBI files by low-level officials in the Clinton White House in 1993 and 1994. Even among the most fevered anti-Clinton activists, there was never a suggestion that the president ordered these files to be obtained or that he saw them once they arrived. The only people ever implicated in the entire file fiasco were Craig Livingstone, a beefy former bar bouncer who became the director of the White House office of personnel security, and his aide, Anthony Marceca.

  The idea that anyone committed any crime in Filegate was dubious at best. Career prosecutors at the Justice Department could have handled this modest investigation with no difficulty. Still, in the poisonous atmosphere of Washington in the nineties, and under the broad mandates of the independent counsel law, Reno turned the matter over to Starr. Any controversy that hit the newspapers—as Filegate did—was instantly transformed into a putative criminal case. In the inverted logic of The New York Times’s editorial page (and others), the very existence of the inquiries proved how serious they were. In this way the legal system continued its takeover of the political system. Once again, a new set of victims paid the price—the witnesses who had to hire lawyers, the targets who had to live in fear, the investigating agents who had to turn away from more important work, and the public, which was distracted from the real business of government and, of course, had to pay the bill.

  There was one more victim—Starr himself. At a time when he was thinking about moving on with his life, Washington’s conflict-of-interest culture dropped another unwelcome gift in his lap. Starr could have, and probably should have, turned the Filegate case back to the Justice Department, but only a prosecutor sure of his own judgments (a Bob Fiske, for example) would have had the self-confidence to take that kind of step. Burdened with Whitewater, Travelgate, the Foster suicide, and now Filegate, Starr made it clear that he would not take any public action in these investigations through the presidential election in November. Though the Whitewater case—the original reason for his appointment—had just about run its course, Starr was heading into year three of his investigation with no end in sight.

  The Clintons, of course, had no sympathy for Starr’s troubles. For them, the expansion of Starr’s jurisdiction to include Filegate was followed by a piece of good news. On June 24, 1996, at the end of the Supreme Court’s term, the justices announced that they would hear the case of Jones v. Clinton during its October term. This decision meant that Bob Bennett had succeeded in his most important goal in the case. The case could not be resolved before the election. Though it had been filed in May 1994, Bennett had delayed it for more than two years, and the Supreme Court’s decision meant that no one would be able to take depositions in the case until 1997 at the earliest.

  On November 5, 1996, Bill Clinton was reelected after a campaign in which Starr’s investigation figured hardly at all. His margin of victory was held down by the emergence, shortly before the election, of what became known as the campaign finance scandal—even though, as with Filegate, scarcely anyone could even articulate any criminal offense the president might have committed. On this issue, Reno would spend much of the following several years in another controversy about whether she should appoint independent counsel. Ultimately, she declined to do so. (Meanwhile, of course, the campaign finance laws—which were clearly the root of the “scandal”—remained unchanged.)

  The election also served as an opportunity for Ken Starr to take stock. By that time, he had won his cases against Hubbell, Tucker, and the two McDougals, but their cooperation hadn’t brought the prosecutors any closer to the Clintons. With the investigation stalled, the prosecutor tried to declare defeat. On February 17, 1997, shortly after Clinton was inaugurated for a second term, Starr announced that he would be stepping down to become dean of the Schools of Law and Public Policy at Pepperdine University, in Malibu, California.

  The White House reacted with quiet satisfaction to the news that Starr was, in effect, surrendering, and decamping to a school of modest reputation in a beach community known for starlets, bodybuilders, and surfers, to take a job partially financed by Richard Scaife, who had also subsidized The American Spectator and a variety of anti-Clinton causes. But the Republican right was outraged. In a typical example of conservative pique, William Safire declared that Starr had “brought shame on the legal profession by walking out on his client—the people of the United States.” Four days later, Starr announced contritely that he had changed his mind about Pepperdine, and he promised to stay on until the end of the investigation. Still, as Bill Clinton began his second term in office, Kenneth Starr had effectively concluded his work as independent counsel.

  6

  “Joan Dean”

  In the first two years of its existence, the Starr team had behaved in the tradition of honorable law enforcement. For the most part, they had investigated crimes rather than people and operated by the same general standards as other federal prosecutors. Notwithstanding his own political and personal distaste for the president, Starr himself appeared content to depart for Pepperdine without inflicting many wounds on his chief target. In sum, Starr had nothing to do with keeping the case against Clinton going at this low moment. The forces of culture and money took care of that.

  Clinton’s election as the first baby-boomer president had unleashed powerful resentments against him. It was Clinton’s perceived moral lassitude and self-indulgence—far more than his political views—that outraged his critics. The president’s conservative adversaries in what became known as the culture wars never represented a majority of Americans, but they were a market—especially for books. When Starr flagged, the forces of capitalism took temporary custody of the anti-Clinton campaign.

  The first person to tap the anti-Clinton market with great success was a former FBI agent named Gary Aldrich. For Clinton’s adversaries, Aldrich provided one of the few bright spots in the otherwise dismal year of 1996. In late June, Aldrich published a book titled Unlimited Access, an account of his brief tenure in the Clinton White House. Aldrich had a minor job coordinating the background investigations of new employees, but he parlayed his contacts among disaffected career staffers into a remarkably hostile narrative about the first family and the people around them. The book received a good deal of publicity when it first appeared, mostly because of its allegation that the president regularly ducked his Secret Service protection and made “frequent late-night visits to the Marriott Hotel” for assignations with a woman who “may be a celebrity.” The former agent noted gravely that the story of the Marriott trysts had been provided to him by “a highly educated, well-trained, experienced investigator.” Aldrich’s scoop was marred somewhat by the fact that it turned out to be fictional; shortly after the book was published, Aldrich’s “source” was revealed to be David Brock, the erstwhile chronicler of the troopers’ tales, who had merely asked Aldrich about rumors of Clinton’s late-night wanderings.

  Despite his errors, however, Aldrich managed to express a coherent message about the president, and in time, the book emerged as a sort of ur-text of Clinton-hating. He wrote at one point, “If you compared the staffers of the Bush administration with those of the Clinton administration, the difference was shocking. It was Norman Rockwell on the one hand, and Berkeley, California, with an Appalachian twist on the other.” Aldrich charged that the White House social office hung pornographic ornaments on the White House Christmas tree, and that the men on Clinton’s staff wore earrings and the women no underwear. Some of these charges were provably false, but that was almost beside the point. Aldrich tapped into a genuine cultural fault line in the country, and his book was an enormous success. Unlimited Access sp
ent nineteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold even more copies than its unofficial videotape counterpart, Patrick Matrisciana’s Clinton Chronicles. (Like so many of Clinton’s adversaries, Aldrich included an obligatory passage about how “I might even be in danger, if the stories coming from Little Rock were true—about how so many enemies of the Clintons ended up having fatal ‘accidents.’ ” Like all the others who expressed this fear, Aldrich survived to tell his tale.)

  The core of Aldrich’s complaints concerned sex. In one passage, as Aldrich sat musing about one of Newt Gingrich’s appearances on Meet the Press, the author observed, “I nodded in agreement when Gingrich said that the Clintons and their staff were throwbacks to the 1960s counterculture.” (At the time, Gingrich himself was engaged in an extramarital affair with a House staffer two decades his junior.) Aldrich’s disgust at gay staffers, at the president’s supposed affairs, and at the first lady’s disrespect for her husband poured forth on nearly every page. In this respect, Aldrich had a kindred spirit on the White House staff. They spoke nearly every day, and they kept in touch after he retired. This former colleague watched the success of Aldrich’s book with pride—and more than a little envy. And Linda Tripp decided to follow in Gary Aldrich’s footsteps.