A Vast Conspiracy

by Jeffrey Toobin

  When The Washington Post finally reached him later that evening, Bennett announced, “I smell a rat”—which was indignant but noncommittal. (The Washington Post and ABC News both posted their first reports about Lewinsky on their web sites just after midnight on Wednesday, January 21.)

  As Tuesday night wore on, Lanny Breuer figured the news was big enough to summon his boss, Charles Ruff, back to the office for an emergency conference with the scandal management team, including Podesta, Bruce Lindsey, Cheryl Mills, and Lanny Davis (who would be leaving the White House staff in a few days). Ruff, who had attended Clinton’s deposition, said he thought the questions about Lewinsky “came out of left field.” Clinton’s private lawyer, David Kendall, was brought in by speakerphone, and they decided to take the safest course—to say as little as possible.

  Clinton himself spoke to both Kendall and Bennett on Tuesday night and persisted in his denial of any sexual relationship with Lewinsky, just as he had in the deposition. Ruff said White House spokesmen could repeat this denial in the morning, but no one should go into any detail, not until they knew more about the whole story.

  The president left a wake-up call for 7:00 A.M. on Wednesday morning, and he called Kendall at 7:02. He then awakened his wife. Hillary Clinton later recalled that her husband woke her up with the words “You’re not going to believe this, but …”

  The news prompted a press frenzy without precedent in recent American history. The anchors of the network news programs scrambled onto private jets to return from Cuba, where they were covering the pope’s visit. Talk of resignation, impeachment, and an incipient political Armageddon enveloped Washington.

  All through that Wednesday morning, Clinton met with his staffers and assured them that there was nothing to the allegations. Clinton began most days with a nine o’clock meeting with his chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, and his two deputies, Podesta and Sylvia Matthews. At the meeting on January 21, the president took the initiative as soon as the trio gathered before him in the Oval Office. “I want you to know that I did not have sexual relationships with this woman Monica Lewinsky,” Bowles testified that Clinton said. “I did not ask anybody to lie. And when the facts come out, you’ll understand.” Others—including Mike McCurry, the press secretary—heard a similar recital from Clinton that day.

  The president had three interviews scheduled for Wednesday, all timed to preview his State of the Union address, which was to be given the following Tuesday. In keeping with the fevered atmosphere, all three major broadcast networks broadcast the first interview, with PBS’s Jim Lehrer, live. As Clinton walked into the Roosevelt Room at three-thirty, the atmosphere was funereal, and it leavened only slightly when his then new dog, Buddy, planted himself by the president’s chair and refused to leave. The president had to get up from his seat and drag Buddy out of the room.

  In answer to Lehrer’s question about Lewinsky, Clinton said, “There is not a sexual relationship, an improper sexual relationship, or any other kind of improper relationship.” Reporters immediately seized on the president’s peculiar use of the present tense, and in his subsequent two interviews—with the newspaper Roll Call and National Public Radio—Clinton made his position clear that there had been no sexual relationship in the past, either. Still, as in the first interview with Lehrer, he looked and sounded tentative and unsure.

  Only one member of the White House staff received a more thorough explanation of the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship on this tumultuous first day—or, as it turned out, ever. Sidney Blumenthal was only in his fifth month of government service, but he already occupied a special place in the firmament of people around the president and first lady.

  Blumenthal had been born fifty years earlier in Chicago, and had worked his entire professional life as a journalist until he joined the president’s staff. (For a few years early in Clinton’s presidency, we were colleagues on the staff of The New Yorker.) Ironically, perhaps, in light of his previous career, Blumenthal quickly asserted himself as perhaps the most partisan member of the Clintons’ circle. In a White House, and a capital, where people tried to slice issues into narrow, achievable objectives, Blumenthal saw the world in a broad sweep of ideological conflict between the Clintons and what he invariably called “the right wing.” He shared his views by conducting unnerving Socratic dialogues to hint of the larger forces that underlay his worldview. “Starr, right?” Blumenthal might say. “Leaks, okay? You know? Money from the Rutherford Institute, right? Get it? Right?” The specifics were frequently obscure, and his colleagues at the White House generally viewed him with a sort of wary amusement. Blumenthal’s predilection for conspiracy theories prompted his colleague Rahm Emanuel to nickname him “G.K.”—for Grassy Knoll.

  The first lady and Blumenthal talked often. After enduring six years of investigations about everything from the Whitewater investments to her health-care task force, Mrs. Clinton had grown bitter about the accusatory nature of politics in Washington. Blumenthal’s Manichaean outlook—his sense of the world as divided between the Clintons’ supporters and their implacable and obsessed enemies—had come increasingly to appeal to the president’s wife. To her, the Lewinsky story simply looked like the latest chapter in the unrelenting war on the Clintons.

  So it wasn’t surprising that on Wednesday, January 21, Mrs. Clinton took Blumenthal aside and explained her view of what had happened—that is, what the president had told her about Monica Lewinsky that morning. Monica was a troubled young woman, Mrs. Clinton said, and her husband had “ministered” to her. “He ministers to troubled people all the time,” she said. “He’s done it dozens if not hundreds of times. He does it out of religious conviction and personal temperament.

  “If you knew his mother,” she said to Blumenthal, “you would understand it.” (The first lady often attributed her husband’s behavior to the influence of his mother, as she did in a much-publicized interview with Talk magazine, in 1999.)

  The attack on the president from the Jones lawyers and the Starr prosecutors was simply political, Mrs. Clinton felt, and it was a shame that her husband was being punished for his good deeds.

  Late in the afternoon, after the president had completed the three interviews, he summoned Blumenthal to the Oval Office. According to his grand jury testimony, Blumenthal began by saying he had spoken earlier to the first lady and she had explained his relationship with Lewinsky. Clinton knew that they had spoken, and then he began to tell the same story, almost word for word, that Blumenthal had heard from Mrs. Clinton. He told of how he was being punished for ministering to this troubled woman.

  Blumenthal said he understood Clinton’s compassion, but “you’re president, and these troubled people can just get you in incredible messes, and you just—I know you don’t want to, but you have to cut yourself off from them.”

  “It’s very difficult for me to do that, given how I am,” Clinton said. “I want to help people.”

  Clinton told Blumenthal that Dick Morris, his political consultant and on-and-off Svengali, had called him earlier and said, “You know, Nixon could have survived Watergate if he had gone on television and said everything he had done wrong and got it all out in the beginning.”

  “What have you done wrong?” Blumenthal asked.

  “Nothing,” Clinton said. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “Well, then, that’s one of the stupidest ideas I’ve ever heard,” said Blumenthal, who despised Morris in any event.

  The president then gave Blumenthal an account of his relationship with Lewinsky. “Monica Lewinsky came at me and made a sexual demand on me,” Blumenthal later testified that Clinton had said. He rebuffed her. “I’ve gone down that road before, I’ve caused pain for a lot of people, and I’m not going to do that again.” Lewinsky had responded to Clinton’s rejection by threatening him. She said she was known as a “stalker” by her peers—she hated that—and if she said they had actually had an affair, she wouldn’t be known as the stalker anymore.

&
nbsp; “I feel like a character in a novel,” Clinton said. “I feel like somebody who is surrounded by an oppressive force that is creating a lie about me, and I can’t get the truth out. I feel like a character in the novel Darkness at Noon.”

  This remarkable conversation prompted a duel of literary analogies. Clinton thought of himself as Nicholas Rubashov, the hero (and victim) of Arthur Koestler’s parable about Stalinist totalitarianism. Much later, Blumenthal would cast himself as Nick Carraway, who ferried messages between the doomed lovers in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Yet these selections seem rather more pretentious than the circumstances warranted. Having damaged his relationship with his girl, then compounded his troubles by lying to her about it, the boy tries to work his way back into her good graces by bamboozling her best friend, too. It was a theme played out regularly in the pages of Archie comics.

  But Clinton had a political, as well as romantic, crisis on his hands, and, as he told Blumenthal, he had turned for advice to Dick Morris. This garrulous New Yorker had flitted in and out of Clinton’s life since 1977, advising on campaign strategy, wearing out his welcome, then being summoned again in moments of crisis. He was exiled again after his exposure, on the eve of the 1996 Democratic National Convention, as a patron of a Washington prostitute, but in this moment of great peril, Clinton turned to him once more.

  “You poor son of a bitch,” Morris told the president in their first conversation of the day.

  “I didn’t do what they said I did,” Clinton replied, according to Morris’s later testimony. “I’ve tried to shut myself down, sexually, I mean. But sometimes I slipped up, and with this girl, I just slipped up.” Morris and the president then agreed that Morris should conduct a poll on public attitudes about the Lewinsky matter. Morris said he would call back late that night with the results.

  Morris then typed up four single-spaced pages of questions and faxed them to Action Research, a polling operation in Melbourne, Florida. He knew few facts at this point and decided to do a poll based on a worst-case scenario. In the key questions in his survey, he asked the respondents to assume that Clinton had had the affair with Lewinsky, had lied about it himself, and had asked Monica to lie about it as well. In light of all this, only 47 percent would want him out of office. If Clinton pleaded guilty to the crime of obstruction of justice, only 56 percent would want him out of office. The questions were fairly garbled, but it appeared that adultery alone would pose relatively little problem for the voters—and lying about adultery would only make it somewhat worse.

  Morris called Clinton at about 1:15 A.M. on Thursday morning to tell him about the poll. All in all, the news wasn’t too bad for the president, but Morris seemed to misread the results. Morris said he thought the voters weren’t ready for any kind of confession.

  “Well,” Clinton said, “we just have to win, then.”

  In those first few days, Clinton marinated in his sense of victimhood. To a handful of close advisers, he mentioned a file that he kept in his desk in the Oval Office—what the president called his “Richard Jewell File,” named for the Atlanta security guard who was falsely accused of the bombing at the Olympic Games in 1996. Clinton spoke often of Jewell. In November 1996, long before the Lewinsky story broke, Clinton compared himself to Jewell at a press conference in Australia. “I would urge you to remember what happened to Mr. Jewell, in Atlanta,” Clinton said, “remembering what has happened to so many of the accusations over the last four years made against me that turned out to be totally baseless.” Clinton’s Jewell File contained some of the most outlandish accusations against him—and a handful of stories that pointed out the way he had been persecuted.

  Clinton circulated one item from the Jewell File to at least one aide, an op-ed piece from The New York Times that the president had saved for more than three years. Written by H. Brandt Ayers, the editor of the local paper in Anniston, Alabama, the article was headlined “The Death of Civility.” Ayers denounced “the hatred of unprecedented violence being directed at the White House … and the well-financed personal industries dedicated to destroying Mr. Clinton.… The unsubstantiated allegations of sexual misconduct by Mr. Clinton are nothing but a red herring.” Ayers’s theme was that while all presidents were criticized, the level of antagonism toward Clinton was unprecedented.

  Clinton’s complaints made interesting fodder for debate, but as the week ended, his staff in the White House faced a more immediate problem—what to say on the Sunday talk shows. Through Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, and campaign finance, White House aides had developed a fairly well-tuned strategy for scandal management. They did their best to stay in front of the stories, to release damaging material themselves, and to make sure there were no surprises.

  But as Rahm Emanuel brought his baby son to the White House on Saturday, January 24, those options weren’t available. Bruce Lindsey, John Podesta, Paul Begala, and others floated in and out of the West Wing asking the same questions. What can we say? If Clinton and Lewinsky did not have a sexual relationship, what kind of relationship did they have? What did the president say to her about her testimony in the Paula Jones case? And did he help her find a job in New York? No one knew the answers—and the lawyers, Kendall and Ruff preeminently, weren’t letting anyone ask questions. James Carville, stuck in a hotel room in San Francisco and scheduled to appear on Meet the Press, struggled with the same question. What can we say? Should the message be contrition, caution, magnanimity, something else? What can we say?

  But as Zach Emanuel was passed from one set of shoulders to another, his noisy presence a welcome distraction on a difficult day, the answer finally came into focus. It was obvious in retrospect, but it didn’t seem that way at the time. In a narrow sense, their answer was the product of six years of defending Bill Clinton. They did what they knew. But from a broader perspective, the White House response to the Lewinsky allegations represented a logical culmination of changes in the political culture that had been occurring for decades. Politics had degenerated into litigation by other means. You push us, we push you. For the White House, the strategy would boil down to a single word.

  Attack.

  14

  “I Guess That Will Teach Them”

  As Harry Thomason cradled the television remote control in his office on the CBS lot—just downstairs from Jerry Seinfeld’s digs and a few blocks from Matt Drudge’s former enclave in the gift shop—he did not like what he saw. Thomason was watching Clinton’s interview with Jim Lehrer, on Wednesday, January 21, and he thought the president looked tentative and unsteady. Thomason told his wife, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, of his concerns, and she said, “You need to go to Washington.” Harry then put a call through to the first lady, who had only one question for him.

  “When can you get here?”

  Harry took the first plane to Washington on Thursday morning. He moved into a third-floor bedroom in the residence area of the White House and didn’t leave for thirty-four days. Linda joined him about halfway through his stay.

  The son of a grocer in a small town in southern Arkansas, Harry worked as a high school art teacher and a football coach, but he wanted to make movies, so one day he checked out a book on filmmaking from the local library. By the early 1970s he was making commercials and low-budget movies in Little Rock. In 1974, he obtained the rights to a Reader’s Digest story about a terminally ill athlete and hitched a ride on a freight plane to Los Angeles; in time, he started producing for television. Linda’s tale was only somewhat less unlikely. The daughter of a politically liberal lawyer who moved from Arkansas to southern Missouri, she also went west, taught school briefly in Watts, and discovered a gift for writing when she and a friend dashed off a script for the M*A*S*H TV series. At the time Clinton was elected president, the couple had three situation comedies on the air—Hearts Afire, Evening Shade, and, their biggest hit, Designing Women. With Linda doing almost all the writing, Harry directing, and both of them producing, they were reported to be making $300,
000 a week.

  Along the way, the Thomasons became devoted friends of the Clintons. They never had formal roles in any of the Clinton campaigns, but Harry had stage-managed several of the most important public moments in the president’s career, including his walk to Madison Square Garden during the 1992 convention and his train ride across the Midwest before the 1996 convention, in Chicago. For her part, Linda produced The Man from Hope, a Capra-esque documentary about Clinton that was shown at the 1992 convention, and a sequel that was shown at the convention four years later. The Thomasons had no political or social ambitions of their own in Washington—only a ferocious determination to protect their friends in the White House.

  In this respect, then, it wasn’t surprising that the first lady would summon Harry when her husband was in political extremis. But the move symbolized something larger, too. By early 1998, the Clintons had lived in Washington for more than five years and made precisely one close friend in the city. But that ally, Vernon Jordan, was himself implicated in the unfolding scandal, so the Clintons had to call across the country for shoulders to lean on. The leaders of the political and journalistic establishment never had much use for the Clintons (and vice versa), and this hostility contributed to the atmosphere that overtook the city almost overnight—that of a decorous lynching party.

  Indeed, the Thomasons may have unintentionally contributed to the Clintons’ social isolation. The couple had also served as impresarios of the president’s first inauguration ceremony, in 1993, and as part of the proceedings, Linda produced a five-minute film for the evening gala. To the strains of Frank Sinatra singing the Gershwin tune “They All Laughed,” the film featured a rapid-fire series of sound bites from Washington media figures during the 1992 campaign. One after another, Robert Novak, Fred Barnes, David S. Broder, and other journalists were shown dismissing Clinton as a “loser,” “unelectable,” and “dead meat.” The Thomasons regarded the film as a harmless needle at some puffed-up egos, but several of the targets and their friends regarded it as an act of war. The lingering controversy about the film may have reflected the thin skins of the Washington press corps more than any initial hostility on the part of the Thomasons, but it helped to poison the ambiance for the Clintons almost from day one.