A Vast Conspiracy (47 page)

Ginsburg persuaded Emmick to put Monica on the telephone, and her new lawyer instructed her simply to leave the hotel and go home. Along with her mother, who had arrived by that point, that was just what Monica did.

The following morning, Saturday, January 17, Ginsburg flew to Washington, and Monica picked him up at the airport. From there they drove to
the Hay-Adams Hotel, across the street from the White House, where they spent three hours discussing Lewinsky’s situation. One thing Ginsburg knew for sure was that Monica shouldn’t talk to anyone—not the president, not Betty Currie, and not the prosecutors (at least before he obtained immunity for her). That evening, Monica ignored her lawyer’s advice and did return one of Currie’s pages, but that was when the president’s secretary was too tired to talk. The following day, when Currie tried seven times to prompt a phone call from her, Lewinsky did not answer.

The story percolated, just beneath the surface, for one more day, the King holiday on Monday. At this point, Drudge had basically turned over his site to Lucianne Goldberg, who was giving him new material every few hours. Drudge became the first person to go public with the name Monica Lewinsky, and then he reported that Lewinsky had filed an affidavit in the Paula Jones case denying a “sexual relationship with President Clinton.” At one point, however, on that frenetic Monday, Goldberg and Drudge got their signals crossed.

The headline on one Drudge dispatch was
CONTROVERSY SWIRLS AROUND TAPES OF FORMER WHITE HOUSE INTERN, AS STARR MOVES IN
. This was a major development, because it was the first suggestion that the Lewinsky matter had potential criminal ramifications and that Starr was investigating. Drudge was on to the story of his life, and though he wished Clinton ill, he was more interested in generating scoops than protecting Starr’s investigation. Goldberg, on the other hand, had a broader perspective and a deeper political and personal animus.

“Take that goddamn story down!” Goldberg shouted at Drudge on the phone. The news that Starr was involved would deprive the prosecutor of the element of surprise. (Ginsburg, who was visiting the Starr offices on Monday, recalled prosecutors passing around printouts of the
Drudge Report
and despairing about the leak of their investigation.)

Drudge’s news flash about Starr had been posted for only twenty minutes, so he did take it down overnight. But on Tuesday, Drudge saw that events were moving so fast that he said to himself, Fuck her—let’s run it. Drudge’s transmission actually anticipated the central controversy about the new area within Starr’s jurisdiction. “ ‘Starr is not on the bimbo beat,’ one source close to the situation told the
Drudge Report
late Tuesday. ‘He’s looking at a potential for obstruction of justice charges.’ … The development
has completely consumed high-level Washington, with Starr’s investigators working past midnight in recent days.… Developing …”

At around nine in the evening on Tuesday, January 20, a White House lawyer named Lanny Breuer was sitting at his desk addressing invitations to his wife’s fortieth-birthday party. Breuer was in charge of handling the legal aspects of the manifold congressional and criminal investigations of the White House—mostly on campaign finance (which was still a relatively hot topic) but also on the dying embers of the Starr investigation. The phone rang with a call from Wolf Blitzer, of CNN.

“Have you heard anything about an intern?”

Unlike many people at the White House, Breuer did not read the
Drudge Report
. (Drudge enjoyed pointing out that his site received 2,600 visits from White House staffers in the twelve hours after his first Lewinsky dispatch.) Breuer couldn’t help Blitzer … but then about ten minutes later the White House lawyer’s pager nearly overheated with calls.

The same thing was happening all over Washington. Scores of reporters had spent the day in a blind sprint to catch up to the disclosures that Goldberg had been feeding Drudge for the past three days. The prosecutors in the Starr office had been saying nothing, relying on the increasingly forlorn hope that they might still arrange for controlled telephone calls to their chief targets. But the Jones lawyers were emboldened by the possibility of an obstruction of justice investigation based on their lawsuit. Above all, they wanted Clinton destroyed, which a new criminal probe might accomplish. The Jones lawyers—not the Starr prosecutors—served as leakers-in-charge.

Chris Vlasto, the ABC producer who had dined with the Jones team on the night of the deposition, called Bob Bennett at home on Tuesday night and told him there were tapes of Lewinsky. At first, Bennett was so distraught he could scarcely mutter a single question: “How bad?”

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.