A Vast Conspiracy (49 page)

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.

The Thomasons themselves had an even worse time of it. Harry stumbled into what became Travelgate, by suggesting that an aviation-consulting company in which he had a small interest might provide a better deal for the White House. Two civil suits against Harry for his role in Travelgate were dismissed, and Starr’s prosecutors never even questioned him in the matter, but the issue further soured the Thomasons on Washington—and the city’s establishment on them. The travel-office debacle broke in the press during the same week in 1993 as the infamous presidential haircut aboard Air Force One, in Los Angeles. It was Christophe, the hairdresser for the cast of
Hearts Afire
, who gave the haircut, and it was Thomason who introduced Christophe to the Clintons and hired the hairdresser under a “personal services contract.” Contrary to press reports at the time, the haircut did not delay air traffic, and Harry was in Florida when it occurred. But placing Christophe in the president’s entourage was a perfect opening for the president’s critics to mock him as an elitist masquerading as a populist.

By 1998, the Thomasons were pretty thoroughly embittered about Washington, and like their friends in the White House, Harry and Linda shared a heartfelt contempt for the entire metropolis of prosecutors and pundits. Harry Thomason said not long after the story broke, “We’ve had a slow-motion assassination in process for some time. Once everybody on our side falls in, this is war. Never give them a break. Never give them one inch. Once you finally get that through your head, then you have to get out and fight this every way you can.

“My grandfather used to say that the Bible said when someone hits you, you turn the other cheek,” Thomason went on, “but after that, you deck him.”

Thomason arrived in Washington on the rainy night of Thursday, January 22, and around midnight he and the president took Buddy for a long walk around the White House grounds. Thomason knew enough about criminal investigations to refrain from asking Clinton any direct questions about his involvement with Lewinsky, but the president conveyed the same message to his friend that he had to his staff—that he was being hounded for his fatherly interest in the girl. More than that, though, Clinton saw himself as the victim of an unparalleled effort at personal destruction. The conversation between the two men continued, on and off, for three more days, as Thomason accompanied the Clintons for a tense weekend at Camp David. There the Catoctin Mountain air was perfumed with the scent of old grudges, as Harry traced the current crisis to villains of their shared past. (For months, Thomason explained the president’s troubles with the phrase “It’s all Arkansas politics.”) As the cabin fire crackled, they talked of Cliff Jackson, who had midwifed the Paula Jones suit and Whitewater investigations, and of Sheffield Nelson, Clinton’s 1990 gubernatorial opponent, who had first nudged the stories about Juanita Broaddrick and other women toward a public stage.

By the end of the weekend, though, Thomason began to sense a shift in momentum. On the Sunday talk shows, Clinton’s supporters began their effort to change the subject from the president’s behavior to that of the prosecutor. James Carville, on
Meet the Press:
“This started out as a $40,000 land deal that lost money, and about $50 million and five years later, after nobody could find anything, we’re wiring up people in hotels and feeding them whiskey trying to get them to talk and everything else. This is a scuzzy investigation.” Rahm Emanuel, on
Face the Nation:
“The only thing that matters is the truth as it pertains to two questions. Did he have a sexual relationship? And did he ask her to lie? The answer to those questions is no and no.”

Now all that remained was for Clinton himself to resume the offensive. On Sunday night, January 25, Thomason returned with the Clintons to their residence at the White House, where Harold Ickes, the equally combative former deputy chief of staff, joined them in the solarium. (A news junkie, Thomason was happiest with one eye scanning the all-news television stations and the other browsing the political web sites. Mrs. Clinton, on the other hand, refused to watch any television news during this period,
so Harry was constantly turning the television in the solarium on and off depending on whether Hillary was in the room.) At this point, Thomason began leaning on the president to make a stronger denial than he had with Lehrer the previous Wednesday.

“You know, you shouldn’t wait any longer,” Thomason told Clinton. “You should make a strong statement at the first opportunity. There was nothing wrong with what you said last week. It was the way you said it.” Ickes concurred—and aides were sent to search for the right moment in the president’s schedule. Since the State of the Union message was just forty-eight hours away, and the frenzy showed no sign of abating, there wasn’t much time.

It was after midnight, early Monday morning, when the phone rang in the Washington hotel room of Bill White, the president of the C. S. Mott Foundation. White was scheduled to speak at a ceremony in the Roosevelt Room, at ten-thirty that morning, to showcase an after-school child-care program that the president would be lauding before Congress on Tuesday. Earlier, White had been told that Vice President Gore and the first lady would be presiding.

“There has been a slight change in plans,” White was told.

“Thank you. Thank you and good morning,” Hillary Clinton said, as the applause died down. “Please be seated. Welcome to the White House.” There was a slight edge to her smile when she added, “And I’m especially pleased to see in the audience so many people who care so much about education and child care.” As the first lady knew, few of the fifty or so people who had squeezed into the room were thinking much about child care on the morning of Monday, January 26.

True, the president’s supporters had finally started to put up a fight, but the rain of new disclosures had continued to fall on the White House. On Saturday, ABC had independently confirmed, through other sources, what Goldberg had fed to Drudge earlier in the week: that “Lewinsky says she saved—apparently as a kind of souvenir—a navy-blue dress with the president’s semen stain on it.” On Sunday, there were the first broadcast reports that someone—unnamed—had witnessed an intimate encounter between Clinton and Lewinsky. This prompted both of the New York tabloids, the
News
and the
Post
, to trumpet the same headline across their front pages on Monday morning:
CAUGHT IN THE ACT
. On their Sunday shows, Tim
Russert, of NBC, had put Clinton’s chances of survival in office at “fifty-fifty at best,” and Sam Donaldson, of ABC, wondered if the president would last out the week.

“This morning we come together to hear about the president’s plans to strengthen education,” Mrs. Clinton gamely went on. “This afternoon, I will be visiting a model program in Harlem.…” As the minutes passed with excruciating slowness, Mrs. Clinton turned the floor over to Richard Riley, the secretary of education, then to Bill White, of the Mott Foundation, then on to a local couple whose children had taken advantage of the after-school program, and then on to the vice president, who thanked everyone for coming—especially Senators Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, and Chris Dodd, who were seated directly in front of the lectern. Finally, after close to an hour, Vice President Gore said, “I am very pleased to introduce America’s true education president and the greatest champion of working parents and working families that the United States of America has ever known: President Bill Clinton.”

The small crowd jumped to their feet and offered a nervous, almost frantic cheer for the embattled president. Clinton said “Thank you” fourteen times before he could continue. The president then spoke easily for about ten minutes about the after-school program and the other education proposals he would be raising the following evening in the State of the Union address. He spoke of reducing class size; teaching every eight-year-old to read; hooking up classrooms and libraries to the Internet—the kind of popular, small-bore initiatives on which he had built the revival of his presidency. “Now I have to go back to work on my State of the Union speech,” Clinton said, “and I worked on it till pretty late last night.”

Then the president looked down and paused. No one—no one—knew what he was going to say next. Not his wife, not the vice president, not Harry Thomason, who was watching Clinton’s remarks on a video monitor in an office down the hall in the West Wing. Nine days earlier, he had given sworn testimony in the Paula Jones case that he did not have a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. But according to the press, there were semen stains! Eyewitnesses! What was he going to say?

For the first time, Clinton leaned forward on the small lectern, inched closer to the microphone, and began in a soft voice that grew louder with each word: “But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I’m going to say this again.”

At this moment, Clinton stood up straight and raised his right index
finger nearly to his chin, and then pumped it four times as he uttered the following sentence: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” Clinton blinked awkwardly after saying “that woman”; he later told Thomason he had used the phrase because, in the stress of the moment, he had momentarily forgotten Lewinsky’s name.

Another jab of the finger, this time hitting the lectern in front of him: “I never told anybody to lie, not a single time, never.”

Jab, again banging the wood: “These allegations are false.”

At this point, Clinton was moving his arm so much that the camera operator had to widen the shot to make sure he remained in the frame.

One more: “Now I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you.”

As the president walked away, the applause was more stunned than joyous.

For her part, Mrs. Clinton left the Roosevelt Room to gather her belongings for her trip to New York to talk about child care. She planned to spend the night at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and then, the following morning, appear on the
Today
show.

Clinton’s statement had its biggest impact in newsrooms. Up to that point, the Lewinsky story had been careening as if down a hill, picking up momentum each day. Each new disclosure made Clinton look worse; every new story made it appear more likely that the president had been sexually involved with the intern and had obstructed justice in the Jones case. Clinton’s forced departure from office seemed, in this moment, almost inevitable. On Saturday, Wolf Blitzer of CNN reported from the White House lawn that Clinton aides were “talking among themselves about the possibility of a resignation.” Several aides promptly chased Blitzer across the grass to tell him he was wrong, but his report reflected the spirit of the moment. In the frenetic atmosphere of that first week, there appeared to be little risk to pushing the story as hard as possible. It seemed that if bad news for Clinton wasn’t true yet, it probably was going to be true soon, anyway.