A Vast Conspiracy (50 page)

Suddenly, on Monday, Clinton had a simple message for the press corps: Prove it. That, it turned out, was going to be more difficult than it appeared. The president’s finger-waving challenge occurred at just about the time the main sources for the previous week’s disclosures—Paula
Jones’s lawyers—were tapped out. The Jones team basically knew only what Linda Tripp had told them; and by January 26, the lawyers had leaked all of her best material—the semen-stained dress, the phone sex, the exchanges of gifts. (Lucianne Goldberg had passed these same stories to the tabloids.) And Tripp, of course, knew only what Lewinsky had told her about the relationship. There wasn’t much corroborative evidence in late January 1998. The infamous dress was still hidden and would not appear for seven more months. The reports about eyewitnesses to White House trysts were simply erroneous. In a purely cynical sense, it was precisely the right time for Clinton to tell this extraordinary public lie.

Like every other White House aide, Sidney Blumenthal did not know for sure that Clinton was lying about Lewinsky, but as a former reporter, Blumenthal did recognize the brief moment of opportunity that beckoned for the Clinton forces. Press and public interest in the embryonic scandal remained intense, but Clinton’s enemies found themselves, for the moment, without new merchandise to sell to reporters. What would fill the void left by the stanched leaks from the Jones lawyers? Blumenthal had an idea, which he shared with the first lady as she spent Monday night at the Waldorf before her appearance on the
Today
show.

At that moment, no one was more important to Bill Clinton’s political future than his wife. Much later, after the president admitted he had been sexually involved with Lewinsky, many of the Clintons’ adversaries suggested that Mrs. Clinton knew all along that he had lied to the public about the relationship. According to this theory, Hillary had backed up her husband’s lies so that they both might cling to power. The evidence suggests otherwise. People who spoke to her during this period recalled that she expressed only passionate support for, and belief in, her husband. Moreover, for Mrs. Clinton to believe that the affair had taken place would be to acknowledge an extraordinary betrayal, and a public humiliation on a grand scale. What human being, given the option, wouldn’t try to avoid such a fate? In light of her husband’s track record, of course, one can imagine that the first lady harbored suspicions about him. But no one glimpsed any hesitancy in those first few days.

Indeed, Mrs. Clinton’s certainty about the falsehood of the accusations against her husband made her all the more receptive to Blumenthal’s message. It was a version of a conversation the former reporter and the first lady had had many times. Since the Lewinsky story broke, Blumenthal said, the press had so far focused on the president’s behavior to the exclusion of
all other subjects. But he asserted the real story was something very different. The press had to see that “the right wing,” not the president, bore responsibility for this scandal. As of the morning of January 27, Mrs. Clinton was the most important character from whom no one had heard. This was a sex scandal, and her posture as a wronged—or supportive—wife might make all the difference to her husband.

The interview on the
Today
show had been scheduled for more than a month. The first lady’s staff had booked her for the morning of the State of the Union address to talk about the “national treasures” initiative, a historic preservation project that her husband would be mentioning briefly in his speech that night. In the years since her health-care proposal had imploded, Mrs. Clinton had been relegated to softer, more traditional first-lady projects like this one. But with her husband embroiled in a sex scandal, Hillary Clinton would return to a pivotal role in his administration. She knew the stakes for this first interview, and she reveled in the action. By five-thirty on the morning of Tuesday, January 27, a squadron of television satellite trucks had set up outside Rockefeller Center merely to catch the first lady’s arrival at the NBC studio.

In the makeup room, at about six-thirty, Mrs. Clinton was relaxed and confident as she was welcomed by Jeff Zucker, the executive producer of
Today
. “You must be the smartest producer in America to have booked me for today,” she told him. She greeted Matt Lauer, the coanchor, with words of sympathy for Katie Couric, whose husband had died of cancer the previous weekend.

“On Close-Up this morning,” said Lauer, at the top of the broadcast, “the first lady of the United States, Hillary Rodham Clinton.” Lauer began by noting that the interview had indeed been scheduled several weeks earlier, and then said, “We appreciate you honoring the commitment, even in light of recent events. Thank you very much.

“There has been a question on the minds of a lot of people in this country, Mrs. Clinton, lately, and that is what is the exact nature of the relationship between your husband and Monica Lewinsky? Has he described that relationship in detail to you?”

“Well, we’ve talked at great length,” she said. “And I think as this matter unfolds, the entire country will have more information. But we’re right in
the middle of a rather vigorous feeding frenzy right now. People are saying all kinds of things, putting out rumor and innuendo. And I have learned over the last many years being involved in politics, and especially since my husband first started running for president, that the best thing to do in these cases is just to be patient, take a deep breath, and the truth will come out. But there’s nothing we can do to fight this firestorm of allegations that are out there.”

Lauer said that Clinton had told the American people what the relationship was not. “Has he described to you what it was?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Clinton said. “And we’ll find that out as time goes by, Matt. But I think the important thing now is to stand as firmly as I can and say that, you know, that the president has denied these allegations on all counts, unequivocally.…”

Lauer turned to one of the specific allegations. Had the president given Lewinsky gifts?

Mrs. Clinton said it was possible. “I mean, I’ve seen him take his tie off and hand it to somebody, you know.… I’ve known my husband for more than twenty-five years, and we’ve been married for twenty-two years, and the one thing I always kid him about is that he never meets a stranger. He is kind, he is friendly, he tries to help people who need help, who ask for help.” Here Mrs. Clinton was hinting at the explanation that her husband had given her and Blumenthal on the first day—that he was ministering to a troubled young woman. Then, in the course of the same answer, the first lady started to try to steer the conversation in the direction she wanted it to go. “So I think everybody ought to just stop a minute here and think about what we’re doing,” she said. “I’m very concerned about the tactics that are being used and the kind of intense political agenda at work here.”

“I want to ask about Ken Starr in a second,” Lauer replied, and then after a few questions about whether Mrs. Clinton knew Lewinsky (“No”), Vernon Jordan’s role (“I just can’t describe to you how outgoing and friendly” he is), and whether her husband would apologize for again causing pain in their marriage (“No. Absolutely not, and he shouldn’t”), Mrs. Clinton had a chance to say what she felt about the investigation.

“This is what concerns me,” she said. “This started out as an investigation of a failed land deal. I told everybody in 1992, ‘We lost money.’ People said, ‘It’s not true, you know, they made money. They have money in a Swiss bank account.’ Well, it was true. It’s taken years, but it was true. We
get a politically motivated prosecutor who is allied with the right-wing opponents of my husband, who had literally spent four years looking at every telephone—”

“Spent $30 million,” Lauer interjected.

“—more than that, now. But looking at every telephone call we’ve made, every check we’ve ever written, scratching for dirt, intimidating witnesses, doing everything possible to try to make some accusation against my husband.”

“We’re talking about Kenneth Starr,” Lauer said, “so let’s use his name, because he is the independent counsel.”

“But it’s the whole operation,” she replied. “It’s not just one person. It’s an entire operation.… I do believe that this is a battle. I mean, look at the very people who are involved in this, they have popped up in other settings. This is the great story here, for anybody who is willing to find it and write about it and explain it, is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president. A few journalists have kind of caught on to it and explained it, but it has not yet been fully revealed to the American public. And, actually, you know, in a bizarre sort of way, this may do it.”

The phrase “vast right-wing conspiracy” created an immediate sensation and quickly became probably the best-known utterance by a first lady in the history of the United States. Yet there was nothing new about Mrs. Clinton’s feelings on the subject. In February 1994, just as the Whitewater story was heating up, the first lady gave an interview to Meryl Gordon, of
Elle
magazine, in which she said, “Look, I know what this is about. This is a well-organized and well-financed attempt to undermine my husband and, by extension, myself, by people who have a different political agenda or have another personal and financial reason for attacking us.” Four years later, she felt the same way.

But was it a fair critique of the president’s adversaries, to call them a “vast right-wing conspiracy”? To the extent the word “conspiracy” suggested illegal behavior, Mrs. Clinton’s remark was not warranted. At that point, there was no evidence that anyone around either Paula Jones or Kenneth Starr broke the law. Nor were the anti-Clinton efforts centrally coordinated. Many of the participants in Mrs. Clinton’s conspiracy—say, Cliff Jackson and the elves, or Lucianne Goldberg and Starr himself—did not know one another at all. As for “vast,” the central players in the effort to bring down Clinton could probably all have fit in a single school bus.
Moreover, the claim ignored the fact that the president brought many of his problems on himself, especially by conducting his disastrous relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Parsed in this way, Mrs. Clinton’s famous phrase did not exactly hold up.

But the charge had—and has—the unmistakable ring of truth. The Paula Jones and Whitewater investigations existed only because of the efforts of Clinton’s right-wing political enemies. People who hated the Clintons initiated these projects and sustained them through many years. To put it another way, there was no one of importance behind either the Starr investigation or the Paula Jones case who was not already a dedicated political adversary of the Clintons. There was scarcely, say, a single prominent Democrat or Clinton supporter who was convinced by the evidence to change sides. The evidence simply reinforced existing political orientations. It was, above all, a story of political passions being played out on a legal stage. In this respect, there was indeed a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to get the president.

Still, Mrs. Clinton’s view neglected an important, and troubling, point. Her outrage about the conspiracy presupposed a belief that there was something extraordinary about the use of the legal system to achieve political aims. In a world where, thanks largely to Democrats like the Clintons, the legal system had taken over the political system, the existence of this conspiracy was business as usual. At a time when lawsuits were replacing elections as weapons of political change, it was not surprising that Clinton’s enemies chose to attack him the way they did. All they were doing was using the tools of the contemporary political trade.

Since Mrs. Clinton’s phrase became a piece of Americana, the importance of her adjacent challenge to journalists had been largely forgotten. The reason she was talking about a “vast right-wing conspiracy” was to appeal to journalists to look into Starr’s background and that of his associates. Sidney Blumenthal had not come up with the famous four words—Mrs. Clinton did that herself—but he had urged her to goad the reporters covering the story. The fever of first disclosures was breaking. Something else had to take its place. “This is the great story here,” Mrs. Clinton had promised. Within a few days, Blumenthal made it his mission to midwife that story to life.

After her appearance on
Today
, though, Mrs. Clinton had to return to Washington and join her husband for the State of the Union address that evening. Her defense of her husband and attack on his pursuers had electrified
the Clintons’ staff and friends—and, it appeared, the first lady herself. On the subject of the investigation, the president had been muzzled by his lawyers, reduced, during a photo opportunity with the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, to asserting vaguely that “the American people have a right to get answers. I’d like for you to have more rather than less, sooner rather than later.” Mrs. Clinton, on the other hand, had for the moment replaced him as the political soul of the family—the combatant, the savior, the indispensable ally in the strategy for survival. Mrs. Clinton was still flush from her triumph in New York when she returned on Tuesday afternoon to join Harry Thomason’s vigil in the solarium.