A Woman in Charge (62 page)

As the Clintons prepared to travel to Virginia's funeral in Arkansas, Dole's office made public a letter he had written to Reno, pushing for a special prosecutor. “It is in the president's interest for you to stop hiding behind the fact that the Independent Counsel Act has not been reauthorized,” Dole wrote, though he had voted against reauthorizing the act when the Senate considered it in November.

White House aides and Democrats on Capitol Hill hastened to criticize Dole and other Republicans, including Gingrich, for the inappropriate timing of their attacks. “I just have to tell you…as the president goes home to bury his mother, to have the political opposition on the warpath, hammering away, raises all sorts of questions about what has happened in this town,” Gergen said on NBC's
Today
show. Senator David Pryor of Arkansas appeared genuinely stunned: the Senate was a collegial place, where members rarely criticized each other personally. “You know, I've never seen anything like this,” he told CNN. “In the name of human decency, it would appear to me that Robert Dole and his friends would allow the president of the United States and their family to bury his mother.”

Gergen had tapped into a central truth about the way war was fought in Washington. There were no days off from battle.

Dole's office now issued a statement criticizing Al Gore for using Virginia's death to stifle criticism of the conduct of the White House and the Clintons.

Of Hillary, Gergen noted later:

Clearly, she had internalized her anger over the years, resolving that she should put her energies into working even harder for their joint success. When she saw mistakes made by his team or by him, she couldn't hold back any longer. Her emotions boiled to the surface. She was also a sensitive, vulnerable woman, as I found. Weeks after our blowup over
The Washington Post
request for Whitewater documents, I agreed to defend the Clintons on NBC's
Today
show. I was trying to show I was a team player. Before going on live that morning, I had a call from Hillary. She and her husband were leaving that morning for his mother's funeral in Arkansas. I expressed sympathy for all she had gone through in recent months. As we talked, she started crying. “You can tell your friends at
The Post,
” she said, “that we've learned our lesson. We came here to do good things, and we just didn't understand so many things about this town. It's been so hard.” I murmured a few things and finally said, “I wish I could come over and give you a hug. I would give a lot to cheer you up.”…Looking back, I wish it had all turned out differently. They did come to Washington to do good things. They were not simply grasping for power. If their relationship had evolved in a different way over the years—or if he had been elected later in life—perhaps it would have been more settled and would not have spilled over into his presidency. They would never have attempted a co-presidency. As it was, they each paid a dreadful price in those days I saw them together. And there was worse still to come.

Kendall was due to arrive in Little Rock that evening for the funeral of the president's mother, on January 8. Wright said that she went to the Little Rock airport to meet his plane. “Kendall would not take the box of documents I had found from me…. I do not know [why]. To this day I don't know.” Not long after, however, the documents were air-expressed to Kendall by Betsey and stored with other records of the Clintons' at Williams & Connolly.

Eventually, Wright's legal fees, unrecompensed by the Clintons, ran to $650,000.

Meanwhile, with the question of a special prosecutor still up in the air, Hillary's opposition to allowing such an appointment hardened to the point of intransigence.

 

B
ILL AND
H
ILLARY
had thought that his tour of Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, beginning on Sunday, January 9, his first to the region as president, would produce many favorable foreign policy stories, pushing domestic scandals aside. They were wrong. Senator Pat Moynihan went on
Meet the Press
that Sunday and said Reno should appoint a special prosecutor. He urged the president to give up all papers related to Whitewater. “Turn over the papers. I don't care what your lawyer says. Turn them over. If there are things that are embarrassing, turn them over faster…. Presidents can't be seen to have any he sitation about any matter that concerns their propriety. And this is an honorable man. We have a fine president. He has nothing to hide.”

No defection from the ranks of Democrats could have been more damaging. Soon, eight other senators joined Moynihan's call, including Bill Bradley. Gergen, who was on the presidential trip—Hillary was in Washington—told reporters, “If it comes to a special counsel, then he'll be very cooperative,” Gergen said. “We've been cooperating with the Justice Department, and if there is a different investigative body, we'll cooperate with that—whatever the investigative body is.” The White House finally seemed to be softening its position.

Clinton stopped briefly in Kiev to meet with Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk in preparation for an agreement the United States, Russia, and Ukraine would sign the following week that would eliminate intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads directed from Ukraine at the United States. At a press conference later in the day, reporters demonstrated almost no interest in the agreement or the foreign policy aspects of the trip. They wanted Clinton to answer questions about Whitewater, Moynihan, and Dole. “I have nothing to say about that on this trip,” Clinton told them. When NBC's Pentagon reporter—on the trip because of its arms control implications—asked the president about Whitewater in a one-on-one interview, Clinton got up from his chair, turned off his microphone, and snapped, “You had your two questions. I'm sorry you're not interested in the trip.”

Clinton had had enough. On January 11, the Whitewater response team met in the Oval Office with Hillary and Kendall. Bill was on speakerphone from Prague. Years later, Hillary said, the scene had reminded her of a cartoon in which a man stood in front of two doors, one with a sign saying “Damned if you do,” the other saying “Damned if you don't.” It was obvious to Hillary that Bill was tired and still grieving over the loss of his mother. It was the just before dawn in Central Europe.

Ickes moderated, instructing Stephanopoulos to argue for a special prosecutor and Nussbaum to argue against. Stephanopoulos recalled years later that it was the only time he could remember being in the Oval Office without Clinton present. Before the meeting, he'd researched the work of a dozen previous independent counsels. He now pointed out to Clinton and the assembled group that few of the special prosecutors had brought indictments. He cited the investigation of President Carter and his brother regarding their ownership of a peanut warehouse, which concluded within six months and produced no indictments. “You've done nothing wrong,” Stephanopoulos said to the president. “This will all be over in six months. Health care is coming. Let's get this behind us.”

When Stephanopoulos finished, Nussbaum said he was still against turning over documents to the press, and he was still against asking Reno to appoint a special prosecutor. “I've lived with this institution,” he said. “It is an evil institution. The world has changed since Carter. Iran-contra lasted seven years. You will create a roving spotlight which will examine your friends and everyone you've ever had contact with.” When aides in the meeting argued that the inquiry could be limited to the Whitewater dealings in Arkansas, Nussbaum got agitated. “Mr. President, one year from now Bruce Lindsey will be under investigation. Your friends, your family will be chased to the ends of the earth.” At that moment it sounded to many in the room like hyperbole. In fact, Nussbaum was prescient.

Frustrated and exhausted, Clinton demanded an alternative. Nussbaum suggested the Clintons turn over every document to Congress and announce that they'd testify on Capitol Hill to get their side of the story out within a month. Stephanopoulos thought the idea was crazy and said so. Nussbaum countered, “If you create a special counsel, it will last as long as your presidency and beyond.” The debate was passionate and emotional, as aides, only too aware of the high stakes, interrupted each other and tried to get their points in. The president wanted to know what Hillary thought. She said that asking for the prosecutor would set a “terrible precedent,” capitulating to a media frenzy instead of holding to legal principle. But it remained his decision to make, she said. The president then asked to speak to Hillary and David Kendall alone. Bill told them he thought there was no other choice than to appoint a special prosecutor. He and Hillary had done nothing wrong, he said, and if they didn't it would completely smother their agenda. Hillary asked him to give it more thought. Bill said he had made up his mind.

Hillary went to Nussbaum's office the next morning to break the news to him. She hugged him and told him he had acquitted himself well. Nussbaum was obviously upset and disappointed by the decision. “This is a great tragedy,” he said. “Why are you going to put your head in that noose?”

 

N
USSBAUM DRAFTED
a letter to Attorney General Janet Reno saying that the president had asked him to request a special counsel to investigate the Whitewater matter. Its tone made clear he opposed the decision. Stephanopoulos went to the White House briefing room to explain the decision to reporters.

Reno, too, was disappointed. She believed that if Congress wanted an independent counsel to investigate, it should first reauthorize the lapsed statute; then a three-judge panel would choose a special prosecutor. Now she was charged with finding one. Quickly the name of Robert Bishop Fiske Jr. rose to the top of her list. He was known for his integrity, toughness, and, above all, his reputation for sifting through and evaluating the facts of a complicated case. Appointed a United States attorney for New York, he'd made a name for himself as an aggressive prosecutor. At sixty-three years of age, he was now a senior partner in the old-line Wall Street firm of Davis, Polk & Wardwell. Most important, he was a Republican.

Fiske flew to Washington on January 19, where he wrote his own charter for the job, outlining a broad jurisdiction that included the freedom to investigate any activity even tangentially related to Whitewater. It stated that the investigation would look into “whether any individuals or entities committed a violation of any federal criminal law relating in any way” to Bill and Hillary's relationship to Whitewater, Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, or Capital Management Services, a small investment firm owned by David Hale, the Arkansas judge indicted for fraud, that was created to help struggling businesses. The statement would allow Fiske to investigate anything that happened in the 1980s or during the presidency related to those companies, including the actions of White House aides who took Whitewater files from Vince Foster's office after his death. The investigation could now begin. “I want you to be completely independent,” Reno told him. “I don't expect to talk to you again until this is all over.”

On January 20, Reno announced his appointment and introduced him to the press. It was the first anniversary of the Clinton administration.

15

Truth or Consequences

“You know, they're not going to let up. They're just going to keep on coming.”

—Living History

W
ITH THE APPOINTMENT
of the special prosecutor, the Clinton administration really consisted of two White House enterprises: the one struggling to be a presidency, and the other a law firm and public relations office struggling to protect its clients and minimize the damage. When the two branches came together, the legal thicket intruded inexorably on governance. When Bill met in Washington in early March with Eduard Shevardnadze, the president of Georgia, to sign an arms control agreement, he was confronted by reporters with question after question about his wife's morality—not about foreign policy. It took all his self-control not to explode on-camera. “I'm telling you, the American people can worry about something else,” he told the press. “Her moral compass is as strong as anybody's in this country, and they will see that.”

Meanwhile, Peter Jennings devoted eighteen of twenty-two commercial-free minutes of his ABC
World News Tonight
broadcast to Whitewater, to “try and explain in one fell swoop the…jam that Bill and Hillary Clinton seem unable to get themselves out of.”

The first two sacrificial post-Foster casualties of Whitewater were Bernard Nussbaum and the undersecretary of the treasury Roger Altman. Both had tried to monitor the Resolution Trust Corporation “referrals” in which the Clintons were listed as potential “witnesses” in possible criminal action involving Madison Guaranty. Their object had been to protect Hillary and Bill by gaining knowledge about what the investigators were doing and thinking. Such oversight of a criminal investigation through executive branch back channels was hardly regular procedure, but did not violate the law, the prosecutor later affirmed. Nussbaum resisted resignation vigorously, but the president reluctantly concluded that fighting to save him would only make things worse. Altman was perhaps the brightest star in the Clinton entourage. Tall, telegenic, a fabulously successful investment banker and Clinton fund-raiser, he'd shepherded the passage of NAFTA and the economic plan on Capitol Hill, and had been expected to succeed Lloyd Bentsen as treasury secretary in the not-too-distant future. Instead, on Capitol Hill, Senator Alfonse D'Amato, the senior Republican on the Banking Committee, was gearing up for public hearings at which Altman would be the star witness. D'Amato made little secret of his desire to clean the Clintons' collective clock. Maggie Williams had been instrumental in urging Altman to reverse his original decision to recuse himself from the RTC matter. She, Lisa Caputo, and Mark Gearan had already been summoned to appear before Fiske's grand jury.

In an interview with
Elle
magazine that had been scheduled for months, Hillary was asked, “How do you counter the constant attacks?”

“You don't,” she said. “Since I know, in the end, nothing bad happened—and that's what everybody's going to know eventually, because they have yet to come forward with anything other than the wildest kind of paranoid conspiracies—you just don't pay much attention to it…. I'm not interested in spending my days falling into the trap that the fomenters of all this want us to, which is to become isolated and on the defensive and diverted. I'm not going to let that happen. Unfortunately, in today's climate, anyone can say anything about a person in public life, and it will get printed.”

“Are you really able to blow it off?” Hillary was asked.

“I blow most of it off. I get angry. I get confused about why people are doing what they do. I don't get up every day thinking destructively about others. I don't spend my hours plotting for somebody else's downfall. My feeling is, gosh there's more work that can be done, everybody ought to get out there and improve the health care system, and reform welfare and get guns out of the hands of teenagers.”

That Hillary, who had come to the White House expecting to be the president's biggest political asset, was becoming an albatross was evident at the Democratic National Committee's spring meeting on March 11. Those in attendance wore buttons that read “Don't Pillory Hillary” but, sotto voce, there were suggestions by influential leaders of the party that Hillary could help with damage control by explaining more forthrightly her role in Whitewater. “Her integrity and effectiveness are at stake,” said Lynn Cutler, then vice chairwoman of the DNC. “They are peeling away her ability to be what she is, which is our leader on the health care reform issue.”

Each day Ickes's special response team prepared a summary of its deliberations, which was sent to the first lady. Nussbaum's replacement as counsel to the president, Lloyd Cutler (no relation to Lynn), seventy-four years old and a pillar of the Washington legal establishment, recruited for the job by Vernon Jordan, wanted Hillary to turn over as many documents as possible. But she and Kendall wanted to make the special prosecutor wear himself out trying to get them, subpoenaing them one at a time to prevent him from establishing a daisy chain of witnesses.

For the first time, Republicans could see the first lady clearly in their sights. Senator D'Amato, who was scheduling some forty witnesses to appear at his banking committee hearings, suggested that Hillary owed a detailed explanation of her actions to the American public, and Bob Dole said he intended to force a vote in the Senate about whether more open-ended hearings should be held in Whitewater and other matters. Dole had something far grander in mind than the Banking Committee hearings: he was thinking along the lines of the Senate's investigation of Watergate.

Under this intensifying pressure, Hillary decided to sit for interviews with the three weekly news magazines and appeared, on March 13, 1994, on the three Sunday morning talk shows. Again she tried to make short shrift of the furor enveloping her. The appointment of the special prosecutor would lead to “people spending millions and millions of dollars [to] conclude we made a bad land investment.”

Her timing was dismal. Jeff Gerth had now discovered her commodities trades, and realized that the refusal of the Clintons to release their 1978–1979 tax returns must have been because they would show her $100,000 windfall—on her $1,000 investment with Red Bone. The
Times
's editor, Joseph Lelyveld, had called all the paper's investigative reporters to a meeting in January and set them loose on “the Clinton story.”

Almost no revelation that fell short of demonstrating an overtly criminal act could have been more damaging to Hillary than the
Times
front-page lead of March 18: “Top Arkansas Lawyer Helped Hillary Clinton Turn Big Profit; Commodities Trading in '70s Yielded $100,000.” Not for the first or last time, the White House response compounded the damage. Lisa Caputo was the unfortunate aide called upon by Hillary to provide background for the story. She was asked how Hillary, as a newcomer to the tricky commodities market, had managed to turn a huge profit (in unborn cows, no less) and knew when to quit. Caputo argued that Hillary had read
The Wall Street Journal
and had sought advice from “numerous people.” Gerth had mentioned one, Jim Blair. “There was no impropriety,” the White House insisted. “The only appearance [of it] is being created by
The New York Times.
”

 

H
ILLARY'S COMMODITIES
windfall dominated news coverage and gleeful Washington gossip for the next three weeks. The open wound was worsened by Webb Hubbell's abrupt resignation from the Justice Department the same week—it was guilt by association, but suggestive nonetheless. Newspaper accounts said that the Rose Law Firm planned to file a complaint with the Arkansas Bar Association because Hubbell allegedly overbilled clients and padded his expense account in excess of $500,000. That matter, too, had become part of Fiske's investigation. Hubbell gave her a plausible—to her at the time—explanation for his actions, and said the “misunderstanding” would blow over. She was inclined to believe her friend. But the events furthered the perception that the Clintons and their entourage had come up to the capital from a Southern cesspool. The stench hovered.

At a Democratic Party fund-raiser the night of Hubbell's resignation, Bill's temper flared and he put aside his planned remarks about creating jobs. Red-faced, his voice rising, he attributed the investigatory climate to the Republicans, who were “committed to a politics of personal destruction” and would rather criticize Hillary than develop their own health care plan.

Shortly thereafter, Bill scheduled a prime-time, full-scale news conference, hoping to calm the atmosphere.

“Have you taken any lessons from this ordeal, whether it's about the presidency, about the process, about the city, or anything?” he was asked.

“I think there is a level of suspicion here that is greater than that which I have been used to in the past. And I don't complain about it, but I've learned a lot about it. And that my job is to try to answer whatever questions are out there so I can get on with the business of the country. And I think I've learned a lot about how to handle that.

“I've also learned here that there may or may not be a different standard than I had seen in the past, [though] not of right and wrong.”

The press conference didn't work.

Hillary and her advisers decided it was essential for her to have her own press conference, at which she would answer all questions thrown at her. Her $100,000 profit-taking now public knowledge, Bill had agreed to release their tax returns for 1978–1979. The day before her press conference, the latest
Los Angeles Times
poll showed her approval rating had declined from 56 percent to 44 percent in the three months since January. Bill's had remained steady at 54 percent.

“I don't think she really wanted to do it at the beginning,” said a senior member of her staff, “but it was collectively decided between everybody—the West Wing and the East Wing—that she needed to face the charges. And so we went through this whole thing about trying to put together a press conference, and basically did it in the State Dining Room under the portrait of Lincoln, and she had on this pink suit. That's why we call it the Pink Press Conference…. And she basically stayed until almost every single last question was answered.” Thirty-four reporters asked questions and follow-ups. All the networks overrode their regular programming to provide live coverage.

Her answer to the first question about the commodities trading—was it hypocritical to condemn the 1980s as the decade of greed while she was milking cattle futures and investing in speculative land?—was classic Hillary-under-pressure: obsequious, well rehearsed, not quite right. There was a faint echo of Richard Nixon in his famous Checkers speech. Hugh Rodham had read his young daughter the stock tables from the
Chicago Tribune,
she said, and now Hillary carried on the tradition by studying the finance pages with Chelsea. “You know, I was raised to believe that every person had an obligation to take care of themselves and their family,” she said, preternaturally calm. She continued: “I don't think you'll ever find anything that my husband or I said that in any way condemns the importance of making good investments and saving or that in any way undermines what is the heart and soul of the American economy, which is risk-taking and investing in the future. What I think we were saying is that, like anything else, that can be taken to excess—when companies are leveraged into debt, when loans are not repaid, when pension funds are raided. You know, all of the things that marked the excess of the 1980s are things which we spoke out against. I think it's a pretty long stretch to say that the decisions that we made to try to create some financial security for our family and make some investments come anywhere near there…. We obviously wanted enough financial security to send our daughter to college and put money away for our old age and help our parents when we could.”

Later, she claimed to have been grateful for the questions, so she could put everything out in the open. She was asked if she believed that withholding information had “helped to create any impression that you were trying to hide something.”

“Yes, I do,” she answered. “And I think that is one of the things that I regret most, and one of the reasons why I wanted to do this…. I think if my father or mother said anything to me more than a million times, it was: ‘Don't listen to what other people say. Don't be guided by other people's opinions. You know, you have to live with yourself.' And I think that's good advice. But I do think that that advice and my belief in it, combined with my sense of privacy…led me to perhaps be less understanding than I needed to [be] of both the press and the public's interest, as well as [their] right to know things about my husband and me.”

Did she and Bill “ever look in the mirror and wish that you just never got into this?”—meaning the presidency.

“No, never, never. This is really a result of our inexperience in Washington,” she insisted. “I really did not fully understand everything that I wish now I had known”—including the need to keep the people informed by answering questions from reporters. (“I'm certainly going to try to be more sensitive to what you all need and what we need to give you.”) In terms of the difficulties of Whitewater, “I feel very confident about how this will all turn out. This is not a long-term problem or issue in any way.”

The final question was eerie. Richard Nixon, eighty-one, was in a deep coma after suffering a stroke three days earlier. “Considering what you've been through, do you have any greater appreciation of what Richard Nixon might have been going through?”

For the first time since she had entered the State Dining Room in her pink outfit, she seemed to be genuinely emotional. Her tears were visible on television, and her voice broke. “What I think we ought to be doing is praying for President Nixon,” she said. “And from my perspective, you know, it was a year ago April that my father died at the age of eighty-one, and so, you know, I'm just mostly thinking about his daughters right now.”