A Woman in Charge (71 page)

“And I said, ‘Sure it did, Bill.' I mean I reminded him who else was there, and there was just this silence.”

Wright did not believe Clinton was deliberately lying, but rather exhibiting a family trait: “He and his mother both have a fabulous ability to lock stuff away…to genuinely forget things.” This tendency was exactly the reason Wright had brought another person to the meeting with Bill in 1987—to have a witness to remind him.
^*23
She was convinced that the president was not coaching her to disavow something truthful. But she knew from what he was saying that Maraniss's book posed massive problems for him with Hillary, and for his lawyers as well.

“I never talked to Hillary about womanizing,” Wright explained years after the courthouse phone conversation. “Never, never, never! And it's something I feel very guilty about. That by calling her my friend I couldn't warn her before stuff hit her. I didn't. And it was a confusion between her as a friend, and the fact that I worked for him. There was no point in telling her about all of it…. I clearly took on a role of protecting her from him in his philandering, which certainly was an inappropriate role for a staff person. But I don't think I would have ever viewed it as inappropriate. It was what I was going to do. Period…. I guess my expectations to some degree differ between them because I worked for Bill at that point.”

As he read the galleys, Clinton wrote in the margins, apparently in preparation for meeting with his lawyers and members of the White House staff who would have to deal publicly with the book's revelations. “In his handwriting, it said: ‘This never happened.' Or, ‘I don't know why she makes this stuff up,'” recalled Wright, who was shown the materials in one of the numerous legal depositions at which she testified over the next five years. But in that first conversation, she held her ground.

Clinton, meanwhile, had summoned Dick Morris.

“Why did you talk to Maraniss? Can't I trust you anymore? Can't I trust
anybody
anymore?”

Morris was dumbfounded. Clinton was railing at him for telling Maraniss that they had worked together on negative campaign ads attacking Jim Guy Tucker. “That was in 1978,” he told the president.

“But he's now the governor!” Bill shouted.

“What the fuck do you care?”

“He controls the state police!”

That was the other legal problem the lawyers had identified. They feared that some of the troopers might testify that Clinton, as president, had held out the possibility of getting them federal jobs if they either didn't cooperate with or disavowed their conversations with Brock and other reporters. Serious questions of federal law were involved. It was possible that some of the troopers, who still worked for the incumbent governor of Arkansas, might seek Tucker's advice.

The pages of Maraniss's book became the urtext that lawyers, prosecutors, reporters, and presidential aides spent hours and hours parsing and studying, poring over the brief passages that dealt with the troopers, and Betsey's meeting with Clinton. It was pregnant with the possibility of ruinous assertion, testimony, and lines of inquiry: Clinton had correctly identified the biggest problems in his angry conversation with Morris—about the state police, i.e., the troopers, who could talk about alleged offers of federal jobs whether true or not, and the meeting with Paula Jones in such a way that would give her claim a measure of legal (not just gossipy) credence.

Wright could see there was broad agreement among Clinton, Morris, and at least one of Clinton's lawyers, Bob Bennett, that it was necessary to immediately challenge Maraniss's version of the facts. But Wright insisted to them that “David Maraniss is one of the most careful researchers I have ever met in my life…. He may have misunderstood me, which is easy to do, but it wouldn't have been because of sloppy research or writing.” At the time Maraniss had interviewed her, said Wright, “I was in such deep clinical depression that…all the time I talked to him, all I remember was that I was crying all the time…. And I remember nothing I said to him. But I know he didn't make anything up.”

Bill, Morris, and Bennett, according to Wright, persuaded her to deny the key element of Maraniss's account: that the Arkansas troopers attached to the governor's office had solicited women for Bill—despite the fact that, as Maraniss reported, part of the conversation between Wright and Clinton in July 1987 directly touched on the question of women procured by the troopers, according to Betsey.

“Well, there was one thing that they [the president and his lawyers] really didn't like in [the Maraniss biography] about the role the troopers played in the procuring…. Bill said, ‘That plays right into the Paula Jones lawsuit. What are you talking about?'” Clinton was screaming at her, trying to get her to disavow it, Wright said. On the other end of the phone she could hear Dick Morris and the president “talking to each other, Dick being there in the room with Bill, I could hear him saying, ‘Tell her this. Tell her that.'”

Wright did not have Maraniss's book with her. Morris and Clinton were reading to her from a text, she said. “I felt I was at a real disadvantage. I wasn't seeing what they were talking to me about and screaming at me about…. Bill was screaming…. ‘Why did you say this to him?'”

She got off the phone and called Maraniss—immediately after the president had screamed at her. She was upset. Why had Maraniss written about their meeting and what she'd said to him about the troopers? she asked.

“Are they coming down on you?” she said Maraniss asked.

“Yep, they are,” she told him.

“Bill Bennett, Bill, Bob, one of those Bennett boys—Bill's lawyer Bennett—was very concerned about” what she'd said to Bill's biographer.
^*24

Under this pressure “I ended up issuing a statement saying that David Maraniss must have misunderstood me” about the troopers' alleged role in procuring women. Following her disavowal, “David [Maraniss] has never spoken to me since,” said Wright.

Later, Morris described the event this way: “I was with Clinton in the residence—in the Treaty Room—and we were talking to Betsey on the phone, both of us: we were negotiating a statement in which she would deny what she obviously had said to Maraniss, and which was true, about the state troopers and getting women. Bill was getting unbelievable grief from Hillary about the Paula Jones business and he had told me that, for the first time, Chelsea was mad at him over this and that he was very upset at Betsey for talking to Maraniss. He'd said ‘I don't care what she knows, I'm finished with Betsey.'

“I said, ‘I think you should be careful about that because she knows everything'…I was saying don't alienate her totally because she could do you a lot of damage; earlier she had told me she had all the files on all his women; and when I'd cautioned her to move them to a safe deposit box, she said a warehouse would be more like it.

“So in this [telephone] conversation in the White House, with Bill, I was urging Betsey, trying to negotiate a statement she would make in which she would deny saying what she actually said. Clinton was very focused on it, and [Bob] Bennett was involved. I worked with Bennett on it, and Bill was talking to Betsey and to Bennett by phone, working out what Betsey was going to say. While we were working on the statement with Betsey, it went back and forth for several drafts; she was very upset, and so was Clinton; it was a hard situation to handle, Clinton on one hand, Betsey on the other.”

The statement that Wright issued under duress later that afternoon, February 4, 1995, said:

I think that David Maraniss may have misunderstood what I told him about the troopers. What I believe is that some of them solicited women for themselves, exploiting the fact that they worked for the governor. I do not believe that they ever solicited women for the governor, certainly not with his knowledge. My recommendation [that Clinton not run for president in 1988] was based on my fear that in the climate of Gary Hart that liars and gold diggers would come out of the woodwork. What I learned from my conversation with the governor was that the rumors were nothing in reality. My concern was for the impact the rumors would have on Chelsea and Hillary.

My fears were borne out in the 1992 campaign when liars and gold diggers did emerge, and I proudly and truthfully defended Governor Clinton against them. My admiration was strong for his determination to keep his marriage intact, and I became upset that his public acknowledgment of troubles in his marriage then made him more vulnerable to lies. Any so-called cover-up for Bill Clinton was the usual staff role in explaining why he was late for a meeting or couldn't see someone or couldn't agree with them.

Maraniss was flabbergasted, and issued his own statement, which accurately described what had happened and the dynamic so obviously involved: “I interviewed Betsey Wright several times for my book and based my account of her dealings with Bill Clinton directly on what she told me during those interviews.” Maraniss said, “Before the book's release, I met with her and read to her the sections related to her. Her response at the time was that I had fairly and accurately reported what she had said. During the two years I spent working on this biography, I came to understand the complicated love-hate relationship between Betsey Wright and Bill Clinton, which seems to be in evidence again.”

Meanwhile, the Maraniss book caused Hillary to stop talking to Dick Morris, for months, by his account. “She was mad at me because of my telling Maraniss about the swimming pool she wanted to build at the Little Rock mansion,” he said. “She was pissed that I talked about this, and she stopped talking to me. She also, I think, basically stopped talking to Bill because she was mad about Betsey Wright saying to Maraniss that state troopers were used to get women, and also about the list of women in connection with the 1988 race.”

During the first twenty months of the Clinton presidency, Morris had usually communicated with Bill through Hillary, since Bill did not want to be seen or heard speaking to him; nor did the president particularly like talking with Morris. Now, according to Morris, things changed. Hillary wouldn't speak to him.

“I would talk to Bill constantly about the advice that I'd give Hillary and he would pass it on,” said Morris. “And, I would periodically say to him, ‘Listen, I've known you guys for twenty years. Relationships with you don't work if your wife doesn't want them to work. And I'm nervous that I don't get to talk to Hillary.' And he said, ‘Well, I pass on your advice.' Or he'd say things like, ‘Well, you know it's a tough situation for everybody. I mean I'm having problems, too. She's very mad at both of us for the Maraniss book.' And then after a few months into it…I complained again about the lack of access and he said, ‘Well, she takes your advice.' And she did. I had recommended she do a newspaper column, and she was doing that. And I recommended that she talk about the Gulf War disease and she was doing that. And mammograms…I called them soft-core health care issues. I said, ‘We'll carry forward the image [of concern about adequate medical care], but it won't have the same hard social engineering component.' And she would do everything that…I would advise. And, Bill said, ‘She's following your advice.' And I had a line, which was perhaps a little too unequivocal, I'd said, ‘Yeah, we put out the dog food at night, and in the morning the dish is empty.'”

16

Truth or Consequences (2)

Anger is not the best state of mind in which to prepare for a grand jury appearance.

—Living History

T
HOUGH
H
ILLARY
had withdrawn from the West Wing and a visible policymaking role, she tightly held the legal reins, consulting and instructing her lawyers almost daily over the next two years.

Shortly before leaving for Asia, Hillary met with Mark Fabiani, the Harvard-educated lawyer and former counsel and deputy mayor of Los Angeles, whom Ickes and Jane Sherburne had recruited. Fabiani was chosen because he had successfully coordinated legal and media strategy for Mayor Tom Bradley during city and federal investigations of his personal and family finances.

Having watched the Clintons' problems unfold from afar, Fabiani wanted to meet with his prospective clients before signing on. Immediately it became clear to Fabiani that Ickes was recruiting a legal team for Hillary, “not for anyone else.” Ickes had told him, “You should come in and meet the president and first lady.” But “when I came in,” said Fabiani, “the person I met was the first lady, not the president. Hillary had set this [mechanism] up. And Harold was her surrogate in sort of setting it up and then running it.”

In
Living History,
Hillary described the Whitewater response team in terms suggesting that it had little to do with her: Mack McLarty and Maggie Williams as well as other senior staff had recommended its establishment, she said, to “centralize” all discussion of Whitewater.

“Hillary was clearly orchestrating it from the beginning…. She was the conductor of it—the damage control operation,” which meant the legal operation, said Fabiani, “and had been going back to 1992 and the first Whitewater revelation…directing Susan Thomases, directing Webb Hubbell, Vince Foster, to try to structure the Whitewater defense. And she'd been doing it ever since”—to the Clintons' great disadvantage, in the view of a number of her lawyers. Hubbell confirmed that Hillary had, from the start, taken over the defense. Ickes's operation, said Mark Fabiani, “was another iteration of her damage control, and it never changed.” In his initial meeting with Hillary, and in a subsequent discussion the same day with Williams on the veranda of her office, “we talked about what this all meant, and how to fix it.”

Hillary's personal instrument was David Kendall. Over the next two years, Fabiani came to “like him very much,” but “he's a soul mate of hers in terms of his instinct, in terms of his carefulness about saying anything publicly, in terms of his attitude toward the press. He is very much someone that she's comfortable with, because he reinforced everything she thought, and she reinforced everything he thought. You never heard them disagree in a meeting.”

Several members of Sherburne's team, said one, came to believe that Hillary's “instincts are horrible in terms of politics, in terms of managing a crisis like this, like the one that she was in, like the one [Bill] got in with Monica…. We had a joke that all we had to do was ask her, What would you do? And then do just the opposite, without even thinking about it…because almost always her instincts were wrong, backwards…. And she never surrounded herself with people who would stand up to her, who were of a different mind.”

Until the special prosecutor caught Monica Lewinsky in his sights, Kendall rarely dealt with the president, only Hillary, said Fabiani. “The president wasn't the client, except in name only, and except when there were a few flare-ups that involved him. But those were rare and…he was easy to deal with compared to her.” In two years at the White House, Fabiani never met with Bill and Hillary together.

It is impossible to know how much Hillary told Bill about her lawyering back in Arkansas on behalf of McDougal and their Whitewater investment, and in defending herself when she came under investigation by reporters, prosecutors, and the Congress. Just as he never told her about his assignations with other women, it seems reasonable from what we know that she never fully told him just how legally exposed her actions might have made her.

“She is so tortured by the way she's been treated that she would do anything to get out of the situation,” Fabiani realized time and again over the next two years of trying to defend her. “And if that involved not being fully forthcoming [in releasing documents and other materials], she herself would say, ‘I have a reason for not being forthcoming.'” Her reasoning, said Fabiani, followed a linear path: “If we do this [she would say], they're going to do this to me. If we say this, then they're going to say this. You know, fuck 'em, let's just not do that.” Meanwhile, she would “wake up in the morning…saying, What are they going to do to me today? Where are they coming at me today? What do I need to do today.” Eventually Fabiani, Sherburne, Ickes, and the other lawyers on the team came to be known in the West Wing as “The Masters of Disaster.”

The president, said Fabiani, “never seemed to be too concerned about her legal vulnerability. There was never any detectable concern. His concern was, What do I say about it? if an event had occurred that he was going to be asked about.” Bill's general attitude toward the legal situation was “keep your eye on the ball, get good people who can handle it for you, deal with them only as necessary, and keep trying to move the administration forward.”

Until the president personally became enmeshed in the Lewinsky scandal, Fabiani saw Bill explode only once—“very late in the [investigations] over the treatment of Susan McDougal,” when television broadcasts showed her being taken to prison, shackled, in an orange jumpsuit.

Fabiani underwent a trial by fire. In early May 1995, the Senate had formally authorized, by a vote of ninety-six to three, a resolution creating the Special Committee to Investigate Whitewater Development Corporation and Related Matters, under the auspices of Alfonse D'Amato's Banking Committee. Democrats, still reeling from the election results of November and many of them now mistrustful of the Clintons' assurances that Whitewater was a dry hole, had little choice but to go along. Because Democrats were the minority party now, D'Amato and other implacable opponents of the Clintons would control the investigations and—especially moving toward a presidential election year—try to use them as a means of denying him a second term.

D'Amato focused on Vince Foster's death for maximum publicity; investigating his death would grab more headlines and attention than the minutiae of Arkansas real estate and banking practices. The most probing questions of the investigation would be about Hillary, Foster's friend and enabler, not the president. From the outset, the rhetoric of D'Amato and his fellow Republicans made clear these would be viciously partisan hearings. The first batch of subpoenas issued by D'Amato's committee was for information related to the Travel Office, Foster's death, his duties, and the documents removed from his office—which, D'Amato implied, could lead to the president and his wife.

Fabiani and Sherburne, determined to make an end run around D'Amato, appealed to Hillary to allow leaking to the press—prior to the scheduled start of the hearings on July 18—the relevant documents sought by the committee. These included thirty “personal” files removed from Foster's office after his death, about one hundred pages of which dealt with his work on Whitewater for the Clintons. Kendall opposed the idea, on grounds that such disclosures might give the committee a roadmap to new leads and an opportunity to contradict old statements by the Clintons. Hillary said the press would, as usual, report the material negatively (some of the contents
was
embarrassing, but not criminal), but she left the matter in Kendall's hands.

In this instance, Kendall met with unusually vigorous opposition from the new counsel to the president, Abner Mikva, and virtually the whole legal defense apparatus outside of Williams & Connolly (where many of the records were held in a secured area). Kendall relented. It was decided to let the press present a coherent account, based on the documents, of what had happened both in Whitewater back in Arkansas and on the night Foster died—before D'Amato offered his skewed and selective interpretation. The material was carefully parceled out to reporters, the biggest cache going to
Newsweek
's Michael Isikoff, who was known to be very tough on Whitewater matters and the Clintons in general. Isikoff produced a long account titled “The Night Foster Died,” in which he concluded that there was no evidence of a connection between Foster's death and Whitewater, “no document, memo, note or scrap of paper suggesting that Foster, the Clintons or anyone else was orchestrating a cover-up,” before or after Foster's death. Foster's colleagues—who were also his friends, in shock, grieving—had tended to make a jumble out of the materials in his office, but that was all.

But it wasn't.

Kendall had withheld important documents from the White House lawyers, some of which related to Whitewater tax matters. D'Amato had obtained copies of that material and triumphantly accused the White House of yet another cover-up. The records that Fabiani and Sherburne now demanded from Kendall showed that the Clintons' claim, during the 1992 campaign, of a $68,900 tax loss from their Whitewater investment had been wrong. Foster had calculated the real loss was only $5,800. The IRS was undertaking an audit of the matter. More ominously, Foster had written in his notes held back by Kendall that Whitewater was “a can of worms you shouldn't open.”

That quotation was in the next day's headlines and read aloud portentously in D'Amato's nasal Long Island accent on the evening television news broadcasts.

Among the first witnesses called by the committee were Susan Thomases, Maggie Williams, and Betsey Wright, all of whom expressed degrees of reluctance, forgetfulness, and exasperation as they were savaged by the chairman, the committee's counsel, Michael Chertoff,
^*25
and its Republican members. In Thomases's case, the situation seemed particularly cruel; she was becoming debilitated by multiple sclerosis, and her difficulty in providing quick responses to the questions shouted at her by D'Amato (who called her a liar) was perhaps more a result of her physical condition than anything else.

The basic methodology of the hearings was Chertoff's, who implied—through his questions and the introduction of White House phone logs showing a series of back-to-back phone calls between Hillary, Thomases, Williams, and Bernie Nussbaum—that Hillary had attempted to delay and prevent investigators from going through Foster's office before damning evidence could be stashed away or removed.

Wright was on the stand for eight consecutive hours, “bobbing and weaving with Chertoff in her sarcastic and colorful fashion,” as the
Washington Post
reported. “Go ahead and talk,” she told him at one point, when he tried to frame an unusually elaborate and convoluted question. “And then sometime next week I'll come back and answer.” As she neared the end of her testimony that day, after providing answers to “nigh on a jillion questions,” as she put it, D'Amato inquired about how she was holding up. “I'm tired and I'm bored,” she said with a sigh.

Williams testified on July 28, during the second week of the hearings. A Secret Service uniformed guard, Henry P. O'Neill Jr., an eighteen-year veteran of the White House detail, had testified that he'd witnessed Williams taking a stack of files from Foster's office the night of Foster's death. She denied it, and had undergone two lie detector tests to buttress her account. But her lawyer released the results of only one. She was near tears finally, after being hammered on the stand by D'Amato, whose pre-senatorial reputation as a local politician with deep conflict-of-interest problems of his own, including the prosecution of his brother for mail fraud,
^†26
was well known. She said she had visited Foster's office that night only because she had seen a light on and had a momentary “irrational hope that I would walk in and find Vince Foster there.” She had spoken to Hillary perhaps three times in the forty-eight hours after Foster's death, she said, phone conversations in which they discussed Vince's apparent torment, the question of where the Clintons' “personal files” in his office should go, and how to deal with a distraught White House staff, including sending in grief counselors. She'd spoken to Thomases only once, about Foster's insurance policy, she testified. Aggressively challenged by Senator Connie Mack, a Florida Republican, who said phone records demonstrated that Thomases had called her nine times in forty-eight hours, and that her account made “very little sense,” Williams responded that the records showed only that Thomases phoned the office of the first lady, not that she had reached Williams. “Everything that happened is not some big plot.”

For instance, two days after Foster's death, she said, she had some of the Clintons' personal records transferred from Foster's office to a locked closet in the first family's personal residence, only because she was too tired to wait for a messenger from the office of the Clintons' lawyers to pick them up—not (as the Republicans on the committee were intimating) for nefarious reasons. Bernard Nussbaum had asked her to send those records to the attorneys.

Her voice choked up, and she wiped her eyes, when she recalled Hillary's phone call informing her of Vince's death. Evelyn Lieberman, Williams's deputy and later White House deputy chief of staff, was seated at the witness table next to her, and put her arm around Williams to console her.

The Secret Service agent, O'Neill, stuck to his story despite a pounding by Democrats who kept him at the microphone for nearly four hours. He said he told no one about Williams taking the files until he was interviewed by FBI agents in April 1994, in connection with one of the investigations of Foster's death.