A Woman in Charge (72 page)

At 10:30 that night, he said, he was on his regular tour accompanying a cleaning crew from office to office in the West Wing. His duties included locking and unlocking offices for the cleaners, and securing sensitive “burn bag” documents for disposal.

O'Neill said his first stop was the White House counsel's suite, where Foster and Nussbaum had their private offices and aides worked in a common open area with several desks. Around the time he entered the suite, he said, Nussbaum arrived and entered his office. O'Neill and the cleaning crew then left the suite, and in the hallway outside he encountered Howard Paster, the White House liaison to Congress, who told him Vince Foster's body had been discovered, apparently a suicide. O'Neill then walked back to the counsel's suite and encountered Williams's aide Lieberman standing outside the door; she asked him to make sure the counsel's office was locked properly.

When he returned to the suite a short while afterward, Patsy Thomasson, the White House deputy administrative director who sometimes reported to Foster, was sitting at Foster's desk, looking down, apparently reading something. O'Neill thought she might be Foster's wife, so he left. When he again returned to lock up, Lieberman was just coming out, as was Nussbaum. Then, “after a few more seconds, Maggie Williams came out, walked by me carrying what I would describe as folders.” By way of explanation, Lieberman told him, “That's Maggie Williams, the first lady's chief of staff.”

O'Neill said Williams walked to her office nearby carrying a stack of folders, which he estimated to be three to five inches high, perhaps with a cardboard box on top. He locked the counsel's office at 11:41
P.M.,
and said that he, Williams, and Lieberman went down the elevator together.

 

W
RIGHT'S LEGAL BILLS,
in excess of $650,000, were probably the highest of all of Hillary's and Bill's aides forced to run a gauntlet between D'Amato's committee and Starr's grand jury. Williams's bills totaled about $150,000.

“I had assurance from both Lloyd Cutler and Bill Clinton directly that they would pay my bill because I was in effect custodian of his campaign papers, and they told me his legal defense fund was being structured in a way that it would be covered,” said Wright. Later, she read an article in the
New York Times
saying only Hillary and Bill's fees would be paid by the fund. “I had approached the guy who was the keeper, and he told me he had never been given instructions to pay me; and when I asked him to go back to Bill, he told me that the president had never authorized the payment. That was a little embarrassing.”

Meanwhile, Wright spent hundreds of hours searching through records in her lawyer's office and at Williams & Connolly that had been subpoenaed by the special prosecutor.

Joe Klein, the author of
Primary Colors
and a
Newsweek
columnist at the time, excoriated Hillary in print for failing to aid her beleaguered staff, especially Maggie, who was highly regarded by colleagues and reporters alike. Klein's column depicted Williams and other aides as the Clintons' victims, left to fend for themselves. Referring to Bill and Hillary as “the Tom and Daisy Buchanan of the Baby Boom Political Elite,” he asked: “Why hasn't she come forward and said, ‘Stop torturing my staff. This isn't about them. I'll testify. I'll make all the documents available. I'll sit here and answer your stupid, salacious questions until Inauguration Day, if need be.'” On the same day that Klein's column appeared, Webb Hubbell reported to the Federal Prison Camp in Cumberland, Maryland, where he was to serve twenty-one months for mail fraud and tax evasion.

Hillary, meanwhile, told Jane Sherburne that she wanted to testify, to go one-on-one with D'Amato and bury him. Her appearance would demonstrate that she was “a good person,” and maybe once and for all put an end to the whole Whitewater outrage. Others were not sure if Hillary was serious or, more likely, that she knew the lawyers would never allow it. The lawyers were indeed unanimous in their opposition, and that was that.

In Hillary's first newspaper columns, appearing that month, she briefly deviated from her topic of families and children to reflect on her frustration, as first lady, without specifically citing the investigations by Starr or D'Amato's committee: “The truth is it is hard for me to recognize the Hillary Clinton that other people see.”

Later, she wrote about her inability, for legal reasons, to talk with her friends about their mistreatment by investigators and prosecutors, and the “injustices” dealt them.

 

O
F ALL
the foreign policy dilemmas faced by the Clinton administration, the U.S. relationship with China was as vexing as any, a matter of delicate calibration based on the American adherence to the fundamental principles of human rights and China's status as a superpower.

For months, Hillary had been looking forward to going to China as honorary chairwoman of the U.S. delegation at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, to be held in Beijing between September 4 and 15. The title understated her mission, which was to address, on behalf of the United States government, the most urgent questions of human rights abuses—particularly those of women—to the host Chinese regime and the rest of the world, while not causing a rift in the Sino-American relationship. Like her health care portfolio, this was not the kind of assignment normally entrusted to first ladies. The recent behavior of the Chinese complicated matters: imprisoning a Chinese-American human rights activist charged with espionage (and, on the eve of the conference, releasing him); selling M-11 missiles to Pakistan; and conducting provocative military exercises in the Taiwan Strait.

From Pearl Harbor, where Bill had spoken at the fiftieth anniversary observance of V-J Day, Hillary flew to Beijing, where her advance team was being badgered by the authorities, who wanted a prior look at what she was going to say in her address. Hillary was told that, while the Chinese government looked forward to her presence at the conference, it did not want to be embarrassed by her words, and hoped that she was appreciative of “China's hospitality.” For most of the fourteen-hour flight across the Pacific she worked on her speech, consulting with the head of the American delegation, U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright, former ambassador to China Winston Lord, and Eric Schwartz, the National Security Council's expert on human rights in China. She was deciding how far she should go in condemning Chinese and other governments' and cultures' abuses. The bureaucrats found her draft tepid, despite her insistence that she wanted to “push the envelope” on behalf of women and girls. They recommended incorporating an affirmation of principles adopted at the recent World Council of Human Rights in Vienna.

Back home, Hillary's participation in the Beijing conference had already been attacked. Senators Jesse Helms and Phil Gramm complained that the meeting was “shaping up as an unsanctioned festival of anti-family, anti-American sentiment.” Their view was reinforced by fellow Republicans disinclined to approve of any U.N.-sponsored event. They ignored that meetings such as this one were of great import to the worldwide human rights movement, women's rights advocates, and Third World governments, which were reluctant—for religious, cultural, or merely authoritarian reasons—to relax feudal policies regarding women and girls, in particular, and human rights in general. The U.S. delegation included Republican Tom Kean, the former governor of New Jersey (and a Catholic), nuns, and a vice chair of the Muslim Women's League.

Hillary had learned (or so she said later) from her health care experience that the tone and pitch of her voice often worked against her when she felt strongly about an issue. (She attributed this to women being subject to criticism if they showed too much feeling in public.) The Chinese, ultimately, blacked out her speech on official state radio and television, but her message was startlingly forceful and clear to her hosts:

It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are girls. It is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution. It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small. It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war. It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide among women ages fourteen to forty-four is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes. It is a violation of human rights when young girls are brutalized by the painful and degrading practice of genital mutilation. It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.

Her twenty-one-minute-long oration ended with a plea that the delegates return to their countries and demand action to improve opportunities for women—in health, the law, politics, and education. Now there was an agonizingly long delay before the translations were completed (delegations from 189 countries were in attendance). Hillary anxiously awaited the audience response. Suddenly there was something approaching pandemonium as hundreds in the hall leaped to their feet and began a long-standing ovation for the first lady.

For the rest of her time in China, Hillary was mobbed by those who had heard the speech, both in Beijing and at a huge meeting of nongovernmental organizations in Huarirou, whose conference—to coincide with the smaller official U.N. assembly in Beijing—had been moved by the authorities to a distant city.

Her speech became front-page news around the world, noted (in countries where its message was consistent with cultural and governmental principles) for its power and eloquence. In the United States, the
New York Times
editorial page said the speech “may have been her finest moment in public life.”

“It kind of legitimized her as an ambassador for those issues,” said her speechwriter Lissa Muscatine, who had accompanied Hillary and worked on the address. After two taxing years, and for the first time since her trip to Capitol Hill when she had charmed the committees of Congress that were to consider, and eventually help bury, health care reform, this was the first widespread positive recognition she received.

The germ of an idea she had first planted in Africa and South Asia a few months before was now firmly rooted. She could see that, no matter how she was treated by politicians and the press back home, she had an international platform from which to preach the ideas and concepts that meant the most to her. Neither D'Amato's hearings nor Ken Starr's investigation had paused during her trip to China, but with her own powerful will and determination she had successfully been able to present an alternative Hillary. She—and others—could now see that she was a figure of enormous respect around the world, regarded with fascination and treated as a new kind of
statesperson,
a first lady who brought a compelling, important message, not just flowers to hand to a king or prime minister. She may have failed miserably at changing things at home, but she could sense her potential to effect change elsewhere. Her message had been skillfully presented in Beijing and would continue to be sharpened: to encourage democratic movements not by insisting on U.S.-style governance and constitutions in other cultures, but by promoting democratic and universal ideals of human freedom. For at least a moment, this felt like a return to her lifelong agenda.

 

A
BATTERY OF
White House lawyers and paralegals labored full-time to meet the demands for thousands of documents sought under subpoenas issued by D'Amato's Senate committee, a parallel investigating committee of the House of Representatives, and the office of Kenneth Starr. On December 29, one of Jane Sherburne's deputies, searching a batch of records carted from a federal warehouse in suburban Maryland, found David Watkins's memorandum with its damning detail about Hillary's “insisten[t]” role in the Travel Office firings instigated by Harry Thomason. “Foster regularly informed me that the first lady was concerned and desired action—the action desired was the firing of the travel office staff,” Watkins had written.

If D'Amato were to wave this kind of memo in front of the cameras while reading its perditious words, the suggestion that Foster died because he knew the darkest secrets of the Clinton presidency would become more credible to some, whether his death was suicide or murder. It was already known that he had left a note expressing his worry that Hillary would be held responsible for the firings. It was well established that Foster had really been Hillary's in-house lawyer, not the president's. Foster's death had raised the Travel Office matter, which in any other administration might have been a minor blip for a few weeks, to a matter of national fascination and, with the newly discovered memo, potentially momentous political proportions. The Watkins memo was nine pages long, each making clear Hillary's centrality to the controversy. Worse, it was filled with the kind of language that D'Amato and others could have a field day with, given Hillary's persistent denials that she had anything to do with the Travel Office matter.

Inside the White House, the discovery of the memo sent the lawyers into another spasm of damage control, which lasted days before they finally turned it over to D'Amato. Hillary was set to begin her book tour for
It Takes a Village
on January 16, the triumphant event in her planned redemptive return to visibility at home. The publisher and author were looking forward to sales in the hundreds of thousands of copies as the first lady barnstormed the country delivering her message about the urgent needs of families and children in distress around the world. Watkins's memo made her sound neither first lady–ish, nor family-friendly.