A Woman in Charge (73 page)

Watkins had written that his memo was a “soul-cleansing…my first attempt to be sure the record is straight, something I have not done in previous conversations with investigators—where I have been as protective and vague as possible.” That hardly improved the situation.

Watkins's memo was a classic “cover your ass” document that had not been intended for the White House files where a copy had been left behind (apparently accidentally), but rather was written for his lawyer in the event Watkins would ever be criminally investigated or charged in the matter. Watkins had been fired in 1994 for using a government helicopter to ferry him to a golf course, where he claimed he needed to play a round to scout a golf outing for the president. The helicopter ride had cost the government $13,000. Cronyism. Lady Macbeth. Hidden records. They were back to square one as the president was trying to cautiously approach the election season. The self-serving origins of the Watkins memo did not undermine its recitation of events, and its belated discovery, after months of denials, only underscored its capacity for damage. Hillary had said there would be “hell to pay” if Watkins didn't “take swift and decisive action in conformity with the first lady's wishes” to replace the Travel Office employees.

The congressional committees received the memo from the White House late in the day on January 3, four days after its discovery. William Clinger, the chairman of the House investigating committee, declared, “There was a cover-up here,” requiring more hearings by his committee and further work by its investigators. Starr, in contrast to the lawyerly approach that his predecessor, Fiske, had adopted, publicly announced his “distress” at what had happened. “The White House had an obligation to turn this memorandum over to the Office of Independent Counsel as soon as it was discovered,” he said, not several days later. D'Amato noted the “troubling pattern that keeps recurring involving Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

The lead editorial in the next day's
Wall Street Journal
was “Who Is Hillary Clinton?,” aping the headline of the
Journal
's momentous attack on Vince Foster.

According to her aides, Hillary read the editorial. The
Journal
had devoted 1,600 words to its diatribe, three times the space ordinarily devoted to one of its editorials. The Watkins memo, said the
Journal,
confirmed D'Amato's contention that, in the first lady's case, there was a sinister pattern of denial and delayed discovery of information that contradicted earlier accounts claimed by her and the White House. The “related” matter of Whitewater was part of the pattern. As to whether Hillary had improperly sought state intervention on behalf of Jim and Susan McDougal's Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, “The Rose Firm's billing records on the Madison account would, of course, clear up the issue, but the billing records have vanished,” said the
Journal.
By the time Hillary read the editorial, the records had—disastrously, as it turned out for her—been found.

The disaster was less in what the billing records actually showed (lawyers, politicians, and bystanders alike would argue that question for years) than the impression of chicanery their discovery created; that eighteen months after their disappearance, with investigators pressing from all directions, the records suddenly appeared, in the office of Hillary's constant aide Carolyn Huber. The first lady's fingerprints were found on the records, specifically on a page that dealt with Madison Guaranty. Vince Foster's handwriting, in red pen, annotated numerous pages of the documents.

By any measure, this seemed to be damaging evidence.

They had been found, apparently on the morning of January 4, 1996, the day after public disclosure of the Watkins Travel Office memo, by Huber, who had managed the governor's mansion in Bill's first term, then served as the Rose Law Firm's administrator in the years Hillary was there, and now, ensconced in the White House, paid the Clintons' bills, maintained Hillary's and Bill's personal correspondence, and kept their financial records.

Huber said she had picked up the records—a half-inch sheaf of folded computer printouts—perhaps as much as ten months earlier, but most likely in the summer of 1995, from a small table in the Book Room, a kind of storage room, in which all manner of personal papers and gifts, including from foreign trips, were kept before being properly sorted. Space had to be created in the Book Room to accommodate Barbara Feinman's files for
It Takes a Village
, and things were being constantly moved around. She had not paid attention to what records she had taken; she simply put them into a box with some other items. They had languished in her own office since then, she said, even though subpoenas were issued ad infinitum and White House employees—including Huber—were ordered by the lawyers to search for them.

Some presidential aides in the White House—including critics of Hillary—found Huber's story plausible. Others deemed it absurd, particularly given her history as the Rose Law Firm's administrative manager and keeper of records. However, Huber was known in the White House to be less than tidy and efficient at times, though one would expect someone with her job description to be well organized. Then again, the bulk of records, papers, gifts, and books that kept accumulating from campaign to campaign and from Little Rock to Washington was enormous, and kept being packed and unpacked and moved from one location to another. As Huber told it, the box in which she found the records had been sitting in her office on the second floor of the East Wing for months; she just hadn't gotten to it yet. The box turned up (on January 4), with several others, when she was disposing of some furniture in her office, to make room for new bookshelves. They'd been under a big table. She'd taken out the sheaf of papers—there was also a coat hanger in the box—and that was when she saw that they were the billing records.

David Kendall and Jane Sherburne both said that Huber's hands were shaking when she showed them the boxes and told them the story.

Kendall, apparently, had heard it once before. He said later that Huber had called him that noontime, asked him to come to the White House, showed him the records, and explained the circumstances. Then, he said, sometime after 1
P.M.,
he'd gone to the National Gallery to see the Vermeer show, for which he had a hard-to-get ticket. At 5
P.M.,
he called Sherburne and told her he'd just had a call from Huber “and she says she has found some documents that she thinks that I ought to look at. And so I'm on my way over.” He did not mention to Sherburne having seen the documents earlier in the day. “Well, let's go see what she's got,” he apparently told Sherburne when he got to her office in the West Wing. The eleven-by-seventeen-inch pages were labeled “Madison Guaranty: Client Billing & Payment History.”

The lawyers were aware that, plausible as Huber's explanation might have been to people who knew her and worked in the White House, it would not fly smoothly in congressional and judicial Washington; with the press, it would never get off the ground. Everything about the story was strange, including Kendall's apparent withholding from Sherburne that he had seen the records earlier in the afternoon—documents that could cause enormous problems for Hillary—and then had sauntered off to look at Vermeers. Why would one lawyer leave a fellow lawyer under a false impression that he was hearing the story of the crucial witness for the first time? (Kendall refused to discuss the matter with the author.)

Ken Starr would surely seize on what had happened with the billing records as justification for trying to pin an obstruction of justice charge on someone, and he would use the old prosecutorial tool of squeezing one witness to get at another. And, in fact, as soon as Starr had the documents in his possession, he convened a staff meeting at which the prevailing view of his deputies was that all of Hillary's actions after Vince's death seemed intended to conceal, and that she was a likely target for an obstruction of justice charge. The billing records were the most important circumstantial link to date. Starr wanted Hillary's testimony.

Sherburne urgently sought a meeting with the president to warn him of the obvious problems for Hillary. Clinton failed to see how the discovery of the billing records, or their contents, made Hillary or anyone else vulnerable: “Why would we be producing them now,” she quoted him, “if we have been trying to hide them and obstruct. That doesn't make sense. Why would we have been hiding them if it was turning out that they're helpful or support what we have been saying all along?”

D'Amato, Chertoff, and Clinger would surely say these billing records were among the documents Maggie Williams surreptitiously removed from Foster's office, and which Officer O'Neill had seen her carrying.

Moreover, there was confusion and distrust among some of the lawyers themselves—more than a dozen were involved on behalf of the Clintons and the White House—once they had learned of the day's events. Some were less confident about what they were being told by their clients—Hillary and Bill—and the people acting on their behalf.

The records turned over to investigators by the White House later that day showed that in 1985–1986 Hillary billed about sixty hours for work on the Madison-McDougal account—“89 tasks, including 33 conferences or phone calls with Madison officials on 53 separate days.” She had described her work as “very limited,” and mostly supervisory. In two separate government investigations, she had denied working on a McDougal project, undertaken with Webb Hubbell's father-in-law, called Castle Grande. But the records showed that more than half the hours she billed were for that project. After that disclosure, she said she had known Castle Grande by a different name—IDC—and that her answer had been based on a semantic misunderstanding.

Kendall had recommended that the White House remain silent on all the questions raised by the discovery of the billing records. But at the insistence of the White House press secretary, Kendall made a statement from his office at Williams & Connolly. The records now turned over to Starr and Congress “confirm what we have said all along about the nature and amount of work done by the Rose Law Firm and Mrs. Clinton for Madison,” said Kendall. “With the public release of these records, yet another set of baseless allegations can be laid to rest.” But he had no explanation for why the billing records had disappeared in the first place.

Hillary's fear over the possibility of being indicted became palpable the day the billing records were found. It would become acute and terrifying for the next two years. “[It] could have been for obstruction,” one of the lawyers said. “[It] could have been, These things were in your possession. You had a legal obligation to turn then over…. You didn't do it. The specter [of indictment] had already been raised by the discovery of this so-called Watkins memo just a week before the billing records.”

Aides noticed a distinct change in Hillary's demeanor. She was angrier, and her anxiety about whether the lawyers were doing enough intensified. Before the discovery of the billing records, “everybody sort of thought our effort was successful because the D'Amato hearings didn't really get any traction, and nobody really cared about them,” said the same attorney. “So everybody was sort of happy with the way things were going. But then, all of a sudden, Boom!…Everybody says, ‘What are you people doing?'…I mean we had nobody defending us, for Sunday talk shows, which all of a sudden we needed. And we couldn't find anybody. And so she raised questions. ‘What are you doing? Why don't we have surrogates? Why don't we have more people out there defending us?' And then she was…understandably concerned about what would happen. You know there was this specter of a search warrant being served on the White House…. But there were all sorts of possibilities, some of which didn't happen. And the grand jury is the first one that did…. She was subpoenaed to testify. So she was much more anxious, and who can blame her?”

Hillary asked aides why Democrats weren't coming to their defense. “People are nervous about taking a position that may not hold up,” one of her aides reluctantly told her. “And, you know, we don't have answers for people. We can't tell them where these things [billing records] were. We can't tell them why it took two years to find them. So people don't want to go out there. And she would say, ‘Yeah, but people should know that if I wanted to destroy these things I would have destroyed them. And they never would have been found. It's crazy to think that'—which is a decent argument.”

 

P
UBLICATION OF
It Takes a Village
had been scheduled for the first week of January, to be followed soon afterward by an eleven-city book author tour. Hillary's friend Jay Rockefeller described the book as “one of her ways of saying I'm still here” after her exile. “It was a campaign document,” explained Neel Lattimore, her deputy press secretary, “but it was what she believed in, what she was all about. It was her writing something down for the first time. And it defined who she was in her commitment to children.” It also attempted to explain to the world her commitment to her own daughter and family, including her husband, about whom she wrote in the book more thoughtfully and analytically than herself.

Perhaps the most painful aspect of the book for Hillary was that its elemental, truthful picture of herself as a wife and mother could be so at odds with what people saw on television news and read in their newspapers and magazines, that the perception of the public figure had become so negative that it overwhelmed even these basic truths about the private individual.

The promotional tour for the book—beginning with a Barbara Walters TV special—was largely for her personal redemption. But the tour became a schizoid marketing exercise, in which she would spend part of each day answering questions about the billing records, and the rest going to bookstores and signing autographs for the thousands of people who had lined up to buy the book. The profits were to go to children's hospitals and other charities—$1 million in the end.