A Woman in Charge (75 page)

During the book tour, reporters were asking the White House whether, as rumor had it, Hillary's book had been “ghostwritten.” To make clear it was
her
book, several reporters were invited to visit Hillary's private study to examine pages of the manuscript written on yellow legal pads in her hand. Soon, however, White House officials did acknowledge that Barbara Feinman had worked with Hillary for eight months. Feinman had worked with Hillary on the basic structure and content of about eight chapter drafts, which were rewritten after she left, aides said. Feinman had stayed overnight at the White House during 1995, and she accompanied the Clintons to Jay Rockefeller's Wyoming ranch for their vacation that summer to work on the book. In October, Feinman had taken a scheduled two-week break to go to Italy. Upon her return, she was informed that Hillary no longer required her services and that Simon & Schuster would withhold a quarter of Feinman's $120,000 fee. The White House told Feinman that Hillary had nothing to do with the fee being withheld, but privately, knowledgeable aides said otherwise.

The actual writing experience of working on
It Takes a Village
with Mrs. Clinton was not extraordinary in any respect [Feinman wrote in
The Writer's Chronicle
in September 2002]. Together with our editor, we produced drafts in a round-robin style. We worked well as a team and things went about as smoothly as can be expected when you're producing a high-profile book in eight months and one of you is married to the leader of the free world.

The problem came when Mrs. Clinton decided, for reasons still a mystery to me, not to acknowledge my help, or that of anyone else by name. Because the White House had issued a press release early on in the process stating that I had been hired to “help prepare the manuscript,” when it was finished and there was no mention of me in the acknowledgments, the anti-Clinton forces went to town—and began spreading the rumor the book was “ghostwritten.”

When the “rumors” resulted in numerous news stories suggesting that Hillary had not treated Feinman well and that chapters were ghostwritten, Simon & Schuster agreed to pay the full $120,000 fee.

 

H
ILLARY,
in her interview with Barbara Walters, had recited a piece of childhood doggerel to describe her experience in the Whitewater contretemps:

As I was standing on the street,

As quiet as could be

A great big ugly man came up

And tied his horse to me.

On January 15, a few hours after Hillary appeared on Diane Rehm's show, Sherburne telephoned the first lady. She read her a statement in which the White House would concede Hillary's “mistake” in saying that all her Whitewater records were shown to the
New York Times
in 1992. Thus armed, the
Times
would run a front-page news story, in essence calling her a liar—a week after Safire had already called her that on its op-ed page. With the discovery of the billing records, the late-night television comedians were ridiculing her mercilessly.

Sherburne, now deadly serious, also informed Hillary that the independent counsel intended to subpoena her to testify before his grand jury. Hillary knew that Starr would be keen to have her perjure herself, and would be trying to establish grounds to indict her for obstruction of justice in the disappearance and belated discovery of the billing records. He would be asking her pointed questions about the Travel Office, and her denials to investigators of any involvement in the firings, and about what she had done in the hours and days after Vince Foster's death. Suddenly Hillary enumerated to Sherburne a litany of the indignities heaped on her over the past week:
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“I can't take this anymore,” she said. “How can I go on? How can I?”

Four days later, Hillary spoke at Wellesley College to promote her book, staying overnight on the shore of Lake Waban at the home of the president of the college. She awakened early and walked the wooded path that surrounds the lake. A quarter-century had passed since the afternoon of her commencement speech, after which she had gone back to her dorm, walked down to the lake, changed into her bathing suit, and gone for a swim to clear her head.

David Kendall reached her later in the morning, with news that Starr had formally subpoenaed her and was insisting that she testify in front of the grand jurors at the courthouse in downtown D.C., not be interviewed privately under oath at the White House, and a tape made for the jurors, as Fiske had permitted. Starr wanted her inside the jury room unaccompanied by her army of lawyers. This would be the first time in the country's history that a first lady had been summoned to testify in person before a grand jury. Hillary was traveling with Melanne Verveer, her deputy chief of staff. Though Verveer could see the first lady's agitation and distress, Hillary told her nothing specific about her conversation with Kendall. For months, Hillary had been reminded by the lawyers not to discuss anything relating to Whitewater with anybody but Bill and her attorneys; anyone she talked to who lacked a legal privilege was a potential witness against her.

Hillary returned to the White House “discouraged and embarrassed,” worried that “whatever credibility I retained” was now being destroyed, and concerned about what her deteriorating reputation and legal situation were having on her husband's presidency. The presidential election was eleven months away, and she knew Starr would do everything in his power to find grounds for indicting her before then. In
Living History,
Hillary said Bill often expressed the wish he could do something to help. Chelsea, obviously concerned, kept close track of developments in the investigation and tried to comfort her mother. Hillary wrote she was unable to sleep and lost ten pounds in the week before her grand jury appearance, scheduled for January 26. She said she was angry, that she concentrated on preparing herself mentally and spiritually, focusing on her breathing (deep), and praying for God's help.

As she prepared with her lawyers for her appearance, they did not minimize the dangers she faced. Kendall, Sherburne, Ickes, and Fabiani all believed the odds were in favor of Starr seeking and probably obtaining an indictment. “When I say there was a serious fear that she would be indicted, I can't overstate that,” said Fabiani.

The situation was aggravated by the fact that the lawyers could not come to agreement among themselves about what precisely had happened regarding the billing records. Huber's story kept changing in its details, particularly about when she had moved the billing records from the Book Room to her office. Hillary professed to know nothing about what had happened in regard to their disappearance or reappearance, but she obviously had been less than forthcoming in her past statements about the extent of her work on behalf of Madison and its subsidiaries, which had been recorded on the billing records, and which she had minimized in connection with the Resolution Trust investigation. It was not hard to see how a skilled and determined prosecutor could coax a compliant grand jury into bringing criminal charges—even against a first lady.

The senior attorneys on Ickes's team believed that she had gotten herself into a mess over next to nothing, that had she been forthcoming in the first place about events from Whitewater to the Travel Office, none of this would have come to pass. That kind of second-guessing was easy, they knew; it was also easy to see how the Jesuitical lying, evasion, and the stonewalling—about the Whitewater deal and its offshoots, at least—had begun during the first presidential campaign, after Jeff Gerth's story had appeared. Then matters had to be recast and explained again to loosely fit the version of events already shorn of the truth.

“Hillary had run everything” in the hours after Vince Foster's death, noted one of her lawyers. “Then she had denied it. You could see her…getting so intimately involved in…how you handle his office, and what are you going to do with the documents, and who's going to search the office. You can see her jumping into this.” The discovery of the billing records, however, had changed everything.

“It was no longer just a political thing,” no matter how serious. “We had seen the D'Amato hearings as a political matter,” noted one of the lawyers. “This was a criminal matter.” Once she had testified before the grand jury, Starr, with an army of FBI agents and federal prosecutors at his command, would spend months trying to tear her story apart, and searching for evidence of obstruction of justice and perjury. Kendall's holding on to the records for a day without notifying Starr had sharpened Starr's suspicions and appetite.

Several of the White House lawyers, including Sherburne, were skeptical of Huber's account. “Carolyn Huber [initially] called Kendall,” said one. “When Kendall said, ‘Where did you find these?' she didn't [immediately] go back to the summer and say, I remember seeing them on the table in the Book Room in the residence. Only later, when pressed by the FBI and then by the D'Amato committee, did she have a recollection of, I remember seeing these. It was sometime in…late July or early August, and I picked them up. I threw them in a box. The new year comes around, I'm cleaning out my office to where the box had been moved, and boom! I find them. I know they're important.” The timing of their discovery did not inspire confidence, i.e., the day after the D'Amato committee's flagging investigation had been revived by David Watkins's memorandum about Hillary and the Travel Office.

Some of Hillary's lawyers believed that she had never wanted the billing records disclosed. Certainly that appeared true at the outset. She had had Foster make a copy of them in 1992, when Gerth had written his original story, apparently to see exactly what they showed—and then declined to give them to the
Times.
She had told the RTC that she had done virtually no work for Madison. She had always taken the position that as a lawyer she would never work for anybody who had pending business with the state. And, of course, the records turned out to show that she had, on behalf of Madison, the McDougals, and Webb Hubbell's father-in-law, Seth Ward.

Several of the lawyers kicked around theories about why Hillary acted as she had. Said one White House attorney, “This really goes to what you think of her…[and] the way she looks at herself, I think. Either she was embarrassed at having dealt with people like McDougal and was embarrassed by these business dealings and just didn't think they were the kind of thing that you would expect from a Yale Law graduate and one of the finest lawyers east of the Mississippi or west of the Mississippi or whatever in the world it was that people said about her, that it was just professionally embarrassing to be in that kind of a situation. And that it wasn't so much political damage control because, really, it was never going to be that much of an issue in the campaign. It wasn't going to be the kind of thing that was going to make people decide not to vote for [Bill Clinton] in a Democratic primary. Really it was personal embarrassment…. Maybe she just didn't want people to know that this is what her life was…small-time stuff, too. Her law practice, for example. The billing records are embarrassing, maybe for what they show about how she spent her time, which was not in any kind of high-minded or incredibly intellectual pursuit of the law, which is sort of her reputation, but [these were] small-potatoes deals. And a lot of people [on the White House legal team] believed that. I don't know what I believe about why she mishandled it, except that she was probably very suspicious then of the press and thought that you could gut it out and get through it, and it would go away and life would go on.”

And then there was her promise when she went to work for the Rose Law Firm not to work for clients who had state business and the Bar Association's waiver Vince Foster had obtained for her, as the attorney general's wife, to join the firm. “The billing records are going to show that she did work for…a number of people that had connections: the McDougals. Seth Ward. So, in Foster's phrase, which he used later, it was a can of worms for her. That…once you let someone into your practice, maybe it turns out that you weren't quite as careful ethically, or maybe it just turns out that you don't want people to know that what you did on a daily basis was sort of…crude.”

The evidence suggested Hillary might not have done some of the work for which clients were billed at her hourly rate, that in fact drafting attributed to her had been done by clerks and junior lawyers at the firm. This suggested to the same lawyer “that she was getting paid because she was the governor's wife…. The reason why that theory has some currency is she truly doesn't seem to know anything about [some] of the stuff that she supposedly worked on. Now, a cynical person would say…she's got a good memory and she remembers a lot of the stuff [but doesn't want to recall it]. The other answer is she never really did the work…. I think that she probably didn't do a lot of the work.”

The D'Amato hearings, now reinvigorated, became the longest-running congressional investigation of a sitting president in history (though most of it had to do with his wife). C-SPAN broadcast them (seemingly endlessly). The ratings spiked briefly only when Vince Foster's death was on the agenda, and just after the billing records were found. Producers of the network evening news broadcasts thought their audience would be driven off by the accumulation of arcane detail.

“The biggest mistake D'Amato made in his hearings,” said one of the White House lawyers, “upon the discovery of the billing records, he immediately, for some stupid reason, started to focus on what they said. I mean how many hours she did this. And how many hours she did that. And it's like wait a minute, Who cares about that? Instead of, Where were they [the records]? Who was keeping them secret? That's the interesting issue to people. But he immediately lost the focus of the whole thing by talking about how many hours she spent on this or that. We were more than happy to debate that with him because it was all impenetrable to people, and nobody really cared.”
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