A Woman in Charge (76 page)

Ken Starr did. He saw the billing records as a great tool for bringing an indictment against Hillary.

On January 26, rather than unobtrusively entering the U.S. District courthouse for the District of Columbia, she waded through the press mob and their cameras and microphones. Her intent—and effect—in testifying was to appear self-assured, nonconfrontational, and respectful of the jurors. Twenty-one were present, ten of them women, and perhaps 75 percent were African-American. Starr and eight of his deputy prosecutors—all white males who were Starr look-alikes, Hillary said—followed them into the grand jury room.

As her lawyers had expected and prepared her for, much of the questioning was about the perambulations of the billing records, not their substance. Starr, who seemed constitutionally unable not to exude sanctimony and piety, had on this occasion decided to let one of his deputies ask the questions. Under oath, Hillary testified that she, too, was “mystified” by the sudden appearance of the documents “after all these years.” She might have seen them when they were generated in 1992, during the campaign, she said. How and why they had been taken to the residence from Vince Foster's office, and what stops they had made in various rooms upstairs she hadn't a clue, except what she'd been told by David Kendall when he informed her that Carolyn Huber had found the records in her office under a table, in a box.

Hillary was patient when questions were rephrased, over and over. She was a good witness, and that very skill had been the subject of a meeting in Maggie Williams's office two days earlier, in which the lawyers debated among themselves (Hillary was not present) whether she should also testify before the D'Amato committee, making a potentially beneficial preemptive strike.

“Some people made the argument that the only way that she could possibly rehabilitate herself in short order between now and the election would be to go to the Senate,” said one aide. “Give testimony and be open and forthright.” The idea's chief proponent was Bob Bennett, who saw it as a way—among other things—of overshadowing her sensational appearance as a prospective criminal defendant marching into a federal courthouse. The contrary argument was that Hillary would give D'Amato's committee credibility it didn't deserve, and lay down another set of sworn answers that could be used against her for a perjury indictment.

She marched out of the courthouse at 6
P.M.
with her head held high. She stepped into a scene otherworldly even by Washington standards. On a winter's night, the courthouse plaza was enveloped in garish white light from the candlepower of hundreds of television crews, so bright that it was difficult to see without squinting. Helicopters hovered overhead, casting search beams downward for aerial shots for the networks and local news, the sky buzzing from their rotors and those of police and Secret Service helicopters.

Above the noise, Hillary's answer to the most obvious question was perfectly articulated: “I, like everyone else, would like to know the answer about how those documents showed up after all these years. I tried to be as helpful as I could in their [the grand jury's] investigation efforts.”

Bill and Chelsea met her with hugs at the White House. Kendall and his colleagues were pleased with her testimony. Hillary, however, was “angry, agitated, worried,” according to one of the lawyers, and ready to go on the attack.

“It was her against everybody,” the attorney said. “Starr had forgotten about Bill Clinton basically.” Hillary had now seen firsthand that she was fighting for her life.

“She became very upset that Starr was getting a free ride from the media,” noted Mark Fabiani. She wanted an all-out offensive. Until Starr had ordered her to the courthouse, Kendall had thought it possible to work with him, and he had noted Starr's reputation for fairness, based on his record as a judge in cases decided in favor of newspapers. Hillary thought his First Amendment views explained why the press treated him with undue respect. Now, Kendall's objections disappeared.

“Starr wasn't the kind of guy you could chop down in a week or two,” said Fabiani, who was asked to formulate a strategy. “I tried to make a case to her that the best thing to do is try to seed stories out there that were legitimate: Should Starr still be working for his law firm, making a million dollars a year? Shouldn't he be doing this [the independent counsel's job] full-time? Should he still be speaking around the country? Should he be representing the tobacco companies? And ultimately people started to write about those things. But she was very frustrated it was so slow…. She said, If we did the kind of things that Starr did, we'd bethrown out of here. Why don't people focus on that stuff?”

She initiated a morning conference call with lawyers and aides to review each day's events and develop assignments. One of the participants recalled, “Every morning at eight or 8:30 there would be a call where she would basically scream about what was in the paper in the morning [She was either reading them or getting summaries of what she needed to know for her own defense now.], and ask us what we were doing about it. She was religious about it. And she got very concerned that we weren't doing enough.”

Until her grand jury appearance, only Kendall had Hillary's permission to deal with Arkansas, Whitewater, or Rose firm matters, with the exception of Bennett, who was handling the Paula Jones case. “The rest of us handled everything that had occurred after they [the Clintons] got to Washington. So, for example, we would do Vince Foster's suicide documents, but Kendall would do the Whitewater investigation,” said a member of Sherburne's team. Once, Hillary exploded at Fabiani when he was quoted in a newspaper story about the Whitewater investment. “She just got furious. She said, ‘This is Kendall's. You don't talk about that.'” Partly because Kendall disliked doing TV interviews and talking to the press, the arrangement was becoming untenable: “And Kendall was more than happy to let us talk about anything, as long as he was involved in deciding what to say.” Meanwhile, Hillary would spray the lawyers with phone calls throughout the day about something that was being said on TV or a story brought to her attention.

“What she's very good at is sort of marshaling the forces,” said one of them. “Get people ready to fight, get them together. Find the right people, find a Harold Ickes. And then have Harold go find people. But when it comes down to the tactics about, Now what do we do? What do we say? How do we handle this? That's where her instincts are just awful.” An instance of that was her determination to systematically attack the
Washington Post.

The idea of a campaign against the
Post
“went fairly far down the road before some of us succeeded in stopping it,” said Fabiani. Hillary told her aides: “We have to figure out all the mistakes that the
Post
has made. We're going to document it, and then publicize it somehow or get a journalism review to write an article about it, or go to the
Post
editors and complain about Sue Schmidt with this evidence, this dramatic evidence in hand.” She summoned a group to the residence: Kendall, Stephanopoulos, Sherburne, Fabiani, Maggie Williams. Fabiani said the first lady pointed at him, saying: “‘You can take it over and meet with Len Downie [the editor of the
Post
] and…go through this, and then we can publicize it.' I said, ‘Well, you know, I'm not sure that the content of it is going to be quite as dramatic as maybe you'd hoped for. A lot of the things that you're concerned about are matters of tone, and maybe a headline, or a placement in the paper, and that's not exactly the sort of stuff that's going to grab people.' And she said, ‘No, if you look at it, I'm sure it's going to be true. Go ahead.'”

For the next ten days or so, a team worked to compile a dossier to be used against the
Post.
Finally, the virtually unanimous opposition of the lawyers and Stephanopoulos prevailed.

This reflected a new reality. “Mostly she was persuadable,” said Fabiani. “But it took a lot of work, a lot of times it felt like she was going to eat you alive, or you weren't going to be there the next day. But, if people stood up to her, she listened. To her credit. When some of us stood up to her, she generally would back down. But the kind of people that were around her were yes people. She had never surrounded herself with people who could stand up to her, who were of a different mind…. I always thought that was a real tragedy in that if she had had different people around her [who would challenge her] earlier, that maybe some of the things that happened might not have happened.”

Hillary was active and outspoken again, but hardly optimistic. “Well, okay, go ahead and do it, but it's not going to work,” she would say. “We're never going to get a fair shake.” Some problems were manageable, but for her, everything seemed doom and gloom, her lawyers could see. Much of the gloom no doubt reflected her fear of indictment. Kendall had told her at some point he believed her indictment was a strong possibility, that Starr would stop at nothing. Even if he failed, Maggie Williams had noted, the remainder of the term, the next year, would be dominated by the effort to criminalize and further stigmatize the first lady. The first three years had been dominated by Vince's suicide, the death of health care reform, the loss of the Congress…and now this. “We had all these great hopes, and they've come to nothing,” said Williams.

 

A
S
B
ILL
and his aides developed a strategy for the 1996 presidential campaign, the phrase “damaged goods” was frequently used in the White House to describe Hillary's political utility and, sadly, more. She avoided planning meetings, preferring to give her opinions to her husband in private. “I would meet with her every two weeks from around July '95 until August of '96,” said Dick Morris, “and I would have to brief her on what was going on. I would have to brief her on the ads that were running. I would have to brief her on the polling data. This was not stuff she knew. And while, allegedly, the agendas I prepared were given to her, and I'm sure that Bill did give them to her, she didn't seem to know it [the material] and wasn't terribly involved. And that was amazing to me. Her husband was running for reelection as president, and she really wasn't there.”

Bill was enjoying the transition from entrapment in the White House to flat-out campaigning, and the opportunity to change some misperceptions.

There was no attempt, however, to rebuild Hillary's image before the election. “There was a deliberate calculation made that she was going to be damaged goods through the election,” said one of the president's aides. On the occasions when she was scheduled to campaign on Bill's behalf, “it was understood that you would place her in with the hard-core [pro-Clinton] constituencies that weren't going to be affected by any of this [scandal talk]. She wasn't going to be able to go anyplace where there weren't true believers…. You weren't going to solve the credibility problems that she had unless you did something dramatic, and that carried huge risks. What if she were indicted? If she wasn't indicted, she was going to sort of limp along to the election. She was going to speak to women's groups and hard-core Democratic groups, and liberal groups, and raise money from those people. And her favorability rating was going to be what it was going to be. And over time it would get better, but you had to live with it.”

Inside Hillaryland there was considerable consternation about the first lady being sacrificed. But the president had made a calculated decision. “Why didn't Bill defend his wife more vocally? Why didn't he sort of constantly buck her up? I mean he said the perfunctory things about her,” a political aide noted, “but, you know, he was smart. He knew the less he said about this stuff, the better. The more he said, the more people would talk about it…. I mean that was our advice to him, and that was his instinct as well.”

Bill Clinton's 1996 reelection strategy, especially before the Republicans had chosen their nominee, was to highlight the positive, incremental initiatives his administration had implemented, and the economy, which was stabilized and showing the first signs of explosive growth. The scandal-mongering, in Bill's view, had kept voters from the real story of what his presidency had accomplished under the most difficult circumstances: a minimum wage increase, changes in the Safe Drinking Water Act, acquisition of new lands for national parks, a crime-fighting bill, the Earned Income Tax Credit, an anti–teen smoking initiative, and serious educational reform, among other things. The Republicans had shut down the government during the previous November's budget battle, and he was happy to run against the opposition's irresponsibility.

Looking toward the Democratic convention, to be held in Chicago in August, Morris's polling indicated that the so-called scandals of Whitewater were having little effect on the voters—a conclusion that Bill found dubious, especially because Hillary's poll numbers had hit rock bottom. He seemed invested in holding the press and the Clintons' enemies responsible for stripping himself and Hillary of their dignity and political effectiveness. His tendency to self-pity was well established, but on this point his anger was understandable. Morris kept telling him, “None of this is having any effect as long as you don't make it an issue.” Clinton formed the impression—probably correctly—that Morris believed that he and Hillary had been fast and loose both about the finances of their Whitewater investment and in their responses to the investigations that had marked them, thus making the president all the more angry.