A Woman in Charge (84 page)

 

P
ERHAPS NEVER BEFORE
had a peacetime State of the Union address been so anticipated, and for reasons having little to do with what the president thought the actual state of the union was at that moment. Rather, there was far more interest in the state of the president, and what, if anything, he would say about the scandal swirling around him, whether he said it in words or in body language. And, if he did not address the subject, was that some kind of message in itself?

In the event, the president did not mention Monica Lewinsky. Instead, in a calm, focused, and direct voice he declared: “We have more than fourteen million new jobs, the lowest unemployment in twenty-four years, the lowest core inflation in thirty years. Incomes are rising, and we have the highest home ownership in history. Crime has dropped for a record of five years in a row, and the welfare rolls are at their lowest level in twenty-seven years. Our leadership in the world is unrivaled. Ladies and gentlemen, the state of our union is strong.” That said nothing, of course, about the state of the presidency or the president.

In the next hour and fifteen minutes he talked about big plans: targeted tax cuts and new programs to help working families, to improve education and child care. “Now if we balance the budget for next year, it is projected that we'll then have a sizable surplus in the years that immediately follow,” Clinton said. “What should we do with this projected surplus? I have a simple, four-word answer: Save Social Security first. Tonight I propose that we reserve 100 percent of the surplus, that's every penny of any surplus, until we have taken all the necessary measures to strengthen the Social Security system for the twenty-first century.”

On that count, Clinton won ovations from both sides of the aisle. Said one Democrat: “The speech reminded us why the president stays popular through everything that's hit him.”

Hillary, who had earned Bill a stay of execution, was pleased with the speech. She thought it had reinforced the message she was trying to get him and the White House to convey: they would not be deterred; the business of the nation went on with great success; the lawyers would take care of the Lewinsky business; he had a loving wife who not only accepted his explanation, but had recast the whole attack on her husband. As the
New York Times
wrote the next day:

While no proof has been offered to support Hillary Rodham Clinton's allegations that a “vast right-wing conspiracy” is behind the accusations of sexual impropriety imperiling her husband's presidency, several figures in the case against President Clinton have common ties in conservative groups and causes. Monica S. Lewinsky's alleged account of a sexual relationship with the president was steered to the Whitewater independent counsel, Kenneth W. Starr, by two lawyers, George T. Conway 3rd of New York and James W. Moody of Washington, who have been active in conservative causes.

“Part of my duty as good soldier, first knight, was to try to get the right story out,” said Blumenthal. “I felt I had to go into a journalistic mode, but I couldn't be a journalist myself. I could suggest information….” This was certainly the case with Conway and Moody, who had been steered to Blumenthal by Brock. The
Times
story noted that Starr, Conway, Moody, and others were members of the Federalist Society, an organization of attorneys who were dedicated to reversing “liberal” dominance of the law and the judiciary.

 

A
T THE TIME
the Lewinsky story broke, Chelsea was at Stanford. Hillary and Bill did not know how she would withstand this latest and most personal crisis of their married life; the political ramifications, the possibility they might be forced to leave the White House, would weigh on her, they knew. Now, like her mother, there would inevitably be an element of humiliation that she would have to endure.

There had been some question, during the frenzy of the previous week, of whether Hillary, almost immediately after the State of the Union speech, would go ahead with a planned trip to Davos, Switzerland, to attend the World Economic Forum, where she was scheduled to speak. In the end, Hillary decided to go and that Chelsea should come home on Friday, January 30, and spend the weekend at Camp David with Bill and the Rodham family—her mother and brother Tony, and his wife, Nicole. Bill could then talk to Chelsea, do the necessary explaining beyond whatever comfort they had both been able to convey to their daughter by telephone.

Chelsea was visibly upset through the weekend, and the crisis atmosphere, personal and political, hardly abated. Bill's concern and guilt about the situation he had provoked was evident. He was on and off the phone almost constantly, though he took time out for a round of golf. The rest of the family hovered over Chelsea. She was unusually quiet, aloof, distant, not herself. For much of the weekend, the family watched movies in silence. Meanwhile, following a well-received speech at Davos, Hillary went skiing in the Alps, returning to Washington on Tuesday, February 3.

Hillary, through the next weeks, stayed in regular touch with old friends by phone. Many called to see how she was holding up; others she called. Hillary would invariably change the subject from herself, or what she and Bill were going through, and instead discuss the lives of her friends, they said later. She had done this kind of thing over the years whenever her world had been shaken. It seemed to help her keep her equilibrium. People who did not know her well suggested her solicitousness was premeditated, intended to win favor or find its way into the press. That does not seem to have been the case.

Nancy Bekavac had been expected at the White House as Hillary and Bill's guest the week the Lewinsky story broke, but she called to cancel—on Wednesday, the same day Bill had awakened Hillary with the news—leaving a message that she had a
personnel
emergency. The next morning Bekavac received an urgent call from Hillary, who had received a message that her friend had had a
personal
emergency. “And she said, ‘Oh! We never have those in Washington,'” Bekavac recalled. “And the two of us just laughed. I said, ‘God, what are you doing wasting your time calling me when you got these other things to do?' And she said, ‘Waste my time? You're a friend, I'm worried about you. Bill's worried about you. We expected to see you last night, and I got this message, and he said, “You got to call.”'…So, I told her about my personnel problem. And, I said, ‘What about you? How are you?' She said, ‘I'm sure everybody out there thinks this is the worst day of my life. But the day isn't any different from any other day since we got to the White House.'” The two joked about the photo of Hillary in her bathing suit dancing with Bill on the beach in Hilton Head, South Carolina, that ran in newspapers across the country during their Christmas vacation.

Bekavac was nearing the end of a 120-day sabbatical from the presidency of Scripps College. “[Hillary said], ‘Tell me the very best thing about your sabbatical.' Okay, here it is. Four months, no pantyhose….

“I hung up the phone and I thought, in what has to be the worst week for any first lady in recorded history of humankind, she's made me feel better,” said Bekavac. “She's made me feel happy. And I don't think I did a goddamn thing for her.”

A
WEEK AFTER
her appearance on the
Today
show, a
Washington Post
/ABC poll showed that 59 percent of Americans believed that “Clinton's political enemies are conspiring to bring down his presidency.” Bill had achieved the highest approval ratings of his presidency—67 percent of Americans approved of his performance as president.

During a February 6 press conference with British prime minister Tony Blair, Bill addressed Hillary's claim of a vast right-wing conspiracy for the first time. “Now you know I've known her for a long time, the first lady,” Bill said. “And she's very smart. And she's hardly ever wrong about anything. But I don't believe I should amplify her observation in this case.”

Newsweek
was working on a cover story for its February 9 issue to include a two-page chart under the title “Conspiracy or Coincidence?” The artwork was professional, but it looked something like the diagrams Blumenthal was constantly refining, with links between twenty-three prominent luminaries and institutions of the ultraconservative constellation—politicians, lawyers, publishers, think tanks, fund-raisers, contributors—that helped feed the Starr investigation.

Finally, the campaign by Hillary and Blumenthal to turn the media tables on Starr was breaking through: Lars-Erik Nelson, the chief Washington correspondent of the New York
Daily News,
wrote about the gullibility of the capital press corps and its acceptance of Starr's “slander” the
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
published a series about the Arkansas Project and Richard Mellon Scaife; the coverage of the Associated Press became critical of the prosecutor's tactics, yet balanced; the reporting of the online magazine
Salon
and
The New York Observer,
both representative of new journalistic directions, was as focused on the independent counsel as on the president and the White House. And in the
Boston Globe,
columnist Pat Oliphant wrote critically about how the Washington press corps had generally “overreached the facts in mad pursuit of an actual or circumstantial witness to White House sex,” accusing the
Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal,
the
New York Times,
the
Dallas Morning News,
ABC, and
Newsweek
of abandoning traditional standards of fairness.

Meanwhile, Starr was investigating Blumenthal for obstruction of justice in his criticism of the special prosecutor's investigation, and had subpoenaed him to appear before the same grand jury investigating the president. “In essence, I was being accused of speaking to the press,” Blumenthal said. He was willing to be judged guilty of pointing out Starr's abuses “to as many journalists as I could.”

For the White House state dinner in honor of Tony and Cherie Blair, Hillary decided to seat Newt Gingrich to her left and Blair to her right. She was hoping to get a reading on the speaker's thoughts about Starr's charges, and gauge his reaction to the drumbeat of impeachment commentary. Gingrich, she had decided, was “the key” without his go-ahead it would be difficult for the impeachment train to reach its destination.

Much of the conversation at the table was about foreign affairs—Bosnia, Iraq, NATO expansion. Gingrich was aware that the Clintons and the Blairs had become close, and he admired the prime minister, if not the more liberal of his policies. Gingrich took the initiative himself—as the story was told by Hillary to Bill—and said, “These accusations against your husband are ludicrous…. Even if it were true, it's meaningless. It's not going to go anywhere.” Hillary was surprised and pleased. Perhaps Gingrich was more complicated and less predictable than she had given him credit for. He was also, unbeknownst to her or even Blumenthal or Brock, at the time having an affair with a member of his staff twenty years younger than himself, for whom he would eventually leave his wife.

 

I
N THE PAST,
Hillary and Betsey Wright had succeeded in silencing or undermining the claims of many of Bill Clinton's women, and many who weren't but claimed to be so. That option was now closed off, lest Hillary or Wright risk another go-round with Starr over obstruction of justice.

The new details leaking steadily—many deliberately from Starr's office and Paula Jones's lawyers—about the president and Monica Lewinsky, and what they may have done while in each other's company, lent a certain plausibility to the accusations of other women, including those whose stories had previously been branded as false or misguided. One, Kathleen Willey, appeared on
60 Minutes
on March 15 to sensational effect, accusing the president of groping her. She said that Clinton had lied in his deposition in the Paula Jones case when he described a meeting between the two of them. “Too many lies are being told,” she said. “Too many lives are being ruined. And I think it's time for the truth to come out.” When Willey, a Democrat and volunteer at the White House, had asked Clinton for a staff job in 1993, she said, the president groped her in a meeting in the Oval Office and took her hand and put it on his genitals. Clinton had said in his deposition in January that he recalled their meeting but he denied anything sexual occurred. “When she came to see me [about her family's financial difficulties and whether he could help her get a paid position at the White House] she was clearly upset,” he said. “I did to her what I have done to scores and scores of men and women who have worked for me or have been my friends over the years. I embraced her, I put my arms around her, I may have kissed her on the forehead. There was nothing sexual about it.”

Willey was among a list of witnesses the Jones lawyers had called to support their claim that the president had a pattern of harassing and forcing himself upon women, and whom Starr's investigators were now interviewing. Despite Hillary's aversion to watching TV or reading the papers, Willey's story infiltrated the shield the first lady and her aides had created to keep her from hearing the seamier details of ongoing developments. Once again, she had to confront the effects of her husband's “empathy”—regardless of the specifics of what had transpired between Bill and Willey. Willey's testimony was eventually rendered legally useless to Starr because, like Bill Clinton, she had been untruthful under oath in the Jones case about events in her own private sexual life.
^*34
The special prosecutor never considered bringing a charge of perjury against her, unlike the president.