A Woman in Charge (86 page)

“I think she handled it as a very personal situation,” said Mary Mel French, a friend of the Clintons from Arkansas and chief of protocol at the State Department during the Clinton administration. During this period, the messages and visits from members of her prayer group were becoming more frequent, though she is not known to have confided in anyone. It was around this time that Hillary learned from David Kendall—neither has ever disclosed the exact date in late July—that Starr had negotiated an immunity deal with Monica Lewinsky to tell her story to the Whitewater grand jury.

Starr had also informed Kendall that he intended to subpoena the president to testify before the grand jury. Kendall and the other lawyers were adamantly opposed to allowing him to testify, on grounds that the target of a criminal investigation should never testify before a grand jury and instead plead his Fifth Amendment rights. Hillary told Kendall and Bill that she believed he had to testify, that the massive “political pressure” left them no choice. As when she had opposed settling with Paula Jones, her vote on this crucial matter would be the one that counted. Hillary later claimed she was not unduly concerned about it, that there was no reason for her to fear what Bill would testify to.

This claim of unconcern is striking given their lawyers' understanding of the dangers. Starr's questions to Bill in a grand jury appearance would undoubtedly be difficult. Starr had asked for a blood sample from Bill. Kendall thought it was conceivable Starr was only trying to bluff and unnerve Bill, Hillary wrote. It is hard to believe that by then she did not suspect that the purpose of the blood test was to match Bill's DNA against the purported stains on Lewinsky's by-then infamous blue dress.

There was another reason Kendall did not want Bill to testify. If the president evaded Starr's attempt to bring about his impeachment, Kendall believed the prosecutor would attempt to indict him after he left office. Lawyers did not want their clients to be confronted in court with answers pried by a grand jury with its almost limitless latitude in asking questions. But another midterm election was approaching, in which the chance for Democrats to pick up seats in Congress would surely be adversely affected if, after claiming innocence for seven months, the president were to refuse to testify. A Democratic electoral tide might mitigate against impeachment.

On August 6, Lewinsky told her story to the grand jury under a grant of immunity and the threat of perjury charges being filed against her if she were not truthful. Bill Clinton knew he was trapped. Starr issued a subpoena for the president to testify on August 17. There was no room left to maneuver. He would have to tell his wife—and the world—that he had lied. He would have to explain to Hillary that the story he told her seven months earlier about his relationship with Lewinsky did not accurately describe what had transpired and was not what he would soon tell the grand jury.

Bill went to Linda Bloodworth-Thomason on Friday, August 14, to ask whether she might talk to Hillary first. She flatly declined.

On Friday night, according to Hillary, Bob Barnett came to the White House to meet with her in the Yellow Oval Room on unrelated business, ostensibly, and to see how she was holding up. By then, Barnett was the essential Clinton family adviser, moving easily between Hillary and Bill, strategizing with his law partner Kendall, handling personal and financial matters for the president and first lady, negotiating her book contracts, and, increasingly, trying to get reporters not to write unfavorably about the Clintons, or not write about them at all. He could be intimidating.

Hillary said Barnett asked her if she was worried. What if there was more to the story than she knew?

Hillary said she told Barnett that she didn't believe there was more to it, that she had continued to ask Bill—over and over again—if he had been truthful with her.

In her telling, Barnett persisted: she had to consider the possibility that some of what Bill had said was a lie.

“My husband may have his faults, but he has never lied to me,” she said she replied.

That statement speaks for itself.

 

B
ARNETT HAD
prepared the ground that Linda Bloodworth-Thomason had refused to tread. He also did nothing to dissuade the
Washington Post
and the
New York Times
from publishing stories in their weekend editions that said the president was considering changing his story: by now Bill's lawyers wanted him to admit what had occurred, and feared he might, at the last minute, continue to stonewall or perjure himself before the grand jury, to save his marriage, his presidency, or both. “President Weighs Admitting He Had Sexual Contacts,” read the
Times
page-one headline.

Early on the morning of August 15, a Saturday, Bill woke Hillary. “This time he didn't sit by the bed,” she wrote. He told her that the situation was “much more serious” than he'd previously admitted, that he now would have to testify that he and Lewinsky had had an “inappropriate intimacy.” What had occurred was “brief and sporadic.” He was pacing to and fro as he talked. Seven months before, he hadn't told her because he knew how hurt and angry she'd be; and he was ashamed.

Hillary wrote, in
Living History:
“I could hardly breathe. Gulping for air, I started crying and yelling at him, ‘What do you mean? What are you saying? Why did you lie to me?' I was furious and getting more so by the second. He just stood there saying over and over again, ‘I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I was trying to protect you and Chelsea.'”

Until then, she insisted, she had believed only that he had acted ridiculously for paying attention to Lewinsky, and that she had remained convinced that he was being treated unfairly. She was now “dumbfounded, heartbroken and outraged that I'd believed him at all.”

“She should have killed him on the spot,” said Sara Ehrman. Later, Sara, Diane, Dorothy Rodham, and Hillary would all speak privately of Hillary's “heartbreak,” and how it figured in her eventual decision-making: both to try to hold the marriage together and to seek a seat in the United States Senate.

Hillary insisted that Bill tell Chelsea himself that “he had lied to her, too.” Both Hillary and Bill were now aware that their marriage might not survive, that there might be “an irreparable breach,” she wrote. She said his eyes had filled with tears when she'd insisted he tell Chelsea.

There had been days when the Clinton White House was out of kilter, but with the possible exception of the day the Lewinsky story had broken, no one could remember a day as disorienting as the one of the president's grand jury testimony. Only the lawyers had any idea of what Clinton was going to say in his testimony (and they worried he might go off-script), and no one—including Bill—knew what he was going to say publicly afterward. His speechwriters and other aides had taken the initiative to draft a post-testimony address to the nation, but Bill had hardly looked at it.

Blumenthal, who was in Italy for a European conference on the “Third Way,” the anti-ideological political movement that Bill Clinton and Tony Blair had championed, phoned Hillary. As much as he wanted to respect her privacy, he recognized that they had to be considering the obvious political questions. She agreed. She told him that the president would be “‘embarrassed,'” by having to testify before the grand jury, “but that was for him to deal with.” Blumenthal's assessment of what had occurred between Hillary and Bill reflected his closeness to her, but was also accurate, if slightly hyperbolic: “Hillary had hoped against hope that her husband had reformed himself, that whatever agony she had gone through earlier in her marriage had been resolved. Now she was discovering that it was not over…. In a way, this blow to her pride made her in the eyes of many a more accessible and sympathetic figure. As she steeled herself, she drew warm concern. Her private relationship with her wayward husband had a magnified effect through her every word and gesture.”

 

U
NSURE WHETHER
his marriage would survive, Bill wanted his testimony to do as little as possible to undermine it further. It would be conducted in the White House Map Room, a private sitting room on the ground floor that FDR had used to follow combat reports in World War II. Starr had withdrawn his subpoena after Bill voluntarily agreed to testify, in the presence of his attorneys, with the entire proceedings tape-recorded and with a live feed to the grand jurors in the courthouse. Four hours had been allotted for the session. Bill was determined to run out the clock on his interrogators, and play to the camera—and the country: he did not doubt that, grand jury secrecy notwithstanding, eventually the tape would be made public.

Overreaching as it might seem, he saw the possibility of turning the tables, in the long run, on his tormentors and Starr. He was a master of words, as he would prove once again. They were literalists and flatfoots and haters. His answers were lengthy, and he almost always took the question and turned it upside down. When they mentioned the Paula Jones case, he challenged its relevance and identified its political purpose: “They just thought they would take a wrecking ball to me and see if they could do some damage.” The Jones suit, he noted, had been “funded by my political opponents.”

The first questioner was Starr's deputy Robert Bittman: “Mr. President, were you physically intimate with Monica Lewinsky?”

What followed led to a presidential locution as famous in its day as “Fourscore and seven years ago” had been: “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is' is,” said the president.
^*36

He read from a prepared statement in which he admitted “inappropriate intimate contact” with Lewinsky, which “did not consist of sexual intercourse,” and did not “constitute sexual relations” as defined in a long list of terms he had been read at his deposition in the Jones case in January. He addressed the grand jury, and whoever else would eventually be watching the tape: “I'll bet the grand jurors, if they were talking about two people they know, and said they have a sexual relationship, they meant they were sleeping together; they meant they were having intercourse”—not oral sex. “In an effort to preserve the dignity of the office I hold,” he told Bittman, looking down at his prepared notes, “this is all I will say about the specifics of these particular matters.”

Literally hours were spent trying to pin the president down on what was sex and what wasn't, on what kind of sex it was that he'd had with Lewinsky (he kept saying he wouldn't talk about specifics); he had told Vernon Jordan that “there was no sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, which was true,” and on and on.

He took numerous opportunities to characterize the methodology of Starr and his investigation, and to remind his audience that he was the president of the United States, with official duties. “I don't have a perfect memory of all these events that have now in the last seven months, since Ms. Lewinsky was kept for several hours, four or five of your lawyers and four or five FBI agents, as if she were a serious felon, these things have become the most important matters in the world. At the moment they were occurring many other things were going on.”

He offered a soliloquy on the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill testimony, concluding “I believed that they both thought they were telling the truth,” trying to demonstrate that there could be two honestly held interpretations of whatever had occurred. The prosecutors kept asking about “touching her breast, kissing her breast, or touching her genitalia.” They did not look or sound good on tape.

Starr was the final questioner, asking three times about the claims of executive privilege the White House had utilized, trying to show a pattern of stonewalling—with only twelve minutes remaining until the 6:30 completion scheduled for Bill's testimony. Starr had never been a criminal prosecutor before his appointment as independent counsel, and, as had been evident for two years, it showed. Bill filibustered. He did not want to put the presidency at risk of being weakened. “Most of my time and energy in the last five and a half years have been devoted to my job. I have also had to contend with things no previous president has ever had to contend with…. And during this whole time, I have tried as best I could to keep my mind on the job the American people gave me.”

When Starr asked for more time, Kendall declined.

 

D
URING
B
ILL'S TESTIMONY,
Hillary remained in the Solarium as aides wandered in and out with drafts of the statement Bill would make on national television later that night. She had asked Harry Thomason that morning if he would get in touch with James Carville, who was in Brazil.

“Hillary thinks it's a good idea if you came,” said Thomason. “It's going to be a pretty tough day…. I think she'd feel better if you were kind of hanging around.”

Carville went straight to the Solarium. “It was like somebody had died,” he said. Usually when he saw Hillary, she was smartly dressed, her hair nicely styled, and she'd have makeup on. This time, if she had any makeup on, it wasn't noticeable, and her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. “She'd obviously been crying,” Carville recalled. “She asked me to sit by her…. Just, ‘Come sit with me.'”

At the end of his testimony, Bill went to the residence to shower and have something to eat. She caught a glimpse of him and she could tell he was infuriated. Otherwise, she avoided him. He went back to talk to the lawyers and speechwriters who were working on his statement. “I don't think he was anxious to go in that room [where Hillary was],” said Carville. “It was a pretty somber thing.”

When Carville was leaving about 8
P.M.
to appear on
The Larry King Show,
a draft of a statement for Bill's speech to the nation was circulated. Hillary did not want to review it. “Her mind was elsewhere,” said Carville. Some members of the staff were debating whether, in his address to the nation, Bill should attack Starr or simply acknowledge his inappropriate relationship with Lewinsky and apologize. Chelsea was listening. Finally “out of habit, maybe curiosity, perhaps love,” Hillary said later, the first lady joined the group working on the statement: Bill, Chuck Ruff (the White House Counsel), Mickey Kantor, Rahm Emanuel, the Thomasons. The television had again been turned off in deference to her. She asked how things were going. It became clear that the president hadn't yet determined what he should say, that he was flustered and getting angrier. Time had been reserved with the networks for him to go on the air at 10
P.M.
Bill saw the chance to attack Starr and the unfairness of the investigation, the unconscionable abuse by Starr of his position, but there were differing views as to how far he should go. He was getting more frustrated. Suddenly, Hillary interjected, “Well, Bill, this is your speech. You're the one who got yourself into this mess, and only you can decide what to say about it.” That was all the advice she gave before she left the room.