Living History (53 page)

From there I went to the National Gallery to address the women of the north and south of Ireland. In a speech carried live on national Irish television, I praised the bravery of Irish women who had stood up for peace. I joked about the Irish television personality who had recently welcomed a group of women lawmakers to his show by asking, “Who’s minding the children?” I smiled and said, “I long for the day when men are asked the same question.” Debate raged in Ireland about what choices women should be “allowed”

to make, especially in the realm of family life. A week earlier, the Irish had narrowly passed a referendum legalizing divorce over vigorous opposition from the Roman Catholic Church. The women attending the event knew very well that despite the progress women had made economically, politically and socially, many obstacles remained.

I met up with Bill at the Bank of Ireland next to the College Green of Trinity University, where we spent time with Bono and other members of the band U2, who have since become friends. Bill and I have worked with Bono on the global issues he champions, debt relief for poor countries and more resources to fight HIV/AIDS. When we walked onto the stage constructed for Bill’s speech, I gasped. There were probably one hundred thousand people jammed into the narrow streets and across the green to hear the American President speak. Bill exhorted the immense crowd to work for peace, saying that no conflict is too intractable to remain forever unresolved and that the Troubles too could yield to a peaceful future.

After another address, before the Irish Parliament, known as the Dáil, we hit the streets for some shopping and a visit to Cassidy’s Pub. Our advance teams used genealogical information to track down any Cassidy who might be related to Bill, and they joined us inside for a pint of Guinness. I soon concluded that all the Irish are related in some way or another.

At Ambassador Smith’s residence early that evening we were thrilled to meet Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Prize-winning poet, and his wife, Marie. Heaney’s poem “The Cure at Troy” had inspired Bill’s theme that this was a time in Ireland “where hope and history rhyme.” Ireland invigorated and inspired me, and I wished we could bottle up the good feelings and take them back home.

Bill’s parting words in Belfast―“may the Christmas spirit of peace and goodwill flourish and grow in you”-hadn’t penetrated Washington, where partisan battles continued into the holiday season. The annual Congressional Ball, hosted by the White House on December 5, was attended by the same people who were fighting Bill over the budget and decking our halls with subpoenas. Yet they were eager to wait in a long receiving line in the Diplomatic Reception Room to be photographed with us. Bill of course welcomed everyone warmly. It wasn’t until the next day that he showed the Republican leaders his steel when he vetoed the seven-year budget reconciliation bill for fiscal year 1996.

The Republicans had incorporated brutal cuts in environmental protections, education funding and programs that help poor women, children and seniors, including Medicaid and Medicare. Bill signed the veto with the same pen that Lyndon Johnson had used thirty years earlier when he signed Medicare into law. At stake, Bill pointed out, were “two very different futures for America.” He knew the Republicans didn’t have the necessary votes to override a presidential veto, and he urged them to soften their positions and negotiate with the White House to break the impasse. But Gingrich’s revolutionary freshmen refused to budge from their ideological crusade to dismantle the power of the federal government.

The government’s authority to spend money expired again at midnight on December 16. This time there was a “partial” shutdown―some federal workers were furloughed, working without a paycheck until the government reopened. It was a truly terrible hardship to impose on people, especially during the holidays. And before Congress recessed for its Christmas break on December 22, Gingrich Republicans added to the callousness by passing a radical welfare reform act that, if left to stand, would imperil millions of vulnerable women and children.

Welfare reform had been debated by Bill’s staff since the presidential campaign, when Bill promised to “end welfare as we know it.” I agreed that the system was broken and needed to be fixed, but I was adamant that whatever reform we advocated would ensure an adequate safety net that provided incentives for individuals to move from welfare to work. I expressed my opinions vigorously and often to my husband as well as to his staff members charged with shaping reform. I argued that any reform package must preserve Medicaid and provide child care for working mothers. Although I stayed out of the public debate, I actively participated in the internal one. I made clear to Bill and his policy advisers in the West Wing that if I thought they were caving in to a meanspirited Republican bill that was harmful to women and children, I would publicly oppose it. I understood Bill’s dilemma, and I wanted to influence his decision. Bill’s staff worked with mine and we made some real progress in framing a rebuttal to the Republicans. The President vetoed the Republican welfare bill as promised.

The Republicans finally were being held accountable for both the budget impasse and the shutdowns, and the drop in their approval ratings led to a fracturing of the party’s united front. By January, Senator Bob Dole, likely looking ahead to the launch of his presidential campaign in New Hampshire, started talking compromise. Gingrich’s strategy of “playing chicken” with Bill had failed, and I felt great relief that we could reopen the government and get workers back on the payroll now that Bill had prevailed.

As the second session of the 104th Congress opened on January 3, 1996, only three minor pieces of the Gingrich Contract had been signed into law. Bill had sustained eleven vetoes. He had managed to stave off disastrous cuts to Medicare and Medicaid and to save programs like AmeriCorps and Legal Aid services, which had been destined for the chopping block. By the end of the month both sides reached a compromise funding agreement and reopened the government.

One institution unaffected by the shutdown was the Senate Banking Committee, whose work was deemed “essential.” Without pause, it continued to haul our friends, lawyers and associates up to the Hill to fish for evidence of wrongdoing, while VA hospitals were prohibited from treating most patients, and other government employees were furloughed without pay.

On November 29, while we were in Europe, the Republicans’ key witness, L. Jean Lewis, had been crossexamined by Senator Paul Sarbanes of Maryland and the Democratic counsel on the D’Amato committee, Richard Ben-Veniste. Lewis was the RTC official who had filed a criminal referral in August 1992 with the FBI and the U.S. Attorney in Little Rock, naming as felony suspects not only the McDougals but everyone who contributed to a fundraiser McDougal held for Bill at Madison Guaranty in 1985. She listed Bill and me as possible witnesses. Ben-Veniste charged that Lewis was politically biased against us and had submitted this referral just before the 1992 election to affect the outcome.

According to the final Whitewater Report published in 2002, this pre-election effort to implicate us in a criminal probe was encouraged by people in the Bush White House and Justice Department.

To rebut her testimony before the Banking Committee, Ben-Veniste crossexamined Lewis intensely, suggesting that she was lying when she said she had accidentally made a lengthy tape recording of a conversation she had with an RTC official who visited Lewis at her Kansas City office. Ben-Veniste got Lewis to state that, while she was a conservative Republican, she had no political bias against Bill and had never called him a liar. He then presented a letter that she’d written in 1992 which made exactly that charge. Democrats also introduced evidence that Lewis had sought to market a line of T-shirts and mugs carrying messages that were critical of both Bill and me. Before the questioning concluded, Lewis collapsed and had to be helped from the hearing room.

The general public heard little about this development in the ongoing Whitewater drama. Among the television networks, only C-SPAN covered the details of the Lewis appearance. Days after her memorable and self-destructing testimony, The New York Times continued to give credence to Lewis’s unsubstantiated accusations and to refer to her as a “star witness.” Undaunted by the facts, the D’Amato committee continued to probe my association with McDougal’s savings and loan. Ken Starr’s investigation was supposedly confidential, but his team was displaying a remarkable talent for calculated leaks to the media.

In late 1995, Dick Morris came to see me to deliver a bizarre message: I was going to be indicted for something as yet undefined and “people close to Starr” suggested I accept the indictment and ask Bill to pardon me before trial. I assumed Morris was carrying water for his Republican clients or contacts, so I chose my words very carefully. “Tell your sources to report to Starr’s people that even though I have done nothing wrong, I’m well aware that, in the immortal words of Edward Bennett Williams, ‘a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich if he chooses.’ And if Starr does, I would never ask for a pardon. I will go to trial and show Starr up for the fraud he is.”

“Are you sure you want me to say that?” Morris asked me.

“Word for word,” I replied.

In the ruckus over budgets and shutdowns, an important development in the Whitewater investigation passed almost unnoticed: Findings of the RTC report on Whitewater were finally made public just before Christmas. This independent report corroborated our contention that Bill and I had minimal involvement with the Whitewater investment and no liability in the collapse of Madison Guaranty. After examining forty-seven witnesses, compiling 200,000 documents and spending $3.6 million, the RTC investigators found no evidence of misconduct on our part and no factual basis for any aspect of the Whitewater “scandal.”

Like Jean Lewis’s discredited testimony, the report was minimally covered in the news media. USA Today didn’t acknowledge it at all; The Washington Post buried the news in paragraph 11 of a front-page story about Whitewater subpoenas and The New York Times ran a few paragraphs on the report. Republicans dismissed the RTC investigation as too narrow and continued their hearings.

I was encouraged by this news when I met with David Kendall at the White House early on January 4, 1996, for one of our periodic catch-up sessions. David always tried to keep things light at our briefings by photocopying his favorite political cartoons for me or clipping the most outrageous tabloid stories, such as “Hillary Gives Birth to Alien Baby”

or whatever they dreamed up that week.

We met in the Family Room, between the large master bedroom and the Yellow Oval Room on the second floor of the residence. The Bushes and Reagans relaxed and watched television there, and Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt had each used it as a bedroom.

Bill and I furnished it with a television and card table along with a comfortable couch and armchair. Midway through the meeting, an usher knocked on the door and handed David a note, which he folded up and put in his pocket. When we finished our conversation, David left.

The next morning David called and asked if he could come see me.

“Something has come up,” he said.

David explained that the note he’d been given the day before was from Carolyn Huber, asking him to stop by her East Wing office on his way out. Carolyn, our longtime assistant in Arkansas, came to Washington to handle our personal correspondence and to organize, catalog and archive personal papers―everything from old school report cards to vacation photos to major speeches―that were now stored in hundreds of boxes throughout the residence and at a special White House storage facility in Maryland.

David often asked Carolyn to help locate documents requested by the independent counsel, and, throughout the previous months, she had turned over thousands of pages of records from our boxes and her files.

When he arrived at her office, she handed him a sheaf of papers. David quickly realized what they were: a 1992 computer printout detailing the legal work I and others had done at the Rose Law Firm for Madison Guaranty back in 1985-86. Although Madison Guaranty billing records were included in the Special Counsel’s subpoenas, the logical place to find them was in the records of the Rose Firm and Madison Guaranty. Their absence in our records did not surprise David or me, although we were anxious for them to appear, since I was certain they would support my recollection about what little legal work I had done. I was relieved that they had finally been found.

“Where on earth have they been?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” said David. “Carolyn was going through a box of papers in her office and came across them. As soon as she realized what they were, she sent me the note.”

“What does this mean?” I asked David.

“Well, the good news is we found them. The bad news is this gives the press and prosecutors the chance to go wild again.”

And they did. William Safire, a former Nixon speechwriter, called me a “congenital liar” in his New York Times column. My picture appeared on the cover of Newsweek under the headline SAINT OR SINNER? And there was renewed talk of a grand jury subpoena and a possible indictment in the Whitewater investigation.

The copy of the billing records, we later concluded, was probably made during the 1992 campaign so that Bill’s campaign staff and the Rose Law Firm could respond to the media questions about Madison Guaranty, Jim McDougal and Whitewater. Vmce Foster, who handled the queries at the time, had scribbled notes on the documents. I believed they would corroborate what I had been saying all along: that my work for McDougal’s savings and loan so many years ago had been minimal, in time and compensation.

On January 9, 1996, with the careful help of White House ushers, the Green Room was transformed into a temporary television studio for my interview with Barbara Walters.

Technicians snaked cables along the floor and set up equipment that bathed the room in a golden light so gentle and flattering that even the powdered-wig portrait of Benjamin Franklin above the fireplace seemed to glow with youth. Barbara and I made pleasant small talk while the crew adjusted the sound levels.