Living History (71 page)

Months later, when our new canine pal was sent off to be neutered, Buddy Carter came into the residence shaking his head and muttering, “Not a good day for Buddy today.

Not a good day at all.”

The little Lab settled swiftly into my husband’s routine. He slept by his feet in the Oval Office and stayed up late into the night. They were perfect for each other, since Buddy had, or developed, many of Bill’s traits. Buddy loved people, possessed a sunny, optimistic disposition, and had the ability to focus and concentrate with singular intensity.

Buddy was obsessed with two things: food and tennis balls. He was an absolute maniac when it came to chasing balls. He retrieved the ball, if you let him, until he fell down exhausted.

Then he’d get up and look for his dinner.

Buddy quickly became the center of our family life, which was hard for Socks to deal with. Socks had been showered with all the attention for years. One of my favorite photos showed Socks surrounded by photographers outside the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion before our move to Washington. Unfortunately, Socks despised Buddy. We tried so hard to convince them to get along. But if we left them in the same room, we inevitably came back to find Socks with his back arched, hissing at Buddy, who was intent on chasing the cat under the couch. Socks had blunt-clipped claws, but he never passed up an opportunity to take a swipe at Buddy and once landed a direct hit on the puppy’s nose. Both of them had their fans and each received thousands of letters, mostly from children who expressed their affection―and preference―for one or the other. In fact, I had to set up a separate correspondence unit at the U.S. Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Home to answer their mail. In 1998, I published some of the letters in Dear Socks, Dear Buddy, giving the proceeds to the National Park Foundation, the charity that raises funds to support our national park system.

Before we knew it, Christmas had come and gone, and we were off for our trip to Hilton Head, South Carolina, for Renaissance Weekend and a gathering of 1,500 friends and acquaintances.

I looked forward to seeing our friends and loved the long, serious conversations at Renaissance. But I needed some rest, and I was eager for the four days we had planned on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Is lands after New Year’s. We had visited this beautiful Caribbean island the year before, staying in a house overlooking Magens Bay. This year we were returning to the same location, taking Buddy along with us.

We landed at the little airport in Charlotte Amalie, the capital, and drove along the curvy mountain road lined with coconut and mango trees to our secluded spot on the north side of the island. The warm air and tropical breezes were so welcoming, as was the house, set on a hill with winding steps leading down to a tiny beach below. The Secret Service was headquartered next door, and the Coast Guard had cleared boats out of the little bay to enhance security―and privacy. As we looked out across the water, there was virtually no sign of life. It was an idyllic setting.

Bill, Chelsea and I did what we usually do on vacations: We played cards and word games and put together a one-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. We brought plenty of books that we read, swapped and discussed over informal meals. Otherwise we swam, walked, jogged, hiked and cycled together. Normally Bill plays golf every chance he can, and since our vacations usually coincide with football and basketball seasons, our accommodations must have adequate television reception. We were not, however, ever truly alone.

The Secret Service was on duty nearby, and the Navy stewards who travel with a President were ready to cook or clean whenever needed. And, of course, essential staff was with us: the doctor, nurse, military aide, press staff and security adviser. But we got used to the entourage, and they respected our privacy. The paparazzi did not.

One afternoon midway through the trip, Bill and I put on our bathing suits and ventured down to the beach for a swim. Unbeknownst to us, a photographer from Agence France-Presse, the French wire service, was hiding in the bushes on a public beach across the bay. He must have had a powerful telephoto lens, because the next day a photo of us slow-dancing on the beach appeared in newspapers around the world. Mike McCurry, the White House press secretary, was angry about the invasion of privacy and the fact that the photographer was, as he told the press corps, “sneaking around in bushes and taking pictures surreptitiously.” Obviously, the incident raised questions about security as well as privacy. If you’re close enough to take a picture with a telephoto lens, you’re close enough to shoot a gun with a scope. Bill wasn’t upset. He liked the photo.

A debate ensued in the press over whether the photographer had violated journalistic ethics and invaded our privacy for prurient interests. That led to speculation by some journalists that we had “posed” for the photo in hopes that our embrace would be captured on film.

Hello? As I told a radio interviewer a few weeks later, “Just name me any fifty-yearold woman who would knowingly pose in her bathing suit―with her back pointed toward the camera.”

Well, maybe people who look good from any angle, like Cher or Jane Fonda or Tina Turner.

But not me.

“Thank you, Mrs. Clinton,” said one of Kenneth Starr’s deputies. “That’s all we’ll need for now.”

David Kendall sat next to me in the Treaty Room during an interview with the independent counsel to clear up some final matters in the investigation of the mishandled FBI files. “They’ve got to ask these questions, just so they can say they asked,” David assured me. He was right: the questions were brief and perfunctory. Kenneth Starr was in attendance but said nothing during the ten-minute Q and A.

David later remarked that the prosecutors had seemed more smug than usual―“like the cats who swallowed the canary,” in the words of one lawyer in the room―but I didn’t pick up any unusual frequencies that morning. I was just grateful that the case was closed on one more of the non-scandals being probed by the OIC. It was January 14, 1998, and Starr’s inquiry was in its fourth year. Like every other investigation in the independent counsel’s portfolio, Filegate was a dry hole. A midlevel White House employee in the Office of Personnel Security had blundered by using an outdated list to order FBI file summaries for current staff, and had inadvertently been sent files on some security pass holders from the Reagan and first Bush Administrations. But it was neither a conspiracy nor a crime. The previous fall, Starr had finally conceded that Vince Foster really had committed suicide. (Robert Fiske had reached that conclusion three years earlier, but it took four more official investigations, including Starr’s, to confirm it.) Starr had also run into a dead end in his original probe of the Whitewater land deal. The culture of investigation followed us out the door of the White House when clerical errors in the recording of gifts mushroomed into a full-blown flap, generating hundreds of news stories over several months.

The most active litigation we were contending with was a civil case unrelated to the OIC investigation. Paula Jones’s legal team was being paid for and guided by the Rutherford Institute, a legal aid organization with a fundamentalist rightwing agenda. Bill’s lawyers had fully expected the case to be thrown out of court on a motion for summary judgment before it got to trial, but the Supreme Court had decided to let the case proceed.

Jones therefore was entitled to depose witnesses, including the President. Bill was scheduled to be interviewed under oath on Saturday, January 17, 1998.

Although there had been opportunities to settle with Jones out of court, I had opposed the idea in principle, believing that it would set a terrible precedent for a President to pay money to rid himself of a nuisance suit. The lawsuits would never end. With the wisdom of hindsight, of course, not settling the Jones suit early on was the second biggest tactical mistake made in handling the barrage of investigations and lawsuits. The first was requesting an independent counsel at all.

Bill had been up late the night before, preparing for his testimony. When he left, I wished him luck and gave him a big hug. I waited for him in the residence, and when he came back, he looked agitated and exhausted. I asked him how he thought it went, and he told me it was a farce and that he resented the whole process. Although we had planned to go out with friends to a Washington restaurant, he wanted to cancel in favor of a quiet dinner at home.

As usual, there was a lot on everyone’s plate at the beginning of the new year. The White House was rolling out new initiatives every week in anticipation of the upcoming State of the Union Address. While moving towards a balanced budget, the President planned significant expansions in Medicare and education, as well as the major increase in child care benefits that my staff had advocated to double the number of eligible children.

Then on Wednesday morning, January 21, Bill woke me up early. He sat on the edge of the bed and said, “There’s something in today’s papers you should know about.”

“What are you talking about?”

He told me there were news reports that he’d had an affair with a former White House intern and that he had asked her to lie about it to Paula Jones’s lawyers. Starr had requested and obtained permission from Attorney General Janet Reno to expand his investigation to look into possible criminal charges against the President.

Bill told me that Monica Lewinsky was an intern he had befriended two years earlier when she was volunteering in the West Wing during the government shutdown. He had talked to her a few times, and she had asked him for some job-hunting help. This was completely in character for Bill. He said that she had misinterpreted his attention, which was something I had seen happen dozens of times before. It was such a familiar scenario that I had little trouble believing the accusations were groundless. By then, I also had endured more than six years of baseless claims fomented by some of the same people and groups associated with the Jones case and the Starr investigation.

I questioned Bill over and over about the story. He continued to deny any improper behavior but to acknowledge that his attention could have been misread.

I will never truly understand what was going through my husband’s mind that day.

All I know is that Bill told his staff and our friends the same story he told me: that nothing improper went on. Why he felt he had to deceive me and others is his own story, and he needs to tell it in his own way. In a better world, this sort of conversation between a husband and wife would be no one’s business but our own. Though I had long tried to protect what was left of our privacy, I could do nothing now.

For me, the Lewinsky imbroglio seemed like just another vicious scandal manufactured by political opponents. After all, since he had started running for public office, Bill had been accused of everything from drug-running to fathering a child with a Little Rock prostitute, and I had been called a thief and a murderer. I expected that, ultimately, the intern story would be a footnote in tabloid history.

I believed my husband when he told me there was no truth to the charges, but I realized that we faced the prospect of another horrible and invasive investigation just at the point when I thought our legal troubles were over. I knew, too, that the political danger was real. A nuisance civil action had metastasized into a criminal investigation by Starr, who would undoubtedly take it as far as he could. Leaks to the media from the Jones camp and the Office of the Independent Counsel implied that Bill’s testimony in his sworn deposition may have conflicted with other witness descriptions of his relationship with Lewinsky. It appeared that the questions in the Jones deposition were designed solely to trap the President into charges of perjury, which might then justify a demand for his resignation or impeachment.

This was a lot of bad news to absorb in one morning. But I knew that both Bill and I had to carry on with our daily routines. Aides in the West Wing were walking around in a daze, muttering into their cell phones and whispering behind closed doors. It was important to reassure the White House staff that we would deal with this crisis and be prepared to fight back, just as we had in the past. I knew that everyone would be looking to me for their cues. The best thing I could do for myself and those around me was to forge ahead. I could have used more time to prepare for my first public appearance, but that was not to be. That afternoon, I was scheduled to give a speech on civil rights to a large gathering at Goucher College at the invitation of our old friend Taylor Branch, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on Martin Luther King, Parting the Waters. Since I was not about to let down the college or Taylor, whose wife, Christy Macy, worked for me, I headed to Union Station and caught a train to Baltimore.

David Kendall telephoned me during the train ride, and it was good to hear his voice.

Other than my husband, he was the only person with whom I felt I could talk freely. The year before, Starr had subpoenaed notes from conversations I’d had with White House lawyers about Whitewater, and a court had ruled that attorney-client privilege did not apply to government-paid lawyers. According to David, the OTC was likely planning to subpoena every employee, friend and family member who might have information about the Lewinsky case.

As the Amtrak train lumbered through the Maryland suburbs, David told me he had been hearing snippets of rumors since the day before the Jones deposition. Journalists had called him with questions about another woman’s involvement in the case. He thought it might be a troublesome development, but not serious enough to set off any alarms. Now he confirmed that on January 16, Attorney General Reno wrote a letter to the three-judge oversight panel recommending that Starr be allowed to expand his investigation to the Lewinsky matter and possible obstruction of justice. We later learned that Reno’s recommendation was based on incomplete and false information provided to her by the OTC.

Bill had been blindsided, and the unfairness of it all made me more determined to stand with him to combat the charges.