Living History (75 page)

As part of our two-year commemoration, I initiated Save America’s Treasures, a program to restore and recognize cultural and historic landmarks and artifacts around our country. In every community, there is something―a monument, a building, a work of art―that tells a story about who we Americans are. Yet we too often neglect that history and fail to learn from it. The Star-Spangled Banner, which inspired our national anthem, hung in tatters in the National Museum of American History. Its painstaking repair would cost millions; its loss would be incalculable.

At a kickoff for Save America’s Treasures, Bill and I announced a donation of $ro million from Ralph Lauren and the Polo Company for the restoration of the flag that inspired our national anthem. Over the next two years, Save America’s Treasures matched $60 million from the federal government with $50 million in private donations and used the funds to restore old films, renovate pueblos, refurbish theaters and save many other examples of America’s heritage.

In July, I embarked on a four-day bus trip from Washington to Seneca Falls, New York, stopping along the way at places of significance: Baltimore’s Fort McHenry; Thomas Edison’s factory in New Jersey; George Washington’s military headquarters in Newburgh, New York; a park in Victor, New York, dedicated to Iroquois culture and Harriet Tubman’s house in Auburn, New York.

Harriet Tubman is one of my heroines. A former slave, she escaped to freedom on the Underground Railroad and then courageously returned to the South time and again to lead other slaves to freedom. While not formally educated, this extraordinary woman was a nurse and scout in the United States Army during the Civil War and became a grassroots activist who raised money to school, clothe and house newly freed black children during Reconstruction. She was a force unto herself and an inspiration to Americans of all races. “If you are tired, keep going,” she said to the slaves she led on treacherous paths from slavery to freedom. “If you are scared, keep going. If you are hungry, keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.”

The emotional capstone of the tour was an event at the Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, attended by sixteen thousand people. This marked the 150th anniversary of the campaign for women’s suffrage led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

Inspired by the history that this small town represented for women and for America, I opened my remarks with the story of Charlotte Woodward, a nineteen-year-old glove maker living in nearby Waterloo 150 years ago. I asked the audience to imagine her life, working for low wages, knowing that if she married, her pay, her children and even the clothes on her body would belong to her husband. Imagine Charlotte’s curiosity and growing excitement on July 19, 1848, when she traveled by horse-drawn carriage to Seneca Falls to attend the first Women’s Rights Convention in America. She saw the roads filled with others like herself, forming one long procession on the path to equality.

I spoke of Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist, who came to Seneca Falls to continue his lifelong struggle for freedom. I wondered what the brave men and women who signed this declaration “would say if they learned how many women fail to vote in elections? They would be amazed and outraged… One hundred and fifty years ago, the women at Seneca Falls were silenced by someone else. Today, women―we silence ourselves.

We have a choice. We have a voice.”

Finally, I urged women to be guided into the future by the vision and wisdom of those who had gathered in Seneca Falls.

“The future, like the past and present, will not and cannot be perfect. Our daughters and granddaughters will face new challenges, which we today cannot even imagine. But each of us can help prepare for that future by doing what we can to speak out for justice and equality, for women’s rights and human rights, to be on the right side of history, no matter the risk or cost.”

It was fitting that my spring and summer of discovery should end on this historic ground. I had witnessed the fragile bloom of democracy taking root in China, Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America. The drive for freedom in those countries was the same drive that made America. The link between Harriet Tubman and Nelson Mandela was a part of the same human journey, and I was looking for the best way to honor it. Because so much blood has been shed for the right to vote, here and all over the world, I have come to think of it as a secular sacrament. Choosing to run for elected office is a tribute to those who sacrificed for our equal right to vote for our leaders. I returned home with a renewed reverence for our flawed but vigorous system of government and new ideas about how to put it to work for all citizens. And when I thought about the obstacles Bill and I still faced in Washington, I dipped deep into the well of inspiration that Harriet Tubman had handed down to us all and vowed to just keep on going.

AUGUST 1998

August 1998 was a bloody month, and its events seemed to signal a turning point at the end of a hopeful decade. In much of the world, the mid-1990s had been a time of reconciliation and growing stability. The Soviet empire had dissolved without causing another world war, and Russia was working with the United States and Europe to construct a safer future. South Africa had held free elections. Virtually all of Latin America had embraced democracy. Ethnic cleansing in Bosnia had ceased and rebuilding had begun. The peace talks and cease-fire in Northern Ireland were successful. Despite terrible setbacks, leaders in the Middle East seemed to be edging toward peace. As always, there were pockets of conflict and suffering in all parts of the globe, but many hostilities had eased.

This period of relative calm was shattered on August 7 when the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were simultaneously bombed by Islamic terrorists, injuring over 5,000 people and killing 264, among them 12 Americans. Most of the victims were African office workers and pedestrians. It was the most devastating of a series of attacks on American targets overseas and an omen of things to come. Bill was more focused than ever on finding the causes of the terror campaign and isolating its leaders. It was increasingly evident to the intelligence community that a diabolical Saudi exile named Osama bin Laden was organizing and bankrolling much of the terrorism in the Muslim world, and his attacks were getting bigger and bolder.

In Iraq, Saddam Hussein had again defied U.N. demands requiring that weapons inspectors be granted full access to his facilities without notice. Bill conferred at length with U.N. officials and U.S. allies to weigh the proper response to Hussein. It was remarkable to everyone except those who knew him that Bill was able to shut out the political distractions around him in Washington and concentrate on the international crises.

But Bill and his national security team were having a hard time directing congressional attention and government resources to the growing threats at home and abroad. Perhaps that was because so much energy in the news media, Congress and the FBI was directed to an investigation of the President’s private life.

In late July, I learned from David Kendall that Starr had negotiated an immunity deal with Monica Lewinsky. She testified before the Whitewater Grand Jury―which no longer had anything to do with Whitewater―on August 6. Starr was determined to subpoena the President to testify, and Bill had to decide whether or not to cooperate. Bill’s legal team opposed the idea, asserting that the target of an investigation should never testify before a grand jury. If it came to a trial, anything he said could be used against him.

But the political pressure to testify was intense. Another midterm election was coming up, and Bill did not want this issue to cloud it. I agreed that Bill had to testify, and I didn’t think there was any reason to worry if he did. It was just another hurdle. David Kendall was briefing Bill and me regularly on developments in the Starr investigation, and I knew the prosecution had requested a blood sample from the President without specifying its significance. David thought it was possible the OIC was bluffing, trying to spook Bill right before his testimony.

I knew from my own experience that a grand jury appearance is nerveracking. On Friday night, August 14, Bob Barnett met with me in the Yellow Oval Room to talk over some unrelated business and, as a friend, to see how I was holding up. After we’d finished, Bob asked me if I was worried. “No,” I said, “I’m just sorry all of us have to endure this.”

Then Bob said, “What if there’s more to this than you know?” “I don’t believe there is. I’ve asked Bill over and over again.” Bob persisted. “What if Starr springs something on him?”

“I wouldn’t believe anything Starr said or did based on my own experience.”

“But,” Bob continued, “you have to face the fact that something about this might be true.”

“Look, Bob,” I said. “My husband may have his faults, but he has never lied to me.”

Early the next morning, Saturday, August 15, Bill woke me up just as he had done months before. This time he didn’t sit by the bed, but paced back and forth. He told me for the first time that the situation was much more serious than he had previously acknowledged.

He now realized he would have to testify that there had been an inappropriate intimacy. He told me that what happened between them had been brief and sporadic.

He couldn’t tell me seven months ago, he said, because he was too ashamed to admit it and he knew how angry and hurt I would be.

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.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Up until now I only thought that he’d been foolish for paying attention to the young woman and was convinced that he was being railroaded. I couldn’t believe he would do anything to endanger our marriage and our family. I was dumbfounded, heartbroken and outraged that I’d believed him at all.

Then I realized that Bill and I had to tell Chelsea. When I told him he had to do this, his eyes filled with tears. He had betrayed the trust in our marriage, and we both knew it might be an irreparable breach. And we had to tell Chelsea that he had lied to her too.

These were terrible moments for all of us. I didn’t know whether our marriage could―or should―survive such a stinging betrayal, but I knew I had to work through my feelings carefully, on my own timetable. I desperately needed someone to talk to so I called a friend who was also a counselor to seek guidance. This was the most devastating, shocking and hurtful experience of my life. I could not figure out what to do, but I knew I had to find a calm place in my heart and mind to sort out my feelings.

Thankfully there were no public appearances on my schedule that weekend. We were supposed to be on vacation, but we had delayed our departure for Martha’s Vineyard until after Bill’s grand jury appearance. Despite the emotional wreckage all around him, Bill had to prepare his testimony and work on a statement to make to the nation.

As we struggled with this personal and public crisis, the world provided another cruel reality check: In Omagh, Northern Ireland, a renegade Irish Republican gang detonated a car bomb in a crowded market, killing twenty-eight, wounding more than two hundred and badly damaging the peace process that Bill had worked so long and hard to nurture with Irish leaders. As reports of the casualties came in that Saturday afternoon, I remembered the times I’d sat with women in all parts of Ireland to talk about the Troubles and to look for a way to achieve peace and reconciliation. Now that’s what I had to try to do in the midst of my own heartrending troubles.

Bill gave his fourhour testimony on Monday afternoon in the Map Room. Starr had agreed to withdraw the subpoena, and the voluntary session was videotaped and relayed on closed circuit to the grand jury chamber. This spared Bill the indignity of appearing in court as the first sitting President summoned before a grand jury, but it was the only humiliation dispensed with that day. When it was over, at 6:25 P.M., Bill emerged from the room composed but deeply angry. I had not been present for his testimony, and I was not ready to talk to him, but I could tell from his body language that he had been through an ordeal.

David Kendall had alerted the TV networks that Bill would briefly address the nation at to P.M. eastern standard time. Some of Bill’s most trusted advisers―White House Counsel Chuck Ruff, Paul Begala, Mickey Kantor, James Carville, Rahm Emanuel, Harry and Linda Thomason―gathered in the Solarium to help him work on his statement.

David Kendall was there, as was Chelsea, who was trying to make sense of what was happening. I stayed away, at first. I didn’t much want to help Bill compose his public statement on a matter that violated my sense of decency and privacy. Finally, though, out of habit, maybe curiosity, perhaps love, I went upstairs. When I walked into the room at about 8 P.M., someone quickly switched off the sound on the television set. They knew I couldn’t stand to hear whatever was being said. When I asked how things were going, it was clear that Bill still hadn’t decided what to say.

He wanted people to know that he deeply regretted misleading his family, his friends and his country. He also wanted them to know that he did not believe he had lied during the Jones deposition because the questions had been so clumsy―but that sounded like legalistic hairsplitting. He had made a terrible mistake, then tried to keep it a secret, and he needed to apologize. At the same time, he didn’t think he could afford to appear vulnerable to his political enemies or to those of the nation. In the days before his confession to me, we had discussed the dangerous standoff looming in Iraq, precipitated on August 5

by Saddam Hussein’s announcement of a ban on continued weapons inspections. And only Bill and 1, along with his foreign policy team, knew that within hours of his statement about his personal transgression, the United States would launch a missile strike against one of Osama bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan, at a time when our intelligence indicated bin Laden and his top lieutenants would be there, to retaliate for the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. With the whole world watching―much of it wondering what the fuss was about―Bill felt that the President of the United States couldn’t afford to appear on television looking weak.