“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.
AT 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.
IN 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 ri
sk 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.
Four days after Willey appeared on television, Gingrich and Representative Henry Hyde, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, sent a Republican staff delegation to the special prosecutor’s office to sift through the evidence and get Starr’s judgment on whether there would be enough there to justify an impeachment inquiry.
This was a moment Starr had been waiting for, and he told the delegation that the evidence of obstruction of justice and perjury against the president was mounting and voluminous. Moreover, the details of Bill’s assignations with Lewinsky were, in Starr’s judgment, demeaning to the presidency to the extent that neither the Congress nor the American people would want him in office, once disclosed. (When some of his deputies questioned the relevance of the lascivious details and language Starr chose to include in his report to Congress, the prosecutor replied, “I love the narrative,” and refused to expurgate it.)
The impeachment locomotive was now gathering steam. Hyde would at various times have doubts about the wisdom of continuing down the impeachment track, especially because Bill Clinton’s popularity remained high, but from this point forward Gingrich had no hesitancy. Despite what he had told Hillary at the dinner for the Blairs, he had experienced a change of heart very soon afterward, or hadn’t meant what he’d said at the time. And whatever his unease about the possible disclosure of his own marital problems, he subsequently enunciated a distinction: Bill Clinton had lied under oath while Gingrich had merely failed to live up to his own high standards and God’s. “The president of the United States got in trouble for committing a felony in front of a sitting federal judge,” he said of Bill Clinton’s impeachment. “I drew a line in my mind that said, ‘Even though I run the risk of being deeply embarrassed, and even though at a purely personal level I am not rendering judgment on another human being, as a leader of the government trying to uphold the rule of law, I have no choice except to move forward and say that you cannot accept…perjury in your highest officials.’”
Even the speaker’s own aides believed that sheer grandiosity was part of Gingrich’s enthusiasm for impeachment, given the nature of his ambitions, whether to take down the president or one day replace him. A bizarre rumor was circulating through the speaker’s staff, which was first reported publicly by journalist Elizabeth Drew, and which Blumenthal seized on shortly after Gingrich had received Starr’s heads-up. Drew, in an interview with Salon magazine, said:
Speaker Gingrich is talking to, and has been talking to over a period of time, close associates about the idea of impeaching both Clinton and Gore. It goes as follows: Gingrich believes that the report will be so tough that Clinton will be impeached [and removed or driven from office]. The thinking then goes that Gore, as his successor, will pardon Clinton. This, of course, leaves Gore in place as the incumbent president, which is not something the Republicans wish to have happen. So once Gore has pardoned Clinton, Gingrich’s thinking goes, the Congress will impeach Gore for having pardoned Clinton. As one of these close associates of Gingrich said to me, “You can’t have a Clinton strategy without a Gore strategy.”
I know this seems wild…. I’m simply reporting what the Speaker of the House [the next in line for the presidency, under the Constitution, after the vice president] has been talking about.
With Gingrich now known among his colleagues to be relishing the chance to have Clinton impeached, other Republicans felt more comfortable in their extreme advocacy. Senator John Ashcroft said he believed Willey’s story was “credible” and that “we are now not just dealing on the basis of rumors and suspected leaks. We have sworn affidavits from a variety of settings.” And Republican whip Tom DeLay, himself as ethically challenged as any leader in the House of Representatives in decades, stated that the “faith the people have put in President Clinton has been violated time and again…. I cannot think of a better way to bring on formal congressional proceedings than to go on hindering, obstructing and belittling the judicial proceedings now under way.” *35
Hillary tried to remain calm and in control. She told one friend about a book she had been reading by Myra McLarey on “the earthy stoicism of rural women.”
DURING THE FIRST five years of the Clinton presidency, Diane Blair would stay at the White House every month or two for several days. That was how she and Hillary kept in touch. Visiting late at night, after the first lady’s official duties were over, “We can do gossip. We can do parents. We can do the whole bit,” she explained in 1999. But in the previous year of Lewinsky and impeachment, 1998, Diane spent much less time at the White House, “because I was a coward. There were things I didn’t want to discuss with him, and I didn’t want to discuss with her. I was upset and I was blue and I was angry. And, I wanted to be a friend, but I wasn’t sure what was the best way to be a friend to her.” Diane, unlike Hillary, had made her own supposition early on about Bill and Lewinsky: “That he’d probably done something really stupid.”
Blair was present enough, though, to see that “the joy went out of the White House. You could just feel this, and even though there were denials about particulars, and this, that, and the other, it was clear that something had happened, which was wildly inappropriate, and which was foolish. I’m not even sure at what point Hillary began having darker and darker suspicions about what did and did not occur.” But by spring, her certainty was being shaken. Hillary had stopped reading newspapers “way back, in the early days of the administration,” said Blair. “They made her angry. She found them trivial…. And I was shocked sometimes. I’d come in from Fayetteville, Arkansas, and I would know a lot more about, you know—I read the Times and the Post, and a whole bunch of other things, that I would know a lot more about certain things that were going on than she did, just because she hadn’t read them…. And knowing this, it wa
s a very awkward time to be a good friend because I didn’t want to be the one to tell her something that everybody was chatting about on the Internet, that she literally was not aware of.”
Diane was “as open to her as she wanted to be to me during that year. But we never really discussed it. I would ask, ‘How are you doing?’ in a general way. ‘How are you feeling? Why don’t you come down [to Arkansas]. Let’s go take a trip.’…I mean I was trying to do that. But I did not force her to talk about the whole situation because I didn’t how much she knew. I didn’t know how much she wanted to know.”
Like her mother, Hillary has said, she rarely reveals her innermost feelings to even the closest of friends.
“She would call me,” said Diane, “but she never called and said, ‘What should we do? I’m going insane. I don’t know what to believe.’ Nothing. And when the other shoe dropped the week of his grand jury testimony—and it was clear that there had been a relationship with Lewinsky…. She could not talk to anyone.” For days.
FRIENDS OF the Clintons have long noted that when Bill has most needed Hillary’s support, his attention and affection toward her flourishes. This was evident during their eleven-day tour of six African nations, starting March 22. Later, Hillary would write about a romantic interlude sitting alone with Bill in the back of a boat floating down the Chobe River in Botswana. They had seen elephants, hippos, eagles, crocodiles, and a mother lion and her four cubs that day. Though some critics denounced the tour as a way to divert attention from the Lewinsky scandal, the trip had been planned well before, and was to be the longest of the Clinton presidency. Bill had wanted to visit sub-Saharan Africa since his youth and now they were traveling to Ghana, Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa, Botswana, and Senegal to talk about economic development, environmental concerns, democracy, and human rights. No president had ever visited any of those African countries while in office.