“I thought the meeting was about confronting him and making it very clear that what he did was wrong,” Donna Shalala said. “And he seemed to think that he could just come in and apologize and that was it. And I suddenly realized that…he thought that his behavior was private, and that you separate the two…. I just think public figures have to be extremely careful about their private actions and that they set the tone, and I told him that. I just told him that I wanted him to reassure me that he understood that leaders were also moral leaders. He gave me a strange answer. He said, ‘By your standard we should have elected Nixon instead of Kennedy.’ And I think everybody was mortified at his answer, but most people didn’t say a word because they weren’t quite sure what the meeting was about…. Not many people seemed willing to look him straight in the eye and say that.”
Shalala said that Hillary did not speak to her about the episode but that “I wasn’t sure she got it either…. Within two weeks…she and everybody else around her were still talking conspiracies. They were still convinced it was a conspiracy. I’m convinced to this day that they don’t get it,” she said in 1999. By 2006, said Shalala, “They got it.”
HILLARY WAS PREPARING for the worst, based on Kendall’s assessment that Starr’s report would contain a detailed narrative of what had happened between Bill and Lewinsky. Starr, and now Henry Hyde, had refused to let Kendall see the report in advance of its public release. On September 10, the House Rules Committee unanimously recommended its release. Just after noon the next day, the full House voted 363 to 63 to release the full report and the supporting documents. Within an hour it was posted on the Internet.
Starr wanted the most explicit report possible, he said, to demonstrate how much work the investigation had done. He was proud of the narrative. A few members of Starr’s staff had resisted the kind of report that was transmitted. Brett Kavanaugh, one of his principal deputies (later named a federal judge by President George W. Bush), had argued that “the narrative shows how pathetic Clinton is…. He needs therapy, not removal…. Our job is not to get Clinton out. It’s just to give information.” But Starr’s purpose was transparent, and many of his deputies agreed; a few even said it aloud: they wanted to humiliate the both of them, Hillary and Bill, and drive them from town. They believed there was sufficient evidence to impeach Clinton for perjury and obstruction, but if the Congress wasn’t willing to impeach and convict him, the full tale was so abhorrent and disgusting, Starr was banking, the country would be repulsed and demand that Clinton go.
That afternoon, the country was transfixed: the contents of the report were beyond the wildest expectations of the White House lawyers, the network anchors, Democratic members of Congress who had been kept in the dark (unlike Hyde and a few Republican leaders who knew what was coming), and certainly the millions of Americans—including Chelsea Clinton—who were reading excerpts on the Internet.
The president’s relationship with Lewinsky was recounted in lurid, semi-pornographic detail designed to strip Clinton of all respect and render a picture of him as a sex-obsessed degenerate or pervert. The blue dress had been only a preview: there was the phone sex, cigars as sex toys, the president masturbating in a closet, receiving oral sex while he talked to congressional leaders.
“This is about trying to destroy me as a person,” Bill told his friend Terry McAuliffe. James Carville’s outrage was, as always, quotable: “The core of the entire conspiracy lies in a few blow jobs. No phone was tapped, no one’s office burglarized, no tax return audited. You can’t elevate a blow job to anything more than a blow job.” Much of the report cited raw grand jury evidence that, under the Constitution, could never have been used in a court case without cross-examination of witnesses.
Meanwhile, Bill continued what some of his aides variously described as the “contrition tour” or his “repentance tour”—they believed the attitude was genuine—seeking forgiveness, retreating into the arms of preachers and confessing his sins, and trying to stay in office.
Hillary went to work.
ON SEPTEMBER 17, 1998, Betsy Ebeling and Diane Blair were both staying at the White House to give Hillary moral support.
“So Hillary had us for five days,” said Betsy. “I mean I had only seen the president once since August 17, and it had to have been terrifying for him to know that his wife and her two best friends were coming together that weekend,” which was also the weekend that House Republicans and Democrats were arguing over whether to release the videotape of the president’s grand jury testimony, and other taped evidence, including phone calls between Monica Lewinsky and her confidante Linda Tripp.
Though the president and his wife were “moving on separate schedules without doing more than briefing each other,” said Diane, she didn’t doubt, even then, that they would remain together. “I mean it’s love, but it’s also [that] they’re dependent upon each other, and have been for over twenty-five years in ways the rest of us can only begin to understand if we have that kind of marriage ourselves.”
The visit, said Betsy, was “surreal,” and highly revealing of Hillary’s way of coping.
“It was business as usual,” said Betsy. “She was very busy. Very busy. But also Hillary wanted to make sure Diane and I had things to do: could we do this, and could we meet for dinner?—while people on the Hill were dueling on releasing the tapes. And we had no idea how much she knew of what was going on because she was not reading newspapers, and she was not watching TV…. Hillary was out doing three or four events in the afternoon. Diane and I sat up in the Solarium that afternoon trying to figure out what we were going to do, and I think we finally decided that we would just go with whatever cues she was giving us, and whenever the three of us got together we would have a good time and, if she wanted to,” only then would they discuss the Lewinsky turbulence.
The day before, unbeknownst to Diane and Betsy, Stevie Wonder had attended a state dinner in honor of Czech president Václav Havel. “And, evidently at some point,” said Betsy, “he came up to Hillary and said, ‘I have had this song going through my head for the last couple of days, and I cannot complete the song unless you help me with the words.’ So she said, ‘Send me a tape, I’d be more than happy to listen to it.’ And, he said ‘No, no. You don’t understand. I will not leave Washington until you give me the right words.’ So she arranged for him to come upstairs.
“When the phone rings up in the Solarium it’s Capricia Marshall, Hillary’s secretary, saying, ‘Hillary would like you and Diane to join her this evening at six o’clock in the residence. Stevie Wonder is coming to sing.’ Diane and I are in my room and we have the TV on—no one has said to us, no, you can’t watch TV. It’s very quiet in the house. Very quiet. I mean this is a pretty intense atmosphere staff-wise, and the help, and throughout the house—nobody is talking. And we’re standing in this room and we have the TV on waiting to hear when they’re going to announce that they’re going to release these tapes, when the phone in my room rings again…. ‘Mr. Wonder’s here, you’ve got to come down.’ ‘Okay.’
“So we go down, and there’s nobody there. You know, the two of us standing near the piano. We’re looking around. And I said, ‘Oh my gosh, think of the stuff they’d have to move if they have to leave here.’ I mean it was just…it was very weird timing, and we were very emotional. And all of a sudden in comes Capricia, and then in comes Stevie Wonder…like one of the most handsome men I have ever seen, and his manager, and his teenage son, who’s about six-foot-two. You know: Walkman, the whole bit. Introductions all the way around.
“And then in comes Hillary, she’s late, and we sit down. And he sits at the piano, which she assures him has been tuned that day. She’s the hostess, so she sits next to him, in a chair by herself. Diane sits with the son. I sat with the manager. And Stevie starts to talk about why he is here, and what he is doing…. So he sits down, and plays this song, the whole the me of it being forgiveness…and every once in a while he’ll go ‘dada-da-da,’ because he doe
sn’t have the words. And I’m watching Hillary sitting in this chair while Diane and I are just lost…. And, un be knownst to us, she had paged the White House photographer to come up, who gets a 911 call. Well, he has no idea what’s going on. The photographer comes up and Stevie now is singing this song with his heart, and this beautiful melody, and it’s all about what forgiveness is, and Hillary has moved her chair all the way over now to where she is right next to the piano. He finishes the song…and, I mean I have never heard anybody put it into words, and with such feeling. He obviously touched her, but she was dry-eyed. I don’t know how she did this. He finishes the song, and they talk about the nature of forgiveness. And what it does for the soul.” Contrary to Betsy’s account, Hillary, in a brief mention in Living History, says her eyes had filled with tears.
Stevie proceeded to play a second song, also about forgiveness—“No One Walks on Water”—which, for a while, Diane thought was “No One Likes Cole Porter.”
“So, Diane is laughing at this point and I’m looking at her. It’s like, ‘What is your problem?’ So, he finishes that song as well, and Hillary looks over at us and she says rather jokingly, ‘I have to run to this event, but I hope you will stay and cheer my friends up.’”
Wonder did not want Hillary to leave yet. He had an idea, which Hillary did not mention in her eleven-line account of the musical interlude in Living History: “His idea was that they would write this song together, and the royalties would go to women’s shelters. So off Hillary goes to this event, and before she leaves she looks at both of us and she says, ‘Now don’t go out. Don’t be out late because I’m going to be home and we’ll sit up tonight. Have a good time.’ And that was pretty much what the weekend was like….
“Truthfully between the two of us, I never saw her angry. There’s other ways of expressing anger.”
THE FOLLOWING DAY, September 18, Congressman Jim Moran of Virginia called Hillary. “If you were my sister, I think I’d just grab him, pull him behind the house, and break his nose,” he told her.
She sounded happy to hear from him. Bill had regarded Moran as a crucial Democratic ally, assuring him back in January that he hadn’t been involved with Monica Lewinsky. Moran had believed him and stuck with him, until a television interview on September 8 in which the congressman said, “The fact is that he lied to the American people as he did in the court. I think that that is a major problem that is going to undoubtedly necessitate impeachment proceedings.” Now he told Hillary that her husband was “a philanderer” and “a liar.” As much as Moran respected Bill’s abilities and commitment to public service, he was “offended at what he’s done to you, not to mention all the people who supported him.”
Hillary responded that rightist elements opposed to what Bill had been trying to do all his life were behind the impeachment drive. It was important for the country that they not win, she said. They talked for another fifteen minutes. Moran agreed to back off for the moment.
Hillary said she had become the general in charge of Bill’s defense and that she believed in him.
She was braced for the inevitable release of Bill’s videotaped grand jury testimony, which the House agreed to that same afternoon. News stories, perhaps based on a few transcribed excerpts of the session and leaks from the Office of the Independent Counsel, suggested that the tape would show him erupting and snarling at the prosecutors.
The release of Bill’s taped grand jury testimony, on the afternoon of September 21, was a turning point in the history of the Clinton presidency. The networks initiated a thirty-second delay in their transmissions to enable excision of sexual content, if necessary. But what viewers saw was something far different than anticipated, and enough felt offended by the prosecutors’ conduct—and the release of the videotape itself—to change the dynamic of the struggle. There was something prurient about what Starr and the Congress were doing that seemed to offend more people than Clinton’s conduct had. At least that was what the polls were showing.
Bill had been delivering a televised speech to the United Nations about the threat of international terrorism when the networks cut away to the videotaped report. Some networks showed a split screen—the U.N. delegates on their feet giving the president an ovation on one side, the president testifying on the other—while the audio feed was about touching breasts and all the rest.
In the White House the next evening, Nelson Mandela, who had attended the U.N. session, spoke of his love for the president. “We have often said that our morality does not allow us to desert our friends. And we have got to say tonight, we are thinking of you in this difficult and uncertain time in your life.”
If Mandela could forgive, Hillary would write later, she could try; but it was difficult, no matter how eminent the role models.
“You could feel the deep gasps, the strain, the personal anguish,” said Melanne Verveer, who was at Hillary’s side more than anyone in this period. “This was not something that was hidden…. The public got some sense of it when they were together. But it was very hard on her. Getting on the helicopter or at events…this was something that really was very painful. And to have to work it out personally, whatever that took, with every fiber of your being and you have to know you’re a public figure and the world was watching…not just the country was watching, the world was watching.”
Earlier than most of the media, Hillary sensed the ground shifting outside Washington. It went beyond the polls. In individual congressional districts, and in states with competitive Senate races, she detected a desire for compromise, for a decent end to the national soap opera in which she was forced to play a starring role.
Perceptions of the first lady were changing, too. Many saw her handling herself under the most difficult circumstances imaginable with dignity and fortitude. There were some, too, who believed she was acting as an unfortunate role model for women, that she should have packed up and left him.
She saw her basic work as campaigning for Democratic candidates. If the Democrats made an impressive showing in the midterm elections in November, the Republicans would have to take note, she believed, and pull back from their fervid campaign for impeachment and removal of Bill from office. The president, meanwhile, was making headway in peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
“Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness,” Paul Tillich had said in his classic sermon that she’d first heard from Don Jones. “It happens; or it does not happen.” She said she was continuing to take one day at a time and see what transpired.
She kept to her own schedule of events, giving speeches, traveling both in the United States and abroad. She raised funds for Democratic candidates across the country. She campaigned for California senator Barbara Boxer, Arkansas Senate candidate Blanche Lincoln, and Representative Charles Schumer in his effort to unseat Senator Al D’Amato of New York, who had chaired the Senate Whitewater hearings. Even in the South she drew huge crowds, and when she left a state or campaign district, polls showed that the Democratic candidate had invariably benefited. “She was on fire,” said Boxer’s daughter Nicole, Hillary’s sister-in-law. “She was the most popular woman in the country and the most popular principal to have out on the road to campaign for you.”
Hillary attended rallies and gave speeches in twenty states. When she was diagnosed with a blood clot in her leg and had to take blood thinners, she didn’t stop campaigning. “We have to send a very clear signal to the Republicans in Washington that Americans care about the real issues,” she said. In mid-October, Bill managed to conclude a budget deal on Capitol Hill, resulting in the first federal surplus in three decades.
The midterm elections were less than three weeks away. Gingrich was predicting a Republican pickup of twenty-two seats in the election on the strength of anti-Clinton, pro-impeachment sentiment. “I will never again, as long as I am speaker, make a speech without commenting on this topic,” he had pledged.
One of the ads ordered by the Republican Nationa
l Committee pictured a series of mothers proclaiming, “What did you tell your kids?” Yet an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll on October 29 showed that 68 percent of the country was dissatisfied with the way Congress was handling impeachment. The negative reaction wasn’t all against Republicans, though; Democrats in Congress hadn’t come up with a unified front themselves. Some favored censuring the president as a means of staving off impeachment and meting out more measured punishment; others favored negotiating rules for an impeachment inquiry that would slow down the process and introduce an element of fairness that wasn’t evident in the Republican approach yet.
James Hansen of Utah, one of the Republicans dedicated to impeachment, had said the previous week on a radio talk show, “Well, over 90 percent [of Republicans] are saying impeach. They’re saying censure, they’re saying all kinds of crazy things. Some are saying assassinate. I’m not saying that.”
The full House, with thirty-one Democrats in support, had voted overwhelmingly earlier in the month to authorize a formal impeachment investigation by the Judiciary Committee. With that vote, Dick Gephardt predicted, “We’re going to win by losing.” The November elections, the White House hoped, could bring a compromise that would put the matter to bed without the inquiry going forward. Clearly, most Americans did not think the punishment of impeachment fit the crime—whatever the crime was.
The disconnect between the country at large and Washington was huge, as Sally Quinn noted in a 3,700-word (almost a full page) essay in the Post on November 2, one day before the election. “With some exceptions, the Washington Establishment is outraged by the president’s behavior,” and “want some formal acknowledgment that the president’s behavior has been unacceptable…not just for the sake of the community, but for the sake of the country and the presidency as well…while around the nation, people are disgusted but want to move on,” she wrote. “Certainly Clinton is not the first president to lie. But the scope and circumstances of his lying enrage Establishment Washington…. If Washington is a tribe, then the president is the tribal chief. He cannot be seen to dishonor the tribe.” Many of the locals, she declared, “are offended that the principles that brought them to Washington in the first place now seem to be unfashionable or illegitimate.” She suggested Clinton “resign” to spare the capital “any more humiliation.”