A Vast Conspiracy (19 page)

The New Year’s Eve encounter set off a month of regular contact between them—which is of interest chiefly because of what else was occurring in Clinton’s family life. The most intense month of his relationship with Lewinsky was the worst month of Hillary Clinton’s tenure as first lady. On January 4, 1996, Carolyn Huber, a White House aide and former office manager at the Rose Law Firm, discovered 115 pages of Hillary Clinton’s billing records from her time at the firm. Huber reported that she had found the records the previous August in the Clintons’ residence area at the White House, and had then taken them to her own office and forgotten about them. Starr’s prosecutors had subpoenaed the documents more than
a year earlier, and the Clintons’ lawyers had been unable to produce them. As White House officials never tired of pointing out, the substance of the records generally backed what Hillary had said all along—that she had done “minimal” work at the Rose firm for Madison Guaranty. Still, no one could erase the suspicion that surrounded the documents’ mysterious vanishing and reappearance.

The story of the billing records hit the newspapers on Saturday, January 6. The following day, Clinton telephoned Lewinsky for the first time. She later testified, “I asked him what he was doing and he said he was going to be going into the office soon. I said, oh, do you want some company? And he said, oh, that would be great.” Later that afternoon, Clinton called Lewinsky at her desk to arrange their meeting. He said she should bring some papers by the Oval Office. He would leave his door open, catch a glimpse of her “accidentally,” and then invite her in. The operation went perfectly, and they spoke for about ten minutes in the Oval Office and then went to his private bathroom. The Starr report recounted, “The President ‘was talking about performing oral sex on me,’ according to Ms. Lewinsky. But she stopped him because she was menstruating and he did not. Ms. Lewinsky did perform oral sex on him.” In the course of this encounter, Lewinsky noticed that the president was looking at a cigar in “sort of a naughty way.” She told him, “We can do that too, sometime.”

The next day’s newspaper brought a thunderous attack against Hillary Clinton. In a column headed “Blizzard of Lies,” in the
New York Times
of January 8, William Safire began, “Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady—a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation—is a congenital liar.” In his daily briefing on the day after the article was published, press secretary Michael McCurry said that Clinton had told him that if he were not president, he “would have delivered a more forceful response to that [column] on the bridge of Mr. Safire’s nose.” (The same day, a three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in St. Louis ruled that Paula Jones could proceed with her lawsuit against the president. This was only a temporary setback for Bob Bennett’s strategy of delay, because he still could appeal the issue to the full appeals court and then on to the Supreme Court—all of which would likely take enough time to push the issue past the election in November. Still, the appeals court decision served as a reminder of the potential costs of Clinton’s personal behavior—a warning, of course, he chose not to heed.)

All through the week after the Safire column, White House lawyers tried to convince the prosecutors in Starr’s office that the first lady had made an innocent mistake in not providing the documents earlier. By this time, Starr was already almost six months past his self-imposed (and obviously unrealistic) deadline of one year to complete his investigation, and the Whitewater trial of Tucker and the McDougals wouldn’t even begin until the spring. He had come up with nothing against the Clintons, and the frustrations of an already long and inconclusive investigation were starting to weigh on his staff. Moreover, the experienced lawyers on his staff were starting to drift back into private life. The high-handed and contemptuous style of David Kendall, the Clintons’ private lawyer for Whitewater, irritated Starr’s people as well.

The mysterious reappearance of the documents led to a dramatic confrontation behind the scenes. Starr’s deputy John Bates told Jane Sherburne, of the White House counsel’s office, that Starr was planning to obtain a search warrant for the living quarters of the White House, to look for another box of documents relating to the Rose Law Firm. After heated negotiations, Bates agreed to forgo the search warrant, but in return for this concession Sherburne herself would have to do the search. So Sherburne crawled through every room in the residence, searching everywhere from the bathrooms to the underwear drawers. As required by the agreement with Starr’s office, Sherburne even combed through Chelsea Clinton’s possessions. “After I finished,” Sherburne recalled, “I felt like standing in the shower.” The White House lawyer never found what Starr was seeking.

White House lawyers pleaded with Starr’s people to take Mrs. Clinton’s deposition in private and spare her the indignity of parading up the steps of the courthouse like any other witness. (In the midst of these negotiations, on January 16, Mrs. Clinton left on her tour to support sales of her new book,
It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us
. The president took advantage of her departure that night to call Lewinsky for their first round of phone sex.) The Starr team thought the discovery of the documents made the prosecutors look ridiculous, so they were not inclined to cut the lawyers—or Hillary—a break. So on Thursday, January 18, Hillary Clinton became the only first lady in American history to be subpoenaed before a federal grand jury.

Clinton spent the next weekend preparing for his State of the Union address, which he would give on the following Tuesday. On Sunday afternoon,
Clinton and Lewinsky had a genuinely accidental meeting near the Oval Office, and the president invited her in. Before he ushered her into the private office, Lewinsky asked him whether their relationship was “just about sex, or do you have some interest in trying to get to know me as a person?” Clinton assured her that he “cherishes the time that he had with me.” Even Lewinsky thought this remark was a bit excessive considering how little time they had spent together, but it didn’t deter her from another sexual encounter. After a moment commiserating about the first death of an American soldier in Bosnia, Clinton and Lewinsky returned to the private hallway, where she performed oral sex in the manner he preferred.

After most of their encounters, Lewinsky simply left through the Oval Office. But their January 21 session ended with a scene out of a pornographic bedroom farce. When the president, as was his custom, stopped Lewinsky before completion, the couple faced a dilemma, because there were visitors waiting just outside the Oval Office. (The guests were Jim and Diane Blair, family friends from Arkansas; Jim was the Tyson Foods executive who had set up Hillary’s brief but successful foray in commodities trading.) In order to avoid being seen, Lewinsky tried to leave through the office of Betty Currie, who was Clinton’s personal secretary, but the door was locked. When Lewinsky came back to tell the president that she would have to find another exit, she found him in the office of Nancy Hernreich, Currie’s boss, masturbating. Lewinsky wound up leaving through the Rose Garden.

The high point of the State of the Union address two days later came when Clinton defended the person the newspapers were calling his “embattled” wife. Turning to Hillary in the gallery above the House chamber, his eyes moist with tears, the president said, “Before I go on, I would like to take just a moment to thank my own family, and to thank the person who has taught me more than anyone else over twenty-five years about the importance of families and children—a wonderful wife, magnificent mother, and a great first lady. Thank you, Hillary!” (Two years later, Betty Currie hid beneath her bed some of the gifts that Clinton gave Lewinsky. Among them was an official copy of the 1996 State of the Union address, which was inscribed, “To Monica Lewinsky, With best wishes, Bill Clinton.”) Three days after Clinton’s speech, on Friday, January 26, Hillary Clinton made her way past the cameras into the United States Courthouse, where she testified before the grand jury for more than four hours.

The next Sunday afternoon, February 4, Clinton again telephoned
Lewinsky to arrange another “accidental” encounter, which ended back in the hallway in the customary way. For the first time, Clinton and Lewinsky had a post-“coital” conversation of some duration, about forty-five minutes. According to Lewinsky, they chatted about her combat boots (“like Chelsea’s,” said Clinton), how they had lost their virginity, and Monica’s mistreatment by an earlier married boyfriend, Andy Bleiler. An actual conversation with Lewinsky may have been the thing that cured the president of his infatuation, because the next time he summoned Lewinsky, two weeks later, it was to break off their relationship. On Presidents’ Day, Clinton invited Lewinsky to the Oval Office and announced that—for her good as well as his—their sexual relationship had to end.

Their January idyll was over—as was the public crisis for Hillary Clinton. For Starr’s prosecutors, the grand jury appearance itself was really the only form of punishment they could inflict. They had no grounds to make a case against the first lady for obstruction of justice—they couldn’t prove that she had intentionally hid the documents—so the matter of the billing records faded to an inconclusive muddle.

How, then, to explain the juxtaposition of Clinton’s fling with Lewinsky and his defense of his wife? The most likely answer is that they were simply separate events. Both the president and the first lady shared a passionate desire to defeat the political enemies who had pursued them for years. Even in 1996, before Starr became a mortal enemy, the prosecutor was far from a friend, and the president did not have to muster false outrage in order to stand by Hillary against his (or Safire’s) assault. How then to explain the affair? Pop psychological analyses of the president have often characterized him as a man of split personalities—a good Clinton and a bad Clinton, the policy wonk and the party animal. This explanation seems too facile. Not every adulterer suffers from multiple personality disorder. Clinton had affairs during his marriage, and he had never paid a calamitous personal or political price. Clinton pursued Lewinsky for the same reason he had pursued other women—because, presumably, he enjoyed the excitement and the sex, such as it was. These relationships were simply the way he lived. One part of his life never interfered with the other—as long as he didn’t get caught.

On May 28, 1996, Governor Jim Guy Tucker and Jim and Susan McDougal were convicted in “the 825 case”—the trial that grew out of the failure of
Madison Guaranty. The jury had believed at least some of the testimony of David Hale, who was the star witness for the prosecution. (After making a plea bargain with Starr, Hale ultimately served less than two years in prison for his various crimes.) The president had testified by videotape from the White House, and he had denied ever discussing a loan with Hale in February 1986, but Clinton played a largely peripheral role in the case. Notwithstanding their convictions, the McDougals still stood by Clinton’s version of the facts of the case, so Starr had no way to use his victory to advance his investigation. In any event, Starr soon lost the chance to capitalize on the McDougal convictions. In another case he brought, against a pair of Arkansas bankers for violations in connection with the financing of Clinton’s 1990 gubernatorial campaign, the trial ended with the jury failing to convict on any count.

So, coming up on its second anniversary, the Starr investigation was running out of steam—and yet, in the curious manner of independent counsels, it wasn’t slowing down either. A week after the convictions in the Whitewater case, Attorney General Janet Reno gave Starr jurisdiction over “Filegate”—the unauthorized receipt of about three hundred confidential FBI files by low-level officials in the Clinton White House in 1993 and 1994. Even among the most fevered anti-Clinton activists, there was never a suggestion that the president ordered these files to be obtained or that he saw them once they arrived. The only people ever implicated in the entire file fiasco were Craig Livingstone, a beefy former bar bouncer who became the director of the White House office of personnel security, and his aide, Anthony Marceca.

The idea that anyone committed any crime in Filegate was dubious at best. Career prosecutors at the Justice Department could have handled this modest investigation with no difficulty. Still, in the poisonous atmosphere of Washington in the nineties, and under the broad mandates of the independent counsel law, Reno turned the matter over to Starr. Any controversy that hit the newspapers—as Filegate did—was instantly transformed into a putative criminal case. In the inverted logic of
The New York Times
’s editorial page (and others), the very existence of the inquiries proved how serious they were. In this way the legal system continued its takeover of the political system. Once again, a new set of victims paid the price—the witnesses who had to hire lawyers, the targets who had to live in fear, the investigating agents who had to turn away from more important work, and
the public, which was distracted from the real business of government and, of course, had to pay the bill.