A Vast Conspiracy (60 page)

“Someone on the grand jury might be absent that day,” Bittman said.

This was preposterous. First, it is hard to imagine that any of the twenty-three grand jurors could have had more pressing business on August 17 than listening to the president of the United States testify. Second, even if someone was absent, he or she could read a transcript or listen to a reading of one; that was how grand juries usually worked. Still, in light of all of Bittman’s other concessions, Kendall decided to give in on this one as well.

But why did Bittman insist on only these two points? Testimony in August allowed Starr to release his report in early September—at the beginning of the campaign season, but not so late as to expose him to criticism for interfering in the races. In fact, one could not have chosen a more politically incendiary moment to release the report than the time Starr eventually did select. The videotape demand was even more suspicious. At this point, Starr knew that he would be turning evidence over to Congress; he understood that the legislators would face enormous pressure to release it, especially in the middle of their campaigns. Though Starr, Bittman, and his staff denied it, the only reasonable interpretation of their insistence on videotape was to embarrass Clinton—to display him to the public answering the kind of questions that no president, and scarcely any American, had ever been required to address.

The videotaped grand jury testimony was, it appeared, the independent counsel’s form of payback for four years of Clinton’s hostility and disdain. Yet like so many of Starr’s plans during his long tenure, this one, too, did not have the results he may have expected.

Both sides spent the next fortnight in frantic preparations for Clinton’s grand jury testimony. Starr gained a psychological edge with a brief, understated letter that Bittman sent to Kendall on July 31. “Investigative demands,” he wrote, “require that President Clinton provide this Office as soon as possible with a blood sample to be taken under our supervision.” That could only have meant one thing. On the day after Lewinsky signed her immunity deal, she handed Mike Emmick a “GAP dress, size 12, dark blue,” as the FBI report put it, in a brief meeting in Cacheris’s office. A test the next day showed the presence of semen, giving Bittman the justification for his letter. Though Kendall was not told the results of the DNA tests before Clinton’s testimony, the lawyer had a pretty good idea why Bittman was asking. (The president provided the blood sample on August 3, and preliminary tests that night showed a match. More refined tests later put the odds at 7.87 trillion to one that the semen on the dress came from someone other than Clinton. In a reflection of the tense atmosphere in the Starr office before the president’s testimony, Bittman lied to several colleagues about the results of the DNA test, suggesting there was no match.)

At around nine on the morning of August 6, Lewinsky made her way
past the phalanx of television cameras in front of the United States Courthouse and settled down to her first day of grand jury testimony. At 11:06
A.M.
, President Clinton appeared in the Rose Garden of the White House at a ceremony to mark the fifth anniversary of the gun control legislation known as the Brady Bill. That night, Monica’s mother knew how tired her daughter would be after her big day, so she brought home her favorite Chinese dinner, chicken chow mein, and the two women ate in front of the television. As they were watching, Monica was startled to see the blue-and-gold necktie Clinton was wearing on the occasion.

“I gave that to him,” she told her mother, of the Ermenegildo Zegna design. “I bet it’s a signal to me.”

Thus began one of the story’s more peculiar byways—the saga of the “love tie,” as it was sometimes called. The next day, Lewinsky passed her hunch to the prosecutors. She said that she had mailed Clinton the tie for his fiftieth birthday, in August 1996, and told him, “I like it when you wear my ties because then I know I’m close to your heart.” (It was at Clinton’s fiftieth birthday party, at Radio City Music Hall, that she surreptitiously grabbed his penis.) Some of Starr’s staff believed that the tie was another sign of Clinton’s perfidy—that he was dressing to obstruct justice. By wearing the tie, they thought, he was instructing Lewinsky to remain faithful to him.

This was a fairly absurd notion; Clinton appeared in public only after Lewinsky began testifying. But Jackie Bennett took the tie issue seriously enough to ask Clinton several questions about it during his grand jury testimony. Within a week of Clinton’s testimony, the tie issue leaked in the press, to much public merriment. Surprisingly, the tie-signaling story made sense to some of Clinton’s closest friends. Unlike most people, they knew Clinton was actually a superstitious man, a collector of rabbit’s feet and lucky pennies, which he meticulously placed in his pocket each day. (Some of these same friends were convinced that Clinton had had an affair with Lewinsky only when they heard that she had given him a wooden frog letter opener; small frog sculptures were another one of his private hobbies.) It would be like Clinton, they thought, to seek some sort of cosmic alliance with Lewinsky by wearing her tie on the day of her debut before the grand jury.

After Clinton’s own grand jury testimony, Starr avoided the tie controversy in his report to Congress, so the issue largely faded from view. But had the prosecutors pursued the issue, the president might have been saved
by a suitably bizarre deus ex machina regarding the love tie. In December 1996, the president’s brother, the singer Roger Clinton, had traveled to Italy. His agent had told him to look up another one of his clients, a woman named Marina Castelnuovo, who made her living as Italy’s foremost Elizabeth Taylor impersonator. In Rome, Castelnuovo took Roger shopping for Christmas presents for his brother, an expedition that was tape-recorded by the RAI television network. Almost two years later, when Italian television broadcast photographs of the Zegna tie in question, the Italian entertainer instantly realized that she and Roger, not Monica Lewinsky, had purchased that tie for the president. Castelnuovo tracked down the RAI videotape and passed the proof triumphantly to David Kendall.

In truth, the matter could never be resolved definitively. Clinton received many ties from different people and cycled through them quickly, and he swore he couldn’t remember the origin of the blue-and-gold number he had worn on August 6. It was even possible that Roger and Monica had both given him the same tie; Zegna distributed this model only in 1996. Perhaps there was an innocent explanation. But as Clinton prepared to face his inquisitors at the Office of Independent Counsel, he could be sure that they, if not the American people, were always ready to believe the worst about him.

Clinton had survived decades of rumors about his sex life either by denying them or refusing to address them. In spite of this strategy—or, perhaps, because of it—he had twice been elected president of the United States. As the August 17 date approached, all of the people around the president knew how difficult it would be to persuade him to change his ways. But Lewinsky had been in the grand jury; the DNA tests were under way. Though no one in the Clinton camp said it directly, the mission in preparing the president was to save him from himself.

Only two people were in a position to know what he was going to say. In the days leading up to his testimony, Kendall and his partner Nicole Seligman spent many hours with Clinton, and even they were not entirely sure how he was going to address the issue of his relationship with Lewinsky. On many issues, Clinton’s positions were clear. He didn’t ask Vernon Jordan to find Monica a job in return for her silence; he didn’t ask her to retrieve the gifts to avoid the Jones subpoena; he didn’t obstruct justice. That was the easy stuff. But as for the issue at the core of the case, Clinton
wouldn’t commit one way or the other. This was, of course, a personal as well as political and legal dilemma. For seven months, he had told his wife nothing more than he had on the first day—that he had only “ministered” to the troubled Monica Lewinsky.

As the final weekend before his testimony approached, the White House moved into the same kind of crisis mode that had prevailed just after the story broke. Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason returned from California. Mickey Kantor, the former trade representative and commerce secretary, began spending virtually all his time at the White House, in his role as an additional personal lawyer for the president. A genuine foreign policy crisis further rattled the atmosphere. Saddam Hussein evicted United Nations weapons inspectors from Iraq, and the administration was threatening to resume air strikes.

Finally, the logjam was broken in a manner distinctive to Washington. In the Friday, August 14, edition of
The New York Times
, a front-page story bore the headline
CLINTON WEIGHS ADMITTING HE HAD SEXUAL CONTACTS
. Citing a member of Clinton’s “inner circle,” the story suggested that Clinton was thinking of changing his story to admit that he had had “intimate sexual encounters” with Lewinsky. In a way, the story could be seen as a proactive leak—designed more to shape Clinton’s testimony than to disclose his plans for it. Most people around the president felt that he had more to lose from lying than from admitting the affair; thus, this leak. In private as well as public, all of those in the “inner circle” denied being the source of the story. However, close observers were drawn to one of the four bylines on the
Times
story—that of David E. Sanger. An international economics specialist, Sanger had not covered the Lewinsky story. On the other hand, he had spent several years chronicling Mickey Kantor’s career.

The leak to the
Times
had its intended effect. On that Friday, Clinton said gravely to Harry Thomason, “I’ve got to talk to Hillary.” Indeed, that same day, the president went to Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, who was especially close to the first lady, and asked if she might soften the blow a little bit. She refused. She didn’t want to get in the middle of a situation like this one. Bill had gotten himself into this mess, and she wasn’t going to help him get out of it—at least not with his wife. Almost as a form of therapy, the president on Friday began handwriting a draft of a speech that he would deliver to the nation after his grand jury testimony on Monday. It was little more than an angry diatribe about the invasions of privacy he had had to endure, but it made Clinton feel better—a little.

Paul Begala would be responsible for shepherding the Monday-night speech through to completion, so over the weekend, he called Robert Shrum, a veteran Washington speechwriter and author of several Clinton State of the Union addresses, to do a draft. Shrum was on vacation in Sun Valley, and he received no special instructions. He simply worked off the
Times
leak and wrote what he thought Clinton should say. On Sunday night, he faxed his draft to Begala and to the president’s pollster, Mark Penn. “My fellow Americans,” Shrum wrote:

No one who is not in my position can understand fully the remorse I feel today. Since I was very young, I’ve had a profound reverence for this office I hold. I’ve been honored that you, the people, have entrusted it to me. I am proud of what we have accomplished together.

But in this case, I have fallen short of what you should expect from a President. I have failed my own religious faith and values. I have let too many people down. I take full responsibility for my actions—for hurting my wife and daughter, for hurting Monica Lewinsky, for hurting friends and staff, and for hurting the country I love. None of this ever should have happened.

I never should have had any sexual contact with Monica Lewinsky. But I did. I should have acknowledged that I was wrong months ago. But I didn’t. I thought I was shielding my family, but I know that in the end, for Hillary and Chelsea, delay has only brought more pain. Their forgiveness and love, expressed so often as we sat alone together this weekend, means far more than I can ever say.

What I did was wrong—and there was no excuse for it. I do want to assure you, as I told the Grand Jury under oath, that I did nothing to obstruct this investigation.