A Vast Conspiracy (61 page)

Finally, I also want to apologize to all of you, my fellow citizens. I hope you can find it in your heart to accept that apology. I pledge to you that I will make every effort of mind and spirit to earn your confidence again, to be worthy of this office, and finish the work in which we have made such remarkable progress for the last six years.

God bless you and goodnight.

Begala read it and thought—No way. Too much groveling. Like many White House aides, Begala was a student of the presidency, and he was familiar with the high point of presidential apologies. In 1987, Ronald Reagan
conceded, in a famous use of the passive voice, that “mistakes were made” in the Iran-contra affair. Saddam Hussein would be listening to Clinton’s speech. He couldn’t sound like a weakling. So Begala went to work on his own draft, which he and Emanuel fiddled with on Sunday night. An apology; an acceptance of responsibility; and a firm insistence on reclaiming a measure of his own privacy—a point that was especially important to Clinton. Erskine Bowles, the chief of staff, had charged Begala with taking responsibility for shepherding the speech to completion on Monday night. Neither man knew that their boss had his own plans.

When Starr arrived at the White House just after noon on Monday, Kendall intercepted him and pulled him aside for what he would later call a “walk in the woods.” He told the independent counsel that the president would concede an inappropriate sexual relationship with Lewinsky, but he wouldn’t talk about the details. Kendall was really packaging a threat as a concession. If Starr and his people demanded the details, Kendall would fight him every step of the way.

Starr had planned for this contingency. For the prosecution’s rehearsals of the examination, Hickman Ewing had come up from Little Rock to play Clinton. Compared to denying the sex outright or simply refusing to answer any questions about it, a third option of a limited confession made the most sense. The absence of the element of surprise made the failure of the Starr team that afternoon all the more striking.

The questioning began at 1:03
P.M.
, with Kendall keeping time, to make sure that the prosecutors would have exactly 240 minutes. Starr had awarded his three favorites with the historic opportunity to question the president—Bob Bittman, Jackie Bennett, and Sol Wisenberg. After Wisenberg asked a few questions to establish that Clinton understood the meaning of his oath, he turned the interrogation over to Bittman.

“Mr. President, we are first going to turn to some of the details of your relationship with Monica Lewinsky,” Bittman began. “The questions are uncomfortable, and I apologize for that in advance. I will try to be as brief and direct as possible.

“Mr. President, were you physically intimate with Monica Lewinsky?”

Bittman had begun with admirable candor. In an investigation about sex, he had asked the only question that really mattered. Clinton was ready for it. He asked permission to read a statement—which would, he said,
“perhaps make it possible for you to ask even more relevant questions from your point of view.” This last remark reflected the spirit with which Clinton sparred with the prosecutors in the grand jury. He knew—as did they—that the president had a very different notion of what was “relevant” to their investigation than they did.

“When I was alone with Ms. Lewinsky on certain occasions in early 1996 and once in early 1997, I engaged in conduct that was wrong,” Clinton recited. “These encounters did not consist of sexual intercourse. They did not constitute sexual relations as I understood that term to be defined at my January seventeenth, 1998, deposition. But they did involve inappropriate intimate contact.

“These inappropriate encounters ended, at my insistence, in early 1997. I also had occasional telephone conversations with Ms. Lewinsky that included inappropriate sexual banter. I regret that what began as a friendship came to include this conduct, and I take full responsibility for my actions.

“While I will provide the grand jury whatever other information I can, because of privacy considerations affecting my family, myself, and others, and in an effort to preserve the dignity of the office I hold, this is all I will say about the specifics of these particular matters.…

“That, Mr. Bittman, is my statement.”

Though Kendall and Seligman had applied their gloss, the statement was vintage Clinton—a quivering dance on the edge of falsehood. He put the start of the relationship in 1996, when Monica was a staffer, not in 1995, when she was still an intern; he said their relationship “began as a friendship,” whereas in fact it commenced after she showed him her thong, just a few hours before his pants came down in his study; he coined the prim phrase “inappropriate sexual banter” to replace the indignity of “phone sex.” Still, in spite of it all, Clinton had made a clever tactical move. In a single paragraph, he had neutralized months of grand jury testimony and investigation by Starr—the DNA test, the Secret Service witnesses, the accounts of the relationship provided by Monica to her friends and family. Yes, they had had an affair. What else could Starr’s team establish in the four hours that were available to them?

The answer was clear: not much. The hapless Bittman began by sparring with the president about the definition of sexual relations that had been used in the January deposition. But Clinton knew the tortured definition better than the prosecutor did, and they debated such vague phrases as “causes contact” and “intent to gratify.” Bittman wasted more than an hour
and a half, until Kendall called a break, and then Wisenberg took over the questioning. The prosecutor asked the president about Bob Bennett’s assertion in the Paula Jones deposition that “there is absolutely no sex of any kind in any manner, shape or form, with President Clinton.”

“That statement is a completely false statement,” Wisenberg said. “Is that correct?”

Clinton’s almost comic literalism landed him in trouble. “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” he said, smiling, realizing a little too late how foolish he sounded. Still, despite the absurdity of the remark, Clinton’s larger point was a fair one. Bennett was his lawyer; Clinton wasn’t Bennett’s. It wasn’t the client’s job to monitor what his lawyer said. And anyway, Starr had the admission about sex. What else did he want?

Kendall had done his best to make sure that Starr got as little as possible. As part of the cynical calculus that the defense lawyer had employed in preparing Clinton, the president had about a dozen set-piece speeches he could deploy at various times during the session. Without a judge present, there was no real way that Clinton could be stopped from running down the clock in this manner. So, in Wisenberg’s portion of the examination, the president inveighed at length against the motives of the Jones lawyers, the weakness of their case, the burdens of his job, his fading memory. And other than on the questions about sex—that is, the details of what he and Lewinsky did with each other—Wisenberg made no more progress than Bittman had.

The other two prosecutors took so long that Jackie Bennett was cheated out of most of his time. Unlike the others, Bennett had a strategic approach to this work—a sense of the larger structure of the attempt to bring Clinton down. After three-plus hours, it was clear that the Lewinsky line of questions had produced little of use for the prosecutors. So instead of meandering over the same topics as the others, Bennett asked Clinton a series of specific questions about Kathleen Willey, eliciting the categorical denials that the OIC potentially could use for a separate perjury charge against him. As Clinton enemies did throughout his presidency, Bennett tried to lay the plans for the next battle—in this case, staking his office’s credibility behind Willey’s allegation that the president had groped her on November 29, 1993.

After Kendall warned the prosecutors that only twelve minutes remained, Starr himself asked a handful of questions about the invocation of executive privilege, and then Wisenberg used several of those last precious
seconds on the matter of the love tie. He had gone to the trouble of locating photographs of the president wearing the Zegna model on August 6, the day of Lewinsky’s appearance before the grand jury.

“Were you sending some kind of signal to her by wearing a tie that she had given you on the day that she appeared in front of the grand jury?” Wisenberg asked.

“No, sir,” Clinton said, for the first time in the long afternoon breaking into a smile at the peculiarity of the question. “I don’t believe she gave me this tie.… I don’t, I don’t want to make light about this. I don’t believe she gave me this tie.… And I had absolutely no thought of this in my mind when I wore it.”

With almost no time left on the clock, Bennett made a pitch to lengthen the session, but Kendall cut him off. Ever the politician, Clinton interjected that he was sorry he could not have addressed the grand jurors’ questions face to face. He noted that Kendall had tried to arrange for the grand jurors to be brought to the White House for the session.

This was a touchy topic for the prosecutors. “Just for the record,” Wisenberg jumped in, “the invitation to the grand jury was contingent upon us not videotaping, and we had to videotape because we have an absent grand juror.” (One grand juror did fail to attend court on August 17.)

Suspicious—for good reason—of this explanation for preserving this awful moment in Clinton’s presidency for posterity, Kendall shot back, “Is that the only reason, Mr. Wisenberg, you have to videotape?”

Clinton, too, saw the political dimension to the videotaping issue. “Well, yes,” he said. “Do you want to answer that?”

But Bittman decided it was time to go. At 6:25
P.M.
, he said, “Thank you, Mr. President.”

There is nothing political people hate more than enforced ignorance, but the top people on the White House staff spent the afternoon of August 17 in a state of brittle anticipation. Like everyone else, they knew nothing about what was going on in the Map Room, so they worried and traded gossip. Given the stresses that the Lewinsky matter imposed on the staff, Clinton’s advisers managed to get through the year without taking out too much of their anger on each other—with a single exception. Mickey Kantor’s ill-defined duties, his boasting about his closeness to the Clintons, and
his officious manner made him a favorite target of the full-timers on the staff. Late in the afternoon of the seventeenth, Kantor poked his nose in Chuck Ruff’s office, where press secretary Mike McCurry, his deputy Joe Lockhart, the lawyer Lanny Breuer, and a handful of others were waiting out the final moments of the testimony.

“I want you to know,” Kantor announced to the group, “that the president appreciates everything you have done for him.”

The recipients nodded at this unctuous expression of gratitude, and when Kantor closed the door, they erupted in a cheerful chorus of “Fuck you!” and “Who the fuck do you think you are?” The invective cheered everyone up, if only for a little while.

Kantor had issued one decree about the White House on August 17. Mark Penn could not be allowed on the premises. Kantor didn’t want any news stories saying that the president’s pollster had told him how to testify. In fact, Penn had been intimately involved in planning the testimony. He had even polled on whether Clinton should take the Fifth; the public was highly negative. Penn had tested the phrase that the White House invariably used to describe how the president was handling the crisis—by focusing on “the people’s business.” The expression scored very high, and it was used often.

Later in the afternoon, James Carville arrived from a trip to Brazil, and he posted himself in Rahm Emanuel’s office. Clinton’s team figured the president would want to see a friendly face when he walked out of the Map Room, so they stationed Carville by the door. When Clinton and his lawyers stepped outside the room, they were still chuckling quietly about the questions about the Zegna tie. For Kendall, Seligman, and Chuck Ruff, the tie issue symbolized the pointlessness of so many of the inquiries about Clinton. A tie signal? Carville joined in the amusement, but the president seemed subdued, tired—and, it quickly became apparent, full of rage.