A Vast Conspiracy (77 page)

When Isikoff decided to go ahead with his story, later in the summer of 1997, Steele told him that she had lied in their earlier conversation. In truth, Steele said, she had never heard Willey complain about Clinton in 1993. She had told the original falsehoods as a favor to Willey. In the months that followed, Steele stuck to the second version of her story—that Willey had asked her to lie in her behalf. On one level, the whole Willey vs. Steele controversy could be seen as much ado about relatively little. Two witnesses told conflicting stories, which is something that often happens in criminal investigations.

But the Steele prosecution grew out of the central obsession of Starr’s investigation. Jackie Bennett, Starr’s chief strategist, had questioned Clinton closely about Willey’s charges in his grand jury testimony on August 17, 1998. The president categorically denied Willey’s account of a groping. Bennett wanted to build another perjury case against Clinton—this one based on the word of Kathleen Willey. Steele’s account made Willey out as a conniving liar herself, so the OIC set out to build up Willey and destroy Steele. Thus this prosecution.

As so often happened with the OIC, things did not go as the prosecutors hoped. Willey had to answer hard questions about the financial misdeeds that led her husband to commit suicide; she had provided, at best, dodgy and evasive testimony during her deposition in the Jones case. She had also made the customary inquiries about selling her story of Clinton’s alleged sexual come-on. In light of all this, Willey’s attorney wisely insisted on a grant of immunity before she agreed to cooperate with Starr’s office.

Then, after Willey received immunity, she told the Starr office a series of flat-out lies about her relationship with a man named Shaun Docking. After her husband’s death, she had become sexually involved with this younger man, and the affair had ended badly, in 1995. As part of their breakup theatrics, she told him a false story about having gotten pregnant. In Steele’s trial, Willey was asked, “Why did you not tell the United States” the truth about Docking?

“I was embarrassed, and I was ashamed of that,” she said.

Willey’s lies put Starr’s prosecutors in a dilemma. Her immunity agreement stated clearly that if she didn’t tell the truth, her immunity could be
withdrawn and she could be prosecuted for all her crimes—including the lies that broke the agreement. But she was also their last, best hope to make another case against Clinton. Starr had to choose: hold fast to his oft-repeated insistence on the truth and void Willey’s immunity deal, or ditch the principle and save a witness who might finally bring down Bill Clinton.

The prosecutors gave Willey a second immunity agreement, which served to excuse her latest round of lies. After all, Willey had only lied about sex.

In a broad sense, Starr’s team made the right call about Willey’s immunity. On this most private subject in her life, she had lied out of shame and regret. There was no need to make a federal case out of it. But this reasoning should have been applied to Bill Clinton as well. The actions that led to his impeachment were rooted in his embarrassment about how he had conducted his sex life. Of course, prosecutors and the nation at large should hold the president to higher standards. But even by the stern measure a nation should apply to its leaders, Clinton’s enemies staged a banquet of excess—in the tactics they used, in the judgments they made, and in the remedy they sought.

One person saw the case for what it was, and when the heat of the impeachment fever had passed, Judge Susan Webber Wright offered a cool final assessment. On April 12, 1999, the judge found Clinton in contempt of court for violating her orders in
Jones v. Clinton
—that is, by lying about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. After a brief, sober review of the facts, Wright concluded that “there simply is no escaping the fact that the President deliberately … undermined the integrity of the judicial system. Sanctions must be imposed, not only to redress the President’s misconduct, but to deter others who might themselves consider emulating the President of the United States.…” In an especially bitter pill for Clinton, Wright ordered him to pay the Jones lawyers’ expenses in connection with Clinton’s deposition in the case. (After a final bit of rancorous litigation, Wright set that amount at $90,000.) The judge imposed a punishment that was no more, and no less, than Clinton deserved. The legal system may have taken over the political system elsewhere, but in one Little Rock courtroom, the basic rules of fairness still applied.

One more party also had the case right from the start—the American people. The Lewinsky saga abounded in fatuous judgments about the alleged
sentiments of this great inert beast. But even employing due caution, one can only marvel at the quiet wisdom of the vast majority of Americans, especially in the face of nonstop hysteria from the political and media classes. These opinion leaders announced that long-established distinctions—between public and private, between personal and political—no longer mattered in American life. And the people replied, evenly, that they certainly did. This battle, of course, did not conclude with the verdict in the Senate. The self-appointed arbiters of moral fitness moved on to new targets—candidates instead of presidents—and new subjects—drug use instead of adultery—and insisted on passing judgment. Again, apparently, the public disdained these assessments from on high. But with the legal system showing no sign of relinquishing its hold over the nation’s politics, the language of accusation and investigation will continue to dominate the nation’s discourse.

Bill Clinton responded to the end of the Lewinsky story with the same maddening concatenation of qualities that got him into, and out of, trouble in the first place. As he indicated in reviewing the trial with his lawyers on February 12, the president regarded the whole adventure, bottom line, as a victory. He thought this was a totally political attack on him from the beginning, and on those terms, he won and his enemies lost. For Clinton, the moral and personal implications of his behavior remained private and, apparently, not unduly troubling.

Indeed, on balance, the first family saw fit to turn trauma into opportunity. Back in the president’s first term, when Hillary Clinton had formal political responsibilities of her own, she quickly became one of the least popular first ladies in memory. Her defense of her husband during the Lewinsky scandal, however, drove her to great heights of popularity. Her character and ambition had changed little in the interim, but she and her husband decided to try to capitalize on the good feelings toward her. With the same tenacity that led Bill to reach the presidency and then to cling to it, they began to invest in Hillary’s nascent political career. The obstacles were large, but so were the Clintons’ ambitions. As their friend Linda Bloodworth-Thomason liked to say, “When they’re dead and gone, each one of them is going to be buried next to a president of the United States.”

And at some point in the distant future, Americans will likely regard this entire fin de siècle spasm of decadence with incredulity—at the tawdriness
of the president’s behavior, at the fanaticism of his pursuers, and at the shabbiness of the political, legal, and journalistic systems in which this story festered. Mostly, though, these baffled future citizens will struggle with the same question about Bill Clinton. He was impeached for
what
? The answer will honor neither the president nor his times.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

M
y thanks begin with my terrific colleagues at
The New Yorker
. David Remnick has made the transition from
consigliere
to
capo di tutti capi
with characteristic grace, and my debt to him is vast—for his work on this book, for his leadership of the magazine, and for his incomparable friendship. Many thanks, also, to Dorothy Wickenden, for keeping a wary eye on me for several years now; to John Bennett, for hauling my words across the finish line; and to Amy Tübke-Davidson, for knowing the story better than I do. My gratitude also goes to my fellow writers on the Clinton beat: Rick Hertzberg, Joe Klein, and Jane Mayer. Also, I will always be grateful to Tina Brown for giving me a chance in journalism and for guiding my coverage of the early part of this case.

I also shared this story with many friends and colleagues at ABC News, and I am delighted to thank them all—especially the beat reporters, Jackie Judd and Linda Douglas. Chris Vlasto and I saw much about this case differently, so it is especially gratifying to thank him for his generosity to me while I wrote this book. I am grateful for the research assistance (and merciless criticism) of Josh Fine of ABC News and Sarah Smith, formerly of
The New Yorker
.

I am privileged, once again, to be published by Random House. Ann Godoff has guided this book with her trademark enthusiasm and savvy. The copy-editing team of Beth Pearson and Ted Johnson accomplished a great deal in a short time. Thank you also to Mary Bahr, Caroline Cunningham, Greg Durham, Richard Elman, Liz Fogarty, Kate Niedzwiecki, Tom Perry, and Carol Schneider. My agent, the great Esther Newberg, simply reigns.

I was blessed with an on-site focus group to address a much asked question in this case: What will the children think? At the age of eight, Ellen Toobin is herself a veteran news analyst, and I treasure her insights. Her brother, Adam, two years
her junior, wisely took the high road about the details of the president’s difficulties, and I was delighted to explore other parts of the world with him. The mother of these great kids, Amy McIntosh, provides a living reminder of all that is best in our world. In return for the joy of sharing her life, the dedication of this book is the least I can offer her.

New York City
November 1999

SOURCE NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

T
his book is based principally on my observations and interviews during the two years I covered the Jones and Lewinsky cases. During this time, I interviewed more than two hundred people for this book. All quotations from private conversations come from one (or both) of two sources: my interviews with participants in the conversations, or a participant’s testimony in the course of the Starr investigation. The House of Representatives chose to release an unprecedented amount of material from Starr’s investigation, including thousands of pages of grand jury transcripts and FBI summaries of interviews. Though the wisdom of that decision remains open to question, that material stands as an extraordinary resource for journalists and historians, and I drew upon it heavily. All quotations from court proceedings come from the official court transcripts.

In addition to my own efforts, I have steeped myself in the voluminous media coverage of the case. I followed the continuing coverage in
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post
. I am especially grateful to the
Post
’s superb web site, which maintains a useful archive of its coverage (
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/clinton.htm
).

I drew upon the following books and articles in my analysis of the case and its context.

BOOKS

Aldrich, Gary.
Unlimited Access: An FBI Agent Inside the Clinton White House
. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1996.

Bennett, William J.
The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals
. New York: The Free Press, 1998.

Berger, Raoul.
Impeachment: The Constitutional Problems
. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1973.

Black, Charles L., Jr.
Impeachment: A Handbook
. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1974.

Brock, David.
The Seduction of Hillary Rodham
. New York: The Free Press, 1996.