A Woman in Charge (78 page)

Hillary delivered her speech—which she had written herself, with some polishing by her aides—to thunderous applause by the twenty thousand conventioneers. Hillary's mother, brothers, Betsy Ebeling, and other hometown friends watched the speech from a suite high above the stage. Hillary had been taking lessons from Michael Sheehan, a media coach who was, among other things, trying to teach her how to use the TelePrompTer. She worried she might look “like a robot.” She had also asked Bill to review her speech with her the previous day.

Hillary took her theme from Bob Dole, whose acceptance speech had attempted to bring her, unfavorably, back into the political spotlight. He had used her as the exemplar of those who would have the government intrude into every area of American life, including the family. He had implied that Hillary's book
It Takes a Village
used the village as a metaphor for the state—which it most certainly did not. “And after the virtual devastation of the American family, the rock upon which this country was founded,” said Dole, “we are told that it takes a village, that is collective, and thus the state, to raise a child…. And with all due respect, I am here to tell you it does not take a village to raise a child. It takes a family to raise a child.”

Hillary turned it around. She talked about “raising our daughter,” and “that to raise a happy, healthy, and hopeful child, it takes a family. It takes teachers. It takes clergy. It takes businesspeople. It takes community leaders…. Yes, it takes a village.

“And it takes a president.

“It takes a president who believes not only in the potential of his own child, but of all children, who believes not only in the strength of his own family, but of the American family.

“It takes Bill Clinton.”

 

F
OR THE PRESIDENT
the campaign was exhilarating. Though there seemed to be little doubt about the outcome, he was concerned that Starr might seek to indict Hillary before the election. This would be the ultimate “October Surprise,” a term in the political lexicon that had come to mean a terrifying last-minute jolt or event that could knock a candidate off his horse. The Clinton campaign needed to raise more cash continually to match the spending of the Republicans. In the process, the campaign's managers were looking for money wherever they could find it—including the sale of nights to be spent in the Lincoln Bedroom and the Queen's Bedroom across the hall in the White House. The Clintons' fund-raising—Hillary was among those who picked paying guests for Lincoln's old room—provided fertile new ground for Starr's inquiry.

This led to renewed prosecutorial pressure on Webb Hubbell, who insisted he was being persecuted because of his association with the Clintons, and he had no more information to give the independent counsel about Bill and Hillary. Hubbell had been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees in the fifteen months between his guilty plea and entering prison, including by some of the Clinton campaign's biggest contributors, notably officials of a multinational firm known as the Lippo Group, with large operations in Indonesia. Starr and his deputies were determined to prove that Hubbell had performed no real work for this largesse. His Lippo employer, James Riady, had made a $200,000 contribution to the Clinton campaign after a limousine ride with Bill, and a big bundler of campaign cash who was associated with Lippo, John Huang, was appointed to a major position in the commerce department. Hubbell had known the Riady family since they had invested in an Arkansas bank in the 1980s with another Rose Firm partner. Millions of dollars had been raised for the campaign by Huang and his friends, much of it funneled through a maze of American subsidiaries of Asian firms.

Details were hard to follow, but any newspaper reader could tell that the whole mess reeked. But of what exactly, aside from the obvious desire—shared by thousands of big campaign contributors, Republican and Democrat—for influence and access? Johnny Chung, a Democratic fund-raiser who later pleaded guilty to funneling illegal contributions to the Clinton campaign, had shown up one day in Hillary's office with a check for $50,000 for the reelection committee. “You take, you take,” he demanded of some startled Hillaryland aides. Maggie Williams was summoned, and she accepted the check, then sent it over to the DNC. Chung explained his methodology to an interviewer: the White House was “like a subway: You have to open the gates.”

Bill, meanwhile, angrily asserted that “no one around here” knew of Hubbell's employment arrangements as a consultant to various enterprises. That was demonstrably false. Mack McLarty had made calls to help Hubbell get a job and testified (much later) that he'd told Hillary about it. Vernon Jordan and Erskine Bowles, the White House chief of staff, had also been enlisted—by Bruce Lindsey—to help.

 

F
OR
H
ILLARY,
the conflict with Starr was almost a death struggle. She did not doubt that he wanted to destroy her and her husband. “You never felt you knew how Starr was going to impact the election,” said Melanne Verveer. “You had weeks and weeks and months of imponderable horrors.”

Hillary's orders to Fabiani and other aides to urge reporters to write about Starr's operation, and the prosecutor's acts of indisputable injudiciousness, were finally subjecting him to some degree of journalistic oversight. While an independent counsel, Starr had gone into federal appeals court to defend the nation's tobacco companies against a class action lawsuit brought on behalf of millions of Americans. The Clinton Justice Department, with numerous state attorneys general, had been the motivating force in finally bringing them to heel for medical costs associated with lung cancer. Starr's firm received $1 million a year from the tobacco industry. The president had initiated a ban on cigarette advertising aimed at teenagers and imposed other restrictions on the industry's advertising practices. How could an “independent” special prosecutor be investigating the president and first lady given this conflict of interest?

On September 23, in an interview with Jim Lehrer for his PBS
NewsHour,
Bill, for the first time in public, said what he really thought about Starr and his investigation. Lehrer noted that Susan McDougal had refused to testify (and been sentenced to jail for contempt) because, she said, it was obvious that Starr “was out to get the Clintons.”

“There's a lot of evidence to support that,” said the president.

Lehrer twice gave Clinton the opportunity to qualify the statement. He declined.

“But do you personally believe that's what this is all about, is to get you and Mrs. Clinton?”

“Isn't it obvious?” the president said.

Starr reacted furiously. The president had, unequivocally, accused him of unethical conduct, and he demanded, in a series of letters to the White House that went unanswered, a retraction. Privately, after Starr and his prosecutors had come to interview him at the White House that summer, Bill said, “They were the sleaziest, filthiest people you could imagine. I wanted to take a shower after it was over.” At one point, apparently seeking a box they believed might have been removed from Foster's office and might contain something relating to the billing records, they had demanded a full household search of the White House living quarters, including Chelsea's room and Hillary's bedroom drawers. The search had, after much negotiation, been undertaken by Sherburne and witnessed by the head White House usher in lieu of a subpoena that would have required the FBI to conduct it. Nothing turned up.

The decision to fight Starr outside the grand jury room and beyond the reach of his subpoenas, vicious as the hand-to-hand combat was becoming, represented Hillary's thinking at its most clearheaded. She wasn't wrong that Starr would try to stretch the law and use his almost unlimited powers to indict her—or seek the impeachment of the president. But if he knew he was going to be more carefully scrutinized, and if more outrage among Democrats on Capitol Hill could be stirred by demonstrating his excesses, it might constrain him, especially in the midst of a presidential campaign when he could be credibly accused of partisanship if he brought an indictment against the first lady. Individual members of his prosecutorial staff maintained direct lines to Republicans on Capitol Hill; his office leaked constantly. (There were no leaks from the office of Leon Jaworski, the special prosecutor during the Nixon era.)

In September and October, when the press began reporting on the Riady organization's fund-raising and contributions to Bill's campaign—and its employment of Webb Hubbell in 1994—Starr and his deputies saw an opportunity to squeeze Hubbell and his wife. Surmising that the payment represented some kind of hush money, and that they had missed part of the big picture the first time around, they went back to Hubbell and questioned him again; as part of his plea bargain, he was obliged to answer prosecutors' questions. He produced no additional useful information. In fact, there is little reason to think that Hubbell possessed the kind of knowledge that Starr and his investigators were in search of.

Starr was looking for a grand conspiracy, and failing that, specific instances of when the president or, more likely, the first lady lied under oath. But he had little specific idea of wrongdoing beyond the first lady's obvious disingenuousness regarding the Travel Office, and some vague notions that the “Whitewater” finances were not what the Clintons and their aides had represented.

The president had dismissed any connection between meeting with the Riadys and doing them favors. He had seen an easy source of campaign money when he desperately needed it, meeting more than twenty times with Riady. Huang had visited the White House seventy-eight times while working as a DNC fund-raiser. Bruce Lindsey had been present at many of the meetings and told reporters they were “social meetings.” That was untrue. Sherburne had found a memorandum that described some of Riady's objectives in one meeting, which were to lobby for Indonesia's participation, with observer status, at a G7 summit meeting; recognition of North Vietnam; and better relations with China. Sherburne and Fabiani, who had to explain the meetings to the press and the prosecutors, were deeply disturbed by Lindsey's continuing false characterization of the get-togethers and the seeming expectation that they would lie as well. They resolved to resign after the election—and did so.

In August, Hillary toured half a dozen New England colleges, including Wellesley, with Chelsea. Chelsea's eagerness to see Stanford, however, had not abated, and daughter and mother flew to California at the end of the month. They were met by the university's provost, Condoleezza Rice, who guided them around the campus. Chelsea was captivated by Stanford: its mission architecture, the Northern California weather, the surrounding hills—and perhaps the chance to put greater distance between herself and the bubble in which she had lived in Washington. She had an A-average at Sidwell, and there was no doubt she would gain admission.

 

B
ILL AND
H
ILLARY
made a last-minute campaign sweep on Air Force One, stopping in seven smaller states to support local Democratic candidates for Congress and governor in the final twenty-four hours before polls opened on November 6, 1996. In the early-morning hours of election day, the Clintons and their entourage of friends, aides, and reporters headed to Little Rock. While the press remained in the back of the plane, Hillary, Bill, Chelsea, and the Clintons' friends crowded into the conference room to break open the champagne. While the others clapped, Chelsea led her parents in an approximation of the macarena, that season's dance craze. The gathering turned nostalgic. A few of those aboard had been there in the first years of the journey. The stories flowed. Clinton was riding a wave of popularity and accomplishment. A week earlier he held a 51 to 35 percent lead in the polls. Throughout the campaign the crowds had been huge and almost deliriously enthusiastic. People waited all night on curbsides for him.

In the hotel, Melanne and Hillary stayed up talking. Maybe, with the election over, Hillary said, she and Bill could get back to why they had run in the first place. “Here we had made it to election day, and the worst did not happen,” said Verveer. “I think for her it was a huge personal relief.” At a lunch for the president and first lady attended by several hundred people, Senator David Pryor talked about Ken Starr's office across town, which remained as active as ever since FBI agents and prosecutors had set up shop two years before. “I think the biggest round of applause you could get in Arkansas is to say, ‘Let's get this election over with and let Ken Starr go home,'” he said. The investigation had “ruined a lot of lives, broke a lot of people financially…. [I]t's time for them to let us go on.” The voters had clearly agreed.

Later in the day, at Doe's Eat-Place, Hillary and a crowd of her friends ate greasy food at a long table covered with a paper tablecloth. They told stories from the road and about stupid hairdos, of which Hillary had had more than a few. Later, she described feeling an “unburdening” that day, “a real sense of liberation.” From Doe's she went to visit her mother in the Hillcrest neighborhood, and prevailed on her Secret Service lead agent to let her drive. According to Hillary, it was her last time at the wheel. After midnight, following a gracious concession by Bob Dole, she and Bill held hands and, with the Gores, strode from the Old State House where Bill had announced his candidacy for the presidency on October 3, 1991. “I would not be anywhere else in the world tonight,” Bill told the crowd of thousands on the lawn. “I thank you for staying with me for so long, for never giving up, for always knowing that we could do better.”

They could finally get into the second term riding upward. Despite all the humiliation and the foreshadowing of doom, especially during the past two years, Bill had managed to govern with surprising effectiveness and accomplishment, given the obstacles. Beyond the strong economy that was now firmly established, the successful intervention in Bosnia, and bailing Mexico out of a currency crisis, much of what he had done was through executive order, a mechanism that had enabled him to bypass the Republican Congress and cobble together pieces of the social agenda he and Hillary had envisioned originally as attainable through legislation.