A Woman in Charge (89 page)

Bill had been delivering a televised speech to the United Nations about the threat of international terrorism when the networks cut away to the videotaped report. Some networks showed a split screen—the U.N. delegates on their feet giving the president an ovation on one side, the president testifying on the other—while the audio feed was about touching breasts and all the rest.

In the White House the next evening, Nelson Mandela, who had attended the U.N. session, spoke of his love for the president. “We have often said that our morality does not allow us to desert our friends. And we have got to say tonight, we are thinking of you in this difficult and uncertain time in your life.”

If Mandela could forgive, Hillary would write later, she could try; but it was difficult, no matter how eminent the role models.

“You could feel the deep gasps, the strain, the personal anguish,” said Melanne Verveer, who was at Hillary's side more than anyone in this period. “This was not something that was hidden…. The public got some sense of it when they were together. But it was very hard on her. Getting on the helicopter or at events…this was something that really was very painful. And to have to work it out personally, whatever that took, with every fiber of your being and you have to know you're a public figure and the world was watching…not just the country was watching, the world was watching.”

Earlier than most of the media, Hillary sensed the ground shifting outside Washington. It went beyond the polls. In individual congressional districts, and in states with competitive Senate races, she detected a desire for compromise, for a decent end to the national soap opera in which she was forced to play a starring role.

Perceptions of the first lady were changing, too. Many saw her handling herself under the most difficult circumstances imaginable with dignity and fortitude. There were some, too, who believed she was acting as an unfortunate role model for women, that she should have packed up and left him.

She saw her basic work as campaigning for Democratic candidates. If the Democrats made an impressive showing in the midterm elections in November, the Republicans would have to take note, she believed, and pull back from their fervid campaign for impeachment and removal of Bill from office. The president, meanwhile, was making headway in peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

“Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness,” Paul Tillich had said in his classic sermon that she'd first heard from Don Jones. “It happens; or it does not happen.” She said she was continuing to take one day at a time and see what transpired.

She kept to her own schedule of events, giving speeches, traveling both in the United States and abroad. She raised funds for Democratic candidates across the country. She campaigned for California senator Barbara Boxer, Arkansas Senate candidate Blanche Lincoln, and Representative Charles Schumer in his effort to unseat Senator Al D'Amato of New York, who had chaired the Senate Whitewater hearings. Even in the South she drew huge crowds, and when she left a state or campaign district, polls showed that the Democratic candidate had invariably benefited. “She was on fire,” said Boxer's daughter Nicole, Hillary's sister-in-law. “She was the most popular woman in the country and the most popular principal to have out on the road to campaign for you.”

Hillary attended rallies and gave speeches in twenty states. When she was diagnosed with a blood clot in her leg and had to take blood thinners, she didn't stop campaigning. “We have to send a very clear signal to the Republicans in Washington that Americans care about the real issues,” she said. In mid-October, Bill managed to conclude a budget deal on Capitol Hill, resulting in the first federal surplus in three decades.

The midterm elections were less than three weeks away. Gingrich was predicting a Republican pickup of twenty-two seats in the election on the strength of anti-Clinton, pro-impeachment sentiment. “I will never again, as long as I am speaker, make a speech without commenting on this topic,” he had pledged.

One of the ads ordered by the Republican National Committee pictured a series of mothers proclaiming, “What did you tell your kids?” Yet an NBC/
Wall Street Journal
poll on October 29 showed that 68 percent of the country was dissatisfied with the way Congress was handling impeachment. The negative reaction wasn't all against Republicans, though; Democrats in Congress hadn't come up with a unified front themselves. Some favored censuring the president as a means of staving off impeachment and meting out more measured punishment; others favored negotiating rules for an impeachment inquiry that would slow down the process and introduce an element of fairness that wasn't evident in the Republican approach yet.

James Hansen of Utah, one of the Republicans dedicated to impeachment, had said the previous week on a radio talk show, “Well, over 90 percent [of Republicans] are saying impeach. They're saying censure, they're saying all kinds of crazy things. Some are saying assassinate. I'm not saying that.”

The full House, with thirty-one Democrats in support, had voted overwhelmingly earlier in the month to authorize a formal impeachment investigation by the Judiciary Committee. With that vote, Dick Gephardt predicted, “We're going to win by losing.” The November elections, the White House hoped, could bring a compromise that would put the matter to bed without the inquiry going forward. Clearly, most Americans did not think the punishment of impeachment fit the crime—whatever the crime was.

The disconnect between the country at large and Washington was huge, as Sally Quinn noted in a 3,700-word (almost a full page) essay in the
Post
on November 2, one day before the election. “With some exceptions, the Washington Establishment is outraged by the president's behavior,” and “want some formal acknowledgment that the president's behavior has been unacceptable…not just for the sake of the community, but for the sake of the country and the presidency as well…while around the nation, people are disgusted but want to move on,” she wrote. “Certainly Clinton is not the first president to lie. But the scope and circumstances of his lying enrage Establishment Washington…. If Washington is a tribe, then the president is the tribal chief. He cannot be seen to dishonor the tribe.” Many of the locals, she declared, “are offended that the principles that brought them to Washington in the first place now seem to be unfashionable or illegitimate.” She suggested Clinton “resign” to spare the capital “any more humiliation.”

Clinton's aides were thrilled with this further evidence of the hypocrisy of the self-proclaimed ruling class of the town. They brought him a copy of the article. He proudly kept it on his desk.

On election night, Bill and his aides ate pizza in John Podesta's office while getting the returns and exit polls by phone and on the Internet. Hillary, deputy counsel Cheryl Mills, and Maggie Williams waited for the returns in the White House theater and watched the film version of Toni Morrison's novel
Beloved
, about a black woman brutalized by men.

On election day, the Democrats picked up five seats in the House, shrinking the Republican majority from 223 to 211. In the Senate, the 55 to 45 Republican majority held. The results were bizarre, both for a lame duck presidency and the extraordinary circumstances of the election itself. Most of the journalistic experts had agreed with Republican predictions of large gains in the House and an increase in the GOP majority in the Senate. The last time the president's party had picked up seats in a second term was 1822. Hillary believed the Democrats could have done even better had they been unified and adamant against impeachment.

Barbara Boxer, whose seat had been considered endangered, won. In New York, Schumer defeated D'Amato, to Hillary's great satisfaction. Almost as satisfying, in North Carolina, Senator Lauch Faircloth was defeated. Faircloth, of course, was believed by Hillary to be complicit in the hiring of Ken Starr.

That Friday, New York's other senator, Pat Moynihan, taped an interview in Manhattan with longtime TV newsman Gabe Pressman. It was scheduled for Sunday broadcast. Moynihan said he would not run for a fifth term, two years hence. Later Friday night, the news already all over town, Charles Rangel, the Harlem congressman and one of the president's most ardent supporters, phoned Hillary to tell her and to ask her to consider running for Moynihan's seat. He thought she could win. Ten months earlier, Judith Hope, the chairwoman of the state Democratic Party, had told Hillary she didn't believe Moynihan would run in 2000 and had already urged her to consider it.

Hillary said later that she told Rangel she didn't want to pursue it, that, obviously, there were other matters for her to resolve in her personal and political life. Rangel's recollection is that she had been less unequivocal, and had left the door open ever so slightly. Over the next two weeks,
Time
magazine conducted a poll that showed Hillary's approval ratings at the highest they had ever been—70 percent, double the percentage at the time of the defeat of the health care initiative.

 

N
EWT
G
INGRICH
was now both terrified and furious that his extramarital affair with a congressional aide might be revealed in the upcoming impeachment fight. Many in his party blamed him for the election disaster. Three days later, Representative Robert Livingston of Louisiana declared he would challenge Gingrich for the speakership. In a conference call to the entire Republican membership after realizing his support was evaporating, Gingrich announced he was resigning as speaker and from the House. It was a remarkable end for the “Contract with America,” his revolutionary and controversial brainchild for governmental change and reduction, and a nasty departure for its author. He headed home to Georgia, where not long after, he joined his girlfriend and left his wife. The undercurrent of unease and discontent among Republicans was the big story but a complicated one. Behind the scenes, Henry Hyde had told Kendall and Charles Ruff that, without a bipartisan majority, he didn't believe impeachment should move forward, and that perhaps an alternative—censure, most likely, and/or an admission by Clinton that he had lied—could succeed.

Bill and his White House political and legal staff had reason to think that the election returns might stave off the appetite of House Republicans for impeachment. Partly to eliminate any further troubles, the president settled the Paula Jones case on November 13 for $850,000 ($475,000 was covered by insurance). There could now be no appeal from the dismissal of the suit or other action arising from it. Hillary said she knew, with the wisdom of hindsight, that not settling with Jones early on had been a terrible error.

Despite the dismal Republican showing in the midterm election, few of its incumbents in the House seemed to lose their hunger for impeachment and whatever other punishment they could mete out, even though they doubted the Senate would vote to convict. And the White House, as late as the third week of November, was still talking about censure. But Gingrich's deputy, Tom DeLay, was now the real Republican power in the House. Known as “the Hammer,” he controlled perks, campaign funds, and an ideological agenda that, in terms of disdain for the Clintons, was even more extreme than Gingrich's. He had no intention of giving an inch.

On November 19 Starr testified before the Judiciary Committee—the main witness in its four-week impeachment “inquiry.” (Hillary had spent eight months working on the impeachment investigation of Richard Nixon before hearings had even begun.) In enumerating the charges against Clinton, Starr said that his investigation had found no grounds for articles of impeachment in the Travel Office affair, or an investigation into the improper use of FBI files by White House employees that had once achieved “Filegate” status. Congressman Barney Frank asked when Starr had arrived at those conclusions.

“Several months ago.”

The congressman asked why the exoneration had been withheld until after the election, “when you were sending a referral with a lot of negative stuff about the president and only now…give us this exoneration.”

Starr's answer was full of legal hems and haws, finally amounting to an acknowledgment that his office was responsible only for supplying derogatory—not exculpatory—information to Congress, in his view.

 

A
MONG
D
EMOCRATS,
there was a growing sense that Hillary was “mechanically defending Bill but not engaged,” as one of the capital's Democratic elders put it.

Whatever her role earlier, Hillary was now less a day-to-day player in the White House strategy sessions. Several people tried to engage her in the process, but to no avail. “I would make a point of trying to reach out to her and tell her what's going on because I knew she cared,” said Greg Craig, her old friend from law school days, and a special counsel at the White House for impeachment matters. “And then she would call back with thoughts. But by and large she was pretty much detached from the entire enterprise…. She appeared at one residence meeting very earlyon. In my tenure there I never saw her again. And those residence meetings were every week except when the president was traveling…. It wasn't that she was disinterested, though. She was interested, but she was detached…. If you raised something about the process with her, she would respond appropriately and intelligently, and she would have a view. Did she deal herself in? No. Not in the way I've seen her do when she's traveling nationally.”

The midterm campaigning had enabled her to get out of Washington and the White House, to be with her own staff and the people she felt close to. She did not relish plunging back into strategy sessions with her husband's aides, and all the painful reminders of what had occurred during the first seven months of the year, when she had led the fight to save him. Many of her aides noted the change. This was still a delicate period in the Clintons' relationship. To some she seemed emotionally overwhelmed—understandably. Though many still speculated as to whether Hillary would divorce Bill, those closest to them thought the possibility remote. “This is how it is,” Tony Rodham told his wife, Nicole, “and they will always be together. You have two people that love each other. There is no doubt.”