Kati Marton (58 page)

Months later, after Lieberman had become the head of the Voice of America, she was accosted by Monica’s mother at a V.O.A. event. “You ruined my daughter’s life,” Marcia Lewis said to the startled Lieberman, “by moving her to the Pentagon. And I know why. It’s because she is too beautiful.”

“Monica was not just another political crisis,” said a close friend of the Clintons. “It was not like health care. It was both a constitutional crisis and their own marital crisis.” First, it took place in the White House, a place of nearly spiritual power for many Americans. Most serious, however, was that not only did Clinton lie to his wife, but he let his wife lie for him to the nation. On January 27, 1998, clearly not knowing the truth, Hillary appeared on
The Today Show
and told Matt Lauer that a “vast right-wing conspiracy” was behind the latest charges against her husband.

White House correspondent Helen Thomas recalled an astonished Melanne Verveer exclaiming, “Hillary really believes him!” Had Hillary known the truth, she would not have said those things, Verveer said.
“Her credibility was on the line. I have no doubt that she believed him.” He lied to his wife because only she could save him. “What else can she do but believe him,” Stephanopoulos noted, “or lose everything she’s worked for. But that’s too cynical. She has to believe him because she also loves him. At another level she was complicit. If she went along with it for eighteen years, how could she be the person who stabs him in the back now?”

Clinton had betrayed the unspoken promise he had made to his staff and supporters who had endured the nearly fatal Gennifer Flowers tapes in 1992. “We believed certain things were not going to happen,” Stephanopoulos said. “Even when it looked like it was happening, we said to ourselves, It’s not possible. He’s just not that dumb.” Until evidence of the most appalling and explicit nature—a stained dress—forced his hand, Clinton did not tell even his lawyers the truth.

Shortly after the Monica story broke, some of the president’s oldest friends gathered at Camp David for President’s Weekend in February 1998. Former ambassador (to Sweden) Tom Siebert was there with his wife, Debbie. As Georgetown freshmen, Siebert said, they “had all talked about changing the world, but [we felt] Bill was really going to do it.” Hollywood producers and old Arkansas friends Harry Thomason and his wife, Linda Bloodworth Thomason, were there. While Hillary and the other wives sat at the opposite side of the room, the men formed a semicircle around the fireplace. “Bill started to attack Ken Starr in a very profane, very personal, very bitter way,” one friend recalled. “Bill said no other president had ever had this kind of scrutiny. From his tone I could tell it was true about Monica. It was such a non-denial denial. I felt just terrible for him and for [Hillary] and for the country.”

Shalala also got a non-denial denial from the president. “I said to him, ‘Look, I’m not going out there and defend you unless you tell me straight out.’ And he told me the same thing he told the press. ‘I didn’t have sex with her.’ I said, There’s something inappropriate going on. And he just shrugged his shoulders.” Still Shalala and Secretary of State Albright publicly defended the president.

From the beginning of 1998, Hillary virtually disappeared from the West Wing. Like Pat Nixon during the final days of Watergate, she
stopped reading the newspapers. “She blocks it out,” said Grunwald during the most fevered days of the media’s Monica obsession. “She knows it’s just going to drive her nuts, so she blocks it out. I was over there two weeks ago. It was a pretty big day in the life of the scandal. No one in the first lady’s office was talking about it. They would talk about how Betty Currie had been in a car accident because some reporter had chased her or something, and Betty had sat in her office crying that day because she had banged up her car. That was how they were relating to the story.”

“I waited for Hillary to call,” Shalala remembered. “I left messages for her, If you need anything just yell. But basically she didn’t want to talk about it. She just wanted people to distract her. She’s got to be furious and disappointed. And maybe that stiffness was just covering up. I think she understands his weakness and she may have believed him because she wanted to. And it’s too outrageous. She couldn’t believe he would risk everything they worked for all these years.” “This was not something we talked about,” Verveer said later. Even Diane Blair, Hillary’s closest friend before Blair’s death from cancer during the summer of 2000, said that she and the first lady had never discussed Monica Lewinsky or her husband’s adultery.

Not since the state of siege that gripped Nixon’s final days in 1974 had the White House been ground zero. The remote trucks and camera crews transformed the lush front lawn into mud, often covered by brown garbage bags. Late into the night, hot television lights bathed the gleaming facade.

Hillary inhabited a separate universe. But there was no more room for illusions after August 14, 1998, when an FBI lab test showed a match between the president’s blood and a semen stain on a blue dress. For the president, it was the first time in a lifetime of evasions that he had to face the full consequences of his sexual behavior. “We were told there was no blue dress with DNA,” said one of his inner circle. “We could not talk to the president, so we talked to his lawyers. They didn’t know either.”

How could Hillary, whose husband credited her with teaching him “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again
and expecting a different result,” not have known? Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., had the same answer for the mysterious willed blindness he perceived in both Jackie Kennedy and Hillary Clinton: “Never underestimate the power of protective denial.” Until August 1998, Hillary said she thought the “problem” was behind them. “I thought he had conquered it; I thought he had understood it.”

First she had to save his presidency. She switched the personal relationship off, turned the political one up full throttle. She summoned old friends and trusted aides like Mickey Kantor, Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth Thomason, Paul Begala and Steven Ricchetti to help with her husband’s defense. “We have to fight. They are out to destroy his presidency,” she told the people whose help she was asking. “The other thing is between Bill and me. We will work it out in our own terms.” When Virginia Democratic congressman James P. Moran began to waver in his support of the president, Hillary confronted him. “I’m the field general of this operation,” she told Moran. “I believe in my husband. I believe in what he has accomplished and what he’ll be able to accomplish once this is all over. He is my best friend. And I still believe in him.”

But, on a personal level, her body language was clear. Her husband was about to give the most important speech of his political career, explaining his long deception. She refused to help him. “Hillary was so angry,” said one of his speechwriters, “that she did not want to have anything to do with the guy. She wanted him not to exist.” All she said to him was “It’s your speech.”

It was indeed. In some ways Clinton’s four-minute speech on August 17, 1998, was his most revealing. Full of anger and self-pity, it was hardly an apology. The dichotomy in the man’s character had never been laid so bare: self-awareness intertwined with self-justification. “I answered their questions truthfully … questions no American citizen would ever want to answer. Still, I must take complete responsibility for my actions, both public and private …. I was motivated by … a desire to protect myself from the embarrassment of my own conduct …in a politically inspired lawsuit … This has gone on too long, cost too much, and hurt too many innocent people ….” Petulant and reproachful, his speech tried to shift
the blame to Ken Starr. But a man who hated to apologize did admit, for the first time, that he had “misled” people, including his wife and daughter.

In a season of extraordinary humiliations for the first lady, surely one of her worst days was August 19. On that day the Starr Report was released. CNN asked that children leave the room because of the “inappropriate nature” of the report. Newspapers and talk shows argued over the precise definition of various types of sex. Hillary’s tight, drawn features as she held her daughter’s hand and crossed the White House lawn to a waiting helicopter mirrored the nation’s emotional landscape. But once again the Clintons were stronger than their enemies. The image of the three Clintons was poignant and sad, but without the presence of his wife and daughter beside him, the shamed president would have cut a different figure. Blessed by enemies in Congress like Gingrich, Tom DeLay and Henry Hyde, Clinton still could not have survived without Hillary; with her great inner strength on public display, she led the country from denial through rage to grudging acceptance of her husband’s evasions and lies. If she could stand it and maintain her dignity, the American people decided, so could they.

BILL AND HILLARY
, who always related on two levels, would take longer to mend their personal relationship. “She had to forgive him,” Melanne Verveer said, “so their lives could go on.” Their religious beliefs helped. “I believe deeply in forgiveness and reconciliation,” she told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. “I’m very gratified that my husband and I have a very strong relationship and a lot of understanding of one another and a great commitment to each other …. Part of it is our religious faith and part of it is just our experience of human nature and how one always has to be ready to forgive if one wants to go on and live without bitterness ….”

As a southern Baptist, Clinton believed in the redemption of the sinner through constant effort. For Clinton, character was not a fixed quality but an evolving one. Unlike Nixon or Johnson, Clinton was not a tormented soul. His remarkable capacity for self-renewal, the flip side of
his reckless sense of invulnerability, served the nation and saved him. In many ways, he resembled that other president whose father had been an alcoholic, Ronald Reagan.

At the White House holiday parties at the end of 1998, the Clintons stood as rigid as two sentries in the receiving lines. At the Kennedy Center honors in early December, they sat side by side without touching, barely acknowledging each other. During the intermission, Hillary was surrounded by friends and well-wishers in the presidential box. Her husband stood apart, virtually alone. But the couple with the surreal survival skills were moving on. The Clintons were back among old friends for the year-end Renaissance Weekend at Hilton Head. In a forty-minute speech there, the president hailed the successes of 1998, never even alluding to his impeachment. Following his speech,
Newsweek
columnist Jonathan Alter wished him a better year in 1999. “I hope the Constitution has a better year,” Clinton replied coolly.

In February 1999, a friend visiting them in the upstairs residence found the couple still estranged, their conversation strained and artificial. “Have you walked the dog?” Hillary asked her husband. “No, I thought you had,” the president replied tersely. “All right, I’ll do it,” she snapped. “No, let me,” he said. It was, the visitor recalled, “an atmosphere of complete unreality. This was not about Buddy the dog.”

But a thaw was necessary and inevitable. In April 1999, the Clintons played host to Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel and more than a hundred scholars, philanthropists and human rights activists at a White House millennium evening. In the white-and-gold, classically elegant East Room, beneath a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington, the Clintons were at their best. Husband and wife took turns speaking and answering questions, dazzling in their discussion of war, genocide, the nature of evil and human responsibility. The frost between them was melting. They interrupted each other with a relaxed ease. “You can tell we’re obsessed with this,” President Clinton said. “Yeah,” Hillary said, laughing, “we talk about this a lot …. When Bill and I are either entertaining people from other countries here, or traveling abroad, we’ll get together at the end of the day and trade notes and stories about what occurred.” It was not by chance that Hillary publicly volunteered this small but positive detail about their shared life. The
Wiesels stayed the night and saw the Clintons reaching out to each other privately.

During this period, Hillary was nourished by an unaccustomed form of sustenance: massive public approval. Her conduct during the year’s tawdry soap opera had won her unprecedented support. The public’s attachment seemed to have transferred from Bill to Hillary—and she liked it. With magazines running features on her—in one she was called “the better half”—and a glamorous
Vogue
cover, her public approval ratings had never been higher. When
Time
magazine considered making her Person of the Year, however, Hillary expressed mixed feelings. She understood her support came from the very thing she did not want to be known for: standing by her man. But for a woman raw from public humiliation, sudden popularity was a balm. For the first time in their three decades together, she was the object of more adulation than her husband. It was no longer just in Bangladesh and Morocco that people lined up to touch her. Now they lined up in New York City, too. At the lowest point in her personal life, the public reinforcement was welcome.