Living History (34 page)

Christmas is always a big event in the Clinton family. Bill and Chelsea are enthusiastic shoppers, gift wrappers and tree decorators. I love watching them trim our tree together, pausing to reminisce about the origin of each ornament. This year was no different, although it took a while to find the family Christmas decorations. Many of our possessions remained in unlabeled boxes stuffed in rooms on the third floor of the White House or in the presidential warehouse in Maryland. Finally, though, our treasured Christmas stockings hung from the mantel of the fireplace in the Yellow Oval Room, in a house that was starting to feel like home.

This would be the last Christmas for Virginia, who was getting weaker and now required regular transfusions. The indomitable Mrs. Kelley was determined to live every last moment of her life to the hilt, and Bill and I wanted her to spend as much time as possible with us, so we convinced her to stay for a week. She agreed but insisted that she couldn’t remain through New Year’s because she and Dick were going to Barbra Streisand’s concert in Las Vegas. Virginia had formed a deep friendship with Barbra, who had invited them to be her guests at her long-awaited return to the concert stage. I think Virginia willed herself to live long enough to make the trip, because there was nothing she enjoyed more than a swing through the casinos and a chance to see Barbra Streisand perform.

The media fixation with Whitewater continued throughout the holiday season as The New York Times, The Washington Post and Newsweek competed for scoops. Republicans in the House and Senate―particularly Bob Dole―called for an “independent review” of Whitewater. Editorial writers hectored Attorney General Janet Reno to appoint a special counsel. The Independent Counsel Act, which had been voted into law after the Watergate scandal, had recently expired, and investigations now had to be authorized by the Attorney General. The pressure was mounting every day, though there were no facts that came close to meeting the only criterion for appointing a special counsel: credible evidence of wrongdoing.

Vince Foster was being hounded beyond the grave. A week before Christmas, the press reported that some of his files, including Whitewater documents, had been “spirited”

out of his office by Bernie Nussbaum. The Justice Department was well aware, of course, that the personal files had been retrieved from his office in the presence of lawyers from the justice Department and FBI agents, handed over to our lawyers and were being turned over to the justice Department for examination. But the leak of this “news”

tossed fuel on a smoldering fire.

Then we were confronted with an outrageous partisan attack. On Saturday, December 18, I was hosting a holiday reception when David Kendall reached me by telephone.

“Hillary,” he said, “I’ve got to tell you about something very, very ugly…”

I sat down and listened as David summarized a long, detailed article that would appear in the American Spectator, a rightwing monthly that regularly attacked the administration.

The article, written by David Brock, was filled with the most vile stories I had ever heard, worse than the salacious garbage in supermarket tabloids. Brock’s main sources were four Arkansas troopers from Bill’s former bodyguard detail. They claimed―among other things―that they had procured women for Bill when he was Governor. Years later, Brock would recant, writing a stunning confession of his political motives and directives at the time.

“Look, it’s just a lot of sleaze, but it’s going to be out there,” said David. “You’ve got to be prepared.”

My first thoughts were for Chelsea and for my mother and Virginia, who had already been through too much.

“What can we do about it?” I asked David. “Is there anything anyone can do?”

His advice was to stay calm and say nothing. Comments from us would only help publicize the article. The troopers were doing a reasonable job of discrediting themselves, shamelessly boasting that they expected to cash in on their stories. Two of the four agreed to be identified, and they were shopping around for a book deal. Even more telling, they were being represented by Cliff Jackson, another of Bill’s most vehement political enemies in Arkansas. Most of Brock’s tales were too vague to be checked on, but certain specifics were easily refuted. The article claimed, for example, that I had ordered the gate logs to the Governor’s Mansion destroyed to cover up Bill’s supposed liaisons; the mansion, however, never kept such logs. Unfortunately, the fact that Brock’s sources were state troopers who had worked for Bill gave their stories a veneer of credibility.

I don’t think the full effect of the article hit me until the next evening, at a Christmas party for our friends and family at the White House. Lisa Caputo told me that two of the troopers were touting their stories on CNN that night and that the Los Angeles Times was about to publish its own version of the troopers’ allegations. It was too much. I wondered if what Bill was trying to do for the country was worth the pain and humiliation our families and friends were about to suffer. I must have looked as devastated as I felt, because Bob Barnett came over to ask if he could help. I told him we had to decide how to respond by the next day. I suggested we go upstairs with Bill for a few minutes to talk it over. Bill paced in the center hall. Bob knelt in front of me as I sank into a small chair against the wall. With his oversize glasses and mild features, Bob looks like everybody’s favorite uncle. Now he was talking in a soothing voice, clearly trying to see whether after all that had happened this year, we had the strength for yet another struggle.

I looked at him and said, “I am just so tired of all of this.”

He shook his head. “The President was elected, and you’ve got to stay with this for the country, for your family. However bad this seems, you’ve got to stick it out,” he said.

He wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t know, and it wasn’t the first time I had been advised that my actions and words could either strengthen or undermine Bill’s Presidency.

I wanted to say, “Bill’s been elected, not me!” Intellectually, I understood Bob was right and that I would have to summon whatever energy I had left. I was willing to try.

But I just felt so tired. And at the moment, very much alone.

I realized that attacks on our reputations could jeopardize the work Bill was doing to set the country on a different track. Ever since the campaign, I had seen how ferociously the Republicans wanted to hold on to the White House. Bill’s political adversaries understood how high the stakes were, which made me want to fight back. I went back downstairs to rejoin the party.

I had scheduled several media interviews that I couldn’t cancel. On December 21, I met for a year-end wrap-up with Helen Thomas, the dean of the White House press corps and a legendary journalist, and other wire service reporters. Naturally, they asked me about the Spectator article, and I decided to give them an answer. I didn’t believe it was a coincidence that these attacks should surface just when Bill’s standing in the polls was at the highest level since his inauguration, and I told them so. I also believed the stories were planted for partisan political and ideological reasons.

“I think my husband has proven that he’s a man who really cares about this country deeply and respects the Presidency… . And when it’s all said and done, that’s how most fair-minded Americans will judge my husband. And all the rest of this stuff will end up in the garbage can where it deserves to be.”

It was not exactly the calm, quiet response David had recommended.

Although the initial damage had been done, the media finally started examining the troopers’ motives. It turned out that two were angry because they felt that Bill had been ungrateful to them. They had also been subjects of an investigation into an alleged insurance fraud scheme involving a state vehicle in which they were riding, which had been wrecked in 1990. Another trooper who reportedly claimed that Bill had offered him a federal job for his silence later signed an affidavit swearing it never happened. But nearly a decade would pass before we learned the full, chilling story behind what became known as “Troopergate.”

David Brock, the author of the Spectator article, was seized by an attack of conscience in 1998 and publicly apologized to Bill and me for the lies he had spread about us. He was so consumed with building his rightwing credentials that he allowed himself to be used politically even when he had doubts about his sources. His memoir, Blinded by the Right, published in 2002, chronicles his years as a self-described “rightwing hit man.”

He claims he was not only on the Spectator’s legitimate payroll, but was receiving money under the table to dig up and publish whatever dirt anyone would say about us. Among his secret patrons was the Chicago financier Peter Smith, a key supporter of Newt Gingrich.

Smith paid Brock to travel to Arkansas to interview the troopers, an arrangement facilitated by Cliff Jackson. According to Brock, the success of the trooper article inspired Richard Mellon Scaife, an ultraconservative billionaire from Pittsburgh, to fund similar stories through a clandestine enterprise called “the Arkansas Project.” Through an educational foundation, Scaife also pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into the Spectator to support its anti-Clinton vendetta.

The plot described by Brock and others is convoluted and the cast of characters preposterous.

But it is important for Americans to know what was taking place behind the scenes to understand fully the meaning of Troopergate, the tabloid scandals that preceded it and those that would follow. This was all-out political war.

“[I]n pursuit of my budding career as a rightwing muckraker,” writes Brock, “I let myself get mixed up in a bizarre and at times ludicrous attempt by well-financed rightwing operatives to tar Clinton with sleazy personal allegations. Operating in conjunction with, but outside of, official GOP or movement organizations and well below the radar of the American public and the press corps as the election campaign unfolded, the effort went far beyond the opposition research typically conducted by political campaigns―not only in its secretiveness and its single-mindedness, but also in its lack of fidelity to any standard of proof, principle or propriety. These activities … were a very early hint of how far the political right would go in the coming decade to try to destroy the Clintons.”

Along with other members of Scaife’s secret Arkansas Project, Brock took on the task of planting and nourishing seeds of doubt about Bill Clinton’s character and his fitness to govern. According to Brock’s memoir, the “country was being conditioned to see an invention made up entirely by the Republican right…. from virtually the first moment that they stepped out of Arkansas and onto the national stage, the country never again saw the Clintons.”

One frosty morning between Christmas and New Year’s, Maggie Williams and I were having coffee in our favorite spot in the residence: the West Sitting Hall in front of a large fan-shaped window. We were talking and leafing through the newspapers. Most front pages were wall-to-wall Whitewater.

“Hey, look at this!” said Maggie as she handed me a copy of USA Today. “It says you and the President are the most admired people in the world.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. All I could do was hope that the American people would maintain their reserves of fairness and goodwill, as I struggled to maintain my own.

The sound of a telephone ringing in the middle of the night is one of the most jarring in the world. When our bedroom phone rang long after midnight on January 6, 1994, it was Dick Kelley calling to tell Bill that his mother had just died in her sleep at her home in Hot Springs.

We were up for the rest of the night, making and taking phone calls. Bill spoke twice with his brother, Roger. We reached out to one of our closest friends, Patty Howe Criner, who had grown up with Bill, and we asked her to work with Dick on the funeral arrangements.

Al Gore called at about three in the morning. I woke Chelsea and brought her into our bedroom so Bill and I could tell her. She had been very close to her grandmother, whom she called Ginger. Now, she had lost two of her grandparents in less than a year.

Before dawn, the White House Press Office put out the news of Virginia’s death, and when we turned on the television set in our bedroom, we saw the first news item flash on the screen: “The President’s mother died early this morning after a long battle with cancer.”

It made her death seem terribly final. We almost never watched the morning news, but the background noise was a relief from our own thoughts. Then Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich appeared on the Today show for a previously scheduled appearance. They began talking about Whitewater: “It to me cries out for the appointment of a regulatory, independent counsel,” Dole said. I looked over at Bill’s face. He was utterly stricken. Bill was raised by his mother to believe that you don’t hit people when they’re down, that you treat even your adversaries in life or politics with decency. A few years later, someone told Bob Dole how much his words had hurt Bill that day, and to his credit, he wrote Bill a letter of apology.

Bill asked the Vice President to deliver a speech scheduled for Milwaukee that afternoon so he could go to Arkansas right away. I stayed behind to contact family and friends and help with their travel arrangements. Chelsea and I flew to Hot Springs the next day and went straight to Virginia’s and Dick’s lakeside home, where we found friends and family members squeezed into the modest rooms. Barbra Streisand had flown in from California, and her presence added a touch of excitement and glamour that Virginia would have loved. We stood around drinking coffee and eating the mountains of food that show up after any death in Arkansas. We swapped stories about Virginia’s amazing life and her appropriately titled autobiography that was moving toward publication, Leading with My Heart. She would never see it published, but what a remarkable and honest story it tells. I am convinced that if she had lived to promote it, not only would it have been a best-seller, but it might have helped some people understand Bill a little better.