Living History (73 page)

Our next gala event was the official dinner in honor of Tony Blair on February 5, 1998. Given the friendship Bill and I had developed with Tony and Cherie, as well as the historic ties and special relationship between our nations, I wanted to pull out all the stops for the Blairs. And we did, with the largest dinner we ever hosted inside the White House, held in the East Room because the State Dining Room was too small. For the after-dinner entertainment, I lined up Sir Elton John and Stevie Wonder to perform together, a truly great Anglo-American musical alliance.

When Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich accepted our dinner invitation, I decided to seat him on my left, while Blair, as expected by protocol, would sit on my right. Gingrich admired Blair as a transformational political leader, a term he had once used to describe himself. I was curious about what they might say to each other and also hoped to glean Gingrich’s thoughts on the latest Starr charges. A spate of commentators had introduced the specter of impeachment, and although there was no legitimate constitutional basis for such a move, I knew that might not deter the Republicans from trying. Gingrich was the key: If he gave the go-ahead, the country was in for a rough ride.

After a long discussion at our dinner table about NATO expansion, Bosnia and Iraq, Gingrich leaned in my direction. “These accusations against your husband are ludicrous,”

he said. “And I think it’s terribly unfair the way some people are trying to make something out of it. Even if it were true, it’s meaningless. It’s not going anywhere.” That was what I had hoped to hear, but I was surprised. I later reported to Bill and David Kendall that Gingrich seemed to believe that the allegations against Bill were not serious. He completely changed his tune when he led the Republican charge for Bill’s impeachment. For the moment, though, I took this conversation as evidence that Gingrich was more complicated and unpredictable than I had thought. (Months later, when his own marital infidelities were exposed, I better understood why Gingrich may have wanted to dismiss the issue.) In February, Starr decided to subpoena members of the Secret Service to compel them to testify before the grand jury. Starr was looking for something that would contradict Bill’s deposition in the Jones case, and wanted the agents to report on conversations they might have overheard or activities they might have witnessed in the course of protecting the President. It was unprecedented to force Secret Service agents to testify, and Starr’s subpoena put them in an untenable position. The agents are non-political professionals whose job involves long hours, difficult conditions and tremendous pressures. Inevitably they are privy to the confidences of those under their watch, confidences they know they must not compromise. If the agents aren’t trusted by the President, they won’t be allowed the proximity necessary to do their job, which is to keep the President and his family out of harm’s way―not to eavesdrop on behalf of the independent counsel or other investigative bodies.

I respect and admire the agents I’ve met over the years. The protector and the protected make an extraordinary effort to maintain a professional distance, but when you spend nearly every waking hour in each other’s company, you develop relationships of trust and caring. My family and I have also come to know the agents as warm, funny and thoughtful human beings. George Rogers, Don Flynn, A. T Smith and Steven Ricciardi, who successively served as my lead agent, invariably struck the right balance of informality and professionalism. I will never forget Steve Ricciardi’s calm presence after the September 11 attack when he got on the phone with Chelsea, who was with her friend Nickie Davison in lower Manhattan, to make sure she was safe.

Lew Merletti, a Vietnam veteran who had led the Presidential Protective Division (PPD) and then became the director of the Secret Service, met with Starr’s operatives and warned them that forcing agents to testify would compromise the necessary trust between agents and Presidents, undermining presidential safety now and in the future. Having guarded Presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton, Merletti based his assessment on long experience in the field. Previous heads of the Secret Service concurred. The Treasury Department, which oversees the Service, asked the court to deny Starr’s request, and former President Bush wrote letters opposing Starr’s attempt to force agents to testify. But Starr pressed with his subpoenas. The conditions under which the agents worked and the unique role of the Secret Service counted for little in his calculus. In July, he compelled testimony from Larry Cockell, the head of PPD, and filed motions to compel others to testify. Ultimately the courts sided with Starr on the legal grounds that agents and protectees, unlike lawyers and clients or doctors and patients, could not assert “privilege”

within a confidential relationship. Before the end of the year, Starr had forced more than two dozen agents on the White House detail to testify.

By early spring of 1998, the public seemed to be tiring of Starr’s investigation. Many Americans took offense at the prurient, sensational disclosures from the Office of the Independent Counsel and recognized that even if Bill had made mistakes in his personal life, his transgressions hadn’t interfered with his ability to carry out his presidential responsibilities.

The media began to pursue the possibility that there was some organized effort against us. On February 9, Newsweek magazine published a two-page chart entitled “Conspiracy or Coincidence?” It traced the connections linking twenty-three conservative politicians, contributors, media executives, authors, lawyers, organizations and others who fueled and funded the various scandals investigated by Starr.

Then, in the April issue of Esquire magazine, David Brock wrote an open letter to the President, apologizing for his Troopergate story, which had been published in the American Spectator in 1994 and which led to the Paula Jones lawsuit. It was the beginning of Brock’s crisis of conscience. His book Blinded by the Right fully documents his own complicity in the organized efforts to destroy Bill and his administration and the determination, tactics and objectives of the rightwing movement in America.

We took the offensive on the legal front. The Office of the Independent Counsel was prohibited by federal law from disclosing secret grand jury information. Yet grand jury information routinely leaked from Starr’s office, usually to a select group of reporters whose stories were favorable to the independent counsel. David Kendall filed a contempt order and held a press conference to announce that he was asking that the judge supervising the Whitewater grand jury, Norma Holloway Johnson, prohibit the disclosure of such information. This action had the desired effect. For awhile, the leaks stopped.

On April 1, while Bill and I were overseas on the final leg of his presidential trip to Africa, Bob Bennett phoned with an important message for the President: Judge Susan Webber Wright had decided to throw out the Paula Jones lawsuit, finding that it lacked factual or legal merit.

During the spring, Starr hired Charles Bakaly, a public relations guru, to improve his image. Perhaps guided by Bakaly, Starr gave a speech to a bar association in North Carolina in June in which he com pared himself to Atticus Finch, the courageous white Southern lawyer in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. In the novel, Finch takes on the case of a black man accused of raping a white woman in his small Alabama town. Finch, in an act of moral courage and heroism, opposed the unfettered power of a prosecutor who twisted evidence to serve his own purposes. I had always seen a lot of Atticus Finch in Vince Foster, and the character’s appropriation by Starr, a man whose sense of moral superiority justified overlooking rules, procedures and decency, was more than David or I could bear. David fired off an op-ed piece that ran in The New York Times on June 3.

“Like Atticus,” Kendall wrote, “public officials need to be skeptical-about their own motives, about their opponents’ motives and even about their version of the ‘truth.’”

By mid June, Judge Johnson ruled that there was “probable cause” to believe the OIC

was leaking information illegally and that David could subpoena Starr and his deputies to find the source of the leaks. Grand jury secrecy is vitally important because a federal grand jury has, quite properly, broad powers to investigate. The law is strict that grand jury proceedings must be kept secret out of fairness to those people who are investigated but never charged. Judge Johnson found that the leaks to the media about the OIC’s investigation had been “serious and repetitive” and that the OIC’s definition of “confidentiality”

was too narrow. It was ironic that her decision, which was in our favor but delivered “under seal” because it related to grand jury proceedings, was one of the few facts about Starr’s investigation at the time that did not leak to the press.

Against this backdrop, Bill forged ahead with his agenda throughout the first half of 1998, battling with the “gang of three”―Gingrich, DeLay and Dick Armey. I marshaled opposition to their plan to kill the Administration’s budget for the National Endowment for the Humanities and to sap federal support for cultural activities throughout the country.

I had written an op-ed in The New York Times in 1995 about the importance of federal support for the arts. I also championed public television and brought Big Bird and other Sesame Street characters to the White House for a press conference. The puppets were saved, but we continued to fight to preserve the limited but vital support the federal government provided to all the arts.

Bill had a new nominee for Ambassador to the United Nations, Richard Holbrooke, whom Senate Republicans were in no mood to confirm. Holbrooke had negotiated the Dayton Peace Accords and served as Bill’s Ambassador to Germany and Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs in the Administration’s first term. Dick had also acquired fervent enemies, generally for reasons to his credit. He was ferociously intelligent, strong, often blunt and fearless. During his negotiations to end the war in Bosnia, Dick occasionally called me to discuss an idea or ask me to convey information to Bill. When Bill nominated Dick to be Ambassador in June of 1998, Dick’s detractors tried to torpedo his appointment. Melanne and I worked hard to get him confirmed and urged him to persevere through the process that increasingly deters qualified people from accepting nominations for important posts. After fourteen months, Dick prevailed and went to the U.N. in August of 1999, where he shepherded through Congress the long delayed payment of our U.N. dues and worked with Secretary-General Kofi Annan to make the HIV/AIDS pandemic a United Nations priority.

The highlight of spring was Bill’s long-anticipated trip to Africa, his first to the continent and the first extended visit to sub-Saharan Africa made by a sitting President. Since we had first met, Bill had opened my horizons to the world beyond our country, but now it was my turn to show him what I had discovered.

We arrived in Accra, the capital of Ghana, on March 23, 1998, to a welcome by the largest crowd I had ever seen. More than half a million people gathered in the searing heat in Independence Square to hear Bill speak. I had loved traveling with Bill ever since he took me to England and France in 1973/ He rose to every public occasion, delighted in meeting strangers, and had a vast appetite for new experiences.

Standing on the stage and facing the immense crowd, he told me to look behind us at the rows of tribal kings who were decked out in vibrant robes and festooned with gold jewelry. He squeezed my hand. “We’re a long way from Arkansas, little Hi’ry”

And indeed we were. Ghana’s President, Jerry Rawlings, and his wife, Nana Konadu, hosted a luncheon for us at Osu Castle, the President’s official residence. Slaves and convicts had once been kept in its dungeon. Rawlings, who first came to power in a military coup in 1979, confounded his critics by bringing stability to his country. Elected President in 1992 and reelected in 1996, he peacefully relinquished his office in a free election in 2000. His wife, Nana, a graceful woman who wore her own striking designs made of Kente cloth, shared with me an intimate connection: Hagar Sam, a Ghanaian midwife who helped deliver Chelsea in Little Rock, had also delivered the four Rawlings children.

Like many enterprising people all over the world, Hagar continued her education in America, studying at Baptist Hospital in Little Rock and working for my obstetrician.

Every day was an eye-opener for Bill. In Uganda, President and Mrs. Museveni traveled with us to the Wanyange village near the source of the Nile. I had asked the two Presidents to highlight the positive results of microcredit loans. From house to house, we saw the evidence of success: borrowers who used their loans to build a rabbit hutch or buy a bigger cooking pot to make extra food to sell or purchase goods to take to the market.

Outside one of the houses, my husband came face-to-face with another Bill Clinton―

a two-day-old boy whose mother had named him in honor of the American President.

Bill wanted to go to Rwanda to meet with survivors of the genocide. The best estimates were that in less than four months, between five hundred thousand and one million people were killed. The Secret Service insisted that meetings occur at the airport because of ongoing security problems. Sitting in an airport lounge with survivors of one of the worst genocides in human history reminded me again what human beings are capable of doing to one another. For two hours, victim after victim calmly recited the circumstances of his or her encounter with evil. No country or international force, including the United States, had intervened to halt the killings. It would have been difficult for the United States to send troops so soon after the loss of American soldiers in Somalia and when the Administration was trying to end ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. But Bill publicly expressed regret that our country and the international community had not done more to stop the horror.

In Cape Town, Bill and I were greeted by President Mandela, who ushered Bill into a speech before the South African Parliament. We lunched afterwards with a racially diverse group of parliamentarians who before independence would never have met one another socially. Bill also visited Victoria Mxenge to see the more than one hundred new houses built since Chelsea and I had visited a year earlier. The women had named a street after me, and they gave me a souvenir street sign with my name on it.