Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (3 page)

On January 24, Drudge quoted White House sources in an exclusive: “The Bush Administration has quietly launched an investigation into apparent acts of vandalism and destruction of federal property—after incoming Bush staffers discover widespread sabotage of White House office equipment and lewd messages left behind by previous tenants! Harriet Miers, 55, Assistant to President Bush and staff secretary, will be investigating possible legal ramifications of the White House trashing and possible theft, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.”

According to a “well-placed source,” wrote Drudge, “Miers is just beginning her investigation,” adding, “The level of the trashing is very troubling, this is not just ‘W’ keys missing from keyboards.” He quoted a “close Bush adviser” claiming that the “damage left by departing Clintonites goes ‘way beyond pranks, to vandalism.’ ” Finally Drudge warned, “photographic and audio evidence is being collected—as the full scope of the damage becomes clear. Bush’s staff has been cautioned not to go public with the extent of the damage and the worst is being closely held among very top staffers for fear of leaks.”

That night the same stories came up on CNN’s
Crossfire
, with the
Washington Post
’s Mike Allen, a reliable sounding board of capital insiders, on set to discuss the missing “W”—a sign that the Clinton “scandals” were dominating Washington chatter and would spread rapidly through the national media. It was all erupting just in time to spoil Hillary Clinton’s first historic opportunity to preside over the Senate the next day, and it wasn’t about to subside anytime soon.

To Hillary, McAuliffe, Band, and others close to Clinton—not to mention the former president himself—it seemed obvious that the Bush White House was playing a very cynical double game. On the press podium in the briefing room, Fleischer pretended to downplay the “vandalism” story while keeping it alive; privately, White House aides were leaking ugly, unproven allegations about the trashing of the White House, the Old Executive Office Building next door, and the presidential airplane. Nearly every story on the subject featured a “close Bush adviser,” a “
high-level Bush staffer,” or some similarly unnamed source talking about the awful destruction perpetrated by those Clinton people.

To come under this kind of sustained attack by the White House was a signal of how far and how suddenly Clinton had fallen. Only days before, the vast communications operation of the presidency would have served and protected him. Now he could rely on nothing even resembling that mighty bureaucratic apparatus—only a tiny temporary office that sat, ironically enough, across the street from the White House in a townhouse on Jackson Place.

Directed by Karen Tramontano, who had served as a special assistant to the president, the Clinton “transition office” consisted mainly of a few aides on six-month stipends from the federal government. Still on hand was Betty Currie, who had famously endured crisis after crisis, and more than one grand jury appearance, as Clinton’s personal secretary, along with Laura Graham, who had worked on the White House scheduling team, Mary Morrison, who had helped to run Oval Office operations, and former White House social secretary Capricia Marshall, a Hillary confidante who served more as a consultant than a full-time employee—plus several employees who continued as they had before, handling correspondence from the tens of thousands of people on the Clintons’ various lists.

A highly competent executive originally recruited from a top position in the labor movement by White House chief of staff John Podesta, Tramontano had never overseen media relations, let alone a full-blown crisis. Receiving phone calls every few minutes from reporters who had managed to find her, demanding responses on the Rich pardon, vandalism in the White House, and Hillary’s gift registry, she lacked the skills and experience to respond effectively.

In the final weeks before the end of his presidency, Clinton had remained busy and preoccupied, with very little time devoted to what might come after. He and Podesta had hastily assembled the transition office, approaching Tramontano to run it less than a month before Clinton left the White House. They hadn’t anticipated the need for a press secretary—let alone a war room. Now Clinton sat isolated in Chappaqua, hundreds of miles from the transition office, and nobody there could begin to help him cope with a burgeoning public relations disaster.

Tramontano did what she could under the circumstances. She knew how to pick up the phone and reach officials in the White House, and within a day or so after the vandalism stories broke, she placed an irritated call to Andrew Card, Bush’s chief of staff. She had been in the White House during those final days; she knew that the trashing tales were wholly fabricated or at most terribly exaggerated. It was also obvious to her that whatever Fleischer might say, those stories emanated directly from the highest levels of Bush’s staff.

But rather than return her call, Card told his deputy Joseph Hagin to ring Tramontano back—and a “senior Bush official” instantly leaked word of the exchange to a CNN White House reporter. Then Fleischer described the conversation between Tramontano and Hagin to the White House press corps, complete with yet more insinuations of serious misconduct.

According to Fleischer, Hagin described “plural incidents” of vandalism to the Clinton aide, although he would not say what those incidents were. A “senior Bush aide” confirmed to CNN that the incidents had occurred mostly in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, but that some also took place in the West Wing. Yet while his colleagues kept whispering poison, Fleischer primly remarked that the White House had tried to minimize the entire flap from the beginning and “move forward.”

Through the final days of January, massive waves of negative coverage were washing over Clinton and his meager staff, leaving them virtually drowned and demoralized. Former Clinton press secretaries would clock in for temporary duty on what they all privately called “the shit-show,” but they had other commitments and were hardly in any position to push back effectively. When Jack Quinn finally appeared in the press to defend the Rich pardon on legal grounds—including an op-ed essay under his byline in the
Washington Post
—scarcely anyone noticed, and almost nobody cared.

What drew far more attention was the spectacle promised by the House Republicans who had seized upon the Rich case, apparently still eager to vindicate impeachment. Representative Dan Burton, chair of the House Government Reform Committee, announced on January 25
that he would soon open an investigation of the Rich case, because the former president “has not given an adequate explanation as to why Mr. Rich deserved a pardon.” Burton released a letter he had sent to the Justice Department seeking documents and promised to subpoena “a host of different groups that may have played some kind of a part in this pardon.”

Burton’s announcements excited the Washington press corps, many of whom had once ridiculed his committee’s clownish and ineffectual probes of Democratic fundraising and other alleged scandals. The Indiana Republican was probably best known for inviting reporters to his own backyard, where he had blasted a watermelon with a pistol to dramatize his suspicions about the death of Vincent Foster, the White House counsel whose 1993 suicide aroused right-wing conspiracy theorists.

Suddenly, Burton was a figure to reckon with again in Washington, where the network news and cable shows all wanted him to discuss the pardon investigation, and in certain circles he even became a potential hero. “I just wish one of these times you would catch them, Congressman,” cried Chris Matthews when he interviewed the eccentric Burton on
Hardball
. “You’ve been in pursuit. You’ve been like Smokey the Bear trying to catch this guy,” meaning Clinton, as if Burton were a dogged state trooper tirelessly hunting a career criminal.

Unwilling to cede the glaring scandal spotlight to the House, Senator Orrin Hatch, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, soon announced that he, too, would convene pardon hearings—evidently with the eager support of Senate Democrats, several of whom had publicly denounced Clinton’s pardon of Rich, including their leader, Senator Tom Daschle.

Among the most voluble grandstanders, rather predictably, was Senator Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut Democrat and longtime Clinton friend from Yale days, who had vaulted onto the Democratic presidential ticket in 2000 because of his moralistic scourging of Clinton during the impeachment crisis. Lieberman had even pushed himself forward to comment on the White House vandalism, while admitting that he had no idea what had actually happened.

But Lieberman’s irrepressible urge to promote himself was merely the least attractive expression of a basic Washington reality: Almost
every prominent Democrat felt obliged to express disappointment if not disgust over the Rich pardon. Those who had always disliked Clinton could barely conceal their satisfaction, while those who had been close sought a safe distance from him, sadly shaking their heads.

In those early days, Clinton rarely left the house in Chappaqua. When Hillary came up from Washington on weekends, she saw that he was “out of sorts” and angry, indeed often “madder than hell.” What made him especially furious were the stories about the furniture that he and Hillary had supposedly purloined, portraying him and his wife as some kind of low-class thieves.

Worried friends noticed that no matter how many times they urged him to turn off the TV and stop reading the newspapers, he couldn’t help himself. He would promise to stop, and then get on the phone with friends and ask whether they had seen the latest cable TV slurs against him.

“You’ve got to stop it!” McAuliffe told him. “Stop reading this stuff and stop watching this junk on TV! You’re going to drive yourself nuts.” But he couldn’t help himself. He watched constantly.

As January ended, a few small signs appeared of possible relief from the cable-driven scandal storm. After the Clintons voluntarily returned several items of furniture to the White House, the gift stories started to recede. The vandalism stories began evaporating, too, because Fleischer could never produce the “list” of damage incidents that he had said the Bush staffers were compiling; there was never a single photograph of any trashed office, or even a missing W. (Eventually Mark Lindsay, Clinton’s former assistant for management and administration, who had forcefully denied the vandalism charges at every step, would be vindicated by a General Accounting Office investigation that found no basis for them.)

Nor had the missing champagne glasses on Air Force One been stolen. A White House photographer, on board for Clinton’s final flight as president, had smashed them accidentally. When the steward came out of the galley carrying the glasses, the photographer had turned and, with her telephoto lens, hit and knocked over about ten of the tall flutes. Shards of glass falling into a celebratory cake had left it inedible.

But revulsion against the Rich pardon showed no sign of fading away—just the opposite. Both the Senate and House investigating committees were preparing to subpoena witnesses, including several top Clinton aides, Denise Rich, and the prosecutors who believed that Clinton had made a corrupt bargain to vacate their case against Rich. Worse still, rumors were circulating that the Justice Department, under a new Republican attorney general named John Ashcroft, who had voted to convict Clinton in the Senate, would open a criminal investigation of the pardon.

The prospect of a criminal investigation, with a grand jury calling witnesses under penalty of perjury, revived chilling memories of the very worst days of the Starr investigation. For anyone who had ever worked for Clinton, this was a nightmare déjà vu.

As for the Clintons themselves, the idea that they would again have to hire lawyers to defend themselves was utterly depressing. They were still deeply in debt to David Kendall and the other attorneys who had handled their defense in Whitewater and all the other fizzled scandals that Starr had investigated, plus the Lewinsky case, with unpaid bills that still totaled somewhere north of $11 million. To pay off that obligation, as Hillary told friends, her husband would have to earn at least $25 million before taxes. Now there would be more debt, not less.

While the roar of contemptuous media coverage, bipartisan congressional probes, and prosecutorial threats continued, Band and Tramontano had the satisfaction of knowing that at least a few important goals had been achieved. Most significant was the contract she had helped to negotiate with Don Walker, a prominent and highly respected booking agent whose agency would set up lucrative speaking engagements for the former president both in the United States and abroad. He paid a significant sum up front that helped the Clintons to retire their mortgage.

Walker had gotten off to a rapid and successful start, inking contracts for a heavy schedule of appearances, mostly at corporate events, that would pay no less than $100,000—and as much as $250,000—for what usually amounted to no more than a few hours of travel, talking, and face time. Having declined to join any corporate boards, as so many
of his predecessors had done, paid speeches and book deals looked to Clinton like his only hopes for erasing the burden of debt hanging over him and Hillary and paying for the costs of two big homes. He was working on a speech that would be worth the money.

Every week or so, Tramontano would come up from Washington for a meeting with Clinton. She would board an Amtrak train for the three-hour trip to New York’s Penn Station, then walk over to Grand Central Terminal and board a Metro-North commuter train for another hour’s to Chappaqua. This time, on the last day of January, she had news that she didn’t want to discuss over the telephone.

Tramontano called Oscar to make sure that nobody except for Band and Cooper was there. “How is he?” she asked. “Can I come up to see him?”

She wanted to tell Clinton in person what Walker had told her the day before. Almost all of the corporations, trade groups, and venues that had lined up to book Clinton speeches were withdrawing those commitments—with as many as five or six canceled in a single day.