Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (62 page)

This is not to say, however, that the Clinton administration deserves especially harsh censure for its policies regarding terrorism. The sources of radical Muslim ideas, some of which emanated from fury against earlier American foreign policies in the Middle East—support of the shah of Iran, the Gulf War, backing of Israel—were deep, and surely not easy to counter in the short run. The threat of terrorism from groups such as Al Qaeda, while worrisome to government officials after 1996, was but one of many absorbing foreign policy and military concerns—anti-missile defense, Kosovo, Bosnia, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Palestine Liberation Organization—that devoured the administration’s time and energy. Subsequent probes into American intelligence identified memoranda that between the late 1990s and September 2001 had urgently warned top officials about bin Laden and Al Qaeda: One warning titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.” was delivered to President George W. Bush in an intelligence briefing on August 6, 2001.
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But these warnings were among an avalanche of information about terrorism that tumbled into the in-boxes of officials who had to evaluate cyber-age data of all sorts.

It is always easier to assign blame after a disaster, such as the extraordinarily well executed hijackings that stunned the world on September 11, 2001, than it is to appreciate the complexities and uncertainties that face officials beforehand. Notwithstanding the tragedies that befell the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the bombing of the U.S.S.
Cole
, the fact of the matter is that in the late 1990s, Americans, including most media sources, did not pay great attention to terrorist activities. Neither immigration officials nor the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) bolstered security in ways that were likely to succeed in detecting terrorists, or weapons in carry-on baggage. (In September 2001, only twelve suspected terrorists, of thousands so identified by the CIA and FBI, were on the FAA’s “no-fly” list.)
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Dramatic preemptive moves by the United States would likely have had little popular support during the late 1990s or 2000. Prior to 9/11/2001, neither Clinton nor Bush, his successor, dared to mount serious attacks against the Taliban, to order the assassination of bin Laden, or to impose truly tough measures at home concerning travel, immigration, or civil liberties.

The largest obstacle to dealing with threats from terrorism stemmed from what the 9/11 Commission emphasized in its final report of July 2004: a failure of imagination. It was difficult prior to 9/11 for Americans, including most high government officials, to imagine that terrorists had the courage or capacity to mount bold and coordinated attacks in the United States. No suicidal hijacking, for instance, had been carried out anywhere in the world for more than thirty 30 years, and none had ever occurred in the United States. As in 1941, when the Japanese managed a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, most Americans in the late 1990s (and until September 2001) had a false sense of security.

Nor did there seem to be any foolproof way to prevent terrorist activity. Afghanistan, for instance, had proved too confounding a place in the past for either the British or the Soviets to monitor, let alone to control. Some 8,000 miles distant from the United States, it was a landlocked nation where xenophobic jihadism had escalated during the struggles against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and where bitterly turf-conscious warlords controlled substantial areas of the countryside. Nearby countries, such as Pakistan, refused to confront the Taliban or to help in the capture of bin Laden. In that area of the world, as in many others, the sources of anti-western feeling remained almost unfathomably deep—and impossible to combat in the short run.

The advance of globalization, which required relatively open borders, made it tough to keep track of terrorists who jetted freely about and who would stop at nothing to achieve their goals. Technological developments, such as cell phones and the Internet, further facilitated terrorist communications. So did lax immigration procedures in the United States, which prided itself on being an open society, and where tourist visas and false identities were easy to acquire. America’s lengthy borders continued to be thinly policed and porous. Tourists from many countries needed no visas at all: They could enter the United States and stay for ninety days, after which they could disappear. It was simple for immigrants to blend illegally into the background, like the nineteen determined Muslim hijackers, fifteen of them of Saudi extraction, who wreaked such havoc in the United States on 9/11/2001. Most of these radicals had entered the United States with fraudulent passports; one had left and reentered the United States six times in 2000 and 2001.
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Unlike overseas dangers during the Cold War, when the primary sources of international violence—state-sponsored—had been relatively easy to identify, terrorist threats in the post–Cold War era sprang not only from secretive and authoritarian regimes but also from a host of semi-autonomous, stateless groups that were very hard to locate. By 2000, it was believed that agents connected in one way or another with Al Qaeda were operating in as many as sixty nations. Other terrorists seemed to move in and out of a wide range of secretive cells and anti-American groups. It was widely believed that bin Laden’s suicidal terrorists, not the Taliban, called the shots in many areas of Afghanistan.

For all these reasons, the United States remained vulnerable to terrorism when the Clinton administration left office in January 2001. Three additional reasons—beyond those cited above—help account for popular and official neglect that worsened this vulnerability. The first was the surging economy, which had helped to promote pride in American accomplishments and to spread widespread popular complacency about the future course of international developments, terrorism included. In those prosperous, self-indulgent times, neither the Congress nor the administration faced significant popular pressure to stiffen American defenses against violence from overseas.

The second was Clinton’s irresponsible and scandalous personal behavior, news of which burst into the public arena with headline-grabbing momentum in January 1998. The third was the partisan zeal with which the president’s Republican enemies, especially in Congress, thereafter tried to drive him from office.

The political recriminations that ensued riveted millions of Americans, often wrenching their attention from more serious matters, including terrorism. The partisan hassling and its aftermath unavoidably distracted the Congress as well as the president and his top advisers. When the political warfare abated a little after February 1999, at which point the embattled president finally outlasted his many foes, it left his administration in a wounded state. Though with the passage of time Clinton’s personal excesses may occupy a relatively small place in American textbooks, historians and others will necessarily wonder how much better the United States might have prepared against terrorism if the eyes of its political leaders—and of the media—had not been clouded by steamier concerns.

12
Impeachment and Electoral Crisis, 1998–2000

Thanks in large part to the influence of a family friend, who contributed generously to the Democratic Party, Monica Lewinsky secured an internship at the White House in July 1995. Raised in Brentwood—O. J. Simpson’s Los Angeles neighborhood—and a recent graduate of Lewis and Clark College in Oregon, she was then twenty-one years old. Once in the nation’s capital, she lived at the Watergate apartment complex. Four months later, on November 15, she and Bill Clinton had a tryst in the White House, the home, of course, of the president and his wife. This was the second day of the partial shutdown of the federal government that had stemmed from partisan battling over the budget that summer and fall, and the White House staff of 430 had temporarily shrunk to 90.

Their tryst was the first of ten meetings, nine of them involving Lewinsky performing oral sex, that the furtive couple arranged over the next sixteen months, most of them between November 15, 1995, and April 7, 1996, by which point Lewinsky, who had by then become a government employee, had been transferred to the Pentagon. Most of these rendezvous took place either in a small private study just off the Oval Office or in a windowless hallway outside the study. According to Lewinsky, the president telephoned her frequently, fifteen times to engage in phone sex. The couple also exchanged gifts. The last of their serious assignations took place on March 29, 1997, after which they had two meetings at the Oval Office, in August and December 1997, involving kissing.
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There the matter might have rested. Though Lewinsky was a bold and brazen young woman who flirted with the president, lifting up her skirt before him and flashing her thong underwear, and though Clinton was known for his roving eye, no one on the scene imagined that the president was engaging in oral sex next to the Oval Office. Until January 1998, the American public had no idea that such meetings might be taking place. If Clinton’s near-legendary luck had held out—as it might have done if he had been chief executive during pre-Watergate days when reporters had turned a relatively blind eye to the promiscuity of politicians—he would have joined a number of other American presidents who had engaged in extramarital relations without being publicly exposed while in office.

A complex set of developments deprived Clinton of such good fortune. One of these was the partisan zeal of conservative political enemies, who had long regarded him as a schemer and a womanizer. Well before January 1998, when the Lewinsky affair hit the headlines, the president had been forced to hire attorneys to contest two investigations into his conduct. Both had landed him in the glare of often sensational news coverage. One of these was the probe by Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel who in mid-1994 had begun to dig into the Clintons’ involvement in a range of matters, notably the Whitewater River land development project in Arkansas. The other was the civil suit that Paula Corbin Jones had filed in May 1994, alleging that as governor of Arkansas in 1991 he had sexually harassed her in a Little Rock hotel room.
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Though Clinton’s lawyers had fought these probes every step of the way, they had not been able to quash them. In May 1997, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected Clinton’s claim that the Constitution immunized him while in office from civil suits such as the one that Jones had initiated. It ruled that the case must go forward.
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Many legal analysts criticized this decision, arguing that it placed all future chief executives at risk of having to contend with time-consuming, potentially frivolous litigation alleging misbehavior that might have taken place before a president took office. The Court’s decision nonetheless stood, forcing Clinton and a battery of high-priced legal help to cope with the suit thereafter.
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Still, neither Starr nor the lawyers helping Jones began to learn much about Clinton’s involvement with Lewinsky until the fall of 1997. At that point Linda Tripp, a co-worker of Lewinsky’s at the Pentagon, became a major actor in the drama that was soon to unfold. Tripp, nearly fifty years old when she met Lewinsky in 1996, nursed a number of grudges, especially against Clinton and his aides, who had earlier moved her out of her secretarial position at the White House and sent her to the Pentagon. When she came across Lewinsky, a fellow exile at the Pentagon, she realized that her young colleague was infatuated with Clinton. Pretending to befriend her, she learned that Lewinsky had enjoyed a sexual relationship with the president.

Starting in September 1997, Tripp secretly recorded a number of conversations in which Lewinsky revealed intimate details of her trysts. Tripp then began sharing the tapes with Paula Jones’s legal team, which had been searching for evidence concerning extramarital affairs that Clinton might have engaged in over the years. When Lewinsky submitted an affidavit in January 1998 in the Jones case, Starr (who had talked to Jones’s attorneys before becoming independent counsel and who closely monitored developments in that case) saw a chance to broaden his probe.

This complicated chain of circumstances and personal connections indicated several facts. First, Lewinsky, like many people having affairs, could not keep a secret. Second, Tripp was a friend from hell. Armed with apparently damning information from Tripp, Starr sought authority from Attorney General Janet Reno to broaden his office’s inquiries. In particular, he hoped to prove that Clinton had engaged in a conspiracy to obstruct justice by getting Lewinsky a new job in New York and by encouraging her to commit perjury in her affidavit in the Jones case, and that he had violated federal law in his dealings with witnesses, potential witnesses, or others concerned with that case.

Reno, confronted with developments such as these, recommended to the three-judge federal panel empowered to oversee the activities of independent counsels that Starr receive authority to widen his investigation, and the panel quickly gave it. For Starr, who been unable to gather evidence that implicated the president in improprieties surrounding the Whitewater deals, this authority was wonderful. It was the key decision that enabled him to dig deeper and deeper and that led to one astonishing news story after another—and eventually to the impeachment of the president.
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At the same time, moreover, word leaked out, via the Drudge Report, an Internet site, that Clinton had been involved in an ongoing sexual relationship with a White House intern. The next day the Report updated the information, naming Lewinsky. Newspapers, distrusting the source, were at first reluctant to print such a sensational story, but the facts seemed to check out. When the
Washington Post
published the Drudge Report’s information on January 21, its revelations rocked the nation. On and off for the next thirteen months, “Monicagate” dominated the front pages.
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Clinton, who was a dogged fighter, refused to give ground. When the
Post
account appeared, he contacted Dick Morris, who agreed to conduct an instant poll to find out how Americans might be reacting to Clinton’s behavior. When they talked again late that evening, Morris said that the American people would tolerate a presidential affair, but not perjury or obstruction of justice. He also advised the president not to make a public confession. Voters, he said, were “just not ready for it.” “Well,” Clinton replied, “we’ll just have to win, then.”
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Pursuing this bold strategy, Clinton denied everything in the first few days after the news broke out—to his wife, Cabinet members, friends, aides, and interviewers. On January 26, in the presence of his wife and Cabinet officers in the Roosevelt Room of the White House he faced a battery of television cameras and vigorously proclaimed his innocence. Wagging his finger forcefully at the cameras, he exclaimed: “I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I’m going to say this again. I did
not
[here he slashed his finger downward] have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time,
never
. These allegations are
false
[more vigorous gestures here] and I need to go back to work for the American people.”
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His wife, Hillary, accepting her husband’s statement, forcefully backed him up the next day, telling a vast television audience watching the
Today
show that his administration was being victimized by a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Denouncing Starr, she added: “We get a politically motivated prosecutor who . . . has literally spent four years looking at every telephone . . . call we’ve made, every check we’ve ever written, scratching for dirt, intimidating witnesses, doing everything possible to try to make some accusation against my husband. . . . It’s not just one person, it’s an entire operation.”
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Having constructed this stonewall of a defense, the president said nothing in public about the matter for the next seven months, during which time he six times declined invitations by a federal grand jury to testify about his actions. It was during these months that Starr, avidly pursued by television crews, became a highly visible figure. Only four weeks older than the president, he had grown up in East Texas near the Oklahoma border, not far from where Bill Clinton had been born. His father was a barber and minister in the conservative Church of Christ denomination. Starr at first went to Harding College in Searcy, Arkansas, an institution affiliated with his church. During summers he sold Bibles door-to-door. Starr’s religiously oriented, conservative upbringing contrasted sharply with that of Clinton, a young man of the 1960s who was leading a considerably more adventuresome social life at the same time.
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Like Clinton, Starr left his geographical roots to strike out for the East, transferring from Harding College after a year and a half to complete his college education at George Washington University. He then received a master’s degree in history at Brown University and graduated from Duke Law School. He rose rapidly in the legal world, clerking for Chief Justice Warren Burger at the Supreme Court, serving as a judge on the prestigious federal court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit, and then becoming solicitor general in the Bush administration. Political insiders predicted that he would some day sit on the Supreme Court. A conservative Republican, he had worked methodically since taking over the task of investigating the Whitewater tangle in 1994, and he was eager to pursue evidence of wrongdoing that might incriminate the president.

Having talked to Jones’s lawyers in 1994, Starr was sure that Clinton was an adulterer, and the tapes that Tripp had recorded seemed almost heaven-sent. A churchgoing man who prided himself on his moral rectitude, he found the details of Clinton’s affair repellent. Subsequent testimony by various of Lewinsky’s friends, in whom she had also confided her relationship, further steeled Starr’s resolve to expand his investigation in the hope that he might find the president guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice. That summer he gave Lewinsky immunity from prosecution (among other things for perjury arising from her affidavit in the Jones case), whereupon she told a federal grand jury about her sexual adventures with the president. She also produced a semen-stained navy blue dress that she said she had worn at a tryst with the president. In August, DNA tests required of the president revealed that the semen was Clinton’s.

With the evidence building up against him, Clinton himself gave sworn testimony to Starr’s aides in a four-hour interrogation at the White House on August 17—and via televised hookup to a federal grand jury. He admitted that he had engaged in an “inappropriate” relationship with Lewinsky that involved “intimate contact,” but he denied having explicitly lied about his behavior in his deposition concerning the Jones case, and he refused to answer a number of questions. That evening he defended himself via television to the American people. In a four-minute address he conceded at last: “I did have a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky that was not appropriate. . . . It constituted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part for which I am solely and completely responsible.” He admitted that he had “misled people, including even my wife.” Still, the president remained self-pitying and defiant. Lashing out at Starr’s investigation, he complained that it had “gone on too long, cost too much, and hurt too many innocent people.” He ended by proclaiming that it was time to move on and “repair the fabric of our national discourse.”
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Many editorial reactions to Clinton’s address were scathing. One paper commented: “In a ghastly four-minute session, the President told the nation no more than he had to. It was a calculated, carefully calibrated effort at damage control. It was a hell of a comedown from a fireside chat with F.D.R.” Another wrote that Clinton’s “mantra of taking personal responsibility rings hollow. He has let the whole country down.”
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Then and later, commentators lamented that the drawn-out Clinton-Lewinsky matter was virtually paralyzing consideration of other important issues, including the future financial viability of Social Security and Medicare, regulation of managed health care plans, and campaign finance reform.
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About the only presidential accomplishment of note in early 1998 was his success in securing Senate approval, 80 to 19, of an expansion of NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.
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