A Vast Conspiracy Page 33

  The Thomasons themselves had an even worse time of it. Harry stumbled into what became Travelgate, by suggesting that an aviation-consulting company in which he had a small interest might provide a better deal for the White House. Two civil suits against Harry for his role in Travelgate were dismissed, and Starr’s prosecutors never even questioned him in the matter, but the issue further soured the Thomasons on Washington—and the city’s establishment on them. The travel-office debacle broke in the press during the same week in 1993 as the infamous presidential haircut aboard Air Force One, in Los Angeles. It was Christophe, the hairdresser for the cast of Hearts Afire, who gave the haircut, and it was Thomason who introduced Christophe to the Clintons and hired the hairdresser under a “personal services contract.” Contrary to press reports at the time, the haircut did not delay air traffic, and Harry was in Florida when it occurred. But placing Christophe in the president’s entourage was a perfect opening for the president’s critics to mock him as an elitist masquerading as a populist.

  By 1998, the Thomasons were pretty thoroughly embittered about Washington, and like their friends in the White House, Harry and Linda shared a heartfelt contempt for the entire metropolis of prosecutors and pundits. Harry Thomason said not long after the story broke, “We’ve had a slow-motion assassination in process for some time. Once everybody on our side falls in, this is war. Never give them a break. Never give them one inch. Once you finally get that through your head, then you have to get out and fight this every way you can.

  “My grandfather used to say that the Bible said when someone hits you, you turn the other cheek,” Thomason went on, “but after that, you deck him.”

  Thomason arrived in Washington on the rainy night of Thursday, January 22, and around midnight he and the president took Buddy for a long walk around the White House grounds. Thomason knew enough about criminal investigations to refrain from asking Clinton any direct questions about his involvement with Lewinsky, but the president conveyed the same message to his friend that he had to his staff—that he was being hounded for his fatherly interest in the girl. More than that, though, Clinton saw himself as the victim of an unparalleled effort at personal destruction. The conversation between the two men continued, on and off, for three more days, as Thomason accompanied the Clintons for a tense weekend at Camp David. There the Catoctin Mountain air was perfumed with the scent of old grudges, as Harry traced the current crisis to villains of their shared past. (For months, Thomason explained the president’s troubles with the phrase “It’s all Arkansas politics.”) As the cabin fire crackled, they talked of Cliff Jackson, who had midwifed the Paula Jones suit and Whitewater investigations, and of Sheffield Nelson, Clinton’s 1990 gubernatorial opponent, who had first nudged the stories about Juanita Broaddrick and other women toward a public stage.

  By the end of the weekend, though, Thomason began to sense a shift in momentum. On the Sunday talk shows, Clinton’s supporters began their effort to change the subject from the president’s behavior to that of the prosecutor. James Carville, on Meet the Press: “This started out as a $40,000 land deal that lost money, and about $50 million and five years later, after nobody could find anything, we’re wiring up people in hotels and feeding them whiskey trying to get them to talk and everything else. This is a scuzzy investigation.” Rahm Emanuel, on Face the Nation: “The only thing that matters is the truth as it pertains to two questions. Did he have a sexual relationship? And did he ask her to lie? The answer to those questions is no and no.”

  Now all that remained was for Clinton himself to resume the offensive. On Sunday night, January 25, Thomason returned with the Clintons to their residence at the White House, where Harold Ickes, the equally combative former deputy chief of staff, joined them in the solarium. (A news junkie, Thomason was happiest with one eye scanning the all-news television stations and the other browsing the political web sites. Mrs. Clinton, on the other hand, refused to watch any television news during this period, so Harry was constantly turning the television in the solarium on and off depending on whether Hillary was in the room.) At this point, Thomason began leaning on the president to make a stronger denial than he had with Lehrer the previous Wednesday.

  “You know, you shouldn’t wait any longer,” Thomason told Clinton. “You should make a strong statement at the first opportunity. There was nothing wrong with what you said last week. It was the way you said it.” Ickes concurred—and aides were sent to search for the right moment in the president’s schedule. Since the State of the Union message was just forty-eight hours away, and the frenzy showed no sign of abating, there wasn’t much time.

  It was after midnight, early Monday morning, when the phone rang in the Washington hotel room of Bill White, the president of the C. S. Mott Foundation. White was scheduled to speak at a ceremony in the Roosevelt Room, at ten-thirty that morning, to showcase an after-school child-care program that the president would be lauding before Congress on Tuesday. Earlier, White had been told that Vice President Gore and the first lady would be presiding.

  “There has been a slight change in plans,” White was told.

  “Thank you. Thank you and good morning,” Hillary Clinton said, as the applause died down. “Please be seated. Welcome to the White House.” There was a slight edge to her smile when she added, “And I’m especially pleased to see in the audience so many people who care so much about education and child care.” As the first lady knew, few of the fifty or so people who had squeezed into the room were thinking much about child care on the morning of Monday, January 26.

  True, the president’s supporters had finally started to put up a fight, but the rain of new disclosures had continued to fall on the White House. On Saturday, ABC had independently confirmed, through other sources, what Goldberg had fed to Drudge earlier in the week: that “Lewinsky says she saved—apparently as a kind of souvenir—a navy-blue dress with the president’s semen stain on it.” On Sunday, there were the first broadcast reports that someone—unnamed—had witnessed an intimate encounter between Clinton and Lewinsky. This prompted both of the New York tabloids, the News and the Post, to trumpet the same headline across their front pages on Monday morning: CAUGHT IN THE ACT. On their Sunday shows, Tim Russert, of NBC, had put Clinton’s chances of survival in office at “fifty-fifty at best,” and Sam Donaldson, of ABC, wondered if the president would last out the week.

  “This morning we come together to hear about the president’s plans to strengthen education,” Mrs. Clinton gamely went on. “This afternoon, I will be visiting a model program in Harlem.…” As the minutes passed with excruciating slowness, Mrs. Clinton turned the floor over to Richard Riley, the secretary of education, then to Bill White, of the Mott Foundation, then on to a local couple whose children had taken advantage of the after-school program, and then on to the vice president, who thanked everyone for coming—especially Senators Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, and Chris Dodd, who were seated directly in front of the lectern. Finally, after close to an hour, Vice President Gore said, “I am very pleased to introduce America’s true education president and the greatest champion of working parents and working families that the United States of America has ever known: President Bill Clinton.”

  The small crowd jumped to their feet and offered a nervous, almost frantic cheer for the embattled president. Clinton said “Thank you” fourteen times before he could continue. The president then spoke easily for about ten minutes about the after-school program and the other education proposals he would be raising the following evening in the State of the Union address. He spoke of reducing class size; teaching every eight-year-old to read; hooking up classrooms and libraries to the Internet—the kind of popular, small-bore initiatives on which he had built the revival of his presidency. “Now I have to go back to work on my State of the Union speech,” Clinton said, “and I worked on it till pretty late last night.”

  Then the president looked down and paused. No one—no one—knew what he was going to say next. Not hi
s wife, not the vice president, not Harry Thomason, who was watching Clinton’s remarks on a video monitor in an office down the hall in the West Wing. Nine days earlier, he had given sworn testimony in the Paula Jones case that he did not have a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. But according to the press, there were semen stains! Eyewitnesses! What was he going to say?

  For the first time, Clinton leaned forward on the small lectern, inched closer to the microphone, and began in a soft voice that grew louder with each word: “But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I’m going to say this again.”

  At this moment, Clinton stood up straight and raised his right index finger nearly to his chin, and then pumped it four times as he uttered the following sentence: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” Clinton blinked awkwardly after saying “that woman”; he later told Thomason he had used the phrase because, in the stress of the moment, he had momentarily forgotten Lewinsky’s name.

  Another jab of the finger, this time hitting the lectern in front of him: “I never told anybody to lie, not a single time, never.”

  Jab, again banging the wood: “These allegations are false.”

  At this point, Clinton was moving his arm so much that the camera operator had to widen the shot to make sure he remained in the frame.

  One more: “Now I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you.”

  As the president walked away, the applause was more stunned than joyous.

  For her part, Mrs. Clinton left the Roosevelt Room to gather her belongings for her trip to New York to talk about child care. She planned to spend the night at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and then, the following morning, appear on the Today show.

  Clinton’s statement had its biggest impact in newsrooms. Up to that point, the Lewinsky story had been careening as if down a hill, picking up momentum each day. Each new disclosure made Clinton look worse; every new story made it appear more likely that the president had been sexually involved with the intern and had obstructed justice in the Jones case. Clinton’s forced departure from office seemed, in this moment, almost inevitable. On Saturday, Wolf Blitzer of CNN reported from the White House lawn that Clinton aides were “talking among themselves about the possibility of a resignation.” Several aides promptly chased Blitzer across the grass to tell him he was wrong, but his report reflected the spirit of the moment. In the frenetic atmosphere of that first week, there appeared to be little risk to pushing the story as hard as possible. It seemed that if bad news for Clinton wasn’t true yet, it probably was going to be true soon, anyway.

  Suddenly, on Monday, Clinton had a simple message for the press corps: Prove it. That, it turned out, was going to be more difficult than it appeared. The president’s finger-waving challenge occurred at just about the time the main sources for the previous week’s disclosures—Paula Jones’s lawyers—were tapped out. The Jones team basically knew only what Linda Tripp had told them; and by January 26, the lawyers had leaked all of her best material—the semen-stained dress, the phone sex, the exchanges of gifts. (Lucianne Goldberg had passed these same stories to the tabloids.) And Tripp, of course, knew only what Lewinsky had told her about the relationship. There wasn’t much corroborative evidence in late January 1998. The infamous dress was still hidden and would not appear for seven more months. The reports about eyewitnesses to White House trysts were simply erroneous. In a purely cynical sense, it was precisely the right time for Clinton to tell this extraordinary public lie.

  Like every other White House aide, Sidney Blumenthal did not know for sure that Clinton was lying about Lewinsky, but as a former reporter, Blumenthal did recognize the brief moment of opportunity that beckoned for the Clinton forces. Press and public interest in the embryonic scandal remained intense, but Clinton’s enemies found themselves, for the moment, without new merchandise to sell to reporters. What would fill the void left by the stanched leaks from the Jones lawyers? Blumenthal had an idea, which he shared with the first lady as she spent Monday night at the Waldorf before her appearance on the Today show.

  At that moment, no one was more important to Bill Clinton’s political future than his wife. Much later, after the president admitted he had been sexually involved with Lewinsky, many of the Clintons’ adversaries suggested that Mrs. Clinton knew all along that he had lied to the public about the relationship. According to this theory, Hillary had backed up her husband’s lies so that they both might cling to power. The evidence suggests otherwise. People who spoke to her during this period recalled that she expressed only passionate support for, and belief in, her husband. Moreover, for Mrs. Clinton to believe that the affair had taken place would be to acknowledge an extraordinary betrayal, and a public humiliation on a grand scale. What human being, given the option, wouldn’t try to avoid such a fate? In light of her husband’s track record, of course, one can imagine that the first lady harbored suspicions about him. But no one glimpsed any hesitancy in those first few days.

  Indeed, Mrs. Clinton’s certainty about the falsehood of the accusations against her husband made her all the more receptive to Blumenthal’s message. It was a version of a conversation the former reporter and the first lady had had many times. Since the Lewinsky story broke, Blumenthal said, the press had so far focused on the president’s behavior to the exclusion of all other subjects. But he asserted the real story was something very different. The press had to see that “the right wing,” not the president, bore responsibility for this scandal. As of the morning of January 27, Mrs. Clinton was the most important character from whom no one had heard. This was a sex scandal, and her posture as a wronged—or supportive—wife might make all the difference to her husband.

  The interview on the Today show had been scheduled for more than a month. The first lady’s staff had booked her for the morning of the State of the Union address to talk about the “national treasures” initiative, a historic preservation project that her husband would be mentioning briefly in his speech that night. In the years since her health-care proposal had imploded, Mrs. Clinton had been relegated to softer, more traditional first-lady projects like this one. But with her husband embroiled in a sex scandal, Hillary Clinton would return to a pivotal role in his administration. She knew the stakes for this first interview, and she reveled in the action. By five-thirty on the morning of Tuesday, January 27, a squadron of television satellite trucks had set up outside Rockefeller Center merely to catch the first lady’s arrival at the NBC studio.

  In the makeup room, at about six-thirty, Mrs. Clinton was relaxed and confident as she was welcomed by Jeff Zucker, the executive producer of Today. “You must be the smartest producer in America to have booked me for today,” she told him. She greeted Matt Lauer, the coanchor, with words of sympathy for Katie Couric, whose husband had died of cancer the previous weekend.

  “On Close-Up this morning,” said Lauer, at the top of the broadcast, “the first lady of the United States, Hillary Rodham Clinton.” Lauer began by noting that the interview had indeed been scheduled several weeks earlier, and then said, “We appreciate you honoring the commitment, even in light of recent events. Thank you very much.

  “There has been a question on the minds of a lot of people in this country, Mrs. Clinton, lately, and that is what is the exact nature of the relationship between your husband and Monica Lewinsky? Has he described that relationship in detail to you?”

  “Well, we’ve talked at great length,” she said. “And I think as this matter unfolds, the entire country will have more information. But we’re right in the middle of a rather vigorous feeding frenzy right now. People are saying all kinds of things, putting out rumor and innuendo. And I have learned over the last many years being involved in politics, and especially since my husband first started running for president, that the best thing to do in these cases is just to be patient, take a deep breath, and the truth will come out. But there’s nothing we can do to fight this firestorm of allegati
ons that are out there.”

  Lauer said that Clinton had told the American people what the relationship was not. “Has he described to you what it was?”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Clinton said. “And we’ll find that out as time goes by, Matt. But I think the important thing now is to stand as firmly as I can and say that, you know, that the president has denied these allegations on all counts, unequivocally.…”

  Lauer turned to one of the specific allegations. Had the president given Lewinsky gifts?

  Mrs. Clinton said it was possible. “I mean, I’ve seen him take his tie off and hand it to somebody, you know.… I’ve known my husband for more than twenty-five years, and we’ve been married for twenty-two years, and the one thing I always kid him about is that he never meets a stranger. He is kind, he is friendly, he tries to help people who need help, who ask for help.” Here Mrs. Clinton was hinting at the explanation that her husband had given her and Blumenthal on the first day—that he was ministering to a troubled young woman. Then, in the course of the same answer, the first lady started to try to steer the conversation in the direction she wanted it to go. “So I think everybody ought to just stop a minute here and think about what we’re doing,” she said. “I’m very concerned about the tactics that are being used and the kind of intense political agenda at work here.”