Site Presented By
Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
For months Jones's legal team had been trolling for women who had supposedly had sexual relations with Clinton. The women's stories were uncorroborated; some were contradicted; and according to the President, Dolly Kyle Browning, a former high-school classmate of Clinton's, explained to him at their class reunion, in the presence of a witness, that she had felt compelled to make her claims because she was in dire financial straits and seeking a book contract. (She denied making this statement and sued for libel, but her case was dismissed.) In May, after Jones had filed her complaint with the Arkansas court, Bob Bennett had said, "In a single term, this complaint is tabloid trash with a legal caption on it," and he made it clear to me that, though there might be a season of "tabloid trash," Jones would lose. He had affidavits that proved that Jones's claim of sexual harassment on the job, the only legal basis of her claim, was dismissible on its face. (She had, in fact, been promoted despite her evident absence of ability.) The case would very likely never even come to trial; it would be tossed out.
January 19, 1998, Monday, was Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, and not much went on at the White House. I came back from Chicago and spoke with Bob Bennett, and the next day I went to staff meetings where we worked on drafts of the State of the Union address. I met with the President in the Oval Office about it; I met with members of the National Security Council; I attended meetings to prepare for the next political strategy session with the President. Also on that day Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a prickly character whom Clinton was trying to handle, came to the White House. Yasser Arafat, an even more difficult customer, was due on January 22.
I had not a glimmer of knowledge that several members of the legal counsel's office were already responding to Ken Starr's expanded probe from Whitewater into the sex tapes of Monica Lewinsky. I learned later that a few of the lawyers, less than half a dozen, were aware that a story was coming soon about the President's sexual relationship with a White House intern, a rumor whose dimensions they weren't sure of.
The first portent had come from a Drudge Report, posted late Saturday night, January 17:
NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN,
BLOCKBUSTER REPORT: 23-YEAR OLD FORMER WHITE HOUSE
INTERN, SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESIDENT
The next night, Drudge posted Monica Lewinsky's name. His sources for his stories were the elf George Conway and Lucianne Goldberg, Linda Tripp's Linda Tripp, the goad to the goad, whose role was still masked. On January 20, Drudge posted:
CONTROVERSY SWIRLS AROUND TAPES OF FORMER
WHITE HOUSE INTERN, AS STARR MOVES IN!
**World Exclusive**
**Must Credit the DRUDGE REPORT**
Federal investigators are now in possession of intimate taped conversations of a former White House intern, age 23, discussing details of her alleged sexual relationship with President Clinton, the Drudge Report has learned.
Though I later learned that some people in the White House were reading the Drudge Report with growing trepidation, I had only rapidly skimmed it while I was away from Washington. From what I gleaned superficially, I simply thought this was just another Drudge story, like the "distinguishing characteristic" one. It was enough for me to hear the name "Drudge" to dismiss it. I did not even read it closely enough to see the name "Lewinsky." Paul Begala told me about Stephanopoulos's rejoinder to Kristol, and I thought George had reduced the item to its proper place. Eerily, most of the President's political team was working without any sense that the legal team was frantically scrambling. That brief division of labor would abruptly end.
On Wednesday, January 21, I woke up to a blaring headline in The Washington Post: "Clinton Accused of Urging Aide to Lie." The article began:
"Independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr has expanded his investigation of President Clinton to examine whether Clinton and his close friend Vernon Jordan encouraged a 24-year-old former White House intern to lie to lawyers for Paula Jones about whether the intern had an affair with the president, sources close to the investigation said yesterday.
"A three-judge appeals court panel on Friday authorized Starr to examine allegations of suborning perjury, false statements and obstruction of justice involving the president, the sources said. A Justice Department official confirmed that Attorney General Janet Reno had forwarded Starr's request to the panel that oversees independent counsels after Starr had asked her for 'expeditious' consideration of his request."
The article identified Monica Lewinsky as the intern and Linda Tripp as the informant. It was the first time I recall reading those names.
The obvious was immediately apparent: Starr's stalled investigation had broken through to an entirely new plane that now threatened the president. This was not just another wrinkle in the tangled fabric of Whitewater.
It was about 6:45 a.m. when I bolted from my house for the West Wing. I arrived before almost anyone else. Fewer than about a dozen of us filed into Erskine Bowles's corner office for the regular early-morning meeting and sat around his long table. We all turned to the Post in our White House News Summary. Bowles's face was pale, his voice subdued. Just a week before, he had agreed reluctantly to serve for another year. He had wanted to return to North Carolina, where his wife and children spent most of their time. For him, negotiating the passage of the balanced budget the previous fall had been a crowning achievement. During the Whitewater investigation, he had been subpoenaed before the grand jury and had not liked it a bit. Now everything about his body language and tone conveyed that he wished he were anywhere but where he was. He said that the White House staff would focus on the work at hand and avoid distraction. At the senior staff meeting in the Roosevelt Room, he repeated his stricture to maintain focus and just do our work. But he was clearly upset.
Erskine worked hard and was respectful of everyone around him, encouraging, well organized-and wealthy, therefore independent. He was neither censorious nor particularly judgmental about people's private lives. He had become a regular golfing buddy of the president's and shared in humorous banter with him. As information began to pour out, we learned that he had played a tangential role in trying to get Monica Lewinsky a job. Perhaps the revelations about her and Clinton came as less of a surprise to him than to others. Nonetheless, the impact swept him off his feet. After a mid-morning meeting with lawyers and the political staff, he remarked, "I think I'm going to throw up." Later that day -- or was it the next day? -- I went to see him alone. I told him I would support him in any way I could. I knew that others had also gone to talk to him. He replied that he wouldn't have anything to do with managing the scandal and he didn't want to hear about it. I understood, without his mentioning it, that he expected to be subpoenaed. I was sympathetic to his reticence and even withdrawal, but I didn't have the same feelings. By the end of the week and through the weekend, Erskine took time off. He was coping with his emotions, as everyone was, and in his case he wanted to be able to get back to work on the President's legislative program. But his absence on those first few days created an instant vacuum at the center.
By the time the senior staff meeting finished, at about eight o'clock, the last semblance of regular order had departed. Pandemonium descended. The television morning shows were preaching apocalypse. On ABC's Good Morning America, Sam Donaldson held forth: "If Kenneth Starr can mount sufficient evidence that the President of the United States told this young lady to lie, that's a federal crime, that's suborning perjury. And, clearly, a serious impeachment investigation would begin on Capitol Hill." George Stephanopoulos adopted that scenario as his own: "If the allegations are true, it could lead to impeachment proceedings."
George had already talked that morning to Begala and Rahm Emanuel; they had all worked together in the Little Rock War Room during the 1992 campaign. The trio had gone through ups and downs in the first term, Begala leaving for a sojourn in Texas after the 1994 midterm defeat, Rahm going in and out of various posts, and George losing favor, then inching himself back, only to depart for television punditry after the reelection victory. Whenever a crisis had struck Clinton, Stephanopoulos's impulse was to turn doomsayer. In difficult situations, his pessimism invariably overcame him. He had once been a vote counter on the House floor for Dick Gephardt (in whose office he had worked side by side with Begala) and was, by his own admission, more a tactician than a strategist. During the New Hampshire primary, at a particularly low ebb, George had believed that Clinton would have to quit the race. And now, once again, pessimism gripped him. He believed the charges against Clinton and was doomsaying to friends and acquaintances on the phone. Since he was Clinton's best-known former aide, his uttering the word "impeachment" on television was treated as a news event in itself. Some on Clinton's political staff were furious at him as a betrayer for using what quickly became known as "the 'I' word." But the problem wasn't Stephanopoulos.
Tensions were already developing within Clinton's staff. The political aides thought the lawyers were withholding information. The lawyers, both those in the counsel's office and Clinton's outside attorneys, believed that information had to be guarded and dispensed according to the best interests of the president's legal situation. But nobody had much information to begin with. The political people tended to think the lawyers lacked political sense, while the lawyers tended to think the political staff lacked legal understanding. Each believed that the other side might create a catastrophe if given control and left to its own devices. But neither side really had a strategy. Out of the early meetings among all these people, a consensus emerged to issue a statement on behalf of the president denying the charges. Almost everyone in the White House was swamped with phone calls from the media, demanding responses, tidbits, hints, anything to feed the story that was the only story. Charles Ruff, the legal counsel, wrote a draft statement in which the president, through the press secretary, Michael McCurry, would say that he was "outraged by these allegations" and "never had a sexual relationship with this woman." Someone in the meeting suggested a word change: from "sexual" to "improper." McCurry, with Clinton's concurrence, released the statement. "Improper" became the other "I" word of the day.
Within the White House, there was no organizing focus, no strategy, no one calling meetings, and we had a growing sense of standing on a beach waiting for a tidal wave. Some felt near panic. Normally poised political people believed they faced potential personal ruin. They correctly thought that Starr's power was limitless and his motive to destroy the President relentless. They convinced themselves, even if they had no reason, that they, too, would become Starr's targets. Their fear was stark and it was seeping out to reporters.
The scandal plague that had gone through chronic and acute phases from the beginning of Clinton's administration was now extremely acute. But as sudden and all-encompassing as the crisis was, its elements were not unknown to us. For years there had been accusations, congressional hearings, and Starr's grand juries. There had been prosecutorial leaks and raging firestorms over Whitewater, with Hillary herself dragged past the klieg lights to testify. The entire scandal system was already in order. All the actors, from Starr to Gingrich, from the reporters to the talking heads on television, were on their well-rehearsed marks. The plague now arrived in full force and the whole political city was consumed by delirium.
Lewinsky was Starr's salvation. He had been flustered by the dead ends he kept encountering in his Whitewater investigation. He had wanted to escape and had tried to resign; he had been humiliated into going back into this thankless case with no leads. His pride was injured, the last of his predecessor Robert Fiske's judicious, skillful prosecutors were gone, and his office was being run by fiercely partisan Republicans who had embarked on a sexual fishing expedition before Lewinsky ever appeared on the witness list. Starr's invasion of the Jones case showed the culmination of his frustration. It was his only way out.
Mark Tuohey, the deputy counsel to Fiske and then to Starr during his first six months in his post, thought that Fiske, had he not been replaced, would have finished the Whitewater investigation and report by the spring or summer of 1996, and that he would have found no wrongdoing by the Clintons. He told me he was sure the report would have concluded the matter once and for all. Tuohey, who directed Starr's only successful prosecutions, became aware after he left the independent counsel's office for private practice that Hickman Ewing, the deputy in charge of the "Arkansas phase," was leaking grand-jury material, or what purported to be grand-jury material, to the press. This was, of course, most improper conduct, and Tuohey told me that his successor, John Bates, had reprimanded Ewing and demanded that he stop -- to no avail. Ewing, who had once considered seeking a job with the Rutherford Institute, the base for Jones's lawyers, kept up the leaks. Long before the Monica Lewinsky story, the Office of Independent Counsel had developed relationships with reporters who came to depend on its unacknowledged leaks.
Tuohey told me that Starr himself never believed the Clintons were innocent, though the Independent Counsel's closing argument against Jim McDougal in his trial had pointedly stated that the President was innocent. As for Ewing, he had a particular animus against Hillary Clinton, and he also believed that the deep secret of Whitewater was that she was covering up an illicit affair with Vincent Foster. Thus, sex charges against both Clintons seemed to be an obsession for the Office of Independent Counsel.
