The Clinton wars

On January 21, Hillary went to speak at Goucher College in Baltimore at the invitation of an old friend, Taylor Branch, the biographer of Martin Luther King, Jr. She was chipper in her remarks to reporters who asked her if she believed her husband: "Absolutely."

Upon her return to the White House that afternoon, she called me. She explained that this story involved Clinton's concern for a person with personal problems, a common occurrence since she had known him. His empathy, she went on, came from his relationship with his mother, an open, compassionate woman, and from Clinton's own difficult experiences growing up. I knew, of course, what she was referring to: being fatherless and poor, the often terrifying battles with his alcoholic, abusive stepfather. She had always known her husband to befriend people in trouble, and as she saw it, this was another example. I knew myself of people Clinton had gotten close to and helped, privately and without publicity. Anyone who knew him would encounter this unusual ability of his to connect. In explaining what had happened, she relied upon her understanding of her husband. I assumed that she had spoken with him and that what she was saying reflected their conversation.

For her, the stakes were greater than for anyone. They encompassed not only everything she had worked on politically for a lifetime, but her marriage. She had to defend both. Over the years, I had had many separate conversations with the Clintons, and especially with Hillary, during which they spontaneously talked about each other. They were, of course, a team. They talked to each other several times a day, and each thought the other was the smartest person he or she knew. They were always warm about and toward each other and, in each other's presence, touching. They were also extremely caring about their daughter, Chelsea. I saw the three of them together fairly frequently. They seemed to me to be a close family.

I didn't presume to have superior insight into the deep, dark secrets of other people's marriages. I had had friends who I thought were happy but suddenly divorced. And I had married friends whose marriages, which appeared less than ideal, endured everything. I had many friends in second and third marriages. I had friends who had committed adultery and loved their wives. I had friends who had never strayed, to my knowledge, and complained constantly about their spouses. A marriage belongs only to those in it. As a friend, I didn't believe it was an act of friendship to second-guess a marriage from the outside. Had Clinton had an affair with an intern? I just didn't know. I had no reason to doubt Hillary's sincerity in her version of events, and whatever my doubts, I wanted to believe her -- to believe along with her.

Above all, though, she and I had no doubt we were confronting a supremely political crisis. Starr's investigation was a daring political venture that used dubious accusations of criminality as a justification. The notion that President Clinton and Vernon Jordan had criminally conspired struck me as ridiculous. Whether Starr would succeed in making this charge stick would depend on the politics. Could he foster enough hysteria and momentum? Neither of us was panicked. This was politics, perhaps a greater crisis than ever, but politics nonetheless. She said that the president had remarked to her, "Well, we'll just have to win."

I related to Hillary a conversation that I had that very day with conservative muckraker David Brock, who was becoming disillusioned with the anti-Clinton crusade. Brock told me about the secret connivance between Starr's office and a cabal of conservatives who were controlling the Paula Jones case from behind the scenes and about how they were manipulating the media coverage. His revelations filled in the details of what was driving this new "acute" scandal phase. Having knowledge restored a sense of normality, even amid the storm. We could see the lines of influence underlying the scandal, the cause and effect, intent and action -- and they were political and familiar. Thus, on the first day, both Hillary and I knew about what she would soon call the vast right-wing conspiracy.

Hillary laughed and told me that as a matter of fact, the Daddy Warbucks of the conspiracy, Richard Mellon Scaife, was coming to dinner that night at the White House. Of all the gin joints in the world, why was he showing up at this one? It turned out to be a long-scheduled dinner to honor the donors to the White House Preservation Society. Those who had contributed since the 1980s would be present, including, for a rare excursion, the reclusive Scaife. But who should sit next to him? Hillary thought maybe I should, or maybe my wife, Jackie. For the rest of the afternoon, while the President was giving his three dreaded interviews, Hillary and I were back and forth a couple of times on the phone joking about Scaife and the seating arrangements.

At about six that evening, Betty Currie, the president's private secretary, called me in my office and asked me to come up to the Oval Office. I found the president alone, standing, his gaze distracted. He started pacing slowly behind his desk and then in front of it. He rearranged knickknacks, touching some and slightly moving others. He wanted to explain to me about Monica Lewinsky. He told me he had been trying to help her. I said I had spoken to Hillary and that she had told me the same thing. Before he could elaborate, I said that I understood his feeling of wanting to counsel a troubled person. I knew he was compassionate. I knew he had helped many people. Then, I said: The problem with troubled people is just that, that they're troubled. These troubled people can get you into incredible messes, and I know you don't want to, but you have to cut yourself off from them. He replied: It's very difficult for me not to want to help. That's how I am. I want to help people. I cut in: You can't do that at this point, whatever you've done in the past. The reason is that you have to be self-protective. You can't get near anybody who is remotely troubled. You don't know how crazy people may be. You are the president.

He shifted the discussion. He told me that he had spoken that day to political consultant Dick Morris. I wasn't surprised. I knew he maintained some contact with Morris. Most of the people on Clinton's staff despised Morris, and I was one of the few who didn't. I had had no history of conflict with him; I thought his political intelligence deserved a hearing, which should not be confused with accepting his advice. And Clinton knew I thought that. He told me that Morris had said to him that if Nixon, at the beginning of Watergate, had delivered a speech on national television explaining everything he had done wrong, making it all public, he would have survived. I thought this was one of Dick's wacky ideas, a complete misreading of history and a false analogy. The Plumbers who broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters had committed crimes at Nixon's behest and were being paid from a secret fund he had authorized. I asked Clinton: What have you done wrong? Nothing, he replied. I haven't done anything wrong. Then, I said, that's one of the stupidest ideas I've heard. Why would you do that if you have done nothing wrong?

He launched into an account of an incident involving Lewinsky. He said that she made a sexual demand on him and he rebuffed her. He said: I've gone down that road before, I've caused pain for a lot of people and I'm not going to do that again. He said she responded by threatening him. She said she would tell others they had had an affair. She said that her name among her peers was "the Stalker," that she hated being called that. If Clinton had sex with her and she could say she had had an affair, she wouldn't be known as the Stalker anymore.

I repeated to Clinton that he had to avoid troubled people. You need to find some sure footing here, I said, some solid ground, some traction.

I feel like a character in a novel, Clinton said. I feel like somebody who is surrounded by an oppressive force that is creating a lie about me and I can't get the truth out. I feel like the character in "Darkness at Noon."

I knew the novel well. "Darkness at Noon" is a fictional portrait by Arthur Koestler of one of the original Bolsheviks facing a purge trial and execution for political crimes. I did not respond to this literary reference. Instead, I asked a series of questions about reports I had read or heard about Lewinsky. Were you alone with her? I asked. I knew that the Oval Office had outside peepholes at its doors. I had looked in through them myself many times. The president was surrounded by a host of watchers, by aides, secretaries, valets, waiters, Secret Service agents. If he were ever alone, he would have to arrange it carefully. I was within eyesight or earshot of someone, he said.

You know, I said, there are press reports that you made phone calls to Monica Lewinsky and that you left voice-mail messages on her machine. Did you make phone calls to her? He said he recalled calling to tell her that Betty Currie's brother had died in a car accident. He explained that Monica had been friendly with Betty, that Betty had been kind to her.

I repeated myself again. You need to find some solid ground here, I said. You need to find some traction. I mentioned that I had heard a report that Vernon Jordan had scheduled a press conference the next day. Maybe, I said, that will provide some traction. Clinton didn't say anything. Our extraordinary meeting ended.

I had seen him upset before, wandering around the Omni Center in Atlanta at the Democratic National Convention in 1988 after he had delivered a disastrous nominating speech for Michael Dukakis. But I had never seen him this off-balance before. I was used to him in the Oval Office as a master of policies, facts, and ideas, the judge of arguments, always in control. Now he described himself as being at the mercy of his enemies, uncertain about what to say or do.

In that Oval Office encounter I saw a man who was beside himself. He told me a story that was basically the story I had heard earlier that day from his wife. Part of me wanted to believe him as a friend. Part of me wondered if his story could be true. That was why I repeatedly asked him probing questions. I wanted an explanation. Part of me had nagging doubts. I was a friend separately and together of the president and the first lady, though closer to her. And I was also the president's aide. Both of them wanted me to believe the story as he told it, because he wanted her to believe it and she wanted to believe him. In any case, I felt awkward even being in the middle. I felt it should be between the two of them. But this was a personal crisis that affected my job in the White House and how I would do my work in the future. Even if he was lying about Lewinsky, I could understand. He wouldn't have been the first man to lie to me about sex. More than one of my friends (including wellknown journalists) had done so and then asked for my help afterward, and I was happy to give it, and the friendships lasted. These are the terms of a mature friendship, what friends expect from friends, freely given. I did not believe that President Clinton and Vernon Jordan had obstructed justice or suborned perjury. Nor, in my wildest dreams, did I imagine that my listening to his telling me what he did was, as the House Managers later claimed, part of an obstruction of justice. That was absurd.

I did not mention this conversation to anyone except my wife. I did not tell other people on the staff. Not until later did I learn that this was the most detailed story the president had given to anyone, including his lawyers. To several other aides that day he had denied having an affair with Lewinsky, I learned later, in uncomplicated, brief denials. It was only then that I realized he probably had told this elaborate story only to me because of my relationship with Hillary. He knew we would share information and develop our politics together. There was no reason for him to think I would ever be subpoenaed. After all, I had never heard of Lewinsky until that very day. I never knew her, spoke with her, or met her. To my knowledge, I was never even in the same room with her. But I was close to Hillary and there was nothing more important to him at that moment than protecting his marriage.

Much much later, after the release of the Starr Report, I learned that almost everything he had told me was true. Almost. He had spoken with Morris, who had run a poll. (When I saw the poll reproduced in the Starr Report it struck me as mostly worthless as a political document, because all the key questions had the word "crimes" attached to them, ensuring negative responses. The statistics indicating the public's inclination to forgive incidents that were just sex, Morris misinterpreted.) Clinton had called Monica about Betty's brother's death -- one of several calls. Lewinsky had, in fact, demanded that he engage in sexual intercourse with her, which he refused. It was when he broke off with her, according to the Starr Report, that she made her demand for intercourse and her threat to expose him.

Had he done anything "wrong" -- the word I used with him? He had committed no crimes; he was innocent of Starr's accusations. But he had acted recklessly, and in doing so he had given ammunition to his enemies and endangered everything he believed in. Later, I told him and Hillary that that was what I thought he had done wrong. Infidelity was between them, but this was the error that pulled the rest of us in.

Clinton was a man who came from nowhere; overcame all obstacles by virtue of his own intelligence, skill, and attractiveness; and then, having achieved his goal, gave in to his weakness. It was a mundane weakness, a most ordinary weakness. He did not give in to it for money, power, status, or fame. He did not do it out of mean-spiritedness, resentment, or cruelty. What he did was not a crime. It was part of the same personality that got him to the White House, with his need for affirmation, attention, and affection. He was a character with large appetites and desires, and a surplus of human nature, not unlike Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, the good-natured, life-loving figure who falls into follies of his own making as he tries to fend off the vicious connivances of others. The tragic aspect, the inexorable drama, was that this least unconscious president knew that what he had done was stupid. He understood that he had given in to his weakness. He had known that it was a mistake, but he made it anyway. It hurt his wife, Lewinsky, and himself. He knew, moreover, that this was not like the Kennedy era, when private lives had been kept private. He knew hateful pursuers were seeking to hurt him, and he knew he had the Jones case before him. Yet with this self-centered act he set himself up. And he knew it. Stunned by the situation, he did what most husbands would do: he tried to protect his wife, his daughter, and his own privacy. He acted as a man, not as a president. But the collision of roles could not be avoided.

Hillary, in her conversation with me, was not wrong in her assessment. She knew Bill Clinton, loved him, and worried about him -- more than anyone. Understandably, she didn't want to believe that his empathy had extended into an affair. Whatever the truth of that situation, it was entirely her business -- and no one else's. No matter what, she would defend her marriage, her privacy, her husband, and his presidency.

Even though Clinton had momentarily lost his equilibrium, he was not deprived of his political sense. His reference to "Darkness at Noon" indicated that he was anticipating that a certain kind of spectacle was about to take place. The impeachment trial, when it came, was in one respect the very opposite of a Stalinist purge trial, where countless people were called to account for public crimes they had not committed; it was a special inquisition only for Clinton -- and everyone around him. And he knew why: it was because he had won the presidency. Whatever the animosities against him, his ultimate offense was that he was in the White House. That was the truly unforgivable crime. The additional crime was that he had survived previous would-be scandals.

In the book, at noon the accused is forced into a dark inquisition chamber and can give no right answer. His position is always that of a guilty party. The fact of being named is a certificate of condemnation. Just raising the question of innocence means it is a moot question. Rubashov is indeed guilty -- of seditious thought -- and he confesses, agreeing with his prosecutors that, given his loss of faith in the revolution, he should have rebelled against Number One. If that text was not apposite for President Clinton, then another notable novel about totalitarianism, George Orwell's "1984," perhaps was. In it, Winston commits the "thoughtcrime" of having an affair with Julia, which is a crime against the state, which trains young people through compulsory membership in the Junior Anti-Sex League. The Ministry of Love tortures him into betraying Julia and loving Big Brother. He is reduced to terrified obedience.

But, then, the Starr inquiry was not operating in a totalitarian state. Clinton knew how it was. He understood the Republicans' ruthlessness and unscrupulousness. He had been through years of Whitewater, years of the Independent Counsel's grand jury, years of endless congressional hearings. Now everything came down to a sheer political struggle. Clinton may not have known where to find "traction" on the first day, but he knew the score: "We'll just have to win."

That night, the White House Preservation Society dinner was a glittery event. The president shook the hand of Richard Mellon Scaife, who waited in line for the honor, and they posed together for the official White House photographer. At dinner I was seated not next to Scaife, but next to the wife of the chief executive officer of the Philip Morris tobacco company, Mrs. Bible. Mrs. Scaife was at our table and seemed delighted to be present, applauding when the president delivered gracious remarks. After dinner, Clinton and the first lady mingled with the guests as though they didn't have a care in the world.

Excerpted from "The Clinton Wars," by Sidney Blumenthal, to be published on May 20 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux LLC. Copyright 2003 by Sidney Blumenthal. All rights reserved.

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