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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
On February 8, Henry Hyde tried to reopen the Senate trial on the basis of Hitchens' affidavit. He sent a letter to Republican majority leader Trent Lott and Democratic minority leader Tom Daschle, pleading to "admit new evidence and to authorize and issue subpoenas" for Hitchens, his wife, and Scott Armstrong. Hyde described Hitchens as having "credible evidence" that "the president may have engaged in an intimidation campaign against potential adverse witnesses in a civil rights action brought against him and in a criminal investigation of his misconduct." This gambit was the very, very last one.
Lindsey Graham, on CNBC that day, remarked on Hitchens' affidavit: "I think this scenario will bring us votes we didn't have, that it went from being about concealing an affair, to turning on people and obstructing justice."
"I will never again laugh at a Southern accent or confuse it with right-wing drivel," Hitchens told the Washington Times about Graham and Hutchinson.
McDaniel, my lawyer, prepared a ten-page brief he had written on his own initiative, categorically refuting every allegation and falsehood made as a result of Hitchens' affidavit. In it, he noted that the Nexis database contained 439 stories about Lewinsky as stalker published between the day the scandal broke and the day of my lunch with Hitchens. The White House exhibits, the exculpatory articles that the House Managers had excluded in their batch of articles on the subject, were appended. McDaniel urged me to let him send the document to Lott and Daschle and to release it to the press. I consulted with White House counsel Chuck Ruff, but in the end this was my decision, and I decided that no matter how much I wanted to defend myself, the best decision was not to respond to Hitchens.
Within the Senate, Lott attempted to gain unanimous consent to subpoena Hitchens and the others, but Daschle, under the rules of the trial, vetoed. There would be no more witnesses. Still, Republicans demanded a Justice Department investigation to determine if I had committed perjury, and White House counsel David Kendall explained to me that any member of the House could refer it to the Justice Department, which would then be obligated to investigate. Of course, he said, they would conclude not to prosecute, but that could take months. Even though the trial would be over, my ordeal would be on-going. There were still several days to go before the Senate vote. White House chief of staff John Podesta asked me if I was holding up, and I said I was steady. Within the White House, my colleagues went out of their way to be supportive through small gestures.
I deliberately kept silent about Hitchens, and as the story faded his tone toward me changed from that of concerned friend to hostile foe, attracting new attention. When the Washington Post reported in January 2001 that I would be writing this book, he was quoted: "As everyone now knows -- too late -- the Clinton presidency was a racket and a shakedown operation. I don't begrudge Sidney his small share of it. It's the price of his soul." In March 2002, the Post quoted him again, apropos of nothing: "It's right that we should be enemies." The paper noted, "Blumenthal declined to comment."
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From the moment I learned about Hitchens' affidavit, I wanted to know what really had happened and why he had done what he had. Initially I hoped that his stumbling explanations somehow meant that he had regrets. I wanted to attribute his overheated, overwrought self-justifications to an inner recognition of what he had done. However, as I was trying to clarify the events while writing this book, a very different sequence emerged. Unraveling Hitchens' actions required finding those with whom he had collaborated, and the tale of the innocent truth-seeker faded in these new shafts of light.
A year after the trial, a Republican staff member on the House Judiciary Committee told me that far from being a reluctant witness, Hitchens had "eagerly volunteered," that initially his wife was upset and the Republicans feared she would "squelch it." Knowing this led me to ask James Rogan about Hitchens. "Hitchens may well have called Lindsey [Graham], who was a habitui of the talk shows back then," Rogan said. "That may also be why Lindsey wanted in on the questioning with you."
This suggestion -- that Hitchens had been in touch with Congressman Graham before the Senate trial -- prompted me to contact an old conservative source of mine whom I had known when I was a reporter on the Washington Post. I recalled that during the impeachment Jude Wanniski had been a cheerleader for Lindsey Graham.
Wanniski had been an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal in the late 1970s, who helped promote supply-side economics. (He gave the "Laffer Curve" its name -- the theory President Reagan adopted from the work of his then adviser, Art Laffer, that tax cuts would increase government revenues.) The voluble, opinionated Wanniski attached himself to politicians and pundits whom he badgered into becoming mouthpieces for his pet ideas. For many years, he was close to Jack Kemp. As a private financial analyst, Wanniski published a newsletter in which he pushed his causes. He called Black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan "one of the nicest men I've ever met," crusaded against military action against Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, and called for Clinton's impeachment because the United States had bombed Iraq. Wanniski also promoted Matt Drudge as his "Man of the Year." During the impeachment and trial, Wanniski wrote memo after memo addressed to Lindsey Graham and devoted to "The Importance of Sidney Blumenthal," which he posted on his Web site and circulated to political acquaintances; they eventually found their way to me. Wanniski, in fact, had incessantly left me phone messages, which I thought prudent not to return.
Now I contacted Wanniski on the off chance that he might know something. He told me he had telephoned Lindsey Graham right after Graham had questioned Ruff about the "stalker" story on December 9, and from then on had been in regular touch with him. Having become a fan of Hitchens' anti-Clinton screeds, Wanniski also conversed with him fairly often "in this period," he said. His obsession was the "stalker" story -- "I was drawing Graham's statements to everyone's attention" -- which he said he raised with Hitchens.
This prompted Hitchens to tell Wanniski a version of the lunch with me, and Wanniski said he instantly called Graham. "I told him about Hitchens' story as soon as I heard it," Wanniski e-mailed me. I asked Wanniski, "When did Hitchens tell you his story? Was it before the Senate trial?" "Yes," he replied. "Did Hitchens know of your role with Graham and that you had told Graham his story?" "Yes." Wanniski explained, "Hitchens told me you had mentioned the 'stalker' story at that meal with his wife, not that you were complicit in its fiction, but that if you were bringing it up with him, you were surely bringing it up with others, which is what the Pres. would have expected from you, as a defender. That really sums up what was in my mind."
I asked Rogan how Hitchens had come to the House Managers. Had they stumbled across his story through the grapevine or an obscure newspaper clipping, as he had claimed? Rogan said he would ask David Schippers, the House Judiciary Committtee's counsel, for me. Schippers, through Rogan, replied, "Hitchens called us and said what you testified to was untrue. He [Schippers] says that's how the Hitchens thing popped up." Hitchens called them.
I discovered another peculiar incident, related to me by Steve Wasserman, which shed light on Armstrong's affidavit. Wasserman told me that Carol Blue had telephoned him the very day she filed her own affidavit, sounding panicked and pleading that she and Christopher needed him to help them. Could Steve corroborate her memory of a conversation she had with him, telling him about Blumenthal's "stalker" story at the time? Wasserman remembered no such conversation, then or later. She asked again. Again he insisted that he recollected no such thing.
For reasons unknown to me, Hitchens, having already imagined I was doing the bidding of an evil manipulator, was posing as the saint for whom nothing, not even friendship, would stand in the way of virtuous revelation. It was a familiar story. Both Linda Tripp and Christopher Hitchens had seen fit to relate patently private conversations to prosecutors, knowing the material might be used in criminal proceedings. But unlike Linda Tripp, who had betrayed actual confidences, Hitchens had purveyed what he claimed were confidences and were not.
Lifestyle and "contrarian" politics explained little about Hitchens' motives. My mistake had been to think that he was a harmless entertainer. The surprise was that he was capable of doing harm without conscience or regret. That remains the mystery.
