Part 15 (1/2)

To disparage Jones, the Clinton people resorted to crude stereotypes, and unashamed cla.s.s warfare--pitting middle cla.s.s sensibilities that found it hard to imagine such an accusation could be true, against the underlying prejudice against the white poor, the sort of people who punch, betray, and lie about each other on ”trash TV” shows like those hosted by Jerry Springer. Ironically, the same stereotypes that Clinton's upbringing calls to mind.

Hillary's War Room skillfully portrayed Jones as a greed-stricken creation of the radical right. But Jones struggled on with a lonely campaign. When her lawyers urged her to settle for cash, she refused and took new legal counsel. She wanted justice. She got, at a minimum, headlines. The Jones scandal was a shot across the bow of complacent Democrats--if not, ultimately, one that altered the behavior of the president himself.

”He can't play JFK,” a major Democrat said. ”If he does, it would be a killer. All bets would be off.”*3 Hillary had a.s.siduously cultivated a picture of family normalcy in the White House. It Takes a Village spoke warmly of what it was like ”to live above the store.” Journalists were fed images of a president who, in a memorable 1993 portrait in U.S. News and World Report, ”often pads down to the Oval Office wearing jeans, sneakers, and an open-collared work s.h.i.+rt and sits at the big desk that John F.

Kennedy used, doing paperwork and making phone calls. Clinton loves the fact that next door, in the small study where George Bush ran the Persian Gulf War, Chelsea will sometimes do her homework, sometimes shouting a question about an algebra problem to Dad.*4 Time portrayed a family that spent hours gathered around the piano, or on the rug plang Pictionary, Scrabble, and Hungarian Rummy.*5 And they painted a homey portrait of the use of the room adjacent to the Oval Office wildly at variance to what the American public was soon to discover.

Hillary went to great lengths to let no one see the truth, that for her living above the store could sometimes be like living above a brothel. How did she reconcile it? She resorted to another favorite Clinton gambit. Bringing history's greats down to the Clintons's level.

”I remember when I read The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin,”

Hillary recounted in American Heritage in 1994, ”I discovered things about Franklin's personal life that at the age of fourteen I was shocked by. I remember going to my English teacher and saying, 'I just can't believe it.' I felt I had been disillusioned about Benjamin Franklin. And I'll never forget my teacher saying, 'But why should you be disillusioned? He was a great man; he wasn't a statue somewhere. Men have faults as well as virtues; the real challenge is to see people in their humanity and then admire them even more because of what they were able to accomplish.'”*6 Bill Clinton could thus be portrayed as another great man like Benjamin Franklin, who also had faults--because Bill Clinton and Ben Franklin were after all just human.

MONICA.

The story the world would know simply as ”Monica” broke at the worst possible time for Hillary. Safe in the White House for another four years, the president talked of delegating major responsibilities to his wife. Hillary herself went further, speaking of a ”formal” role in welfare policy.*7 But Hillary's bid once again to act as co-president of the United States was overtaken by a new scandal.

When Bill Clinton submitted to questioning from Paula Jones's lawyers in January 1998, he was asked about ”Jane Doe Number Six,” a zaftig twenty-four-year-old intern from Beverly Hills. He must have known the game was up when the questions turned specific. Did you give her a T-s.h.i.+rt? Leaves of Gra.s.s? Call her at home?

Jane Doe Number Six, of course, was Monica Lewinsky, a by-product of the Clinton White House's solicitous att.i.tude for donors--in this case, Lewinsky's family friend, Walter Kaye. With Monica, the commanders of spin were forced to move into the fog of battle without a good compa.s.s or a map. One line, sold around town by Sidney Blumenthal, portrayed the president as a victim, the ”I-was-stalked”

defense.

Why the White House would allow the commander-in-chief and leader of the free world to be victimized by a libidinous s.e.xual predator was never fully explained. The story was simply not credible. The really incredible thing about it, however, was the number of Clinton sycophants and journalistic supporters who not only bought but willingly peddled the story.

The other line could be called the Gladstone defense, after the nineteenth century prime minister who was famous for approaching street prost.i.tutes, and converting them from a life of sin by taking them upstairs and ”ministering” to them. In much the same way, the staff (and Hillary herself) trotted out this excuse, speaking of the president's interest in ministering to and counseling a troubled young woman.

”You poor son of a b.i.t.c.h,” Morris said to the president of the United States over the telephone in a conversation he recounted for Vanity Fair. ”I've just read what's going on.”

”Clinton's whole tone between the lines,” Morris remembered, ”was 'Oh G.o.d, have I f.u.c.ked up this time.'”*8 When all else failed, the Clintons went to straight denial and attacking their enemies. It had, after all, worked before. The line, ”I did not have s.e.xual relations with that woman,” the rehea.r.s.ed finger wag, likely even Hillary's sun-yellow made-for-television dress, had all been stage-managed by Harry Thomason.

Hillary's signal moment came early, when she appeared on the Today show to denounce her husband's detractors as agents of ”a vast right-wing conspiracy.” The word ”vast” was overdone, the kind of adjective that, in a previous era, had been used to describe Communist purveyors of fluoride in our drinking water. Otherwise, her Today show appearance was dead-on. She was the essence of a moderate and thoughtful woman, a middle-cla.s.s mom with a Midwestern tw.a.n.g and a gentle manner. For those anxious to see no further than what Hillary had to tell them, it was the most effective damage control appearance since Nixon's ”Checkers” speech.

But as the months of 1998 marched on, and the facts began to emerge on the front pages of the New York Times and the Was.h.i.+ngton Post, it became harder and harder to hide the truth. Worse, what had begun as a s.e.xual indiscretion was now a matter of possible perjury and the beginnings of an impeachment process.

The president's legal defense had to resort to absurd interpretations of conventional words like ”s.e.x” or ”is.”

By many accounts, Hillary was most dismayed by Monica's version as her supporters leaked it to the press that Bill had encouraged her fantasies of dumping Hillary and spending the rest of his life with Lewinsky. ”And then I said something about... us sort of being together,” she told Starr's investigators. ”I think I kind of said, 'Oh, I think we'd be a good team'.... And he... jokingly said, 'Well, what are we going to do when I'm seventy-five and I have to pee twentyfive times a day?'”

If Hillary was angry, hurt, and humiliated by her husband, she was positively seething with hatred at Starr for exploding the myth of the happy family that lived above the store. It was Starr, not Bill, she blamed for splas.h.i.+ng the revelation that her husband had admitted to Lewinsky that he had had ”hundreds of affairs” earlier in his marriage.

Proven a liar by the presence of his own DNA on Monica's dress, Bill Clinton finally went on national television on August 17 to lance the boil and cut his losses. His brief appearance was a devastating failure, an angry self-pitying whine; an effort at one time to paint himself as a contrite victim, but also to attack his enemies. I was in the green room waiting to appear on Larry King Live while watching the speech. It was painful to watch. Even James Carville looked unusually reserved. It was, as America saw it, a thin-skinned attack on Starr disguised as a national apology.

According to White House spin, it wasn't until just before that speech that a reluctant president, his head bowed, went to his wife and told her the truth. The same woman who had not missed a beat to launch a counterattack on the ”vast right-wing conspiracy” was now portrayed as a national victim.

The Clintons then left for a vacation at Martha's Vineyard, one in which Hillary allowed the press corps to see her batting away Bill's hand. Another well-rehea.r.s.ed gesture, probably as carefully orchestrated as the ”I-did-not-have-s.e.x” finger wag. The new spin from press secretary Mike McCurry was a kind of amused, boy-he's-in-for-the-spanking-of-his-life story, letting Hillary stand as a surrogate for America's anger. Otherwise, she was to be admired for standing by her man.

”Rather than jump s.h.i.+p or turn on her husband, she turned to him with her daughter and offered love and support when he needed it the most and perhaps deserved it the least,” the Reverend Jesse Jackson said after counseling (rehearsing with) the first family. ”Many women would have been nursing their wounds or in private solitude. She was in the room helping to chart the plan for his testimony.”*9 She also spearheaded strategy sessions on the November congressional elections, and shrewdly allowed aides to see her bark instructions at a meek Bill Clinton.*10 The staff Hillary had a.s.sembled to defend a president who had obviously lied to the American people were unshakable. Only George Stephanopoulos, who was trying to recreate himself as an ABC journalist, denounced the president's abuse of trust. Otherwise, no Clintonites resigned or seriously criticized the president. Only Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala dared to express her disappointment in a meeting in which the president called ostensibly to apologize to his cabinet. She was rudely slapped down by an aggrieved Clinton, who challenged her to answer whether she preferred a president like Richard Nixon with his abuses of power, or a John F. Kennedy, who slept around? Of course, with Bill Clinton she got both. But like a good Clinton cabinet member, she shut up.

By all the political rules of the past, the War Room-style counteroffensive should have been a disaster. But Hillary and Bill have a way of making the world play by their rules. Many of the advisors to the president argued against the attack on Starr in the national apologia speech.

But the president's astute advisors were ultimately proven to be wrong. A direct frontal attack was, perhaps, Clinton's only hope of staving off a forced resignation or removal from office. Here a good offense was not only a good defense, it was essentially the only defense. As she had done before to try to rescue her health care agenda, Hillary went to the Hill. She addressed House Democrats, whipping up a fury against Starr and the House impeachment managers.

She a.s.sured them she was a ”wife who loves and supports her husband,”

and was standing firm to keep the vast right-wing conspiracy from ”hounding him out of office.” She told them that the real fight was not over the impeachment issue, but over whether the Republicans would be allowed to break the back of the Democratic Party.

Hillary even attributed the attacks on her husband to ”prejudice against our state.”

”They wouldn't do this if we were from some other state,” she said, ignoring the fact that Kenneth Starr had lived near the Arkansas border and attended two years of college at Harding University at Searcy, Arkansas.*11 And ignoring also the fact that no one had thought to link perjury, obstruction of justice, witness tampering, and intimidation to the state of Arkansas. But Hillary knew that her only salvation was attack, attack, attack. It mattered less that there was any substance to the attack.

There were the predictable confessions, the prayer breakfast, all the tearful Jimmy Swaggart moments. Hillary actually went public with praise for her husband for his courage and for his willingness to do the right thing. Clinton himself characteristically slipped into self-pity. At one gathering in late August, he recounted a conversation with Nelson Mandela: ”You can't make me believe you didn't hate those people,” Clinton told the South African leader.

”And then [Mandela] said, 'They could take everything away from me--everything--but my mind and my heart.” The implication, of course, was that both men had been unfairly persecuted, as though being imprisoned for decades on Robben Island was the moral equivalent of committing perjury under oath and masturbating in the Oval Office in front of a young intern.*12 If Bill was helpless, Hillary's War Room was gaining ground. The congressional Republicans were effectively portrayed as the ideological descendants of Thaddeus Stevens and the Radical Republicans who had railroaded the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. Senator Joseph Lieberman, a respected centrist Democrat, appeared to turn the tide for impeachment when he lashed out against the president. The appearance was deceiving, however, for Lieberman's attack was based only on s.e.x. It was intended and had the same effect as Hillary's public vacation reprimand to her husband--to inflict some public pain on Bill Clinton and to relieve some of the mounting pressure for him to resign. This was an enormous favor to the president in the wrappings of a rebuke. The Democrats succeeded in defining the issue as wholly about s.e.x, as though perjury under oath were of no consequence.

Meanwhile, the Republicans not only misread the tea leaves, they ignored them all together. House Speaker Newt Gingrich had been warned in late summer by GOP pollsters that the public att.i.tude was turning against impeachment. The American people were disgusted with President Clinton's behavior. Their anger toward Clinton, however, was modified by a horror that the most powerful man in the country (and therefore anyone) could be dragged into a courtroom and subjected to such extensive questioning over the most embarra.s.sing aspects of one's life. They rebelled against the explicitness of the Starr report, and blamed Republicans for dragging the whole country through the mud.

What could the Republicans have done?

They needed to reinforce the fact that Bill Clinton was a victim not just of his own actions but also of his and his wife's Orwellian approach to the law. It was Clinton, after hard lobbying by Hillary, who had signed the Violence Against Women Act and supported other legislation that had allowed s.e.xual hara.s.sment suits to open up a man's whole life to microscopic examination in civil suits. They could have reminded the American people that the independent counsel's office, which the public increasingly agreed with James Carville was out of control, was advanced by the very Watergate lawyers who protected Clinton and was reauthorized by the president himself, with one hundred Republican House members voting against it.

They could have forcefully reminded the public that the whole process had been started by Attorney General Janet Reno.

In short, the Republicans could have portrayed the president as a man pursued by Frankenstein monsters of his own creation. Instead, they proceeded methodically, overriding the Democrats in bitter, contentious proceedings that played right into the ”Radical Republicans” stereotype.

Even after all of this, the presidency hung by a thread. There was a brief period in which the senior leaders of the Democratic Party.

seemed to weigh whether it would be better to jettison Clinton and go with an inc.u.mbent Gore. All it would take for that to happen was for the right Senate Democrat to stand up and call on him to resign.

John Glenn could have done it. Joseph Lieberman could have done it.

Patrick Moynihan could have done it. Dianne Feinstein seemed at times to come the closest, unafraid to express her outrage that the president had lied to her, point blank. The Senate Democrats could have played the honorable role that Republicans Howard Baker and Watergate counsel Fred Thompson played during Watergate, going where the facts led them.

But party discipline--and Clinton's brazen defense--reigned over conscience. The Clintons maneuvered senators of stature and conscience into defending him as a matter of const.i.tutional propriety. The national feminist organizations, so certain that Clarence Thomas had been a s.e.xual hara.s.ser, were by now transformed into a kind of Clinton pep squad. At worst, they would issue Delphic p.r.o.nouncements about the slight but ultimately unimportant degree of Clinton's culpability.

Below the surface, Hillary unleashed the secret police. The director of White House records later admitted in a deposition that he ordered a search for ”anything and everything we might have in our files on Linda Tripp,” the former White House and Pentagon employee whose taped conversations with Monica Lewinsky helped prove that Clinton was lying. Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon likely broke the law by divulging an embarra.s.sing juvenile arrest from Linda Tripp's personal security file.

Meanwhile, the president refused to distance himself from the very public efforts of p.o.r.nographer Larry Flynt, who offered a small fortune for s.e.x dirt on members of Congress, managing to smear House Judiciary Chairman Henry Hyde for a decades-old affair. The president's attorney, even hired Terry Lezner and his private detective firm, IGI, with the implied threat that if the president was going to go down because of s.e.xual improprieties, he was going to take others with him. As it turned out, of course, others would go down, like the new House Speaker Bob Livingston, who sought to do the n.o.ble thing by resigning. But President Clinton would never have followed that course. If the worst thing that could happen to Clinton was also the worst thing that could happen to America, it simply was not going to happen. By slinging dirt and wrapping himself in a ”zone of privacy” against Starr and the apparent Puritans of the radical right, Clinton no doubt felt he could beat the rap.

The Clintons had a long history of using private detectives to sniff out vulnerabilities of enemies and keep track of each other's private lives. In 1992 Betsey Wright hired Jack Palladino, San Francisco detective and student of Hal Lipset, who had served as a private investigator in many Black Panther cases. Palladino's job was to ransack the lives of women who could have turned on Clinton during the campaign.

This time round, the focus seemed to be on getting the bimbos to shut up. Kathleen Willey, who would later claim Bill Clinton had groped her, had her tires slashed. In another incident, a stranger jogged next to her in a park and inquired about the health of her cat, calling it by name.

Other inducements were used. Elizabeth Ward Gracen, a former Miss America, got the carrot--offers of acting roles dangled in front of her by FOB Mickey Kantor--and the stick, when someone ransacked her room.

While the Clinton machine worked--allowing the Clintons to claim victory in the congressional elections and to survive the Congress's impeachment proceedings--it had forced the Clinton machine to run to the last dregs of support. And the sweet savor of victory was short-lived. The next Jane Doe would rock the administration, permanently mar the president's image and throw the liberal establishment into crisis.