All Too Human: A Political Education (37 page)

The press was still queasy about sex stories, however — especially with Hillary defending her husband surrounded by mistletoe and holly. But when the
Washington Times
reported that in the hours following Vince Foster's suicide a Whitewater file had been removed from Foster's office and given to the Clintons' private attorney instead of the investigators, the repressed energy stirred up by the trooper story was sublimated straight into the “Whitewater cover-up.” Republicans jumped on the revelation and began to agitate for an independent investigation, and the editorial pages escalated calls for public release of the potentially incriminating files. Backpedaling, we agreed on December 23 to hand over what we had to the Justice Department but not the press, which only raised more suspicions. The drumbeat for full disclosure continued through Christmas.

On the first Sunday of the new year, I appeared on
This Week with David Brinkley
, and the first question Sam Donaldson asked me was, Would the White House oppose an independent counsel to look into the Whitewater Land Development Corporation affair?

Mr. Stephanopoulos: “This is being investigated by the Justice Department. The president has turned over all the documents to the Justice Department. It was exhaustively looked into during last year's campaign. The president was part of a real estate deal many years ago where he lost a lot of money. Those are the facts. No laws were broken. The Justice Department investigation will show that, but there's no need at this time for an independent counsel.”

Four follow-up questions later, George Will finally changed the subject, but by the next day both Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole had publicly called for the appointment of a special prosecutor, and the White House press corps was pressing Clinton for his response. A mistake I had made on
Brinkley
made matters worse. When I said that we had turned over the Whitewater documents to the Justice Department, I thought I was telling the truth. I assumed it was true because we had previously pledged to turn over the files between Christmas and New Year's. But as Felix Unger used to say on
The Odd Couple
, “When you assume, you make an ass of you and me.” We hadn't delivered the files yet, because the lawyers were still cataloging them. Dee Dee had to spend the morning cleaning up my mess. Harold Ickes, who had just joined the White House staff to work on health care, was tasked instead with managing damage control on Whitewater.

All day Tuesday, we held a rolling Whitewater meeting in Mack's office. Although I had delivered the party line against a special prosecutor on
Brinkley
, inside I was arguing that we had to request a special counsel before it was forced on us. Ever since Watergate, whenever a president or other high-level government official was accused of wrongdoing, an outside counsel had been appointed. (In January 1994, the independent counsel law had expired. So we were arguing for the attorney general to use her authority to appoint a special counsel as was done under President Carter when questions were raised about his peanut warehouse business.) After the first couple of hours, we reached consensus; only Nussbaum was holding out. Joel Klein, his deputy, was dispatched to broach the matter with Hillary, but she shut him down. Two hours later, Harold and Mack tried again. The answer was still no.

When they returned with the news, about a dozen of us were scattered around Mack's office. Some sat at the conference table in the far corner, some by the fireplace; I was folded over the wing-back chair by Mack's desk, facing the door, griping openly about the magnitude of our mistake. Then she walked in. The whole room dropped dead silent.

“Well,” said Hillary crisply, taking a seat on the couch by the door. “I think this is a meeting I ought to be at.”

Because I had been talking, I felt as if everyone was looking at me. The old Life cereal commercial passed through my head: Two older boys don't like the looks of their new breakfast, so they pawn it off on their little brother — “Let Mikey try it. He'll try anything.” I prided myself on not being afraid to make a tough argument to the principals, and I'd look like a wimp now if I didn't continue.

“Well, I might as well go on with what I was saying,” I said. Sitting up straight and staring right at Hillary, I made my case: “Assuming we did nothing wrong, the best thing is to have a special counsel say so. There's an air of inevitability to this. If we don't ask for one from the attorney general, we're going to get an independent prosecutor. Congress will keep the drumbeat going; they'll pass the Independent Counsel Act, and the Appeals Court will appoint one. I know we didn't do anything wrong, but it looks like we did because we're not being forthcoming. More important than anything else, this is going to kill health care if we don't get it under control. This debate will sap us for the next thirty, sixty, ninety days — as long as we keep up the fight. If you want us to fight, Hillary, we will. We can beat this back. But it will take all our time, all our staff resources, and, most important, all our political capital, which we need every bit of to pass health care.”

I thought the final argument was the coup de grâce — the killer point that she couldn't counter. Instead it struck at her deepest fear — that after all of her hard work, after all her sacrifice, after all the indignities of the campaign and the frustrations of the first year, the project that would make it all worthwhile would be crippled by scandal. Cornered, she struck back: “What do you mean, the Congress won't stop? You told me that if we gave everything to the Justice Department that would
end
it. It
didn't
end it. Now the Congress wants them? If we were as tough as the Republicans, we'd band together and beat them back.”

I tried to stay calm, answering point by point.

“The Democrats are still holding firm.” (Republican senators Alfonse D'Amato and Bob Dole had demanded Whitewater hearings, but Democrat Banking Committee chairman Don Riegle was holding them off.) “But I can't promise that they'll be with us in a month. It's beyond the Congress now: It's in the editorial pages; it's everywhere. We don't get the benefit of the doubt because we're not being forthcoming, and we
are
being defensive.”

Whatever I said was exactly wrong. Tears stung the corners of her eyes, and I imagined Hillary's fear-induced fury — at the Republicans for trying to destroy health care by destroying her, at the press for its small-minded, obsessive scrupulousness when issues affecting real people were at stake, at her husband for getting her into this stupid land deal with his shady friends in the first place and then expecting her to clean it up, at her best friend, Vince, for killing himself, at herself for letting the situation spiral out of control. All of that fury, for a moment, was directed at me.

“You
never
believed in us. In New Hampshire, it was just me and Susan [Thomases] and Harold [Ickes] who believed in us. If we wouldn't have fought, we would never have won.
You
gave up on us. …”

She paused, her voice fell, and Hillary started to cry. “We were out there alone, and I'm feeling very lonely right now. Nobody is fighting for
me
.”

We all seemed stuck to our chairs, not knowing whether to be unnerved, afraid, or consoling. I was too stunned to respond. Harold, who had been explicitly absolved from the accusation of disloyalty, tried to rescue me with one final plea for reconsideration.

“I don't want to hear anything more,” Hillary snapped, back in control. “I want us to fight. I want a campaign now.” Looking back at me, she took one last shot: “If you don't believe in us, you should
just leave
.” Then she walked out the door.

A dead moment passed. I fixed a crinkly smile on my face. Once I was sure Hillary was long gone, I rose to leave. “Nice try,” Dee Dee whispered. I walked the few steps to my office, closed the door behind me, and broke down.

“
You
gave up on us
.”
How could she say that? Nobody's fought harder for them. I'm the most loyal staffer they've ever had. I went out there every day. On Gennifer. And the draft. And Whitewater. Sacrificed my credibility. I went out there on faith, without the facts, and would get killed, just humiliated. No matter what I thought inside, I went before the whole country like a crazy person, even said I believed he never had sex with Gennifer. People would laugh at what I would say. Then to get attacked — not for being wrong but for being disloyal, for
abandoning
them. Fuck her. I'm arguing for what's best — for her, for him, for all of us and everything we're fighting for. Fuck her
.

But I also knew why Hillary's words wounded me so deeply. They were true. I never showed it to the world, but I did give up in New Hampshire — on the floor of the yogurt factory when we received the forgotten draft letter, in the Nashua laundry room when I was accused of conspiring to get Gennifer Flowers a job, in my Little Rock office when I heard Clinton talking to her. Remembering all that made me feel sorry for Hillary. She'd had to listen to those tapes too. She'd had to gulp hard on prime-time television when Sam Donaldson read back her husband's farewell to Gennifer: “Good-bye, baby.” She'd had to pull it all together every single day — for him, for Chelsea — and she never really knew what was coming next either. And all for what? Not just to be first lady, but to do big things. Now her integrity was being questioned; everything she'd worked for was imperiled, and no one was there for her.

The West Wing is a small place. Later that afternoon, the vice president pulled me aside as we gathered for a meeting in the Oval: “How are you doing?”

“What do you mean?” I replied, trying to stay cool.

“Sometimes it gets pretty rough around here,” he said, putting his arm on my shoulder. “But it will be OK.”

It was a thoughtful gesture, and I needed the encouragement even if I couldn't admit it. But a phone call I'd received early that evening had already startled me out of my self-pity. Ann Devroy, urgent, on deadline: “George, I just want to be clear on this. We're hearing lots of rumors, but you guys haven't heard anything about Bobby Inman and any possible homosexual activity, right?”

“No, Ann,” I said. “What are you talking about? No. Nothing. Not even a buzz. Zero. …”

In December, after a secret courtship led by Strobe Talbott, President Clinton had nominated Bobby Inman, a retired four-star admiral, to replace Les Aspin as defense secretary. Having served as deputy director of the CIA and head of the National Security Agency, Inman was a darling of the defense establishment, with a reputation for independence. At the time, I had argued against announcing Inman so precipitously, without giving Aspin adequate notice — not because I imagined what would happen next, but because I thought that Les had been loyal to the president and deserved a graceful exit rather than a public humiliation. But Inman, true to form, played hardball, demanding an immediate decision. His appointment was met by a chorus of bipartisan praise from both the Senate and the political establishment. The
New York Times
called Inman “a safe and smart choice.” After a year of troublesome nominations, it looked to the world as if we finally had a winner.

I wasn't so sure. Inman's failure to pay social security taxes for his maid, coupled with his refusal to resign from an exclusive, all-male club called the Bohemian Grove, meant that he'd face some prickly questions during confirmation hearings. Our administration would be accused of having a double standard when it came to “nanny problems,” and Inman would be scored for insensitivity to women's rights. Even worse was Inman's arrogance. When the president announced his appointment, the admiral acted as if
be
were commander in chief, saving that he had agreed to be defense secretary only after reaching “a level of comfort” with Clinton.

Devroy's call worried me even more. After hanging up the phone, I headed straight to Tony Lake's office. “Tony,” I said, taking a seat in his rocking chair, “I just got the strangest call from Devroy.” But before I could finish the sentence, Joel Klein — the counsel supervising Inman's background check — stuck his head in the room and said, “I gotta talk to you guys.”

“Funny,” I replied, “you were my next stop.” Joel let me go first: “Ann Devroy just called me and asked if I knew anything about Bobby Inman and homosexual activity, and I completely denied it. Said it was absurd, the stupidest thing I'd ever heard. Over the course of the conversation, she said that there were people in the gay community in Austin [Inman's hometown] who were saying things. She didn't really believe it, but she wanted to make sure I hadn't heard anything about it.”

“It's really funny that you bring that up,” Klein replied, a wry smile on his face. He had heard the same rumors, but Inman had flatly denied the allegation to Klein, adding that he'd been dogged by these allegations ever since an incident at the National Security Agency when he refused to follow established practice by firing employees who were found to be gay. (Since then, Clinton had rightly overturned the intelligence community guidelines that classified homosexual orientation and activity as prima facie security risks.) After hearing about Devroy's inquiry, Joel said he'd call Inman again just to be sure.

If the rumors of Inman's being gay could be proved true, there was no way he'd be confirmed as secretary of defense. He'd get hit from both sides: by conservatives who believed that homosexuality was a disqualifying condition and by gay-rights advocates who would argue justifiably that it was hypocritical to have a homosexual defense secretary when gays and lesbians were prohibited from serving openly in the military. Meantime, I faced a dilemma: Do I tell Devroy what Joel just told me? I didn't think it was fair for uncorroborated rumors to worm their way into the paper. On the other hand, if Devroy later discovered that information had been provided to the White House and believed that I had deliberately lied to her, there'd be hell to pay on the front page of the
Post
. She'd never let the story go. If Ann were less trustworthy, I might have taken that risk and kept the information to myself. But I knew that she would honor an “off the record” conversation. So, with the proviso that the information was “only for her” (which meant so off the record that not only could it not be published, but she couldn't share it with any of her colleagues inside the paper except, maybe, a single supervising editor), I told her that we had heard some sketchy rumors, emphasizing that Inman had denied them and that they were hearsay, not hard information. Devroy said that the
Post
was hearing the same stories, but they weren't going in the paper without more proof. For a night, we'd dodged another bullet.