All Too Human: A Political Education (38 page)

But now we were in a box. Although Inman had categorically denied the gay allegation again in a following conversation with Klein, he understood that the rumors were likely to surface. Before the hearing, some sort of spectacle might be staged by Act Up, the radical gay group that had threatened to out public figures suspected of being secretly gay. Or perhaps the Republican senators and their staffs would find a way to air the allegations, either by leaking investigative files to the media or by calling a surprise witness — the way Democrats did with Anita Hill during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. After the Thomas, Robert Bork, and John Tower hearings, where Republican nominees were publicly pelted with embarrassing details from their private lives, they would be seeking payback.

For the next twenty-four hours, Inman swung back and forth between depression and defiance. In a second conversation with Klein late Wednesday night, Inman seemed increasingly distraught but still insisted that he wanted the job. We wondered whether Inman's vacillation was some sort of ploy, conscious or not, to get us to make the decision for him. Everyone agreed that at a minimum, Joel had to look Inman in the eye and assess his stability. He booked a late-morning flight to the admiral's vacation cabin in the Rocky Mountains.

Preoccupied with his own sadness, the president didn't know the details of our deliberations. Earlier that morning, his mother had died in her sleep; he spent the day accepting our condolences and preparing for the funeral. Around noon, he wandered into my office, where I was sharing a quick sandwich with the writer Joe Klein, and we spent a few minutes reminiscing about the mother who had given him the gift of unconditional love and a sunny fighting spirit. Then Clinton left, and the lawyer Joel Klein walked in my door.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. “I thought you were going to Vail.”

“I have to see you.”

I told Joe I'd be back in a minute and walked down to Gergen's office with Joel. Two hours later, we were still there. Just before his plane took off, Joel got an urgent message to call Inman. “Listen,” Inman told him. “You don't need to fly out here. Let's just talk. When the president was first considering my appointment, I told you only ninety percent of the truth. Here's the other ten.”

While consistently and convincingly denying the gay rumors, Inman next disclosed more about his private life that he had withheld during the initial background check. Had. we known the full story a month earlier, the president would not have chosen Inman — and it would be risky and wrong for us to stick with the nomination now in the face of this disclosure. Once the Senate investigators finished digging through Inman's life, everything would be public, and Inman would not be confirmed.

Inman had a corresponding obligation not to place the president in that predicament. The only option was for him to withdraw quietly, but the flinty and flighty admiral wasn't ready for that. His most ardent administration advocate, Strobe Talbott, called in to make his case. According to Talbott, Inman had explained away his behavior as “a way to get attention.” The rest of us rolled our eyes, but Talbott continued, arguing correctly that it would be grossly unfair to dump Inman because of some uncorroborated rumors. Then Joel told Talbott about his most recent conversation with Inman. Even if you made the dubious assumption that Inman's private life would remain private during the confirmation process, we had a problem: the fact that Inman had misled the White House at the outset of his background check. By coming clean now, he was basically begging to be cut loose. The more we talked about it, the more we all agreed Inman had to withdraw.

The only question remaining was how. Mack left to call the president. While he was gone, the rest of us brainstormed about Inman's replacement. We kicked around all of the usual suspects — senators like Sam Nunn, John Warner, and David Boren; a business executive like Norm Augustine, chairman of Martin Marietta. But the idea we liked best was to shift Treasury Secretary (and WWII fighter pilot) Lloyd Bentsen to Defense and appoint Bob Rubin to Treasury. Then Mack returned to report on his call to the president, who generally agreed with our judgment but added that Inman's behavior “wasn't quite disqualifying.” We dutifully went over the details of the case one more time. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore: “Wait a second, it's just not discussible. We can't do it.”

“It may not be discussible,” Gergen quipped, “but it's damn interesting.”

Once the nervous laughter died down, we had to decide what to do. The president was scheduled to fly overseas on Saturday, and Gergen worried that announcing the withdrawal either right before or during the trip would send the wrong message and drown out news coverage of the president's first visit to Russia. After giving Joel the job of working with Inman to postpone any action for ten days, we adjourned.

It turned out, though, that Whitewater alone would overshadow the president's trip. The morning after my confrontation with Hillary, the
Post
had published another breathless but mind-numbing 2,018-word front-page story going over all of the details. At 7:15
A.M.
, a good hour and a half before the president usually arrived in the West Wing, Clinton burst through the back door of my office holding a newspaper. I braced myself for another blast. But it never came. Maybe Clinton was trying to compensate for Hillary's broadside by keeping me close; maybe he saw something in the article that I had missed. Whatever the reason, the president was bubbling with excitement.

“Mr. President, I know you think the story's great,” I said, puzzled. “But I don't get it. You really have to explain to me
why
you think it's great.”

“Oh, don't you see,” he said, showing me the paragraphs he'd underlined and starred. “It's full of factually untrue stuff. And it shows that even career attorneys from the Justice Department saw no reason to pursue the case.”

The article did, in fact, make that point, adding that “there was no conclusive evidence that the Clintons had done anything illegal.” But it also repeated the suggestion that the involvement of the first couple had impeded the progress of the investigation. Putting these two arguments together, I made one last plea: “You may be right, Mr. President, and I know you guys didn't do anything wrong. That's why I think it's best to turn this whole thing over to a special counsel so we can get back to work.”

“Hmm, that makes some sense,” he said, before going back upstairs to change. When he returned to the Oval an hour later for another meeting with me, Harold, and Mack, Clinton said he knew it was the right thing to do. But a little later, we were back in Mack's office — the same group, going over the same ground — when first Harold and then Mack got called to the Oval. They returned chastened and pale, and it didn't take a detective to figure out what had happened.

“You all can keep talking about this if you want,” Harold said. “But it's useless. We're not doing a special counsel.”

I knew I was in big trouble again. The president hadn't called me back for the follow-up discussion, and Harold looked at me as if he'd just discovered I had a terminal illness. At the first lull in the meeting, he signaled me out with a shake of his head. We whispered in the hallway.

“Boy,” he confided in me. “She's really angry. Blames you for getting him all ginned up again this morning.”

“Well, I guess I have no choice,” I replied. We'd been discussing how to organize a campaign to get our side of the Whitewater story out, and I asked Harold to engineer the meeting so that I would be appointed spokesman for the damage control effort. “I'm so shot up and bloody that the only way I can recover with them is to be the spokesman.”

“George, you're absolutely right.”

So I stepped up my contacts with the press and put up an aggressive front. Just before the president's lunch with columnists to brief them on his upcoming trip to Russia, Safire pulled me aside to pound me on Whitewater. “How come it takes two weeks to catalog a box of documents?” he asked, taunting me. “What are you guys doing — tearing them up? Throwing them out? How are you doing, George?” he continued. “Are you doing OK?” “Why shouldn't I be doing OK?” I replied, afraid he might know something. “You're like my old Jewish grandmother in Brooklyn,” he said, letting me off the hook. “Every time I ask a question, she answers with a question.” With the president, Safire asked only about NATO expansion, but his next day's column on Whitewater was another killer.

Whitewater was everywhere. At the Italian embassy that night, I was seated between Mary McGrory, the longtime Washington columnist, and Katherine “Kay” Graham, doyenne of the
Washington Post
. We were the three unattached people at the dinner. In normal times (if there was such a thing) it would have been a terrific evening. Mary was an old friend, and both women are engaging dinner partners, with something funny and sharp to say about everyone in the room. But that night, all the talk was about Whitewater, and I couldn't give an inch.

“George,” Kay said, “I think this Whitewater thing is really trouble, don't you?”

“No, Kay,” I replied. “It's not trouble because the Clintons didn't do anything wrong.”

“But if they didn't do anything wrong, why don't you just release the documents or ask for an independent counsel to clear their name?”

Good point
. But I knew I couldn't even wink — not even betray the hint of distance hidden in an opening like “Well, the president believes …”

“Well, Kay,” I replied, “that might be good politics, but it would set a horrible precedent. The standard hasn't been met. It would be an invitation to irresponsible allegations if all you have to do to get an independent counsel is level a charge. It's just wrong. It devalues the institution of the special counsel and demeans the presidency.”

All that might have been true, but blocking a special counsel was an unwinnable battle. Over the next few days, our defenses completely crumbled after the
Post
reported that our delivery of documents to the Justice Department was not, as we had claimed, strictly voluntary. When David Kendall had first contacted Justice to discuss the matter, he had been informed that the department was already drafting a subpoena for the documents. Kendall subsequently negotiated with department lawyers to broaden the subpoena for the purpose of shielding more documents from the press, another fact we failed to reveal at the time. Although this sort of maneuver was routine and appropriate in private litigation, it reinforced the cover-up charge and raised a new allegation of improper presidential interference with an independent investigation. By Tuesday, January 11, nine Democratic senators — led by Pat Moynihan and Bill Bradley — had joined the Republican calls for an independent investigation, which demolished our claim that this was just a partisan witch-hunt.

The television coverage of the president's trip was dominated by Whitewater. We couldn't go on like this, and Clinton wanted the issue resolved. On Tuesday evening, January 11, Hillary called a small group of us into the Oval for a conference call with the president, who was plugged in by speakerphone from Prague. It was an odd scene, the only time I can remember meeting in the Oval Office without the president present. We stood around the president's desk as if he were there, staring at the small black box in front of his chair. Harold Ickes structured the debate, assigning me to make the case for requesting a special counsel. Nussbaum would oppose.

I made the argument I'd been making for days — that we had no choice; that if we didn't ask for a special counsel now, one would be forced on us later; that the press would keep hounding us until we surrendered; that Whitewater was killing the rest of our agenda. Bernie countered, correctly, that special prosecutors take on a life of their own, but his only answer was to release the documents.
Now you tell us. Where were you a month ago, when releasing them might have made a difference? It's too late now
. But I didn't replow that old ground aloud because it was unnecessary. There was a pro forma quality to this final debate. Clinton had already made up his mind; or, more accurately, he believed that he no longer had a choice. After several minutes of discussion, Hillary asked everyone except David Kendall to leave and concluded the decision with the president.

The next day, Nussbaum sent a letter to Attorney General Reno saying that President Clinton had directed him to request a special counsel “to conduct an appropriate independent investigation of the Whitewater matter and report to the American people.”

I went to the White House briefing room to explain our reversal. My internal victory (if you can call it that) had come at some cost, so I went on the offense, using the public forum to challenge our accusers: “Despite their total and voluntary cooperation with the current investigation, the Clintons have been subjected to a barrage of innuendo, political posturing, and irresponsible accusations. … We still don't think that the evidence is there to require a special counsel. At the same time, we want to make sure that nothing interferes with the president's agenda.”

Toward the end of the briefing, someone asked about reports that Hillary was among the most resistant to naming a special counsel. I didn't want to lie, but I couldn't tell the whole story. Evasion was my only out: “I think that there is a general reluctance throughout the White House.” Mercifully, no one asked a follow-up.

Shortly after Clinton returned from Moscow, on Tuesday, January 18, Bobby Inman put on a mesmerizing and manic performance for the Washington press corps. Looking like a man who was broadcasting instructions transmitted through the fillings in his teeth, he railed against “modern McCarthyism,” he criticized the White House for “spinning” his failure to pay social security taxes, he attacked the
New York Times
for how it covered his work as a defense contractor and the
Washington Post
for how it depicted him in an editorial cartoon. His diatribe also cited critical columns by Ellen Goodman and Anthony Lewis, but the bulk of his bile was reserved for William Safire. Inman falsely accused him of plagiarism and added that Safire was conspiring with Senator Dole to derail his nomination. After raising the allegations about homosexuality himself and volunteering to take a lie detector test to prove they were wrong, he denied that there was any other damaging information about to emerge and expressed his firm belief that he would have been “handily confirmed” by the Senate.