The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (17 page)

In 1989 the cancer came back in his bones, incurable multiple myeloma. Mr. Sam tried
not to slow down. At the next annual meeting, he predicted more than $100 billion
in sales by the millennium. “Can we do it?” he shouted to nine thousand people in
an arena at the University of Arkansas, and they shouted back, “Yes we can!” He wrote
his memoirs, asking himself whether he should have spent more time with his family
in his later years, or devoted himself to good works, and concluded that he would
do the same exact things all over again. Partnerships had kept the money in the family,
and Helen and the four children (they had all received your everyday heartland upbringing)
were worth $23 billion, and eventually six of the surviving Waltons would have as
much money as the bottom 30 percent of Americans.

By early 1992, Mr. Sam was fading. In March, President and Mrs. Bush came to Bentonville,
and Mr. Sam rose unsteadily from his wheelchair to receive the Presidential Medal
of Freedom. In his final days, nothing cheered him more than a hospital visit from
a local store manager who wanted to talk about sales figures. In April, just after
turning seventy-four, Mr. Sam died.

And it was only after his death, after Wal-Mart’s downhome founder was no longer its
public face, that the country began to understand what his company had done. Over
the years, America had become more like Wal-Mart. It had gotten cheap. Prices were
lower, and wages were lower. There were fewer union factory jobs, and more part-time
jobs as store greeters. The small towns where Mr. Sam had seen his opportunity were
getting poorer, which meant that consumers there depended more and more on everyday
low prices, and made every last purchase at Wal-Mart, and maybe had to work there,
too. The hollowing out of the heartland was good for the company’s bottom line. And
in parts of the country that were getting richer, on the coasts and in some big cities,
many consumers regarded Wal-Mart and its vast aisles full of crappy, if not dangerous,
Chinese-made goods with horror, and instead purchased their shoes and meat in expensive
boutiques as if overpaying might inoculate them against the spread of cheapness, while
stores like Macy’s, the bastions of a former middle-class economy, faded out, and
America began to look once more like the country Mr. Sam had grown up in.

1994

WITH NEW YEAR COMES NEW FREE-TRADE ZONE, NEW UNCERTAINTIES
 …
“I don’t feel threatened,” says the 35-year-old weaver, who has worked at Cone Mills,
the world’s largest producer of denim fabric, since she was 18. “It will be good for
textiles. It will help save the future of our jobs.”
 …
MTV’S “REAL WORLD” HOUSEMATE GRAVELY ILL
 …
Fuck the world, fuck my moms and my girl / My life is played out like a Jheri curl
/ I’m ready to die
 …
KURT COBAIN, 1967–1994
In Seattle, a Mood of Teen Dispirit
 …
a result of heightened concerns among parents. “Increasingly,” Lieberman said, “you
hear from constituents who say, ‘We’re worried about values, we’re worried about moral
decline in our society.’”
 …
Alison Quigg, 14, for one, spent $500 on her orange sags and huge T-shirts. “We see
these clothes on MTV,” she says. “I thought they looked good.”
 … If the United States did as much to encourage high-IQ women to have babies as it
now does to encourage low-IQ women, it would rightly be described as engaging in aggressive
manipulation of fertility.…
AS CITIES REACH RECORD NUMBERS OF KILLINGS, YOUTHS PLAY GRIM ROLE
 …
SHAMEFUL DAWDLING ON RWANDA
 …
Television viewers nationwide watched last night as a white Ford Bronco carrying O.
J. Simpson was chased across the freeways of
 …
While the Democratic leaders in Congress are struggling to write health legislation
that follows President Clinton’s principles, Newt Gingrich, the Republican whip, has
united his party
 … Call toll free. Know the facts. If we let the government choose, we lose.…
OPRAH OVERCOMES
She Lost 67 Pounds, Then Gained 90. Now, After a Five-Year War with Her Weight, She
Is Once Again Queen of Lean
 …
A HISTORIC REPUBLICAN TRIUMPH
 …
The freshman class, which included not a single “femi-Nazi,” one of Mr. Limbaugh’s
favorite epithets for supporters of women’s rights, whooped and applauded, proving
itself one big fan club of the man it believes was primarily responsible for
 …
I switched my motto—instead of sayin fuck tomorrow / That buck that bought a bottle
could’ve struck the lotto

JEFF CONNAUGHTON

Connaughton lived in a basement apartment on Sixth Street, on Capitol Hill, beneath
Mitch McConnell and next door to Daniel Patrick Moynihan. A few blocks east, north,
and south were the kind of run-down streets he’d seen back in 1979 when he got lost
on his way from Alabama to find a Republican senator to debate Biden. But Connaughton
never went into those neighborhoods. While he was on Biden’s staff, Capitol Hill was
where he worked, slept, and socialized. The hours at the office were long; then he
spent weekday evenings with other young staffers at the Tune Inn, the Hawk ’n’ Dove,
and other Hill meeting places.

For the next two decades he remained a Biden guy, yet he actually worked for the senator
only four years. During that time Biden learned Connaughton’s name, if not his value.
He could do the kind of staff work—research, writing, bringing in experts, and sounding
out interest groups—that would make the senator look substantive. That was the purpose
of the postdisgrace Biden operation, after the senator recovered from an aneurysm
that nearly ended his life and brain surgery that put him out of action the first
half of 1988: to prove that he wasn’t just a flashy talker who’d been caught out,
that he had the gravitas and legislative prowess to deserve a second chance at the
presidency. Connaughton worked with the Association of Trial Lawyers and blocked a
change on a law regarding international airline liability. He proposed setting up
several hearings on drug policy, which would give Biden a reputation for being tough
on crime. He put together a dossier of the senator’s achievements—a counterpoint to
the scandal archive—that was used for Biden’s 1990 reelection campaign. And he endured
the muttered rebuke at a hearing, the silence that answered every joke he tried. Eventually,
Connaughton sat at a desk right outside Biden’s office, but he never dared to ask
to see the boss. “I just didn’t have the foundation under me to deal with Biden, who
is like a political genius,” he said. “If you went in there and he could sense any
confusion, doubt, or uncertainty in your mind, he’d pounce on it.” Just like the journalists
who had pounced on Biden when they smelled his blood.

Then, in 1991, Connaughton decided that he needed to go to law school. A law degree
would allow him to move in and out of politics, to know the substance of government,
to make money in the course of a career, and—perhaps—to move back to Alabama. He spent
his Wall Street savings on three years at Stanford. When he graduated in 1994, he
went to clerk for Chief Judge Abner Mikva, of the D.C. Court of Appeals (a Biden aide
helped him get the job). Mikva was a former congressman from Chicago, widely respected
and liked. Almost immediately, there were rumors that Mikva would be named President
Clinton’s counsel. Suddenly Connaughton’s dream of a path to the White House took
a shortcut that had nothing to do with Joe Biden. He called Ted Kaufman. “I need Biden
to call Mikva and tell him I’m great and that he should definitely take me with him.”
Connaughton had worked for Mikva only a month, and a word from the chairman of the
Senate Judiciary Committee would be worth a lot.

A few days later, Kaufman called Connaughton back. “Biden doesn’t want to call Mikva.”

“What?”

“He doesn’t want to call Mikva. It has nothing to do with you. He doesn’t like Mikva.”

For once, Connaughton was too angry to bite his tongue. “Who cares whether he likes
Mikva! This is about me.”

Kaufman sighed. It was one of his duties to defend the principal to his underlings,
to protect Biden from the consequences of the slights and indignities he dealt out.
Usually this meant the tactical silences, feigned ignorance, or euphemisms with which
the wife of a tyrannical father mollifies the children. But Kaufman cared about Connaughton,
and he spoke candidly. “Jeff, don’t take this personally,” Kaufman said. “Biden disappoints
everyone. He’s an equal opportunity disappointer.”

Connaughton never really forgave Biden, and would never be truly surprised or disappointed
by him again. For many years to come he would continue to associate himself with Biden,
raise money for him, campaign for him,
be a Biden guy
, but the romance of that pursuit died with the phone call Biden refused to make.
There had always been a transactional aspect to Connaughton’s obsession, and now it
was the central aspect. Biden had used him, and he had used Biden, and they would
go on using each other, but that would be all. It was a Washington relationship.

Mikva took Connaughton to the White House anyway, because Connaughton did what he
always did as a number two, which was to make himself indispensable. Before being
offered a job, he wrote a detailed transition plan for Mikva’s move to the counsel’s
office, with a media strategy and a summary of the issues that he would face. Mikva
named Connaughton special assistant to the counsel, at thirty-two thousand a year
(his clerkship salary). Neither of them had any idea what the job meant.

Connaughton first set foot in the West Wing on October 1, 1994. It was a Saturday,
and he was wearing what he thought would be appropriate attire for a weekend in the
White House: blue blazer, white shirt, khakis, and loafers, as if dressing for dinner
at the country club. The first person he recognized was George Stephanopoulos—slouching
down a hallway in sweatpants and stubble. Offices in the West Wing were surprisingly
small and antiquated, like rooms in a shabby-elegant museum from the Federal period.
The counsel’s office was up the staircase to the right of the lobby, in a corner of
the second floor. There were four desks in the reception area, and Connaughton was
given the one used by a volunteer named Kathleen Willey, whom everyone understood
to have a “special relationship” with the president, and whom Mikva’s deputy, Joel
Klein, wanted to get out of the West Wing. Another desk had recently been vacated
by Linda Tripp, an executive assistant to the late deputy counsel and close Clinton
friend Vince Foster, dead the year before of a self-inflicted pistol shot in the mouth.

To Connaughton, the whole building was sacred real estate, and the awe never really
wore off. He started giving after-hours tours to everyone he knew who wanted one.
By the time he left, sixteen months later, he must have given three hundred fifty.

On that October Saturday, the president used his morning radio address to urge Congress
to pass a bill that would prohibit gifts from lobbyists and require full disclosure
of their business. The U.S. military intervention in Haiti was a week old. The siege
of Sarajevo was in its third year. The First Lady’s health care initiative had recently
been euthanized in the Senate. Some of the Clintons’ top aides and best friends—Webster
Hubbell, Bruce Lindsey—were under investigation by Kenneth Starr, the newly appointed
special prosecutor in the Whitewater matter. The president was being sued for sexual
harassment by Paula Jones, an Arkansas state employee. Within a month, Congress would
fall to the Gingrich Republicans, blowing a massive hole in the middle of Clinton’s
first term.

Whitewater, Travelgate, the daily pounding of the press corps, the relentless attacks
of the Republicans, the independent counsel’s drilling: a fog of siege and paranoia
spread through both wings of the White House, but the worst start to any presidency
in living memory always led back to the corner office on the second floor. That was
why Clinton was burning through counsels at a record clip—Mikva was the third, after
less than two years. Colleagues joked that Connaughton was the only lawyer in the
White House who didn’t have a lawyer of his own.

Not long after starting work, Mikva and Connaughton met with an official from the
communications team named David Dreyer. Mikva was speaking the next morning at
The Christian Science Monitor
’s monthly breakfast, and Dreyer came with instructions: Mikva was to announce that
he had looked into Whitewater and found nothing.

Judge Mikva, in his late sixties, white-haired and sage, was silent.

“Why would he say that?” Connaughton said. “He’s only been here two weeks.”

“I’ll tell you why,” Dreyer snapped. “It’s his job to say that.”

“It’s not his job to throw away a lifetime’s worth of credibility in a single morning.
No one would believe him.”

Dreyer insisted: Mikva was the president’s lawyer and had an obligation to defend
him. That was what working in the White House meant—everyone worked for the president,
personal loyalty was the highest imperative.

“Let me think about it,” Mikva finally said.

At the breakfast, Mikva avoided committing himself to a position on Whitewater. He
was asked about Clinton’s legal defense fund, which had been started by the president’s
supporters after Jones filed her lawsuit accusing Clinton of having her escorted to
his Little Rock hotel room in May 1991, dropping his pants, and asking her to fellate
him. (The charges were eventually settled in November 1998 when the president’s defense
fund and insurance companies paid the sum of the plaintiff’s claim, $850,000, without
a presidential apology—one month before his impeachment by a narrowly partisan vote
of the House on charges of perjury resulting from his testimony in the Jones lawsuit;
three months before his acquittal by the Senate; two years before Jones posed nude
in
Penthouse
to pay off a large tax bill on the house she’d bought with her settlement money;
twenty-six months before Clinton was stripped of his Arkansas law license for five
years on his penultimate day in the White House; and four years before Jones lost
a match on Fox TV’s
Celebrity Boxing
to the former figure skater turned felon Tonya Harding while filling in for the former
teen shooter Amy Fisher.) “I’m uncomfortable,” Judge Mikva replied. “I expect the
president is uncomfortable.” He added that he saw no alternative to a legal defense
fund other than limiting the presidency to the very rich.