My Life, page 111
Soon after that, Newt Gingrich announced that he didn’t have the votes to pass the fast-track trade legislation in the House. I had worked very hard for months to pass it. In an attempt to get more votes from my party, I had pledged to Democrats that I would negotiate trade agreements with labor and environmental provisions, and told them that I had secured Chile’s agreement to put such requirements into the bilateral agreement we were working on. Unfortunately, I couldn’t persuade very many of them, because the AFL-CIO, which was still angry about losing the NAFTA vote, had made the fast-track vote a test of whether Democrats were for or against labor. Even Democrats who agreed with me on the merits were reluctant to face a reelection campaign without the AFL-CIO’s financial and organizational support. Several conservative Republicans conditioned their vote on whether or not I would impose further restrictions on U.S. policy for international family planning. When I wouldn’t do it, I lost their votes. The Speaker had also worked to pass the bill, but at the end we were still six votes short at best. Now I would just have to continue making individual trade agreements and hope that Congress wouldn’t kill them with amendments.
In mid-month we had a new crisis in Iraq, when Saddam expelled six American members of the UN weapons inspection teams. I ordered the USS George Washington carrier group to the region, and a few days later the inspectors returned.
The Kyoto global warming talks opened on December 1. Before they were over, Al Gore flew to Japan to help our chief negotiator, Undersecretary of State Stu Eizenstat, get an agreement we could sign, with firm targets but without undue restrictions on how to achieve them and with a call for developing countries like China and India to participate; within thirty years they would surpass the United States as emitters of greenhouse gases (the United States is now the world’s leading emitter). Unless the changes were made, I couldn’t submit the treaty to Congress; it would be difficult to pass in the best of circumstances. With the support of Prime Minister Hashimoto, who wanted Kyoto to be a success for Japan, and other friendly nations including Argentina, the negotiations produced an agreement I was happy to support, with targets I thought we could meet, if Congress would enact the tax incentives necessary to promote the production and purchase of more conservation technologies and clean energy products.
In the days before Christmas, Hillary, Chelsea, and I went to Bosnia to encourage the people in Sarajevo to stay on the path of peace and to meet with the troops in Tuzla. Bob and Elizabeth Dole joined our delegation, along with several military leaders and a dozen members of Congress of both parties. Elizabeth was the president of the American Red Cross, and Bob had just agreed to my request to head the International Commission on Missing Persons in the former Yugoslavia. On the day before Christmas the United States agreed to put up $1.7 billion to provide financial support to the faltering South Korean economy. It marked the beginning of our commitment to solving the Asian financial crisis, which would grow much worse in the coming year. South Korea had just elected a new president, Kim Dae Jung, a longtime democracy activist who had been sentenced to execution in the 1970s until President Carter intervened on his behalf. I had first met Kim on the steps of Los Angeles City Hall in May 1992, when he proudly told me he represented the same new approach to politics that I did. He was both brave and visionary, and I wanted to support him.
As we headed to Renaissance Weekend and a new year, I looked back on 1997 with satisfaction, hoping the worst of the partisan wars had passed in the wake of all that had been accomplished: the balanced budget; the largest increase in college aid in fifty years; the biggest increase in children’s health coverage since 1965; the expansion of NATO; the Chemical Weapons Convention; the Kyoto accord; sweeping reforms of our adoption laws and of our Food and Drug Administration to speed the introduction of lifesaving medicines and medical devices; and the One America initiative, which had already involved millions of people in conversations about the current state of race relations. It was an impressive list, but it would not be enough to bridge the ideological divide.
FORTY-EIGHT
When 1998 began, I had no idea it would be the strangest year of my presidency, full of personal humiliation and disgrace, policy struggles at home and triumphs abroad, and, against all odds, a stunning demonstration of the common sense and fundamental decency of the American people. Because everything happened at once, I was compelled as never before to live parallel lives, except that this time the darkest part of my inner life was in full view.
January began on a positive note, with three major initiatives: (1) a 50 percent increase in the number of Peace Corps volunteers, primarily to support the new democracies that had emerged since the fall of communism; (2) a $22 billion child-care program to double the number of children in working families receiving child-care subsidies, provide tax credits to encourage employees to make child care available to their employees, and expand before-and after-school programs to serve 500,000 children; and (3) a proposal to allow people to “buy into” Medicare, which covered Americans sixty-five and older, at age sixty-two, or at age fifty-five if they had lost their jobs. The program was designed to be self-financing through modest premiums and other payments. It was needed because so many Americans were leaving the workforce early, through downsizing, layoffs, or choice, and couldn’t find affordable insurance elsewhere after they lost their employer-based coverage.
In the second week of the month, I went to South Texas, one of my favorite places in America, to urge the largely Hispanic student body at Mission High School to help close the gap between the collegegoing rates of Hispanic young people and the rest of the student population by taking full advantage of the tremendous increase in college aid the Congress had authorized in 1997. While there, I was informed of the collapse of Indonesia’s economy, and my economic team went to work on the next casualty of the Asian financial crisis; Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers went to Indonesia to secure the government’s agreement to implement the reforms necessary to receive assistance from the International Monetary Fund.
On the thirteenth, trouble broke out in Iraq again as Saddam’s government blocked an American-led UN inspection team from doing its job, the beginning of a protracted effort by Saddam to coerce the United Nations into lifting sanctions in return for continuing the weapons inspections. The same day, the Middle East moved toward crisis as Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government, which still had not completed the overdue opening of the Gaza airport or provided safe passage between Gaza and the West Bank, put the entire peace process in danger by voting to keep control of the West Bank indefinitely. The only bright spot on the world horizon in January was the White House signing of a NATO partnership with the Baltic nations, which was designed to formalize our security relationship and reassure them that the ultimate goal of all the NATO nations, including the United States, was the full integration of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia into NATO and other multilateral institutions. On the fourteenth, I was in the East Room of the White House with Al Gore to announce our push for a Patients’ Bill of Rights, to provide Americans in managed care plans with some basic treatment guarantees that were being denied all too frequently, and Hillary was being questioned by Ken Starr for the fifth time. The topic on this occasion was how the FBI files on Republicans got to the White House, something she knew nothing about.
My deposition in the Jones case came three days later. I had gone over a series of possible questions with my lawyers and thought I was reasonably well prepared, though I didn’t feel well that day and certainly wasn’t looking forward to my encounter with the Rutherford Institute lawyers. The presiding judge, Susan Webber Wright, had given Jones’s lawyers broad permission to delve into my private life, allegedly to see if there was a pattern of sexual harassment involving any women who had held or sought state employment when I was governor or federal employment when I was President, during a time period from five years before Jones’s alleged harassment to the present day. The judge had also given the Jones lawyers strict instructions not to leak the contents of any deposition or other aspects of their investigation.
The stated objective could have been achieved less intrusively by simply directing me to answer yes or no to questions about whether I had ever been alone with women working for the government; then the lawyers could have asked the women whether I had ever harassed them. However, that would have rendered the deposition useless. By this time, everyone involved in the case knew there was no evidence of sexual harassment. I was certain that the lawyers wanted to force me to acknowledge any kind of involvement with one or more women that they could then leak to the press, in violation of the judge’s confidentiality order. As it turned out, I didn’t know the half of it. After I was sworn in, the deposition began with a request from the Rutherford Institute lawyers that the judge accept a definition of “sexual relations” that they had purportedly found in a legal document. Basically, the definition covered most intimate contact beyond kissing by the person being asked the question, if it was done for gratification or arousal. It seemed to require both a specific act and a certain state of mind on my part, and did not include any act by another person. The lawyers said they were trying to spare me embarrassing questions.
I was there for several hours, only ten or fifteen minutes of which were devoted to Paula Jones. The rest of the time was spent on a variety of topics with no connection to Jones, including a great many questions about Monica Lewinsky, who had worked in the White House in the summer of 1995 as an intern and then in a staff job from December through early April, when she was transferred to the Pentagon. The lawyers asked, among other things, how well I knew her, whether we had ever exchanged gifts, whether we had ever talked on the phone, and if I had had “sexual relations” with her. I discussed our conversations, acknowledged that I had given her gifts, and answered no to the “sexual relations” question.
The Rutherford Institute lawyers kept asking the same questions with slight variations over and over again. When we took a break, my legal team was perplexed, because Lewinsky’s name had shown up on the plaintiff’s list of potential witnesses only in early December, and she had been given a subpoena to appear as a witness two weeks later. I didn’t tell them about my relationship with her, but I did say I was unsure of exactly what the curious definition of sexual relations meant. So were they. At the beginning of the deposition, my attorney, Bob Bennett, had invited the Rutherford Institute lawyers to ask specific and unambiguous questions about my contact with women. At the end of the discussion of Lewinsky, I asked the lawyer who was questioning me if there wasn’t something more specific he wanted to ask me. Once again he declined to do so. Instead he said, “Sir, I think this will come to light shortly, and you’ll understand.”
I was relieved but somewhat concerned that the lawyer seemed not to want to ask specific questions, nor to want to get my answers to them. If he had asked such questions, I would have answered them truthfully, but I would have hated it. During the government shutdown in late 1995, when very few people were allowed to come to work in the White House and those who were there were working late, I’d had an inappropriate encounter with Monica Lewinsky and would do so again on other occasions between November and April, when she left the White House for the Pentagon. For the next ten months, I didn’t see her, although we talked on the phone from time to time.
In February 1997, Monica was among the guests at an evening taping of my weekly radio address, after which I met with her alone again for about fifteen minutes. I was disgusted with myself for doing it, and in the spring, when I saw her again, I told her that it was wrong for me, wrong for my family, and wrong for her, and I couldn’t do it anymore. I also told her that she was an intelligent, interesting person who could have a good life, and that if she wanted me to, I would try to be her friend and help her. Monica continued to visit the White House, and I saw her on some of those occasions, but nothing improper occurred. In October, she asked me to help her get a job in New York, and I did. She had received two offers and accepted one, and late in December, she came to the White House to say goodbye. By then, she had received her subpoena in the Jones case. She said she didn’t want to be deposed, and I told her some women had avoided questioning by filing affidavits saying that I had not sexually harassed them.
What I had done with Monica Lewinsky was immoral and foolish. I was deeply ashamed of it and I didn’t want it to come out. In the deposition, I was trying to protect my family and myself from my selfish stupidity. I believed that the contorted definition of “sexual relations” enabled me to do so, though I was worried enough about it to invite the lawyer interrogating me to ask specific questions. I didn’t have to wait long to find out why he declined to do so.
On January 21, the Washington Post led with a story that I had had an affair with Monica Lewinsky, and that Kenneth Starr was investigating charges that I had encouraged her to lie about it under oath. The story first emerged publicly early on the eighteenth, on an Internet site. The deposition had been a setup; nearly four years after he first offered to help Paula Jones, Starr had finally gotten into her case. In the summer of 1996, Monica Lewinsky had begun talking to a co-worker, Linda Tripp, about her relationship with me. A year later, Tripp had started taping their telephone conversations. In October 1997, Tripp offered to play the tapes for a Newsweek reporter and did play them for Lucianne Goldberg, a conservative Republican publicist. Tripp was subpoenaed in the Jones case, though she was never on any witness list provided to my attorneys.
Late on Monday, January 12, 1998, Tripp phoned Starr’s office, described her secret taping of Lewinsky, and made arrangements to turn over those tapes. She was concerned about her own criminal liability, because the kind of taping she had done was a felony under Maryland law, but Starr’s people promised to protect her. The next day Starr had FBI agents wire Tripp so that she could secretly record a conversation with Lewinsky over lunch at the Pentagon City Ritz-Carlton. A couple of days later, Starr asked the Justice Department for permission to expand his authority to encompass the investigation of Lewinsky, apparently being less than truthful about the basis for his request. On the sixteenth, the day before my deposition, Tripp arranged to meet Lewinsky again at the hotel. This time Monica was greeted by FBI agents and attorneys who took her to a hotel room, questioned her for several hours, and discouraged her from calling a lawyer. One of Starr’s lawyers told her she should cooperate if she wanted to avoid going to jail and offered her an immunity deal that expired at midnight. Lewinsky was also pressured to wear a wire to secretly tape conversations with people involved in the alleged cover-up. Finally, Monica was able to call her mother, who contacted her father, from whom she had long been divorced. He got in touch with a lawyer, William Ginsburg, who advised her not to accept the immunity deal until he learned more about the case, and who blasted Starr for holding his client “for eight or nine hours without an attorney” and for pressuring her to wear a wire to entrap others. After the story broke, I called David Kendall and assured him that I had not suborned perjury or obstructed justice. It was clear to both of us that Starr was trying to create a firestorm to force me from office. He was off to a flying start, but I thought that if I could survive the public pounding for two weeks, the smoke would begin to clear, the press and the public would focus on Starr’s tactics, and a more balanced view of the matter would emerge. I knew I had made a terrible mistake, and I was determined not to compound it by allowing Starr to drive me from office. For now, the hysteria was overwhelming.
I went on doing my job, and I stonewalled, denying what had happened to everyone: Hillary, Chelsea, my staff and cabinet, my friends in Congress, members of the press, and the American people. What I regret the most, other than my conduct, is having misled all of them. Since 1991 I had been called a liar about everything under the sun, when in fact I had been honest in my public life and financial affairs, as all the investigations would show. Now I was misleading everyone about my personal failings. I was embarrassed and wanted to keep it from my wife and daughter. I didn’t want to help Ken Starr criminalize my personal life, and I didn’t want the American people to know I’d let them down. It was like living in a nightmare. I was back to my parallel lives with a vengeance. On the day the story broke, I did a previously scheduled interview with Jim Lehrer for the PBS NewsHour. I responded to his questions by saying that I had not asked anyone to lie, which was true, and that “there is no improper relationship.” Although the impropriety was over well before Lehrer asked the question, my answer was misleading, and I was ashamed of telling Lehrer that; from then on, whenever I could, I just said I never asked anybody not to tell the truth. While all this was going on, I had to keep doing my job. On the twentieth, I met with Prime Minister Netanyahu at the White House to discuss his plans for a phased withdrawal from the West Bank. Netanyahu had made a decision to move the peace process forward as long as he had “peace with security.” It was a bold move because his governing coalition was shaky, but he could see that if he didn’t act, the situation would quickly get out of hand.
The next day Arafat came to the White House. I gave him an encouraging report of my meeting with Netanyahu, assured him that I was pushing the prime minister to fulfill Israel’s obligation under the peace process, reminded him of the Israeli leader’s political problems, and stated, as I always did, that he had to keep fighting terror if he wanted Israel to move forward. The next day Mir Aimal Kansi was sentenced to death for the murder of the two CIA agents in January 1993, the first terrorist act to occur during my presidency.
