T he year 1994 was one of the hardest of my life, one in which important successes in foreign and domestic policy were overshadowed by the demise of health-care reform and an obsession with bogus scandal. It began with personal heartbreak and ended in political disaster.
On the night of January 5, Mother called me at the White House. She had just returned home from her trip to Las Vegas. I told her I had been calling her hotel room for several days and never found her in. She laughed and said she had been out day and night, having the time of her life in her favorite city, and she didnt have time to sit around waiting for the phone to ring. She had loved Barbra Streisands concert, and was especially pleased that Barbra had introduced her and dedicated a song to her. Mother was in high spirits and seemed strong; she just wanted to check in and tell me she loved me. It wasnt much different from the countless calls wed shared over the years, usually on Sunday nights.
About 2 a.m. the phone rang again, waking Hillary and me. Dick Kelley was on the line, crying. He said, Shes gone, Bill. After a perfect but exhausting week, Mother had just gone to sleep and died. I knew it was coming, but I wasnt ready to let her go. Now our last phone conversation seemed too routine, too full of idle chitchat; we had talked like people who think they have forever to talk to each other. I was aching to redo it, but all I could do was tell Dick that I loved him, that I was so grateful to him for making her last years happy, and that Id get home as quickly as I could. Hillary knew what had happened from my end of the conversation. I hugged her and wept. She said something about Mother and her love of life, and I realized that the phone conversation was just the kind Mother would have chosen to be our last one. My mother was always about life, not death.
I called my brother, who I knew would be devastated. He worshipped Mother, all the more because she never gave up on him. I told him he had to hold up for her and keep building his life. Then I called my friend Patty Howe Criner, who had been part of our lives for more than forty years, and asked her to help Dick and me with the funeral arrangements. Hillary woke Chelsea and we told her. She had already lost a grandfather, and she and Mother, whom she called Ginger, had a close, tender relationship. On the wall of her study room, she had a terrific pen-and-ink portrait of Mother by Hot Springs artist Gary Simmons, entitled Chelseas Ginger. It was moving to watch my daughter coming to terms with the loss of someone else she loved, trying to express her grief and keep her composure, letting go and holding on. Chelseas Ginger is hanging in her room in Chappaqua today.
Later that morning we put out a release announcing Mothers death, which was all over the news immediately. By coincidence, Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich were on the morning news programs. Undeterred by the moment, interviewers asked about Whitewater; to one, Dole replied that it cries out for the appointment of an independent counsel. I was stunned. I would have thought that even the press and my adversaries would take a time-out on the day of my mothers death. To his credit, a few years later Dole apologized to me. By then, I better understood what had happened. Washingtons narcotic of choice is power. It dulls the senses and clouds the judgment. Dole was not even close to being its worst abuser. I was touched by his apology.
That same day Al Gore went to Milwaukee to deliver a foreign-policy speech I had agreed to make, and I flew home. Dick and Mothers house was full of their friends, family, and the food Arkansas folks bring to ease common grieving. We all laughed and told stories about her. The next day Hillary and Chelsea arrived, as did some of Mothers other friends from out of state, including Barbra Streisand and Ralph Wilson, the owner of the Buffalo Bills, who had invited Mother to the Super Bowl the previous year when he learned she was a huge Bills fan.
No church was big enough to hold all Mothers friends and it was too cold to hold the funeral service at her preferred venue, the racetrack, so we scheduled it for the Convention Center. About three thousand people came, including Senator Pryor, Governor Tucker, and all my college roommates. But most of the attendees were simple working people whom Mother had met and befriended over the years. All the women from her birthday club were there, too. There were twelve members, each with a birthday in a different month. They celebrated them together over monthly lunches. After Mother died, as she requested, the other women picked a replacement; and they renamed their group the Virginia Clinton Kelley Birthday Club.
The Reverend John Miles presided over the service, referring to Mother as an American original. Virginia, he said, was like a rubber ball; the harder life put her down, the higher she bounced. Brother John reminded the crowd of Mothers automatic response to every problem: Thats no hill for a stepper.
The service featured the hymns she loved. We all sang Amazing Grace and Precious Lord, Take My Hand. Her friend Malvie Lee Giles, who once lost her voice completely, then got it back from God with an extra octave to spare, sang His Eye Is on the Sparrow, and Mothers favorite, A Closer Walk with Thee. Our Pentecostal friend Janice Sjostrand sang a powerful hymn Mother had heard at my inaugural church service, Holy Ground. When Barbra Streisand, who was sitting behind me, heard Janice, she touched my shoulder and shook her head in amazement. When the service was over, she asked, Who is that woman and what is that music? Its magnificent! Barbra was so inspired by Mothers funeral music that she made her own album of hymns and inspirational songs, including one written in Mothers memory, Leading with Your Heart.
After the funeral we drove Mother home to Hope. All along the way, people were standing by the road to show their respect. She was buried in the cemetery across the street from where her fathers store had been, in the plot that had long awaited her, beside her parents and my father. It was January 8, the birthday of her favorite man outside the family, Elvis Presley.
After a reception at the Sizzlin Steakhouse, we drove to the airport to fly back to Washington. There was no time to grieve; I had to go back to putting things together. As soon as I dropped Hillary and Chelsea off, I left for a long-planned trip to Europe to establish a process for opening NATOs door to the Central European nations in a way that wouldnt cause Yeltsin too many problems in Russia. I was determined to do everything I could to create a Europe that was united, free, democratic, and secure for the first time in history. I had to make sure NATO expansion didnt simply lead to a new division of Europe farther to the east.
In Brussels, after a speech in the city hall to a group of young Europeans, I received a special gift. Belgium was celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the death of my favorite Belgian, Adolphe Sax, inventor of the saxophone, and the mayor of Dinant, Saxs hometown, presented me with a beautiful new Selmer tenor sax made in Paris.
The next day the NATO leaders approved my Partnership for Peace proposal to increase our security cooperation with Europes new democracies until we could achieve the expansion of NATO itself.
On January 11, I was in Prague with Vclav Havel, twenty-four years to the week after my first trip there as a student. Havel, a small, soft-spoken man with dancing eyes and a biting wit, was a hero to the forces of freedom everywhere. He had been in prison for years and used the time to write eloquent and provocative books. When he was released, he led Czechoslovakia through a peaceful Velvet Revolution, then oversaw the orderly division of the country into two states. Now he was the president of the Czech Republic, eager to build a successful market economy and to claim the security of NATO membership. Havel was a good friend of our UN ambassador, Madeleine Albright, who was born in Czechoslovakia and delighted in every opportunity she had to speak with him in their native tongue.
Havel took me to one of the jazz clubs that had been hotbeds of support for his Velvet Revolution. After the group played a couple of tunes, he brought me up to meet the band and presented me with another new saxophone, this one made in Prague by a company that, in Communist times, had produced saxophones for the military bands throughout the Warsaw Pact nations. He invited me to play it with the band. We did Summertime and My Funny Valentine, with Havel enthusiastically joining in on the tambourine.
On the way to Moscow, I stopped briefly in Kiev to meet with Ukraines president, Leonid Kravchuk, to thank him for the agreement that he, Yeltsin, and I would sign the following Friday, committing Ukraine to eliminate 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles and 1,500 nuclear warheads targeted at the United States. Ukraine was a large country of sixty million people with great potential. Like Russia, it was wrestling with the question of exactly what kind of future it wanted. Kravchuk faced considerable opposition in parliament to getting rid of his nuclear weapons, and I wanted to support him.
Hillary met me in Moscow. She brought Chelsea, too, because we didnt want her to be alone right after Mothers death. Staying together in the guest quarters of the Kremlin and seeing Moscow in the dead of winter would be a good distraction for all of us. Yeltsin knew I was hurting because he also had recently lost his mother, whom he adored.
Whenever we had a chance we took to the streets, shopping for Russian artifacts and buying bread at a small bakery. I lit a candle for Mother at Kazan Cathedral, now fully restored from the ravages of Stalinism, and visited the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church in the hospital. On January 14, after an impressive welcoming ceremony in the Kremlins St. Georges Hall, a massive white room with high arches and columns with the names of more than two hundred years of Russias war heroes emblazoned in gold, Yeltsin and I signed the nuclear agreement with Ukranian president Kravchuk, and held talks about economic and security initiatives.
In the press conference afterward, Yeltsin expressed his appreciation for the American aid package and the one approved at the Tokyo G-7 meeting, for the commitment of $1 billion more in each of the next two years, and for our decision to reduce tariffs on five thousand Russian products. He gave a qualified endorsement of the Partnership for Peace, on the strength of my commitment to work out a special cooperative agreement between NATO and Russia. I was also pleased that we had agreed, as of May 30, not to target our nuclear missiles against each other or any other country, and that the United States would buy $12 billion worth of highly enriched uranium from Russia over the next twenty years, gradually removing it from any possibility of being used to make weapons.
I thought all these actions were good for both the United States and Russia, but not everyone agreed. Yeltsin was having some problems with his new parliament, especially with Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of a sizable bloc of militant nationalists who wanted to return Russia to imperial glory and were convinced I was trying to reduce its power and reach. To push back a bit, I repeated my mantra that the Russian people should define their greatness in terms relevant to the future, not the past.
After the press conference, I did a town hall meeting with young people at the Ostankino television station. They asked questions about all the current issues, but they also wanted to know whether American students could learn anything from Russia, how old I was when I first thought of becoming President, what advice I could give a young Russian who wanted to go into politics, and how I wanted to be remembered. The students made me hopeful about the future of Russia. They were intelligent, idealistic, and fiercely committed to democracy.
The trip was going well, advancing important American interests in building a safer, freer world, but you would never have known it back home, where the only thing the politicians and press wanted to talk about was Whitewater. I even got questions about it on my trip from the American press accompanying me. Even before I left, the Washington Post and the New York Times had joined the Republicans in demanding that Janet Reno appoint an independent counsel. The only new development in recent months was that David Hale, a Republican who had been indicted in 1993 for defrauding the Small Business Administration, had said I had asked him to make a loan to Susan McDougal for which she was ineligible. I had not done so.
The standard for appointing an independent counsel under both the old law, which had expired, and the new one being considered by Congress was credible evidence of wrongdoing. In its January 5 editorial calling for an independent counsel in Whitewater, the Washington Post explicitly acknowledged that there has been no credible charge in this case that either the President or Mrs. Clinton did anything wrong. Nevertheless, the Post said the public interest demanded an independent counsel, because Hillary and I had been partners in the Whitewater real estate deal (on which we lost money), before McDougal bought Madison Guaranty (from which we had never borrowed money). Even worse, we had apparently failed to take the full tax deduction for our losses. It was probably the first time in history when the flames of outrage against a politician were fanned because of money he lost, loans he didnt receive, and a tax deduction he didnt take. The Post said the Justice Department was headed by presidential appointees who couldnt be trusted to investigate me or to decide whether someone else should investigate me.
The independent counsel law was enacted in reaction to President Nixons firing of Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who had been appointed by Nixons attorney general and therefore was an executive branch employee subject to termination. Congress recognized both the need for independent investigations of alleged wrongdoing by the President and his major appointees and the danger of giving unlimited power to an unaccountable prosecutor with limitless resources. Thats why the law required credible evidence of wrongdoing. Now the press was saying the President should agree to an independent counsel without such evidence, whenever anyone with whom he had ever been associated was being investigated.
In the Reagan-Bush years, more than twenty people were convicted of felonies by independent counsels. After six years of investigations and a finding by Senator John Towers commission that President Reagan had authorized the illegal sales of arms to the Nicaraguan rebels, Iran-Contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh indicted Caspar Weinberger and five others, but President Bush pardoned them. The only independent counsel investigation into a Presidents activities before he took office involved President Carter, who was investigated for a disputed loan to a peanut warehouse he and his brother, Billy, owned. The special prosecutor the President requested finished his investigation in six months, exonerating the Carters.
By the time I got to Moscow, several Democratic senators and President Carter had joined the Republicans and the press in calling for an independent counsel, though they couldnt give a reason that approached credible evidence of wrongdoing. Most of the Democrats didnt know a thing about Whitewater; they were just anxious to show they didnt object to Democratic Presidents being investigated, and they didnt want to be on the other side of the Washington Post and the New York Times. They also probably thought that Janet Reno could be trusted to appoint a professional prosecutor who would deal with the problem promptly. Regardless, it was clear that we had to do something, in Lloyd Bentsens words, to lance the boil.
When I arrived in Moscow, I got on a conference call with my staff, David Kendall, and Hillary, who was still in Washington, to discuss what we should do. David Gergen, Bernie Nussbaum, and Kendall were against asking for an independent counsel, because there were no grounds for one, and if we got unlucky, an unscrupulous prosecutor could pursue an endless disruptive investigation. Moreover, it wouldnt have to last long to bankrupt us; I had the lowest net worth of any President in modern history. Nussbaum, a world-class lawyer who had worked with Hillary on the congressional Watergate inquiry, was adamantly against a special prosecutor. He called it an evil institution, because it gave unaccountable prosecutors the ability to do anything they wanted; Bernie said I owed it to the presidency, and to myself, to resist a special prosecutor with everything I had. Nussbaum also pointed out that the Washington Posts disdain for the Justice Departments inquiry was unfounded, since my records were being reviewed by a career prosecutor who had been nominated for a Justice Department position by President Bush.
Gergen agreed, but argued forcefully that I should turn over all our records to the Washington Post. So did Mark Gearan and George Stephanopoulos. David said Len Downie, the Posts executive editor, had achieved his spurs with Watergate and had convinced himself we were covering something up. The New York Times seemed to think so, too. Gergen thought the only way to defuse the pressure for an independent counsel was to produce the documents.
All the lawyersNussbaum, Kendall, and Bruce Lindseywere against releasing the records because, while we had agreed to give the Justice Department everything wed found, the records were incomplete and scattered, and we were still in the process of rounding them up. They said as soon as we couldnt answer a question or produce a document, the press would return to the drumbeat for an independent counsel. In the meantime, wed get lots of bad stories full of innuendo and speculation.
The rest of my staff, including George Stephanopoulos and Harold Ickes, who had come to work as deputy chief of staff in January, thought that because the Democrats were taking the path of least resistance, the special prosecutor was inevitable, and we should just go on and ask for it, so we could get back to the peoples business. I asked Hillary what she thought. She said that asking for the prosecutor would set a terrible precedent, basically changing the standard from requiring credible evidence of wrongdoing to giving in whenever a media frenzy could be stirred up, but that it had to be my decision. I could tell she was tired of fighting my staff.
I told everyone on the call that I wasnt worried about an investigation, because I hadnt done anything wrong and neither had Hillary, nor did I have any objections to releasing the records. After all, we had endured a lot of irresponsible Whitewater stories since the campaign. My instincts were to release the records and fight the prosecutor, but if the consensus was to do the reverse, I could live with it. Nussbaum was distraught, predicting that whoever was appointed would be frustrated when nothing was there, and would keep widening the investigation until he found something someone I knew had done wrong. He said if I felt I had to do more, we should just dump the records on the press and even offer to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Stephanopoulos thought that was a terrible idea because of all the publicity it would generate. He said Reno would appoint an independent counsel who would satisfy the press and the whole thing would be over in a few months. Bernie disagreed, saying that if Congress passed a new independent counsel law and I signed it, which I had promised to do, the judges on the Washington, D.C., Court of Appeals would appoint a new prosecutor and start all over again. George got angry, saying Bernie was paranoid and it would never happen. Bernie knew that Chief Justice Rehnquist would name the panel and it would be dominated by conservative Republicans. He laughed nervously at Georges outburst and said maybe the chances of a second prosecutor were only fifty-fifty.
After further discussion I asked to speak with just Hillary and David Kendall. I told them I thought we had to go along with the consensus of the nonlegal staff for a special prosecutor. After all, I had nothing to hide, and all the clamor was diverting the attention of Congress and the country from our larger agenda. The next day the White House asked Janet Reno to appoint a special prosecutor. Though I had said I could live with it, I almost didnt live through it.
It was the worst presidential decision I ever made, wrong on the facts, wrong on the law, wrong on the politics, wrong for the presidency and the Constitution. Perhaps I did it because I was completely exhausted and grieving over Mother; it took all the concentration I could muster just to do the job I had left her funeral to do. What I should have done is release the records, resist the prosecutor, give an extensive briefing to all the Democrats who wanted it, and ask for their support. Of course, it might not have made any difference. At the time I wasnt that worried about it, because I knew I hadnt broken any laws, and I still believed that the press wanted the truth.
Within a week Janet Reno appointed Robert Fiske, a Republican former prosecutor from New York, who would have completed his investigation in a timely way had he been left to do his job. Of course, Fiske was not allowed to finish, but Im getting ahead of myself. For now, agreeing to the special prosecutor was like taking aspirin for a cold; it brought temporary relief. Very temporary.
On the way home from Russia, after a brief stop in Belarus, I flew to Geneva, for my first meeting with President Assad of Syria. He was a ruthless but brilliant man who had once wiped out a whole village as a lesson to his opponents, and whose support of terrorist groups in the Middle East had isolated Syria from the United States. Assad rarely left Syria, and when he did it was almost always to come to Geneva to meet with foreign leaders. On our visit, I was impressed by his intelligence and his almost total recall of detailed events going back more than twenty years. Assad was famous for long meetingshe could go on for six or seven hours without taking a break. I, on the other hand, was tired and needed to drink coffee, tea, or water to stay awake. Fortunately, the meeting ran only a few hours. Our discussion produced the two things I wanted: Assads first explicit statement that he was willing to make peace and establish normal relations with Israel, and his commitment to withdraw all Syrian forces from Lebanon and respect its independence once a comprehensive Middle East peace was reached. I knew the success of the meeting resulted from more than personal chemistry. Assad had received a lot of economic support from the former Soviet Union; that was gone now, so he needed to reach out to the West. To do that, he had to stop supporting terrorism in the region, which would be easy to do if he made an agreement with Israel that succeeded in giving back to Syria the Golan............