W hile I was hard at work on foreign affairs, the new world of Whitewater was beginning to take shape at home. In March, Robert Fiske began his job in earnest by sending out subpoenas to several members of the White House staff, including Maggie Williams and Lisa Caputo, who worked for Hillary and were friends of Vince Fosters. Mack McLarty set up a Whitewater Response Team, led by Harold Ickes, to coordinate responses to questions from Fiske and from the press; to free the rest of the staff, and me, to do the public work we came to Washington to do; and to minimize conversations our staff might have about Whitewater among themselves or with Hillary or me. Any such conversations could only expose our young staffers to depositions, political attacks, and big legal bills. A lot of people had already acquired a vested interest in finding something wrong; if there was nothing illegal in our long-ago land deal, perhaps they could catch someone doing something wrong in the handling of it.
The system worked well enough for me. After all, I had learned how to lead parallel lives as a child: most of the time, I could shut out all the accusations and innuendo and go on with my work. I knew it would be harder to cope with for those who had never lived with the constant threat of arbitrary and destructive attacks, especially in an atmosphere in which there was a presumption of guilt attached to any charge. To be sure, there were some legal experts, like Sam Dash, who talked about how cooperative we were compared with the Reagan and Nixon administrations, because we didnt resist subpoenas and we turned all our records over to the Justice Department and then to Fiske. But the goalposts had been moved: unless Hillary and I could prove ourselves innocent of whatever charges any adversary could come up with, most of the questions would be asked, and the stories written, in a tone of intense suspicion; the underlying current was that we must have done something wrong.
For example, as our financial records found their way into the press, the New York Times reported that, starting with a $1,000 investment, Hillary had made $100,000 in the commodities market in 1979, with the help of Jim Blair. Blair was one of my closest friends; he did help Hillary and a number of his other friends in trading commodities, but she took her own risks, paid more than $18,000 in brokerage fees, and, following her own instincts, got out of the market before it dropped. Leo Melamed, the Republican former chairman of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, on which agricultural commodities are traded, reviewed all of Hillarys trades and said there was nothing wrong with them. It didnt matter. For years, the critics would refer to Hillarys commodity profit as prima facie evidence of corruption.
The presumption of wrongdoing was reflected in a Newsweek story saying Hillary did not put up her own money for her sweet deal, with an analysis that it said was based on the expert opinion of Professor Marvin Chirelstein of Columbia Law School, one of the nations leading authorities on corporate law and contracts, who had taught me at Yale and who had been asked by our lawyer to review our tax returns for 197879, the period of the Whitewater investment. Chirelstein disputed the Newsweek story, saying, I never said anything like that, and that he was outraged and humiliated.
About the same time, Time magazine ran a cover photograph purporting to show George Stephanopoulos peering over my shoulder as I sat at my desk fretting over Whitewater. In fact, the photo captured an earlier routine scheduling meeting at which several people were present. At least two others were in the original picture. Time simply cropped them out.
In April, Hillary held a press conference to answer questions about her commodity trades and Whitewater. She did a fine job and I was proud of her. She even got a laugh from the press corps when she acknowledged that her belief in a zone of privacy might have made her less responsive to press questions about her past personal dealings than she should have been, but that after resisting for a long time, Ive been rezoned.
The presumption of guilt imposed on us was extended to others. For example, Roger Altman and Bernie Nussbaum were both heavily criticized for discussing criminal referrals issued against Madison Guaranty by the Resolution Trust Corporation, because the RTC was a part of the Treasury Department and Altman was overseeing it temporarily. Presumably, the critics thought Nussbaum could have been trying to influence the RTC proceedings. In fact, the discussions were a result of the need to answer press questions arising out of leaks about the Madison investigation, and they had been approved by the Treasury Departments ethics counsel.
Edwin Yoder, an old-fashioned progressive columnist, said Washington was being overtaken by ethical cleansers. In a column on the Nussbaum-Altman meeting, he said:
I wish someone would begin by explaining to me why it is so very wicked for White House staff to want information from elsewhere within the executive branch about charges and rumors concerning the president. . . .
Robert Fiske found the contacts between the White House and the Treasury Department to be legal, but that didnt stop the smearing of Nussbaum and Altman. Back then, all our political appointees needed to be read their Miranda warnings three times a day. Bernie Nussbaum resigned in early March; he never got over my foolish decision to ask for an independent counsel, and he didnt want to be a source of further problems. Altman would leave government service a few months later. They were both able, honest public servants.
In March, Roger Ailes, a longtime Republican operative who had become president of CNBC, accused the administration of a cover-up with regard to Whitewater that includes . . . land fraud, illegal contributions, abuse of power . . . suicide cover-uppossible murder. So much for the credible evidence of wrongdoing standard.
William Safire, the New York Times columnist who had been a speechwriter for Nixon and Agnew, and who seemed determined to prove that all their successors were just as bad as they were, was especially avid in his unsupported assertions that Vinces death was linked to illegal conduct by Hillary and me. Of course, Vinces suicide note had said exactly the reverse, that we had done nothing wrong, but that didnt prevent Safire from speculating that Vince had improperly kept records damaging to us in his office.
We now know that a lot of the so-called information that fueled the damaging but erroneous stories was fed to the press by David Hale and the right-wingers who adopted him for their own purposes. In 1993, Hale, the Republican municipal judge in Little Rock, was charged with defrauding the Small Business Administration of $900,000 in federal funds that were supposed to have been used to make loans to minority businesses through his company, Capital Management Services (a later GAO audit indicated he had defrauded the SBA of $3.4 million). Instead, he gave the money to himself through a series of dummy corporations. Hale discussed his plight with Justice Jim Johnson, the old Arkansas racist who had run against Win Rockefeller for governor in 1966 and against Senator Fulbright in 1968. Johnson took Hale under his wing, and in August put him in contact with a conservative group called Citizens United, whose principals were Floyd Brown and David Bossie. Brown had produced the infamous Willie Horton ads against Mike Dukakis in 1988. Bossie had helped him write a book for the 1992 campaign entitled Slick Willie: Why America Cannot Trust Bill Clinton, in which the authors gave special thanks to Justice Jim Johnson.
Hale claimed that I had pressed him to lend $300,000 from Capital Management to a company owned by Susan McDougal, for the purpose of giving it out to leading Arkansas Democrats. In return, McDougal would lend Hale more than $800,000 from Madison Guaranty, enabling him to get another million dollars from the Small Business Administration. It was an absurd and untrue story, but Brown and Bossie peddled it hard. Apparently, Sheffield Nelson also helped, by pushing it to his contact at the New York Times, Jeff Gerth.
By March 1994, the media was wringing its hands about some documents shredded by the Rose firm; one of the boxes that held the papers had Vince Fosters initials on it. The firm explained that the shredding involved material unrelated to Whitewater and was a normal procedure involving papers that were no longer needed. No one in our White House knew about the routine destruction of unneeded records unrelated to Whitewater at the Rose firm. Moreover, we had nothing to cover up, and there still wasnt a bit of evidence to indicate that we did.
It got so bad that even the highly respected journalist David Broder referred to Bernie Nussbaum as unfortunate for allegedly tolerating arrogance and abuse of power that led to the all-too-familiar wordsinvestigation, subpoena, grand jury, resignation that had echoed through Washington again this past week. Broder even compared the war rooms that managed our campaigns for the economic plan and NAFTA to Nixons enemies list.
Nussbaum was unfortunate, all right; there would have been no investigation, subpoenas, or grand jury if I had listened to him and refused to give in to the demands for an independent counsel to clear the air. Bernies real offense was that he thought I should abide by the rule of law and accepted standards of propriety, rather than the constantly shifting standards of the Whitewater media, which were designed to produce the very results they professed to deplore. Nussbaums successor, longtime Washington attorney Lloyd Cutler, had a justifiably good reputation in the Washington establishment. In the coming months, his presence and advice would help a great deal, but he couldnt turn the Whitewater tide.
Rush Limbaugh was having a field day on his show, wallowing in the Whitewater mud. He claimed that Vince had been murdered in an apartment Hillary owned, and that his body had been moved to Fort Marcy Park. I could not imagine how that made Vinces wife and kids feel. Later, Limbaugh falsely charged that journalists and others working on or involved in Whitewatergate have been beaten and harassed in Little Rock. Some have died.
Not to be outdone by Limbaugh, former Republican congressman Bill Dannemeyer called for congressional hearings on the frightening number of people connected to me who had died under other than natural circumstances. Dannemeyers grisly list included my campaign finance co-chairman, Vic Raiser, and his son, who had died tragically in a plane crash on a trip to Alaska in 1992, and Paul Tully, the political director of the Democratic Party who had died of a heart attack while working on the campaign in Little Rock. I had delivered eulogies at both funerals, and later appointed Vics widow, Molly, as chief of protocol.
Jerry Falwell outdid Dannemeyer by releasing Circle of Power, a video about countless people who mysteriously died in Arkansas; the film implied that I was somehow responsible. Then came Falwells sequel, The Clinton Chronicles, which he promoted on his television show, The Old Time Gospel Hour. The video featured Dannemeyer and Justice Jim Johnson, and accused me of being involved with cocaine smuggling, having witnesses killed, and arranging the murders of a private investigator and the wife of a state trooper. A lot of the witnesses were paid for their testimonials, and Falwell sold a great many videos.
As Whitewater unfolded, I tried to keep some perspective, and to remember that not everyone was caught up in the hysteria. For example, USA Today ran a fair story on Whitewater that included interviews with Jim McDougal, who said Hillary and I didnt do anything wrong, and Chris Wade, the real estate agent in north Arkansas who supervised the Whitewater land, who also said we were telling the truth about our limited involvement with the property.
I could understand why right-wingers like Rush Limbaugh, Bill Dannemeyer, Jerry Falwell, and a paper like the Washington Times would say such things. The Washington Times was avowedly right-wing, financed by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, and edited by Wes Pruden Jr., whose father, the Reverend Wesley Pruden, had been chaplain of the White Citizens Council in Arkansas and an ally of Justice Jim Johnsons in their lost crusade against civil rights for blacks. What I couldnt believe was that the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others in the media I had always respected and trusted had been sucker punched by the likes of Floyd Brown, David Bossie, David Hale, and Jim Johnson.
Around this time I hosted a dinner at the White House to observe Black History Month. Among the attendees were my old law school professor Burke Marshall and his friend Nicholas Katzenbach, who had done so much to advance civil rights in the Kennedy Justice Department. Nick came up to me and told me that he was on the board of the Washington Post and that he was ashamed of the papers coverage of Whitewater and the terrible damage that had been done to me and the presidency over charges that didnt amount to a hill of beans: What is this about? he asked. It sure isnt about the public interest.
Whatever it was about, it was working. A poll in March said that half the people thought Hillary and I were lying about Whitewater, and a third of them thought we had done something illegal. I have to confess that Whitewater, especially the attacks on Hillary, took a bigger toll on me than I thought it would. The charges were baseless and unsupported by any reliable evidence. I had other problems, but except for occasionally being hardheaded, Hillary was above reproach. It killed me to see her hurt by one false charge after another, all the more so because I had made things worse by giving in to the nave notion that an independent counsel would clear the air. I had to work hard to keep my anger in check, and I didnt always succeed. The cabinet and staff seemed to understand and tolerate my occasional flare-ups, and Al Gore helped me get through them. Though I kept working hard and continued to love my job, my normally sunny disposition and innate optimism would be put to one severe test after another.
It helped to laugh about it. Every spring there are three press dinners, hosted by the Gridiron Club, the White House correspondents, and the radio and television correspondents. They give the press an opportunity to poke fun at the President and other politicians, and the President gets a chance to reply. I looked forward to these occasions because they allowed all of us to let our guards down a little, and because they reminded me that the press was not a monolith and was made up mostly of good people trying to be fair. Also, as Proverbs says, A happy heart doeth good like medicine, but a broken spirit drieth the bones.
I was in pretty good spirits on April 12 at the Radio and Television Correspondents dinner, and I got off some good lines, like I really am delighted to be here. If you believe that Ive got some land in northwest Arkansas Id like to show you; Some say my relations with the press have been marked by self-pity. I like to think of it as the outer limits of my empathy. I feel my pain; Its three days before April fifteenth, and most of you have to spend more time on my taxes than your own; and I still believe in a place called Help!
The work of what Hillary would later call the vast right-wing conspiracy has been chronicled in great detail by Sidney Blumenthal in The Clinton Wars and by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons in The Hunting of the President. As far as I know, none of their factual assertions have been refuted. When those books were published, the people in the mainstream media who had been part of the Whitewater mania ignored their charges, dismissed the authors as being too sympathetic to Hillary and me, or blamed us for the way we handled the Whitewater problem and for complaining. Im sure we could have handled it better, but so could they.
In the early days of Whitewater, one of my friends was forced to resign his government post because of something he had done wrong before he came to Washington. The Rose Law Firm filed a complaint against Webb Hubbell with the Arkansas Bar Association for allegedly overcharging his clients and padding his expenses. Webb resigned from the Justice Department, but assured Hillary there was nothing to the charges, saying that the whole problem arose because his wealthy but irascible father-in-law, Seth Ward, had refused to pay the Rose firm for the costs of a patent infringement case they had lost. It seemed plausible, but it wasnt true.
It turned out that Webb had overcharged his clients, and in so doing, had injured the Rose firm and reduced the income of all his partners, including Hillary. If his case had played out normally, he probably would have reached an agreement with the law firm to repay it for the cost of reimbursing its clients and would have lost his license for a year or two. The bar association might or might not have referred him to the state prosecuting attorney; if it had, Hubbell probably would have been able to avoid going to prison by reimbursing the firm. Instead, Webb was caught up in the independent counsels net.
When the facts first came out, I was stunned. Webb and I had been friends and golfing partners for years, and I thought I knew him well. I still think hes a good man who made a bad mistake, one he had to pay too high a price for, because he refused to become a pawn in Starrs game.
While all this was going on, I stayed on the other track of my parallel lives, the one I came to Washington to pursue. In March, I devoted considerable time to pushing two bills that I thought would help workers without college degrees. Most people could no longer keep one job or even stay with one employer for their entire working lives, and the churning job market treated them in markedly different ways. Our 6.5 percent unemployment rate was misleading; it was 3.5 percent for college graduates, more than 5 percent for those with two years of college, over 7 percent for high school graduates, and more than 11 percent for high school dropouts. At events in Nashua and Keene, New Hampshire, I said I wanted to convert the program of unemployment benefits into a reemployment system with a broader range of better-designed training programs. And I wanted Congress to approve a school-to-work program, to provide one or two years of high-quality training for young people who didnt want to get a four-year college degree. By the end of the month, I was able to sign the Goals 2000 bill. Finally, we had a congressional commitment to meet the national education goals I had worked on back in 1989, to measure students progress toward them, and to encourage local school districts to adopt the most promising reforms. It was a good day for Secretary Dick Riley.
On March 18, Presidents Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia and Franjo Tudjman of Croatia were at the White House to sign an agreement negotiated with the help of my special envoy, Charles Redman, that established a federation in the areas of Bosnia in which their populations were in a majority, and set up a process to move toward a confederation with Croatia. The fighting between Muslims and Croatians had not been as severe as that in which both sides had engaged with the Bosnian Serbs, but the agreement was still an important step toward peace.
The last days of March marked the beginning of a serious crisis with North Korea. After agreeing in February to let inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) check their declared nuclear sites on March 15, North Korea blocked them from completing their work. The reactor they were studying operated on fuel rods. Once the rods had been exhausted for their original purpose, the spent fuel could be reprocessed into plutonium in sufficient quantities to make nuclear weapons. North Korea also was planning to build two larger reactors, which would have produced many more spent fuel rods. The rods were a dangerous asset in the hands of the most isolated country in the world, a poor one that could not even feed its own people and might feel the temptation to sell the plutonium to the wrong buyer. Within a week I had decided to send Patriot missiles to South Korea and to ask the UN to impose economic sanctions against North Korea. As Bill Perry told a group of editors and reporters on March 30, I was determined to stop North Korea from developing a nuclear arsenal, even at the risk of war. In order to make absolutely certain that the North Koreans knew we were serious, Perry continued the tough talk over the next three days, even saying that we would not rule out a preemptive military strike.
Meanwhile, Warren Christopher made sure our message had the right balance. The State Department said we preferred a peaceful solution, and our ambassador to South Korea, Jim Laney, described our position as one of watchfulness, firmness, and patience. I believed that if North Korea really understood our position, as well as the economic and political benefits it could realize by abandoning its nuclear program in favor of cooperation with its neighbors and the United States, we could work it out. If we didnt, Whitewater would soon look like the sideshow it was.
On March 26, I was in Dallas for a happy weekend off, to serve as best man in my brothers wedding to Molly Martin, a beautiful woman hed met when, after spending a few years in Nashville, hed moved to Los Angeles in the hope of reviving his singing career. I was really happy for Roger.
On the day after the wedding, we all went to see the Arkansas Razorbacks defeat the University of Michigan in the NCAA Basketball Tournament quarterfinals. That week Sports Illustrated had me on the cover in a Razorback jogging suit; the article inside included a picture of me palming a basketball. After the kind of coverage Id been getting, the piece was manna from heaven. A week later I was in the arena in Charlotte, North Carolina, when Arkansas won the national championship, defeating Duke 7672.
On April 6, Justice Harry Blackmun announced his retirement from the Supreme Court. Hillary and I had become friends of Justice Blackmun and his wife, Dotty, through Renaissance Weekend. He was a fine man, an excellent justice, and a sorely needed moderate voice on the Rehnquist Court. I knew I owed the country a worthy replacement. My first choice was Senator George Mitchell, who had announced his retirement from the Senate a month earlier. He was a good majority leader, he had been loyal and extremely helpful to me, and it was far from certain that we could hold on to his seat in the November election. I didnt want him to leave the Senate but was excited by the prospect of appointing George to the Supreme Court. He had been a federal judge before coming to the Senate, and would be a big personality on the Court, someone who could move votes and whose voice would be heard, even in dissent. For the second time in five weeks, Mitchell turned me down. He said that if he were to leave the Senate at this time, whatever chance we had to pass health care would evaporate, hurting the American people, the Democrats up for reelection, and my presidency.
I quickly settled on two other prospects: Judge Stephen Breyer, who had already been vetted; and Judge Richard Arnold, chief judge of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which sits in St. Louis and includes Arkansas within its jurisdiction. Arnold was a former aide to Dale Bumpers who came from a long line of distinguished Arkansas lawyers. He was probably the most brilliant man on the federal bench. He graduated at the top of his class at Yale and at Harvard Law School, and had learned Latin and Greek, in part so that he could read early biblical texts. I probably would have appointed him, except for the fact that he had been treated for cancer and his prognosis was not clear. My Republican predecessors had filled the federal courts with young conservatives who would be around a long time, and I didnt want to risk giving them another position. In May, I made the decision to nominate Judge Breyer. He was equally qualified, and I had been impressed with him in our earlier interview after Justice White resigned. Breyer would be confirmed easily. Richard Arnold, Im happy to say, is still serving on the Eighth Circuit and still plays an occasional round of golf with me.
Early in April, NATO bombed in Bosnia again, this time to stop the Serbs siege of Gorazde. On the same day, mass violence raged in Rwanda. A plane crash killing the Rwandan president and the president of Burundi sparked the beginning of a horrendous slaughter inflicted by leaders of the majority Hutu on the Tutsis and their Hutu sympathizers. The Tutsis constituted only 15 percent of the population but were thought to have disproportionate economic and political power. I ordered the evacuation of all Americans and sent troops to guarantee their safety. Within one hundred days, more than 800,000 people in a country of only 8 million would be murdered, most of them with machetes. We were so preoccupied with Bosnia, with the memory of Somalia just six months old, and with opposition in Congress to military deployments in faraway places not vital to our national interests that neither I nor anyone on my foreign policy team adequately focused on sending troops to stop the slaughter. With a few thousand troops and help from our allies, even making allowances for the time it would have taken to deploy them, we could have saved lives. The failure to try to stop Rwandas tragedies became one of the greatest regrets of my presidency.
In my second term, and after I left office, I did what I could to help the Rwandans put their country and their lives back together. Today, at the invitation of President Paul Kagame, Rwanda is one of the countries in which my foundation is working to stem the tide of AIDS.
On April 22, Richard Nixon died, one month and a day after writing a remarkable seven-page letter to me about his recent trip to Russia, Ukraine, Germany, and England. Nixon said I had earned the respect of the leaders he visited and could not let Whitewater or any other domestic issue divert attention from our major foreign policy prioritythe survival of political and economic freedom in Russia. He was worried about Yeltsins political position and the rise of anti-Americanism in the Duma, and he urged me to keep my close relationship with Yeltsin, but also to reach out to other democrats into Russia; to improve the design and administration of our foreign aid program; and to put a leading businessman in charge of getting more private investment into Russia. Nixon said the ultra-nationalist Zhirinovsky should be exposed for the fraud he is, rather than suppressed, and that we should seek to keep the bad guysZhirinovsky, Rutskoi, and the Communistsdivided, and to try to get the good guysChernomyrdin, Yavlinski, Shahrai, Travkinto coalesce if possible in a united front for responsible reform. Finally, Nixon said I should not spread directed aid dollars all over the former Soviet Union, but concentrate our resources beyond Russia on Ukraine: It is indispensable. The letter was a tour de force, Nixon at his best in the eighth decade of his life.
All the living former Presidents came to President Nixons funeral on the grounds of his presidential library and birthplace. I was somewhat surprised when his family asked me to speak, along with Bob Dole, Henry Kissinger, and California governor Pete Wilson, who as a young man had worked for Nixon. In my remarks, I expressed appreciation for his wise counsel, especially with regard to Russia, and I remarked on his continuing vigorous and clearheaded interest in America and the world, mentioning his call and letter to me a month before his death. I referred to Watergate only by indirection, with a plea for reconciliation: Today is a day for his family, his friends, and his nation to remember President Nixons life in totality . . . may the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to an end. Some of my partys Nixon-haters didnt like what I said. Nixon had done a lot more than Watergate with which I disagreedthe enemies list, the prolongation of the Vietnam War and the expanded bombing, the Red-baiting of his opponents for the House and Senate in California. But he had also opened the door to China, signed bills establishing the Environmental Protection Agency, the Legal Services Corporation, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and had supported affirmative action. Compared with the Republicans who took over the party in the 1980s and 1990s, President Nixon was a wild-eyed liberal.
On the day after the funeral, I called in to the Larry King show because he was interviewing Dick Kelley and James Morgan about Mothers book, Leading with My Heart, which was just coming out. I told Larry that when I got back from the foreign trip I had taken after her funeral, I found myself halfway to the phone in our kitchen before I realized I couldnt call her on Sunday night anymore. It would be months before the urge to make that call stopped coming over me.
On April 29, with virtually the entire cabinet in attendance, I hosted Native American and Native Alaskan tribal leaders on the South Lawn, apparently bringing them to the White House for the first time since the 1820s. Some of them were so wealthy from Indian gaming that they flew to Washington in their own planes. Others, who lived on isolated reservations, were so poor they had to pass the hat among their tribes to collect enough money for a plane ti............