W hen 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 couldnt 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 college-going 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 Indonesias 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 governments agreement to implement the reforms necessary to receive assistance from the International Monetary Fund.
On the thirteenth, trouble broke out in Iraq again as Saddams 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 Netanyahus 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 didnt feel well that day and certainly wasnt looking forward to my encounter with the Rutherford Institute lawyers. The presiding judge, Susan Webber Wright, had given Joness 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 Joness 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 judges confidentiality order. As it turned out, I didnt 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 Lewinskys name had shown up on the plaintiffs list of potential witnesses only in early December, and she had been given a subpoena to appear as a witness two weeks later. I didnt 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 wasnt 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 youll 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, Id 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 didnt 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 couldnt 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 good-bye. By then, she had received her subpoena in the Jones case. She said she didnt 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 didnt 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 didnt 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 Starrs 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 Starrs 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 Starrs 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 Starrs 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 didnt want to help Ken Starr criminalize my personal life, and I didnt want the American people to know Id 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 didnt 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 Israels obligation under the peace process, reminded him of the Israeli leaders 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.
By January 27, the day of the State of the Union address, the American people had been deluged with a week of coverage of Starrs inquiry, and I had spent a week dealing with it. Starr had already issued subpoenas to a number of White House staff people and for our records. I had asked Harold Ickes and Mickey Kantor to help deal with the controversy. The day before the speech, at the urging of Harold and Harry Thomason, who felt I had been too tentative in my public comments, I reluctantly appeared once more before the press to say I did not have sexual relations with Lewinsky.
On the morning of the speech, on NBCs Today show, Hillary said that she didnt believe the charges against me and that a vast right-wing conspiracy had been trying to destroy us since the 1992 campaign. Starr issued an indignant statement complaining that Hillary had questioned his motives. Though she was right about the nature of our opposition, seeing Hillary defend me made me even more ashamed about what I had done.
Hillarys difficult interview and my mixed reaction to it clearly exemplified the bind I had put myself in: As a husband, I had done something wrong that I needed to apologize and atone for; as President, I was in a legal and political struggle with forces who had abused the criminal and civil laws and severely damaged innocent people in their attempt to destroy my presidency and cripple my ability to serve.
Finally, after years of dry holes, I had given them something to work with. I had hurt the presidency and the people by my misconduct. That was no ones fault but my own. I didnt want to compound the error by letting the reactionaries prevail.
By 9 p.m., when I walked into the packed House chamber, the tension was palpable both there and in living rooms across America, where more people were watching my State of the Union address than since I delivered my first one. The big question was whether I would mention the controversy. I began with what was not in dispute. The country was in good shape, with fourteen million new jobs, rising incomes, the highest rate of home ownership ever, the fewest people on the welfare rolls in twenty-seven years, and the smallest federal government in thirty-five years. The 1993 economic plan had cut the deficit, projected to be $357 billion in 1998, by 90 percent, and the previous years balanced budget plan would get rid of it entirely.
Then I outlined my plan for the future. First, I proposed that before spending the coming surpluses on new programs or tax cuts, we should save Social Security for the baby boomers retirement. In education, I recommended funding to hire 100,000 new teachers and to cut class size to eighteen in the first three grades; a plan to help communities modernize or build five thousand schools; and assistance to help schools end the practice of social promotion, by providing funds for extra learning in after-school or summer-school programs. I reiterated my support for a Patients Bill of Rights, opening Medicare to Americans between the ages of fifty-five and sixty-five, expanding the Family and Medical Leave Act, and called for a large enough expansion in federal child-care assistance to provide support for one million more children.
On the security front, I asked for congressional support in combating an unholy axis of new threats from terrorists, international criminals, and drug traffickers; Senate approval of the expansion of NATO; and continued funding for our mission in Bosnia and our efforts to confront the hazards of chemical and biological weapons and the outlaw states, terrorists, and organized criminals seeking to acquire them.
The last section of my speech dealt with appeals to bring America together and look to the future: tripling the number of empowerment zones in poor communities; launching a new clean water initiative for our rivers, lakes, and coastal waters; providing $6 billion in tax cuts and research funds for the development of fuel-efficient cars, clean-energy homes, and renewable energy; financing the next generation Internet to transmit information up to a thousand times faster; and funding the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which, because of congressional hostility, didnt have the resources to handle sixty thousand backlogged cases alleging discrimination in the workplace. I also proposed the largest increase in history for the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute, and the National Science Foundation so that ours will be the generation that finally wins the war against cancer and begins a revolution in our fight against all deadly diseases.
I closed the speech thanking Hillary for leading our millennium campaign to preserve Americas treasures, including the tattered old Star Spangled Banner, which inspired Francis Scott Key to write our national anthem during the War of 1812.
There wasnt a word in the address about the scandal, and the biggest new idea had been to save Social Security first. I was afraid Congress would get into a bidding war for the coming surpluses and squander them on tax cuts and spending before we had dealt with the baby boomers retirement. Most Democrats agreed with me, and most Republicans didnt, though over the coming years we would hold a series of bipartisan forums around the country in which, despite everything else that was going on, we searched for common ground, arguing about how to provide for retirement security rather than whether to do so.
Two days after the speech, Judge Wright ordered that all evidence related to Monica Lewinsky be excluded from the Jones case because it was not essential to the core issues, making Starrs inquiry into my deposition even more questionable, since perjury requires a false statement about a material matter. On the last day of the month, ten days after the firestorm began, the Chicago Tribune published a poll showing that my job approval rating had risen to 72 percent. I was determined to show the American people that I was on the job and getting results for them.
On February 5 and 6, Tony and Cherie Blair came to the United States for a two-day state visit. They were a sight for sore eyes for both Hillary and me. They made us laugh, and Tony gave me strong support in public, emphasizing our common approach to economic and social problems and to foreign policy. We took them to Camp David for a dinner with Al and Tipper Gore, and held a state dinner at the White House with entertainment by Elton John and Stevie Wonder. After the event Hillary told me that Newt Gingrich, who had been seated at her table with Tony Blair, had said the charges against me were ludicrous, and meaningless even if true, and werent going anywhere.
At our press conference, after Tony said that I was not just his colleague but his friend, Mike Frisby, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, finally asked the question I had been waiting for. He wanted to know whether, given the pain and all the issues about my personal life, at what point do you consider that its just not worth it, and do you consider resigning the office? Never, I answered. I said I had tried to take the personal venom out of politics, but the harder I tried, the harder others have pulled in the other direction. Still, I would never walk away from the people of this country and the trust theyve placed in me, so Im just going to keep showing up for work.
In mid-month, as Tony Blair and I continued to build support around the world for launching air strikes on Iraq in response to the expulsion of the UN inspectors, Kofi Annan secured a last-minute agreement from Saddam Hussein to resume the inspections. It seemed that Saddam never moved except when forced to do so.
Besides plugging my new initiatives, I spent time working for the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill, which the Senate Republicans killed at the end of the month; swearing in a new surgeon general, Dr. David Satcher, the director of the Centers for Disease Control; touring tornado damage in central Florida; announcing the first grants to help communities strengthen their efforts to prevent violence against women; and raising funds to help Democrats in the coming election.
In late January and in February, several White House staffers were called before the grand jury. I felt terrible that they had been caught up in all this, especially Betty Currie, who had tried to befriend Monica Lewinsky and was now being punished for it. I also felt bad that Vernon Jordan had been caught up in the maelstrom. We had been close friends for so long, and time and again I had seen him help people who needed it. Now he was being targeted because of me. I knew he hadnt done anything wrong and hoped someday he would be able to forgive me for the mess I had gotten him into.
Starr also subpoenaed Sidney Blumenthal, a journalist and old friend of Hillarys and mine who had come to work in the White House in July 1997. According to the Washington Post, Starr was exploring whether Sids criticism of him amounted to an obstruction of justice. It was a chilling indication of how thin-skinned Starr was, and how willing to use the power of his office against anyone who criticized him. Starr also subpoenaed two private investigators who had been hired by the National Enquirer to run down a rumor that he had been having an affair with a woman in Little Rock. The rumor was false, apparently a case of mistaken identity, but again, it reflected a double standard. He was using FBI agents and private investigators to look into my life. When a tabloid looked at his, he went after them.
Starrs tactics were beginning to draw the attention of the press. Newsweek published a two-page chart, Conspiracy or Coincidence, which traced the connections of more than twenty conservative activists and organizations that had promoted and financed the scandals Starr was investigating. The Washington Post ran a story in which a number of former federal prosecutors expressed discomfort not just with Starrs new focus on my private conduct, but with the arsenal of weapons he has deployed to try to make his case against the president.
Starr was particularly criticized for forcing Monica Lewinskys mother to testify against her will. Federal guidelines, which Starr was supposed to follow, said that family members should ordinarily not be forced to testify unless they were part of the criminal activity being investigated, or there were overriding prosecutorial concerns. By early February, according to an NBC News poll, only 26 percent of the American people thought Starr was conducting an impartial inquiry.
The saga continued into March. My deposition in the Jones case was leaked, obviously by someone on the Jones side. Although the judge had repeatedly warned the Rutherford Institute lawyers not to leak it, no one was ever sanctioned. On the eighth, Jim McDougal died in a federal prison in Texas, a sad and ironic end to his long downward slide. According to Susan McDougal, Jim had changed his story to suit Starr and Hick Ewing because he desperately wanted to avoid dying in jail.
In mid-month, 60 Minutes ran an interview with a woman named Kathleen Willey, who claimed I had made an unwanted advance toward her while she was working in the White House. It wasnt true. We had evidence that cast doubt on her story, including the affidavit of her friend Julie Hiatt Steele, who said Willey had asked her to lie by saying she had told Steele about the alleged episode shortly after it happened, when in fact she hadnt.
Willeys husband had killed himself, leaving her responsible for more than $200,000 of outstanding debt. Within a week, news stories reported that after I called her to offer my condolences on her husbands death, she had told people I was coming to his funeral; this was after the alleged incident. Eventually we released about a dozen letters Willey had written to me, again after the alleged encounter, saying things like she was my number one fan and that she wanted to help me in any way that I can. After a report that she had sought $300,000 to tell her story to a tabloid or in a book, the story faded away.
I mention Willeys sad tale here because of what Starr did with it. First, in a highly unusual move, he gave her transactional immunitycomplete protection against any kind of criminal prosecutionprovided she told him the truth. When she was caught being untruthful about some embarrassing details involving another man, Starr just gave her immunity again. By contrast, when Julie Hiatt Steele, a registered Republican, refused to change her story and lie for Starr, he indicted her. Even though she wasnt convicted, it ruined her financially. Starrs office even sought to challenge the legality of her adoption of a baby from Romania.
On St. Patricks Day, I met with the leaders of all of the political parties in Northern Ireland that were participating in the political process, and had extended visits with Gerry Adams and David Trimble. Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern wanted to reach an agreement. My role was basically to keep reassuring and pushing all the parties into the framework George Mitchell was constructing. There were hard compromises still ahead, but I thought we were getting there.
A few days later, Hillary and I flew to Africa, far away from the clamor at home. Africa was a continent that America had too often ignored, and one that I believed would play a large role for good or ill in the twenty-first century. I was really glad Hillary was going with me; she had loved the trip she and Chelsea had made to Africa the previous year, and we needed the time away together.
The visit began in Ghana, where President Jerry Rawlings and his wife, Nana Konadu Agyemang, got us off to a rousing start with a ceremony in Independence Square; it was filled with more than half a million people. We were flanked on the stage by tribal kings draped in bright-colored native kente cloth and entertained by African rhythms played by several Ghanaians on by far the largest drum I had ever seen.
I liked Rawlings and respected the fact that after seizing power in a military coup, he was elected and reelected president, and was committed to relinquishing his office in 2000. Besides, we had an indirect family connection: when Chelsea was born, the doctor was assisted by a wonderful Ghanaian midwife who had come to Arkansas to continue her education. Hillary and I came to like Hagar Sam very much and were pleased to learn she had also helped to deliver the four Rawlings children.
On the twenty-fourth, we were in Uganda to meet with President Yoweri Museveni and his wife, Janet. Uganda had come a long way since the stifling dictatorship of Idi Amin. Just a few years earlier, it had had the highest AIDS rate in Africa. With a campaign called the big noise, the death rate had been cut in half through a focus on abstinence, education, marriage, and condoms.
The four of us went to two small villages, Mukono and Wanyange, to highlight the importance of education and of American-financed micro-credit loans. Uganda had tripled education funding in the previous five years and had made a real effort to educate girls as well as boys. The schoolchildren we visited in Mukono wore nice pink uniforms. They were obviously bright and interested, but their learning materials were inadequate; the map on the classroom wall was so old it still included the Soviet Union. In Wanyange, the village cook had expanded her operation and another woman had diversified her chicken-raising business to include rabbits with micro-credit loans funded by U.S. aid. We met a woman with a two-day-old baby. She let me hold the infant boy as the White House photographer took a picture of two guys named Bill Clinton.
The Secret Service didnt want me to go to Rwanda because of ongoing security problems, but I felt that I had to. As a concession to the security issue, I met at the Kigali airport with the leaders of the country and with survivors of the genocide. President Pasteur Bizimungu, a Hutu, and Vice President Paul Kagame, a Tutsi, were trying to put the country back together. Kagame was the nations most powerful political leader; he had decided that it would advance the reconciliation process to begin with a president from the majority Hutu tribe. I acknowledged that the United States and the international community had not acted quickly enough to stop the genocide or to prevent the refugee camps from becoming havens for the killers, and I offered to help the nation rebuild and to support the war crimes tribunal that would hold accountable the perpetrators of the genocide.
The survivors told me their stories. The last speaker was a dignified woman who said her family had been identified to the rampaging killers as Tutsis by Hutu neighbors whose children had played with hers for years. She was badly wounded by a machete and left for dead. She awoke in a pool of her own blood to find her husband and six children lying dead beside her. She told Hillary and me that she had cried out to God in despair that she had survived, then came to understand that my life must have been spared for a reason, and it could not be something as mean as vengeance. So I do what I can to help us start again. I was overwhelmed; that magnificent woman had made my problems seem pathetically small. She had deepened my resolve to do whatever I could to help Rwanda.
I began the first visit by any American President to South Africa in Cape Town, with a speech to the parliament in which I said I had come in part to help the American people see ............