O n Saturday morning, August 15, with the grand jury testimony looming and after a miserable, sleepless night, I woke up Hillary and told her the truth about what had happened between me and Monica Lewinsky. She looked at me as if I had punched her in the gut, almost as angry at me for lying to her in January as for what I had done. All I could do was tell her that I was sorry, and that I had felt I couldnt tell anyone, even her, what had happened. I told her that I loved her and I didnt want to hurt her or Chelsea, that I was ashamed of what I had done, and that I had kept everything to myself in an effort to avoid hurting my family and undermining the presidency. And after all the lies and abuse we had endured from the start of my presidency, I didnt want to be run out of office in the flood tide that followed my deposition in January. I still didnt fully understand why I had done something so wrong and stupid; that understanding would come slowly, in the months of working on our relationship that lay ahead.
I had to talk to Chelsea, too. In some ways, that was even harder. Sooner or later, every child learns that her parents arent perfect, but this went far beyond the normal. I had always believed that I had been a good father. Chelseas high school years and her freshman year in college had already been clouded by four years of intensely personal attacks on her parents. Now Chelsea had to learn that her father not only had done something terribly wrong, but had not told her or her mother the truth about it. I was afraid that I would lose not only my marriage, but my daughters love and respect as well.
The rest of that awful day was dominated by another terrorist act. In Omagh, Northern Ireland, a breakaway faction of the IRA that did not support the Good Friday accord murdered twenty-eight people in a crowded shopping section of the city with a car bomb. All the parties to the peace process, including Sinn Fein, denounced the bombing. I issued a statement condemning the butchery, extending my sympathy to the victims families, and urging the parties of peace to redouble their efforts. The outlaw group, which called itself the Real IRA, had about two hundred members and supporters, enough to cause real trouble, but not enough to disrupt the peace process: the Omagh bombing showed the utter insanity of going back to the old ways.
On Monday, after spending what time I could preparing, I went downstairs to the Map Room for four hours of testimony. Starr had agreed not to bring me down to the courthouse, probably because of the adverse reaction he got when he made Hillary do it. However, he insisted on videotaping my testimony, allegedly because one of the twenty-four grand jurors couldnt attend the session. David Kendall said the grand jury was welcome to come to the White House if Starr would not videotape my secret testimony. He refused; I suspected that he wanted to send the videotape to Congress, where it could be released without getting him into more hot water.
The grand jury was watching the proceedings on closed-circuit television back at the courthouse while Starr and his interrogators did their best to turn the videotape into a pornographic home movie, asking me questions designed to humiliate me and to so disgust the Congress and the American people that they would demand my resignation, after which he might be able to indict me. Samuel Johnson once said that nothing concentrates the mind as much as the prospect of ones own destruction. Moreover, I believed that a lot more was at stake than what might happen to me.
After the preliminaries, I asked to make a brief statement. I admitted that on certain occasions in 1996 and once in 1997 I engaged in wrongful conduct that included inappropriate intimate contact with Monica Lewinsky; that the conduct, while morally wrong, did not constitute sexual relations as I understood the definition of the term that Judge Wright accepted at the request of the Jones lawyers; that I took full responsibility for my actions; and that I would answer to the best of my ability all the OICs questions relating to the legality of my actions, but would not say more about the specifics of what had happened.
The principal OIC interrogator then took me through a long list of questions dealing with the definition of sexual relations that Judge Wright had imposed. I acknowledged that I had not been trying to be helpful to the Jones lawyers because they, like the OIC, had engaged in repeated unlawful leaks, and since they knew by then that their case had no merit, I believed that their objective in the deposition was to elicit damaging new information from me for the purpose of leaking it. I said that of course I didnt know that by the time I testified Starrs office had already become heavily involved.
Now Starrs lawyers were trying to capitalize on the setup by getting me on videotape discussing things in graphic detail that no one should ever have to talk about publicly.
When the OIC lawyer continued to complain about my deposition answers on the sex questions, I reminded him that both my lawyer and I had invited Joness attorneys to ask specific follow-up questions, and that they declined to do so. I said it was now clear to me that they didnt do so because they were no longer trying to get a damaging admission that they could leak to the press. Instead, they were working for Starr. They wanted the deposition to lay the basis for forcing my resignation, or impeachment, or perhaps even an indictment. So they didnt ask follow-up questions because they were afraid I would give them a truthful answer. . . . They were trying to set me up and trick me. And now you seem to be complaining that they didnt do a good enough job. I confessed that I deplored what the Rutherford Institute lawyers had done in Joness namethe tormenting of innocent people, the illegal leaking, the pursuit of a bogus, politically motivated suitbut I was determined to walk through the minefield of this deposition without violating the law, and I believe I did.
I did acknowledge that I had misled everyone who asked about the story after it broke. And I said over and over again that I never asked anyone to lie. When the agreed-upon four hours had expired, I had been asked many questions six or seven times, as the lawyers tried hard to turn my interrogation into admissions that were humiliating and incriminating. Thats what the, to date, whole four-year $40 million investigation had come down to: parsing the definition of sex.
I finished the testimony at about six-thirty, three and a half hours before I was scheduled to address the nation. I was visibly upset when I went up to the solarium to see friends and staff who had gathered to discuss what had just happened, including White House counsel Chuck Ruff, David Kendall, Mickey Kantor, Rahm Emanuel, James Carville, Paul Begala, and Harry and Linda Thomason. Chelsea was there, too, and to my relief, at about eight, Hillary joined in.
We had a discussion about what I should say. Everyone knew I had to admit that I had made an awful mistake and had tried to hide it. The question was whether I should also take a shot at Starrs investigation and say it was time to end it. The virtually unanimous opinion was that I should not. Most people already knew that Starr was out of control; they needed to hear my admission of wrongdoing and witness my remorse. Some of my friends had given what they thought was strategic advice; others were genuinely appalled by what I had done. Only Hillary refused to express an opinion, instead encouraging everyone to leave me alone to write my statement.
At ten oclock I told the American people about my testimony, said I was solely and completely responsible for my personal failure, and admitted misleading everyone, even my wife. I said I was trying to protect myself and my family from intrusive questions in a politically inspired lawsuit that had been dismissed. I also said that Starrs investigation had gone on too long, cost too much, and hurt too many people, and that two years earlier, another investigation, a truly independent one, had found no wrongdoing by Hillary or me in Whitewater. Finally, I committed to doing my best to repair my family life, and I hoped we could repair the fabric of our nations life by stopping the pursuit of personal destruction and prying into private lives, and moving on. I believed every word I said, but my anger hadnt worn off enough for me to be as contrite as I should have been.
The next day we left for Marthas Vineyard on our annual vacation. Usually I counted the days until we could get away for some family time; this year, though I knew we needed it, I wished that I was working around the clock instead. As we walked out to the South Lawn to get on the helicopter, with Chelsea between Hillary and me and Buddy walking beside me, photographers took pictures that revealed the pain I had caused. When there were no cameras around, my wife and daughter were barely speaking to me.
I spent the first couple of days alternating between begging for forgiveness and planning the strikes on al Qaeda. At night Hillary would go up to bed and I slept on the couch.
On my birthday General Don Kerrick, Sandy Bergers staffer, flew to Marthas Vineyard to go over the targets recommended by the CIA and the Joint Chiefsthe al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and two targets in Sudan, a tannery in which bin Laden had a financial interest and a chemical plant the CIA believed was being used to produce or store a chemical used in the production of VX nerve gas. I took the tannery off the list because it had no military value to al Qaeda and I wanted to minimize civilian casualties. The hit on the camps would be timed to coincide with the meeting the intelligence indicated bin Laden and his top people would be having.
At 3 a.m. I gave Sandy Berger the final order to proceed, and U.S. Navy destroyers in the northern Arabian Sea launched cruise missiles at the targets in Afghanistan, while missiles were fired at the Sudanese chemical plant from ships in the Red Sea. Most of the missiles hit the targets, but bin Laden was not in the camp where the CIA thought he would be when the missiles hit it. Some reports said he had left the camp only a couple of hours earlier, but we never knew for sure. Several people associated with al Qaeda were killed, as were some Pakistani officers who were reported to be there to train Kashmiri terrorists. The Sudanese chemical plant was destroyed.
After announcing the attacks in Marthas Vineyard, I flew back to Washington to speak to the American people for the second time in four days, telling them I had ordered the strikes because al Qaeda was responsible for the embassy bombings, and bin Laden was perhaps the preeminent organizer and financier of international terrorism in the world today, a man who had vowed to wage a terrorist war on America with no distinction between military personnel and civilians. I said that our attacks were not aimed against Islam but against fanatics and killers, and that we had been fighting against them on several fronts for years and would continue to do so, because this will be a long, ongoing struggle.
Around the time I spoke of the long struggle, I signed the first of a series of orders to prepare for it by using all the tools available. Executive Order 13099 imposed economic sanctions on bin Laden and al Qaeda. Later the sanctions were extended to the Taliban as well. To date, we had not been effective in disrupting terrorists financial networks. The executive order invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which we had earlier used successfully against the Cali drug cartel in Colombia.
I had also asked General Shelton and Dick Clarke to develop some options for dropping commando forces into Afghanistan. I thought that if we took out a couple of al Qaedas training operations it would show them how serious we were, even if we didnt get bin Laden or his top lieutenants. It was clear to me that the senior military didnt want to do this, perhaps because of Somalia, perhaps because they would have to send in the Special Forces without knowing for certain where bin Laden was, or whether we could get our troops back out to safety. At any rate, I continued to keep the option alive.
I also signed several Memoranda of Notification (MONs) authorizing the CIA to use lethal force to apprehend bin Laden. The CIA had been authorized to conduct its own snatch operation against bin Laden the previous spring, months before the embassy bombings, but it lacked the paramilitary capability to do the job. Instead, it contracted with members of local Afghan tribes to get bin Laden. When field agents or the Afghan tribals were apparently uncertain of whether they had to try to capture bin Laden before they used deadly force, I made it clear that they did not. Within a few months I had extended the lethal force authorization by expanding the list of targeted bin Laden associates and the circumstances under which they could be attacked.
By and large, the response of the congressional leaders of both parties to the missile strikes was positive, in large part because they had been well briefed and Secretary Cohen had assured his fellow Republicans that the attack and its timing were justified. Speaker Gingrich said, The United States did exactly the right thing today. Senator Lott said the attacks were appropriate and just. Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt, and all the Democrats were supportive. Soon I was heartened by the arrest of Mohamed Rashed, an al Qaeda operative who was a suspect in the Kenyan embassy bombing.
Some people criticized me for hitting the chemical plant, which the Sudanese government insisted had nothing to do with the production or storage of dangerous chemicals. I still believe we did the right thing there. The CIA had soil samples taken at the plant site that contained the chemical used to produce VX. In a subsequent terrorist trial in New York City, one of the witnesses testified that bin Laden had a chemical weapons operation in Khartoum. Despite the plain evidence, some people in the media tried to push the possibility that the action was a real-life version of Wag the Dog, a movie in which a fictional President starts a made-for-TV war to distract public attention from his personal problems.
The American people had to absorb the news of the strike and my grand jury testimony at the same time. Newsweek ran an article reporting that the publics reaction to my testimony and television address about it was calm and measured. My job rating was 62 percent, with 73 percent supporting the missile strikes. Most people thought I had been dishonest in my personal life but remained credible on public issues. By contrast, Newsweek said, the first reaction of the pundit class was near hysteria. They were hitting me hard. I deserved a whipping, all right, but I was getting it at home, where it should have been administered.
For now, I just hoped that the Democrats wouldnt be pushed by the media pounding into calling for my resignation, and that I would be able to repair the breach I had caused with my family and with my staff, cabinet, and the people who had believed in me through all the years of constant attacks.
After the speech I went back to the Vineyard for ten days. There was not much thaw on the family front. I made my first public appearance since my grand jury testimony, traveling to Worcester, Massachusetts, at the invitation of Congressman Jim McGovern, to promote the Police Corps, an innovative program that provided college scholarships to people who committed to becoming law-enforcement officers. Worcester is an old-fashioned blue-collar city; I was somewhat apprehensive about the kind of reception I would get there, and was encouraged to find a large enthusiastic crowd at an event attended by the mayor, both senators, and four Massachusetts congressmen. Many people in the crowd urged me to keep doing my job; several said they had made mistakes in their lives, too, and were sorry that mine had been aired in public.
On August 28, the thirty-fifth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.s famous I have a dream speech, I went to a commemorative service at Union Chapel in Oak Bluffs, which had been a vacation mecca for African-Americans for more than a century. I shared the platform with Congressman John Lewis, who had worked with Dr. King and was one of the most powerful moral forces in American politics. He and I had been friends for a long time, going back well before 1992. He was one of my earliest supporters and had every right to condemn me. Instead, when he rose to speak, John said that I was his friend and brother, that he had stood with me when I was up and would not leave me when I was down, that I had been a good President, and that if it were up to him, I would continue to be. John Lewis will never know how much he lifted my spirits that day.
We returned to Washington at the end of the month to face another tremendous problem. The Asian financial crisis had spread and was now threatening to destabilize the entire global economy. The crisis had begun in Thailand in 1997, then infected Indonesia and South Korea, and now it had spread to Russia. In mid-August, Russia had defaulted on its foreign debt, and by the end of the month the Russian collapse had caused large drops in stock markets across the world. On August 31, the Dow Jones industrial average dropped 512 points, following a drop of 357 just four days earlier; all the gains of 1998 were wiped out.
Bob Rubin and his international economics team had been working on the financial crisis since Thailands trouble began. Although the details of each nations problem were somewhat different, there were some common elements: flawed banking systems, bad loans, crony capitalism, and a general loss of confidence. The situation was aggravated by the lack of economic growth in Japan over the past five years. With no inflation and a 20 percent savings rate, the Japanese could stand it, but the absence of growth in Asias largest economy increased the adverse consequences of bad policies elsewhere. Even the Japanese were getting restless; the stagnant economy had contributed to the election losses that had led to the recent resignation of my friend Ryutaro Hashimoto as prime minister. China, with the regions fastest-growing economy, had kept the crisis from growing even worse by refusing to devalue its currency.
The general formula for recovery in the 1990s was the extension of sizable loans from the International Monetary Fund and wealthy countries in return for necessary reforms in the affected nations. The reforms were invariably politically difficult. They always forced change on entrenched interests and often required fiscal austerity that made things harder on ordinary citizens in the short run, though it brought a quicker recovery and more stability in the long run.
The United States had supported the IMF efforts in Thailand, Indonesia, and South Korea, and had made contributions in the last two cases. The Treasury Department decided not to put money into Thailand because the $17 billion already available was sufficient and because the Exchange Stabilization Fund, which we had used to help Mexico, had some new, albeit temporary, restrictions imposed on it by Congress. The restrictions had expired by the time the other nations needed help, but I regretted not making at least a modest contribution to the Thai package. State, Defense, and the NSC all wanted to do it because Thailand was our oldest ally in Southeast Asia. So did I, but we let Treasury make the call. On the economics and in terms of domestic politics it was the correct decision, but it sent the wrong message to Thais and across Asia. Bob Rubin and I didnt make too many policy errors; I believe this was one of them.
We certainly didnt have the Thai problem with Russia. The United States had been supporting the Russian economy since my first year in office, and we had contributed almost a third of the $23 billion IMF package in July. Unfortunately, the first disbursement of about $5 billion from the package had virtually disappeared overnight, as the ruble was devalued and Russians began to move large sums of their own money out of the country. Russias problems were aggravated by the irresponsible inflationary policies of its central bank and by the Dumas refusal to establish an effective system to collect taxes. The tax rates were high enough, maybe too high, but most taxpayers didnt pay them.
Right after we got back from Marthas Vineyard, Hillary and I took a quick trip to Russia and Northern Ireland with Madeleine Albright, Bill Daley, Bill Richardson, and a bipartisan congressional delegation. Ambassador Jim Collins invited a group of leaders of the Duma to his residence, Spaso House. I tried hard to convince them that no nation could escape the discipline of the global economy, and that if they wanted foreign loans and investment, Russia would have to collect taxes, stop printing money to pay bills and bail out troubled banks, avoid crony capitalism, and pay debts. I dont think I made many converts.
My fifteenth meeting with Boris Yeltsin went as well as it could, given his problems. The Communists and ultra-nationalists were blocking his reform proposals in the Duma. He had tried to create a more effective tax collection system by executive action, but he still couldnt stop the central bank from printing too much money, which only encouraged greater capital flight from the ruble to more stable currencies and discouraged foreign credit and investment. For now, all I could do was encourage him and say the rest of the IMF money would be available as soon as it could make a difference. If we released it now, the funds would disappear as quickly as the first installment had.
We did make one positive announcement, saying that we would remove from each of our nuclear programs about fifty tons of plutoniumenough to make thousands of bombsand render the material incapable of being used to make weapons in the future. With terrorist groups as well as hostile nations trying to get their hands on fissile material, it was an important step that could save countless lives.
After a speech to the new Northern Ireland Assembly in Belfast in which I encouraged the members to continue to implement the Good Friday accord, Hillary and I went with Tony and Cherie Blair, George Mitchell, and Mo Mowlan, the UK secretary of state for Northern Ireland, to Omagh to meet with victims of the bombing. Tony and I spoke as best we could, then we all moved among the families, listening to their stories, seeing the children who had been scarred, and being struck by the victims steady determination to stay on the path of peace. During the Troubles someone had painted a provocative question on a Belfast wall: Is there life before death? Amidst the cruel carnage of Omagh, the Irish were still saying yes.
Before leaving for Dublin, we and the Blairs attended a Gathering for Peace in Armagh, the base from which St. Patrick brought Christianity to Ireland and now the spiritual center in Northern Ireland for both Catholics and Protestants. I was introduced by a lovely seventeen-year-old girl, Sharon Haughey, who had written to me when she was just fourteen, asking me to help end the fighting with a simple solution: Both sides have been hurt. Both sides will have to forgive.
In Dublin, Bertie Ahern and I spoke with the press after our meeting. An Irish reporter said, It usually seems to take a visit from you to give the peace process a boost. Will we need to see you again? I replied that for their sake I hoped not, but for my own sake I hoped so. Then Bertie said my quick response to the Omagh tragedy had galvanized the parties to make decisions quickly that might have taken weeks and months. Just two days earlier, Martin McGuinness, the chief Sinn Fein negotiator, had announced that he would oversee the arms decommissioning process for Sinn Fein. Martin was Gerry Adamss top aide and a powerful force in his own right. The announcement sent a signal to David Trimble and the Unionists that for Sinn Fein and the IRA, violence, as Adams had said, is a thing of the past, over, done with, and gone. In our private meeting, Bertie Ahern told me that after Omagh, the IRA had warned the Real IRA that if they ever did anything like that again, the British police would be the least of their worries.
The first question I got from an American reporter was a request to reply to the stinging rebuke I had received the day before on the floor of the Senate from my longtime friend Joe Lieberman. I replied, I agree with what he said . . . I made a bad mistake, it was indefensible, and Im sorry about it. Some of our staff were upset that Joe attacked me while I was overseas, but I wasnt. I knew he was a devoutly religious man who was angry about what I had done, and he had carefully avoided saying that I should be impeached.
Our last stop in Ireland was in Limerick, where fifty thousand supporters of peace filled the streets, including the relatives of one member of our delegation, Congressman Peter King of New York, who had brought his mother home for the event. I told the crowd that my friend Frank McCourt had memorialized the old Limerick in Angelas Ashes, but I liked the new one better.
On September 9, Ken Starr sent his 445-page report to Congress, alleging eleven impeachable offenses. Even with all the crimes of Watergate, Leon Jaworski hadnt done that. The independent counsel was supposed to report his findings to Congress if he found substantial and credible evidence to support an impeachment; Congress was supposed to decide whether there were grounds for impeachment. The report was made public on the eleventh; Jaworskis never was. In Starrs report, the word sex appeared more than five hundred times; Whitewater was mentioned twice. He and his allies thought they could wash away all their sins over the last four years in my dirty laundry.
On September 10, I called the cabinet to the White House and apologized to them. Many of them didnt know what to say. They believed in what we were doing and appreciated the opportunity I had given them to serve, but most of them felt I had been selfish and stupid and had left them hanging for eight months. Madeleine Albright led off, saying that I had done wrong and she was disappointed, but our only option was to go back to work. Donna Shalala was tougher, saying it was important for leaders to be good people as well as to have good policies. My longtime friends James Lee Witt and Rodney Slater talked about the power of redemption, and quoted scripture. Bruce Babbitt, a Catholic, talked about the power of confession. Carol Browner said she had been forced to talk with her son about subjects she never thought shed have to discuss with him.
Listening to my cabinet, I really understood for the first time the extent to which the exposure of my misconduct and my dishonesty about it had opened a Pandoras box of emotions in the American people. It was easy enough to say that I had been through a lot in the past six years, and that Starrs inquisition had been awful and the Jones lawsuit was bogus and politically motivated; easy enough to say that even a Presidents personal life should remain private. But once what I had done was out there in all its stark ugliness, peoples evaluations of it were inevitably a reflection of their own personal experiences, marked not only by their convictions but also by their own fears, disappointments, and heartbreak.
My cabinets honest and very different reactions gave me a direct sense of what was going on in conversations all across America. As the impeachment hearings grew closer, I received many letters from friends and strangers alike. Some of the letter writers offered touching words of support and encouragement; some told their own stories of failure and recovery; some expressed outrage over the actions of Starr; some were full of condemnation and disappointment over what I had done; and still others reflected a combination of all these views. Reading the letters helped me to deal with my own emotions, and to remember that if I wanted to be forgiven, I had to forgive.
The atmosphere in the Yellow Oval Room remained awkward and tense until Bob Rubin spoke. Rubin was the one person in the room who best understood what my life had been like for the last four years. He had been through an exhaustive investigation of Goldman Sachs that featured one of his partners being hauled away in handcuffs before he was cleared. After several others had spoken, Rubin said, with characteristic bluntness, Theres no question you screwed up. But we all make mistakes, even big ones. In my opinion, the bigger issue is the disproportion of the media coverage and the hypocrisy of some of your critics. The atmosphere got better after that. Im grateful that no one quit. We all went back to work.
On September 15, I hired Greg Craig, a fine lawyer and old friend of Hillarys and mine from law school, to work with Chuck Ruff, David Kendall, Bruce Lindsay, Cheryl Mills, Lanny Breuer, and Nicole Seligman on my defense team. On the eighteenth, just as I knew they would, the House Judiciary Committee voted on a straight party-line vote to release the video of my grand jury testimony to the public.
A few days later, Hillary and I hosted our annual breakfast for religious leaders at the White House. We usually discussed shared public concerns. This time I asked for their prayers during my personal travail:
I have been on quite a journey these last few weeks to get to the end of this, to the rock-bottom truth of where I am and where we all are. I agree with those who have said that in my first statement after I testified, I was not contrite enough. I dont think there is a fancy way to say that I have sinned.
I said that I was sorry for all who had been hurtmy family, friends, staff, cabinet, and Monica Lewinsky and her family; that I had asked for their forgiveness; and that I would pursue counseling from pastors and others to find, with Gods help, a willingness to give the very forgiveness I seek, a renunciation of the pride and the anger which cloud judgment, lead people to excuse and compare and to blame and complain. I also said I would mount a vigorous defense in response to the charges against me and would intensify my efforts to do my job in the hope that with a broken spirit and a still strong heart I can be used for greater good.
I had asked three pastors to counsel me at least once a month for an indefinite period: Phil Wogaman, our minister at Foundry Methodist Church; my friend Tony Campolo; and Gordon MacDonald, a minister and author of several books I had read on living ones faith. They would more than fulfill their commitment, usually coming to the White House together, sometimes separately. We would pray, read scripture, and discuss some things I had never really talked about before. The Reverend Bill Hybels from Chicago also continued to come to the White House regularly, to ask searching questions designed to check my spiritual health. Even though they were often tough on me, the pastors took me past the politics into soul-searching and the power of Gods love.
Hillary and I also began a serious counseling program, one day a week for about a year. For the first time in my life, I actually talked openly about feelings, experiences, and opinions about life, love, and the nature of relationships. I didnt like everything I learned about myself or my past, and it pained me to face the fact that my childhood and the life Id led since growing up had made some things difficult for me that seemed to come more naturally to other people.
I also came to understand that when I was exhausted, angry, or feeling isolated and alone, I was more vulnerable to making selfish and self-destructive personal mistakes about which I would later be ashamed. The current controversy was the latest casualty of my lifelong effort to lead parallel lives, to wall off my anger and grief and get on with my outer life, which I loved and lived well. During the government shutdowns I was engaged in two titanic struggles: a publ............