Living History by Unknown (the lemonade war series txt) 📗

press corps, “sneaking around in bushes and taking pictures surreptitiously.” Obviously, the incident raised questions about security as well as privacy. If you’re close enough to take a picture with a telephoto lens, you’re close enough to shoot a gun with a scope. Bill wasn’t upset. He liked the photo.

A debate ensued in the press over whether the photographer had violated journalistic ethics and invaded our privacy for prurient interests. That led to speculation by some journalists that we had “posed” for the photo in hopes that our embrace would be captured on film.

Hello? As I told a radio interviewer a few weeks later, “Just name me any fifty-yearold woman who would knowingly pose in her bathing suit―with her back pointed toward the camera.”

Well, maybe people who look good from any angle, like Cher or Jane Fonda or Tina Turner.

But not me.

SOLDIERING ON

“Thank you, Mrs. Clinton,” said one of Kenneth Starr’s deputies. “That’s all we’ll need for now.”

David Kendall sat next to me in the Treaty Room during an interview with the independent counsel to clear up some final matters in the investigation of the mishandled FBI files. “They’ve got to ask these questions, just so they can say they asked,” David assured me. He was right: the questions were brief and perfunctory. Kenneth Starr was in attendance but said nothing during the ten-minute Q and A.

David later remarked that the prosecutors had seemed more smug than usual―“like the cats who swallowed the canary,” in the words of one lawyer in the room―but I didn’t pick up any unusual frequencies that morning. I was just grateful that the case was closed on one more of the non-scandals being probed by the OIC. It was January 14, 1998, and Starr’s inquiry was in its fourth year. Like every other investigation in the independent counsel’s portfolio, Filegate was a dry hole. A midlevel White House employee in the Office of Personnel Security had blundered by using an outdated list to order FBI file summaries for current staff, and had inadvertently been sent files on some security pass holders from the Reagan and first Bush Administrations. But it was neither a conspiracy nor a crime. The previous fall, Starr had finally conceded that Vince Foster really had committed suicide. (Robert Fiske had reached that conclusion three years earlier, but it took four more official investigations, including Starr’s, to confirm it.) Starr had also run into a dead end in his original probe of the Whitewater land deal. The culture of investigation followed us out the door of the White House when clerical errors in the recording of gifts mushroomed into a full-blown flap, generating hundreds of news stories over several months.

The most active litigation we were contending with was a civil case unrelated to the OIC investigation. Paula Jones’s legal team was being paid for and guided by the Rutherford Institute, a legal aid organization with a fundamentalist rightwing agenda. Bill’s lawyers had fully expected the case to be thrown out of court on a motion for summary judgment before it got to trial, but the Supreme Court had decided to let the case proceed.

Jones therefore was entitled to depose witnesses, including the President. Bill was scheduled to be interviewed under oath on Saturday, January 17, 1998.

Although there had been opportunities to settle with Jones out of court, I had opposed the idea in principle, believing that it would set a terrible precedent for a President to pay money to rid himself of a nuisance suit. The lawsuits would never end. With the wisdom of hindsight, of course, not settling the Jones suit early on was the second biggest tactical mistake made in handling the barrage of investigations and lawsuits. The first was requesting an independent counsel at all.

Bill had been up late the night before, preparing for his testimony. When he left, I wished him luck and gave him a big hug. I waited for him in the residence, and when he came back, he looked agitated and exhausted. I asked him how he thought it went, and he told me it was a farce and that he resented the whole process. Although we had planned to go out with friends to a Washington restaurant, he wanted to cancel in favor of a quiet dinner at home.

As usual, there was a lot on everyone’s plate at the beginning of the new year. The White House was rolling out new initiatives every week in anticipation of the upcoming State of the Union Address. While moving towards a balanced budget, the President planned significant expansions in Medicare and education, as well as the major increase in child care benefits that my staff had advocated to double the number of eligible children.

Then on Wednesday morning, January 21, Bill woke me up early. He sat on the edge of the bed and said, “There’s something in today’s papers you should know about.”

“What are you talking about?”

He told me there were news reports that he’d had an affair with a former White House intern and that he had asked her to lie about it to Paula Jones’s lawyers. Starr had requested and obtained permission from Attorney General Janet Reno to expand his investigation to look into possible criminal charges against the President.

Bill told me that Monica Lewinsky was an intern he had befriended two years earlier when she was volunteering in the West Wing during the government shutdown. He had talked to her a few times, and she had asked him for some job-hunting help. This was completely in character for Bill. He said that she had misinterpreted his attention, which was something I had seen happen dozens of times before. It was such a familiar scenario that I had little trouble believing the accusations were groundless. By then, I also had endured more than six years of baseless claims fomented by some of the same people and groups associated with the Jones case and the Starr investigation.

I questioned Bill over and over about the story. He