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

continued to deny any improper behavior but to acknowledge that his attention could have been misread.

I will never truly understand what was going through my husband’s mind that day.

All I know is that Bill told his staff and our friends the same story he told me: that nothing improper went on. Why he felt he had to deceive me and others is his own story, and he needs to tell it in his own way. In a better world, this sort of conversation between a husband and wife would be no one’s business but our own. Though I had long tried to protect what was left of our privacy, I could do nothing now.

For me, the Lewinsky imbroglio seemed like just another vicious scandal manufactured by political opponents. After all, since he had started running for public office, Bill had been accused of everything from drug-running to fathering a child with a Little Rock prostitute, and I had been called a thief and a murderer. I expected that, ultimately, the intern story would be a footnote in tabloid history.

I believed my husband when he told me there was no truth to the charges, but I realized that we faced the prospect of another horrible and invasive investigation just at the point when I thought our legal troubles were over. I knew, too, that the political danger was real. A nuisance civil action had metastasized into a criminal investigation by Starr, who would undoubtedly take it as far as he could. Leaks to the media from the Jones camp and the Office of the Independent Counsel implied that Bill’s testimony in his sworn deposition may have conflicted with other witness descriptions of his relationship with Lewinsky. It appeared that the questions in the Jones deposition were designed solely to trap the President into charges of perjury, which might then justify a demand for his resignation or impeachment.

This was a lot of bad news to absorb in one morning. But I knew that both Bill and I had to carry on with our daily routines. Aides in the West Wing were walking around in a daze, muttering into their cell phones and whispering behind closed doors. It was important to reassure the White House staff that we would deal with this crisis and be prepared to fight back, just as we had in the past. I knew that everyone would be looking to me for their cues. The best thing I could do for myself and those around me was to forge ahead. I could have used more time to prepare for my first public appearance, but that was not to be. That afternoon, I was scheduled to give a speech on civil rights to a large gathering at Goucher College at the invitation of our old friend Taylor Branch, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on Martin Luther King, Parting the Waters. Since I was not about to let down the college or Taylor, whose wife, Christy Macy, worked for me, I headed to Union Station and caught a train to Baltimore.

David Kendall telephoned me during the train ride, and it was good to hear his voice.

Other than my husband, he was the only person with whom I felt I could talk freely. The year before, Starr had subpoenaed notes from conversations I’d had with White House lawyers about Whitewater, and a court had ruled that attorney-client privilege did not apply to government-paid lawyers. According to David, the OTC was likely planning to subpoena every employee, friend and family member who might have information about the Lewinsky case.

As the Amtrak train lumbered through the Maryland suburbs, David told me he had been hearing snippets of rumors since the day before the Jones deposition. Journalists had called him with questions about another woman’s involvement in the case. He thought it might be a troublesome development, but not serious enough to set off any alarms. Now he confirmed that on January 16, Attorney General Reno wrote a letter to the three-judge oversight panel recommending that Starr be allowed to expand his investigation to the Lewinsky matter and possible obstruction of justice. We later learned that Reno’s recommendation was based on incomplete and false information provided to her by the OTC.

Bill had been blindsided, and the unfairness of it all made me more determined to stand with him to combat the charges.

I chose to keep going and fight back, but it wasn’t pleasant to listen to what was being said about my husband. I knew that people were wondering, “How can she get up in the morning, let alone go out in public? Even if she doesn’t believe the charges, it has to be devastating just to hear them.” Well, it was. Eleanor Roosevelt’s observance that every woman in political life must “develop skin as tough as rhinoceros hide” had become a mantra for me as I faced one crisis after another. No doubt my armor had thickened over the years. That may have made things endurable, but it didn’t make them easy. You don’t just wake up one day and say, “Well, I’m not going to let anything bother me, no matter how vicious or meanspirited.” It was, for me, an isolating and lonely experience.

I also worried that the armor I had acquired might distance me from my true emotions, that I might turn into the brittle caricature some critics accused me of being. I had to be open to my feelings so that I could act on them and determine what was right for me, no matter what anyone else thought or said. It’s hard enough to maintain one’s sense of self in the public eye, but it was twice as difficult now. I constantly examined myself for traces of denial or hardening of emotional arteries.

I made my speech at Goucher’s winter convocation, then returned to the Baltimore train station, where a mob of reporters and camera crews was waiting for me. I hadn’t been so swarmed in years. The journalists were