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

our household. Although I was heartbroken and disappointed with Bill, my long hours alone made me admit to myself that I loved him. What I still didn’t know was whether our marriage could or should last.

The day-to-day was easier to forecast than the future. We were returning to Washington and a new phase in a never-ending political war. I hadn’t decided whether to fight for my husband and my marriage, but I was resolved to fight for my President.

I had to get a grip on my feelings and focus on what I needed to do for myself. Fulfilling my personal and public obligations drew on a reservoir of different emotions―

requiring different thinking and different judgments. For over twenty years, Bill had been my husband, my best friend, my partner in all of life’s trials and joys. He was a loving father to our daughter. Now, for reasons he will have to explain, he had violated my trust, hurt me deeply and given his enemies something real to exploit after years of enduring their false charges, partisan investigations and lawsuits.

My personal feelings and political beliefs were on a collision course. As his wife, I wanted to wring Bill’s neck. But he was not only my husband, he was also my President, and I thought that, in spite of everything, Bill led America and the world in a way that I continued to support. No matter what he had done, I did not think any person deserved the abusive treatment he had received. His privacy, my privacy, Monica Lewinsky’s privacy and the privacy of our families had been invaded in a cruel and gratuitous manner. I believe what my husband did was morally wrong. So was lying to me and misleading the American people about it. I also knew his failing was not a betrayal of his country. Everything I had learned from the Watergate investigation convinced me that there were no grounds to impeach Bill. If men like Starr and his allies could ignore the Constitution and abuse power for ideological and malicious ends to topple a President, I feared for my country.

Bill’s Presidency, the institutional Presidency and the integrity of the Constitution hung in the balance. I knew what I did and said in the next days and weeks would influence not just Bill’s future and mine, but also America’s. As for my marriage, it hung in the balance, too, and I wasn’t at all sure which way the scale would, or should, tip.

Life moved on, and I moved with it. I accompanied Bill to Moscow for another state visit on September 1 and then on to Ireland to meet Tony and Cherie Blair and to walk the streets of Omagh where the bombing occurred. The detonation of 500 pounds of explosives in a busy shopping area did not succeed in shattering the cease-fire, as the bombers had hoped. It simply inspired people to work even harder for peace. Shocked hard-liners on both sides of the conflict softened their positions in response.

Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA, announced publicly that violence in its seventy-seven-yearold war to end British rule was “a thing of the past.” Following Adams’s public statement, David Trimble, the Ulster Unionist leader, agreed to meet with Sinn Fein for the first time. All sides concurred that such hopeful developments would not have been possible without the direct diplomacy of Bill Clinton and his envoy, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell.

The agony of Omagh was a reminder of the worthy risks Bill was willing to take for peace around the world, of all the good he had accomplished. Bill spent innumerable hours trying to persuade the Irish, Bosnians, Serbs, Croats, Kosovars, Israelis, Palestinians, Greeks, Turks, Burundians and others to give up past grievances and overcome barriers to peace. His efforts were sometimes successful, sometimes not. Many of the successes were fragile, as we later learned in the collapse of the Middle East peace process. But even the failures forced people to come to grips with the pain and humanity of the other side. I was always proud and grateful that Bill persevered in the search for peace and reconciliation.

The huge contingent of reporters who followed the President to Russia and Ireland was looking for more than a peace mission story. They were watching both of us closely for clues to the state of our marriage. Did we stand close together or apart? Was I frowning or crying behind dark glasses? And what was the significance of the knitted sweater I bought for Bill in Dublin, which he wore to Limerick for his first golf game in more than a month? I desperately wanted to restore a zone of privacy for myself and my family, but I wondered if that would ever be possible again.

While Bill was negotiating with foreign leaders abroad, Joe Lieberman, Senator from Connecticut, admonished him publicly. Lieberman, who had been a friend since Bill had worked on his first campaign for the Connecticut state senate in the early seventies, took to the Senate floor to denounce the President’s conduct as immoral and harmful because “it sends a message of what is acceptable behavior to the larger American family.”

When Bill was asked by reporters in Ireland to respond to Lieberman’s speech, he replied: “Basically I agree with what he said. I’ve already said that I made a bad mistake. It was indefensible, and I’m sorry about it. I’m very sorry about it.” It was the first of many unconditional public apologies my husband would make on his long journey of atonement.

But I realized that apologies would never be enough for hardcore Republicans and might not be enough to avert a meltdown within the Democratic Parry. Other Democratic leaders, including Congressman Richard Gephardt of Missouri, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York and Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, condemned the President’s personal actions and said he should in some way be held accountable. None, however, advocated impeachment.

By the time we