The Breach

Inside the Impeachment and Trial of William Jefferson Clinton

Peter Baker

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2000
• eBook ISBN: 9780743212939
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The journalist who co-wrote the original article breaking the Monica Lewinsky scandal for the Washington Post reveals the complete story behind the headlines: a riveting, in-depth account of an event unique in American history -- the first impeachment of an elected president. "For all of the titillation about thongs and cigars, the story of the impeachment and trial of William Jefferson Clinton was not so much about sex as it was about power. It may have started with an unseemly rendezvous near the Oval Office, but it mushroomed into the Washington battle of a generation, ultimately dragging in all three branches of government....
"Clinton opened his second term vowing to bring the parties together, to become the 'repairer of the breach.' But the last half of the presidency demonstrated that the breach was wider than anyone had anticipated."
-- from the Prologue With unprecedented access to all the players -- major and minor -- Washington Post reporter Peter Baker reconstructs the compelling drama that gripped the nation for six critical months: the impeachment and trial of William Jefferson Clinton. The Breach vividly depicts the mind-boggling political and legal events as they unfolded, a day-by-day and sometimes hour-by-hour account beginning August 17, 1998, the night of the president's grand-jury testimony and his disastrous speech to the nation, through the House impeachment hearings and the Senate trial, ending on February 12, 1999, the day of his acquittal. Using 350 original interviews, confidential investigation files, diaries, and tape recordings, Baker goes behind the scenes and packs the book with newsworthy revelations -- the infighting among the president's advisers, the pressure among Democrats to call for Clinton's resignation, the secret back-channel negotiations between the White House and Congress, a tour of the War Room set up by Tom DeLay to force Clinton out of office, the agonizing of various members of Congress, the anxiety of lawmakers who feared the exposure of their own sex lives, and Hillary Clinton's learning that her husband would admit his affair with Monica Lewinsky.
The Breach is contemporary history at its best -- shocking, revealing, and consequential. It is a tale of how Washington became lost in "the breach" of its own partisan impulses. All of this, and much more, makes The Breach one of the most important and illuminating volumes of history and contemporary politics of our generation.

CHAPTER ONE
“I don’t know how we can get through this”

Hillary Rodham Clinton looked miserable. Her hair was pulled back, her face clear of any makeup, her eyes ringed red and puffy in that way that suggested she had been crying. She stared vacantly across the room. The people who had surrounded her and her husband for the past seven years had never seen her like this. Even in private, she was always perfectly poised, immaculately coiffed, impeccably dressed, and inalterably in control. Now, however, she appeared to have been to hell and back. To see her like this, thought some of the longtime Clinton loyalists who had rushed back to the White House to help in weathering the worst crisis of her husband’s presidency, it seemed as if someone had died.

When one of her husband’s original political advisers, James Carville, arrived in the Solarium on the third floor of the White House, summoned back overnight from Brazil at her request, Hillary rushed over to him, clutched his hand, and sat him down next to her.

“You just have to help us get through this,” she said. “I don’t know how we can get through this.”

Neither did anyone else. At that moment, on the afternoon of Monday, August 17, 1998, President Clinton was three floors below them, facing off against Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr in the Map Room of the White House and testifying via closed-circuit television to a federal grand jury about his relationship with a young former intern named Monica Samille Lewinsky and his efforts to cover it up during the sexual-harassment lawsuit filed against him by former Arkansas state clerk Paula Jones. Forced by incontrovertible DNA evidence, Clinton was admitting after seven months of adamant denials that he had fooled around with a woman less than half his age in a private hallway and cubbyhole just off the Oval Office, and he would have to tell the nation later that night. It was not an easy confession to make. Indeed, Clinton had not been able to bring himself to break the news to his own wife. Four nights before, he had sent his lawyer to pave the way for him.

It had to have been the longest walk of David E. Kendall’s life, the journey that night, Thursday, August 13, to the residential part of the executive mansion where he had met with the first lady. Kendall, a fastidious yet tough-as-nails attorney from the blue-chip Washington law firm of Williams & Connolly, had represented both Clintons for five years now through every manner of alleged scandal, from Whitewater to Travelgate to Filegate, becoming one of their most trusted confidants. And so it fell to him at that critical moment to play emissary from husband to wife, to disclose the most awful secret of any marriage.

Something had obviously gone on between the president and Lewinsky, Kendall had told the first lady in his soft, understated way. The president was going to have to tell the grand jury about it. Only after Kendall laid the foundation did Clinton speak directly with his wife.

Over the weekend it became clear to others in the White House that the president was about to change his story, and reports citing unnamed sources began appearing in the press, first in the New York Times and later the Washington Post. Clinton’s political advisers began preparing for the inevitable national television address he would have to give to explain himself. Mickey Kantor, a longtime friend who had served as his commerce secretary and now as occasional damage-control adviser, was pushing to have Clinton preempt Starr by addressing the nation on Sunday evening, the night before his grand jury appearance. The lawyers were horrified. A witness never spoke publicly before undergoing an interrogation under oath, they argued; that would only give the prosecution ammunition and possibly aggravate the grand jurors.

No, it had to be Monday night after the session, or perhaps the next morning, depending on how Clinton felt afterward. With the timing settled, the real question then came down to what should be said and how. Everyone agreed that Paul Begala, Carville’s spirited and tart-tongued former partner who had come on board at the White House as a free-floating political adviser, would be in charge of putting together a speech for the president, even though no one had told him officially what Clinton would tell the grand jury. The consensus was that Begala would have the best feel for the delicate job. Begala solicited a draft from Robert Shrum, the longtime Kennedy family adviser and wordsmith, who faxed it over to the White House. In this version, Clinton would say, “I have fallen short of what you should expect from a president. I have failed my own religious faith and values. I have let too many people down. I take full responsibility for my actions—for hurting my wife and daughter, for hurting Monica Lewinsky and her family, for hurting friends and staff, and for hurting the country I love.” While he would maintain that he “did nothing to obstruct this investigation,” he would not mince words in saying he was sorry. “Finally, I also want to apologize to all of you, my fellow citizens,” he would say. “I hope you can find it in your heart to accept that apology.” That would be it. No rationalization. No nimble word games. And no mention of Starr.

As they studied the Shrum text, Begala and the other Clinton aides concluded that it would be too groveling. After all, Clinton was still the president and needed to avoid appearing weak to the nation’s enemies. Neither Begala nor most of the other White House advisers working on the draft realized just how timely that concern was, not having been told about secret plans to launch air strikes within days against terrorists blamed for recent bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa.

Begala spent the weekend coming up with his own passages and phrases intended to have Clinton express his contrition without sacrificing his dignity or antagonizing Starr. In Begala’s draft, the president would frankly acknowledge that he had misled the country, would take responsibility for his actions, and would pledge to spend the rest of his administration working on the issues the public cared about to regain the nation’s trust. On Saturday night, Begala called up a fellow White House political adviser, Rahm Emanuel, at home and read him the latest draft. Emanuel agreed it was the way to go.

Others sent drafts too. Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster who worked for many Democratic congressmen, was asked to sketch out some thoughts. Sidney Blumenthal, a fiercely partisan defender of the Clintons first as a journalist for The New Yorker and then as a member of their staff, faxed in versions from vacation in Europe that would have the president firmly denounce Starr’s politically motivated witch-hunt. But the only draft that counted was the one the president scratched out in his own left-handed scrawl on a yellow legal pad over the weekend. On Monday morning, as Clinton was going through his final preparation session with his lawyers, Kantor arrived at a strategy meeting in the office of White House counsel Charles F. C. Ruff, clutching three pages of now-typed remarks, with more notes from Clinton in the margins.

“I’ve got what he wants to say,” Kantor announced.

There was groaning around the room, where most of the president’s political team had gathered, including Begala, Emanuel, Deputy Chief of Staff John D. Podesta, counselor Douglas B. Sosnik, and press secretary Michael D. McCurry. They were flabbergasted. Begala had his latest draft in his coat pocket. When had Clinton had time to write his own speech? Between the long hours of preparations with his lawyers, dealing with his own tortured family situation, and secretly overseeing plans for retaliation against terrorist Osama bin Laden, the president hardly had a lot of free moments. The group decided to have Begala go over the new draft, but it became clear immediately that it was too strident.

Across the building, Clinton was huddling in the Solarium with Kendall and his partner, Nicole K. Seligman, to go over one last time what he would tell the grand jury. Neither Chuck Ruff nor any of the other White House lawyers was allowed to attend because Starr had already shown that they did not have complete attorney-client privilege as lawyers for the government, so it was left entirely to the president’s privately paid legal team. Knowing that Starr had a sample of his blood to compare with a semen stain on a navy blue Gap dress Lewinsky had saved, Clinton recognized he had no choice but to admit the obvious, but he refused to use the actual words. Starr’s office had insisted on videotaping the session, ostensibly in case one of the grand jurors was absent, and Clinton had no doubt that the tape would ultimately find its way into public view. Any clip of him saying anything explicit, such as “She performed oral sex on me,” would be played on television again and again, until it became so instilled in the minds of viewers that it would not only humiliate Clinton but become the single moment defining him in the history books.

The solution he and his lawyers came up with was a prepared statement with carefully chosen words that would make the confession as dignified as possible. Oral sex would be described simply as “inappropriate intimate contact.” Phone sex would be called “inappropriate sexual banter.” Everyone would know what he was saying.

Clinton and the lawyers also went over fourteen set pieces they had drafted—prepared mini-speeches ranging from four lines to four pages that he could deliver at opportune moments during the session. They knew, for example, that the prosecutors would surely ask the president if it was right or wrong to mislead the Jones lawyers during his civil deposition, and they had rehearsed an answer for him, saying that it was acceptable as long as he was trying to be “literally truthful.” Normally, lawyers instruct clients to give short answers under oath, but in this case, Kendall and Seligman knew Clinton would never be able to tell his story for the camera unless he talked right over his inquisitors. Besides, having negotiated a strict four-hour limit to the questioning, the president’s team figured he could filibuster long enough to eat up the clock.

The prep session with the lawyers was interrupted when the president’s national security team arrived to brief him on another matter. The attorneys picked up their papers and left the room, unaware of what was so important. Once they were gone, National Security Adviser Samuel R. Berger gave Clinton the latest report on plans to bomb a suspected terrorist camp in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical-weapons facility in Sudan.

* * *

Around 12:30 p.m., Starr arrived at the White House, where he was met by Kendall, who pulled him aside for a private “walk in the woods.” Kendall mentioned a weekend newspaper report suggesting that despite their long adversarial relationship, the president’s lawyer actually had great respect for the special prosecutor.

“You know all those nice things I was quoted saying about you?” Kendall asked.

“Yes.”

“I didn’t say them.”

“I didn’t think so.”

Kendall went on to tell Starr that the president would make a difficult admission to the grand jury that he did in fact have a relationship with Lewinsky but would not get into the specifics. Kendall warned the prosecutor not to push the matter with intrusive questions. “If you get into detail, I will fight you to the knife, both here and publicly,” he vowed.

At 12:59 p.m., the president entered the ground-floor Map Room, where Franklin Delano Roosevelt had charted the progress of Allied forces during World War II and where the last map of troop locations that he saw in 1945 before his fateful trip to Warm Springs, Georgia, still hung on the wall more than a half century later. Waiting were Starr and six of his lawyers, a pair of technicians, a court reporter, and a Secret Service agent. Accompanying Clinton were Kendall, Seligman, and Ruff. At 1:03, the cameras were turned on and the oath administered.

From the start, Starr’s deputies set a confrontational tone by stressing the importance of the oath and asking Clinton if he comprehended it—in effect challenging the president’s basic capacity for honesty before his first answer.

“Do you understand that because you have sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, that if you were to lie or intentionally mislead the grand jury, you could be prosecuted for perjury and/or obstruction of justice?” asked deputy independent counsel Solomon L. Wisenberg.

“I believe that’s correct,” Clinton replied evenly.

Wisenberg pressed the point. “Could you please tell the grand jury what that oath means to you for today’s testimony?”

“I have sworn an oath to tell the grand jury the truth and that’s what I intend to do.”

“You understand that it requires you to give the whole truth—that is, a complete answer to each question, sir?”

Clinton tried to remain calm. “I will answer each question as accurately and fully as I can.”

The questioning was turned over to another deputy, Robert J. Bittman, who began by asking Clinton if he was ever physically intimate with Lewinsky. The president said he would read a statement, pulled out some paper from his pocket, and put on his reading glasses. The effect of the glasses, combined with the hair that had grayed considerably in office, made Clinton look like an aging man instead of the vital, vigorous leader who had first emerged on the national stage seven years earlier.

“When I was alone with Ms. Lewinsky on certain occasions in early 1996 and once in early 1997, I engaged in conduct that was wrong,” he began, reading slowly and deliberately. “These encounters did not consist of sexual intercourse. They did not constitute sexual relations as I understood that term to be defined at my January 17, 1998, deposition. But they did involve inappropriate intimate contact. These inappropriate encounters ended, at my insistence, in early 1997. I also had occasional telephone conversations with Ms. Lewinsky that included inappropriate sexual banter. I regret that what began as a friendship came to include this conduct and I take full responsibility for my actions.”

For Ruff, who as the chief lawyer for Clinton in his capacity as president had helped direct his defense for seven months, this was the first time he learned directly that his client had lied to all of them. Ruff had come to the White House the year before to cap a sterling legal career, having served as the final Watergate special prosecutor, U.S. attorney in Washington, chief lawyer for the city government, and defense counsel for such embattled Democrats as Senators John H. Glenn and Charles S. Robb. At fifty-eight, he had spent much of his adult life in a wheelchair after contracting a poliolike disease while teaching law in Africa. Yet never in his career had he been as hampered in representing a client; as a government lawyer without full attorney-client privilege, Ruff had been shut out of the recent grand jury preparations and therefore had never heard the truth from the president’s mouth until just then. By this point, that was hardly a shock, but it meant that from now on, Ruff would always have to wonder if he was being lied to.

Undeterred by Kendall’s warning, Starr and his prosecutors spent much of the afternoon deconstructing Clinton’s opening statement and trying to pin down the president on exactly what he meant and how he could justify his testimony. During the Jones deposition, Clinton had testified he did not recall being alone with Lewinsky except for a few occasions when she brought him papers and the like. Now his first words were “when I was alone with Ms. Lewinsky.” In the Jones deposition, he said he had no specific recollection of giving her gifts. Now he was well aware of all sorts of gifts and named them in great detail. In the Jones deposition, he had said he did not have “sexual relations” or a “sexual affair” with Lewinsky. Now he was admitting that they engaged in some sort of sex play without stating exactly what it was, in effect insisting that he did not actually have sexual relations with Lewinsky because he was merely a passive recipient of oral sex and never fondled her as she testified he did.

Clinton jousted with the Starr lawyers every step of the way, insisting that there was no legal inconsistency between his past statements and his new admission, that he had been technically accurate before and did not commit perjury. Wisenberg noted that Clinton allowed his attorney during the Jones deposition to assert that there “is absolutely no sex of any kind in any manner, shape, or form” between Clinton and Lewinsky.

That “was an utterly false statement. Is that correct?” Wisenberg asked.

“It depends on what the meaning of the word is is,” Clinton responded. “If the—if he—if is means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.” The president’s lawyers winced. They believed he was being somewhat lighthearted about it, but recognized immediately that by quibbling over the tense of the verb, it would reinforce the public criticism of Clinton’s slippery style with words.

Convinced the videotape would eventually be made public, Clinton resisted strenuous attempts by Starr’s prosecutors to get him to elaborate on his admission, declining to describe his sexual activities with Lewinsky. But with his finger wagging and his eyes narrowed in anger, Clinton lashed out against both the Jones lawyers for their “bogus lawsuit” and the Starr team for trying to “criminalize my private life.”

When they asked about his January 17 testimony in the Jones case, Clinton fell back on one of his fourteen prepared set pieces. “My goal in this deposition was to be truthful, but not particularly helpful,” he said. “I did not wish to do the work of the Jones lawyers. I deplored what they were doing. I deplored the innocent people they were tormenting and traumatizing. I deplored their illegal leaking. I deplored the fact that they knew, once they knew our evidence, that this was a bogus lawsuit, and that because of the funding they had from my political enemies, they were putting ahead. I deplored it. But I was determined to walk through the minefield of this deposition without violating the law, and I believe I did.” As for Starr, Clinton said resentfully, “We have seen this four-year, forty-million-dollar investigation come down to parsing the definition of sex.” Never mind that it was Clinton doing the parsing.

While the president was in with Starr and his deputies, the rest of the White House was in a strange state of suspended animation. The waiting was killing everyone; little real work was getting done at the most senior levels. Soon after the grand jury session began, the electronic surveillance equipment that monitored the president’s precise location at all times while in the White House showed that he had moved from the Map Room to the medical center. Some of his aides momentarily panicked. Was he all right? Doug Sosnik, the president’s counselor and constant companion for most of the past two years, raced from the West Wing over to the residence to find out, only to discover that they had just taken a break and retreated to the medical unit because it was next to the Map Room and had a refrigerator filled with Diet Coke. All over the White House, televisions were tuned to CNN, where a surreal “game clock” in the corner of the screen showed the time elapsed during the grand jury session as if it were a football game. Joe Lockhart, the deputy press secretary, grew so angry that he started throwing things at the television and finally called up CNN correspondent John King to tell him the clock was inaccurate anyway because they had no idea how much time had been spent in breaks. Soon afterward, the clock disappeared from the screen. One small victory, at least.

The political team reconvened in Ruff’s office, including Podesta, McCurry, Lockhart, Emanuel, and Begala. Mickey Kantor sauntered in and began delivering a pep talk. The president appreciated everything everyone had done, he announced. Nobody should worry that the president had committed perjury, he added before leaving again.

The other aides were stunned at the presumption. Lockhart was particularly furious. They had spent every waking moment fighting for this president, absorbing his private tirades and being lied to by both the boss and his lawyers. And now this guy from the outside professed to convey the president’s feelings toward them? In their minds, Kantor was an enabler who encouraged Clinton’s worst instincts and caused more damage than he contained. They had blamed him for spreading stories early in the scandal suggesting the president suffered from sexual addiction, and just in recent days they were certain despite his denials that he had been the one who had leaked news of Clinton’s impending confession to the New York Times. “Fuck you,” someone exclaimed as soon as the door closed behind Kantor. “Who the hell are you?” others piped in.

A mor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• ontents
• Cast of Characters
• Prologue: “We have to impeach the bastard”
• Chapter 1: “I don’t know how we can get through this”
• Chapter 2: “You’re a damn, damn, damn fool”
• Chapter 3: “… go to the White House and tell him he has to resign”
• Chapter 4: “I don’t want them to win”
• Chapter 5: “How can you be so goddamn stupid?”
• Chapter 6: “We need to purge the poisons from the system”
• Chapter 7: “The crazy right has them by the throat”
• Chapter 8: “Somebody in this room rat-fucked the president last night”
• Chapter 9: “The pressure got to me”
• Chapter 10: “There are people in my party who just hate you”
• Chapter 11: “We are fighting for the presidency of the United States”
• Chapter 12: “Heavenly Father, we are in trouble”
• Chapter 13: “There may actually be a case here”
• Chapter 14: “The horse is stinking up the room”
• Chapter 15: “This is going to be ninety white men leering at her”
• Chapter 16: “She’s the best witness I ever saw”
• Chapter 17: “Good God Almighty, take the vote!”
• Chapter 18: “The most difficult, wrenching, and soul-searching vote”
• Epilogue: “The country didn’t want an impeachment”
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Chronology
• Appendices
• Index