HUNTING OF THE PRESIDENT

SENATOR D’AMATO’S LONG GOOD-BYE

ON JUNE 7, 1995, independent counsel Kenneth Starr indicted Arkansas governor Jim Guy Tucker, his attorney, and a former business partner from San Francisco on three counts of conspiracy to commit bankruptcy and tax fraud in Little Rock. The charges grew out of Tucker’s 1987 acquisition of cable TV companies in Florida and Texas. Highly technical in nature, the charges brought by the Office of Independent Counsel struck local criminal defense attorneys as curious in two ways. First, Tucker and his associates were not accused of actually evading taxes—only of concocting a sham bankruptcy that would theoretically have made such evasion possible. (The relevant statute had been enacted to deal with so-called drug kingpins.) Second, the indictments had no connection of any kind with Whitewater, Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, or Bill and Hillary Clinton.

To Arkansas journalists it was well known that Bill Clinton and Jim Guy Tucker were more enemies than friends. Although generational contemporaries with Ivy League degrees, they were of two entirely different breeds. Having grown up in Little Rock, Tucker had enlisted in the Marine Corps immediately after graduating from Harvard University in 1964. Discharged due to a chronic liver disorder, he had nevertheless found his way to Vietnam by taking a job as a correspondent for the military newspaper Stars & Stripes. He subsequently earned a law degree from the University of Arkansas, served as Little Rock’s prosecuting attorney, preceded Clinton as state attorney general, and won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1976.

Unlike the ingratiating Clinton, Jim Guy thrived on confrontation, tended to resist compromise, and was not averse to making enemies. As a prosecutor, he sometimes accompanied police on drug busts. Critics called him arrogant. He and Clinton first crossed swords politically during the 1978 Democratic primary race for the U.S. Senate, in which Clinton supported the eventual winner, David Pryor. Four years later, Clinton defeated Tucker in a rough contest for the gubernatorial nomination. The campaign left Tucker badly in debt and both men with bruised feelings. Tucker had consoled himself by earning a considerable fortune in real estate and cable TV. As recently as 1990, he had publicly contemplated running against Clinton again, only to back off in the face of the incumbent’s superior funding. Settling for the position of lieutenant governor, Tucker had succeeded to the governorship at last after Clinton left Arkansas to become president in 1993. He had been easily elected to a new four-year term in 1994 in a race against Republican Sheffield Nelson.

During the 1994 campaign, Nelson had repeatedly charged that Tucker was about to be indicted. His campaign ran TV commercials showing a cell door slamming, a tactic that served mainly to reinforce the Republican candidate’s reputation as a sore loser whose machinations had led to the widely resented Whitewater investigation. Although they clearly backfired, Nelson’s efforts to portray Tucker as a corrupt politician got a strong boost from an extraordinary four-part “investigative report” in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette titled “Whitewater: The Tucker Connection.” The newspaper was so proud of its work that it issued a special reprint less than two months before the election.

When reporters examined Madison Guaranty and David Hale’s Capital Management Services, the Democrat-Gazette editors explained, they found themselves wondering “which governor of Arkansas is really at the center of the story?” As the series made clear, Tucker had done a great deal of business with both David Hale and Jim McDougal during the eighties. Less obvious, amid the welter of details about long-ago real estate transactions, was exactly what, if anything, the governor had done wrong. Tucker compared his role in the newspaper series to the hero of the Tom Hanks film Forrest Gump, as the ultimate innocent bystander. Hale was not a named source for the Democrat-Gazette series; just how closely its premises were tied to his version of events would become evident only with time.

Tucker’s response to Starr’s indictment was characteristically combative. He accused the OIC of blatant partisanship, and attacked what he called the “sickening mendacity” of a prosecutor who publicly pledged to respect his targets’ dignity while covertly leaking hurtful accusations to Republican members of Congress and the press. In the course of its yearlong investigation, the OIC had subpoenaed more than fifty thousand documents from Tucker and his wife, Betty, including his credit records, bank records, military records, college and law school transcripts, passports, and every business and personal check the couple had written since 1978.

Starr’s answer to Tucker’s defiance was a second indictment, handed down on August 17, 1995, charging him, Jim McDougal, and his ex-wife, Susan McDougal, with a total of twenty-one counts of bank fraud. At an angry press conference, Tucker accused the OIC of a “politically driven … taxpayer-funded invasion of Arkansas.” He complained that he had learned of the second indictment, like the first, from a reporter. “If you throw enough mud at somebody,” Tucker said, “maybe you can make something stick. You file enough indictments against a whole bunch of people, some who are in fact culpable, and include someone who is not, maybe you’ll get one of those to stick.” He vowed to ignore Sheffield Nelson’s call for his resignation.

Starr’s initial indictment of Tucker for bankruptcy fraud was assigned by lot to U.S. district judge Henry Woods. On September 5, 1995, Judge Woods handed down an opinion dismissing the three-count indictment on the grounds that the independent counsel had exceeded his lawful authority. “The subject matter of the indictment at issue,” Woods wrote, “bears no relation whatsoever to the Clintons or James McDougal or their relationship with Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan Association, Whitewater Development Corporation, or Capital Management Services, Inc.” Woods’s decision took sharp issue with a rhetorical question in Kenneth Starr’s brief: “‘What is the harm if the Independent Counsel handles this investigation rather than the Attorney General?’ What difference does it make? It makes a great deal of difference if the statute and the Supreme Court plainly state that only matters related to the Independent Counsel’s original prosecutorial jurisdiction are to be handled by him … . To gloss over and shortcut the requirements of criminal statutes is the first step toward tyranny.”

Woods quoted the words of the late Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson on the dangers of prosecutorial abuse, previously cited by Justice Scalia in his dissent in Morrison v. Olson. “Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor; that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him.”

The eighty-year-old judge and former FBI agent could hardly have administered a more stinging rebuke to Starr. But if Woods’s opinion angered the independent counsel, it outraged the American Spectator’s Arkansas Project team. Jim Guy Tucker’s indictment had been greeted with popping champagne corks down at Parker Dozhier’s bait shop in Hot Springs. Its dismissal had Dozhier and his associates, including one in particular, vowing revenge. An appointee of President Carter, Henry Woods had been an outspoken opponent of Arkansas governor Orval Faubus’s racist policies during the fifties and sixties—and a bitter foe of arch-segregationist Jim Johnson.

The Arkansas Project’s first strike against Woods had come earlier, in the form of a lengthy attack on the Washington Times op-ed page written by Johnson himself. It described Woods as a corrupt Clinton crony who had narrowly escaped indictment for misusing highway funds in the fifties. The late Orval Faubus, Johnson wrote, had once commented in Shakespearean tones that “Henry was measured for prison stripes, and now he wears the purple.” The accusation of cronyism appeared to stem from the fact that Woods had once appointed Hillary Clinton to a panel overseeing integration of the Little Rock public school system, which Johnson had long denounced as a Communist plot. Woods had also earned Justice Jim’s eternal enmity in 1991 by voiding the notorious “Johnson Amendment” to the Arkansas state constitution, in response to a lawsuit filed by black state legislators. The 1956 measure, authored by Johnson, empowered the governor of Arkansas to resist what it called the U.S. Supreme Court’s “unconstitutional” 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision banning school segregation.

Johnson’s accusations of financial impropriety against Judge Woods had been disproved forty years earlier. The remaining charges in his Washington Times essay came straight from The Clinton Chronicles, among them the hoary myth that Stephens, Inc., described as Woods’s benefactor as well as the nation’s largest commodities broker, had made an improper $3.5 million loan to the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign. In reality, Woods had no financial ties to Stephens, Inc. (which has never traded commodities at all).

Once again, Warren Stephens found it necessary to defend his company’s honor against its ostensible Republican allies. He wrote a letter to Washington Times editor Wesley Pruden describing himself as “surprised and appalled” that any newspaper would lend credence to Jim Johnson, “one of Arkansas’ most prolific and least credible conspiracy theorists … . When the facts do not support his theories, he simply distorts them or makes up events that did not occur … . [Y] ou do yourself and your readers a disservice by printing anything he has to say on any subject.” But Stephens knew he was wasting his time. Wesley Pruden was a Little Rock native whose father had been the chaplain of Johnson’s White Citizens Council.

Despite their manifest inaccuracies, Johnson’s attacks upon Woods were extensively quoted in a subsequent article in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and parroted on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal by investigative columnist Micah Morrison, a regular at Dozhier’s bait shop.

A page of contemporaneous notes from Dozhier’s files shows numerous references to Judge Woods and “JJJ,” for Justice Jim Johnson. The notes say, “Woods’ charge is to protect the president by taking care of Tucker.” Another page shows Johnson’s Conway, Arkansas, phone number along with the notation “Wesley Pruden told me Wesley sent material to M.M.,” presumably Micah Morrison. Pruden acknowledged meeting with Johnson on many occasions, but denied any knowledge of the Arkansas Project. (Morrison refused comment.)

The Arkansas Project documents also include a derogatory memo about Woods, written by Parker Dozhier, that was faxed to the office of Senator Lauch Faircloth, the North Carolina Republican, on August 28, 1995. Markings on the fax indicate that it was routed to Faircloth’s office through Stephen Boynton, the Virginia attorney who held the Arkansas Project purse strings. The Dozhier memo, addressed to Faircloth aide Jim Highland, claimed that Woods plotted with President Clinton to fix the Tucker case in order to hamper the independent counsel’s investigation. “Tucker,” it claimed, “is in the position of offering testimony [that] would send the President to prison.”

Only days before Woods was scheduled to hear oral arguments on Tucker’s challenge to Starr’s indictment, the judge was notified that Faircloth’s office had requested fifteen years’ worth of his financial disclosure statements. The request came from David Bossie, the Citizens United sleuth only recently hired as a full-time aide to the senator.

Upon learning of the request, the judge summoned all parties to the Tucker case to his chambers and informed them, he later wrote, of what he considered “a crude attempt to intimidate me, since it was well-known that Senator Faircloth had more than a passing interest in the Whitewater investigation. I assured counsel that such an attempt would in no way affect my handling of the Tucker case.” At that meeting, neither Tucker nor the OIC requested that the judge recuse himself.

But Starr’s attitude changed soon after Woods ruled against him. Following a second vitriolic attack upon the judge by Jim Johnson in the Washington Times (which described every Democratic-appointed federal judge in Arkansas as a member of Bill Clinton’s “corrupt machine”), the independent counsel filed an appeal with the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis. In it, Starr urged not only that the Tucker bankruptcy indictment be reinstated, but that the appeals court take the almost unprecedented step of removing Woods from the case due to his friendship with Hillary Rodham Clinton and others in the “Arkansas political establishment.” Conceding that the Tucker indictment accused the Clintons of no wrongdoing, Starr nevertheless argued that “information in the public domain” created “an unmistakable appearance of bias by Judge Woods.”

In Washington, meanwhile, the burden of promoting the “Clinton scandals” had fallen to the Senate Banking Committee, chaired by Alfonse D’Amato. The notion of the ethically tarnished junior senator from New York leading a clean-government crusade against the president struck many as an absurdity. Al D’Amato had endured a lengthy and still-secret investigation by the Senate Ethics Committee in 1991 before escaping with a mere reprimand for allowing his lobbyist brother Armand to misuse his Senate office. (Armand had been indicted and convicted of fraud and conspiracy in a related matter involving a crooked defense contractor, only to have his conviction overturned on appeal.) The ethics probe had covered many additional accusations against D’Amato, involving alleged misuse of his office and illicit fund-raising. Literally dozens of the senator’s friends and associates had cited the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify before the committee. After his reprimand, he had refused to unseal his executive-session testimony before the Ethics Committee, which couldn’t release it without his permission under Senate rules. Without the least embarrassment, D’Amato would demand “full disclosure” from the White House—while falsely claiming that his own testimony was “classified,” as he put it in his 1995 memoir, Power, Pasta and Politics.

After fifteen years in office the New York senator was best known for his many and varied ethical transgressions, which had won him the title “Senator Sleaze.” D’Amato had once appeared as a character witness for a Mob-connected Long Island disco owner who raised money for his first Senate campaign. He had twice approached Rudolph Giuliani, then the United States attorney for Manhattan, seeking leniency for Mafia gangsters then represented by Roy Cohn, the late attorney who had been a close D’Amato friend. Many times he had sought campaign contributions from the businesses whose interests he assiduously served, prompting the New Republic to give him another nickname: “Senator Shakedown.”

There was an old D’Amato scandal, from his first Senate campaign in 1980, that closely paralleled the Whitewater accusations about Clinton getting favors from Madison Guaranty. For years, as a town official on Long Island, D’Amato had placed public funds in interest-free accounts in a local bank (a practice investigated and harshly criticized by a Nassau County grand jury). When he ran for the Senate, D’Amato had turned to the same bank for loans that totaled more than a million dollars—and had gotten the money on very soft terms, at an interest rate below prime.

Episodes like that typified D’Amato’s career. There were so many that few observers could recall them all in detail. The impression he had left was clear enough, however. Many New Yorkers found it hard not to laugh when D’Amato railed against the ethics of the Clintons, and many Republicans wished that some other senator could lead the Whitewater investigation. But Bill Clinton’s luck held firm when Al D’Amato insisted on his prerogative to delve into Whitewater as the Banking Committee chairman.

The Senate Whitewater hearings opened with a flourish on July 18, 1995, with Alaska Republican Frank Murkowski upending Vince Foster’s empty briefcase—duly sent over for use as a stage prop by the Office of Independent Counsel—to dramatize the senator’s view that there had been something terribly suspicious about the belated discovery of the White House aide’s torn suicide note several days after his death. Starr’s own reinvestigation of his predecessor Robert Fiske’s finding that Foster had killed himself due to clinical depression was then almost a year old, with no end in sight.

Despite that dramatic beginning, D’Amato’s hearings soon settled into a predictable pattern: Amid the glare of TV lights and the clicking of camera shutters, one Republican senator or another would level broad changes of corruption and cover-up against the Clintons and their allies, in Arkansas, the White House, or both. Reporters for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and their followers at the TV networks would gravely repeat each accusation, warning of shocking evidence to come. Subsequent testimony would either fail to support or actually disprove the damning charge. Accusers would then either harangue the witnesses for testifying falsely, or pretend that the point had been proved and move on.

Led by Times columnist William Safire, media commentary followed this same pattern with utter regularity. Safire notched numerous false predictions, most notably a January 1996 column declaring Hillary Clinton a “congenital liar” who would soon be indicted for perjury. Senator Christopher Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat, captured the mood of the hearings precisely. “If you get a witness who says, ‘Oh, I don’t recall,’” Dodd said, “the immediate accusation is ‘You’re being disingenuous.’ If you have witnesses with conflicting testimony, the allegation is ‘Someone’s lying.’ And if you have witnesses that have consistent statements, ‘It’s a conspiracy.’”

The committee Republicans devoted weeks to probing the Clintons’ allegedly incriminating possession of their own financial records. During the first months of the new administration, Vince Foster had done the job of putting the president and first lady’s assets into a blind trust. A few days after his suicide, their tax returns (including Whitewater records) were returned to the Clintons pending their selection of a private attorney. At Hillary’s instructions, her chief of staff, Maggie Williams, had stored the documents temporarily in a closet in the upstairs living quarters at the White House. Five days later, they were sent to Robert Barnett, a Washington attorney who represented the Clintons.

Even the fact that there simply was no Whitewater investigation on July 20, 1993, and hence no reason to hide the files, failed to deter suspicion. Protected by lawyer-client privilege, the files in Foster’s office couldn’t have been examined without a subpoena from a federal judge who believed there was “probable cause” that evidence bearing directly upon his death would be found in them. No investigator who testified to the Senate had ever considered seeking such a subpoena.

At the Senate hearings, Republicans accused a succession of White House aides of stripping Foster’s office of incriminating Whitewater evidence and conspiring to lie about it under oath. The scheme was allegedly coordinated by Hillary Clinton via telephone from her mother’s home in Little Rock, and carried out by Maggie Williams, Hillary’s friend Susan Thomases, and White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum. A July 24 column by Safire alleged that a White House lawyer named Steve Neuwirth “told congressional investigators that Susan Thomases, Hillary’s confidante, told Nussbaum that the Clintons wanted the search [of Foster’s office] strictly limited.”

Neuwirth opened his Senate testimony on August 3 with a prepared statement explaining that the information in Safire’s column was categorically false. He read aloud questions and answers from his deposition, in which he had explicitly denied the premise of a question implying any knowledge of what Hillary Clinton or Susan Thomases wanted. He explained that every lawyer in the White House was concerned about how to balance the legitimate interests of law enforcement, lawyer-client privilege, and the institution of the presidency. In a time of tremendous grief and confusion, Hillary Clinton’s views had never been consulted. Neither Safire nor Susan Schmidt, whose byline appeared on a similarly themed news article in the Washington Post, ever corrected themselves.

During his testimony on August 9, former White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum attacked the very premises of the Senate hearings. With no precedent to follow, Nussbaum had made himself responsible for sorting through the contents of Vince Foster’s office in the presence of investigators from the Park Police and the Justice Department. In so doing, he had missed noticing the torn-up note in the bottom of Foster’s briefcase, which bitterly expressed the dead man’s lament that in Washington, “ruining people is considered a sport.” Although none of the witnesses believed that he had done anything unethical, Justice Department officials had warned Nussbaum that suspicious minds could misconstrue his actions.

Nussbaum, however, insisted that “what prompted these hearings is something different. It is the unfair linking of two separate, disparate events. The first event involved the transfer, in July 1993, of personal files—including a Whitewater file—to the Clintons’ personal attorneys following Vince’s death, a transfer which was totally proper and, indeed, known to Justice Department officials. The second separate, disparate event involves the emergence in the fall of 1993 of the Whitewater investigations and the resulting media frenzy. Linking these two events is illogical, unwarranted and unfair. They are totally unrelated.”

Senator Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican, was not persuaded. He compared Nussbaum’s actions to “the fox guarding the henhouse.” Shelby scolded the former counsel: “You did it your way and the American people will never really know what was in there … . You didn’t want the people to know, including the Justice Department of the United States of America.”

Another southern politician who generated lots of accusatory sound bites during the Whitewater hearings was Lauch Faircloth. The North Carolina Republican lavished particular attention upon Maggie Williams, then Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff. He found it incredible that Williams could have forgotten the details of a two-year-old phone conversation with the first lady, someone she spoke with several times each day. Faircloth scoffed at Williams’s tearful denials, buttressed by two lie detector tests—including one administered by the Office of Independent Counsel—that she had removed a stack of files from Vince Foster’s office during the hours immediately after his body was found in Fort Marcy Park. Her testimony was contradicted by a career Secret Service agent who swore that he had seen her take the files, although he could not be certain of the exact date. (Williams had admittedly transferred the files after investigators finished with Foster’s office.)

With David Bossie whispering frequently in his ear, Faircloth was equally scathing toward Susan Thomases, who had exchanged a number of phone calls with the first lady and Bernard Nussbaum on the morning after Foster died. He openly mocked her protestations that she and Hillary were sharing their grief, consoling each other, and discussing funeral arrangements. At one point, Faircloth read aloud from a media account quoting James Carville to the effect that “Susan Thomases has the juice,” meaning strong influence. “And then we go back to the calls to Bernie Nussbaum,” Faircloth drawled. “I mean call, call, call, call, call, call. And you were discussing the weather, his general feelings, politeness, niceness, and all of a sudden you spill the juice, according to you. You no longer had it. Is that right?”

Thomases tersely said that was correct. She hadn’t discussed the search of Foster’s office with the first lady, and didn’t know what Hillary Clinton’s opinion was.

By the time the Senate Whitewater hearings went into summer recess, opinion surveys showed that whatever the level of suspicion among the Washington press corps, the public didn’t share it. A Louis Harris poll released on August 13 showed that only one in four adults who had followed the Congressional probes thought less of President and Mrs. Clinton as a result. Just 8 percent of Democrats thought Whitewater a damaging issue, compared with 35 percent of Republicans. D’Amato’s investigation appeared to be getting nowhere, and very slowly.

Possibly it was frustration over his committee’s inability to deliver that caused D’Amato to throw in temporarily with the Vince Foster conspiracy theorists. The senator probably didn’t realize that he had stumbled into yet another Larry Nichols production.

By 1995, Nichols and his friends at Citizens for Honest Government were busily seeking another vehicle to follow upon the success of The Clinton Chronicles and its sequels. After Nichols signed a contract to pay Arkansas state troopers Larry Patterson and Roger Perry a flat $1-per-video royalty for a new project tentatively titled Nichols vs. Clinton, the trio began searching their memories for important (and potentially marketable) revelations.

The first bombshell they came up with involved Vince Foster’s death, still quite a popular subject on the talk-radio and Clinton-conspiracy circuits. It debuted April 9, 1995, in the London Sunday Telegraph under the byline of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. The White House, his startling article alleged, had falsified both the time and place of Foster’s demise. According to the troopers, a young woman named Helen Dickey had telephoned the governor’s mansion in Little Rock at 6:00 P.M. on July 20, 1993, to inform Governor Jim Guy Tucker of the terrible news. Roger Perry had been on duty in the guard shack and had taken the call.

At the very least, Evans-Pritchard extrapolated, that meant somebody in the White House had known about Foster’s death hours before the Park Police had relayed the bad news to the Secret Service at 8:20 P.M. (Little Rock is in the central time zone, one hour behind Washington.) Even more ominously, it appeared that Foster’s body had been moved. Helen Dickey, recalled Perry, “was kind of hysterical, crying, real upset. She told me that ‘Vince got off work, went to his car in the parking lot, and shot himself in the head.’” Perry’s account was confirmed by his friend and fellow trooper Larry Patterson, whom he had phoned at home immediately after taking Dickey’s call. The chain of corroboration extended to Lynn Davis, whom Patterson said he had called the same evening. Davis was an attorney and former trooper who, along with Cliff Jackson, had negotiated payments from Chicago financier Peter W. Smith at the time of the Troopergate episode.

Oddly, Davis, Patterson, and Perry all had neglected to mention Dickey’s suspicious phone call to David Brock of the American Spectator or Bill Rempel of the Los Angeles Times back in the summer and fall of 1993, just after it allegedly happened. This discrepancy did not prevent the excited Evans-Pritchard from drawing dire conclusions. “Dickey, a former nanny to Chelsea Clinton,” the Sunday Telegraph explained, “is a member of the tight-knit ‘Arkansas Group.’ She refused to answer queries about the alleged call to the Governor’s Mansion … . If the White House received an early warning about Foster’s death, why would it have been covered up? One explanation is that a tip-off would have provided a window of time for pre-emptive moves.”

Within days, the Western Journalism Center, a Scaife-supported outfit in California, paid for a full-page ad in the Washington Times reprinting Evans-Pritchard’s article. The advertisement also urged readers to purchase a Citizens for Honest Government videotape titled Unanswered: The Death of Vincent Foster, by “award-winning journalist Christopher Ruddy.” A compilation of largely irrelevant questions supposedly not addressed by investigators, the video was an all-out attack on the integrity of the Fiske Report. To the tiny fraction of Americans familiar with the forensic evidence, the video was silly. One example of Ruddy’s methods should suffice. His video portrayed as a mystery the fact that the .38 revolver Foster used to take his life was found in his hand. Impossible, Ruddy and an “expert homicide investigator” protested.

Fiske’s investigators had shown otherwise. “After firing,” the report concluded, “the trigger of Foster’s gun rebounds forward. Based on analysis of scene photographs and an autopsy photograph showing a mark on Foster’s right thumb, the Pathologists Panel and FBI ballistics experts concluded that Foster’s thumb was ‘trapped and compressed’ between the trigger and the guard of the gun. This conclusion is corroborated by the statement of Park Police Technician Peter Simonello who removed the gun from Foster’s hand. He stated that Foster’s knuckle initially prevented him from removing the gun from Foster’s hand. As a result, Simonello half-cocked the gun causing the trigger to be pulled back. Only then could Simonello remove the gun.”

On June 15, Ruddy weighed in with his own version of the Arkansas troopers’ new story in the Scaife-owned Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Already the Internet was abuzz with fanciful conspiracy scenarios. Letters and faxes began to pour into the offices of senators on the Whitewater committee. By August, columnist John Crudele of the New York Post took it upon himself to offer D’Amato some advice on how to revive the flagging Whitewater hearings by bringing the troopers to Washington: “Perry telling his story, followed by [Arkansas first lady] Betty Tucker confirming it, followed by Helen Dickey explaining the call, would make a great closing act to an otherwise tedious melodrama.” Next the Wall Street Journal editorial page, stung by the Fiske Report’s endorsement of the lament in Foster’s suicide note that “WSJ editors lie without consequence,” seized upon the trooper tale.

In a September 13 interview with WCBS radio in New York City, D’Amato vowed to get to the bottom of the Foster case. His Whitewater committee, the chairman announced, planned to subpoena Helen Dickey. Echoing Newt Gingrich, D’Amato insinuated that Foster had been murdered. “It’s impossible for that gun to be found in his hand after the discharge,” the senator said. “It would have been kicked back and the gun would have jumped out. Yet here it is in his hand by his body. How do you explain that?”

The White House released a sworn affidavit from Helen Dickey to the effect that she had, indeed, phoned Little Rock and spoken briefly with trooper Perry on the night of Vince Foster’s death—except that the call had been made after 10:00 P.M., three hours later than the troopers claimed. Nor had she mentioned anything about any White House parking lot.

Almost as if on cue, independent counsel Kenneth Starr sent FBI agents to search Fort Marcy Park with metal detectors for the third time. The OIC made sure that reporters and TV cameras went with them. The inability of investigators to locate the bullet that killed Foster was another “unanswered question” that much impressed conspiracy buffs, although little knowledge of the range and velocity of a .38 revolver was required to know that the chances of finding it had never been good. Starr was merely grandstanding.

The second round of Senate Whitewater hearings, which began in November 1995, went very much like the first. Armed with detailed telephone records, the Republicans took another pass at Maggie Williams and Susan Thomases. According to a detailed chart dutifully printed by the New York Times, the two women, Hillary Clinton, and Bernard Nussbaum had exchanged some forty-three phone calls between the discovery of Vince Foster’s body and the searching of his office, although many were clearly taken by answering machines.

“It’s difficult to believe,” D’Amato said, “[that] all of these calls were the result of touching, feeling, holding.” Senator Faircloth denounced Williams’s and Thomases’s testimony—both had professed inability to remember in detail many of the calls—as “an insult to this committee:’ Suspicions, however, aren’t evidence—and the hearings produced none of the latter.

By late November, the stage was set for the triumphal return to Washington of L. Jean Lewis. Given her incoherent performance several months earlier before Representative Jim Leach’s House Whitewater committee—where her misquotation and mischaracterization of her own tape-recorded conversations with an RTC attorney named April Breslaw had been disclosed—the Republican senators were courting disaster by asking her back.

To anyone familiar with her House testimony, Lewis’s opening statement on November 29 was remarkable. Seemingly undaunted by her previous experience, she told almost precisely the same story in virtually the same words. Waving the flag of her military upbringing, she recounted how RTC lawyers had “obstructed” her Whitewater investigation for seven long days. (One RTC attorney, Democrats later forced Lewis to admit, had delayed her probe by pointing out the futility of seeking an indictment against a Madison Guaranty official who had died some years earlier.) She complained that Clinton-appointed U.S. Attorney Paula Casey had stalled two entire weeks before rejecting her criminal referral naming the Clintons—as she put it, “in direct conflict with information I had received from the Justice Department in Washington.”

Once again Lewis charged that RTC attorney April Breslaw had visited her office “to deliver the message that ‘the people at the top would like to be able to say that Whitewater did not cause a loss to Madison’”—the same inaccurate quote that Lewis had unpersuasively relied upon during her House testimony. Once again, she stated bluntly that the Whitewater project had caused a loss to Madison and that the Clintons had earned illicit profits, statements for which she had provided no evidence, nor ever would. “But if the committee wants to know what the Clintons knew about the corrupt activities resulting in losses to Madison,” she smirked, “why not invite the Clintons to testify as I am today and have in the past? Why not invite them directly?”

Perhaps unbeknownst to Jean Lewis, both Clintons had already answered detailed written interrogatories from RTC investigators, under oath. The White House had released those answers to the press back when the House and Senate hearings opened in August 1995. The Clintons had also testified under oath about Whitewater to the Office of Independent Counsel.

Subsequent testimony revealed that there were many things about the Whitewater investigation that L. Jean Lewis didn’t know. She didn’t know, Lewis swore, that Little Rock U.S. attorney Chuck Banks had rejected her 1992 referral. She didn’t know that the Justice Department and FBI had exchanged letters and telex reports debunking her evidence, and pointing out her ignorance of the law and her political motives. She didn’t know, although the details had been reported by the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press months earlier.

Unfortunately for Lewis, Senate Democrats had a few nasty tricks waiting for her. Her political bias and her high-handed treatment of her colleagues had not gone unnoticed in the RTC’s Kansas City office. More than a year earlier, a two-week preliminary inquiry into Lewis’s conduct had resulted in her being placed on administrative leave pending an investigation by the RTC inspector general. Among the charges forwarded to Washington were improper handling and disclosure of confidential financial documents, secret tape-recording of her colleagues, and frequent use of her government office for personal gain. Her supervisor, Richard Iorio, was charged with failing to take action regarding her leaks, allowing her to take Madison Guaranty documents home and thus hide them from RTC lawyers, condoning her surreptitious recordings, and helping her defy orders to investigate larger thrift failures to keep working on Madison.

One of Kenneth Starr’s little-noticed first acts as independent counsel had been to assume control of the RTC investigation of L. Jean Lewis and turn it against her supervisors. At the same time, Starr’s law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, was negotiating a highly sensitive legal settlement with the very same RTC officials Starr proposed to investigate.

Ironically, the settlement had involved Kirkland & Ellis’s longtime representation of a bankrupt thrift in Colorado. Considering that the three judges of the Special Division had removed Robert Fiske as independent counsel on the grounds that his law firm had represented a timber company that once sold a piece of land to Jim McDougal, Starr’s behavior seemed almost reckless. Yet no one noticed his extraordinary conflict of interest until much later, an early sign that Starr would exercise with impunity great liberties as independent counsel.

The Senate Democrats, however, had done their homework with regard to L. Jean Lewis. Hardly had she finished her prepared remarks at the November 29 hearing when minority counsel Richard Ben-Veniste confronted her with Little Rock FBI agent Steven Irons’s contemporaneous notes showing that—contrary to her sworn deposition—she had begun pushing him to act upon her 1992 referral only days after filing it. Lewis had also made what the agent called “very dramatic” statements about altering history. There had been similar testimony from former U.S. attorney Chuck Banks’s staff. Altogether, the evidence showed Lewis had made a minimum of eight determined attempts to prod her ill-conceived referral along in the two months before the 1992 election. In her deposition, Lewis claimed she had made none.

Next, Ben-Veniste produced a personal letter retrieved from the hard drive of Lewis’s computer. It mocked “the illustrious Gov. Bill Clinton” as a “lying bastard” who had put his mistress Gennifer Flowers on the state payroll. Senator Barbara Boxer questioned Lewis about a November 1993 letter in which she had proposed to market “Presidential BITCH” T-shirts and coffee mugs bearing Hillary Clinton’s likeness. (She had listed her RTC office as her business phone.)

Lewis testified that to her, the word “bitch” signified no disrespect, and that she personally had no objection to being called a bitch.

Ben-Veniste also questioned her closely about her tape-recording of April Breslaw. He asked if she hadn’t, in fact, bought a brand-new tape recorder for the specific purpose of ambushing the RTC attorney.

Nothing, Lewis insisted, could be further from the truth. “I purchased that new recorder well after I had that conversation with Ms. Breslaw,” she said. “As I have previously testified, the old one worked sometimes. It didn’t sometimes. It was eight years old … . I did not deliberately set out, which I believe is your inference, to tape Ms. Breslaw.”

But the real drama took place after Democrats laid out documents casting doubts on Lewis’s behavior. Maryland senator Paul Sarbanes read to Lewis from U.S. Attorney Banks’s letter refusing to act on her 1992 referral, on the grounds that to do so would constitute “prosecutorial misconduct.” Next, Sarbanes brought up a 1993 Justice Department appraisal pointing out Lewis’s woefully inadequate understanding of federal banking law. It noted in acid terms that what she called Jim McDougal’s “check-kiting”—shifting money back and forth among his own corporate accounts inside the same bank—simply wasn’t a crime.

But Sarbanes had scarcely begun when a remarkable thing happened. Lewis began to tremble visibly. Tears suddenly welled in her eyes, and she fainted dead away at the witness table. After being revived, she had to be assisted from the Senate chamber, hospitalized overnight, and treated for high blood pressure. L. Jean Lewis’s career as Whitewater heroine had come to an abrupt and seemingly ignominious end. Her appearance before D’Amato’s committee had been a complete disaster.

Yet while many thousands of citizens watched Lewis live on C-SPAN, neither of the newspapers that had received stacks of confidential RTC documents two years earlier reported her swoon. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post failed to mention her sudden collapse. Just as both newspapers had ignored U.S. Attorney Banks’s letter and other documents casting doubt on Whitewater’s factual and legal premises, so they elided the contradictions in Lewis’s testimony. No “Presidential BITCH” coffee mugs—nothing. To the Times’s Stephen Labaton, the most significant event of the day had been the mention of Gennifer Flowers. “SENATE HEARING TOUCHES ON CLINTON’S INTEGRITY,” read the headline. “A LINE OF INQUIRY BACKFIRES ON THE DEMOCRATS.” Only a few days later, on December 6, a Times editorial stated without a particle of irony that “Jean Lewis, a star witness … and a government investigator into Madison’s practices, repeated her charge that there had been a deliberate effort at both the Justice and Treasury departments to obstruct her inquiry. Ms. Lewis has said flatly that the Clintons knew about and improperly benefited from Madison’s freewheeling practices … . Why not come forward with the complete story?”

Later that same day, December 6, minority counsel Ben-Veniste read into the hearing record a few salient facts about Lewis’s allegedly defective tape recorder. It turned out that receipts submitted to the committee to support her contention that she had bought a new recorder only after accidentally taping April Breslaw hadn’t told the real story. Records subpoenaed by the committee from the Office Depot store showed that Lewis had in fact purchased an Olympus Pearlcorder Model S-924 two weeks before her meeting with Breslaw. It seemed that Lewis had deliberately misled the committee. Ben-Veniste announced that the tapes had been submitted to independent counsel Kenneth Starr with a request that FBI experts determine whether the new recorder had made them. This challenge to Lewis’s credibility was again ignored by both the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Evidently, Starr felt free to ignore the Senate Democrats’ request as well. Nothing was ever heard of the issue again.

With the congressional budget process at an impasse and the Republican leadership vowing to shut down the federal government rather than compromise with a seemingly crippled president, the Senate Whitewater hearings droned on into December. Apart from reporters, the hearing room was almost devoid of spectators. The demand for transcripts was so small that the Federal News Service quit providing continuous overnight coverage.

Typical of the investigation’s many blind alleys was a much-hyped legal confrontation between the White House and the Whitewater committee over a few pages of handwritten notes taken by Clinton aide William Kennedy on November 5, 1993. With the Washington Post and New York Times then featuring front-page stories about Whitewater and David Hale, the White House lawyers had met with the Clintons’ private counsel to decide how to cope with the burgeoning scandal. White House attorney Kennedy, a former law partner of Hillary Clinton, had kept notes on that meeting.

Accompanied by heavy rhetoric about “cover-ups” and “smoking guns,” D’Amato demanded to see Kennedy’s notes. The White House agreed to surrender the notes, but only if the committee would stipulate that by so doing, the Clintons hadn’t given up attorney-client privilege altogether.

The dispute remained unsettled for a couple of weeks, amid grave commentary about a “constitutional crisis.” Finally, just before Christmas, the White House got its way on the privilege issue and turned over the Kennedy notes. They turned out to contain little of interest. A sheaf of clippings released along with the notes made it clear that the lawyers had mainly talked about how to respond to media accusations. But in television interviews, Senator D’Amato charged that the phrase “Vacuum—Rose Law Firm files” was proof of a cover-up. Kennedy said he had used “vacuum” to describe the paucity of available information. To conclude otherwise—that he had meant “vacuum” as a verb—it was necessary to assume that a half dozen top Washington lawyers (three from the White House, three from Williams & Connolly); meeting for the first time, had hatched a conspiracy to obstruct justice, taken notes on the conspiracy, and kept the notes in case any investigator might want them in the future.

A second entry that provoked speculation read “VF suicide—David Hale investigation—same day.” Here at last was evidence that the White House had secretly worried about the alleged link between Foster and Whitewater. The actual meaning of that notation only emerged when William Kennedy testified a month later. Had the lawyers discussed the fact that Vince Foster killed himself on the very day the FBI raided David Hale’s Little Rock office? They hadn’t, because it wasn’t true. The earlier press accounts were erroneous. Foster died on July 20, 1993; Hale’s office was not searched until July 21. What Kennedy had set down in his notes was the lawyers’ discussion of Whitewater coverage in the media—and how much of it was driven by a conspiracy theory based upon a simple factual error.

A moment of truth intruded in the midst of D’Amato’s hearings on December 13, 1995, with the release of the second volume of the Resolution Trust Corporation’s $3.6 million Pillsbury Report. The remainder of the study was to appear over the ensuing weeks. With the RTC due to go out of existence at the end of 1995, the San Francisco law firm of Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro was obligated to deliver its conclusions about the Clintons and Whitewater by December 31. In an embarrassing incident that led to his appearance before the grand jury, White House aide George Stephanopoulos had vigorously protested to a Treasury Department aide about the RTC’s decision to hire the San Francisco firm because he feared the partisan bias of Pillsbury partner Jay Stephens, the former Reagan and Bush administration U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, who had been fired by Clinton in 1993.

Stephanopoulos’s much-publicized fears had proved baseless. The firm’s findings could hardly have been more favorable to the White House. Based on the Clintons’ sworn interrogatories, interviews with forty-five other witnesses, and some two hundred thousand documents, the report concluded that the president and first lady had told the truth about their Whitewater investment: The Clintons were passive investors who were misled about the actual status of the project by Jim McDougal almost from the start. The report failed to challenge their account on a single substantive point. As Charles Banks had anticipated back in 1992 when he was the U.S. attorney in Little Rock, every one of L. Jean Lewis’s incriminating assumptions regarding the Clintons was shown to be wrong.

The Pillsbury Report found no evidence that Whitewater’s losses had been subsidized by taxpayers in the savings and loan bailout. But even if they were, it concluded, the Clintons were not at fault: “There is no basis to assert that the Clintons knew anything of substance about the McDougals’ advances to Whitewater, the source of the funds used to make those advances, or the sources of the funds used to make payments on the bank debt … . There is no basis to charge the Clintons with any kind of primary liability for fraud or intentional misconduct. This investigation has revealed no evidence to support any such claims. Nor would the record support any secondary or derivative liability for the possible misdeeds of others … . There is evidence that the McDougals and others may have engaged in intentional misconduct. There are legal theories by which one can become liable for the conduct of others—e.g. conspiracy and aiding and abetting. On this evidentiary record, however, these theories have no application to the Clintons.”

Over the ensuing weeks, the RTC released several more volumes of the report, plus appendixes, clearing both the Rose Law Firm and Arkansas state regulatory officials of all accusations of wrongdoing. Far from coddling Jim McDougal, the report found, “if anything, Arkansas regulators took a more aggressive position toward Madison Guaranty than did the FHLBB [Federal Home Loan Bank Board].” It noted that in December 1987, Arkansas securities commissioner Beverly Bassett Schaffer “wrote a letter to Stewart Root, Director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, stating that Madison Guaranty (and two other Arkansas thrifts) are ‘unquestionably insolvent and have been for a long time … We must request that these associations be transferred immediately to the FSLIC.’” She wanted Madison shut down, which “did not happen for reasons that had nothing to do with Bassett.”

In its hundreds of minutely detailed pages, thousands of footnotes, and documentary exhibits, the Pillsbury Report demonstrated that the premises of the Whitewater “scandal” had no factual foundation. On December 18, the Wall Street Journal ran a straight, clear summary of its findings, written by Viveca Novak and Ellen Joan Pollock. But other newspapers with a substantial investment in Whitewater virtually buried news of the report. The Washington Post stuck a brief mention of the report’s existence into a story devoted to the battle over William Kennedy’s notes. The New York Times waited until Christmas Eve, then hid Stephen Labaton’s perfunctory summary on see here. Judging by his article’s dismissive tone, no reader could imagine that the Pillsbury Report answered every one of the accusatory rhetorical questions the Times had urged the president and first lady to come clean about for years (most recently in a December 6 editorial). Labaton’s story ignored the passages pointedly exonerating the Clintons, and focused upon the fact that the report’s “authors had been unable to interview a number of important witnesses, some of whom have been cooperating with the independent counsel.” Specifically, neither David Hale nor the McDougals had been interviewed by the Pillsbury lawyers.

The major television networks predictably followed the Times and the Post. For the great majority of the Washington press corps, and thus for their national audience, the Pillsbury Report and the facts and conclusions its authors had painstakingly assembled didn’t exist.

Within the Office of Independent Counsel, meanwhile, a plan was taking shape to indict Hillary Rodham Clinton for perjury—or, at the very least, to persuade the press that such a headline-grabbing event was about to happen. Behind this effort was deputy independent counsel Hickman Ewing, Jr., the head of Kenneth Starr’s Little Rock operation and a veteran federal prosecutor from Memphis.

Ewing enjoyed a well-earned reputation as a crusader against political corruption and something of a religious zealot. After being appointed U.S. attorney in 1981 by Ronald Reagan, he specialized in public integrity, gambling, and pornography prosecutions; many of his cases involved state, county, or federal officials—including two controversial attempts to win a conspiracy conviction against Harold Ford, a black Democratic congressman from Memphis who was ultimately acquitted.

During nearly a decade as U.S. attorney, though, Ewing won dozens of important victories, including felony convictions of former Tennessee governor Ray Blanton, banker Jay Butcher, a top judge, a few state senators, and several west Tennessee sheriffs. He was renowned for pursuing his quarry doggedly, unfazed by a mistrial or two. The theme of his legal career, which began several years after a navy tour in Vietnam, was the punishment of those who violated positions of public trust—and whose transgressions often resembled those of Ewing’s father, a county court clerk who pleaded guilty to stealing $43,000 and was sentenced to three years in prison. He sometimes said he blamed his father’s criminality on excessive drinking.

Hick Ewing’s combination of piety and pugnacity made the prosecutor widely popular in his home state, but he also acquired some powerful enemies. When George Bush entered the White House, Don Sundquist, Tennessee’s most influential Republican member of Congress, asked the new president to seek Ewing’s resignation—possibly because he had targeted Sundquist’s former campaign manager and her husband on tax charges. Another Sundquist friend and Ewing target was Dana Kirk, the Memphis State University basketball coach, whom Ewing sent to prison in 1988 on charges of tax fraud and obstruction of justice in a wide-ranging sports-betting probe.

Whenever questions arose about his motives, the congressman blandly insisted that he had no personal quarrel with Ewing and merely believed it was time for a change in the U.S. attorney’s office. Sundquist eventually succeeded in removing Ewing, but not without an embarrassing struggle. A newspaper advertising campaign and petition drive to keep Ewing as U.S. attorney was led by his close friend Ed McAteer, a leading Memphis Republican and chairman of the Religious Roundtable, a national organization of Christian conservatives. “I supported Ewing from the first day he went into office and I haven’t changed my position one iota,” vowed McAteer, a senior figure on the religious right who in the seventies pioneered the effort to mobilize evangelical Christians as a political force. After the campaign to save Ewing’s job failed, he was celebrated at a June 1991 luncheon tribute featuring speeches by the mayor and local religious right leaders.

In praise of the departing prosecutor, the Memphis Commercial Appeal quoted Mark Wardell, a representative of the Reverend Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association, which promotes “morality in media.” “He has made Memphis a place where pornographers didn’t feel comfortable doing business,” Wardell said. “What we have here is a man whose faith is not separate from his work. We appreciate that.” John Bramlett, a former pro football player turned evangelist, agreed. “I’m thankful today we had a man in office who obeyed God rather than obeyed man” (a peculiar description of a federal law enforcement official). Ewing modestly insisted that he had been merely an instrument of God’s will. His future plans were uncertain. “I’m trusting the Lord for the next step.” But as he left government, he was said to be considering full-time church work with the Campus Crusade for Christ, or a “quasi-legal position” with a “pro-family organization such as the Rutherford Institute.”

Instead, after a few years in solo law practice, Ewing got a call in late August 1994 from Kenneth Starr, who had just been appointed Whitewater independent counsel. They met at a McDonald’s restaurant in Brinkley, Arkansas, and Ewing quickly accepted the position as Starr’s senior deputy, even though it meant living in Little Rock during the week and commuting home to his family in suburban Memphis on weekends. He had the right attitude for the Office of Independent Counsel, guided always by his trained ability to sense guilt, as he told the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin years later.

As early as the spring of 1995, Ewing testified years later, he had drawn up a draft indictment against Hillary Rodham Clinton and circulated it to other lawyers in the OIC. He said the document was based upon a sworn statement she had given that April “about her representation of Madison Guaranty when she was at the Rose Law Firm: How the business came in, what work she performed, and how the retainer was returned.” During his testimony at Susan McDougal’s contempt trial in 1999, Ewing also admitted that he had taken to making quasi-public pronouncements about the first lady’s guilt. He recalled, “We were eating dinner one night, and somebody said, ‘How do you grade them?’ I think the President was about a ‘C’ and Mrs. Clinton was about an ‘F’.”

On December 19, 1995, the morning after the Wall Street Journal’s comprehensive news summary of the Pillsbury Report’s findings absolving the Clintons, a front-page article appeared in the New York Times indicating that the first lady was in serious trouble. Written by Stephen Labaton, the story appears likely to have relied upon Ewing or other Starr deputies as sources. It confidently laid out a case for two possible felony courts against Hillary: perjury and obstruction of justice. Labaton repeated Jim McDougal’s account of Bill Clinton jogging over to Madison Guaranty’s office in the summer of 1984 to solicit legal business for Hillary because the couple needed cash. But the real bombshell in the Times article was the supposed contradiction between Hillary’s account of how her law firm came to represent Madison Guaranty and that of a former colleague named Rick Massey.

“Mrs. Clinton said in a sworn statement this year,” wrote Labaton, “that Mr. Massey, then a first year associate at the Rose firm, had been contacted by a friend at Madison, John Latham, with a request for legal help … . Mr. Massey, who is now a partner at the Rose firm, told Federal investigators he ‘does not know how or why Madison selected the Rose Law Firm,’ according to a summary of his October 1994 interview with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.”

Even more damning was a Nightline report broadcast that same evening. The segment came very close to branding Hillary Clinton a perjurer. In his introduction, host Ted Koppel spoke pointedly about “the reluctance of the Clinton White House to be as forthcoming with documents as it promised to be.” He then turned to correspondent Jeff Greenfield, who posed a rhetorical question: “Hillary Clinton did some legal work for Madison Guaranty at the Rose Law Firm, at a time when her husband was governor of Arkansas. How much work? Not much at all, she has said.”

Up came a video clip from Hillary’s April 22, 1994, Whitewater press conference. “The young attorney, the young bank officer, did all the work,” she said. “It was not an area that I practiced in. It was not an area that I know anything, to speak of, about.” Next the screen filled with handwritten notes taken by White House aide Susan Thomases during the 1992 campaign. “She [Hillary] did all the billing,” the notes said. Greenfield quipped that it was no wonder “the White House was so worried about what was in Vince Foster’s office when he killed himself.”

What the audience didn’t know was that the ABC videotape had been edited so as to create an inaccurate impression. At that press conference, Mrs. Clinton had been asked not how much work she had done for Madison Guaranty, but how her signature came to be on a letter dealing with Madison Guaranty’s 1985 proposal to issue preferred stock. ABC News had seamlessly omitted thirty-nine words from her actual answer, as well as the cut, by interposing a cutaway shot of reporters taking notes. The press conference transcript shows that she actually answered as follows: “The young attorney [and] the young bank officer did all the work and the letter was sent. But because I was what we called the billing attorney—in other words, I had to send the bill to get the payment sent—my name was put on the bottom of the letter. [Emphasis added.] It was not an area that I practiced in. It was not an area that I know anything, to speak of, about.”

ABC News had taken a video clip out of context, and then accused the first lady of prevaricating about the very material it had removed. Within days, the doctored quotation popped up elsewhere. ABC used the identical clip on its evening news broadcast; so did CNN. The New York Times editorial page used it to scold Mrs. Clinton, as did columnist Maureen Dowd. Her colleague William Safire weighed in with an accusatory column of his own: “When you’re a lawyer who needs a cover story to conceal close connections to a crooked client,” he began, “you find some kid in your office willing to say he brought in the business and handled the client all by himself.” Safire predicted the first lady’s imminent indictment.

What really made the story take off, however, was White House aide Carolyn Huber’s belated discovery of missing Rose Law Firm billing records that had been under subpoena by the OIC. The time sheets had been used by the 1992 Clinton campaign to respond to reporters’ questions, and then disappeared. For weeks, Republicans on the Senate Whitewater committee had spoken darkly of obstruction of justice. On January 4, 1996, Huber found the missing documents in a box in her office at the Old Executive Office Building. She called the Clintons’ lawyer, David Kendall, who immediately made copies and sent the originals to Kenneth Starr. Actually, the documents Huber found weren’t themselves originals, but photocopies of computer printouts made in 1992. Nobody who wanted to hide them could have any way of knowing how many additional copies might be floating around. Nor was Mrs. Huber, an Arkansas loyalist who supervised the Clintons’ personal correspondence, certain where she had found the documents, at least according to Kendall.

In her subsequent Senate testimony, however, the former office manager at the Rose Law Firm was unequivocal. Huber recalled coming upon the time sheets in August 1995 in the “book room” on the third floor of the White House, inside the Clintons’ private quarters. Without looking to see what they were, she had stuck them in a box and taken them to her office for later filing. Then in January 1996, she had opened the box and gotten scared.

How she could be sure they were the same papers without having examined them in the first place was never clear. Putting the 1992 campaign records in order and storing them was one of Huber’s secondary tasks at the White House. Kendall later testified that when Huber first contacted him, “She said a number of different things that were inconsistent. She was flustered. She was upset. Her hands were shaking. She said that she had brought the documents over from the residence at some earlier point. She said she thought it was maybe three months ago. A little while later in the conversation, she referred to bringing them over ten months ago. She was very confused about the timing … . She was unclear about where she had found them … . Her stories were extremely vague.” Kendall’s co-counsel Jane Sherburne remembered the same thing. But the lawyers hadn’t pressed Huber on the issue because they didn’t want to be accused of trying to influence her testimony.

Here at last was a dramatic Whitewater event that even the dullest voter could grasp. Kenneth Starr lost no time hauling the first lady before a Washington grand jury in the most public manner possible, prompting press commentary about a “smoking gun.” The irrepressible Safire predictably saw Nixonian skullduggery: “Can you imagine the sinking feeling in the ‘Someone,’ when he or she came back to the Book Room and found the records gone?” Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff went further. “The printouts were covered with the late Vince Foster’s handwriting,” he wrote, continuing, “it is Foster’s suicide that lends Whitewater its aura of menace.”

Hillary Clinton emerged from Starr’s grand jury to say that she had no idea where the billing records had come from, but was glad they had turned up—perhaps because they provided only exculpatory evidence. Along with Vince Foster’s handwriting, FBI fingerprint analysts found his fingerprints, as well as those of the first lady. Hers were found only on those pages dealing with issues discussed during the 1992 campaign—but not on topics of more recent interest, such as the ill-fated McDougal real estate development and shopping center known as “Castle Grande.” All the forensic evidence suggested that the billing records had in fact been misplaced ever since the 1992 election.

The records’ contents also supported Hillary’s testimony and public statements in detail. In her sworn statements to RTC investigators, she had recalled only a single phone conversation with Securities Commissioner Beverly Bassett Schaffer regarding the Madison Guaranty preferred stock issue. The records showed exactly one, on April 29, 1985.

Asked whether she had done any work on McDougal’s “Castle Grande” development, she had replied no. Republicans charged that an unused 1985 real estate document she had prepared for Webb Hubbell’s father-in-law contradicted her. But the billing records, like all internal Rose Law Firm documents, referred to that transaction not as Castle Grande but as “the IDC matter.”

A small part of a large parcel of land Madison Guaranty bought from a company called the Industrial Development Corporation later became known as “Castle Grande”—but not the part described in the document Hillary Clinton had prepared. Her answer was accurate. After studying the newly found billing records, the investigators at Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro came back with an even stronger conclusion that nobody at the Rose Law Firm had done anything unethical or illegal in their representation of McDougal’s savings and loan. Regarding the unused real estate contract, the report stipulated that “while Mrs. Clinton drafted the May 1, 1986 option, nothing proves she did so knowing it to be wrong, the circumstances of the work point strongly toward innocent explanations, and the theories that tie this option to wrongdoing … are strained at best.”

Starr’s investigators would spend years seeking evidence to the contrary, with no success.

In January 1996, however, such exculpatory facts received no attention in the press. To hype their excerpt from James B. Stewart’s forthcoming Whitewater book Blood Sport, the editors of Time magazine ran a cover photo of the first lady that looked like a post office “Wanted” poster. Time columnist Richard Stengel opined that “Hillary Rodham Clinton now faces a crisis that even the most artful public relations may not be able to fix.” Stengel predicted that the stage was set for high drama at the Whitewater hearings. “Mrs. Clinton has stated that the lion’s share of the work on Madison was done by a ‘bright young associate’ named Richard Massey. Mrs. Clinton also implied in a sworn statement to the RTC in May 1995 that Massey brought Madison’s business to the firm. Committee sources tell Time that Massey will testify this week that he did not bring Madison in as a client, and that he assumed Mrs. Clinton was involved.”

And in the New York Times, William Safire advised the president that the time had come to hire himself a separate criminal defense lawyer, because his wife was going to jail.

All such expectations were dashed when the first lady’s soft-spoken, balding former partner Rick Massey appeared before the D’Amato committee on January 11. Not only did Massey fail to contradict Hillary’s testimony; any tighter fit between their recollections would have been suspect. As a twenty-six-year-old associate at the Rose Law Firm, Massey said, he had taught a night course in securities law at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock. Among those enrolled was a Madison Guaranty officer named John Latham, whom Massey had known in college. During the semester, Latham began staying after class to ask Massey’s advice about raising new capital for the thrift.

“I should say for the record,” Massey testified, “that I asked him to lunch one day and I pitched the business, asked for their work. They were a growing S&L. We liked working for companies like that, so I pitched the work … . I think the pitch was basically, ‘Gee, you’re asking me all these questions. Why don’t you hire us and put us to work on these things?’”

The only problem had been Jim McDougal’s tardiness in paying the bills for legal work that the Rose firm had done for him several years earlier. Certain partners objected to taking him on as a client again without a prepaid retainer. So the firm had sent Hillary Clinton to meet with McDougal on April 23, 1985, to see whether such an arrangement could be made. Madison Guaranty agreed to a $2,000 per month advance against billings, and the work arrived on Rick Massey’s desk the next day. What Massey had been unable to remember, eleven years after the fact, was whether he had first approached Hillary about taking up the payment issue with McDougal, or whether she had approached him—a question of no consequence. Such was the pretext upon which deputy independent counsel Hickman Ewing, Jr., proposed to indict the first lady of the United States for perjury.

As to who had done all the work on the preferred stock matter, Massey was unequivocal. Based upon his review of the billing records, he told Senator Connie Mack of Florida that “these were primarily one-man jobs, and I did primarily all of the research, writing, drafting, and so forth. Mrs. Clinton had a role in these matters. I view it as a supervisory role. In terms of who was in the trenches and doing the work, Senator, it was me.”

Concerning the preferred stock deal itself, the allegedly illicit transaction the New York Times had placed at the center of the “scandal,” Massey’s explanation was simple. As Arkansas state officials had tried to show reporter Jeff Gerth four years earlier, the idea of selling stock in thrift institutions was first proposed by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. “Sir, there is no better form of capital than cash,” said Massey, “and we were trying to raise cash for the institution.”

Not much of this was conveyed by the same journalists who had failed to notice L. Jean Lewis’s fainting spell. “AT WHITEWATER SESSION, A STRUGGLE TO RECALL,” read the headline in the New York Times. “In five hours of testimony before the Senate Whitewater committee,” wrote Stephen Labaton, “a lawyer for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s law firm said today that he could not remember events of 11 years ago clearly enough to support the First Lady’s account of how the firm came to represent a troubled Arkansas savings and loan association.” The Times account did mention Massey’s luncheon pitch to his college friend, but concluded by pointing the finger of suspicion back at an implicitly corrupt bargain between Jim McDougal and Bill Clinton to funnel cash into Hillary’s pocket.

A similar account appeared in the Washington Post under the byline of Susan Schmidt. Massey, she wrote, testified “that he does not believe that he was responsible for signing up Madison as a client, as [Mrs. Clinton] has asserted … . She has said Massey came to her with a proposal for a stock plan to help Madison raise capital after meeting with Madison president John Latham. She said he asked her to work as the firm’s billing partner and work with James B. McDougal, the S&L’s owner, to resolve a past billing dispute Rose had with him. ‘I don’t believe it happened that way,’ Massey said.”

When investigators for Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro issued their final report on February 25, they concluded that the minor discrepancies between the recollections of Rick Massey and Hillary Clinton weren’t worth quibbling over. Moreover, “the purported recollections of Jim McDougal are inconsistent with those of the others and upon analysis make little sense.” Contrary to McDougal’s story, the retainer agreement didn’t begin until work on the preferred stock issue started—almost a year after the purported “jogging” incident. “Most significantly,” the report concluded, “the alleged economic motivation makes no sense … . There is no evidence that the Clintons ever received anything like $2000 a month from this engagement, and every reason to believe that they never received more than a trivial sum of money … . Even if all the retainer had been earned in fees, Mrs. Clinton’s share would have been less than $20 a month.”

On the evening of Massey’s testimony, Nightline aired key portions that made its real import clear. This time Ted Koppel made a point of emphasizing that few, if any, of Senator D’Amato’s dire predictions had turned out to be accurate. On Saturday, January 13, the New York Times ran an “Editor’s Note” stipulating that Stephen Labaton’s story on Massey’s appearance “should have included testimony that seemed to support” Hillary Clinton—a halting clarification, but a clarification all the same.

The manifest failure of the monthlong assault on Hillary Clinton to yield evidence of wrongdoing was not ignored everywhere. New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis became the first important voice at his newspaper to break ranks. “Three years and innumerable investigations later,” he wrote on January 15, “Mrs. Clinton has not been shown to have done anything wrong in Whitewater. One charge after another has evaporated.”

Lewis compared D’Amato’s performance to that of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy during the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the fifties. But Lewis noted one major difference. “On Whitewater, the press too often seems an eager accomplice of the accusers … . Some of the coverage of Whitewater reads as if the reporters or editors were committed to finding something wrong—as if they had an investment in the story.”

Still, other celebrated journalists continued to predict the first lady’s probable indictment as the election year began, most notably Pulitzer Prize-winning author James B. Stewart. Published by Simon & Schuster in early 1996 to the accompaniment of a multimedia publicity campaign, Stewart’s book Blood Sport claims to be the inside story of “the president and first lady as they really are.” Set forth as a sweeping narrative, it includes dramatized scenes and imaginary dialogue purporting to represent the innermost thoughts of individuals whom the author had in some cases never met, much less interviewed.

“Scenes that Mr. Stewart could never have observed firsthand,” complained New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani, “are recounted from an omniscient viewpoint. Mr. Stewart rarely identifies the sources for such scenes; nor does he take into account the subjectivity and often self-serving nature of memory. The reader never knows whether the quotes Mr. Stewart has put into the mouth of an individual … are from a first or secondhand source.”

Kakutani also noticed that everybody who served as a source for Stewart got gentle treatment, while those who did not were treated harshly. (After considering Stewart’s request, both Clintons decided not to cooperate.) Yet neither the Times reviewer nor the thousands of others who read Blood Sport had any way of protecting themselves against the author’s chronic inaccuracy. The book is filled with telling errors from beginning to end. It opens with a dramatized scene purporting to render the first lady’s reaction to a phone call informing her of Vince Foster’s death at “the Rodham home in Little Rock, where Hillary was visiting her mother and father, who was ill.” In fact, Hugh Rodham had died three months earlier, in April 1993.

Another pivotal early scene has the young Bill Clinton traveling to the college town of Arkadelphia in 1975 to seek “kingmaker” Jim McDougal’s advice about running for David Pryor’s U.S. Senate seat. A gripping moment, except for the fact that Pryor was governor of Arkansas between 1975 and 1979. Stewart also seemed unaware that the “crusty country lawyer” and “Democrat-turned-Republican” Jim Johnson had hardly “veered steadily to the right,” but had won the 1966 endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan.

Other errors are more significant. Not only does Blood Sport describe the “devout Baptist” David Hale as having been appointed by Bill Clinton, rather than Republican governor Frank White, as history records, it also misreports what got Hale in trouble with the Justice Department. According to Stewart, Hale’s crime was that he “fraudulently misrepresented the kinds of loans he was making … to what Hale, quoting McDougal, described as his Democrat ‘political family.’” Hale in fact made more loans to Republicans than Democrats. His crime was embezzling over $2 million.

Stewart’s worst blunders appear to stem from his decision to accept Jim McDougal’s word as truth and his disinclination to offend any important Washington reporter. Thus a Pulitzer Prize–winning financial journalist whose previous book had pilloried junk-bond savant Michael Milken somehow failed to see any problems in McDougal’s handling of Whitewater. He ignored the Pillsbury Report’s findings altogether, along with McDougal’s secretive sale of Whitewater’s assets for pennies on the dollar, his elaborate fiscal juggling act, his misleading assurances and deceptive letters to the Clintons. Stewart portrayed Hillary Clinton as the embittered McDougal saw her: a greedy, coldhearted shrew.

The book’s key scenes depict her coolly refusing to sign over the Clintons’ Whitewater stock to McDougal without also being released from the company’s debt. “While Hillary was technically correct about the mortgage,” wrote Stewart, “from McDougal’s point of view, he didn’t see that there was a problem.” But Stewart doesn’t mention that had she agreed to McDougal’s terms, the Clintons would still owe the bank roughly $100,000, but no longer own a share of the company. Not until two years later did her accountant inform Hillary that the Whitewater stock was worthless, another point that escaped Stewart.

Stewart began his whirlwind publicity tour telling interviewers that his book hadn’t uncovered any actual crimes by the president and his wife, merely bad character and political opportunism. But surely, Ted Koppel pressed during Stewart’s March 11, 1996, appearance on Nightline, there was some problem that “will still come back to haunt the Clintons.” Stewart affirmed that there was indeed, though the charge wouldn’t be murder, perjury, fraud, or obstruction of justice. What Stewart had discovered at the root of Whitewater was “the Clintons’ refusal to abide by financial requirements in obtaining mortgage loans.” He told Koppel that in filling out a personal financial statement for a 1997 Whitewater loan, Hillary Rodham Clinton had “vastly inflated” the value of the property. “It is a crime,” he added gravely, “to submit a false loan document.” The first lady’s guilt was “a question for a prosecutor and a jury to decide.”

Again Stewart was badly mistaken. Down at the bottom of the allegedly felonious loan document, thoughtfully reproduced in Blood Sport’s appendix, was the following warning, which Stewart apparently hadn’t noticed: “(BOTH SIDES OF THIS DOCUMENT MUST BE COMPLETES And on the document’s reverse side, available from the first lady’s private attorney, was all the information the author had accused Hillary of omitting, written in her own quite legible hand. Stewart had simply failed to notice that his set of papers was missing that second page.

Meanwhile, the Senate Whitewater hearings continued to grind on relentlessly toward Election Day. Before Senator D’Amato and his Banking Committee colleagues finally quit, they held more than seventy days of hearings—far more than were necessary to investigate either Watergate or Iran-contra. Former Arkansas securities commissioner Beverly Bassett Schaffer finally got her chance to testify on January 25. Ever since she had agreed to speak with Jeff Gerth four years earlier, her life had been devastated. “I provided you with a detailed account in writing of the facts,” she had written the Times reporter bitterly after his first article portraying her as a corrupt hack appeared in March 1992. “This information was ignored and, instead, you based your story on the word of a mentally ill man I have never met [McDougal] and documents which you admitted to me on the telephone on February 26, 1992 were incomplete.”

In December 1993, Bassett Schaffer had found herself pursued through the streets of Fayetteville, Arkansas, by an NBC News crew guided by Citizens United’s David Bossie. Her name and caricature had appeared on “Wanted” posters circulated by his group. During the House Whitewater hearings in August 1995, she had been accused of suspicious behavior by witnesses she had never met. Despite Democratic protests, Chairman Jim Leach had refused to let her testify in her own defense. But she had been called to Little Rock to testify before the Whitewater grand jury numerous times.

The endless media pressure and resulting emotional distress had forced Bassett Schaffer to abandon her law practice and deal with Whitewater full-time. Her husband, Archie Schaffer, a public relations executive for Tyson Foods, had been indicted by independent counsel Donald Smaltz for the crime of writing a letter to Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, inviting him to the annual meeting of the Arkansas Poultry Federation—which coincided with chicken mogul Don Tyson’s yearly birthday bash.

In the interim, Bassett Schaffer and her department had been vindicated. After multiple FBI and grand jury interviews, the Office of Independent Counsel had notified her that she was not a target of its investigation. The recently released Pillsbury Report had concluded that her department had acted more aggressively with regard to Madison Guaranty than had the federal thrift regulators. Only because Democrats insistently pressured Senator D’Amato was she called to testify at all. At the Washington hearings, Bassett Schaffer was amused to notice that David Bossie, then an aide to Senator Faircloth, carefully avoided her and her husband.

D’Amato’s chief counsel, Michael Chertoff, tried to make an issue of the fact that Bassett Schaffer had informed the governor’s office back in 1986 that state and federal regulators intended imminent action against Jim McDougal. She replied that aside from her duty to warn Clinton of an impending action apt to bring both press inquiries and calls from anxious Madison Guaranty depositors, she had sought to ensure that McDougal couldn’t involve Bill Clinton in his troubles.

And why would she think that might happen? inquired Chertoff. “Because of Mr. McDougal’s history of bragging about his relationship with Bill Clinton,” she answered. “Because of his having told people over the years that he was friends with Bill Clinton … . I believe that Jim McDougal abused his relationship with Bill Clinton, and might again.”

“And he abused it in order to get influence?” Chertoff pressed. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“Well, he didn’t get any,” she snapped. “But he certainly tried.”

From the perspective of her friends and neighbors in Arkansas, Bassett Schaffer’s best moment may have come when Senator Paul Simon, the professorial Illinois Democrat, asked why she found Whitewater so distressing. “It’s personal,” she told him. “I don’t think it’s been very fair to me—actually, to the whole state of Arkansas. It’s really been very personal, very vicious. It’s been an effort to vicariously destroy Bill Clinton piece by piece by ruining the people that he trusted, that worked for him—good people, who didn’t do anything wrong. The job’s been done very well. And a lot of people have been hurt unnecessarily for the purpose of winning an election. And I just think there’s something wrong with that.”

The Senate hearings, having opened with theatrical flair in August 1995, eventually faded out, having proved none of the Republicans’ initial accusations. Despite all the insinuations about perjury and obstruction, not a single witness was ever charged with any offense. To the extent that the hearings had any real effect, it appeared to be the opposite of what the sponsors had intended. Senator D’Amato’s habit of promising horrors and proving nothing, to paraphrase Anthony Lewis, caused him severe political damage among his own constituents. His ratings dropped precipitously in New York opinion polls, and he was soundly defeated by Democrat Charles Schumer in 1998. A similar fate retired Lauch Faircloth, the even more obstreperous Republican from North Carolina.

But the real climax of the Senate Whitewater hearings may have come during the February 14, 1996, testimony of White House aide Helen Dickey. Only twenty-five years old, she had practically grown up in the Arkansas governor’s mansion, and had at one time been Chelsea Clinton’s nanny. Her mother was Robyn Dickey, the former mansion administrator who moved on to oversee the White House Social Office.

It was Helen Dickey who, according to Arkansas state troopers Roger Perry and Larry Patterson, had allegedly phoned the governor’s mansion hours before Vince Foster’s death was announced, crying hysterically because the lawyer had killed himself in his car on a White House parking lot. Working with Larry Nichols, the troopers and their attorney Lynn Davis had filed sworn affidavits to that effect with the D’Amato committee. Trumpeted by British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the London Sunday Telegraph, and then amplified by the American right-wing media, the troopers’ story eventually persuaded Senator D’Amato himself to endorse its dubious premises.

All that came to an abrupt end during Helen Dickey’s tearful appearance before the committee. She explained that a White House usher had told her of Foster’s suicide shortly after she had watched President Clinton being interviewed on Larry King Live on the terrible night of July 20, 1993. “Vince Foster was very close to our family,” she explained. “[We] lived next door to them in Little Rock. It was a very personal thing to me. I immediately began to cry, and become hysterical.” She phoned her mother, then her father with the news. Telephone records obtained by the Senate showed that those calls were made shortly after 10:00 P.M.—several hours later than the troopers’ affidavits claimed.

She had then wandered around the White House living quarters in a daze until she encountered the president, who told her the exact circumstances in which his boyhood friend’s body had been found. Only then did she think to call the Arkansas governor’s mansion; she didn’t want Foster’s friends there to learn about his death on television. As for the troopers’ testimony that Foster had shot himself in a White House parking lot, she swore, “That’s absolutely not true … . I never heard that. I never would have said that because that’s not the facts as I knew them at the time. I’m absolutely certain of the timing of this.”

To his credit, Senator D’Amato apologized to Helen Dickey. He explained that Senate officers had been deluged with letters and phone calls from citizens who had bought the conspiracy theories about Foster’s death. “Senator Sarbanes,” said D’Amato, “suggested that we attempt to deal with this in a public way. So I would think that what we’ve attempted to do is to bring some facts and less of this wild speculation—the kind of thing that, you know, fuels the fire.”

After examining telephone records and hearing Helen Dickey’s testimony, Republicans on the committee decided they didn’t need to hear from the troopers. Within twenty-four hours, Larry Patterson was nevertheless narrating his version of the saga to a shocked Pat Robertson on his TV news program, The 700 Club. Because the conclusion of the Dickey episode went virtually unreported, hardly anybody in the national media confronted its implications about the Arkansas troopers’ motives and credibility. (One who did was David Brock, who ultimately made a public apology to the president for all the trouble his Troopergate article had caused.)

In contrast, Kenneth Starr, in a footnote to his subsequent report endorsing Robert Fiske’s conclusions about the Foster suicide, blandly suggested that Patterson and Perry were merely mistaken.

It was during the government shutdown of November 1995 that Bill Clinton first made the acquaintance of an attractive, dark-eyed twenty-two-year-old White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. On Capitol Hill, triumphal Republicans behind the leadership of Speaker Newt Gingrich had decided to inflict further humiliation on the scandal-weakened president. They confronted Clinton with an ultimatum: Sign the Republican budget bill as written, or they would close the United States government until such time as he did. Perhaps understanding the wishes and priorities of the American people better than his overconfident opponents, Clinton accepted the dare. For the first few days of the shutdown, Republican spokesman were breathing fire. On conservative talk radio, Rush Limbaugh demanded to know just who needed the federal government, anyway.

Still the Whitewater hearings lumbered onward, having been deemed essential by Congress and exempted from the shutdown. Well-placed leaks had the Washington press corps abuzz with rumors that Hillary Rodham Clinton would soon be indicted. In Little Rock, the Paula Jones case was in temporary hiatus, while Judge Susan Webber Wright’s order postponing trial until after President Clinton left office was considered by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis. Dominated by conservative Reagan appointees, the court was expected to overrule Wright. Almost as certain, however, was a White House appeal to the Supreme Court that would have the effect of delaying the decision until after the presidential election. Deputy independent counsel Hickman Ewing was proceeding with plans to try Arkansas governor Jim Guy Tucker, Jim McDougal, and Susan McDougal on bank fraud charges early in 1996.

As she remembered it, Monica Lewinsky first caught Bill Clinton’s eye along a rope line at a departure ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House in early August 1995. They made “intense eye contact” that Lewinsky found thrilling. On November 15, the buxom brunette intern succeeded in getting herself invited to a West Wing party for an aide named Jennifer Palmieri. She made eyes at the president again and, when she was sure nobody else was looking, lifted her jacket to show him the top of her thong panties.

Around 8:00 P.M. that evening, Lewinsky was walking past George Stephanopoulos’s office when she saw the president inside, alone. Clinton beckoned to her to come in. Determined not to miss her chance, Lewinsky blurted out that she had a crush on him. “We talked briefly,” she would eventually testify, “and sort of acknowledged that there was a chemistry that was there and that we were both attracted to each other, and then he asked me if he could kiss me.”

“And what did you say?” she was asked.

“Yes.”

Behaving rather gallantly for a man accused of dropping his pants in front of an unwilling stranger, Clinton asked Lewinsky to come back ten minutes later, at which time he escorted her to his private study off the Oval Office. According to her account (though disputed by his subsequent testimony), they began to make out like high-school kids, quickly advancing to what was euphemistically called “heavy petting” when the fifty-one-year-old president was her age. Lewinsky assured him that she had been involved with a married man before and understood the rules.

For his part, the president later swore that the intern’s oral endearments didn’t begin until two months after that first encounter. Two nights later, on November 17, according to Lewinsky, she contrived at Clinton’s suggestion to deliver a pizza to the private study, where their furtive grappling resumed. Altogether, Lewinsky was able to recall with great particularity nine separate occasions over a period of several months when she and her new boyfriend conspired to steal a few crazy moments together.

For the romantic Monica, it was puppy love from the start. “We enjoyed talking with each other and being with each other,” she was later forced to explain to Starr’s Washington grand jury. “We were very affectionate … . We would tell jokes. We would talk about our childhoods, talk about current events. I was always telling him my stupid ideas about what I thought should be done in the administration, or different views of things. I think back on it and he always made me smile when I was with him … . He was sunshine.”

To the president, a seemingly sentimental lecher, it quickly became clear that he had made an extraordinarily reckless and foolhardy mistake. “I formed an opinion early in 1996, once I got into this unfortunate and wrong conduct,” he would explain during his own grand-jury testimony, “that when I stopped it, which I knew I’d have to do and which I should have done a long time before I did, that she would talk about it. Not because Monica Lewinsky is a bad person. She’s basically a good girl. She’s a good young woman with a good heart and a good mind. I think she is burdened by some unfortunate conditions of her upbringing … . But I knew that the minute there was no longer any contact, she would talk about this. She would have to. She couldn’t help it. It was part of her psyche. So I had put myself at risk.”