The "Bimbo Patrol" worked. Bill Clinton was elected.
When the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, once again the detectives were called out: - The Washington Post reported that Terry Lenzner was hired to probe Monica"s past, to discredit her in the event that she turned on the president.
- Lenzner investigated Monica"s friend Linda Tripp, who leaked the affair to Ken Starr.
- Pellicano was reported to have turned up Monica Lewinsky"s former boyfriend Andy Bleiler four days after the Lewinsky story broke in January 1998. Through his lawyer, Terry Giles, Bleiler said that Monica had stalked him, and that when she got her job in Washington she had quipped that she was going to have to get "presidential knee pads." When New York Post reporter Andrea Peyser asked Pellicano if he was the one who found Bleiler, he told her, "you"re a smart girl. No comment."
- White House staffer Sidney Blumenthal is reported to have tried to place a story that a member of Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr"s staff was gay.
- Blumenthal also reportedly encouraged journalists to investigate the past life of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde, uncovering evidence of a thirty-year-old affair.
- A lobbyist for Planned Parenthood accused House Government Oversight Committee Chairman Dan Burton, a persistent thorn in the Clintons" side, of groping her. How coincidental that her boss when the incident allegedly took place was Ann Lewis, Hillary"s confidante and partisan.
- During the impeachment proceedings, House Speaker Bob Livingston resigned after reports of infidelity were leaked to the press. ABC News reporter c.o.kie Roberts said she had gotten advance word of the scandal by a source close to the White House. Other reports had White House operatives "peddling" the story to ABC"s Linda Douglas.
Shortly after America learned that Monica Lewinsky had confessed her affair with Clinton to Linda Tripp, who had taped her calls, Jane Mayer of the New Yorker reported that Tripp had lied on her Pentagon personnel questionnaire. Asked if she had ever been arrested, she answered no, ignoring her teenage detention by police in Greenwood Lake, New York, over a missing wallet and watch.
My wife, Eileen, immediately surmised that the leak to Mayer must have been illegal, since personnel files are confidential. In February 1998, I published a column accusing the Pentagon press office of violating Tripp"s rights under the Privacy Law.
Apparently, Kenneth Bacon, chief Pentagon spokesman and a former colleague of Mayer at the Wall Street Journal, had permitted the improper release of the information. On November 4, 2003, the Pentagon agreed to pay Tripp $595,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch. The Defense Department admitted that it had released data from her personnel file, and had violated the Privacy Act.
My own feelings about the Clintons changed as I saw their tactics in defending against impeachment. I did not think Bill Clinton should be impeached. But I could not countenance the Clintons" use of secret police digging up dirt on innocent people, a tactic that turned my stomach. I had never used such tools in political campaigns, no matter how bare-knuckled they got. I was stunned that the Clintons were doing so.
How far Hillary had fallen! How different her life had become from what she must have imagined it would be. Describing her work for the Senate Watergate Committee in Living History, Hillary recalls that "The charges against President Nixon included . . . directing the FBI and the Secret Service to spy on Americans and maintaining a secret investigative unit within the Office of the President."
But how was any of that different from what Hillary herself did? Hillary"s legal team kept a phalanx of detectives on the payroll throughout the impeachment imbroglio to find incriminating information about their enemies. The fact that they were paid for by private funds, and were not government officials, is a detail. They worked for the president and the first lady, and their job was to spy on American citizens.
The history of underhanded investigative tactics in American politics is long and ign.o.ble. Former FBI head J. Edgar Hoover is reported to have snooped on presidential opponents for decades, and was famous for his voluminous files detailing the private lives of members of Congress and other high government officials.
But Hoover"s techniques have been so roundly repudiated that it"s unlikely the FBI can ever be so misused again. Richard Nixon"s "Plumbers Unit," established to plug leaks in the administration by running down the source using wiretaps and the like, was exposed when they broke into the offices of Daniel Ellsberg"s psychiatrist to discredit him for releasing the Pentagon Papers. When the plumbers broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate to plant eavesdropping bugs, they had committed one burglary too many; the resulting scandal, as everyone knows, led to Nixon"s resignation.
Hillary Clinton"s efforts to protect her husband and silence his opponents picked up where Hoover and Nixon left off. She has resurrected a style of politics and campaigning that had died a much-needed death.
SAY IT NEVER HAPPENED.
In Living History, Hillary repeats all the charges against her husband, and all the predictable Clinton denials, again and again. Granted, the lies of a woman standing by her husband in a time of great trial deserve some consideration. But the misrepresentations of an author trying to make good on an $8 million book deal deserve much less. It was one thing to attack Gennifer Flowers"s credibility while Bill was running for president. It is quite another to keep up the pretense now, even after the man himself has admitted under oath to having had an affair with her. But in Living History, even now, Hillary, arrogantly - and falsely - dismisses Flowers"s accusations as "a whale of a tale."
Barbara Walters didn"t let Hillary get away with denying the Flowers affair in her interview promoting the publication of Living History. Walters asked: "When Governor Clinton decided to run for president, a woman named Gennifer Flowers claimed that she had a twelve-year affair with your husband. Your husband told you it wasn"t true. Did you believe him?"
Hillary dutifully answered "I did."
Then Walters closed in. "Years later, under oath in a deposition in the [Jones] lawsuit, your husband did admit that he did have a s.e.xual encounter with Gennifer Flowers. How did you reconcile that with what he told you all the years earlier?"
Hillary double talked her way through her answer: "Well, you know, Barbara, we"ve been through a lot together now, over many years. And as I also write in the book, we have spent some time having marriage counseling, which I highly recommend to people, especially people who led such busy lives as we did over so many years together. And I think I"ll leave it at that."
For a trial lawyer, the refusal ever to admit guilt is key in litigation strategy. The defendant"s right not to incriminate himself is so fundamental that it"s in the Bill of Rights. We do not expect those who have committed crimes to tell the truth. They can refuse to testify one way or the other. We make prosecutors prove that they committed the crimes using forensic and other evidence. A confessional style of justice would inevitably bring back the rack and the thumbscrew.
But as a lawyer, Hillary mistakenly applies the right of refusal to politics, where trust is the key factor. From the very beginning of their political career, Bill and Hillary have understood that any allegation of personal misconduct becomes a "he said, she said" situation, in which denial is the first and best weapon to defeat scandal. Until DNA testing transformed a stain on a blue dress into a trigger for impeachment, the denial defense carried them through all their scandals.
But at what price to Bill Clinton"s credibility? He will never escape his finger-wagging denial of a relationship with Monica Lewinsky. This brazen lie is engraved in our minds forever, sullying his place in our memories and in history.
As with so much else involving the Clintons, I had a preview of the "say-it-never-happened defense." It occurred in 1990, during Bill Clinton"s final race for re-election as governor. Though it showed me a side of Bill"s personality - his capacity for rage - for the first time, and I found it scary indeed, it was Hillary who made the deeper impression on me - with the coolness with which she asked me to lie and pretend the incident had never happened.
Clinton was locked in an unexpectedly tough Democratic primary against a virtually unknown challenger, Hal McRae. The race looked like it might go either way, and Clinton was rattled by its closeness. Defeat seemed a real possibility.
I had dental surgery earlier that day as I prepared to fly to Little Rock to present the latest polling data - which was not good news. The pain in my dry socket did nothing to improve my mood, especially since I resisted taking painkillers because I needed to be clearheaded when I met with the Clintons.
Bill was late. He had cancelled our earlier evening meeting to do a TV show, and returned around midnight to the Governor"s Mansion for our strategy session. Campaign manager Gloria Cabe, Hillary, and I joined him in the breakfast room adjoining the kitchen in the Mansion. On seeing the poll data, Bill ripped into me like he never had before. "You got me into this race," he screamed, "so you could make some extra money off me. That was the only reason. And now you give me no attention, no attention at all. I"m about to lose this election, lose this primary, against a n.o.body, and you"re too busy with the little legislative races that Betsey [Wright] got you to give me any attention at all. I pay your expenses, and you come down here and you work on Betsey"s races, not on mine. You"ve forgotten me. You"ve dismissed me. You don"t care about me. You"ve turned your back on me." Growing red in the face, he kept it up: "I don"t get s.h.i.t from you anymore. You"re s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g me! You"re s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g me!"
In pain, angry, tired, fed up, I stormed out of the Mansion, yelling back at him: "Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. You"ve just solved my problem. I"m getting s.h.i.t from [Lee] At.w.a.ter and s.h.i.t from [Trent] Lott for working for you, and now I can solve my problem. I"m quitting your campaign - I"ll be a free agent. I can be a fifty-state Republican, and I won"t have to take your s.h.i.t." As I marched through the kitchen to leave the Mansion, I heard hoofbeats. Bill came up at a run, threw me to the ground, and drew his fist back to punch me. Hillary was on him in a flash, grabbing his arm and screaming at him: "Bill! Stop! Think! Get control! What are you doing? Bill!"
Red faced, breathing hard, Clinton jumped to his feet spewing apologies. Realizing he"d gone too far, he switched instantly to damage control, trying desperately to keep me on his reservation.
Hillary leapt forward and followed me out of the Mansion as I stalked off to the parking lot. "d.i.c.k, d.i.c.k, I"m sorry - I"m so sorry. Don"t go. Bill didn"t mean it. Please don"t go. Calm down. d.i.c.k." Then she said something I have pondered ever since. I offer no explanation of its meaning; I leave it to readers to make of it what they will. She said: "He only does this to people he loves."
Eileen wanted me to swear out a warrant for his arrest on a.s.sault charges. I didn"t, but our relationship was never the same. There was a new formality to it, with an undercurrent of warning: Don"t go too far again. I continued to work for him in the 1990 election out of a sense of duty, but after 1990 we parted ways, probably figuring we would never meet again.
Perhaps I was engaging in denial myself. Because after their defeat in the congressional races of 1994, Hillary called to ask me to come back and work for Bill. In Living History, she describes me as reluctant. She says I told her: "I don"t like the way I was treated, Hillary . . . people were so mean to me."
"I know, I know, d.i.c.k, but people find you difficult," she says she replied.
Baloney. I never felt "people were mean to me," and never said anything of the sort. Hillary knows why I was reluctant - our fight at the Mansion. I had resolved never to work with Clinton again. Why did I? The allure of power, prestige, money, and everything else was too great. Like so many people in Bill Clinton"s life, I gave in.
During the 1992 campaign, reporters got wind of what had happened and pressed me for an account. A reporter for the Los Angeles Times called me after the Rodney King riots in L.A., claiming he wanted a comment on their impact on the election. His call turned out to be a ruse to get into my home very early one morning to ask about the Mansion episode. I rushed down in my bathrobe and threw him out. I wondered if there had been a photographer in his car; I could just imagine a photo of me, with wild, slept-on hair, hollering at the reporter in my slippers and bathrobe, finding its way onto the Times"s front page.
I called Betsey Wright to ask how to handle the questions. She checked with Hillary and called back: "Hillary said to say it never happened," Betsey reported.
"Say it never happened." It was my first direct, inside taste of how the Clinton rapid response team worked. Operatives who first heard about negative attacks that might be building against the Clinton campaign reported to central command: Hillary. She would orchestrate the response. And the central insight was this: If it happened in private, say it never happened and it will go away. From my altercation with the governor in the Mansion, to Bill"s affairs, to his confrontation with Paula Jones, the instructions were always the same: "Say it never happened." This line of defense worked well until a blue dress ripped it apart.
To this day, spokesmen for the Clintons - although not Bill or Hillary themselves - deny that he attacked me. But Gloria Cabe, Clinton"s 1990 campaign manager and still a loyalist, confirmed the incident to David Maraniss: "Clinton . . . slugged Morris, sending him reeling." From where she was standing, my fall must have looked like it was in response to a punch.
Bill Clinton didn"t punch me. But he did tackle me. Years later, when I was asked about Cabe"s account, I called the president. "Deny it," he said. "I didn"t punch you."
"But you tackled me," I answered.
"Right, but I didn"t punch you," he replied.
"If you had, I would have undoubtedly decked you," I joked. Even six years later, though, it wasn"t that funny.
(In Behind the Oval Office, my 1997 memoir of the Clinton years, I tried to protect the president with a sanitized account: "Clinton charged up behind me as I stalked toward the door, grabbed me from behind, and wrapped his arms around me to stop me from leaving. I slipped to the floor. Hillary helped me to my feet." When I read this account to Clinton over the phone before the book was published, he chuckled and said "that"s right - I was trying to stop you from leaving.") The "say-it-never-happened" tactic was, of course, a daily feature of the president"s defense while the Monica Lewinsky scandal was convulsing the country. But for Hillary still to be relying on it six years later is a bit much. Yet in Living History, she hews to the party line that Bill lied to her.
But did he really lie to Hillary?
He didn"t lie to me that same morning when we spoke by phone. "Ever since I became president I"ve had to shut myself down, s.e.xually I mean," he told me. "But I screwed up with this girl. I didn"t do what they said I did, but I may have done enough that I cannot prove my innocence."
I had no earthly idea what the president meant, and I wasn"t about to ask him. It was months before I realized, like the rest of the country, what he actually was saying that morning. I did not reveal my conversation with the president until I was summoned to a Grand Jury.
In June 2003, on the Fox News Channel"s Hannity & Colmes, former Dukakis campaign manager Susan Estrich, a friend of the president"s and a top lawyer, indicated that Clinton also told her the truth about Monica Lewinsky.
I leave it to the reader to decide whether, if the president told Susan Estrich and me, he lied to Hillary. But even if he didn"t tell her the truth, was she born yesterday?
If your husband has a history of kleptomania and he"s accused of shoplifting, you don"t take his denials at face value. After Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Elizabeth Ward Gracen, Dolly Kyle Browning, Kathleen Willey, Sally Perdue, the testimony of state troopers L. D. Brown and Danny Ferguson, Betsey Wright"s warning about the women problems that would arise if Bill ran for president in 1988, and dozens of others, is Hillary seriously asking us to believe that she gave Bill the benefit of the doubt?
And when it came out that Bill had spoken to Monica more than one hundred times in person or on the phone - including late night calls - didn"t Hillary think twice about Bill"s limited admission that he had "talked to her a few times?"
We have to a.s.sume she knew that Bill was guilty.
But, if so, why did she pretend she thought he was innocent, and why does she perpetuate that pretense in Living History?
At the time the Lewinsky scandal broke, it made complete political sense for Hillary to say that she believed in Bill"s innocence. His presidency - and her own first ladyship - was hanging by a thread. Demands for his resignation were rife. Hillary acknowledges as much in Living History. Had Hillary not publicly defended him, they both would likely have been forced out of the White House. Had Hillary failed to defend him, her own loyalists - and even at her lowest ebb, she still retained the affection of millions of Americans, most of them hardcore liberal Democrats - would have turned against the president, tipping the balance and likely forcing both Clintons out of the White House.
Hillary could not publicly defend her husband without a.s.serting his innocence. To have done so would have been to make everyone realize that she would put up with the most unbelievable public humiliation just to hang on to power. It would have made a sham of her claims that she had a real marriage based on love, trust, and affection. It was only by pretending not to believe the charges that she could stand up and defend his - and her - status and power.
But why lie now? Why even address the issue of Monica in Living History? Hillary"s pious statement in her book that "in a better world, this sort of conversation between a husband and wife would be no one"s business but our own" is nothing more than verbal sleight-of-hand. No one made her write this book; nor did anyone hound her for an explanation of January 21, 1998. Hillary could have written her memoir and glossed over this aspect of her personal life. She might not have made $8 million, but she could have settled for a smaller sum and avoided repeating her lie. But she wanted the money. Her initial fabrication in January 1998 was an attempt to save her husband"s presidency, and her own proximity to power. Her transparent lying in Living History was designed solely to make money.
Just as in the gift scandals that followed Hillary out of the White House, she was willing to incur political harm for financial gain - a tendency that augers ill for a president.
As for Bill Clinton, he had faced the question of whether to commit perjury or admit his adulteries before. In June 1996, as he prepared to testify in the trial of Jim and Susan McDougal and Jim Guy Tucker, Clinton asked me what he should say "if they ask about my relationship with Susan McDougal."
I didn"t press him but wondered if he meant that he had an affair with her and wanted to know how to handle it. "Tell the truth," I said. "If you had an affair with her, admit it. You"ll drop ten points [in the poll] and you"ll only be seven points ahead, but we"ll get those points back. Just don"t commit perjury. Then n.o.body can help you." He was never asked, and Susan McDougal repeatedly denied any such relationship.
President Clinton was deeply aware of the mess he had gotten himself into by lying about Lewinsky in his Jones deposition. When we spoke on January 21, the day the story broke in the Washington Post, I told him he should consider telling the truth to the American people about the affair, since they were generous and inclined to forgive. "But what about the legal situation?" he asked.
"If the public forgives you, no prosecutor will be able to move against you," I a.s.sured him.
Then I conducted a survey for him that indicated while the voters would, indeed, forgive the adultery, they would not overlook perjury. Misunderstanding my advice, he decided to-keep on lying. And he did it in the most emphatic way possible, wagging his finger on national television. Here is how Hillary describes the event: "The President issued a forceful denial that he"d had s.e.xual relations with Lewinsky. I thought his show of anger was justified under the circ.u.mstances, as I understood them."
Hillary stood by, bobbing her head in agreement.
Absent from her description is any sense of outrage, anger, or even concern at the aggressiveness with which the president lied to the people. It remains the single most blatant lie ever told on national television by a president of the United States, and represents an a.s.sault from which American politics has yet to recover.
Hillary, though, was applying her standard tactic in "he said, she said" situations: Say it never happened. Hillary reflected her confidence on the Today show in January 1998, just seven days after the allegations had come out. "If all that [Bill"s affair and perjury] were proven true, I think that would be a very serious offense. This is not going to be proven true."
And it never would have been, were it not for DNA.
Hillary is at her most disingenuous when she describes the denouement of the Monica story. She writes, in Living History, that she "knew the prosecution had requested a blood sample from the President without specifying its significance." What did she think they wanted the blood sample for? To test his cholesterol?
Then she writes with anguish of how she finally learned the truth: "I could hardly breathe. Gulping for air, I started crying and yelling at him, "What do you mean? What are you saying? Why did you lie to me?""
Is her story credible? By August 1998: - Hillary knew that Linda Tripp had taped Monica describing her affair explicitly.
- Hillary knew that Lewinsky had visited the White House more than three dozen times since leaving her job there.
- Hillary knew that her friend Evelyn Lieberman, Clinton"s deputy chief of staff, had transferred Monica from the White House to the Pentagon because she was around Bill too much.
- Hillary knew that Clinton had lied to her about his relationship with Gennifer Flowers.
- Hillary knew that Betty Currie, Clinton"s loyal secretary, was often listed as the cover for Monica"s meetings with him.
- Hillary knew that Monica Lewinsky had told Vernon Jordan that "she had had s.e.x with Clinton and that she planned to lie to the court."
- Hillary knew that Bill had given Monica a copy of Walt Whitman"s Leaves of Gra.s.s, the same book he"d given Hillary "after our second date."
- Hillary knew that Starr had asked for a blood sample from the president, and press leaks linked it to Monica"s blue dress.
In short, Hillary"s account of the August confrontation with her husband is very likely her most egregious and elaborate lie. She couldn"t admit to knowing that Bill and Monica were an item until August 15 because that would make it impossible for her to stand by her man in public. And impossible to hold at bay the forces that wanted him - and therefore her - out of the White House.
If she were to take up residence there again, would President Hillary Clinton use the same stonewalling tactics as the ones she adopted when first lady? Presidents can draw on a deep wellspring of forgiveness in sustaining their administrations. It is only when they get stuck - hunker down in a position and lose their flexibility - that they get badly hurt.
Johnson on Vietnam, Nixon on Watergate, Clinton on Monica, and, perhaps, Bush on weapons of ma.s.s destruction in Iraq are all examples of getting stuck. Losing her ability to maneuver, a chief executive who stonewalls takes a serious political risk. Hillary"s record indicates that she may fall again into the same trap.
BLAME THE RIGHT WING.
The most consistent theme running through Hillary"s scorched-earth defense of her husband"s administration is an obsession with the Clintons" ideological enemies. As Gail Sheehy writes of the 1992 campaign: "Hillary turned a different face to the world. The stories of her husband"s infidelities appeared to register, consciously at least, as having nothing to do with their marriage, but rather as evidence of the depths to which the hit men behind George Bush would stoop."
Sheehy quotes Hillary"s friend, former newspaper publisher Dorothy Stuck, saying, "it doesn"t make any difference [to Hillary] what people say about her. Whatever criticism or belittling, she doesn"t take it personally, because the cause is always more important. It may very well be the way she insulates herself from hurt. And I think in the past ten or twelve years with Bill she may have done that to protect her sanity."
Most famously, Hillary sought to blame the entire Lewinsky scandal not on Bill, but on enemies of the progressive cause. It was on the Today show, shortly after the Monica scandal broke, that Hillary famously said of Ken Starr"s investigation: "I do believe that this is a battle. I mean, look at the very people who are involved in this. They have popped up in other settings. This is - the great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president. . . ""
In Living History, she writes: "Looking back, I see that I might have phrased my point more artfully, but I stand by the characterization of Starr"s investigation. ... I do believe there was, and still is, an interlocking network of groups and individuals who want to turn the clock back on many of the advances our country has made, from civil rights and woman"s rights to consumer and environmental regulation, and they use all the tools at their disposal - money, power, influence, media, and politics - to achieve their ends."
On the Today show that morning, the HILLARY mask slipped and we glimpsed the real Hillary underneath - the one all of us who know her well are used to: partisan, combative, and angry. And, always, anxious to deflect an attack on her husband"s character into an a.s.sault on civil rights, woman"s rights, consumer"s rights, and environmentalism - anything but what the criticism actually concerned.
But Hillary"s rhetoric is not just an effort to channel the scandal into defensible pathways; it also reflects her actual inner thinking. To Hillary, objective guilt or innocence is not nearly as important as the motivations and ideology of those who are bringing the charges. Good people - like herself - cannot really be guilty; bad people - like her conservative critics - are never really innocent. Nothing is objective. All is seen through the prism of ideology.
THE LOCKDOWN.
Hillary"s defense tactics - private investigators, character a.s.sa.s.sination, denial, and even turning scandal into ideological warfare - have backfired over and over again. But Living History would indicate that she has learned nothing.
In fact, the entire catastrophe, beginning with Clinton"s perjury in the Paula Jones deposition, and ending with the subsequent impeachment and his trial in the Senate, could have been averted had she been willing to listen to reason and be a bit flexible.
Lanny Davis, a key Clinton defender, ruminated to Gail Sheehy on what might have been if Hillary had not stonewalled the media requests for information. "One can speculate that the whole chain of events that led up to the Whitewater investigation, then led to Ken Starr, which then led to the investigation of Monica and finally to impeachment can be traced back to ... [Hillary"s] first instinct - to lock down."
Davis is absolutely right. Both Ken Starr"s original Whitewater investigation, and the Paula Jones lawsuit in which Clinton lied under oath, could have been stopped early on had Hillary been less reflexively insistent on stonewalling. In fact, no special prosecutor would have been appointed had she been more forthcoming in answering the media"s requests for information on Whitewater. And had she accepted Paula Jones"s offers to settle her lawsuit, Bill would never have been summoned to a deposition in the first place.
The settlement offer was actually quite generous. Jones, a former Arkansas state employee, sued Clinton saying that she had been led to his hotel room by a state trooper on some pretext. Once there, she said, the governor behaved lewdly and propositioned her. To settle her lawsuit, Jones just wanted Clinton to affirm her good moral character and rebut the accusations of the president"s defenders that she had asked the trooper to take her to Clinton"s room in hopes of having an affair with the governor. All Jones wanted Clinton to say was: "I do not deny meeting Paula Jones on May 8, 1991, in a room at the Excelsior Hotel. She did not engage in any improper or s.e.xual conduct. I believe her to be a truthful and moral person." That was it. No money. No admission of inappropriate behavior.
But Hillary"s strategy was to lock down.
In Living History, she writes that she wouldn"t settle because it would create "a terrible precedent. . . the lawsuits would never end."
But that wasn"t the real reason she rejected Jones"s offer.
To have accepted it would have been to admit that a state trooper brought Paula Jones to "a room at the Excelsior Hotel" in Little Rock. To admit that this was how Clinton used troopers would have lent credibility to the charges of retired Arkansas cops that they had procured women for Clinton while he was governor.
By then, the tapestry of lies Hillary had created in defense of Bill was so densely interwoven that she could not admit the truth in one sector without imperiling her defense of her husband in another. Pull one thread, and the whole design unraveled. So for the sake of covering up the trooper scandal (for which Clinton could not have been impeached, for it concerned his conduct as governor and was not criminal), she let the Jones suit continue, until it mushroomed into perjury by the president - an impeachable offense. And, to her credit, in Living History Hillary admits to the mistake: "With the wisdom of hindsight, of course, not settling the Jones suit early on was the second biggest tactical mistake made in handling the barrage of investigations and lawsuits." She can"t resist adding, "The first was requesting an independent counsel at all."
But then, she goes on to remind the reader that "Judge Susan Webber Wright had decided to throw out the Paula Jones lawsuit, finding that it lacked factual or legal merit."