Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [366]
Ultimately, David Kendall’s team counseled the president that if he was determined to go to the grand jury, he needed to run out the clock. A neophyte like Bob Bittman, the lawyers argued, would grossly underestimate Bill Clinton’s prowess as a world-class witness. Answering questions for four hours was a piece of cake for a nimble politician like Clinton. He could talk his way out of a tied rucksack in that short time. A group of ten of Ken Starr’s prosecutors was no match for a star orator like Bill Clinton.
In the end, the president accepted this advice; he also rejected the Fifth Amendment approach. Appearing in the grand jury and running out the clock provided the greatest odds of survival. To implement this bold plan on behalf of their client, Clinton’s legal team crafted twelve or fourteen “blocks of testimony” or “set pieces” that the president could roll out in response to questions, allowing him to talk away long stretches of time. Clinton was primed to begin each answer with “Well, let me think,” or “Please don’t interrupt me,” or “Can’t you let me answer it fully?” The White House team knew that OIC would be bending over backward to appear respectful. So the president’s job was to “roll over their questions, like a steam-roller.”
One of the greatest concerns of the White House lawyers was that they had not yet heard the Linda Tripp tapes; the team had nothing but thirdhand knowledge of what was on them. To compensate for this handicap, the president’s lawyers created their own mock tapes. On these tapes, they pretended that Tripp was saying various “outrageous things,” and then played them for Clinton to get him to “react.” The president would get agitated and say, “What—she’s saying that?” The team would have to calm him down, reminding the president “that these were exaggerations.” By going through these practice drills, which provoked Clinton and caused his blood to boil, the president was prepared to deal with “some rather extreme situations.”
Clinton’s friend Harry Thomason—an award-winning Hollywood producer—also contributed his expertise by advising the White House lawyers to conduct the filming so that Clinton’s face dominated the screen. None of the Starr prosecutors, he said, should appear on the live feed at all. The viewers would see the president at all times and be forced to “imagine” his disembodied interrogators as if they were invisible gremlins. “We wanted nobody else but Clinton on that film,” one presidential counselor would later divulge. Yet these plans, like all preparations involving grand jury testimony, were kept strictly secret so that they could be sprung on OIC as a fait accompli at the final hour.
Starr’s prosecutors, in the meantime, were holding their own secretive “moot court” sessions, prepping for their date with destiny. Hickman Ewing, Jr., feeling lonesome in Arkansas now that Whitewater had dried up, flew to Washington to play the role of Bill Clinton for OIC’s practice sessions. By all accounts, Ewing turned in a masterful performance. Adopting a perfect Southern accent and “aw shucks” charm, he danced around his colleagues’ questions and tied them in knots, giving them a taste of what to expect with a pro like “the Comeback Kid.” Already, the New York Times and Washington Post were reporting that Clinton might walk into the grand jury session and confess to some minor sexual indiscretion, while denying perjury in the Jones deposition.
OIC struggled to agree on a master strategy. Bittman’s overall philosophy, in sync with that of Starr, was, “We should treat [Clinton] with dignity and let him tell his story.” For one, he was president of the United States. Besides, “no matter what he said, it was going to be helpful to us.”
Yet within the hard-line OIC faction there were rumblings that