Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [387]
Environmental Protection Agency administrator Carol Browner tore into the president, asking Clinton how she was supposed to explain these lurid accounts of sex in the White House to her eleven-year-old son and demanding, “What do I say to him?” Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala lectured Clinton that it was one thing to profess remorse and quite another “to demonstrate it.”
At the conclusion of the blood letting session, having swallowed another healthy serving of humble pie, the president rushed up to Shalala and hugged her, expressing gratitude that she had not walked out on the administration. Each tiny victory was one more day in office.
Clinton repeated the same drill with key Democratic members of Congress. One presidential aide recalled that these meetings were “like a spy movie where you’re hypnotized.” Time seemed to be moving backward. It was a political exercise of the most basic sort; Bill Clinton was forced to throw himself at the mercy of his core supporters and beg forgiveness. His advisers worried that traditionalists like Senator Robert Byrd (D.-W.Va.) and Harry Reid (D.-Nev.) might consider Clinton’s actions so offensive that they would take a hike. “You know, if they took a walk along with a couple others,” said one aide, “we could end up with a stampede.”
KEN Starr said later that he was appalled when he learned that Congress was preparing to dump his report into the public domain without ever reading it. Deputy Bittman phoned a high-ranking staffer friend on the Hill and chastised him: “This is crazy. You guys aren’t even going to read the thing?” His friend replied stoically, “The train has left the station. Nobody wants to touch this thing. Even to open it to see what’s in it.”
There was a short-lived debate within OIC about delivering a second letter to Congress, instructing them not to release the report—at least not until the legislators had reviewed its contents and determined if some material was too sensitive or too explicit for public consumption. Prosecutors “ran around in the hallway” giving Starr conflicting advice. Finally, the independent counsel issued his proclamation: It was too late to change course; it would look like “a loss of confidence in our own work product” to issue an edict that the report had to stay under wraps. Rather than trying to halt its release, Starr’s deputies now swung in the opposite direction, providing House staffers with an electronic version of the Starr Report, “so that they could more easily load it onto the Internet.”
The next morning, Friday, President Clinton was scheduled to attend the traditional national prayer breakfast at the White House. He had stayed up all night preparing for his atonement. As a hundred clerics of mixed faiths sat silently in the East Room at this awkward fellowship gathering, the president confessed: “I don’t think there is a fancy way to say that I have sinned.” He had caused hurt and pain to many people—his family, his friends, his staff and Cabinet members, Monica Lewinsky, her family, and the American people. The president now begged forgiveness with tears welling up in his eyes. He confessed that he had hit the “rock-bottom truth,” possessing “what my Bible calls a broken spirit: an understanding that I must have God’s help to be the person that I want to be, a willingness to give the very forgiveness I seek, a renunciation of