Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [394]
“This was an outraged wife,” said one observer. Hillary planned to deal with her husband later. For now, the principal target of the First Lady’s ire was Kenneth W. Starr.
President Clinton himself later confessed with surprising candor, “Look, this was a terrible personal ordeal for me, and it was, you know, pretty dicey politically. But one of the things that I realized is that I still had sworn a duty to do my job, and that I was going to do it till the last day. And, frankly, it was a constant source of reassurance and consolation to me that I could do my job.… I mean, I knew I had done a bad thing personally, a terrible thing. But I also knew there was nothing about it that was impeachable, by any reasonable definition of what an impeachable offense was. And I just decided that the only way that the whole thing could go bad was if I was unable to function as the president.”
Only one piece of news shook up Bill Clinton badly: He was thrown for a loop emotionally when he learned that Chelsea had read portions of the Starr Report online at Stanford. For Clinton, according to one aide, nothing was more distressing than finding out that his daughter was “reading this sh——over the Internet.” But the president steeled himself and kept working. Hillary Clinton herself set up meetings with jittery White House staffers, urging them to “stay the course of what we’re doing.” The aggrieved wife told them, “We can’t let these guys get to us.”
CHAPTER
46
STARR WITNESS
The blowback from the Starr Report was so intense that Washington was thrown into a state of political turmoil. Five days after Congress released the report, the online magazine Salon reported that Republican Judiciary Committee leader Henry Hyde had engaged in an extramarital affair with one Cherie Snodgrass in the late 1960s, when the aspiring Illinois politician was in his forties. Blood was in the water and sharks had begun circling.
Hyde, now seventy-four, had ended the affair after five years when Snodgrass’s husband had discovered the relationship. Hyde had reconciled with his wife and remained happily married for three decades, until his spouse’s death of cancer in the early 1990s. Now, this frightful ghost had been let out of the closet for no reason but to intimidate and humiliate him, Hyde felt. In a statement to the press, he defended himself: “The statute of limitations has long since passed on my youthful indiscretions.” Unfortunately, the congressman’s four grown children had never known of these “youthful indiscretions.” As hail clouds gathered over the Capitol, Hyde was forced to make four phone calls to his children, confessing that he had cheated on their dead mother so they did not hear it first on the nightly news.
Seated years later in his office in a converted brick school house in the leafy Chicago suburb of Addison, Illinois, Hyde pursed his lips, searching for words to describe this horrible turn of events. “It is the most hurtful thing that has happened to me in public life,” Hyde said, not long before his death. “It was in the distant past.… I wanted this to go away.”
Hyde lowered his voice and noted that there were certain things about his relationship with Snodgrass that he “could not talk about,” certain factors that (perhaps) mitigated his own blameworthiness. He intimated that Snodgrass, whose family members were friends, suffered from emotional problems that had made it difficult for him to break off the relationship.
Said Hyde, “It was over thirty-some years before, and my wife had forgiven me … and I felt that should