Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [462]
Despite his fall from grace, plummeting from number three lawyer in the U.S. Justice Department to former convict, Hubbell had concluded that it was pointless to do anything rash. Suicide had entered his mind, on and off, during this horrible period. But he had decided that it was counterproductive to take the path that his friend Vince Foster had taken. “I’d be lying to you if I said [I didn’t] get depressed,” he admitted. “Especially bearing the shame of what I did and having to confront it. Having to admit to your kids that you’d done something wrong. To your wife. Face all that I faced—you know, in prison.” Making the transition to a new life and a new career—selling insurance in Washington—was hardly a cakewalk. At the same time, said Hubbell, “anybody who’s been around somebody who committed suicide realizes that it doesn’t solve any problems. It doesn’t leave your family better off.”
Hubbell remembered first arriving in Washington after having been nominated to serve as assistant attorney general and meeting with Senator Joe Biden, who chaired the Judiciary Committee. Biden had said to him, half-facetiously, “Are you sure you want this job? The president’s best friend always gets indicted.” Now, Biden’s remark had proven to be prescient, like an ugly nightmare come alive. But Webb did not allow himself to consider what-ifs, such as whether he would have ended up in prison if he had never been a close personal friend of Bill and Hillary’s. Hubbell bit his thick lower lip and said, “I don’t even think about that. I did something wrong, and I’ve paid for it and that’s behind me. To get into would-haves and should-haves is not healthy.”
Similarly, Bill Clinton’s decision not to grant him a pardon was now cordoned off in a remote corner of his mind. Hubbell’s only regret, after disgracing himself and cobbling the pieces of his life back together, was that he had never spoken to Bill or Hillary again. “I mean, I miss them as friends,” he said, folding his napkin after indulging in an infrequent breakfast at the Mayflower Hotel. “They’re wonderful people. We had wonderful friendships. I cannot deny that’s a loss in my life. But it was brought on by my own actions. So I can regret it. But I don’t blame them for anything.”
Putting on a worn corduroy jacket, Webb Hubbell paused before lumbering off to his Washington office to sell insurance, long enough to formulate a final question that still bedeviled him. Although he liked Ken Starr as a Southern gentleman and as a former colleague in the law, and had long ago forgiven Starr for the treatment he and his family had endured in the wake of his admitted crimes, Hubbell couldn’t discern, for the life of him, what else Starr’s lawyers were trying to extract from him. The fact that Bill Clinton had not pardoned him seemed to be proof positive that he had not hidden any deep, dark secrets. After all—Hubbell pointed out, shrugging his shoulders in bewilderment—if this had been a grand conspiracy designed to protect the Clintons, surely Bill would have been forced to pardon him to keep him from spilling his guts.
“I’d love to know what they were really after,” Hubbell mused, before stepping into the overcast Washington morning to continue his rehabilitation, one day at a time. “It’s never been clear to me—what did they think the Clintons had done that they couldn’t prove? That led them to spend this much money? Or was it merely the belief that they had to go down every alley and every pathway? …”
MONICA Lewinsky had done her best to move on with her life, securing an apartment in New York City. It was an awkward place to call home, since Hillary Clinton was now her U.S. senator and Bill Clinton had set up his office nearby in Harlem. Yet she did her best to carve out her own space. She had designed and sold her own line of handbags as a temporary business venture, then enrolled at the London School of Economics to complete a master’s degree in social psychology.
But the former White House intern would never quite outgrow the scars of her relationship with President