Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [61]
George Stephanopoulos, a senior adviser on policy and strategy, cut off Nussbaum, arguing that Reno should appoint a special prosecutor and be done with it. In his view, “this will be over in six months.” The Republican Congress was likely to reauthorize the independent counsel law, anyway. If Reno beat the legislators to the punch and appointed her own special counsel with impeccable credentials, that person could remain in place after the law kicked back into effect. How was the administration supposed to move forward with key initiatives like health care reform, Stephanopoulos asked, moving closer to the phone, if Whitewater kept dominating the national news?
Nussbaum “went bananas” at this logic, thinking back on his experiences during Watergate. “You could appoint me independent counsel,” he shouted into the speakerphone, meaning it would still be a disaster. “If I was the ‘good Bernie,’” he said, “I would take three years, turning over every piece of information to protect myself. If the ‘bad Bernie’ took over, I would look under every rock, twist and distort, try to distract you. Even the good Bernie will keep going three or four years. A bad Bernie will last forever.”
President Clinton, half exhausted in Prague, lost his cool. “You’re telling me I can’t do it, Bernie, but I’m being killed!” he yelled back into the phone. “I’m going to press conferences here in Europe and Whitewater is all they want to know about. I can’t take it.”
“Turn over every piece of paper to Congress,” Bernie replied. “The president and the First Lady should go to Capitol Hill and answer any questions they want, for as long as they want.” Some White House aides in the room gasped—had Nussbaum gone completely bonkers? Turn over everything to Congress and march up to Capitol Hill? That was suicide!
Hillary Clinton stood up. They had vented enough for one night, she said. The president would have to absorb the information and make a decision. “I’ll sleep on it,” President Clinton said, sounding unusually weary and distant.
THE next morning, Hillary walked into Nussbaum’s office in the West Wing. She slipped her arm around her old mentor as if to console a soldier who had been wounded fighting for a noble cause. The president, she said, had decided to appoint an independent counsel to get this monkey off his back. “He feels he has no choice,” Mrs. Clinton replied soberly.
Bernie looked at the First Lady with sadness in his baggy eyes. “Hillary,” he said, “this is a great tragedy.”
Looking back on it with the benefit of ten years’ hindsight, President Clinton would describe his decision to appoint an independent counsel as one of the greatest miscalculations of his entire presidency. He had expected that the investigation would last “maybe two years, three at most.” He had also believed that it would allow him to rid himself of this Whitewater bugaboo. Both of those assumptions, he confessed, proved to be wildly off the mark.
“I mean, I knew Janet Reno would probably appoint a Republican because we were Democrats,” Clinton said, explaining his thought processes. “I knew Hillary and I hadn’t done anything. I mean, the worst that could happen is we would be bankrupt. We didn’t have any money when we got [to the White House], so they’d take what little we had and, you know, they’d be happy.”
He was prepared to take it on the chin so that he could go back to being president. Yet he underestimated, Clinton said, the fact that the American media was hungering for a political scandal as big and spectacular as Watergate. Now a collection of Arkansas desperadoes had stepped forward—including David Hale and Jim McDougal—who were dishing up the sensational story they wanted.