Betrayal The Clintons

In January, 1996, a sheaf of Hillary's old billing records

was discovered in the private residence of the White House.

The documents showed that she had done legal work

for her old friend Jim McDougal,

while he was engaged in fraudulent real estate deals in Arkansas.

The Whitewater inquiry, which had receded from the front pages,

suddenly came roaring back.

'There is the issue of why it took the White House

'so long to turn up the billing records.'

The discovery of the billing records

for Hillary Clinton's work for Jim McDougal

and Madison Guaranty, was explosive.

Everyone had been looking for those billing records.

There were subpoenas all over the place to turn those over.

And then all of a sudden, they just show up.

Our job is to get at the truth

and the truth will speak for itself, so, thank you very much.

The Whitewater inquiry

was now in the hands of a new independent counsel.

Kenneth Starr had been appointed by a panel of conservative judges

to replace Robert Fiske.

Starr was a respected jurist

and former official in the Bush Administration.

At first, his appointment caused little upset in the White House.

In fact, however, Starr would prove to be a far more aggressive

independent counsel than his predecessor.

Unlike Fiske, who determined to finish his work quickly,

Starr followed his investigation wherever it led,

no matter the cost in time or money.

I came to believe it was a persecution, not a prosecution.

It was an investigation in search of a crime,

which is not how investigations are supposed to work.

They were not investigating an allegation of a crime.

They were looking for a crime.

To Starr, the sudden appearance of Hillary's billing records

seemed anything but accidental.

The discovery of the Rose Law Firm Records

was a very significant event.

It was a significant event

because there had been a subpoena outstanding

for those law firm records for a long, long time,

and the Rose Law Firm said, "We don't have them,"

and, "They were taken away,"

and there were issues as to,

well, why would law firm records leave the law firm?

They weren't individual records. They were law firm records.

So, why wouldn't they be there? Where are they?

Mrs Clinton!

-How are you all?

-Mrs Clinton, how important is this week

in terms of turning your image around?

Oh, I think it's important to talk about the book I've written

about America's children, and that's what I'm going to try to do,

plus answer the questions!

The discovery of her missing billing records

undermined Hillary's efforts to recede from the public spotlight.

'The Rose Law Firm records were found in the living quarters of the White House...'

As she set out on a national tour to promote her book on children,

she could not escape questions about Whitewater.

'It's an important question, Mrs Clinton,

'because Republicans on the...'

She was totally under siege, and so was the President,

but he allows this kind of thing much more easily to roll off his back.

Hillary becomes obsessed.

She has an enemy, the enemy is the Special Prosecutor,

and one or the other is going to be killed.

I think soon we will continue to do that.

In Ken Starr, though, Hillary had met her match.

Behind his avuncular smile, he was relentless and implacable.

On January 19th, Starr subpoenaed Hillary,

the only First Lady ever to have been forced to testify before a grand jury.

Rather than take her testimony in the White House,

he insisted that she come to the federal courthouse in downtown Washington.

I think the idea that they would make her come to the courthouse

and to the grand jury was intended to humiliate her.

Would you rather have been somewhere else today?

Oh, about a million other places today, indeed.

Hillary's billing records proved little.

They showed that she had represented Jim McDougal,

but didn't prove she'd known he had used fraudulent loans to prop up Whitewater.

Nonetheless, Starr redoubled his efforts.

He re-opened all the files that Fiske had closed.

He chased down and challenged every privilege that had been afforded

not just to President Clinton but to previous presidents,

he decided to re-interview everybody, bring 'em all back to the grand jury.

The independent counsel focused much of his energy

on finding witnesses in Arkansas

who could testify to the Clintons' participation

in fraudulent real estate deals 15 years before.

People at the lowest level were hurt.

People's lives were ruined.

People were left in debt that they took years to get out of.

They broke people.

I mean, investigators invaded high school campuses

to put the thumb-screws on high school kids for information.

In May, Starr was able to convict Jim McDougal of loan fraud.

Under the threat of imprisonment,

McDougal agreed to cooperate.

Suddenly, he claimed that Bill Clinton

had known about his illegal loans.

After Jim McDougal is convicted, everything changes.

Up until that point, he never pointed the finger at the Clintons.

He never indicated that they were involved in wrongdoing.

But once he's convicted, all of a sudden

he begins coming up with stories that implicate the Clintons.

McDougal's testimony was confused and contradictory -

few believed him.

But Starr was increasingly determined to find something that would stick to the President.

There's no question at all that at this point the Starr prosecutors

believe that the Clintons are hiding evidence

and lying when they deny that they had involvement in some of McDougal's enterprises.

And conversely, the White House thinks that these Starr prosecutors have shifted,

and now all they're doing is a president hunt.

As Starr scoured the past for evidence of crimes,

Clinton's prospects for his presidential race were looking brighter than ever.

Clinton's Republican opponent in the presidential election that fall

was Kansas Senator Robert Dole.

With the economy strong, and Clinton resurgent, Dole could do little

but caricature the president as a free-spending liberal.

The federal government is too big

and it spends too much of your money, your money.

To force the issue, the Republican Congress in August

sent Clinton a welfare reform bill he had already vetoed twice.

Welfare reform had been a key part of Clinton's "New Democrat" philosophy,

but he was aware of how much liberals

in his own Party hated the bill.

Good afternoon.

In August, the President signed the Welfare Reform Bill.

When I ran for President four years ago,

I pledged to end welfare as we know it.

I have worked very hard for four years to do just that.

Today, the Congress will vote on legislation

that gives us a chance to live up to that promise.

Clinton's decision was the last straw for many on the left.

Several of his closest political allies resigned in protest.

It made him someone who was capable of anything.

And it no longer mattered what party he was in.

You couldn't tell what he would do

and what he would be willing to go along with.

With welfare reform behind him,

Clinton solidified his grip on the race.

We will together build a bridge to the 21st century

wide enough and strong enough to take us to America's best days.

Will you do that?

He was in his element.

He was shorn of this great burden that had been over him in '94.

He was out making the case in the best,

most positive and toughest way he could, and he was loving it.

In November, Clinton won by a margin that had once seemed inconceivable,

taking 31 states and 70% of the electoral votes.

I, William Jefferson Clinton, do solemnly swear...

That I will faithfully execute the office of President Of The United States.

..that I will faithfully execute the office of President Of The United States.

The re-election in 1996 is obviously one of the great comebacks

in American politics.

A president who had been written off as road kill just two years earlier,

managed to come back to a very convincing re-election in 1996,

the first Democrat to win a second term

since Franklin Roosevelt.

As Clinton strode triumphantly down Pennsylvania Avenue,

there was no hint that he had already set in motion events

that would soon divide the country as never before

and nearly destroy his Presidency.

By early 1997, Bill Clinton had been carrying on his affair with Monica Lewinsky for over a year.

I've asked myself a number of times why he put himself

and his presidency in jeopardy

in such a careless way.

The presidency is probably the loneliest office in America.

Regardless of your friends,

regardless of how good your marriage is,

regardless of anything, you are alone there at the top.

And maybe Bill Clinton, who so much needed and wanted to be loved,

couldn't say no to someone

who was going to give him affection and wanted affection back.

Lewinsky's superiors in the White House

had begun to notice her attraction to the president.

Quietly, she was transferred to a job across town at the Pentagon.

There, Lewinsky befriended a career civil servant named Linda Tripp.

Like Lewinsky, Tripp had come to the Pentagon

after years working at the White House,

first in the Bush administration

and then, less happily, in Clinton's.

Linda Tripp didn't like the Clinton people.

She didn't like their politics, she didn't like their personalities,

she didn't like their social lives,

and she simmered with resentments.

And she finds this young woman, a couple cubicles away,

Monica Lewinsky, who decides to cry on her shoulder.

It was very much a big sister-little sister,

mother-daughter relationship.

Monica would tell her everything.

Linda genuinely cared about Monica,

but there was one overriding emotion

and that was what Bill Clinton was doing

and I'm telling you, this was an angry woman.

Shortly before meeting Lewinsky,

Tripp had approached literary agent Lucianne Goldberg

about writing a tell-all book on the Clinton White House,

but the project had gone nowhere.

In the Autumn of 1997, she contacted Goldberg with a new project -

the true story of an ongoing affair between a White House intern

and the President Of The United States.

She called me

and she said, "He's having an affair with a girl who's 23 years old."

And I said, "Yeah, yeah."

You know, the kind of agenting that I did I heard a lot of wild stuff

and people have to prove things.

So, she said, "No, I'm not kidding you. He's having an affair with a...

"and I know the girl and I talk to her every day."

And I said, "Well, can you prove this, do you have pictures,

"is she willing to step forward,

"is she willing to go on the Today Show and say...?"

And she said, "Well, no, I'm sure she wouldn't. This is a big secret."

I said, "Well, you got to, you got to do something to prove to me

"so I can prove to a publisher that this, this wild story is true.'

And I said, "You say you talk to her every day,

"how about taping your phone conversations?"

And she agreed that that would be a cool idea

and she went to Radio Shack and bought a tape recorder

and plugged it into her phone.

'Linda, I don't know why I have these feelings for him.

'I never expected to feel this way about him.

'And the first time I ever looked into his eyes close up

'and was with him alone,

'I saw somebody totally different than I had expected to see.

'And that's the person I fell in love with.'

Linda wanted the world to know about this,

and I think the motivation was no, you know,

no deeper, no more shallow than that.

That was it. She wanted the world to know about this relationship.

She came to believe that fate did call her

to expose these defects in this president to the country.

On the other hand, she becomes entwined in a scandal

that she helped to create.

'He was supposed to call me again,

'but I wasn't home and I was afraid to call.'

'What happened?'

'I don't know. I saw him for 60 seconds.'

'So, how was it?'

'I mean, we hug, and I gave him the paperweight.'

'So, what did you wear?'

I knew if the story broke huge

that people would start calling Linda,

and Linda would say, "Call my agent."

And they would call her agent, and her agent would make a book deal,

and then would make some money, and she would get a little money

and I would get ten percent of it, and that's the way the world works.

Goldberg suggested Tripp reach out to Newsweek's Michael Isikoff.

Before long, the two were having regular conversations.

She would, kind of, tease me

and she told me early on that there was a woman,

who had been an intern.

And that...she was having an ongoing affair

with Bill Clinton.

I was taken aback, as anybody would be.

So, I wanted to get Linda Tripp to tell me as much as she could.

And, so, I kept talking to her.

Linda Tripp was not just talking to Isikoff.

She had also begun sharing her story with the independent counsel

investigating the Clintons.

By 1997, after more than two years,

Kenneth Starr's investigation into Whitewater had stalled.

Short on evidence or reliable witnesses,

he had too little to bring charges against the President or First Lady.

We know that they were running out of gas, and running out of rope,

and had just about completely failed, until Monica came along.

In early January, 1998,

Starr's office received a phone call from Tripp.

She revealed the existence of her tape recordings of Monica Lewinsky.

At first, Starr saw little value in the tapes -

a presidential affair, no matter how sordid, was not illegal.

But there was something in Tripp's story that caught Starr's attention.

The president had asked his friend Vernon Jordan

to help find Lewinsky a job in the private sector.

Could this be an attempt, Starr wondered, to buy Lewinsky's silence?

'I'm just... I'm starting to get a little nervous about Vernon.'

'Why?'

'I just want everything to be easy. I want him to call me and say,

'"You know, how does this amount of money, doing this here sound?"

'And I say, "That's sound great."

'He says, "OK. Consider it a done deal."'

Clinton had good reason

to worry about whether Lewinsky would keep their affair secret.

She had just been subpoenaed

to testify in a sexual harassment lawsuit against the president

brought by a former Arkansas state worker named Paula Jones.

Tipped off to the affair,

Jones' lawyers believed the president's relationship with Lewinsky

would demonstrate a pattern of behaviour.

I thought it showed

President Clinton's proclivity to make sexual advances

to extremely young, low-level employees,

and President Clinton had obtained jobs for Monica Lewinsky

as part of his effort to control her.

Highly relevant to Paula Jones' case

Ken Starr was watching the Jones' lawsuit with great interest.

If Clinton was trying to influence Lewinsky's testimony,

he would be committing a major crime.

Suddenly, Starr glimpsed a bridge from Whitewater

to a potentially more fruitful area of investigation.

The bridge is that the president, and those close to him,

may be encouraging Monica to lie

in the Paula Jones case and therefore suborning perjury.

That's the little connection they make,

it's tenuous at this point, but they go for it.

Three seemingly unrelated threads from Clinton's past and present -

Whitewater, Paula Jones, and Monica Lewinsky -

had suddenly come together in one potentially devastating investigation.

And a single reporter threatened to upend the whole thing.

I knew we had

a blockbuster of a story.

And, of course, I had to call Starr's team.

And fair to say that when I did, they freaked out.

They realised that were I to publish a story,

it would blow their investigation wide open.

Starr hoped to convince Lewinsky

to secretly tape record the president

before Isikoff's story could be made public.

On January 16th, he sent Linda Tripp to meet with Lewinsky

at a food court at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.

Before the friends sat down, FBI agents swooped in.

The FBI grabs Monica in front of the Cinnabon

and takes her upstairs in the Ritz-Carlton,

and tries to get her to flip.

But Monica basically just drives 'em crazy with her histrionics,

with her refusal to talk.

They felt like one of these scenes in a movie

where a bunch of grown men are trying to change the diapers of a baby

and don't know how to do it.

Monica's crying, she's kind of wailing out loud.

What they weren't counting on, what they hadn't figured out is,

"So, what to do we do when Monica is not going to tell us

"whether she had an affair with Bill Clinton?"

Unable to secure Lewinsky's cooperation against the president,

Starr still had a card to play.

The next day, January 17th, 1998,

Clinton was scheduled to give his deposition

under oath in the Paula Jones lawsuit.

If he lied about his affair with Lewinsky,

Starr would be able to bring a charge of perjury.

He was about to testify,

and they knew he was going to lie about Monica

and that was, if you want to call it, the trap.

And when a man is asked about this,

a married man is asked about this, he's going to lie.

and once he lies, we got him. We got him!

You may show the witness the definition number one.

Barred from questioning the president himself,

Starr had to rely on Paula Jones' lawyers.

Lead attorney Jim Fisher began the deposition

by introducing a definition of sexual relations

taken from a federal statute.

In an effort to avoid ambiguity, I thought I would use a definition

that was well grounded in federal law.

So, I thought that there could be no doubt that these were...

unambiguous definitions

for which the law had a well-recognised meaning.

Fisher's efforts to avoid ambiguity had the opposite effect,

leaving Clinton a loophole through which to escape.

So the record is completely clear,

have you ever had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky

as that term is defined in deposition exhibit one?

I have never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky.

I never had an affair with her.

If they had simply asked him,

"Did Monica Lewinsky ever perform oral sex on you?"

The gig would have been up.

Instead, they gave him this ridiculously complicated,

hard-to-understand definition of sex, which allowed him to parse.

If I could have done it over again,

I would have just asked the salacious questions.

I would have let him have it.

I was trying to be respectful, and I paid a price for it.

Having said that, he clearly didn't answer the questions honestly.

If she told someone that she had a sexual affair with you

beginning in November of 1995, would that be a lie?

It's certainly not the truth. It would not be the truth.

The turning point was when I started asking about gifts

that he had given to her and she had given to him.

And I described some of them quite specifically.

There was a book of poetry by Walt Whitman, for example.

I thought his mood changed visibly at that point.

His face became bright red. There was tension in his face.

He knew at this point there was a mole.

There was a rat in the woodpile.

Someone has given all of this damning information to these people.

He was in trouble.

Clinton's secret affair with Monica Lewinsky

was now hurtling toward public exposure.

The very day that the President was deposed in the Jones lawsuit,

Michael Isikoff filed his story on the Lewinsky affair.

But at the last minute, his editors at Newsweek backtracked

and decided to kill the story.

Obviously, we had an enormous scoop here

that was going to shake Washington.

Some of my colleagues and some of the editors agreed,

but at the end of the day the brass at Newsweek

just were not willing to pull the trigger.

Michael told me. He said, "They aren't going to run with it.

"They're afraid of it. They don't like it.

"Nasty stuff, they don't want to do it."

And I said, "Well, what am I going to do? I'm sitting on this thing."

Goldberg turned to an internet gossip columnist named Matt Drudge.

A couple of people said,

"Call Matt Drudge."

Or, I said, "Well, tell him to call me."

So at 11 that night he called me, and that was it.

It went kaboom!

The President, the intern, the accusations and the denials.

The allegations that the President had an illicit affair

with a 21-year-old intern and then attempted to cover it up

blasted through the White House today.

This scandal could unravel the administration.

Over the next 72 hours, the story made its way around the world.

SHE SPEAKS FRENCH

HE SPEAKS GERMAN

Monica Lewinsky.

Caught unawares, Clinton's cabinet members

rushed to his defence.

I believe that the allegations are completely untrue.

I'll second that.

Aides who had worked for him

for five to six years at this point are just on the floor.

They can't figure out what there's supposed to think about this,

much less what they're supposed to do about this.

I was convinced that Bill Clinton had been set up.

He's got all these enemies who are out to get him.

He wouldn't be so stupid as to jeopardize

his entire Presidency.

For what? No, that was not the Bill Clinton I knew.

Clinton did confide in the one person he knew would not judge him.

When the Lewinsky scandal broke

the President paged me and I returned the call.

And he said,

"Ever since I got here to the White House

"I've had to shut my body down, sexually, I mean,

"but I screwed up with this girl.

"I didn't do what they said I did,

"but I may have done so much that I can't prove my innocence."

And I said to him,

"The problem that Presidents have is not the sin, it's the cover up

"and you should explore just telling the American people the truth."

He said, "Really, do you think I could do that?"

And I said, "Let me test it, let me run a poll."

So, I took a poll and I tested popular attitudes on that

and I called him back and I said,

"They will forgive the adultery,

"but they won't easily forgive that you lied."

Mr President, welcome.

Thank you, Jim.

Clinton didn't take Morris' advice.

In interviews days after the story broke,

he continued to hide his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

The news of this day is that Kenneth Starr,

the independent counsel,

is investigating allegations that you suborned perjury

by encouraging a 24-year-old woman, a former White House intern,

to lie under oath in a civil deposition

about her having had an affair with you. Mr President, is that true?

That is not true. That is not true.

I did not ask anyone to tell anything other than the truth.

There is no improper relationship.

And I intend to cooperate with this inquiry.

But that is not true.

He says, quite indignantly,

"There is no relationship with Monica Lewinsky."

And people begin to focus on the words.

He said "is", didn't he? He didn't say "was".

What is he trying to say? Is he parsing here?

I didn't notice the peculiar tense issue until later.

But I did think to myself, I said,

"Boy, there's got to be a stronger denial of this."

And I think some group of us said,

"Look, you're denying this, you've got to be strong.

"You've got to get out there

"and say, you know, how outrageous this is."

And, of course, I think that was dreadful advice in retrospect.

I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again.

I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.

I never told anybody to lie.

Not a single time. Never.

These allegations are false,

and I need to go back to work for the American people.

Thank you.

I was watching with a friend in my office and I said,

"That is it, this man is dead meat.

"That is it, because I know that he's lying

"and if I know that he's lying

"then the rest of the world is going to know he's lying."

Having set off on a course of deception,

there was no turning back.

Clinton continued to press his lie, even to Hillary.

He tells her it's not true.

He tells her that Monica Lewinsky was a troubled young woman,

that he had just tried to be nice to her, to mentor her in some ways,

and that's a story that Hillary Clinton hangs onto like a life raft.

The day after Clinton's denial,

Hillary appeared on national television.

I just think that a lot of this is deliberately designed

to sensationalize charges against my husband

because everything else they've tried has failed. And I also...

She focused her energy and her anger and her ire at the external enemies.

At Ken Starr, at the press, at the Republicans in Congress.

They were the ones who were doing this,

not her husband.

The great story here for anybody willing to find it

and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy

that has been conspiring against my husband

since the day he announced for president.

She says, "This is all about the vast right-wing conspiracy,"

and in that moment, sort of, sets the tone for the defence

of the President against these charges.

To the Clintons, the Lewinsky scandal was just the latest front

in a war waged by their political enemies to destroy them.

The Lewinsky scandal was not really the Lewinsky scandal.

It was really an attempt by the Republican Party

to have a coup d'etat

based on having discovered the President's personal behaviour.

But, even some allies of the Clintons

found their protestations hollow.

You can never blame your enemies

for doing what your enemies will predictably do.

You can only blame yourself for what you have given to your enemies.

If you've given them absolutely nothing,

guess what they're going to be able to do - nothing.

As the scandal raged around him, Clinton did his best to focus,

he said, "On the job the American people hired me to do."

He's coming to work every day, he says,

and he's going to do the job that's in front of him.

Privately, behind the scenes, it's a completely different story.

Of course, he's obsessed by this. Of course, he's consumed.

Of course he's, distracted.

He has a meeting with the head of the World Bank, for instance,

who goes back to his office, and calls Clinton's chief of staff,

and says, "It's like he wasn't even there."

"I feel like a character in the novel Darkness At Noon,"

Clinton told an aide.

"I am surrounded by an oppressive force

"that is creating a lie about me and I can't get the truth out."

In fact, the truth was closing in.

All he can do is buy time.

All he can do is hope Starr doesn't have the goods,

doesn't have the evidence, that there's no physical evidence that could prove it.

Before long, Starr had his physical evidence.

In July, Monica Lewinsky reached a deal to give her testimony

in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

As part of the deal,

she turned over a blue dress stained with Clinton's semen.

Clinton also agreed to answer questions before Starr's grand jury.

Before the president faced Starr, however, he had to face Hillary.

That morning, Clinton awoke the First Lady from a deep sleep.

Pacing the room, he finally confessed he had lied.

It was probably the most shattering moment in her life.

He'd lied to her and he'd used her.

He let her go out and essentially make alibis for him.

And it not only jeopardized

everything they'd worked for all their lives

but totally humiliated her and Chelsea

and she couldn't trust him anymore.

Later that day, Clinton's deposition

was scheduled to take place in the Map Room of the White House.

The President's lawyers had won an important concession from Ken Starr -

the interrogation could not last longer than four hours.

-Good afternoon, Mr President.

-Good afternoon.

Could you please state your full name for the record, sir?

William Jefferson Clinton.

Bill Clinton's strategy was to run out the clock.

And so, he would start talking about little stories from Arkansas,

he would, you know, take an aside and give a lecture about justice

and the American Dream.

And all along, the clock is ticking out.

Let me begin with the correct answer - I don't know for sure.

Well, it would depend upon the facts.

I think on the whole people in the uniformed secret service...

If we circle number one - this is my circle here.

I remember doing it so I could focus only on those two lines...

It depends upon what the meaning of the word "is" is.

The Starr prosecutors walked out of that

grand jury testimony totally demoralized.

They knew they had been clobbered by President Clinton.

And even though it was just, obvious what he was doing,

it was a masterful performance on Clinton's part.

If Clinton could find his way out of Starr's legal trap,

he could not, he knew, escape the judgment of the American people.

And we've got about 45.

That night, President Bill Clinton addressed the nation

in one of the most bizarre broadcasts in American history.

Standby. Five seconds.

Good evening.

This afternoon in this room, from this chair,

I testified before the Office of Independent Counsel

and the Grand Jury.

I answered their questions truthfully,

including questions about my private life,

questions no American citizen would ever want to answer.

Still, I must take complete responsibility

for all my actions, both public and private.

And that is why I am speaking to you tonight.

Indeed, I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky

that was not appropriate.

In fact, it was wrong.

For many of those closest to Clinton,

this was the first time they'd heard him admit the affair

and they were deeply hurt.

Yes, I felt betrayed. He lied to me, yeah.

He lied to a lot of people about that, not least of whom was himself.

The morning after his grand jury testimony

and his speech to the nation, he and Hillary and Chelsea

head off to Martha's Vineyard for their annual vacation.

It may be the worst timed family vacation

in the history of the world,

but there they are, heading out to the helicopter on the South Lawn.

And the staff is sitting in the White House thinking,

"What are we going to do about the walk to the helicopter?"

They decide they can't do anything.

They can't orchestrate it, they can't spin it.

They are powerless to affect it.

And in the end, it falls to Chelsea Clinton, a teenager,

to take both of their hands, on her own initiative,

take her father's hand in one and her mother's hand in another

and walk across the lawn,

literally the bridge between her parents

at this moment of crisis between them.

As the Clintons spent a tense vacation on Martha's Vineyard,

Washington was abuzz with talk of resignation or even impeachment.

At this moment, he was in maximum peril.

Clinton's advisors were acutely aware

that President Nixon was driven out of office

not by the opposing party, but by his own party,

when the Republicans came to him, and said,

"Enough, you have to leave."

That's when President Nixon resigned.

And so there was real concern

that Democrats were going to begin bolting

and they were not returning President Clinton's calls.

They were not happy with this.

There was a real concern that this could be the beginning of the end.

It had been a quarter of a century since Richard Nixon

had resigned the presidency rather than endure an impeachment.

Now, many were urging Clinton to do the same.

But Clinton had no such intentions.

There were the inevitable comparisons

between Nixon and Clinton.

I always thought there was a fundamental difference.

Both Nixon and Clinton were convinced

that it was their political enemies

that were responsible for all their troubles.

The difference is that Nixon

always suspected that his political enemies were better than him.

Clinton hated his political enemies

and were convinced they were beneath him.

And, that was the reason, at the end of the day,

Clinton was never going to do what Richard Nixon did,

which was to give into them and resign.

Yes, go ahead.

Mr President, all these questions about your personal life

have to be painful to you and your family.

At what point do you consider that it's just not worth it

and you consider resigning from office?

Never.

You know, I was elected to do a job.

I think the American people know two or three things about me now

that they didn't know the first time...

..this kind of effort was made against me.

I think they know that I care very much about them,

that I care about ordinary people whose voices aren't often heard here.

And I think they know I have worked very, very hard for them.

Hard work had always been Clinton's salvation

in moments of vulnerability.

Now, as he sought to show the American people he could still function,

he bore down on a suddenly violent foreign policy crisis.

Early on the morning of August the 7th, 1998,

two truck bombs exploded simultaneously

outside US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.

The death toll reached 200 with another 5,000 injured.

Within hours, the FBI had pegged responsibility

to a little known terrorist organisation called AlQaeda.

Clinton soon ordered his national security team

to hunt down and destroy AlQaeda

and its elusive leader Osama Bin Laden.

CIA had information, it thought it was reliable information,

that Bin Laden and the AlQaeda leadership

were going to come together at a certain camp,

in Afghanistan, at a certain date, at a certain time.

We went to the president and said,

"We want to be able to land cruise missiles at that camp while they're there."

The order would have huge political risks.

Clinton knew that it would be widely seen as an attempt

to distract the public from his own personal problems.

Somebody said something about,

"Well, you know, we have to take into account the political realities in the United States at the moment."

Which was, sort of, code words for,

"You've got this Monica Lewinsky scandal going on."

And he snapped.

He just very quickly and sharply said,

"You don't think about that. You think about national security.

"You give me the national security advice you would give me if this were not going on.

"You let me worry about that."

On August 20th, Clinton ordered a series of missile strikes

against AlQaeda,

targeting training camps in Afghanistan and a plant in Sudan

that the administration claimed was involved in making chemical weapons.

The missiles narrowly missed their main target.

We didn't kill Bin Laden, we didn't have that to show for the attack.

And people, frankly, a lot of people in the Congress, and in the media,

said this was just an attempt to "wag the dog."

The timing of all of this is more than coincidental.

And I think it may very well...

the President may run the risk of having an even more cynical view of his behaviour.

He knew that. He knew that was going to happen.

He knew that would make it worse for him to do this.

But he launched the attack because he thought it was the right national security thing to do,

that's what we told him.

And he said,

"I'll do it anyway, even though it makes it worse for me."

Things were deteriorating quickly for the President.

On September the 9th, Kenneth Starr finally delivered to Congress

the long-awaited results of his investigation.

In 450 pages of sometimes salacious detail,

Starr laid out his case against Clinton for perjury,

obstruction of justice, and abuse of office in the Lewinsky affair,

while dropping almost all reference

to his original investigation of Whitewater.

Lawyers are thorough. Good lawyers are thorough.

There could be absolutely no gap whatsoever between the facts

and then a reasonable conclusion to be drawn from the facts.

The case had to be proven.

'The House Sergeant at Arms officially unsealed

'the document at mid-Afternoon.

'It had been advertised as steamy, and you could almost see the steam rising as the boxes came open.'

'According to the sources, the report focuses almost

'entirely on the President's relationship with Lewinsky.'

However this turns out, it is a turning point

in Mr Clinton's Presidency.

It is not an exaggeration to say

that he has less control of his destiny

than at any time since he was elected.

The Starr report was a turning point,

but not in the way the independent counsel

or his Republican supporters had expected.

Polls showed that after four years and 40 million,

most Americans believed the investigations against Clinton

were more persecution than prosecution.

The Republicans had so undercut their own credibility

in the way they were going after him

that people, although they deplored what he had done

and thought it was stupid

and it demeaned the office of the presidency

and tarnished the presidency, tarnished him

and had been a devastating blow to Hillary and Chelsea

and all those things that went through people's minds,

they looked at the Republicans and they had enough already.

After the release of Starr's report,

Clinton appeared in the Rose Garden to offer his apology

to the American people.

I am profoundly sorry for all I have done wrong in words and deeds.

I never should have misled the country, the congress, my friends or my family.

Quite simply, I gave into my shame.

I have been condemned by my accusers with harsh words,

and while its hard to hear yourself called deceitful and manipulative,

I remember Ben Franklin's admonition

that our critics are our friends, for they do show us our faults.

If Clinton was willing, at last, to take responsibility,

the American people were willing to forgive him.

He disappoints them every time on some level,

but he always gets up and tries to make it better.

You know, what else can you ask from a sinner, right?

And that's how he would define himself. "I'm a sinner.

"And I try to be better every time, and I learn from my mistakes and I go forward."

And I think the American public is pretty forgiving of a guy who sees himself as a sinner.

Weary of the attacks on Clinton,

Americans punished Republican candidates

in the Congressional elections in November.

Upsetting precedent, Democrats actually gained seats in Congress.

I think the message the American people sent was loud and clear.

We want progress over partisanship and unity over division.

Blamed for the defeat, Newt Gingrich resigned his post

as Speaker of the House of Representatives.

To the frustration of his Republican opponents,

Clinton seemed to have won over the American people again.

There are two or three things

that I have witnessed in my political career

that I never could figure out.

The fact that a lot of people didn't think

that that was a serious problem -

that he, you know, perjured himself in his testimony

and that he'd had a relationship with that woman, Monica Lewinsky.

That did shock me

and I've never quite figured out how in the world could that be -

that he'd come out the back end of it pretty much where he was at the beginning.

It was just one of those things I never quite figured out.

Determined to punish the President,

House Republicans led by Texas Congressman Tom Delay,

played their last card - impeachment.

A resolution impeaching William Jefferson Clinton,

President of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors.

The Republicans were gripped by just unreasoning hatred of Bill Clinton.

They just despised the man

and could not stand that he was going to get away with this.

Article One -

In his conduct while President Of The United States,

William Jefferson Clinton, in violation of his constitutional oath

faithfully to execute the office of President Of The United States,

has wilfully corrupted and manipulated

the judicial process of the United States...

On Saturday, December 19th, the House of Representatives

voted along party lines to impeach the president on two of four counts

involving obstruction of justice and perjury.

On this vote, the yeas are 228, the nays are 206.

Article one is adopted.

Bill Clinton had become only the second president in American history,

and the first in more than a century,

to be impeached by the House.

The American people, I call them to my side here at the podium

to verify to you that the President committed falsehoods under oath.

Republican leaders moved the proceedings to the Senate

where a two-thirds majority was required to convict

the President and remove him from office.

The Senate will convene as a court of impeachment.

We are here today because President William Jefferson Clinton

decided to put himself above the law.

This is not about sex, this is about obstruction of justice.

This is about a pattern. This is about a scheme. This is about a lot of lies. This is about...

For three long weeks, with little hope of success,

13 Republican Congressmen pressed the case against Clinton.

This is not about sexual misconduct

any more than Watergate was about a third-rate burglary

Finally, Arkansas Democratic Senator Dale Bumpers

rose to express the sentiments felt by many in the country.

We are here today because the president suffered a terrible moral lapse.

A marital infidelity,

not a breach of the public trust,

not a crime against society.

It is a sex scandal.

HL Mencken said one time, "When you hear somebody say,

"'This is not about money,' it's about money."

LAUGHTER

And when you hear somebody say, "This is not about sex,"

it's about sex.

The Senator judges that the respondent,

William Jefferson Clinton, President of the United States,

is not guilty as charged in the 1st article of impeachment.

What had begun as a sexual liaison more than three years earlier,

and became a full blown constitutional crisis,

was finally over.

This time, however, there was no triumph,

no crowing about "The Comeback Kid."

Bill Clinton knew both he and the country

had paid a heavy price.

Bill Clinton in his second inaugural address

said it was his ambition during the second term to be, quoting scripture,

"a repairer of the breech."

That ambition was not realised in his second term

and it effectively died in 1998, the year of scandal.

The fact that the president was impeached

will always be part of his story, part of his legacy.

It consumed a tremendous amount of energy.

It undercut his standing.

And, I think, limited his ability to accomplish anything

outside of surviving for almost two years.

And, you know, that's tragic.

Clinton created many of his own problems,

but his enemies exaggerated, enhanced,

mythologized, lied,

were utterly hypocritical in their attacks on him.

You know, to the extent that I believe that every human being

is responsible for their own lives, he holds the responsibility for it.

To the extent that context shapes a life,

his enemies have a lot to answer for.

Clinton had survived,

but the impeachment ordeal

seemed to have sapped much of his drive and ambition.

President Clinton has more than 700 days left in office

after he's acquitted by the Senate,

and he promises to use every single one of them to its fullest.

But the constraints were enormous, at that point.

The big aspirations were gone.

The chances of re-inventing Social Security

or re-inventing Medicare just proved too elusive.

He had a Congress, which had just, literally, put him on trial,

and was not willing to do a lot of business with him.

In 2000, Clinton came tantalizingly close

to the great historical achievement for which he had yearned,

but a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians

broke down in the 11th hour.

The same year, after decades of budget deficits,

the federal budget had a surplus of nearly 240 billion,

an accomplishment for which Clinton was given much credit.

Only as her husband was preparing to leave the stage,

Hillary was finally ready, at last, to take her star turn.

The day the Senate votes to acquit President Clinton on impeachment charges,

Hillary Clinton is meeting

in the White House residence with Harold Ickes

to plot a campaign for the very same United States Senate.

Literally the end of his crisis is the birth of her new phase.

She said, "I want to be independent.

"I want to be judged on my own merits."

And she finally released herself from, you know,

the shadow of Bill Clinton over her and began making her own decisions.

He then came to her support,

and there was nobody more of a champion

for her Senate race than Bill Clinton.

He was behind her all the way.

So even if I didn't know her better than anyone in this room,

I'd be for her.

That November, as Vice-President Al Gore

lost the closest presidential election in American history,

Hillary Clinton easily won the Senate seat in New York.

I am profoundly grateful to all of you

for giving me the chance to serve you.

In his final round of goodbye speeches,

Bill Clinton even bid farewell to the Washington Press corps.

You know, I read in the history books how other presidents say

the White House is like a penitentiary,

and every motive they have is suspect.

Even George Washington complained he was treated like a common thief.

And they all say they can't get away, can't wait to get away.

I don't know what the heck they're talking about.

I've had a wonderful time.

It's been an honour to serve and fun to laugh.

I only wish that we'd even laughed more these last eight years

because power's not the most important thing in life

and only counts for what you use it.

Clinton departed the White House for the last time

on Saturday, January the 20th, 2001.

In the end, he left much as he had come -

a man loved by his friends, and loathed by his enemies -

a politician who had achieved a great deal,

yet left behind a curious sense of unfulfilled promise.

I know a lot of people think that Clinton's presidency was a wasted opportunity.

But he came to office in 1992 and left a stronger country in 2000.

I don't know if you can say of a president who served us well

and improved our material good that it was a wasted opportunity.

And it was sure a lot of fun to watch.

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