Hillary's Big Mistake - excerpt from 'All Too Human: A Political Education'

Washington Monthly, May, 1999 by George R. Stephanopoulos

A revealing episode in George Stephanopoulos' White House memoir All Too Human confirms what many of us have long suspected: Hillary Clinton made the fatal decision to stonewall on Whitewater in 1993. Here's the story of that crucial moment, one that was to become what Winston Churchill calls "a hinge of fate." By refusing to divulge the relatively trivial sins of the Whitewater land deal, she fed rumors of a major political scandal, and triggered the appointment, of an independent counsel--the beginning of a long scavenger hunt that led to impeachment. It didn't have to be that way. As Lanny Davis explains in the article that follows this one, the best policy with bad news at the White house is to get it out in a way that minimizes the damage.

The decision that spawned impeachment

The hoofbeats were closing in. This time they came from the Ozark home of the busted land deal that began when I was a senior in high school and Bill Clinton was attorney general of Arkansas. Whitewater. After an early 1992 flurry precipitated by a New York Times investigation, the issue had faded when our campaign commissioned an audit that documented how much money the Clintons had lost on the investment. The republicans couldn't effectively exploit the issue because President Bush's son Neil Bush had come under fire for his own involvement with a failed savings and loan. But late in 1993, the Resolution Trust Corporation (the government agency established to manage the aftermath of the 1980s S&L crisis) asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation of Madison Guaranty, the S&L managed by Jim McDougal, the Clintons' Whitewater partner. David Hale, a former judge and business associate of McDougal's who was trying to worm his way out of a fraud indictment, offered prosecutors and the press a new hook by alleging that Governor Clinton had pressured him to lend McDougal money.

These new developments, coupled with the miasma of mystery surrounding Vince Foster's suicide, piqued the interest of the Times and The Washington Post. They asked again to review all the Whitewater documents, and a series of faxed questions from the Post sat in the White House for weeks without a formal response. Busy with NAFTA, Somalia, and the crush of other business, I didn't attend the few October and November meetings on the matter. To me Whitewater was old news, the obsession of a few conspiracy theorists. But by early December, the Post was convinced we were hiding something sinister. Executive editor Leonard Downie made a series of extraordinary personal requests for the documents, and Ann Devroy warned me that the paper would go on the warpath unless we answered their questions and released the documents.

I wish we had. If a genie offered me the chance to turn back time and undo a single decision from my White House tenure, I'd head straight to the Oval Office dining room on Saturday morning, Dec. 11, 1993. The night before, Bernie Nussbaum, David Kendall (Clinton's private attorney), and Hillary had persuaded the president to stonewall the Post. All three were tough trial attorneys who were determined to follow a close-hold strategy more appropriate for corporate litigation than presidential politics. The possibility that the Clintons would be implicated in wrongdoing by any investigation of Madison Guaranty was extremely low, but the lawyers were taking nothing for granted. Hillary also feared that the Post inquiry was an invasive fishing expedition that would only create more inquiries. They all underestimated, however, the media reality that reporters want most what they're told they can't have, the political reality that a president's right to privacy is limited by the public's right to know, and the cultural reality that the country probably wouldn't care about the ins and outs of an old land deal as long as it didn't look as if the Clintons had something to hide.

On Saturday morning, just after the radio address, Mack gave Gergen and me one last chance to convince Clinton the only way to kill the story was to cooperate with the Post.

The president was sitting at the head of his small oval table, sipping a mug of decaf, with a pile of folders in front of him. Gergen and I were on either side. For once, though, the two of us were arguing the same case. Although we often clashed on policy matters, we both insisted now that turning over the Whitewater documents was the only way to manage the story. The president seemed to agree. "I don't have a big problem with giving them what we have," he said, almost apologetically, his mind elsewhere (that weekend, he was preparing to replace Secretary of Defense Aspin). "But Hillary ..."

Saying her name flipped a switch in his head. Suddenly, his eyes lit up, and two years' worth of venom spewed out of his mouth. You could usually tell when Clinton was making Hillary's argument: Even if he was yelling, his voice had a flat quality, as if he were a high school debater speeding through a series of memorized facts. The anti-press script was familiar to me by now. "No, you're wrong," he said. "The questions won't stop. At the Sperling breakfast, I answered more questions about my private life than any candidate ever, and what did that get me? They'll always want more. No president has ever been treated like I've been treated."