Zero fail, p.23
Zero Fail, page 23
But Clinton’s bad-boy behavior with women—both from his past and some bubbling rumors of new misbehavior—created a major distraction inside the White House. In his first year in office, Clinton faced a daunting set of domestic and international fires that tested his leadership abilities. Clinton’s top political lieutenants, George Stephanopoulos, James Carville, and Bruce Lindsey, were often juggling the business of governing and safeguarding the country with the challenge of saving Clinton’s political hide. Not long after the inauguration, they were flung into episodic bursts of panic and damage control as new accusations arose about Clinton’s sexual activities and misconduct. During the campaign, Clinton campaign aide Betsey Wright had called these moments “bimbo eruptions,” a phrase intended to dismiss the accusers’ credibility. Once he reached the White House, Clinton blamed reports of past sexual dalliances on a right-wing cabal manufacturing stories to hurt a popular Democratic president. But some were fresh new scandals of Clinton’s own making.
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THE DISTRACTION WAS obvious in the summer of Clinton’s first year. While his political aides rebutted rumors of Clinton’s past affairs, the president’s military and intelligence agencies were piecing together what they would later identify as a dangerous global threat: Islamist terrorism. Clinton’s presidency coincided with a rapid rise in little-known radicalized Muslim groups plotting to kill Americans. The plotters were rarely connected to one another, but they shared a desire to strike U.S. troops abroad or, more boldly, to target citizens on American soil.
Almost exactly one month after Clinton’s swearing-in, on February 26, 1993, one such plot paralyzed and terrified Lower Manhattan. A thirteen-hundred-pound truck bomb driven into the parking garage under the North Tower of the World Trade Center exploded. The mastermind, Ramzi Yousef, hoped the detonation would so damage the North Tower that it would fall and knock over the South Tower, killing tens of thousands of people. Instead, the explosion’s damage was largely limited to the underground area of the building. The bombing killed six people, injured more than a thousand with falling debris and smoke inhalation, and caused a panicked evacuation. But though Yousef’s bomb failed to kill on a grand scale, it was the first terror attack by Islamists on U.S. soil. The boldness of the attack caught the attention of Osama bin Laden, who knew of Yousef’s uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, from fighting with him in the mujahideen army in Afghanistan.
As Clinton spent 1993 learning the ropes of the presidency, bin Laden was busy trying to find ways to strike the head of the snake, the troops of the United States. He found a possible target later that year. President Bush had committed U.S. troops to help with the United Nation’s transport of food supplies amid a famine in Somalia the previous year, in 1992. But the situation only grew more violent as the months passed, until a growing rebel Somali military force attacked and killed humanitarian aid workers. The new president, Clinton, then sent in troops in the summer of 1993 to capture the rebels’ commander and strike his stronghold. But after more U.S. troops were killed by rebel bombs, Clinton authorized a special forces mission to seize the rebels’ top deputies in the city of Mogadishu.
The extraction team set off the night of October 3 for a mission they estimated would take an hour. Instead, Somali rebels supported and trained by bin Laden’s fighters used rocket-propelled grenade launchers to shoot down the two Blackhawk helicopters. In a bloody firefight lasting through the night, they trapped like cornered prey the special ops soldiers who had been riding through the streets in Humvees. The next morning, the rebels triumphantly dragged U.S. soldiers’ bodies through Mogadishu’s streets on live television. Nobody in the Clinton White House knew then that bin Laden was a backstage player in the battle.
Back in Washington, the president and his confidants were simultaneously trying to investigate and prevent another “bimbo eruption.” Arkansas officials close to the Clintons alerted the president’s political aides that reporters were in the state sniffing around, meeting with state troopers and asking them about claims the troopers had helped sneak Clinton around to meet women for sex. Chief of Staff Mack McLarty dispatched Clinton’s trusted aide Betsey Wright to find out what the troopers were saying.
Bill Rempel, an investigative reporter at the Los Angeles Times, and David Brock, working for the conservative American Spectator magazine, got the same tip about four troopers with firsthand knowledge. They set out that August to interview them. But after Brock finished his first sit-down interview, three of the four troopers got unsolicited phone calls from the former head of Governor Clinton’s security detail, Captain Buddy Young. The previous month, Young had been named by Clinton to a federal emergency management post, overseeing Texas operations. Young scolded Roger Perry, then a sixteen-year veteran of the state police and president of the Arkansas State Police Association, for talking to the press. Perry told friends that Young made himself clear: “I represent the president of the United States. Why do you want to destroy him over this? You don’t know anything anyway. This is not a threat, but I wanted you to know that your own actions could bring about dire consequences.”
Young later acknowledged calling the troopers, but he disputed claims that he had done so in coordination with the White House. “I called Roger as a friend, and I told him I thought this was wrong, it was unethical, and it was a disgrace to security people,” he said. “But I never said I spoke for the president, because I don’t.”
Another trooper, Danny Ferguson, told friends that Clinton personally called him twice about his interview with the reporter. Perry said Clinton had offered Ferguson help with jobs and had peppered the trooper to “tell me what stories [the troopers] are telling” so Clinton could try to “clean it up.”
On Sunday, December 19, 1993, the scandal known as Troopergate broke wide open. That night, CNN broadcast interviews of two Arkansas state troopers who served on Clinton’s security detail and recounted years of facilitating and covering up the governor’s liaisons. Roger Perry and Larry Patterson’s tell-alls had been coordinated to air just before the American Spectator released its monthslong investigation of the same subject. The article published that Monday told all the tawdry details a group of troopers had seen: Clinton getting oral sex in a car from a department store cosmetics clerk; his long-running affairs with an office staffer, a local judge, the wife of a judge, and a reporter; Clinton directing troopers to seek out attractive women and bring them to an office or hotel suite to meet him.
Two troopers signed sworn affidavits that their accounts were truthful, and two more provided supporting information but asked not to be named. On Tuesday, the Los Angeles Times reporters who’d been chasing the same claims published their own extensive report. The security agents said they were coming forward because they were tired of covering up for Clinton, and in some cases they felt he had misled them with promises of jobs. “We lied for him and helped him cheat on his wife, and he treated us like dogs,” state trooper Larry Patterson told a reporter for the American Spectator.
The troopers described in detail their supporting roles in a lengthy series of cover-ups for a compulsive womanizer, suggesting that the forty-second president had lied to voters during the campaign about many things, including his long affair with Gennifer Flowers. The law enforcement officers also provided probable cause to launch an investigation into misuse of government resources. The American Spectator noted:
They were instructed by Clinton on a regular basis to approach women and to solicit their telephone numbers for the governor; to drive him in state vehicles to rendezvous points and guard him during sexual encounters; to secure hotel rooms and other meeting places for sex; to lend Clinton their state cars so he could slip away and visit women unnoticed; to deliver gifts from Clinton to various women (some of whom, like Flowers, also had state jobs); and to help Clinton cover up his activities by keeping tabs on Hillary’s whereabouts and lying to Hillary about her husband’s whereabouts.
When the story first broke on Sunday night, Clinton’s team was panicked. Bruce Lindsey issued a bold-sounding statement dismissing the claims as “ridiculous.” “Similar allegations were made, investigated and responded to during the campaign, and there is nothing here that would dignify a further response,” he said.
Lindsey confirmed that Clinton had called one trooper before the stories ran, but there was “nothing improper” about that because the president had a right to question false stories about him. “Any suggestion that the president offered anyone a job in return for silence is a lie,” Lindsey said.
Behind the scenes at the West Wing, senior aides knew that these specific, precise stories, backed by multiple law enforcement officers, could not all be false. They also intuited the truth of the claims by reading the First Couple’s body language. In the wake of the report, Bill Clinton was contrite and shamefaced around his wife, a reaction that David Gergen compared to “a bouncy golden retriever who has pooped on the living room rug” and gotten caught.
Hillary Clinton appeared humiliated and downcast with close friends, but she didn’t reveal her personal pain publicly. With aides, she fumed at the political cost. She was then negotiating with Congress on massive health care reform, and she told McLarty, “It’s going to distort everything that we do.”
The Troopergate stories upset a few of the younger aides working in the White House, raising doubts in their minds about whether President Clinton had lied to his wife, to the voters, and to them. Clinton’s closer confidants—Lindsey and Stephanopoulos—scoffed at the idea. Clinton was a victim of a political hit job, they said. An avowed Clinton foe, Cliff Jackson, had coordinated the troopers’ stories. The troopers were lured in by the prospect of a profitable book deal. And if all these affairs had taken place, some aides asked, why had not one woman come forward to confirm any of it? Actually, Flowers had come forward, but Team Clinton didn’t dwell on that. Dee Dee Myers pleaded with reporters to see reason. “It’s just not true,” she said. Joe Klein, a Newsweek columnist who had covered the Clinton campaign, echoed the White House line in a piece he wrote titled “Citizens of Bimboland”: “Where are the women?”
Within a week or two, the dust kicked up from the Troopergate tremor began to settle. But there was an earthquake yet to come.
On May 6, 1994, Paula Corbin Jones stepped forward in a federal court to say that she was one of the women in the Troopergate stories. That day, she sued Bill Clinton, accusing him of luring her to a hotel room and pressuring her for oral sex when she was a $6.35-an-hour state clerk. Jones, a bubbly woman with dark brown hair, had tried to convince reporters earlier that year that Clinton had sexually harassed her in a Little Rock hotel in 1991. But she’d refused to give specific details, so mainstream newspapers and national networks had been wary of her claim.
Now she and her lawyers spelled it out in a seventy-nine-point civil complaint, seeking $700,000 in damages. She said she had come forward because the Troopergate stories had gotten a key detail wrong. Yes, state troopers approached her when she was working at a governor’s conference at the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock, saying Governor Clinton would like to meet her in one of the hotel rooms they set aside for him for private meetings. She went thinking it might lead to a better job. The troopers then escorted her to the room.
But, Jones insisted, despite what the troopers said in their stories, she was in fact not a happy or willing participant. She said that when she and the governor were alone, she pulled away once he tried to pull her close and kiss her. But he followed her to her seat on a couch and dropped his pants, exposing his erect penis.
“Kiss it,” he said.
Jones said she jumped up to leave.
“I’m not that kind of girl,” she said. “Look, I’ve got to go.”
White House aides continued to tell reporters that Jones’s claims were fabrications. But in private, they and Clinton’s lawyers discussed the serious threat that Jones’s civil lawsuit presented. If the suit proceeded, Clinton would become the first sitting president to have to sit for a deposition under oath and face trial while in the Oval Office.
Hillary Clinton had foreseen this threat months earlier when Jones first aired her claims that Clinton had sexually harassed her. She’d turned to Wright, pleading with her longtime aide-de-bimbo-eruptions to go down to Arkansas and investigate this woman. “Please,” Clinton had said. “Put a stop to it.”
The Clintons’ newly hired lawyer Bob Bennett instinctively felt it wise to settle the case. But when he met one-on-one with Hillary and then Bill, it was clear that Hillary didn’t want to settle and that the president wasn’t sure what to do. Clinton seemed focused on convincing people, including his wife, that he hadn’t whipped out his penis with a random woman he’d lured to a hotel room.
“I swear to God, it didn’t happen,” Clinton told Bennett.
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ON SEPTEMBER 12, 1994, a very different kind of threat came at the president—in the form of a stolen red-and-white propeller plane. At about 1:45 a.m., the small two-seater Cessna flew low over the office buildings along Seventeenth Street in downtown Washington, made a U-turn when it reached the Washington Monument, and then headed straight for the South Lawn of the White House. The pilot shut off the Cessna’s power as he set a glide path, but then tried to pull the nose up slightly when he spotted a sea of metal bleachers set up on the grass for an event planned for later that afternoon.
The plane clipped a massive magnolia tree, planted when Andrew Jackson was president, and then skidded fifty feet to a stop within inches of the White House’s sandstone wall, just outside the State Dining Room. The crumpled wreckage smoldered with the dead pilot inside, just two floors below the Clintons’ bedroom. Fortunately, that night, the Clintons happened to be sleeping in the nearby Blair House while their residence’s ventilation system was being repaired.
Neither the Secret Service nor anyone else did anything to protect Crown—largely because they had no idea the plane was coming. Some officers stationed on the South Portico noticed a low-flying plane over the Mall, but they had only seconds to scramble out of the way when it turned back toward the White House. After the fact, fire trucks swarmed the South Lawn to douse the area. Bomb detection teams carefully picked through the wreckage to see if any explosives were aboard the plane. Secret Service Deputy Guy Caputo woke up senior agency leaders at home to alert them to the close call. A detail agent woke Clinton to inform him of the crash, and the president then went back to bed.
Frank Corder, a depressed truck driver feeling hopeless after the breakup of his third marriage and the death of his father, had stolen the plane from an airport in Harford County, Maryland, sometime around midnight. A friend claimed Corder had once threatened to kill himself by crashing into the White House.
But Corder’s amateurish plan revealed that the Secret Service had crafted no strategy to foil an attack from the skies. Agents insisted to White House officials and reporters the next morning that the president was never in danger and that there was no sign Corder wanted to kill the president. The Service claimed that it had a plan for incoming planes—to rapidly move the president to safety—and didn’t strategize about how to stop the aircraft.
President Clinton’s White House aides and Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, who then oversaw the Secret Service, weren’t comforted by the Service’s assurances early that Monday morning. Though it was illegal for planes to fly in the restricted airspace around the White House, known as P-56, the Service had not formulated a plan to deal with planes that ignored the rules. The FAA didn’t have an automatic protocol for alerting the Service to looming threats in the skies. And Corder’s small, low-flying plane appeared to have ducked under FAA radar when he was downtown. The Service had scrutinized every way to enhance the physical barrier around the president—but they hadn’t taken steps to defend against this somewhat unusual threat.
Beginning at 2 a.m. and continuing throughout that long Monday morning, there was a tense push and pull over who would control the investigation of this near-catastrophic miss: the Secret Service or the White House. The Secret Service, reflexively resistant to having anyone peer into their business, wanted to investigate this breach like all the others in the past—entirely on their own. The White House insisted on coordinating the show, and after a series of teleconferences with Director Bowron, who had been up most of the night, and Bentsen, who was flying back to Washington to deal with the crash, they presented their compromise.
Under a rare presidential order, Bentsen tasked his undersecretary Ron Noble to lead an external investigation to determine the security gaps at the complex and to figure out how to patch them. The Secret Service would act as a partner in the investigation. At a news conference at roughly 2:45 p.m. that Monday, Noble and Special Agent Carl Meyer fielded a barrage of questions from a room of reporters, who seemed to be shocked that this kind of attack had so easily breached the White House perimeter. Many in Washington assumed the Secret Service and U.S. military had some early detection system for incoming planes, and even perhaps antiaircraft missiles installed in the White House roof.
“Mr. Noble, can you tell us to the best of your knowledge…how something like this could happen?” a reporter asked.
“That’s precisely the sort of question I can’t answer,” Noble replied, a grim look on his face.
Noble and Meyer both tried to sidestep detailed questions about whether the Secret Service had had any warning of Corder’s plane or had taken any action to try to deflect or stop the threat.
