Presidents and Political Scandal by Richard P. Barberio

Author:Richard P. Barberio
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030455040
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

6 The White House Strikes Back?

The key to the puzzle of the Clinton White House or those outside of the administration who were interested in helping to create or support a backfire is what Hillary Clinton knew about the affair with Monica Lewinsky. The president quickly adopted a lawyerly strategy of feigning ignorance about a sexual relationship with “that woman” in order to find a way out of his situation through negotiation and, if absolutely necessary, some grudging concessions of part of the truth. He attempted to keep Monica Lewinsky appeased with her distance from the White House once she had been transferred off to the Department of Defense. He asked his good friend Vernon Jordon to help her find employment in the private sector. What Bill Clinton did not know was that Lewinsky was confiding her disappointments in the affair to a coworker, Linda Tripp, who recorded many of their phone conversations and was an instrumental link in the chain that brought the affair to the attention of Ken Starr.

Before the revelations of the affair were made public in the aftermath of his grand jury testimony in the sexual harassment case brought by Paula Jones dating back to Clinton’s time as the governor of Arkansas in the 1980s, President Clinton had convinced the one person that he needed to convince of his innocence; his wife. While Bill Clinton huddled with his disgraced advisor, Dick Morris, and realized that he would have to appear to cooperate while stonewalling the investigation as he searched for a way to negotiate or somehow wait out the Starr inquiry, Hillary Clinton was convinced of her husband’s innocence. She was willing to entertain some possibilities; that the young intern was smitten by the President but harmless, that the President may have flirted a bit with Lewinsky, that Lewinsky was a crazed stalker who was dangerous, or that this was all another episode cooked up by the Republicans and their fellow travelers to damage the goals of the administration and personally harm their family (Gormley 2011, 543). She had every reason to believe these things, in part, because her husband actively wanted her to do so. Given the history that Bill Clinton had with other women over the course of time—he admitted to euphemistically “causing pain” in their marriage during one so-called bimbo eruption when charges of infidelity came up during the 1992 campaign—Mrs. Clinton’s willingness to accept her husband’s categorical denial is notable. However, the credible contemporary accounts of this time period portray the First Lady as supportive of her husband’s innocence. This support may have manifested itself as a precursor to something resembling a backfire, or at least in the form of a whispering campaign against Monica Lewinsky.

“If you drag a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find” (CNN 1998). Aimed at Paula Jones rather than Lewinsky, this infamous line from Bill Clinton’s chief campaign strategist, James Carville, captures some of the venom that Clinton loyalists could summon

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