By Christmas, I had felt for some time that if left to our own devices, Senator Dole and I could have resolved the budget impasse fairly easily, but Dole had to be careful. He was running for President, and Senator Phil Gramm was running against him with Gingrich-like rhetoric, in Republican primaries in which the electorate was well to the right of the country as a whole. After breaking for Christmas, I vetoed one more budget bill, the National Defense Authorization Act. This one was tough because the legislation included a military pay increase and a larger military housing allowance, both of which I strongly supported. Nevertheless, I felt I had to do it because the bill also mandated the complete deployment of a national missile defense system by 2003, well before a workable system could be developed or would be needed; moreover, such action would violate our commitments under the ABM Treaty and jeopardize Russia’s implementation of START I and its ratification of START II. The bill also restricted the President’s ability to commit troops in emergencies and interfered too much with important management prerogatives of the Defense Department, including its actions to redress the threat of weapons of mass destruction under the Nunn-Lugar program. No responsible President, Republican or Democrat, could have allowed that defense bill to become law. During the last three days of the year our forces deployed to Bosnia, and I worked with the congressional leaders on the budget, including one seven-hour session. We made some progress, but broke for New Year’s without agreement on the budget or on ending the shutdown. In the first session of the 104th Congress, the new Republican majority had enacted only 67 bills, as compared with 210 in the first year of the previous Congress. And only 6 of the 13 appropriations bills were law, three full months after the beginning of the fiscal year. As our family headed down to Hilton Head for Renaissance Weekend, I wondered whether the American people’s votes in the ’94 elections had produced the results they wanted.
And I thought about the last two emotionally draining, exhausting, jam-packed months, and the fact that the enormity of the events—Rabin’s death, the Bosnian peace and the deployment of our troops, the progress in Northern Ireland, the herculean budget fight—had done nothing to slow down the worker bees in Whitewater World.
On November 29, as I was making my way to Ireland, Senator D’Amato’s committee called L. Jean Lewis to testify again about how her investigation of Madison Guaranty had been thwarted after I became President. During her appearance before Congressman Leach’s committee the previous August, she had been so badly discredited by government documents and her own tape-recorded conversations with Resolution Trust Corporation attorney April Breslaw that I was amazed D’Amato would call her back. On the other hand, hardly anybody knew of the problems with Lewis’s testimony, and D’Amato received a lot of publicity, as Leach had, by simply leveling charges that were unsupported and were actually disproved by subsequent testimony.
Lewis once again repeated her claim that her investigation was thwarted after I was elected. Richard Ben-Veniste, the committee’s minority counsel, confronted her with evidence that, contrary to her sworn deposition, she had tried repeatedly to push federal authorities to act on her referral of Hillary and me as material witnesses in Whitewater before the election, not after I became President, and had told an FBI agent that she was “altering history” by her actions. When Senator Paul Sarbanes read to Lewis from the 1992 letter of U.S. Attorney Chuck Banks saying that acting on her referral would constitute “prosecutorial misconduct,” then referred to a 1993 Justice Department appraisal of Lewis’s inadequate knowledge of federal banking law, Lewis cried, slumped in her chair, and was led away, never to return. Less than a month later, in mid-December, the complete Whitewater story finally came out, when the RTC inquiry from Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro was released. The report was written by Jay Stephens, who, like Chuck Banks, was a Republican former U.S. attorney whom I had replaced. It said, as had the preliminary report in June, that there were no grounds for a civil suit against us in Whitewater, much less any criminal action, and it recommended that the investigation be closed. This was what the New York Times and the Washington Post had wanted to know when they called for an independent counsel. I eagerly awaited their coverage. Immediately after the RTC report was released, the Post mentioned it in passing, in the eleventh paragraph of a front-page story about an unrelated subpoena battle with Starr, and the New York Times didn’t run a word. The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Washington Times ran an Associated Press story of about four hundred words on the inside pages of their papers. The TV networks didn’t cover the RTC report, though. ABC’s Ted Koppel mentioned it on Nightline, then dismissed its importance, because there were so many “new” questions. Whitewater wasn’t about Whitewater anymore. It was about whatever Ken Starr could dig up on anybody in Arkansas or my administration. In the meantime, some Whitewater reporters were actually covering up evidence of our innocence. To be fair, a few journalists took note. Washington Post writer Howard Kurtz wrote an article pointing out the way the RTC report had been buried, and LarsErik Nelson, a columnist for the New York Daily News, who had been a correspondent in the Soviet Union, wrote, “The secret verdict is in: There was nothing for the Clintons to hide… in a bizarre reversal of those Stalin-era trials in which innocent people were convicted in secret, the President and the First Lady have been publicly charged and secretly found innocent.”
I was genuinely confused by the mainstream press coverage of Whitewater; it seemed inconsistent with the more careful and balanced approach the press had taken on other issues, at least since the Republicans won the Congress in 1994. One day, after one of our budget meetings in October, I asked Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming to stay a moment to talk. Simpson was a conservative Republican, but we had a pretty good relationship because of the friendship we had in common with his governor, Mike Sullivan. I asked Alan if he thought Hillary and I had done anything wrong in Whitewater. “Of course not,” he said. “That’s not what this is about. This is about making the public think you did something wrong. Anybody who looked at the evidence would see that you didn’t.” Simpson laughed at how willing the “elitist” press was to swallow anything negative about small, rural places like Wyoming or Arkansas and made an interesting observation: “You know, before you were elected, we Republicans believed the press was liberal. Now we have a more sophisticated view. They are liberal in a way. Most of them voted for you, but they think more like your right-wing critics do, and that’s much more important.” When I asked him to explain, he said, “Democrats like you and Sullivan get into government to help people. The right-wing extremists don’t think government can do much to improve on human nature, but they do like power. So does the press. And since you’re President, they both get power the same way, by hurting you.” I appreciated Simpson’s candor and I thought about what he said for months. For a long time, whenever I was angry about the Whitewater press coverage I would tell people about Simpson’s analysis. When I finally just accepted his insight as accurate, it was liberating, and it cleared my head for the fight.
Despite my anger over Whitewater and my puzzlement about what was behind the press coverage of it, I headed into 1996 feeling fairly optimistic. In 1995, we had helped save Mexico, gotten through Oklahoma City and increased the focus on terrorism, preserved and reformed affirmative action, ended the war in Bosnia, continued the Middle East peace process, and helped make progress in Northern Ireland. The economy had continued to improve, and so far I was winning the budget fight with the Republicans, a battle that in the beginning seemed likely to doom my presidency. It could still lead to that, but as we headed into 1996 I was ready to see it through to the end. As I had told Dick Armey, I didn’t want to be President if the price of doing so was meaner streets, weaker health care, fewer educational opportunities, dirtier air, and more poverty. I was betting that the American people didn’t want those things either.