After a vigorous defense, Branscum and Hill were acquitted on the reporting charges, and the jury deadlocked on the question of whether they had falsely reported the purposes for which they had withdrawn funds from their own bank. I was relieved that Herby, Rob, and Bruce Lindsey were cleared, but sickened by the abuse of prosecutorial power, the enormous legal costs my friends had been forced to bear, and the staggering costs to the taxpayers of a prosecution over the $13,000 of reimbursements the defendants got from their own bank and the failure to file federal reports on two legal and publicly reported withdrawals of campaign funds.
There were noneconomic costs as welclass="underline" FBI agents working for Starr went to Rob Hill’s teenage son’s school and dragged him out of class for questioning. They could have talked to him after school or during lunch or on the weekend. Instead, they humiliated the young man in hopes of pressuring his father into telling them something that would damage me, whether it was true or not. After the trial, several jurors burned the independent counsel’s office with comments like “It’s a waste of money…. I would hate to see the government waste more money on Whitewater”; “If they’re going to spend my tax dollars, they need stronger evidence”; “If anyone is untouchable it is OIC [Office of Independent Counsel].” One juror who identified himself as an “anti-Clinton” person said, “I would have loved for them to have a little more evidence, but they didn’t.” Even conservative Republicans who lived in the real world, as opposed to Whitewater World, knew the independent counsel had gone too far. As bad as Starr’s treatment of Branscum and Hill was, it was a tea party compared with what he was about to do to Susan McDougal. On August 20, Susan was sentenced to two years in prison. Starr’s people had offered to keep her out of jail if she gave them information implicating Hillary or me in some illegal activity. On the day she was sentenced, when Susan repeated what she had said from the beginning—that she knew of nothing either of us had done wrong—she was served with a subpoena to appear before the grand jury. She appeared, but refused to answer the prosecutors’ questions, fearing that they would charge her with perjury because she wouldn’t lie and tell them what they wanted to hear. Judge Susan Webber Wright found her in contempt of court and sent her to jail for an indefinite period until she agreed to cooperate with the special prosecutor. She would remain confined for eighteen months, often under miserable conditions.
September opened with the campaign on a roll. Our convention had been a success, and Dole was tarred by his association with Gingrich and the government shutdown. Even more important, the country was in good shape, and the voters no longer saw issues like crime, welfare, fiscal responsibility, foreign policy, and defense as the exclusive province of the Republican Party. Polls showed that my job and personal approval ratings were around 60 percent, with the same percentage of people saying they felt comfortable with me in the White House.
On the other hand, I expected to be weaker in some parts of Amer-ica because of my positions on the cultural issues—guns, gays, and abortion—and, at least in North Carolina and Kentucky, on tobacco. Also, it seemed certain that Ross Perot would receive far fewer votes than he had in 1992, making it harder for me to carry a couple of states where he had taken more votes from President Bush than from me. Still, on balance, I was in much better shape this time around. All through September the campaign drew large, enthusiastic crowds, or “October crowds,” as I called them, beginning with nearly thirty thousand people at a Labor Day picnic in De Pere, Wisconsin, near Green Bay. Since presidential elections are decided by electoral votes, I wanted to use our momentum to bring a couple of new states into our column and to force Senator Dole to spend time and money in states a Republican could normally take for granted. Dole wanted to do the same thing to me by contesting California, where I was opposing a popular ballot initiative to end affirmative action in college admissions and where he had helped himself by holding the GOP convention in San Diego. My main target was Florida. If I could win there and hold most of the states I had won in ’92, the election was over. I had worked hard in Florida for four years: helping the state recover from Hurricane Andrew; holding the Summit of the Americas there; announcing the relocation of the U.S. military’s Southern Command from Panama to Miami; working to restore the Everglades; and even making inroads into the Cuban-American community, which normally had given Republicans more than 80 percent of its votes in presidential elections ever since the Bay of Pigs. I was also blessed with a good organization in Florida and the strong support of Governor Lawton Chiles, who had great rapport with voters in the more conservative areas of central and northern Florida. Those people liked Lawton in part because he hit back when attacked. As he said, “No redneck wants a dog that won’t bite.” In early September, Lawton went with me to north Florida to campaign and to honor retiring Congressman Pete Peterson, who had spent six and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam and whom I had recently nominated to be our first ambassador there since the end of the war.
I spent most of the rest of the month in states I’d won in ’92. On a western swing, I also campaigned in Arizona, a state that hadn’t voted for a Democrat for President since 1948, but that I thought I could carry because of its growing Hispanic population and the discomfort of many of the state’s moderate and traditional conservative voters with the more extreme politics of the Republican Congress. On the sixteenth, I received the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police. The FOP usually endorsed Republicans for President, but our White House had worked with them for four years to put more police on the streets, take guns out of the hands of criminals, and ban cop-killer bullets; they wanted four more years of that kind of cooperation.
Two days later, I announced one of the most important environmental accomplishments of my entire eight years in office, the establishment of the 1.7 million–acre Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument in the remote and beautiful red rock area of southern Utah, which contains fossils of dinosaurs and the remains of the ancient Anasazi Indian civilization. I had the authority to do so under the Antiquities Act of 1906, which allows the President to protect federal lands of extraordinary cultural, historic, and scientific value. I made the announcement with Al Gore on the edge of the Grand Canyon, which Theodore Roosevelt had first protected under the Antiquities Act. My action was necessary to stop a large coal mine that would have fundamentally changed the character of the area. Most of the Utah officials and many who wanted the mining operation’s economic boost were against it, but the land was priceless, and I thought the monument designation would bring in tourism income that over time would more than offset the loss of the mine.
Apart from the size and exuberance of the crowds, the September events offered anecdotal evidence that things were going our way. After a rally in Longview, Texas, as I was shaking hands in the crowd, I met a single mother of two who had left welfare to serve in AmeriCorps and was using its scholarship money to go to Kilgore Junior College; another woman who had used the family leave law when her husband became ill with cancer; and a Vietnam veteran who was grateful for the health and disability benefits for children born with spina bifida as a result of their fathers’ exposure to Agent Orange during the war. He had his twelve-year-old daughter with him. The child had spina bifida and had already endured a dozen operations in her short life.