I went on doing my job, and I stonewalled, denying what had happened to everyone: Hillary, Chelsea, my staff and cabinet, my friends in Congress, members of the press, and the American people. What I regret the most, other than my conduct, is having misled all of them. Since 1991 I had been called a liar about everything under the sun, when in fact I had been honest in my public life and financial affairs, as all the investigations would show. Now I was misleading everyone about my personal failings. I was embarrassed and wanted to keep it from my wife and daughter. I didn’t want to help Ken Starr criminalize my personal life, and I didn’t want the American people to know I’d let them down. It was like living in a nightmare. I was back to my parallel lives with a vengeance. On the day the story broke, I did a previously scheduled interview with Jim Lehrer for the PBS NewsHour. I responded to his questions by saying that I had not asked anyone to lie, which was true, and that “there is no improper relationship.” Although the impropriety was over well before Lehrer asked the question, my answer was misleading, and I was ashamed of telling Lehrer that; from then on, whenever I could, I just said I never asked anybody not to tell the truth. While all this was going on, I had to keep doing my job. On the twentieth, I met with Prime Minister Netanyahu at the White House to discuss his plans for a phased withdrawal from the West Bank. Netanyahu had made a decision to move the peace process forward as long as he had “peace with security.” It was a bold move because his governing coalition was shaky, but he could see that if he didn’t act, the situation would quickly get out of hand.
The next day Arafat came to the White House. I gave him an encouraging report of my meeting with Netanyahu, assured him that I was pushing the prime minister to fulfill Israel’s obligation under the peace process, reminded him of the Israeli leader’s political problems, and stated, as I always did, that he had to keep fighting terror if he wanted Israel to move forward. The next day Mir Aimal Kansi was sentenced to death for the murder of the two CIA agents in January 1993, the first terrorist act to occur during my presidency.
By January 27, the day of the State of the Union address, the American people had been deluged with a week of coverage of Starr’s inquiry, and I had spent a week dealing with it. Starr had already issued subpoenas to a number of White House staff people and for our records. I had asked Harold Ickes and Mickey Kantor to help deal with the controversy. The day before the speech, at the urging of Harold and Harry Thomason, who felt I had been too tentative in my public comments, I reluctantly appeared once more before the press to say “I did not have sexual relations” with Lewinsky. On the morning of the speech, on NBC’s Today show, Hillary said that she didn’t believe the charges against me and that a “vast right-wing conspiracy” had been trying to destroy us since the 1992 campaign. Starr issued an indignant statement complaining that Hillary had questioned his motives. Though she was right about the nature of our opposition, seeing Hillary defend me made me even more ashamed about what I had done.
Hillary’s difficult interview and my mixed reaction to it clearly exemplified the bind I had put myself in: As a husband, I had done something wrong that I needed to apologize and atone for; as President, I was in a legal and political struggle with forces who had abused the criminal and civil laws and severely damaged innocent people in their attempt to destroy my presidency and cripple my ability to serve. Finally, after years of dry holes, I had given them something to work with. I had hurt the presidency and the people by my misconduct. That was no one’s fault but my own. I didn’t want to compound the error by letting the reactionaries prevail.
By 9 p.m., when I walked into the packed House chamber, the tension was palpable both there and in living rooms across America, where more people were watching my State of the Union address than since I delivered my first one. The big question was whether I would mention the controversy. I began with what was not in dispute. The country was in good shape, with fourteen million new jobs, rising incomes, the highest rate of home ownership ever, the fewest people on the welfare rolls in twenty-seven years, and the smallest federal government in thirty-five years. The 1993 economic plan had cut the deficit, projected to be $357 billion in 1998, by 90 percent, and the previous year’s balanced budget plan would get rid of it entirely.
Then I outlined my plan for the future. First, I proposed that before spending the coming surpluses on new programs or tax cuts, we should save Social Security for the baby boomers’ retirement. In education, I recommended funding to hire 100,000 new teachers and to cut class size to eighteen in the first three grades; a plan to help communities modernize or build five thousand schools; and assistance to help schools end the practice of “social promotion,” by providing funds for extra learning in afterschool or summer-school programs. I reiterated my support for a Patients’ Bill of Rights, opening Medicare to Americans between the ages of fifty-five and sixty-five, expanding the Family and Medical Leave Act, and called for a large enough expansion in federal child-care assistance to provide support for one million more children.
On the security front, I asked for congressional support in combating “an unholy axis of new threats from terrorists, international criminals, and drug traffickers”; Senate approval of the expansion of NATO; and continued funding for our mission in Bosnia and our efforts to confront the hazards of chemical and biological weapons and the outlaw states, terrorists, and organized criminals seeking to acquire them.
The last section of my speech dealt with appeals to bring America together and look to the future: tripling the number of empowerment zones in poor communities; launching a new clean water initiative for our rivers, lakes, and coastal waters; providing $6 billion in tax cuts and research funds for the development of fuel-efficient cars, clean-energy homes, and renewable energy; financing the “next generation” Internet to transmit information up to a thousand times faster; and funding the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which, because of congressional hostility, didn’t have the resources to handle sixty thousand backlogged cases alleging discrimination in the workplace. I also proposed the largest increase in history for the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute, and the National Science Foundation so that “ours will be the generation that finally wins the war against cancer and begins a revolution in our fight against all deadly diseases.”