On the fourteenth, I asked Al Gore to represent the United States at the annual APEC meeting in Malaysia, the first leg of a long-scheduled trip to Asia. I couldn’t go, because Saddam was still trying to impose unacceptable conditions on the return of the UN inspectors; in response, we were preparing to launch air strikes at sites our intelligence indicated were connected to his weapons program, as well as other military targets. Just before the attacks were launched, with the planes already on their way, we received the first of three letters from Iraq addressing our objections. Within hours, Saddam had backed down completely, and had committed to resolving all outstanding issues raised by the inspectors, to giving them unfettered access to all sites without any interference, to turning over all relevant documents, and to accepting all UN resolutions on weapons of mass destruction. I was skeptical, but I decided to give him one more chance.
On the eighteenth, I left for Tokyo and Seoul. I wanted to go to Japan to establish a working relationship with Keizo Obuchi, the new prime minister, and to try to influence Japanese public opinion to support the tough reforms necessary to end more than five years of economic stagnation. I liked Obuchi and thought he had a chance to tame the turbulent Japanese political scene and serve for several years. He was interested in American-style hands-on politics. As a young man in the 1960s, he had come to the United States and talked his way into meeting with then attorney general Robert Kennedy, who became his political hero. After our meeting Obuchi took me to the streets of Tokyo, where we shook hands with schoolchildren who were holding Japanese and American flags. I also did a televised town hall meeting in which the famously reticent Japanese surprised me with their open, blunt questions, not only about Japan’s current challenges but also about whether I had ever visited victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; how Japan could get fathers to spend more time with their children, as I had with Chelsea; how many times a month I ate dinner with my family; how I was coping with all the pressures of the presidency; and how I had apologized to Hillary and Chelsea.
In Seoul, I supported both Kim Dae Jung’s continuing efforts to move beyond the economic crisis and his outreach to North Korea, so long as it was clear that neither of us would allow the proliferation of missiles, nuclear weapons, or other weapons of mass destruction. We were both concerned about the recent North Korean test launch of a long-range missile. I had asked Bill Perry to head a small group to review our Korea policy, and to recommend a road map to the future that would maximize the chances of North Korea abandoning its weapons and missile programs and reconciling with South Korea, while minimizing the risks of its failure to do so.
At the end of the month Madeleine Albright and I hosted a conference at the State Department to support economic development for the Palestinians, with Yasser Arafat, Jim Wolfensohn of the World Bank, and representatives of the European Union, the Middle East, and Asia. The Israeli cabinet and the Knesset had supported the Wye River accord, and it was time to get some investment into Gaza and the West Bank to give the beleaguered Palestinians a taste of the benefits of peace. While all this was going on, Henry Hyde and his colleagues kept pushing their agenda, sending me eighty-one questions that they demanded be answered with “admit or deny,” and releasing twenty-two hours of the Tripp-Lewinsky tapes. Tripp’s taping of those conversations without Lewinsky’s permission, after her lawyer explicitly told her the taping was criminal and she should not do it again, was a felony under Maryland’s criminal law. She was indicted for it, but the trial judge refused to allow the prosecutor to call Lewinsky as a witness to prove the conversations occurred, ruling that the immunity Starr had given Tripp to testify about her unlawful violation of Lewinsky’s privacy prevented Lewinsky from testifying against her. Once more, Starr had succeeded in protecting lawbreakers who played ball with him even as he indicted innocent people who would not lie for him. During this period Starr also indicted Webb Hubbell for a third time, claiming that he had misled federal regulators about work he and the Rose Law Firm had done for another failed financial institution. It was Starr’s last, almost desperate attempt to break Hubbell and force him to say something damaging about Hillary or me.
On the nineteenth of November, Kenneth Starr appeared before the House Judiciary Committee, making comments that, like his report, went far beyond the scope of his responsibility to report the facts he had found to Congress. The Starr report had already been criticized for omitting one big piece of evidence helpful to me: Monica Lewinsky’s adamant assertion that I never asked her to lie. Three surprising things came out of Starr’s testimony. The first was his announcement that he had found no wrongdoing on my part or Hillary’s in the Travel Office and FBI file investigations. Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts asked him when he had reached those conclusions. “Some months ago,” replied Starr. Frank then asked him why he waited until after the election to exonerate me on these charges, when he had submitted his report “with a lot of negative stuff about the President” before the election. Starr’s brief response was confused and evasive.
Second, Starr admitted he had talked to the press, on background, a violation of the grand jury secrecy rules. Finally, he denied under oath that his office had tried to get Monica Lewinsky to wear a wire to record conversations with Vernon Jordan, me, or other people. When confronted with the FBI form proving that he had, he was evasive. The Washington Post reported that “Starr’s denials… were shattered by his own FBI reports.”
The fact that Starr had admitted violating the law on grand jury secrecy and had given false testimony under oath didn’t slow him or the committee Republicans down a bit. They thought different rules applied to the home team.
The next day Sam Dash resigned as Starr’s ethics advisor, saying that Starr had “unlawfully” injected himself into the impeachment process with his remarks at the congressional hearing. As my mother used to say, Dash was “a day late and a dollar short”: Starr hadn’t cared about the lawfulness of his behavior for a long time.
Shortly before Thanksgiving, the House Republicans returned to Washington to elect Bob Livingston of Louisiana, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, as the new Speaker of the House. He would take office in January when the new session of Congress began. At the time, most people thought the movement to impeach me was stalled. Several moderate Republicans had said that they were opposed to it, and that the election had been a clear message that the American people wanted the Congress to reprimand or censure me and get on with the public’s business.
In the middle of the month, I settled the Paula Jones case for a large amount of money and no apology. I hated to do it because I had won a clear victory on the law and the facts in a politically motivated case. Jones’s lawyers had appealed her case to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, but the governing case law was clear: if the Court of Appeals followed its own decisions, I would win the appeal. Unfortunately, the three-judge panel assigned to hear the case was headed by Pasco Bowman, the same ultra-conservative judge who had removed Judge Henry Woods from one of the Whitewater cases on the basis of spurious newspaper articles after Woods had rendered a decision Starr didn’t like. Pasco Bowman, like Judge David Sentelle in Washington, had shown that he was willing to make exceptions to the normal rules of law in Whitewater-related cases.