There is a scattering of what used to be called hard news in Bob Woodward’s latest hot Washington book, Shadow, though it is not clear whether anybody — even the author — much notices or cares. For example: Confusion has always surrounded the meaning of President Clinton’s violent rage on December 6, 1997, after Secret Service officers at the White House’s northwest gate let slip to Monica Lewinsky that her pined-for ex-boyfriend-in-chief was at that very moment meeting privately with another woman, Eleanor Mondale. Critics of the president have theorized that he was at that point already concerned about Lewinsky’s potential testimony in the Paula Jones lawsuit — and thus alarmed that jealousy over Mondale might turn Lewinsky against him. Clinton and Bruce Lindsey, however, have insisted under oath that Lewinsky’s pending involvement in the case was completely unknown to them until later in the afternoon of December 6, when the president’s personal attorney, Robert Bennett, first showed them her name on the plaintiff’s official witness list. And no one has been able to establish otherwise.
Until now. Shadow reminds us that Bennett had received the witness list by fax at 5:40 P.M. the day before, December 5. The book also reports what the lawyer had done next: “Bennett immediately sent a copy of the witness list to Bruce Lindsey at the White House and another to Clinton” — in advance of the Mondale incident. “Bruce,” Bennett said, “here’s the witness list. Get back to us.”
So: Yet another White House lie exploded, this specific explosion implicating the president of the United States once again in perjury and obstruction of justice. Does Woodward grasp the significance of this detail? If so, he has not let on in his book. And if he had, would it actually matter to most of his readers? Probably, sadly, no. As a serious political and legal issue, the Lewinsky episode has long since been consigned to history.
Our political class does not look to Bob Woodward for meticulous analysis of such stuff, in any case. It looks to him instead, as it looks to no one else, for juicy fun. And here, as always, the genius interviewer delivers. For in the service of Shadow’s insider account of Clinton administration scandal management, Woodward has induced literally dozens of presidential aides and lawyers to dump on one another, betray excruciating first-family confidences, and generally behave like boors. There has never been gossip quite like it. Washington is agog.
But exactly why the city should also claim to be surprised by any of this — and why so much of the surprise should be directed at Robert Bennett — is a curious question. Yes, Shadow includes exhaustive reconstructions of highly sensitive conversations between the president and his lawyer, complete with elaborate descriptions of what Bennett’s thoughts were while he was listening to Clinton talk. Clinton reassures him after Bennett warns, “If you’re caught f-ing around in the White House, I’m not good enough to help you.” In the search for the elusive “distinguishing characteristic,” Bennett asks a series of Clinton’s buddies what the president’s penis look like — and then asks the president himself. Bennett tells Clinton that he thinks the president has lied to him about a past affair with Arkansas business executive Marilyn Jo Jenkins.
All of which business is strictly privileged, a sanctionable violation of bar association rules if disclosed by a personal lawyer, without authorization from his client, to any third party. We know that the client in this case, Bill Clinton, did not grant Bob Woodward an interview. We cannot believe that Clinton would ever endorse public dissemination of such embarrassments. And so, for the identity of Woodward’s single “knowledgeable source” here, we are left with only one likely suspect, acting unilaterally and therefore unethically. What, everyone wonders, did Bob Bennett imagine he was doing when he spilled this way to the nation’s most famous reporter?
He probably imagined what every other heedless “knowledgeable source” cited in Woodward’s footnotes imagined: that he would never get caught, because when it came time actually to write it all down, the nation’s most famous reporter would try a little harder to disguise who had told him what. Didn’t happen. Now it’s too late. Bennett, more than anyone, must be panicked out of his mind.
Or at least the talk-show gabsters believe he should be. It seems to have escaped their attention that in Shadow many other people have failed to keep secrets much more damaging to Bill and Hillary. Clinton, the book reports, in what he no doubt thought was a private post-confession phone conversation with James Carville, was grief-stricken that his wife “is not going to forgive me.” Mrs. Clinton, in similarly private conversations with various “women friends” late last summer, desperately attempted to convince herself that the Lewinsky affair was only sex to her husband — not true “partnership.” And so on and endlessly on. Each of which revelations comes from a “knowledgeable source” whose behavior is manifestly caddish and whose identity appears transparently obvious.
Bennett’s, for that matter, is not even the book’s most devastating violation of attorney-client confidentiality. That honor must be reserved to Sydney Hoffman, one of the new lawyers retained by Monica Lewinsky after she sacked William Ginsburg in early June 1998. Right off the bat, Hoffman spent five hours debriefing her client. And she quickly concluded, according to Woodward, that Lewinsky was “delusional” and suffering from a “deep obsession.” Then, Hoffman consulted a number of psychiatrists, who persuaded her that it was “highly possible that Lewinsky had a form of Clara Bow syndrome, named after the famous silent film actress who couldn’t say no.” Or “perhaps Lewinsky had erotomania, an abnormally strong sexual desire.” Nice of Hoffman — sorry, a “knowledgeable source” — to pass this on.
And leaving the brutality of private-sector lawyers behind for a moment, what of the official attorneys so prominently involved in last year’s scandal? From the very beginning, these men and women, from White House Counsel Charles F.C. Ruff on down, loudly proclaimed that the confidentiality of their advice to Bill Clinton was a matter not just of ancient legal ethics, but of constitutional importance. If Kenneth Starr’s grand jury forced them to reveal the substance of their guidance, then the presidency as an institution would be grievously harmed.
But again and again in Shadow, Woodward quotes these very same White House lawyers acknowledging in private, at the time, that the privilege they were asserting in public was fictitious. And, as if to prove that the privilege was also trivial — and to compound the hypocrisy — “knowledgeable sources” now explain to Bob Woodward the very things they tried to withhold from Starr. Clinton’s exposure in Shadow by his own staff lawyers — who mock and disbelieve him behind his back whenever they take a break from savaging one another — is every bit as pornographic, in its way, as anything in the independent counsel’s report.
No, this is not by any stretch of the imagination run-of-the-mill staff-level “leaking.” It is a betrayal of the president and his wife, by their putative allies, on a chilling scale. But again, we ask: Why should it genuinely surprise anyone? Bill Clinton is an uncommonly dishonorable man. It stands to reason that he would be “supported,” if that’s the word for it, by equally dishonorable aides.
Is there anything new, then, about dishonor in the Age of Clinton, and does Shadow have anything to tell us about it? Yes there is, and yes it does. In one truly depressing passage of the book, former Clinton scandal spokesman Mark Fabiani, among the few administration officials to speak to Woodward on the record, describes how it was that he came to take his thankless job in the first place. Harold Ickes summoned him to the White House and demanded that he abandon his post at the Department of Housing and Urban Development to come on board. Fabiani initially said no; he liked the job he already had. So Ickes bluntly threatened to get him fired. And while Fabiani was collecting himself from this shock, Ickes offered another blandishment. “Look,” Ickes pointed out, “the president needs to be reelected.”
“Mulling it over,” Woodward reports, “Fabiani decided he had to get beyond Ickes’s threat about losing his current job. It was despicable, but Ickes’s later arguments were compelling.”
There you have it: Ickes’s later arguments were compelling. If throwing in with people you know to be despicable, and defending their lies and lying some yourself in the bargain . . . if this is what’s necessary to win, well, then it’s okay.
You would not think individuals at the highest level of our government would ever say anything like this out loud. You would not think, for example, that Vice President Gore could, without apparent embarrassment on national television last week, so coolly explain why he is now prepared to denounce as “inexcusable” presidential behavior he vigorously defended not six months ago. His now inoperative denials that the president was lying about Monica Lewinsky, according to Gore, must be understood “in the context of . . . what I felt was a partisan effort in the Congress to remove him from office.” I didn’t believe it, that is to say, but pretending I did was necessary to win.
And does Washington seem at all surprised that such situational ethics is explicitly asserted as an appropriate element of the nation’s public life? No, it does not. That, perhaps, is the biggest and worst surprise of all.
David Tell, for the Editors
