The article, written by David Brock, was filled with the most vile stories I had ever heard, worse than the salacious garbage in supermarket tabloids. Brock’s main sources were four Arkansas troopers from Bill’s former bodyguard detail. They claimed―among other things―that they had procured women for Bill when he was Governor. Years later, Brock would recant, writing a stunning confession of his political motives and directives at the time.

  “Look, it’s just a lot of sleaze, but it’s going to be out there,” said David. “You’ve got to be prepared.”

  My first thoughts were for Chelsea and for my mother and Virginia, who had already been through too much.

  “What can we do about it?” I asked David. “Is there anything anyone can do?”

  His advice was to stay calm and say nothing. Comments from us would only help publicize the article. The troopers were doing a reasonable job of discrediting themselves, shamelessly boasting that they expected to cash in on their stories. Two of the four agreed to be identified, and they were shopping around for a book deal. Even more telling, they were being represented by Cliff Jackson, another of Bill’s most vehement political enemies in Arkansas. Most of Brock’s tales were too vague to be checked on, but certain specifics were easily refuted. The article claimed, for example, that I had ordered the gate logs to the Governor’s Mansion destroyed to cover up Bill’s supposed liaisons; the mansion, however, never kept such logs. Unfortunately, the fact that Brock’s sources were state troopers who had worked for Bill gave their stories a veneer of credibility.

  I don’t think the full effect of the article hit me until the next evening, at a Christmas party for our friends and family at the White House. Lisa Caputo told me that two of the troopers were touting their stories on CNN that night and that the Los Angeles Times was about to publish its own version of the troopers’ allegations. It was too much. I wondered if what Bill was trying to do for the country was worth the pain and humiliation our families and friends were about to suffer. I must have looked as devastated as I felt, because Bob Barnett came over to ask if he could help. I told him we had to decide how to respond by the next day. I suggested we go upstairs with Bill for a few minutes to talk it over. Bill paced in the center hall. Bob knelt in front of me as I sank into a small chair against the wall. With his oversize glasses and mild features, Bob looks like everybody’s favorite uncle. Now he was talking in a soothing voice, clearly trying to see whether after all that had happened this year, we had the strength for yet another struggle.

  I looked at him and said, “I am just so tired of all of this.”

  He shook his head. “The President was elected, and you’ve got to stay with this for the country, for your family. However bad this seems, you’ve got to stick it out,” he said.

  He wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t know, and it wasn’t the first time I had been advised that my actions and words could either strengthen or undermine Bill’s Presidency.

  I wanted to say, “Bill’s been elected, not me!” Intellectually, I understood Bob was right and that I would have to summon whatever energy I had left. I was willing to try.

  But I just felt so tired. And at the moment, very much alone.

  I realized that attacks on our reputations could jeopardize the work Bill was doing to set the country on a different track. Ever since the campaign, I had seen how ferociously the Republicans wanted to hold on to the White House. Bill’s political adversaries understood how high the stakes were, which made me want to fight back. I went back downstairs to rejoin the party.

  I had scheduled several media interviews that I couldn’t cancel. On December 21, I met for a year-end wrap-up with Helen Thomas, the dean of the White House press corps and a legendary journalist, and other wire service reporters. Naturally, they asked me about the Spectator article, and I decided to give them an answer. I didn’t believe it was a coincidence that these attacks should surface just when Bill’s standing in the polls was at the highest level since his inauguration, and I told them so. I also believed the stories were planted for partisan political and ideological reasons.

  “I think my husband has proven that he’s a man who really cares about this country deeply and respects the Presidency… . And when it’s all said and done, that’s how most fair-minded Americans will judge my husband. And all the rest of this stuff will end up in the garbage can where it deserves to be.”

  It was not exactly the calm, quiet response David had recommended.

  Although the initial damage had been done, the media finally started examining the troopers’ motives. It turned out that two were angry because they felt that Bill had been ungrateful to them. They had also been subjects of an investigation into an alleged insurance fraud scheme involving a state vehicle in which they were riding, which had been wrecked in 1990. Another trooper who reportedly claimed that Bill had offered him a federal job for his silence later signed an affidavit swearing it never happened. But nearly a decade would pass before we learned the full, chilling story behind what became known as “Troopergate.”

  David Brock, the author of the Spectator article, was seized by an attack of conscience in 1998 and publicly apologized to Bill and me for the lies he had spread about us. He was so consumed with building his rightwing credentials that he allowed himself to be used politically even when he had doubts about his sources. His memoir, Blinded by the Right, published in 2002, chronicles his years as a self-described “rightwing hit man.”

  He claims he was not only on the Spectator’s legitimate payroll, but was receiving money under the table to dig up and publish whatever dirt anyone would say about us. Among his secret patrons was the Chicago financier Peter Smith, a key supporter of Newt Gingrich.

  Smith paid Brock to travel to Arkansas to interview the troopers, an arrangement facilitated by Cliff Jackson. According to Brock, the success of the trooper article inspired Richard Mellon Scaife, an ultraconservative billionaire from Pittsburgh, to fund similar stories through a clandestine enterprise called “the Arkansas Project.” Through an educational foundation, Scaife also pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into the Spectator to support its anti-Clinton vendetta.

  The plot described by Brock and others is convoluted and the cast of characters preposterous.

  But it is important for Americans to know what was taking place behind the scenes to understand fully the meaning of Troopergate, the tabloid scandals that preceded it and those that would follow. This was all-out political war.

  “[I]n pursuit of my budding career as a rightwing muckraker,” writes Brock, “I let myself get mixed up in a bizarre and at times ludicrous attempt by well-financed rightwing operatives to tar Clinton with sleazy personal allegations. Operating in conjunction with, but outside of, official GOP or movement organizations and well below the radar of the American public and the press corps as the election campaign unfolded, the effort went far beyond the opposition research typically conducted by political campaigns―not only in its secretiveness and its single-mindedness, but also in its lack of fidelity to any standard of proof, principle or propriety. These activities … were a very early hint of how far the political right would go in the coming decade to try to destroy the Clintons.”

  Along with other members of Scaife’s secret Arkansas Project, Brock took on the task of planting and nourishing seeds of doubt about Bill Clinton’s character and his fitness to govern. According to Brock’s memoir, the “country was being conditioned to see an invention made up entirely by the Republican right…. from virtually the first moment that they stepped out of Arkansas and onto the national stage, the country never again saw the Clintons.”

  One frosty morning between Christmas and New Year’s, Maggie Williams and I were having coffee in our favorite spot in the residence: the West Sitting Hall in front of a large fan-shaped window. We were talking and leafing through the newspapers. Most front pages were wall-to-wall Whitewater.

  “Hey, look at this!” said Maggie as she handed me a copy of USA Today. “It says you and the President are the most admired people in the world.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. All I could do was hope that the American people would maintain their reserves of fairness and goodwill, as I struggled to maintain my own.

  INDEPENDENT COUNSEL

  The sound of a telephone ringing in the middle of the night is one of the most jarring in the world. When our bedroom phone rang long after midnight on January 6, 1994, it was Dick Kelley calling to tell Bill that his mother had just died in her sleep at her home in Hot Springs.

  We were up for the rest of the night, making and taking phone calls. Bill spoke twice with his brother, Roger. We reached out to one of our closest friends, Patty Howe Criner, who had grown up with Bill, and we asked her to work with Dick on the funeral arrangements.

  Al Gore called at about three in the morning. I woke Chelsea and brought her into our bedroom so Bill and I could tell her. She had been very close to her grandmother, whom she called Ginger. Now, she had lost two of her grandparents in less than a year.

  Before dawn, the White House Press Office put out the news of Virginia’s death, and when we turned on the television set in our bedroom, we saw the first news item flash on the screen: “The President’s mother died early this morning after a long battle with cancer.”

  It made her death seem terribly final. We almost never watched the morning news, but the background noise was a relief from our own thoughts. Then Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich appeared on the Today show for a previously scheduled appearance. They began talking about Whitewater: “It to me cries out for the appointment of a regulatory, independent counsel,” Dole said. I looked over at Bill’s face. He was utterly stricken. Bill was raised by his mother to believe that you don’t hit people when they’re down, that you treat even your adversaries in life or politics with decency. A few years later, someone told Bob Dole how much his words had hurt Bill that day, and to his credit, he wrote Bill a letter of apology.

  Bill asked the Vice President to deliver a speech scheduled for Milwaukee that afternoon so he could go to Arkansas right away. I stayed behind to contact family and friends and help with their travel arrangements. Chelsea and I flew to Hot Springs the next day and went straight to Virginia’s and Dick’s lakeside home, where we found friends and family members squeezed into the modest rooms. Barbra Streisand had flown in from California, and her presence added a touch of excitement and glamour that Virginia would have loved. We stood around drinking coffee and eating the mountains of food that show up after any death in Arkansas. We swapped stories about Virginia’s amazing life and her appropriately titled autobiography that was moving toward publication, Leading with My Heart. She would never see it published, but what a remarkable and honest story it tells. I am convinced that if she had lived to promote it, not only would it have been a best-seller, but it might have helped some people understand Bill a little better.

  Hours later the house was still as packed as a church on Easter Sunday, but without Virginia’s presence, it felt as though the whole choir were missing.

  There wasn’t a church in Hot Springs big enough to accommodate a lifetime’s worth of Virginia’s friends. The memorial service would have to be held at the Convention Center in downtown Hot Springs. Bill told me, “If the weather were better, we could have used Oaklawn racetrack. Mother would have loved that!” I smiled at the thought of the track filled with thousands of racing fans cheering one of their own.

  As the funeral procession drove through Hot Springs the next morning, the roads were lined with people who silently paid their respects. The service celebrated Virginia’s life with stories and hymns, but nothing could capture the essence of this unique woman who had shared her love of life with anyone who crossed her path.

  After the service, we drove to the cemetery in Hope where Virginia would be laid to rest with her parents and first husband, Bill Blythe. Virginia had come home to Hope.

  Air Force One picked us up at the airport in Hope for the sad flight back to Washington.

  The plane was filled with family and friends who tried to lift Bill’s spirits. But even on the day he buried his mother, Bill couldn’t escape being hounded about Whitewater.

  White House staff members and lawyers huddled with the President. Everyone was concerned that the drumbeat for appointing a special prosecutor was drowning out Bill’s message, but nobody could predict whether asking for a special prosecutor would quiet the drums. By the time we had landed at Andrews Air Force Base and helicoptered to the White House, Bill was obviously tired of the debate. He had to go back to Andrews to fly to Europe that night for long-scheduled meetings in Brussels and Prague about the expansion of NATO, followed by a state visit to Russia to address President Boris Yeltsin’s concern about NATO’s plans to move eastward. Before Bill left, he made it clear to me that he wanted the Whitewater issue resolved one way or another, and soon.

  I had planned to join Bill in Moscow for the state visit on January 13. At Virginia’s funeral, we decided that I should bring Chelsea because we didn’t want to leave her in the White House at such a sad time. I knew a decision about the special prosecutor had to be made before we left. That Sunday, a number of leading Democrats appeared on the political talk shows to voice their support for a special prosecutor. None of them could explain exactly why this step was appropriate or necessary. They seemed to be caught up in the moment and wary of pressure from the press. The momentum kept building, and my own determination was wearing down.

  My gut instinct, as a lawyer and a veteran of the Watergate impeachment inquiry staff, was to cooperate fully with any legitimate criminal inquiry but to resist giving someone free rein to probe indiscriminately and indefinitely. A “special” investigation should be triggered only by credible evidence of wrongdoing, and there was no such evidence.

  Without credible evidence, a call for a special prosecutor would set a terrible precedent: From then on, every unsubstantiated charge against a President concerning events during any period of his life could require a special prosecutor.

  The President’s political advisers predicted that a special prosecutor would eventually be forced on us and argued that it was better to appoint one and get it over with. George Stephanopoulos researched previous independent counsels and cited the case of President Carter and his brother, Billy, who were investigated for a disputed loan to a peanut warehouse in the mid-1970s. The special prosecutor requested by Carter completed his investigation in seven months and exonerated the Carters. That was encouraging. By contrast, the investigation into what was known as “the Iran-Contra affair,” begun in the Reagan-Bush Administration, had continued on for seven years. In that case, though, there was illegal activity by White House and other governmental personnel in the conduct of our nation’s foreign policy. Several Administration officials were indicted, including Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Lt. Col. Oliver North, who worked on the National Security Council.

  Only David Kendall, Bernie Nussbaum and David Gergen agreed with me that we should resist a special prosecutor. Gergen considered a special prosecutor a “dangerous proposition.” Bill’s staff trooped in to lobby me, one after another, each delivering the same familiar message: I would destroy my husband’s Presidency if I didn’t support their strategy. Whitewater had to be pushed off the front pages so we could get on with the business of the administration, including health care reform.

  I believed that we needed to distinguish between holding our ground when we were in the right and giving in to political expediency and pressure from the press. “Requesting a special prosecutor is wrong,” I said. But I couldn’t change their minds.

  On January 3, Harold Ickes, an old friend and adviser from the 1992 campaign, had joined the administration as Deputy Chief of Staff. Bill had asked Harold, a sandy-haired, hyperkinetic lawyer, to coordinate the upcoming health care campaign. Within days he was diverted to organize a “Whitewater Response Team” composed of several senior advisers and members of the communications staff and counsel’s office. Harold was the best advocate to have in your corner during a fight. Like Kendall, he was a veteran of the civil rights movement in the South―in fact, Harold had been so badly beaten while organizing black voters in the Mississippi Delta that he had lost a kidney. Although he had spent most of his early life avoiding his legacy―at one point he worked breaking horses on a cattle ranch―he was the son of Harold Ickes, Sr., one of the most significant players in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s cabinet. Politics pumped through Harold’s veins, and the White House seemed to be his natural habitat.

  Harold did his best to keep the Whitewater debate under control, but the turmoil continued in the West Wing. Each news story brought us closer to a fateful decision. The day after I returned to the White House from Hot Springs, Harold told me that he had reluctantly concluded we should request a special prosecutor.

  On Tuesday evening, January 11, I arranged a conference call with Bill in Prague.

  David Kendall and I met in the Oval Office with a handful of Bill’s top aides for a final debate on the issue. The scene reminded me of a cartoon I had seen: A man stood in front of two doors, obviously trying to decide which one to enter. A sign above the first door said, “Damned if you do.” The other said, “Damned if you don’t.”

  It was the middle of the night in Europe. Bill was worn out and exasperated after days of hearing nothing but Whitewater questions from the media. He was also heartbroken about losing his mother, the one steady presence throughout his life and his chief cheerleader, offering unconditional love and support. I felt sorry for him and wished that he didn’t have to deal with such a crucial decision under these circumstances. He was terribly hoarse, and we had to lean in close to the black, batwing-shaped conference phone to hear his voice.