As a White House Special Counsel from 1994 until 1996, she was responsible for damage control on Whitewater-related matters. Interview conducted August, 2000 by Chris Bury Your first stint at the White House was under Lloyd Cutler, right before you came back. Tell us a little bit about what you were doing your first time around. Lloyd had gone over to be the temporary counsel to the president when Bernie Nussbaum resigned. And if you recall, Bernie resigned at a time when there were questions about the investigation of Vince Foster's suicide and contacts that the White House had had with the Treasury Department about the investigation that the Treasury was doing of the Whitewater matter. Lloyd came in at a time when there was a perception that those issues had been mishandled by the White House, that they needed someone to come in who could restore some confidence, that there was a real grown-up in there who had things in hand and was going to get everything whipped into shape, and find out what went wrong and take care of it if something did go wrong. He went in to conduct an internal investigation of the White House Treasury contacts issue, as well as the Vince Foster suicide and the aftermath of that, and I went with him. I have worked for Lloyd for many years, and I went with him to help him do that. In that first period, our goal was to conduct an internal inquiry and then report both to the president and to Congress what we found and recommend any changes in policies, any disciplinary actions as a result of that. That was our first encounter with the scandal environment in the Clinton years. This was in April of 1994. How would you characterize the scandal management approach at that time? When we first came in, it was being handled by people in the West Wing, and it absorbed very much the attention of the entire West Wing operation. There were various people involved--John Podesta, who was staff secretary at the time, was quite involved; Harold Ickes was involved; the press secretary, Dee Dee Myers, was involved at the time...all of the people who were also involved in the day-to-day White House operations were involved in the scandal management. It was a little chaotic in the beginning because Lloyd's role was to come in and try and manage it all within the counsel's office, all under his direction. And there is always a tension between political people and lawyers. Political people assume that lawyers have a tin ear, and they can't possibly understand what the public needs to hear about whatever is the issue of the day. Lawyers are worried that if anyone says anything, it can be held against them later or create problems in some sort of a legal environment...there's always difficulty in marrying those two. There was, in those initial days, a tremendous amount of wariness and suspicion that the lawyers didn't know what they were doing, and the lawyers thought the political people were being too aggressive, and there was an effort, I think, made to integrate those teams in a way so that we could actually work together and accomplish a reasonable investigation that resulted in a report to Congress that would create some confidence by the American people that this issue had been looked at carefully and had been fully exhausted and dealt with by this inquiry. Were you there for the great debate about whether to turn over the Whitewater material to the Washington Post? I know that that had been advocated by David Gergen and others. Were you there for that debate? I came after that debate. We had similar debates many times about what to do with that material and whether it should be turned over. But that debate was after the time that I was there. You talked about this tension between the political staff and the legal staff. The political staff argued, I assume, for more public disclosure, and the legal staff for less; is that accurate? I'm not so sure it broke down on those lines. Lloyd Cutler has always been an advocate of full disclosure. Let's [have] full cooperation. We'll waive privileges. "Open kimono" is what he'd say...that it was more useful to provide information. I think that some of the political people were quite wary of the press and quite concerned that any information that was put out there would be used against them; that the press would treat it unfairly; that the Clinton haters would grab hold of it and exploit it and use it irresponsibly. It didn't actually break down necessarily along the traditional lines. In 1994, the Democrats lose both Houses of [Congress]. Gingrich comes in as Speaker, and there's a famous Gingrich quote which says, "Washington just can't imagine a world in which Republicans have subpoena power." You are then brought in again to come back to the White House Counsel's Office. Tell us about that and the new atmosphere with a Republican Congress. It was very clear. Gingrich made it clear. I think there was a time when Al D'Amato had said that by the '96 election every kid over the age of six was going to know how to spell the word subpoena. There was an environment that made it perfectly clear that the Republicans would use that power to try and defeat the president's reelection. And combined with an independent counsel, this was perceived to be something that was quite dangerous and needed to be managed carefully. When I came back in, Leon Panetta had given the primary responsibility for managing these kinds of issues to Harold Ickes. And I worked with Harold on a plan for putting together a team that would essentially take the management of these issues out of the mainstream operations of the West Wing, so that the press spokesman, who was meeting with the press every day, would not be the Whitewater spokesman; so that the people who went to the Hill and dealt with the Congress on this were not the same people who were asking for various positions and support on the president's initiatives. We tried to move it out of the mainstream White House and handle it as a discrete unit so that the primary work of the White House wouldn't bleed into the scandal work. And I think conceptually that was a terrific idea, and I think it worked quite well for a while. We did get to a point where, at the daily press briefings, the press was not asking McCurry about Whitewater. They were quite content to go and talk to Mark Fabiani to get their answers, who was the Whitewater press person. It also worked, I think, quite effectively on the Hill. We had relationships on the Hill with people who developed confidence in us and the information we were giving them. And it wasn't tainted by anything else that was going on or any other initiative that the White House was trying to work with the Hill. And similarly, with the other work of the Counsel's Office, we weren't involved in that either. I think it did succeed in keeping from distracting the people who really were responsible for developing domestic policy and seeing the president through that period after the midterm election, to keep their eye focused on the right issues. When you were hired, you meet with the president, and there's a scene in Woodward's book where he puts his arm around you and talks to you. Can you tell us about that meeting, what it was the president said? Well, I think that encounter was something that was designed mostly to send a signal to others that I was part of the team. I had come in, everyone knew I was Harold's person. I had worked closely with Harold in the '94 period on those investigations. But...sometimes I've thought that in dealing with the external world to the White House was easier than dealing with the internal world. It's very important to your own ability to get things done for other people to understand what kind of access and what kind of authority you actually have. And I think that that encounter was really more designed to demonstrate to others that this was a relationship that was important and that I would have some ability to execute my brief with a direct line to the president. My direct line was to Harold. I occasionally dealt with the president, and that was usually with Harold and sometimes others. But it was still a demonstration by the president that-- It was a signal to others in the White House that you had some authority. That's right, and it was in the presence of others. So, at least, that's how I understood it. You went to see Mrs. Clinton, who had some early skepticism about your mission...or your plans. I think she had skepticism about the ability to manage the risk that she understood the White House was confronting. And she also understood that she was the foil, that a lot of the attacks on the president would actually be directed against her. And she was very concerned that there be some kind of an operation in place that was dealing with that in a very smart way. She, too, was looking to Harold to make sure that he put that together. And Harold, in turn, was looking to me. I'd encountered Hillary briefly in the course of the '94 investigation. But in '95, I had spent quite a bit of time working with Harold to put together this plan for how we would manage the so-called scandals on an ongoing basis, and then met with her to lay out the plan and tell her what kind of staffing we were considering, who we were considering hiring, who had been hired and what our goals were and how we expected to proceed. She is a very smart woman, and she asked lots of good questions, and I had lots of good answers, and we just progressed through the meeting. And I think she was persuaded that there was an apparatus in place, that we had thought the issues through, and now we just had to see if it worked. At the end of the day, I felt that the meeting had been sufficiently positive that we could go forward with this plan and at least have her support and confidence that it was the right way to start. What were her reservations about? I don't remember that she had reservations about it. One of the issues that was always a difficult one, I think, for me to deal with was how you develop the relationship with the outside counsel. The Whitewater issue, as you know, arose many, many years before Clinton was president. It was something that really came about in the context of their personal lives, not in an official capacity when he was president or she was first lady. The relationship with...the personal counsel, who was really primarily responsible for those issues that had developed in that pre-inaugural era, was something that I thought was important to understand and that we needed to develop the appropriate lines there. That was a struggle throughout the whole period because those lines cannot be easily drawn when you're dealing with someone in their official capacity who is profoundly affected in that capacity by things that happened in his personal life prior to the time he was president. It was a very difficult line to walk, and I have a recollection of describing that to her. But I don't recall a reservation. [The attitude was] let's move forward with this in place and see how it works The way it's recounted in one book is that when you went to go see Mrs. Clinton for that meeting in her West Wing office, that, "Mrs. Clinton could barely contain her skepticism." Is that how you recall it? No. No. I don't recall her being skeptical. She wanted to know what we were going to do. She asked the right questions...I wouldn't say she heaved a big sigh of relief and said, "Whew, you know, everything's under control." But we had something in place, and that if it worked on a going-forward basis, it would be great. But if it didn't, we'd have to see. She was not going to embrace the whole plan, until she saw whether it was working. And that was fair. You worked for, you said, Harold Ickes, although technically you worked for Abner Mikva, the White House counsel, and there was apparently some dispute about who you really worked for. At one point Ickes defends you pretty vigorously. He also, at the same time, apparently tells Mikva, "Hands off. She works for me," or something like that. That was a difficult arrangement. The understanding that I had with Harold when I went to work in the White House was that I would have some control over what it was we were doing. I felt that this was a very high-risk, for me professionally, undertaking, and that unless I could actually have the access, get access to the facts, the witnesses, the people, the documents, touch and feel it myself, make my own professional judgments, with my own staff that I had selected and was comfortable with, that I didn't want to do it. I laid that out to Harold and said, "That's the terms. I want my own operation here." And that was the understanding that we had on a going-forward basis as I came to the White House, and I had thought, as Harold had, that that was the understanding that Abner Mikva had as well. As time went on, and the relationship with Mikva was one where I would keep him informed of things that were developing, and certainly he had terrific relationships with Congress and could be deployed very effectively to be helpful in some of these matters, [then] we would work together, but [it] was my operation. As time went on, I think Ab became uncomfortable with that arrangement and resisted it. And that created some tensions, which have been described in various places. April 22nd [1995], the Independent Counsel decides to depose the Clintons at the White House. How did that go? This is three days after the Oklahoma City bombing. It was three days after. We had set up this interview. We had worked with the president to prepare him and worked with Hillary as well. And the depositions were set to go forward, and this terrible tragedy occurred, which had diverted the attention of the White House. That's where the president's attention should have been. That required some jockeying with the schedule and consultations with Starr's office about timing and what happens when. In that particular interview-- in the president's study, which is in the residential part of the White House. It's a beautiful room. It's not large. It's got a big desk. It's got all of these artifacts in it that have got great historical significance. It's an interesting room. The president went first. Starr came with several deputies, and they sat along one side of a table, and the lawyers for the president sat along the other side, and the president sat on the end. There was a court reporter. And Starr began by asking the first questions. I was sitting toward the end of the table, and I was sitting close to Mark Toohey, who was a deputy independent counsel at the time. And all of the lawyers in the room immediately realized that Ken Starr had failed to swear in the president. That is a very common first-year lawyer kind of mistake. It's something that [you do] when you're nervous about a deposition...what you always say to a kid when you send him off to take their first deposition is, "Don't forget to swear in the witness." I can see Mark scratching a little note that he passes down the table to Ken Starr, and Starr stops and says, "Oh, excuse me. I need to swear in the witness." It was an amusing moment, and it was an interesting observation just how experienced Starr was at this kind of a thing. I had heard from someone that that was his very first deposition that he had ever taken. He was not a prosecutor by training, and this very first word or words out of his mouth seemed to establish that. The deposition proceeded. The president handled himself quite well, as he always does. He's the kind of witness who really wants to connect with his questioner. Anyone who's been around the president knows that he has a very engaging personal style, and he likes to connect in a very direct way with the people that he's dealing with, and he did that with Ken Starr [and] his deputies. The deposition proceeded without any particular [trouble]--it was not a tough series of questions, and no one ever got testy. There was never any argument. The lawyers weren't objecting. It was quite cordial. So cordial, in fact, that afterwards the president apparently asked someone to show Starr the Lincoln Bedroom, and Mrs. Clinton issued sort of opposite directions. Do you know that story? Were you there? I do know that story. Afterward, the president was talking to Starr and his...four or five lawyers there with him, and--he was showing them around the room and explaining what some of the different artifacts were. And they were talking some about the Oklahoma City bombing. Then the president invited me to show this team where the Lincoln Bedroom was. I was actually myself quite anxious just to get on with it and get these people out of the room. I don't like to be discourteous to an opponent, but I typically don't need to show them my bedroom either. And so this was a little awkward, but it was something that I would have done after Hillary was deposed, and she was next. After she had completed her deposition, I then dutifully took these folks on a very rapid tour of the Lincoln Bedroom and then got them out of the White House. Hillary did express some dismay. This was their home. This was an invasion in their home, and I understood completely. I wanted those folks out of their home as well. It was an interesting comparison of how the two of them approached those kinds of situations. But Hillary wasn't happy about that. As I said, she was dismayed, and she didn't understand why they couldn't just be ushered out promptly. The second interview comes up July 22nd. Anything particular about that interview that marks it as different from the first one? I'm trying to remember what the subject matter of that interview was. I know that with each of these interviews, there was always the question about when you disclose that it's taking place. If it gets leaked, what happens, how do you respond, as well as what does it say, and how do we prepare people for the fact that Starr has said that he wants to conduct several of these interviews. Every time there was an interview like this, it stirred the pot. It made people think that the scandal issues were coming to a head, that Starr was about ready to do something or that he had found something that he needed to question the president about. So it was always important to try and help people understand that this was a process, that Starr couldn't question the president and the first lady about everything that he needed to talk to them about in one sitting, that there would be more, and that this was something that was completely expected. And those issues surfaced each time we had these depositions in the White House.