In that first sitting with the Independent Counsel, you said things were pretty routine and went pretty well. Was there any noticeable difference between how things went for the president versus Mrs. Clinton? Did the prosecutor seem more interested in Mrs. Clinton? Did Mrs. Clinton handle it different than the president? I don't think the prosecutors were any more interested, but there was a different tone to the depositions. The president is a very warm, engaging and outgoing person in almost any situation. And Hillary was an ideal client because she was very courteous and polite. She answered the questions, but there wasn't a lot of superfluous talk in the deposition, and it was perfectly cordial, and she left. Unlike the president, who stood around to chat, and talk about what was in the room. I think the attitude on the part of the prosecutors was perhaps somewhat more aggressive with her. Certainly, I picked up over the course of the time that I worked with Starr's people a tremendous hostility toward Hillary. I could be dealing with [Starr's] people on a perfectly benign subject [like], "When are you going to get us the documents?" and if her name came up, there would be a whole change in the conversation, and the venom with which they spoke about her was just startling. I wouldn't say that that came through in that particular deposition, the venom, but there was a wariness here. She knew these people were not allies and that they were scouring every inch of her life for something to harm her with. And so she answered their questions, she went through it, but it was not friendly. In August 1995, Joe Klein, who had written very approvingly of the Clintons early in the campaign, came out with a column which called the Clintons the "Tom and Daisy Buchanan" of their generation; that they had sort of left this trail littered with debris, including a lot of people who had gone to bat for them and suffered enormous legal bills and so on. What was Mrs. Clinton's reaction to that column? What did she convey to you? Well, I know when I read that column I fervently hoped that she wouldn't read it because I knew it would be painful to her, and I also knew that it was unfair. I had worked with her enough to have seen how deeply troubled she was about what people close to her were being put through in these investigations. And to have her analogized to a Daisy Buchanan was really quite hurtful and quite unfair. There came a time when she and I did talk about that column, and it was hurtful to her. She didn't want to be perceived that way because she wasn't that way, she didn't feel that way. She cared deeply about Maggie Williams. She loves Maggie. And Maggie would do anything for her. And for someone to think that she was being callous and disregarding what this was doing to Maggie...it wasn't the case, and it wasn't fair to present that perception of her, and it hurt her. Later on that summer, there is a debate about whether or not Mrs. Clinton herself should be a witness before Congress. What was that debate like, and where did you stand on it? ...[Senator Al] D'Amato hoped the hearings were building. But, in fact, the hearings were a dud. They weren't establishing what he wanted to establish. They weren't the sensation that he hoped they would be. And so the only card he had left was Hillary. He didn't dare subpoena her. And so the question was, would she make herself available and go up and say, "All right. Here I am. I'll tell you anything you want to know," and put herself forward in that way. I thought it was a tough call, actually. She's a terrific witness. She's very compelling. She would have, I thought, been quite effective. But it would have been completely sensational. It would have been a total diversion from the president's agenda, and I thought, ultimately, unnecessary because I didn't think D'Amato would pull that subpoena trigger. And if he didn't have the guts to do that, I didn't think she should go up there. We played this game of chicken for a while with D'Amato--he would send a letter saying, "We would welcome her if she would like to come." She'd send a letter or we would send a letter from the White House saying, "If you want to ask her to come, go ahead and ask her." It was this game of chicken that we played. Ultimately he never did pull the trigger, and she didn't go. I think that was the right judgment, ultimately. In December, there is an event which is tied to some other events. It starts with this David Watkins' memo that's discovered about the Travel Office. Why did that cause such consternation at the White House when it was discovered that Watkins had, in fact, written this memo where he sort of blames Mrs. Clinton for pulling the strings? The Watkins memo, which at the time seemed, when we found it, as if the sky was falling, was a problem for a couple of reasons. One, the travel office matter, was being investigated, and investigations of investigations were being undertaken, but it was a big nothing. There was no clear connection, although there were allegations, to Hillary really having been involved directly in any of the decisions that were made with the firing of the travel office employees. Watkins' memo...was sort of a soul-cleansing memo. He was frustrated with the way this had happened in the White House. He felt like he'd taken the fall for decisions that he didn't make by himself. And he wrote in the memo that he understood from another White House staffer that Hillary was the one who had ordered the firings. Now, he never said that she told him that. He doesn't say that, and she doesn't say that. But the memo was sufficiently relevant to all of the inquiries that had been taking place and was sufficiently inflammatory about her role that we knew it would be significant. The fact that it was discovered late [was significant]...these were documents that had been subpoenaed before, there had been many investigations, and we knew it would have some key significance to any of these investigations, and that the Republicans were going to use it...[they'd say] we'd been hiding this, [and] why hadn't we produced it sooner? I always wondered, [about] those arguments...because why would we produce it in December or January all of a sudden if we were going to hide it? Why wouldn't we have hidden it permanently? Those arguments just rang so hollow to me. But we did produce it, and it was the source of a tremendous amount of controversy. How was it produced in the first place? Where had it been? Let me start by saying it was produced as the result of our great diligence in trying to respond to subpoenas. We had not looked at all of the archive files. We discovered fairly late in the process that some files were archived with the White House Records Office and some were archived with the Federal Records Center, and that records at the Federal Record Center hadn't been reviewed, and that, in fact, Patsy Thomasson, who worked in the White House at the time and had been involved in the travel office matter, had shipped some documents to the Federal Records Center. We thought we better go and look at them. We retrieved those documents, and when going through them, discovered this memo that she had her in her files. Apparently, David Watkins had given her a copy to review, and she had kept it. We found it, and we produced it. We produced it to Congressman Clinger, who was chairman of the Government Reform Committee in the House at the time and conducting an investigation on the travel office. Later, I think the next day, [we] produced it to Ken Starr, who had also called for travel office documents and subpoenas. At this time, did Starr give you trouble about this document appearing late or seeming to appear late or was it later that Starr starts getting testy about that? We produced it to Clinger on January 3rd. One of the lawyers who had worked for me had said to me either earlier in the day or the day before, "Remember, we've got to get this to Ken Starr." We had gotten these documents up to the Hill, had managed this whole thing. It had been a crazy, chaotic day. It also happened to be my birthday, and my children, who were relatively young at the time, had worked to prepare a dinner for me at home. It was 9 o'clock at night; you know, it was bedtime, a school [night]. I raced out the door to get home for their dinner. And about 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning I woke up and realized that we hadn't sent the document to Starr at the same time we sent it to Clinger. I called one of the lawyers who worked for me [and] she met me at the White House early in the morning. We got the document, sent it over to Starr, and Starr issued a press release complaining that we had withheld this document from him when we had produced it to the Hill and that we were being intransigent and started throwing around allegations about our failure to cooperate and that this was an intolerable way to deal with the prosecutor. You called one of Starr's deputies and let him have it. I did. I did. Well, I had a good relationship with this guy, John Bates. We actually worked through a lot of the subpoena issues pretty well. And as Starr's people go, he was a professional and someone I could deal with pretty easily. I called him and said, "What kind of nonsense is this?" He has five kids, and I knew that he would appreciate my story, and you know we're all human. And working in a job like that in the White House doesn't permit you to be human. You can't have to race out home for your kid's dinner that they prepared for your birthday. That's not an excuse. And, you know, it ought to be. But in that environment, it just isn't, and you shouldn't take the job if you can't deal with it. The trouble is for the White House on the next day, January 4th-- Boy, that was a bad month. On January 4th, we learned that the billing records were in the White House--[compared to that] the Watkins memo looked manageable. The billing records were records of the work that Hillary had done for Madison Guaranty in 1985. When she was with the Rose Law Firm. When she was with the Rose Law Firm, that's right. And they had been the subject of some speculation and questioning in the course of Ken Starr's examination, in the course of the Treasury review of the Whitewater issue and the course of the Pillsbury Madison study that was commissioned by Treasury on the Whitewater matter, in the course of D'Amato's hearings, Leach's hearings. All of those entities investigating Whitewater had asked, at one time or another, "Well, where are Mrs. Clinton's billing records?" And no one could find them. So this day in January I get a phone call from David Kendall, who was a personal counsel to the Clintons, who said, "We have to go over to the East Wing, where Caroline Huber's office is. She says she's found something that we need to take a look at." So David came by, and we walked over there to Caroline's office. Caroline was the personal secretary or personal assistant to the Clintons. She had worked with them in the governor's mansion in Arkansas and had come with them to the White House, and she organized and managed a lot of their personal papers, prepared things for archiving and had a role like that. She also handled some correspondence. She had an office in the East Wing. She also had had an office in the residence on the third floor, in what people called the Book Room. And she reported to us that she had found these records in the Book Room one day when she was cleaning up. You know this is going to be a problem. I saw these documents, she handed them to me, I saw them, I saw Vince Foster's handwriting all over them, which by now I recognized, and just realized immediately that this was going to be a problem. You could see the conspiracy theorists going. I saw the next 6 months of my life spin out in front of me and knew what the allegations would be. There was always some sense that something was removed from Vince Foster's office after his suicide. I knew that there would be allegations that this must have been it. It was going to be a problem. In fact, it turned out to be a big nothing. But at the time looking at these records, you couldn't tell immediately what they showed. It was something that I remember going out in the hallway with David and another lawyer, Caroline's lawyer--nobody ever did anything without their lawyer--and said, from this moment forward, we have to make completely sure that we are confident in all of the judgments we are taking here because we're all going to be questioned. Every minute from this moment forward on how we handle this is going to be second-guessed. So let's be careful. Let's think coolly about this. And I was absolutely right. We all testified in the grand jury. David and I testified before D'Amato, and it was true that every decision we made going forward on how to deal with those records was absolutely questioned and second-guessed. The next day you go to see the president about these records and how the information ought to be released. Harold and I went. And this was after we had had an opportunity to look through them and figure out whether there was anything in them that was inconsistent with anything that had been said. Hillary had been questioned about her work, but she had been questioned 15 years, probably, after the work had been done...in fact, the records were completely consistent with what her recollection had been. And we had that information by the time we were able to tell the president. When we told the president, we were also able to explain that and then talk about the significance of these records and how we anticipated they would be used. What was his concern? Well, it's the usual frustration. When you look at these records and you know that they essentially exonerate, but that they are still going to be somehow twisted and used against you, it's frustrating. You know, this is a good thing that the records are found. This is a useful thing because they corroborate what she said. How can this be a problem? The answer is they were just found. They were under subpoena for years. This was we're going to look like we were hiding these. But it's hard for a rational person to understand why people would think you would hide something that was actually helpful to you. So explaining that, and it's not as if he didn't understand completely the political reality here, but there's still the frustration because the logic of it is so compelling, and logic doesn't control. For the Independent Counsel and some of those on the Hill, this is sort of a one-two punch, though; there's the Watkins memo, which comes up late, in their eyes, then the billing records which had been under subpoena for a long time. And the Independent Counsel takes this very seriously. Oh, they were in heaven. The Hill hearings were completely anemic before the Watkins memo and the billing records, and this breathed new life into D'Amato's efforts and it certainly gave the independent counsel a lot to work with as well. The Independent Counsel decides that he's going to now subpoena Mrs. Clinton. Did you try to negotiate with them to avoid that? Well, as I said, there was this sequence of questioning that they had said that they were going to do. There was every expectation that the next installment of the sequence would be at a time that was in a similar context, as the earlier ones. We had every expectation that she would be deposed in the White House with the president at the moment that they thought they needed the next segment of questioning. With the billing records, they did something quite extraordinary. They subpoenaed her to come down and testify before the grand jury and actually leave the White House and do it in a very public kind of way, not discrete and not befitting of the office and totally sensationalizing the significance of these billing records. It was something that concerned us. There were a number of us who did go and meet with Ken Starr...[to] try and persuade them that this was wholly unnecessary, it was just a political stunt and couldn't be justified. It was a very tough meeting. And even Sam Dash, a prominent Democrat, who was serving as ethics advisor, recommended to Starr, and I assume in that meeting even argued, that it wouldn't be such a big deal for the first lady to testify before the grand jury. Well, indeed, we saw how untrue that was. It was a complete circus. The place was mobbed. It was the focus of a tremendous amount of attention, and it was exactly what I believe they wanted it to be, which was focusing a lot of attention, trying to attach great significance to these billing records, which were completely helpful to Mrs. Clinton. She didn't know how they got into the White House, and if she had had them earlier, she certainly would have produced them because they were useful. Starr recognized that it was a moment to demonize her and that people wouldn't understand the nuances, they wouldn't understand the details of 22 hours of billing in 1985 were confirmed on these records. They would see the picture. They would see the picture and that's what he wanted, and that's what he got. Was that humiliating for Mrs. Clinton to have to do that? I don't think so. I think that, once we recognized that this is what he was going to insist that she do, she just did it, and she did it with all of the grace and style that she has. She faced it squarely. She went in there...answered the questions, and told the truth, and came back out, met the press, said, "Here I am. Yes, I did it. I answered the questions, and I'm going home because I'm tired." She couldn't be humiliated by it. It was too obviously a political ploy to actually be humiliated. Can you characterize what Mrs. Clinton's concerns were? January of 1996, this was the month that she had planned to go on her book tour, releasing her wonderful book, It Takes a Village. And she was excited about that. It was something she had put a lot of energy into, and she had really been looking forward to it. And suddenly there was this complete total absorbing distraction of the billing records, the grand jury subpoena, the Watkins memo, all of these things were developing all at the time that she was getting ready to go on her book tour. She wanted to talk about kids, and all anybody else wanted to talk about was the billing records--where had they been, why weren't they found sooner. And it was enormously disheartening to her because she saw this book, at the time, as a culmination of an interest of hers that she's had throughout her professional life, and it was being completely destroyed by these politically-motivated investigations, and it was enormously frustrating and disheartening to her. Mrs. Clinton is on the book tour. At the same time, back in the White House, you're dealing with this subpoena. How did that go, that tension between the face Mrs. Clinton had to show the public and what was really going on back at the White House? How much did the subpoena take up her concern? She was on the road, so she wasn't there to be confronting it, although she was confronted with it wherever she went. Consistent with the way I approach my job, I thought the less contact I had with the principals, the better job I was doing. The less they were diverted from the book tour or from whatever else was on the agenda, the better off we were managing the problem. And so we tried very hard to let her do the book tour, but to keep her informed along the way of any new developments and anything that she might be asked because she was putting herself out there. She was being interviewed. At one point on the book tour, she gave an interview to Diane Rehm, on the "Diane Rehm Show." In the course of that interview, she was hoping to talk about her book and was asked questions about the billing records. And Diane Rehm asked her a question [like], "why didn't you just get all of the documents out there when this issue first came up," and Hillary had said, at that point, something like, "Well, we did. We went up and showed the New York Times everything." In fact, it turned out that that wasn't the case, and the New York Times was going to write a story the next day saying that she had misrepresented that fact in her interview with Diane Rehm, and they were going to feature it... It would have come at an incredibly [bad] time for the White House. It would have come at a very bad time...[it] also happened on the same day that the subpoena to testify before the grand jury arrived. It was a very bad day...[we had] to try and understand what happened with the New York Times, what documents were given, who managed that process, who actually had the answer, so we could correct the story and get her to acknowledge that perhaps she hadn't been fully informed about what was actually provided and not provided. And, indeed, we learned that the people who had managed that process hadn't given all of the documents. And somewhere along the way, there had been a change in the plan, and Hillary had not been aware of it. So she had been operating under this misimpression, which then she repeated publicly on the "Diane Rehm Show. " So it was necessary then to get her in a position where she would say publicly that she had been mistaken when she said that on the "Diane Rehm Show,"and then get that to the New York Times and see if that wouldn't affect the way they handled this story. It worked, right? It worked. It was a very hard day because it came in the midst of receiving the subpoena, which created a whole host of other issues. That wasn't public yet, and it was a bombshell, that the Independent counsel was demanding, was hauling the first lady down to the grand jury...[it] was stunning that he would have the audacity to do that and was going to require careful handling, and we didn't know how quickly public knowledge of that would come about. Was this a low point for her? I would say the entire month. That, I know, was a bad day. It was a bad day for her. It was enormously frustrating because it was clear that she was going to have to go through the rest of this book tour and just accept the fact that she was going to have to answer these questions, and it wasn't going to be what she had hoped. You accompanied Mrs. Clinton to the grand jury. What do you recall about that day? I remember decisions about whether she would go in through the garage and get snuck up through the back elevators and so forth, and deciding that that was the wrong way to do this; that she was going to get out in front of the courthouse and walk up there and deal with the press and not look like she was sneaking in anywhere. She didn't have anything to hide, and that she was just going to go and handle it and answer questions. We got to the courthouse and got up to the grand jury room, and there's the grand jury room, and then on a hallway alongside of the room there were witness rooms. ... We were in a witness room for a little while waiting for the grand jurors to get ready to convene and got told that it was time. I remember standing in a doorway of one of these witness rooms with her and watching the grand jurors file by, and then the prosecutors started going by, and it was one, two, three--there were nine, I believe, prosecutors. They were all white males. Nine prosecutors is a ridiculous number of prosecutors for a grand jury session. But it was quite remarkable, just the impact of watching those nine white males file past us into the grand jury. And she just took a deep breath and followed them in. It was interesting because of the juxtaposition with the grand jurors. The grand jurors, as I recall, were [primarily] African American. I'm actually not sure of what the gender breakdown was...