She felt very comfortable with the questions. She was completely familiar with what the subjects were that they were going to question her about and seemed to be completely at ease. It was a little unnerving. I've since had the pleasure of being in the grand jury; it is unnerving in that kind of a situation. But she seemed to be as comfortable as one can be under those kinds of circumstances.

Inside your office, inside the White House, indeed, this appearance is a major turning point in terms of how the Independent Counsel is viewed--a certain line had been crossed.

That was the event for me. The meeting that we had [with] Ken Starr about [it really being] necessary to do this grandstanding by calling her into the grand jury--that was the turning point for me. That was when I concluded, having really tried to give the benefit of the doubt for many months, here was a guy who was a federal judge -- he was a Solicitor General, he was someone in my professional circles -- even if you disagree with views, you respect their integrity and have some confidence in it. I thought that that meeting, and his failure to come up with any kind of an explanation for why hauling her into the grand jury was necessary, was the point at which I concluded that he was not out to seek the truth, that he was out to do harm to the president and the first lady and that that was his primary objective. After that, those are the terms on which I approached the whole situation.

It became war after that?

Well, it's hard to go to war with somebody who has grand jury power, and subpoena power. You still have to cooperate, you still have to try and negotiate the best deals you can. You can't just shut down. It's a fact of life, and you have to keep dealing with it. But to have any trust or confidence that what they're doing is actually in the interest of justice, no. That still doesn't justify not complying or cooperating with the legal process. You have to do that under our system of justice. But being smart about what was really going on here, I think, had to affect the strategy.

Did that impression get reinforced when Mrs. Clinton had to be fingerprinted, for example? What was your view on that?

She was fingerprinted for the billing records. And I understood why they wanted to do that, although she actually had acknowledged that she believed that she had handled the billing records during the '92 campaign. So I wasn't quite sure, since she acknowledged handling them, what finding her fingerprints on them was going to establish. That struck me as another indignity that we had to endure, but part of the process.

You develop a mentality with this kind of an assault, where you just accept it as a fact of life, and then you try not to let it distract or divert. I think, over the course of time Hillary got very good at that. She had to because there were other things that were far too important to her...for example, being annoyed with the request for fingerprints would have absorbed energy that she really wanted to keep for something else that was much more important.

She was always known as a first-rate lawyer, in her own right, and an excellent legal mind. To what extent did she influence the legal strategy of the White House?

I think occasionally she'd have a view that she would express. But, again, once she recognized that the legal strategy was being handled by the lawyers and this team that we had set up, she did relax about it, and she didn't worry about it. She didn't focus on it. And it was consistent with her goal not to put a lot of energy into that. She wanted to move forward, and she did not want to be distracted by these kinds of things.

Occasionally she'd have a view about something if it involved some action that she was going to have to take. But she absolutely did not put herself right in the middle of it and try and manage it or lawyer it herself. It was not her agenda.

The reason I ask is one description of her is that she moves from pre-'94, where she's described as sort of the president's premier domestic policy advisor, to after that period becoming his top legal advisor. You didn't see it quite that way.

I didn't see it that way.

Just checking the dates here, we are now up to May '96 --the Independent Counsel talks about issuing a search warrant for the White House private residence. What is that about and what are the reactions of the White House legal staff?

Well, I think by this time we were probably in a mode of...just take a take deep breath and get through it. It's the fact-of-life kind of attitude toward all of this, although this seemed beyond the pale to me.

I got a phone call from I believe it was John Bates, the deputy independent counsel, saying that they had a search warrant that they wanted to execute on the residence. And, you know, I just went nuts. I said, "You're out of your mind. That can't happen."

I asked him what it was for, and he said that it was for a box that they believed might have something related to Vince Foster in it, with Vince Foster's name on top. What it appeared to me is that someone must have said in a grand jury appearance that they had seen a box in the White House somewhere. It must have been pretty nonspecific because John couldn't describe for me how big it was. I said, "Is it a shoe box? Is it a packing box? Is it a jewelry box?"

He said, "I can't give you any details. It's just a box." And he said that an alternative to sending in the FBI agents would be to have me do the search. I thought that was actually pretty clever on his part.

Why?

Because I'm a Washington lawyer. I've got a career and a professional reputation. John and I had worked together enough that he knew I wasn't going to be a White House lawyer for my whole life. I could not afford to participate in any kind of a search that wasn't complete, and thorough, and careful, and certify, if I had to certify, and do it truthfully. So I thought it was sort of clever on his part to do that. Would he really have executed a search warrant and sent in FBI agents? I actually kind of doubt it.

Even after hauling Mrs. Clinton before the grand jury?

It wasn't worth the risk as long as he presented the alternative. It wasn't worth the risk of calling his bluff. He presented an alternative, and that's what we did.

Did you find the box?

No.

What was Mrs. Clinton's reaction to the search warrant news?

Hillary's reaction was, "Fine. Do it." And by that time she was definitely in this mode of, you know, "This is a fact of life. I'm just going to have to live through it, and I'm not going to put my energy into being angry about it or upset about it or resisting it--just do it." And that was that.

To what extent, as you worked with her over these years, did she get angry? I mean, when did you see her really lose her temper about this?

I can't remember a specific incident where she would have lost her temper at something that Starr had done or something that the Republican Congress was doing. I know that there was this continuing sense of frustration at just not comprehending how, given the importance of the issues that she wanted to pay attention to, these people would want to distract her...

She cared deeply about children and families. She wanted to develop those issues, as she has done, and how could anyone want to discourage her from doing that? It was this sense of incomprehension; what would motivate someone to want to undermine this kind of effort in this way? It was that sense of frustration.

Did she think they were out after her personally? I mean, that she was--did she feel embattled because there was this sense that she was the target?

Certainly, when you're a target, it's hard not to take it personally. I certainly hope that she was in a position to recognize that she was just a tool. It wasn't her, personally. But when you're attacked, you're called the terrible things that she's been called along the way and treated with such venom, it's hard not to, at some level, take that personally.

But she's a very strong person, and she has a very strong core. And I would certainly hope that she recognized that she was being used as a tool to get to objectives that were much bigger than just her.

In the summer of '96, the other flap on your watch is the FBI files thing. Was Mrs. Clinton concerned that she would get blamed for that, too, somehow?

I remember there was a moment when she was joking. The FBI files are found in the White House, and it was a completely startling event. And as you know now, the independent counsel has just acknowledged that there was nothing more to it than what we said within 48 hours of finding these files--it was a mistake, and there was no significance to it beyond that. But at the time, it was a great opportunity for the Republicans, again, and they seized it and ran with it.

At one point, as the whole thing was developing, Hillary laughingly said, you know, "Sooner or later they're going to think this is my fault too." And I thought that was completely absurd. I thought it was a ridiculous statement because I had been working with this FBI files issue from the moment that it hit. I knew all of the facts, all of the details. She wasn't anywhere near it. Her name never came up. There wasn't any even remote way that she was connected with this.

Then, sure enough, we get the Republicans, and Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch, and others claiming that somehow she had directed this whole thing, and there was absolutely no basis in truth. But she was right.

Why did she become such a lightning rod for all of these things, do you think?

I think that Starr had been looking for something to go after the president on for a long time and hadn't found it. And she was a target that was easier to go after until, of course when Starr finally found the issue. Then Hillary had no significance at all to his investigation.

But I think it was easy to go after her, and the president wasn't terribly involved in the Whitewater issue. She managed that. And, of course, that's come to nothing. The president wasn't terribly involved in the travel office. There were allegations that she was, and I also think she's a compelling, strong, interesting, articulate, lively woman who engages in ways that people may not have been used to or even necessarily comfortable with, and I think it made it easy.

In the fall of--right before the election, the campaign finance stories start coming out with the Riady connection. At some point here, you have a disagreement with the White House about how this is being handled.

Internally you always have judgment calls to make about how you describe something or how [and] when you reveal it, and who you tell, and it's always a question of timing, what's happening at the particular moment; if there's a crisis that diverts. There are always judgment calls about how you characterize something.

And I guess over the course of the time that I was in the White House, I learned that you guys would prefer that we not characterize things; that the people in the White House just gave you the facts and let you figure out what they mean and how they can be characterized. That's not to say that it's not useful to give you the facts and then give you my characterization of them, but it's really the facts that a good investigative reporter wants.

I had also come to appreciate that when you give a characterization without the facts, there's something inherently suspicious about the characterization and that a good investigative reporter tends to want to get behind the characterization to test it. And so it was a judgment call, based on sort of my experience and sense of how things ought to be played. Others in the White House had different views of how some of these meetings that the president had should be described and what kind of information should be--

Are you talking about the coffees now?

I'm actually talking about the meetings that the president had with Mr. Riady and how--how those should be described. And I actually never got too terribly involved in the coffee issue.

What was your argument on Riady?

I worked briefly on this issue, but had done enough research on it to know that there were some descriptions of these meetings that were in records, official White House records, that I thought could be interpreted as more substantive than what others wanted to characterize the meetings as being. They wanted to say that these meetings that the president had were more social in nature. And while I think they were social in nature, the documents suggested that there may have been some substantive policy issues raised in the course of these meetings.

It was a dispute over do we just say they were social and not say more or do we say records reflect that these six subjects were discussed, although I'm telling you that the tone and nature of the meeting was mostly social. And that was an uncomfortable kind of disagreement.

Why did you decide to leave the White House?

When I came to the White House, I had an understanding that I would stay through the election. As you know, when the midterm election occurred, everyone recognized that scandals were going to be high on the priority of the Republicans and that that was a weapon they were going to use to try and defeat the president. I had said I would handle the scandal management through the reelection, and then I was going to leave. I have three children, and 2 or 2 1/2 years on that beat is enough for anyone.

Did your disagreement on the Riady thing prompt you to leave in any way?

No, it didn't. It made my departure more uncomfortable than I had hoped, but I had already planned to leave.

When you now look back, I guess, you actually got the easy part of the scandal management, how do you see the legacy of this president, good and bad? How do you think he will be recollected in history?

I think, over time, the president will be recorded as a terrific president. He's brought us into an era of prosperity that is unprecedented, and I think that the scandal issues will eventually take a proper perspective. Certainly, in the first term, every single scandal that we worked on has been found to be nothing. There was nothing there.

I think that once history takes proper account of that, there will also be some account of how desperate the Clinton haters were to find something. And by "Clinton haters," I do mean this whole group of people that includes Starr, includes the Republican fringe in Congress, and includes all sorts of these other people [such as] the Linda Tripps of the world. I think history will show that their effort to try and diminish this president just cannot survive.

A lot of people have talked to us about the decision, in which it was debated about whether the Whitewater records should have been given to the Washington Post. Some have said that it was the single biggest mistake of the first term because it led to so much heartache. What do you think about that decision not to turn everything over back in '93?

I think everything should have been turned over in '93, but I would take issue with it being the single biggest mistake. These people were bent on harming the president. And if it hadn't been Whitewater, it would have been some other issue. And if it hadn't been not being forthcoming here, it would have been some allegation that they weren't forthcoming there.

These people didn't have anything to hide. They truly didn't. And these allegations of trying to create all of this smoke around an effort to try and maintain some privacy would have persisted into, as it did, every corner of their lives. So even though that set a tone that I think made it harder to deal with, it was harder for someone like me, when I came in, to have sufficient credibility about the facts that we were revealing, for example, when so much had been withheld in the past. It made it hard to manage some of these issues.

But I think these people were so bent on using scandal issues, the politics of personal destruction, as the president has called it, to affect and diminish, if not destroy, the president. I think their motivation was so strong, they would have found something else.

You say that the decision not to turn over the records to the Washington Post was not the most critical one, but do you feel or believe or agree that it led to a certain tone, especially in the press coverage? Did it make the White House look like it was covering things up?

I think it did, and I think that made it difficult then to try and persuade people, when we gave them information, that it was complete and credible and that they ought to rely on it, and that there wasn't something else there. It did end up, I believe, creating this constant worry, on the part of good reporters, and, you know, that there was something else behind this, otherwise why would they resist?

And I don't think the average person appreciates how invasive it would feel if you were asked to just disclose to the press, who would publicize all of your personal financial matters. And that's essentially what they were being asked to do. They did resist. It wasn't that they were hiding anything. They were trying to hold on to some privacy. But it did create an atmosphere where people were questioning, "Well, what is there? Why do they care about this so much? What are they hiding?"

And that, I think, did persist, which is why when Lloyd Cutler came in '94, it was refreshing when he came and said, "We're going to make a full report to Congress. We're not going to claim privileges," because he felt very strongly that it was necessary to overcome that impression, with a completely open investigation.

What was the legal argument at the time for not turning this stuff over? I mean, legal arguments were made to the Clintons, especially Mrs. Clinton, who decided against it.

I suppose that there may have been some material in there to which an attorney-client privilege attached, although I think the arguments were more political than legal. If you put 20 boxes of documents before a bunch of people who either don't understand the transactions or the context in which they arose or they've got questions, [or] are not necessarily going to push them all of the way through, that can create a lot of misinformation that then takes on a life of its own and can cause other inquiries to be opened, possibly legal inquiries, based on the misimpression or false reports, however well-intentioned they were.

At that point in time, it wasn't all that clear exactly what this Whitewater investigation was going to focus on or what they thought was wrong. What did they do--can you sit here today and tell me what you think the Whitewater allegations really were? What on earth was all that about? It's really hard to understand, and it became something that I think could easily be misunderstood and misconstrued.

So the argument was, if you give this information out, you're going to open another can of worms.

You give all sorts of opportunities for people to paw through your personal papers and come up with another six things that they want to investigate, and they start demanding, and it'll never stop. And that's a legitimate argument. I think, ultimately, it all came out anyway, and nobody died. But it was a legitimate kind of concern at the time. It was not a frivolous concern.

Before the White House was divided into the legal team that you headed to take over the scandal, were the scandals dominating business in such a way that it became destructive at the White House?

I think, yes; that it was perceived to be siphoning too much energy from the people who were responsible for helping the president implement his agenda. When you're focused on trying to figure out the facts and run down what everybody knows, and figure out what documents are out there, it becomes very difficult.

This was in a time, you'll recall when the White House Treasury contacts became full-blown. Fiske had subpoenaed several White House officials to go down and testify in the grand jury, and this was incredibly consuming. That's not something you take lightly. All of these people had to scramble to get lawyers, they had to figure out what the documents were, and it was something that really did divert and distract from what people really wanted to be working on.

Were you, yourself, called as a grand jury witness?

I testified in the grand jury about finding the billing records, yes.

Was it important, as well, to separate the press aspect of this out of the White House press secretary? You had your own spokesperson, the first one Mark Fabiani. What was the idea behind that?

It was part of the same idea, where we really wanted Mark Fabiani to be the person who would understand the details and develop the relationships with the members of the press who reported on these issues.

Not all of the mainstream press was absorbed with Whitewater or travel office or FBI files, and there was a cadre of people who Mark worked with and provided information to, and those were people who didn't go and pester Mike McCurry about those things, which meant that Mike could really try and stay about that fray and keep people focused on the issues that the president wanted to stay focused on.

I think that worked quite well. I think Mike thought it worked quite well. There weren't too many times when he had to deal with questions that related to Whitewater-type issues, and it certainly made it easier for us to manage the process and manage the facts. When you disburse facts through a whole West Wing of people who are all talking to their contacts in the press, somebody's going to get it wrong, and they're going to end up saying something that you're going to have trouble explaining later.

This contained it with people who were lawyers, they understood facts, they knew how to talk about them, and developed over time their own credibility by having good information that they were able to manage the process.

The one time that it broke down was when the FBI files matter hit, and that was frustrating to me because normally, if you stay enough ahead of a problem, you figure out how you're going to manage it before it actually blossoms into something that needs to be managed.

The FBI files took me completely by surprise, and so it had already exploded into a real crisis, from my perspective, by the time I had even really heard about it. So I didn't know the facts. I didn't know what was there. I hadn't talked to the relevant people. I didn't know if there was a problem or not. And when you're put in that position and somebody is calling and saying, "Well, how bad is this?" and you say, "I don't know yet. I need some time." And there is no time. People want answers. So you go with an answer sooner than you really think you're ready, and you just hope you've got it right.

That was frustrating because my team didn't have a handle on it, when all of a sudden everyone in the West Wing wanted to know what was going on. And so that causes then other people to start feeling like they need to get the answers. Then it sort of spirals out of control until you sort of pull it back in after a while and persuade people that, indeed, you've got your arms around it. It's working. That was frustrating, and it did distract. I can't remember what else was going on in Congress or what the president was doing during that time period, but it did end up diverting a lot of attention from people who should have been focused on the positive agenda.