Living History Unknown (best books to read fiction .txt) 📖

William Safire, a former Nixon speechwriter, called me a “congenital liar” in his New York Times column. My picture appeared on the cover of Newsweek under the headline SAINT OR SINNER? And there was renewed talk of a grand jury subpoena and a possible indictment in the Whitewater investigation.

The copy of the billing records, we later concluded, was probably made during the 1992 campaign so that Bill’s campaign staff and the Rose Law Firm could respond to the media questions about Madison Guaranty, Jim McDougal and Whitewater. Vmce Foster, who handled the queries at the time, had scribbled notes on the documents. I believed they would corroborate what I had been saying all along: that my work for McDougal’s savings and loan so many years ago had been minimal, in time and compensation.

On January 9, 1996, with the careful help of White House ushers, the Green Room was transformed into a temporary television studio for my interview with Barbara Walters.

Technicians snaked cables along the floor and set up equipment that bathed the room in a golden light so gentle and flattering that even the powdered-wig portrait of Benjamin Franklin above the fireplace seemed to glow with youth. Barbara and I made pleasant small talk while the crew adjusted the sound levels.

This interview had been scheduled for January 9, 1996, long in advance, to promote It Takes a Village on the eve of its publication. Now I expected Barbara, whom I admired and liked, had other topics on her mind. It was not the best way to kick off an eleven-city book tour, but I welcomed the chance to respond to the latest volley of allegations. When the cameras began to roll, she got straight to the point.

“Mrs. Clinton, instead of your new book being the issue, you have become the issue.

How did you get into this mess, where your whole credibility is being questioned?”

“Oh, I ask myself that every day, Barbara,” I said, “because it’s very surprising and confusing to me. But we’ve had questions raised for the last four years, and eventually they’re answered and they go away and more questions come up and we’ll just keep doing our best to answer them.”

“Are you distressed?”

“Occasionally I get a little distressed, a little sad, a little angry, irritated. I think that’s only natural. But I know that that’s part of the territory and we’ll just keep plowing through and trying to get to the end of this.”

When Barbara Walters asked me about the missing records, I said: “You know, a month ago, people were jumping up and down because the billing records were lost and they thought somebody might have destroyed them. Now the records are found and they’re jumping up and down. But I’m glad the records were found. I wish they had been found a year or two ago, because they verify what I’ve been saying from the very beginning.

I worked about an hour a week for fifteen months. That was not a lot of work for me, certainly.”

Barbara had trouble visualizing why the documents were so hard to find.

“What does it look like up there with your records?”

“It’s a mess… .”

“That’s hard to understand.”

“But I think people do need to understand that there are millions of pieces of paper in the White House, and for more than two years now, people have been diligently searching.”

It was difficult to convey the disarray we had lived with ever since moving into the White House. We had arrived in 1993 with all of our worldly possessions haphazardly packed in boxes, largely because we didn’t own a home where we could store things.

Shortly after we moved into the residence, we found ourselves in the midst of a major renovation of the heating and airconditioning systems to bring the White House up to environmental energy standards. We had to stuff boxes into closets and spare rooms while workers put new ducts into the ceilings and walls. It seemed that each week we had to move around boxes again, just to stay one step ahead of the construction.

During the summer of 1995, duct work was being done on the roof and on the third floor, an informal area with extra guest rooms, the Solarium, an office, an exercise room, a laundry room and several storage areas. One of these, which we called the “book room,”

was a storage area where we had built shelves to handle our overflow of books. With several doors leading from it to the laundry room, exercise room and a small hallway used by the residence staff, it was one of the busiest spots in the residence, with people marching through at all hours of the day and night. We had set up tables in the book room for the boxes of papers and personal effects that were regularly shuttled from an off-site warehouse to the White House and back again so that they could be examined and cataloged.

Carolyn Huber also had several file cabinets in the room for papers she was organizing.

And complicating matters, the tables were often covered with drop-cloths to protect them from plaster and dust raining down from the ceiling during construction work.

The ongoing search for documents in response to subpoenas added to the mess. David Kendall asked us to set up a copying machine in the book room so that he and his assistants could copy documents before turning them over to the Office of the Independent Counsel. And that was where, in the summer of 1995, Carolyn later testified that she found a sheaf of folded papers on one of the tables. Carolyn thought they were old records that had been left for her to file. Unaware of their significance, she tossed them into a box of other records that was taken to her office, already jammed with boxes she planned to sort through when she had more time. Months later, when she started sifting through all of these items, she unfolded the papers and recognized them as the long-lost billing records.

Carolyn did the