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

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