My life

There were noneconomic costs as well: FBI agents working for Starr went to Rob Hill’s teenage son’s school and dragged him out of class for questioning. They could have talked to him after school or during lunch or on the weekend. Instead, they humiliated the young man in hopes of pressuring his father into telling them something that would damage me, whether it was true or not. After the trial, several jurors burned the independent counsel’s office with comments like “It’s a waste of money. . . . I would hate to see the government waste more money on Whitewater”; “If they’re going to spend my tax dollars, they need stronger evidence”; “If anyone is untouchable it is OIC [Office of Independent Counsel].” One juror who identified himself as an “anti-Clinton” person said, “I would have loved for them to have a little more evidence, but they didn’t.” Even conservative Republicans who lived in the real world, as opposed to Whitewater World, knew the independent counsel had gone too far. As bad as Starr’s treatment of Branscum and Hill was, it was a tea party compared with what he was about to do to Susan McDougal. On August 20, Susan was sentenced to two years in prison. Starr’s people had offered to keep her out of jail if she gave them information implicating Hillary or me in some illegal activity. On the day she was sentenced, when Susan repeated what she had said from the beginning—that she knew of nothing either of us had done wrong—she was served with a subpoena to appear before the grand jury. She appeared, but refused to answer the prosecutors’ questions, fearing that they would charge her with perjury because she wouldn’t lie and tell them what they wanted to hear. Judge Susan Webber Wright found her in contempt of court and sent her to jail for an indefinite period until she agreed to cooperate with the special prosecutor. She would remain confined for eighteen months, often under miserable conditions.

September opened with the campaign on a roll. Our convention had been a success, and Dole was tarred by his association with Gingrich and the government shutdown. Even more important, the country was in good shape, and the voters no longer saw issues like crime, welfare, fiscal responsibility, foreign policy, and defense as the exclusive province of the Republican Party. Polls showed that my job and personal approval ratings were around 60 percent, with the same percentage of people saying they felt comfortable with me in the White House.

On the other hand, I expected to be weaker in some parts of Amer-ica because of my positions on the cultural issues—guns, gays, and abortion—and, at least in North Carolina and Kentucky, on tobacco. Also, it seemed certain that Ross Perot would receive far fewer votes than he had in 1992, making it harder for me to carry a couple of states where he had taken more votes from President Bush than from me. Still, on balance, I was in much better shape this time around. All through September the campaign drew large, enthusiastic crowds, or “October crowds,” as I called them, beginning with nearly thirty thousand people at a Labor Day picnic in De Pere, Wisconsin, near Green Bay. Since presidential elections are decided by electoral votes, I wanted to use our momentum to bring a couple of new states into our column and to force Senator Dole to spend time and money in states a Republican could normally take for granted. Dole wanted to do the same thing to me by contesting California, where I was opposing a popular ballot initiative to end affirmative action in college admissions and where he had helped himself by holding the GOP convention in San Diego. My main target was Florida. If I could win there and hold most of the states I had won in ’92, the election was over. I had worked hard in Florida for four years: helping the state recover from Hurricane Andrew; holding the Summit of the Americas there; announcing the relocation of the U.S. military’s Southern Command from Panama to Miami; working to restore the Everglades; and even making inroads into the Cuban-American community, which normally had given Republicans more than 80

percent of its votes in presidential elections ever since the Bay of Pigs. I was also blessed with a good organization in Florida and the strong support of Governor Lawton Chiles, who had great rapport with voters in the more conservative areas of central and northern Florida. Those people liked Lawton in part because he hit back when attacked. As he said, “No redneck wants a dog that won’t bite.” In early September, Lawton went with me to north Florida to campaign and to honor retiring Congressman Pete Peterson, who had spent six and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam and whom I had recently nominated to be our first ambassador there since the end of the war.