Lanny J. Davis - Truth To Tell: Tell It Early, Tell It All, Tell It Yourself: Notes from My White House Education

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Copyright 1999 by Lanny J. Davis

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ISBN 0-684-86413-4
eISBN: 978-0-684-86413-6

To my wife, Carolyn, who made it all possible, and who speaks the truth, early, all, and herself.

Prologue:
The Monica Lewinsky Story: The First Ten Days

Epilogue:
The Monica Lewinsky Story: In Retrospect

THIS BOOK DERIVES FROM MY EXPERIENCES WORKING IN THE White House. Other than transcriptions of press briefings and television appearances, the incidents and conversations recountedwhether through description, paraphrase, or reconstructed dialogueare as I best remember them, based on my own personal observation or participation.

IT WAS ABOUT 9:00 P.M. ON FRIDAY, JANUARY 30, 1998.

I walked through the Secret Service trailer at the northwest gate of the White House for the last time as special counsel to the president. I said goodbye to each of the agents, whom I had come to know pretty well during the previous fourteen months. They were supposed to be completely apolitical, but during my tenure as the White Houses chief spokesman on all scandal issues, they had joshed me each morning and evening about how I was surviving the ordeal. You okay, Mr. Davis? they used to ask me. Dont let those bastards get you down.

Youre lucky youre getting out when you are, Mr. Davis, said one.

I wasnt so sure. I walked outside into the cold night air, thought about those words, and felt a terrible inner conflict. I had come to the White House in December of 1996 because I had been a friend of Hillary Rodham Clinton at Yale Law School and because of my support for President Clinton and his policies. At the White House I worked with the press primarily on the allegations of improper campaign fundraising and on the administrations response to congressional hearings and investigations on the subject, which by the end of 1997 had basically fizzled out with little lasting damage to the president or his administration.

I had announced my departure in December 1997, primarily because my wife Carolyn was pregnant, and I wanted to spend more time at home with my family. I also was convinced, as I told the president prior to the White House Christmas party when I informed him I planned to leave by the end of January, I think its okay for me to return to my law practice, Mr. President, because all the worst scandal stories are behind us.

I guess I was wrong.

T HOUGH MOST OF MY DUTIES as a White House spokesman revolved around finance and politics, on one occasion I was asked to comment on a story concerning a possible encounter in the White House between the president and a womanin this case, a volunteer named Kathleen Willey, who claimed the president had groped her during a visit she had paid to him in late November of 1993.

In early July 1997, a colleague in the White House counsels office asked me to call Michael Isikoff of Newsweek magazine to find out, if I could, whether he was working on a story about the president and another woman. I had known Isikoff for many years, from the days when I had been active in Maryland politics and he was a reporter for the Washington Post. He was feisty, with a razor-sharp intellect, and he was relentless if he smelled a good storyespecially if he sensed that the target of his reporting was being evasive or disingenuous. Isikoff reportedly had left the Post three years earlier in part because of disagreements with his editors over the news value of his reporting on Paula Joness allegations against the president. The Posts editors had decided that Isikoffs story was neither substantial nor legitimate enough to run, and he left the paper for a position at Newsweek.

I reached Isikoff at home on a Friday morning, the Fourth of July, and asked him whether he was working on a story about Clinton and another woman. He said, Not right now. I said that was an ambiguous reply. He was silent. He asked me who was asking the question in the White House. I didnt tell him. I reported the conversation back to the counsels office.

The following Monday, someone told me that the Drudge Reportan Internet Web site that focuses almost exclusively on negative rumors and developing negative stories about the Clintons and their allieshad reported that Michael Isikoff was hot on the trail of a story involving a federal employee sexually propositioned by the president on federal property. I subsequently learned that Drudge had posted the allegation on July 4the very day that I had called Isikoff.

In late July, Isikoff called to inform me that he was about to break a story naming Kathleen Willey as having been involved with the president. I asked him whether this was the same story that Drudge had reported, and why he was going with it now when he hadnt before. He said cryptically that he had more now than he had before, that there was someone else who might be corroborative. He wanted me to confirm or deny the allegations, but he also seemed worried about my going into a full-court press to try to get an official White House comment, because if I did so the word might get out to one of his competitors. He therefore refused to go into any details as to why he was taking this story seriously. The reporters dilemma can be seen here: he needs help and information from a source to complete his story accurately, but he wants to reveal as little as possible so that he doesnt lose his scoop. In this case, because Isikoff and I had known each other for so many years he knew he could trust me not to deliberately bust his exclusive story.

I went through the motions of trying to check the story out, but given the little information Isikoff had been willing to share with me, I knew I wouldnt get very far. In fact, no one I spoke to in the counsels office or elsewhere was even willing to check out whether someone named Kathleen Willey had ever worked at the White House as a volunteer or otherwise, much less whether the president had had an intimate incident involving her.

I dont believe I ever called Isikoff back. I just couldnt take this story seriously. I didnt understand why Newsweek was crossing the line into alleged private conduct by the president, a line not crossed in previous White Houses. After all, as I understood it from talking to Isikoff, in this instance there was no legal proceeding, no grand juryand, significantly, Ms. Willey was unwilling to go on record with Isikoff. I wondered: Will Isikoff and Newsweek become the first mainstream national media organization perhaps in U.S. history willing to publish allegations of extramarital sexual activity by a president of the United States without anything else to justify the publication of the story?

After the story broke on August 4, the White House decision was not to comment on it at all, though we had to prepare a response because the president had a press availability scheduled that day or the next. (A press availability, as distinguished from a full-blown press conference, is an event at which the president is performing some official function, such as meeting with a head of state or making an announcement of a policy initiative, and a few questions of the president on unrelated matters are permitted from representatives of the press corps.) Those of us on the White House counsels investigations team joined the prep session with the president customarily conducted by press secretary Michael McCurry and other senior White House political advisors. McCurry turned to me and asked whether the Willey story had any significant legs. On the scandal beat, the test of viability of a breaking story is whether other news organizations treat it seriously, get concerned or irritated that they have been beaten, and thus launch their own investigative energies and resources into finding new news to break beyond the original story. The quick shorthand expression to describe this phenomenon is legs; if a story has legs, other news organizations will report it, and sometimes, if it is a huge story, expand on it over additional news cycles. In response to McCurry, I said no, it had no legs, that I had heard from few reporters about it. McCurry turned to the president and asked him a hostile question about the incidentposing, as he usually did at these sessions, as an aggressive reporter. The president smiled and cracked a joke; we all laughed nervously. Then, changing to a serious tone, he denied that the incident alleged by Ms. Willey had ever happened.