questions six or seven times, as the lawyers tried hard to turn my interrogation into admissions that were humiliating and incriminating. That’s what the, to date, whole four-year $40 million investigation had come down to: parsing the definition of sex. I finished the testimony at about six-thirty, three and a half hours before I was scheduled to address the nation. I was visibly upset when I went up to the solarium to see friends and staff who had gathered to discuss what had just happened, including White House counsel Chuck Ruff, David Kendall, Mickey Kantor, Rahm Emanuel, James Carville, Paul Begala, and Harry and Linda Thomason. Chelsea was there, too, and to my relief, at about eight, Hillary joined in.
We had a discussion about what I should say. Everyone knew I had to admit that I had made an awful mistake and had tried to hide it. The question was whether I should also take a shot at Starr’s investigation and say it was time to end it. The virtually unanimous opinion was that I should not. Most people already knew that Starr was out of control; they needed to hear my admission of wrongdoing and witness my remorse. Some of my friends had given what they thought was strategic advice; others were genuinely appalled by what I had done. Only Hillary refused to express an opinion, instead encouraging everyone to leave me alone to write my statement.
At ten o’clock I told the American people about my testimony, said I was solely and completely responsible for my personal failure, and admitted misleading everyone, “even my wife.” I said I was trying to protect myself and my family from intrusive questions in a politically inspired lawsuit that had been dismissed. I also said that Starr’s investigation had gone on too long, cost too much, and hurt too many people, and that two years earlier, another investigation, a truly independent one, had found no wrongdoing by Hillary or me in Whitewater. Finally, I committed to doing my best to repair my family life, and I hoped we could repair the fabric of our nation’s life by stopping the pursuit of personal destruction and prying into private lives, and moving on. I believed every word I said, but my anger hadn’t worn off enough for me to be as contrite as I should have been. The next day we left for Martha’s Vineyard on our annual vacation. Usually I counted the days until we could get away for some family time; this year, though I knew we needed it, I wished that I was working around the clock instead. As we walked out to the South Lawn to get on the helicopter, with Chelsea between Hillary and me and Buddy walking beside me, photographers took pictures that revealed the pain I had caused. When there were no cameras around, my wife and daughter were barely speaking to me.
I spent the first couple of days alternating between begging for forgiveness and planning the strikes on al Qaeda. At night Hillary would go up to bed and I slept on the couch.
On my birthday General Don Kerrick, Sandy Berger’s staffer, flew to Martha’s Vineyard to go over the targets recommended by the CIA and the Joint Chiefs—the al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and two targets in Sudan, a tannery in which bin Laden had a financial interest and a chemical plant the CIA believed was being used to produce or store a chemical used in the production of VX nerve gas. I took the tannery off the list because it had no military value to al Qaeda and I wanted to minimize civilian casualties. The hit on the camps would be timed to coincide with the meeting the intelligence indicated bin Laden and his top people would be having.
At 3 a.m. I gave Sandy Berger the final order to proceed, and U.S. Navy destroyers in the northern Arabian Sea launched cruise missiles at the targets in Afghanistan, while missiles were fired at the Sudanese chemical plant from ships in the Red Sea. Most of the missiles hit the targets, but bin Laden was not in the camp where the CIA thought he would be when the missiles hit it. Some reports said he had left the camp only a couple of hours earlier, but we never knew for sure. Several people associated with al Qaeda were killed, as were some Pakistani officers who were reported to be there to train Kashmiri terrorists. The Sudanese chemical plant was destroyed.
After announcing the attacks in Martha’s Vineyard, I flew back to Washington to speak to the American people for the second time in four days, telling them I had ordered the strikes because al Qaeda was responsible for the embassy bombings, and bin Laden was “perhaps the preeminent organizer and financier of international terrorism in the world today,” a man who had vowed to wage a terrorist war on America with no distinction between military personnel and civilians. I said that our attacks were not aimed against Islam “but against fanatics and killers,” and that we had been fighting against them on several fronts for years and would continue to do so, because “this will be a long, ongoing struggle.”
Around the time I spoke of the long struggle, I signed the first of a series of orders to prepare for it by using all the tools available. Executive Order 13099 imposed economic sanctions on bin Laden and al Qaeda. Later the sanctions were extended to the Taliban as well. To date, we had not been effective in disrupting terrorists’ financial networks. The executive order invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which we had earlier used successfully against the Cali drug cartel in Colombia. I had also asked General Shelton and Dick Clarke to develop some options for dropping commando forces into Afghanistan. I thought that if we took out a couple of al Qaeda’s training operations it would show them how serious we were, even if we didn’t get bin Laden or his top lieutenants. It was clear to me that the senior military didn’t want to do this, perhaps because of Somalia, perhaps because they would have to send in the Special Forces without knowing for certain where bin Laden was, or whether we could get our troops back out to safety. At any rate, I continued to keep the option alive. I also signed several Memoranda of Notification (MONs) authorizing the CIA to use lethal force to apprehend bin Laden. The CIA had been authorized to conduct its own “snatch operation” against bin Laden the previous spring, months before the embassy bombings, but it lacked the paramilitary capability to do the job. Instead, it contracted with members of local Afghan tribes to get bin Laden. When field agents or the Afghan tribals were apparently uncertain of whether they had to try to capture bin Laden before they used deadly force, I made it clear that they did not. Within a few months I had extended the lethal force authorization by expanding the list of targeted bin Laden associates and the circumstances under which they could be attacked.
By and large, the response of the congressional leaders of both parties to the missile strikes was positive, in large part because they had been well briefed and Secretary Cohen had assured his fellow Republicans that the attack and its timing were justified. Speaker Gingrich said, “The United States did exactly the right thing today.” Senator Lott said the attacks were “appropriate and just.” Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt, and all the Democrats were supportive. Soon I was heartened by the arrest of Mohamed Rashed, an al Qaeda operative who was a suspect in the Kenyan embassy bombing. Some people criticized me for hitting the chemical plant, which the Sudanese government insisted had nothing to do with the production or storage of dangerous chemicals. I still believe we did the right thing there. The CIA had soil samples taken at the plant site that contained the chemical used to produce VX. In a subsequent terrorist trial in New York City, one of the witnesses testified that bin Laden had a chemical weapons operation in Khartoum. Despite the plain evidence, some people in the media tried to push the possibility that the action was a real-life version of
For now, I just hoped that the Democrats wouldn’t be pushed by the media pounding into calling for my resignation, and that I would be able to repair the breach I had caused with my family and with my staff, cabinet, and the people who had believed in me through all the years of constant attacks. After the speech I went back to the Vineyard for ten days. There was not much thaw on the family front. I made my first public appearance since my grand jury testimony, traveling to Worcester, Massachusetts, at the invitation of Congressman Jim McGovern, to promote the Police Corps, an innovative program that provided college scholarships to people who committed to becoming law-enforcement officers. Worcester is an old-fashioned blue-collar city; I was somewhat apprehensive about the kind of reception I would get there, and was encouraged to find a large enthusiastic crowd at an event attended by the mayor, both senators, and four Massachusetts congressmen. Many people in the crowd urged me to keep doing my job; several said they had made mistakes in their lives, too, and were sorry that mine had been aired in public.
On August 28, the thirty-fifth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I have a dream” speech, I went to a commemorative service at Union Chapel in Oak Bluffs, which had been a vacation mecca for African-Americans for more than a century. I shared the platform with Congressman John Lewis, who had worked with Dr. King and was one of the most powerful moral forces in American politics. He and I had been friends for a long time, going back well before 1992. He was one of my earliest supporters and had every right to condemn me. Instead, when he
