The call came late Sunday night from a household in crisis. That it was the White House, Rev. Jesse Jackson says, mattered little. Hillary Rodham Clinton summoned him because her daughter, Chelsea, wanted his advice and counsel. Jackson, in the middle of a town hall meeting elsewhere in Washington, was obliging.
He arrived at 10:30 p.m. and stayed until nearly midnight. He left with insight into a home and a family that he said was staying strongly together through its time of trouble.
The president, he said, was embarrassed, burdened by “a sense of contrition, a sense of disappointment within himself.” But, he said, Clinton was preparing for his Monday appearance before Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s grand jury “like it was a presidential debate.”
Jackson found Mrs. Clinton just as embarrassed and humiliated but likewise resolute, working with the president and his advisers to prepare. “During the pain and humiliation of all of this,” he said, “where was she but in the room, helping to determine strategy for the day’s session. She’s determined to keep her family strong and stand by her husband.”
As for 18-year-old Chelsea Clinton, Jackson said she understood fully what had been alleged and what it was her father was admitting to. “Chelsea is amazingly mature for her age,” he said. “A 19- or 20-year-old in America today who watches American television, watches GAP ads on buses, listens to American music, is not shocked by sex.”
At the end of their extraordinary meeting, Jackson said, “We joined arms and prayed. I simply asked God to forgive us for our sins, forgive us for the foolishness of our ways, build a hedge around us to protect us.”
There is no doubting that the Clintons and White House strategists were relying on Jackson to be that hedge, protecting the president against the political onslaught his reversal will invite. He retold the story of his meeting with the Clintons to the networks, to reporters in Washington and Chicago, and on CNN’s Larry King Live.
Though he emphasized the religious and spiritual nature of his late-night visit to the White House, the political function of Jackson’s loyalty was underscored by his traveling partner, former Democratic National Chairman David Wilhelm, who was with him in Chicago on Monday evening.
Wilhelm told a crowd of reporters and onlookers outside Tribune Tower that Clinton should not be judged.
“I wouldn’t want my character or morality or goodness to be judged on the worst moment of my life,” Wilhelm said. “I hope the American people do not judge Bill Clinton on the worst moment of his life.”
More Top Picks Laptop
While Jackson has not always agreed with Clinton’s policies, he has been a stalwart when it has come to Clinton’s personal troubles.
It was Jackson who counseled and prayed with Bill and Hillary Clinton when Gennifer Flowers accused Clinton of engaging in a 12-year affair while he was governor of Arkansas. Back then, he met with the Clintons before they went on CBS’s “60 Minutes” and admitted to troubles in their marriage.
Clinton, in a deposition during the sexual harassment lawsuit filed against him by former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones, admitted to having sex with Flowers, but just once.
Jackson was with the Clintons at the beginning of this latest, wrenching sex scandal, watching the Super Bowl at the White House in January just as the tawdry allegations of a affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky were becoming public. That’s when he began his self-described role as “fatherly and brotherly” adviser to Chelsea Clinton, then a freshman at Stanford University.
Family matters aside, how the scandal will leave the country is another matter, one that the president and first lady may have more difficulty controlling. Jackson said the president, in his television appearance after his testimony Monday, “was very good in his statement. He was very explicit, took responsibility for his actions.”
Still, Jackson acknowledged that the best thing the president has going for him right now is the healthy economy and the opinion polls that show voters are skeptical of the president’s explanations but think he’s doing a good job.
“There are nine other commandments” besides the one forbidding adultery, Jackson said. “If you put this matter in perspective, are we better off six years later as a nation? We’re better off, we’re stronger.”