Adventures in Correspondentland

by Nick Bryant

  Nothing in your BBC training quite prepares you for that – although at least no macadamia nuts sprinkled Kenneth Starr’s account, the alleged presidential insertion of which became one of the great urban myths of the entire scandal.

  Of course, the public appeared a lot less shocked about the scandal than Washington, which is the main reason why Clinton survived. That and the fact that Kenneth Starr and his Republican allies continually overplayed their hand. When a videotape of Clinton’s appearance before the grand jury was released in September 1998, rumours abounded beforehand that it showed the president erupting into a childlike tantrum – a display of petulance sure to harden public opinion against him and heighten calls for him to resign. (By now, 78 newspapers, including USA Today, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, had called for him to go.)

  For the most part, however, this four-hour screening was numbingly boring, and it lives in the memory for Clinton’s dissembling rather than his irritability. ‘It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is,’ he said at one point during his testimony. On the question of whether they had shared ‘sexual relations’, he explained that sex for him meant the giving of oral sex rather than the receiving – an almost Yuletide-like expression of sexual charity. What we did not yet know was that Hillary Clinton had been informed of the affair just three days before the president’s video-testimony. Rather than tell her himself, Clinton had reportedly dispatched his lawyer, David Kendall, to do so.

  Had this been more widely known at the time – this particularly juicy nugget came out in the reporter Peter Baker’s book The Breach – Clinton, and the Democrats through association, might have fared much worse in the congressional mid-terms. As it was, Newt Gingrich’s Republicans, the president’s accusers, suffered a net loss of five seats. Politically embarrassed, and later personally embarrassed when revelations surfaced about his own marital infidelity, Newt Gingrich resigned his post.

  We therefore witnessed a curious inversion of how scandals are supposed to play out in Washington: the Democratic president had admitted to an affair, but it was a Republican house speaker who lost his job. Throughout the whole scandal, however, there was always the feeling that the sound of shattering glass might come from the houses of those throwing the stones. Congressman Henry Hyde, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and the main prosecutor of impeachment, suffered the ignominy of seeing an affair from 40 years ago splashed across the front pages. Even on the day of Clinton’s impeachment in the House of Representatives, another Republican speaker, Gingrich’s successor, Bob Livingston, was lanced on his own erection, and was forced to resign when Hustler magazine caught wind of his own adulterous frolics.

  What followed in the New Year was still more bizarre: the sight of Clinton being tried by the US Senate, a body whose membership included some of Washington’s most celebrated philanderers. Peering down from the press gallery, it was rather like seeing teenagers watching a movie in the lounge room with their parents and facing the squirming horror of knowing that a sex scene was about to unfold before them on screen. Never before had senators become so closely acquainted with the mouldings and paintings on the walls and ceilings above and around them.

  That said, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, the 100-something former Dixiecrat who had run for the presidency in 1948 as a white supremacist and then fathered a black love child, was the spriteliest I had seen him in years. The record holder for the longest solo filibuster in senate history – 24 hours and 18 minutes – he seemed to regard the presidential sex show about to unfold in the well of the chamber as his reward. Most of his 99 colleagues, however, had no appetite for such sordidness and made sure the trial was as brief as possible, apparently to save themselves from embarrassment as much as the president.

  For me, the postscript to the impeachment saga came in March 1999, just six weeks after the end of the senate trial, when Clinton appeared at the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association dinner at the Washington Hilton. Like the Japanese cherry blossoms that start blooming on the Washington mall, these black-tie dinners are a rite of spring, a ritual that requires the president to submit himself to a gentle roasting and then to hit back with a stand-up routine of his own.

  That night, with everyone still recovering from the exertions of the past 15 months, the simple fact that the Clintons had accepted the invitation earned them a good deal of warmth and protection, and when the MC Jay Leno cracked a lone Lewinsky gag there were boos from the floor. ‘Just one?’ pleaded Leno.

  In his opening remarks, Clinton acknowledged the weirdness of turning up to a dinner attended by 2000 journalists. ‘If this isn’t contrition,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what is.’ Then he risked another post-impeachment quip: ‘I know you can’t really laugh about this. I mean, the events of the last year have been quite serious. If the senate vote had gone the other way, I wouldn’t be here. I demand a recount.’

  As the strained laughter evaporated, the president introduced onto the stage a surprise guest, the ‘prime minister of the United Republic of Karjakador’ – a play on his habit during the impeachment crisis of only appearing before the press when accompanied at the podium by a visiting international leader. Together, they performed a slapstick routine that was not only funny but, as ever at these dinners, impressively produced and well rehearsed.

  What was most extraordinary about the evening, however, was not the president’s self-deprecation but how he handled himself in another ceremony he was expected to perform. Every year, a journalist was honoured for their excellence in reporting ‘Congressional and political affairs’, a citation that took on an especially unfortunate connotation. And, sure enough, that year’s recipient was the ABC’s Jackie Judd, the correspondent who discovered the existence of the stained blue dress, ‘apparently as a kind of souvenir’, in the words of her award-winning report.

  As her name was read out and she started on her journey to the stage, all eyes naturally fixed upon Clinton to see how he would react. Yet far from showing any hint of embarrassment or discomfort, he greeted her with his trademark handshake, a rosy smile and a look almost of parental pride. The First Lady, sat a few seats away on a top table that faced out over the audience, was nowhere near as good at political play-acting. Indeed, if the looks she darted towards her errant husband could have killed, a Secret Service agent would have been rugby-tackling the president.

  Just as he survived the scandal, Bill Clinton got through the awkwardness of this encounter with his unique blend of theatricality, likeability, political smarts and sheer bravado. From years of covering him, it remains to this day my favourite Bill moment, and by far the most telling. In this glorious instance of maximum unauthenticity, we could see the real Clinton.

  Devotees of The West Wing would be crushingly disappointed by the reality of Washington. White House counsels are rarely as beautiful as Rob Lowe, press secretaries are never as witty as C. J. Cregg, presidents rarely quote long passages from the scriptures to break the tension of policy meetings, and their aides stalk the corridors of power with noticeably less fleet of foot, speed of mind and swiftness of tongue.

  Doubtless, there are high-powered, big-brain types who can neatly encapsulate the world’s most complicated problems in five pithy bullet points, and all in the time that it takes to hightail it from the Oval Office to the Situation Room. But I have yet to meet them, and nor truly would I wish to. Rather, the real West Wing is unexpectedly stately, elegant and orderly. Its corridors are not clogged with harried young BlackBerry-wielding aides, nor are the offices strewn with flip charts, whiteboards, campaign paraphernalia, plastic basketball hoops or stacks of empty pizza boxes. The West Wing has the look more of an English country home – albeit one with a state-of-the-art security system and its own private army – than the boiler-room of American executive government.

  All this is not to deny that The West Wing gets a lot right. It captures the workaholic culture of official Washington, th
e perpetual politicking, the bristling egos, the obsession with the news cycle, and the Beltway patois of pinched abbreviations that turns the president of the United States into POTUS, the first lady into FLOTUS and the justices of the Supreme Court into SCOTUS. It accurately portrays how most global problems end up in the Oval Office – although much of the president’s daily work is conducted in an adjacent private study – and how the personality of the incumbent stamps itself so completely on the administration that bears his name.

  As originally envisaged, The West Wing intended to make the president an invisible presence, rather like Marlon Brando in Godfather II. That, however, would have made it totally implausible. For no city in the world, not even the Vatican or Pyongyang, is quite so preoccupied with the thoughts, beliefs, statements, musings, body language, blood pressure, eating habits, moods, whims, idiosyncrasies and indiscretions of a single being. The West Wing, real and imagined, is the president.

  As a place to work and live, Washington definitely has its limitations. The food, aside from its Frisbee-sized power steaks, is poor. The climate is horrible, especially in the swampy summer. On the style front, residents look like they have taken their fashion cues from watching reruns of Dynasty. It can be stultifyingly unimaginative, which partly explains why the suffix ‘gate’ is attached to every scandal, however big or small. It suffers from being overpopulated by lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, policy wonks, diplomats and, yes, even journalists. Nowhere in the world has a higher concentration of self-important narcissists – with the possible exception, I suppose, of Hollywood, that west-coast Washington for beautiful people. With the mainly white population congregated in the north-west quadrant and the mainly black population occupying the rest, it is one of America’s most racially polarised cities. Ridiculously, it still suffers from the democratic deficit of not having any representation in the US Senate and of relying on a fairly powerless ‘delegate’ rather than a full-blown lawmaker in the House of Representatives, an example of how black disenfranchisement survives even today.

  But it is the place to be. Washington ‘dies at sundown, it is too hot in the summer, too damp in the winter, too dry on Sunday and more interested in politics than it is in sex,’ observed the veteran reporter Russell Baker of The New York Times, ‘but I like it.’ Most correspondents are much more fulsome in their praise and admit to falling completely for its seductive charms.

  On the reporting front, the set-piece staple of the day is the televised lunchtime White House briefing, where the president’s press secretary stands behind the world’s most closely watched podium, in front of the world’s most familiar blue curtain, and tries to stonewall reporters. (Earlier in the morning, the press secretary takes questions in an off-camera briefing called ‘the gaggle’.)

  The correspondents hurling the questions sit in pre-assigned seats, marked with small brass nameplates, etched with the kind of inscription work that you would expect to find on a Little League championship shield or a spelling-bee trophy. The 49 seats are allocated, as you would expect in a city obsessed with seniority, by rank. The front row is occupied by the major television networks (ABC, NBC, CBS) and the key wire services (the Associated Press and Reuters), while CNN has also muscled its way onto it. Next come the major newspapers, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. Then come some of the lesser lights, such as the Chicago Tribune, Voice of America and The Christian Science Monitor. These days, there is even a place, on the seventh row, for the Christian Broadcasting Network, sandwiched between two once-great newspapers, The Boston Globe and The Baltimore Sun.

  Some of the more venerable institutions, such as Time, have now been relegated. If memory serves, the demotion came about after a former Time correspondent by the name of Jay Carney could not see much point in turning up every day to the briefings, which is richly ironic because he has recently been appointed as the White House press secretary.

  Alas, international news organisations, such as the BBC, have always struggled in the stamped-seats stakes, and we tended to jostle for standing room at the sides and back of the briefing room. To be honest, none of us ever really minded, because the Time guy had pretty much got it right: if the White House had anything useful to impart, it would have done so already with a leak to The Times, The Post or, as is increasingly the case, Politico, the online news-sheet. Similarly, if an errant administration official had something the White House didn’t want you to know, it would already have appeared in the papers, and the morning briefing was unlikely to offer much in the way of elucidation.

  After the briefings, correspondents would rush out to their live television positions on the gravel-strewn patch of land next to the North Lawn known as Pebble Beach, which has since been renamed Stonehenge after the crushed bluestone was replaced with concrete. With the alabaster columns of the North Portico over our shoulders, the shot was intended to convey the notion that we all had an inside track on the internal workings of the building behind, even though none of us could boast genuine access to the president.

  In my day, the grand marquess of the White House press corps, the legendary Helen Thomas, still occupied pole position in the middle of the front row. Like some medieval gargoyle carved into the facade of a great cathedral, however, she was there largely for decorative purposes and did not perform a vital function. Her long-time employer, the wire service United Press International (UPI), had years ago fallen into a state of disrepair, and as UPI waned so too did its star correspondent. Now an octogenarian, Thomas rarely got to ask the first question at presidential press conferences but did maintain the tradition, which she herself had revived during the Kennedy administration, of ending them with a cheery ‘Thank you, Mr President’.

  But I honestly cannot remember ever reading a single word that Helen Thomas had written, and I dare say the same was true of many Washington-based reporters. For sure, there was a pantomime-like fun to be had watching her bully and badger White House press secretaries, especially the nervy debutants (in her later years, she even resembled a character from a pantomime). And, to her credit, in the aftermath of 9/11 she not only refused to succumb to the mood of ultra-patriotism but also railed against it.

  Increasingly, however, her questions took on the feel of mini-monologues – Bush’s first press secretary, Ari Fleischer, started referring to her lengthy interjections as ‘advocacy hour’ – and, like many of Washington’s human landmarks, her reputation would have been better served by an earlier and more graceful exit.

  As it was, she left under a cloud of her own making, when she barked that Israel should ‘get the hell out of Palestine’, and its citizens should return to Germany and Poland. President Barack Obama, who only a few months before had presented her with cupcakes to mark her 89th birthday, condemned this blast of anti-Semitism. So, too, did the White House Correspondent Association, the organisation she not only once headed but also came to personify. For those who maintained the view that Washington was Hollywood for ugly people, Thomas was like a faded silent-movie star: she had turned Pennsylvania Avenue into Sunset Boulevard and cast herself as Norma Desmond, the crazed idol who now lived in her own fantasy world.

  By far the most fun to be had with the White House press corps was way beyond the Beltway – the multi-laned ring road that doubled as a great halo of power – on international trips with the president. Aside from a small complement of reporters who flew on Air Force One, we would travel on a press charter where the seating assignments copied those of the White House briefing room. En route, the White House media team handed out pocket-sized briefing books, embossed with the presidential seal, which contained useful – and US-friendly – factoids about the countries we were about to visit. There were potted biographies of everyone the president was likely to meet, the times of the baggage calls (always ludicrously early), and helpful cultural pointers, which had the unintended side effect when travelling with George W. Bush of highlighting his own cultural faux pas.

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p; In the run-up to the trips, we happily surrendered our passports to a US immigration official and were not handed them back until we returned to Washington. It meant we enjoyed the bliss of passport-free travel, jetting from one country to the next unencumbered by customs, immigration or any brush with local officialdom and sometimes even the locals themselves.

  From the moment we left Andrews Air Force Base, we were pretty much ensnared inside ‘The Bubble’, a mobile West Wing, near hermetically sealed, that would move from country to country, city to city, and from one windowless ballroom to the next. These bland, featureless digs served as our temporary filing centres, where the desks were laid out according to the usual ranking system. (The only time that I ever witnessed a departure from the rankings was when those champion bureaucrats at Vnukovo International Airport on the outskirts of Moscow refused to play ball with our usual passport-less travel ruse and demanded that we collect our documentation, one by one in alphabetical order. Being a ‘B’, I was one of the fluky ones. Pity poor La Repubblica’s White House correspondent, Arturo Zampaglione.)

  Regardless of where we went, we were shuttled around town in buses that never stopped for traffic lights and were accompanied everywhere by motorcycle outriders wearing polished white leather gloves. The ‘green corridor’ it was called. Then we would faithfully record each of the president’s intricately stage-managed appearances with his hosts. To help us keep track of what was said, the White House transcription service was always on hand, like a wandering band of courtroom stenographers, to provide us with a verbatim record of every utterance. To help us keep track of what was thought, White House aides would occasionally deliver background briefings, providing scraps of information that we gobbled up like performing seals being tossed small sardines by their handlers, an aquatic reworking of Pavlov’s dogs.