All Too Human: A Political Education

by George Stephanopoulos

  We went to the bar, where Clinton ordered decaf and the rest of us had a drink. Within minutes Carville and Clinton were competing. Who knew more about politics, who was the real Southerner, who had the most sophisticated take on Super Tuesday's primary chessboard. Everyone agreed that the black vote could make the difference for Clinton — and that New Hampshire was a crap-shoot. After Carville and Begala left, Clinton turned to me in the elevator and said, “Those guys are smart.” Which meant, of course, “They agree with me.” They signed up with us a couple of weeks later, and the Post reported that we treated it “as the December equivalent of winning the New Hampshire primary.”

  True — and that wasn't the only good news coming our way at the end of 1991. Clinton was catching on, even with liberals who had been suspicious of him. At the early cattle calls, he'd tell the crowds, “I'm a Democrat by instinct, heritage, and conviction. My granddaddy thought he was going to Roosevelt when he died.” The party regulars would stomp and yell, oblivious to the unspoken yet unmistakable “but” at the end of the sentence. Clinton was establishing his bona fides, rallying skeptics with words he knew they wanted to hear. But the fact that he had to do so out loud was an implicit warning: “I come from your world, but if you don't change with me and cut me some slack, we'll never get anything done, because we'll never win.”

  Most liberals knew this, understood that Clinton wasn't really one of us. But it felt good to get lost in the partisan reverie, to be carried back to a time when photos of FDR graced Democratic mantels like the icons of a patron saint, a time when the Kennedy brothers epitomized the best and the brightest, a time long before McGovern, Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis were caricatured into a sadly comic Mount Rushmore, symbols of a party out of touch and doomed to defeat. It felt good, again, to think about winning.

  Only one other Democrat could still stir the party faithful in the same way, and he was the cloud over our heads as 1991 drew to a close. No matter what we said or did, the campaign wouldn't feel entirely real until the eternally ambivalent front-runner finally declared his true intentions. Nobody knew what Cuomo was going to do. He was teasing the press, the party establishment, his potential opponents — and the longer he took to make up his labyrinthine mind, the more frustrated we got. He had frozen the race.

  Reporters were dying for Cuomo to jump in. It seemed as if every time the governor of New York scratched his nose he received more fawning coverage than we could get with a series of substantive speeches. What could be better than an enigmatic and eloquent intellectual who quoted Saint Francis of Assisi and didn't dirty his hands by actually entering the race? Few figures are more appealing than the reluctant statesman untroubled by ambition but willing to accept the burden of office for the good of all. “Cuomo Sapiens,” the Post called him. “The Thinking Man's Non-Candidate.”

  Although I had shared those feelings, I was ready to engage. Clinton resisted most of our efforts to draw clear lines with Cuomo, but we got an opening when Cuomo took the first shot. Joe Klein was stirring the pot. In a New York magazine interview with Cuomo, he got the governor to criticize Clinton's plans on welfare and national service. Schmoozing on the phone with E. J. Dionne of the Post, I saw we had the opportunity we'd been waiting for. Maybe if we lobbed the grenade back to Cuomo, E. J. would have enough material to write a story and frame the debate.

  I scratched out a statement and drove my battered Honda to the mansion to show it to Clinton. In his makeshift basement office, Clinton edited the statement and stood over me while I dialed the phone, wishing, I knew, that he could pick up the phone and talk to E. J. himself but knowing it wouldn't be smart: Candidates don't debate noncandidates. But by attacking Clinton's signature issues, Cuomo was helping define him — as the un-Cuomo, the new Democrat who wasn't afraid to challenge party orthodoxy. An attack from Cuomo was also a sign that we mattered. Maybe he was hearing footsteps.

  Dionne wrote a small story that included a quote from me defending Clinton's ideas and challenging Cuomo to “let the debate begin.” Any ambivalence I felt about taking on one of my political idols was balanced by my frustration at the way Cuomo was toying with the race, by my convincing myself that Cuomo was criticizing a caricature of the Clinton proposals rather than the ideas themselves, and by Dionne's observation that the Clinton campaign “fired back immediately.” E. J. was sending a signal to the political world, telling it, I imagined, “If you hit Clinton, he hits back. His campaign won't repeat the mistakes of the past.” But I couldn't help wondering what Cuomo thought when he read my words, or what I would have thought and said had I been working for him instead.

  Cuomo was telling people that he couldn't decide about the race until he finished work on his budget in Albany. Thankfully for us, an external deadline forced his hand: the final filing date for the New Hampshire primary was December 20.

  The twentieth was a Friday, and that entire week felt like one long election day, waiting for results you could no longer pretend to control. Work was impossible; all we cared about was information about Cuomo's intentions. We scrutinized every statement, rumor, and hint for possible clues. Cuomo chartered a plane for a flight to Manchester — must be getting in. But Republicans in his state senate were holding firm in budget talks — maybe he can't get in. We seemed to have the most to lose if Cuomo entered the race, which is why we were desperately trying to convince ourselves that we wanted him in, that his entry, which was probably inevitable, would actually work to our advantage. “The only way to be a heavyweight is to beat a heavyweight” was our new mantra.

  Clinton was on his way to Tennessee that Friday, where a throat specialist would make the first try at treating his persistent hoarseness. Anticipating the worst — or the best, depending on your point of view — we had prepared a statement for Clinton welcoming Cuomo into the race. As the filing deadline approached, CNN went live with cameras in Albany and New Hampshire. They even had a camera trained on the idling plane. Then Bernie Shaw broke in with a bulletin. Cuomo was out. The first big break of the campaign.

  Clinton was just about to exit when I reached his plane. “Don't get off,” I said. “Listen to this.” Cuomo approached the microphones to make it official, and I simulcasted his statement to Clinton over the phone. Clinton seemed unfazed by the news, but I knew he was making the calculations in his head, and I guessed he was pleased. One of the reasons he had been so reluctant to hit Cuomo early was to avoid prodding him into the race in a fit of personal pique. Without pausing to comment, Clinton dictated a gracious statement for me to release to the press.

  Meanwhile, Rahm Emanuel was playing the tough guy. “Damn.” His fists pounding his thighs. “It would have been so great if he came in. We'd rip his head off.” But he didn't linger. Cuomo's decision would free up a lot of New York money, so he had to hit the phones.

  David Wilhelm then came into my office, and for a moment we just looked at each other across the desk. Like me, he was more liberal than centrist, more old than new Democrat.

  “You didn't want him in, did you?”

  “What, are you kidding?”

  “Me neither.”

  Not a single vote had been cast, but the complicated, almost alchemic process that creates conventional wisdom had made Clinton the front-runner. A similar process was solidifying my spot in Clinton's inner circle. The daily phone calls, endless meetings, late-night games of hearts on the plane, and early-morning reviews of the headlines were deepening the bond. Clinton seemed to have confidence in me, and he coached me on what I needed to know — even taking me into the bathroom once to deliver an important message on how to deal with a particular woman friend of his.

  The night before, I had shared a car with Susan Thomases, a brassy New York lawyer and Democratic campaign veteran who was also one of Hillary's best friends. Exhausted from an all-night speech meeting and a full day of events, I didn't make a good impression. Bad move: She apparently told Hillary, who told Clinton that I was rude. When we got to the airport that mo
rning, he gave me some advice over the urinals: “George, you know that Hillary and I have a lot of good women friends our age. You have to pay attention to them, ask them what they think so they don't resent you. You're smart, but you're a boy. You have to go out of your way to be nice to them.”

  By the end of the year I was doing better in that department. Every Tuesday, before her weekly “ladies lunch” in Little Rock, Clinton's mother, Virginia Kelley, would stop by my office to chat before leaving me with a powerful hug as thanks for “taking care of my Bill.” Hillary knew she could count on me to get things done and let me know how much she appreciated it by inviting me to the family Christmas party along with a dozen or so longtime friends of the Clintons. We played parlor games and sang carols — an old-fashioned American-style Christmas in the South. The ethnic in me found the whole scene exotic but warm. I was becoming part of the family.

  3 HEARING HOOFBEATS

  After a few days off with Joan at a funky Ozark resort called Eureka Springs, I caught up with Clinton on New Year's Day in Charleston, South Carolina. He and Hillary wanted a quiet family night after their annual visit to Renaissance Weekend — a gathering of credentialed baby boomers who flew to Hilton Head every New Year's for earnest talk and energetic networking. Once they were settled in their suite with Chelsea and her choice of movie rentals, I went out for a walk. The warm salted breeze and the gaslights guarding the turn-of-the century town houses by the bay connected me to another time. But I was thinking about the year ahead.

  Things were looking good. Not only were we succeeding, but our rivals were stumbling. Cuomo was out, and Wilder would soon follow. Nobody took Tsongas seriously yet, and Harkin signaled that he wasn't a serious threat by taking a two-week vacation in the Caribbean. Jerry Brown was still a joke, and Kerrey had been hampered by a staff coup, weak fund-raising, and the revelation that he didn't provide health insurance to employees at the fitness centers he owned — a devastating charge given that the senator was trying to make universal health care the signature issue of his campaign.

  Our team was starting to gel. Dee Dee Myers came in from California to be press secretary, and Bruce Reed moved down from D.C. to run the issues shop. I was back on the road — this time for good. I couldn't have been happier with where we were or how I fit in. If our luck held, we'd get the nomination. If it held a little longer …

  The next day's main event was in an antebellum mansion with a staircase out of Gone with the Wind. As night fell, about a hundred supporters crowded up the stairs to watch Clinton go to work. These were his people — progressive Southern Democrats. And this was his place — a room big enough to perform in but small enough to forge personal connections. Mellowed by his brief holiday and building hopes for the new year, Clinton spoke in a soft drawl stretched out just a touch for his neighbors' ears. The crowd was rapt with parochial pride and the hope that this night might be a memory in the making — the year we began with the next president.

  Clinton didn't simply speak to the group; he conducted it. When he recounted the daily struggles of single women working their way off welfare, they nodded in empathy. When he left rhetorical questions hanging over the foyer, they responded with murmurs and muffled shouts. When he condensed his life's ambition into a single closing sentence — “I desperately want to be your president, but you have to be Americans again” — the applause wrapped around him like a communal hug.

  Joe Klein and I took it all in from the back of the room with tears in our eyes — moved by the emotional moment, expectation, and apprehension. Reporters are paid to be dispassionate, but Joe was either smitten with Clinton or doing a smooth job of spinning me. We talked openly and often now, either on the phone or when he hooked up with us on the road. As the paying guests sat down to dinner, we retreated to the basement. The campaign was going so well that we slipped into what Joe called a “dark-off,” whispering fears of future misfortune like a couple of black-robed crones spitting in the wind to ward off the evil eye. We're peaking too early. It can't stay this good. Too tempting a target. What goes up must come down.

  “I come from Russian Jews,” Joe said. “Whenever things are good, we start to hear hoofbeats — the Cossacks.”

  “Yeah, I know just what you mean.”

  “Don't try to out-dark me on this one, George. It's in my genes.”

  “Mine too,” I replied. “The Turks.”

  The hoofbeats we heard that night weren't Cossacks heading for a Russian shtetl or Ottoman Turks bearing down on a Peloponnesian chorio. They were the ghosts of Clinton's past, summoned to life by his campaign's success. From Hot Springs and Little Rock, Fayetteville and Oxford, they were gathering together and galloping north — to New Hampshire.

  New Hampshire's not only the first presidential primary; it's also the most intimate. You meet people where they live and work and play, and talk to them over cake donuts and Greek pizza, over Friday night boilermakers in the dimly lit Manchester men's clubs, and in bowling alleys on Saturday afternoons where families roll games of duckpins. Only in New Hampshire do presidential hopefuls still go door-to-door. Salt stains crept up my loafers as I followed Clinton through the snow.

  A master at what James Madison called the “little arts of popularity,” Clinton was made for this kind of hand-to-hand campaign. No one could match him at a house party. He'd greet each guest individually while I checked in with headquarters from the kitchen phone. Then I'd settle on the second-floor landing with a Styrofoam cup of strong coffee and watch him do his stuff in the living room below.

  Clinton would lay out his economic plan, and they'd fire back questions. Flinty and frugal, New Hampshirites wanted to know exactly how he was going to pay for his programs. But that year they also needed help. New Hampshire was mired in recession. Clinton's new ideas on health care, jobs, and student loans sounded sensible, and he answered every question — in detail. No one could stump him, and people walked away impressed. Here was a politician who cared enough to really know the pressures families faced, and with definite ideas on what could be done to ease them.

  I summed up that sensibility in a quote I gave Joe Klein for his January profile of Clinton in New York magazine. “Specificity is a character issue this year,” I said. Like all good spin, it was a hope dressed up as an observation. We wanted Clinton to be seen as the thoughtful candidate — the man with a plan who knew what to do — and we needed that to be the character test of 1992. A good spinner is like a good lawyer: You highlight the facts that help your client's case and downplay the ones that don't. When the facts are unfavorable, you argue relevance. That's what I was trying to do: blunt the questions about Clinton's private behavior by pointing to his public virtues and saying that was what voters cared about most. It was, but “specificity” obviously wasn't the only character issue in 1992.

  Which brings us back to Clinton and women. That front had been mostly quiet through the fall, except for “sweet, sweet Connie.” Immortalized in the Grand Funk Railroad classic “We're an American Band,” Connie Hamzy was a Little Rock groupie who was infamous on the rock circuit for her lusty backstage adventures. But in November 1991, she claimed that her favors had also been bestowed upon a certain Arkansas governor.

  My assistant, Steve “Scoop” Cohen, heard about it on a local talk-radio station. They were promoting an upcoming issue of Penthouse, in which photos of Connie would be accompanied by her claim that Clinton had propositioned her eight years earlier in a hotel lobby. Hamzy's charge felt like a mortal threat to our embryonic campaign, so we scrambled into action.

  I contacted Clinton on his way to a Texas fund-raiser, but he didn't seem too concerned. Sure, he'd met Hamzy, he recalled, but not the way she said. As he quickly recounted the story over the phone, I imagined his eyes getting wider and detected a little laugh in his voice. They had run into each other in the lobby of the North Little Rock Hilton. The governor was leaving a speech with a few associates when Hamzy, who had been sunbathing by the hotel pool, ran up
to him, flipped down her bikini top, and asked, “What do you think of these?” Clinton seemed to take great pleasure in picturing the scene again.

  Hillary was less amused. “We have to destroy her story,” she said from her seat next to him on the plane. I was with her. Hamzy's story didn't sound funny to me either. It was flimsy, but it could still do some damage if we didn't snuff it out fast. Thankfully, the facts seemed to be on our side. This wasn't just a “he said, she said” case. Working with Clinton's gubernatorial staff, I was able to round up sworn affidavits from three people who'd accompanied Clinton, witnessed the encounter, and corroborated his account.

  The story broke before dawn on CNN Headline News. Barely into my first cup of coffee, I called CNN central in Atlanta. It took a little while to find someone with responsibility, but when I finally reached a night editor, I started screaming: “You can't run something like this without proof. You have to check a charge before you run with it.”

  Stopping CNN was key. If they ran the story all day, however briefly, other news organizations could cite them to justify running their own stories. Our denials would be folded into the accounts, but the damage would be done. All of the trashy images — Penthouse, rock and roll groupie, bikini — would be out there, and they might stick. If a bad joke merited four stories in the Post, who knew what this would get?

  When other reporters started calling, I refused to comment on the record. A denial, just like a mention on CNN, could become a pretext to run the story. So I denied it off the record and offered to fax the affidavits rebutting the charge on the same basis. The strategy was to convince legitimate news organizations that Hamzy's charge wasn't credible enough to be aired. It worked. CNN dropped the story after a single mention, and none of the other networks picked it up.