All Too Human: A Political Education

by George Stephanopoulos

  Which was exactly what Birnbaum had done. But Holmes, like Gennifer Flowers, had changed his story. Now he was saying that he felt Clinton's promise to join the ROTC was merely a pretext to avoid the draft, suggesting that Clinton had manipulated both him and the system. When I read Birnbaum's article early the next morning, I tried hard to offset my natural pessimism. Holmes is old. Maybe he's confused; maybe it's a misquote; maybe Birnbaum trapped him, twisted what Holmes was trying to say. Why's he turning now? Who got to him?

  It was still dark when I walked across the freezing parking lot to the health club next to our hotel. I was working up a sweat on the StairMaster, and working hard to convince myself that the Journal article wasn't so bad, when Larry Barrett from Time came over to say hello. Barrett is a gruff guy, and no reporter is especially friendly at 6:20 A.M. after spending the night in a second-rate motel during a New Hampshire winter. “Good morning,” he said, shaking his head. “Looks like you've got some day ahead of you.” There went any illusions I had mustered. If Larry Barrett was getting avuncular on me, we were definitely in trouble.

  How should we spin this? Clinton explicitly denied manipulating the system and seemed genuinely puzzled by Holmes's account. None of us knew about Clinton's induction notice — and if he remembered, he wasn't telling. We would certainly point out that Colonel Holmes had changed his version of events. But where Gennifer had changed her story for money, what was driving Holmes? We couldn't attack a veteran who, for all I knew, was also a war hero. So all we could do was try to poke factual holes in Birnbaum's story. But except for failing to mention the fact that Holmes had changed his account, Birnbaum's article was more solid than we knew or could admit.

  My age was also a handicap. Later that day, Paul Begala and I faced another media mob at the Sheraton Tara. Any ambivalence reporters may have felt about prying into a candidate's sex life was supplanted on the draft story by a righteous intensity deepened by personal experience. For male reporters around Clinton's age, the draft was a defining moment; how you dealt with it spoke volumes about who you were. Some had served honorably, while others were self-proclaimed experts at evading the selective service or connoisseurs of cover stories told to local draft boards. They knew in their bones that Clinton's good fortune was not a “fluke.”

  But those of us born in 1961 came of age in a different America. My class of eighteen-year-olds was the first to register for the peacetime draft. Vietnam was over, and no other war was on the horizon. To a suburban kid with a latent political consciousness, signing up was such a casual procedure that I did it at the post office with a few friends on the way to play golf. The emotional investment of the reporters I encountered was foreign to me, and I could see they weren't putting much stock in anything I had to say. For good reason: Not only did I not really know the facts, I didn't understand their meaning.

  Frustration was building on both sides. After fifteen minutes of getting screamed at in the lobby, I finally gave up. “You guys don't understand,” I blurted out. “I can't help you on this one. All I cared about in 1969 were the Mets.”

  The draft did all the damage Gennifer didn't do. As Clinton would later joke, we dropped “like a turd in a well,” falling to third place in three days. But on the Sunday night we found out, he wasn't in a humorous mood. Pacing around his family room in jeans while Hillary sat at a card table in her sweats, Clinton went on a tirade. “It's that damn middle-class tax cut. It's killing us,” he thundered in a fit of self-delusion. Grow up. If it weren't for that tax cut, we'd be dead last. That's what people like about you. It's everything else they're sick of.

  But I stayed silent, and Hillary stayed focused. She knew the self-pity would pass if we had a plan. We spent the rest of the night drafting new commercials and a “fight like hell” strategy for the last ten days. The next morning, we flew back to Manchester, lightheaded from lack of sleep but liberated by the prospect of having little more to lose. It was February 10, my thirty-first birthday, and Mark Halperin of ABC News had a present for me.

  When we landed in Manchester, he was waiting on the tarmac. Mark had been with our campaign nearly as long as I had, and we were as close to friends as possible given our adversarial roles. The look on his face as he walked my way was all the commentary I needed on what he held in his hands. “Nobody else has this,” he said, giving me a couple of pages. “Read it right away. We're going to need a response.”

  Even before the document touched my hands, my eyes took in three details: the Oxford University seal at the top of the first page, the phrase “Dear Colonel Holmes,” and a line I still can't read without getting slightly sick to my stomach: “I want to thank you, not just for saving me from the draft …”

  My knees went wobbly; lack of sleep and scandal fatigue were taking their toll. That's it. We're done. I told Mark we'd get back to him, although I had no idea what we would say. But my overdeveloped damage control instincts kicked in immediately. The letter's a fake, I decided as I took it over to Clinton. The Republicans are at it again. They're doing to us what they did to Muskie.

  That had to be it. The alternative was too grim.

  Inside the terminal, Paul, James, Bruce, Clinton, and I squeezed into a small men's room. Hillary marched in right behind us. For a minute or two we silently passed the pages back and forth. Hillary spoke first. “Bill, this is you! I can hear you saying this.”

  So much for the dirty-trick defense. So much for my fantasy of making the Republicans pay for every nasty act from Watergate to Willie Horton. Hillary not only authenticated the letter, she seemed moved by it — misted by a nostalgic memory of the Bill Clinton she fell in love with across the stacks at the Yale Law Library.

  You guys can relive Woodstock some other time. Again, the generation gap. “This must have been what they were all going through in 1969,” Paul told me later, “while you and I were asking if we could stay up late to watch Mod Squad.” The two of us were convinced that the press would use the letter to prove that Clinton dodged the draft. James had a different take. “This letter is our friend,” he said. “If you read the whole letter, you end up thinking, ‘I wouldn't mind having a president who could write a letter like that when he was twenty-one.’”

  We both turned out to be right. But at that moment I was certain we were holding the political equivalent of a death warrant. Although it was a thoughtful letter that expressed both respect for the military and principled opposition to the Vietnam War, Clinton didn't post it until after he had received a high number in the draft lottery. At a minimum, it suggested that Clinton was stringing Holmes along and holding on to his coveted ROTC slot until after he was certain he wouldn't be drafted. I also couldn't believe that we hadn't known about the letter, and just wanted the whole ordeal to be over. How long will people give us the benefit of the doubt? How much of this stuff can they take? How much more can I take?

  Our next stop was the Stonyfield Farms yogurt factory in Londonderry, where Jim Wooten would do the interview we had promised Halperin. As Clinton toured the factory floor, I stayed in the back room, where I lay on the floor feeling sorry for myself. Staring up at the ceiling, I felt as if I were back on the high school wrestling mat, just before a match against someone who would probably kick my butt. At least it will be over soon. We'll be knocked out of the race in eight days, and here's where it all began to end. On the cold stone floor of a yogurt factory, waiting for the final interview. Happy birthday.

  Begala was as bleak as I was. We tried to prep Clinton, but there was really nothing we could say. Only he knew what had happened and why. Wooten taped a short interview before turning off the camera and asking for five minutes alone with Clinton. Paul, Halperin, and I watched them talk through a window in the hall, trying to read their lips for any sign of how it was going. Expecting the worst, I was certain that Wooten was just doing his best to soften the blow of a killer story. Neither of them said a word after they shook hands, and we parted company with Wooten. But thirty minutes later, Ha
lperin beeped me. The story was off. We had a stay of execution.

  But not for long. The next day, Nightline also had the letter. I was in a van with Paul and James when my pager vibrated with a call from Ted Koppel. We pulled off the road at a nearby hotel to find a pay phone. No luck, so in what seemed like an essential extravagance, we rented a room. The clerk raised an eyebrow but must have decided that what three consenting adults did in the privacy of a paid-up room was none of his business. We passed him a credit card and made the call.

  I asked Koppel how he had received the letter. “It's my impression it came from the Pentagon,” he replied. The Pentagon? Then maybe the Republicans do have something to do with this. Isn't it illegal to rifle through someone's draft records? Do we have enough evidence to actually make the charge? Or is Koppel trying to trick us into coming on? Within fifteen minutes we were back on the road and pumped up again by the prospect that Clinton really was the victim of a dirty trick.

  We made the Pentagon charge, but it didn't pan out. And Clinton went on Nightline. Answering the questions was our only hope. Koppel first asked Clinton if he wanted to read the letter on the air, but we weren't that dumb. A clip of Clinton reading one damaging line out of context would be replayed endlessly. Instead, Koppel read the letter and gave Clinton the whole show to explain himself. Clinton was masterful — calm about the past, impassioned about the future, with just the right degree of indignation about the kind of issues that ought to matter in electing a president. In the final minute of the show he squeezed in a sterling sound bite: “Ted, the only times you've invited me on this show are to discuss a woman I never slept with and a draft I never dodged.”

  Even had I known for certain then that Clinton's closing statement wasn't really true, I would have had a hard time admitting it to myself. I was in battle mode, and nearly anything we did, I believed, was justified by what was being done to us. Tabloid reporters were prowling the streets of Little Rock, offering cash for stories about Clinton. Almost all the rumors swirling around our increasingly gothic campaign — that Clinton sanctioned drug running from Arkansas's Mena Airport, that Clinton was a cocaine fiend, that Hillary was a secret lesbian — were both malicious and untrue. And on the Friday before the vote, one more person emerged from the more recent past with a story that could sink us.

  I first heard about it while Clinton was appearing at a senior citizens' center in Nashua. All through the afternoon he listened to the testimony of people struggling to get by. When a tiny, frail woman named Mary Annie Davis confessed tearfully that she had to choose each month between buying food or medicine, he knelt down, took her hand, and comforted her with a hug. Even the hardest-bitten reporters in the room were wiping tears from their eyes.

  I missed it. As we walked in, a reporter for the Nashua Telegraph pulled me out of the entourage and confronted me on the sidewalk. “We have to talk,” she said. “I have a witness to a recent conversation that Governor Clinton had with you and Bruce Lindsey about getting Gennifer Flowers a job in state government. He says you were planning to pay her off.”

  “I have no idea what you're talking about,” I said, “but you can't run a story like that without giving us a chance to respond.” We agreed that at six that evening, Bruce and I would go to the Telegraph and meet with the editors — our only hope of killing the story.

  James was hanging with some reporters on the edge of Clinton's event. Pulling him into the laundry room, I paced around in my parka while he sat on a washing machine and tried to calm me down. Now I saw a different side of what Clinton was going through; someone was telling stories about me too, and sullying my reputation. Over time, I developed calluses against the personal attacks that come with high-stakes politics — that's the price that accompanies the privilege. Then I was distraught. I knew I wasn't guilty, but if the charge was published at the height of the New Hampshire primary, a lot of my peers would see it and believe it despite my denial. We'd tank in New Hampshire, and the last thing anyone would hear about me was that I tried to get a government job for the governor's girlfriend.

  A part of me was almost hoping we'd get knocked out. Then, at least, I wouldn't have to face another reporter asking me another question about another story I couldn't control. The hoofbeats weren't just in my head anymore; they were everywhere. The whole experience was dirty, draining, and depressing. So much for recreating Bobby Kennedy's crusade. We looked more like Gary Hart's campaign every day.

  Bruce and I arrived at the Telegraph, where the editorial board was behind closed doors. Then a man emerged from the conference room with a young girl, and it all came together in an instant. The man had been our driver on a Saturday in early January, a lifetime ago. All afternoon he talked about a charity he'd started to send household goods to Russia. Perfectly good cause, but the driver's chatter had a manic quality. We made a vague commitment to appear at his booth at an upcoming fair but forgot about it in the tumult that followed.

  This must be payback for the broken promise. When Bruce and I denied the charge and explained the situation to the editorial board, they killed the story. I'd like to think it was our persuasive power that carried the day. More likely they realized the allegation was too thin. It might not have made a difference even if it were published, but then I was sure it was the tipping point — the final piece of information that would make everyone conclude all at once that Clinton was more trouble than he was worth.

  I wish this episode had ended there, but it didn't. While the driver had a final word with the editorial board, his daughter — who couldn't have been older than eight or nine — waited for him in the lobby. Flushed with our tiny victory and frayed from a month of crises, I approached the driver's daughter on our way out: “Your father,” I said, looking at her as if she were to blame for all our troubles, “is a really bad man.” I felt ashamed the second the words escaped my mouth, but it was too late. The girl just stared back at the brutal zealot I'd become, and I couldn't argue with her, or change the subject, or even spin myself.

  The final weekend was a blur. I was sure all was lost, but Clinton demonstrated the power of pure will. He was determined to touch and talk to every voter in New Hampshire. We staffers left the suite in shifts to accompany him, but we were superfluous. This was all about Clinton — his pride, ambition, and anger, his need to be loved and his drive to do good. Watching him made me wonder if you had to be a little crazy to become president. What did it do to you to want something so badly?

  What I didn't realize at the time was how the focus on Clinton's problems was paradoxically helping him, turning the New Hampshire primary into a referendum on what politics should be about. Clinton was channeling public disgust and transforming it into a reason to vote for him. The best way to strike a blow against the obsession with scandal was to vote for the candidate most plagued by scandal. Never mind that Clinton brought many of the problems on himself; he also offered a way out — and he was a kick to watch. No matter how hard you hit him, he popped up smiling.

  On election day, I was so dark that I couldn't pull myself out of bed. The bond Clinton was forming with the voters of New Hampshire wasn't showing up in our polling, which predicted we would fade to third or worse. Clinton kept his promise to keep pushing for votes “till the last dog dies,” but there was nothing the rest of us could do. James and I considered killing time by going to see Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey at the Cineplex across the street, but we didn't want to be far from a phone when the first exit polls came in.

  A bunch of us retreated from our makeshift headquarters and gathered on the twin beds in Carville's room. James was pacing around like a medieval penitent, lightly lashing himself over each shoulder with a small piece of rope. Stan and Mandy ducked in and out with news from their network contacts. On the road with Clinton, Dee Dee called in for updates, and our New Hampshire communications director, Bob Boorstin, joined us to help draft that night's speech. When the exit polls started to come in, we ordered cheeseburgers from room serv
ice and started banging out a victory memo on Bob's laptop.

  Of course, coming in second to Tsongas wasn't technically a victory, but it sure felt like one after all we'd been through. Even Clinton, the eternal optimist, seemed surprised by the news. I spent the late afternoon with him as he sat through a series of satellite interviews to news outlets in the states we would visit next. Between questions, I fed him updates. Although he had been suspicious of exit polls ever since they falsely predicted his reelection as governor in 1980, he silently signaled his growing excitement by slowly pumping his fist just below camera range. “I'll feel like Lazarus if these poll numbers hold up,” he told me as we headed to the elevator, where he pounded his open palms on the closing metal doors.

  Our near-victory suppressed my new doubts about Clinton. Success has a way of doing that. My initial infatuation was maturing into a more complicated bond. Clinton wasn't a hero, just a man, with flaws as profound as his gifts. But he was by far the best politician I'd ever met. He had more ideas than anyone in the race, his heart was in the right place, and he refused to quit. Together, we still might do some good, and he was still my ticket to the top.

  Late that night, we staffers took a victory lap around the bar of the Sheraton Tara, accepting congratulatory cocktails from reporters just steps from the lobby where we'd been mauled on Gennifer and the draft. Across the bar, I spotted Pat Buchanan, holding court with a bare-toothed grin. Beer-and-shot populist in union halls by day, sipping an incongruous chardonnay with his Beltway friends at midnight, he'd shocked President Bush that day by winning 37 percent of the Republican vote. With Bush that weak, working in the White House wasn't just a fantasy anymore.

  But we had to keep the hoofbeats at bay.

  4 HIGHER UP, DEEPER IN

  The Secret Service agents made it real. The morning after the New Hampshire primary, when I cracked open my door to collect the newspapers, there they were, guarding the governor's suite down the hall. Molded ear pieces, microphones hidden in their sleeves, magnums strapped to their backs — concrete reminders that Clinton might be a target of more than the tabloids. All through the fall I had a recurring fantasy about wrestling a gunman to the ground to save Clinton. From now on I would share that imagined responsibility with the United States Government.