All Too Human: A Political Education

by George Stephanopoulos

  By the fall, the rest of the country was starting to believe that Clinton was one of a kind too. As his bus rolled across the Midwest and down through the South, he promised hope and personified change, which was exactly what people were looking for after eight years of Reagan and four more of Bush. In late September, Stan Greenberg conducted a national poll that tested all the charges the Bush campaign could throw at us and every rebuttal we would give. Nothing the Republicans could try would work. On paper, at least, the election was ours.

  Of course, we were usually way too superstitious to say so out loud. That would be like mentioning a no-hitter in the bottom of the eighth. But on the first Sunday in October at the Washington Hilton, we were revising a speech on the North American Free Trade Agreement that Clinton would give later that afternoon. Clinton had decided to endorse the treaty if it included provisions to protect labor rights and the environment, but getting the wording right in a way that didn't enrage our labor base was tough. The prep wasn't going well. Clinton cut it off and called me into the bedroom.

  He was lying on the bed in jeans and a T-shirt, propped up on pillows, with his speech draft and reading glasses lying untouched beside him. As I walked in, he launched into his ritual complaint about how nobody on his staff could write a speech. But I could tell that his heart wasn't in it. He gestured toward a chair by the bed, and when I sat down he just stared at me. Then he said it.

  “You think we're going to win, don't you?”

  He rarely asked me a direct question. We always seemed to be in the middle of a conversation, speaking in sentence fragments with a familiar tone. His more deliberate approach that morning was as significant as the fact that he was reading my mind. I hadn't said it to anyone and had barely acknowledged it to myself, but even I, the prince of pessimism, was optimistic. If he was asking, I had to answer.

  “Yes, sir,” I said with some solemnity. “I think we will.”

  “I do too.”

  His words seemed to hang there in the space between us. Maybe he hadn't intended to issue a kind of encyclical, but he knew that I knew this wasn't a random comment either. We had known each other for just over a year, and every moment had been dedicated to transforming this man from governor of Arkansas to president of the United States. When he said he expected to win, I felt it had to be true.

  Only years later did I realize that Clinton's unconvincing anger earlier that morning was somehow connected to growing awareness of his impending responsibilities — that his uneasiness was the product of hope and fear and God knows what else a man feels when it dawns on him that he might actually achieve the goal of a lifetime and become the most powerful single person on the planet. You say a lot of things in campaigns that you never really expect to be called on — you overpromise — but the closer you get to victory, the more weight every word carries. Clinton knew this, and he was starting to think more like a president than a candidate — more about how he would implement his agenda than whether he would get the chance. In the final weeks of the campaign, he salted his stump speeches with an important reminder: “We didn't get into this mess overnight; we won't get out of it overnight.”

  I left Clinton's room floating on the notion of victory, tethered by its prospective burdens. But as we entered the homestretch of the race, fear of success wasn't my big problem. I was much more scared of blowing our big chance. “Buyer's remorse,” Clinton called it. At the last minute, the voters might return to the devil they knew rather than take a chance on the new guy. We had seen it happen in Britain that spring, when Neil Kinnock, the Labour challenger to Prime Minister John Major, lost a big lead in the last few days of the campaign.

  The closer we got to election day, the more fearful we all became. With the press speculating openly about a Clinton landslide in public, we started to drive each other crazy in private. James stopped changing his underwear; I stopped sleeping. We were both convinced that Clinton's former chief of staff, Betsey Wright (who had joined the campaign to defend Clinton against attacks from his Arkansas past), had such a twisted relationship with Clinton that she was sabotaging the campaign by inadvertently giving damaging information to reporters under the guise of defending him. I was so on edge that at a dinner with some reporters, I lashed out at E. J. Dionne and stormed away from the table over a single adjective he used in an otherwise straight piece. Clinton, egged on by Hillary, obsessed about Perot: “I'm telling you — this guy's coming on, and it's all going to come from me.”

  Our anxiety peaked on the Thursday before election day. Bush had spent Wednesday barnstorming Ohio by train, and our overnight polls there showed a drop from seventeen points up to three points down in twenty-four hours. If the same tactic worked in Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin over the weekend, we could actually lose. CNN confirmed our fears by releasing a national poll that showed our overall lead had dropped to a single point, within the margin of error. Even though we suspected that CNN was cooking the results to inject a little excitement into the race, we couldn't be sure.

  As we all gathered around the speakerphone in my office for a strategy call that quickly turned into a screaming match, only Stan Greenberg was calm, maintaining the manner of a physician treating a roomful of hypochondriacs. The little box was vibrating from the force of fifteen people all talking at once. This was the last chance to change our ads before election day, and everyone wanted to win his or her own way: Hillary wanted to put up ads attacking Perot; Clinton wanted to defend Arkansas, which was now being portrayed in the Bush ads as a wasteland watched over by buzzards; the rest of us were seized by a bloodlust backed up by our research into what was working. All we wanted to do was keep our foot on Bush's neck by running “Read my lips” ads right up through election day.

  Clinton finally conceded. “All right,” he said. “I'm not saying I agree, but you guys do what you think is right.” It was a vote of confidence that failed to conceal a warning: “But if I lose this election, it'll be all your fault.”

  In my own craziness, that's how I was starting to think too. If we lose after holding a lead like this, it will be all our fault. Democrats all over the country will hate us. In the final days of the campaign, Carville and I spent more and more time crouched in my corner office, making dark jokes about our exile in Europe after allowing Bush the biggest comeback in presidential history. But our worries that Thursday ended when President Bush stopped his minisurge by calling Clinton and Gore “bozos” at a campaign rally in suburban Michigan. The next day, his fading hopes and our remaining fears were put to rest.

  After lunch on Friday, James ran into my office with his black gloves in the air. He was jumping up and down like an underfed club fighter who had startled himself by knocking out the champ, and screaming obscenities in the singsong meter of a nursery rhyme: “He's going to have a clus-ter-fuck; he's going to have a clus-ter-fuck.” “He” was President Bush. Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh had just indicted former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, and a note included in the indictment indicated that Bush had both known about and supported trading arms for hostages — a charge the president had repeatedly denied. The Weinberger note was the closest thing yet to a smoking gun. Bush's campaign was dead anyway, but this was the nail in the coffin.

  That night I did a little jig on the grave. I was at the gym when Michael Waldman, our campaign's specialist on Iran-Contra and other Bush scandals, beeped me to let me know that Bush was on Larry King Live, challenging Larry to “ask me anything.” I jumped into my car with a cell phone and dialed Tammy Haddad, King's executive producer. “Tammy,” I started, “Larry's letting Bush off the hook. How could he not know they were trading arms for hostages?”

  “Good question,” she replied. “Why don't you ask him yourself?” Figuring a little confrontation would make for good television, she gave me a special number to connect directly with the show.

  Good television, maybe, but was it smart politics? We had the lead, why take a chance? If I said something s
tupid and the election turned, then I personally — not Clinton or James or anyone else — could conceivably be responsible for the loss. It really would be all my fault. But we had come this far by never letting up, by being in their face every minute of every day. This was no time to change tactics.

  James was all for it, but I wanted higher clearance. I couldn't reach Clinton, so I tried Gore. Had he vetoed the idea, I would have backed off. Had he been unavailable, I would have had to make a choice. “Go for it,” Gore said. I dialed the number.

  As I waited on hold, all the moisture in my mouth drained into my palms. Suddenly, the line opened into what sounded like a wind tunnel. I was on the air. King announced a call from Little Rock, Arkansas, and for the first time in my life I was talking to a sitting president. “Mr. President, you asked us to find out what the smoking gun was,” I said, before citing the Weinberger memo as evidence that Bush had to know Iran-Contra was an arms-for-hostages deal.

  “May I reply?” Bush said, sounding peeved but still in control. He then surprised me by reciting my resume on national television. Where's he going with this? He told the viewers I was a very able young man who had once worked for Congressman Richard Gephardt. That's it, trying to tie me to the congressional Democrats, but pretty nice to call me “able” considering I'm trying to throw him out of office. Then he finally answered my question by saying that President Reagan didn't believe it was arms for hostages and that he believed President Reagan. Nothing new.

  Larry King: “George, want to respond?”

  President Bush: “I didn't come here to debate Stephanopoulos.”

  Wait a minute. He's debating six-foot chickens all over the country, but he won't debate me? King tried again to get me to respond, but Bush cut him off. He filibustered by praising me again, saying I was a “patient fellow” and that “every time we'd say something, he was out there with a —”

  A response. A rejoinder, a retort, anything. Just finish the sentence!

  “And they did a very good job on it,” the president concluded.

  In that spontaneous encounter, Bush revealed his state of mind and the condition of his campaign. He seemed to be acknowledging that our team was better than his. And by speaking in the past tense, Bush seemed to be admitting that the election was over — an idea that became even more explicit a moment later, when he offered what sounded to me like a presidential seal of approval: “So I would like to take this opportunity, because I might not have a chance to see him before the election, to commend him on all that.”

  Bush was the first presidential candidate I thought about working for and the only one I had ever worked against. Defeating him and his agenda had been the focus of my career for the last five years, and I had heard that my campaign press releases had gotten under his skin. One of the altar boys at my dad's church was a page at the Republican convention, and he attended a speech in which Bush complained about “some guy named Stenopoulos” who was always messing up his stories. But that was nothing compared to hearing the president of the United States praise me on Larry King Live. I hoped my parents were watching.

  Later that night, Clinton called to congratulate me. But from the tone of his voice I could tell that he was a little annoyed. And why not? Calling Larry King's producer was my job. But confronting an incumbent president was a risk, and not necessarily a prudent one. Good thing it had worked.

  “The wai-ai-ting is the hardest part.” Tom Petty's song was my anthem the last weekend. The last commercials were in the can and on the air, and the schedule was set. Only two news cycles to go: No new charge could hurt us now, and nothing more we could say about Bush would make any difference. People had made up their minds; they were going to take a chance on Clinton. But knowing that wasn't the same as believing it. James and I spent the final hours in my office figuring out how we could still manage to lose. All day Monday, he folded his body across the club chair in front of my desk and burned off nervous energy by ad-libbing a series of Clinton concession speeches:

  “We tried hard; we came up a little short. To those who embraced our crusade, we say thank you. … Throughout this campaign, I have endeavored to bring my message of change to the American people. Over forty-two percent of you embraced that message, and I am grateful to each and every one of you. Hillary and I will never forget you. The way you welcomed us into your homes, your towns, and your cities. It is not that we have lost this battle. It's whether we endure in a larger war.”

  “Shut up,” I pleaded, still half convinced Clinton would be saying these same words tomorrow night. Part of me simply couldn't believe we were going to win, just like President Bush and his team never really believed they would lose. But by late Monday afternoon, I began to relax. Lying on James's couch and bouncing a Wiffle-ball bat on my knee, I wondered what to call Clinton after we won. I had never called him Bill; it was always Governor. Tomorrow it would be — what? Mr. President-elect. Of course I'd address him as Mr. President in public, but I wondered if in private he'd still let me call him by what I thought of as his first name. Governor had a nice ring to it, kind of stately and Southern, like when you honored a senator who had served on the bench by calling him Judge.

  The final War Room meeting was Monday night — a time to say thank you and good-bye, to voice our hopes for the days ahead. More than a hundred of us were crowded together on the floor, standing on tables, spilling out into the hallway, our numbers expanded by family and fans from all over the country. My job was to introduce James, but I hoped to be inspired, to say something that would sum up our collective experience, knowing that all of us in the room would always remember this night. Now I was crossing a threshold, from a person who had read history to one who had helped shape a slice of it; from a person who had dreamed about working in the White House to one who would do it; from a person who professed that politics could change peoples' lives to one who would have the chance to prove it.

  In a voice choked with fatigue, gratitude, and hope, I talked about Clinton and James, and summed up my expectations in a few sober sentences: “For the first time in a generation tomorrow, we're going to win. And that means that more people are going to have better jobs. People are going to pay a little less for health care, get better care. And more kids are going to go to better schools. So, thanks.”

  It wasn't soaring rhetoric, but I was a little scared, and my skeptical soul was aware of the all-too-human imperfections that prevent promises from being fulfilled. It had been a tumultuous campaign, upsetting and exciting at the same time. It had toughened me up, hardened me more than I liked, but I still believed we could make it all worthwhile with what we would do. Camus spoke to me that night in a passage I had carried in a notebook for years: “Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don't help us, who else in the world can help us do this?”

  For James, the obligations would end. His job was done, and his speech that night was a version of the ode to brotherhood and honor and battles well fought that Shakespeare's Henry V delivered to his troops on Saint Crispin's eve. James talked about love and labor as the two most precious gifts a person could give. He said his work was finished, and as tears clouded his eyes and quivered his body, he thanked the kids he'd been tormenting for months and told them he loved them.

  For a moment we were silent, subdued by the private feelings of one man and the public weight of what lay before us. Then the room broke into a chant — “One more day! One more day!” — and when Clinton's voice cracked through the speakerphone in the middle of the table, the room erupted in a cheer that I could have listened to forever.

  Outside, the streets were blocked by tractor trailers and satellite trucks, the Old Statehouse had been transformed into a Hollywood soundstage, and downtown was teeming with people ready to party. Later that night, our celebration was almost spoiled by a final sleazy attack: A Republican congressman called an airport press conference
to accuse Clinton of sleeping with a reporter on the campaign plane. At least all that will end tomorrow.

  After the eleven A.M. exit polls confirmed an electoral college landslide, election day was a blur of high fives and hugs. But Clinton didn't trust exit polls. Back in the mansion, he inhaled the results I fed him in hourly phone calls but refused to let himself believe them. Only when the official tally came in later that night did the anxious man revert to the hypercompetent pol. As I read off the list of states we'd won over my cell phone, Clinton became nonchalant. “I knew that. … Yeah, I figured we'd win there too.” I tried to thank him for changing my life. Helping him win was the best thing I'd ever done. But he wanted an update on Nevada.

  Our campaign relationship ended as it had begun. Two men at work, talking shop, a candidate and his staff. The formalities were for the rest of the world. They would get the waves and smiles, the gracious words, the promise to face the future with humility and hope. I got “How'd we do in Nevada?” My own personal victory speech. An ocean away, in my grandfather's village, the village where my father was born, they roasted lambs in the square for their young cousin making their name in America. Priests serve; immigrants succeed. Perhaps I'd done both.

  The next day, I drove out to the mansion for my first meeting with the president-elect. I called him Mr. President, of course; nothing else seemed possible once I saw him face-to-face. But this was a family visit Clinton and Hillary were in the den off the butler's pantry, a staircase below the bedroom where I had first been admitted to the Clintons' private world, a floor above the basement office that was now the operations center of the Little Rock White House.

  When I walked through the door, Clinton called me “Master of the Universe,” and the two of them wrapped me in a three-way hug. We were all washed out, but as we sipped tea and talked about the future, I could already see sparks beneath their pale skin and exhausted eyes. Their dream was just beginning, and they wanted me to “keep on doing what you did in the campaign.” Exactly what that meant would be worked out later; for the moment, it was just nice to hear.