All Too Human: A Political Education

by George Stephanopoulos

  Clinton just laughed when I skidded through the door to the anteroom where he was getting made up for the cameras. As I handed him his speech, we reminisced for a minute about our mutual friend, Father Tim Healy. A month before, Healy had died suddenly. But his notes for Clinton's Inaugural Address were saved on his computer, then passed on to Clinton through me, and his “forcing the spring” theme was at the heart of the final draft. I wished the president luck. All he said was “Thanks,” but he looked me in the eye and took my hand between both of his. He knew this was an important moment for me, the last one we'd share before he became president.

  The ceremony passed in a flash. Joan and I were sitting about ten rows back, and the seats around us were filled with the old guard and the new, senators, Supreme Court justices, generals in full dress uniform. I couldn't see much over all the women's hats, and the mile-long crowd's cheers reached us in time-delayed waves. But the ceremony transported me outside of my present harried self. For a moment I left behind logistics and little decisions, lost myself in the constitutional splendor, and daydreamed about what we had done and what we might do: Force the spring.

  Joan and I spent the early afternoon walking our way back up Pennsylvania Avenue. We waded through the crowds, soaking up the carnival atmosphere yet eager to reach our destination — the walled compound where I would spend nearly every waking moment for the next four years. Until now, the White House had always been a slightly alien place for me. It was where the president worked, and for as long as I had been in Washington, the president was a Republican. Before this week, I had been behind the gates only once, during the 1990 budget negotiations, but I never got past the lobby.

  Now we were ushered through the heavy oak doors to the cluster of staff offices surrounding the Oval. Except for the furniture and four TVs, the bulletproof vest was all that was left of Marlin's office, my office now, when Joan and I entered on inauguration day. Dust frames took the place of pictures on the walls. The bookshelves were bare, and empty file drawers stuck out into the room. A disemboweled computer stood on the corner of my desk; the hard drives in every terminal had been removed with the old regime. We were told later that they had to be examined to see if anyone in the White House had been involved in the illegal search of Clinton's passport files during the campaign, but then we were sure it was sabotage.

  Even lingering campaign paranoia, however, couldn't wreck this moment. Walking through the office door was like crossing the threshold of a new house. The room was empty but inviting, with a fireplace and wide view of the North Lawn; all it needed was a personal touch. Joan pressed her hand lightly to the wall, as if to prove it wasn't fake, that we were really here. Then we flopped full-length onto the couch, caught each other out of the corners of our eyes, and just started laughing out loud.

  A day later, I was sitting on the same couch with my feet on the coffee table, sipping a Diet Coke and wondering what went wrong. My debut was a bomb, that much I knew. What I couldn't gauge was just how bad it was, and how unprepared we all were for what lay ahead. The campaign, coupled with my own genetic code, had trained me to flatten my feelings, to stay steady through the daily, hourly, ups and downs. I just kept plowing through — to the next task, the impending crisis, the decision that just couldn't wait.

  Today that decision was Zoe Baird, but it was already out of our hands. No matter what we did, she wasn't going to be attorney general. The only questions were how this had happened, and how to get out. Her selection, the ensuing controversy, and the way we responded were emblematic of our early troubles.

  Smooth and supersmart, Zoe Baird had worked her way up from “red diaper” baby to chief counsel of Aetna Insurance by doing well at all the right schools and impressing mentors like Warren Christopher in early career stints at the Carter White House and top-flight law firms. She would have made an excellent White House counsel but had neither the high-level government experience nor the close personal connection with the president that had always been the traditional requirements for attorney general.

  She did, however, meet the qualification we had allowed to become the bottom line. Although I can't point to a discrete moment of decision, we worked from the assumption that keeping Clinton's pledge to have an administration that “looked like America” meant appointing a woman to one of the “big four” cabinet posts: state, treasury, defense, or justice. This was a worthy goal, but by turning it into a quota, we put ourselves in a box. After twelve years out of power, the pool of Democrats with high-level government experience was limited; the pool of women Democrats was even smaller. But now that the first three positions were filled (with men), the transition team was scrambling to find the best female attorney general rather than the best attorney general period. Arguably more experienced candidates, like federal judge Patricia Wald, took themselves out of the running, and Clinton wasn't about to appoint a Republican as attorney general, so Baird rose to the top of the list on the strength of her solid credentials and her connection to Christopher.

  If Baird had not had a “nanny problem,” she would probably have been confirmed and performed competently as attorney general. But she didn't have the independent stature to survive a confirmation battle, and a new president could hardly be expected to take a stand on the principle of not paying your taxes. That all dictated that we should never have let Baird's nomination get as far as it did, but our systems failed us at every crucial step.

  Christopher was understandably but overly protective of his protege, and his lawyer's reasoning told him that Baird's problem was survivable because she had relied on legal advice in making the arrangements. Clinton pressured himself to make a decision that was both quick and historic, and he relied too much on his lawyer, Christopher, rather than his political gut. The rest of us on the political team just blew it. Though we were brought into the process late, we still should have raised more of a fuss. But our antennae went down after the election, and we lost our common touch. Other elites missed the story too, because they all had housekeepers, many of them illegal, almost all with unpaid tax bills. The first New York Times story was a brief item buried inside the paper, and Senator Orrin Hatch, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, endorsed Zoe despite her admission. The normal political signals were flashing yellow, not red, and we plowed through the light.

  What we failed to see was Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich bearing down on us from the right. They started to hammer us as self-indulgent, overprivileged yuppies who thought it was permissible to break the law if you were wealthy and went to Yale. The attacks were effective, and unlike many of their later attacks against Clinton and our administration, not entirely unfair. Absent the grassroots firestorm right-wing talk radio ignited, we might have gotten away with the Baird nomination, but that's what it would have been — getting away with it.

  So that's where we were on our first day — managing a crisis before we had functioning computers, before we understood our political opponents and the White House press corps, before we even knew how to work the phones. The president tried to dial out a couple of times, but every time he picked up the receiver, an operator picked up on the other end, which he didn't seem to like at all. We may have been snakebit, but we were also suffering from our own ineptitude and arrogance. We had won a campaign, but we didn't know yet how to govern — and we didn't know what we didn't know.

  The Baird nomination ordeal lasted through the first night. Christopher was dispatched to convince her to withdraw, but she relented only after we agreed to take the hit. Her letter to the president stressed that she had fully disclosed her household situation to the transition team, and the letter we drafted for Clinton praised Baird and accepted full responsibility for the failed nomination.

  Clad in sweatpants and a baseball cap, chomping on a banana smeared with peanut butter, the president came down from the residence after midnight to sign the letter. He was in a pretty good mood, considering — the product of relief from a crisis put to r
est and his usual late-night second wind. He told the group of staff waiting for him in my office that he was disappointed to lose Zoe, but added that he was happy to end it with a measure of grace. After he signed the letter, I introduced him to the man who wrote it, my new deputy, David Dreyer. Leaning back into my leather chair, his feet up on the curved wooden desk, the brim of his cap pulled down to his eyes, Clinton stared at Dreyer's long beard and asked when he had started.

  “Yesterday,” answered David.

  The president smiled. “Well,” he said. “It sure didn't take you long to screw everything up.”

  6 BUNGEE JUMPING WITHOUT A ROPE

  The president slammed the magazine on his desk with enough force to kill a family of cockroaches. But on that first Monday morning of our first full week in the White House, his target was another species of vermin — leakers. “They're killing us,” he fumed. A column in Time carried a challenge from a “top administration official” to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. “He's not one of us,” the unnamed blowhard swaggered. “We'll roll right over him if we have to.”

  Since Moynihan's committee controlled the heart of our agenda — health care, welfare, the budget — it was the president who had to roll over first. “If I find out who did this, they'll be gone, I promise you that,” he told Moynihan over the phone. “Well, if you're upset, I'm not,” Moynihan responded graciously, but he would remember this slight and exact his revenge many times over the next few years. And the president was upset. The fact that he had to waste political capital apologizing for something he didn't do drove him crazy. Standing behind his desk, hammering his index finger into his magazine, he ordered me to find the offender and fire him.

  Such a search-and-destroy mission was futile, because the insult could have come from any one of a hundred people. But I was as angry as Clinton. Not only because I didn't want to be blamed for bad leaks, but also because I'd be expected to answer for them in press briefings, where other reporters would take the quotes as evidence that my podium responses were spin and the phantom's analysis was unvarnished truth. That was often the case, but not always. Sometimes a colorful anonymous quote just fits the reporter's thesis more snugly than on-the-record boilerplate; sometimes it reflects the staffer's personal wish more than the president's official position; sometimes it sounds more candid simply because it isn't the party line.

  All administrations obsess about leaks. But the underlying attitude the Time comment betrayed was even more damaging than our paranoia about the enemy within. Through this one anonymous official, it seemed as if our administration were revealing its self-satisfied, self-destructive subconscious.

  “He's not one of us. … We'll roll right over him if we have to.”

  Most of us were discreet enough not to say such stupid things, but that didn't always stop us from acting as if we believed them. We saw ourselves as smart, and tough, and good; above all, we had won, deposed an incumbent president. Now we had work to do, lots of it. Sure, it wouldn't be easy, but we'd waited a long time — the country had waited a long time — for our chance to change America, and we were going to do it all in one hundred days, just like FDR. Nothing was going to stand in our way.

  Or so we thought.

  The Moynihan insult was merely an irritant compared to our other problems that first week. We didn't have a new nominee for attorney general. We didn't have an economic plan yet, but we were already getting hit for dropping the middle-class tax cut, and Monday's Post reported (correctly) that we were also considering an energy tax that would amount to a middle-class tax increase. Three people were killed in a shooting at the CIA, and we had a showdown that afternoon with the Joint Chiefs of Staff over gays in the military.

  “Roll right over them. You're commander in chief. Order them, just like Truman did when he demanded full integration in 1948.” That's what our gay and lesbian supporters wanted us to do. David Mixner, the president's old friend and leading gay fund-raiser, argued that Clinton should issue an executive order lifting the ban on homosexuals in the military and tell the Joint Chiefs that he expected them to implement it with enthusiasm.

  I wish Mixner could have been in the Roosevelt Room on the afternoon of January 25, when all four service commanders — army, navy, air force, marines — entered in full uniform with their chairman, Colin Powell. On our first postelection visit to Washington, Clinton and Powell had met for a friendly late-afternoon talk about this and other issues in a Hay-Adams hotel suite overlooking the White House. But today was different — high noon, not high tea; a summit, not a visit.

  The president stepped around the oblong oak conference table and welcomed the chiefs one by one. Then the delegations took their seats — the military on one side, the president's team on the other, Powell and Clinton facing each other across the center of the table. Multicolored military service flags stood at one end of the room; Teddy Roosevelt's Nobel Prize sat on a mantel at the other. Oil portraits of both Roosevelts looked down on the scene. I sat below them, behind Clinton, in a chair against the wall — seen but not heard.

  It started out pleasantly enough. The president's navy stewards poured coffee and passed around plates of Pepperidge Farm cookies. The chiefs congratulated Clinton on his victory. But while Clinton was their host and their boss, he didn't hold the balance of power in the room. Yes, he was commander in chief, but Clinton's formal powers were bound by the fact that he was a new president, elected with only 43 percent of the vote, who had never served in the military and stood accused of dodging the draft. Presidential power, in Neustadt's classic formulation, is the “power to persuade,” but the chiefs weren't there to be persuaded, and they had the congressional troops they needed to fortify their position. Their message was clear: Keeping this promise will cost you the military. Fight us, and you'll lose — and it won't be pretty.

  Our initial skirmish with the military was a war that couldn't be won. One by one, the chiefs made that point to Clinton in measured but uncompromising tones. The crew-cut marine commander, Carl Mundy, was most vehement; he saw it as an issue of right versus wrong, military discipline versus moral depravity. But Colin Powell was the most effective. He leaned his thick forearms into the table, his clasped hands pointing straight at the president, and laid down a marker: The armed forces under Clinton's command were in “exquisite” shape, he said. We shouldn't do anything to put that at risk. We'd never had full civil rights in the military, and it would be impossible to maintain morale if gay and straight soldiers were integrated.

  The president stood his ground, but his voice was still soft and scratchy from the inaugural all-nighters. He said he intended to keep his commitment, making the irrefutable point that gays and lesbians had served — and were serving — in the military both honorably and well. The only question, he said, is whether they should have to live a lie. “I want to work with you on this,” he told the chiefs.

  I was proud of his argument, but I also knew that we had no cards to play. If we didn't work out a compromise with the chiefs, they would sabotage us on the Hill. While they were obligated to obey their commander, they had the right to present their personal views to congressional committees publicly. That's all we needed: the top military brass led by Colin Powell, lined up in a row in direct confrontation with a new president who, they said, was sacrificing national security for the sake of a campaign promise to a special interest — all live on CNN.

  Impassioned testimony from the highest-ranking black man in America denying the parallels between skin color and sexual orientation would trump our strongest civil rights argument for ending the ban, and legislation overturning an executive order would fly through both houses of Congress by veto-proof margins. Gays serving in the military would be denied new protection, and the president would have another embarrassing defeat his first week on the job. The rest of the country would wonder what happened to the moderate “New” Democrat they had elected to fix the economy. Nobody had told them tha
t his opening legislative fight would be gays in the military. Nobody had told us either; in fact, it was the last thing we wanted. Like so much else in those first few months, it just seemed to spin out of control.

  I had first encountered the issue when candidate Clinton spoke at Harvard on October 30, 1991. During the postspeech Q & A, a student questioned Clinton about discrimination against gays and lesbians in the military. If they want to serve their country, Clinton replied, they ought to be able to do it openly. The exchange was so unremarkable that it wasn't highlighted in press accounts of Clinton's appearance. After that, Clinton repeated his position at a couple of fund-raisers before gay groups and in a questionnaire for the Human Rights Campaign Fund, but it wasn't mentioned in the convention speech or our advertisements, and it didn't come up in the debates. Fearing that pressing the issue would make them look intolerant, the Bush campaign never brought it up, and Ross Perot came out against lifting the ban one day, then took it back the next. Gays in the military was the stealth issue of the 1992 campaign.

  A week after the election, Clinton gave a Veterans Day speech to reassure skeptics that he honored the military and would strengthen our armed forces as commander in chief. He didn't mention gays in the military because it wasn't one of our immediate priorities. But a federal court had just ruled that the navy should reinstate a sailor named Keith Meinhold, who had been discharged for being gay. In light of that ruling, NBC's Andrea Mitchell asked Clinton if he would fulfill his campaign pledge to end discrimination against homosexuals in the military. “I want to,” Clinton replied blandly. “How to do it, the mechanics of doing it, I want to consult with military leaders about that. There will be time to do that.”