All Too Human: A Political Education

by George Stephanopoulos

  My job on Friday was to prevent that from happening — to find some way for Kimba to postpone her withdrawal until after the evening news, and to convince the networks that legislation affecting millions of families was more newsworthy than whether one person whom most of the country had never heard of was still in the running for attorney general. But my negotiations with Kimba's husband, Time political columnist Michael Kramer, deteriorated into a shouting match, and when I confronted the network correspondents with my case, they just laughed. On the news-value meter, an expected legislative accomplishment was no match for a political gaffe. While I understood their argument, I was apoplectic — at Judge Wood's failure to disclose the situation fully and our failure to ferret out the information earlier, at the media's insatiable appetite for bad news and our uncanny ability to provide it.

  I was also upset about losing another weekend. We couldn't catch a break — and I needed one. Joan was coming down from her judicial clerkship in Philadelphia for a “talk,” something I wouldn't be able to concentrate on while cleaning up the Kimba debacle all day Saturday. Joan tried to be understanding but became understandably annoyed as the day wore on. I would dash out of Oval Office meetings and swear we'd be done in less than an hour. Then another. And another. By seven o'clock, we were still discussing options, and Clinton invited a group of us up to the residence for dinner and more discussion with Hillary. Now I really had to choose: my girlfriend or my glamorous job. False choice, I decided (Clinton was teaching me well). “Sir, I don't want to impose,” I said, “but would you mind if Joan joined us? It would be a real treat for her.” False choice, maybe, but I was oblivious then to how inappropriate my request was, professionally and personally.

  “Sure, bring her on up,” Clinton said. Hillary made Joan feel at home, and we spent hours going over names, even leafing through the congressional directory in search of the perfect candidate for attorney general. The president consulted others over the phone: David Boren, Bill Bradley, even Carville. By the end of the evening, he had settled on Judge Richard Arnold, an old friend on the federal bench in Arkansas. But Arnold didn't work out, so we were back at square one.

  Soon I was too — as a single man. The evening was special; the sense of privilege that accompanies dinner at the White House is somehow enhanced when you're wearing jeans in the family's private solarium on the third floor. But it was also Joan's final straw, a sure sign of where my heart was. First the campaign, then the transition, now this. My job would always come first. She dumped me a week later — exactly what I deserved.

  But my job did come first, for better or worse. Besides, I didn't have time to be lonely, with work consuming twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day, six days a week, and several hours on Sunday. Every day was a dozen meetings, a hundred phone calls, a new crisis, another first.

  A short time later, Janet Reno was appointed attorney general, but most of our time behind closed doors was spent struggling with our number one campaign promise — an economic plan to “get the country moving again.” From election day on, we'd been in endless meetings about how to reconcile our incompatible campaign promises: to reduce the deficit, cut middle-class taxes, and increase investments in research, education, and training. Our economic team was split into battling camps: National Economic Council Director Bob Rubin, Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, and Budget Director Leon Panetta were the deficit hawks, with Gore on their side as the champion of a new energy tax; liberal Labor Secretary Bob Reich led the charge for new investments, assisted by Gene Sperling and me. But Gene and I saw ourselves above all as guardians of the campaign promises. Our job was to see that what we did conformed to what we said we would do. Too bad that wasn't really possible. All our campaign estimates were off: The deficit was now larger than we had projected, our investments cost more, and our proposed budget cuts saved less.

  The president presided over the rolling Roosevelt Room meetings in shirtsleeves, with glasses sliding down the end of his nose. Sometimes it felt more like a college bull session than presidential policy making. Clinton let everyone have a say, played us off against one another, asked pointed questions, and took indecipherable notes. But the reminders of who we were and what we were doing were never far away. Late one night, we ordered pizzas. When they arrived, the president grabbed a slice with the rest of us and lifted the dripping cheese to his lips. But just before he took his first bite, an agent placed a hand on his shoulder and told him to put it down. The pie hadn't been screened, and the way the president frowned when the steward replaced his hot pizza with stale cookies reminded me of the old Peanuts Halloween special. While all the other kids got candy, Charlie Brown got a rock.

  The economic plan we finally developed also seemed disappointing at first to a liberal like me. We had to drop the middle-class tax cut and drastically reduce the human capital investments proposed in the campaign. But we were hamstrung by the size of the deficit and the demands of the bond market. If we didn't reduce the deficit, the Federal Reserve and the market wouldn't force interest rates down; if interest rates stayed high, the economy wouldn't create jobs and growth. I didn't fully appreciate it then, but to achieve our overall goals for the economy, we had to sacrifice some specific promises. But many survived: the earned income tax credit for the working poor; our investments in education, including a national direct student loan program; and the Americorps national service proposal. Maybe we couldn't achieve everything all at once, but we were making progress.

  We were still fiddling with the numbers on Monday, February 15, the day Clinton was set to give an Oval Office address designed to break the bad news on taxes before he outlined the popular agenda items in the State of the Union two days later. All day long Clinton scrawled over the text in black felt marker, ignoring the clock. I gave up on getting an advance copy to the press. At 8:48, the text was loaded into the TelePrompTer, and Clinton raced through a single practice before the networks went live at nine.

  Later that evening, I had to give my own talk to the Judson Welliver Society. Named after the “literary clerk” to Calvin Coolidge who was the first White House speechwriter, the society was a group of former White House scribes from both parties who met periodically at the home of William Safire, the Nixon speechwriter and New York Times columnist. That night they gathered to critique the new president's speech and to ask me some off-the-record questions about the new team.

  I arrived after ten, still flustered from the day's events, but we thought the speech had gone well, and the president was pleased. The verdict from the jury sequestered in Safire's basement was not so favorable; they thought the “class warfare” rhetoric was too hot and the delivery too hurried. Arrayed before me were speech-writers from every president since Eisenhower — Stephen Hess, Ted Sorensen, Jack Valenti, Pat Buchanan, Jim Fallows, David Gergen, Peggy Noonan, and several more. While I was deflated a bit by their reviews, I felt protected in that room, as if I were being inducted into an exclusive club where I wasn't just Clinton's guy anymore but part of the community of people who would always know they had written for a president.

  Safire handed me a drink and asked me to say a few words about the process. As I recounted the chaotic details, the members began to stare, their jaws dropping in disbelief. Pat Buchanan finally broke the spell. “You mean, you mean,” he faltered, “he didn't practice for the first time until ten minutes before nine?” Incredulous murmurs swept over the tables. I hung in for a few more minutes, until Bush speechwriter Tony Snow finally exclaimed, “George, you guys are bungee jumping without a rope.”

  He was right, of course; I just didn't know it at the time. It's hard to develop a sense of perspective from the cramped quarters of the West Wing, which is at once the most intimate and transparent corner of the government, where you're bombarded hourly with more information, advice, and attacks than you can possibly absorb, where snap decisions may shape history and thoughtful deliberations can lead to nothing, where the mundane details of daily life mingle with
majesty and mystery. As the evening ended, Safire pulled me into his book-lined study and urged me not to get too lost in the details, to “take time, no matter what happens, to smell the Rose Garden.” No single piece of advice was more simple, more valuable, or more difficult to follow.

  I did my best. My favorite time was Saturday morning, before the president's weekly radio address. I'd get in a little later than usual, around eight. If the sun was out, I'd take my newspapers and coffee to the steps leading from the Oval Office to the Rose Garden, savoring the feeling of being the first one up in a quiet house that happened to feel like the center of the world. Once, I ventured out to lean against a tree on the South Lawn. Lost in my reading, I looked up to see three uniformed guards standing over me. The trees were wired, and alarms were ringing all over the White House grounds.

  Our first real Saturday crisis came on March 20, when Boris Yeltsin announced that he was dissolving the Russian parliament and assuming emergency powers. The president summoned Tony Lake and his deputy, Sandy Berger; Secretary Christopher and Strobe Talbott came over from the State Department, and I joined them around the small television in Clinton's private study to watch Yeltsin's speech on CNN.

  The president needed an official reaction. Yeltsin may have been acting outside of the new constitution, but he seemed to be doing it in the name of democratic reform. Talbott, a Russian expert and former journalist who had translated Khrushchev's memoirs, insisted that Yeltsin was the only horse the forces of reform had. His Oxford roommate, the president, agreed. But what if Yeltsin turned into a tyrant and we got tagged with a “Who lost Russia” challenge two months into the job?

  To avoid ratcheting up the sense of crisis, I was sent to the briefing room to read a statement instead of having the president, Lake, or Christopher appear in person. Now I was really nervous, aware that what I said would be dissected in capitals around the world. After the statement, I answered a few questions, sticking to our agreed-upon script: “We support democracy and reform, and Yeltsin is the leader of the reform movement.” That mantra gave us some wiggle room if Yeltsin abandoned reform, but not much.

  On Monday morning, there was a cream-colored envelope on my desk. Inside was a single handwritten sentence: “You could not have handled a delicate situation better. Sincerely, Richard Nixon.” Wow, Nixon thought I did a good job. Wait, Nixon's the president liberals like me are supposed to hate. I'm going native. Oh, c'mon, George, lighten up; it's just a nice note. Take it for what it's worth.

  I did, and secretly hoped the former president was watching a few weeks later when we had our first summit with Boris Yeltsin. The setting was an estate overlooking Vancouver's harbor, and the photo op was Clinton and Yeltsin strolling through the forest, an echo of the “walk in the woods” between Soviet and American negotiators that had sealed the European nuclear missile accord of the 1980s. The cold war was over, and this summit was about trade, investment, setting up a stock market, fighting crime. But both sides, and the media that covered us, were still a bit nostalgic for the dark brinksmanship of summits past, when adversarial superpowers seemed to hold the fate of the earth in their hands. In Vancouver, I delivered my first briefing to several hundred members of the international press, feeling less like a political operative than a patriot — America's spokesman.

  As always, though, the event was a mix of high politics and low. There was a quiet struggle over who would accompany the president to his private meeting with Yeltsin. Secretary Christopher and Tony Lake were veterans of the Carter administration, in which the rivalry between Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski had deteriorated into a daily battle. They wanted to avoid repeating that experience but still jockeyed for position. Each thought that he should get the seat that signaled prominence in the new president's universe. Which meant that Strobe Talbott ended up in the room by default. Since he spoke Russian and was outranked by both Christopher and Lake, having him there meant the other two didn't lose face.

  The person who was really losing his face that day was Yeltsin. He opened strong in his tête-à-tête with Clinton. “I liked him a lot, full of piss and vinegar, a real fighter,” Clinton told me after the meeting, the first of several authorized clichés I would pass to reporters on background. “I do my best when I'm under the gun; so does he,” Clinton continued. “This guy's not deterred by long odds, and now he's at the top of his form.”

  But Yeltsin's form faded as the day wore on. That afternoon, I bumped into Martin Walker, the Washington bureau chief for Britain's Guardian newspaper. He said that Yeltsin had had three scotches on the boat ride to Vancouver Island — on top of wine at lunch. At dinner, Yeltsin ignored his food and downed wine in single-gulp shots. Christopher slid me a note during the second course: “No food, bad sign. Boat ride was liquid.” By the end of the evening Yeltsin was extending his arms across the table toward “my friend Beeel,” and I finally understood what people meant when they described a drunk as “tight.” Yeltsin's skin was stretched across his cheeks in a way that nearly obliterated his features. With his slicked-back white hair, he looked like a boiled potato slathered in sour cream.

  Fortunately, it didn't seem to impair his performance the next morning. The summit was a success, marred only by a mistake on our part. Richard Gere, Cindy Crawford, Sharon Stone, and Richard Dreyfuss were all in Vancouver making movies. Dreyfuss had been a campaign supporter, and he invited the president over to his hotel suite for a late-night drink, which inevitably and justifiably led to clucks in the press for hobnobbing with Hollywood stars at a superpower summit.

  As we slogged through April, that seemed to be the least of our problems. Obsessed by the idea that we had to keep all our promises at once, we were trying to do too much too fast. My daily schedule illustrated an administration-wide condition. Here's a note I made to myself on the events of a single day, April 14, 1993:

  What a full day, too many meetings, too little time.

  Came in pressed. Saw P at nine before he left for summer jobs event He yelled at me for a few minutes, feeling he is losing control of his presidency. Feels we are making incremental, day-to-day decisions because we don't have a core vision. Fears that many of his appointees aren't committed to his goals. Also fears that his schedule and his government are not organized to achieve what he wants to achieve. Not enough time on welfare reform.

  We had a diverse, kaleidoscopic campaign: You can find justification for any of our actions sometime in the campaign.

  Our central dilemma is that the deficit has hamstrung us. We can't achieve all that we called for.

  Because we're not coming through on investments and stimulus, we feel more pressure to respond on abortion, gays, and other liberal issues. This is an unthinking kind of reaction. Our appointees are generally more liberal than our core vision.

  Jesse Jackson came in to see me. Even when you're alone with him, there's still an element of performance. Complained that the president is too quiet about jobs, and that he, JJ, isn't being talked to by the administration. Also wants P to appear on his CNN show. But he was most concerned about the upcoming anniversary of the L.A. riots (April 30). Thinks L.A. is about to blow.

  Tom Brokaw came in to discuss a prime-time special with Hillary and Katie Couric.

  Meeting with Mack's working group on stimulus strategy. VP reported on phone calls to Republicans. Final negotiations after initial vote.

  Met with Tony [Lake] on various subjects, including Bosnia.

  Met with Howard [Paster] on VAT and Bosnia.

  Press briefing.

  Lunch with Susan Zirinski, Dan Rather's producer. Doing a segment on people's dreams about Clinton.

  Meeting with Johnny Apple and Andrew Rosenthal on NYT's policy on background briefings. Interrupted by roomful of Hollywood stars: Billy Crystal, Christopher Reeve, Lindsay Wagner, Sam Waterston, and others, who came to discuss environmental policy. My office was part of the tour. Lots of phone calls.

  Meeting
with P on campaign finance.

  Meeting with P on stimulus strategy.

  Traded jokes with Susan Spencer [CBS White House correspondent]. Why don't Junior Leaguers like group sex? Too many thank-you notes. Told P.

  False alarm on King verdict in L.A.; just a sick juror.

  Talked Walter Kirn out of profiling me for NYT magazine.

  Health care meeting. Ira [Magaziner] presenting elements of plan. I'm listing my day's events during meeting because I'm too brain-dead to pay attention.

  Not far from an average day.

  When you're brain-dead, you make mistakes. My worst came the day of the FBI raid on cult leader David Koresh's compound in Waco, Texas. On April 19, as I stood at the podium for my daily noon briefing, CNN started broadcasting pictures of the compound in flames. Informed by his headquarters, CNN White House correspondent Wolf Blitzer asked me about the fire, but I had no idea what he was talking about. Then someone handed me a note, and I left the podium to find out what was going on.

  The rest of the day I was in constant contact with Associate Attorney General Webb Hubbell, who was monitoring the situation for the Justice Department. They didn't have good information on what was happening in the compound, or where David Koresh was, or whether the children were still alive. Later in the afternoon, I issued a statement saying the president was monitoring the situation and took full responsibility for its consequences, but the press was clamoring for the president in person. That's where I erred. Dee Dee Myers and Bruce Lindsey pushed to have the president do it, and he agreed at first. But I convinced him not to out of fear that if he said something that triggered Koresh to kill the kids who might still be alive, then we'd be culpable.

  My motive may have been unassailable, but my judgment was dead wrong. The odds were high that everyone inside had already perished and that nothing the president said could make the situation worse. Beyond that, the first rule in a presidential crisis is to take responsibility fully and openly. Don't duck. That's the Bay of Pigs lesson that should have been burned in my bones. When Attorney General Janet Reno appeared before the cameras, she was praised and the president was criticized, but it was my fault.