All Too Human: A Political Education

by George Stephanopoulos

  No, I wasn't ready for that. I believed in our work and wanted to prove that I could take a punch. Just like my boss. On the flight back Monday afternoon, I plotted out a strategy. My touchstone was a piece of advice phoned in from former Congressman Tony Coelho: “Nobody will remember what happened to you. They'll remember how you handle it.” My first day back would set the tone.

  Tuesday morning it seemed as if everyone in town were stopping by on a condolence call or phoning in an encouraging word. Hillary, who had thoughtfully noticed that I hadn't fought my fate with off-the-record comments to reporters, called to say, “You're a class act, Mr. Stephanopoulos.” Warren Christopher walked into my office with moist eyes: “This can be a cruel town. I went through this under Carter. For a week, I was supposed to be secretary of state after Vance resigned, then I was passed over and everyone pounced.” Colin Powell said exactly what I wanted to hear: “I always feel better when you're in my meetings.” Washington elder Bob Strauss added exactly what I needed to hear: “You may be a young punk, but you've been around long enough to know that all this stuff doesn't make a bit of difference. Time and performance take care of these things.”

  Listening to the past-tense praise was a little like hearing my eulogies, which was fitting, because that afternoon I would have to perform the political equivalent of speaking at my own funeral. Gergen wasn't set to start for another week, and they hadn't decided who would do the press briefings once he came on board. So I had four more days of facing the reporters who'd become my tormentors. Tuesday noon was the start of my final run.

  “Nobody will remember what happened to you. They'll remember how you handle it.”

  My whole staff gathered in my office to help me prepare. The substance I could manage, but style would matter more. A little California sun helped, and I had shaved extra close that morning. Even more important was my opening line: Should I act as if nothing had happened and get right to work? No, that would ring false, look like I was in denial. Everyone was going to ask about it anyway. Someone suggested Mark Twain's old saw “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” No, too obvious and too defensive. What I needed was something light, a little ironic, with just the right touch of self-deprecation. I had to acknowledge that the press had won and show good-humored dignity in defeat. Gene Sperling came up with the line:

  “So … how was your weekend?”

  My comeback had begun.

  7 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

  Out of nowhere, P's half-brother turns up. P talked to mother about it. Agrees to call him before noon; nobody's home. We're trying to round up the Senate vote, NAFTA meeting, welfare reform meeting, prepare for G-7, but I spend much of the morning deciding what to do about the new half-brother. What does the P do? What do you do when you're forty-nine years old and you discover a brother you never knew you had? His mother didn't know either.

  Lots of Arkansas jokes in the WH. But this is a real human problem; there's no precedent. P going to call him, invite him to the WH. Just another odd moment. No advance warning on this one. Just something to deal with.

  Note to myself, June 21,1993

  Just another manic Monday. The day before, a Father's Day story in the Post broke the news that Bill Clinton had a second half-brother he'd never met, Henry Leon Ritzenthaler of Paradise, California. Their charming rogue father, a traveling salesman named William J. Blythe II, had died in a car accident three months before the boy who would be president was born.

  Back in Dogpatch. How could you not know you had a brother? That's what they'll say. Accuse us of covering up. Poor guy; can't catch a break. Every time he turns around another surprise pops out of his past. What's he going to say to his mom? What's she going to say to him? How do we explain this — and keep it from becoming another excuse to dissect Clintons “character”?

  These were my preoccupations as I followed my morning routine: up at six; drive down Connecticut Avenue to the Southwest Gate; wait while the German shepherd from the Secret Service K-9 division sniffs my Honda for hidden explosives; grab a black coffee from the basement mess and walk up the single flight to my new office.

  The room was a study in small. All the furnishings were miniature — from the twelve-inch television to the CD Walkman with four-inch speakers; from the spindly table five feet across to the squat club chair planted by the back door behind my desk. That door was the best. With its peephole peering directly into the president's private dining room, it meant that I was connected and protected.

  When it comes to White House offices, it's not the size that counts. Location, location, location. Proximity, like celebrity, is a source and sign of power. The closer you are to the president, the more people believe he listens to you. The more people believe he listens to you, the more information flows your way. The more information flows your way, the more the president listens to you. The more the president listens to you, the more power you have. This particular cubicle had even played a small role in history: Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield kept the Oval Office taping system in the back closet.

  In our White House, Clinton's longtime aide Nancy Hernreich had it first. But after Memorial Day, I didn't just covet that office — I needed it. All the other first-floor offices were taken — by the vice president, the national security adviser, the chief of staff, the press secretary, and they weren't going anywhere. I could have secured space in the basement, or even a spacious corner suite with eighteen-foot ceilings in the Old Executive Office Building across the street, but that would be like owning a palace in Siberia. Even if it was just a matter of inches, my new office had to be closer to the Oval than my old one.

  Proximity, after all, was now my professional reason for being. The public rationale for my job shift was to have me work “more closely” with the president. “One of the reasons for this move,” Clinton had said in the Rose Garden, “is that I have missed very badly, and I have needed, the kind of contact and support that I received from George in the campaign.” Putting me by the back entrance to the Oval would be proof that the president meant what he said, a sign that his kind words weren't just a graceful pat on the back as he pushed me out the door. Not quite Harry Hopkins being invited by FDR to live in the residence, but the next best thing — a space in the Oval Office suite.

  The trick was figuring out how to get the prize without groveling. Asking the president directly was out of the question. It would look petty and weak and make Clinton think I didn't take him at his word. Mack couldn't really help because he had his own job worries and was thinking about bolstering his position by commandeering the president's dining room (where Michael Deaver had worked for Reagan). Gergen was maneuvering for turf too. So I called on the two biggest guns I knew: my old friend James Carville and Clinton's pal Vernon Jordan, who had befriended me upon my arrival at the White House. Both understood power and the perception of power, and both would try to help. I still don't know exactly how it happened, but one day in early June, Vernon called to let me know that Nancy Hernreich was moving into a cubbyhole on the other side of the Oval that would put her even closer to Clinton, and that her office would be mine. Five minutes later, Mack walked in to make it official.

  Relieved of the burdens of managing a fifty-person staff and confronting a dyspeptic press corps, I was free to do the job I did pretty well, the job I had first started doing for Clinton early in the campaign.

  Which was what, exactly? Sometimes I'd take on a special project, like helping shape the final compromise on gays in the military. But mostly my job was just to be there, by the president's side; to help give background to the press on the president's thinking and background to him on theirs; to know what was going on, what the president should say, and how to get things done; to help corral decisions to closure, assess the political impact of policy decisions, and contain mistakes before they became scandals. The president tended to take each discussion and each decision as it came. My job was to think about whether they formed a coherent whole, and to help ensure
that others who met with the president didn't mistake his empathy for agreement. Clinton told the world that I was to focus on “day-to-day decision making, helping me to integrate all the complicated debates that confront my office.” He told me that he liked having me around because I had a “good bullshit detector.”

  After a predictable flurry in the press, the president's new half-brother passed back into private life. But throughout the summer of 1993, President Clinton was confronted with close encounters of a more consequential kind: episodes of intimate decision in which individuals from Clinton's past held a piece of his presidency in their hands.

  “IT WAS DIRECTED AGAINST YOU”

  Jumbo shrimp and canapés on silver trays were being offered by the serenely silent staff who served from president to president. It was eight P.M., June 23, and summer light was still filtering into the parlor by the Lincoln Bedroom. You couldn't ask for a better setting at cocktail hour. But the waiters were wearing business-black jackets, not their formal whites, and no one ordered a gin and tonic or champagne — it was Diet Cokes and club sodas all around.

  This wasn't a social evening at the White House. President Clinton was about to order air strikes in defense of the president he had defeated.

  Two months earlier, Kuwaiti authorities had arrested fourteen men for planning to place a 175-pound car bomb in the path of former President Bush as he received an award in Kuwait City. Immediately after the arrest, Clinton ordered the FBI and CIA to determine if this assassination attempt was authorized by Saddam Hussein. The official report was due on June 24, but we already knew that the investigation had established a link between the bombing suspects and the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

  Our job that night was to help the president decide how to retaliate. All of the top guns were there: Colin Powell, Les Aspin, Warren Christopher, Tony Lake, and Sandy Berger (deputy national security adviser), the vice president and his national security adviser, Leon Feurth. Mack McLarty, David Gergen, and I rounded out the group, but we were there largely for Clinton's political comfort and to provide counsel on presenting the decision to the public. For now the meeting was top secret. We met in the residence because, unlike the West Wing, it had a side door that the cabinet secretaries could enter without being detected by the press.

  As the president ambled over from his bedroom on the other end of the second floor, we arranged ourselves around the parlor's coffee table. We didn't sit until the president sat; our early pretensions of informality were gone now, overtaken by the task at hand. This would be Commander in Chief Clinton's first military strike.

  Before then, our foreign policy had been more a matter of words than deeds. During the campaign, it amounted to little more than a couple of speeches and a series of press releases. But winning the White House added retroactive weight to everything we had said before. Poor Haitians heard that the new American president had promised not to turn them away, so they built hundreds of rickety wooden boats to head for the promised land. Besieged Bosnians heard that he had vowed to bomb the Serbs, and they hunkered down with heightened expectations, waiting for the American cavalry. Promises that were briefly considered and barely noticed during a presidential campaign, we had learned, could set entire worlds in motion, proving again the poet's words: “In dreams begin responsibilities.”

  After the election, that lesson was hammered home every day. We had to reverse our Haitian refugee policy, cave on gays in the military, stall on Bosnia, and flip-flop on Iraq. In a pre-inaugural interview with the Times devoted largely to expressing support for President Bush's policy of “containing” Iraq, President-elect Clinton had refused to rule out the prospect of a more normal relationship with Saddam Hussein. “I'm a Baptist; I believe in deathbed conversions,” Clinton had said in the familiar surroundings of his Little Rock living room. “If he [Saddam] wants a different relationship with the United States and with the United Nations, all he has to do is change his behavior.”

  Clinton wasn't trying to signal a shift in U.S. policy. In his own mind, he had already sent a tough message by publicly supporting his predecessor's approach. He was just being himself — the relaxed, reflective, and reasonable Bill Clinton who liked to shroud conflict in soft language and shape his thoughts by hearing how they sounded out loud. It had almost always worked for him in the past.

  Not this time. Sitting on the couch across from Clinton, I winced when he raised the possibility that Saddam might be redeemed and hoped that it might escape attention. Right. Tom Friedman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning diplomatic correspondent who'd just been shifted to the White House beat, was the lead questioner. He was accustomed to covering Bush secretary of state James Baker, a man of notorious verbal discipline who wouldn't utter a provocative sentence on the record unless he was deliberately trying to send a signal. Noting Clinton's colorful language, Friedman wrote a front-page story saying that Clinton was ready for a “fresh start” with Iraq.

  Hours before most people would read the paper, Iraq's foreign minister was on Nightline welcoming the new American initiative. Middle Eastern leaders wondered aloud whether the tough-talking presidential candidate was really a dove, and I was desperately in search of the Times. Too impatient to wait for a fax from New York, I phoned Friedman. “All hell's breaking loose, Tom. What did you write?” No one likes being awakened near midnight, but Friedman's crankiness was quickly calmed by the pleasant realization that my call meant that his competitors were chasing his scoop. I was still hoping we could fix the story for the final edition, but though Friedman may have misinterpreted Clinton, he didn't misquote him. Once Friedman finished reading me the article off his computer screen, all I could say was, “Yeah, that's what he said. Good night.”

  The next morning, Clinton knew he had to adamantly deny any normalization of relations with Iraq, but he wasn't happy about it. At a press conference announcing the appointment of the new White House staff, he responded to the inevitable question with a flash of temper: “Nobody asked me about normalization of relations,” he said, before reasserting his intention to pursue Bush's policy. Now I was in real trouble. The olive branch to Saddam had been retracted, but Clinton had just declared war on the New York Times.

  My beeper was already vibrating. It was Tom Friedman, and he was as angry as Clinton. “George, was I dreaming or did we have a conversation last night where you acknowledged that my reporting was right?” Friedman began. “I have won not one, but two Pulitzer Prizes, and I won't stand for being called a liar by the next president.” But Friedman didn't have only his reputation to rely on; he also had the transcript. So did everyone else who had seen the Times. There was no denying that a question on normalization had been asked and answered.

  A quick apology was our only out. For the foreseeable future, Tom Friedman would be one of the relatively few people filtering Clinton to the rest of the world; we couldn't afford to antagonize him and his newspaper any more than we already had. Convinced that Friedman had deliberately twisted his words to distort their meaning, Clinton refused to issue a personal apology. But he said I could do it for him — if, that is, I did it right. So my first job as White House communications director-designate was to publicly contradict the president-elect without making him look like a liar or a fool. The best I could do was a statement saying that President-elect Clinton “inadvertently forgot that he had been asked that specific question about normalization and he regrets denying that it was asked.”

  Five months later, as Clinton opened the Lincoln Bedroom meeting, we were all determined to send an unambiguous, unapologetic message to Saddam — but with weapons, not words. Even the new members of our team were acutely aware of the president's tendency to overexplain himself in streams of sentences. When Clinton was “on” (the first State of the Union), he was dazzling. But when he was exhausted or embarrassed (“I didn't inhale”), he courted political disaster.

  “Don't oversell and don't undersell,” advised Colin Powell — the only man in the room who'd actually
commanded a battalion or directly counseled a president in wartime. David Gergen reminded Clinton that the Reagan administration had rushed to judgment after the shooting down of KAL 007. Warren Christopher, whose taciturn North Dakota nature appeared to restrain his loquacious Arkansas boss, offered a one-sentence conclusion: “You'll be judged on whether you hit the target.”

  Wise counsel. But that night, President Clinton didn't need to be coached. He wasn't ill informed, insecure, or itching for a fight. As Tony Lake reviewed the evidence and asked Aspin and Powell to outline the military options, Clinton silently jotted notes on a small pad. When he spoke, the questions revealed a man determined to make his decisions in the right way for the right reasons: “Are we sure the evidence is compelling?” “Is this a truly proportionate response?” “How can we minimize harm to innocent civilians?” The president pressed Powell on the best time to strike. A predawn raid, Clinton reasoned, would kill fewer people, but those most likely to be killed would be the least culpable, security guards and janitors. An attack later in the day would create more casualties but also increase the odds of killing the real culprits.

  I sat by the president's right shoulder, taking it all in from an armless chair pulled a few inches back from the tight circle. But I couldn't catch every word because I had another job: keeping tabs on the president's budget, which was facing its first vote on the Senate floor. Every few minutes a waiter would hand me a note from a senator calling from the cloakroom for the president. I would take the call in the Queen's Bedroom and try to handle it myself, but a couple of the senators demanded to speak to the president. Don't you know he's got better things to do right now than beg for your vote?