All Too Human: A Political Education

by George Stephanopoulos

  We watched the roll call in Clinton's study off the Oval — a room even smaller than my office and packed with stuff. Clinton's collection of wood-shafted golf clubs leaned up against one corner, surrounded by sleeves of golf balls with the presidential seal. A rough-hewn rocking chair of light pine anchored the other corner. Kenny G. and Barbra Streisand CDs were stacked on the table under the window, next to the wall of books. A soft-focus black-and-white portrait of Hillary and Chelsea hung above the desk. To its right was the tiny Sony that commanded all our attention.

  I was sitting in the leather desk chair. Clinton stood directly behind me, cigar clenched in his teeth, steadying himself like a captain on the bridge with his left hand on Mack and his right hand on me. All his tension seemed to be pulsing into me through the knot of my left clavicle. I focused my energy on the little screen, trying to will the yeas up to 218. With no time left on the clock, we were one vote behind, 211–212. I still thought we were OK, but the hand on my shoulder was growing heavy. The leadership wouldn't close the vote until there was no hope left, and I was on an open line to my old colleagues in the House cloakroom, who said we had a couple of safe votes holding back. One came in: 212–212.

  Then Dave McCurdy voted no. Bastard. He still can't stand the fact that Clinton's president while he's just another member of Congress. Trying to bring us down. We were in the danger zone now: 212–213. We'd either win by two or lose by twenty. Close votes in the House follow the laws of political physics. You have all those guys hanging back who said they'd “be there if you need me.” But they're desperate not to be needed, and everybody is watching everybody else. By voting no with six votes to go, McCurdy was trying to start the dominoes tumbling down at the last moment, so a member could reasonably say, “I was ready to vote yes, but you weren't going to win anyway.” McCurdy was hoping the final holdouts would follow his lead and give him a seat at the table in the follow-up negotiations. I was certain it was an act of treachery.

  Our guys hung in there: 213–213, 216–214. Two votes ahead, with four votes to go. No one remaining wanted to vote yes; the “no” column is almost always the safest place to be in a political storm. Ray Thornton of Arkansas should have volunteered first. For godsakes, he's the president's congressman. Even if he hates every line in the bill, he should follow the lead of his constituent in chief. Coward. When we saw another “no” flash on the screen and I told Clinton who it was, he was more incredulous than angry: “I made him president of Arkansas State. I can't believe he's doing this to me.”

  But Thornton did, so it took two small profiles in courage to save the day: Pat Williams, a loyal Democrat whose home was Montana, where the gas tax would really bite; and Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, a freshman Democrat from Philadelphia's Republican Main Line. Her wealthy constituents would surely remember who raised their taxes. Both had a lot to lose by voting yes; neither would return to the next Congress — because they turned in their green voting cards, and the Speaker's gavel came hammering down. The final vote was 218–216. Not a vote to spare.

  The president's study erupted in a riot of hugs that soon subsided into sober relief. Clinton wasn't ready to celebrate. We had lived to fight another day but learned another painful lesson in the limits of presidential power. After all of the threats and promises, after all of the carefully crafted compromises and absurdly trivial deals (“I'd really like to play golf with the president”), all we could do was watch on TV with the other C-Span junkies. Our fate, in the end, was out of our hands.

  Tomorrow, it would be in Bob Kerrey's.

  A little after eight, Clinton walked into the Oval dripping wet from his morning run in a driving rain. This was usually my favorite part of the day. The monitor behind my desk that displayed the Secret Service's tracking of the president's whereabouts would beep and flash “POTUS — OVAL OFFICE” in tiny green letters, which was my cue to head for Betty's desk. I knew the president's morning routine as well as I knew my own: After stretching on the patio, Clinton would walk through to the pantry for a bottle of water and a cup of coffee, then cool down by puttering around his desk or flipping through the newspapers on Betty's credenza. We staffers from his personal office would hover around him with a little light business: Betty would show him his call sheets from the night before; Nancy might hand him a stray piece of paperwork that couldn't wait, or ask him again whom he wanted to sit next to at the formal dinner that night; I would deliver my patter on the morning papers, serve up a piece of political gossip, and fill him in on the morning staff meeting. The heavy work could wait until after he showered.

  That Friday morning, Gergen and Mack joined our little group. After yesterday morning's explosive phone call, they had met Kerrey for a prematinee lunch and feather-smoothing session. Now they wanted to brief the president before his final meeting with Kerrey. “Don't make it personal,” Gergen said. “Talk about your shared principles.” I knew it was the right advice, but I also seethed for Clinton's sake. Spare me another Kerrey speech on principled sacrifice. Yes, he's a war hero and always will be. But he's also getting pounded on taxes back in Nebraska. That's what's going on here: He wants credit with the voters back home for no new taxes and credit with Capitol pundits for having the “courage” to stick it to the middle class even more. Give me a break.

  Clinton just nodded — “I'll be all right” — and went home to change. I returned to my office to find Howard Paster on the phone, trying to convince Kerrey not to back out of the meeting with the president. Howard and Kerrey both knew that it would be harder to vote no after a visit to the White House. Kerrey came, of course, and spent an uncomfortable but calm ninety minutes with Clinton on the Truman Balcony. But in the end, the meeting didn't really matter. Kerrey would vote for the bill because he had to, even if he didn't know it yet. Like Clinton, he couldn't afford to make it personal.

  Even if Kerrey didn't respect Clinton, even if a side of him still sought revenge for 1992, or even if Kerrey sincerely believed that the bill wasn't good enough, he couldn't vote no. He may have held Clinton's fate in his hands, but he didn't fully control his own. It was too late. If his conscience truly called him to vote no, he should have said so — clearly, unequivocally, publicly — before the Democrats in the House walked the plank the night before. Kerrey may be a little flaky, but he's not crazy. There'll be a lynch mob in his office if he votes no. He'll be finished as a Democrat. Once the House hit 218, Kerrey's decision was made for him. A “no” vote after that wouldn't just be a blow to Clinton, it would betray the bulk of the House Democrats. They'd have the worst of both worlds: a damaging vote on taxes and nothing substantive to show for it.

  But there was still a chance, however slim, that Kerrey could pull a Gadhafi, commit a senseless, irrational, self-destructive act. Thank goodness for Liz Moynihan. She and her husband, Senator Pat, were Kerrey's close friends and early campaign supporters. Like the Cuomos, the Moynihans kept their politics in house. Liz ran all of her husband's campaigns and was his chief political strategist. That Friday, she convinced Kerrey that loyalty to both the Democratic Party and his own future ambition to be a Democratic president demanded that he vote yes.

  That did the trick. But the drama had to play itself out, and talk of high principle gave way to hard bargaining. In return for his vote, Kerrey wanted Clinton to make him chairman of a new Presidential Commission on Budget Discipline. While this horse-trading seemed more high-minded than the deals cut by other senators (Deconcini traded his vote for a mention in the president's Oval Office speech, fund-raising help, and a job for a longtime aide), it still required bare-knuckle negotiating.

  I didn't like the idea because I feared that a commission could lock us into a long-term strategy of cutting even more government benefits for people who needed them. But I also knew Kerrey had us over a barrel. The vice president was apoplectic at the thought of Kerrey's trampling on his turf. He thought the commission would overshadow the Reinventing Government initiative he was scheduled to launch in
the fall, so his chief of staff, Jack Quinn, and I were deputized to edit Kerrey's draft in a way that would reduce the potential conflict with Gore. In the end, we managed to weaken Kerrey's mandate by expanding it, renaming the group the White House Commission on Economic Priorities. A commission that broad would inevitably become nothing more than a debating society.

  But Kerrey didn't budge, and the negotiations shifted to Majority Leader George Mitchell's office in the Capitol. We followed the faux debate on C-Span (every senator already knew how every other senator was voting) and waited for Kerrey to announce that he'd made up his mind. The call finally came to the Oval at 8:20 P.M.

  Clinton was silent. He just chewed his lip and nodded his head to the rhythm of the upright thumb he was pumping in my direction. It would be OK. Less than a minute later, the phone was back on the desk, and Clinton was dumbstruck from yet another strange encounter with Cosmic Bob. After forty-eight hours filled with screams, threats, promises, and demands, Kerrey had just called to tell the president, “This one's for free.”

  Free, my ass. Kerrey went to the floor and delivered a broadside against Clinton, calling him “green and inexperienced,” and followed up with a few self-righteous shots about how “my heart aches with the conclusion that I will vote yes for a bill which challenges Americans too little.” Not five minutes later, Kerrey was in Mitchell's office, closing the deal on his commission, but for appearance's sake, he didn't want it announced until a decent interval had passed.

  Howard called me from the majority leader's office to let me know that Kerrey was still negotiating, and I relayed the message to the president up in the residence. I also told him about Kerrey's speech, which irritated him, but he didn't let it spoil the victory. He and Hillary were having too much fun. “You know what my wife just said, George?” He chuckled. “‘Every woman in the Congress voted for you. They've got more balls than the men.’”

  So we won — and our plan did work. The Republican party line that Clinton's plan would be a “job-killing poison” for the economy was flat wrong. At the time, we couldn't have imagined how right we were, but we did know that we'd be in a world of hurt if we lost. A failed vote would mean a failed presidency. Winning meant redemption, and a second chance. Forget about Zoe, Kimba, Lani, Waco, Haircut, Travelgate, Gays in the Military; we passed our economic plan — did what we were elected to do. The economy, stupid. Remember?

  But we didn't just dodge a bullet; we did some good. An überwonk with a heart as pure as you'll find in politics, Gene Sperling gave a speech to the staff in the Roosevelt Room that put the whole ordeal into perspective. “People say I'm too obsessed with numbers,” he said while glancing down at a sweaty scrap of paper. “Well, let me tell you some numbers — one hundred thousand poor mothers and their babies will be healthier because of the child nutrition program; one hundred thousand more poor kids will get to go to Head Start; fifteen million working families will get a tax cut with our earned-income tax credit; and twenty million more young people will get student loans at better rates.” Reducing the deficit was what we had to do, but we also did a little of what we wanted to do — what we cared about when we started.

  After the president's victory speech, a bunch of us went to Bice, an Italian restaurant near the Capitol, to celebrate the final act of the 1992 campaign. It was the old War Room gang: Carville, me, Mandy Grunwald, and Stan Greenberg — Sperling showed up late, as always. Halfway through our postmidnight supper, a tray of drinks arrived at our table, from the gentleman in the far corner — Senator Bob Kerrey.

  We nodded our thanks and wondered out loud about what it meant. The gesture, like the man, was graceful, awkward, and ironic all at the same time. What was he saying? “I forgive you for pressing me so hard”? “It's you who should be sending me the drink”? “I'm glad I did it”? “Congratulations. You guys won” (it didn't feel like “us guys”)? or maybe just “Let's hope this works”? On the way out, we stopped at his table, but no one knew what to say. We shuffled our feet, mumbled our thank-yous, and went on our way.

  The moment wasn't right. But I would have loved to pull up a seat for a real talk with our former adversary and reluctant ally. Kerrey's detachment, his cool, his intellectual curiosity, his ability to do what he needed to do while letting you know that he understood it might not mean much in the end, appealed to the part of me that was afraid to believe too deeply in anything. He was frustrating in a fascinating way.

  I was still grateful, however, that Clinton was my president. He may not have had Kerrey's ethereal, ice blue charm — he was too “out there” for that. He may not have been a hero like Kerrey — Vietnam wasn't his finest hour. But with all his raw, naked, intelligent, profound, and profane humanity, Clinton really did feel other people's pain, and he was determined to do something about it.

  Courtesy of Bob Kerrey, he still could.

  MYSTERY

  “Webb, it's George; I'm afraid I have some bad news.”

  “What is it?”

  “Vince killed himself.”

  “What?”

  “Vince killed …”

  “No. Whaaat?”

  “Vince, I'm sorry, Vince …”

  “What? I don't believe …”

  Seven times he asked; seven times I answered. It was a little before 9:30 on the night of July 20, 1993. I found Webb from a phone by the map room on the first floor of the residence. Minutes before, Bill Burton, an assistant to Mack McLarty, had crashed in from the colonnade with the news: Vince Foster's body had been found in a wooded area off the GW Parkway. Early signs pointed to suicide.

  Mack looked stricken, but he quickly clicked into checklist mode. “I'll call Hillary,” he said. “You call Webb.” We couldn't tell the president; he was on the air, chatting with Larry King in the library across the hall. At the next commercial break, Mack fixed the president with a stare to signal that our reluctance to extend the show wasn't just our usual fear that an overtired Clinton would say something we'd all regret later. When King said good night, Mack ushered the president to the elevator with an arm on the back of his elbow. Clinton's head dropped, and he seemed to steady himself on Mack's arm as they rode upstairs.

  A few minutes later, I went up to the second-floor kitchen to get Clinton's guidance for a presidential statement we'd have to issue before the evening ended. But he had no head for official duties that night. In shirtsleeves, with red eyes but still no tears, the president was thinking about his boyhood friend and the family he had left behind, about his private grief, not public relations. “You know what to say,” he said, not unkindly, just preoccupied. “I have to go see Lisa” (Foster's wife).

  When Clinton left for Foster's house, I returned to my office, reviewed the brief statement Dreyer had drafted, read it to Clinton over the phone, and left. Jennifer Grey was in town, and I needed to talk to someone who wasn't immersed in our closed world. At a time when I probably needed them most, my hyperreactive political instincts were shutting down. Jennifer poured me a drink and drew me a bath as I struggled to make sense of what had happened. I didn't know Vince well; he wasn't a friend. But he was my colleague, and he'd killed himself. How could that be? Is the pressure more intense than we know?

  By the next morning, official Washington's highest-ranking suicide since Secretary of Defense James Forrestal in 1949 was fast becoming a political scandal. Inside the White House, we were captured by grief, confused by the inherent inexplicability of suicide, and convinced that we had a duty to preserve as much privacy as possible for both the Fosters and the Clintons. Focused on ourselves, we walked through the halls with careful looks, huddled in corners and consoled one another with a touch on the shoulder or a hug: “Are you OK? Are you sure? Do you want to talk?” If this could happen to Vince — Clinton's “Rock of Gibraltar” — maybe it could happen to anyone.

  Trying to comfort us, the president called the staff together in room 450 of the Old Executive Office Building. He urged us to understand that what happened to Vin
ce “was a mystery about something inside of him” and reminded us “that we're all people and that we have to pay maybe a little more attention to our friends and our families and our coworkers.” At his press conference, Mack echoed the theme: “Try as we might, all of our reason, all of our rationality, all of our logic, can never answer the questions raised by such a death.” Somewhat less elegantly, I told the Post: “The fundamental truth is that no one can know what drives a person to do something like this. Since you can't ever know, it's impossible to speculate on it. In the end, it is a mystery.”

  This was the White House line, and I believed it was true. But it made sense to the world only if you understood what we were feeling inside, only if you were part of our family. To more skeptical ears, Clinton's refusal to speculate on Vince's psychological state and our preemptive insistence that Vince's suicide could not be explained by examining his White House work sounded as if we were trying to shut down a legitimate inquiry — which guaranteed, of course, that this was just the beginning. At a White House briefing a week after Vince's death, Dee Dee was asked 139 questions about the Foster case. Over the next month, the Times and the Post each published six front-page stories on the suicide, and William Safire used his column to make it a cause célèbre.

  Combine the predictable press interest with Vince's involvement in the travel office imbroglio, with our claim that the White House counsel had to control Vince's papers to preserve his attorney-client privilege with the Clintons, with the confusion over who had been in Vince's office and what had been done there, with the belated discovery and release of a torn-up note from the bottom of Foster's briefcase, and you have the circumstantial seeds of a full-blown scandal. By trying to preserve a measure of Foster's privacy, we invited more invasive scrutiny. By thinking like lawyers, we risked being questioned like criminals. By emphasizing the “mystery” of suicide, we appeared to be manufacturing a cover-up. Our human reactions were read through the prism of post-Watergate politics: Every president is Nixon until proven innocent.