All Too Human: A Political Education

by George Stephanopoulos

  “I'm just not sure, Mr. President,” I said. “We don't have an endgame. Maybe later, if nothing else works. But it's definitely too early right now.”

  It was too early, even for President Aristide. After the vice president called Aristide to talk him through the president's decision to reimpose economic sanctions rather than return him to power by force, Gore returned to the Oval. “He's ecstatic,” Gore reported, shaking his head in disgust. Clinton, relieved to hear some evidence reinforcing his decision, responded in kind: “See, I told you. What would you rather do? Go back to Haiti, or sip champagne in Harry Belafonte's apartment?”

  But a week later, Clinton revealed something closer to his true feelings about the man he would eventually help return to the Haitian presidency. We were in the Oval, discussing CIA leaks to Congress of psychological profiles concluding that Aristide was an unstable manic-depressive. “You know, you can make too much of normalcy,” Clinton said. “A lot of normal people are assholes.” Then his mind leaped from the present-day freedom fighter Aristide to a memory of one of the greatest. Abraham Lincoln often boarded in rest houses where the guests shared beds divided by wooden planks, Clinton recalled, suddenly distant. “The people who slept next to him said that Lincoln would just sit up in bed … staring into the night.

  “Well.” He shrugged, snapping to. “Lincoln might have been crazy, but he was a hell of a president.”

  By the end of the year, Clinton was looking like a better president than he had been. Our fortunes started to turn after November's victory on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Not that I can take any credit for NAFTA; I was against making the fight. Maybe Gore was right: It was that Gephardt DNA. Working for Midwestern Democrats who represented communities hit hard by the loss of manufacturing jobs had shaped my thinking, and I believed that we should go forward with the agreement only if it included our promised protections for labor and the environment, which would be a spur, I believed, to higher wages and safer working conditions. I didn't think we could win the NAFTA fight. It was a stick in the eye of our most loyal labor supporters, and our base in the House had been through enough already this year. Why put them through the wringer one more time for a Republican trade treaty?

  After I lost the argument, I had the uncomfortable task of trying to prove myself wrong. I was sure we were headed for a defeat that would divide the Democratic Party and divert us from the health care fight. But we needed to win more than I needed to be right, so I threw myself into the battle, working on the undecided members I knew best and trying to keep up a good front.

  I didn't always succeed. On October 19, less than a month before the congressional deadline, we were still dozens of votes short, Newt Gingrich (our unlikely ally on this) was publicly calling the president's effort “pathetic,” and the House Republicans were resisting a small border tax to pay for worker training. In an Oval Office meeting on NAFTA, I was chafing at the indignity of being beholden to Newt, nearly bouncing on the president's couch as I opposed more concessions. “Newt's trying to have it both ways,” I argued. “He's setting up a situation where he gets the credit if NAFTA wins and we get blamed if it loses — because ‘we're not trying hard enough’ or ‘because we have taxes,’ whatever. We can't keep caving to these guys.”

  “We have to,” Gergen responded. “The Republicans won't be held accountable. After all, this is President Clinton's treaty; this is our treaty.”

  Gergen's political analysis was essentially correct, but hearing him say “our” just set me off. Not only do I have to hear Newt Gingrich call the president pathetic. Not only do we have to give up the worker training that makes NAFTA marginally palatable to Democrats. Now I have to listen to a guy who worked for three Republican presidents tell me that an initiative drafted by President Bush is our treaty.

  “That's bullshit.”

  Unleashing an obscenity in a formal policy meeting was the most indiscreet thing I'd ever done in the Oval Office — and it had an effect. For a moment, no one said a word. But then the president took my side, agreeing to call Gingrich and demand some concessions. He wasn't as tough as I'd hoped, but when Clinton put down the phone, he did his best to brighten my mood by taking a shot at Newt: “Dealing with that guy is like hugging an eel.”

  Caring too much about an issue can cloud your political judgment. In the end, that's what happened to me on NAFTA. I underestimated President Clinton's persuasive powers and the power of the presidency on foreign-policy matters. I also misjudged how crushingly effective Gore would be in his televised NAFTA debate against Ross Perot on Larry King Live. Being so wrong made me the butt of gentle jokes inside the White House. Rahm drafted, and the president signed, a “Statement by the President” that read, “While still officially undecided, George's personal pledge to save my presidency and be the 218th vote if needed, demonstrates his loyalty, convictions, and moral compass.”

  On the day we won, I tried to be graceful in defeat. Walking through the West Wing after a victory press conference, I caught up with Gore, who was strolling a step or two behind the president. “You know, Mr. “Vice President, I have to eat some crow. You were right about NAFTA; I was wrong.”

  “No, no, no, George,” he said with a smile. “You were right. We were going to lose — until I debated Perot.” Then, just before ducking into the Oval, Clinton cut in with an exit line: “I like that: win … win … spin.”

  On the day before Thanksgiving 1993, the White House was in a playful mood. At our morning briefing in the Oval, we discussed what to do if the turkey Clinton was “pardoning” became incontinent in his arms, and Gore offered to demonstrate his skill at hypnotizing chickens. The president mentioned John Kennedy Jr.'s upcoming birthday, and I told him that gossip columns were reporting that Kennedy had split with actress Daryl Hannah. Bob Rubin seemed so bemused by the banter that the president told him to relax: “C'mon Bob,” Clinton joked. “We're just trying to set George up.”

  I was more interested in setting the president up — with Salman Rushdie, the writer condemned to death by Ayatollah Khomeini for his novel The Satanic Verses. On November 24, he was in Washington to speak at the National Press Club, see Tony Lake and Warren Christopher, and secure something that had been denied him in the past — a meeting with the president of the United States. Although the Bush administration, through Marlin Fitzwater, had dismissed Rushdie as simply an author on a book tour who didn't merit any “special interest,” I believed that a presidential meeting would demonstrate that the U.S. would stand up to terrorism, provide Rushdie an added measure of protection, and remind the world that tolerance and free expression are values we hold dear. But the State Department advised against a meeting, fearing that it would increase the risk of terrorism against Americans, disrupt the Middle East peace process, and alienate the Muslim world.

  In a hurried Oval Office meeting later that morning, Tony Lake and I lobbied hard. Thankfully, the president sided with us, mentioning that he had received a message from an old Arkansas lady friend, Norris Church, Norman Mailer's wife. We hurriedly fashioned a compromise: no Oval Office, no photographer; Clinton and Rushdie would shake hands in the Old Executive Office Building after the president finished taping some interviews — an “accidental” encounter that recalled stories I'd heard about how the Kennedy White House had arranged for JFK to drop by Harris Wofford's office so he could “happen” to meet Martin Luther King.

  The meeting itself was anticlimactic. As Tony Lake and I watched Rushdie and Clinton shake hands in a remote corner on the fifth floor of the Old Executive Office Building, I wondered if the setting had somehow diminished what we were trying to do. The president was unusually uncomfortable, unsure of what to do with his hands; and the two of them together seemed like a pair of old lovers who had bumped into each other by chance — sticking to safe subjects like their mutual friends Norman (Mailer) and Bill (Styron) as if they were afraid of what might happen if they lingered too long or said too much.

&nb
sp; No matter. I returned to my office to leave a message — “The eagle has landed” — on the answering machine of Rushdie's friend and advocate the journalist Christopher Hitchens. Rushdie hurried to the Press Club to tell the world about the “real friendship and warmth” he felt from Clinton. That was all that mattered; the meeting was the message.

  While we were striking a small blow for free speech on one end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell was announcing a victory for public safety on the other. After seven years of trying, the Brady Bill was about to become law. Named after James Brady, the Reagan press secretary shot and paralyzed by a bullet meant for his boss, the bill would require a five-day waiting period and background check for handgun purchasers. Despite Reagan's eventual support for the bill, President Bush had vetoed it twice. But on Thanksgiving eve 1993, the National Rifle Association's Senate filibuster of the bill crumbled, and we immediately invited Jim and Sarah Brady to the Oval for a public celebration. For me, this victory was especially sweet. Seven years earlier, I had sat with Sarah Brady in the office of my boss, Congressman Edward Feighan, to help draft the original bill. Now my new boss would sign it into law, and I was certain it would save lives.

  I knocked off early, and as I walked home through an Indian summer mist that afternoon, I couldn't believe how much I had to be grateful for that Thanksgiving. I had the job of my life, and I was doing better at it. The whole administration was getting the hang of governing, and we were getting things done. The next morning, I'd be on a plane to New Orleans for another celebration. James Carville and Mary Matalin were getting married — another incongruous couple, another lavish public ceremony. Republicans and Democrats flew down to the French Quarter to march in the Dixieland wedding parade led by trumpeter Al Hirt. A “second line” of Thanksgiving tourists joined in, toasting the new couple with plastic cups of beer.

  Many toasts later, Mary introduced me to a man who'd often made my life miserable over the past year. Whenever Rush Lim-baugh had mentioned me during his new television show, he superimposed my face on the body of a baby. Enough was enough. “Rush,” I joked, “don't you think it's time to get me out of the diapers?”

  He chuckled nervously, naked without his microphone, and mumbled something about seeing what he could do. By year's end, I was a toddler in short pants, riding a rocking horse.

  9 HOOFBEATS REDUX

  The hoofbeats were closing in.

  This time they came from the Ozark home of the busted land deal that began when I was a senior in high school and Bill Clinton was attorney general of Arkansas. Whitewater. After an early 1992 flurry precipitated by a New York Times investigation, the issue had faded when our campaign commissioned an audit that documented how much money the Clintons had lost on the investment. The Republicans couldn't effectively exploit the issue because President Bush's son Neil Bush had come under fire for his own involvement with a failed savings and loan. But late in 1993, the Resolution Trust Corporation (the government agency established to manage the aftermath of the 1980s S & L crisis) asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation of Madison Guaranty, the S & L managed by Jim McDougal, the Clintons' Whitewater partner. David Hale, a former judge and business associate of Mc-Dougal's who was trying to worm his way out of a fraud indictment, offered prosecutors and the press a new hook by alleging that Governor Clinton had pressured him to lend McDougal money.

  These new developments, coupled with the miasma of mystery surrounding Vince Foster's suicide, piqued the interest of the Times and the Washington Post. They asked again to review all the White-water documents, and a series of faxed questions from the Post sat in the White House for weeks without a formal response. Busy with NAFTA, Somalia, and the crush of other business, I didn't attend the few October and November meetings on the matter. To me Whitewater was old news, the obsession of a few conspiracy theorists. But by early December, the Post was convinced we were hiding something sinister. Executive editor Leonard Downie made a series of extraordinary personal requests for the documents, and Ann Devroy warned me that the paper would go on the warpath unless we answered their questions and released the documents.

  I wish we had. If a genie offered me the chance to turn back time and undo a single decision from my White House tenure, I'd head straight to the Oval Office dining room on Saturday morning, December 11, 1993. The night before, Bernie Nussbaum, David Kendall (Clinton's private attorney), and Hillary had persuaded the president to stonewall the Post. All three were tough trial attorneys who were determined to follow a close-hold strategy more appropriate for corporate litigation than presidential politics. The possibility that the Clintons would be implicated in wrongdoing by any investigation of Madison Guaranty was extremely low, but the lawyers were taking nothing for granted. Hillary also feared that the Post inquiry was an invasive fishing expedition that would only create more inquiries. They all underestimated, however, the media reality that reporters want most what they're told they can't have, the political reality that a president's right to privacy is limited by the public's right to know, and the cultural reality that the country probably wouldn't care about the ins and outs of an old land deal as long as it didn't look as if the Clintons had something to hide.

  On Saturday morning, just after the radio address, Mack gave Gergen and me one last chance to convince Clinton the only way to kill the story was to cooperate with the Post.

  The president was sitting at the head of his small oval table, sipping a mug of decaf, with a pile of folders in front of him. Gergen and I were on either side. For once, though, the two of us were arguing the same case. Although we often clashed on policy matters, we both insisted now that turning over the Whitewater documents was the only way to manage the story. The president seemed to agree. “I don't have a big problem with giving them what we have,” he said, almost apologetically, his mind elsewhere (that weekend, he was preparing to replace Secretary of Defense Aspin). “But Hillary …”

  Saying her name flipped a switch in his head. Suddenly, his eyes lit up, and two years' worth of venom spewed out of his mouth. You could usually tell when Clinton was making Hillary's argument: Even if he was yelling, his voice had a flat quality, as if he were a high school debater speeding through a series of memorized facts. The antipress script was familiar to me by now. “No, you're wrong,” he said. “The questions won't stop. At the Sperling breakfast, I answered more questions about my private life than any candidate ever, and what did that get me? They'll always want more. No president has ever been treated like I've been treated.”

  Gergen did his best to calm Clinton down. Having worked for Nixon, Ford, and Reagan, he'd seen what happens when a president is accused of covering up. He also tried to make the case that the Post would treat Clinton fairly. “Mr. President,” he replied, “in twenty-five years, I've never seen better first-year coverage of a president.” Gergen was doing exactly what he'd been hired to do — serving as a kind of emissary from the Washington establishment to the outsider from Arkansas. Still battle scarred from the campaign scandals and the snafus of our first six months, I tried a different tack, hoping to convince Clinton by invoking our shared experience. “Mr. President, you're right,” I said. “You have gotten a raw deal from the press, and the stories they write will be unpleasant. But they can't really hurt you because they're all about the past, and you didn't do anything wrong. If we don't give them what they want, they'll say we're covering up. The pressure will build, and we'll end up answering the questions later anyway. Better to flush it out over the holidays when no one's paying attention.”

  For a moment, I thought our rare double-team effort had worked. Clinton didn't make a counterargument; the pol in him knew we were right. If only we'd dialed Downie right then and handed the phone to Clinton. But even that might not have worked. On this issue, Clinton wasn't commander in chief, just a husband beholden to his wife. Hillary was always the first to defend him on bimbo eruptions; now he had to do the same for her. Gerg
en and I didn't know what was in the Whitewater documents, but whatever it was, Hillary didn't want it out — and she had a veto. The president ended the meeting by saying he wanted to think about it some more. Later that afternoon, Mack called Gergen to tell him we were standing firm.

  Needless to say, Hillary's strategy failed. Over the next week, successive stories began to suggest that the White House was orchestrating a cover-up. Newsweek, 12/15/93: “The White House strategy last week appeared to be to try to contain the story by treating it with contempt.” The Washington Post, 12/19/93: “But the full financial history of Whitewater may never be known. White House officials have declined over the past several weeks to answer detailed questions about Whitewater's finances.” The New York Times, 12/20/93: “Based on what's publicly known, there's probably not a crippling scandal here. But the White House is behaving as if there were.” Exactly right.

  A few days before Christmas, the controversy approached critical mass. Then two successive disclosures triggered an explosion. First, the American Spectator and the Los Angeles Times reported that as governor of Arkansas, Clinton had used state troopers to procure women, and that he had recently called some of those troopers in an attempt, the articles suggested, to offer them federal jobs in return for their silence. When I asked Clinton about the rumors a few days before the stories broke, his abrupt shift to fast-talking, lawyerly, hyperexplanation mode convinced me something was up. “I never offered anyone a job,” he insisted. But he didn't deny calling the troopers (and as I soon learned, he had discussed the subject with at least one of them), which gave me a sickening sense of déjà vu. I was back in Little Rock, hearing Clinton's voice on the Gennifer tapes. How could he be so reckless? He's so sure he can talk his way out of anything that he doesn't even think about the consequences. What if they have a tape? Why can't he just leave these things alone? A few stupid presidential phone calls now threatened to transform an old Arkansas story into an Oval Office scandal.