All Too Human: A Political Education

by George Stephanopoulos

  The only question remaining was how. Mack left to call the president. While he was gone, the rest of us brainstormed about Inman's replacement. We kicked around all of the usual suspects — senators like Sam Nunn, John Warner, and David Boren; a business executive like Norm Augustine, chairman of Martin Marietta. But the idea we liked best was to shift Treasury Secretary (and WWII fighter pilot) Lloyd Bentsen to Defense and appoint Bob Rubin to Treasury. Then Mack returned to report on his call to the president, who generally agreed with our judgment but added that Inman's behavior “wasn't quite disqualifying.” We dutifully went over the details of the case one more time. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore: “Wait a second, it's just not discussible. We can't do it.”

  “It may not be discussible,” Gergen quipped, “but it's damn interesting.”

  Once the nervous laughter died down, we had to decide what to do. The president was scheduled to fly overseas on Saturday, and Gergen worried that announcing the withdrawal either right before or during the trip would send the wrong message and drown out news coverage of the president's first visit to Russia. After giving Joel the job of working with Inman to postpone any action for ten days, we adjourned.

  It turned out, though, that Whitewater alone would overshadow the president's trip. The morning after my confrontation with Hillary, the Post had published another breathless but mind-numbing 2,018-word front-page story going over all of the details. At 7:15 A.M., a good hour and a half before the president usually arrived in the West Wing, Clinton burst through the back door of my office holding a newspaper. I braced myself for another blast. But it never came. Maybe Clinton was trying to compensate for Hillary's broadside by keeping me close; maybe he saw something in the article that I had missed. Whatever the reason, the president was bubbling with excitement.

  “Mr. President, I know you think the story's great,” I said, puzzled. “But I don't get it. You really have to explain to me why you think it's great.”

  “Oh, don't you see,” he said, showing me the paragraphs he'd underlined and starred. “It's full of factually untrue stuff. And it shows that even career attorneys from the Justice Department saw no reason to pursue the case.”

  The article did, in fact, make that point, adding that “there was no conclusive evidence that the Clintons had done anything illegal.” But it also repeated the suggestion that the involvement of the first couple had impeded the progress of the investigation. Putting these two arguments together, I made one last plea: “You may be right, Mr. President, and I know you guys didn't do anything wrong. That's why I think it's best to turn this whole thing over to a special counsel so we can get back to work.”

  “Hmm, that makes some sense,” he said, before going back upstairs to change. When he returned to the Oval an hour later for another meeting with me, Harold, and Mack, Clinton said he knew it was the right thing to do. But a little later, we were back in Mack's office — the same group, going over the same ground — when first Harold and then Mack got called to the Oval. They returned chastened and pale, and it didn't take a detective to figure out what had happened.

  “You all can keep talking about this if you want,” Harold said. “But it's useless. We're not doing a special counsel.”

  I knew I was in big trouble again. The president hadn't called me back for the follow-up discussion, and Harold looked at me as if he'd just discovered I had a terminal illness. At the first lull in the meeting, he signaled me out with a shake of his head. We whispered in the hallway.

  “Boy,” he confided in me. “She's really angry. Blames you for getting him all ginned up again this morning.”

  “Well, I guess I have no choice,” I replied. We'd been discussing how to organize a campaign to get our side of the Whitewater story out, and I asked Harold to engineer the meeting so that I would be appointed spokesman for the damage control effort. “I'm so shot up and bloody that the only way I can recover with them is to be the spokesman.”

  “George, you're absolutely right.”

  So I stepped up my contacts with the press and put up an aggressive front. Just before the president's lunch with columnists to brief them on his upcoming trip to Russia, Safire pulled me aside to pound me on Whitewater. “How come it takes two weeks to catalog a box of documents?” he asked, taunting me. “What are you guys doing — tearing them up? Throwing them out? How are you doing, George?” he continued. “Are you doing OK?” “Why shouldn't I be doing OK?” I replied, afraid he might know something. “You're like my old Jewish grandmother in Brooklyn,” he said, letting me off the hook. “Every time I ask a question, she answers with a question.” With the president, Safire asked only about NATO expansion, but his next day's column on Whitewater was another killer.

  Whitewater was everywhere. At the Italian embassy that night, I was seated between Mary McGrory, the longtime Washington columnist, and Katherine “Kay” Graham, doyenne of the Washington Post. We were the three unattached people at the dinner. In normal times (if there was such a thing) it would have been a terrific evening. Mary was an old friend, and both women are engaging dinner partners, with something funny and sharp to say about everyone in the room. But that night, all the talk was about Whitewater, and I couldn't give an inch.

  “George,” Kay said, “I think this Whitewater thing is really trouble, don't you?”

  “No, Kay,” I replied. “It's not trouble because the Clintons didn't do anything wrong.”

  “But if they didn't do anything wrong, why don't you just release the documents or ask for an independent counsel to clear their name?”

  Good point. But I knew I couldn't even wink — not even betray the hint of distance hidden in an opening like “Well, the president believes …”

  “Well, Kay,” I replied, “that might be good politics, but it would set a horrible precedent. The standard hasn't been met. It would be an invitation to irresponsible allegations if all you have to do to get an independent counsel is level a charge. It's just wrong. It devalues the institution of the special counsel and demeans the presidency.”

  All that might have been true, but blocking a special counsel was an unwinnable battle. Over the next few days, our defenses completely crumbled after the Post reported that our delivery of documents to the Justice Department was not, as we had claimed, strictly voluntary. When David Kendall had first contacted Justice to discuss the matter, he had been informed that the department was already drafting a subpoena for the documents. Kendall subsequently negotiated with department lawyers to broaden the subpoena for the purpose of shielding more documents from the press, another fact we failed to reveal at the time. Although this sort of maneuver was routine and appropriate in private litigation, it reinforced the cover-up charge and raised a new allegation of improper presidential interference with an independent investigation. By Tuesday, January 11, nine Democratic senators — led by Pat Moynihan and Bill Bradley — had joined the Republican calls for an independent investigation, which demolished our claim that this was just a partisan witch-hunt.

  The television coverage of the president's trip was dominated by Whitewater. We couldn't go on like this, and Clinton wanted the issue resolved. On Tuesday evening, January 11, Hillary called a small group of us into the Oval for a conference call with the president, who was plugged in by speakerphone from Prague. It was an odd scene, the only time I can remember meeting in the Oval Office without the president present. We stood around the president's desk as if he were there, staring at the small black box in front of his chair. Harold Ickes structured the debate, assigning me to make the case for requesting a special counsel. Nussbaum would oppose.

  I made the argument I'd been making for days — that we had no choice; that if we didn't ask for a special counsel now, one would be forced on us later; that the press would keep hounding us until we surrendered; that Whitewater was killing the rest of our agenda. Bernie countered, correctly, that special prosecutors take on a life of their own, but his only answer was to release the documents. Now
you tell us. Where were you a month ago, when releasing them might have made a difference? It's too late now. But I didn't replow that old ground aloud because it was unnecessary. There was a pro forma quality to this final debate. Clinton had already made up his mind; or, more accurately, he believed that he no longer had a choice. After several minutes of discussion, Hillary asked everyone except David Kendall to leave and concluded the decision with the president.

  The next day, Nussbaum sent a letter to Attorney General Reno saying that President Clinton had directed him to request a special counsel “to conduct an appropriate independent investigation of the Whitewater matter and report to the American people.”

  I went to the White House briefing room to explain our reversal. My internal victory (if you can call it that) had come at some cost, so I went on the offense, using the public forum to challenge our accusers: “Despite their total and voluntary cooperation with the current investigation, the Clintons have been subjected to a barrage of innuendo, political posturing, and irresponsible accusations. … We still don't think that the evidence is there to require a special counsel. At the same time, we want to make sure that nothing interferes with the president's agenda.”

  Toward the end of the briefing, someone asked about reports that Hillary was among the most resistant to naming a special counsel. I didn't want to lie, but I couldn't tell the whole story. Evasion was my only out: “I think that there is a general reluctance throughout the White House.” Mercifully, no one asked a follow-up.

  Shortly after Clinton returned from Moscow, on Tuesday, January 18, Bobby Inman put on a mesmerizing and manic performance for the Washington press corps. Looking like a man who was broadcasting instructions transmitted through the fillings in his teeth, he railed against “modern McCarthyism,” he criticized the White House for “spinning” his failure to pay social security taxes, he attacked the New York Times for how it covered his work as a defense contractor and the Washington Post for how it depicted him in an editorial cartoon. His diatribe also cited critical columns by Ellen Goodman and Anthony Lewis, but the bulk of his bile was reserved for William Safire. Inman falsely accused him of plagiarism and added that Safire was conspiring with Senator Dole to derail his nomination. After raising the allegations about homosexuality himself and volunteering to take a lie detector test to prove they were wrong, he denied that there was any other damaging information about to emerge and expressed his firm belief that he would have been “handily confirmed” by the Senate.

  Official Washington was transfixed, watching and talking at the same time. Minutes after he first appeared on CNN, Andrea Mitchell called to say, “This guy's a nutcase.” Brit Hume observed, “You guys dodged a bullet on this one.” “At least I take my medication,” joked Bob Boorstin, who often spoke publicly about his struggle to overcome manic depression. Hillary and I had exchanged apologies since our confrontation the week before, and she called to ask if we should “be giving psychological tests to our nominees.” The next day's coverage described Inman's performance with adjectives like “breathtaking,” “bizarre,” and “baffling.” Not since Ross Perot cited an alleged Republican conspiracy to disrupt his daughter's wedding as his reason for quitting the 1992 presidential race had the political world seen such a public display of delusion.

  We didn't know that Inman was going to act out at his press conference. No one guessed that he would be so brazen, and we probably couldn't have stopped him if we tried. Accepting that the motives of others are inherently obscure, I believe there was a method to Inman's apparent madness — just as his prime target intuited at the time. “I think Inman is not crazy,” wrote Safire in response to the admiral's attack. “That was the old disinformation specialist in full manipulative mode, screening his final evasion in a newsy concoction.” On this weird episode, he deserves the last word.

  Two days after Inman's withdrawal, six months to the day after Vince Foster's suicide, one year following President Clinton's first inauguration, Attorney General Janet Reno appointed a Republican former prosecutor and Wall Street lawyer named Robert Fiske to be the Whitewater special counsel. That morning's New York Times poll found that President Clinton had a higher approval rating than either Reagan or Carter on their first anniversaries in office and that the American public had more confidence in the economy than at any time since 1990. The pattern of the Clinton presidency was set.

  10 THE WEEKEND I WAS HALDEMAN

  Clinton loves giving presents. All year long he compiles lists and stuffs his closets with gifts for Christmas and special occasions. On February 10, my thirty-third birthday, he walked into my office holding a tiny brass battleship with an alligator clip attached to the back. The front was etched in black: “PT 109.” It was a rare souvenir from the 1960 campaign, one of those tie clips that marked a Kennedy man.

  That same night, ABC News evoked memories of Nixon and Watergate. Eighteen minutes of World News Tonight's twenty-two-minute broadcast were dedicated to Whitewater, echoing the time in 1972 when anchorman Walter Cronkite startled the political world by devoting nearly an entire CBS evening news broadcast to the still-unfolding Watergate scandal. But in those early months of 1994, ABC wasn't alone. By mid-March, the three major network newscasts had spent 220 minutes on the fallout from Whitewater — three times what they gave to health care.

  The saturation coverage reinforced our bunker mentality, which only made matters worse. The tighter we crouched, the harder they hit, and the stories just kept on coming: Clinton accuser David Hale cut a deal with Special Counsel Fiske; congressional hearings were held on whether the administration had tried to derail the White-water investigation; a Post story revealed previously undisclosed White House/Treasury “contacts” about the inquiry, precipitating a raft of subpoenas to the White House and the resignation of White House Counsel Bernie Nussbaum.

  The Times also discovered that Hillary Clinton had parlayed a $1,000 investment into a $100,000 profit in the late 1970s commodities market, which provided a plausible theory as to why she had been so adamant about refusing to publicly release the Whitewater documents. The only real “news” in the documents, which would have included the Clintons' 1978-79 tax returns, would have been Hillary's windfall. Other Rose Law partners who had come to Washington with Hillary faced personal ethical problems. Associate White House Counsel Bill Kennedy, who had been responsible for doing background checks on administration nominees with “nanny problems,” had to resign after belatedly admitting that he had failed to pay social security taxes for his household help. Webb Hubbell resigned from the Justice Department over a billing dispute with the Rose Law Firm that later became the basis for a fraud and embezzlement conviction.

  Whitewater became the catchall term for any allegation of unseemliness or impropriety against anyone anywhere near the Clintons or the White House — and it stuck. Health care and the rest of our legislative agenda were stalled, and the president's approval ratings drifted down. With the fire coming in from so many different directions, I was almost nostalgic for New Hampshire — especially when, for the first time, I had to confront a White House scandal of my own.

  It began with a heated phone call on a harried day.

  February 25 was not a casual Friday at the White House. I woke to a 5:45 bulletin from my clock radio: An Israeli fanatic had walked into the courtyard of a mosque in Hebron and massacred several dozen Muslims observing their day of prayer. Minutes later, I got a fill from the situation room and fed the latest facts to the television reporters preparing their morning stand-ups from the North Lawn. To make sure the president wasn't blindsided, I left a message at the usher's office for him to check in before his morning jog.

  Our morning staff meeting focused on Hebron and health care, but we also spent a few minutes discussing the coverage of a tumultuous Senate hearing into the Resolution Trust Corporation's investigation of Madison Guaranty and Whitewater. The RTC reported to Deputy Treasury Secretary (and old Clinton friend) Roger Altman, but Republica
ns had demanded that Altman remove himself from supervising the investigation because his close ties to the president created a conflict of interest. Here was another needless fight: I argued that Roger couldn't, wouldn't, and didn't need to do anything improper to shield the Clintons, so why risk the appearance of impropriety caused by having him oversee the investigation? But Nussbaum cut me off, saying that Altman's recusing himself would be a sign of weakness. I didn't pursue it because I had to help brief the president for a nine A.M. meeting on the Aldrich Ames spy case with members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. At 9:45, I hopped into a White House car with Harold Ickes for a health care strategy session on Capitol Hill. By 11:30, I was back at the White House to help brief Clinton for his press conference on the Hebron tragedy.

  The crisis had scrambled everyone's schedules. White House public liaison Alexis Herman asked me to fill in for Ickes at a meeting with business lobbyists on health care, which made me late for a long-scheduled lunch with two reporters writing a political history of the deficit. But after half a sandwich and a few minutes of conversation, Heather popped in with a request from the White House social office. Could I do an emergency “grip and grin” over in the East Room? A hundred party activists from Iowa were waiting for a reception with the president, who was running an hour late. Hillary and the vice president had already come and gone, and they needed another body to keep the crowd warm. Since the Iowa caucuses were our first barricade against a 1996 primary challenge, I headed to the East Room.