All Too Human: A Political Education

by George Stephanopoulos

  The interview request was masterly; Woodward knew his subject and his potential source. He opened with bland understatement:

  I believe you are aware that I am writing a book on government economic policy-making. The book already has a heavy and growing emphasis on your administration.

  Followed by intimidation:

  I already have accumulated more than 100 pages of typed notes, memos, recollections, charts, and tables on just one of the pre-Inaugural meetings (January 7, 1993, in Little Rock) you had with your economic team. …

  Obligatory humility:

  But I have wondered many times, what am I missing? A lot, no doubt — too much. My reporting has yielded enough that I am definitely humbled by what I don't know. … Though much of what I have comes from the inside, I've written enough about government and Presidents to know that the most powerful inside account is still really from the outside. It lacks the perspective of the President. …

  An appeal to history:

  Richard Reeves, in his remarkable new book on President Kennedy, Profile of Power, poses the graphic and compelling question: What is it really like to be President? … Reeves was forced to rely on substantial documentary records and the testimony of others near, but not at, the very center. He never interviewed Kennedy. …

  A civic-minded slap at the press:

  Just in eight months, it's clear you've been on a singular journey. But the published and broadcast accounts of it miss far too much. Public dialogue is at too low a level. Aren't the problems of governing connected to the shallow discourse? Don't Phil Donahue and Rush Limbaugh and the twenty-second update dilute understanding and short-change the public? People ought to know, or at least have the chance to know, as authoritatively as possible, the truth. …

  Fair warning and reassurance:

  Might it involve some loss of control and some risk? Yes. … [But] I don't intend a how's-he-doing assessment. … No cheap shots. No cheerleading …

  And a big, flattering, irresistible finish:

  In my last book, The Commanders … I ended the introduction with this idea: “The decision to go to war is one that defines a nation, both to the world and, perhaps more importantly, to itself. There is no more serious business for a national government, no more accurate measure of national leadership.”

  I wrote that in the spring of 1991. About that time, you made the point to friends and associates that the battlefield had shifted. National self-definition, seriousness, and leadership would next be measured by economic and domestic policy. You were right.

  Clinton secretly met with Woodward, and The Agenda largely lived up to the promise of that hand-delivered letter. Taken as a whole, in the fullness of time, it is a comprehensive and basically accurate account of how we developed and passed an economic plan that worked. But that's not how it played in June of 1994. Appearing on 60 Minutes, Woodward boiled the whole book down to a less-than-twenty-second sound bite: “Chaos. Absolute chaos.” The Agenda was marketed as the most persuasive proof yet that Clinton was an undisciplined and indecisive president leading an inexperienced, out-of-control White House. The repercussions were immediate.

  Mack McLarty was the first casualty. Woodward's book crystallized the conventional wisdom that Clinton needed a stronger chief of staff from the Washington establishment. Mack was a good man, a successful business executive, and a close Clinton friend, but he had never worked in Washington — and Clinton never gave him real authority. When Clinton was first considering Mack, I encouraged the choice, myopically thinking that my relative wealth of inside-the-beltway experience would increase my power within the West Wing. But even before The Agenda was published, it was clear we needed a change, and even I wanted a tough chief of staff who could corral the president and keep his headstrong independent operators (like me) in line.

  During the flight to the D day ceremonies, Leon Panetta and I spent a few minutes alone in the empty back passenger section. I knew Leon from the Hill, where he was chairman of the Budget Committee and a close friend and ally of Dick Gephardt's. A former Republican, he was a bit too much of a fiscal disciplinarian for my taste, but he had a big heart, first-generation immigrant values, and an infectious laugh. When he said that Clinton wanted to talk to him about replacing Mack and asked for my advice, I was encouraged. Leon's indefatigable, disciplined leadership was exactly what we needed. I handed him the book I was reading, The Haldeman Diaries, with a placemark on page 309, an entry recounting a 1971 Nixon speech to his cabinet. “Here,” I told Leon. “You need this, this ultimate control”:

  From now on, Haldeman is the Lord High Executioner. Don't you come whining to me when he tells you to do something. He will do it because I asked him to and you're to carry it out. … I want discipline. It's up to Haldeman to police it. … When he talks, it's me talking, and don't think it'll do you any good to come and talk to me, because I'll be tougher than he is. That's the way it's going to be.

  “You need a broader mandate than Mack's,” I continued. “You need the power not to be overridden, not to have to deal with three different White Houses. You need to be a dictator.”

  Leon thanked me and took the book. If he appreciated the irony in the exchange over the diary excerpt, he didn't mention it. (Nixon had tried to fire Panetta from the Office of Economic Opportunity for disloyalty. Leon resigned.)

  I didn't realize the joke was on me. Everyone has a blind spot; mine was on the issue of loyalty and leaks. I was trying so hard to stop bad stories that I thought I was immune to being blamed for them. I assumed I was part of the solution, but the president and Hillary were beginning to think I was part of the problem, and The Agenda became their proof. The overall impression left by the book was bad enough. The quotes attributed to me were even worse:

  “You've got to always keep in mind,” Stephanopoulos said to one of his closest associates, that watching Clinton “is like a kaleidoscope. What you see is where you stand and where you're looking at him. He will put one facet toward you, but that is only one facet.” …

  Leon Panetta was up next. Campaign aides had told him that Clinton was deadly slow to make decisions. “The worst thing about him is that he never makes a decision,” Stephanopoulos had said.

  Woodward's attribution clearly indicates that he didn't get these quotes from me. But I had said things like this in the White House when I was trying to explain Clinton to my new colleagues. These “closest associates,” or one of their “closest associates,” then passed the anecdotes on to Woodward. Whatever their provenance, the words appeared far more damning in the black-and-white type of a number one bestseller than when they evaporated into a West Wing hallway. And my unvarnished assessments combined with my earlier advocacy of Woodward's project enraged Clinton.

  Which means I didn't hear about it directly at first. I rarely took Clinton's outbursts personally; more often than not, they passed right through me. But I did worry about his silences. As I was still learning, there were many dimensions to Clinton's anger, and he was a virtuoso at expressing them.

  The most common and least virulent strain of Clinton's anger was the morning roar. He's not a morning person. He wakes up cranky and moves slowly. The morning roar was a way of clearing his throat before breakfast, like a rooster greeting the dawn, but with an edge. It rarely signified any deep seething, just irritation at an outside event that he couldn't control, like an overcrowded schedule, a speech draft he didn't like, or almost any story in the morning paper. Typically, he'd be at his desk in the Oval, surrounded by little piles of notes that he'd just removed from his briefcase, holding the offending article at arm's length. He'd push the paper toward me, his voice rising in staccato bursts to emphasize his point: “This … is … just … wrong. … It's just not honest. … I don't … have time … to think. … I try … and try … and try … to tell you … but they never … get it … right!” As long as Clinton stayed seated at his desk, there wasn't much to worry about. I'd promise to fix the problem, explain the reasoni
ng behind the day's event one more time, sympathize with him on press bias, and change the subject.

  A close cousin of the morning roar was the nightcap, which I rarely witnessed. I generally heard it over the phone, but I could imagine him in jeans and a sweatshirt at the kitchen counter, surrounded by his ubiquitous piles, with the television on in the background. The trigger event was usually a conversation with Hillary, a phone call from a friend in Arkansas about some new right-wing outrage, or a critical Senate floor speech that he had just seen replayed on C-Span. Like the morning roar, it usually wasn't too serious. Again, a promise to fix it in the morning, coupled with some reassuring words or a tidbit of gossip, usually worked like a glass of warm milk. The nightcap was a problem only when the evening upset didn't fade with a good night's sleep. That was a sure sign that more serious trouble was brewing.

  The slow boil could develop during a single meeting or over the course of a couple of days — or even weeks. Unlike the first two variations, the slow boil wasn't sparked by a single precipitating event. It was, instead, the eruption of a resentment that had been churning inside him, and every external event became new evidence that the underlying condition wasn't being addressed. Certain recurring phrases were sure signs of a serious slow boil: “These leaks are killing us. … Al From is right; all we are is a bunch of yuppie elitists. … You lashed me to the Congress like Captain Ahab. I'm president, not prime minister. … The Senate is full of wimps. I raise them money, get them reelected, but one word from Howell Raines or the Republicans and they fold.” The slow boil built like a baroque concerto, with intricate variations on a theme, repeated and repeated at increasing volume until the crescendo ended in a crash of exhaustion. Slow boils were the product of deep-seated structural problems, not trivial matters. Although the outbursts were unpleasant, they were usually justified.

  Two other types of outbursts were more calculated: the show and the last gasp.

  The show was Clinton's way of making himself mad for the benefit of someone else in the room, usually Hillary. Over the course of the health care fight, he often exploded in legislative strategy meetings as a way of protecting Hillary and telling us to take her seriously. The last gasp was generally reserved for those times when Clinton suspected that he had made a mistake but didn't want to admit it. It would also contain elements of counterattack and a little preemptive blame laying. “I'll do this if you want me to, but I have to say, I think it's wrong!” A good example was Clinton's earlier-described performance on the conference call to decide which ads to run over the final weekend of the 1992 campaign.

  The worst of all was the silent scream. No yelling, no finger in your face, nothing. Just silence. I would walk into the office, and he wouldn't look up; the slightly formal “Hello, George” would sound more like an irritating obligation than a greeting. He wouldn't automatically turn to me to gauge my reaction to his new idea or his proposed answer in a press conference. He wouldn't stop by. He wouldn't call. And worst of all, he wouldn't mention what had made him so mad — because it was me.

  Toward the end of the D day trip, I knew Clinton was raging about Woodward — he had to be. But he didn't discuss The Agenda in my presence. The only inkling I got of how angry he was came below the decks of the USS George Washington. As we walked toward a makeshift television studio for the president's interview with NBC's Tom Brokaw, I warned Clinton about a new Newsweek poll that rated Colin Powell and Bob Dole ahead of him as “role models” for America's young people. Both were potential rivals, and if Brokaw blindsided Clinton with the news, it could make for a petulant interview.

  Dozens of times before, that kind of last-second intervention had saved the day. But not now. Clinton seized up and stared straight down at me, his clear blue eyes clouded with suppressed rage. “I didn't need that now, George. I didn't need you to bring me down.” I perceived the rebuke as an outburst, but he wasn't yelling at all. He was all control, and his words had a metallic tone. It was the first manifestation of a resentment that would last for months.

  Hillary didn't mask her anger. Over the next several weeks, The Agenda became her single-bullet theory for our summer troubles. “The whole problem with this administration is the Woodward book,” she said at one July strategy session. “It's hurting us overseas, and it's the reason all our numbers are down. There are people who go out there with no loyalty to the president, no loyalty to the work we have to do for the country, just seeking to aggrandize themselves. And I hope they're satisfied!”

  I wasn't — disloyal or satisfied. Deciding to grant such broad access to Woodward was a mistake — a naive lapse of judgment. Had I been more mature and disciplined, I might have seen that there was no way to win with Woodward; a less authoritative account would have been less damaging to our agenda in the short term. My open cooperation, however, was not an act of treachery. Nor was it the sole source of our political turmoil in the summer of 1994.

  After forty years of dominating Congress, our party had become a complacent feudal kingdom no longer bound by fervent belief or fear of the king. Each member was master of a barony, each chairperson, lord of a duchy. Our majority was more a tactical alliance of autonomous factions than a political movement based on shared values and a coherent governing philosophy. Striking at our weakest seams, Republican strategists pitted North against South, suburb against city, a capitol controlled by liberal career politicians against the America where real people lived. They understood how populist anger that had worked for Clinton in 1992 would work against him in 1994, and they coalesced around a strategy that political analysts Dan Balz and Ron Brownstein labeled “the politics of ‘no’ — ‘no’ to Clinton, ‘no’ to the Democrats, and ‘no’ to bipartisanship.” In August, as we confronted rapid-fire Republican attacks on Whitewater, the crime bill, and health care, our fragile coalition broke apart.

  The summer had opened with some uncharacteristically welcome news on Whitewater. Special Counsel Fiske disappointed conspiracy theorists by finding that Vince Foster did indeed commit suicide in Fort Marcy Park, and that the various White House-Treasury “contacts” over the Whitewater investigation (including my phone call to Josh) were ill-advised but not illegal. A separate inquiry by the Office of Government Ethics reached a similar conclusion. But these findings didn't stop the Republicans. Although ringleaders like Senators Al D'Amato and Lauch Faircloth had praised the appointment of Fiske, saying that “he's the kind of person who will bring out the truth for the American people,” they maneuvered to have him replaced once he started to clear the administration. They also held full-scale hearings to cultivate the full electoral potential of Whitewater come November.

  We knew that sequential inquiries in the House and Senate would hurt us, but we hoped the Republicans would overplay their hand and appear obsessed with a small-bore scandal at the expense of substantive issues. Our talking points for the hearings attempted to turn the “character” issue on its head:

  Whitewater is about the character of the president's foes — lacking a positive program of their own, they simply engage in attack politics. Meanwhile, the president is determined to fix the economy and health care, and attack crime — to do the work the people elected him to do.

  The Republicans were willing to take that risk, hoping that a focus on Whitewater would weaken us and make it easier to kill our legislative agenda. Here they were helped by the media. Major newspapers and the television networks were invested in proving serious White House wrongdoing, if only to justify all the time and money they had spent on Whitewater. Conservatives reinforced this predisposition by repeating the charge of “liberal media bias.” A Democratic scandal, they argued, deserved exactly the same treatment as Watergate and Iran-Contra. All this guaranteed two weeks of gavel-to-gavel coverage on C-Span and CNN, combined with several minutes a night of negative spots on the network news.

  Which meant more trouble for me. Although I had already been smeared by Time and cleared by Fiske, the hearings would bring my phone c
all to Josh back into the spotlight. The word on the Hill was that D'Amato had targeted Harold and me: We were both from New York, and he knew that we'd worked to defeat him in the past. The Republicans also banked on the fact that distracting senior staffers like us was half the battle. If we were busy with our lawyers or testifying in the hearing room, we couldn't be working on health care and crime. I also worried that with the president and Hillary still upset about Woodward, I couldn't count on the same reservoir of support I had received when the Time story first broke. If I slipped up now, Clinton might not be there to catch me.

  The opening tableau of the House hearings wasn't pretty: a long table of mostly youthful White House staffers, all with right hands in the air, like a well-dressed version of the Little Rascals in a police lineup. At first, we were nervous; none of us had testified to Congress before on a matter of policy, much less as witnesses before an investigating committee. But the hearing turned out to be a partisan political food fight. Halfway through, Barney Frank sent me a note: “Relax, we're beating the shit out of them.” He was right. The hearing didn't help us, but it didn't do any more damage.

  The Senate was a different story. To me, the House was home, but I had never worked in the Senate and didn't have the same feel for it. Everything about it seemed imperious — from the senators to their staffers to the setup of the hearing room. I knew D'Amato was out to get me, and the Democratic senators weren't as encouraging as my old friends in the House. Our legislative liaison, Pat Griffin, called me up to his office for a cup of coffee and confided that the Democrats were worried that I would be “arrogant” at the hearing and fail to show the committee proper respect. “You gotta be humble, George,” he said. “I know it's hard for you, but you have to.” Pat and I had become close friends over the course of countless car rides back and forth to Capitol Hill; I knew he was giving me good advice. But I also wondered what was happening to me. “Before we got here, we thought of ourselves as good people.” Have I changed? Am I as bad as they say? A punk? I promised Pat that I'd do my best.