All Too Human: A Political Education

by George Stephanopoulos

  But I still wanted to influence our coverage, which presented me with a dilemma that afternoon. We needed the public to know that our mission in Haiti would be “limited,” that the U.S. military wasn't going to become an occupying force, and that we didn't consider America “the world's policeman.” But as his wire-service interview wound down, the president still hadn't said it. How could I get Clinton to make that point without its looking as if he was being coached? That's all I needed — a line in some story noting that the president's spin doctor was telling him what to say as he sent American troops into harm's way. Sitting across from the president, directly in his line of sight, I worked to get his attention without being noticed by anyone else. First, I simply stared at him, a trick that had worked in the past. He'd see my wide-open, worried eyes and his mind would click back to the points I had emphasized in the prebrief. When that failed, I mouthed the word limit while moving my hands in front of me as if I were squeezing a small accordion. That only made him think I had a stomach flu, but now that I had his attention I wrote “LIMIT MISSION” in block letters on my notepad and flashed it fast. No luck; his squint told me that he couldn't read it without his glasses. Finally, I took the risk of making myself part of the story. Before Dee Dee announced last question, I wrote out a note, folded it up, and walked across the room to hand it to Clinton. Nodding his head, he ended his next answer with a segue into a soliloquy on our “exit strategy,” starting with “I do want to emphasize this. …” Even though I thought I had done the right thing, I apologized to Clinton after the reporters left. “No, no,” the president assured me. “It's a good thing you did.”

  The next day, I wasn't so lucky. Stan Greenberg had conducted a final poll to fine-tune our arguments before the president's speech. I had cautioned Clinton against calling Stan himself, because while I thought it was appropriate to use a poll to help sell a decision that was already made, I didn't think it would look great to have the president's pollster on his call sheet the day he was telling the nation we were going to war. On Thursday morning, Stan faxed me the results, and I gave Leon an oral briefing. The Haiti arguments hadn't changed, but the president's overall approval rating was the lowest it had ever been. Several times that morning Clinton asked for the results, which put me in a bind. I didn't want to distract him with bad news, but if I tore out the offensive pages, he would notice and accuse me, rightfully, of manipulating him. What I should have done was simply give Leon the poll and let him deal with it; after all, he was the boss. Instead, I dropped it on the president's desk.

  Twenty minutes later, I was facing Leon Panetta in full patriarchal fury. The president had ripped into him about his approval ratings, and now Leon was ripping into me. “Damnit, George, what happened here?” I didn't know, but I did apologize — fast. “I'm sorry, Leon. I told you about the poll but didn't think to give you a copy, and the president kept asking for it. I just didn't think I'm sorry.” One of the knocks against me was that I had a tendency to upset the president with bad news; and although I believed it was an unfair rap (What am I supposed to do, Leon? Tell the president, “No, you can't have your poll, it'll make you too mad”?), I knew this incident would hurt me with Leon.

  By that evening, however, it was like old times with Clinton. His hair still wet from the shower, he and I stood in the hallway outside his bathroom in the residence, making the final edits on the advance text of his Oval Office address, which would be released to the press. When we got to the central sound bite of the speech —”The message of the United States to the Haitian dictators is clear: Your time is up. Leave now, on your own, or we will force you from power” — Clinton ran his felt tip through the words “on your own.” The president didn't say a word; neither did I — sometimes you just know not to ask. But the two phone calls that Clinton had received from President Carter earlier that afternoon suddenly made sense to me.

  An hour later, Clinton had finished his speech and was back on the phone in his study. I knew something was up with Carter and Colin Powell, but I didn't know exactly what. As I did my usual round of postspeech press and political calls, Tony, Leon, and the vice president kept shuttling through my office with intense looks and zipped lips. The intrigue continued the next day, Friday, September 16. At nine A.M., Tony slumped into my office and asked, “Do you ever have black moods?”

  “All the time.”

  “Well, I've been working on a very complicated operation,” Lake continued. “It went south late last night. What's the earliest I can leave?”

  Before I could answer and pump Tony for more info about this “complicated operation,” the president called him to the Oval. A few hours later, I got another clue when Clinton wandered, talking, into my office: “I can't figure out why they [the Haitian dictators] don't want to leave. I guess they just think it's their country and we're trying to take it away from them. They have different values, and they think Aristide is a bad guy.” Only later did I realize that Clinton was musing out loud on his latest conversation with President Carter about Raoul Cedras. In his post-White House incarnation, Carter had developed a negotiating style that led him to form bonds with strongmen like Cedras, Kim Jong II of North Korea, and Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia. But even Clinton, the king of empathy, couldn't convincingly work his way into the head of a Haitian dictator. Aware that the president just needed company and reassurance, I stuck to my usual script.

  “You ought to feel good about the preparation. You've done everything you could.”

  “I do feel good about it. The military's impressive, isn't it?”

  A few minutes later, Clinton was back on the phone in the Oval, and Tony was back in my office looking chipper. “We're trying another angle,” he said. “I think it's going to work.” I felt as if I were watching one of those British bedroom farces in which the whole plot is revealed with snatches of dialogue punctuated by slamming doors. Clinton returned to my office after talking to President Aristide, hoping to catch a nap with a John Calvin Batchelor novel he had spied on my desk about a vice president who plots a coup against his boss. But he probably couldn't sleep through the commotion. A few minutes later, I was in the hallway talking to Jesse Jackson and Leon Panetta when alarms started to blare and firefighters ran by in full gear. Apparently, a crossed wire had sent out a puff of smoke and set off a wave of panic on the second floor. But in a White House week that began with a plane crash and was about to end with military action, everyone was jumpy.

  Finally, just before four o'clock that Friday afternoon, Clinton let me in on the secret. Before heading to a Capitol Hill ceremony for black World War II veterans, the “forgotten heroes,” he pulled me aside in the doorway of the Oval. “I'm sending Carter,” he whispered in my ear. “You think it will be OK, don't you?”

  “Yeah, it'll be OK,” I said, but I wasn't sure. After pressing President Carter not to fly to Haiti on his own, Clinton had agreed to send him as part of a trio, along with Colin Powell and Sam Nunn, to present Cedras with a final offer. If Carter stuck to the talking points, I was all for it — who could be for war as long as diplomacy might work? But there was an even chance that Carter would make it harder to force the dictators out. The former president is a true humanitarian, but his pacifist leanings could have had the effect of undercutting Clinton's ultimatum. He was also a bit of a lone ranger. A year earlier, during a tense diplomatic confrontation with North Korea over its nuclear weapons program, we had learned what Carter was offering the North Koreans by watching CNN. We couldn't afford more freelancing, and Tony and the president had reduced that risk by convincing Powell and Nunn to accompany Carter. But none of them really agreed with Clinton's Haiti policy, and they now had an effective veto over it. I also worried about the appearance of subcontracting our diplomacy to a former president. The draft press release I reviewed in Tony Lake's office would have sealed that impression. It began, “With President Clinton's approval, Jimmy Carter …”

  “Tony, we can't say this,” I said. “It has to
be ‘President Clinton has requested …’”

  “Can't. Clinton already agreed to this draft.”

  “No, he couldn't have meant it. Let me call him.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Clinton has political grace; he doesn't stand on ceremony and goes out of his way to share political credit. But in this case, his instincts undermined our central message. Presidents don't “approve” national security missions; they “order” them. We couldn't afford to give the impression that Carter had backed Clinton into a corner (even if he had), or to allow anyone to mistake the president's willingness to negotiate for a failure of nerve. I reached the president in his limo. “Sure, sure,” he said. “Make the change.”

  Carter's team took off early Saturday morning for a final round of negotiations with Cedras, and I made a scheduled fund-raising appearance in New Hampshire. Late Sunday morning, with the deadline for military action only hours away, I returned straight from the airport to the Oval, where the president's national security team was sprawled across the couches, waiting for word from the deliberations in Port-au-Prince. Leon welcomed me back by kicking me out: “George, there are too many people in here; go.”

  So I spent the afternoon swinging between self-pity and shame: angry at Leon for banishing me, angry at myself for being upset about it. I kept busy by working on an immigration problem that had cropped up in California, but I really wanted to be in on the action in the Oval. The talks had a noon deadline, but at two P.M., Carter's team was still negotiating, and Clinton had to make a decision: Should the 82nd Airborne Division pack their parachutes for an invasion that night? “Pack 'em,” Clinton ordered. But the talks continued: Carter told Clinton that Cedras had agreed to leave, but he wouldn't agree to a date certain for the departure, saying that his resignation had to be tied to an amnesty vote in the Haitian parliament (which might never happen). Carter advised the president to accept the compromise.

  Around five, I was on the phone with Janet Reno in Panetta's office when the president walked in. “Come see me,” he mouthed, motioning toward me with his finger. When I got down the hall, Leon and Strobe Talbott were sitting in Betty's office. Spooked by my earlier ejection and wary of saying the wrong thing, I approached Leon and assured him the president was looking for me. “Go in,” he said, flicking his head.

  “Here's where we are,” Clinton said, as he motioned me toward the seat by the side of his desk. “They've agreed to leave, but we're stuck on a date. Carter says we don't need one; what do you think?”

  Not wanting to blow my return to action, I was all business. “No date is not even worth talking about, Mr. President. You'll get killed. You told the country and the world they have to go by noon today, so they have to go. But if you get a date certain, even with a delay, I think it's easy. You gotta go for it.”

  A few minutes later, Betty cracked the door to say that Colin Powell was on the line, and the rest of the national security team filed in. Wary of overstaying my welcome, I headed for the door. But the president stopped me. “George, stay here. I want you to hear this.” The president then told Powell that it had to be a date certain, and Powell agreed. A short while later, with our planes in the air, the dictators agreed to leave Haiti by October 15.

  Did Clinton really need me that afternoon? Probably not; everyone in the inner circle agreed that a date certain was essential. I don't know why he came to find me. But whether it was an act of kindness or a vote of confidence, the president had asked for my advice at a critical time. The situation in Haiti might later deteriorate, and Congress would still carp, but for now, at least, democracy was being restored to Haiti without war, President Clinton had a diplomatic success, and I could tell myself I had helped.

  The satisfaction didn't last long. Our political situation as the 1994 midterm elections approached was effectively summed up by an encounter I had the week we were preparing to invade Haiti. At a New Hampshire fund-raiser for the Democratic nominee for governor, an ardent and early Clinton volunteer from the 1992 primary approached me near tears. Her nine-year-old daughter had come home from school with a question she couldn't answer: “Mommy, why do we love Bill Clinton so much if he makes so many mistakes and he's taking us to war?”

  I stuttered out my practiced spiel about how “change is tough” and “we've made steady progress; people just don't know it.” But most of the country had a much simpler answer to the girl's question: “We don't.” Despite the diplomatic success in Haiti, our poll numbers were stuck in the mud. The shrinking deficit was fueling a growing economy, but people didn't buy it yet; and the failure of health care overshadowed legislative successes like the Family and Medical Leave Act and the Brady Bill. All this was driving the president to distraction. Although he didn't mind sharing credit, he hated not getting any. His response was to work even harder, to become a hyperactive combination of campaign manager, press secretary, and robocandidate.

  Seeing Clinton the campaign animal up close was a new experience for Panetta, whose passion was governing, not politics. One Friday afternoon, after two straight days of presidential bellyaching over the quality of the Democratic National Committee advertising campaign, Leon couldn't take it anymore. He called me in. “Listen,” he said, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes, “the president is all upset about these political ads. Would you just go sit in his office and talk to him, calm him down?” Resisting feelings of vindication (You see, it's not just us kids who have a hard time handling Clinton), I walked down to Betty's office and waited. Wendy Smith and Nancy Hernreich were there too, and Clinton's mood must have been even worse than I thought, because they were wondering how to cheer him up. At one point, Nancy was called into the Oval and returned with a question: “What's another word for ‘Pavlova's slippers’?” Pulling the Times from the credenza, I checked the crossword puzzle and walked into the Oval.

  “Toe shoes.”

  “Oh … thanks,” he replied, penning in the blanks. I took my seat by his desk, and we went to work. I reviewed the DNC's advertising strategy, outlined the scope of the buy, and received Clinton's suggestions on how to tweak the wording here and there. Most of the discussion, though, was a form of political therapy. A new wave of Republican “morph” ads was taking a toll on Clinton's psyche, and he was having a visceral reaction to being caricatured into a “cardboard cutout of myself.” But his answer — a series of ads centered on how he'd kept his promises — wouldn't work. Even if people liked one of his policies in the abstract, support tended to drop when Clinton's name was attached to it. I heard him out and faithfully relayed his ideas to our consultants. That fall, President Clinton was the unfortunate opposite of King Midas — everything he touched turned to lead.

  But Clinton was nothing if not persistent. Often that October, I would enter the Oval during his “phone and office time” to find him settled behind a stack of Xeroxed articles, furiously writing notes to editorial writers, friends, and supporters around the country. Journalists like Gene Lyons, Tom Patterson, Richard Rothstein, and Jacob Weisberg had recently written that the press was treating Clinton unfairly or not giving him enough credit for his accomplishments. When the president ran low, he'd summon me for a fresh supply of his favorite articles from the folder that I kept on file.

  Clinton's favorite remedy for personal and political malaise was to hit the road. He crisscrossed the country to raise money for the party, and appeared at rallies and fund-raisers for any Senate candidate who would have him. He called in to talk-radio shows and wired up for satellite interviews with local news anchors. If his staff couldn't get the message out, he'd do it himself. With hindsight, it's easy to see that our only hope of avoiding electoral disaster in 1994 would have been a modified “Rose Garden” strategy. In the weeks leading up to the election, whenever the president stuck to official business, whether it was ordering missile strikes in Iraq or helping broker a new peace agreement in the Middle East, his ratings improved. But advising Clinton to stay off of the campaign trail in Oct
ober was like asking him not to breathe.

  I was beginning to understand the impulse. That fall, I was learning what it was like to be a candidate. I had become a “draw.” Since I was the best-known staffer in the White House, the party pressed me into service as a fund-raiser for cash-strapped candidates all across the country. Not that I had to be forced. Our agenda would be dead if we lost the Congress, the country had to be warned about Newt Gingrich's “Contract with America,” and nothing was more important in the homestretch of a tough campaign than money in the bank.

  Besides, I needed to get out of the house. Instead of being a sign of power, celebrity now masked my increasingly tenuous status inside the White House. Our White House operation had improved under Leon Panetta's leadership. He became the nerve center of the West Wing, tightening up decision making, instilling a sense of discipline, and shaking up the staff. But I worried about being eased out. It was already happening to others, like my friends Dee Dee Myers and David Dreyer, and there were rumblings about bringing in Clinton's old friend ABC News executive Rick Kaplan to push me aside. Even if I survived on staff, I no longer knew where I fit in. The power of my position, and the rhythm of my workday, had always rested on my “special relationship” with Clinton. I understood how he thought and knew how to prepare him for public appearances. Others in the administration relied on me to interpret his moods or get decisions made. Clinton, in turn, counted on me to give him accurate information, and he seemed to value my judgment. So he had let me freelance and float. But part of Leon's mandate was to put me in my place (a move that was emphasized on the organization chart by shifting me from the “Office of the President” to the “Office of the Chief of Staff”).