All Too Human: A Political Education

by George Stephanopoulos

  Pat muttered “cocksucker” under his breath. I couldn't breathe. Clinton just ignored it, which was better than the alternative. Like Clinton, I was lucky in my enemy. If someone was going to call for my head, who better than a bitter, out-of-work congressman who was publicly attacking the president? But this was another first I could have done without: When I imagined working in the White House, I never thought that one day I'd be sitting in the Oval Office watching someone try to get me fired. By the time I returned to my office and heard from Heather that Rush Limbaugh had devoted fifteen minutes of his show to attacking me, there was nothing to do but laugh — and contemplate payback. Later, I found a fragment of a Republican newsletter in my in-box and taped its frayed edges to the center of my desk: “… it will take not just a comeback but a miracle for Bill Clinton to win in 1996. …”

  Just seeing the words made me feel better; they had the power of a lucky charm. Little did I know that Bill Clinton had been reaching into his past to retrieve a talisman of his own.

  13 MY DINNER WITH DICK

  Where is that cocksucker? I knew what Harold was thinking. We were finishing our drinks on the curved banquette by the second-floor landing of Kinkead's, his favorite restaurant. It was 9:30 P.M., and our guest still hadn't arrived. Although this felt like a transparent power play, I didn't have the standing to complain. I needed this meeting, and showing up late was a trick I'd often used myself. Pleading an uncontrollable schedule was one of the perks that accompanied a place in the president's inner orbit (“You know what he's like, just wouldn't stop talking. …”). On that night, May 17, 1995, no one flew closer to the sun than the man we were meeting.

  I sat on Harold's left, by his good ear. What our tardy dinner partner would say didn't much interest him. He'd heard it all before. Not me. Aside from an accidental after-hours encounter in Betty Currie's office, I'd never really met the man. Twenty minutes passed. Harold threatened to leave. I said we should order. Dick Morris then appeared at the top of the stairs and promptly excused himself to find a phone.

  He was the dark buddha whose belly Clinton rubbed in desperate times. I didn't really know that then. I didn't know much about Dick at all. When I first joined Clinton's team, Morris was just another unsavory figure from Clinton's past, an ex-adviser with a grudge and a story. A few times in 1992, I knocked down a Morris-related rumor about Clinton's 1990 campaign — something about how Clinton had coldcocked Dick on the porch of the governor's mansion. Aside from a single reference in October 1993 to a poll conducted by his “old friend,” Clinton had never mentioned Dick's name in my presence.

  In late 1994, however, I had picked up an unfamiliar frequency in Clinton's monologues. Keeping track of the president's information flow was part of my portfolio, and I always tried to decipher what I heard him say through the filter of what he'd read and who he'd seen. If I knew the source of a command or question, I could usually figure out how to handle it. But monitoring Clinton's phone calls was nearly impossible. He called all sorts of people at all hours of the day and night, and would often pass on new thoughts without revealing his sources — a kind of blind market testing. A few times that fall, I could tell that someone new was wiring his way into Clinton's brain. The president would wander through my back door during his “phone and office time,” saying, “I was just talking to someone. …” He would then recite a fully developed revision of his stump speech, propose a brand-new script for the DNC ad campaign, or launch into an extended critique of the political advice he was getting from Stan Greenberg and the rest of our consultants. His running theme was the need for a “centralized strategic process,” coupled with a plan to raise “twenty to twenty-five million dollars” to finance a steady stream of generic Democratic ads on cable television. After the election, as Clinton withdrew from those of us on staff, the clues were silent but still visible, like the boldly inked crib sheets the president slipped out of his folder during meetings. Or the anonymous calls announced by Betty Currie that Clinton would take in the privacy of his study. Or the yellow Post-it notes left by his phone, reminding him that “Charlie called.”

  “Charlie” was Dick's code name. The president had engaged him to run a covert operation against his own White House — a commander's coup against the colonels. The two of them plotted in secret — at night, on the phone, by fax. From December 1994 through August 1996, Leon Panetta managed the official White House staff, the Joint Chiefs commanded the military, the cabinet administered the government, but no single person more influenced the president of the United States than Dick Morris.

  As Dick's power grew, mine receded. I still participated in White House policy meetings; I still helped prep the president for press conferences and other public appearances. My office wasn't moved, and my title stayed the same: senior adviser to the president for policy and strategy. But I was a presidential strategist in name only.

  The estrangement from Clinton that I began to fear in 1994 became more pronounced in 1995. My word could no longer tip the balance of a decision; I was no longer the morning flak catcher, the master interpreter of Clinton's mood, or the ultimate authority on what he would do. Clinton would occasionally take my suggestions on minor tactical matters. But after the 1994 debacle, the president didn't fully trust me or my judgment.

  When I was honest with myself, I couldn't really blame him. I was part of the team that had failed. But it still hurt, and I wanted to fight my way back, certain there was too much at stake, both personally and politically, to just pick up and leave. Instead, I picked my spots — working with the Democrats in Congress to run a guerrilla campaign against the Republican budget, the heart of their “Contract with America,” and volunteering within the White House to manage a review of federal affirmative action programs. If I was no longer a trusted adviser, no longer defined as “by his side,” at least I'd work on the issues that mattered most to me.

  Tonight's dinner was part of the president's evolving effort to integrate Morris into the official White House operation. For most of the winter they had met alone. Then Clinton had introduced Morris to the vice president and convened weekly political strategy meetings in the residence with Gore, Leon Panetta, and Leon's two deputies, Harold Ickes and Erskine Bowles. I was excluded, which was killing me and my pride. Yeah, '94 was a disaster, but it wasn't all my fault. I'm still the only staffer here who's been through an entire election cycle. Besides, how can I even pretend to myself that I'm the president's strategist if I don't attend the strategy meetings? Both Harold and Erskine let me know that Dick was constantly undermining me with the president, telling him that I was too liberal and too much of a leaker to be part of the team. But although Clinton didn't want me in too close, he didn't want me too far away either. I wouldn't have been there that night if Clinton had wanted to totally freeze me out. If I was worthy of a summit, I still had some juice. But Morris had far more — and it showed.

  When he returned from the phone, I got my first good look at Dick. He was a small sausage of a man encased in a green suit with wide lapels, a wide floral tie, and a wide-collared shirt. His blow-dried pompadour and shiny leather briefcase gave him the look of a B-movie mob lawyer, circa 1975 — the kind of guy who gets brained with a baseball bat for double-crossing his boss. But his outfit was offset by the flush of power on his pasty face. I knew that look — the afterglow of a private meeting with the leader of the free world. For some reason, however, Dick seemed a little nervous. When he first spoke, his hands fluttered just below his chest and his voice vibrated his saccharine greeting. “I am soo happy to meet you. I have been soo impressed by your work,” he said, bowing into the table. “I know Bill soo well, so I know how hard your job was in the last campaign. Watching from the outside, I could imagine how hard it must have been on the inside. And I really want to thank you for winning the last election — so I can win the reelection.”

  Spare me the unctuous bullshit, you insincere prick. You've been trying to get me fired for months. Of course I did
n't say that; all I squeezed out was my own false note of thanks. To me, Dick's flattery was a form of condescension, the verbal equivalent of a pat on the head. Now go away, kid, you bother me. After all, he was the one who really knew “Bill,” who had the intimate, long-term relationship that I couldn't presume to challenge. An hour ago, he was the one in the family quarters of the White House while I was working out in the OEOB's basement gym. That final line said it all: “I really want to thank you for winning the last election, so I can win the reelection.” Oh, so that's why I did it. Thanks for clarifying.

  But beneath Dick's grandiosity was a childlike transparency that might have touched me if I hadn't been so jealous. His greeting betrayed a tendency to say things that political operatives like me might think but not speak because they're not seemly and not really true — like the notion that “we,” rather than the candidates, are the ones who really win elections. I noticed at once that Dick was missing a gene: He literally had no shame. At the moment, though, I was focused on the message Morris was sending to me — that my experience was merely a brief chapter in Clinton's political saga, and my time had passed.

  For the next forty-eight minutes, I listened to the Morris story. Every last detail. How Dick managed his first student-council campaign in grade school and worked his way up to ward leader races on the Upper West Side, winning every time. How he did field organizing for McCarthy in '68 and McGovern in 72. How he shifted abruptly from urban policy analyst to political gun for hire in 1977, when he lost his job and found a wife. Dick talked nonstop, in fluent, unpunctuated paragraphs. Yet he seemed as disconnected from his own words as he was from us, as if he were reading someone else's obituary from a TelePrompTer; at least until he got to the heart of the narrative — part buddy movie, part perverse morality play: the story of Dick and Bill.

  It was a tale of two political prodigies — one from the North, one from the South; one short, one tall; one a consultant, the other the candidate of his dreams. Idealistic, fast-talking baby boomers, they both grew up revering Kennedy, hating Nixon, losing with McGovern, and vowing never to let it happen again. They believed in the power of politics to help people but loved the sport of it even more. When they met in 1978, Dick was a fledgling consultant scouring the country for candidates and Bill was an ambitious attorney general of Arkansas looking to make a move. They bonded by poring over polls and bantering about campaign strategy the way baseball fans study box scores and relive their favorite plays. And together, they won. But it wasn't an easy or equal relationship. When Dick looked up at Bill, he saw a future president; when Bill looked down at Dick, he saw the devil he knew — the part of himself that confused power and popularity with public service and principle. Dick knew how to win, but by the time he met Bill, he wasn't scrupulous about how he did it or whom he did it for. His other clients were Republicans, and his attack ads were the roughest in the business. Word was that he would work for both sides of the same race if he could get away with it.

  So after Bill became America's youngest governor, he fired Dick for being, as Morris put it, an “assault on his vanity.” Two years later, Bill had become America's youngest ex-governor. Tried to do too much too fast, let his ideals get the better of him. Chastened, he summoned Dick to plot the comeback. They trimmed their sails, tacked to the center, and won — again and again. The only victory Dick missed was the biggest — 1992 — though Morris claimed to me that Clinton's comeback kick in New Hampshire was plotted with him over the phone. The world according to Morris wasn't complicated: Over their sixteen-year relationship, when Dick was by his side, Bill succeeded; when Bill pushed Dick away, disaster.

  Just as he reached that conclusion, Morris paused. His eyes widened, his hands fell still on the table, and his voice settled back into his body. For the first and only time that night, he sounded authentically human. “Bill only wants me around when his dark political side is coming out,” Morris said, self-aware and sad. “He doesn't want anything to do with me when he's in good-government, Boy Scout mode.” Dick knew his client well. Bill might need him, but he'd never be proud of him. They might be soul mates, but it had to be secret. And there would be days and weeks, months and years, when Bill just wouldn't call.

  I almost felt for the guy. But the moment passed in the time it took for the insight to flash across Dick's face. Being out wasn't his problem now. Morris was as in as you could be. Hillary had helped bring him back. Although she didn't share Dick's politics, she valued his strategic skills and the magic he could work on her husband's political mood. They had stayed in touch, talking on the phone several times in 1993 and 1994; she knew they might need Dick one day. Shortly before the midterm election, the president joined the conversation. “I told Clinton that he was going to get beat,” Dick said. “I tried to tell him not to demonize the Republicans and focus on his smaller accomplishments, like family leave and direct student loans. After the Middle East trip, I told him not to campaign at all, just stay out of the race.”

  Most of Dick's soliloquy had washed right over me. Why is he telling me all this? Is he ever going to stop? But these last few points were different. Not because they were new. Quite the contrary. I'd heard them all before — straight from the president. “I knew that going after the Contract with America was a loser. … I should have never let you talk me into attacking it. … Should have never let myself get sucked into campaigning so much.” Never mind that Clinton had insisted on doing more talk radio, more television interviews, and more campaign rallies in the closing days of 1994, or that when the spirit moved him on the stump, no one loved to rip into the Republicans more. Dick's advice — sound advice, I had to admit — was his ticket to the family quarters of the White House. It had also become one of the stories Clinton told himself to explain his defeat.

  “I've been talking to Clinton constantly since the election,” Morris continued. No kidding. But my resentment was temporarily replaced by fascination. As Dick dictated to me what he'd been drilling into Clinton for months, he morphed into a political version of the autistic math genius played by Dustin Hoffman in the movie Rain Man. His voice gained speed but lost all its tone, as if it were being generated by a transistor wired to the back of his throat. His index finger tapped furiously at a slim pocket computer that stored the polls he called his “prayer book.” Weaving that data with bits of policy analysis, political science theory, and historical analogies from England, America, and France, Dick spun out an elaborate “Theory of the Race” — that Clinton would win in 1996 if he “neutralized” the Republicans and “triangulated” the Democrats.

  Neutralization required passing big chunks of the Republican agenda: a balanced budget, tax cuts, welfare reform, an end to affirmative action. This would “relieve the frustrations” that got them elected in 1994 and allow Clinton to “push them to the right” on “popular” issues like gun control and a woman's right to choose in 1996. Triangulation demanded that Clinton abandon “Democratic class-warfare dogma,” rise above his partisan roots, and inhabit the political center “above and between” the two parties — a concept Dick helpfully illustrated by joining his thumbs and forefingers into the shape of a triangle. That meant Clinton had to deliberately distance himself from his Democratic allies, use them as a foil, pick fights with them. Combine these two tactics with a “strong” foreign policy, a reasonably healthy economy, and public advocacy of issues like school uniforms and curfews that would demonstrate Clinton's commitment to “values,” Dick said, and Clinton would win in 1996.

  Suddenly he stopped. His spine stiffened, and his head dropped mechanically toward his belt. Then it popped back up, as if he'd been snapped out of a hypnotic trance. It was his beeper. “The president.” He smiled, followed by a little laugh. All I need, another reminder of who's in charge. But at least the interruption as Dick went to find a phone gave me a chance to collect my thoughts and absorb all I'd seen and heard.

  It was a tour de force, no question about that. As abstract strategy, Dick
's theory was elegant; as performance art, it was mesmerizing. Watching Dick, I began to see what attracted Clinton to him. Beneath the weird veneer, Dick's mind was color-blind. He thought in black and white, a useful complement to Clinton's kaleidoscopic worldview. Stan Greenberg, Clinton's previous pollster, was a former professor with an academic style, analytical and nuanced. He appealed to Clinton's intellectual instincts and synthesizing nature, but Clinton often groused that Stan didn't make definitive recommendations. Dick, however, spoke to the part of Clinton that wanted to be told what to do. He offered clear prescriptions and promised measurable results. His certainty helped cure Clinton's chronic bouts of indecision. I could almost hear his steady drone on the phone with Clinton, calming the anxiety that often came over the president after midnight: “Remember the theory. If we stick to it, we'll win. Just like we always have. Promise. It's in the prayer book.”

  Of course, no single adviser could ever fully own Clinton. He was too smart and too stubborn for that. But after hearing Morris out, I was struck by the degree to which Clinton had integrated Dick's thinking with his own. In strategy meetings, Clinton had been repeating the Morris mantra that I'd heard fully explained tonight: “We have to help the Republicans spend their antigovernment, antitax energy. We don't want 1996 to be about taxes and government.” Other scenes now started to make sense as well. Like the time in December when I was up in the residence with Hillary and Clinton as he prepared to address the nation from the Oval Office. “Who came up with this language on the middle-class bill of rights?” I asked. Clinton pretended he didn't hear me; Hillary wore a Cheshire grin, throwing me off. It wasn't her; it was Dick. Or on State of the Union day. Clinton and Hillary retreated to the family quarters to revise the speech themselves, or so we thought and faithfully spun to reporters as a sure sign that the president was preparing to speak from his heart. When I reviewed a late draft and questioned their decision to drop a line opposing Republican “tax cuts for the wealthy,” Hillary snapped, “You say what you want to say, Bill.” That's weird. She usually likes a good pop on the Republicans. I didn't know then that the edit had come from Dick, who was hiding in the family room next door.