All Too Human: A Political Education

by George Stephanopoulos

  “What are you, nuts?”

  “No, I polled it,” he replied. “If Jesse runs it will cost us three points with blacks but open up fifteen percent of white voters” who would never even consider voting for Clinton without Jackson in the race.

  Thankfully, the president dismissed this Morris brainstorm. He'd had his fill of triangulation for a while. “I hope the Court decision will make this a less virulent issue,” Clinton said a few days later; and he finally authorized us to finish the report and prepare a speech that would say: “Here are my principles …” and “Here's what works …” We scheduled it for July 19. While Edley polished our official report, I devoted the final month to getting the politics right. In the wake of the double assault of Adarand and Clinton's balanced-budget speech, unifying the Democrats was not only politically prudent, but, at least to me, had become a matter of principle — solidarity. I wanted the president to demonstrate fidelity to long-held beliefs and loyalty to longtime friends, and I wanted to be on the side of the underdogs; I wanted the Democrats to praise Clinton, not rage at him — to feel inspired, not betrayed.

  I also wanted Clinton to be reelected. Remembering the rule that primary challenges almost always cripple incumbent presidents, I was convinced we'd lose if Jackson ran. To feel him out, Harold and I paid Jesse a courtesy call at the Rainbow Coalition headquarters near K Street. Maybe it was the daylight hour and the downtown offices; or the numbing rush of intervening events and the fact that I was four years older, a little jaded, and more of a principal; but that first Clinton-Jackson summit now seemed like a scene from another life. This session was cordially corporate, less dramatic but far more direct. Sitting beneath a huge wall map of the United States marked with each state's filing deadline for an Independent slot on the presidential ballot, Jesse rehearsed speech riffs (“If we can use goals, targets, and timetables to get fair trade with Japan, we can use goals, targets, and timetables to get a fair shake for our own folks. That's what affirmative action is all about”), and he delivered his bottom line (“I'm not moving one inch on set-asides”). If we went beyond the Adarand decision, he'd be calling Bob Johnson and Earl Graves to finance his presidential run. Dick might get his wish after all.

  From there I made the rounds, giving briefings on our review and getting suggestions for the president's speech. Emulating the style of my old boss Dick Gephardt (who had earned the admiring nickname Iron Butt for his ability to sit through as many meetings for as many hours as it took to reach a consensus with his colleagues), I visited all the House caucuses — blacks, women, Hispanics, Asians, and the “Blue Dog” conservatives. I had small group sessions with cabinet secretaries and one-on-one discussions with influential senators like Bill Bradley and Pat Moynihan (who told me how he'd helped draft Lyndon Johnson's famous Howard University speech on affirmative action back in 1965). Outside the government, I balanced our running contacts with the liberal civil rights community by reaching out to my old adversaries in the DLC. In each meeting, my message was the same: The president would defend affirmative action; Adarand would do the job of reform.

  Of course, I couldn't be sure that Clinton would actually do what I was saying. Dick kept pushing for daylight between Clinton and the Democrats, and the president was still fiddling with the final decision. Although he didn't relish a Jackson challenge, Clinton was intrigued by one of Dick's decent ideas (developed by presidential assistant Bill Curry), for a system of race-neutral incentives for businesses to locate in poor neighborhoods, which I favored as long as it was clearly a supplement to rather than a replacement for the current system. All my soundings made me more certain than ever that we had to stay within the confines of Adarand. If Clinton seemed to be moving to the right of Sandra Day O'Connor by preemptively eliminating programs before the Justice Department had analyzed them using the Adarand guidelines (a process that would take several months at least), Democrats would fracture.

  So in the final days leading up to the speech, I made sure that the president heard from Democrats directly. Personal testimony would affect Clinton even more than Dick's polls. The more meetings he had with civil rights leaders, old friends like John Lewis and Vernon Jordan, cabinet secretaries like Donna Shalala, Henry Cisneros, Ron Brown, and Dick Riley, the more locked in he would get. But I still had to listen closely to every word; he was preserving his options right until the end. At a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus, D.C. delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton tried to pin him down: “Mr. President, there is considerable anxiety about your views here. We need to know more.”

  “I don't think I'll cause high anxiety,” he replied. “You'll find what I do interesting but not troubling.”

  “Interesting but not troubling”? Oh, that helps. Now I know what to do: “Edley — the president's decided: He wants a policy that's ‘interesting but not troubling.’ Call the speechwriters, tell them we need a ringing speech that's ‘interesting but not troubling.’”

  As the meeting continued, Clinton's responses became more fulsome. His tone was reassuring. His denunciations of discrimination were passionate, but his words were careful. When other members stood up to say that an unequivocal statement of presidential support on affirmative action was essential, Clinton took notes, bit his lip, and nodded his head in vigorous agreement. The members left thrilled, convinced they had a promise from the president. I hoped he wasn't leading them on. Erskine and I approached him after the meeting to call him on it.

  “Mr. President,” Erskine said, “you understand now that whatever door you think you left open, you didn't.”

  “What?”

  “In their minds,” I continued, “you have firmly decided to stay within Adarand, not to go one step outside it, and to fully support affirmative action.”

  “I didn't say that.”

  Maybe not those precise words, but his message was clear — even if he didn't want it to be. Clinton's compassion was involuntary, fully felt yet entirely existential, an instinctive empathy so ingrained that he communicated commitment even when he thought he was creating space. He couldn't control the bend of his neck, the fold of his lower lip, or the earnest curl of his forefinger any more than he could pace the beat of his heart or the blink of his eye. His mind, however, never stopped calculating, playing the angles, figuring the outs. Read him his words, and he'd show you the loopholes.

  But this time, he didn't put up much of a fight. By now, he wanted an unapologetic defense of affirmative action. Sensing the changing tide, Morris called the weekend before the speech with the convenient news that a new poll he had commissioned showed that a Jackson candidacy would turn the presidential race from a 38-38 tie with Bob Dole to a 30-38 loss. At least he was consistent. The “prayer book” was an infallible guide; his hands were tied. In the only way he knew, Dick was conceding defeat.

  So I had a win — my most satisfying yet. I thought we were doing the right thing for (basically) the right reasons. The more I had studied and learned, the more I had encountered people who knew and cared about affirmative action, the more I had become convinced that embracing the idea and its advocates was a form of presidential leadership. That's what Clinton was going to do, that's what the job was supposed to be about, and I could tell myself that it might have turned out differently if I hadn't been there. Others went out of their way to praise me to the president. After a dinner at Vernon Jordan's house where I previewed the review for a group of African American journalists, Vernon passed the president a note through Erskine: “George was the only white person there. He stood his ground, defended you, and was not afraid. You would have been very, very proud. He was a White House staffer in the best sense of the word.” Henry Cisneros did the same, telling Clinton that by successfully managing such a large effort I had shown “a different side” of myself. Morris's replacing me “by Clinton's side” — a form of psychological exile I still hated — had turned out to be good for me, giving me the opportunity to immerse myself in an important issue and to stop defining
myself solely as Clinton's flak catcher, defender, and message disciplinarian.

  Of course, it was still nice to be needed. On the day before the speech, Clinton walked back and forth from my office, draft in hand, asking for facts, testing a phrase, looking for my advice. Later in the evening, he tracked me down at the gym and called me at home to report on his last-minute consultations with Colin Powell and Jesse Jackson. “Colin's going to be fine,” he said, “and I had a good talk with Jesse, but he needs more information. Give him a call.” I was Clinton's guy again, and he was in a groove. The basic speech was set: The president would decry the persistence of discrimination, defend affirmative action as a crucial tool in the struggle for equal opportunity, and demand that it be reformed, as necessary, to meet the test of fairness and the requirements of the Constitution. But Clinton still tinkered with it through the night at his kitchen counter, following the advice that Senator Howell Heflin had offered a few hours earlier: “Put a little Bible in the speech.”

  Which made for a typically chaotic morning in the Oval. The president was late to the office, then he was delayed by calls to the prime ministers of Britain and France — another emergency in Bosnia. Nancy Hernreich and I used the time to try and decipher Clinton's edits, but even our combined experience was inadequate. He would have to dictate them to us. Edley couldn't take it. A major Clinton speech was always a hazing for some novice who hadn't been initiated into the rite. Chris paced around Betty's office, pressing his fingers to his scalp, tormented by the thought that we'd never make it to the National Archives on time.

  But of course we did. Edley and I took our seats in the second row, and the president walked to the podium we had set between glass cases holding the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to begin a forty-five-minute meditation on “America's rocky but fundamentally righteous journey to close the gap between the ideals enshrined in these treasures here … and the reality of our daily lives.”

  “Rocky but fundamentally righteous journey.” Vintage Clinton, an improvisation that condensed the struggle for civil rights into a single phrase. Rocky but fundamentally righteous journey. I wanted to believe it captured the essence of our presidency. And at a moment like this, on a day like today, for the first time in a long time — with Clinton preaching in the fervent tones of an evangelist on the basic tenets of the Democratic faith, with our allies ecstatic at the sight of a president taking a stand and challenging their fellow citizens to follow his lead, with our adversaries temporarily flummoxed by Clinton's call to “mend but don't end” affirmative action — I could.

  The president asked me to join him on the ride back to the White House. I sat on the jump seat, facing him and the vice president. Clinton handed me a bottle of water from his cooler; Gore congratulated me: “George, you did a hell of a job on this.”

  “Yeah,” the president added. “You really did a good job on this, George.”

  My reaction to that praise caught me by surprise. I thought I was hardened to political courtesy — the autographed picture, the handshake on a rope line, the handwritten note, the thank-you car ride for a job well done. But I wasn't. I needed a sip of that water now — to clear my throat and keep my voice from cracking. Escaping to safe territory, I reported on the early reviews I had gathered while Clinton shook hands at a postspeech reception. The civil rights guys were crying, they were so happy. Not a single Democrat was complaining yet, Mary McGrory called it the best presidential speech on race since 1965, and even our beat reporters (now they were off the record) said they had never seen Clinton better. In the interest of full disclosure, I had to add that California governor Pete Wilson (who was planning to challenge Clinton in 1996) would get some attention with his response: “He should have said end it. You can't mend it.” And that Joe Klein was fuming and would probably write a nasty column in Newsweek because the speech wasn't tough enough for his taste.

  Knitting his brow, the president nodded. “I was walking down the aisle and could see in his eyes that he didn't like it.” For a second, I thought I saw regret in Clinton's eyes. A potential foe and an old friend were both on the attack. But his doubt seemed to pass as we entered the White House gates.

  “I feel good about it,” he concluded. “We did the right thing.”

  15 ENTENTE CORDIALE

  There are these two George Stephanopouloses — Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll is unbelievable. He's the only staffer in the White House with a brain. The only one who's good. I talk to my wife and I catch myself liking him. We were driving along the other day, and I'm telling her how great you are, how smart you are, how brilliant you are; and she reminds me: ‘Dick, he wants to kill you.’”

  She's right.

  “That's Mr. Hyde,” he continued. “The one who tells people, ‘Dick Morris lies directly to my face.’ Ann Devroy says that Stephanopoulos and Ickes are out to kill Morris. I hear these things.”

  Late in the afternoon of the affirmative action speech, after a silence of several days, Dick called. It was time to talk again, he said, but in person, not on the phone: “Meet me outside 160 OEOB.” So there we were, crouched together in a recessed space off the main corridor, whispering. Why? I didn't know. But Dick's eyes kept darting toward the hallway, and his hands were trembling.

  If we don't win in 1996, he continued, “there are only two losers: Bill Clinton and Dick Morris. You'll go on. You'll have a candidate in the year 2000. I have given up my career. I have no home. I have no one left to talk to.”

  Get a dog. Get to the point.

  “I want us to share power — everything. I'll make a deal with you: I'll trade you access for an end to the backbiting. I want you to be my friend and confidant.”

  He's suing for peace by sucking you in. Knows your weakness, knows you need that place at his weekly meeting with the president. Must think it's going to happen anyway; knows Harold's working on it. Didn't like losing on affirmative action. Doesn't want it to happen again. Knows he needs you. Hang tough.

  “Well, Dick, this is a chicken-and-egg problem. I think you're trying to fuck me.”

  “I'm not the one who's kept you out of those meetings,” he responded. “The president's kept you out.”

  Ummgh. He's right. Who am I kidding? Today was great, but how will Clinton feel tomorrow? Dick's still got the real power. The president's ear, his confidence, and those polls. Without him working on Clinton, I'll never get back in.

  “So what do I have to do?”

  “I'll know when you stop,” he said. “A thousand flowers will bloom. I'll be surrounded by sweetness and light. All these people you control will stop fucking me.”

  “Dick, I'm in an impossible situation. You're blaming me for things other people do.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “That's just life. I'm going to have to see results to make the trade work.”

  “Fine, but I need direct access. I need to be in the meeting, and it has to be soon. I'm not going through the whole campaign filtering my advice through you.”

  “I understand.”

  We parted abruptly, turning in opposite directions like a pair of incompetent spies. I walked back to the West Wing trying to figure out what Dick's terms meant exactly. I made no secret of my dislike for Morris and no apologies for opposing his ideas. But as much as I loathed Morris and his methods, I wasn't leaking on him. As much as I loved the idea of running him out of the White House, it wasn't going to happen. As amused as I was by his delusion that I “controlled” White House troops, I didn't — everyone loathed Dick for his or her own reasons. As angry as I was at being beholden to Morris, I needed to be in those strategy sessions. Exclusion made me feel like a poster boy for downward mobility. The day I started to attend, Dick's power over me would effectively end — and his influence with Clinton would be diluted. I'd have the chance to make my case directly to the president — all you can ask for in the White House; Clinton would hear me debate Morris before he made his decisions, instead of on the fly or after the f
act. Morris knew that too. Maybe he couldn't avoid it forever, but Dick wanted to squeeze me and would use any pretext to keep me out of his Clinton meetings. I was determined not to give him one and figured I had nothing to lose. I couldn't be Dick's friend, but I could be his confidant. Five minutes after our encounter, I called him to confirm our deal.

  So began a phase that Morris called our “entente cordiale.” For a few months, we talked more than a dozen times a day, at all hours, usually on the phone or in the OEOB (Leon had effectively banned Dick from the West Wing). Watching him work was fascinating, almost fun. He could read a poll and compose a five-minute speech on its findings in five minutes flat. We often agreed on the tactical maneuvers, like how to play off breaking news, that are the daily fare of campaigns. Sometimes I felt guilty for enjoying his company — for letting my need to be a player, and the pleasure I took in it, cloud my conviction that even being associated with a guy like Morris was corrupt. So I rationalized, telling myself that I was getting my hands dirty for the sake of Clinton and our cause, that somebody like me had to hug Morris to stop his crazy ideas before they went too far.

  Like the time he wanted to fire the attorney general. About a week after we struck our deal, Dick summoned me back to his OEOB hideaway to discuss an “urgent, private matter.” He was certain his phones were bugged, and this mission demanded utmost secrecy — never mind that his words caromed off the marble columns and down the open corridor.