All Too Human: A Political Education

by George Stephanopoulos

  “The president,” Morris said, “is stark, raving, berserkly mad” at Janet Reno. “I can't divulge why,” but Clinton wanted us to “rid him of this priest.” He asked me to devise a cabinet shuffle that would include a new attorney general. “I can't do it myself,” he concluded. “I don't know these people well enough, but we need to come up with a plan.”

  What are you, nuts? We couldn't fire Reno if we wanted to. I sure couldn't. Must be a test. No, a trap. He's trying to see if I'll leak the idea, so he can blame me when it goes bad.

  Unable to resist his reference to Henry II, I replied, “Dick, maybe Clinton does want us to ‘rid him of this priest,’ I don't know. But sometimes our job is to talk him out of his politically suicidal impulses.”

  “Don't worry,” he said. “This isn't the Saturday Night Massacre.”

  Why — because it's Tuesday?

  Dick's scheme was so incendiary that I didn't mention it to anyone — and certainly didn't do anything. I wasn't even sure what Clinton was supposedly so upset about until I saw the July 30 Sunday Times, which ran an AP story that said Attorney General Reno had filed court papers that Friday arguing that Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr had “the right to pursue fraud and conspiracy charges against President Clinton's successor as Arkansas governor,” Jim Guy Tucker.

  It all made sense now. The report was perfectly pitched to the mutually reinforcing paranoia of the president and Morris. Dick had another theory. “We have succeeded,” he once told me, “in having sixty-five percent of the public blame Hillary for Whitewater.” To him that was good news; his only fear was that “Starr will get Jim Guy Tucker to cop a plea in order to nail Hillary. Then Hillary will have to bargain with Starr for disbarment or a critical report in return for no indictment.” Unsure of the law, he probably thought a new attorney general could reverse Reno's decision.

  Clinton was smarter than that. He understood the decision was a fait accompli, and I'm sure he didn't share Dick's equanimity over the political value of having his wife take the fall for Whitewater. But he didn't like Janet Reno all that much, and he sure did hate Ken Starr. When he heard about Reno's decision, he probably did erupt; he may even have wailed for a new attorney general. But I couldn't believe that he really imagined that he could get away with removing her.

  But Morris didn't give up. Two days later, he called me at seven A.M. “Clinton is through the roof,” he said. “He just gives me this dumb stare, demanding an answer.” Dick was obsessed, pleading with me for a solution; here was one problem he couldn't really poll (at least I hoped he hadn't). “Why can't we replace her with Mickey Kantor or Leon Panetta?” he asked.

  I hated even having this conversation. A phone call about Jay Stephens had put me on the cover of Time; plotting to get rid of the attorney general would probably land me in jail. (“Section 1505 of Title 18 in the U.S. Code brands any attempt to ‘influence, obstruct, or impede the due and proper administration of the law’ a crime punishable by imprisonment of up to five years.”) But like an idiot, I didn't hang up. Instead, I tried to reason with Dick. “The president will get crucified if he picks Mickey,” I said. “Everyone will accuse him of trying to save his own skin by replacing an attorney general brimming with integrity with a political crony. Leon's not a close friend, but he would never take the job until the end of the year, when the budget is done.” I was learning how to deal with Dick. Instead of raising broad ethical or political objections that he'd simply dismiss, I'd offer relatively narrow but irrefutable rebuttals. He'd bounce off these roadblocks like a bumper car and spin off in a new direction, but at least I could slow him down.

  “What about Babbitt?” he tried.

  I didn't have a rapid response. The interior secretary's reputation for integrity rivaled Reno's. I told Dick I'd have to think about it. Thankfully, he let it drop after a few more calls. Bosnia had grabbed his attention. Earlier in July, when Harold had shown me an agenda from the weekly residence meeting, I saw that a page and a half were missing from the memo. “What's this ripped-out part?” I asked.

  “George, you can't tell anybody,” he said. “It was Dick's recommendation for a bombing campaign against Serbia.”

  Any public exposure of Dick's foreign-policy role would be political death. Bad enough that he was wreaking havoc with domestic policy. On national security matters, ad hoc decisions could be dangerous, and his involvement would open the president up to attack for turning to an amoral pollster on matters of war and peace. In May, after Morris tried to end run the NSC and rewrite U.S. policy on terrorism and trade with Japan, Tony Lake had gone to Clinton and secured his commitment that Morris would be walled off from the national security policy-making process. But by July, Dick was on a power jag. He was building his campaign empire, and he had the run of the government, foraging through the agencies and pressing cabinet secretaries for new ideas to poll. He claimed that he was “functionally White House chief of staff,” and he wasn't far off. As his influence grew, he became more manic and less discreet.

  On the same day Morris asked me to remove Reno, at a weekly meeting of about twenty senior White House staffers from the press, politics, and communications departments that Dick presided over in room 180 of the OEOB, we were discussing the need for a presidential statement on Bosnia. “The next statement I want to hear on Bosnia is brroom! … brroom! … brroom!” Morris started bouncing off his seat cushion while puffing out his cheeks and lips to simulate a bombing raid. Seconds later, like a two year old acting out, he was giggling. We were stunned. All of us knew Dick; most of us were disgusted by him. Sometimes you could suspend your revulsion long enough to enjoy his shtick. Not now — not when the most influential adviser to the president of the United States was discussing an act of war in the manner of a madman.

  The next morning, only slightly more calm, he called me with a question: “Why can't Clinton just bomb Bosnia on his own?”

  I was sympathetic to the idea of air strikes. The fact that we had failed to confront the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia with punishing force was a black mark on our foreign policy — a shame underscored by the massacres in Srebrenica earlier that month. But as I explained to Dick, our UN and NATO allies had peacekeeping forces on the ground in Bosnia. If we decided to bomb without their consent, they would withdraw their troops — and we were obligated to provide U.S. ground troops to cover their retreat. This posed a dilemma for Morris: Bombing polled well; ground troops didn't. But you couldn't have one without the other unless the allies were on board.

  “Then why can't we just launch an attack directly on Serbia?”

  The Pentagon will go into open revolt, I explained. If the president essentially declares war on Serbia on his own, Congress will say he's creating another Vietnam, and some will start to talk about impeachment. A little hyperbolic, maybe, but the Morris method was rubbing off on me, and I was desperate to shut Dick up, if only to throw him off track. I knew that Tony Lake was secretly drafting a risky new Bosnia strategy that would include, as a last resort, the threat of unilateral air strikes. Only by convincing Britain and France of our resolve to go it alone, Lake believed, would we keep them on board — a lesson we had learned from our 1993 Bosnia failures. Tony was right, and I wanted the initiative to work. But if Dick kept talking about the idea (he was now covertly consulting foreign-policy experts outside the government and summoning White House reporters to his hotel suite for supersecret “background” sessions) or one of his polling memos leaked, the delicate effort would collapse — dismissed by opponents at home and abroad as pure politics.

  Which for Morris, of course, it was. The more we talked, the more frustrated he became. I tried a new tack — taking his side. “Listen, Dick,” I said. “I agree with you. Our policy is unsustainable. The killings are horrible. But you have to be patient.” Enraged, he cut me off. “Yeah, well, they're slaughtering the Bosnians, but so what?” Dick roared in a guttural tone that made me feel I had exorcised a demon from the darkest corner of his soul.
“I want to bomb the shit out of the Serbians to look strong.”

  “So what”? “Look strong”? The candor was chilling. Not only for what it said about Dick, but for what it touched in me. Maybe Dick was right; maybe there were two Georges: I cared about the Bosnians, and I believed bombing was our moral duty, but I also wanted Clinton to look strong, and I believed bombing was a political necessity. Which motive colored my judgment more? Was Morris truly the alien force I imagined him to be? Or just brutally honest? With every encounter, Dick was becoming more than a hated colleague; he was a cautionary tale — even when, especially when, I agreed with his advice. “The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.” Like the lines of Eliot I kept underlined behind my desk, he was a daily reminder of who I was when I wasn't careful.

  How Clinton reacted to Dick's ravings on Bosnia, I can't say. This part of the Morris portfolio was still supposed to be their secret. Another problem in dealing with Dick during this period was trying to figure out when he was speaking for the president and when he was freelancing; when he was anticipating Clinton's demands and when Dick's wishes would later become the president's commands. But I did know that Clinton was anxious, consistently complaining that the status quo in Bosnia “makes everyone look weak and unprincipled. The only thing that has worked is when the Serbs thought we were prepared to use disproportionate air power.” The president was also conscious of the politics — international and domestic. Our allies were getting shaky. If they decided to withdraw, American troops would have to go in even without a peace agreement. At home, Senator Dole's resolution to lift the arms embargo on Bosnia was about to pass the Congress by a large margin; Clinton could sustain a veto and avoid a political defeat only by forcing a peace in Bosnia now. We needed “to bust our rear to get a settlement in the next couple of months,” he said, “explore all alternatives, roll every die.” Otherwise, he feared, the decision would be “dropped in during the middle of the campaign.”

  The president was now prepared to do what had always seemed unthinkable before: dispatch twenty thousand American ground troops to the Balkans, knowing that any casualties could cost him his presidency. Would Clinton have been willing to gamble if his hand hadn't been forced by the campaign calendar? Was his moral courage now a function of political necessity? I wished I knew. Humanitarian concern, realpolitik, and electoral politics all steeled Clinton in their own way. But the pressure seemed to bring out the best in Clinton, in contrast to Morris. The experience of being president appeared to be making him a better president. In a series of early-August meetings with his national security advisers, he was calm and determined, aware of the weight of his decision. “If we let this moment slip away,” he said, “we are history.” After reviewing the maps, pressing all his advisers with detailed questions, and personally revising the terms of the initiative, he signaled his decision with a glance across the cabinet table at Tony Lake: “How quickly can you get your bags packed?”

  “I've got a toothbrush in my office.”

  With the hole card of Clinton's commitment to strike alone if necessary, Lake secured allied backing for more aggressive bombing coupled with intensified peace talks. By early September, the shelling of Sarajevo finally triggered a massive NATO bombing campaign that forced the Serbs to back down and gave our negotiator, Richard Holbrooke, the leverage he would need to negotiate a diplomatic settlement before the Balkan winter.

  Back home, Dick Morris was counting on a similar formula to produce a budget deal with the Republicans. “We'll defeat them in the air war,” he said. “Our Medicare ads will turn them into roving bands of hunter-gatherers in search of a home.” Morris had discovered Medicare, and he was now planning to force the Republicans to compromise by launching a multimillion-dollar ad showing the president standing up to their assault on Medicare. For Dick, this was a twofer: Not only did he believe that the ads would improve Clinton's poll numbers and help pave the way for his prized budget deal, but he would also get a healthy commission for every dollar we spent on television.

  Despite Dick's support, I was all for the ads. The insurance industry's “Harry and Louise” campaign had demolished us during the health care fight; this time we'd beat them to the punch. And Medicare was our best weapon — the only Democratic issue as potent as the Republicans' “less government, lower taxes” mantra. Medicare was more than just another government program; its guarantee of health care for the elderly was a metaphor for our commitment to the middle-class American dream and a political shield for less popular programs for the poor that we were trying to protect. All year long, the Republican leadership had threatened to stop funding the government and financing its debt if the president refused to sign their budget. “We want to force change,” Gingrich warned Clinton in a meeting before the August recess. Now the showdown was only weeks away. To prevail, we would have to convince the public that the president was making a principled stand against blackmail and using his power to protect average people. An ad campaign focused on Medicare would help Clinton and the congressional Democrats sustain a presidential veto and survive a government shutdown. Morris didn't want a Clinton veto, and he insisted that the ads, coupled with back-channel negotiations with his former client Trent Lott, the number two Republican in the Senate, would produce a budget deal long before it came to that. In early September, he asked me to help with these “secret” talks, just as I had worked with him when we were constructing our June budget. “Only Lott, Gingrich, Clinton, Gore, and Panetta know about it,” he said. “Lott and I will be the negotiators. Gingrich specifically requested that you and Ickes be kept out of the loop, but I need your help with the deal.”

  To secure my cooperation, he offered two incentives — one old, one new. Two months after our hallway accord, I still hadn't been invited to the weekly strategy meetings, so he tried to resell me a place in the room. It seems there was a new obstacle. “Gore's cut your balls off,” he said. According to Morris, now it was the vice president who was blocking me. Dick said that early in 1995, Gore had urged him to make peace with Harold, not me, because “George is your real enemy. He's shrewd, tactically smart, and he runs this place.” But Dick was too obsessed with Ickes to follow that advice, assuming Gore had even given it. “I have a list of twenty-three times that Harold has fucked me over,” he said. “One of the two of us will have to go, and I don't think it's going to be me.” Then he pressed me to join forces with him against Harold. “I had to destroy you so you would know that I could,” he confessed. But now he and I could be “the heart and soul of the campaign,” he continued. “My team is like the politburo. We work together, everyone has a say, and when we disagree, we submit the decision to the ultimate master of the Western world — the polls.” Sweetening the offer with a bribe, Dick later added that if I left the White House and formally joined his team, he would pay me a million-dollar fee — my cut of the ad buy.

  What's true? What's spin? What's fantasy? What's pure control? What planet is this guy living on?

  I didn't want Dick's money. After telling him that I thought Clinton trusted Harold (“No, it's only because Ickes has something on him”), I agreed to help him only with the budget. He accepted my partial rebuff but added that I couldn't discuss our conversations with Panetta (who complained that Morris was “a spy in our midst”). “OK,” I lied. Since Morris was a Republican mole inside our White House, I would be a double agent.

  Dick would relay his conversations with Lott, and I would report back to Leon and Pat Griffin. Not that I really needed to. The fact that Morris and Lott were talking was the worst-kept secret on Capitol Hill. Lott was giving detailed debriefings on their conversations to the entire Republican leadership, which would filter back to us through Pat's network of Hill contacts. In turn, I tried to sensitize Morris to what Democrats were thinking and to help him understand the political realities behind the budget numbers that he and Lott were throwing around. For example, I explained that meeting Lott's �
��bottom lines” of a $200 billion tax cut and a seven-year balanced budget under the economic assumptions of the Congressional Budget Office would require almost $500 billion more in cuts than our June budget. No Democrat would vote for that, I argued; the president would be perceived as caving, and he wouldn't be protecting Medicare as we were promising in our ads.

  Morris listened but didn't hear. The truth is, he didn't really care. His theory demanded a deal, so we had to get one. But he feared that once the Republicans “walked the plank” and actually voted for a final budget that included deep Medicare cuts, a subsequent Clinton veto would harden each side's position and make compromise impossible. That was fine with me. I was happy to take the issues to the 1996 election — and even lose — rather than have Clinton sign anything close to the Republican budget into law. I didn't think a good deal was possible. The gap between the two sides was too big, and the consequences of the Republican cuts — particularly for the poorest children and seniors who relied on Medicaid as well as Medicare — were too devastating to contemplate. A Democratic president just couldn't sign them into law. Even if a decent deal were possible in theory, I believed that Clinton couldn't forge it without the sledgehammer of a veto — and his party would lynch him if he tried. “If you force Clinton to make a deal before he has the veto,” I argued to Dick, “you're forcing him to commit political suicide.”

  What the president would do was anyone's guess. He was talking tough in public but itching for a deal. The Morris theory merged in his mind with his natural inclination toward conciliation and a Pan-glossian faith in his ability to achieve what he willed. To nudge the process along, he supplemented the Morris-Lott back channel with his own quiet phone calls to Speaker Gingrich. We worried about these contacts, fearing that the Republicans would be smart enough to make some quick concessions and lock Clinton into an agreement that wouldn't get Democratic support. But the Republican leaders were hemmed in by hubris and their own restless troops — the freshmen elected in the revolution of 1994 who equated compromise with capitulation. They overplayed their hand and, like me sometimes, underestimated the president.