All Too Human: A Political Education

by George Stephanopoulos

  My only original contribution to the State of the Union was “a little dig” at our most likely opponent. On the afternoon of the speech, as Clinton practiced before a group of us from a mock podium in the family theater, I interrupted when he reached the section on national security challenges. As drafted, it opened with thanks “to our veterans” for providing America with “fifty years of prosperity and security.” I suggested that the president stop there and single out Senator Dole and his World War II colleagues for special praise. Clinton smiled and made a note on his reading copy.

  The maneuver would rankle the Dole campaign, but what could they say? How could they possibly criticize the president of the United States for taking the unprecedented step of praising his prime opponent during the State of the Union Address? Because it was a body blow wrapped in a bouquet. Clinton's seemingly gracious salute was a subtle reminder that Senator Dole's time had passed — and he was already in a deep hole. With the economy humming and Clinton stealing the political center, even a flawless campaign would probably fall short. The crucial contrasts were working in our favor: Thirty-five years of congressional experience tagged Dole as a Washington insider; Clinton was still a relative newcomer who seemed to be in touch with average Americans. The government shutdown, during which Dole had repeatedly appeared in press conferences (and our television advertising) joined at the hip with Newt Gingrich, portrayed him as captive to the most extreme forces in his party, while Clinton had shown his backbone by standing up to them. Clinton had started green, but he was growing into the job; Dole seemed too old to be president.

  Morris was so eager to make sure Dole won the Republican nomination that he tried to help him out — in his own way. Two days after the State of the Union, he secretly leaked a polling memo to the Dole campaign that said Dole could not win in either New Hampshire or Iowa unless there was a budget deal. Like one of those aged Japanese soldiers still fighting World War II from deserted island outposts, Dick hadn't surrendered his magnificent obsession. The Dole people thought the memo was bizarre. The questions were clearly slanted, and they couldn't figure out what Morris was up to. But they did take the opportunity to embarrass us by passing it on to the Post.

  When Ann Devroy called Mike McCurry for our official comment, McCurry found Morris, and Morris blamed … me. On the spot, he concocted a convoluted scheme in which I had supposedly stolen a copy of the memo from Clinton's desk and passed it on to Carville, who gave it to his Republican wife, Mary Matalin, who funneled it through to Devroy — all to smear Morris. Dick could prove it, he told McCurry, because the president's copy was missing a line scribbled on the memo that was given to the Dole campaign: “You might want to check this with your own pollster.”

  After informing me that I had been charged with treason, McCurry called Devroy, whose copy, I knew, included the handwritten notation that would prove that I had nothing to do with Dick's scheme. But when McCurry, Panetta, and Ickes presented the case against Morris to the president, I stayed away. Not only because I had also been accused, but because I didn't want to watch the charade. I knew that Dick would pay no real price for falsely charging me with the political equivalent of a capital offense. A few days earlier, I had heard a rumor that the Dole campaign had the Morris memo, so I went to the Oval to warn Clinton that they were likely to leak it. “Dick wasn't supposed to do that,” he said — a rebuke that was also, I suspected, an inadvertent admission. Morris had probably told Clinton that he would make another play for a budget deal by passing his polls to the Dole campaign, but the president must have assumed that Dick was smart enough not to leave a paper trail.

  Which Clinton was sincerely furious about. Leon and Harold came straight from the Oval with the verdict: The president had defended me and chewed out Dick. “Whenever something goes wrong around here,” he yelled, “you blame it on George.” Against my will, my eyes welled up. I guess I wasn't all that detached yet. Although I feared that Clinton didn't fully mean it and knew that nothing would follow from it, the president's spontaneous defense was something I needed to know about. The episode ended with a front-page story by Devroy, a public McCurry wrist slap of Morris, and a Morris apology to me, which I didn't accept. He was sorry for getting caught, and I didn't have to pretend anymore. From now on, no Dick attack on me would stick.

  Dole secured the nomination despite ignoring Dick's advice, but he couldn't develop any real momentum. When he tried to use his position as majority leader to pass popular tax cuts and force a Clinton veto, Democrats pinned him down on the Senate floor with amendments on our issues like raising the minimum wage. Then he tried to reignite his run by resigning from the Senate. Although his farewell speech was the most moving rhetoric of the campaign, its political benefits didn't linger. On the campaign trail, he looked lost, almost sad, a man homesick for Capitol Hill. Following our 1992 example, he tried to compensate for his lack of campaign funds by hitting the “free media” talk-show circuit. But Dole's ironic humor didn't always translate well on television; nor did his clipped legislative shorthand, honed over thirty-five years of cutting Senate deals. In the emblematic moment of the preconvention season, Dole argued with Today's Katie Couric about whether tobacco was addictive. Taking on America's sweetheart, he seemed crotchety and out of touch. All we had to do was watch.

  But I still worried. Dole couldn't match Clinton as a communicator, but there was still the issue of “character” — the contrast between the straight-talking war hero of sterling integrity and the slippery draft dodger under an ethical cloud. Our internal mantra was “public values trump private character” — a refined version of the formula that had worked ever since Gennifer Flowers and the draft. For us, it was now an article of faith that Clinton could overcome personal attacks as long as he kept addressing the “real problems of real people.” That meant, however, that the rest of us had to work even harder to keep the hoofbeats at bay.

  In June of 1996, it felt like an entire herd was converging on the White House. Ken Starr won convictions of Arkansas governor Jim Guy Tucker and Clinton's Whitewater partners Jim and Susan Mc-Dougal, and he named Bruce Lindsey an unindicted coconspirator in the trial of an Arkansas banker with ties to Clinton. Senator D'Amato issued a scathing report on Whitewater recommending that several Clinton friends and staffers be investigated for perjury. Even worse, we created a mess of our own when two midlevel White House staffers mistakenly obtained the FBI files of nine hundred Republicans from previous administrations, including former Secretary of State James Baker. “Filegate” was a bureaucratic screw-up, but with its echoes of Watergate and our 1992 attacks on the Bush administration for examining Clinton's passport file, it had the potential to be our most serious scandal yet.

  By now, damage control was a cottage industry in the White House. We had a team of lawyers, nicknamed the Masters of Disaster, whose sole job was to handle Whitewater and related inquiries — responding to grand jury subpoenas, preparing congressional testimony, answering questions from the press. Better them than me. From experience, I'd learned that simply gathering facts to answer allegations could spawn new inquiries and additional avenues of attack, creating a cycle that was the political equivalent of a perpetual-motion machine. Anyone anywhere near the activity risked getting sucked into the swirl and spit out with a tarnished reputation and a ton of debt. At approximately $100,000, my legal fees were already high enough. Though I talked to our Masters of Disaster frequently, I had steadily disengaged from the daily scandal patrol.

  At the end of June, however, I took myself out of early retirement for a farewell run at the “right-wing conspiracy.” Maybe Jay Stephens made me do it. My old nemesis was now representing Gary Aldrich, an ex-FBI agent who wanted to document the depravity he supposedly witnessed when conducting security checks on the Clinton White House staff. Stephens steered Aldrich to Regnery Publishing, an established conservative publisher. With additional assistance from the Southeastern Legal Foundation — a right-wing law firm with ties to New
t Gingrich and funding from Richard Mellon Scaife (the reclusive tycoon who had donated millions of dollars to groups promoting conspiracy theories about the Clinton White House) — they created a work of fiction and called it a memoir: Unlimited Access: An FBI Agent Inside the Clinton White House.

  The prepublication buzz was hot, and the book broke into the news on Thursday, June 27, when ABC reported that Aldrich's book alleged (falsely) that Craig Livingstone — the White House staffer under fire for obtaining the FBI files — had been hired at the direction of Hillary. The Washington Post was working on the same story, and we knew that the New York Post and the Washington Times were planning front-page treatments of the book's most sensational fabrication — that Clinton frequently snuck out of the White House in the backseat of Bruce Lindsey's car for late-night trysts at the downtown Marriott. Although the charge seemed ludicrous on its face, the media was taking Aldrich seriously. Over the next week, he was set to be seen by millions of Americans on shows like This Week with David Brinkley, Larry King Live, Good Morning America, and Dateline.

  To counter the air assault, I first had to read the book. My assistant Laura Capps bought me a copy, and I settled in by my fireplace for a night of study. With a blue felt tip, I underlined each specific charge and ranked it in the margins: “False,” “Innuendo,” “Fabrication,” “Lie.” The allegations (that the social office hung pornographic ornaments on the White House Christmas tree; that when the Gennifer Flowers story surfaced, Washington superlawyer Lloyd Cutler brokered a deal in which Hillary agreed to stand by Bill in return for total control over domestic policy in the White House; that the men on Clinton's staff wore earrings and the women no underwear) were either silly, specious, or provably false. The more I read, the more righteously indignant I became. How can they even think about broadcasting this crap before checking it out? But Aldrich's outlandish account also created an opportunity: His fifteen minutes of fame would make him the poster boy of the anti-Clinton conspiracy. If we could destroy his credibility in a high-profile way, the press might be more skeptical of the inevitable flurry of allegations late in the campaign.

  The next morning, I worked with our team to document Aldrich's partisan connections and collect affidavits refuting his claims. Then I called the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, a respected media critic whose column would be read by the editors and producers deciding how to handle Unlimited Access. Offering him an exclusive first look at the information we'd compiled, I pitched a piece about the ethics of airing the Aldrich allegations. The real story here, I argued, is not Clinton's sex life, it's his sleazy attackers and the state of journalism, adding for good measure that Aldrich's tale “couldn't get past the fact checkers at the National Enquirer.” Then I walked to the Washington bureau of ABC News to make my case to the producers of the Brinkley show. Although I didn't expect them to be particularly moved by my commitment to their First Amendment responsibilities (and they weren't), I did hope that a full-court press would help ensure that Aldrich didn't get a free ride. Brinkley kept Aldrich, but they also offered me a chance to answer his charges in person on Sunday morning.

  I arrived at the studio spoiling for a fight, and the sight of an Aldrich handler in the greenroom gave me extra ammunition: Craig Shirley was a paid agent of the NRA and big tobacco, and an unpaid adviser to Senator Dole's campaign. His presence was all the proof I needed to charge that Aldrich was part of a “smear campaign conducted by Republican Party operatives.” But as it turned out, my presence was largely superfluous. Like a boxer dissing his opponent in the center of the ring, I whispered “Liar” at Aldrich as I walked onto the set. But he'd already been pummeled by one of the referees, George Will, whose questioning revealed that the Marriott tale was a hand-me-down figment from “Troopergate's” David Brock. Newsweek had the same story, and Kurtz's article had raised all the right ethical questions. By Sunday afternoon, Dateline and Larry King Live had canceled Aldrich, and most of the follow-up focused on his shoddy sourcing and shady connections.

  My War Room swan song was a success. Was it necessary? Hard to say. But a cardinal rule of the Clinton culture was, Never take political threats lightly.

  On July 31,1996, I feared it was a lesson learned too well. Over the previous year, the president had vetoed two Republican welfare reform bills that would have ended the federal government's guarantee of health and welfare benefits to poor children. Now, after restoring the entitlement to health care but not welfare, Congress was sending it back a third time. With the election only three months away and the final decision meeting only three hours away, Clinton faced a perilous choice.

  “If he vetoes, he'll lose,” Morris declared.

  I was listening to Dick's desperate rant from the phone booth carved into the back corner of Panetta's office, where the morning staff meeting had just begun. Morris said his polls predicted that a veto of welfare reform would transform our projected fifteen-point November win into a three-point loss, and he begged me to switch sides and support the bill. Taking comfort from his anxiety, I refused. Dick had been bragging for days that Clinton was sure to sign the welfare bill, walking through the halls offering 10-1 odds against a veto to any of us willing to take his bet. The fact that he was this worried on the morning of the final decision gave me hope.

  So did Hillary. In my last few phone calls with the first lady, I could tell she preferred a veto. Like her friend Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children's Defense Fund, she feared the bill would effectively abolish the safety net and jeopardize millions of poor children. But she also kept referring to “the president's decision” — oddly formal, but somehow appropriate. After the failure of health care, and given the persistence of Whitewater, political prudence and the balance of power in their marriage weighed against a decisive Hillary intervention on welfare. She couldn't be positioned — publicly or privately — to take the fall if he vetoed the bill and the race went south. I had the sense that she was pointing out the flaws without being pushy. Maybe the lighter touch was working.

  The atmosphere in the cabinet room that morning was self-consciously statesmanlike, as if we were gathered for a council of war. Which was appropriate. The decision to end a cornerstone of the New Deal was historic, and lives hung in the balance. “The objective reality is that people are going to get hurt,” argued Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros, and Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala cited a study that predicted up to eleven million families could suffer severe harm if Clinton signed the bill. Bob Reich, Bob Rubin, Laura Tyson, Harold Ickes, and Leon Panetta all seconded the veto recommendation. A smaller faction that included Rahm Emanuel and Mickey Kantor countered that killing the bill would cause more harm by perpetuating a failed system that trapped families in a cycle of dependency. As each cabinet member and staffer solemnly stated a position, the president took notes and played devil's advocate — challenging the bill's proponents on the cruelty of the cuts and its opponents on the irresponsibility of doing nothing. But he didn't tip his hand.

  The strongest argument for signing came from domestic policy adviser Bruce Reed, a New Democrat of integrity and conviction who had developed Clinton's welfare policy since 1992. Calling it “a good welfare bill wrapped in a bad budget bill,” he conceded that the deep cuts in food stamps and emergency benefits to legal immigrants were gratuitous and needed to be fixed. But he also insisted that the core welfare reform provisions — time limits and work requirements—were close to Clinton's original proposals; that changes in child care, child support enforcement, and the school lunch program made this a far better bill than the two Clinton had vetoed; and that we couldn't get a better deal if this one broke down. Finally, he said, a third veto would break faith with voters who took Clinton at his word when he promised in 1992 to “end welfare as we know it.”

  Bruce made a good case — and I said so when Clinton called on me. “It's a tough call,” I began. Although I recommended a veto and said that I thought the benefit cut
s to legal immigrants were unconscionable and un-American, any temptation I felt to mount a self-righteous soapbox was tempered by my complicity. In 1992, I had been eager to put millions of dollars of television advertising behind the phrase “end welfare as we know it,” even though I knew full well that it sent a message far more powerful than, and somewhat contradictory to, the fine print of our proposal in Putting People First, which had promised more assistance to welfare recipients looking for work, not less. The policy arguments had all been made by the cabinet experts, so I used most of my time to answer the adviser not in the room. While conceding that a veto could cause “a quick five-or six-point drop,” I argued that it would never cost us the race and that the president had always pulled through potentially unpopular decisions like Bosnia, the budget, and affirmative action by taking principled stands. The truth is, I wanted Clinton to be a hero — to take a political risk on behalf of people who had nowhere else to turn. Besides, I concluded, “signing the bill will cut the legs out from Democrats running against the extreme Gingrich Congress,” and we needed them for a successful second term.

  After more than two hours of discussion, Clinton retreated to the Oval with Panetta and Gore, the only other person in the room who hadn't said what he thought. I walked back to my office with Harold, and we waited for the decision together, still hoping. Neither of us knew what the president would do, or maybe that's just what we needed to believe. The uncertainty — the idea that Clinton was struggling toward a principled decision after reasoned deliberations — was somehow reassuring. To Clinton too. This was a decision he couldn't compartmentalize; before he could act, he had to convince himself he was doing the right thing for the right reasons. His heart urged a veto, while his head calculated the risk. They were reconciled by his will — a will to win that was barely distinguishable and basically inseparable from the conviction that what was best for the poor was for him to be president. They would have to trust his decision: Sign it now; fix it later.