by Wendy Walker
It was two years before the attacks and before Al Qaeda became a household term. I was at a fabulous designer sale in New York where women stood in line to get the latest name-brand clothing at slashed prices. It took place in a hotel suite where crowds of us grabbed amazing pieces and tried them on in a group. Modesty flew out the window as animated women tried on the finest clothing available at almost affordable prices. And there I was, in the group fitting room, connecting with a woman next to me.
Only women do this, as we try on clothes and become best friends in an instant, truthfully critiquing each other’s outfits. “Hi, I’m Wendy,” I said. “That skirt is fabulous on you but the top isn’t quite right.”
She smiled, told me her name was Christy, and we began to help each other choose some great new clothes. It turned out we were both in media, and when I finally left with my spoils, I was sorry we had not exchanged phone numbers. I just knew that we could have been friends.
Fast forward two years to the 9/11 tragedies. Two weeks after the attacks, I got a call from Maureen Orth, Vanity Fair writer and wife of beloved Tim Russert who has since passed away. “Do you remember a huge designer sale you went to a couple of years ago in New York?” she asked. “There was a woman there and the two of you hit it off?”
“Of course I remember,” I said. “She was great. I wish I’d gotten her number.”
“Well, her name is Christy Ferer,” Maureen told me, “and her husband, Neil Levin, died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. He was the head of the Port Authority. I’ve known her a long time and she wants to contact Rosemary Altea, a British psychic who appeared on your show. Can you get them in touch?”
I did it right away, and now Christy and I have become friends. There was so little anyone could do for people who had lost their loved ones, I was happy to be able to offer someone a modicum of comfort. While we may be perfect strangers to people around us, we have connections that may only become apparent in times of crisis. Since we are all human, we can feel the gratitude and connectedness of being alive, right here, right now, and being there for someone else, when need be. The decision is up to us. We can choose to walk away from tragedy and repress our feelings of loss and grief. But they will rear their heads when we least expect it. Or we can choose to be grateful for each day as we join with others to say, “There but for the grace of God go I.”
BE GRATEFUL EVERY DAY OF YOUR LIFE
Being grateful for everything in life helps you focus on what’s good and right, instead of what’s bad and wrong. When I hear kids complaining about having a bad day, I would like to say, “No, the people in that Haitian earthquake had a bad day. You are having some aggravation in your life.”
Remember the old cliché, Life is short. Why are you wasting time rehashing your problems when there is so much to be thankful for? The key here is that gratitude needs to become a habit. I have heard it said that it takes twenty-eight days of a new behavior to break a habit. So here again, make a list of all that you have to be grateful for and recite it each morning when you wake up. I’ve been doing this long before it was considered fashionable and before the self-help shelves in the bookstores were filled with books on gratitude. As a result, I can say from direct experience that it really does make a difference.
If you wake up in the morning with complaints and resentment, that is how your day will unfold. But when you remind yourself to focus on the good instead of the bad, then that is how you will direct your day. It’s all about changing your mind-set and building new patterns that will help make your life more productive and satisfying.
Gratefulness can be contagious. Have you noticed how quick we are to tell someone when we’re pissed off about something? But what about when someone does something nice for us? If somebody has changed the quality of your day from negative to positive, or if a child has behaved well, tell them. Give them the positive reinforcement that will encourage more of the same. It’s a fine feeling to have someone say, “Hey, you made my day.” In this way, you are setting a foundation of gratefulness.
Since being grateful opens your heart and shows you ways to comfort yourself and others, gratitude can help get you through some close to impossible situations. Let’s act like this is the last day of our lives, and feel grateful for all the beauty that life has to offer. Crises will happen and so will loss. It is a part of the human experience. But so is being grateful. Give it a try. You’ll like it.
CHAPTER 11
How Do You Want to Be Remembered?
I wonder if the Clintons considered this question when they moved into the White House in January 1993. Whatever they were thinking (or not thinking), they had a seriously shaky start with the press corps.
It is the prerogative of any new administration to target certain White House positions, fire the people who were hired under the previous administration, and fill the jobs with those who worked very hard to get the new president elected. This was the case when the Clintons first arrived at the White House in January 1993. Everyone understands that this is common practice and it occurs with each administration. But there are some positions, such as White House chef, various secretarial jobs, and certain nonpolitical and nonpartisan offices that work differently. The people who work in these positions serve whichever president is in office, and they remain in their jobs from administration to administration, no matter who is elected.
That was the case with the White House travel office. From the time I began work as CNN’s White House producer, I became attached to this group of highly skilled and caring guys who helped us in a major way during all of our trips, both domestic and international. I sometimes wondered what we would have done without them. In fact, they did such a great job for so long, I was completely stunned and upset when I got a call from Billy Dale, director of the travel office who had been there since the Kennedy administration. “We’ve been fired,” he told me.
“Who was fired?” I asked.
“The whole travel office,” he said. “All seven of us. They fired us and asked us to clean out our desks.”
I could hardly believe my ears. These people had worked as hard as any of us, sacrificing holidays with their families and flying halfway across the world with us to make sure we had everything we needed when we traveled. Over the years, the press corps and the travel office had come to know each other’s names and families, and we considered each other friends. Barney Brasseaux, one of the travel guys, had come to my wedding, I was so close to him.
Now, the Clintons were set on replacing this experienced, hardworking, egoless staff who had served us loyally for many years, with friends of theirs whom they thought would do a better job. When we balked at these firings, the people in charge inferred that maybe we didn’t get the whole story and how much more efficiently things could be run.
The truth was that the Clinton White House didn’t understand the press corps’ relationship with the long-standing travel office staff. This was not like firing a group of anonymous people whom we barely knew. Quite the opposite. We had dealt with these wonderful people on a steady basis for many years as they arranged our international as well as our domestic travel, including chartering press planes, buses, booking last minute hotels and conference rooms, and anything else we needed. They knew all of our idiosyncrasies and they always did their best to make us as comfortable as possible. This was particularly important for me because I was not what you would call a great traveler. I absolutely detested flying and my suitcase was so big, they called it “the suitcase from hell.”
This group also took a lot of abuse when things went wrong. If a plane was delayed or a bus didn’t get through on time and someone missed a deadline, these men bore the brunt of that. But time after time, they kept their heads down and weathered the rage and criticism without complaining. They just took it and moved on. Now, instead of being respected or even rewarded for a hard job well done for many years, they were being replaced. On top of that, since they were not going quietly, it appeared tha
t the administration was leveling charges against them, focusing on Billy Dale, the director of the travel office.
Billy and his staff of six men were accustomed to booking what we needed, and then billing the costs back to the networks. This is where Billy and I worked very closely. For example, I would call him, give him the particulars of an upcoming trip, and ask him, “How much do you think this will cost?”
“Let’s see,” he would say, “first you head to New York, which will cost this much, and then it’s on to Paris, which will cost this much”—and so on. He had extreme patience with me because he kept in mind that CNN had less money and had to justify the expense of each trip.
One time, NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell said to me, “Wendy, you’re so lucky you don’t have an evening news deadline every night like we do.”
I looked at her, amazed, and said, “CNN doesn’t have an evening news deadline like yours because every minute is a deadline. We have them all day long and all night.”
In order to meet those deadlines, we had depended on Billy Dale’s travel office to make it all work, which required Billy to keep a large amount of petty cash on hand, to tip the drivers and pay people along the way to do their jobs. For example, if we suddenly needed to leave Budapest in the middle of the night, Billy would pay the appropriate people to make sure we had a plane on the tarmac, ready to go.
But the Clinton administration was leveling charges that Billy had been skimming off the top in order to fund a lake house he was building for his family. The fact that he had been saving for this house for many years did nothing to convince them of his innocence. One of the main problems was that although Billy kept meticulous notes, he wrote them in pencil and entered them into a ledger. No electronic data had been entered because Billy kept his files the old-fashioned way that had always worked for him in the past.
In the midst of this turmoil dubbed Travelgate, in a related crisis, President Clinton was faced with the undoing of his White House counsel and old friend from Arkansas, Vince Foster. Because Foster was defending Hillary in the travel office scandal, he had been the target of several hostile Wall Street Journal editorials, and he was quite upset over the entire matter. A stickler for integrity, in early May 1993, Vince Foster had given a commencement address at his alma mater, the University of Arkansas Law School. He said:
The reputation you develop for intellectual and ethical integrity will be your greatest asset or your worst enemy. You will be judged by your judgment… There is no victory, no advantage, no fee, no favor, which is worth even a blemish on your reputation for intellect and integrity… Dents to [your] reputation are irreparable.
Now, he feared being asked to testify at a Congressional hearing because he so disliked the public spotlight. Dedicated to maintaining his personal integrity, he had considered resigning his position as White House counsel, but he feared facing humiliation if he returned to Arkansas.
Now, a few months later, Larry landed an interview with President Clinton, which would be shot live in the library of the White House. I rushed around doing my usual job as White House producer, doubly anxious to make the show run smoothly. I had yet to become Larry’s executive producer, but I knew the job was coming available, I had my sights set on it, and I wanted to make a good impression on him.
It was 9:10 p.m. on July 20, 1993, and I was watching the show on a monitor in a room across the hall from the library. All was going fine until I glanced down the hall and noticed that some of the president’s aides, George Stephanopoulos, Dee Dee Myers, and Mack McLarty, were whispering among themselves. I caught Mack’s eye and he motioned for me to come and join them. As soon as I got there, Mack said quietly, “We have to end the show right now.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Off the record,” Dee Dee told me in a whisper, “we believe that Vince Foster just committed suicide. He was found dead off the George Washington Parkway in Virginia. We can’t have you telling anyone else yet. We’re afraid someone will call in and tell the president about Vince. That’s not how we want him to find out.”
George began to tell me who Vince Foster was, when Mack stopped him. “She knows who Vince is,” he said. “They’re neighbors.”
I could not have been more shocked. Since our marriage, I’d been living with my husband in his town house in Georgetown, and Vince Foster had lived across the street from us. The three of us had met at a White House dinner, and we had struck up a neighborly conversation and had talked about getting together. That would never happen now. I knew that Bill and Hillary had been close friends with Vince, and the idea of the president finding out about his friend’s death on the air from a live caller was unacceptable. But it was also unacceptable to stop the show ten minutes in. If that wasn’t a clear sign to the general public that an emergency had occurred, I couldn’t imagine what was.
“We don’t have to stop the show,” I said. “I can prevent the president from finding out on the air by screening calls. If we only take overseas calls and skip the domestic ones, no one will find out until the show is over.”
I asked Dee Dee to go to the production truck with me and I spoke to the producer of the show. “Something very serious just happened,” I told him. “We can’t report it yet, but the president’s aides want to stop the show. I talked them into continuing, but we have to make very sure that the president doesn’t hear this piece of news from anyone before we tell him.”
He understood. But as I was walking back to the monitor in the control room, I heard Larry tell his viewing audience, “Well, you’ve heard it now. The president has just decided to stay on for an hour and a half. We’ll have an extra half hour with President Clinton.”
I literally ran back to tell George, Mack, and Dee Dee, who had not heard Larry’s announcement about the president staying on for an extra half hour.
“He can’t do that,” George said. At the next break, George and I went into the library and George said, “I’m sorry, Mr. President, but you can’t stay on for the extra half hour.”
“Why not?” he asked. “Larry just announced it.” The truth was that President Clinton would have stayed on for two more hours if they would let him. He loved doing interviews.
“I know Larry just announced it,” said George, “but you can’t do it tonight. You can take a rain check. Just not tonight.”
The president looked at George more closely and said, “Oh, you know something I don’t. Right?”
“Well,” George said, “we have some things we have to do after the show.”
When they went back on the air, Larry announced that they would not be doing the extra half hour. “The president has something to do at ten,” he explained, “but he’ll come back again.”
The White House press room was full of reporters covering the president’s appearance on Larry King Live. When they heard the announcement that the extra half hour was being canceled, they knew something was up. When the show was finally over, President Clinton stood up and said, “C’mon Larry, get your whole gang and we’ll give them a tour. Has everyone seen the Lincoln bedroom? Let’s go upstairs and take some pictures.”
George stepped in and said, “We can’t do that tonight. Really sorry,” and he whisked the president away. I called my husband, Ralph, to say I’d be late and then I got ready for a long night of work. But fifteen minutes later, Ralph called me at the White House. “What’s going on, Wendy?” he asked me. “I think the president is on our block. There are all these unmarked cars at Vince’s house. Something’s happening.”
While Ralph walked across the street in his sweats to see what was up, I let him know what had happened since Dee Dee was about to announce it. By now, I was in the press room with all the other reporters. Several of them asked me, “Something is going on. What is it?”
I confirmed their suspicions by saying, “If I were you, I’d stay right where you are. If you leave and go home, you’ll just have to turn right around and come back.”
Eventually, Dee
Dee came to the press room to tell the reporters that the President’s special counsel and friend from Arkansas had taken his own life. Apparently, Vince had been diagnosed with clinical depression months earlier, and it was obvious how much the Travelgate scandal was taking out of him, a man who was a stickler for integrity. It was clearly more than he could bear, and the police found a draft of a resignation letter doubling as a suicide note, torn into twenty-seven pieces. The authorities also found a list of complaints in Foster’s briefcase, including a note that said,
The Wall Street Journal editors lie without consequence… I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here, ruining people is considered sport.
Vince Foster’s death, piled on top of Travelgate, was weighing down the Clintons. Their integrity was in question, and many believed it signified the end of optimism among much of the White House staff. Not much had been resolved in Travelgate when, on November 7, 1995 (I was working with Larry by then), an article appeared in the Washington Post by journalist Toni Locy. Here are excerpts:
Some of the people from whom Billy R. Dale allegedly stole $68,000 testified yesterday in his defense, saying they trusted him when he ran the White House travel office and still trust him today. Dale, 57, is charged with embezzling money the news media paid to cover costs of traveling with the president from 1988 to 1993 by putting it into his personal bank account.
“It doesn’t surprise me,” said Wendy Walker Whitworth, a vice president for CNN and senior executive producer of “Larry King Live” who formerly was assigned to the White House. “Billy is not an e-mail kind of guy. He doesn’t have a lot to do with computers. If he was doing this, he was doing it to run the kind of operation he had to run [as] efficiently [as he could].”
