Talking Back

by Andrea Mitchell

  Suddenly, later that afternoon, the office paged me with awful news. There had been a plane crash in Croatia, killing an official delegation led by Commerce Secretary Ron Brown. I knew Ron well. He had previously been chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and earlier, in 1988, was the party’s intermediary with Jesse Jackson, as Jackson bargained for a bigger role. Since I had been assigned to cover Jackson at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta that year, I’d also gotten to know Ron, his son Michael, and his wife Alma.

  Ron’s assignment had been to handle Jackson’s complaints and clear the way for the party’s choice, Michael Dukakis. Jackson had taken a bus caravan to Atlanta, and was threatening to create a serious challenge to the party’s attempt to unify behind Dukakis’s candidacy. My job was to hang out just off the floor, next to the Jackson trailer where he had his war room operation, on the opposite side of the railroad tracks that ran around the stadium. It was a thankless task; most of the time, the trailer was empty because the action was on the floor. Except, one night, when Washington’s mayor Marion Barry wandered by with a young companion. Perhaps he thought he could use Jesse’s trailer for a secret rendezvous. Instead, he walked right into the blinding lights of our network cameras.

  Ron had done a first-rate job of containing Jackson and, later, reorganizing the party for Clinton. Now the sudden death of this young, energetic man was a terrible shock. I went over to explain to the senator that I’d have to return immediately to Washington.

  I said, “Senator, I am so sorry to tell you that there’s been a plane crash, and Secretary Ron Brown has been killed.”

  Jesse Helms looked at me, smiled, and said, “That’s good.”

  I was stricken. I didn’t know—and don’t know to this day—whether he really heard me. But I think he did. And I think that was his honest response, unfiltered by the conventions of Washington and the corridors of the Senate. This was Jesse Helms at home.

  Democratic Washington mourned Ron officially for a full week, and then congregated at the National Cathedral to celebrate his life. His good friend President Bill Clinton told the gathering, “The Bible tells us, ‘Though we weep through the night, joy will come in the morning.’”

  Afterward, the procession wound past the palatial embassies, where Ron had dined often as an A-list guest, and then on to the city’s poor neighborhoods, supposedly representing his modest roots. In fact, Brown had come from a relatively privileged family in New York City, but the symbolism of the route his cortege took was fitting. Despite his elegant clothes and powerful connections, Brown had never forgotten rank-and-file Democrats, especially those living in the inner cities.

  The most striking thing about Ron’s death, though, was how partisan the response was to his life. As commerce secretary, Ron interacted daily with the largely Republican business community, but none of them came to the cathedral to pay their respects. The absence of the Republican congressional leadership also caused a great deal of bitterness in the black community.

  Many racial and sexual tensions came into sharper relief during those years. Looking back, I still regret that Alan missed the most transformative event of the period, the Thomas-Hill hearings in the fall of 1991, because of an economic meeting in Bangkok. It was difficult to explain to someone who had not experienced the showdown that weekend why it was so significant. But, unlike anything Washington, or the nation, had ever witnessed, the hearings exposed the differences between the way men and women interpreted the same set of facts.

  Alan and I had grown up in different ages, but he is in many ways a very modern man. I often think of him as a feminist, because he is so blind to gender when it comes to judging people on their merits. When he ran his Wall Street economic consulting firm, he always had strong women around him. In fact, throughout his previous tenure in government, during the Ford administration, he turned his company over to several women employees to manage until he returned several years later.

  With me, he has always been unfailingly supportive. He adjusts to schedule changes, no matter what the emergency or how short the notice. And he is my biggest fan. (I think everyone needs an unapologetic, nonobjective fan.) He has the endearing, if somewhat embarrassing, habit of tuning out everything, including important staff meetings, when I pop up on the evening news. He even calls my office to ask if I’m “in the show,” so he knows to watch.

  Contrary to what has often been written about him, Alan is not a social animal. Alan’s idea of heaven is to stay home, have a simple supper, and watch baseball. It almost doesn’t matter who’s playing, as long as they use bats and balls and run four bases ninety feet apart. But to please me, he goes to a certain number of special events in Washington. And nothing could have been more special than the visit of Queen Elizabeth II in the spring of 1991.

  It was one of those times when Washington got so crazed that you would have thought the colonies had failed to win the Revolution. It was sheer monarch envy. We wanted to have some royals, and here they were. In his inimitable fashion, George Bush invited the queen to a baseball game in Baltimore, at Memorial Stadium, the run-down, old-fashioned stadium that preceded Camden Yards. In those days, Washington still had no major-league baseball franchise, and Baltimore was the next best thing.

  The team’s owner, Eli Jacobs, invited us to be part of the group that met the queen when she arrived at the ballpark. Losing sight of the fact that it was just a ball game, on one of the hottest days of the year, everyone got all dressed up, as though we were going to a garden party. I wore a silk dress with a jacket, one of those matronly floral prints that made me look at least twenty years older than I was. The dress had long sleeves—shades of that trip to Texas with Rosalynn Carter. At the stadium we were seated in the owners’ box, on the other side of a glass partition from the queen and the president.

  Unfortunately, because of security concerns, the Secret Service had ordered the front of the box enclosed and covered with a bulletproof glass window. With the window in place, air couldn’t circulate and everyone began to sweat—if queens sweat—through his or her clothes. The queen had never seen American baseball, and was clearly feigning interest as the president tried to explain balls, strikes, pop-ups, and double plays. During her half century as a monarch, I’m sure the queen has suffered worse—perhaps a visit to some tropical island—but I can’t imagine anything hotter or more uncomfortable than that baseball game that day at Memorial Stadium.

  Before the royal party retreated, in the third inning, there was an unintended breach of protocol. American royalty approached British royalty: Joe DiMaggio, one of the invited guests, passed a baseball to the queen’s personal secretary so that Her Majesty could autograph it for him. Instead, the ball was politely handed back down the row. DiMaggio, an American icon, was told, “Her Majesty does not sign baseballs.”

  The next night, the British embassy hosted a dinner, to which Alan and I were invited. I splurged on a white gown and even called a store in New York to find a pair of white kid gloves that reached above the elbow. For someone who grew up in the sixties, and had never been anything close to a debutante, this was as dressed up as I’d ever get. As we moved up the receiving line toward the president and the queen, President Bush, who knew me well (he’d shown me his bathroom in Kennebunkport, if nothing else!), took my arm and said, “Your Majesty, this is one of our premier American journalists.” Then he turned to me and said, “Hello, Barbara.”

  Since he was standing next to Barbara Bush, I assumed at first that it was a slip of the tongue. Only a few minutes later, when I was halfway down the receiving line, did I realize that he’d mistaken me for Barbara Walters, who had previously dated Alan.

  The next day, there was a delivery to the house, a personal note from President Bush. Well known for his good manners, he’d sent a White House souvenir key chain to apologize for his mistake in confusing me with the other Greenspan television date.

  He wrote, “It was the ‘excitement’ of the Queen’s even
ing; it was my ‘heart;’ it was the ‘medicine;’ it was that I’m ‘almost 67;’ it was that you ‘looked great;’ alas it was that I screwed up. A thousand sorries. Here’s a peace offering! Am I forgiven? Con Afecto, George Bush.”

  Bush was still popular, and the Democrats worried about finding anyone strong enough to challenge him. Covering Congress put me right in the middle of the campaign coverage, since most of the candidates came from the Senate. I did long interviews with all of the senators who were thinking about it: Tom Harkin of Iowa, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, Al Gore of Tennessee, and former Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas. Rockefeller and Gore later decided not to run, for family reasons. Gore explained that he wanted to sit out the election because his young son was still recuperating from being hit by a car after attending an Orioles game—in the same ballpark where the president had entertained the queen.

  By early winter of ’92, I had spent time with all of the likely contenders except one: the governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton. So I decided to go to New Hampshire to meet him. At that early stage of the campaign, Clinton was traveling with two aides, Bruce Lindsey and George Stephanopoulos, on a tiny plane, courting New Hampshire voters almost one by one. My producer Carroll Ann Mears and I landed at Boston’s Logan Airport and rented a car. Carroll Ann was driving, and I was navigating—supposedly. We were in a hurry to get to Keene because Clinton’s people had promised an interview if I got there in time.

  Typically, we didn’t realize we were in trouble until we looked up and the sign read, WELCOME TO VERMONT. Somehow, we’d taken a wrong turn, and Carroll Ann and I had missed New Hampshire. Perhaps this was the best metaphor for what was to become my coverage of Bill Clinton’s presidency.

  CHAPTER 6

  “White House Pit Bull”

  —The Clinton Years

  One of the first times I ever saw Hillary Clinton, she looked like a trapped animal, fighting for her life. Still in her headband long hair mode, she had joined her husband to campaign in New Hampshire as he tried to cope with twin scandals: first, allegations that he had not been truthful about avoiding the draft during Vietnam; and second, that he’d had a longstanding affair with a lounge singer named Gennifer Flowers when he was governor.

  Though Hillary was there to help save her husband’s campaign, the presence of the “wronged woman” in the marital scandal only increased the media’s appetite. As Bill Clinton tried to cross the street with his wife after delivering a speech to the New Hampshire legislature that winter day in 1992, a mob of reporters and camera crews wielding shotgun and boom microphones was in hot pursuit, trying to corner the couple, then backpedaling to get in front of them. Typically, like a hunting dog chasing a fox, I was leading the pack, running alongside to ask a question, then racing ahead to get another shot at the pair. The frenzied scene could have been an outtake from Primary Colors, but no film could capture the sheer terror, and anger, that Hillary must have been feeling.

  Hillary Clinton was quarry we were chasing; but at the same time I felt such sympathy for her, not only as a woman, but also as another human being. I could separate myself from the situation and see that there was a real person caught in the midst of all this. Yet she was also complicit. As Bill Clinton’s chief defender, she helped devise the strategy to deflect the charges they both knew were coming. This strange amalgam defined their political partnership, then and later. She was a victim, yet also in charge of damage control. As a correspondent assigned to the campaign, I knew I needed to report on her role. At the same time, I felt she might have had a point when she talked about trying to maintain the Clintons’ “zone of privacy.”

  When I first started following Bill Clinton in New Hampshire after years of covering scandal on the Hill, I hardly imagined that I would soon be chasing an unending series of campaign scandals. The Arkansas governor seemed like the perfect candidate—bright, smart, a Southern Democratic centrist, and the darling of the liberal elites. For years, he had cultivated the power brokers of Georgetown at dinners carefully orchestrated by friends like Pamela Harriman, a Democratic fund-raiser and the widow of former New York governor Averell Harriman.

  The Clintons’ first hurdle was their marriage. For years, there had been rumors of his infidelities. In 1988 he had considered a run for the presidency and then backed off, reluctantly accepting the advice that his misbehavior would become an obstacle. The issue was raised by his opponents when he ran for reelection in Arkansas in 1990. So, in September 1991, the Clintons devised a strategy: if they brought it up themselves, they could defuse the fallout from their less-than-perfect marriage. During a celebrated breakfast with Washington print reporters, Bill and Hillary tried to inoculate themselves from questions about their complicated relationship by suggesting that there had been “difficulties” in their marriage and that their relationship had “not been perfect.” In Washington, among reporters who lived most of their lives on the road and had experienced their own marital problems, everyone understood what they meant.

  Yet the Clintons’ relationship remained a legitimate part of the political debate, because as they themselves told the voters of New Hampshire, “Buy one, get one free.” They were a team, a package deal, what Hillary called the “blue plate special”—a twofer running for president of the United States. At first, it worked. They were a novelty act. And until Gennifer Flowers, and the appearance of a damning letter a young Bill Clinton had written to his ROTC director about avoiding possible service in Vietnam, he was leading the pack in New Hampshire. The draft issue resurrected the same questions that had dogged Dan Quayle four years earlier. Within a week of the Flowers accusation and the draft controversy, Clinton was trailing former Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas by eleven points.

  We had to cover the marital scandal, yet were unsure what was fact, what was rumor, and how much was payback from his Arkansas enemies. Initially, our network decided not to air Gennifer Flowers’s charges because we could not confirm them—a cautious approach that now, only thirteen years later, seems almost quaint. For journalists trying not to get swept up in a feeding frenzy, when does a rumor become news? Clinton was in full denial. But as we now know from books written by some of his closest aides, his campaign staff had long been aware of his “woman problem.” For months, they’d been war-gaming how to handle what Betsey Wright, his former chief of staff in Arkansas, had colorfully called, “bimbo eruptions.”

  The larger issues of how important the “eruptions” were to his qualifications to be president, and to his credibility and character as a human being, were still to be addressed. At NBC, we only mentioned the assertions briefly until Nightline devoted an entire broadcast to the allegations. In those days, before Matt Drudge and Internet bloggers, it was Ted Koppel who validated the Flowers story for much of the press corps by doing a program on it.

  With the story now in play, Gennifer Flowers held a news conference at the Waldorf-Astoria, broadcast live on CNN. The headline: she had proof, audiotapes, which she played. But what she released were excerpts, with obvious breaks where the tapes had been edited selectively; and though it was undeniably Bill Clinton’s voice on them, we could not ascertain his exact meaning from the excerpts. It was evidence of a relationship—but what kind of relationship, and of what duration?

  The campaign was in free fall. The Clintons had responded to the Flowers allegation by addressing a huge television audience of forty million on 60 Minutes, immediately after the Super Bowl. They had appeared side by side, holding hands. It was the first of many occasions when Hillary stood by her man, even while declaring she was not sitting there as “some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.” Hillary was taking charge of the Clinton rescue mission, even as she clearly resented being put in that role.

  The Clintons toughed it out, brazenly facing down their critics. For the moment, they succeeded in silencing many of the doubters, but they paid a heavy price. The media accepted their denials of the Flowers affair, bu
t with considerable skepticism. When the president admitted to it under oath in 1998, his credibility suffered a terrible blow. Looking back, it’s also clear that those early confrontations with the press in New Hampshire marked the beginning of Hillary Clinton’s bitterness toward the national press corps. With this introduction to the media, it would be hard to imagine her feeling otherwise. The seeds were being sown for the Clinton administration’s subsequent defensiveness at the slightest hint of scandal. Instead of using the media to help sell his programs, the president and his wife resented most of the reporters assigned to the White House. That became one obstacle to a truly successful presidency.

  At times that winter, literally going door-to-door, Clinton pleaded with New Hampshire voters to view the “character issue” as a test of who would help make their lives better, not who had had a perfect marriage. At one emotional rally, he said if the voters would give him a chance, he’d promise to be with them “until the last dog dies.” The phrase was so quintessentially Clinton, combining his Southern vernacular with a personal appeal to the voters, that it became the mantra of his campaign.

  In one of the great recoveries in American politics, Clinton pulled off a second-place finish in New Hampshire, instead of being demolished by the late-breaking scandal as Gary Hart had been in 1987. Hart, also a married politician, had been caught on the aptly named yacht Monkey Business with a young aspiring actress named Donna Rice. His presidential campaign immediately imploded.

  In Clinton’s case, if you were watching television news, or reading the headlines the next morning, you might have thought he’d won in New Hampshire, instead of placing second. Even before all the votes were counted, Clinton was spinning the results as a victory and calling himself “the comeback kid.” In fact, while knocking Bob Kerrey and some of the lesser candidates out of the race, he had still lost to the former Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas. But Clinton knew that while Tsongas had a unique advantage in New England, he did not have the money or organization to mount a truly national campaign. The Arkansas governor began to look like a winner, and I realized I might be covering the potential nominee.