Talking Back

by Andrea Mitchell

  The Clinton team then moved south, stopping in Georgia to pick up an important endorsement from the state’s popular Democratic governor, Zell Miller—who would later turn on his party and gave a fiery convention speech for George W. Bush in 2004. But in 1992, Miller was far more liberal and, in fact, had even had the same campaign strategists—Paul Begala and James Carville—as Clinton. Performing on cue, Miller threw his arms around the candidate and declared, “This old marine corps sergeant is proud to call Bill Clinton one of our own.” After the draft controversy, it was a welcome embrace.

  But there were more questions about his past. The Clintons had survived the Gennifer Flowers attack, at least temporarily, but a week before the Illinois primary, The New York Times raised questions about the role of Hillary’s law firm in an obscure Arkansas land deal. It was the first national mention of Whitewater. At NBC, lacking the investigative teams the Times had deployed, we started scrambling to catch up, sending our top investigative producer to Arkansas. Then, two days before the Illinois primary, The Washington Post added more details about Hillary’s law practice and its connections with Arkansas state contracts.

  That night, during a debate in Chicago, California iconoclast Jerry Brown, still pursuing a quixotic race for the nomination, challenged Clinton on whether Hillary Clinton’s legal work on savings and loan and real estate deals were a conflict of interest.

  Bill Clinton drew up in umbrage and said, “I don’t care what you say about me…. But you ought to be ashamed of yourself for jumping on my wife. You’re not worth being on the same platform with my wife.” It was a turning point, the highlight of the encounter. By taking the offensive, Clinton clearly hoped to discourage any further scrutiny of their finances.

  By now, Hillary was so protected by aides that there was no way to get to her. I knew that the Clintons were going to address rushhour commuters at the Busy Bee Diner under the elevated train in Chicago at six-thirty or seven a.m. the next morning. I figured that the only way to get a question to Hillary was to get up earlier than anyone else, hightail it to the diner, and plant myself on a stool as just another paying customer before the Secret Service and the advance men roped it off. I sat there, drinking mug after mug of coffee for more than an hour. They couldn’t stop serving me, nor could they throw me out. I was positioned so that when the Clintons finally did arrive, I was front and center, able to ask Hillary whether her husband had steered state business her way, as charged.

  Outside, Bill Clinton was telling commuters that Brown’s attack the night before was “insulting and unfair.” In that Southern slang that sometimes sounded self-conscious, or deliberately folksy, he told the Chicago commuters that if someone attacked his wife, “I’m going to jump them back.”

  Meanwhile, inside the diner, Hillary was on her own, and making news. To my question about a possible conflict of interest, she answered famously, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas,” adding, “but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life.” She had stepped into a political minefield for candidates’ wives, much as Teresa Heinz Kerry did in 2004 when she inaccurately suggested that Laura Bush never had “a real job.”

  Instantly, Clinton aides at the diner, especially Paul Begala, knew she had made a mistake. Just as they were trying to soften her image, and make her seem less abrasive—less threatening to homemakers across America—she was putting down all women who bake cookies and serve tea. They quickly took her aside, telling her she had to fix it, and fast—within the same news cycle.

  The advance people brought us outside, herding us with a rope like cattle. We lined up as a newly politically correct Hillary came out to declare that of course she was not demeaning women who worked at home. “I’m a big believer in women making the choices that are right for them. And, you know,” she said, “the work that I’ve done as a professional, as a public advocate, has been aimed in part to assure that women can make the choices that they should make—whether it’s full-time career, full-time motherhood, some combination, depending upon what stage of life they are at—and I think that is still difficult for people to understand right now, that it is a generational change.”

  Hillary’s off-the-cuff remark was an early example of how important she was going to become, and how controversial: Bill and Hillary were definitely a team. But there was a downside to the teamwork, and they were beginning to realize that she could engender as much hostility among voters as support.

  My predawn stakeout at the diner had provoked an incident that became emblematic of the Clinton campaign, Hillary as a lightning rod, and the campaign’s attempts to transform her from defiant feminist into Betty Crocker. It was an example of how important it is to cover an event yourself, no matter how routine, rather than relying on a producer or other surrogate. I’d learned that lesson covering Frank Rizzo in Philadelphia, and then again during the Reagan years. Unfortunately, it gave me a reputation for being very aggressive, for getting in people’s faces—not a popular quality with candidates or their aides.

  The lesson Hillary drew from the experience was to become even less accessible to reporters—except when she knew she was in control and could charm them, as she did later in her successful bid for a Senate seat in New York. She was, and is, a formidable campaigner. She is now a virtuoso at taking the media attention she attracts and making it work to her advantage. But it took years for her to perfect those skills.

  Clinton won easily in Illinois, despite “tea and cookies,” but the road to the nomination still had obstacles. Jerry Brown threatened to derail the Clintons in New York’s primary. Difficult as it is to imagine now, with Clinton the toast of Harlem and his wife New York’s popular senator, in 1992 New Yorkers were not charmed by Clinton’s Southern accent. Typically, they didn’t hesitate to tell him what they thought. Hecklers harassed him wherever he went, even on a street corner when he went to see a doctor for his chronic laryngitis. In turn, we felt we had to trail him everywhere, in case something unscripted happened, such as this street corner exchange: “Do you pardon all the drug dealers, or just the ones who contribute to your campaign?” one man asked.

  “You’re a phony, and you’re dishonest, and you misrepresented yourself,” Clinton shot back, after discovering that the guy had been planted by one of the state’s fringe candidates.

  People would question Clinton’s character wherever he went, even when he was talking about foreign policy. In frustration, he blamed the media, especially those of us in television news, complaining, “Half the voters question whether you have the honesty to be president. What do you say about that? If I had been sitting here watching the television, I would, too.”

  By the end of March, only a week after declaring that he would not agree to any more debates, Clinton changed strategy and accepted a joint appearance with Brown. Tackling the problem head-on, he hoped reporters would finally focus on how Brown had changed his positions over the years, on everything from taxes to abortion. But at the forum, Marcia Kramer, a local CBS reporter, asked whether Clinton had ever tried marijuana while studying at Oxford University in the sixties. For years, Clinton had evaded responding on the issue, saying carefully he had never broken the drug laws of the United States.

  This time he said, “When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two and I didn’t like it. And I didn’t inhale.” Bang—we had another character issue. As Clinton later wrote in his autobiography, My Life, “As the old country song goes, I didn’t know whether to ‘kill myself or go bowling.’”

  To soften the damage, Clinton went on Phil Donahue’s television show, where I was sitting in the audience in the press seats. It was a debacle. Donahue peppered him for a full twenty minutes with questions about marital infidelity. The audience was on Clinton’s side, but Donahue was relentless. He wasn’t the only media heavyweight who was killing Clinton on the air: radio talk show host Don Imus was calling him a “redneck boz
o.” Showing considerable guts, Clinton went out to Queens to face down Imus and try to prove him wrong—a risky strategy, as any of us who submit to Imus’s tender mercies know. That time, it paid off for Clinton. At least back then, before the Monica revelations, Imus was willing to cut him a break, especially after Clinton joked that Bubba—Imus’s derogatory nickname for the candidate—was Southern for “mensch.”

  Clinton also visited another New York political icon, Mario Cuomo. Clinton wanted to make peace with “the oracle of Albany.” Their relationship had become strained when, on Gennifer Flowers’s tapes, Clinton was heard calling Cuomo “a mean son of a bitch,” and said he “acts like” a Mafia figure. The two men also had profound differences on issues like the death penalty, which Cuomo opposed. But with Clinton closing in on the nomination, the New York governor was willing to fake it. He proclaimed, “Bill Clinton will make in my opinion a superb president.” Cuomo knew that of all the Democrats, Clinton could mount the most credible challenge to an incumbent president. And Cuomo was not going to be a spoiler.

  But nothing Clinton did could appease Jerry Brown. The two men were at each other’s throats through the final hours of the New York campaign. Brown simply refused to fade away, even when he lost his press bus because the campaign hadn’t paid its bills. Party leaders worried that Clinton would survive the New York primary, but would be so damaged he’d never be able to defeat George Bush.

  It was not a misplaced concern. Clinton won the primary, but the exit polls from New York were ominous: only 50 percent of the voters thought he had enough honesty and integrity to be president. And 24 percent of both Democrats and Republicans said they would vote for someone entirely different in November, Ross Perot. Colorful, eccentric, and very, very rich, Perot was not even a declared candidate, but was making waves with his idiosyncratic call for people to “get under the hood” and fix the budget deficit.

  Perot had announced on Larry King Live that he would consider running as a third party candidate if enough people put his name on the ballot in all fifty states. Rapidly, he made his quirky noncandidacy the liveliest political story around. His sound bites were irresistible to talk show hosts. At the same time, his call for responsible budgeting made him equally appealing to more sober-sided newspaper columnists.

  Suddenly, Clinton found himself almost ignored—a Democratic front-runner unable to get top billing on the evening news. Even after Clinton won the California primary and wrapped up the nomination at the beginning of June, the lead story on Nightly News was how Ross Perot had hired two nationally known political professionals, Republican Ed Rollins and Democrat Hamilton Jordan, to help run his campaign.

  Lisa Myers’s report on NBC began, “This morning, official Washington awakened to discover that it was not just a bad dream—Ross Perot really could be elected president.” That day, the billionaire had also proved he would play dirty, saying he “would not go to war to prove my manhood at the expense of young people”—suggesting that Bush had done exactly that with the Gulf War. There was a history of bad blood between Bush and Perot. Perot blamed Bush for preventing him from going to Hanoi five years earlier as an official envoy to negotiate for soldiers missing in action during Vietnam. An extensive Senate investigation had disproved Perot’s theories about finding surviving prisoners of war, but he never forgave Bush for denying him the opportunity. Now Bush’s campaign manager, Bob Teeter, was pushing the president to fight back.

  And what about Bill Clinton? There were troubling signs for the candidate, despite his victories in the final primaries. Even at that late stage in the campaign, the presumptive Democratic nominee was trying to get the American people to give him a second look. Democratic and independent primary voters in both Ohio and California had said they’d defect to Perot in the fall. In national polls, Perot was beating Bush, with Clinton coming in third.

  As Clinton struggled to get attention, so did I. I was covering the Democratic nominee, but couldn’t get on the air. Clinton was yesterday’s news. All the producers cared about was Perot.

  At least that gave Clinton time to focus on choosing a running mate. He considered, among others, Senators Bob Graham, Bill Bradley, Bob Kerrey, Harris Wofford, Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton, and, of course, Al Gore. At first, Gore was not the most obvious. He’d been preparing to be president all his life, but he had bombed at a Democratic party conference a year earlier in Cleveland. Instead, a Washington outsider, Bill Clinton, had wowed the crowd. Unlike Clinton, Gore was not a natural politician. And, on one level, even after being chosen for the ticket, he must have resented Clinton, feeling their roles should have been reversed.

  They had very different styles: one so straightlaced and disciplined, the other so—well, Clintonesque. They did not have good chemistry. And choosing Gore ignored all the conventional wisdom about seeking geographic balance in a running mate. But during a secret late-night session at a downtown Washington hotel, Gore proved that he could fill in Clinton’s gaps in foreign policy and the environment. By the end of the night, it was a done deal.

  Defying their past practice, the Clintons now launched an entirely new campaign at the Democratic National Convention in Madison Square Garden. For months, they had pleaded with us for a zone of privacy, especially with regard to Chelsea. Now they needed to sell themselves to a larger audience as the reincarnation of Ozzie and Harriet. Their Hollywood friends, Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, created a soft-focus campaign video called “The Man from Hope,” in order to generate a new political narrative. Now Clinton was the poor boy who understood the common man because of his humble origins. The Thomasons produced everything but a log cabin.

  After months of shielding their daughter from public view, the Clintons permitted People magazine to take informal family pictures of them at home with Chelsea. The convention featured a rousing nominating speech from Mario Cuomo, followed by Clinton’s surprise appearance at the Garden to thank the delegates. The Democrats had finally learned how to hide their differences behind a façade of great visuals, a skill previously the sole province of Reagan Republicans. To achieve unity, they silenced Pennsylvania governor Bob Casey, denying him a chance to speak because of his opposition to abortion. I scampered through the stands to score an interview with him. But Casey’s bitter complaint was an isolated instance of criticism. The party had come together behind Clinton.

  On the morning of his acceptance speech, the best news for Clinton was that Ross Perot, his campaign spinning out of control, had quit the race. Perot’s campaign manager, Ed Rollins, had resigned the day before, saying the candidate wouldn’t listen to his advice about running positive TV ads. And Perot had suffered a serious setback a week earlier, when he gave a speech to the NAACP and referred to African-Americans as “you people,” a phrase that was widely perceived to be patronizing and insensitive.

  Throughout the convention, I’d been doing triple duty: appearing on Nightly News, covering the action on the floor during prime time, and then preparing for live reports each morning on the Today program. That meant working into the night in a trailer the network had erected in a vacant parking lot on Thirty-second Street, between Seventh and Eighth avenues. There was a flashlight in case I needed to use the portable john. After writing my morning script and feeding my voice track back to the studio at Rockefeller Center, I’d head to the hotel for a few hours’ sleep before appearing on the Today show at seven the next morning. I couldn’t have gone on if I hadn’t had a cheerleader at home, my “constant viewer,” Alan. I’d call after every morning live shot to get his reaction. Instantly, I knew whether it was merely okay or really good. He’s always been my most constructive critic.

  By the last night of the convention, I was barely functioning, and the hard part was just beginning. To launch their general election campaign, the Clinton-Gore team introduced the baby boomer duo and their wives in a novel way—a bus tour across America.

  Bus trips have since become a campaign cliché, but for deca
des, until 1992, candidates had flown from airport rally to airport rally, appearing before preselected, ticketed crowds produced by the local political party. There was nothing unscripted or spontaneous about any of it.

  This was different. The morning after the Democratic convention, Clinton and Gore got on the bus and just took off across America. For the networks, covering this rolling campaign was a huge technical and logistical challenge. Our plan was to follow the buses with a satellite truck taking in and feeding out the video, plus a Winnebago outfitted with editing equipment, so that a producer and tape editor could screen the videotape as they drove along. I would ride the bus for most of the day, jumping off to cover Clinton’s speeches at each stop, calling my team in the RV on a two-way radio with video cues as I outlined a script.

  Later in the day, I’d switch to the Winnebago to finish writing and packaging my report for Nightly News. We would edit on the road while we were moving, using early-generation cell phone technology and computers that were constantly losing the connection, and often our scripts. No one had thought to build car seats for this job; seat belts were nonexistent. Most of the time, my producer, Carroll Ann Mears, and I would perch on folding chairs to view what we’d shot, as we rocked down the highway and tried to brace ourselves against sudden stops. By the end of the tour, we were in complete meltdown, physically and emotionally.

  Our first misadventure, on the very first day, had nothing to do with faulty computers or our aching backs. It had been a whirlwind: I’d worked the convention floor for Clinton’s acceptance speech, written my Today show story, covered Clinton’s midmorning rally in Manhattan, and boarded the bus. We planned to file for Nightly News that night from Camden, New Jersey, where Clinton would make his first stop at a former RCA plant at five p.m. Carroll Ann and our crack tape editor, Wayne Dennis, were following behind in the Winnebago.