In today’s context, it still seems right, but so old-fashioned—the notion that if I were to give my opinions, it would damage my reputation for objectivity as a White House correspondent. Thirteen years later, White House reporters go on talk shows, write blogs, express their opinions on everything.
The other downside about being assigned to the White House was that once again I had to cover a presidential transition. That meant being stuck in Little Rock until January with no direct flights for an easy escape to Washington. By then, Alan and I knew that our relationship was moving in a more serious direction. But we had never really talked about it. Both of our jobs involved enormous concentration and a lot of travel. In contrast to when we first met, when I was away for months at a time while covering Ronald Reagan, now we were a couple. I just didn’t know how we were going to manage a relationship if I became White House correspondent and ended up back on the road, traveling for long stretches whenever the president did.
On the morning after the election, I was the pool reporter covering the president-elect’s walk from the Governor’s Mansion to the home of Carolyn Staley, one of his closest friends from high school, for a victory brunch. In a bad sign of things to come, his press aides kept us so far away we could barely get a picture, much less a question.
They no longer needed us, and wanted us to know it. We did get a group shot of Clinton, his wife and mother, and all their old friends posing on Carolyn’s front porch. The Clintons were standoffish, but the president-elect’s irrepressible mother, Virginia Kelley, shouted out, “Hello, Andrea.” She was a force of nature, strong and invariably friendly. She’d raised her son by herself, and he’d prevailed to become president-elect. Yet she put on no airs and seemingly held no grudges against the reporters who’d been hounding him for months. I liked her a lot, and admired her spunk.
For the next two and a half months, I was in transition hell, focusing almost exclusively on who was or wasn’t going to be in the cabinet, instead of on ideas or policies. The competition for leaks was intense. Clinton was forming his cabinet literally at his kitchen table in the Governor’s Mansion. Clinton, Warren Christopher, Vernon Jordan, Hillary, Al Gore, Mickey Kantor, and Mack McLarty, Clinton’s boyhood friend and campaign advisor, were vetting names and interviewing candidates.
Our only way of finding out what was going on was to stake out the airport, look for private planes, and try to spot people coming in and out. Washington faxed us copies of pictures of potential nominees so our camera crews could chase them down at the airport. It wasn’t a fail-proof system. I suspect a lot of salesmen from Memphis and grandmothers heading to Atlanta had their mug shots taken.
We thought we had the whole thing covered, which is why it was pretty remarkable one day at George Stephanopoulos’s daily briefing when the Clinton spokesman announced that the president-elect was having lunch with Alan Greenspan. I’d barely seen him in months, but the transition team had managed to sneak Alan into town unnoticed, past all of the cameras. Did they have him slump down in the backseat of his car? Per our understanding about such things, Alan hadn’t said a word to me about it.
What was even more interesting was that he and Clinton, whom he’d never before met, really hit it off. What was supposed to be a brief lunch turned into hours of conversation about a wide range of subjects, ranging far beyond monetary policy. Clinton clearly was impressive: well educated, widely read, and a good listener. As The Washington Post reported the next morning, “The biggest news out of Little Rock yesterday was that NBC’s Andrea Mitchell was caught by surprise when her longtime boyfriend, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, showed up to meet with Bill Clinton.” The gossip item was in the same column as a report that Madonna’s erotic Sex book would be airbrushed for its Japanese edition, providing some cover to the men, but leaving the revealing photos of the women untouched. I was in august company.
The Clintons were attracting plenty of talented Democrats to their Little Rock jobs fair, including people who didn’t need or want to move to Washington. The center of all the action, other than the Clintons’ kitchen table, where the interviews were taking place, was the bar at the Capitol Hotel. The Capitol was stately, vaguely Victorian with deep burgundy velvet curtains, and featured an enormous guest elevator explained variously as having been built to accommodate coffins or the hoop skirts of Reconstruction-era prostitutes. The bar was a meeting place for campaign aides, reporters, and cabinet prospects, real and imagined.
One night, I ran into Goldman Sachs co-chairman Bob Rubin, looking vaguely uncomfortable in those surroundings. He flashed me that crooked grin of his, and without revealing anything asked what I thought of Clinton and his team.
Where should I start? Clinton’s colorful war room regulars ( James Carville, Paul Begala, and George Stephanopoulos) had to be experienced to be understood. I certainly didn’t think Bob Rubin of Wall Street would understand Carville, aka the Ragin’ Cajun, a man so superstitious he wouldn’t change his underwear during the last weeks of the campaign to avoid some imagined jinx. But despite their idiosyncrasies, Clinton’s advisors were sharp, dedicated, and energetic. And their system of answering any attack with a rapid response made campaign history.
The president-elect was clearly smart, and he knew it. To signal that his laser-beam focus on the economy was not just a campaign slogan, a few weeks after the election he hosted an economic summit in Little Rock. Unlike most such events, which are glorified photo opportunities, Clinton actually listened to the views of the invited experts, hoping to learn something; predictably, most simply parroted Clinton’s own positions. It was an early lesson in how difficult it is for a president to get honest advice.
Sometimes, as we struggled to break stories about the players in the new White House, the evidence was right in front of us. I kept running into a little-known Clinton advisor named Ira Magaziner, who was very close to Hillary. He told me he was going to have a very important job in the new administration on health care—little did I realize how important he would be. Ira became the architect of the convoluted health-care proposal that was to preoccupy the new administration for the next two years.
Completing the cabinet took longer than Clinton expected, partly because he was determined to make his administration “look like America” by finding people of diverse backgrounds. White House staffs had always been predominantly male, and white. Not surprisingly, the Clintons wanted a team more representative of their values, and their friends. I remember looking up during a news conference called to introduce the new domestic policy team and noticing that Council of Economic Advisors chair Laura Tyson and EPA administrator Carol Browner both looked like my own friends—women more or less of my generation, from similar backgrounds.
It was striking, after covering all-male administrations for so many decades. I was identifying with them in a visceral way that had nothing to do with politics or policy. I imagined that the symbolism of their selection would resonate with millions of women and girls across the country. Official Washington was going to be very different. And Clinton had chosen Tyson, a well-regarded economics professor from Berkeley, despite a campaign to belittle her by a fellow economist, Paul Krugman of MIT, suggesting she was not up to the job. It was not the first, or last, time a qualified woman would have to overcome sniping by male competitors, in this case by someone thought to want the job himself.
But in their zeal to create a Noah’s Ark with at least two officials of every color, from every part of the country, the Clintons trapped themselves with an artificial goal, and an unrealistic Christmas deadline. At times, potential cabinet secretaries, well-regarded men like Bruce Babbitt and Bill Richardson, found themselves parked in Little Rock hotel rooms, not knowing which jobs would be left when the game of musical cabinet chairs ended. If the Clintons didn’t fill their diversity goals, perfectly qualified candidates would not make the cut. I’d known some of the cabinet prospects for years, and every few days one or another would call me to ask w
hether he was in or out. It was more than a little humiliating, and a harbinger of chaotic West Wing decision making in the years ahead.
With his cabinet and staff still unformed, Bill and Hillary Clinton took a victory lap into Washington for the inauguration on a bus from the home of Thomas Jefferson—Clinton’s namesake—near Charlottesville, Virginia. Riding the bus one more time celebrated the way their campaign had begun and symbolized their stated commitment to remain connected with Americans outside the nation’s capital. In his inaugural address, Clinton declared, “Let us give this capital back to the people to whom it belongs…. We have changed the guard….”
The self-proclaimed “change agent” had arrived.
In one last symbolic gesture, on Inauguration Day, Clinton flung open the doors of the White House so that ordinary Americans could line up and shake his hand. It was a deliberate homage to the populist traditions of Andrew Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt. So many people had lined up on the South Lawn, despite freezing weather, that the Clintons abandoned their receiving line inside and rushed out to shake as many hands as they could before sunset.
Despite the auspicious beginning, the new president still faced a more lasting problem. Clinton had spent so much time trying to create a diverse cabinet that he didn’t focus enough on how to staff his White House. He didn’t think clearly about who was best suited to be his chief of staff and how to organize his communications team. He also hadn’t found the right person to be his attorney general, a job that should have been reserved for a trusted advisor. His first nominee for attorney general, Washington attorney Zoe Baird, had to withdraw because of a political firestorm over her failure to pay her nanny’s Social Security taxes. Though it was a far cry from the charges that had scuttled John Tower’s nomination at the beginning of George Bush’s presidency four years earlier, it was a clear signal that the Senate Republicans were not cutting the new administration any slack. Personnel problems became a recurring theme, a leitmotif for Bill Clinton’s first term.
The staff difficulties also overshadowed more positive events. On February 5, I prepared a story for Nightly News on a significant domestic program, the Family and Medical Leave Act. It was Clinton’s first legislation, symbolizing his priorities and fulfilling a campaign promise to guarantee workers unpaid time off when a baby is born or a family member is sick. But late in the day, I confirmed that the president’s second choice for attorney general, New York federal judge Kimba Wood, would not be nominated, because of a nanny issue involving an undocumented family worker whom she had employed, although before it was illegal to do so. Quickly, I was told to switch stories.
The Family Leave legislation would be reduced to an anchor “item,” a brief mention; instead, I would do a live cross talk about the new team’s continuing failure to find an attorney general. Just before air, standing on the North Lawn at our camera position, I spotted George Stephanopoulos headed my way. He made the rounds, stopping at each of the network camera positions, trying to spin us into believing that Judge Wood had never been seriously considered. The only problem was that her husband, New York journalist Michael Kramer, was telling everyone exactly the opposite.
After two false starts, the new president ended up filling one of his most important cabinet posts with a woman he barely knew, Janet Reno, a Florida prosecutor recommended by his wife and brother-in-law. Reno turned out to be one of the least politically astute of his appointments, and one of the least successful. She became mired in endless disputes with Clinton’s inner circle. Not having a trusted ally as attorney general became a huge disadvantage when the president was struggling with how to respond to the legal challenges of Whitewater, as well as the Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky affairs.
Similarly, Clinton later realized that having his childhood friend Mack McLarty as chief of staff had its pluses and minuses: McLarty knew all the players, but was less brutal than an outsider would have been in imposing discipline and cutting their losses. In a key slot at the Justice Department, Clinton placed another Arkansas crony, Webb Hubbell, a former law partner of Hillary’s. When Hubbell was later investigated for billing problems from his former law practice, it became a White House problem. As deputy White House counsel, Clinton chose yet another of his kindergarten friends, Vince Foster, with even more tragic results.
During the transition, the president-elect was also stumbling over issues that would plague him once he took office. Chief among these was how to handle gays in the military. It was a touchy subject for Clinton because of his lack of military service. He was never comfortable around the military brass, and initially at least, they thought of him as that “draft dodger” who had avoided service in Vietnam. They were also hostile because, during the campaign, he had promised to permit gays to serve—not a popular idea at the Pentagon.
I had a small part in bringing the issue to a head on November 11, even before Clinton took office: I thought Veterans Day would provide a good news peg, and knowing that Clinton would show up for a Veterans Day event at the Arkansas state Capitol, I went early to stake him out.
When you’re five foot three, you can’t get people to answer a question unless they can see you in a crowd. So just as I’d prepositioned myself up front at the Busy Bee lunch counter to accost Hillary during the campaign, I had to figure out which direction he’d be coming from and plant myself in front of him. That meant arriving early, not letting competing camera crews push me around, and waiting. It isn’t dignified, but neither was shouting questions to Ronald Reagan. More to the point, sometimes it worked.
Was this journalism? It depends on your definition. We had a new president with no military experience who had written a controversial letter in 1969 thanking an ROTC colonel for “saving” him from the draft. Now he was about to become commander in chief and had to either renege on his campaign promise to gays, or further alienate the military brass. I thought it was a good test of his decision making on an important, hot-button issue.
When Clinton arrived, I waited for local reporters, who wanted to pin him down about his state pension (technically, he was still governor). Then I asked, “How are you going to handle the opposition of the military to your position on gays and lesbians in the military?”
Clinton didn’t duck. “If people who have served our country with distinction, many of them with battlefield ribbons and who have never had any kind of question about their conduct, can be booted out of the military, that is the issue, and I think there are ways that we can deal with this that will increase the comfort level of a lot of the military folks here.” Unfortunately, he had no idea how to “increase their comfort level,” especially since the most popular man in uniform, Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was dead-set against changing the military’s policy toward gays.
The issue had come up before with Powell, frequently because of pressure from Democrats like former congresswoman Pat Schoeder of the House Armed Services Committee. During the previous administration Powell had told Dick Cheney, then defense secretary, that the military could not openly accommodate gay servicemen and-women. Powell knew that Cheney was sympathetic to gay rights because of his daughter, Mary, but Powell argued that the military and civilian worlds were very different. Then, after Clinton was elected, Powell and the president-elect met at the Willard Hotel to discuss a long list of defense issues. At the end of the meeting, as the two men stood up to leave without having dealt with the question of gays in the military, Powell strongly urged Clinton to give the brass time to study it, telling him, “I don’t think you want to start off with that kind of conflict.” Clinton agreed, and Powell left thinking that the new president was not “hell-bent” on taking on the controversy. But within weeks, the White House staff had proposed changing the military regulations. Powell found himself in the uncomfortable position of being on the opposite side of his new commander in chief on a major issue, not where he wanted to be.
I give the president-elect credit for trying to stick to his pr
inciples. But he was caught between a campaign promise of equal treatment of gays and his reluctance to alienate the military any more than he already had. The issue also created friction with a powerful player whose support he needed on the Hill, Senate Armed Services chairman Sam Nunn. The Georgia Democrat and Clinton had never been close. I always suspected that Nunn’s discomfort with Clinton had similar roots to his uneasiness with John Tower, whose womanizing had also offended Nunn’s sense of propriety. As a result, Nunn did the minimum amount for Clinton during the campaign.
Clinton held a news conference on January 29 to announce his decision to delay the decision for six months. It was contentious. I asked if he hadn’t thought through the practical problems when he made his campaign promise, and what he had learned from dealing with the powerful members of the Senate and the Joint Chiefs? He stiffened, and glared. You could always tell when Clinton was angry, because a muscle in his cheek would twitch visibly.
I knew I would not win a popularity contest with the Clintons or their aides. At times, it saddened me, because there was a part of me that wanted to be liked, and despite all my years of reporting, I never quite adjusted to the role of skunk at the garden party. But I responded instinctively to any whiff of hypocrisy on the part of politicians. The Clinton people considered me far too tough and edgy—somehow, they expected campaign correspondents to perform as boosters, not adversaries.
I may have annoyed Clinton, but he hadn’t lost his sense of humor. When USA Today described me in a lengthy profile as “White House watchdog” and a “pit bull,” the president’s press aides photocopied my picture from the newspaper and attached it to every chair in the briefing room. They then took a picture of the briefing room, populated with “Andrea Mitchell” in every chair, and gave it to the president to sign. He inscribed the resulting photo: “To Andrea Mitchell—Here’s my nightmare—They all become clones of you and I vanish under the pressure! One of you is great but sufficient. Bill Clinton.”
Talking Back Page 28
