Assigned to find a way to satisfy everyone on the gays-in-the-military issue, George Stephanopoulos came back with the policy of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a compromise first suggested by Powell. But the military was still resentful and the president lost credibility with some of his closest friends, like longtime gay activist and Clinton campaign fund-raiser David Mixner. Mixner was so alienated he was later arrested outside the White House for protesting Clinton’s policy toward gays. Because the Senate’s Republican leader, Bob Dole, made it sound as though the Clinton White House had focused on nothing else for six months, Clinton lost ground with conservatives as well.
Whether because of arrogance, naïveté, a hostile press—or all three—the first year of Clinton’s presidency was sheer chaos for the White House, and unremitting hell for the first couple. For a while, they antagonized us by confining us to the briefing room and closing the corridor to the press secretary’s office. That meant that in a crisis, when no one picked up phones, we had no way to get our questions answered. Putting that hallway off-limits also backfired on the Clinton team: what they gained in privacy they more than lost in an early warning system. Press secretaries from the Eisenhower to the first Bush administration had used their press room contacts to get a heads-up on pending disasters. Eventually, they reopened the corridor.
In those first few weeks, the Clintons also misjudged what a revolutionary role they were carving out for the first lady. Hillary Clinton was the first to have a coveted office in the West Wing, where real estate is power. She was the first to lead a supersecret task force to revamp the nation’s health-care system. Initially, Mrs. Clinton was given high marks for the homework that she had done. The male politicians viewed it as remarkable that she could do it at all. When she testified before Dan Rostenkowski’s powerful House Ways and Means Committee, they were astounded at her mastery of facts and figures. In fact, when she concluded, the members awarded her a spontaneous round of applause.
But the first lady’s insistence on keeping the development of her health-care proposals secret—much as Dick Cheney insisted on secrecy for his energy task force in 2001—played into the hands of her critics. Conservative groups filed suit against the first lady, and the Wall Street Journal’s influential editorial page campaigned against her. Hillary’s health initiative also created divisions within the White House. The president’s economic team was deeply distrustful of her top advisor, Ira Magaziner, and nervous about what he and Hillary might produce. Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, the former Texas senator and vice presidential candidate, didn’t know what to make of Hillary’s role. Bob Rubin was wary of the economic assumptions her team had reached. After all, they were taking on one-seventh of the nation’s economy. What would be the unintended consequences?
With barely a honeymoon, Clinton prepared to make his debut on Capitol Hill at his first speech to a joint session of Congress. That evening, as I waited in our White House cubicle for the advance text of the speech, I received a phone call from Tony Verdi, our director. It was NBC’s turn to be the television pool shooting the speech, providing all the camera shots to the media at large. That meant our director received a secret list of the first lady’s special guests for her box two hours before the speech was to begin.
Tony asked me if I knew of another A. Greenspan. I didn’t. “Brace yourself,” he warned. “They have Alan sitting in the place of honor next to the first lady.” Though Alan knew he’d been invited, he had no idea he’d been given such a high-profile seat. The new president wanted to signal his commitment to fiscal responsibility, and Alan was as good a symbol as anyone. I felt conflicting emotions: pride that he was so well respected, but at the same time, concern that the exposure would raise new questions about my objectivity.
As I’ve mentioned, people often wonder how we manage to keep our work separate. When I was covering the Hill, there was less potential crossover. Now, back at the White House, it could become an issue if his monetary policy became politicized. All I could do was continue being blissfully ignorant of his decision making. Since he never discusses anything at home, I learn of his decisions only when they become public. And anyone who’s seen him testify knows that Alan can be a sphinx when he wants to be.
Alan was widely criticized in conservative business circles for sitting next to the first lady and seeming to lend his credibility to the new administration. Clearly, he owed the Clintons the respect due their positions. He also felt Clinton’s deficit-reducing policies deserved support. But the fact that he could be criticized for appearing with Mrs. Clinton demonstrated how rapidly she had become a polarizing figure.
With Hillary Clinton already under a microscope, when the White House fired seven veteran civil servants from the office that arranged travel for the press corps, reporters leaped at suspicions that she had engineered the coup. “Travelgate” sounded even more like old-fashioned patronage when the media learned that the people taking over the business included a Clinton cousin and other friends of the first family. The Clintons insisted they’d uncovered mismanagement in the travel operation, but it was handled so clumsily that it aggravated the climate of mutual suspicion between the West Wing and the press.
Then there was the two-hundred-dollar presidential haircut on Air Force One by a fancy Beverly Hills stylist, allegedly forcing a ramp delay at Los Angeles International Airport. The White House denied it, vehemently. One of my fellow correspondents at NBC confirmed the flight delays, and Jim Miklaszewski filed the report for Nightly News. Later, the Federal Aviation Administration released records contradicting the account, but as we say in the business, the story had legs. White House officials told me Clinton was furious.
Despite his resentment, the president searched for a way to bridge the cultural divide with official Washington. With his approval rating down to 36 percent, he and Hillary sought out David Gergen, a friend from their annual New Year’s gathering, Renaissance Weekend. A veteran of the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan White Houses, Gergen would bring badly needed experience and wisdom to the Clinton team, and he would work well with McLarty. But he was a Republican! Hiring him infuriated Clinton’s war room veterans, especially since he was going to be big-footing Stephanopoulos. I broke the story during a Clinton trip to Philadelphia.
The announcement in the Rose Garden the next day was painful to watch: six-foot-six Gergen stood on one side of the president; the much shorter Stephanopoulos, his head literally hanging, stood on the other. How could the campaign team, who’d been with Clinton “until the last dog died” in New Hampshire, not resent a man who’d worked for Richard Nixon? In addition, George was being yanked from performing the daily press briefings (not his forte) and replaced by Dee Dee Myers, the role model for C. J. Cregg in the television drama The West Wing. Relieved from jousting with the press every day, Stephanopoulos now had time to become a more important advisor to the president. But at first, none of this was apparent. Begala later cracked that only the White House press corps would consider spending less time with them and more with the president a “demotion.”
There was also a manic, self-indulgent quality to White House decision making in those first one hundred days. Budget decisions were made during all-nighters resembling college cram sessions, with the president himself presiding over every line-by-line choice. A lot of pizza was consumed. Then, only days after taking office, Clinton and Gore were widely ridiculed for hosting a cabinet retreat at Camp David in which New Age facilitators tried to foster bonding by getting people to reveal personal weaknesses. The president set the example by confessing that as a child he’d always felt ostracized for being a fat boy. Warren Christopher followed by confiding that he liked piano bars. Both Rubin and Bentsen, more than a little horrified at all this self-examination, opted not to play.
More serious crises arose, like the inferno in Waco, Texas, after a protracted standoff between federal agents and cult leader David Koresh. It was a terrible test for Janet Reno, the newly appointed attorney general
, one she was widely perceived to have failed. Overseas, the new president faced a growing crisis over ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, which paralyzed both NATO and the United Nations with indecision. The Europeans were once again ignoring slaughter in their own backyard. Determined to do something, Clinton sent Secretary of State Warren Christopher to Europe to propose lifting the arms embargo and launching air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs. But the NATO countries objected, and Clinton withdrew his support for the military option even as Christopher was flying home. It was a humiliating debut for the new secretary of state, badly damaging his credibility.
An even bigger crisis hit at home, although at the time few people in or out of government realized its significance. On February 26, 1993, a month into Clinton’s presidency, a bomb exploded at the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring a thousand. We now know that it was Osama bin Laden’s first attack on American soil, and that he would spend the next eight years plotting to complete the job. But the relatively small number of lives lost lulled the Clinton White House into looking at it as an isolated event. When the smoke cleared, a top Clinton aide told me, “We really dodged a bullet on that one.” Neither they, nor we, realized that the nation had entered a new era.
There were so many distractions. Clinton was still running into trouble confirming his top appointees. When law professor Lani Guinier, a personal friend and the president’s nominee to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division, faced obstacles because of her past writing on voting rights and quotas, Clinton barely hesitated before withdrawing her nomination. It was a painful Oval Office “firing” that friends say she has still not forgiven.
On his first Memorial Day as president, Clinton tried to heal his rift with veterans over his failure to serve in Vietnam. His approach was both diplomatic and symbolic. Coordinating with the White House, Vietnam veterans John McCain and John Kerry, along with military and space hero John Glenn, went to Hanoi to begin talks on the fate of American POWs and MIAs, to help pave the way for normalizing diplomatic relations. In addition to giving Clinton political support for a controversial decision, the trip helped cement the unusual bipartisan friendship between McCain and Kerry.
At the same time, at the Vietnam wall, the president drafted another Vietnam hero, General Powell, to give a stirring introduction to his commander in chief, even though Powell was known to have misgivings about Clinton the politician. I had come early so that I could spend some time walking through the memorial, looking at the reflections of people in the granite, touching the names. It is a place where monument and history combine to make you feel swallowed by the earth, as the wall recedes. There are always families and friends tracing the names of loved ones onto paper, to bring home a more permanent memory. People leave flowers, teddy bears, and ribbons. Even on duty, I can’t go to that spot without tearing up. The ability of the young Yale architect Maya Lin to inspire that kind of emotion through such a simple design has never failed to amaze me.
But Memorial Day of 1993 did not bring closure for Clinton. Driving over with Powell, the president was noticeably nervous. He had good reason. Loud protestors tried to drown out his speech, saying he had no place at that wall of honor. Most of the demonstrators were kept out of Clinton’s view, but not beyond his earshot. They shouted, “He’s a traitor, he’s a draft evader, draft dodger.”
Another said, “He served the war in Moscow.” When he tried to speak, one shouted, “Shut up and get out of here, coward! Coward! Get out of here! Run!”
It was hard to tell whether it was organized or spontaneous. The president replied, “To all of you who are shouting, I have heard you. I ask you now to hear me. I have heard you. Some have suggested that it is wrong for me to be here with you today because I did not agree a quarter of a century ago with the decision made to send the young men and women to battle in Vietnam.”
People in the crowd shouted, “Where was Bill? Where was Bill?”
The president went on, “I ask you at this monument, can any American be out of place? And can any commander in chief be in any other place but here on this day? I think not.”
It was a gutsy performance, and some of the veterans were impressed. I looked at Powell and Clinton, and thought about the different paths they had taken as young men. At the time, it didn’t seem possible that Vietnam would still be haunting American politics more than a decade later, in the 2004 campaign.
Clinton made another high-profile effort to get right with the military during a trip to the DMZ, where I’d gone with Reagan in what seemed like a different era. In driving rains, we went back to the Bridge of No Return, right up to the line where American soldiers face down North Koreans every day. What many people forget is that even though the armistice was signed in 1953, the two sides still stare at each other every day in a tense standoff. We were warned not to raise our arms or make any sudden gestures that could be interpreted as provocative. After all, it was here that a U.S. Army commander and a platoon leader were hacked to death in 1976 by North Korean guards wielding axes. But, given the rain, the mud, and the obvious political agenda of the photo opportunity, it was difficult to treat the entire event seriously. In fact, Gwen Ifill and I snapped photos of each other wearing orange plastic slickers with hoods, posing in front of the rigidly solemn North Korean troops standing guard at the armistice site. I wonder what they thought of us, and our hijinks.
For Clinton, this was an important rite of passage. He posed, as Reagan had, with field glasses looking out over the wasteland separating North from South. Then, in a hangar at Camp Casey, he addressed two thousand cheering troops, and even played the saxophone. It was a big public relations success. But first, we had to carry the video back, and feed it to the networks from Seoul.
The rest of the press corps was busing back directly to the airport, a long drive of several hours. In order to meet television deadlines, the military had arranged to fly the four network correspondents by helicopter to Seoul. When the choppers arrived to pick us up, I thought I’d overcome a residue of acrophobia—a fear of heights, going back to that 1972 helicopter crash that killed my friend Sid Brenner during Hurricane Agnes. Climbing on board with Susan Spencer from CBS, Brit Hume from ABC, and Wolf Blitzer from CNN, I commandeered one of the outside seats and waited for them to close the door. All of a sudden we were lifting off, and I realized there was no door. I’d flown on Black Hawk helicopters before, but never on one without a door.
With my legs dangling over the edge, the only place for the huge bag filled with the tapes we’d shot that day was between my knees. Could I keep my balance without losing the tapes? Looking down, I got dizzy and began to panic. The choppers were banking across the mountains, as in the opening scene in M*A*S*H*, except that these mountains looked a whole lot closer. The only thing separating me from them was a shoulder harness and seat belt.
If I’d only taken one of the inner seats, I would have felt safe, or at least safer. Now I was teetering over the edge of this precipice. The wind was lashing my face. With one hand, I held my baseball cap on my head. With the other, I grabbed the colonel next to me, a public information officer, and said, “You don’t know me, but I’m hanging on to you for dear life.” With my knees, I tried to prevent the bag of videotapes from tumbling overboard. Though the trip seemed endless, it lasted only an hour. I kept asking myself, “Why am I on this crazy ride?”
After we finally got to Seoul and filed our reports, we boarded the buses to go out to the airplane. We would be out of contact for eight or nine hours during the flight to Hawaii, and because of the time difference we would land there only an hour before the evening newscast. It was then that I discovered, in comparing notes with my network competitors, that I had not noticed a telling detail. When Bill Clinton was gazing out over the DMZ trying to look like Ronald Reagan, he had forgotten to take the lens cap off his field glasses. He may have looked like a commander in chief, but he had a little more practicing to do. For at least the next eight hours, al
l the way to Hawaii, I tortured myself for missing what seemed a big deal at the time. Such are the preoccupations of covering White House photo opportunities.
With the press corps so focused on gotcha moments, it’s understandable that the president was often thin-skinned around us. For instance, when he was choosing his first Supreme Court justice, after the retirement of Justice Byron “Whizzer” White, we all wrote that Clinton was considering two possibilities: Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt or Federal Appeals Court judge Stephen Breyer. Clinton, like all Presidents, hated leaks, so he delighted in the fact that his final choice was a surprise, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Ginsburg had a compelling life story, the experiences of a woman who had fought discrimination her entire career. In the Rose Garden when she was introduced, Bill Clinton was visibly moved by her comments. That’s probably why he reacted so angrily when a reporter asked if the decision not to nominate Breyer reflected a “zigzag” quality to his decision making.
“I have long since given up the thought that I could disabuse some of you of turning any substantive decision into anything but political process,” he said and stalked out.
There would be more anger that summer, and a month later, terrible grief, with the suicide of the Clintons’ Arkansas friend, deputy White House counsel Vince Foster. Foster and Clinton had gone to kindergarten together in Hope, and Foster had been one of Hillary’s partners at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock. As deputy counsel, he had been in charge of responding to a litany of accusations, ranging from the travel office inquiry to his own membership in an all-white Little Rock country club. When the pressure, and his growing depression, became unbearable, he drove to a park overlooking the Potomac one afternoon and shot himself in the head.
Talking Back Page 29
