Talking Back

by Andrea Mitchell

Foster left behind an anguished note that said he was “not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here, ruining people is considered sport.”

  Foster was especially bitter toward The Wall Street Journal, which had hounded him with a series of editorials captioned, “Who Is Vincent Foster,” questioning his ethics. To the tightly knit clique of his friends in the White House, Foster’s death represented all that was most repugnant about Washington. The president and first lady called it the politics of personal destruction: the way petty scandals like Travelgate can get blown up out of all proportion, and personalized; and the way people can be caricatured and demonized by the press.

  Inevitably, many of Foster’s colleagues, most likely including the Clintons, also felt tremendous guilt for not recognizing his anguish in time to help him. Their anger surely contributed to their defensiveness later, when Whitewater allegations began to reach critical mass. It was the Arkansans against the rest of the world, especially the Washington press corps. What made it even worse for Vince Foster’s family and friends were the conspiracy theorists, mostly from the Republican right, who suggested that he had not killed himself, but had been murdered.

  Fortunately for Clinton, it was not all pain and tragedy that summer. Congress passed the president’s economic plan, a mix of tax increases and spending cuts designed to reduce the projected deficit by a half trillion dollars over five years. It may have been his proudest achievement, helping to transform the American economy. To win the vote, he had to agree to major concessions, giving up some of his most cherished promises for both tax cuts and new programs.

  The final House vote on August 5 was a frantic race against the clock. Clinton did not know he would win until the dramatic entrance of Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky of Pennsylvania and Pat Williams of Montana, giving him a one-vote margin of victory. (Her vote cost Marjorie, a former NBC reporter, her seat in Congress. In her heavily Republican district outside Philadelphia, casting the decisive vote for Bill Clinton’s budget was hardly good politics.)

  The Senate vote, the next night, was equally dramatic. After days of arm-twisting, Clinton owed the victory to his old rival, Bob Kerrey. When Kerrey finally committed, it was not with enthusiasm. He rose on the Senate floor and said, “I could not and should not cast a vote that brings down your presidency.” Kerrey and Clinton had been uneasy rivals since the New Hampshire primary, but the Nebraska senator knew that if Clinton lost the economic package, he would have no clout with Congress for other priorities. With Kerrey, the president had a fifty-fifty tie, permitting Al Gore as vice president to cast the deciding vote. The White House staff exploded in celebration.

  I blended in with the West Wing crowd as they surged toward the North Portico in a spontaneous rally to cheer Clinton and Gore. It reminded me of the bus trips, just after the convention, and election night in Little Rock. For one night, they could forget about Vince Foster’s death, Travelgate, designer haircuts, Arkansas land deals, and the fear of scandals yet to come.

  The other great accomplishment of that first year was achieved without great White House involvement, but Clinton was still able to bask in the success. For months, negotiators for Israel and the Palestinians, including Mahmoud Abbas, had been meeting secretly in Oslo. When they reached agreement, and were ready to sign their first treaty, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat agreed to do it at the White House.

  As I walked out to the signing ceremony on the South Lawn, I saw everyone who was anyone in foreign policy and Jewish-American causes, meeting and greeting, seeing and being seen. It felt like a Jewish festival, or a bar mitzvah. Normally staid diplomats were practically giving each other high fives in the backyard of the White House. The jubilation was not misplaced—this was the first breakthrough in the Middle East conflict since Jimmy Carter brought Begin and Sadat together at the White House to sign the Camp David accords in 1979. I thought about how I’d covered that pathbreaking ceremony alongside John Chancellor so many years earlier. How many Palestinians and how many Israelis had died in the intervening years?

  This time, I was broadcasting from the press platform at the rear of the South Lawn. The speeches were extraordinary, especially Rabin’s. It was a heady moment and I have no doubt it inspired Clinton to believe he could broker a real peace before his time in the White House was up.

  The very next day, Clinton launched his campaign to ratify the NAFTA fair trade agreement in the East Room, with Presidents Bush, Ford, and Carter looking on. Seeing them together impressed me: despite disagreeing on most issues, they could still come together behind broader principles, like free trade. I wondered how difficult it was for George Bush to lend his presence to the man who had defeated him. Clinton had chosen Bill Daley, son of one famous Chicago mayor and brother of another, to shepherd the controversial trade agreement through Congress.

  Daley is a rare combination: a skilled political operative with a deep knowledge of issues, no matter how complex. The NAFTA deal was an unusual example of Washington bridging the usual political divides. It also featured one of Al Gore’s most effective performances, when he demolished anti–free trade advocate Ross Perot in a highly entertaining debate. It gave Gore an aura of debating prowess that led people nearly seven years later to assume mistakenly that he would demolish George W. Bush.

  But it seemed as though every victory in the Clinton White House was coupled with a disaster, or at least a close call. The staff ricocheted from one crisis to the next. Some were simple mishaps. For instance, that fall the president went to Congress to propose Hillary’s giant health-care plan. The plan was a complex scheme to expand access to health coverage by taking advantage of the economic efficiencies of managed care. But it relied on a series of untested economic assumptions about the way the marketplace would respond. And, more fatally, it threatened the profitability of a number of powerful industries.

  The night of Clinton’s speech, I was standing on the North Lawn, ready to go live. We kept being told they would bring us the prepared text in advance, but the Clintons frequently made so many last-minute changes (even while riding in the limousine to the Hill), that we weren’t very surprised when it didn’t arrive on time. Without a text to follow, I had no idea that anything was wrong. Only afterward did we learn that the president got to the podium and realized the speech loaded in the TelePrompTer was his previous address to Congress. Clinton later joked, “I thought to myself, that was a pretty good speech, but not good enough to give twice.”

  Realizing the error, Clinton turned to Al Gore and said, “They’ve got the wrong speech.” It took a full seven minutes to fix the problem. Clinton was so knowledgeable he was able to deliver a complex and detailed speech on health reform extemporaneously, seemingly without missing a beat. I can’t think of another politician who could have pulled it off.

  Yet his communication skills, and obvious intelligence, could only carry him so far. Preoccupied by domestic conflicts, he seemed unable to prevent foreign crises from becoming full-blown disasters. As early as the fall of 1993, he was juggling twin conflicts in Somalia and Haiti. Clinton had inherited the American peacekeeping operation in Somalia from George Bush, but it was on Clinton’s watch that the U.S. lost eighteen soldiers in the murderous incident memorialized in the film Black Hawk Down. What began as a mission to provide food to starving Somalians in a country wracked by civil war turned into a seventeen-hour battle, the longest single American military engagement since Vietnam. As a result of a series of bad military decisions, during a poorly conceived daytime raid, Army Rangers in a Black Hawk helicopter were shot down and their bodies dragged through the streets of Mogadishu by the forces of a Somalian warlord. Colin Powell had just retired as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his successor, John Shalikashvili, had not yet been confirmed.

  Defense Secretary Les Aspin took some of the blame for not providing armor that had been requested by commanders in the field, but Clinton was devastated by the loss, especially after the families of some
of the dead rangers excoriated him at a posthumous Medal of Honor ceremony. It revived all of the resentments over his lack of service in Vietnam. From then on, the president was uncertain about using military power, even when he needed to; and Congress tried to limit his authority to use force in future conflicts in Haiti and Bosnia.

  What is still unclear about these early foreign policy failures is how much the president was already distracted by Whitewater. All the newspapers were pursuing investigative leads, and in November we broke some new ground: in his first television interview, a former Arkansas judge named David Hale suggested that as governor Bill Clinton had pressured him to help his Whitewater partners. Hale said that Clinton had asked him if he could approve a loan for Jim and Susan McDougal, Clinton’s friends and partners in the land deal.

  The president denied ever having had the conversation, and Hale was at the time under indictment in an unrelated case. Clinton’s deputy White House counsel Bruce Lindsey, the first line of defense whenever scandals arose, called me to try to debunk Hale’s claim. Who was telling the truth? We couldn’t tell, but other sources backed up Hale’s account. We laid out the charges and countercharges, including Hale’s claim that Clinton had pressed the McDougals to hire Hillary as the attorney for a savings and loan they had run. The government had subsequently forced the S&L to shut down.

  Was there a conflict of interest? The Clintons had always denied it. But Vince Foster had discovered that the Whitewater partnership had not filed federal or state tax returns for three years. I reported that the day before Foster died, a judge in Little Rock had filed a search warrant enabling the FBI to raid David Hale’s offices. Then, for the first time, the controversial land deal began to merge with allegations of a new sex scandal. Several Arkansas state troopers told a conservative magazine they had helped line up women for Clinton when he was governor. Hillary was furious. Both The New York Times and The Washington Post pressed for the appointment of an independent counsel.

  The pressure increased daily, including January 6, the morning the president’s mother, Virginia Kelley, died of breast cancer. As Hillary Clinton later recounted, when she and the president turned on the Today show a few hours later, Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich hammered the point home. “It to me cries out for the appointment of a regulatory, independent counsel,” Dole said. Their appearance had been scheduled previously, but much later the Clintons said the insensitivity of Dole’s comments, given the timing, was crushing to them.

  After only a few days, Clinton traveled to Moscow, physically exhausted from the scandals, grieving the loss of his mother, and facing his first summit with Boris Yeltsin. There was perhaps one remaining chance to defuse the Whitewater issue. Len Downie, the executive editor of The Washington Post, proposed that the White House turn over all its Whitewater documentation to prove there was nothing to hide. Dave Gergen and Mack McLarty both advised the Clintons to let the newspaper have the material. They argued that it was probably the only way to avoid a special counsel, but Hillary and all of the White House lawyers adamantly refused. They thought it would lead to a fishing expedition and not stop the demands for more information.

  With most of the White House press corps focused on Whitewater, Clinton tried to carry on at his first European summit. Following tough three-way negotiations with Russia and Ukraine, he was able to announce Ukraine’s agreement to eliminate its entire stockpile of nuclear weapons. The world’s third-largest arsenal, a total of eighteen hundred warheads, including 176 long-range missiles plus bombers and cruise missiles, would be disassembled. The warheads would be shipped to Russia, where the uranium would be extracted by U.S. contractors and sold for peaceful use in nuclear reactors around the world. Ukraine, desperately in need of cash, would profit by one billion dollars. At the time, I didn’t realize how important the disarmament arrangement would be: it helped guarantee at least a decade of nuclear safety after the end of the Cold War.

  I reported on the deal from Prague, struggling to edit my piece in a smoke-filled cubicle. Having fought over the years to eliminate smoke from the White House press room—a battle that was led, successfully, by Sam Donaldson of ABC—it was tough to be working in Europe, where everyone still smoked. My eyes burned, and I could barely breathe. We finished filing for Nightly News at two in the morning, and before dawn left with Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert on a small charter flight to Moscow in order to prepare for Clinton’s arrival in the Russian capital that night.

  Unfortunately, that meant leaving Prague hours before Clinton, on the day he finally responded to a growing chorus demanding that he appoint an independent counsel. All of his political advisors said it was the only way to clear the air. Mrs. Clinton, and Dave Gergen—who had lived through Watergate as a member of Richard Nixon’s staff—countered that, once unleashed, a prosecutor could destroy Bill Clinton’s presidency. Against the advice of his wife, who had organized a conference call the night before from Washington to try to talk him out of it, Clinton capitulated. After we left for Moscow, the White House announced the decision, with Stephanopoulos explaining that “the controversy was becoming too much of a distraction.” In Prague, Clinton gave interviews to the network correspondents for the first time in months.

  When my colleague Jim Miklaszewski asked about Whitewater, Clinton made news. Clearly testy, the president blamed the mess on the media, telling Mik, “Basically the press has editorialized and pressured the politicians into saying, ‘Here’s a guy that, as far as we know, hasn’t done anything wrong; nobody’s ever accused him of doing anything wrong. There’s no evidence that he’s done anything wrong, but we think the presumption of guilt—almost—should be upon him. He should somehow prove his innocence.’”

  With that, the president got up and walked out. As The New York Times reported the next day, he also cancelled a scheduled interview with Ted Koppel, whose show Nightline had been promised access to Clinton every day of his trip.

  Years later, he and Hillary both said that agreeing to an independent counsel was their biggest mistake. Though they started with Robert Fiske, a moderate Republican prepared to pursue a defined, relatively contained investigation, when he was replaced, they wound up with Ken Starr. What started as an investigation into the Whitewater land deal became an exploration into everything they had ever done.

  Almost ignored in the furor over Whitewater was the administration’s failure to mobilize action to stop the slaughter in Bosnia. NATO was threatening air strikes because of renewed Serb shelling of Sarajevo, which claimed more victims and again interrupted vital UN relief supplies. Even the British, reluctant to permit air strikes that would endanger their peacekeepers on the ground, were about to give in. But the allies were still not ready, and NATO’s threats sounded feckless to the leaders of the Bosnian Serbs.

  By the time we arrived in Russia, I was having trouble keeping up. What most people didn’t know was that I’d had major surgery a few weeks earlier, and against the advice of colleagues, had insisted on making the trip. I just couldn’t imagine missing Clinton’s first Moscow summit. But before leaving Washington, one of my White House producers had warned that if I went, he wasn’t going to carry my bags—something I never would have asked. I was determined not to show any sign of weakness, or cut myself any slack.

  On Clinton’s first morning in Moscow, in a heavy snowfall, my producer assigned me to cover a pool that was departing at six-thirty a.m. It meant boarding an unheated bus, being driven to the Russian foreign ministry for a security check, switching to a Russian vehicle for the ride to the Kremlin, and then waiting a few more hours for the leaders. There was very little to show for the effort. All we got to see was Clinton and Yeltsin—by then, calling each other “Bill” and “Boris”—walk toward each other, shake hands, and depart for their private talks. It’s the kind of inconsequential photo opportunity that producers now cover, especially if correspondents have to stay up and report live until two-thirty each morning (and do it by climbing up to the hotel rooftop, in th
e snow, the only location with a scenic backdrop). I should never have taken the early-morning assignment, especially not to observe a routine handshake.

  When the Kremlin event finally ended, the situation only got worse. The White House forgot to send a bus to pick us up. By then it was snowing heavily. Loaded down with equipment, the camera crew and I waited in the snow, hoping someone would remember and come get us. In those days, before cell phones were in wide use, there was no way to reach anyone for help. Finally, in desperation, we started walking. My feet were frozen. Not having prepared for outdoor duty, I didn’t even have gloves. At times that morning, I wasn’t sure I would make it. I felt completely overwhelmed, physically and emotionally.

  What I really wanted to be focusing on was the political story we’d come to cover. It was a fascinating time to be in Russia. The Soviet Union had collapsed, but Yeltsin had not consolidated his power. It was not at all clear that he or his reforms would survive. Clinton was practically doing acrobatics to confer legitimacy on him. During the brief summit, the Americans reached into their diplomatic bag of tricks to produce agreements, even symbolic ones. One declaration targeted each country’s missiles toward the sea, no longer aiming them at each other. They could easily be repositioned in a crisis, but it sounded good. Yeltsin also tried to persuade Clinton of his own popularity, ephemeral as it was. Despite every sign to the contrary, he offered a rosy view of his new parliament, even as the militia had to be brought in to break up a fistfight in the lower house provoked by the controversial nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Democracy was still a raw experiment in Russia.

  It was hardly the time, or place, for the president to make a snap judgment about whether to appoint a special counsel to investigate Whitewater. Looking back, I realize that he must have been thinking that he couldn’t win for losing—a hero in Russia, vilified back home.

  Could the train wreck that became the Whitewater investigation—ultimately, the legal process that led to impeachment—have been averted? I think it could have, if the Clintons had been more forthcoming when they had the chance. Yet by the time Clinton took office, the lines between traditional reporting and the tabloids were already blurring. This trend had started earlier with coverage of scandals in Congress and the Gennifer Flowers revelations. Now it was poised to explode.