Talking Back

by Andrea Mitchell

  I think Bill and Hillary’s resistance to cooperating goes back to that early feeding frenzy in New Hampshire, which persuaded them that they’d never get a fair break from the media. It’s also true that the president and first lady had good reason to stonewall. The president didn’t want to admit to past flirtations during his Little Rock years, and by then, Clinton had gotten into a defensive posture about almost everything. If he wasn’t going to be open about issues as trivial as Travelgate, he was hardly going to admit to propositioning Paula Jones.

  Why did official Washington give him such a rough time, having ignored the peccadilloes of his predecessors? One reason may have been that Clinton never really became a part of Washington. When he tried, he could charm any of the “cave dwellers,” the local term for the ruling hostesses of Georgetown. But he didn’t often try. The Clintons probably would have done a whole lot better had they tried to engage more. Strangely, they became almost as isolated as Jimmy Carter, who was widely criticized for being a Southern hick who didn’t know his way around the Capitol.

  Occasionally, the first couple tried to reach out by holding small dinners for a variety of guests, including journalists. We attended one of their dinners, held upstairs in the Yellow Oval Room. There were several tables, and I was seated next to the president. We talked about Vietnam, the antiwar years when we were both in college, the civil rights movement, and Bosnia. Born only two months apart, we had taken such different paths. When he was in the antiwar movement and law school, I was already a reporter, adjusting to the challenge of running into college friends and acquaintances on the other side when I covered demonstrations. Reminiscing with the president of the United States about the sixties, as we watched the sun set from the Truman Balcony—well, as has often been written critically of the Washington press corps, it’s harder to slam the president when you’ve been drinking his wine the night before.

  On another occasion the president invited the four network correspondents in for coffee. His hospitality included a tour of the small study off the Oval Office, where he kept souvenirs. He showed us his collection of putters. At the time, we thought it a useful way of seeing him in a relaxed setting, and learning more about his thinking, even if it was off the record. But we do trade a measure of independence for that kind of personal exposure to the chief executive—and we didn’t learn much, given what we now know about his activities in that retreat.

  The Clintons’ highly conflicted relationship with the media is perhaps best captured by one frantic April afternoon that spring as the president tried to handle the escalating crisis in Bosnia, finally threatening the Serbs in Bosnia with a wider war. Only an hour after he held a news conference signaling his new tough approach on the Balkans, a big headline on any normal day, the first lady invited us to the State Dining Room. She wanted to respond to new charges that she’d made a one-hundred-thousand-dollar windfall on cattle futures because of a sweetheart deal with an Arkansas businessman and friend, Jim Blair.

  Mrs. Clinton did not routinely hold news conferences, and never answered questions about anything the least bit controversial. The network immediately decided what our priority would be, telling me to turn over the Bosnia story to Jim Miklaszewski and head to the State Dining Room for Hillary. We always referred to it afterward as the “pretty in pink” news conference. Wearing a pink sweaterdress, seated under the famous Lincoln portrait, she calmly answered questions for more than an hour about Whitewater, the death of Vince Foster, and her Arkansas commodities trading. After avoiding the press for two years, Hillary seemed contrite, blaming any mistakes on “inexperience” with the ways of press relations in Washington. Although she had been widely criticized for making an improbable killing on the complex commodities market until then she had refused to acknowledge that her profits were unusual. To her, investigations into her finances were unfair and intrusive, even though it was obvious that the deal looked like a conflict of interest.

  It was a flawless performance, but the first lady still would not admit to any errors of law or judgment in her financial dealings. And behind her calm gaze, I saw a woman still enraged that people would even question her ethics. But pragmatism had overcome her stubbornness. Now that both Time and Newsweek had stories about her finances on their covers, she sweetly said that after guarding her “zone of privacy” for so long, she had been “rezoned.” She was in full damage-control mode.

  The first lady’s decision finally to go public after nearly two years of silence almost eclipsed what had just happened down the hall, the president’s threat to bomb the Bosnian Serbs. Most of his staff had expected the media to focus on Bosnia, a major foreign policy decision. Those in the dark about Hillary’s intentions included almost the entire White House brain trust, including Dave Gergen, George Stephanopoulos, and Dee Dee Myers. The lack of coordination showed once again how deeply divided the White House was.

  Although the Hillary story got a lot of attention—a full transcript ran in The New York Times the next day—the news conference was timed carefully for a Friday afternoon, the burial ground for all administration bad news (fewer people read the Saturday papers). And the Clintons knew a secret: Richard Nixon had fallen into a coma. Within a few hours, both Clintons’ appearances were overshadowed by the death of the thirty-seventh president of the United States.

  Hillary’s press conference did help ease some of the public’s doubts about her. At the time her approval rating had dropped to 40 percent, alarming the White House political team. But now her appearance of candor—rattling off facts and figures while looking feminine and nonthreatening—was all part of a calculated strategy. Just as Mike Deaver has said that if Ronald Reagan had been a shoe salesman, Nancy Reagan would have made sure he sold more shoes than anyone else, it is also true that Bill Clinton would never have been president without Hillary. But there’s no question that her health care initiative, and her defensiveness over Whitewater, damaged his first term.

  Hillary’s limited admissions did not stop the momentum of the Whitewater investigation. The scandal began to affect the core goals of the Clinton presidency. A group of moderate Republican senators who’d been considering a health care compromise now saw that the president had been seriously weakened by the scandal. Bob Dole signaled that there was no longer any need to make concessions to the White House. The Republicans were mobilizing, but the Clintons, living in their parallel universe, didn’t seem to realize it.

  With his domestic priorities in trouble, Clinton tried to show he could dominate the international stage. But in those years, he sometimes seemed too small to fill the part. In June of 1994 we went to Normandy for the fiftieth anniversary of D-day. Before crossing the English Channel, we visited the cemetery at Mildenhall Air Force Base, near Cambridge, England where almost four thousand American airmen and soldiers from World War II were buried. It was a foggy morning, with mist hovering over the headstones. Overhead, a retrofitted B-17 “Flying Fortress” bomber flew low over thirty acres of headstones. A band played “Moonlight Serenade,” “In the Mood,” and “American Patrol,” in honor of Glenn Miller, who had never returned from a flight across the channel after entertaining the troops.

  In that somber setting, one of the surviving pilots of the war, Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, gave a remarkable speech. Quietly, Bentsen re-created what it felt like to be flying in the chilly cockpit of his unheated B-24 as he and his crew headed out on their thirty-five bombing runs: “They squeezed that oxygen hose to break up frozen breath, clogging their face masks, and they cranked down the landing gear by hand because the hydraulic lines had been shot out. Scared? Of course, and anyone who wasn’t was either a fool or didn’t have any imagination.” A half century evaporated, and we were flying with him to hit a target we could barely see through the frosted window of his lumbering bomber. In contrast, the forty-eight-year-old president of the United States, the first to have been born after World War II, looked callow. Nothing he could say would be half as memorable.


  Only a handful of reporters in the tight pool covered Clinton the next day as he sailed with the queen from Portsmouth on the royal yacht Britannia, before transferring to a U.S. aircraft carrier for the rest of the channel crossing. But we had our own adventure, a trip across the channel on an enormous ferry. Only one element was historically accurate. The rough seas were almost as stormy as they’d been on that night fifty years earlier. For a few hours, we tried to get some sleep, in tiny staterooms. (Typically, I stayed up most of the night worrying that I’d miss the alarm, and the landing.)

  The more carefree members of the press corps found another diversion, gambling in the ship’s casino. In the predawn hours, I looked out my porthole and tried to imagine the terror of being one of those kids in 1944, pitching through black waters on a battleship and having no idea whether they’d even survive the landing. How did they summon the courage to face the onslaught that lay ahead?

  June 6 dawned rainy and cold. Our logistics seemed complicated, but they were really very simple. We had to find our locations; prepare for the live broadcast, in what had become a sea of mud; and find the right words to re-create the drama of what had taken place a half-century earlier. We were only pale imitations of the previous generation. They had saved the world. We simply inherited it. It was hard not to feel small in comparison.

  Whatever the president was thinking or feeling, his image makers saw an opportunity to enlarge his presence. They staged what they thought would be the perfect television picture: Bill Clinton, looking pensive, winding his way in a solitary walk past the headstones of the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer. Instead, he looked self-conscious, the walk studied.

  Perhaps Ronald Reagan was only acting ten years earlier when he’d delivered his speech at Pointe du Hoc—although I doubt it. Again, the network newscasts focused on how some of the World War II veterans resented the young president for not serving in his generation’s war. That 1969 letter to Colonel Holmes of the Arkansas ROTC was still haunting the middle-aged Bill Clinton.

  In one of those unexpected twists that define our business, I ended up reporting that night from Normandy Beach on a completely different subject, North Korea’s threat to reprocess spent nuclear fuel, potentially the first step toward developing a nuclear weapon. The issue was important because Pyongyang had kicked out the United Nations’s nuclear inspectors three months earlier, and no one knew what the secretive kingdom was doing. But after experiencing the D-day commemoration, I was frustrated that I couldn’t write about it, and share the stories of the men I’d met that day.

  I didn’t finish my live report on Korea for Nightly News until one in the morning. The network then had someone drive me to Paris to catch up with the rest of the press corps, who had long since filed their reports on tape and gone back for a hot shower and a good meal. By the time I got there, tired, dirty, and hungry, I’d been up for twenty-four hours.

  The rest of the trip was pure nostalgia. Bill Clinton, the former Rhodes scholar, went back to Oxford. Ironically, the onetime antiwar protester had to cancel some of his appearances because of student protests over tuition increases and neofascism in Europe.

  I hadn’t been there since my college years, when I’d visited friends. While Clinton went to a few closed events, we had some downtime and I went for a walk through some of the colleges, reflecting on how close I had come to pursuing an academic life. What if I had done graduate work in English literature at Cambridge, where I’d been accepted after graduating from Penn, instead of taking that copyboy job at KYW? I knew I would not trade the travel and excitement, and yes, the celebrity, of my life in journalism. But part of me was still the English student who loved literature, and imagined myself a college professor.

  The European trip was only a brief respite from Whitewater and an array of domestic problems. By the end of the summer, a conservative three-judge panel had fired independent counsel Robert Fiske on a legal technicality. The court ruled that Fiske did not meet the standard of an independent counsel, because he owed his appointment to Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno. The court replaced Fiske with Kenneth Starr. We didn’t know at the time that all the players for an historic showdown were now in place.

  The political opposition to the Clintons and their programs was well funded and well organized. Hillary, especially, in her role as health-care czar, gave them a lot of ammunition. A more traditional first lady is a lot easier for the public to accept. Even Nancy Reagan paid a heavy price for exercising her power over the West Wing. Other presidents’ wives, like Barbara Bush, wielded enormous power behind the scenes, but they didn’t telegraph it. They avoided arousing too much critical scrutiny.

  Hillary Clinton was more up front about her power, but that became part of her undoing. Late that summer, the president was asked at a press conference whether, having been elected with only 43 percent of the vote, he was exceeding his mandate with his legislative ambitions. Was he trying to do too much, too fast? It was a telling question. The other factor was unspoken: was he also permitting his spouse to take on too big a political role, on too important a domestic issue?

  At the end of September, George Mitchell, the Senate majority leader, officially declared health care dead, telling a news conference, “It is clear that health insurance reform cannot be enacted this year.” He couldn’t marshal the sixty Senate votes needed to cut off an inevitable Republican filibuster. It was a terrible blow to both Clintons, but especially the first lady. It also emboldened Newt Gingrich to try to nationalize the midterm elections, challenging the entire Clinton legislative agenda with a revolutionary “Contract with America.” Gingrich and his troops were clever, promising balanced budgets and a new breed of “citizen legislators” who would serve briefly and return to the private sector.

  It was a rout. The Republican victory on November 8 gave the minority party control of both houses of Congress, for the first time in nearly half a century. High-profile election night victims included the speaker of the House, our good friend Tom Foley, defeated in his own district. Tom shares a birthday with Alan and, as part of an informal club of other March 6 birthday boys, celebrates with him each year. Tom’s loss added to the sense that a revolution had in fact taken place in Washington.

  Clinton was in shock, clearly depressed. It was the first time I saw him completely overwhelmed by a political loss. He knew that by losing the House to Gingrich, he was going to be beleaguered for the rest of his term. The self-proclaimed “change agent” was unable to achieve his most important goal, reforming the health-care sysem, and to many in the White House, the first lady was to blame.

  The White House and Congress were undergoing a wrenching change, and so was my little world. The new president of NBC News, Andrew Lack, had fixed problems he’d inherited at the Today show and Dateline, and eventually focused on Nightly News. He wanted to put a rising star destined to be the network’s next Nightly News anchorman, Brian Williams, at the White House. I had mixed feelings, of course, but knew that the timing was right. I wanted to cover more foreign policy, and moving out of the White House would take me further from any potential conflict with Alan, a presidential appointee. To make it more interesting, Tim Russert created a new beat for me, encompassing national security and the intelligence community, as well as the State Department and diplomacy. I’d be able to cover foreign policy from a broader perspective than had been done previously, with a mandate to travel.

  The issues were familiar: North Korea and its nuclear threat; ethnic cleansing in the Balkans; the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians; the desperation of Haiti; the spread of global terrorism; Castro’s Cuba; and, of course, Iraq. The challenge would be to get out of the State Department and make these stories come alive for our viewers. I was excited, but realistic enough to know that I had to create my own breaks. There would no longer be the White House stage, nor the NBC team of producers to perform their logistical magic.

  Before I left the White House, the first lady i
nvited me to a farewell tea. I quickly realized that she had more in mind than making a kind gesture to a departing correspondent. After chatting about my plans and her projects, she revealed her real agenda by asking, “What do we do about Chris? Would it help if we got him a TV coach?”

  With unusual candor, Mrs. Clinton was confiding her concern that the secretary of state, Warren Christopher, wasn’t a good enough communicator to sell the president’s policies. The Clintons felt that their problems could be fixed if “Chris,” as he was known, could be a more effective spokesman on the Sunday talk shows. The administration was focusing on public relations, not substance. I soon learned from friends of the Clintons that the first lady and her husband had also raised the issue with advisors inside and outside of the White House. In fact, it had gone even further: Clinton intimate and Washington superlawyer Vernon Jordan had already approached Colin Powell to see if he would accept an offer to be secretary of state. Powell had turned it down.

  Shortly after arriving at the State Department, I collected more information about the president’s dissatisfaction with his secretary of state from other sources, enough to file a story for Nightly News. Unfortunately, it was painful to Warren Christopher, who probably deserved more loyalty from the Clintons than he received.

  Clinton was, by this point, becoming better liked and respected by foreign leaders. For Boris Yeltsin, Clinton was a lifeline. Similarly, Clinton and Germany’s Helmut Kohl, also a man of large appetites, seemed to enjoy one another’s company, especially over a big meal. On one visit to Washington, Clinton took Kohl to lunch at an Italian restaurant in Georgetown, where the chef informed them, “There is no spa cuisine here, our motto is abbondanza.” Abundance. What an understatement.