Talking Back

by Andrea Mitchell

  In fact, during the 2000 campaign, it was far from clear that foreign policy would be very different under Bush than Clinton. In a pre-9/11 world, no one discussed world events very much. During the second presidential debate that year, there were only a few questions even tangentially related to foreign policy. Bush was asked about nation building, and flatly rejected the idea. “Maybe I’m missing something here. I mean, we’re going to have kind of a nation building corps from America? Absolutely not. Our military is meant to fight and win war. That’s what it’s meant to do. And when it gets overextended, morale drops.”

  In that same debate, he was asked how he would project the United States around the world, as president. He said, “If we’re an arrogant nation, they’ll resent us. If we’re a humble nation, but strong, they’ll welcome us. And our nation stands alone right now in the world in terms of power, and that’s why we have to be humble. And yet project strength in a way that promotes freedom.”

  Few people paid enough attention to that answer. Even in the years since, critics of the Iraq war have made much of the seeming inconsistency between candidate Bush promising to have a “humble” foreign policy, and President Bush’s doctrine of preemptive action. That ignores what he was saying before he took office. In that second debate, he made it clear that he believes great nations have an obligation, almost a religious requirement, to promote freedom by projecting their strength. It is a bedrock view, a core philosophy that is as fundamental to Bush as any of Reagan’s essential principles was to him. You can disagree with the way George W. Bush has conducted his foreign policy, but you’d at least better understand his intentions.

  Bush was judged lacking foreign policy skills because he flunked a pop quiz when asked to identify foreign leaders during a local TV interview in Boston. Critics dismissed him as stupid or, at least, unschooled in foreign affairs. But experience may be a poor measure of how a leader will perform. Most people overlooked the fact that George W. Bush had strong views about America’s place in the world and, if elected, was determined to act on them.

  My job that summer soon got even more complicated. In addition to hosting a daily political broadcast while covering the presidential campaign and foreign policy, I was assigned to follow the hottest Senate race in the country—Hillary Clinton’s race in New York. It was the first time a first lady had run for public office. Most people didn’t know what to make of it. How would she succeed in appealing to voters in New York, instead of her birth state of Illinois, or her adopted Arkansas, especially since she was trying to replace a political icon, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan? And how could she perform her duties as first lady if she was spending all her time in New York?

  Hillary had played many roles over the years: loyal wife, political victim, and political savior. As she saw her husband’s White House years drawing to a close, she and her friends argued that it was her turn. Bill had damaged his legacy with Monica and impeachment. After twenty-five years of helping him, it was time for her to have a political career of her own. She could strike out on her own, instead of being the “wronged wife,” and make sure people remembered her for more than a failed health-care initiative. Her aides were telling me, “Don’t expect joint appearances with that other Clinton. She has to establish her own identity. Let him stay home and run the country.”

  By March of 1999, she was drawing crowds and news coverage befitting a presidential candidate. Three months later, she was dropping local place names like Queens and Elmira into almost every sentence to deflect criticism that she was nothing more than a carpetbagger. Her unofficial staff was hunting for campaign headquarters as she organized her New York makeover. The Clintons would plan a summer vacation in the Adirondacks, or the Finger Lakes, instead of Martha’s Vineyard. She’d visit Cooperstown, the birthplace of baseball. And she would launch her campaign on the historic Moynihan farm upstate.

  Alan and I had spent a weekend there with Liz and Pat Moynihan the previous summer. Their farm was set on a thousand rolling acres not far from the town of Oneonta. This was where Pat retreated to write books in a nineteenth-century one-room schoolhouse on the property—an unlikely place to hold a campaign event with hundreds of reporters and camera crews. Liz had personally managed Pat’s races since he was first elected in 1976 on budgets of thousands, not millions, of dollars. Now Hillary’s big-money operation was coming to a rural crossroads called Pindars Corner.

  Pat and the Clintons had always had an arm’s-length relationship. For instance, three days before Bill Clinton went to Congress in September 1993 and called for universal health insurance, Moynihan had gone on Meet the Press and said there was no health care crisis. He also dismissed Clinton’s claims of $91 billion in projected savings from Hillary’s health-care proposal as “fantasy.” But now Hillary needed Moynihan’s blessing to help win over New Yorkers, and he obliged her. There was huge national interest in the race. In fact, her campaign kickoff drew a bigger crowd of reporters to that upstate farm than had shown up at the Texas statehouse when George W. Bush announced he was running for president.

  The first lady had some big advantages, like an air force jet and the Secret Service to help move her from one location to the next. But she was facing a difficult race, because her likely opponent was New York City’s tough-talking mayor, Rudy Giuliani. Appreciating a good political fight, Moynihan told me, “It’s going to be a wonder to watch.”

  For the next few months, it was. Rudy crisscrossed the state taking shots at Hillary for being a carpetbagger. Both were polarizing figures. Polls showed that people either loved them or hated them. In a contest limited to one-liners and photo opportunities, he even popped up one night on her old turf, at a Cubs game at Wrigley Field, telling reporters, “I don’t even live in Peoria, Illinois. Here’s the idea, maybe you should run in a place that you don’t know anything about.” To rub it in, he scheduled a fund-raiser in Little Rock.

  Hillary also gave Rudy some openings. At one point, she went to the Middle East—an attempt to use her position as first lady to curry votes with New York’s Jewish community. It backfired. Not yet fully aware of the sensitivities of New York’s ethnic voters, she hugged Yasser Arafat’s wife, Suha, during a joint appearance, and even smiled diplomatically after Mrs. Arafat (without any evidence) accused Israel of using poison gas on Palestinian children. Hillary waited a full day to respond, and then blamed the translator for not explaining what Mrs. Arafat had said in Arabic. New York’s tabloids had a field day.

  A bigger challenge was how to appear more authentic to women voters, who should have been her biggest supporters but were telling pollsters they didn’t know who the “real” Hillary was. Her advisors were informing her that white female voters favored Giuliani by eighteen points, a potentially fatal gender gap. Why were they so hostile to her? Some women said she was arrogant. Others said she wasn’t independent enough, had sold out. And to many, she had an identity problem. Was she the “stand by your man” Hillary of 1992, the scorned wife of the impeachment scandal, or the “buy one, get one free” copresident and sometime health care czar?

  The campaign had to reinvent the first lady, and that meant tackling the issue of her troubled marriage head-on. After months of self-imposed silence about the Lewinsky affair, Hillary spoke out in an interview with writer Lucinda Franks for Tina Brown’s Talk magazine. In the article, Mrs. Clinton blamed her husband’s pattern of infidelities on psychological damage he’d suffered as a child. We had come a long way from her angry comments on the Today show a year earlier, when the Lewinsky scandal first broke, about a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

  It was a calculated gamble. Although some people said she was trying to excuse her husband’s misbehavior, she hoped to forestall questions by talking about her marital problems herself. There was another motive. She was about to move out of the White House to establish residency in New York for her Senate campaign, and her advisors wanted to avert any suggestion that the first couple was splitting up. They weren
’t, but the move to address the matter directly was another White House first.

  A friend had already scouted a house for them in Chappaqua, a Westchester County bedroom community an hour from New York City. On January 4,2000, a moving van pulled up to the front door.

  It wasn’t your typical suburban move-in. Instead of the local Welcome Wagon, all the networks trailed the van’s progress live, in “white Bronco” fashion, by helicopter. The first lady was now legally a New Yorker.

  Rudy Giuliani pointedly told us, “I feel very, very proud of the fact that people from all over the country want to come to New York, including people from Arkansas.”

  The Clinton-Giuliani race had enough tension and drama for three soap operas. By March, the Republican-controlled Congress was opening hearings into whether the first lady was improperly using taxpayers’ money to finance her campaign. They called it Air Hillary—a campaign kept aloft partly through subsidized flights on military jets. Democrats countered that all first ladies use military jets, and that the hearings were just a stunt to help Giuliani’s campaign. We reported that the New York mayor also had taxpayer help: no plane, but an official car, and security men to clear his way.

  Fortunately for Hillary, Giuliani had his own problems, many of them self-inflicted. For weeks, he refused to show any sympathy for the Haitian family of Patrick Dorismond, an unarmed man shot by New York’s undercover police. He excused the police, blamed the victim, and even released the man’s confidential juvenile police record. And this was only the latest in a series of controversial police shootings causing tension with minorities.

  Suddenly that April, Hillary leaped ahead in the polls. After months of the race being a dead heat, now she was up by eight points statewide, and by an overwhelming forty-two points in New York City, where Giuliani was known best. The election was still seven months off, but Giuliani had to confront a growing impression that he was too mean even for the United States Senate. Looking for a forum to present a more human face to the public, Giuliani agreed to sit down with me for a town hall meeting, to be carried live on MSNBC in prime time. It was a roll of the dice: not only couldn’t he control my questions, he had no idea what a live audience might ask.

  But before we could do the show, the campaign took another dramatic turn. In a stunning announcement, Giuliani revealed that he was suffering from prostate cancer. New York’s tough mayor, who had made his reputation as a prosecutor busting the mob, was now in a very different kind of battle, fighting cancer while undergoing a very ugly split from his wife. He was evaluating treatment options, and relying heavily on the woman he would later marry, Judith Nathan. This was a man reevaluating his life in front of our eyes.

  At midnight the night before our town hall broadcast, Rudy’s brain trust came to my hotel for a meeting. Clearly, the campaign was in crisis. His closest advisors did not know whether he was going to stay in the race. They wanted to cancel the broadcast, but weren’t sure if that was the best strategy. Finally, they agreed he would keep the commitment.

  It was a contentious interview, especially on the subject of police brutality by New York’s police. This was before 9/11, when Rudy’s courageous response would elevate him to the status of “America’s mayor.” Until then, he was just a middle-aged politician suffering from prostate cancer who had a reputation as a cad for going on television to notify his wife he was leaving her for another woman—not the most sympathetic character.

  But that night, in a rare display of remorse, Giuliani expressed regrets for his handling of controversial police shootings. “I made a mistake. I should have conveyed the human feeling that I had of compassion and loss.” He acknowledged he was “readjusting” his priorities in life. He was almost thinking out loud about his future.

  This Senate race was turning into the best running story I’d been on in years. That is, until the next morning. I was at our New York studios in Rockefeller Center when I got a tip that Rudy had decided to drop out. We interrupted the network to break the story, and then carried his announcement live. Emotional but strangely calm, Giuliani was passing up a good political battle for the first time in his life, having decided that fighting cancer was more important than trying to defeat Hillary Clinton. Giuliani said, “I used to think the core of me was in politics. It isn’t. When you feel your mortality and your humanity, you realize that the core of you is, first of all, being able to take care of your health.”

  Hillary’s new challenger was a little-known Republican congressman from Long Island, Rick Lazio. Without a real contest, the first lady figured she had nothing to gain by talking to the national media, so she avoided us. It was far easier to deal with local reporters who might ask her about farm prices upstate or the dairy compact. The contest was dead even when the two finally faced real questions, in a debate moderated by Tim Russert. In the confrontation, Lazio tried to take Hillary on, crossing over to her podium and demanding she pledge to refuse contributions from political action committees. To millions of women across the state, he looked like a bullying husband demanding to see the credit card bill. Somehow Lazio had done what all of Hillary’s campaign advisors had failed to accomplish—turned her into a sympathetic figure, especially to women.

  Hillary had proved the skeptics wrong. She could operate outside of the White House, although she brought a lot of the White House infrastructure with her to pull it off. She dug down into local issues, particularly in rural, Republican areas upstate. After getting off to a bumpy start, she had shown herself to be an agile, adaptive politician, and a tireless campaigner.

  To keep up with her Senate race, I had to anchor more and more of my shows from New York City, instead of from Washington. We used a Today show studio across the street from the Nightly News offices at 30 Rockefeller Center. To accommodate both deadlines, I frequently wrote and recorded my Nightly News script at five p.m. and then raced across the street to prepare for the six p.m. cable show. If I had time, I’d record my closing stand-up for Nightly News from the set. If not, I’d record my stand-up during a commercial break. It all depended on split-second timing, and having no technical glitches. This was not a drill for the faint of heart.

  Even more challenging was to keep the show going while I juggled the other part of my job, covering foreign policy. In July, President Clinton held round-the-clock talks between the Israelis and Palestinians for fifteen days at Camp David, talks that ended badly. Despite intense pressure from the president, Yasser Arafat balked, refusing to accept the terms offered by Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Barak. Clinton at times reminded me of a very bright, but undisciplined, college student who left his studying until the last minute, and somehow aced his courses. His all-nighters had worked when he needed votes for a landmark budget deal in 1993. Now, with time running out, why couldn’t his powers of persuasion produce a miracle on that most intractable of problems, Middle East peace?

  But the two sides had deep, historic differences that couldn’t possibly be overcome, even by the sheer force of Bill Clinton’s will and personality. The administration had not properly prepared the region for the July summit. The United States failed to bring the so-called moderate Arab states on board, especially Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Without their endorsement, Arafat had no political cover, and no pressure from his own constituency to do anything but stonewall.

  Summits, like Camp David or the Bosnian peace talks in Dayton, Ohio, earlier in the administration, are very difficult to cover. The network’s appetite for information was enormous, but the White House had imposed a “news blackout”—no briefings or substantive announcements to help us update our stories. Of course, that didn’t stop the delegations from holding secret briefings for favored reporters in their own traveling press corps. Both sides played the rumor and leak game relentlessly, making it especially important for reporters to be wary of disinformation. The only way to separate rumor from fact was to call the negotiators on their cell phones when they took breaks and try to piece together an accurate picture of
what was going on inside.

  On July 19, reports leaked through the Israeli press that the summit had collapsed and the president was heading back to the White House to declare it dead. Bags were packed, motorcades lined up with their engines running, and planes rolled out onto the tarmac to await the departing delegations. But just before midnight, people involved in the talks told me that under heavy pressure from Clinton, the two sides had agreed to keep talking. The president had to break away to attend the annual economic summit in Japan that weekend. But Arafat and Barak would stay behind and continue negotiating with the secretary of state until Clinton could return.

  Clinton’s maneuver extended the diplomatic marathon for another few days, but the negotiators never reached the finish line. After Clinton returned from Japan, Arafat still wouldn’t compromise; the Israelis insisted they had made their best offer. After fifteen days of fruitless negotiations, the final breakdown came at three o’clock in the morning. As always, the deal breaker was who would control Jerusalem, a city claimed by both Palestinians and Israelis. U.S. negotiators blamed Arafat and other Arab leaders who had told the Palestinian leader to hold out for a better deal.

  Two months later, in September, a new Palestinian intifada erupted against Israel. The White House blamed Ariel Sharon, the most powerful of Israel’s conservative cabinet ministers, for provoking it by leading a march to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, one of East Jerusalem’s most disputed holy sites. Palestinian youths, outraged, poured into the streets, throwing rocks at the soldiers accompanying Sharon. Over the next two days, the violence escalated quickly. Arab men and boys stoned hundreds of Jews who were praying at the Western Wall on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year; Israel retaliated with considerable force. Israel later claimed the outbreak had been long planned, and deliberately ignited. In any case, the chances of a political dialogue became even more remote.