He had managed the messy collapse of the Communist bloc with prudence and strategic foresight. He’d led us stoutly through the first Gulf War with seamless leadership. There were pockets of localized recessionary problems, but the overall 1992 economy grew at 5.7 percent (after a half decade of Obamanomics, you probably don’t recognize that number). He launched A Thousand Points of Light, leveraging the American spirit of compassion and service to others.
Further, he had unprecedented experience in more fields than any three normal people could accomplish in three lifetimes, including successes in business, intelligence operations, and diplomacy as well as local, state and national politics. And most impressive of all, he excelled professionally while maintaining a first-rate marriage to a firecracker and universally beloved wife and raising five exceptional kids. Oh yeah, he was also a super athlete and a refined man.
Whenever I see the man—then or now—these words spring to mind.
Duty
Honor
Country
Besides all those things, I loved Poppy for personal reasons too. As I said in All’s Fair, he took me under his wing in my worst days, right after my mother died, and, secondly, he was unfailingly loyal to his people and a genuinely good guy.
When our campaign death-spiraled, this historic president and stand-up statesman was caricatured as a one-term loser, and everybody associated with him—or at least those who didn’t jump on the trash-Bush bandwagon—degenerated into radioactive toxic material. And politics being politics, when the chips were down and Poppy started sinking in the polls, very few people—his family and oldest friends aside—seemed eager to go out and publicly defend him.
So it became my job to go out—on TV, radio, in print and even on target-state street corners—and defend, defend, defend, along with making plenty of take-no-prisoners attacks on his opponents, which came pretty naturally to me. My ubiquitous and annoying presence, combined with the persistent focus on the whole Romeo-Juliet parody with James (even though the star-crossed lovers hadn’t been in the same city or state for months) raised my profile while tripping up my life.
We lost and I dive-bombed overnight, splatting on the public pavement like an overripe rotten tomato. After twelve years of steady ascent in national Republican politics, I naively hoped everything I had built in my professional life—all the political miles and commitment and eons of invested time and decades of hard-earned relationships—would add up to something (in a just and merciful world).
But that’s not the way it works in politics. And I can’t honestly say that I didn’t know this or expect this—or even not deserve it. But still, the lightning speed of my professional disintegration left me unmoored and lost. Especially painful were the fair-weather foxhole buddies who dumped me as if I were yesterday’s smelly garbage. Overnight, it seemed, my whole world imploded. Washington is brutal that way. And to my credit, I guess, I didn’t whine about it. No one would have listened anyway.
Besides, I couldn’t wallow around in a one-man pity party, since credit card companies and mortgage holders are notoriously not into excuses for nonpayment.
So I was a loser girl without cash reserves, rich relatives or employment prospects. And I was deluged by payment-due notices. For the first time in my life, I was truly unemployable, at least as far as jobs I wanted, political jobs. I suppose I could have beaten the bushes for a corporate job or lobbying contract or knocked on Capitol Hill doors. But all I really wanted was to do what I always did: go back to the Republican National Committee and work toward the midterm and next presidential elections. But due to my radioactive status, that was no longer an option.
So I sat around my apartment reading cookbooks until I could come up with a better idea. Preferably something that paid.
And while I was adjusting to life without a job and days without purpose, James was beating off endless opportunities and accolades with a baseball bat. And getting every freaking award known to mankind just for being him.
JAMES
SOME OF IT WAS FUN. Some of it wasn’t. But I’d never experienced anything quite like it. You walk into a restaurant, and people want to stop by and talk with you or take a picture together. Not that I didn’t enjoy the attention. I’ve never been one to shy away from the spotlight. But you can begin to feel a little bit like an animal at the zoo, always being gawked at by passersby. I can see how some famous people become reclusive.
I figured out pretty quickly that if you didn’t want to be nice to people don’t go out. But once you went out, you’d better be a gentleman. If people see you being rude to someone, those kinds of stories travel a hell of a lot faster than any story of kindness. You could end up looking like a real asshole. I was pretty determined not to do that.
One thing that helped keep my head out of the clouds was seeing how raw Mary still was from the election. It had taken a lot out of both of us, of course. But to go through all that and lose made it even tougher for her. As thrilled as I was about the results, as much as I was enjoying my newfound celebrity, seeing her struggle with it sort of tempered my excitement.
Plus, it didn’t take long for reality to set in. Clinton had a stimulus package that failed a few months after he took office. There was an uproar over the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays in the military. Then there was the midterm election disaster in 1994, when Republicans took back control of Congress.
That’s how it went during the Clinton years. You were constantly up and then down. Something good would happen; something awful would happen. The reelection in 1996 was joyous. Whitewater and the Monica Lewinsky episode were abysmal. Along the way, Mary and I got hitched in late 1993. Matty was born in 1995. Emerson came along in 1998.
It was all a blur. Most days, I was just trying to keep my head above water.
MARY
NOT WORKING TOOK A TOLL ON ME, not just financially. It also took a toll on my spirit. Even in college, I had a job in a bread factory, worked in my mom’s beauty shop and had a dog-breeding business on the side. I need to work. It would be a disservice to the truly clinically depressed to compare my abject misery and hyperpurposelessness to how they suffer. But I was suffering. I was lost. I was totally out of sorts. I had never ever not worked.
If I did get a chance to go out, it was to one of the two thousand James-victory-lap events, where he’d be getting another golden award or speaking to an audience of movie stars. His mother, Miss Nippy, would be always there, treating him like he was the Christ child and being an example of the sort of unconditionally loving presence that I never could be. (I just wasn’t that kind of girlfriend—never mind wife.) Every single event I went to, trying to be supportive of James, was a miserable, painful experience. It wasn’t just like ripping a scab from a healing wound. It was like sticking hot spikes into a wound and twisting the skin and pouring vinegar on it.
I can’t begin to describe the painful confusion—because it was concomitant with my love for him. I wanted to be proud of him and applaud for him without all this ambivalence, but every award he received involved an incredible description of the brilliant campaign he ran against us and, more specifically, against me, which . . . come on . . . wouldn’t you agree that it’s just bad form for the James groupies to relish rubbing it right in my face?
That became the narrative. He was brilliant. I was inept. He was cool. I was a steaming pile of doggie doo. This undisputed narrative, which went on interminably, resulted in a schizophrenic world in which I was madly in love with him but simultaneously hated every inch of his skinny Cajun being.
Week after week passed with the glitterati swirling around him; Hollywood stars swooned over him, like the actress Kim Basinger—who is so beautiful even I had trouble keeping my eyes off her. The whole interplanetary system waited in line to tell him how incredible he was. And here I am: no job, no prospect of a job, no money, mounting debt and a relationship that was so absurd
ly confusing I couldn’t even think about it . . . not that I wanted to.
Then one day I’m sitting alone in my apartment—again—and a woman named Ann Klenk calls and says, “Would you like to do a TV show?”
“I hate doing TV,” I say.
“Come on,” says Ann Klenk, “it’s not that bad.”
JAMES
I THINK I MADE A series of pretty smart decisions that kept my head on straight even after the initial burst of fame and that set me on a good path. Some were more serendipitous than anything deliberate on my part. There’s that old expression that God protects drunks and fools. I guess, because I was both, I had a lot of protection.
First off, I didn’t take up with a whole new crowd in Washington. I went to a few parties, of course, but I wasn’t overly social. I didn’t settle into the Georgetown dinner scene. I didn’t buddy up to many movers and shakers on Capitol Hill. Most of my friends in town were people from the campaign, only they were in the White House now instead of Little Rock. I’d go over and hang out with them.
Mary and I got engaged that spring of 1993 after Clinton’s inauguration. That was a blessing in more ways than I can count. It settled me and kept me out of trouble. I was a pretty active guy during my single days. The last thing I needed now that I had a much higher public profile was to be out chasing women all over Washington.
The book that Mary and I wrote together after the 1992 campaign turned out to be another good decision. She started on her own television show with Jane Wallace, on CNBC, and was becoming well-known in her own right.
Though I stuck around as an adviser to the president, I chose not to go into the White House full-time or become a lobbyist. That surprised some people, but it felt right. I was almost fifty years old by the time Clinton got to the White House. I didn’t have a hell of a lot of money in the bank. Neither did Mary. I figured I had to go out and make some money while I could. So working in the government didn’t seem like a wise choice, and the lobbying world just didn’t appeal to me.
Bob Barnett, one of the best lawyers and deal makers in D.C., told me I should go talk with Harry Rhoads, who had cofounded the Washington Speakers Bureau back in the late 1970s. I began traveling all over the country giving speeches, and I’ve never really stopped. I’ve probably given 1,500 speeches over the years. It became a big part of my income and something I really enjoy, certainly more than I’d have enjoyed endless meetings at the White House or lobbying on Capitol Hill.
Finally, I was determined not to do any more domestic political consulting. I decided I would only work on foreign campaigns, and that’s a decision that I’ve always been thankful I made at the time.
I just trusted my gut, and I’m glad I did. It kept me out of a lot of stuff I could have gotten into that would have been unpleasant. For instance, I’d encounter people who were hoping to take advantage of my ties to Clinton to win influence in some way. But I could always say truthfully that I didn’t work for the White House, and that I had no real decision-making power there. Likewise, when candidates would approach me about other U.S. campaigns, I didn’t have to make up excuses for somebody I didn’t necessarily want to work for. I’d just say I didn’t do domestic campaigns anymore, period.
I can’t tell you that I sat up one night and planned the whole thing. But I do give myself credit for making some wise choices during those days when I could have gone a lot of different directions. In a town like Washington, not all of them would have turned out well.
MARY
I DIDN’T WANT TO do a TV show. I never wanted to do a TV show. But in 1992 and early 1993, before James and I were married, or had a book contract, I was broke. Stone-cold out of cash, out of work and out of favor. If necessity is the mother of invention, then for me, desperation and starvation were the accidental parents of wacky TV shows.
And so, quite randomly, the spawn of my epic political failure was a groundbreaking, cult-producing, girl-gab show, something called Equal Time, on CNBC. It was ostensibly political. And it was ostensibly an actual “show.” And it starred me, as the humiliated, disgraced and not particularly photogenic politico, and Jane Wallace, as the awesomely beautiful superstar and Emmy Award–winning television journalist who knew what she was doing in front of a camera.
Many have claimed that Jane and I paved the way for The View, and all the subsequent chick-fight shows, which were suspiciously copycat. Okay, I’m bragging, but I’m not exaggerating. Before one reviewer described our show as “Wayne’s World on estrogen,” there were few if any women on TV giving it to you straight up, or at least on the rocks.
And that was the concept: a loose and relaxed show with two smart women being honest, being comfortable in their own skin, and having deep and honest unrushed conversations with people on all sides of the issues. It was five nights a week. Prime time. That sounds a little more glamorous than it actually was, though. CNBC was still a fledgling operation and I was being paid just enough to cover the mortgage. It was about one-third of my campaign salary, which, in those days, was already nothing to write home about.
The “show” was equally low budget, a bargain-basement production literally—it was shot in a D.C. basement—and it looked it. Jane and I did our own hair and wore whatever we wanted, which was frequently and arbitrarily just pulled from a dryer. We didn’t have decent furniture, or even much of a set. Every night before the cameras were turned on, we had to drag in chairs and a rickety dime-store table from the nearby waiting room.
CNBC was still figuring out what it was—and who its audience was. It was the anything-goes era of cable, like the Wild West, way before the whole political-junkie-around-the-clock universe had been created, and before the true TV god, Roger Ailes, took over and gave CNBC a soul and purpose. At the time, the random suits in charge tried experimenting with every sort of show. They wanted to see what worked and they tried having a “this” show and a “that” show, and we were the girl show.
They gave us no guidance, other than the original girl-show concept, and left us alone. We became a neglected orphan show, which must be how hits are made, stars are born and cults created. (So to those of you who dream of launching your own hit TV show, there is your answer. Except I wouldn’t try it in your own basement.)
The dynamic between Jane and me had nothing to do with political tension, left versus right. It was more about attitude. I was intense. She was carefree. We came from different professional worlds and had no respect for each other’s careers. I couldn’t imagine anybody wanting to be a TV reporter; it seemed like the most unserious, insipid and vain thing to do. Jane was even more hateful of politics and politicians, and considered my work pointless, uninspiring and silly. The whole Washington scene was beyond ridiculous to her. It was unserious to her and deadly serious to me. I mean, I’d devoted my entire adult life to it and was still trying to heal an open, oozy wound from losing a presidential election.
Not surprisingly, Jane and I got into nightly on-air fights. It made me nuts when she’d make fun of Dan Quayle or do what journalists do in their sleep—make sweeping assumptions and global statements patched together from scraps of misinformation. I’d call her out on stuff, to her great delight. The girl could really take it. And the girl could really make me laugh. That’s how we complemented each other. Every night was a genuine love-hate bitch-fest bonfire, which all you women out there know is the foundation of a deep and profound friendship.
We were both pigheaded, forceful, and had a beast-of-burden work ethic. I was used to campaign life, had worked alongside legends such as Lee Atwater and Rich Bond. If I hadn’t actually “seen it all,” then I had seen a pretty expansive swath of it all. Jane was a chain-smoker with a truck driver’s mouth, a single mother of what seemed like a passel of urchins to me (being the single, childless know-nothing that I was at the time). Jane’s kids were adorable, actually, and she was a crackerjack mom, always worried about their runny noses and all
that mom stuff that gave me a headache.
We’d all pile into Jane’s car, with the kids sniffling in the backseat, and she’d light up. And as if I was some kind of Mother of the Year, I’d admonish her, “What? You’re smoking? Are you sure that is approved-for-urchin behavior? Open the window at least, beeatch. And give me a butt, babe.”
We drank on the set every night. We put wine in our coffee cups and eventually we joked about it openly on air. What the heck, nobody was watching anyway. At least we didn’t think they were. We were just doing the chick chat-rap that CNBC said it wanted. And somehow we got really good guests. Really good. Even if the politicians were oblivious to cultural happenings, their staffs were onto us like a rat on a Cheeto.
Once Equal Time got a buzz going, we were able to bring on anybody we liked. All-night cable shows didn’t exist in those days, so we had our pick of politicos—the same people who wouldn’t give me the time of day, let alone a job, just months before. People who had lied to me. One should never let a crisis go to waste, as they say, and now they came in droves to try to tap into our politically active and astute cult audience. We called our fans “Loopsters” because they were following such a loopy TV show.
Jane and I were not trying to do good TV. We were trying to do real thinking—mimicking the kind of thought process and conversation that goes on every day inside a campaign, though surely that would have royally pissed off Jane if I had pointed it out to her. It was purposeful gabbing to get somewhere, a destination unknown as far we knew. It was a sincere and intense conversation, and politicians loved it. How often are they asked to do that?
Love & War Page 5
