by Leon Panetta
I also wanted a second deputy chief of staff, for while Harold handled politics and issues, I wanted someone else to take over the president’s schedule and personnel. Clinton agreed and asked me to consider Erskine Bowles. I did, and never regretted it.
Meanwhile, Sylvia and I once again had to rearrange our lives. As chief of staff, there was no way I could regularly leave Washington on weekends to return to the Carmel Valley, and our boys were now grown and leading their own lives. So Sylvia agreed to join me in Washington. She wanted to work in some capacity, though. Luckily, the vice president was willing to offer her a staff job on his Crime Prevention Council, a job for which Sylvia’s work as the director of my district offices for more than a decade had well prepared her; a few months after I started my new job, Sylvia settled into hers. The commission offices were not far from the White House, and we settled in to the busy life of a Washington couple, often even commuting together to work. It is fair to say that I could never have done my job without her support and partnership in yet another demanding task.
For me, the model chief of staff—and the one whom I most consciously emulated—was James Baker, who had done the job for Reagan. I called him just before taking over, and one point he emphasized was that the chief of staff needed to be the conduit for anyone trying to reach the president. I got it: If anyone can get to the president without going through the chief of staff, then the president will be deluged and the chief of staff incapable of organizing decision making. What’s more, the chief of staff then won’t know what the hell is going on. By contrast, a streamlined information system keeps decisions on track and the president focused on what’s most important. I’d seen that firsthand during the Reagan years. I admired the efficiency of that White House, and I knew that much the same was said regarding the effectiveness of the Eisenhower administration, under the surly leadership of Sherman Adams, the first person to impose what was effectively a chief of staff system in the White House.
So on Baker’s advice, from the moment I became chief of staff I directed that all communications to the president pass through me. I braced myself for what I feared would be pushback from aides who were accustomed to being able to drop in on Clinton and make their pitch for this idea or that. Instead, I mostly sensed relief, as the new system restored some sanity to the operation by letting everyone know how decisions were being made and when we could move to the next issue. Most important, it kept Clinton focused, and it kept me informed.
I also was concerned that Clinton himself might bolt the program, that he would resent being pulled away from his late-night bull sessions over pizza and soda, or that he would feel confined by his more modest schedule. To the contrary, he too seemed to like it. Erskine made it a point to build in time during most days—two hours for lunch, say—when Clinton could think or read or make calls to members of Congress simply as a courtesy. I remembered the lasting impacts of Lyndon Johnson’s personal touch, and tried to create a White House where there was time for such overtures.
One other thing Baker impressed upon me was to remember my place and frame advice to the president with that place in mind. “You’re the chief of staff,” he told me firmly. “You’re not the president.” I urged anyone who was briefing the president to bring him options, not to force him into preselected decisions. It was our responsibility to bring him background and explain what appeared to be realistic alternatives. But the people of the United States had elected him, not us, to make decisions. Our job was not to back him into corners. It was to provide him with choices and then implement the choices he made.
Clinton himself, though accustomed to a looser-limbed organizational style, actually made our transition to this new system considerably easier. That’s because he was a master at sifting through complex material and asking pertinent, probing questions. He was, as they say in Washington, an “easy brief.”
In place of the crisis-response atmosphere that pervaded in the administration’s first eighteen months, I tried to impose a regular structure to the day so that the various pieces of our operation—congressional liaison, scheduling, communications, foreign affairs, national security, economics—all would understand what was expected of them and the others. I started every day with a 7 a.m. meeting of a dozen or so top officials from those areas. I soon added a representative of the White House Counsel’s office, which became increasingly important as various scandals—most of them petty but distracting—forced their way into our planning.
I would open that meeting typically by calling on Mike McCurry, the new White House press secretary, to report on what the press was asking about. Then I would turn to Erskine to tell us what to expect in the president’s day. Was he in the White House or traveling? With whom was he meeting? What issues would he be discussing publicly?
Then we moved to economic matters, then legislative issues, international events, and, usually last, any updates from the general counsel—the latest on Whitewater or what have you. I led the meeting, ticking off items from the yellow legal pads I carried constantly in those years. We generally were finished within forty-five minutes, after which I hosted a larger session for about thirty to forty presidential aides and advisers—those responsible for cabinet affairs, outside constituencies, special fields such as science, and the like. They got a short version of the earlier meeting and were invited to offer their thoughts on upcoming questions or issues. The larger meeting allowed people who were on the outer edges of the administration to hear and contribute to plans for responding to breaking news or controversies. And for big announcements—a bill being sent to Congress, the unveiling of an important initiative—it allowed us to streamline our message, so that the president’s remarks on one subject wouldn’t compete for attention with other announcements or comments by White House staff.
The latter group was too big for my office, so we met in the Roosevelt Room, just a few feet from the Oval Office. By 8:30 a.m. on most days, that second meeting was concluded, and all the key people in the White House understood our objectives and potential hazards, at least as far as we could anticipate them. None of that eliminated crises, of course. The White House is buffeted by them almost every week. But it gave us a sense of what we were trying to achieve, and prepared us for unexpected events rather than allowing ourselves to be bowled over by them.
Those sessions also allowed me to get to know the staff, many of whom were impressively intelligent and exceptionally devoted. One of the backbenchers in those days, attending the meetings but only rarely speaking up, was Rahm Emanuel. He didn’t make an immediate impression. He was, as I said, more on the periphery in the early days, but when he did contribute I noted his forcefulness and incisiveness. At first the Clintons seemed wary of him. Just before I signed on as chief of staff, Bob Woodward had written a penetrating look at the budget deliberations of the Clinton administration, and though Woodward’s work was spot-on, it had upset Clinton, who was appalled to discover some of what he considered private conversations described in the book. Stephanopoulos was suspected of leaking, and some suspicion hovered around Rahm as well.
Indeed, Clinton was angry enough at first that he asked me to fire both of them; I pushed back, insisting that they deserved another chance and promising, particularly in the case of Stephanopoulos, to clip his wings a bit. George had been with Clinton for so long and had such a vague set of White House duties that he was accustomed to dropping in on meetings and offering his advice, sometimes unbidden. I was determined to impose greater structure on meetings generally, and one effect of that was to put a tighter rein on George. He resented it at times, but it saved his job.
As for Rahm, we gradually got to know each other, pushed along by the fact that he and Sylvia hit it off. We were often the first ones to arrive at the White House in the morning, and when Sylvia and I came in together, I’d head for my office and she to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee. Invariably, there was Rahm, poring over the morning papers and
preparing for his day. I liked his toughness—which I would come to appreciate later, when we were reunited in the Obama administration—and I enjoyed his facility with profanity. I pride myself in the felicitous use of the occasional four-letter word, but I was an amateur compared to Rahm.*
• • •
Unfortunately, time did not stop for me to get the White House organized, and we continued to struggle as I settled in.
By the summer of 1994, health care was in deep trouble. Republicans had united against it, deciding there was more political advantage in fighting Clinton than in enacting any type of bill, even one that expressed philosophies they once had argued for themselves. That left us looking for a win on Capitol Hill. Welfare reform had been submitted but was still on the distant legislative horizon, so the main event on the Hill during my early weeks as chief of staff was securing passage of a crime bill. Congress had previously rejected an attempt by Senator Joe Biden to address multiple aspects of the national crime problem in a single bill, but Clinton continued to support the idea.
As Clinton envisioned it, the bill drew elements from all sides in the debate over how best to address crime. Community policing was popular with liberals but had its roots in the “broken windows” theory of conservative philosopher James Q. Wilson, so proposing to have the federal government subsidize the hiring and training of one hundred thousand new police officers and, through them, to expand community policing was an easy sell with both parties. Creating a federal three-strikes system for locking away repeat offenders and adding twenty-six new crimes that would be eligible for the death penalty played well with the right; banning assault weapons was an important ambition of the left.
But creating omnibus legislation of that type can be either the secret to compromise or a deal killer, and in this case some of our closest Democratic allies on the Hill worried that we were trying to do too much. Supporters of the assault weapons ban, for instance, urged its inclusion in the crime bill because they feared the National Rifle Association would push its allies to wage a filibuster in the Senate if the proposed ban went up on its own. Critics of that strategy countered that its inclusion could sink the entire package or at least cost some members their seats if the NRA decided to get even with them. One of those who argued that last point was Speaker Tom Foley. Foley supported the assault weapons ban, but he foresaw a huge political backlash and urged us to drop it from the bill. We considered that as a matter of political expediency, but I, among others, was puzzled by the appeal of assault weapons—these are not for hunters, after all, they are purely for killing people. We decided to stick with the ban and take our chances politically. Foley understood, but was so skittish of the package that he declined to help us lobby for it. Instead he found some office space for us off the floor of the House and we set up shop there.
As with the budget battle from the previous year, we were in a contest for every vote, with changes that might help us in one camp costing us in another. This time, though, Republicans decided not to take a walk, so our lobbying was genuinely bipartisan. Clinton himself committed extraordinary time and energy to the effort, traveling around the country in what we billed as a “summer of safety.” He highlighted community efforts in St. Louis; Albany, Georgia; and Boston, among other places, and brought in survivors from tragedies in San Francisco, New Orleans, and Petaluma, California, to testify to the effects of assault weapons or to make the case for new sentencing laws.
Nevertheless, votes were hard to come by. We were particularly frustrated by the opposition of the Congressional Black Caucus, which had generally been supportive of Clinton’s programs. We argued that the bill’s greatest impact could be on largely African-American communities, since those areas often were the hardest hit by crime. I made that argument, and also pointed out that the additional officers paid for under the bill would in many cases benefit those same areas. I didn’t make much headway. Members of the caucus were steadfastly opposed to the death penalty, and those provisions were a deal breaker for most, whatever the other potential benefits of the legislation
Then we had a breakthrough. Barbara-Rose Collins, a former Detroit city council member who was elected to Congress in 1991, had rebuffed all my attempts to persuade her to join us, explaining that the death penalty offended her conscience and she could not vote for a bill that would expand it. I respectfully understood that, and assumed she was lost to us. Then one day I was surprised to get a call from her, saying that she’d been thinking about the bill and asking to meet with me.
Bill Richardson, then a congressman from New Mexico and a supporter of the bill, offered to host the meeting, and we gathered in his Capitol Hill office. I asked what I could do for Collins, and she informed me that Jesus had spoken to her in a dream the night before.
“Really?” I asked calmly, as a few of my colleagues did their best to compose themselves. “What did Jesus say?”
“He told me I should consider supporting the president,” she answered, then added, “I think God will allow me to support this bill if I get a casino for my district.”
“I’m glad to hear that Jesus is flexible,” I responded, while Richardson, standing behind Collins, rolled his eyes in amazement.
I told her I’d see what I could do about the casino, and as soon as she left I asked Pat Griffin to get Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt on the phone and see what he could do to push along the casino project in Collins’s district, which included some Native American land near Detroit. Griffin tracked Babbitt down and made clear we weren’t looking for final approval, just a nudge to push the project forward and demonstrate our responsiveness to the congresswoman. I could hear Babbitt sputtering on the phone, incensed to be part of such naked horse trading. Griffin listened to the secretary for a couple minutes, then covered the receiver and informed me of the obvious: “Babbitt’s going batshit.” My response: “Tell him to get it done.”
On August 21, ten days after narrowly voting down the Crime Bill, the House reversed itself and narrowly approved it, this time by a vote of 235–195, with 188 Democrats, 46 Republicans, and one independent voting yes (and 64 Democrats and 131 Republicans voting no). Collins was among the yeses.
Crime trends are notoriously difficult to examine for causality, as so many factors influence violent behavior. Given that, it’s impossible to know just how much the crime bill contributed to the historic declines in lawlessness and violence that characterized the 1990s. So I’m not trying to claim credit for all of what followed, but it’s worth noting that the numbers were staggering. In 1994, the year the crime bill became law, there were 13,989,543 violent and serious crimes reported in the United States, almost 5,400 per 100,000 residents.8 That same year, there were 23,326 murders across the country. Six years later, in 2000, Clinton’s last year in office, the number of total serious offenses had declined to 11,605,751, or roughly 4,100 per 100,000 residents.9 Murders had declined to 15,517.
Crime was dropping before Clinton and it continued to drop after his presidency, but his efforts at least did not reverse those trends, and almost certainly helped propel them. Thousands of men and women are alive today—and thousands of families are intact—because of the historic turnaround in this nation’s battle against violence. Clinton helped lead that. The crime bill was in my view an important piece.
• • •
I had barely taken my seat outside the Oval Office when we hit our first foreign crisis of my tenure as chief of staff. It erupted in Haiti, where pressure had been building for months as a stubborn military junta clung to power despite mounting international opposition. Lieutenant General Raoul Cédras headed that junta, as he had since 1991, when he and others overthrew the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. President Bush imposed an embargo in response, and after the United Nations banned oil and weapons exports to Haiti in 1993, Cédras agreed to cede power back to Aristide, partly in exchange for amnesty for himself and the other military leaders.*
All that occurred as I was moving from OMB into the chief of staff job, and it came to a head just as I took over my new duties. In fact, it boiled over on September 18, a Sunday, just as I was making my first appearance in my new job on the Sunday morning talk shows. I joined General John Shalikashvili, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the topic of the day was the question of how Haiti would unfold. I wrapped up my appearance and headed for the office through a hot, rainy Washington morning. Arriving, I discovered the president and his national security staff gathered in the Oval Office, their faces drawn with anxiety.
Standing around the president’s desk were Shalikashvili (he must have taken a shortcut from the studio), Secretary of State Warren Christopher, National Security Adviser Tony Lake, and his deputy, Sandy Berger. Clinton was seated, and as was often the case when he faced a tense or difficult decision, the president listened while working on a crossword puzzle—always from the New York Times—a form of doodling that helped him to concentrate. Other aides were milling around the corridors outside the office, and some tried to join the group. George Stephanopoulos, for instance, started to enter, but I waved him away.*
