by Leon Panetta
As the afternoon progressed, the stakes grew. President Carter, Senator Sam Nunn, and General Colin Powell were in Haiti attempting to negotiate with the junta to avert the invasion even as the force began to move toward the island. President Clinton was in constant touch with the delegation, communicating through Powell. At one point, Powell called to say that the junta had agreed to leave, but did not want to set a firm date for its departure. Clinton rejected that, saying a date was essential. Powell went back to work.
Shalikashvili, meanwhile, warned that the invasion force was fast approaching the point where it would need orders to move forward. Finally, we could wait no longer. Told that the junta still had not agreed to a firm date, Shalikashvili asked whether the 82nd Airborne was “go” or “no go.”
In that long moment, I fully appreciated the weight that a president must carry. We were all there to advise, and the negotiators in Haiti were furiously trying to offer an alternative, but in the end, only one person had the authority to say yes or no to a war. Clinton had been considering the question for weeks, but now it was time to decide.
“Go,” he said.
Planes scrambled in Florida. Men strapped parachutes to their backs. Two aircraft carrier groups swung about toward the island. Marines prepared their weapons. How much resistance would these forces encounter when they hit the beaches and ports of a small but furious nation? In the Oval Office, we waited anxiously for the first reports.
And then came the breakthrough. Powell suddenly called to report that the junta had caved. The generals agreed to leave by October 15 or as soon as the Haitian parliament could approve a general amnesty. Our forces landed the following day, but rather than have to fight their way ashore, they were greeted peacefully. Clinton’s reluctant willingness to wage war had been enough to prevent its necessity. After three breathless days, we exhaled.
• • •
Midterm elections historically work against the party that holds the White House. Harry Truman’s Democrats got clobbered in 1946, losing both houses to the GOP for the first time since the Depression. Dwight Eisenhower won a landslide in 1952 and brought Republican majorities to both houses that year; two years later, he lost those majorities for good. Even Lyndon Johnson’s landslide in 1964 wasn’t enough to protect the party two years later: Democrats lost three Senate and forty-seven House seats in that election.
We knew that in the summer and fall of 1994. We worried that we could lose the Senate and we feared significant losses in the House. We didn’t know the half of it.
Indeed, I knew even less than that, because, unbeknownst to me, President Clinton had been secretly reaching out that summer to his old political adviser, Dick Morris, in an attempt to take stock of the nation’s politics. Clinton surely sensed that I wouldn’t like Morris—he was right about that—so even though Morris started doing polling on the very issues that the White House staff was working on, Clinton didn’t share the results, or even the fact, of the polls with me.
I learned much later that it was actually Hillary Clinton who had asked Morris, who by then was mostly consulting for Republicans, to resume working for the president.11 The Clintons admired Morris, and he did have a nose for the political center. Unfortunately, it was accompanied by an outsized personality. He wore big, bright suits, held forth with infuriating bombast, gestured wildly for emphasis, milked his exhaustive polls, and openly disdained the substance of policy. He was about winning, and he had a knack for it.
In his memoirs, Clinton wrote that Morris offered him a fairly specific strategy for the midterms based on his private polls. Morris’s proposal: Stop talking about the economy and the deficit, focus instead on the hundred thousand new police officers in the crime bill, as well as school reform and a few other popular issues. Clinton wrote that Morris also advised him to stay off the campaign trail and to project himself as “presidential” on the theory that boosting his own popularity would help Democrats. “Morris believed that would do more to help the Democrats than my plunging back into the political fray,” Clinton later wrote. “Neither recommendation was followed.”12
That was news to me. As I mentioned earlier, an important principle of White House organization during my tenure was that recommendations to the president needed to come through me, or else he would be distracted and I’d be in the dark. That’s exactly what happened in this case. I didn’t even know Clinton was talking to Morris at that point, much less that Morris had done polling and made specific recommendations for how the president should schedule his time or present himself to the public.
Elections to the House and Senate are not national referenda. They are local and state contests, fought on ideological grounds but also on matters close to home for voters; my own entry into Congress, for instance, was made possible far more by my predecessor’s inattention to his district than by the ideological gap between us. In 1994, however, Gingrich introduced an organizing device for Republican candidates, the so-called Contract with America. I doubt many Americans read the “contract,” and much of it wasn’t made to be taken very seriously—tort reform, term limits, a ban on U.S. soldiers serving under United Nations command, and repeal of the marriage tax penalty were among the grab bag of Republican mainstays and hardly constituted a new vision of government. But the effect of the contract was to unify Republicans and make them appear to be the party of ideas, while Democrats seemed weak and divided. I wasn’t Gingrich’s fan, but I did admire his tactical ability.
Election day approached with ominous speed. Clinton did his best, making trips to battleground areas and trying to boost the fortunes of struggling Democrats. None of it worked. We lost everywhere, a total of eight seats in the Senate and fifty-four in the House. Tom Foley, who had warned us of the NRA backlash from the crime bill, became the first Speaker of the House since 1862 to lose his seat. Dan Rostenkowski, our erstwhile ally on budget and tax matters (though one with some ethics problems), lost his too. Not a single Republican incumbent lost his or her seat in either house.
Bill Kristol, then a rising star among Republican intellectuals, said the returns demonstrated that “60 years of Democratic dominance of American politics, established by Franklin D. Roosevelt, have been effectively ended by two years of Bill Clinton.”13 That may have been a bit much, but the New York Times was not wrong to observe that “everything in Washington is changed.”
Clinton took it hard. One of his greatest strengths as president was his ability to connect with the American people; now that turned against him. The public’s affection had turned to rejection. He mouthed congratulations to Gingrich, then retreated, glum and distant. Gingrich gloated about the American people’s endorsement of the “Contract with America,” and we braced for the worst. The year ended in gloom.
EIGHT
“We Thought You Would Cave”
One awful event and one unlikely person catapulted Bill Clinton back from the depths of the 1994 midterms to the tactical victories of 1995 and his decisive reelection in 1996. The event was the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, and the person, believe it or not, was Newt Gingrich.
I knew Gingrich well enough to know that he was going to be a difficult partner on anything that mattered to Clinton, but even I couldn’t have predicted how quickly he would race for the bottom. On December 4, before the new Congress had been seated with Gingrich as its Speaker, Gingrich appeared on Meet the Press and leveled an outrageous accusation.
“I had a senior law enforcement official tell me that, in his judgment, up to a quarter of the White House staff, when they first came in, had used drugs in the last four or five years,” Gingrich told Tim Russert on live television. “He’s not, I’m not, making any allegations of any individual person, but it is very clear that they had huge problems getting people through security clearance.”
I was watching that Sunday morning, and when I heard those comments, I lost it. For years, I’d been watching Gingr
ich smear enemies and whip up controversies just to advance his agenda and position, but this was a direct attack on my staff. I let him have it, responding in an interview to what I regarded as his personal attack on my colleagues. “The time has come when he has to understand that he has to stop behaving like an out-of-control radio talk show host and begin behaving like the Speaker of the House of Representatives.” I challenged Gingrich to bring me the names of the people who had abused drugs, or to make those names public, and promised I would fire them if the evidence supported his accusations. In the absence of such evidence, I added, his comments were “reckless charges . . . reckless accusations that impugn people’s integrity. No facts, no foundation, just basically smear and innuendo.”1 Needless to say, my remarks were gratefully received by the staff I was defending.
It almost goes without saying that Gingrich never produced any evidence to back up his comments. Instead, he called my remarks “nonsense,” and maintained that it was inappropriate of me to suggest that the White House would have difficulty working with him as Speaker. It was an early taste of how partisan disagreement would descend into personal invective in the mid-1990s. It was ugly.
To give Gingrich credit, though, his theatrics did not prevent him from occasionally doing the right thing. That was evident in those same weeks when we were trying to develop a new political strategy for working with a Republican Congress, and Gingrich was charting the Republican attempt to turn the “Contract with America” into a working doctrine.
As is so often the case, a crisis that none of us had any role in creating suddenly threatened to throw us all off track. This time it came from Mexico, where the economy was failing fast. Mexico had suffered a series of political shocks in 1994—a rebellion in the southern state of Chiapas and the assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio both spooked foreign investors. The government intervened to prop up the value of the peso, but that drained the country’s reserves. More assassinations and government instability followed, and in December the government first tried a small devaluation of the peso, then was overwhelmed when the currency’s value plummeted beyond its control. By early January, Mexico was within a few days of insolvency.
That may seem abstract—a currency devaluation of a foreign country is hardly the kind of thing that stirs panic among American voters. But the implications for the United States were profound. If Mexico were to collapse economically, it would plunge our most populous neighbor into a prolonged recession, disrupting one of our biggest trading partners and sowing chaos along our southern border. Cross-border trade would be severely impacted, hurting businesses throughout the United States and damaging other Latin American nations as well. A sharp rise in Mexican unemployment would almost certainly lead to a dramatic increase in illegal immigration, and the drug trade would explode as desperate people turned to it for a livelihood. And the issue was not something remote or far off: As of January 10, 1995, our economists estimated that Mexico was within a week of collapse unless some help could be offered.
The need was not just immediate, but gigantic. Bob Rubin estimated that Mexico needed $25 billion in order to pay its bills and remain solvent through the crisis. In return, we could insist on some economic reforms that might steer the country back onto a more sustainable path, but there was significant risk that Mexico would collapse anyway, taking our money with it.
Politically, the proposal was a loser. The public was not going to rally around a bailout for Mexico, and Congress was not much better. Gingrich and Bob Dole both supported economic intervention to keep Mexico afloat, but their colleagues in both parties balked. It was in their view too much money for too vague a mission.
On the evening of January 30, Bob Rubin came to my office—the president was out—and told me we were out of time. As he put it, “Mexico has 48 hours to live.”2 Congress would not act, but there was an alternative: The Exchange Stabilization Fund had enough money to cover what was now estimated to be about a $20 billion shortfall, and the president could access that money without congressional approval. When Clinton returned to the White House that night, still in his tuxedo from a dinner he’d attended, Rubin told him we couldn’t wait any longer. The president asked for my analysis. I told him I thought we had to act, that we could not simply stand by and let Mexico collapse. But I warned him that we were in this by ourselves, and that if Mexico defaulted on the loan or went under despite it, it might cost Clinton his reelection. The president ordered the bailout, and announced it the following morning, with Dole and Gingrich, as well as the Democratic leaders of both houses, joining him in the statement.
We all watched Mexico nervously over the next few months. The nation wobbled a bit at first, but then it recovered, not only avoiding collapse but repaying our emergency loan ahead of schedule—and with interest.
Clinton has often been criticized for his excessive preoccupation with politics—with being, in the phrase his critics liked to use, “poll-driven” rather than the bearer of deep convictions. I don’t know any politician who’s indifferent to popularity, and, yes, at times Clinton was more susceptible than most. But his handling of the Mexico crisis was a powerful reminder that he was not a prisoner to polling. He took a stand that was unpopular with the public. He did so without the support or cover of Congress. And he did so despite a clear risk to his presidency. That’s courage.
My early months as chief of staff had been spent trying to establish better internal organization and communication. For the most part I was satisfied by early 1995 that we were moving in the right direction. The president was less harried and more focused. Decisions were handled more crisply. We weren’t being surprised as often.
Still, there were slipups, and the press pounced on them as evidence that I had not succeeded in bringing order to the White House. In February, for instance, Clinton announced the nomination of Henry W. Foster Jr. to serve as surgeon general. Foster was an articulate, respected obstetrician from Tennessee who was acting director of Meharry Medical College and ran a family planning clinic and a well-regarded abstinence campaign—perfect credentials to lead what the president hoped would be a national campaign against teen pregnancy. But when members of Congress started asking questions about his background, specifically how many abortions he had performed, Foster gave incomplete and even false answers. At first he said he had terminated “fewer than a dozen” pregnancies, then, when antiabortion groups challenged him again, he amended that to thirty-nine. He also acknowledged having supervised testing on about fifty-five women of a product that induced early abortions.
None of this would have been enough to derail Foster’s nomination if we had known about it up front, but the story came out in bits and pieces, and began to raise questions about the doctor’s forthrightness. Clinton stuck with him, and in May the Senate’s Labor and Human Resources Committee narrowly voted in his favor, but Texas senator Phil Gramm filibustered his nomination when it reached the full Senate, and though fifty-seven senators voted to invoke cloture, that was three shy of the number needed. Foster’s nomination was reluctantly withdrawn.
I took some lumps for that, since it was clear that had we done a better job vetting Foster we might have headed off the entire controversy by acknowledging at the outset that abortion, which was after all a legal procedure, had been a part of Foster’s medical practice. The Washington Post referred to the “bungled handling” of the nomination, and suggested that it was evidence of “how little the White House operating style has changed despite the appointment of Leon E. Panetta as chief of staff.”3 That seemed a bit over the top to me then—still does, in fact—but the writer did have a point. I had allowed the Health and Human Services Department to do most of the vetting of Foster, and only brought the White House staff into the process very late. The shifting stories in the days immediately after we announced Foster doomed the nomination of a qualified man and infuriated our allies on the Hill.
Overall, I believed we were making pr
ogress, but we weren’t there yet. As I said at the time, “It takes a lot of work to bring all the sheep into the corral.”
Spring was a struggle that year. Gingrich was the nation’s political story, while Clinton seemed to have been outfoxed. The news was dominated by the Republicans in Congress and their rush to pass the legislation that comprised their “Contract with America.” Clinton, meanwhile, was distracted and unsure of himself. And in his desperation to get his program back on track, he was regularly consulting with Dick Morris. He took great pains to keep those contacts from me and the rest of the White House staff. He and Morris spoke only over the phone and only late at night; Clinton gave him a code name, “Charlie,” so that operators or others who might overhear a snippet of conversation would not know with whom he was speaking.
With “Charlie” whispering in his ear, Clinton began wandering in uncomfortable directions. He wondered whether he ought to pull back on affirmative action, for instance, an idea that would help him with conservatives, always Morris’s aim. To his credit, Clinton held fast there, but Morris, who consulted with a number of Republicans, including Trent Lott, kept pushing. I had a hunch that “Charlie” might be Morris, but I didn’t know for sure.
Harold Ickes, who detested Morris and was one of the shrewdest political analysts I’d ever met, sniffed out what was going on and came to me. “You know damn well who this ‘Charlie’ is,” he harrumphed. When I acknowledged that I had my suspicions, Harold forcefully made the point that we couldn’t allow this back channel to remain open. “We’ve got to bring this under control,” he said. “We can’t just let that go freewheeling out there.”
