by Larry King
KING: Well, what’s your sum-up of this first night, Mark?
RUSSELL: There was a moment of limbo, Larry, right at the swearing in. It was between the time that Gore was sworn in and the time Clinton was sworn in. Larry, we had President Bush and Vice President Gore!
KING: Are your hopes high, Art?
BUCHWALD: Larry, they were pretty low until President Clinton as a candidate said he had smoked marijuana but never inhaled. And when I heard that I thought to myself I can build a new tennis court on my house.
KING: Mark, you see it that way?
RUSSELL: I really don’t see what the big deal is. The election laws are very clear and if you had smoked marijuana here you just have to wait until you get to England before you exhale.
Judy Collins was the next guest and had just come from one of the balls. The night before she had sung “Amazing Grace” at the Capitol Center, which was taped for television. The Clintons were there and she told me he knew the words to every song she sang that evening. It was a good lead-in to the next question.
“What song,” I asked, “do you think best describes this day?”
She didn’t miss a beat. “I’ve got sunshine, I’ve got blue skies$#8230;” she began. The audience joined in and soon the entire room was singing Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm.” “That’s the song. That’s what’s going on tonight,” she said to everyone. The crowd broke into applause. Everyone was feeling the words that had spread throughout the day. They came from Maya Angelou, certainly Gershwin, and to a lesser extent, Bill Clinton.
Before Bill Clinton had even taken the oath of office, stories quoting pundits and experts (two different animals) were to be found everywhere about what would, and wouldn’t, be accomplished in the first hundred days. Indeed, Clinton brought most of this on himself during the campaign when he talked about education, health care, and the economy being on center stage before April 30 (the one hundredth day of his presidency). As much as I wanted to blame this preoccupation we seem to have with achievements of a four-year term on only the first three and one third months as dumbing down, I knew the precedent lay with Franklin Roosevelt. He took office trying to show his critics and the public there was a well-thought-out game plan to get the country out of the Great Depression. And in those first hundred days, Roosevelt began fireside chats, declared a three-day national bank holiday so banks could be inspected for financial soundness, and began the Civilian Conservation Corps, which put a quarter of a million people to work. And that was just in the month of March. He framed the idea that the first hundred days were to be filled with accomplishment. They were just that but maybe more important was the symbolic gesture coming at a time when people were picking up the pieces. It offered hope.
But the idea of Doing Something in one hundred days had been a theme for Clinton. During the summer before the election he was telling anyone who would listen there would be an “explosive hundred-day action period.” By mid-November he was talking about how he would “hit the ground running.” But on the day before he was sworn in, Clinton’s campaign strategist, James Carville, was telling audiences at the National Press Club to judge the president not on the first hundred days but, rather, the first four years, which sure made sense to me. Of course, when the lunch conversation at Duke Zeibert’s wasn’t about the usual topic—how to solve the problems of the world—it fell to the lowly idea of what could be done before April 30. Let me put it like this: On the former, we had solutions in place before the iced tea arrived. On the latter, nobody had a clue. Still, on Day 98 I had a conversation with New York governor Mario Cuomo and asked, “Hey, on a scale of 1 to 10, where do you place Bill Clinton?” Cuomo looked at me and asked a question right back: “Larry, how many days in a term?” I had no idea and I knew right away this was a question I shouldn’t have gotten involved with. “Fourteen hundred sixty days in a term,” he said. “You’re asking about the first hundred of 1,460? This is two outs in the first inning.” Sheepishly, I agreed, but just take a guess at what the topic of Larry King Live was on April 30?
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In the last interview he had done with me before the election, which took place in Louisville, Clinton said he would come on Larry King Live every six months to discuss issues and take questions from viewers. I hadn’t asked the essential follow-up question at the time about if the offer was good if he wins the election but he kept his word. Exactly six months after we had watched him become the forty-second president of the United States on that January afternoon, we sat together in the Library of the White House on a sultry July evening for another live show. We went on the air at 9:00 P.M. and he came into the room a little after eight for makeup. We took pictures with the staff and then had some time to just stand around shooting the breeze with each other. We looked out a window at the lights of the city and I sensed Clinton taking a deep breath, sort of wistful, and so I had to ask a question.
“How do you feel when you look out there?”
The answer came right away. “You know, a lot of times I wish I could just go walking.” He looked around the room we were in and pointed. “This is just so insulated. I mean it’s heady but beyond that it’s insulated.” He looked right at me. “It’s lonely.”
“Well,” I said, “you’re the president now. It probably should be a little different than being in Little Rock.”
Clinton was smiling. “Larry, when I was governor, I could go to shopping malls if I wanted.” He looked out the window. “Not anymore.”
I made the comment that I thought Elvis Presley lived a more isolated life than he did because it was self-imposed, rather than part of the job. He was going to respond when we were called to the set. It was show time. And within two minutes of going on the air, we were talking about, well, you know what.
CLINTON: It can be very isolating here.
KING: Do you have to fight it?
CLINTON: I fight it all the time. It can be isolating. There is so much to do that you have to be very disciplined about your time. And I think the more I’m in this office, the more I’ve become conscious of it and, I think, the more disciplined I’ve become about my time. But discipline means deciding things you won’t do, people you won’t see, calls you won’t make.
The interview was going well and we touched on a lot of issues: He said gays should be in the military because “it ought to be conduct, not your orientation,” he thought his nominee to replace Judge William Sessions at the FBI, Louie Freeh, was going to receive Senate confirmation, and he hoped Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg would make it to the Supreme Court. And then there was NAFTA. He was going to go after votes for ratification, which was opposed by the most unique collection of folks I could imagine: Ross Perot, Jerry Brown, and Pat Buchanan. During the 9:30 commercial break, I leaned over and asked, “You want to keep going past ten?” He nodded and said, “Absolutely.” So as we came back I announced to both CNN and the White House, as well as the international audience, that we were going for an extra half hour. I didn’t notice, however, the conversation taking place off camera between David Gergen and George Stephanopoulos and Mack McLarty. Instead, I was focused on asking questions about what movies he watches and military base closings. We took calls from Montreal and the British Virgin Islands and I wondered, “Gee, what about the farm family in Nebraska or the autoworker in Lansing or the retired couple in Florida?” It seemed all the calls we went through were from outside the U.S.A. He answered each question at length and the next thing I knew we were up against another commercial break. As soon as I pitched to it, Stephanopoulos and McLarty were on the set. “Mr. President,” the chief of staff said, “let’s get off at ten.” As this is going on I’m sitting there watching and thinking to myself, “Hey, he’s the president of the United States and he oughta be able to decide if he wants to sit for another thirty minutes or not and, what the hell, it’s late at night and, as far as I can tell, he’s got nothing else to do even if he is the president.” I didn’t offer this cogent observation. I look
ed again at Clinton and it was clear he was upset.
“Why would I want to do that?” he snapped. “You don’t think I’m doing good enough to stay until 10:30? Is that it? You think something’s going to happen?”
By this time even I could tell something was going on. McLarty took a deep breath but stayed focused on his kindergarten chum. It was pretty clear President Clinton wasn’t going to do an extra thirty minutes.
“Please, Mr. President,” he pleaded. “Leave at ten.”
I had never seen Bill Clinton ticked. No question about it. He glared at McLarty. “Are you telling me to keep count of the good things and not risk a bad one?” He shook his head as the floor director started counting me into the next segment. As this happened, the producer in my headset said we were definitely out at ten and I’d be filled in after the show. In this business, you don’t argue the point with two seconds to air.
“We’re back on Larry King Live,” I said. “The president had another commitment he didn’t know about, so there’s a schedule conflict. He’ll be with us to the top of the hour.” I figured it this way: He owed me. And so I decided to hold him to it in front of the world.
“However, we have a rotating date every six months, right, as promised during the campaign.”
Clinton looked right at me. There was no smile anymore. “I owe you a half hour now,” he said.
“So the next appearance will be ninety minutes.” See, I had an hour coming and he was in to me for another half. You gotta always know the score.
“You bet.”
“Or two hours.” Producers in Atlanta now were saying it in my headset and so I was the middle man in a negotiation with the president of the United States. “Atlanta is pointing out two hours. They never stop. Two hours? Okay? But there was another appointment he was unaware of and we were unaware of.”
We talked about NAFTA and then went to another phone call, this one from Paris. Now even I knew there was something going on. Something had happened and only Clinton and Larry were the ones without a clue. We hit the last commercial break and I made small talk with him. He leaned into my ear and said, “As soon as we’re off the air I’m going to find out what the hell this is. We’ll have some coffee.” CNN in Atlanta and Washington is hearing all this and I could hear my producer calmly say, “We’ll explain, Larry. We’ll explain.”
The last phone call was about Clinton’s legacy. It was a good question.
“Is it too early to have a legacy?” I asked. I knew the answer. “Well, Larry,” he would say, “I have so much to do right now it just isn’t possible for me to think about what will be said after I leave.” That’s what I was expecting to hear. Wrong again.
“I’d be happy to tell you that,” he began. “Number one, I’d like to get the economy moving again. Number two, I’d like to provide health security for all Americans. Number three, I want my national service plan to pass. It will open doors of college education to millions of Americans for lower interest loans and give many, many of them the chance to work those loans off through service to their communities. Number four, I strongly want to pass a welfare reform bill that will move people from welfare to work and end welfare as we know it. And five, I want to reform the political system. I’d like those things in my legacy.”
I was flat out amazed. The guy had been in office for six months and he was able to rattle off what he wanted the historians to write. It was clear this wasn’t any ad lib. Bill Clinton had given a lot of thought to the question.
As soon as I said “good night,” Stephanopoulos and McLarty grabbed Clinton by the arm as he was taking out his earpiece, which is used to hear the phone calls. They whispered something to him and everyone was out of the room like a bat out of hell. Me? I sat there thinking I’m going to get invited somewhere for coffee. And that’s when I got a phone call from the Washington bureau. Bill Clinton’s life-long friend and special assistant for legal affairs, Vince Foster, had been found dead in Fort Marcy Park just off the George Washington Parkway overlooking the Potomac River. Preliminary reports were that he had killed himself. The White House was worried, and rightfully so, that someone might hear the news on a police scanner and then call in to ask the president about it on the air. They didn’t want him to find out about it that way, which was why no domestic phone calls were taken.
Soon it was learned that White House aides had gone into Vince Foster’s office and removed files. At the same time, attempts by federal investigators to search the office for possible clues immediately following the death as to why Foster might have killed himself were rebuffed by the White House. This started the whispers which started the supposition which started the conspiracy theories which started the wackos or, now that I think about it, the wackos started on their own and were probably in motion before Foster had even gotten into the White House. The frenzy was off and running. Supposition was in full swing and being driven by a determined anger I’d never seen before or heard. It was mean-spirited and it became a topic at lunch. I thought it was the result of so many television channels having to vamp for time and using talking heads offering opinions based on no facts whatsoever as well as the right-wing talk radio programs, which, after a while, started to sound like echo chambers. Now, all you would hear was “ditto” or “me-too” or the constant use of the words “we” and “they” as if some kind of armed conflict was at hand. The conclusion at lunch in that first week after the death was there are a lot of people who hate Bill Clinton. The White House was always putting that kind of spin on stories when things didn’t work out for the administration, which was probably true 60 percent of the time. This was the first time I really sensed the dislike that was out there. And today when we gather for lunch, that initial idea hasn’t changed.
But certainly, the Vince Foster death was reason to wonder if there was a connection between something occurring in the White House and what occurred in that little park. That was legitimate. Everything after that was speculation. And I knew it would still be a topic ten years later whether there was a formal conclusion or not. These were the times we were in.
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In 1961 I had gone to then mayor of Miami Elliot Roosevelt and asked if he could do me a favor. It wasn’t getting a traffic ticket fixed because I never bothered the mayor with seemingly minor issues like that (usually a circuit court judge could get the job done). I knew his mother, Eleanor, would visit from time to time and I asked that he be the go-between to have her come on my talk show at WIOD Radio. Elliot came through and, at age twenty-three, I had the chance to spend an hour with the former first lady talking about her book, Autobiography (my show was new so I wasn’t exactly on the stopping-off list for every celebrity that came to town).
Thirty-one years later I had the chance to talk about my time with Eleanor while sitting in the White House with the current first lady. Hillary Rodham Clinton and I were taping the first show of Larry King Weekend. We spent a few moments talking about a woman for whom, I was soon to learn, she had great respect. Mrs. Clinton had been compared to Eleanor within the first few minutes of the new administration as she was asked to chair a Health Care Task Force with presidential advisor Ira Magaziner taking charge of day-to-day operations. And it was part of the hundred-day plan at the White House: deliver a health care package that was backed by the people and with the ability to get through Congress.
Mrs. Roosevelt had told me serving in public office was good for one’s ideals but very high in personal sacrifice. I didn’t know it at the time but she said that back in the 1940s and had, simply, repeated it to me during the interview. As a result, I was always quick to point out when telling this story that it was nothing new. Mrs. Clinton had heard the line and I think she identified with the thought her predecessor had so many years earlier. But then, I’m sure Martha Washington was thinking the same thing. In fact, Nancy Reagan had said to me, “Nothing can prepare you for the White House.” Eleanor Roosevelt had told me it was common for the president to bounce
ideas off her before talking to anyone else because if she didn’t understand what he was saying, nobody else was going to understand either. That street went two ways.
KING: She always felt that Franklin, as she called him, deserved her opinion and had to hear it. Whether she carried the day or not, when she disagreed, he should hear it. Does Hillary Clinton feel the same?
CLINTON: I agree with that. I think there are many things I don’t have an opinion about that my husband deals with every day, but there are some things I have a strong opinion about, and if he asks me or if I feel very strongly about it, like most wives that I know, I will share it with him.
Just a week earlier Mrs. Clinton had testified before a House subcommittee on her role as chairperson of the Health Care Task Force. Begun less than a month after the Clinton administration had come to town, the project was under fire from the get-go. The task force had traveled around the country to get opinions from health care experts as well as patients, which was a good idea, even a necessary idea, but the meetings weren’t open to the public. Within a month of the first meeting Hillary and the task force were sued. And on the hundredth day, Mrs. Clinton met with senators from both sides of the aisle in an attempt to find out what she was doing wrong. One month later, the task force went out of business.