Anything Goes

by Larry King

  The time shot right past and before we closed the interview we took a call from Jamison, Pennsylvania. I can still hear the lady’s words.

  CALLER: My question is$#8230;how frustrating is it for you to try and get your message out to the people when it seems like the opposing party is criticizing you constantly?

  KING: What do you make of the daily hate? There is a lot of hate in America.

  CLINTON: There is. And I would say to her I don’t mind the daily criticism. What I don’t like and don’t agree with is the sort of atmosphere of negativism and cynicism$#8230; so I say to the lady it bothers me not to be criticized, but it bothers me there is an atmosphere that is more negative than positive. America should be more positive than negative.

  During the interview, the Republican party bought an ad on Larry King Live slamming the Clinton fiscal policy and promise of a balanced budget within five years of being elected. I thought it was a brilliant move by the GOP and I expect we will see more such ads in years to come. And, of course, it came up in the questioning.

  KING: The Republican National Committee sent out a news release today saying you promised the American people you would offer a plan to balance the budget. Do you have such a plan?

  CLINTON: Well, as you know, I have said that I will work with the Republicans to balance the budget. And at the proper time I will offer how I think the best way to do it is, but I thought it was important after they won the election [1994] on a set of specific promises that they should have a chance to go and say how they think it should be done. Now you know what I think is wrong with their budget? I think that it cuts Medicare and other health programs too much.

  Clinton’s 1996 budget, after receiving the now standard DOA label when it went to Congress, was rejected and called for $200 billion deficits for the next few years. He said the deficit had been reduced by a billion dollars for the past three years and it just wasn’t the right moment to come out with a statement announcing when the net would come to zero. I know budget issues are important and I know if there are bad numbers somewhere that fact will touch every American one way or another, but I think television shows talking about it are boring. On the radio show late at night I used to say to economists to just forget the actual number and tell me it’s “higher” or “lower” or “not enough.” That’s as exact as I want to be. I used to see Lou Dobbs do his MoneyLine program at 6:30 on CNN, and sometimes would actually be in a nearby studio as he did it, and he could have been talking Swahili. But that’s niche programming and it’s a niche I’ll never get into. The Republicans told the viewers the guest that night had no plan to make good on a balanced budget. He said it wasn’t the time. My thought was, “By saying that, you have now doubled the pressure to have a plan.” I understood that part and out of it all, I think I knew exactly what the important facts were.

  Gore had told me off camera that Clinton could do a great Brando. All through the interview I was doing the “should-I-ask-it/shouldn’t-I-ask-it” thing and with a few seconds left, well, let’s just say asking about outyear tax projections wasn’t going to allow appropriate time for a response.

  KING: You don’t want to do a Brando close, do you?

  GORE: Just a handshake.

  KING: Just a handshake?

  CLINTON: We’ve enjoyed being on the show.

  KING: Oh, let me hear. President Clinton does Brando.

  CLINTON: No, no, no.

  KING: Do it once.

  GORE: You missed it.

  CLINTON: It’s been great being on your show, Larry.

  KING: Thank you.

  CLINTON: You got a real future in this business.

  When we were through everyone started laughing and that’s when I realized there was the Brando imitation close I was asking him to do and then there was the Brando close which Brando had done right on my lips. I had flat-out missed what Clinton was telling me. If you want the truth, I’m glad he didn’t do either one of them.

  ———

  When the late-night radio show first called the Clinton White House Press Office to start what would be a weekly discussion about why the new president should speak to America as often as possible and to use radio as the medium to do so, the call was sent to a new department. Clinton had a person handling only radio interviews. When you looked at the numbers, it made sense. Talk radio formats had tripled from the time Clinton spoke in Atlanta in 1988 to his first term as president. Studies showed one out of every seven dollars in radio revenue came from the talk format. I thought a lot of it was loud and angry but people certainly tuned in to hear a host explain a point of view or, better yet, let a guest explain a point of view. Rush’s callers always agreed with him and, quite frankly, the echo chamber got tiring to listen to after a while. Mutual’s Jim Bohannon had a point of view and, many times, his guests and caller were on a different side of the street and it made, I think, for a healthy discussion. It was common for the White House to call my radio show during the day to offer Erskine Bowles (advisor to the president) or Robert Rubin (assistant to the president for economic policy) or Ira Magaziner (co-chair of the Health Care Task Force) to help get out whatever the message happened to be that particular day. The White House installed broadcast lines so the guest could do an interview with me or Bohannon and talk to the entire country while sitting in a studio down the hall from their office. We used it, as did all the other radio networks.

  Three months after the interview with both Clinton and Gore, I did a special one-hour radio broadcast with the president from our Westwood One studios in Culver City, just outside Los Angeles and, even more important, just down the street from Culver Studios where scenes were shot for Gone With the Wind and Citizen Kane. The interview was the result of Westwood One chief executive officer Norm Pattiz telling the White House Bill Clinton gets the hell beat out of him every day on local radio, be it with Rush Limbaugh affiliates or conservative local talk show hosts, and all of it goes unanswered by the White House. Doing a one-hour national show, he argued, and taking calls from listeners and answering e-mail and faxes with more than three hundred affiliates, would be a smart move. It would get the message out and there would be no filter from a conservative host. Norm can be persuasive. The White House was persuaded.

  Westwood One always reminds me of the Starship Enterprise. It has that quiet hum and the rooms are all filled with blue and red and white lights on control boards. Everywhere there’s a digital clock telling you the time to the 100th of a second. You just get the feeling the room could take off if it hasn’t already. It ain’t easy to find either. I remember one night when Dom DeLuise insisted on driving himself over for an interview rather than take the limo offered by the radio show. And of course, he got lost. And with minutes to go before we went on the air, there was no sign of Dom. Then one of those white lights in the control room started flashing and the engineer picked it up. Dom was calling from his car. Dom didn’t know where the hell he was. The engineer talked him through the turns and I walked out into the parking lot to watch as his car pulled in. He got out, looked at me, and said, “I feel like Doris Day in Julie when she was talked down by air traffic control and landed the airplane.” We made it to the studio with forty-five seconds to go. Piece of cake. Dom could have stopped for coffee.

  Clinton cut it closer. Blocks of Washington Boulevard were cordoned off, sharpshooters were on the Westwood One roof, and Culver City buses blocked the entrances to the large parking lot behind the building. I remember standing in the lobby just outside the studio looking at the digital clocks tell me the 100th of a second that was passing and, I gotta tell you, it made the wait all the worse. Always the producer, Norm suggested we put the president on by phone from his car. It made sense. And then, with thirty seconds to air, the limo with the presidential seal pulled into the driveway. Clinton was out the door immediately, so it was clear even he knew this was going to be close. He greeted Norm, posed for a few pictures, and then came into the studio while the theme was rolling. Bil
l Clinton is the guest who has cut it the closest out of all the guests I’ve ever had on the show. It was made all the worse by the stupid digital clocks telling me it was now 1:06:35 and three tenths. You just don’t need to know those things.

  Clinton said this was part campaign trip and part work-related. He had been in San Francisco meeting with business executives about how to get computers into schools and then how to train teachers to use the computers. And he was doing some fund-raising. But he wasn’t going to say the words other than everyone knew he was going to run again but this just wasn’t the right time. And I’m thinking to myself, what’s this “the right time” routine? He wanted to wait until after the budget battle with the House because to announce now would make the entire spending plan partisan and, as a result, dead on arrival (again). I asked him about New Jersey senator Bill Bradley’s decision to get out of Congress because he was disgusted (in total, fifteen senators said they weren’t running again in 1996) and Colin Powell’s statement from a few nights earlier that people right now were disgusted with both Republicans and Democrats.

  CLINTON: Larry, look at all of this. People are going to be faxing us, they’re going to be e-mailing us, they’re going to be doing all this stuff on the Internet. This is a hundred-year change period we’re going through. And it’s not surprising in a period like this that people would be looking around at all their options because they think there are so many balls up in the air.

  KING: So, therefore, come independent candidates and disfavor and people leaving politics?

  CLINTON: Yes. And not only that, if you go home at night you’ve got forty channels on television and they say, which would you rather have, three parties or two—you’d say three.

  I got my first e-mail question. It appeared on my computer monitor, which was something I just couldn’t get into no-matter, no-way, no-how. I used the same monitor taking phone calls and was comfortable but I still didn’t trust it. And now an entire text appeared. It was from England and the listener wanted to know the president’s view of the O.J. trial, since the jury was going to get the case within the next week. And as I read the question I kept thinking some guy with a computer on the other side of the world just typed it out and now it comes out of the radio with my voice. Clinton had it right. We were in a hundred-year cycle of upheaval and I was only sixty-two.

  CLINTON: I would hope neither the American people nor our friends in the United Kingdom would judge the American justice system entirely on this trial because the facts are so unusual. First of all the trial was televised, which I think contributed to the circuslike atmosphere and some of the developments.

  KING: You’re opposed to televising?

  CLINTON: You run a serious risk when you do it in such a high-profile trial$#8230;

  KING: And as attorney general in—

  CLINTON: Arkansas

  KING: —did you ever have a televised trial?

  CLINTON: Never.

  As he said this I thought about the O.J. Industry. I remember Lenny Bruce telling me thirty-plus years earlier that J. Edgar Hoover must have kissed the picture of John Dillinger every night before he went to bed. Otherwise, nobody would have known anything about the FBI director. And Lenny’s theory, like all of Lenny’s theories, held true today: If this trial wasn’t on television, a lot of people wouldn’t have jobs as pundits. I also thought Clinton was right. The question then becomes, So what do you do? Not cover it? Do you then say, no more televised trials? If you don’t say that, then how do you decide which one is on TV and which one isn’t?

  We went to a commercial break and talked about his schedule and where he was headed next, and then he leaned in a little and asked, “Who you dating?”

  “Nobody in particular,” I said. “I get together with a few nice women. Cindy Garvey and I have dinner and Jo-Ellan Dimitrious, who is a guest for the Simpson trial, is a good friend. I like Marcia Clark’s assistant Suzanne Chiles but the answer is nobody exclusive.”

  He smiled and nodded. “I admire your flexibility,” he said.

  I wanted to do some follow-up, but the clock was indicating I only had 4.365 seconds before we were back on the air. Still, I thought it was one of those comments all of us make from time to time that allow a momentary light into a usually dark area. I guess that’s a non-Brooklyn way of saying I wasn’t going to ask the question I wanted to ask.

  The Trial of the Century came to a dramatic close a few days later. I was sitting with my producer, Wendy Walker Whitworth, and lifelong friend Asher Dan at Nate & n Al’s for a quick breakfast before going to work. The streets were empty. The restaurant was empty. In Los Angeles, as in every other city across the country, people were gathered in front of their televisions and radios.

  The jury didn’t spend a lot of time deliberating and, of course, each pundit on the air was drawing meaning into this fact. Now, had the jury spent nineteen days deliberating the pundits would have found meaning there as well. And we would have all listened. I had talked on the phone that day with Herb Cohen, who said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do without being able to watch Judge Ito every day. It was a nice routine because as soon as they broke for lunch at noon in L.A., I could turn on Jerry Springer here in D.C. and have another hour of education.” I knew as I sat and waited that every television was tuned to this moment across the country and the world. People later told me about being in Paris and watching CNN in their hotel rooms. It made me wonder if ESPN was gonna do a cut-in or if HBO would stop the 119th replay of Norma Rae and go live to the court-room? I wasn’t going to find out. Nobody knew the answer. In Perry Mason it always seemed he was gonna lose big-time and maybe then he’d go home with Della Street, but you always knew he was going to win. Not this time.

  I think all of us will remember O.J.’s face as the first “not guilty” was read and then repeated on the second count. And that clip is replayed again and again whenever the story is of The Trial. I wonder, today, if an anchor will read an O.J. story in the year 2006 (and you know an anchor is going to do just that) and say, “Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve seen the video from October 1995 so many times, we’ve just decided to tell the story without it.” A few years later we were going to see another video clip over and over of a woman with a beret and while it wasn’t The Trial it was, to be blunt, a trial to go through. Call it a transition but I think we’re going to see both tapes for many years to come before someone figures out a new way to tell a story that will always be told.

  The verdict proved racism is quiet. White people thought O.J. should have been convicted and blacks believed he was innocent, set up by racists in the L.A. police. Racism erupts from time to time and this verdict created one such explosion, making us spend time looking at how it came about and whether any progress has been made since the last time. In fact Dominick Dunne was on during Verdict Night and said as much:

  It points it out vividly. I mean, and I think of all the kind of civil rights advancements of the last thirty years are all washed away. I think we are so polarized from each other now.

  I agreed. And if the entire O.J. experience did nothing else, it showed us who we are. Or, it gave us a reason to talk, if only for a moment, about who we are.

  I had been talking to both the prosecution and the defense throughout the trial (and not using Robert Shapiro’s cell phone number anymore, I might add) hoping to get commitments they would come on the show as soon as possible following a verdict. The night after the verdict I had Johnnie Cochran in the studio. And prior to his appearance, the production staff had talked with him about bringing along the now free O.J. He was the guest to have. He had been silent throughout the nine months and now, as we told Cochran, he had a chance to talk directly to the public and he had an hour to do it. It was win-win. As a backup, Cochran was given an inside studio number and a password in the event O.J. was more comfortable with a phone call. Did I think he would show up in person? Probably not. Did I think he would make a phone call? Probably not. I figured it woul
d become a book and if that’s the direction he was going to go, the worst thing he could do right now would be an interview. The mystery element was essential.

  There are guests I’ve had on that make me ask myself, “What can’t they tell me right now and how difficult is it to keep that inside?” Cochran was such a guest. As we sat in the Los Angeles studio I wondered about the conversations he’d had that day. He and Robert Shapiro had exchanged public words about Cochran’s handling of the closing arguments. Shapiro, in an interview with Barbara Walters, said he wouldn’t work with Cochran again because Cochran had played the race card all the way. Then Cochran had a news conference saying that wasn’t the case at all. I was watching the verbal tennis match and wondering why the hell these two intelligent men didn’t just pick up the phone, talk to each other, and work it out? Of course, the way it was going now made for good television. And the fact both were scheduled as guests back to back made it all the more interesting. But one issue we got into right away was based on Dominick Dunne’s comments twenty-four hours earlier: