Anything Goes

by Larry King

  “Well, Arthur, this is Larry. What are your perceptions of broadcasting today?”

  Out of nowhere I started answering my question. “I would never have dreamed of satellites.” I agreed with that. I would have never dreamed of them either. Houston urged me to ask a followup question.

  “What advice do you have for my career?”

  “Take the show on the road more often. You need to touch people more. Go overseas.”

  “Am I doing okay with it so far? Anything else I should change?”

  Godfrey liked the show. The answers came automatically to me. I didn’t disagree with anything he said. Did I think I was talking to the great broadcaster? Well, if there is a some-place else, and if I had lived my entire life working in radio and the early days of television, I’d probably want to get back on the air too. Sometimes, you gotta work with what you have available.

  ———

  If timing is everything, Ross Perot’s announcement he was back in the running just before the Republicans convened in San Diego was all one could ask for. He didn’t do it the way he did four years earlier, but Ross has never been predictable. He came back to the same studio and spent an hour fielding questions from all over the world. I asked him if he was going to be in for the long run this time and as I said the words, I could tell he wasn’t enjoying the moment.

  I don’t want to get into that. The point is, can someone stop and take a few minutes and look and see what I’ve done night and day for the past five years?

  I believed him. But it was frustrating. The questions deserved better answers than he was giving. Ross has always been a complicated man. I was certain he wasn’t trying to duck anything being thrown his way. What I don’t think he understood was that the 1992 race with Perot was characterized by a few moments and he expected everyone to view those moments at the same level as all the other moments. It ain’t gonna happen because (1) we don’t view anything else that way and (2) we don’t have enough time to do it.

  Ross came on to do a second interview that summer, which took away any lingering thoughts I might have had about his being complicated. When the “members,” as they were now being called, elected him to be the Reform party candidate over former Colorado governor Dick Lamm, Perot announced he was going to take matching federal funds. I asked him about it. “In talking to our members, they wanted to put some skin in the game. We’re asking them to make small contributions. We don’t take any giant contributions from PACs at all.” He had talked about wanting “skin” from supporters back in 1992 too. It was a good line and it captured the idea that we are in this together. Perot was bothered, though, by the fact that out of more than a million ballots sent out, only about fifty thousand were returned. There didn’t seem to be much skin in this campaign.

  Two days later and just before the Republican convention was to take place in San Diego, Bob and Elizabeth Dole came on to talk about why he wanted to be the next president of the United States. Dole was still having trouble in the polls with women, which was why Mrs. Dole was with him. He had been going nonstop since announcing his candidacy in April, and to show he was serious about the job he wanted, Dole had resigned as Senate majority leader and as senator from Kansas. He discarded the blue pinstripe suit, white shirt, and tie, replacing them with dress slacks and a sports coat and looking absolutely uncomfortable. But this was a way to say, without using the words, that he wasn’t a part of the Washington scene anymore. Of course the pin-stripes were back when he came on the set that night.

  Dole announced on the air he would have Congress woman Susan Molinari deliver the keynote address in San Diego, a total surprise to all the pundits as well as Molinari. It was another attempt to bring in the essential woman vote, or the “soccer moms,” which I had first thought was the result of women getting bored with what they saw on TV and getting hooked on the same Spanish games I had been watching. But Molinari supported abortion rights, which was an issue that plagued the campaign and the party because of the far right’s insistence that being against abortion was the litmus test in order to be a candidate for president or vice president, and the fact the party had a keynoter outside of the litmus test wasn’t going to make Dole’s attempts to build an inclusive party any easier. It was a gutsy move on Dole’s part, who made the point that Republicans can’t be a one-issue party. Molinari was having dinner with her husband at a restaurant in New York when the Larry King Live staff reached her by cell phone. I thought it strange Dole hadn’t even called her for a heads-up but I was glad he didn’t. From her table Molinari accepted the offer on the air. Looking back, which I do a lot now, it was the only spontaneous thing to happen during the entire campaign.

  Dole had been dogged with two other issues: He had not accepted an invitation to speak to the NAACP convention and realized, very quickly, that had been a mistake. His campaign staff cited “scheduling conflicts,” which I think was believed by, possibly, two people in Montauk. He was criticized by Jack Kemp of Empower America on a CNN program for not understanding the importance of making the speech. A week later, Kemp became Dole’s running mate. The other issue was smoking. Dole had made the mistake of rambling in an interview when asked about tobacco’s effect on the body and when given a chance to hit the ball right out of the park, he chose instead to strike out by saying he wasn’t a doctor. I asked him if he could have given a better answer, which was another opportunity to hit it out of the park.

  It’s not good for you. My brother had emphysema. One of the major contributing causes to his death was smoking. My father had a problem. He stopped. So it’s not good for you. It’s bad for your health. Don’t do it.

  Dole paused as he said the last words. I could see his mind was at work. He took a breath and started in again. “Now, having said that—”

  Out of nowhere Elizabeth Dole’s hand came to a rest on her husband’s forearm. “That’s it,” she ordered.

  Dole leaned back, smiled, and said, “That’s it.”

  This happened a number of times during the hour and by the end of the show we were all sharing the humor in it. I asked Dole if he would select Supreme Court justices on the basis of their ideological beliefs and he answered, “I’ll have litmus tests for all judges. I want them to be tough on crime. I want them to interpret the Constitution, not try to amend it.” That brought out Mrs. Dole’s hand on the forearm again.

  “Not legislate from the bench,” she added.

  Just before the interview we had done the small talk about “how is it going?” and “where are you going?” and Dole told me he enjoyed the campaign and meeting voters. I mentioned how it’s important to love what you do because it usually makes you do whatever it is even better. And I told him of the last time I was with Clinton in the Oval Office, before an interview, and how he talked about how lonely a job it is to be president but added, “Even my bad days are good days.” Dole looked down for a second. “I’m in trouble,” he said. Then he looked at me. “If your bad days are good days it’s tough to beat a guy like that.”

  The story of the Republican convention in San Diego was television. It had been designed for the TV audience so all the big names (Gerald Ford, Colin Powell, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Nancy Reagan) were slated to give their speeches within the hour the networks would provide coverage. It was choreographed-produced-packaged—and absolutely boring. Ted Koppel pulled out his Nightline crew and went back to New York saying there was no news to be found. He was right. There wasn’t any hint of surprise, much less news, anywhere. The conventions had become four days of controlled events. Never would one hear a discouraging word. Never would one hear anything newsworthy. It was all Julie Andrews in a field on a sunny day singing “The hills are alive” and it got old after the first thirty-seven seconds. TV producers had been hired to make the program television-friendly and in doing so had made it impossible to watch. It was an infomercial that kept saying “wait, there’s more” and you’d wait and nothing would happen. We had come a long way since George Mc-
Govern’s 3:00 A.M. acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in 1968 but it was the wrong way. In terms of news and national importance, 1968 was far ahead of 1996. CNN by its nature had to be there and cover it and I did interviews with party leaders but there was zero to talk about.

  And the Democrats did the same thing the following week in Chicago. They still weren’t able to start anything on time so at least there was some consistency. This too was a pre-produced, in-unity-we-sing, phony gathering of delegates covered by just as many journalists wearing the standard khaki vests. And the boredom wasn’t just on the convention floor with the cheese heads. Ratings were in the cellar (only 12 percent of all televisions turned on were tuned to the conventions). It made me wish for a second ballot. Television had made democracy boring and I wondered if this was a vision of things to come; sort of a Ghost of Conventions Future? In fact the only “interesting” event in the Chicago convention took place far outside Chicago. Clinton’s pollster, Dick Morris, had been using the services of a hooker and had resigned the job so as not to hurt the campaign. The story first appeared in the tabloid the Star. It started the questions: “Does this one event symbolize how the Clinton White House operates?” “If this goes on with pollsters then where else does it occur?” “Were any national security issues compromised?” The story came out on the day Clinton was going to deliver his acceptance speech. In 1992, on the day he was going to do the same thing, there was another story out there: Ross Perot had quit the race. And so this trend became a story too. I love Greektown and I love the lakefront and I love Michigan Avenue but not as much as I loved getting out of Chicago that year.

  The electronic town hall idea was the good thing to come out of the 1996 race. Throughout October I hosted a number of issue-oriented programs in various cities that permitted the audience in the hall and the audience at home to weigh in on points being made. There was a lot of healthy back-and-forth, which should become a part of any future president’s routine. Clinton and Dole held two debates watched by fewer people than the three-way race of four years earlier. Clinton did few, if any, interviews. It was clear the campaign decided to coast through controlled events rather than do live call-ins. The issue before the pundits during the last days of the campaign was by how many percentage points Dole would lose the popular vote. After the election, Bob Dole told me “the best man lost.” Had television won the election for one candidate and lost the election for other candidates? Absolutely not. Did the best man win? Beats me.

  Despite the gimmicks and the vacuum and the never-ending attempts to make the campaign nothing more than a great big video with scripted words, 1996 was a pivotal election year. Every expert, every pundit, every politician I’ve talked to has said we shouldn’t do it like that again.

  In these times where anything goes, we now had an idea or two of where we didn’t want to go. That leaves a lot of territory. And I figured since Bill Clinton was now a lame duck, it would be a quiet second term.

  NOVEMBER 5, 1996

  · 1996 Voting age population: 195,511,000

  ·

  · 1996 Registration to vote: 146,211,960

  ·

  · 1996 Turnout to vote: 96,456,345

  ·

  · Percentage of voting age who voted: 38.8 lowest since 1924

  ·

  · Popular vote for Bill Clinton: 45,628,667 (379 electoral votes) 50%

  ·

  · Popular vote for Bob Dole: 37,869,435 (159 electoral votes) 41%

  ·

  · Popular vote for Ross Perot: 7,874,283 (0 electoral votes) 9%

  ·

  Source: Federal Election Commission

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Lewinskied”

  January 21, 1998. I’m on the treadmill in my home with the clicker in one hand, USA Today on a stand in front of me, and ESPN on the television. I’m listening to the Super Bowl hype and decide, after three seconds, there’s got to be more going on in the world. So I tune to the Weather Channel because this is the day Pope John Paul arrives in Cuba and I’m curious if he’s going to have to endure the Havana heat and humidity.

  The pope and I are of different tribes, but he is a person with whom I could do business. Whenever I’m asked to name people I’d like to interview some day, the list begins with God (first question: Did you have a son because a lot is riding on the answer?), Hitler (How do you define evil?), and Pope John Paul II (What do you say to the Saddam Husseins of the world?). My interest in the pope was increased all the more when the Vatican announced he would travel to Cuba in early 1998 and meet with Fidel Castro who, thirty years earlier, had banned, among many other things, Catholic schools in the country. In addition, the pope was vocal about America’s economic sanctions against Cuba and was a constant proponent for their removal. It has always seemed to me that sanctions hurt the people most in need of help and the despots to whom the sanctions are directed don’t care about the people in the first place, which is why they have the job of despot. On a larger scale, talking is more productive than not talking. The United States has taken the no-talk side of the street and the way Castro sees the world hasn’t changed one iota.

  The Weather Channel told me John Paul II was going to face 80 degree temperatures, which got me going all the more. We don’t talk to Cuba but we get an hourly temperature. I hit the clicker thinking a show from Cuba would be fantastic and it was something I was going to bring up at the next production meeting, even though I’m never invited to the production meetings. I went to CNN and watched the anchor say, “Once again, today’s Washington Post is reporting Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr is investigating whether President Clinton told a White House intern to lie about an affair she had with him.” CNN went to a commercial and my treadmill stopped.

  The clicker was in motion, moving to Imus on MSNBC (who was in a commercial) to ESPN, which was now talking about the last 185 years of Green Bay and Denver contests and, probably to this day, has yet to mention Bill Clinton won the election in 1992. I clicked over to Good Morning America, which was doing an interview with a correspondent in Cuba, and then I went to Matt Lauer as he said, “This is Today on NBC,” which is the standard cue before, yeah, you guessed it. I was all dressed up with nowhere to go.

  CNN came out of its commercial and did the story. President Clinton was being accused of having an affair with a twenty-one-year-old intern named Monica Lewinsky. She had been taped, without her knowledge, talking about her relationship with the president by a colleague at the Pentagon named Linda Tripp and that tape had been given to Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, who had been hired to investigate Whitewater. The country had been through Clinton’s alleged extracurricular activities before and my first thought was the same as the rest of the country: not again. My second thought was Newt Gingrich must be doing back flips right now.

  Earlier that week, Clinton had testified for six hours about his relationship with Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state employee who accused then-Governor Clinton of suggesting oral sex in a Little Rock hotel room. This was serious stuff because it implied not only a disturbing pattern of behavior with women, but a classic case of what shouldn’t occur between supervisor and employee. And as was true with Gennifer Flowers, it was he said–she said again. I felt as though the country was living the theme of Groundhog Day, where the same thing keeps happening over and over. The only difference was the movie was a comedy. This wasn’t.

  Within the first minute of hearing the word “intern” I knew we were heading full blast into the frenzy, if we hadn’t arrived already. That’s when the phone rang. It was Wendy saying we were going to change the guest lineup around tonight but she was going to keep Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu because he was meeting with Clinton today. I would tape him in a few hours and I already knew my first question would have absolutely nothing to do with discussions about giving up land to the Palestinians while protecting Israeli security. After I hung up the phone I looked again at the television screen. There
was video of Clinton walking from Marine One on the South Lawn. “You’re finished,” I said to the picture.

  Exactly three hours later I was in the studio talking with the Israeli prime minister via satellite. He and I had known each other since his days as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. And I remember Netanyahu and his wife drove me to the airport after my first visit to Israel in 1991. I couldn’t get over the idea that when this political force said “I’ll take you to the airport” that’s exactly what he meant: He drove me to the airport. But even before I had met him and long before he became Israel’s head of state, Netanyahu had endured coverage of the fact he too had had an affair. At the time it was called “Bibigate.” He knew the first question.

  KING: You spent some time with the president, were with him late last night, and you yourself have occasionally had the stories come down about Prime Minister Netanyahu. How has the president reacted to all of this?

  NETANYAHU: He didn’t react at all. He was absolutely businesslike. We talked over three hours in two successive meetings, including one late into the night yesterday. It was right on target, focused, businesslike, very nimble and very creative. I think he’s doing his job.

  KING: When you visit a country and then something like this happens—it can happen anywhere to any visiting head of state—are you put in kind of a difficult position when a story is breaking that is tabloidish in nature?