Anything Goes

by Larry King

  KING: Does the mood of the American public—the opinions—should that affect this trial?

  BYRD: It absolutely does and I don’t think any president will ever be removed from office when the economy is at record highs.

  KING: And he’s popular?

  BYRD:$#8230;Any president that’s going to get the blame if the economy goes bad, he’s going to get credited if it’s good. So I came to the conclusion, quite a while ago, that this president would not be removed.

  Something else was happening. Senators had been sworn in by Chief Justice Rehnquist to be impartial jurors. And yet every day we were getting the daily counts as to how badly the pro-impeachment side was going to lose, so, somewhere, someone was forming an opinion about the case. In fact, many of them would sit all day listening to the arguments and then come on the show in the evening to talk about what they had heard and why they were going to vote a particular way.

  There was a moment in early February, however, when I thought my head was going to explode if I heard someone in a pinstripe suit talk for the 2,859th time about “working in the spirit of bipartisanship.” It was the result of having listened for almost a year to the pinstripes in the House use the same word to the point it actually became meaningless. I was sitting with the clicker watching senators hold yet another news conference about being “bipartisan.” My eyes started to roll into my head. So I clicked to the Spanish-speaking soccer game, which brought them back into focus. I think it was the same game I had watched before but it always made sense despite the fact I still didn’t understand soccer and I certainly didn’t know Spanish. Those words, whatever they were, at least had meaning.

  This was happening to a lot of words on Capitol Hill. “Send a message” makes my eyes roll back. Everyone sends a message but, let me tell you, I don’t think anyone receives it. Just think if we could stop, for a moment, all the messages being sent. It would be busier than air traffic control at JFK Airport. And while a lot would be taking off, nothing would be landing. Another word is “rededicate,” as in “it’s time to rededicate ourselves to”…blah blah blah. It’s nothing other than code for “we haven’t been paying attention.” And then, of course, if we must go around all the time and “rededicate” ourselves to some goal, well, does this mean it isn’t enough to simply dedicate yourself to something in the first place?

  All of this came to a head that afternoon after the soccer game was over. A spectator sitting in the public gallery of the Senate stood up as a vote was being taken and yelled, “God almighty, take the vote. Get it over with!”

  This was the mother lode of defining moments. Everyone in the Senate that day had been talking about “the will of the American people” (another meaningless phrase), but the guy who was being thrown out of the gallery and arrested was the only one actually expressing it. Every news operation reported it. Suddenly, there was a hero coming out of this. I figured we were going to see him in a ticker tape parade, he might even be a guest on the show that night (he was still in jail when we went on the air), and depending on how things went in the Senate, maybe Clinton would recognize him in the next State of the Union Address.

  Despite the fact it sounds like a contradiction in terms, the Senate moved quickly through the impeachment trial. And, of course, predictions were being made every day as to what the outcome was going to be or what the vote tally was going to be or, for those who were really good at this, what senators would defect to the other side. It was the same thing we see every Sunday during an NFL pregame show when pundits tell us what the score will be and why. As that vote drew closer, I asked columnist P. J. O’Rourke and Senator Christopher Bond (R-Mo.) to predict the outcome:

  KING: What do you think is going to happen?

  O’ROURKE: The president skates.

  KING: Skates?

  O’ROURKE:$#8230; with absolutely no punishment whatsoever.

  KING: You are—

  O’ROURKE: Nothing. No censure. Nothing. He serves out his term and he gets a great big book contract and some business deals and everything’s fine except that he blows up to three hundred pounds and marries a waitress from Hooters.

  KING: This is your— Oh boy.

  BOND: We wasted a whole evening to come in and listen to that?

  A week later the Senate acquitted President Clinton on both articles of impeachment. Ten Republicans broke ranks to vote with the Democrats on Article 1 (perjury) while five Republicans voted with Democrats on Article 2 (obstruction). I was having lunch at the Palm in Washington when it happened, and I realized, maybe for just this one moment, the word “bipartisan” had regained definition as Republicans voted with Democrats. But then, maybe, it was still lost by the fact every Democrat voted the party line? I figured it this way: Democrats agreed on something and when you consider the Will Rogers observation that he is not a member of any organized political party because he is a Democrat, there was significance to what had just occurred. I also thought, as did most people, this was an issue the Senate had inherited from the House, so they were just doing their job. And as talk about the vote filtered to my table from the bar in the Palm, I sipped decaffeinated coffee with skim milk and looked at the caricatures of entertainers and media celebrities and politicians on the wall. “Too bad,” I thought to myself, “Jefferson’s nowhere to be found. That guy and the other founding fathers were smart enough to decide a president can’t be impeached unless there’s a two-thirds majority.”

  Obviously, they must have known about partisan votes back then. It was a good rule; especially when one considers the fact there will always be opposition to the party in power. In the case of throwing a president out of office, a simple majority shouldn’t be the deciding factor. As I walked out of the restaurant onto 19th Street, I figured since Jefferson had his own memorial a few miles away, he’s ineligible to be on the wall of the Palm.

  Linda Tripp was scheduled to come on the show the following Monday, which turned out to be, appropriately enough, Presidents Day. On the afternoon of the interview she stopped by the studio to see the set and sit under the lights for a few minutes. She was concerned about her appearance and I came in to spend a few moments trying to put her at ease. Tripp had been beaten up pretty well in the Leno and Letterman monologues and John Goodman had done a Saturday Night Live satire that, to this day, kills me (and to show how well I can read an audience, I didn’t bring it up while talking with Linda). That night she came on the set with new hair and a new look. And in between every segment, she would ask either the crew or me, “Am I doing okay?” She was nervous, but she knew she had to do this and she did fine.

  KING: You think you changed this country?

  TRIPP: Oh heavens.

  KING: Are you saying then, this presidency? Do you think—

  TRIPP: No, I mean, look, I’m sorry. I think he tarnished the presidency. I believe the country, at least, realizes that much, that his behavior tarnished the presidency. It will recover and I don’t flatter myself that I had anything to do with that. But certainly, here on Presidents Day, think of the legacy that leaves.

  I had asked Tripp about taping Monica Lewinsky because a lot of people, myself included, wondered how you can be a friend to someone and at the same time record conversations without their knowledge. Tripp was facing a criminal proceeding in Maryland for doing just that but couldn’t use the word “taping” without incriminating herself. So right there on the air we had to come up with a different word. Tripp suggested “documentation.” This was like a flashback to the campaign where I interview a candidate who refuses to say he or she is a candidate when the entire reason they are on with me is that they are a candidate. So, in the same spirit, the State of Maryland obviously accepted the idea that documentation wasn’t taping. What the heck, we had just gone through a year where oral sex wasn’t sex so this wasn’t really that big a deal. Tripp said she taped Lewinsky to protect herself from a perjury charge were she asked to testify about knowledge of Clinton’s relationships with other w
omen.

  Whatever words are used, twenty years from now, to describe these times, I know historians will watch CNN tapes to make the choice. There, they will find how we struggled with technology. Events moved faster. History, which I used to think of in terms of years and decades, is now measured in minutes. I was the guy who slept through history classes at Lafayette High School because I got tired of listening to a teacher tell me what the Spanish-American War meant fifty years after it happened. Now, I was wide awake trying to understand the meaning of the past twenty-four hours.

  One word that will be seen and heard a lot is “boggled.” Almost as soon as Bill Clinton was acquitted and a sense of closure was at hand, word started to spread about what direction the Clintons will go after they leave the White House (hey, we were already talking about who was going to move in, so this makes perfect sense to me). But the story that was starting to have legs was Hillary Clinton would run for the Senate seat being vacated by New York’s Daniel Moynihan. And I wasn’t the only one to use that word when I brought on Washington Post vice president at large Ben Bradlee, Hugh Downs of ABC, Christian Coalition President Pat Robertson, and U.S. News & World Report managing editor David Gergen.

  KING: Ben, let’s start with you. What do you make of Hillary Clinton in the Senate?

  BRADLEE: I’ve given up, Larry. It just boggles my mind.

  KING: Hugh Downs?

  DOWNS: I am like Ben Bradlee. I have no idea$#8230;

  KING: Pat Robertson, how would you react to a candidacy by the first lady for the office of a senator who is retiring?

  ROBERTSON: I tell you; I don’t have a clue. It is mind-boggling.

  KING: Mind-boggling. David, they’ve all said mind-boggling.

  GERGEN: Our minds have been blown out since a year ago, so we just sort of keep rolling along. Wonders never cease.

  We all were laughing with each answer. The panel was locked at the “mind-boggle” level. I drove home that night thinking something must really be going on in America if all its experts were bewildered. And I rationalized it by saying always having an answer isn’t a good thing. Sometimes, you just gotta say “I don’t know.”

  A month later I attended a party for the terrific photographer Annie Leibowitz in the East Room of the White House. I asked Mrs. Clinton about the story and she said “absolutely.” The announcement would be formal in early 2000. As it turned out, that’s exactly what happened. But it still boggled my mind. And I knew if Eleanor Roosevelt was in the vicinity, she was saying “Do it.” I didn’t think to ask Arthur Godfrey, though.

  ——

  Chance Armstrong King entered the world on a warm March night in Los Angeles. His name came from a “chance” meeting a few years earlier when I was in New York City walking out of Tiffany’s. I passed a beautiful tall blonde as she walked in. It was one of those moments when I did the should-I-go-back/no-go-to-lunch routine. I went back in. And now I was with Shawn all the way through the procedure, cutting the umbilical cord as Chance was placed on her chest. I looked at them both and could feel tears in my eyes. A father will never know what a mother has to endure during childbirth. It’s a moment, though, when every word in any language fails. Shawn later told me she received phone calls from lots of people saying they knew she would do just fine but were concerned about how Larry got through the experience. While standing there looking at our son I knew he was going to be given many things. But what I couldn’t offer was any protection from the future. No child is ever given that and, I suppose, it’s a good thing. But I wondered what his world was going to be like. And I hoped he wouldn’t know his father only from videos of a television show.

  Within three weeks of Chance being here, U.S. troops went into Bosnia as part of a nineteen-nation NATO mission. President Clinton addressed the country as the bombing began and Defense Secretary William Cohen did every TV morning news show, two radio networks, PBS’s News-Hour, Nightline, and Larry King Live. The frenzy had begun. The daily military briefings started up at the Pentagon while the White House fired up its talking heads division (National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, to name a few) to ensure The Message was delivered about Yugoslavian Prime Minister Slobodan Milosevic being guilty of ethnic cleansing.

  On Day 12 of the “Crisis in Kosovo” or, depending on the channel, “Showdown in Bosnia,” I had a return visit with Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic in Sarajevo (and I might add after the first try at his name, he was still “Mr. Prime Minister” from there on. Some things don’t change). He argued for ground troops in the war, which Bill Clinton insisted would not be needed. And then we went to the Yugoslavia chargé d’affaires to the United States, Vladisav Jovanovic, who was in our New York City studio. Jovanovic said the NATO action was “genocidal” and offered the opportunity for any Albanian who had left the country to come home. We went to a commercial break and as I looked at the rundown for the next segment, I could hear Jovanovic in my headset. I looked up and he started talking to me.

  “Larry, I want you to know President Milosevic sends his best.”

  Milosevic? I wasn’t following this at all but I said “thank you.”

  “And he says congratulations on the birth of the child.”

  Milosevic? The guy being compared to Hitler? I said “thank you.” Again.

  “He watches your show every day. And Larry?”

  I looked up.

  “President Milosevic told me to tell you when this is over he looks forward to being back on with you again.”

  “Thank you,” I said while thinking to myself, “again?” By this point we had probably twenty seconds remaining in the break. I got ready for the return but I asked the control room to find out what the hell Jovanovic was talking about. When the show ended, I learned Slobodan Milosevic had been on five years earlier to discuss the Jimmy Carter–brokered cease-fire in Bosnia. I didn’t remember the interview at all. Still don’t. It kept coming back to history’s increased speed. We take an event, look at it from every angle, spit it out, and look for the next event. And when it happens, you miss a lot of what goes past, like conversations with a despot. Sometimes that’s good. Sometimes$#8230;

  Shortly after the Bosnia war began I tuned in A&E’s Biography series and saw a promo for the next night’s show: the life of Slobodan Milosevic. Had they aired that show one month earlier, it would have been beaten by the Knitting Channel. I watched it. And as I did, a familiar thought occurred: If you had told me one month ago that I’d choose an interview with the president of Macedonia over Monica Lewinsky, I’d have said you were wacko. Now, I couldn’t wait to talk with him.

  ——

  In late April the topic changed. Fifteen people were dead as a result of two students opening fire at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. The show wasn’t just providing information from students and teachers and police who were there; it also offered a place to vent anger and frustration. Later, with guests like Billy Graham, it would become, again, a place for healing. And within an hour of the story, the finger-pointing began. We have always pointed where the blame should be directed but now it was aimed toward the gun lobby for selling weapons like this, at the television and movie industry for making money from violence, at parents for not paying attention to their children, at Bill Clinton for not enforcing existing gun registration laws, and on and on. I’m not copping out here but if this were my call, the finger would be pointed at all of us.

  Among the guests that night was a student who knew the two gunmen. CNN had put into effect a rule for this kind of story; anytime a child is interviewed, their parent or guardian has to give consent. I was glad to see other networks and cable operations were doing the same. We were learning as we went along. In the middle of that hour, I was told to go live to our correspondent in Belgrade, Brent Sadler, who was on a satellite phone reporting that massive explosions had just occurred at a nearby government television facility. Three cruise missiles hit the building and the top two fl
oors were engulfed in flames. He handed off to me and I went back to the interview in Littleton. Just as the show was coming to an end I asked one of the guests, defense attorney Gerry Spence, if we were moving toward armed guards in schools.

  Well, you take away all the guns; take away all the knives, you still got pipe bombs. You take away all the pipe bombs, you still got weapons that kill people. So ultimately, we have to take the weapons out of the hearts of the people, not out of their hands.

  I took those words home with me. And as I was driving down Sunset Boulevard listening to the radio report on both the school shooting and about the intense bombing going on in Belgrade, it hit me that I had just talked to a correspondent who described the explosions and never once did I feel anything. People were inside that building but, hell, it was in another part of the world. I worried about becoming numb. Technology can do that. As soon as the front door closed I went to see Shawn, who, I knew, would be holding Chance. And I held on to them both. The little guy hadn’t even been here two months and already there was a war going on thousands of miles away and students had died in a school a few states from here. Once again I wondered, and now I worried, just what kind of world was Chance going to face?