by Robert Rubin
After a few seconds, though, that slightly otherworldly sensation would pass and I’d return to the discussion as if these people didn’t have those titles. Even though the stakes were enormous and I cared greatly about the issues, I generally went to work and did my job, as I would have anyplace else. But then I’d pass by South African President Nelson Mandela in the hallway or see PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat shake hands with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and be struck all over again. Then Gene Sperling would wander in with a decision memo and the spell would be broken.
In an environment where many tended to push themselves forward, my natural inclination was to stand back a bit. Erskine Bowles, who joined the White House as a deputy chief of staff in 1994 and tended to take an anthropological view, told me that what happened inside the Oval Office was sort of a rugby scrum to get up next to the President. Even in the smaller meeting in the chief of staff’s office that followed the large morning staff meeting in the Roosevelt Room, some people would cluster as close to the head of the table as possible. I always liked to be away from the center, whether in the Oval Office or the chief of staff’s office, where my regular seat became the foot of the table. That little bit of physical distance felt more comfortable to me, and let me read the room and comment from a perspective ever so slightly removed. I didn’t worry about being overlooked. No matter how far away you were sitting or standing, you could always just say, “Mr. President, I think this, that, or the other.”
This distance afforded a clearer view of Clinton’s relations with others inside and outside the administration. Evident to me from the first was Clinton’s unusual skill as a listener. He could relate to someone else’s point of view in a way that made that person feel not just heard but understood. Listening in that way was more flattering than ordinary flattery; here was the President of the United States, and he really cared about what you had to say. And this was not calculated or phony. Clinton was like Gus Levy with clients at Goldman Sachs, able to make people feel like the center of his world because they were the center of his world while he engaged with them. The President’s charm, like Gus’s, lay in the fact that he meant it. Moreover, Clinton processed what he heard. He would make comments referring to what someone had told him days or weeks before. And his views reflected his considered reactions.
This is part of what could captivate people about Bill Clinton but could also lead to a certain amount of misunderstanding. Clinton listened so sympathetically that people who were unaccustomed to him often took it as duplicitous when he later came out against their positions, as with Newt Gingrich in the crucial budget negotiations of 1995, when the Speaker mistook Clinton’s comprehension and engagement for assent. By that time, I had seen enough that I could tell where Clinton really was. Sitting in White House meetings over the years, I would say to myself or to someone next to me, “That person is going to think Clinton is leaning toward his position. But he’s going to get a big surprise, because Clinton doesn’t agree at all—that’s just how he listens.”
From his own staff, the President expected candor, and my approach was to tell him what was on my mind—though in some cases diplomatically. Clinton specifically told us during our Little Rock transition meeting, “If you all don’t tell me what you really think, I’m dead.”
That comment reminded me of what John Weinberg had once said to me at Goldman Sachs: as a CEO, you have a special place in the minds of your subordinates. People in your own organization have a natural tendency to pull their punches around you, to soften the bad news and try to tell you what they think you want to hear. Because you’re a bit of a king, you can easily get an unrealistic sense of the wisdom of your own views and your merits as a leader. (Walter Mondale once told me that when he was Vice President and then his party’s presidential nominee, everyone laughed uproariously at his jokes. Then he lost the election and realized he wasn’t so funny after all.) To keep a realistic sense of yourself and to make well-informed decisions, you have to go out of your way to make people feel comfortable disagreeing with you.
A President faces these problems in the extreme. But Clinton meant what he said in Little Rock and worked to draw out disagreement with his own views. And contrary to what I’ve heard and read about some administrations, the people around Clinton generally said what they thought. The instinct to pull punches was often present, but most of us resisted it most of the time—although some more than others.
People outside the administration were a different matter. From time to time, business leaders would meet with me and express strong criticism of one or more of the President’s positions—and on some issues (tort reform, for example) I agreed with them. But when the same people met with Clinton in the Roosevelt Room or in the dining room in the residence, they often either muted their opposition or even sounded supportive of those policies. Then, when I’d later tell Clinton that the business community disagreed with those positions, he’d respond, “Bob, what are you talking about? So-and-so was here last week, and he didn’t say that.” I always encouraged those who met with him to be frank, and he encouraged candor as well. But frequently that didn’t work.
Disagreeing with the President may also have been harder for people who joined the administration later. Some of us who had known him as governor of Arkansas remained comfortable approaching him in a certain way. But a President acquires an aura that can inhibit challenge, and some of those who signed on in later years seemed more affected by it. Midway through the second term, when I directly and strongly expressed disagreement with the President in a Cabinet Room meeting over his reservations about applying conditionality to debt relief in Africa, I caught a look of sharp surprise on the faces of some officials who had little contact with him.
One of Clinton’s characteristics that could be upsetting to people who weren’t used to him was his temper. Once when I was in the Oval Office, the President blew up at Roger Altman over a health care issue. A few minutes later, the two of them were talking as calmly as ever. People who worked in the White House soon learned that Clinton sometimes vented his frustration in an explosive way, but that those outbursts didn’t mean much. His anger was like a tropical storm. It blew up suddenly and then went away.
Despite working closely with Clinton for six and a half years, I never developed the kind of close personal relationship with him that others in the administration such as Mickey Kantor, Ron Brown, Vernon Jordan, and Erskine Bowles had. We had an easy, informal working relationship, but I was never somebody the President called late at night or palled around with on the golf course. This measure of personal distance never interfered with our working relationship and, in Judy’s view, might even have been helpful in some ways.
WORKING IN THE White House was preoccupying like nothing else I’d ever done before, in part because it was always with me. The issues I was dealing with were often on the nightly news and in the newspapers. While at Goldman Sachs, I hadn’t exactly left my cares at the office when I went home at the end of the day, but I hadn’t had to live with the ever-present public focus and spotlight of Washington.
And that spotlight has a strong tendency to be critical. On any issue, partisan opponents might be trying to make my job more difficult, in part through ad hominem attacks. On top of this, the media tended to be critical and emphasize conflict. Tony Lake, President Clinton’s first-term national security advisor, who had served in two prior administrations, told a group of us early in the first term to expect the press to write stories—whether well grounded or not—about who was up and who was down, which could create divisions among us. Tony said we had to keep working together and not to let those stories get to us.
But that was sometimes more easily said than done. Howard Paster, the administration’s highly effective first congressional liaison, made a very shrewd point after he was criticized in a few stories. Recalling Tony’s comment, I told Howard that such stories come and go and that he shouldn’t be concerned. But Howard, who had been a very succes
sful lobbyist in Washington for many years, said that once the press views you in a certain way, that view tends to stick. Being human, none of us was able to put media criticism completely out of mind, but different people reacted to this media environment in different ways. Some became highly focused on how they were perceived and seemed largely driven by a focus on perception—which, ironically, seldom worked. Others were better at putting issues of perception into perspective and concentrating on their substantive and political objectives. I was generally fortunate in my press coverage at the NEC, which may have made it easier to absorb the criticism we did get.
Washington’s critical spotlight added to the stress of an inherently uncertain White House role. At Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, or any other company, you have a job and a role. Whatever your title may be, whether CEO or clerk/typist, you have an idea where you fit into the organization. Positions may have some fluidity, but they also have fairly clear definitions. For someone working in a senior position at the White House or one of the cabinet agencies, by contrast, it was never entirely clear what your role—or anybody else’s—was.
On a daily basis, this uncertainty could manifest itself in the question of what meetings you were going to be in. Struggles about who would be in the room were frequent and sometimes ferocious. I once called Sandy Berger, who succeeded Tony as national security advisor, about a meeting I hadn’t been invited to. Sandy, who sounded stressed, said it was fine for me to come. Then he sighed and said that he sometimes thought his main job was deciding who got into meetings.
The larger uncertainties related to what effect you would have in your job. An administration is a President-centered universe; your title didn’t define your influence on the President’s decisions—and that influence could change at any time. That ambiguous and unstable structure may help explain the constant, intense jockeying that seems endemic to most administrations (though ours probably had less than most). Everyone felt it, although people reacted in different ways. For me, an additional issue was whether people native to the political world would think that I “got it.” The President said to me shortly before his inauguration that the health care task force was going to operate under Hillary and Ira Magaziner. “You’re going to be the strongest person in the White House, and you’ve got to help me make this thing with Ira work,” Clinton said. And I thought to myself, You know, that’s a ridiculous thing to say. I don’t know about the White House; I don’t know about Washington; I don’t know how to do any of this stuff. I’m just hoping to be relevant and have an impact.
I was not a fan of efforts at formalized camaraderie within the administration. In the middle of our putting together the economic plan, the Clintons invited the entire cabinet and the most senior White House staff to Camp David for a weekend of bonding and discussion of strategy. The concept—which was the Vice President’s—might well have been good, but the event itself was pretty awful. Saturday night, after dinner, we sat around in a circle, and each of us was supposed to talk about something the others didn’t know about us. The President talked about having been overweight when he was in school and how everyone had made fun of him. When my turn came, I said I didn’t have anything I particularly wanted to share. By that point, Lloyd Bentsen had wisely gone home for the evening.
I arrived in Washington knowing a good bit about how Wall Street worked, and some of what I knew was very useful. But I also had a strong appreciation for how much I didn’t know about the ways of Washington. My chief asset in navigating this unknown terrain was recognition of my shortcomings and a readiness to learn. I subsequently saw others pay a price for having a different attitude. Sometime during the transition, I took a walk down Pennsylvania Avenue with another new administration official who had never been in government before and was coming from the private sector. I was talking about how difficult and complex this new world was and about how much we outsiders had to learn about it. My future colleague said, “Bob, you and I know how to do things. We’ll do them the same way down here that we did them at home.” Applying the rules of business to politics was his formula for success. I told him that I didn’t think our life in Washington was going to work that way. As useful as our background was likely to be in certain respects, much in Washington was very different.
Steve Silverman, a staff member who worked in Cabinet Affairs, once said to me, “You know, some of us from the campaign were afraid that people like you, who came from big positions in the outside world, would be the big feet and that we’d be kicked aside.” He was pleased that the administration hadn’t turned out that way, but I would never have dreamed of thinking like that. I was an amateur coming into a world of professionals. People such as Gene Sperling and Sylvia Mathews were impressive to me because they knew so much more. In this new realm of government and politics, I was, in a way, their considerably older junior associate.
My modesty about my skills in this world was frequently reinforced. In May 1993, as we were struggling to get our economic plan through Congress, I appeared on The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour opposite Pete Domenici, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee. I spent considerable time preparing with Gene. My opening comment was that our deficit reduction plan was real and serious.
“Frankly, it is predominantly a tax plan,” Domenici replied.
I responded by talking about the “trust fund” we had proposed so that monies set aside for deficit reduction would go to deficit reduction.
“If the American people think there’s too much taxes and not enough spending cuts in the plan, please don’t think that calling the taxes a trust fund changes it,” Domenici said.
I responded that Leon Panetta and Alice Rivlin felt very strongly that the numbers in our plan were real.
Domenici responded that the defeat of our “tax plan” would be the best thing that could happen to the country.
I fired back with more specifics. The numbers produced by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office were close to those produced by OMB. Both agreed that the ratio of tax increases to spending cuts in our plan was approximately 1 to 1.
Domenici responded that our tax plan would hurt the economy.
I thought I’d done pretty well and was very pleased to say so to Gene after the broadcast. They had asked me various questions, and I had come back with good, detailed answers. Domenici had just kept repeating the shibboleth that our plan was a tax increase. Gene had a different take. He said that people who saw the program would think that “you seemed like a nice, smart man who wanted to raise their taxes.” Domenici’s performance demonstrated both how effective a simple message could be on television and how effectively our plan could be attacked. My response demonstrated the difficulty of crafting an effective, simple defense of our substantively complicated strategy.
Of course, part of the problem simply may have been me. Shortly after that episode, I spoke to Ricki Seidman, the deputy communications director, before I was scheduled to go on CNN’s Capital Gang. Ricki told me quite bluntly that I needed some help in dealing with the very particular medium of television. Maggie Williams, who was Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, had said something similar a month or two earlier, so I decided to act. I got Leon Panetta, who was highly skilled at television, to substitute for me on CNN, and I made an appointment to see Michael Sheehan, a media coach who worked with President Clinton, among others.
I was skeptical about going to see Sheehan, because I knew I couldn’t be anything other than myself, on television or anyplace else. I told Sheehan that, and he responded that I should indeed be myself but that I should also try to understand a few basic points about the medium and how it works. For instance, you can attack a question, but you should never attack a questioner, since TV tends to make a personal challenge look more hostile than intended. You should boil down your points and avoid long, discursive answers. You had to be somewhat more animated than in normal conversation just to seem natural, because TV tends to deenergize you. And most important, you hav
e to go in with a clear sense of what you want to accomplish and respond from that perspective.
Over time, I developed some additional pointers about television, sometimes from watching tapes of my appearances with Gene and Sylvia—and later at Treasury, with Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Howard Schloss, David Dreyer, or Linda McLaughlin. For instance, Sheehan was absolutely right about the importance of being sufficiently energetic on television, but energy with an edge could make you seem strident—which was Judy’s comment after seeing me once on This Week with David Brinkley. And boiling complex ideas down into simple formulations could lead to a stronger statement than intended or than the subject matter warranted. I often dealt with that problem by adding a qualifying phrase—such as “at least it seems to me” or “the chances are very good that”—which reflected my approach to life anyway. I had no interest in becoming polished at television appearances—nor, I suspect, the capability to do that—but I did want to learn enough about the medium to be myself on TV and to get my points across at least somewhat more effectively. I also took Sheehan’s rule about not attacking the questioner a step further and decided never to make ad hominem comments in any public appearances, even when someone criticized me in a personal way. But that was a matter of how I felt public discourse should be conducted and had nothing to do with television as a medium.