All Too Human: A Political Education

by George Stephanopoulos

  I was willing to propose to Clinton that this statement be issued as a written release from the White House press office, provided that Ms. Jones would publicly agree with the statement that the president hadn't said or done anything inappropriate and that the statute of limitations would expire on schedule. I thought at the time that we couldn't admit any more than this: It satisfied Ms. Jones's public complaint that she had been defamed by the American Spectator's claim that she had sex with Clinton without forcing the president to admit to behavior that he had denied.

  But the tolling agreement was a bottom line for the Jones team, and it wasn't clear that Paula would agree to publicly confirm the president's claim that he hadn't done anything wrong. These conditions fueled my suspicion that Paula would see if she could sell her story and then concoct an excuse to refile the lawsuit as the 1996 election approached. Bennett, while preferring a settlement, was also convinced that he could win the case in court. Within hours, the debate was moot. The Jones team pulled out of the negotiations with the excuse that they needed a tolling agreement because they couldn't trust the White House not to trash Paula.

  The next morning, as we prepared for a prolonged legal and public-relations battle, we joked about which one of us would have the privilege of talking to the president about his “distinguishing characteristics.” It wasn't the kind of subject that had come up before in the confines of the West Wing; I didn't remember reading anything like it in Clark Clifford's memoirs or Haldeman's diaries. That the president was in a fighting mood made it all easier. When Bennett and Cutler reviewed the details, he reacted vehemently, without hesitation, and offered to have a urologist examine him and file an official affidavit on the spot. Later, when we were alone in the Oval and he seemed more dejected, I tried to buck him up by saying that we would make history when he was reelected despite all this garbage.

  “You may be right,” he responded with skeptical hope. “Andy Jacobs [Democratic congressman from Indiana] told me that I'd be remembered with Adams and Truman as a great president who was vilified while in office because he was doing tough things.”

  Clinton understood how fierce his enemies were, and he was willing to pay the personal price for advancing his public agenda. He also knew that he had no “distinguishing characteristics,” but he failed to comprehend the complexity of his own character. Had he been able to predict how he would react as Paula's case made its way through the legal system, Clinton would have never permitted it to go forward — if only for the harm it would do to everyone and everything he cared about. Me neither; in retrospect, the risk of a tolling agreement seems painfully small.

  But who knew? In May of 1994, Monica Lewinsky was still in college.

  11 THE LONGEST SUMMER

  The Japanese prime minister had the American president on hold, and Clinton wasn't happy. But his impatience on the morning of May 24, 1994, had more to do with domestic politics. A few hours earlier, the polls had opened in Kentucky for a special election to replace the late William Natcher, a courtly Democrat who had cast a record 18,401 consecutive roll-call votes over a forty-year congressional career. Although no Republican had been elected from Kentucky's Second District since 1865, the president was worried about the race. Shielding the phone with his right palm, Clinton said he wanted to be campaigning: “It's Nazi time out there. We've got to hit them back.”

  Afraid that Prime Minister Hata would overhear and misinterpret the president, I talked him down, suggesting that the Republicans' harsh campaign tactics could backfire. “They might,” he replied. “But not if we don't stand up to them.” Then, seamlessly, “Thank you, Mr. Prime Minister, I think you've found your voice in more ways than one. …” Minutes later, after jump-starting trade talks with Japan, Clinton felt better. “I like Hata. Speaks more English than he lets on; caught himself answering my questions before they were translated. But he's a good politician.”

  High praise, like Joe DiMaggio's calling someone a “pretty good ballplayer.” Clinton's feel for electoral politics extended abroad; he intuitively calculated the domestic pressures facing his counterparts like Hata, Helmut Kohl, or Boris Yeltsin. Since his biorhythms were tuned to election cycles, he usually knew when to push and when to hang back. Campaigns, he always said, were his “best friend.” But that morning he was blind to his own political predicament. Our Democratic House seat was imperiled all right, but letting Clinton campaign would only have made matters worse. In 1994, the voters just didn't like their president. Republican polls showed that only 30 percent of the voters in that Kentucky district thought Clinton deserved reelection, and even half of the Democrats polled thought it was time to send him a message by voting Republican.

  Whitewater, Paula Jones, and other missteps like gays in the military weren't our only problems. By the spring of 1994, even our legislative successes were working against us. The Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban had enraged and energized members of the National Rifle Association, but the general public didn't know yet that crime was down. Voters heard Republicans call our economic plan “the largest tax increase in the history of the universe,” but they had yet to feel the benefits of lower interest rates and stronger growth. Our labor base was depressed by the president's all-out effort on the NAFTA agreement they considered a job killer, but the corporate interests profiting from the pact showed their gratitude by attacking our health care plan. Rush Limbaugh and other talk-show hosts were fanning all of this smoldering resentment into an angry flame, and Republican strategists had crystallized the intense anti-Clinton mood into a single, devilishly clever campaign commercial: the “morph ad.”

  Thanks to digital technology, voters in Kentucky's Second District saw a photo of Joe Prather, the Democratic candidate, slowly dissolve into an image of the president as an off-screen announcer ominously warned, “If you like Bill Clinton, you'll love Joe Prather.” Sending a Clinton clone to Congress was about the last thing voters wanted in 1994. Prather lost by ten points, and the Republicans had a road-tested strategy for November's midterm elections.

  Turnabout is fair play. In 1992, our campaign had exploited voter anger at President Bush for breaking his “Read my lips” pledge by broadcasting a series of commercials consisting entirely of video footage of Bush promising “no new taxes” or discussing the dismal economy. But neither Clinton nor I was in a philosophical mood when we received the early returns from Kentucky. A little before 7:30 that evening, I accompanied the president to a working dinner on our upcoming European trip to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of D day. He yelled the whole walk through the Rose Garden colonnade. “I told you,” he said. “We have no strategy. We shouldn't be getting beat this badly. Nobody has our talking points. Nobody knows what we've done.”

  Better distribution of our “talking points” wouldn't have helped much, but the president was right. With the country at peace and the economy improving, we should have been in better shape — and those of us on the political team deserved our share of blame. But I instinctively depersonalized the outburst and refocused the president by lapsing into jargon. “We have real opportunities coming up with D day and the G-7 trip,” I said. “Our numbers will rise to match the fundamentals if we have a good performance.”

  Another irony. We had defeated President Bush, in part, with the charge that he spent too much time and attention on foreign policy. Now I counted on escaping our domestic difficulties by going abroad. Having President Clinton on the world stage, surrounded by fellow statesmen and cheering crowds, would help the country see him in a new light. It had to. Our legislative agenda was floundering, and our poll numbers were plummeting. At a Memorial Day weekend strategy session, Clinton complained that the “American people hired me to get things done, but I'm becoming a prisoner of Congress.” I was starting to take it all personally. The American people were rejecting the Congress I worked for, the president I helped elect, and the policies I cared about most.

  But they couldn't take away Air Force One. To climb i
ts back steps was to enter a world even more rarefied than the White House itself. Inside the huge cabin are all the comforts of home and office combined: couches flanked by bowls of fresh fruit and candy in the corridors; a conference room with two TVs in the wall and a library of first-run movies; offices with computers, fax machines, copiers, and phones; a full kitchen crew serving hot meals and cold drinks around the clock. Up front, the president has a one-bedroom apartment with an office, full bath, and king-sized bed.

  Once we were airborne, Clinton changed into jeans and a flight jacket and patrolled the halls like the captain of a cruise ship. After reviewing his itinerary in the conference room, he joined us for a movie over baskets of tortilla chips and salsa, while Hillary and her staff lounged on the couches outside the door. The president wandered over to catch up on White House gossip and tell tales about how he learned his trade in tiny Ozark churches where they charm snakes and speak in tongues. Hillary had heard it all before, but she seemed to enjoy it anyway, letting him ramble on with an indulgent smile.

  From the moment we touched down in Rome, I felt enhanced, like more than an embattled presidential aide or a member of the Clinton team. Here in Europe, half a century after the battles that defeated fascism, I was an emissary of both my country and my generation. My main responsibility on the D day trip was to monitor the home front, but like the rest of our entourage, I was seized by a sense of history and humility. Sure, we hoped the president would get a political bounce from the trip, but we wanted even more to honor the generation that had made our world possible. At every ceremony, with every speech, in every detail, we wanted to express how grateful we were to be “the sons and daughters of the world they saved.”

  President Clinton spoke those words across a field of marble bordered by cypress and pine — Nettuno's American cemetery. This speech and every other D day ceremony included a variation on our theme — “We are the children of your sacrifice” — along with heart-stopping gestures of remembrance: At Nettuno, a fighter squadron roared low over the crowd, the jets ascending in unison until a single plane suddenly vanished, like a silver bird plucked to heaven by an invisible, almighty hand. Its mates soared on, an empty space their silent tribute to “the lost flyer.” Over the moist, mown lawns of Cambridge, bagpipes pierced the fog with a haunting “Amazing Grace.” At dawn, from the deck of the USS George Washington, fifty years to the hour after D day's first landing, a single wreath was tossed into the sea. Off the cliffs of Pointe d'Hoc, a lonesome gull hovered at attention for a lone bugler playing taps.

  I absorbed these moments from the edges of the crowds, assessing Clinton's performance with one eye, appreciating its meaning with the other. At Colleville-Sur-Mer, I sat behind a sunburned man with a snow white crew cut. When Clinton spoke of Corporal Frank Elliott — one of “the fathers we never knew, the uncles we never met, the friends who never returned, the heroes we can never repay” — the veteran started to cry. His wife reached over to rub his back, and I was acutely aware of being two people at the same time. My human side was moved by the sight of an aging soldier being consoled as he remembered his youth, his mission, and his fallen comrades. My political twin was jumping out of his skin. Perfect. It's working. Clinton rose to the moment again. Even the sun broke through when he started to speak.

  Just as Clinton finished, the man turned around, thinking he would find Dee Dee, whose place card had been on my seat. He had a message for the president: “My name is Frank Callahan. I didn't vote for your man, but I'm a veteran of Omaha Beach. And as a very staunch conservative Republican, please convey to the president how very proud I was of him today. Frank Elliott was with me …” He couldn't go on. The tears were back, unbidden, and he tried to stop them by tapping his fist to his chest. Then he smiled. “Where's that Dee Dee? She's cute as a bug.”

  The trip was filled with little thrills. Like standing on an aircraft carrier in the Atlantic and hearing the loudspeakers bellow, “AMERICA LANDING” as your boss's helicopter touches down on the deck. Or jogging by his side through the stone streets of Rome, with Secret Service agents on bicycles clearing the path ahead and kids on sneakers yelling from behind, “Cleen-ton, Cleen-ton.”

  In Paris, François Mitterrand more than matched his reputation. I couldn't wait to meet him. The moment came just before a joint interview with Clinton on French television. Wendy Smith, the president's trip director, and I were heading to Clinton's holding room when we saw the French president strolling our way, with his head down and his hands clasped behind his back, apparently deep in thought. As we crossed paths, he looked up abruptly and blocked our way — and not (as I fantasized) to make the acquaintance of the young presidential adviser he'd heard so much about.

  “Bonsoir, madam,” he said, bowing slightly as he locked eyes with Wendy, a statuesque beauty with luxurious hair. He took her in from head to toe and back again, lingering in appraising silence. I got a nod.

  At the state dinner that night, the dining room was a scene from Versailles. Every table had a name (I was at “Begonia”). Candles were the only light for a meal of lobster topped with caviar, followed by quail stuffed with truffles the size of chestnuts. The champagne was tinted dusty rose, matching the linens and walls. After Mitterrand's closing toast, a few of us joined the Clintons for a midnight tour of the Louvre's new wing. “What a shame you can't be here during the day to see the sunlight play,” apologized our guide, the wing's architect, I. M. Pei.

  That last night in Paris was a festival of wonderful excess. I stayed up all night, staving off the bad news back home, ignoring for a few more hours the tensions beneath the surface splendor of our European trip.

  The trouble had begun on the Saturday before the anniversary of D day. We had just finished lunch at Chequers with Prime Minister John Major, and Clinton was meeting for the first time with Tony Blair, the Labour Party leader. Back at the White House, a small group coordinated by David Dreyer was quickly reviewing advance copies of Bob Woodward's new book, The Agenda, and faxing us summaries with suggested responses. The next day, all of Washington would read an excerpt on the Post's front page, and the rest of the country would see Woodward in person on 60 Minutes. We were in for a media blitz.

  That was the power of Woodward. What he wrote, people read. His apparently omniscient accounts of how Washington works had toppled a president, exposed the cloistered corridors of the Supreme Court, unveiled the clandestine operations of the CIA, and revealed a White House at war in the Persian Gulf. Now his sights were set on us. For more than a year, he'd been chronicling the economic policy wars inside our White House. His book, as he predicted in the letter I had hand-delivered to President Clinton eight months earlier, would be “the most serious contemporaneous examination of your administration's economic policy.”

  In the summer of 1993, several months into his project, Woodward's first call to me had sparked two simultaneous thoughts: Oh, no! and I have arrived. His books invariably created embarrassing headlines for their subjects, but his sources were assumed to be the most important, connected, and knowledgeable people in Washington. I was wary of Woodward but flattered and curious too. I also considered it part of my job to know what he was up to and make the best of it. We met for a late dinner at his Georgetown town house, where I received the full Woodward treatment.

  The polished wood of his dining-room table was topped with neatly stacked, typed notes and a pocket tape recorder. Over home-roasted chicken, he hit me with memos from one of our first economic meetings, then some handwritten notes from another, followed by word-for-word transcripts of what I had said at a third. Woodward's technique is no less effective for being so obvious: He flashes a glimpse of what he knows, shaded in a largely negative light, with the hint of more to come, setting up a series of prisoner's dilemmas in which each prospective source faces a choice: Do you cooperate and elaborate in return (you hope) for learning more and earning a better portrayal — for your boss and yourself? Or do you call his bluff by walking away i
n the hope that your reticence will make the final product less authoritative and therefore less damaging? If no one talks, there is no book. But someone — then everyone — always talks. The deadliest initial response was my instinctive one: “Well, it wasn't like that exactly. …”

  “Really? … Innnteresting. … I didn't know that. … Tell me. …”

  Our dance had begun, the mutual seduction of reporter and source. Woodward's calculated charm was custom tailored to my intellectual vanity, professional pride, and personal loyalty to the president. I knew that Woodward always beguiled sources into saying more than they should. But like so many others who had supped at his table and spoken into his cassettes under the cover of “deep background,” I was arrogant enough to believe that I could beat him at his own game, that my spin would win. I thought it was possible to soften Woodward's negative slant with context and perspective, or overwhelm it with up-close and personal accounts of the president's public-spirited fortitude, intelligence, and empathy.

  I knew that there was a risk in openly cooperating with Woodward, but at the time, I accepted it as the price of loyalty. It would appear more loyal to ignore Woodward, I reasoned, but it would actually be disloyal because it would cede the book's battleground to those who didn't have Clinton's best interests at heart. I was so sure the book was going to be damaging, so sure I knew how to prevent it, and so sure my motives were beyond question, that I took it on as my personal project.

  What I couldn't fully admit to myself, of course, was what I surely also knew: that even spinning you think is selfless is an act of self-aggrandizement — especially with a reporter of Woodward's stature. Talking to him in an authoritative way demonstrates that you were in the room and in the know. Working on Woodward's book was my job, but it also fed my ego. Relishing the role of fixer, I encouraged friends and allies like Carville, Sperling, Begala, and Greenberg to cooperate with Woodward. I also urged Hillary to do an interview, gave three interviews myself, and handed Woodward's private letter to the president without telling anyone else about it.