An hour after Shesol got home, the phone rang and Waldman was calling with the job offer. It would have been a normal call on any other day. They had been talking about the job for two months, so it would have been absurd—more absurd—to back down now, Shesol thought. They set a starting date a few weeks hence.
Shesol needed advice. The next day, he called Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Pundits were speculating that Clinton’s term was numbered in weeks or days. “It’s an exciting time to be there,” Schlesinger said. “You’ll either see a White House fighting for its life or a White House in a state of dissolution, both of which would be very interesting.” Schlesinger was “surprisingly sanguine” about Clinton’s survival, Shesol wrote in notes to himself.* “Have you ever written political speeches before?” Schlesinger asked. “It’s a particularly low form of rhetoric.”
The atmosphere inside the White House was surreal. “Now the speech has to be really poetic,” Waldman quipped in a senior staff meeting. “Yeah,” shot back deputy chief of staff John Podesta. “Now it’s going to have to be in iambic pentameter.” There were serious issues: Nixon had mentioned Watergate in his 1974 State of the Union; Reagan had touched on Iran-Contra in his 1987 speech. Should Clinton mention Lewinsky? “If I have anything to do with it, he won’t say a word,” promised Rahm Emanuel. With Clinton since the campaign, Emanuel had become one of the president’s senior advisers. Known for his blunt, aggressive style, he was one of the key aides in deciding a speech’s direction, dispensing instructions that were politically apt and occasionally sadistic: When Jordan Tamagni consulted with him on a speech on Clinton’s “millennium program,” Emanuel gave her one instruction: Don’t use the word “millennium.”
Clinton was rehearsing the State of the Union on Saturday, January 24, doing his usual close editing as he rehearsed. He reached the section on how to deal with the budget surplus. “What should we do with the surplus? Social Security first,” he said, and then stopped, scribbled on his draft, and looked at his aides. “What should we do with our surplus? I have a simple four-word answer,” he said. “Save Social Security first!” He grinned and opened his arms. “See? I haven’t totally lost it.”
But the stress was telling on the president. As he worked through the speech, he made bitter allusions to members of Congress who were after his head. “The notion that President Clinton had this…superhuman compartmentalization ability and he just put it away in a little box and didn’t think about it—totally not true, I’m sorry,” said speechwriter Lowell Weiss later. “It was just clear how much stress he was under.”
The rehearsals went on for several days as Clinton edited from the lectern. In the spectator seats, the senior staffers scoured the text not for awkward phrases, but for double entendres or lines that could be interpreted as referring to his problem. “Quiet crisis” out. Experiencing “more change more suddenly than ever before,” no.*
“What is usually a gladiator’s arena was instead a soothing cocoon,” The New York Times reported after the speech. “With thundering applause rolling over him from both sides of the aisle, the President took command with a steady smile and smooth diction, and the suspense quickly ebbed. For a little more than an hour, Bill Clinton escaped from the noise, humiliation and danger that has surrounded him ever since the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal erupted.”
The Clintons hosted the customary post-speech party in the East Room. Waldman was standing with Tony Blinken, the NSC’s chief speechwriter. Clinton brought over the Reverend Jesse Jackson and made the introductions: These are the guys who took down my speech, he said. It was a favorite Clinton joke. A year earlier he had introduced Waldman and Prince the same way at the same event.
Starr’s investigation consumed the country as 1998 wore on. The special counsel was focused on proving that Clinton had indeed had sexual relations with Lewinsky and that he had committed perjury in his deposition and had encouraged the former intern to lie. Congressional Republicans had raised the possibility of impeachment almost as soon as the sex scandal had broken. But Starr’s efforts were slowed by the fact that Lewinsky had refused to cooperate with the investigation.
For Shesol, 1998 had a sense of unreality. The investigation was like “white noise” in the background. “The White House was one of the few places you could be in the United States and not be that focused on the latest allegations or the latest leaks from the Starr Report,” he recalled.
Clinton’s advisers decided early that he would not talk about the scandal, so the closest the speechwriters came to dealing with it was some drafted remarks for friendly members of Congress. Rather, they helped in as much as his defense was that he was busy, as the mantra went, doing the business of the American people. And Clinton demonstrated that with a procession of speeches and policy pronouncements. The twenty-four-hour news networks were suddenly covering every Rose Garden appearance in the hopes that Clinton might, as Waldman put it, “slip up mid-paragraph and start free-associating about the scandal.” The writers laughed about the new blanket coverage: the news channels were covering substantive policy speeches in spite of themselves.
Paul Glastris, a reporter with U.S. News & World Report, who was interviewed for a speechwriting job that summer, asked to be assured that it would not simply be Lewinsky-and impeachment-related work. It was a great time to work in the administration, he was told, because the news networks would break into their programming virtually any time Clinton made a public appearance. “Part of the strategy to surviving Monica was to portray the president doing his job,” Glastris said.
“I was wrong. I have to apologize to the American people,” Clinton said. “But this is outrageous what Starr has done. If I don’t say that, no one else will. I can’t just let this go.”
It was early evening on Monday, August 17, 1998, and Clinton was in the White House solarium with his senior staffers, defense lawyers, and consultants. In late July, Monica Lewinsky’s lawyers had reached an immunity agreement with Starr’s team and she had testified before the grand jury on August 6. She had handed over a blue dress with what she said were semen stains on it, physical evidence of the relationship. The developments had prompted Clinton to testify before the special counsel. The president had spent most of the afternoon sparring with Starr and his aides over whether he had perjured himself in his Jones testimony when he denied having sexual relations with Lewinsky. He maintained that, within the narrow definitions operative during his January deposition, he had not lied. “It depends on what the meaning of the word is is,” Clinton told them.
Like many Clinton friends and staffers, Paul Begala, who had returned to the White House staff in 1997, was furious that the president had lied to them about the scandal for much of the year. But he had put aside his ire and written remarks for Clinton to make to the nation that evening. A draft solicited from veteran Democratic consultant Bob Shrum had been too contrite: “I have fallen short of what you should expect from a president. I have failed my own religious faith and values. I have let too many people down.” Begala wrote a less groveling speech.
But Clinton had written his own, and while it contained an apology, it brimmed with righteous anger. People had to understand that Starr’s investigation was an outrageous, politically motivated invasion, he argued. Clinton’s political advisers warned him that it was too strident and that it missed the point. “People don’t care about you or your problems, they only care about what you are doing for their problems,” Emanuel told Clinton as they all sat in the solarium. But he and the other political pros were fighting a losing battle.
Hillary Clinton had watched the debate quietly, looking tired and dour. When she weighed in, she seemed almost to be taunting her husband. “It’s your speech, Bill,” she said sharply. “Say whatever you want.” She had said the same thing to him before the 1995 State of the Union, encouraging him then to give a speech that had set the course for his political resurrection. Now her advice proved less constructive.
“As you know, in
a deposition in January I was asked questions about my relationship with Monica Lewinsky,” Clinton told the nation that night. “While my answers were legally accurate, I did not volunteer information. Indeed, I did have a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong.” The second half of the speech laid blame.
I had real and serious concerns about an Independent Counsel investigation that began with private business dealings twenty years ago, dealings, I might add, about which an independent federal agency found no evidence of any wrongdoing by me or my wife over two years ago. The Independent Counsel investigation moved on to my staff and friends, then into my private life. And now the investigation itself is under investigation. This has gone on too long, cost too much, and hurt too many innocent people.
It was three and a half weeks before Clinton corrected his mistake, reading a text that he had written by hand that had a dramatically different tone. “I have been on quite a journey these last few weeks to get to the end of this, to the rock bottom truth of where I am and where we all are. I agree with those who have said that in my first statement after I testified I was not contrite enough,” he told religious leaders at a prayer breakfast on September 11. “I don’t think there is a fancy way to say that I have sinned.”
Later that afternoon, Starr released his 445-page report. It recited in detail alternately pornographic and clinical the Clinton-Lewinsky encounters. Starr hoped to so appall the public that Clinton would leave office either in response to public outrage or after an impeachment conviction for perjury. Republicans driving toward the midterm elections focused on the scandal, insisting that they were fixated on dishonesty, not sex, and opened impeachment hearings. The entire exercise—the report, the impeachment inquiry—backfired spectacularly, and voters gave Democrats a five-seat increase in the House in November, an unheard-of result for a presidential party in a midterm election.
On December 19, the Republican House voted to impeach the president, meaning that he would be giving his 1999 State of the Union address in the middle of his trial, addressing a Congress that included his jurors, the U.S. Senate. Would Congress even allow the president to come to the Capitol to give the speech? White House staffers briefly looked into other settings in which he could give the address, including the National Archives.*
One thing was certain: Clinton would not mention Lewinsky or impeachment. As the 1999 State of the Union speech arrived at the point of rehearsal, he would spend a couple of hours with his lawyers, and then walk down the hall to the family theatre to spend a couple of hours practicing and editing. Always aware that he was considered too long-winded, he would start each session by announcing how many words he had cut from the latest draft, and then would dictate additions over the course of the rehearsal.
On January 19, 1999—the day his impeachment defense opened—Clinton presented to the Congress and the nation an unbowed president doing the people’s business. “Without once uttering the word ‘impeachment’ or making any obvious reference to the deeds that had put him on trial, Mr. Clinton tonight made a forceful argument against conviction with a virtuoso 77-minute performance,” The New York Times reported the next day.
The mood was exuberant in the senior staff van riding back to the White House. I won’t be surprised if they call off the impeachment, one of the president’s aides said. The trial ran its course and the Senate acquitted him on February 12.
The Balkans had been a lingering source of foreign policy problems for Clinton for much of his first term. The end of the Cold War let old ethnic tensions flare up in places like the former Yugoslavia, which had rapidly disintegrated, with Bosnia becoming an independent state in 1992. The Serb-dominated Yugoslav army attacked the new country and as it occupied territory it expelled Bosnians in a policy called “ethnic cleansing.” Candidate Clinton had made this a campaign issue, vowing he would do “whatever it takes to stop the slaughter of civilians.” This moral approach contrasted with the Bush administration’s realist view that had led Secretary of State James Baker to say that the United States didn’t “have a dog in that fight.”
But President Clinton had discovered that his options were narrow. He lacked the desire and—with JCS Chairman Colin Powell skeptical of military intervention—the clout to use the armed forces to stop the killing. Yet sitting still was not a viable option, either. The administration had adopted a policy that one Pentagon official aptly called “muddling through”: condemning the ethnic cleansing, urging a cease-fire, talking to European allies about other steps. This continued into the summer of 1995, when Bosnian Serbs captured Srebrenica, an enclave that the United Nations had designated a “safe area.” Women and children, 23,000 of them, were expelled from the city; an additional 8,000 men and boys were put to death and interred in mass graves. The atrocity spurred the administration to action, instituting a new policy of punishing aggression with air strikes and starting a new round of negotiations. By year’s end, a peace agreement was reached.
Now, in the spring of 1999, the former Yugoslavia was smoldering again. Kosovo was a small province of Serbia that had enjoyed semi-autonomy, but the country’s Serbian majority had a history of ethnic strife with the Kosovar Albanians and yearned for control of the territory. The situation had worsened throughout 1998, with Serb attacks into the province and a limited response—economic sanctions and negotiations to prevent further violence—from the Clinton administration. The problems accelerated in early 1999, when the Serbs broke the cease-fire and massed forces on the province’s borders. They attacked on March 20, triggering NATO strikes on March 24. Clinton would have to go on television that evening and explain why U.S. military forces were going into harm’s way.
The chief NSC speechwriter was Tom Malinowski, who had joined the staff the previous year after a stint writing speeches for the Secretary of State. He had a talent for the rhetoric of argument and a deep knowledge of foreign affairs: he would amuse himself by naming all of the foreign capitals around the world.
In foreign affairs, Malinowski knew, the maxim is that you can start a war with the wrong punctuation mark. The difference between “serious” and “grave” can mean pulling an ambassador out versus dropping bombs. “If you think about the tools of foreign policy, one percent of the time it’s bombs, two percent of the time it’s dollars, ninety-seven percent of the time it’s words,” he said. “And it means you have to be very careful because every time you speak out on China, there’s somebody in the Chinese Foreign Ministry in Beijing who’s going to read and parse every single word, phrase, and intonation to discern what the United States means and what it intends to do.”
The key question in the Kosovo speech was whether the United States was willing to commit ground forces. It was a sensitive issue. Many in the Congress, particularly Republicans, were opposed to “nation-building,” and questioned the decision to use force. On the other side, Clinton had been criticized, as in Bosnia, for moving too slowly. One draft of the speech had the president saying “I will not” commit ground troops, but Sandy Berger, who had succeeded Tony Lake as national security adviser in 1997, rewrote the line. “If NATO is invited to do so, our troops should take part in that mission to keep the peace,” Clinton would say that night. “But I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war.” They hoped that the “do not intend” formulation would be sufficiently ambiguous to mollify Republicans, while leaving open the threat of committing ground troops.
Editing continued until the last minute, with Malinowski typing changes into the TelePrompTer until the president went on the air. David Halperin, another NSC speechwriter, was printing the backup hard copy that Clinton would have in front of him, but he was only able to get it half done. “If the TelePrompTer had failed in the latter half of his speech, I don’t know what would have happened,” Halperin said.
Clinton told the nation that the mission was “clear: to demonstrate the seriousness of NATO’s purpose so that the Serbian leaders understand the
imperative of reversing course…if President Milosevic will not make peace, we will limit his ability to make war.” If Milosevic did not stop, in other words, he would be hit hard. But Malinowski saw a hole in the threat. “The implication of that was that if he resisted and did not make peace, didn’t give in to our demands, we wouldn’t…compel him to leave Kosovo,” Malinowski recalled. “The most we would do is just make him bleed a little bit.”
“In his televised speech tonight, Mr. Clinton left no easy way out for Mr. Milosevic, insisting that he would have to agree to allied terms to end the bombing,” R.W. Apple, Jr., wrote in a New York Times “news analysis.” “On the other hand, the President let the Serbian leader know that he need not fear an American invasion. ‘I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war,’ Mr. Clinton said, apparently seeking to reassure the American public but at the same time giving Mr. Milosevic an incentive to hang on.”
The underlying assumption was that like most bullies, Milosevic would retreat if pushed back. Wrong: The Serbs stepped up their campaign and area refugee camps filled at an alarming rate. Malinowski, among others, did not think victory could ultimately be attained if Milosevic still controlled an ethnically cleansed Kosovo.
Clinton was going to reiterate the war aims and praise the U.S. military for its performance in the air assaults on Kosovo in his weekly radio address on March 27. Malinowski inserted a line saying that no resolution could be imagined that did not involve the refugees returning home. Berger was soon on the phone: What are you trying to do? The line would mark a fundamental shift of allied aims for the war, from merely stopping Milosevic to rolling him back. I agree with you, Berger told Malinowski, but we cannot just slip it into a Saturday radio address—we have to get the president’s approval and consult with the rest of the NATO allies.
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 51