by Leon Panetta
While I considered how to address this with the president, the matter came to a head. In early April, the president was scheduled to speak to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and the White House speechwriting team had produced a draft of the talk for him to give. A day or two before it was scheduled, Clinton returned with an entirely new draft. Our version had him largely avoiding Gingrich and congressional Republicans, a tactic I assumed Clinton approved of. Instead, he now proposed to engage those Republicans and emphasize our points of commonality.
I sensed Morris’s hand at work, and confronted the president with my concerns: I respected his right to seek advice, of course, but doing so surreptitiously undermined me and complicated our attempts to focus the White House’s message and decision making. For the moment, our challenge was to rescue the speech and to find some acceptable language that would steer between Morris’s draft and ours.
Unsurprisingly, the speech Clinton delivered drew a confused and confusing response. The New York Times led with Clinton’s threat to veto elements of the “Contract with America” and noted that “the major purpose of his speech was to mount a counterattack.” The Los Angeles Times led its story by quoting the president assailing Republicans in Congress for “ideological extremism” and described the thrust of the address as “a marked departure from the accommodating rhetoric that has predominated in White House statements recently.” The Washington Post, on the other hand, emphasized that he was offering to “split the difference” with those same Republicans. Which of those was right? Sadly, all of them. Our message was unclear even to me.
I was eager not to have that experience again, so I invited Morris to drop the alias and join us openly. We set up a Wednesday evening meeting that combined White House and political staff, including Morris. On balance, that was preferable to having him lurking on the edges and talking to the president out of my earshot, but he was a handful.
After the first of our Wednesday meetings, during which I’d had to endure Morris’s theatrical bombast for a couple hours, I was trudging down the hall back to my office and I ran into Harold, who was fetching a cup of water. “Charlie,” I said, “goddamned Charlie.”
His eyes lit up. “Dick Morris?” he asked, knowing the answer. I didn’t respond, didn’t need to, because he then finished his own thought: “He’s a sleazy little fuck.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself. I tried my best to corral Morris, to respect the Clintons’ appreciation for him, and to take advantage of his skills. But there were days when I regretted it. He used his entree to try to weigh in on foreign policy until Sandy Berger and Tony Lake complained; I shut that down. He sought out White House aides to lecture them on policies that his polling data suggested would be good for Clinton—at one point, for instance, Morris was arguing that we should provide a free college education to every American. Needless to say, that’s an idea that polls well. I had to go back to the president again.
“He can’t do that,” I insisted of Morris having his own contact with my staff. “If he has ideas, he’s going to have to come to me.” Clinton again agreed. We kept tussling.
Morris polled incessantly, and his data always seemed to support his theory of what the White House should be doing. Again with eerie coincidence, that bent policy toward the center, agitating the more liberal members of the staff, especially Harold, whose philosophical disdain for Morris was nothing compared with his visceral distrust of him. Unfortunately for Morris, Harold controlled the money on the polling, and he demanded that Morris produce cross-tabs—the underlying demographic data that make polls genuinely useful—so that he could check Dick’s conclusions. Morris evaded over and over until Harold told him he was cutting off the money. The next morning, a mountain of polling cross-tabs suddenly appeared in our offices. Harold described it as a “dump truck.” That wasn’t far off.
The mixed signals about our approach to congressional Republicans and the botched Foster nomination convinced some people that the White House remained in disarray, and some commentators began to look beyond Clinton, assuming he was a one-term president and asking who might succeed him. Bob Dole announced his candidacy on April 10. The following week, the president held an evening news conference that two networks declined even to air. At the conference, one reporter delicately raised the question of whether Clinton was already fading from the scene. “Do you worry,” the reporter asked, “about making sure that your voice is heard in the coming months?”
Clinton was reduced to insisting that “the president is relevant here.” There would be more low moments in the Clinton presidency, particularly in the second term, but that was the lowest to date.
The news conference was on April 18. Just before 9 a.m. the following morning, Timothy McVeigh parked a rented Ryder truck in a handicapped spot in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Inside the van was a load of fertilizer, racing fuel, and dynamite. At 9:02 a.m., just after parents had dropped off their children at the building’s day care center, McVeigh lit two fuses, locked the van behind him, and walked quickly away, not looking back. Nineteen children were among the 168 who died. It was the second anniversary of the shootout at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco.
There was a television set just outside the door to the Oval Office, and the first reports were so shocking that Clinton emerged and stood next to me in silence. We watched for a few minutes, and the president offered a few quiet thoughts—he wanted to be sure investigators were headed for the scene, and he asked about whether a disaster declaration would help those affected by the blast. We discussed who might be behind this, agreeing that it felt like an act of foreign terrorism. Only later, after McVeigh had been arrested on a traffic stop, did the possibility of domestic terrorism enter our thinking.
That Sunday, the president and first lady traveled to Oklahoma to participate in a nationally televised service of remembrance. The president was uncharacteristically brief, and he captured that complex welter of emotions that swept over the country after the bombing—the shock and grief, the bewilderment and anger, the desperate search for some meaning. Much has been written about that wonderful and moving address, and about President Clinton’s unique capacity to empathize with people in trouble. It was a great moment for the country, a defiant refusal to allow violence to curdle into hatred.
Less noted has been the effect it had on Clinton himself. He and the first lady were shaken and noticeably sad in the days after the bombing. They met on Saturday with a group of federal workers’ children, who sat on the carpet in the Oval Office. One of them suggested that the Clintons plant a tree in memory of the victims, and the Clintons did on Sunday, a white dogwood on the South Lawn, before leaving for Oklahoma. Images of the planting showed them drawn and tired, unusually uncomfortable, unsure what to do with the shovels.
Then they spent the day amid rubble and shattered families. The men and women whom they comforted were in a sense their employees. Those who died included agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. There were army recruiters and employees of the Federal Credit Union. As the president put it, those were men and women who “served the rest of us, who worked to help the elderly and the disabled, who worked to support our farmers and our veterans, who worked to enforce our laws and to protect us. Let us say clearly, they served us well, and we are grateful.”
Those notions—of service and gratitude—spoke tenderly to the president. Whatever his faults, his embrace of those ideas was deep and genuine, and it was powerfully reinforced by his experience in Oklahoma City.
Tragedy can focus the mind, and it did in this instance. Clinton’s speech reminded the nation of the president’s capacity as a leader. It reminded Clinton of something else: the duty and opportunity that leadership presented. He returned to the White House with a new confidence, hard to describe but obvious to all of us. We moved forward.
With C
linton back at full strength, we spent the summer and fall fencing with Gingrich and the Republicans in Congress. We proposed to balance the budget in ten years; they pushed for seven. We offered our version of welfare reform; they offered theirs. They proposed deep cuts in spending for health care; we vowed to protect the sick and elderly. We disagreed vehemently over Medicare, with the administration pressing to reduce the projected increases in the program and Republicans fighting to cut it far more deeply. Republicans voted to drastically reduce AmeriCorps, a work program the president was very proud of; we fought to restore at least most of that funding. They cut education; we tried to invest in it.
In the summer, they attempted to cut foreign aid and agencies of the State Department, preying on the broadly held misconception that foreign affairs represents a serious drain on the budget when in fact it comes to less than 1 percent. Clinton threatened to veto that legislation, and took a hard swipe at the proponents of it during a commencement address at Dartmouth College. “Look at the history of the twentieth century,” Clinton told the graduates on a rainy morning in Hanover. “Every time America turned away from the world, we wound up with a war that we had to clean up and win at far greater costs than if we simply stayed involved in a responsible manner.”
Internally, we spent a great deal of time during those months debating whether we should offer a counterproposal to the cuts being endorsed by Republicans in Congress. On the one hand, offering an alternative was sound governance; it would give us a negotiating platform to debate our differences with Gingrich and his allies and push us toward an eventual deal. On the other hand, I didn’t have much faith that Gingrich was interested in a responsible deal. It seemed to me and others that this was gamesmanship, and his intention was to break us, not meet us halfway. My counsel was to concentrate our fire on the defects in the Republican plan and to chip away at it politically. Others agreed, and we spread the word to the Hill, where members dutifully toed the line.
Clinton was not thrilled by that approach. He wanted to present a counterproposal—he felt obligated to propose a budget, and he was tired of being treated as a sideshow to Gingrich. He appreciated the political wisdom of lying low, but it didn’t come naturally to him, and in a May interview he let slip that he felt he owed the country a “counter-budget,” which he said could be balanced in less than ten years.
I was furious. We had been urging discipline on congressional Democrats, and now Clinton had done exactly what we’d pleaded with them not to do. My phone rang off the hook with angry members of Congress, dumbfounded that we’d changed strategy without bothering to let them know.
Truth is, it was just Clinton chafing at a strategy he never really accepted. Making it worse was Morris, who fervently urged the president to ignore the advice of his staff and instead make a major speech on the budget, in which he would lay out his proposal for bringing it into balance. I fought it out with Morris in meeting after meeting—he specifically blamed me at one of them for being the impediment to his good ideas—but I could see that his counsel was working on Clinton. As Memorial Day weekend approached, Clinton abruptly instructed me to have the speechwriting team work up a budget speech for the following Tuesday, less than a week away.
As I’ve already written, budgets were an important part of my political upbringing. To me, there were smart ways to put together spending plans, and there were dumb ways. But I can’t think of a dumber way to draft a budget for the U.S. government than to throw it together over Memorial Day weekend in order to placate a self-absorbed political consultant. Clinton gave me those instructions on a Thursday evening, and I straggled into the office the next morning, unsure about how to proceed. I happened to run into George Stephanopoulos, who was as troubled as I was. He warned me that Laura Tyson, who headed the Council of Economic Advisers, might resign if we went ahead.
For a moment I wondered whether I might too. To be genuinely effective in Washington, it pays to know your limits. I’d hit them in my conflicts with the Nixon administration in 1970 and 1971, and I’d never regretted leaving. Would being forced to throw together a slapdash budget for purely political ends rise to that same level of offense? I pondered that question even as we worked through the weekend to get Clinton the numbers that would form the core of his presentation. Finally, Bob Rubin persuaded him that we couldn’t manage it. The Tuesday speech was shelved. I, along with the rest of the economic team, felt that we now had a chance to stick with a strong economic agenda.
Throughout my career, I’ve always believed that it’s important to look for points of agreement, to appreciate the ideas on the other side and meet them halfway. But that’s not at the expense of principles; it’s a recognition that progress is important too. Thankfully, Clinton’s last-minute reconsideration of that budget speech did not force me to choose.
Pulled between Morris and his staff, Clinton settled for a hybrid—a speech to the nation that would present our broad principles and some specific targets but avoid commitments in other areas, maintaining our maneuvering room. He gave the speech on June 13. In that brief talk, televised from the Oval Office, Clinton laid out five priorities: We would protect education; we would cut Medicare costs but not services; we would support tax cuts for the middle class but not for high-income earners; we would cut welfare to push recipients back to work; we would resist an overall level of cuts that was so high it might slow economic growth. Beyond that, Clinton did offer a few specifics. He said he was willing to cut discretionary federal spending by 20 percent, though he exempted education from those cuts, and he promised, once again, to balance the budget within ten years. He closed by noting that there were some observers who believed gridlock might benefit one side or the other politically; Clinton said he disagreed, and vowed to try to avoid it. That was our hand; now it was time to play it.
Those tensions mounted through the fall, as Gingrich, followed by a reluctant Bob Dole in the Senate, girded for a showdown over the federal budget and debt ceiling. They were demanding deeper spending cuts than we were willing to give. If they failed to get their way, they vowed to reject the continuing resolutions that keep the government operating in the absence of a budget. Their other bargaining chip was the ministerial vote to raise the debt ceiling, which allows the government to pay its creditors for debts it has already incurred; failing to raise the ceiling would put the U.S. government in default. The same Gingrich who had recognized the calamity of allowing Mexico to default was now prepared to sanction just that fate for our own government and economy.
For me this was an especially tricky period, because I was fending off not just Gingrich and the House Republicans but also Morris, our own house Republican. Morris’s job was to position Clinton for his reelection, and through that prism it made a certain sense to seek a middle ground over the budget fight. If Clinton were seen as governing in cooperation with Republicans, it would mute their argument that he needed to be replaced. Of course, that meant capitulating on matters central to Democrats and to the administration up to that point, but that wasn’t Morris’s concern. So as the showdown loomed, I worried not only that Republicans would force us over the cliff but that Clinton might willingly join them.
We had prepared meticulously for the confrontation. Two weeks after the president’s speech to the nation, he wrote to congressional leaders to warn them that the budget they were considering cut too deeply into Medicare.4 He welcomed leaders back to Washington from the Fourth of July break and suggested that it would be “in error” to let budget talks come to an impasse.5 On July 26, he reiterated his refusal to sign the bill that would cut foreign aid and eliminate important agencies working in arms control and information; if Congress insisted on passing the bill, Clinton said, he would veto it.6 On July 29, the thirtieth anniversary of the passage of the original Medicare bill, the president and first lady jointly delivered the weekly radio address, devoting much of it to the promise to defend that program against the proposed Republican
cuts.7
With each of those statements and more through August and September, we drew our battle lines, clarifying what we were willing to discuss and what we would fight to defend. Behind the scenes, we were also preparing. I asked members of our staff to assemble concrete examples of what some of the consequences of the proposed Republican cuts would be. They were striking: Cuts to the national park system threatened more than one hundred rural communities near those parks across the country; cuts to Medicare would deepen the suffering of families from Fairfax, Virginia, to Los Osos, California. The Chrysalis StreetWorks project in Los Angeles, which was registering important successes in putting homeless people to work and in housing, would face possible closure if the Republicans had their way with the budget for Housing and Urban Development. Children everywhere would suffer if education money dried up.
We collected those stories, inserted some of them into the president’s speeches, and banked the rest to be used in an emergency. We got one.
Both sides took a small step back in late September, when Congress passed measures to keep the government running while we hashed out our differences. But that postponed for only a few weeks the ultimate test. On October 19, with time running out to raise the debt ceiling, Clinton urged members of Congress not to “play political games with the good faith and credit of the United States.” And he warned them that if they cut deeply into Medicare or shifted economic burdens away from the rich and onto the middle class, he would refuse to go along. They went ahead anyway, approving a series of continuing resolutions; some were unobjectionable, and the president signed those. But others were conditional on the very cuts we’d explicitly ruled out.