by Leon Panetta
So as we worked for an acceptable welfare reform package, there was considerable room for political accommodation but also wildly differing motives. That made negotiations both promising and perilous. In 1996, the Republicans went first, and Clinton vetoed their initial attempt, which he felt was too hard on children.
Working through the relevant committees on the Hill, we hammered out a bill that was widely popular in Congress and yet very divisive within the White House. It transformed welfare from a traditional federal social program into a set of block grants. The government would give each state a set amount of money and require the states to contribute as well. That gave states an incentive to push recipients, almost all of them single mothers, from “welfare to work,” as the saying went. Unlike the Republicans’ first effort, it increased support for child care—a major inhibitor for many poor women trying to get work was that child care ate up so much of the money they might make by leaving welfare—but it imposed caps on how long a recipient could receive money. After five years, federal support for struggling families would cease. The program’s new name reflected its changed intentions. Once called Aid to Families with Dependent Children, it was now to be called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. The emphasis was on “temporary.”
If that was all it had done, I might have been able to support it. I understood that welfare had become a source of dependency for many recipients, and if we could combine a cutoff with support for reentering the workforce, that struck me as a fair balance. But in an effort to broaden conservative support for the bill, we allowed it to reduce support for food stamps, which I had long championed in Congress, and to deny many benefits, including food stamps and medical care, to legal immigrants. That last provision struck me as heartless and irrational. My mother and father came to this country young and poor and worked for decades, paying taxes, building a family, running a business. If they had fallen on hard times, why would we have denied them the same benefits we would have given to their neighbors, solely because of where they were born? The bill was predicated on the premise that immigrants, legal immigrants, were somehow less American than people born here. I didn’t accept that premise, and I urged Clinton not to accept it, first in private and then at a meeting of his senior advisers on this issue on the morning of July 31.
“A provision that prevents immigrants from getting any kind of assistance just seems to me to be against everything we’ve stood for,” I said. “And I have to tell you, Mr. President, as the son of immigrants, it’s very hard for me to say that you ought to support this.”
Clinton was plainly torn. In the end, it was the rare instance in which we ended up simply disagreeing. He viewed this as his best chance to do something about the problems of welfare, and though he had serious reservations, he refused to let the moment go. On August 22, he signed the bill, including its indefensible provisions on immigrants. Several important members of the administration, including Peter Edelman, a top official at Health and Human Services, resigned in protest.
By its own terms, welfare reform was a success. It removed millions of recipients from the rolls—about 12.6 million people received Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1996; about 4.5 million received TANF ten years later. It saved billions of dollars in federal spending and helped push many recipients back to work. How much of that is to the program’s credit is a more difficult question to answer. The reform obviously was aided by the booming economy of the mid-1990s; how many of those recipients would have been left with nowhere to turn in more dire economic times is impossible to know. And yet decades of experience under the revised rules convinced many early skeptics that the reforms did achieve important success. Moreover, Clinton went back to Congress the following year and cleaned up some of the more coldhearted aspects of the bill he signed in 1996. Immigrants were reinstated as legitimate recipients of aid.
Though I opposed it, I recognized the political appeal of welfare reform. I didn’t believe Clinton needed it to beat Bob Dole—for me, that deal was sealed by the shutdown—but it certainly did let out any air left in Dole’s tires that year. It’s hard to argue that a president who produces a landmark social reform with the support of majorities of both parties in Congress is either ineffective or out of touch. In that sense, welfare reform was a victory for Morris and triangulation. If so, it was Morris’s last such victory. In September, just hours before Clinton’s speech to the Democratic convention in Chicago, a Washington prostitute revealed to a tabloid news show that she’d had a long dalliance with Morris and that he’d shared his work with her, even letting her listen in on his phone calls with the president. Morris resigned. I’m not one to pass judgment on his personal life, but it sure was a relief to have him out of the White House.
No election can be taken for granted, and Clinton worked hard through the fall to make his case to the American people. In October, he traveled to New York, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Maine, Tennessee, Ohio, Kentucky (those last three in one day), Colorado, New Mexico, California, New Jersey, back to Ohio, Michigan, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Virginia, back to Tennessee, Missouri, Minnesota, Illinois, back to Ohio, Pennsylvania, back to Michigan, back to Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, and back to California. On election night he carried forty-seven million votes, beating Dole by twelve million. He won 379 electoral votes, 70 percent of the total.
Clinton and I spent much of that evening playing cards at his hotel in Little Rock, joined by his friend and lawyer Bruce Lindsey. Clinton is a ferocious hearts player, who can keep track of several games at once. It took his mind off the updates flowing in from across the country. After a while, history overtook cards. The networks announced that he’d won.
Although Clinton lost a few states in 1996 that he’d won in 1992—and carried two, Arizona and Florida, that he’d lost the first time—the only real disappointment of the election was that, for the second time, he won without carrying a majority of the popular vote. In 1992, Ross Perot had been a blessing, taking more from Bush than from Clinton; this time, he did much less well, but just well enough to keep Clinton below 50 percent of the popular vote. The result was one of modern American politics’ stranger oddities: Al Gore in 2000 got a higher percentage of the vote than Clinton got in either of his two elections, but Clinton won both and Gore lost his.
I had made it clear to Clinton from the start that I wanted to wrap up my work once the election was over, and we moved quickly in its aftermath to make the transition. I was happy that he selected Erskine Bowles to succeed me—and pleased that Erskine, after some hesitation, accepted.
For Sylvia and me, it was at last a time to go home to California together, to resume our life in Carmel Valley in a way we hadn’t really done since I left for Congress in 1976. We packed up during those weeks after the election and headed west right after the inauguration.
As we did, I jotted down some parting thoughts to the president. Clinton and I had begun our association with only the barest sense of each other. We had grown to become admiring colleagues and had finished as friends. My respect for him was enormous, and my debt to him—for the opportunity to help him accomplish great things for the country—was deep and heartfelt. So I wrote in a spirit of humility but also out of a genuine desire to leave him with some thoughts to help. I offered five thoughts.
“Trust in your own judgment,” I wrote. “This does not mean you should not listen to others. But be more confident of your own first instincts and your ultimate judgment. After all, the people elected you for your judgment. And for God’s sake, once you’ve decided, do not revisit the decisions—move on.”
Second, “You cannot let the bastards get you down.” Surrounded as he was by critics and a dedicated special prosecutor, Clinton could become distracted or morose. I was sure the American people were as tired of this as he was. I urged him to shrug it off.
Third, “Speak to the people.” Clinton almost always did well when he reached around Con
gress or any other adversary and connected to the people directly. I hoped he would do it more and remember how much power it gave him.
Fourth, “Do not forget your most loyal troops.” Here I confessed I had not helped Clinton as much as I could have. “I felt it was important to meet often with the cabinet and staff to keep them informed of what was happening,” I wrote him. “My regret is that I did not insist that you do more of that.” This was a tension of my entire time as chief of staff—how to streamline decision making and still preserve Clinton’s connection to those he most relied upon. I do believe we’d made it better, but I recognized that the difficulty would continue.
Finally, and somewhat cheekily, I added, “Lastly, for God’s sake, get your rest and stay on time.”
With that, my service to Clinton was concluded. I would, of course, watch with appreciation and some dismay as he bounded through his second term, where his achievements were more incremental than in the first but helped to institutionalize the work we had begun. His economic record was sterling, and the country prospered under his leadership. And yet there were the tawdry revelations about Lewinsky and the bewildering attempt to drive him from office over that embarrassing episode. On December 19, 1998, he became only the second president in American history to be impeached, charged with perjury and obstruction of justice for his evasive, misleading answers about his relationship with Lewinsky. On February 12, 1999, he was acquitted on both counts. To this day, it boggles my mind to think that the nation spent those months discussing whether to remove the president of the United States from office because he lied about an extramarital affair. The American people seemed to share my bafflement; they responded to the impeachment by siding solidly with Clinton.
Bill Clinton was not perfect, but he left a better country than he inherited. And, amazingly, he departed as a more popular leader than when he arrived.
• • •
Sylvia and I were home. I had always regarded Washington as my workplace and Carmel Valley as my home. Now, after decades of bridging that gap, we had the chance to enjoy life in one location.
I wasn’t quite ready for a rocking chair, so after a period of decompression I began scouting out ways to continue contributing. Cal State chancellor Barry Munitz, who had been such a help during the decommissioning of Fort Ord and its rebirth as a Cal State campus, was among the first to reach out with an offer. He brought me on as a consultant, and provided Sylvia and me with an office on Cal State Monterey Bay’s still-transforming campus. That gave us a much-needed base of operations, which still provides our anchor today.
Sylvia launched an “America Reads” program in Monterey, and I began teaching some classes at my alma mater, the now-coed Santa Clara University. Reconnecting with young people was exhilarating for both of us, but also discouraging. So many students whom we encountered seemed to have lost faith in their government. They were prepared to believe the worst about any public official, and resisted the idea that public service was a fulfilling way of helping those in need.
From those observations grew a plan. We set out to expand the lecture series into a full-fledged institute, which became the Panetta Institute for Public Policy. Cal State Monterey Bay provided office space and some support, and we developed a group of sponsors and fund-raising events to raise about $2 million a year. That supported the lecture series as well as leadership courses, a Washington internship program, and eventually a master’s degree program. We haven’t ended cynicism among young people, but we’ve sent hundreds of interns to Washington, and have, I hope, impressed on them some of the positive potential of government, not just the baser calculations of politics.
I suddenly had time on my hands and few limits on my interests. I joined boards and commissions—the boards of Blue Shield, Zenith Insurance, Fleishman-Hillard, and the New York Stock Exchange, as well as a Pew commission that examined and reported on the state of the world’s oceans and California Forward, a group formed to make recommendations for improving California’s gridlocked politics.
Both of those latter projects were immensely rewarding. I chaired the Pew Oceans Commission, and we looked broadly at the state of the world’s oceans—from pressure on fisheries to the impact of coastal development and climate change. As it happened, I was in Washington delivering an update on our oceans work in September 2001 and was sitting at a witness table in the Cannon House Office Building when one of my colleagues, Marilyn Ware, received a message and whispered it to me: The Twin Towers, she said, had been struck by a pair of airplanes and were on fire. Two planes striking both towers in rapid succession could not, we realized, be an accident. Interrupting my testimony, I told the members of the committee that an attack appeared to be under way.
I remember thinking that it was probably not smart to be in a House office building under these circumstances, a thought that dawned on others in the room at the same moment. The meeting was abruptly adjourned, and as I made my way back to my hotel, the radio carried news that a third plane had struck the Pentagon. Not since Pearl Harbor had Americans felt so under attack.
I was desperate to get home to California, but of course, the airlines were grounded. I called my old friend Norm Mineta, then serving as secretary of transportation, and he warned me that flights would remain canceled for days. John Franzén put me up at his place while I pleaded with Hertz to find me a car; eventually they turned up a Lincoln, and I shoved off for California, snaking my way across the heartland and watching community after community absorb the news. Motels replaced VACANCY signs with GOD BLESS AMERICA. Flags fluttered from porches and decorated lawns. People seemed to speak in whispers, and to go out of their way to be kind to one another. Later that week, I pulled into the driveway in Carmel Valley.
The oceans report, released in May 2003, took me back to the work I’d done as a member of Congress protecting the California coastline (the cover photograph of the report was of the Point Reyes peninsula in Northern California). The report’s recommendations, based on two years of study, called for a new ethic of stewardship over our oceans and forcefully made the point that the economic potential of the seas depended on their ecological protection. It was, in my mind, a smart synthesis, and a reminder that environmental protection is not the enemy of economic growth.14
Similarly, the California Forward studies helped propel initiatives to create the state’s first-ever open primaries and to turn redistricting over to a citizens’ commission, removing it from the politicized process that had distorted it previously. It’s my hope that over time those reforms will bend California’s politics toward the center, producing more evenly divided districts and more incentive for deal making rather than ideological posturing. We’ll see.
One other opportunity floated my way in regard to California politics. Governor Gray Davis was elected in 1998 and reelected in 2002, but he’d never enjoyed the deep affection of Californians and was seen more as an effective politician than as an inspiring leader. Dueling crises—the burst of the dot-com bubble left the state’s budget in tatters, and a misguided attempt at privatizing energy produced electricity shortages and blackouts—emboldened his opponents, who launched a campaign to recall him. That put Democrats in a bind: If no Democrat joined the recall campaign and Davis lost, we would lose the governorship, but if a prominent Democrat did join, it would give Democratic voters an opportunity to dump the incumbent, a precedent none of us wanted to set.
A number of people approached me to see if I would run, and I gave it serious thought. At the time, though, I didn’t know whether Senator Dianne Feinstein, an old friend and California’s most popular political figure, might join the race. She was no great fan of Davis’s, and had often been considered a possible governor. I told her I’d wait for her to decide, and would get in only if she declined. She pondered the idea for a while, and by the time she decided to pass on the race, I felt it was too late for me to run. In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t, as it almost sure
ly would have put me on a path—win or lose—of involvement in state government rather than federal, and thus probably would have closed the door back to Washington that I would eventually enter.
One last project from those years bears mention. In March 2006, with the security situation in Iraq at a particularly delicate stage, Congress appointed a special commission to examine the issue and make recommendations for moving forward. Jim Baker and Lee Hamilton were named to chair it, and Baker asked me to become a member. I accepted, joining Robert Gates, Larry Eagleburger, Vernon Jordan, Ed Meese, Sandra Day O’Connor, Bill Perry, Chuck Robb, and Alan Simpson.* We spent the next nine months conducting hundreds of interviews, including a number during our trips to Baghdad. During one of those visits, Bob Gates and I ran into each other in the dining room of our hotel, as we both were fruitlessly in search of something stronger than tea to drink. Being more experienced than I in this particular field, Bob suggested that we try the Baghdad CIA station. We made it over there; he poured himself a vodka, and I took a scotch. It pays to know people.
Ultimately, the Iraq Study Group produced seventy-nine recommendations—all of them unanimously agreed to by the commission. The recommendations were too numerous, diverse, and detailed to recount here, but they ranged from the diplomatic to the economic to the military to the symbolic. They implicitly challenged President Bush by emphasizing the dangerous situation in 2006 and by advancing a far broader effort than he was presently undertaking, but we did not criticize him directly. Our intention was to encourage progress, not to place blame.
When we presented our conclusions to the president and vice president, it was clear to me that they did not welcome a report that raised questions about administration policy. Nonetheless, the president seemed genuine when he pledged to review and consider our findings. The vice president said nothing.