by Dick Morris
Chapter 21
How to Survive a Scandal
THERE IS NO WAY TO “win” at scandal coverage. The only way to come out alive is to tell the truth, take the hit, and move on. Then you need to distract public attention from the scandal by focusing on other, larger items in your agenda.
When a scandal breaks, the chances are that the reporter writing the story has his ammunition all lined up for the next few days. He and his editors deliberately parcel out the story, piece by piece, to be sure that each day a new “revelation” confirms the idea that the scandal is spreading. News organizations have to allocate so many financial and personnel resources to leading the way on a scandal, they must sell the importance of the issue with all their might.
In that sense, each scandal has a journalistic parent. The Washington Post, of course, fathered the Watergate scandal. It was the New York Times that developed the Whitewater affair. The Post controlled the play on the Chinese campaign contributions scandal.
Since each journalistic parent protects its offspring, to counter a scandal in the pages of the paper that originated it is an inevitably flawed strategy. The journalistic “owner” of the scandal has lined up his facts with far greater care than any haphazard defense can rebut.
The key in limiting the damage of a scandal is not to lie. It is rarely the scandal that gets you; it’s the lying. One lie leads to another, and soon what was an embarrassment comes to border on a criminal obstruction of justice. Politicians who are wary of taking their medicine when a scandal breaks and seek to dodge responsibility by not telling the truth are only digging a deeper hole for themselves.
When the Lewinsky scandal broke in the press, President Clinton called me to ask for advice. I urged him to consider telling the truth, citing how Nixon had dug his own grave by piling falsehood and cover-ups on top of each other. Intrigued, he agreed that I should conduct a survey to see how voters would react to the news that he had had an affair with a twenty-two-year-old intern. The poll suggested that while the public would forgive the sex, they would not forgive the perjury. By lying in his deposition in the Paula Jones case weeks before, the president had made an immediate admission of fault impossible.
Even so, he waited far too long to come clean (and, in my opinion, has not done so at the time of this writing). His failure to absorb political embarrassment and personal pain by telling the truth made a big scandal into a potentially lethal one.
Ultimately, it takes personal courage to step up and admit blame, accepting responsibility for wrongdoing. Cowards hide behind lies, and they make the scandal worse by doing so.
But the weakness of any scandal is its political salience. While the law and our supposed moral code speak in absolutes of right and wrong, people live in the real world and understand the shadings of gray. They are unwilling to defrock a public figure just because it is alleged that a rigid line has been crossed and a law broken. They have seen too many good men fall because of technical infractions and watched bad men triumph because they acted legally, if unethically and immorally.
In fact, most voters are reluctant ever to oust a public figure over scandal alone. No president, and very few governors, senators, or congressmen, have ever been denied reelection because of scandal. The electorate, in effect, sees a clear division between its duty to elect people who reflect its ideals and public-policy convictions, and the system’s duty to assure that wrongdoers are punished. The voters are saying that if an accuser can prove the facts of a scandal, let the public official be ousted, but until he does, leave him alone. The elected official must play to this larger sense of society’s interests by continuing to govern with vision and foresight even amid the crossfire of scandal.
In weathering scandal, it is important to look closely at the ultimate public reaction to what you are accused of doing. If voters would be truly outraged at what they say you did, you better not have done it. Stealing money is not often forgiven. But in many scandals, voters are willing to cut you slack even if the press and your political opponents are not. Voters were forgiving over the Clinton sex scandals, the travel office firings, and the Iran-Contra affair. The politicians of the other party were outraged, but the voters weren’t particularly exercised. By playing the vitriol of your adversaries against the tolerance of your electorate, you can defeat many scandals. Voters are likely to see the accuser as guilty of partisanship and a personal grudge rather than accuse you of malfeasance.
Where moral scandals are concerned, Americans currently fall into three categories, largely along generational lines. Older voters tend to be socially conservative and harshly judgmental. They see conduct in terms of absolutes and are unforgiving. They are usually irredeemably lost when a public figure faces scandal. Baby boomers tend to be morally relativistic and are less likely to condemn public figures for sex, drugs, or other lifestyle scandals. Generation Xers, voters now in their twenties and thirties, are conservative and do not condone immorality in their public officials. But they are far too concerned with the daily duty of raising their own children to worry much about the moral behavior of the president. For these voters, the key is not the president’s character, but his actions—do they make it easier to raise children properly?
The Clinton political team of 1996 used, as a guide, the idea that “public values offset private scandal.” By speaking up on issues like teen tobacco use, drugs, drunk driving, gun control, education standards, family leave, health coverage, and the like, Clinton regained the loyalty of the Generation X voters who had been turned off by his omnipresent scandals.
Clinton’s political focus on values issues developed in early 1995 when polls showed that he was winning the votes of single people, breaking even among those who were married and childless, and losing among people who were married and lived with children. Clinton’s failure among the latter group was directly related to questions about his morality and character as a result of the daily pounding of scandal. By pushing a public-values agenda, Clinton was able to move ahead among married voters with children despite their continuing doubts about Clinton’s character.
In fighting scandal, the key is not to overreact. President Nixon was not undone by criticism of his war policies. He was destroyed by his overreaction to the criticism. It was his attempts to wiretap reporters, break into the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in search of damaging material, and burglarize Democratic headquarters that led to his resignation.
When scandal comes, presidents are tempted to rely on secret detectives who will dig up dirt on potential opponents and witnesses. Off-the-shelf operatives always seem to have the answers. In the 1992 campaign, former Clinton Chief of Staff Betsey Wright oversaw the operations of detective Jack Palladino. In 1992, the Washington Post reported that Palladino was digging up negative information on women who were rumored to have had sexual affairs with Bill Clinton, with the intent either of discrediting them should they go public with accusations or of cowing them into silence. Directly and through an attorney, the gumshoe got $118,000, including federal matching funds.
It is exactly this sort of overreaction that can kill a candidate or a president.
At the time of this writing, President Clinton has just survived a Senate impeachment trial, not over illicit sex, but over how he handled the scandal. His failure to tell the truth and his desperate efforts to cover his tracks were the basis of the allegations against him.
Most scandals are not so lethal that they need this kind of a defense. The public is broadly tolerant and knows that nobody would be completely clean if their every move, every tax return, every sexual involvement were held up to the light of public scrutiny. Presidents and elected officials at all levels need to trust the sense and perspective of the American people, not the scorched-earth tactics of counterinvestigation and witness intimidation.
The best way to survive a scandal is to let the chips fall where they may and trust the people while doing all you can to make yourself indispensable in the office you
hold.
Chapter 22
The Key Danger: Personality Change
PRESIDENTS SOON FIND that their vision is clouded by a kind of fog that surrounds them. Like most fog, it is caused by a cold front colliding with a warm front. In the case of the White House, the cold front is the icy criticism, cynicism, and vilification to which most presidents are subjected. The warm front is the obsequious flattery that surrounds the president in every corner of the White House and comes from every member of his staff.
When criticism from the outside collides with adulation from the inside, the result is a kind of fog, which beclouds presidential vision. Some presidents are permanently altered by this fog. In some, bitterness, paranoia, and defensiveness overcome their personalities and cripple them as people and as presidents.
The unreal environment of the American presidency can permanently alter all but the most grounded of men or women. The constant security, the mass of servants, the legions of flatterers, and the natural tendency to respond to criticism by drawing closer to those who fawn can change a person beyond recognition. Likely the single greatest danger any president faces is the prospect of a personality change as he soaks in the adoration of those who eat his bread and sing his praises.
History reflects just this kind of personality change in failed presidencies. President Ulysses S. Grant went from a soldier in a tent to a consort of magnates and let them steal the country blind all around him (without getting anything for himself). President Woodrow Wilson went from an astute reformer, skilled at sensing popular changes and catching their wind, to an isolated, brittle, and inflexible moralist as he campaigned for his League of Nations. Herbert Hoover morphed from a dedicated humanitarian feeding millions to an isolated, bankerish aristocrat hidden behind the walls of the presidency. Lyndon Johnson wallowed ever deeper in self-pity until he began to see his own countrymen as adversaries. Once the paternalistic savior of civil rights and poverty, he became an isolated, embattled, and embittered leader. Richard Nixon’s demons took over from his common sense as he felt surrounded, vilified, and misunderstood by the liberal media establishment. Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon all fell prey to the personality distortions that are caused by constant and ongoing exposure to extreme praise from some and extreme criticism from others.
Secure, well-grounded personalities seem to cope better with the presidential environment. Theodore Roosevelt was so imbued with the excitement of the job that it likely never occurred to him to step back and care about the flattery he received from some and the damnation from others. The former was his due and the latter his challenge to overcome. But both were bully good fun.
Franklin Roosevelt’s inner sense, perhaps developed out of his long personal ordeal, seemed never to be scathed by outside events. Only when his 1937 attempt to pack the Supreme Court with new justices failed did he seem to lose his joy and acquire the mask of the persecuted. Even under the strain of ill health and relative old age, he remained what he had called Al Smith in his nominating speech at the 1928 Democratic National Convention—the Happy Warrior.
Harry Truman’s feisty contempt for all critics, and his remarkable self-possession, seemed to suggest that he didn’t much care what his opponents said about him. One can imagine the obscenities with which he likely dismissed his detractors. His victory in 1948, against all predictions, seems to have reinforced this “I could care less what you think” attitude which served as his own personal insulation against paranoia and bitterness.
Eisenhower descended to the presidency from an even more important challenge earlier in his life, when he commanded the Allied forces in Europe during World War II. No decision he ever made as president likely took the same toll on his psyche as the judgment to land on D-day against overwhelming odds. He alone, perhaps, entered the presidency equipped to cope with its special strains on one’s personality.
For Ronald Reagan, one gets the sense that he played the role of president and tended to attribute the criticism he received to the character he played, not to his inner persona. The character called for a friendly, open approach and Reagan played it perfectly, as he was professionally trained to do. Just as the show must go on and an actor must leave his blues in the dressing room, so it seems that Reagan’s studied cheerfulness carried him through his years onstage. Likely he developed the same team approach to his presidency that he had adopted toward the films in which he starred. Rising or falling together, he didn’t take personally the criticism leveled at his films by the reviewers. Let the critics pound the script, the director, the producer, or the other actors. Why would it concern him? After all, he only played the lead.
George Bush, the son of a senator, born to the purple, seems to have been equipped by heredity and background to cope with “the sort of thing” one endures as president. Like a hereditary monarch or a born aristocrat, he seemed accustomed to the unique circumstances of presidential life and insulated against bitterness by a noblesse oblige attitude inculcated from birth. What his heredity did not prepare him for, decades and decades of personal experience at the side of three presidents did. He floated above reproach and took his lumps in stride. While he reportedly became despondent after his defeat, there is no record of paranoia or bitter reproach, just eternal grace and charm in the face of adversity.
Each successful president needs a personal strategy to avoid changing in office. He must map out a way to steer clear of the paranoia, grandiosity, and self-pity that seem to be the hallmarks of a ruined presidency. Above all, a president must enter office with a strong center of gravity and must keep it forceful and intact. He needs the ballast of a strong spirituality and familial grounding, lest he be buffeted by the waves of criticism and adoration that pound on his soul.
In President Clinton’s case, a deep pragmatic insecurity about his political standing, born of his frequent bouts with electoral adversity, keeps him from becoming arrogant amid flattery. His antennae for those who dislike him is so acute that he will single them out of a crowd and focus all his energies on winning over his single critic in a room. With an almost deaf ear to praise, he picks up the slightest vibration of criticism and lets it resonate at his core.
For President Clinton, the haunting memory of how quickly the pomp went away after his 1980 defeat for reelection, after just two years tasting the good life as governor of Arkansas, inoculates him from internalizing the adulation with which he is surrounded. Criticism, too, usually leaves Clinton unchanged. Being his own harshest critic, he usually leaps to all the negative conclusions others voice long before they even find out about the shortcoming.
The more one evaluates the possibilities for personality change in the White House, the more the dichotomy elaborated by James David Barber in his book, Presidential Character, appears relevant. Writing in 1972, and doubtless suffering a hangover from the Johnson and Nixon days, Barber says the possibility of a president turning sullen and paranoid is related to whether or not he likes the job.
Does he seem to experience his political life as happy or sad, enjoyable or discouraging, positive or negative in its main effect? What I am after here is not grim satisfaction in a job well done, not some philosophical conclusion. The idea is this: Is he someone who, on the surfaces we can see, gives forth the feeling that he has fun in his political life? Whether a man is burdened by power or enjoys power, whether he is trapped by responsibility or made free by it, whether he is moved by other people and outer forces or moves them—that is the essence of leadership. By Barber’s standard, FDR, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton would all be positive personalities, relatively resistant to the change in temperament that negative developments so often bring. Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Herbert Hoover would be most vulnerable to a change in attitude and, eventually, in personality as their administrations progressed.
A president would do well to remember two stanzas from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If”:
If you ca
n dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue;
And walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much…
Chapter 23
How to Get Your Staff to Do What You Want
WHEN PRESIDENT HARRY S. TRUMAN pondered how well his successor, General Dwight David Eisenhower, would do in the Oval Office, he shook his head sadly. “He’ll say ‘do this’ and ‘do that’ and nothing will happen. It’s not like the military.”
Even though a president appoints his staff and can generally fire them at will, it is very hard to get them to do what you want them to do, and even harder to stop them from manipulating you.
One reason for the independence of staff is that very few elected officials are entirely free to appoint whomever they choose to staff jobs. Some people have to be appointed to appease political factions or interest groups the politician needs to cultivate. Sometimes, a major financial donor or political leader, called a “rabbi” in the street parlance of ward politics, pushes a person for a staff job. Frequently, a staff position is really an ambassadorship or a liaison between a vital interest group or demographic block and the politician. This divided loyalty makes it all the more difficult to enforce your will on your staff.
Presidents from Abe Lincoln to Bill Clinton have chosen staffs made up of ambassadors to the various factions of their party. As President Lyndon Johnson said, earthily, “I’d rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.”