All Too Human: A Political Education Read online

  Copyright © 1999 by George Stephanopoulos

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Originally published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company, 1999

  Hachette Book Group, USA

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com.

  First eBook Edition: August 2008

  ISBN: 978-0-316-04192-8

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  1 BACKGROUND CHECK

  2 BECOMING A TRUE BELIEVER

  3 HEARING HOOFBEATS

  4 HIGHER UP, DEEPER IN

  5 OPENING DAY

  6 BUNGEE JUMPING WITHOUT A ROPE

  7 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

  8 DOING THE JOB

  9 HOOFBEATS REDUX

  10 THE WEEKEND I WAS HALDEMAN

  11 THE LONGEST SUMMER

  12 CRASH

  13 MY DINNER WITH DICK

  14 A TALE OF TWO SPEECHES

  15 ENTENTE CORDIALE

  16 GETTING OUT

  EPILOGUE: ON MY OWN

  NOTE ON SOURCING

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ACCLAIM FOR GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS'S ALL TOO HUMAN

  TO MY PARENTS

  PROLOGUE

  Days after the Monica Lewinsky story broke in January 1998, I had a dream about President Clinton: I had returned to the White House after a year away, and I was sitting in my usual chair just next to the president's desk in the Oval Office, prepping him for an interview with CBS News. Seems like old times, I thought, it's good to be back. But moments before the interview was scheduled to start, we got word of some vague but terrible tragedy. The whole country would soon know about it, and the president would need to respond. I pulled out my notepad and struggled to scratch out appropriate words of consolation and hope. Nothing came, but it didn't matter. Clinton did what he always seemed to do so well at times like this, saying exactly the right thing, in exactly the right way. He's still got it — best politician I've ever seen. Then I walked across the Oval, opened a door, and found myself in a pocket-sized room — windowless and bare, except for nude pinups of Monica pasted on its walls.

  I was struggling in my dream with the Clinton I loved and the Clinton I feared, the president I served and the man I didn't want to see. As I write these words, a popular president presiding over an America prosperous and at peace has been impeached. Clinton's lawyers are skillfully defending him in a Senate trial against the charge that he committed perjury and obstructed justice to conceal his sexual affair with a twenty-two-year-old intern. The battle is all but over, and I'm still mystified by the Clinton paradox: How could a president so intelligent, so compassionate, so public-spirited, and so conscious of his place in history act in such a stupid, selfish, and self-destructive manner?

  I don't know how to answer that question, and I never thought I'd have to try. When I first considered writing about my time with President Clinton, I envisioned a political memoir shaped like a human comedy — a story of good, talented but fallible people acting on Vaclav Havel's hope that politics “can be not only the art of the possible, especially if ‘the possible’ includes the art of speculation, calculation, intrigue, secret deals, and pragmatic maneuvering, but that it can also be the art of the impossible, namely, the art of improving ourselves and the world.” I wanted to write a candid story that neither shied away from showing the “art of the possible” nor surrendered to the cynical notion that there is nothing more to know about politics. I hoped to explain how an ambitious and idealistic president of uncertain personal character grew in office — how he outsmarted his enemies, out-hustled his adversaries, and overcame his failings and those of his team to help our country and achieve what no Democrat had done since Roosevelt — two full terms in office and a successful presidency. I believed it would be a story with a happy ending.

  But the plot took a turn.

  The events of the last year have changed the shape of the story I set out to write. It can no longer have a truly happy ending. I have done my best to recount accurately my thoughts and feelings and the events as I perceived them at the time, but I couldn't avoid the filter of the president's affair with Monica and its aftermath. Throughout 1998 and early 1999, I lived in two separate Clinton worlds: the past I had experienced from the inside, and the present I was observing from the outside. As the stories unfolded, one on my word processor and the other on the news, I came to see the connections more clearly, and was tempted at times to think of the Clinton story as a tragedy. That doesn't seem quite right either. For all his talent, Clinton lacks the grandeur of a tragic hero. His presidency, however, does have the momentum of classic drama. The roller-coaster ride from Clinton's improbable election in 1992 to his impeachment in 1998 is a narrative stocked with dozens of characters, hundreds of decisions, and a thousand coincidences — all driving toward a conclusion that feels somehow, sadly, inevitable.

  This book tells my part of the Clinton drama. It covers two presidential campaigns and four years in the White House. From the day I met him in September 1991 to the day I left the White House in December 1996, he was the dominant figure in my life. Our relationship was intense, intimate at times, but not a personal friendship. The Clinton I know is the Clinton I show in this book: the politician and president at work, a complicated man responding to the pressures and pleasures of public life in ways I found both awesome and appalling.

  As I wrote and rewrote, I came to see how Clinton's shamelessness is a key to his political success, how his capacity for denial is tied to the optimism that is his greatest political strength. He exploits the weaknesses of himself and those around him masterfully, but he taps his and their talents as well. I have not lost my conviction that President Clinton has done a great deal to advance our country, and that he has acted out of profound patriotism and concern for others. For every reckless and expedient act, there are others of leadership and vision. I don't know how President Clinton will react to the portrait presented here, but I have tried to provide a fair representation of his many-faceted personality.

  I have also tried to show the modern White House at work. For most of my tenure, I held a relatively amorphous job that was an amalgam of political troubleshooter, public-relations adviser, policy expert, and crisis manager. Having vaguely defined responsibilities was often frustrating, but it allowed me to participate in a wide range of White House decisions: from preparing a budget to writing presidential jokes, from helping to choose a Supreme Court nominee to smothering another “bimbo eruption,” from passing legislation to preparing for press conferences, from organizing a peace ceremony to advising on military action. So much of the excitement of being a White House aide comes from having the chance to be a witness to history, and to feel like you're making it. I hope my account will be a useful tool for presidential historians.

  In the end, however, this is neither a biography of Clinton nor a comprehensive history of his first term. It's a more personal narrative, the story of what happened to me in the White House — what I saw and did, how I felt and reacted to the pressures and pleasures of public life. Theodore White once wrote that “closeness to power heightens the dignity of all men.” I now know that's not always true. I know how often I let my own ambition, insecurity, and immaturity get the best of me, and I have tried to be honest about that as well. But I also know that even having the chance to make the mistakes I made was a tremendous privilege.
Because for all the compromises and disappointments, for all the days when my job felt like an exquisite jail sentence, working in the White House was the greatest adventure of my life.

  — Morningside Heights

  January 31, 1999

  1 BACKGROUND CHECK

  On the Saturday before Christmas 1992, I was feeling lucky. A few weeks earlier, with my help, Bill Clinton had been elected president — and soon I'd be working for him in the White House. But first I had to visit the Rose Law Firm. If you've read John Grisham, you've got a pretty good idea what Rose Law was like — Little Rock's version of “The Firm.” Not that anyone's ever been murdered there (as far as I know), but its pedigree, power, and aura of buttoned-down mystery had made it a force in Arkansas for more than a century. It was also Hillary Rodham Clinton's firm.

  All that made me a little nervous as I walked through the empty streets of Little Rock. I knew my background check was just a formality and believed I had nothing to hide. Still, I couldn't help worrying as I crossed the parking lot and, as instructed, let myself in the back door.

  Waiting for me in the conference room was Webster L. Hubbell, a Little Rock legend — football star, former mayor, former judge, law partner of Hillary, golf partner of Bill. We had met only once before, and I thought of him as part of a pair. Webb and Vince. Hubbell and Foster. Vince Foster was Hillary's other close partner, and closer friend. Upright, quiet, and rail thin, Vince reminded me of Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Webb looked more like the linebacker he once was. A massive man with a beefy grip and thick lips that made you forget there was a brain behind all that brawn.

  I had often heard their names invoked by the Clintons, as in, “I spoke to Webb, and he thinks … ” Or “Vince isn't sure about that. …” It was a way to end the argument. Webb and Vince meant influence, integrity, and judgment. We lived in parallel but separate worlds. They were Little Rock; I was Washington. They were lawyers; I was an operative. They were friends; I was staff.

  “This shouldn't be too difficult,” Hubbell assured me as we shook hands across the table. First, he asked the basics: where I went to school and whom I had worked for. Then more serious stuff: Had I ever been arrested? Any money problems — potential conflicts or large debts? Unlike, say, Bob Rubin (the Wall Street investment banker and incoming head of the National Economic Council), who probably needed half a law firm to vet his portfolio, I had no stocks or bonds. My only investments were a mortgaged condo in the Adams Morgan section of Washington and a small 401K from my work on Capitol Hill. The financial review took about a minute.

  “Drugs?”

  “About what you'd expect,” I replied. “A little marijuana in high school and college, but I haven't touched it in years. Nothing else.”

  Then came a couple of oblique questions about my “social life,” designed to give me an opportunity — if it were true — to admit to being gay or the secret father of a small child. We both knew where Webb was going. He was circling in on the one big question. I had been summoned here so that this man, who, symbolized probity and proximity to the next president, could lean over the table, look me in the eye, and say, “Now George, I want you to think hard about this. Is there anything at all, anywhere in your past, that could ever come back to embarrass the president?” From now on, everything I said or did would reflect on Clinton and affect our mission, even if it happened long ago. The president's welfare had to be my first concern; everything else came second. In return, I would get to be part of something bigger than I ever imagined.

  “Well,” I began, “you should know I'm the subject of a criminal investigation by the FBI.” Republican complaints had forced a probe to see if I had conspired with Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh to damage the Bush campaign. I hadn't, but maybe it would lead to something else — like the time I tried to prove that Dan Quayle was a drug dealer.

  In the fall of 1988, when the Dukakis campaign was going down the tubes, I was part of a “rapid response” team doing a remarkably ineffectual job of rebutting Republican attacks. But late in the race, a federal prisoner named Brett Kimberlin (aka the Speedway Bomber) was telling reporters he once sold drugs to Dan Quayle, and that Quayle might have sold some himself. A rumor reached me that years earlier, a grand jury examining the evidence had covered it up under pressure from prosecutors close to Quayle's family. If I could find the disgruntled grand jurors and convince them to talk, we'd win — and I'd be a hero.

  So I bought a plane ticket to Indianapolis and holed up in the airport Holiday Inn with photocopied courthouse records. After a day of cold-calling people who had no idea what I was talking about, I knew I was on a fool's errand. My sleuthing wasn't illegal, just criminally incompetent and a little slimy. I suppose we would have used the information if it were true, but how naive and desperate could I have been to believe that I would uncover a last-minute bombshell that every news organization in America had missed? That was embarrassing — maybe not to President-elect Clinton, but certainly to me.

  After racking my brain looking for trouble, I even told Webb about the night before I left for college, when I went out egging cars with my high school buddies one last time. Not much to report or worry about. Nothing in my background would keep me out of the White House.

  I was born the second child of a solid Greek family in Fall River, Massachusetts, and baptized George after my grandfather, a missionary priest who left the Peloponnesian village of Neohorio in 1938 for Montana to minister to Greek immigrants scattered across America's west. His job was to make sure the members of the flock kept their faith as they sought their fortunes, to remind them of who they were and where they came from. More than a place of worship, the immigrant church was a piece of home. A year after his arrival, just before the war, my grandfather was joined by his family. The oldest was a five-year-old boy they called Lamby, Bobby, who would also grow up to be a priest — and my father.

  A boy when he sailed from Patras in 1912, my mother's father worked on the railroads from Ellis Island to Salt Lake City before settling in Rochester, Minnesota, where he opened a shoe repair shop. Only after he made his start did he return to his village, Kalithea, to bring the teen bride chosen for him back to America. When he died in 1974, his business was the oldest in town, and his fellow merchants marched down Main Street in his memory. But he was most proud of the fact that all five of his children, including my mom, Nikolitsa, had attended college.

  My parents met at a church youth convention in Minneapolis, where my mom was studying public relations at the University of Minnesota. Dad was on a field trip from seminary, and there was probably no better place to meet a woman willing to become a presbytera, literally “priest's wife” — a word that captures the idea that everybody in the family of a priest has a responsibility to the family of the church. The presbytera is a kind of first lady. She has an official role as hostess and helpmate but can't let people get the idea she's assuming authority that isn't hers. The daughters, like my sisters, Stacy and Marguarite, sing in the choir and teach Sunday school. The sons, like my brother, Andrew, and me, become altar boys.

  I was only four when I first served. Going to the office with my dad meant going to church. He would slap a little Mennen on my cheeks after he shaved, and we would head to the place only men could go — the altar, an inner sanctum separated from the rest of the congregation by a screen of icons. Often it was just the two of us back there. I would watch him whisper prayers as he vested himself in satin robes. Then I would hold out my own robe for him to bless, and the service would begin.

  My first job was carrying a candle, making sure to hold it straight without staring at the flame. Once a year an altar boy forgot, hypnotizing himself and fainting to the floor. Responsibilities increased with age and size: Bigger boys took lanterns, and the biggest carried the cross. My favorite job was tending the censer. After placing a pebble of incense on the charcoal in its gold bowl, I got to walk backward, waving the perfumed smoke in
my father's path as he carried the bread and wine around the altar.

  I soon became a reader as well. When I was six, the bishop came to my father's new parish in Rye, New York, and placed his stole on my head before clipping a bit of my hair to symbolize my servitude to the church. “Axios,” the bishop proclaimed. “He is worthy.” Axios echoed back from the pews — a word weighted with expectation, a word I would hear again if I were ordained. On Sundays after that I would read the Epistle or recite the creed, remembering to speak “loud and slow” — the instructions my dad silently mouthed to me before I faced the congregation. At nine, I appeared on my biggest stage yet. Archbishop Iakovos opened our church convention with a liturgy at Lincoln Center, and I was chosen to stand by his side and hold his staff. Monday's New York Daily News ran a picture of the bearded prelate in a tall gold crown next to a small boy with bangs and hands clasped in front of him. For a day, I was a star.

  But most of my work was backstage. Maybe one reason I've never been queasy about the grubby work of politics, the mechanics of running campaigns and making laws, is that I spent so many of my early days behind the altar screen, where mystery is rooted in the mundane, where faith and duty are one, where my father's prayers were my cues. Agios o Theos. … Get the candles. Wisdom, let us attend. … Lanterns and cross for the Gospel. No one who is bound by carnal desires is worthy to approach. … Light up the censer and line up the other boys. The doors, the doors … Read the creed. Our Father … Heat the water for Holy Communion. O Lord, who blesses those who bless thee … Cut the bread.

  Behind the screen, I learned to stay composed in the presence of power and was swayed by the illusion of indispensability. After all, the miracle of transubstantiation couldn't happen that Sunday if I forgot to boil water on the hot plate in the room off the altar. Altar boys are as much like young operatives as little monks. We serve the priest so he can save everyone else, doing the little things that need to be done. Sometimes I got lost in the details, lost sight of the spiritual essence of the service we were producing, but I hoped that doing the right things in the right place at the right time would help do some good and save some souls, including my own, even when I was just doing my job.