All Too Human: A Political Education Read online

  We'd survived our first bimbo eruption. The Hamzy episode was a test — of Clinton's character, our campaign's competence, and the media's resistance to tabloid trash. We all passed. Clinton was telling the truth, we defended him aggressively on the facts, and the media ignored the story despite the juicy details. Too bad it was only a drill.

  My reward that night was an appreciative phone call from Hillary and the governor, who thanked me between spoonfuls of mango ice cream from the Menger hotel in San Antonio. This wasn't exactly the job satisfaction I imagined getting from a presidential campaign, but the exhilaration at being shot at and missed was tangible, and I told myself that the situation might have spun out of control if I hadn't been there. This first dustup also planted seeds of indignation and resentment in my psyche against Clinton's accusers and their potential accomplices in the press. I was mirroring the Clintons' mood, absorbing their anger and fear and turning it into my motivation. We weren't about to let “them” steal the campaign. I didn't know where the next charge would come from, but I was ready to fight.

  Over the next month, my combativeness was calmed by rising poll numbers and the absence of dropping shoes. But that artificial sense of security disappeared on January 16 — our first “garbage day.” The Star tabloid was faxing around a story alleging that Clinton had had affairs with five Arkansas women, including Gennifer Flowers, a former lounge singer, and Elizabeth Ward, a former Miss America. The allegations had first been raised in Clinton's 1990 gubernatorial race, when a state employee named Larry Nichols filed a libel suit against Clinton. But the women denied them, the story evaporated, and Clinton won reelection.

  After we landed in Boston that afternoon, I read the just-received Star story to Clinton. Although he said it was false, his manner was less breezy than with Hamzy, more agitated and insistent. But any doubts I had were assuaged when Clinton went on to explain that Nichols and his right-wing allies were out for revenge because Clinton had fired Nichols for using official state phone lines to raise money for the Nicaraguan contras, and when he added that all five women had filed sworn affidavits in 1990 denying the charges. That was all the ammunition I needed: The facts still seemed to be on our side, and Clinton's accuser had a motive. This was a smear campaign.

  The narrative we developed that day was a variation of the Hamzy defense. We wanted to avoid an on-the-record denial if possible, not only because it could create a story but also because if Clinton denied some allegations, his silence about others could be construed as confirmation. Since Clinton had admitted to “problems” in his marriage, we knew there had to be at least one woman out there whose charges he couldn't deny. More likely, many more. So we tried to avoid the trap by attacking the tabloid messenger. Paul cooked up some lines about other Star scoops like the discovery of “alien babies,” and I came up with a no-comment denial: “I'm not going to comment on that tabloid trash.”

  When we arrived at the fund-raiser, a reporter from Fox TV was waiting in the lobby. To me that constituted proof of a conspiracy. The Star and Fox were both owned by ultraconservative Rupert Murdoch. It's a setup. Clinton is a victim. It couldn't be any more clear. Now my initial doubts, which I had partially pushed aside earlier on the plane, were swept away by righteous anger. I seethed as Clinton answered the Fox reporter and blew up when CeCe Connelly of the Associated Press asked Clinton if the Star story was true.

  “You can't do that,” I barked at CeCe. “You're trying to create a story with our response.” Fox TV we could handle, but the prospect of a credible news organization like the AP broadcasting this garbage around the globe was trouble — and it drove me crazy. I went straight to a phone to call John King, the AP's chief political reporter in Washington. “You can't put this crap on the wire,” I said. “Just because it's published in a tabloid doesn't make it news. Before you run with the charges you have a responsibility to check them out yourself.” While I was talking to King, I noticed that Clinton had pulled away with Bruce Lindsey for a hushed conversation on another pay phone across the lobby.

  The AP held off, but Friday's New York Post ran a full account of the Star story under the headline WILD BILL. Another Murdoch paper, more evidence of the right-wing conspiracy at work. The mainstream press still resisted, but it was certainly following the story. Our candidate was the front-runner now, and he was throwing off the scent of scandal. When our van pulled up to the mock-Tudor Sheraton Tara Hotel in Nashua the next day for a health care forum, we were greeted by a pack of reporters, cameras, cords, and boom mikes bigger than anything we'd seen yet in New Hampshire. Our first “clusterfuck.”

  Seeing all those reporters waiting in the snow was both scary and a little thrilling. They weren't there to hear what Clinton had to say on health care, but the fact that so many showed up was proof that we were in the big leagues. “Keep smiling,” I reminded Clinton as we prepared to climb out of the van. “We can't let them think they're getting to us.” Images of Senator Edmund Muskie passed through my head. While defending his wife against a Republican dirty trick, the 1972 Democratic front-runner against Nixon had wiped a tear — or was it just a snowflake? — from his eye. It was the beginning of the end of his campaign.

  Clinton was in no danger of repeating Muskie's mistake. As we walked toward the lobby, a mass of reporters surged toward us. Wearing a smile and sticking with our strategy, Clinton calmly explained that the Star story was both old and untrue. Whatever he was feeling inside, whatever uneasiness I witnessed behind closed doors, Clinton stowed it away before facing the cameras.

  Inside the hotel, two different campaigns were going on simultaneously, separated only by a wall. At the candidates' forum, Clinton held forth on health care. I was out in the lobby with most of the reporters, trying to suppress the scandal that threatened to consume our campaign. Under the gaze of the suits of armor posted by the registration desk, I tried to pick off the journalists one by one to explain why the Star story was not only irrelevant but wrong — and part of a plot.

  My main job now was damage control, the front lines of spin. Not only was I an ersatz defense counsel, I was also learning to deconstruct the text of tabloid stories like a literary sleuth, searching for unsupported statements, hearsay, logical inconsistencies, and, most valuable to us but most difficult to find, charges that could actually be disproved rather than merely disputed. A single demonstrably wrong accusation could call an entire story into question, allowing us to focus attention on the accusers rather than the accused.

  Beating back the first Star story was relatively easy — the sworn affidavits did the real work. Besides, I believed Clinton, and believed even more in what he was trying to do. But I was conflicted in another way. Crisis management was starting to consume my time and define my character. My better side cared about the substance of the campaign, but the competitive warrior in me was more engaged by the street fighting. The pull to be part of the battle felt more urgent than shaping the policies we were trying to advance. I wanted to be in the lobby, not the forum. In the heat of the moment, this impulse was easy to justify. I told myself that if this allegation, or the next one, or the one after that metastasized into a full-blown scandal, the campaign would die — and nobody would ever hear or remember or benefit from anything we proposed on health care or education or the economy. I would also be out of a job.

  What began as a strange, even sordid, way to spend my time soon felt natural. Wake me up in the middle of the night, I could have told you the lies in the Nichols story before I even opened my eyes. I began to think that doing the dirty work was not only necessary but noble, a landmark on the road to greater good. I began to fool myself, because fighting scandals can be fun; the action is addictive.

  But any fun I was having faded fast a week later, when Gennifer Flowers flipped. Another Thursday, another Star story, another garbage day. But this one was more serious. A key witness for the defense was now part of the prosecution — and she said she had tapes. Early that morning, from a pay phone at Nat
ional Airport's private terminal, I made my daily predawn call to Carville.

  “You gotta get to the airport,” I said. “We need you to come to New Hampshire with us.”

  “What's goin' on?”

  “Some woman in Arkansas is claiming she slept with …”

  “Ah shit, George. Is that all?”

  “No, it's bad. You gotta come.”

  James resisted, but he wasn't going to miss this. There hadn't been much for him to do when everything was going so well in December; now we needed his gut. I felt better just having him around. The Cajun in him spoke to the Greek in me. As with Klein, we fed each other's dark side, and I loved just listening to him talk.

  We landed in Manchester in an icy rainstorm and drove straight to the Holiday Inn. Inside was a gaggle of reporters, smaller than the mob scene of the week before but more select — “big feet” like Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal, Jules Witcover of the Baltimore Sun, Curtis Wilkie of the Boston Globe, and James Wooten of ABC News. Seeing them, I was painfully aware that we were poised on the brink of a Big Moment. These reporters were some of the original “boys on the bus.” They'd seen it all up here in Manchester, from McCarthy's peace movement to Muskie's meltdown, from Carter's surprise to Hart's surge, from Romney's “brainwashed” gaffe to Reagan's stolen microphone to Bush's tractor pull to victory over Dole. The New Hampshire primary had been the springboard for a few lucky candidates — and the graveyard for so many more who once seemed promising. We'd either survive now and go on to fight other battles, or the big feet would file our eulogies on deadline, and we'd become just another anecdote in the long lore of New Hampshire.

  As the reporters talked among themselves, I imagined their conversation: “Should we ask him? … Don't we have to? … Hate to, though. … Remember Paul.” In 1987, Paul Taylor of the Post had broken a barrier by asking Gary Hart flat-out if he'd ever committed adultery. After that uncomfortable moment in a crowded room, many reporters and their papers vowed to resist sex stories. But reporting the news is as competitive as running for office, and while established reporters weren't eager to break a story that violated a candidate's privacy, they didn't want to get scooped either. How a candidate handled controversies like this, they also reasoned, was relevant to how he would confront the pressures of the presidency.

  We tried to hustle Clinton up to our suite, where Bruce, James, the governor, and I all read the article at once, trading the pages back and forth. “They Made Love All Over Her Apartment,” read one headline. I winced, but from our perspective, a wilder story was actually better. The more sensational the charges, the less likely they'd be taken seriously.

  Clinton read the piece with a running commentary that picked up speed as he skimmed the paragraphs. Every time he spotted a detail he knew was wrong, he seized on it, even squeaking out a laugh when he found charges he knew we could disprove — like the time Gennifer said they rendezvoused in Dallas. His reaction was rooted in some nervous relief. Whatever had happened between him and Gennifer — and I still didn't know — he could prove that elements of her story were untrue.

  I was happy to make a list of the details that were false, but I didn't press Clinton to say which ones were true. Not knowing made it a bit easier to deal with the press; “I don't know” is often the best defense against a reporter on deadline. But my reluctance to question Clinton further went deeper than that. Reading the second Star story, I couldn't help but assume that something had happened with Gennifer. When Clinton wasn't listening, James and I speculated on exactly what that something might have been: a blow job in a car ten years ago? A one-night stand or two? But I couldn't bear the thought that an old dalliance dredged up by a tabloid would curtail the professional experience of my life, or the promise I saw in Clinton. I wanted to believe that it was all malicious fiction, to see Clinton as he saw himself— the target of unscrupulous enemies who would try to destroy him personally because they opposed his policies. And I needed Clinton to see me as his defender, not his interrogator, which made me, of course, an enabler.

  OK, say he's lying about some stupid one-night stand; it's still not fair for him to have his whole past picked apart. He's already said he didn't have a perfect marriage; what more do they want? And what does it matter — what does that have to do with being president? The tabloids are targeting him to make money; the right-wingers are attacking because they're afraid he'll win and afraid of what he'll do. We can't let them get away with it or they'll never stop.

  By the time we returned to the lobby, I was in a lather. We didn't have the silver bullet of Gennifer's sworn denial anymore, but her story was full of holes, and she did have a motive to lie — the Star was paying her to tell this tale. The year before she had threatened to sue a radio station for mentioning her name in connection with the Larry Nichols allegations. Bruce had called down to Little Rock to get a copy of her previous denial and her lawyer's threat, then gave them to reporters to bolster our contention that her change of heart was a case of “cash for trash.”

  Above all, we couldn't appear to let the story throw us off track. The heart of our strategy was to pursue the peoples' business no matter what obstacles our opponents put in our path.

  First, though, Clinton had to talk to Hillary. She was in the middle of an Atlanta fund-raiser, but he finally reached her from a pay phone off the men's room at the Manchester airport. After a brief conversation, Clinton emerged looking more calm than he had appeared in the suite. That bucked me up too. During those stressful days it was easy to forget that Clinton's problems might go beyond politics. What did all of this mean for his marriage? Or for Chelsea? I wondered what Hillary had said to him, but he didn't volunteer any details. All I knew was that if she felt better, he felt better — and if he felt better, I felt better.

  An ice storm grounded our scheduled flight to a brush factory in Claremont, so we piled into vans for the three-hour drive. As we inched along the icy road, Clinton sat up front, seemingly absorbed in a book called Lincoln on Leadership, a gift from Mario Cuomo. But I'm sure he was keeping an ear tuned to my backseat conversations on the cell phone. I was beating back the story with any reporter who asked, checking in with Carville in Manchester and Wilhelm in Little Rock to see how the scandal looked from there, and talking to Ted Koppel about a possible Clinton appearance on Nightline. Koppel and other network representatives were trying to lure Clinton on the air to address the Star charges, but we didn't want to take that big a risk unless we absolutely had to. When two of the three network news broadcasts that evening made no mention of Gennifer Flowers, we rejected all of the interview requests and returned to Little Rock.

  Our reprieve was short-lived. The next day's papers were filled with stories, and Gennifer scheduled a press conference for Monday. We had seventy-two hours. Clinton retreated to the mansion while the rest of us held one conference call after another to decide what to do. 60 Minutes offered us airtime right after the Super Bowl — the biggest audience of the year. If we accepted, the first thing most Americans would know about Bill Clinton was that he had some association with a lounge singer. But our situation was so serious that the only hope was the media equivalent of experimental chemotherapy. 60 Minutes was strong enough to cure us — if it didn't kill us first. The interview was scheduled to be taped on Sunday morning.

  Across Arkansas, Ricky Ray Rector was awaiting a decision on his fate, but he didn't know it. Convicted of murdering a police officer, Rector had lobotomized himself with a bullet to his brain. Unless Clinton intervened, Rector would be executed that night by lethal injection.

  I spent the evening with Clinton, waiting for the execution, a moment out of time. We stood around the mansion's kitchen island, absently shuffling paperwork that had piled up while the governor was in New Hampshire. But our attention was on the adjoining butler's pantry, where a phone receiver lay overturned on a small table — the open line to the execution chamber. Just in case. A new fact. A last-minute stay from the Supreme Court.
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br />   But that only happens in the movies. The sole drama that night was whether the prison doctors would find a vein in Rector's arm. They called periodically with progress reports, interrupting our discussion on how Clinton had come to support the death penalty after opposing it early in his career. He described how meeting with the families of murder victims had pushed him over, and he told me how he had talked it through with his pastor and mentor W. O. Vaught, who had explained that capital punishment was not a violation of Christian teaching because the original translation of the Ten Commandments prohibited “murder,” not all killing.

  But the stories we tell ourselves rarely match what others see. To Clinton's critics, the switch was pure expedience, especially in Rector's case. What better way to change the subject from personal scandal, what better way to signal that you're not a stereotypical Democrat, than to execute a man, a black man — a man so uncomprehending that he set aside the pie from his final meal for “later”?

  But that night, I saw something else — honest engagement with a difficult dilemma. I told Clinton that I opposed the death penalty because I believe the state should take life only in the active defense of life. We argued over whether it was a deterrent. But I couldn't quarrel with how Clinton reached his decision. Rector's verdict had already been reviewed by a judge, a jury, and two separate hearings of the state's Clemency Review Board. In four terms as governor, Clinton had never overruled the board. Had Clinton broken precedent and spared Rector, I would have been proud, but the devil on my shoulder would have whispered that we were handing the Republicans a huge issue.

  Thoughts of Gennifer faded as we talked and Clinton governed. In a horrible and ironic way, Clinton's kitchen seemed like a sanctuary from the storm of scandal we'd left behind in New Hampshire. Cold comfort for Ricky Ray Rector. But Clinton's stoicism comforted me. Wielding ultimate power made him sad, the appropriate sensibility, I thought, for a statesman sanctioning death.