All Too Human: A Political Education Read online

  60 Minutes would be taped Sunday at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Boston. After a spirited Saturday-night rally in Manchester, we gathered at the hotel. Executive producer Don Hewitt and correspondent Steve Kroft showed us the room with the fireplace where the interview would take place. The Clintons didn't say much, just took it all in with clinical eyes.

  Up in our suite, our team was on edge. All of the regulars were there: Carville, Lindsey, Paul Begala, Dee Dee Myers, Stan Greenberg, and our media consultants, Mandy Grunwald and Frank Greer. Susan Thomases also flew in, along with Tommy Caplan, Clinton's college roommate and erudite campaign companion.

  Cracks were starting to develop in our normally cohesive group. Who would lead the prep? Whose advice would be heard and followed? Who really knew what they were doing and had the Clintons' best interest at heart — the friends or the staff? Mandy was supplanting Frank on the strength of her star turn on Nightline a few nights earlier. I was insinuating myself as gatekeeper and prep coordinator. James paced around the edge of the room and waited for the power that would flow his way. Handling crises like this was the reason he was hired. Susan watched us all, including Clinton, with a wary eye. Her client was Hillary.

  Ordering room service broke some of the tension. Hillary reminisced about how this was her ultimate childhood luxury, and we talked about what we were going to order as if it were the most interesting topic in the world. Hillary even let her campaign-bloated husband have a cheeseburger, but she kept an eye on his intake of fries. All of this was just a way of avoiding the question at hand: What were the Clintons going to say — and how were they going to say it?

  Clinton insisted that the Flowers story was untrue, so any admission of a sexual affair with Gennifer was off the table. But we discussed whether he should make a general admission of adultery — explicitly, unequivocally, using that word instead of a euphemism like “problems in our marriage.” Initially, some of us, including me, thought that he should. Better to be straight, I argued; you earn extra credit for candor. I also believed that a concession like that would, at some level, make Clinton's denial of Gennifer's story more credible. But I backed off fast. Both Clinton and Hillary were adamant about not using the A word, arguing that it was too grating, too harsh, too in-your-face to the viewers at home. And with Gennifer's press conference the next day, any explicit admission of adultery — no matter how it was couched — would appear to confirm her story, and call the past denials into question.

  Once the two threshold questions were pushed aside with our empty plates, Mandy and James took control of the meeting and focused us on our goals: to appear candid about past marriage troubles, to define character as a constant struggle for personal improvement, and to confront the country with the question of whether the presidential campaign should be about one candidate's past or the whole country's future. I synthesized the strategy in hand-lettered notes that I gave to Clinton when Hillary adjourned the meeting around one A.M.:

  •YOU'RE FORTUNATE, RATHER THAN AGGRIEVED, YOU REALIZE IT'S A PRIVILEGE THAT THE SON OF A POOR, SINGLE MOTHER FROM ARKANSAS CAN RUN FOR PRESIDENT.

  •YOU'RE SAD ABOUT GENNIFER, NOT ANGRY. YOU DON'T KNOW WHY SHE CHANGED HER STORY, BUT YOU'RE NOT GOING TO BE DIVERTED.

  •USE YOUR FAMILY AS A METAPHOR FOR CHARACTER. YOU'VE HAD PROBLEMS IN YOUR MARRIAGE, YOU'VE FACED THEM, YOU'VE WORKED THROUGH THEM, AND YOU'RE COMING OUT STRONGER THAN EVER.

  After the Clintons left, the rest of us went up to Stan's room for a drink. No one could sleep anyway. With the gallows humor and guilty pleasure that accompany being in the middle of the action without really being in the middle of the fire, we talked about the day ahead and whether we'd even be together a week from now. For us, no matter how tomorrow turned out, it would be a war story, the day we bet a whole campaign on a single interview.

  But what about the Clintons? Alone in their room now, what are they discussing? Is this what they bargained for? Was there a deal between them? These questions swirled through my head and seeped into our conversation. I admired their ability to sacrifice privacy and pride for the chance to do some good — but wondered if I should be appalled. Is it about power's potential, or just power? When is the price too high? Mostly, though, I just felt sorry for them. I had a hard time talking to my parents about my girlfriend. Tomorrow the whole country would be discussing their marriage.

  Around eight the next morning, I went to Carville's room and found him screwing his fists in his eyes to wipe away nervous tears. Mandy was there too, working out her anxiety with cigarettes and talk We all knew that last night's prep wasn't crisp, that we had wasted too much time on side conversations and unnerved the principals with too much conflicting advice. Clinton is a small-d democrat; he takes counsel as it comes. A good quality, but not when you're in a crisis and the clock is ticking. We knew these last few hours had to be different, more focused and disciplined.

  I walked across the hall to get the Clintons to agree. Hillary opened the door with a wan look, and as I slipped into the room she rested her hand on my shoulder for an extra second. Clinton's face looked like a soft, pale stone.

  “How do you want to handle this morning?” I asked them. “Another big meeting, or would you prefer to do this with just a couple of us?” A loaded question, but I was leading them where I thought we needed to go and giving back what I thought I read in their expressions. They didn't want to hurt their friends or pick and choose among their advisers. But Hillary also knew that another bull session would just heighten the tension. Instead, the two of them crossed the hall to James's room, where we spent a few quiet minutes reviewing the strategy. But there wasn't really much to say. They were on their own.

  The rest of the team was down the hall. They were irritated at my going behind their backs, but I told myself I was doing what the Clintons wanted and needed — a conviction strengthened by my desire to inhabit the smallest ring of the inner circle. Any jealousy I created was exacerbated when I followed the Clintons into the interview. The negotiated ground rules allowed one staffer in the room, and James and Mandy agreed it should be me. They trusted me not to freelance if Clinton had a last-second question or qualm, and he had become accustomed to having me around in moments like this. Whatever I felt inside, I could be relied on to stay calm and anticipate his needs. From my seat behind the camera, I would also serve as a human TelePrompTer, a visual reminder of our collective advice. Clinton would see me and remember the talking points I'd handed him.

  Twice during the interview, Don Hewitt called a break and emerged from the control room. He told the Clintons how he'd made John Kennedy president by producing the debates in 1960 and said he could do the same for them. Like a director coaxing his leading couple, he crouched down in front of the couch and whispered, “Just say yes or no. Yes or no, and we'll move on to other things.” I shook my head in slow motion. We had to stick to our strategy, not Hewitt's.

  Kroft kept pushing, but Clinton denied Gennifer's story and refused to directly acknowledge adultery. He admitted to causing “pain” in his marriage and added that most Americans would “get it.” And most viewers did. People heard that Clinton hadn't always been faithful, but they also saw a talented and idealistic couple who were committed to their marriage and the country's future. The performance was infused with the message of the Sperling breakfast from months before: What's past is past; it's time to move on. On the plane to Little Rock that night, we all thought the interview had gone about as well as we could have hoped. We had given it our best shot, and everything was out in the open now.

  The next afternoon, three hundred and fifty reporters showed up at Gennifer's press conference, and CNN was broadcasting live. I pleaded with them to check out Gennifer's story before putting her on the air, but they ignored me — in retaliation, I was then convinced, for our decision to pull the Clintons from CNN Newsmaker Saturday and put them on 60 Minutes. A bunch of us gathered around the television in my office to watch.

  It didn't start out so badly
. Gennifer's red suit and dark-rooted hair sent exactly the right message. A question about Clinton and condoms from Stuttering John of the Howard Stern show helped make the event seem like more of a circus than a serious political scandal. Gennifer even said she'd been approached by Republicans to tell her story. There's an opening. Maybe we can turn this into an “anatomy of a smear” story instead of a morality play about Clinton's character.

  Then came the tapes — scratchy but apparently authentic recordings of Clinton and Gennifer talking in intimate tones about their personal relationship and the presidential race. Hearing Clinton's unmistakably husky voice felt like picking up the phone to catch your girlfriend whispering with another man. My whole torso tightened as I was hit by a wave of nausea, doubt, embarrassment, and anger. Mostly anger.

  He lied. Even if he didn't, what's he doing talking to her in the middle of the campaign? That must have been her Clinton and Lindsey called from that pay phone in Boston. How could he have been so stupid? So arrogant? Did he want to get caught? How come he let me hang out there? Never said a word that whole ride to Claremont while I swore to reporters her story was false — just sat there, pretending to read Lincoln.

  As the senior staffer in the room, I kept my anger inside to avoid demoralizing the interns and volunteers. This was a new challenge: I was used to keeping calm to convince my bosses they could count on me. Now I had to be strong for the kids who looked up to me. I tried to identify hopeful signs. The conversation did sound stilted; her questions were leading — maybe the tapes were doctored? It's a setup. Later investigations by CNN and KCBS would show that the tapes were “selectively edited,” but there was no getting around the fact that by talking to her on the phone, Clinton had put everything we worked for at risk.

  When Gennifer finished, Rahm Emanuel, David Wilhelm, and I retreated to a private office. We didn't know what was true anymore or what was going to happen. All we could trust right now was each other. There comes a time in every campaign when even a candidate you admire becomes your worst enemy. As if by design, each of us in turn expressed our disgust while the other two bucked him up. Tag team venting.

  It worked, and as the night passed, we were back to fighting for Clinton even more fiercely. A dynamic had already started that would repeat itself many times in the years ahead — one explained well by Reinhold Niebuhr: “Frantic orthodoxy,” he wrote, “is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are not sure that we are doubly sure.” I now had doubts about Clinton, had seen his flaws up close, which caused me to focus even more intently on his strengths and believe even more fervently in his ideas. I didn't want to throw away what he could achieve as president and what I could achieve by his side, and I didn't want our enemies to win. They'd stop at nothing to defeat him, so nothing would stop me from defending him. Now I was a true true believer.

  Hillary rallied all of us that night with a conference call from Minneapolis, foreshadowing another pattern that would be repeated again on a larger stage. If she was standing by her man, then so were we. A Boston TV poll showed that Clinton was still leading in New Hampshire, and a national survey on Nightline found that 80 percent of the country thought Clinton should stay in the race.

  We had survived to fight another day.

  Colonel Gene Holmes was the Gennifer Flowers of the draft. In 1969, he was the ROTC commander at the University of Arkansas. After a year at Oxford, Clinton returned to Fayetteville, enrolled in law school, and sought to fulfill his obligation for military service by joining the ROTC unit commanded by Holmes. Later that summer, Clinton changed his mind and returned to Oxford, but avoided military service by drawing a high number in the lottery that determined who would be drafted. This is what I knew about Clinton and the draft when I signed up. What I didn't know was what had not been reported: that Clinton's version picked up the story after he had received an induction notice from his local draft board. In 1969, Clinton gamed the selective service system — and got lucky.

  The full story of Clinton and the draft is an anxiety-ridden tale of manipulation and mendacity similar to thousands of others from the 1960s. But as an aspiring Arkansas politician in the 1970s, Clinton didn't want to be defined by his unflattering draft history. So instead of telling the whole story, he pointed anyone who asked about the draft to Colonel Holmes, who as late as October 1991 assured reporters that he had dealt with Clinton “just like I would have treated any other kid.”

  Holmes's quote seemed like all I needed to know when I signed up. The fact that Clinton hadn't served in Vietnam was likely to come up in the campaign; but like adultery and marijuana, military service was a topic on which the political establishment was setting new standards. Adultery was survivable if it was a discrete event in the past. Smoking pot was acceptable if you stopped in college and professed not to like it very much. Failing to serve in the military was not disqualifying as long as you didn't “pull strings.” You didn't have to be a war hero, but you couldn't be seen as a draft dodger.

  Of course Kerrey's campaign would get a boost from his. background. There was nothing we could do about that. We couldn't win the Vietnam issue; we just had to avoid losing — and change the subject. That was our strategy in early December 1991, when Dan Balz began working on a joint profile of Clinton and Bob Kerrey. “Bookends from the Vietnam generation,” Balz called them, referring to the unavoidable contrast between the war hero and the civilian.

  Balz's interview with Clinton was a few minutes squeezed into a ride to National Airport — a dumb scheduling move on our part given the sensitivity of the subject. I rode up front while Clinton and Balz talked in the back. Just as we reached the airport, Clinton told Balz that the fact that he wasn't drafted in the summer of 1969 was a “fluke.”

  Uh-oh. Where did that come from? When discussing a topic you want to go away, boring is better; Clinton knew that. Fluke was too provocative a word, almost a taunt. I didn't know all the details of Clinton's draft history, but I doubted it fit the word fluke. Balz was skeptical too. “At a minimum,” he wrote, Clinton “was lucky to have survived more than a year classified 1-A.” Balz was letting his readers know that Clinton's explanation wasn't persuasive, and sending his colleagues in the press a signal to dig deeper.

  The better we did, the more scrutiny Clinton's draft history would get. Two days after Christmas, over mansion fare of pimento cheese-spread sandwiches on white bread with corn chips on the side, about twenty of us sat in the Clintons' basement to review the year ahead. When we got to potential problems, I brought up the draft. “We need some tighter answers,” I said, recalling the car ride with Balz. “It's going to come back.”

  You would have thought I had called Clinton a draft dodger. Hillary spoke first, and she was incensed. “Bill's not going to apologize for being against the Vietnam War!” Ignited by her intensity, Clinton launched into a red-faced tirade against the war and said he'd rather lose the race than say it was right.

  That wasn't my point, of course. But in trying to look tough and smart in front of my colleagues, I had painted the Clintons into a corner. They didn't have to blow up, but I had made a rookie's mistake: Pros don't raise sensitive subjects in big meetings. Later, Wilhelm, Carville, and I approached Clinton when he was alone. “We're not saying you have to apologize,” I said. “But we need the same information our opponents have.” Clinton nodded, and we hired a research firm to review his draft history, but it was already too late.

  Flash forward six weeks to Wednesday, February 5. We were still in the lead despite the Gennifer story, but Clinton had come down with a bad flu. So we canceled our schedule for the day and put him to bed in a New Hampshire motel. As he rested in the next room, I returned a phone call from Jeff Birnbaum of the Wall Street Journal. The Post-it note read “Clinton and the draft.”

  The moment Jeff answered the phone, I knew we were in trouble. He wasn't interested in having a conversation or in getting a feel for how our side assessed the campaign and our opponents. He had specific
questions about when Clinton joined the ROTC and whether he enrolled in law school in the summer of 1969, and he didn't want to have a debate with me on whether that information was relevant to voters in the winter of 1992. He didn't want me to change the subject or stall for time. You could almost hear Joe Friday coaching him off-line: Just the facts, George. I'm not in the market for spin today.

  Jeff's manner was a tip-off, what professional poker players call a “tell.” Reporters often clam up when they think they have a big fish on the line. Their counterspin techniques may include holding off calling until just before deadline to deny you the chance to learn more about their angle or question the credibility of their sources. Sometimes they worry that if you know what they're up to, you'll try to blunt the edge of their story by providing them with new information that muddies their lead. Or that you'll release the same information they're after to the competition, which deprives them of their scoop while making you appear candid.

  I don't blame Jeff for being circumspect. Had any of those legitimate spin options been available to me, I would have used them in a minute. But I didn't have much to tell him. When I went into Clinton's room, he was flat on his back and too groggy to get worked up. Even so, he was fairly convincing about having nothing to hide — in part because I wanted to be convinced, in part because he had convinced himself over time that his relatively benign memory of traumatic events a generation ago was exactly how it happened, in part because the research we had commissioned hadn't turned up anything troublesome beyond what had already been in the papers. “I have no idea what he could be getting at,” Clinton wheezed through his congestion. “Tell him to call Gene Holmes.”