All Too Human: A Political Education (11 page)

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.”

Which was exactly what Birnbaum had done. But Holmes, like Gennifer Flowers, had changed his story. Now he was saying that he felt Clinton's promise to join the ROTC was merely a pretext to avoid the draft, suggesting that Clinton had manipulated both him and the system. When I read Birnbaum's article early the next morning, I tried hard to offset my natural pessimism.
Holmes is old. Maybe he's confused; maybe it's a misquote; maybe Birnbaum trapped him, twisted what Holmes was trying to say. Why's he turning now? Who got to him?

It was still dark when I walked across the freezing parking lot to the health club next to our hotel. I was working up a sweat on the StairMaster, and working hard to convince myself that the
Journal
article wasn't so bad, when Larry Barrett from
Time
came over to say hello. Barrett is a gruff guy, and no reporter is especially friendly at 6:20
A.M.
after spending the night in a second-rate motel during a New Hampshire winter. “Good morning,” he said, shaking his head. “Looks like you've got some day ahead of you.” There went any illusions I had mustered. If Larry Barrett was getting avuncular on me, we were definitely in trouble.

How should we spin this? Clinton explicitly denied manipulating the system and seemed genuinely puzzled by Holmes's account. None of us knew about Clinton's induction notice — and if he remembered, he wasn't telling. We would certainly point out that Colonel Holmes had changed his version of events. But where Gennifer had changed her story for money, what was driving Holmes? We couldn't attack a veteran who, for all I knew, was also a war hero. So all we could do was try to poke factual holes in Birnbaum's story. But except for failing to mention the fact that Holmes had changed his account, Birnbaum's article was more solid than we knew or could admit.

My age was also a handicap. Later that day, Paul Begala and I faced another media mob at the Sheraton Tara. Any ambivalence reporters may have felt about prying into a candidate's sex life was supplanted on the draft story by a righteous intensity deepened by personal experience. For male reporters around Clinton's age, the draft was a defining moment; how you dealt with it spoke volumes about who you were. Some had served honorably, while others were self-proclaimed experts at evading the selective service or connoisseurs of cover stories told to local draft boards. They knew in their bones that Clinton's good fortune was not a “fluke.”

But those of us born in 1961 came of age in a different America. My class of eighteen-year-olds was the first to register for the peacetime draft. Vietnam was over, and no other war was on the horizon. To a suburban kid with a latent political consciousness, signing up was such a casual procedure that I did it at the post office with a few friends on the way to play golf. The emotional investment of the reporters I encountered was foreign to me, and I could see they weren't putting much stock in anything I had to say. For good reason: Not only did I not really know the facts, I didn't understand their meaning.

Frustration was building on both sides. After fifteen minutes of getting screamed at in the lobby, I finally gave up. “
You
guys don't understand,” I blurted out. “I can't help you on this one. All I cared about in 1969 were the Mets.”

The draft did all the damage Gennifer didn't do. As Clinton would later joke, we dropped “like a turd in a well,” falling to third place in three days. But on the Sunday night we found out, he wasn't in a humorous mood. Pacing around his family room in jeans while Hillary sat at a card table in her sweats, Clinton went on a tirade. “It's that damn middle-class tax cut. It's killing us,” he thundered in a fit of self-delusion.
Grow up. If it weren't for that tax cut, we'd be dead last. That's what people like about you. It's everything else they're sick of
.

But I stayed silent, and Hillary stayed focused. She knew the self-pity would pass if we had a plan. We spent the rest of the night drafting new commercials and a “fight like hell” strategy for the last ten days. The next morning, we flew back to Manchester, lightheaded from lack of sleep but liberated by the prospect of having little more to lose. It was February 10, my thirty-first birthday, and Mark Halperin of ABC News had a present for me.

When we landed in Manchester, he was waiting on the tarmac. Mark had been with our campaign nearly as long as I had, and we were as close to friends as possible given our adversarial roles. The look on his face as he walked my way was all the commentary I needed on what he held in his hands. “Nobody else has this,” he said, giving me a couple of pages. “Read it right away. We're going to need a response.”

Even before the document touched my hands, my eyes took in three details: the Oxford University seal at the top of the first page, the phrase “Dear Colonel Holmes,” and a line I still can't read without getting slightly sick to my stomach: “I want to thank you, not just for saving me from the draft …”

My knees went wobbly; lack of sleep and scandal fatigue were taking their toll.
That's it. We're done
. I told Mark we'd get back to him, although I had no idea what we would say. But my overdeveloped damage control instincts kicked in immediately.
The letter's a fake
, I decided as I took it over to Clinton.
The Republicans are at it again. They're doing to us what they did to Muskie
.

That had to be it. The alternative was too grim.

Inside the terminal, Paul, James, Bruce, Clinton, and I squeezed into a small men's room. Hillary marched in right behind us. For a minute or two we silently passed the pages back and forth. Hillary spoke first. “Bill, this is
you!
I can hear you saying this.”

So much for the dirty-trick defense. So much for my fantasy of making the Republicans pay for every nasty act from Watergate to Willie Horton. Hillary not only authenticated the letter, she seemed moved by it — misted by a nostalgic memory of the Bill Clinton she fell in love with across the stacks at the Yale Law Library.

You guys can relive Woodstock some other time
. Again, the generation gap. “This must have been what they were all going through in 1969,” Paul told me later, “while you and I were asking if we could stay up late to watch
Mod Squad
.” The two of us were convinced that the press would use the letter to prove that Clinton dodged the draft. James had a different take. “This letter is our friend,” he said. “If you read the whole letter, you end up thinking, ‘I wouldn't mind having a president who could write a letter like that when he was twenty-one.’”

We both turned out to be right. But at that moment I was certain we were holding the political equivalent of a death warrant. Although it was a thoughtful letter that expressed both respect for the military and principled opposition to the Vietnam War, Clinton didn't post it until after he had received a high number in the draft lottery. At a minimum, it suggested that Clinton was stringing Holmes along and holding on to his coveted ROTC slot until after he was certain he wouldn't be drafted. I also couldn't believe that we hadn't known about the letter, and just wanted the whole ordeal to be over.
How long will people give us the benefit of the doubt? How much of this stuff can they take? How much more can I take?