All Too Human: A Political Education (12 page)

Our next stop was the Stonyfield Farms yogurt factory in Londonderry, where Jim Wooten would do the interview we had promised Halperin. As Clinton toured the factory floor, I stayed in the back room, where I lay on the floor feeling sorry for myself. Staring up at the ceiling, I felt as if I were back on the high school wrestling mat, just before a match against someone who would probably kick my butt.
At least it will be over soon. We'll be knocked out of the race in eight days, and here's where it all began to end. On the cold stone floor of a yogurt factory, waiting for the final interview. Happy birthday
.

Begala was as bleak as I was. We tried to prep Clinton, but there was really nothing we could say. Only he knew what had happened and why. Wooten taped a short interview before turning off the camera and asking for five minutes alone with Clinton. Paul, Halperin, and I watched them talk through a window in the hall, trying to read their lips for any sign of how it was going. Expecting the worst, I was certain that Wooten was just doing his best to soften the blow of a killer story. Neither of them said a word after they shook hands, and we parted company with Wooten. But thirty minutes later, Halperin beeped me. The story was off. We had a stay of execution.

But not for long. The next day,
Nightline
also had the letter. I was in a van with Paul and James when my pager vibrated with a call from Ted Koppel. We pulled off the road at a nearby hotel to find a pay phone. No luck, so in what seemed like an essential extravagance, we rented a room. The clerk raised an eyebrow but must have decided that what three consenting adults did in the privacy of a paid-up room was none of his business. We passed him a credit card and made the call.

I asked Koppel how he had received the letter. “It's my impression it came from the Pentagon,” he replied.
The Pentagon? Then maybe the Republicans do have something to do with this. Isn't it illegal to rifle through someone's draft records? Do we have enough evidence to actually make the charge? Or is Koppel trying to trick us into coming on?
Within fifteen minutes we were back on the road and pumped up again by the prospect that Clinton really was the victim of a dirty trick.

We made the Pentagon charge, but it didn't pan out. And Clinton went on
Nightline
. Answering the questions was our only hope. Koppel first asked Clinton if he wanted to read the letter on the air, but we weren't that dumb. A clip of Clinton reading one damaging line out of context would be replayed endlessly. Instead, Koppel read the letter and gave Clinton the whole show to explain himself. Clinton was masterful — calm about the past, impassioned about the future, with just the right degree of indignation about the kind of issues that ought to matter in electing a president. In the final minute of the show he squeezed in a sterling sound bite: “Ted, the only times you've invited me on this show are to discuss a woman I never slept with and a draft I never dodged.”

Even had I known for certain then that Clinton's closing statement wasn't really true, I would have had a hard time admitting it to myself. I was in battle mode, and nearly anything we did, I believed, was justified by what was being done to us. Tabloid reporters were prowling the streets of Little Rock, offering cash for stories about Clinton. Almost all the rumors swirling around our increasingly gothic campaign — that Clinton sanctioned drug running from Arkansas's Mena Airport, that Clinton was a cocaine fiend, that Hillary was a secret lesbian — were both malicious and untrue. And on the Friday before the vote, one more person emerged from the more recent past with a story that could sink us.

I first heard about it while Clinton was appearing at a senior citizens' center in Nashua. All through the afternoon he listened to the testimony of people struggling to get by. When a tiny, frail woman named Mary Annie Davis confessed tearfully that she had to choose each month between buying food or medicine, he knelt down, took her hand, and comforted her with a hug. Even the hardest-bitten reporters in the room were wiping tears from their eyes.

I missed it. As we walked in, a reporter for the
Nashua Telegraph
pulled me out of the entourage and confronted me on the sidewalk. “We have to talk,” she said. “I have a witness to a recent conversation that Governor Clinton had with you and Bruce Lindsey about getting Gennifer Flowers a job in state government. He says you were planning to pay her off.”

“I have no idea what you're talking about,” I said, “but you can't run a story like that without giving us a chance to respond.” We agreed that at six that evening, Bruce and I would go to the
Telegraph
and meet with the editors — our only hope of killing the story.

James was hanging with some reporters on the edge of Clinton's event. Pulling him into the laundry room, I paced around in my parka while he sat on a washing machine and tried to calm me down. Now I saw a different side of what Clinton was going through; someone was telling stories about me too, and sullying
my
reputation. Over time, I developed calluses against the personal attacks that come with high-stakes politics — that's the price that accompanies the privilege. Then I was distraught. I knew I wasn't guilty, but if the charge was published at the height of the New Hampshire primary, a lot of my peers would see it and believe it despite my denial. We'd tank in New Hampshire, and the last thing anyone would hear about me was that I tried to get a government job for the governor's girlfriend.

A part of me was almost hoping we'd get knocked out. Then, at least, I wouldn't have to face another reporter asking me another question about another story I couldn't control. The hoofbeats weren't just in my head anymore; they were everywhere. The whole experience was dirty, draining, and depressing. So much for recreating Bobby Kennedy's crusade. We looked more like Gary Hart's campaign every day.

Bruce and I arrived at the
Telegraph,
where the editorial board was behind closed doors. Then a man emerged from the conference room with a young girl, and it all came together in an instant. The man had been our driver on a Saturday in early January, a lifetime ago. All afternoon he talked about a charity he'd started to send household goods to Russia. Perfectly good cause, but the driver's chatter had a manic quality. We made a vague commitment to appear at his booth at an upcoming fair but forgot about it in the tumult that followed.

This must be payback for the broken promise
. When Bruce and I denied the charge and explained the situation to the editorial board, they killed the story. I'd like to think it was our persuasive power that carried the day. More likely they realized the allegation was too thin. It might not have made a difference even if it were published, but then I was sure it was the tipping point — the final piece of information that would make everyone conclude all at once that Clinton was more trouble than he was worth.

I wish this episode had ended there, but it didn't. While the driver had a final word with the editorial board, his daughter — who couldn't have been older than eight or nine — waited for him in the lobby. Flushed with our tiny victory and frayed from a month of crises, I approached the driver's daughter on our way out: “Your father,” I said, looking at her as if she were to blame for all our troubles, “is a really bad man.” I felt ashamed the second the words escaped my mouth, but it was too late. The girl just stared back at the brutal zealot I'd become, and I couldn't argue with her, or change the subject, or even spin myself.

The final weekend was a blur. I was sure all was lost, but Clinton demonstrated the power of pure will. He was determined to touch and talk to every voter in New Hampshire. We staffers left the suite in shifts to accompany him, but we were superfluous. This was all about Clinton — his pride, ambition, and anger, his need to be loved and his drive to do good. Watching him made me wonder if you had to be a little crazy to become president. What did it do to you to want something so badly?

What I didn't realize at the time was how the focus on Clinton's problems was paradoxically helping him, turning the New Hampshire primary into a referendum on what politics should be about. Clinton was channeling public disgust and transforming it into a reason to vote for him. The best way to strike a blow against the obsession with scandal was to vote for the candidate most plagued by scandal. Never mind that Clinton brought many of the problems on himself; he also offered a way out — and he was a kick to watch. No matter how hard you hit him, he popped up smiling.

On election day, I was so dark that I couldn't pull myself out of bed. The bond Clinton was forming with the voters of New Hampshire wasn't showing up in our polling, which predicted we would fade to third or worse. Clinton kept his promise to keep pushing for votes “till the last dog dies,” but there was nothing the rest of us could do. James and I considered killing time by going to see
Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey
at the Cineplex across the street, but we didn't want to be far from a phone when the first exit polls came in.

A bunch of us retreated from our makeshift headquarters and gathered on the twin beds in Carville's room. James was pacing around like a medieval penitent, lightly lashing himself over each shoulder with a small piece of rope. Stan and Mandy ducked in and out with news from their network contacts. On the road with Clinton, Dee Dee called in for updates, and our New Hampshire communications director, Bob Boorstin, joined us to help draft that night's speech. When the exit polls started to come in, we ordered cheeseburgers from room service and started banging out a victory memo on Bob's laptop.

Of course, coming in second to Tsongas wasn't technically a victory, but it sure felt like one after all we'd been through. Even Clinton, the eternal optimist, seemed surprised by the news. I spent the late afternoon with him as he sat through a series of satellite interviews to news outlets in the states we would visit next. Between questions, I fed him updates. Although he had been suspicious of exit polls ever since they falsely predicted his reelection as governor in 1980, he silently signaled his growing excitement by slowly pumping his fist just below camera range. “I'll feel like Lazarus if these poll numbers hold up,” he told me as we headed to the elevator, where he pounded his open palms on the closing metal doors.

Our near-victory suppressed my new doubts about Clinton. Success has a way of doing that. My initial infatuation was maturing into a more complicated bond. Clinton wasn't a hero, just a man, with flaws as profound as his gifts. But he was by far the best politician I'd ever met. He had more ideas than anyone in the race, his heart was in the right place, and he refused to quit. Together, we still might do some good, and he was still my ticket to the top.

Late that night, we staffers took a victory lap around the bar of the Sheraton Tara, accepting congratulatory cocktails from reporters just steps from the lobby where we'd been mauled on Gennifer and the draft. Across the bar, I spotted Pat Buchanan, holding court with a bare-toothed grin. Beer-and-shot populist in union halls by day, sipping an incongruous chardonnay with his Beltway friends at midnight, he'd shocked President Bush that day by winning 37 percent of the Republican vote. With Bush that weak, working in the White House wasn't just a fantasy anymore.

But we had to keep the hoofbeats at bay.

4 HIGHER UP, DEEPER IN

T
he Secret Service agents made it real. The morning after the New Hampshire primary, when I cracked open my door to collect the newspapers, there they were, guarding the governor's suite down the hall. Molded ear pieces, microphones hidden in their sleeves, magnums strapped to their backs — concrete reminders that Clinton might be a target of more than the tabloids. All through the fall I had a recurring fantasy about wrestling a gunman to the ground to save Clinton. From now on I would share that imagined responsibility with the United States Government.

We flew south with our new security detail, a bigger jet, and a surge of confidence to soothe our New Hampshire hangovers. In a single day, we'd gone from doomed back to unbeatable. Lazarus, just like Clinton said. Kerrey and Harkin hadn't met expectations; both would soon drop out. Cuomo's write-in campaign fizzled; he'd never get in. That left Paul Tsongas as our prime opponent, which was fine with all of us except the one who counted most. On the flight out of Manchester, Clinton called Paul Begala and me to the front of the plane in a fury and waved an
Atlanta Journal
in our faces. The fact that editorial pages were bashing Clinton's middle-class tax cut and praising Tsongas's call for fiscal pain drove him crazy. Our more populist approach would win us the primaries, but Clinton felt as if he was slumming and hated getting called on it.

The nomination was ours to lose — but we did our best to make it a race as the spring unraveled a skein of oddly joyless victories. We were winning ugly; every week we'd snuff out an incipient scandal, grind out a majority, and watch Clinton grow more unpopular. No candidate had ever compiled such high negative ratings while winning the nomination. Primary exit polls consistently showed that Ross Perot — the weird little man who was a ventriloquist's dummy for voter anger — was outpolling Clinton. Establishment Democrats wondered aloud whether a Bradley, a Bentsen, or a Gephardt could jump in and save the party from its damaged front-runner.

When we formally clinched the nomination with a win in California on June 2, the
New York Times
ran a front-page story on the prospect that delegates to the Democratic convention would throw Clinton over for someone new. A “brokered” convention — the dream of political junkies and our worst nightmare.

We bottomed out that night. Clinton was a wreck — exhausted, overweight, angry, and in danger of doing permanent damage to the asset no politician can do without: his voice. Our campaign was broke in every way. We hadn't been paid in months, and our team was split into squabbling camps: the consultants in Washington, the headquarters in Little Rock, and Clinton on the plane. Polls forecasting the November election put us in third place, behind Bush and Perot.