All Too Human: A Political Education (16 page)

“Good question,” she replied. “Why don't you ask him yourself?” Figuring a little confrontation would make for good television, she gave me a special number to connect directly with the show.

Good television, maybe, but was it smart politics? We had the lead, why take a chance? If I said something stupid and the election turned, then I personally — not Clinton or James or anyone else — could conceivably be responsible for the loss. It really
would
be all my fault. But we had come this far by never letting up, by being in their face every minute of every day. This was no time to change tactics.

James was all for it, but I wanted higher clearance. I couldn't reach Clinton, so I tried Gore. Had he vetoed the idea, I would have backed off. Had he been unavailable, I would have had to make a choice. “Go for it,” Gore said. I dialed the number.

As I waited on hold, all the moisture in my mouth drained into my palms. Suddenly, the line opened into what sounded like a wind tunnel. I was on the air. King announced a call from Little Rock, Arkansas, and for the first time in my life I was talking to a sitting president. “Mr. President, you asked us to find out what the smoking gun was,” I said, before citing the Weinberger memo as evidence that Bush had to know Iran-Contra was an arms-for-hostages deal.

“May I reply?” Bush said, sounding peeved but still in control. He then surprised me by reciting my resume on national television.
Where's he going with this?
He told the viewers I was a very able young man who had once worked for Congressman Richard Gephardt.
That's it, trying to tie me to the congressional Democrats, but pretty nice to call me “able” considering I'm trying to throw him out of office
. Then he finally answered my question by saying that President Reagan didn't believe it was arms for hostages and that he believed President Reagan.
Nothing new
.

Larry King: “George, want to respond?”

President Bush: “I didn't come here to debate Stephanopoulos.”

Wait a minute. He's debating six-foot chickens all over the country, but he won't debate me?
King tried again to get me to respond, but Bush cut him off. He filibustered by praising me again, saying I was a “patient fellow” and that “every time we'd say something, he was out there with a —”

A response. A rejoinder, a retort, anything. Just finish the sentence!

“And they did a very good job on it,” the president concluded.

In that spontaneous encounter, Bush revealed his state of mind and the condition of his campaign. He seemed to be acknowledging that our team was better than his. And by speaking in the past tense, Bush seemed to be admitting that the election was over — an idea that became even more explicit a moment later, when he offered what sounded to me like a presidential seal of approval: “So I would like to take this opportunity, because I might not have a chance to see him before the election, to commend him on all that.”

Bush was the first presidential candidate I thought about working for and the only one I had ever worked against. Defeating him and his agenda had been the focus of my career for the last five years, and I had heard that my campaign press releases had gotten under his skin. One of the altar boys at my dad's church was a page at the Republican convention, and he attended a speech in which Bush complained about “some guy named Stenopoulos” who was always messing up his stories. But that was nothing compared to hearing the president of the United States praise me on
Larry King Live
. I hoped my parents were watching.

Later that night, Clinton called to congratulate me. But from the tone of his voice I could tell that he was a little annoyed. And why not? Calling Larry King's producer was my job. But confronting an incumbent president was a risk, and not necessarily a prudent one. Good thing it had worked.

“The wai-ai-ting is the hardest part
.” Tom Petty's song was my anthem the last weekend. The last commercials were in the can and on the air, and the schedule was set. Only two news cycles to go: No new charge could hurt us now, and nothing more we could say about Bush would make any difference. People had made up their minds; they were going to take a chance on Clinton. But knowing that wasn't the same as believing it. James and I spent the final hours in my office figuring out how we could still manage to lose. All day Monday, he folded his body across the club chair in front of my desk and burned off nervous energy by ad-libbing a series of Clinton concession speeches:

“We tried hard; we came up a little short. To those who embraced our crusade, we say thank you. … Throughout this campaign, I have endeavored to bring my message of change to the American people. Over forty-two percent of you embraced that message, and I am grateful to each and every one of you. Hillary and I will never forget you. The way you welcomed us into your homes, your towns, and your cities. It is not that we have lost this battle. It's whether we endure in a larger war.”

“Shut up,” I pleaded, still half convinced Clinton would be saying these same words tomorrow night. Part of me simply couldn't believe we were going to win, just like President Bush and his team never really believed they would lose. But by late Monday afternoon, I began to relax. Lying on James's couch and bouncing a Wiffle-ball bat on my knee, I wondered what to call Clinton after we won. I had never called him Bill; it was always Governor. Tomorrow it would be — what? Mr. President-elect. Of course I'd address him as Mr. President in public, but I wondered if in private he'd still let me call him by what I thought of as his first name. Governor had a nice ring to it, kind of stately and Southern, like when you honored a senator who had served on the bench by calling him Judge.

The final War Room meeting was Monday night — a time to say thank you and good-bye, to voice our hopes for the days ahead. More than a hundred of us were crowded together on the floor, standing on tables, spilling out into the hallway, our numbers expanded by family and fans from all over the country. My job was to introduce James, but I hoped to be inspired, to say something that would sum up our collective experience, knowing that all of us in the room would always remember this night. Now I was crossing a threshold, from a person who had read history to one who had helped shape a slice of it; from a person who had dreamed about working in the White House to one who would do it; from a person who professed that politics could change peoples' lives to one who would have the chance to prove it.

In a voice choked with fatigue, gratitude, and hope, I talked about Clinton and James, and summed up my expectations in a few sober sentences: “For the first time in a generation tomorrow, we're going to win. And that means that more people are going to have better jobs. People are going to pay a little less for health care, get better care. And more kids are going to go to better schools. So, thanks.”

It wasn't soaring rhetoric, but I was a little scared, and my skeptical soul was aware of the all-too-human imperfections that prevent promises from being fulfilled. It had been a tumultuous campaign, upsetting and exciting at the same time. It had toughened me up, hardened me more than I liked, but I still believed we could make it all worthwhile with what we would do. Camus spoke to me that night in a passage I had carried in a notebook for years: “Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don't help us, who else in the world can help us do this?”

For James, the obligations would end. His job was done, and his speech that night was a version of the ode to brotherhood and honor and battles well fought that Shakespeare's Henry V delivered to his troops on Saint Crispin's eve. James talked about love and labor as the two most precious gifts a person could give. He said his work was finished, and as tears clouded his eyes and quivered his body, he thanked the kids he'd been tormenting for months and told them he loved them.

For a moment we were silent, subdued by the private feelings of one man and the public weight of what lay before us. Then the room broke into a chant — “One more day! One more day!” — and when Clinton's voice cracked through the speakerphone in the middle of the table, the room erupted in a cheer that I could have listened to forever.

Outside, the streets were blocked by tractor trailers and satellite trucks, the Old Statehouse had been transformed into a Hollywood soundstage, and downtown was teeming with people ready to party. Later that night, our celebration was almost spoiled by a final sleazy attack: A Republican congressman called an airport press conference to accuse Clinton of sleeping with a reporter on the campaign plane.
At least all that will end tomorrow
.

After the eleven
A.M.
exit polls confirmed an electoral college landslide, election day was a blur of high fives and hugs. But Clinton didn't trust exit polls. Back in the mansion, he inhaled the results I fed him in hourly phone calls but refused to let himself believe them. Only when the official tally came in later that night did the anxious man revert to the hypercompetent pol. As I read off the list of states we'd won over my cell phone, Clinton became nonchalant. “I knew that. … Yeah, I figured we'd win there too.” I tried to thank him for changing my life. Helping him win was the best thing I'd ever done. But he wanted an update on Nevada.

Our campaign relationship ended as it had begun. Two men at work, talking shop, a candidate and his staff. The formalities were for the rest of the world. They would get the waves and smiles, the gracious words, the promise to face the future with humility and hope. I got “How'd we do in Nevada?” My own personal victory speech. An ocean away, in my grandfather's village, the village where my father was born, they roasted lambs in the square for their young cousin making their name in America. Priests serve; immigrants succeed. Perhaps I'd done both.

The next day, I drove out to the mansion for my first meeting with the president-elect. I called him Mr. President, of course; nothing else seemed possible once I saw him face-to-face. But this was a family visit Clinton and Hillary were in the den off the butler's pantry, a staircase below the bedroom where I had first been admitted to the Clintons' private world, a floor above the basement office that was now the operations center of the Little Rock White House.

When I walked through the door, Clinton called me “Master of the Universe,” and the two of them wrapped me in a three-way hug. We were all washed out, but as we sipped tea and talked about the future, I could already see sparks beneath their pale skin and exhausted eyes. Their dream was just beginning, and they wanted me to “keep on doing what you did in the campaign.” Exactly what that meant would be worked out later; for the moment, it was just nice to hear.

Clinton also offered me some personal advice. “George, when I was your age, I was the youngest ex-governor in America. Don't make my mistakes. You get too wrapped up in what you do.” He was right. I was too intense, too tightly wound, too impatient for my own good. Later that day, my father followed his congratulations with another word of caution. “Be careful,” he said, after reminding me of the myth of Icarus. “Keep your balance.”

5 OPENING DAY

S
hit. I can't cover it up
. I was staring at the mirror of the single-stall washroom by the press secretary's office on the first floor of the West Wing of the White House. In a few minutes, I would call my first official press briefing as communications director, and I had a problem. My beard. With all the craziness of the inauguration, I hadn't had the chance to buy new razor blades, and the powder I was pasting on my cheeks gave me the pallor of a corpse with a five o'clock shadow. I was about to face the world from the White House podium looking like an adolescent Richard Nixon.

My job that day was to act like one of his henchmen — to hang Zoe Baird out to dry. Our nominee for attorney general, Baird was in the middle of a firestorm because her background check had belatedly turned up both that she had failed to pay social security taxes for her household help and that the workers were illegal immigrants. As I prepared to face the White House press corps, she was getting pummeled by the Senate Judiciary Committee. She didn't know it yet, but she was toast.

I had just left a meeting in the Oval Office with the president, the first lady, Bernie Nussbaum, the White House counsel, and Howard Paster, our liaison to the Congress. Clinton and Hillary were frazzled from the festivities of the night before and a morning spent shaking hands at an inaugural open house. Clinton sat behind the broad but still bare desk he had requested from storage — JFK's desk, the one John-John crawled from in that famous photo. Hillary stood parallel to Clinton but off to the side, the hard look on her face set off by her pastel blue suit.

“So where are we with Zoe?” Clinton asked in a tone that suggested he knew the answer.

Howard told him her testimony was costing her votes, and I urged a quick, relatively clean kill. Bernie wanted the president to fight. “No, he can't do that,” said Hillary, arguing that this was Zoe's problem, not his. That was Clinton's cue to complain that he hadn't known about Baird's nanny problem when transition chairman Warren Christopher recommended her and that he never would have picked her if he had. But he also wanted to give her the chance to make her case to the Senate and make the decision herself. That meant that she and I were in limbo. My orders were to support Baird without defending her, to say that she'd make a strong attorney general but to leave the president room to cut her loose.

A difficult balancing act, but I wasn't complaining. This was the big leagues. As the loudspeaker announced that my briefing would begin in one minute, I stood behind the wooden door to the press room with a stomach full of pleasant butterflies. I couldn't wait to get behind the podium and show what I could do. The sound of the door sliding open set off dozens of camera shutters. I walked to the podium, adjusted the glasses I had started wearing again in a vain attempt to look older, and took in the scene with a deep breath.