All Too Human: A Political Education (19 page)

It started out pleasantly enough. The president's navy stewards poured coffee and passed around plates of Pepperidge Farm cookies. The chiefs congratulated Clinton on his victory. But while Clinton was their host and their boss, he didn't hold the balance of power in the room. Yes, he was commander in chief, but Clinton's formal powers were bound by the fact that he was a new president, elected with only 43 percent of the vote, who had never served in the military and stood accused of dodging the draft. Presidential power, in Neustadt's classic formulation, is the “power to persuade,” but the chiefs weren't there to be persuaded, and they had the congressional troops they needed to fortify their position. Their message was clear: Keeping this promise will cost you the military. Fight us, and you'll lose — and it won't be pretty.

Our initial skirmish with the military was a war that couldn't be won. One by one, the chiefs made that point to Clinton in measured but uncompromising tones. The crew-cut marine commander, Carl Mundy, was most vehement; he saw it as an issue of right versus wrong, military discipline versus moral depravity. But Colin Powell was the most effective. He leaned his thick forearms into the table, his clasped hands pointing straight at the president, and laid down a marker: The armed forces under Clinton's command were in “exquisite” shape, he said. We shouldn't do anything to put that at risk. We'd never had full civil rights in the military, and it would be impossible to maintain morale if gay and straight soldiers were integrated.

The president stood his ground, but his voice was still soft and scratchy from the inaugural all-nighters. He said he intended to keep his commitment, making the irrefutable point that gays and lesbians had served — and were serving — in the military both honorably and well. The only question, he said, is whether they should have to live a lie. “I want to work with you on this,” he told the chiefs.

I was proud of his argument, but I also knew that we had no cards to play. If we didn't work out a compromise with the chiefs, they would sabotage us on the Hill. While they were obligated to obey their commander, they had the right to present their personal views to congressional committees publicly. That's all we needed: the top military brass led by Colin Powell, lined up in a row in direct confrontation with a new president who, they said, was sacrificing national security for the sake of a campaign promise to a special interest — all live on CNN.

Impassioned testimony from the highest-ranking black man in America denying the parallels between skin color and sexual orientation would trump our strongest civil rights argument for ending the ban, and legislation overturning an executive order would fly through both houses of Congress by veto-proof margins. Gays serving in the military would be denied new protection, and the president would have another embarrassing defeat his first week on the job. The rest of the country would wonder what happened to the moderate “New” Democrat they had elected to fix the economy. Nobody had told them that his opening legislative fight would be gays in the military. Nobody had told us either; in fact, it was the last thing we wanted. Like so much else in those first few months, it just seemed to spin out of control.

I had first encountered the issue when candidate Clinton spoke at Harvard on October 30, 1991. During the postspeech Q & A, a student questioned Clinton about discrimination against gays and lesbians in the military. If they want to serve their country, Clinton replied, they ought to be able to do it openly. The exchange was so unremarkable that it wasn't highlighted in press accounts of Clinton's appearance. After that, Clinton repeated his position at a couple of fund-raisers before gay groups and in a questionnaire for the Human Rights Campaign Fund, but it wasn't mentioned in the convention speech or our advertisements, and it didn't come up in the debates. Fearing that pressing the issue would make them look intolerant, the Bush campaign never brought it up, and Ross Perot came out against lifting the ban one day, then took it back the next. Gays in the military was the stealth issue of the 1992 campaign.

A week after the election, Clinton gave a Veterans Day speech to reassure skeptics that he honored the military and would strengthen our armed forces as commander in chief. He didn't mention gays in the military because it wasn't one of our immediate priorities. But a federal court had just ruled that the navy should reinstate a sailor named Keith Meinhold, who had been discharged for being gay. In light of that ruling, NBC's Andrea Mitchell asked Clinton if he would fulfill his campaign pledge to end discrimination against homosexuals in the military. “I want to,” Clinton replied blandly. “How to do it, the mechanics of doing it, I want to consult with military leaders about that. There will be time to do that.”

Clinton was trying to downplay the potential conflict by stressing his desire to work with the military rather than impose the change on them. His remarks could easily have been interpreted as a hedge on his pledge, but that's not how they played. The network news led with Clinton's response, and the
New York Times
ran two front-page stories, which left the impression that Clinton was throwing down a gauntlet at the military's feet. The media bias I detected most often in the White House was neither liberal nor conservative but a tendency to play up conflict and controversy. A story that included Clinton, the military, and sex was irresistible.

We scrambled to quiet the political storm. Clinton said that he wouldn't make any final decisions until he consulted with the military. I spoke with reporters on background, insisting that while we wanted to keep our promise, we weren't spoiling for a fight. But we soon found ourselves trapped between the military brass who wanted no change, gay leaders who insisted on all or nothing, delighted Republicans who couldn't wait to vote against us, and appalled Democrats who couldn't believe that gays in the military was going to be their first vote with a new president.

During the transition, Clinton's old friend John Holum, who was slated to head the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and Congressman Les Aspin, our nominee for secretary of defense, tried to develop a workable compromise that would buy us some time. But nothing came together until the close of the January 25 meeting in the Roosevelt Room, when Colin Powell raised an alternative that he'd been discussing with Aspin: “Stop asking and stop pursuing,” he called it. Gays and lesbians still wouldn't be allowed to serve openly, but recruits would no longer be questioned about their sexual orientation, and commanders would stop investigating personnel suspected of being gay or lesbian. General Gordon Sullivan, the army chief, seconded Powell's proposal on a conciliatory note: “Permit us to participate with you in the change.” What he meant was: “Permit us to allow you an honorable surrender.”

Senator Sam Nunn, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was called in to negotiate the terms, because any new policy would be subject to congressional review. Nunn had headed Clinton's Georgia campaign, but with friends like him, we didn't need enemies. As a matter of policy, he supported the military ban on homosexuals, but he was also peeved by Clinton's failure to name him secretary of state and happy to throw some pebbles in the path of his former House counterpart, Les Aspin. All through our first week, Nunn held our first bill — the Family and Medical Leave Act — hostage until he got his way on gays in the military.

The gay community was convinced Nunn was a homophobe, a view the president and I decided we agreed with after an interminable negotiating session in the cabinet room with Nunn and his fellow Democrats on the Armed Services Committee. But our discussion of the meeting didn't dwell on Nunn. There was too much to say about Senator Robert Byrd's tour de force.

A compact man with pale blue eyes, a long, straight nose, white hair tapered to a widow's peak, and tightly tailored three-piece suits, Byrd looked just like his name — an elegant, elderly popinjay. He had been a senator since before I was born, and his hobby was writing Senate history. No man loved the institution more. When ignorant House members or imperial presidents threatened Senate prerogatives, he would unsheathe his weapon of choice — the filibuster — and pace the floor for days, reciting history by rote, recalling the glory days of Clay and Webster, England and Rome.

The cabinet room was a smaller stage. Only a dozen of us, including the president and vice president, were seated around the table, but Byrd still stood to speak. The fingertips of his left hand rested lightly on the table; his right hand clutched the buttons of his jacket — a classic orator's pose. Rome was where he began.

“Suetonius writes that Tiberius, under whom Caesar served, had young male prostitutes in his service,” Byrd began, before reeling off other tales of emperors, generals, and the men who served and serviced them. “We're talking about something that has been going around for centuries,” he stated flatly, echoing one of the president's central arguments.
Wow, are we going to get
Byrd?
Can't be
. It wasn't. After a pause for emphasis, he delivered the opening blow. “But Rome fell when discipline gave way to luxury and ease.” Then he traveled through time from the decline of the Roman Empire to the Christian Coalition's slippery slope. “Remove not the ancient landmarks thy fathers have set. I am opposed to your policy because it implies acceptance. It will lead to same-sex marriages and homosexuals in the Boy Scouts.” These were the concrete concerns he would hear in West Virginia that weekend. The senator's closing peroration struck a note of deferential defiance: “Oh God, get me home safely,” he exclaimed. “I will not help you on the procedural issue.”

In a flight of rhetorical empathy, Clinton countered Roman history with the Old Testament. “When the Lord delivered the Ten Commandments, Senator Byrd, he did not include a prohibition on homosexuality. As a matter of conscience, the very fact of homosexuality should not prevent you from serving if you must.” Vice President Gore followed with a mix of hard science and homespun theology. “How could God permit people to be born in such a way that denies them the opportunity to live up to their God-given potential?” They were making similar points, but there was a subtle difference. Clinton was simply stating his position on the senator's terms; Gore was trying a little harder to change Byrd's mind, which wasn't going to happen.

Our whole first week was overwhelmed by gays in the military. We didn't reach a final agreement with Nunn until late Thursday night, when he agreed to permit a six-month review of the proposed compromise as long as the ban was maintained during the review period. Six months later, the president announced “Don't Ask, Don't Tell”— an outcome essentially identical to Powell's initial proposal and not far off from the earlier ban. The compromise satisfied no one, except Republican political strategists, who now had a killer issue for the 1994 midterm elections. The military resented the intrusion, Democrats were furious, the public was confused, and the gay community felt betrayed.

But gays in the military was a defeat, not a betrayal. Our administration can be fairly faulted for raising hopes that couldn't be fulfilled, but not for abandoning a cause that could have been won if only we'd had the courage to try. The military and the Congress had the votes to keep the ban because the country was not ready for the change. Issuing an executive order only to see it overturned in twenty-four hours would have been a setback for gay rights, and it would have looked as if Clinton were throwing the fight. The president had to balance one of many campaign promises against the rest of his agenda and his constitutional responsibilities. He tried to keep his eye on the ball and ask, “What is the best achievable policy for those people who happen to be in the military, in the closet, and are getting harassed?”

Supporters of lifting the ban have a right to be angry at how “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” has been implemented. The heightened attention sparked by the debate has led to increased harassment of gays and lesbians serving in the military, in defiance of the president's orders. Given that result, I now believe that promising to lift the ban was our big mistake. Focusing instead on Clinton's pledge to pass legislation banning discrimination against gays and lesbians in the workplace would have been far wiser strategy. That effort already had bipartisan support, but the bitter debate over the military ban probably stalled its passage for several more years. Confronting the military before legislating against discrimination in the civilian workforce was a losing proposition from the start — for both the new administration and the cause of gay rights.

By the end of the week, I was just glad this storm had passed. Early Friday, I walked into the Oval as the president reviewed his clips with the sun streaming through the curved windows behind his desk. In a reflective mood, he wondered if he should have pressed Colin Powell to be secretary of state. (After an initial approach to Powell from Vernon Jordan, a confidant of both men who was cochair of Clinton's transition, Clinton had let the matter drop.) “I think he would have taken it,” he said. “But the moment's passed.” We fantasized for a minute about how if Powell had been on the inside, maybe we could have smoothed over gays in the military before it erupted; and if Warren Christopher had been attorney general instead of Zoe Baird, maybe we could have avoided a national debate over “nanny problems.” But the moment had passed.

What we really needed just then was a weekend off. Instead, the administration's elite headed to Camp David the next day for a weekend retreat. About forty of us — the Clintons, the Gores, the cabinet, and several consultants and staff — were going to spend a day “setting goals” and “getting to know each other.”

Driving to the White House around 6:30 on Saturday morning in a grumpy mood, I felt the same dread I used to get on my way to summer camp. The prospect of organized play and forced camaraderie made me want to fake a stomachache, which, in turn, made me feel like an ingrate.
Here you are beading up to Camp David with the president of the United States and his cabinet! Appreciate it
.