All Too Human: A Political Education (20 page)

I did my best. As we drove up icy, winding roads to the hilltop retreat, I psyched myself up. By the time we arrived, I almost believed that building team spirit in this manner was the best way to begin our presidency. Camp David, a rustic lodge on a wooded hill surrounded by saltbox cabins with screen doors, reminded me of a Poconos resort. The president had already arrived on
Marine One
and was tooling around with Gore in a golf cart, the only vehicle he was allowed to drive. The rest of us scavenged through the lodge for Camp David matchbooks and coffee mugs.

But when we assembled for the meeting, I was back to longing for home. The aluminum easels sealed it. A pair of them stood at the front of the room, holding giant pads of blank white paper just waiting to be filled with our objectives, goals, and feelings. Two sensible-looking middle-aged ladies with
Romper Room
smiles on their faces and jumbo Magic Markers in their hands completed the picture. They were “facilitators,” brought in by the vice president to help us bond. This weekend was Gore's baby, an amalgam of management science and New Age sentiment that he'd used with his Senate staff.

But what works for a senator isn't necessarily appropriate for a president. As the day wore on, we papered the walls with our “personal” goals for the next four years. Hillary talked about the need to write a “narrative” for the country, and the facilitators divided us into “breakout” groups for “brainstorming” sessions. I fought the impulse but couldn't stop wondering:
Wait a second. Who cares about our “personal” goals? Isn't that what the campaign was for? We made promises, and now we have to try and keep them. Why aren't we back at the White House working on the economic plan and picking an attorney general? Or home getting some rest — instead of up here talking about our feelings?

After dinner, a smaller group of the cabinet secretaries and senior staff sat around the fireplace to share intimacies with the Clintons, the Gores, and our friendly facilitators. The only thing worse than being there would have been not being there. Of the invited, only Lloyd Bentsen — the silky and distinguished secretary of the treasury — was secure enough not to show. The rest of us dutifully shared a revelation about ourselves, as if we were a bunch of preteens on a sleepover playing “What's the most embarrassing thing you've ever done?”

Clinton talked about how getting teased for being fat made him a tough kid, and recounted that when he was five or six, a wild boar bowled him over but he got right back up. Warren Christopher confessed to sipping chardonnay in smoky jazz bars late at night. I told them that as a little kid I loved watching the
Today
show and that I would supplement my small allowance by being an altar boy for pay at weddings and baptisms. It was excruciating.

Near the close of our final Sunday session, I made my obligatory communications director speech cautioning against leaks, which was the functional equivalent of handing out Ann Devroy's phone number: 334-7459. Everyone talked to Devroy. She was a staff writer for the
Post,
but that generic title underplayed her importance to the paper and her influence in official Washington.

Ann's account of the retreat was a signal to the Washington establishment that things were a little screwy at the new White House. Under the headline “A Bonding Experience at Camp David,” Devroy proceeded to piece together the events of the weekend and put them in perspective — pointing out, for example, that while these types of retreats may have been common in the corporate world, they were relatively foreign to the White House. She wrote that the weekend was a sign of how “different this presidency will be” and added the tart reminder that the last time a president had brought so many staffers to Camp David for a working session was during the malaise depths of Jimmy Carter's tenure.

The scoop was vintage Devroy. A chain-smoking reporter's reporter with a gravelly Wisconsin accent, she was the undisputed queen of the White House beat. From her desk in the newsroom she'd work the phones all day long, conferring with telephone operators, top officials, and everyone in between. I didn't know her at first, and she was suspicious of me from watching my extraheavy spinning during the campaign. But James and Mary were her good friends, and they put in a word for me. Soon we were talking up to ten times a day.

Most of the calls were short and to the point. She wanted to check up on a tip and see what we were thinking. More often than not, she had a bead on what we would do even before we'd made a final decision. Her sources were solid, and her body clock was timed to the rhythms of the White House process. “Ann, we haven't made that decision yet, I swear,” I would yell into the phone. “I know, I know, George,” she tutored me. “But you will.” She was usually right, but I came to respect her integrity even more than her insight. Ann would hype a damaging story if the reporting was solid, but unlike many of her colleagues, she'd put the same energy into burying a scurrilous one if the reporting was shaky. She was a great gossip, but she kept that out of the paper.

The cabinet retreat article revealed the presidential scholar in Devroy — the part of her that revered the White House the way Byrd revered the Senate. In August, she would escape to a phone-free cabin in Maine with her husband and daughter to sip whiskey and study the latest monographs on the presidency. The touchy-feely, baby-boomer patina of the Camp David weekend offended both her sensibilities and her conviction that the White House was a special place, steeped in tradition, that deserved reverence. By treating it like just another corporate headquarters, Ann believed, we were throwing away that aura and devaluing the office.

Our way wasn't working, but we resisted change, convinced that it was a kind of surrender. At first, we staff wouldn't always stand when the president entered a room, a throwback to the informal, insurgent style of the campaign. If people did, Clinton hurried to say, “Don't get up” while impatiently patting the air with his hands. His unaffected air may have been refreshing, but it was also a mistake. The same with the jogging shorts; only a series of bare-legged photos on the evening news convinced the president to wear a warm-up suit. Slowly, we learned that maintaining a slightly regal aura in office is as effective as the populist touch during a campaign. Americans want their president to be bigger than life. We started playing “Hail to the Chief” at all public ceremonies.

Clinton's military salute took longer to fix. Sheepish at first, he seemed to be working out his internal conflicts every time he tentatively raised his hand. The tips of his fingers would furtively touch his slightly bowed head, as if he were being caught at something he wasn't supposed to do. The snickering got so bad that National Security Adviser Tony Lake came to my office one afternoon to strategize on how to approach the president about it. The message had to be delivered in private, but who was the right messenger? Not me; I was too young, and not a veteran. The vice president was out; too much competitive tension in their relationship for something so personal. It had to be Tony; though he hadn't served in the military, he had served in Vietnam as a foreign service officer, and Clinton's salute came under the heading of national security. After their talk, it grew crisper.

Meantime, we tried to press forward with our agenda. The president signed executive orders on abortion rights and ethics. Hillary took charge of the Health Care Task Force, an appointment that demonstrated, we believed, how much the president cared about the issue. With gays in the military out of the way, the Family and Medical Leave Act sailed through the Congress by Thursday, February 4. Fighting for legislation like this was why we were supposed to be in the White House. For six years, it had been foiled by Republican presidents with veto power. Now Bill Clinton would sign it into law and make it possible for millions of people caring for sick children or other ailing family members to take time off from work without fear of losing their jobs.
See, a president can make a difference; elections do matter
. We set our first Rose Garden bill ceremony for early the next morning.

I got home that night after ten, but I still hadn't eaten. So I ordered Chinese takeout, cracked open a beer, and rifled through my paperwork. It had been a good day. Not only had we passed our first major piece of legislation, but Clinton's daily sound bite on the economy finally made the evening news.
We're back on track, and tomorrow will be our best day yet
.

Then my phone rang. It was Ricki Seidman, a veteran of the War Room and the Senate Judiciary Committee who was now shepherding federal judge Kimba Wood, our next nominee for attorney general, through the confirmation process. If Ricki was calling at this hour, the news couldn't be good: Kimba had a “Zoe problem.” The facts were more complicated. Kimba had hired an illegal alien as a nanny, but at a time when it was legal to do so. The distinction was real, but difficult to explain to the public, and the political outcome would be the same. Another memorably named nominee with a nanny was going down the tubes — and we were going with her. The president hadn't technically made a final decision, but it was no secret that Kimba was at the top of our list. Her reluctant withdrawal would embarrass us and block out any media coverage of the Family and Medical Leave Act.

My job on Friday was to prevent that from happening — to find some way for Kimba to postpone her withdrawal until after the evening news, and to convince the networks that legislation affecting millions of families was more newsworthy than whether one person whom most of the country had never heard of was still in the running for attorney general. But my negotiations with Kimba's husband,
Time
political columnist Michael Kramer, deteriorated into a shouting match, and when I confronted the network correspondents with my case, they just laughed. On the news-value meter, an expected legislative accomplishment was no match for a political gaffe. While I understood their argument, I was apoplectic — at Judge Wood's failure to disclose the situation fully and our failure to ferret out the information earlier, at the media's insatiable appetite for bad news and our uncanny ability to provide it.

I was also upset about losing another weekend. We couldn't catch a break — and I needed one. Joan was coming down from her judicial clerkship in Philadelphia for a “talk,” something I wouldn't be able to concentrate on while cleaning up the Kimba debacle all day Saturday. Joan tried to be understanding but became understandably annoyed as the day wore on. I would dash out of Oval Office meetings and swear we'd be done in less than an hour. Then another. And another. By seven o'clock, we were still discussing options, and Clinton invited a group of us up to the residence for dinner and more discussion with Hillary. Now I really had to choose: my girlfriend or my glamorous job. False choice, I decided (Clinton was teaching me well). “Sir, I don't want to impose,” I said, “but would you mind if Joan joined us? It would be a real treat for her.” False choice, maybe, but I was oblivious then to how inappropriate my request was, professionally and personally.

“Sure, bring her on up,” Clinton said. Hillary made Joan feel at home, and we spent hours going over names, even leafing through the congressional directory in search of the perfect candidate for attorney general. The president consulted others over the phone: David Boren, Bill Bradley, even Carville. By the end of the evening, he had settled on Judge Richard Arnold, an old friend on the federal bench in Arkansas. But Arnold didn't work out, so we were back at square one.

Soon I was too — as a single man. The evening was special; the sense of privilege that accompanies dinner at the White House is somehow enhanced when you're wearing jeans in the family's private solarium on the third floor. But it was also Joan's final straw, a sure sign of where my heart was. First the campaign, then the transition, now this. My job would always come first. She dumped me a week later — exactly what I deserved.

But my job did come first, for better or worse. Besides, I didn't have time to be lonely, with work consuming twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day, six days a week, and several hours on Sunday. Every day was a dozen meetings, a hundred phone calls, a new crisis, another first.

A short time later, Janet Reno was appointed attorney general, but most of our time behind closed doors was spent struggling with our number one campaign promise — an economic plan to “get the country moving again.” From election day on, we'd been in endless meetings about how to reconcile our incompatible campaign promises: to reduce the deficit, cut middle-class taxes, and increase investments in research, education, and training. Our economic team was split into battling camps: National Economic Council Director Bob Rubin, Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, and Budget Director Leon Panetta were the deficit hawks, with Gore on their side as the champion of a new energy tax; liberal Labor Secretary Bob Reich led the charge for new investments, assisted by Gene Sperling and me. But Gene and I saw ourselves above all as guardians of the campaign promises. Our job was to see that what we did conformed to what we said we would do. Too bad that wasn't really possible. All our campaign estimates were off: The deficit was now larger than we had projected, our investments cost more, and our proposed budget cuts saved less.

The president presided over the rolling Roosevelt Room meetings in shirtsleeves, with glasses sliding down the end of his nose. Sometimes it felt more like a college bull session than presidential policy making. Clinton let everyone have a say, played us off against one another, asked pointed questions, and took indecipherable notes. But the reminders of who we were and what we were doing were never far away. Late one night, we ordered pizzas. When they arrived, the president grabbed a slice with the rest of us and lifted the dripping cheese to his lips. But just before he took his first bite, an agent placed a hand on his shoulder and told him to put it down. The pie hadn't been screened, and the way the president frowned when the steward replaced his hot pizza with stale cookies reminded me of the old Peanuts Halloween special. While all the other kids got candy, Charlie Brown got a rock.