All Too Human: A Political Education (21 page)

The economic plan we finally developed also seemed disappointing at first to a liberal like me. We had to drop the middle-class tax cut and drastically reduce the human capital investments proposed in the campaign. But we were hamstrung by the size of the deficit and the demands of the bond market. If we didn't reduce the deficit, the Federal Reserve and the market wouldn't force interest rates down; if interest rates stayed high, the economy wouldn't create jobs and growth. I didn't fully appreciate it then, but to achieve our overall goals for the economy, we had to sacrifice some specific promises. But many survived: the earned income tax credit for the working poor; our investments in education, including a national direct student loan program; and the Americorps national service proposal. Maybe we couldn't achieve everything all at once, but we were making progress.

We were still fiddling with the numbers on Monday, February 15, the day Clinton was set to give an Oval Office address designed to break the bad news on taxes before he outlined the popular agenda items in the State of the Union two days later. All day long Clinton scrawled over the text in black felt marker, ignoring the clock. I gave up on getting an advance copy to the press. At 8:48, the text was loaded into the TelePrompTer, and Clinton raced through a single practice before the networks went live at nine.

Later that evening, I had to give my own talk to the Judson Welliver Society. Named after the “literary clerk” to Calvin Coolidge who was the first White House speechwriter, the society was a group of former White House scribes from both parties who met periodically at the home of William Safire, the Nixon speechwriter and
New York Times
columnist. That night they gathered to critique the new president's speech and to ask me some off-the-record questions about the new team.

I arrived after ten, still flustered from the day's events, but we thought the speech had gone well, and the president was pleased. The verdict from the jury sequestered in Safire's basement was not so favorable; they thought the “class warfare” rhetoric was too hot and the delivery too hurried. Arrayed before me were speech-writers from every president since Eisenhower — Stephen Hess, Ted Sorensen, Jack Valenti, Pat Buchanan, Jim Fallows, David Gergen, Peggy Noonan, and several more. While I was deflated a bit by their reviews, I felt protected in that room, as if I were being inducted into an exclusive club where I wasn't just Clinton's guy anymore but part of the community of people who would always know they had written for a president.

Safire handed me a drink and asked me to say a few words about the process. As I recounted the chaotic details, the members began to stare, their jaws dropping in disbelief. Pat Buchanan finally broke the spell. “You mean, you mean,” he faltered, “he didn't practice for the first time until ten minutes before
nine?”
Incredulous murmurs swept over the tables. I hung in for a few more minutes, until Bush speechwriter Tony Snow finally exclaimed, “George, you guys are bungee jumping without a rope.”

He was right, of course; I just didn't know it at the time. It's hard to develop a sense of perspective from the cramped quarters of the West Wing, which is at once the most intimate and transparent corner of the government, where you're bombarded hourly with more information, advice, and attacks than you can possibly absorb, where snap decisions may shape history and thoughtful deliberations can lead to nothing, where the mundane details of daily life mingle with majesty and mystery. As the evening ended, Safire pulled me into his book-lined study and urged me not to get too lost in the details, to “take time, no matter what happens, to smell the Rose Garden.” No single piece of advice was more simple, more valuable, or more difficult to follow.

I did my best. My favorite time was Saturday morning, before the president's weekly radio address. I'd get in a little later than usual, around eight. If the sun was out, I'd take my newspapers and coffee to the steps leading from the Oval Office to the Rose Garden, savoring the feeling of being the first one up in a quiet house that happened to feel like the center of the world. Once, I ventured out to lean against a tree on the South Lawn. Lost in my reading, I looked up to see three uniformed guards standing over me. The trees were wired, and alarms were ringing all over the White House grounds.

Our first real Saturday crisis came on March 20, when Boris Yeltsin announced that he was dissolving the Russian parliament and assuming emergency powers. The president summoned Tony Lake and his deputy, Sandy Berger; Secretary Christopher and Strobe Talbott came over from the State Department, and I joined them around the small television in Clinton's private study to watch Yeltsin's speech on CNN.

The president needed an official reaction. Yeltsin may have been acting outside of the new constitution, but he seemed to be doing it in the name of democratic reform. Talbott, a Russian expert and former journalist who had translated Khrushchev's memoirs, insisted that Yeltsin was the only horse the forces of reform had. His Oxford roommate, the president, agreed. But what if Yeltsin turned into a tyrant and we got tagged with a “Who lost Russia” challenge two months into the job?

To avoid ratcheting up the sense of crisis, I was sent to the briefing room to read a statement instead of having the president, Lake, or Christopher appear in person. Now I was really nervous, aware that what I said would be dissected in capitals around the world. After the statement, I answered a few questions, sticking to our agreed-upon script: “We support democracy and reform, and Yeltsin is the leader of the reform movement.” That mantra gave us some wiggle room if Yeltsin abandoned reform, but not much.

On Monday morning, there was a cream-colored envelope on my desk. Inside was a single handwritten sentence: “You could not have handled a delicate situation better. Sincerely, Richard Nixon.”
Wow, Nixon thought I did a good job. Wait, Nixon's the president liberals like me are supposed to hate. I'm going native. Oh, c'mon, George, lighten up; it's just a nice note. Take it for what it's worth
.

I did, and secretly hoped the former president was watching a few weeks later when we had our first summit with Boris Yeltsin. The setting was an estate overlooking Vancouver's harbor, and the photo op was Clinton and Yeltsin strolling through the forest, an echo of the “walk in the woods” between Soviet and American negotiators that had sealed the European nuclear missile accord of the 1980s. The cold war was over, and this summit was about trade, investment, setting up a stock market, fighting crime. But both sides, and the media that covered us, were still a bit nostalgic for the dark brinksmanship of summits past, when adversarial superpowers seemed to hold the fate of the earth in their hands. In Vancouver, I delivered my first briefing to several hundred members of the international press, feeling less like a political operative than a patriot — America's spokesman.

As always, though, the event was a mix of high politics and low. There was a quiet struggle over who would accompany the president to his private meeting with Yeltsin. Secretary Christopher and Tony Lake were veterans of the Carter administration, in which the rivalry between Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski had deteriorated into a daily battle. They wanted to avoid repeating that experience but still jockeyed for position. Each thought that he should get the seat that signaled prominence in the new president's universe. Which meant that Strobe Talbott ended up in the room by default. Since he spoke Russian and was outranked by both Christopher and Lake, having him there meant the other two didn't lose face.

The person who was really losing his face that day was Yeltsin. He opened strong in his tête-à-tête with Clinton. “I liked him a lot, full of piss and vinegar, a real fighter,” Clinton told me after the meeting, the first of several authorized clichés I would pass to reporters on background. “I do my best when I'm under the gun; so does he,” Clinton continued. “This guy's not deterred by long odds, and now he's at the top of his form.”

But Yeltsin's form faded as the day wore on. That afternoon, I bumped into Martin Walker, the Washington bureau chief for Britain's
Guardian
newspaper. He said that Yeltsin had had three scotches on the boat ride to Vancouver Island — on top of wine at lunch. At dinner, Yeltsin ignored his food and downed wine in single-gulp shots. Christopher slid me a note during the second course: “No food, bad sign. Boat ride was liquid.” By the end of the evening Yeltsin was extending his arms across the table toward “my friend Beeel,” and I finally understood what people meant when they described a drunk as “tight.” Yeltsin's skin was stretched across his cheeks in a way that nearly obliterated his features. With his slicked-back white hair, he looked like a boiled potato slathered in sour cream.

Fortunately, it didn't seem to impair his performance the next morning. The summit was a success, marred only by a mistake on our part. Richard Gere, Cindy Crawford, Sharon Stone, and Richard Dreyfuss were all in Vancouver making movies. Dreyfuss had been a campaign supporter, and he invited the president over to his hotel suite for a late-night drink, which inevitably and justifiably led to clucks in the press for hobnobbing with Hollywood stars at a superpower summit.

As we slogged through April, that seemed to be the least of our problems. Obsessed by the idea that we had to keep all our promises at once, we were trying to do too much too fast. My daily schedule illustrated an administration-wide condition. Here's a note I made to myself on the events of a single day, April 14, 1993:

What a full day, too many meetings, too little time.

Came in pressed. Saw P at nine before he left for summer jobs event He yelled at me for a few minutes, feeling he is losing control of his presidency. Feels we are making incremental, day-to-day decisions because we don't have a core vision. Fears that many of his appointees aren't committed to his goals. Also fears that his schedule and his government are not organized to achieve what he wants to achieve. Not enough time on welfare reform.

We had a diverse, kaleidoscopic campaign: You can find justification for any of our actions sometime in the campaign.

Our central dilemma is that the deficit has hamstrung us. We can't achieve all that we called for.

Because we're not coming through on investments and stimulus, we feel more pressure to respond on abortion, gays, and other liberal issues. This is an unthinking kind of reaction. Our appointees are generally more liberal than our core vision.

Jesse Jackson came in to see me. Even when you're alone with him, there's still an element of performance. Complained that the president is too quiet about jobs, and that he, JJ, isn't being talked to by the administration. Also wants P to appear on his CNN show. But he was most concerned about the upcoming anniversary of the L.A. riots (April 30). Thinks L.A. is about to blow.

Tom Brokaw came in to discuss a prime-time special with Hillary and Katie Couric.

Meeting with Mack's working group on stimulus strategy. VP reported on phone calls to Republicans. Final negotiations after initial vote.

Met with Tony [Lake] on various subjects, including Bosnia.

Met with Howard [Paster] on VAT and Bosnia.

Press briefing.

Lunch with Susan Zirinski, Dan Rather's producer. Doing a segment on people's dreams about Clinton.

Meeting with Johnny Apple and Andrew Rosenthal on
NYT's
policy on background briefings. Interrupted by roomful of Hollywood stars: Billy Crystal, Christopher Reeve, Lindsay Wagner, Sam Waterston, and others, who came to discuss environmental policy. My office was part of the tour. Lots of phone calls.

Meeting with P on campaign finance.

Meeting with P on stimulus strategy.

Traded jokes with Susan Spencer [CBS White House correspondent]. Why don't Junior Leaguers like group sex? Too many thank-you notes. Told P.

False alarm on King verdict in L.A.; just a sick juror.

Talked Walter Kirn out of profiling me for
NYT
magazine.

Health care meeting. Ira [Magaziner] presenting elements of plan. I'm listing my day's events during meeting because I'm too brain-dead to pay attention.

Not far from an average day.

When you're brain-dead, you make mistakes. My worst came the day of the FBI raid on cult leader David Koresh's compound in Waco, Texas. On April 19, as I stood at the podium for my daily noon briefing, CNN started broadcasting pictures of the compound in flames. Informed by his headquarters, CNN White House correspondent Wolf Blitzer asked me about the fire, but I had no idea what he was talking about. Then someone handed me a note, and I left the podium to find out what was going on.

The rest of the day I was in constant contact with Associate Attorney General Webb Hubbell, who was monitoring the situation for the Justice Department. They didn't have good information on what was happening in the compound, or where David Koresh was, or whether the children were still alive. Later in the afternoon, I issued a statement saying the president was monitoring the situation and took full responsibility for its consequences, but the press was clamoring for the president in person. That's where I erred. Dee Dee Myers and Bruce Lindsey pushed to have the president do it, and he agreed at first. But I convinced him not to out of fear that if he said something that triggered Koresh to kill the kids who might still be alive, then we'd be culpable.

My motive may have been unassailable, but my judgment was dead wrong. The odds were high that everyone inside had already perished and that nothing the president said could make the situation worse. Beyond that, the first rule in a presidential crisis is to take responsibility fully and openly. Don't duck. That's the Bay of Pigs lesson that should have been burned in my bones. When Attorney General Janet Reno appeared before the cameras, she was praised and the president was criticized, but it was my fault.

My Waco error stemmed from inexperience and misplaced sentimentality. Other missteps, like the failed nomination of Lani Guinier for associate attorney general for civil rights, were the product of sloppy staff work coupled with an overactive desire to appease our liberal base with appointments because we couldn't deliver on policy. The defeat of our economic stimulus was the price we paid for legislative arrogance. Thinking we could roll right over the Republicans in the Senate, we rejected a moderate compromise offered by Senators Breaux and Boren, and lost everything. That was Republican Senate leader Bob Dole's turn to show us who was boss.