All Too Human: A Political Education (23 page)

“
I need to have you close by me
.” Exactly the words I needed to hear. I fell asleep feeling better.

The words the rest of the world would hear were another story. The announcement was scheduled for the ridiculous hour of 7:30 on a Saturday morning. (Gergen had convinced Clinton that we had to get it done fast.) I went to my office around 6:30, booked myself on a later flight to California, and walked into Mack's already crowded office. Gergen was at the table, sipping coffee, and he got up immediately to pull me aside for a few gracious words. The vice president was sitting at a word processor in the outer office, tapping out the president's statement, with Dee Dee and new communications director Mark Gearan standing over his shoulder to watch out for my interests. Knowing that the press would dissect the statement for clues to my new status the way Kremlinologists used to study May Day photos in
Pravda,
I wanted the same title as Gergen — counselor. But Gergen resisted, so my new title was the nebulous “senior adviser for policy and strategy.” Only time would tell what it would mean.

A little after 7:30, the president arrived in the Oval. Before heading to the Rose Garden, he approached me
first
and congratulated me on my new job.
What new job? Nobody's really said what I'm going to do
. Clinton's touch was perfect. Now if only I could convince the rest of the world to congratulate me. I hadn't prepared a statement of my own, but my actual words wouldn't matter much. My mission was to look like a man who was getting promoted.

Inside, I felt like a little kid who was being punished for something that wasn't all his fault. Standing next to Clinton and Gergen didn't help; they both had nearly ten inches on me. I fixed a big smile on my face and stared straight into the cameras, determined not to look like a loser. But when Clinton started to compliment me, my reflexive reaction was a modest, momentary bow of the head. The sound of a thousand cicadas ravaging through a field snapped my head back up, but the photographers had the shot that told the story:
“Brash young presidential aide, head bowed in humiliation, the agony of defeat etched on his face
…”

My comeback strategy could wait until Monday. Now I just wanted that weekend off. But I hadn't lost all my chutzpah. Before I headed to the airport, Mack asked me if there was anything he could do for me. “Thanks for asking,” I replied. “Can we start with a raise?” He laughed, but I got the money — and a small piece of evidence that I really had been promoted. Then I got on the plane and slept. The flight attendants woke me when we landed.

Right then, Malibu was the best place for me to be. At a diner by the beach, a group of college kids who were listening to the radio came by my table to congratulate me.
Hey, maybe this is going better than I thought
. Wrong. I might have been playing OK in the town where only no publicity is bad publicity, but on the East Coast my public double was taking a beating. For every winner in a Washington power play, there must be a loser, and that weekend it was me. The
Times
story was headlined “An Offering to the Wolves.” A pissy piece in the
Post
style section claimed that I broke up with Joan for Jennifer Grey and speculated that my new status would lead Grey to throw me over for Gergen. My whole life was fair game now. Live by celebrity, die by celebrity.

But my ritual sacrifice also created a mildly surprising sense of relief. If ancient myth, modern political culture, and my professional failings had all ordained a fall — and they had — better that it happen when Clinton still claimed he needed me by his side, before I was too shot up to have any chance of recovery. Public humiliation also had its private consolations. My answering machine was packed with “hang in there” messages from all my friends. The old bull Dan Rostenkowski tracked me down on the Pacific Coast Highway to ask: “Are you OK? Because if the president didn't treat you right, he's going to have to answer to me.” The only call I didn't return was from a headhunter who thought I might be interested in joining the private sector.

No, I wasn't ready for that. I believed in our work and wanted to prove that I could take a punch. Just like my boss. On the flight back Monday afternoon, I plotted out a strategy. My touchstone was a piece of advice phoned in from former Congressman Tony Coelho: “Nobody will remember what happened to you. They'll remember how you handle it.” My first day back would set the tone.

Tuesday morning it seemed as if everyone in town were stopping by on a condolence call or phoning in an encouraging word. Hillary, who had thoughtfully noticed that I hadn't fought my fate with off-the-record comments to reporters, called to say, “You're a class act, Mr. Stephanopoulos.” Warren Christopher walked into my office with moist eyes: “This can be a cruel town. I went through this under Carter. For a week, I was supposed to be secretary of state after Vance resigned, then I was passed over and everyone pounced.” Colin Powell said exactly what I wanted to hear: “I always feel better when you're in my meetings.” Washington elder Bob Strauss added exactly what I needed to hear: “You may be a young punk, but you've been around long enough to know that all this stuff doesn't make a bit of difference. Time and performance take care of these things.”

Listening to the past-tense praise was a little like hearing my eulogies, which was fitting, because that afternoon I would have to perform the political equivalent of speaking at my own funeral. Gergen wasn't set to start for another week, and they hadn't decided who would do the press briefings once he came on board. So I had four more days of facing the reporters who'd become my tormentors. Tuesday noon was the start of my final run.

“Nobody will remember what happened to you. They'll remember how you handle it.”

My whole staff gathered in my office to help me prepare. The substance I could manage, but style would matter more. A little California sun helped, and I had shaved extra close that morning. Even more important was my opening line: Should I act as if nothing had happened and get right to work? No, that would ring false, look like I was in denial. Everyone was going to ask about it anyway. Someone suggested Mark Twain's old saw “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” No, too obvious and too defensive. What I needed was something light, a little ironic, with just the right touch of self-deprecation. I had to acknowledge that the press had won and show good-humored dignity in defeat. Gene Sperling came up with the line:

“So … how was
your
weekend?”

My comeback had begun.

7 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

Out of nowhere, P's half-brother turns up. P talked to mother about it. Agrees to call him before noon; nobody's home. We're trying to round up the Senate vote, NAFTA meeting, welfare reform meeting, prepare for G-7, but I spend much of the morning deciding what to do about the new half-brother. What does the P do? What do you do when you're forty-nine years old and you discover a brother you never knew you had? His mother didn't know either.

Lots of Arkansas jokes in the WH. But this is a real human problem; there's no precedent. P going to call him, invite him to the WH. Just another odd moment. No advance warning on this one. Just something to deal with.

Note to myself, June 21,1993

J
ust another manic Monday. The day before, a Father's Day story in the
Post
broke the news that Bill Clinton had a second half-brother he'd never met, Henry Leon Ritzenthaler of Paradise, California. Their charming rogue father, a traveling salesman named William J. Blythe II, had died in a car accident three months before the boy who would be president was born.

Back in Dogpatch. How could you not know you had a brother? That's what they'll say. Accuse us of covering up. Poor guy; can't catch a break. Every time he turns around another surprise pops out of his past. What's he going to say to his mom? What's she going to say to him? How do we explain this — and keep it from becoming another excuse to dissect Clintons “character”?

These were my preoccupations as I followed my morning routine: up at six; drive down Connecticut Avenue to the Southwest Gate; wait while the German shepherd from the Secret Service K-9 division sniffs my Honda for hidden explosives; grab a black coffee from the basement mess and walk up the single flight to my new office.

The room was a study in small. All the furnishings were miniature — from the twelve-inch television to the CD Walkman with four-inch speakers; from the spindly table five feet across to the squat club chair planted by the back door behind my desk. That door was the best. With its peephole peering directly into the president's private dining room, it meant that I was connected and protected.

When it comes to White House offices, it's not the size that counts. Location, location, location. Proximity, like celebrity, is a source and sign of power. The closer you are to the president, the more people believe he listens to you. The more people believe he listens to you, the more information flows your way. The more information flows your way, the more the president listens to you. The more the president listens to you, the more power you have. This particular cubicle had even played a small role in history: Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield kept the Oval Office taping system in the back closet.

In our White House, Clinton's longtime aide Nancy Hernreich had it first. But after Memorial Day, I didn't just covet that office — I needed it. All the other first-floor offices were taken — by the vice president, the national security adviser, the chief of staff, the press secretary, and they weren't going anywhere. I could have secured space in the basement, or even a spacious corner suite with eighteen-foot ceilings in the Old Executive Office Building across the street, but that would be like owning a palace in Siberia. Even if it was just a matter of inches, my new office had to be closer to the Oval than my old one.

Proximity, after all, was now my professional reason for being. The public rationale for my job shift was to have me work “more closely” with the president. “One of the reasons for this move,” Clinton had said in the Rose Garden, “is that I have missed very badly, and I have needed, the kind of contact and support that I received from George in the campaign.” Putting me by the back entrance to the Oval would be proof that the president meant what he said, a sign that his kind words weren't just a graceful pat on the back as he pushed me out the door. Not quite Harry Hopkins being invited by FDR to live in the residence, but the next best thing — a space in the Oval Office suite.

The trick was figuring out how to get the prize without groveling. Asking the president directly was out of the question. It would look petty and weak and make Clinton think I didn't take him at his word. Mack couldn't really help because he had his own job worries and was thinking about bolstering his position by commandeering the president's dining room (where Michael Deaver had worked for Reagan). Gergen was maneuvering for turf too. So I called on the two biggest guns I knew: my old friend James Carville and Clinton's pal Vernon Jordan, who had befriended me upon my arrival at the White House. Both understood power and the perception of power, and both would try to help. I still don't know exactly how it happened, but one day in early June, Vernon called to let me know that Nancy Hernreich was moving into a cubbyhole on the other side of the Oval that would put her even closer to Clinton, and that her office would be mine. Five minutes later, Mack walked in to make it official.

Relieved of the burdens of managing a fifty-person staff and confronting a dyspeptic press corps, I was free to do the job I did pretty well, the job I had first started doing for Clinton early in the campaign.

Which was what, exactly? Sometimes I'd take on a special project, like helping shape the final compromise on gays in the military. But mostly my job was just to be there, by the president's side; to help give background to the press on the president's thinking and background to him on theirs; to know what was going on, what the president should say, and how to get things done; to help corral decisions to closure, assess the political impact of policy decisions, and contain mistakes before they became scandals. The president tended to take each discussion and each decision as it came. My job was to think about whether they formed a coherent whole, and to help ensure that others who met with the president didn't mistake his empathy for agreement. Clinton told the world that I was to focus on “day-to-day decision making, helping me to integrate all the complicated debates that confront my office.” He told me that he liked having me around because I had a “good bullshit detector.”

After a predictable flurry in the press, the president's new half-brother passed back into private life. But throughout the summer of 1993, President Clinton was confronted with close encounters of a more consequential kind: episodes of intimate decision in which individuals from Clinton's past held a piece of his presidency in their hands.

“IT WAS DIRECTED AGAINST YOU”

Jumbo shrimp and canapés on silver trays were being offered by the serenely silent staff who served from president to president. It was eight
P.M.
, June 23, and summer light was still filtering into the parlor by the Lincoln Bedroom. You couldn't ask for a better setting at cocktail hour. But the waiters were wearing business-black jackets, not their formal whites, and no one ordered a gin and tonic or champagne — it was Diet Cokes and club sodas all around.

This wasn't a social evening at the White House. President Clinton was about to order air strikes in defense of the president he had defeated.

Two months earlier, Kuwaiti authorities had arrested fourteen men for planning to place a 175-pound car bomb in the path of former President Bush as he received an award in Kuwait City. Immediately after the arrest, Clinton ordered the FBI and CIA to determine if this assassination attempt was authorized by Saddam Hussein. The official report was due on June 24, but we already knew that the investigation had established a link between the bombing suspects and the Iraqi Intelligence Service.