All Too Human: A Political Education (28 page)

After the president's victory speech, a bunch of us went to Bice, an Italian restaurant near the Capitol, to celebrate the final act of the 1992 campaign. It was the old War Room gang: Carville, me, Mandy Grunwald, and Stan Greenberg — Sperling showed up late, as always. Halfway through our postmidnight supper, a tray of drinks arrived at our table, from the gentleman in the far corner — Senator Bob Kerrey.

We nodded our thanks and wondered out loud about what it meant. The gesture, like the man, was graceful, awkward, and ironic all at the same time. What was he saying?
“I forgive you for pressing me so hard”? “It's you who should be sending me the drink”? “I'm glad I did it”? “Congratulations. You guys won
” (it didn't feel like “us guys”)? or maybe just
“Let's hope this works”?
On the way out, we stopped at his table, but no one knew what to say. We shuffled our feet, mumbled our thank-yous, and went on our way.

The moment wasn't right. But I would have loved to pull up a seat for a real talk with our former adversary and reluctant ally. Kerrey's detachment, his cool, his intellectual curiosity, his ability to do what he needed to do while letting you know that he understood it might not mean much in the end, appealed to the part of me that was afraid to believe too deeply in anything. He was frustrating in a fascinating way.

I was still grateful, however, that Clinton was my president. He may not have had Kerrey's ethereal, ice blue charm — he was too “out there” for that. He may not have been a hero like Kerrey — Vietnam wasn't his finest hour. But with all his raw, naked, intelligent, profound, and profane humanity, Clinton really did feel other people's pain, and he was determined to do something about it.

Courtesy of Bob Kerrey, he still could.

MYSTERY

“Webb, it's George; I'm afraid I have some bad news.”

“What is it?”

“Vince killed himself.”

“What?”

“Vince killed …”

“No. Whaaat?”

“Vince, I'm sorry, Vince …”

“What? I don't believe …”

Seven times he asked; seven times I answered. It was a little before 9:30 on the night of July 20, 1993. I found Webb from a phone by the map room on the first floor of the residence. Minutes before, Bill Burton, an assistant to Mack McLarty, had crashed in from the colonnade with the news: Vince Foster's body had been found in a wooded area off the GW Parkway. Early signs pointed to suicide.

Mack looked stricken, but he quickly clicked into checklist mode. “I'll call Hillary,” he said. “You call Webb.” We couldn't tell the president; he was on the air, chatting with Larry King in the library across the hall. At the next commercial break, Mack fixed the president with a stare to signal that our reluctance to extend the show wasn't just our usual fear that an overtired Clinton would say something we'd all regret later. When King said good night, Mack ushered the president to the elevator with an arm on the back of his elbow. Clinton's head dropped, and he seemed to steady himself on Mack's arm as they rode upstairs.

A few minutes later, I went up to the second-floor kitchen to get Clinton's guidance for a presidential statement we'd have to issue before the evening ended. But he had no head for official duties that night. In shirtsleeves, with red eyes but still no tears, the president was thinking about his boyhood friend and the family he had left behind, about his private grief, not public relations. “You know what to say,” he said, not unkindly, just preoccupied. “I have to go see Lisa” (Foster's wife).

When Clinton left for Foster's house, I returned to my office, reviewed the brief statement Dreyer had drafted, read it to Clinton over the phone, and left. Jennifer Grey was in town, and I needed to talk to someone who wasn't immersed in our closed world. At a time when I probably needed them most, my hyperreactive political instincts were shutting down. Jennifer poured me a drink and drew me a bath as I struggled to make sense of what had happened. I didn't know Vince well; he wasn't a friend. But he was my colleague, and he'd killed himself.
How could that be? Is the pressure more intense than we know?

By the next morning, official Washington's highest-ranking suicide since Secretary of Defense James Forrestal in 1949 was fast becoming a political scandal. Inside the White House, we were captured by grief, confused by the inherent inexplicability of suicide, and convinced that we had a duty to preserve as much privacy as possible for both the Fosters and the Clintons. Focused on ourselves, we walked through the halls with careful looks, huddled in corners and consoled one another with a touch on the shoulder or a hug: “Are you OK? Are you sure? Do you want to talk?” If this could happen to Vince — Clinton's “Rock of Gibraltar” — maybe it could happen to anyone.

Trying to comfort us, the president called the staff together in room 450 of the Old Executive Office Building. He urged us to understand that what happened to Vince “was a mystery about something inside of him” and reminded us “that we're all people and that we have to pay maybe a little more attention to our friends and our families and our coworkers.” At his press conference, Mack echoed the theme: “Try as we might, all of our reason, all of our rationality, all of our logic, can never answer the questions raised by such a death.” Somewhat less elegantly, I told the
Post:
“The fundamental truth is that no one can know what drives a person to do something like this. Since you can't ever know, it's impossible to speculate on it. In the end, it is a mystery.”

This was the White House line, and I believed it was true. But it made sense to the world only if you understood what we were feeling inside, only if you were part of our family. To more skeptical ears, Clinton's refusal to speculate on Vince's psychological state and our preemptive insistence that Vince's suicide could not be explained by examining his White House work sounded as if we were trying to shut down a legitimate inquiry — which guaranteed, of course, that this was just the beginning. At a White House briefing a week after Vince's death, Dee Dee was asked 139 questions about the Foster case. Over the next month, the
Times
and the
Post
each published six front-page stories on the suicide, and William Safire used his column to make it a cause célèbre.

Combine the predictable press interest with Vince's involvement in the travel office imbroglio, with our claim that the White House counsel had to control Vince's papers to preserve his attorney-client privilege with the Clintons, with the confusion over who had been in Vince's office and what had been done there, with the belated discovery and release of a torn-up note from the bottom of Foster's briefcase, and you have the circumstantial seeds of a full-blown scandal. By trying to preserve a measure of Foster's privacy, we invited more invasive scrutiny. By thinking like lawyers, we risked being questioned like criminals. By emphasizing the “mystery” of suicide, we appeared to be manufacturing a cover-up. Our human reactions were read through the prism of post-Watergate politics: Every president is Nixon until proven innocent.

On July 21, the park police said that Foster's injury was “not inconsistent with that of a self-inflicted wound.” By August 11, that was their official finding. Subsequent investigations by two independent counsels, congressional committees, and countless investigative reporters may not have convinced ardent conspiracy theorists, but they have confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt that Vince Foster shot himself in Fort Marcy Park, Virginia, on July 20, 1993. Why he did it, we still can't really know.

“Suicide,” writes A. Alvarez, “is a closed world with its own irresistible logic.” The same can be said of a Washington scandal. When Vince Foster — White House lawyer, president's friend, first lady's confidant — took his own life, the two closed worlds collided like smashing atoms, setting off a chain reaction that Vince would never have wanted and could never have imagined. His suicide raised suspicions; the suspicions spawned scrutiny; the scrutiny sparked resentment and resistance; and the inevitable “cover-up” charge that followed, in the “irresistible logic” of a modern Washington scandal, led to the appointment of an independent counsel. The rest, as they say, is history.

How history will eventually judge Vince Foster and the president we both served is not yet known. But a few weeks before his death, in an interview with Margaret Carlson of
Time
, Vince may have revealed what he feared. His achingly laconic lament is a fair warning for those who aspire to high White House service: “Before we came here, we thought of ourselves as good people.”

The pressures were getting to me too. So much had happened in the two years since I met Clinton. … And now this. A few weeks later, I started to see a therapist. All of the usual reasons — relationships, family, work — motivated me, but they were magnified by the shock of Foster's suicide and the hothouse aspects of my job. Even this most personal decision seemed to have a public component, which made me hesitate.
Will it get out? How will it look in the
Post?
What if my therapist is subpoenaed? Will she talk?
In the wake of Foster's suicide, White House staffers were vaguely encouraged to “get help,” but admitting to mental health treatment was still a political taboo. The memory of Reagan's “invalid” smear of Michael Dukakis in 1988 stuck in my mind. I wondered if I might one day be victimized by a similar allegation, and what would happen if I couldn't deny it. Although I wasn't ashamed of seeking treatment, I instinctively calculated the political fallout.

Then there was Clinton to think about.
(“Is there anything at all, anywhere in your background, that could ever come back to embarrass the president?”)
I knew he wouldn't veto my decision, but I thought he had a right to know. When I entered the Oval to tell him, he responded perfectly — with a shrug of his shoulders that said it was no big deal for him and a look in his eye that said he was concerned about me.

So every Friday evening, shortly before seven, I would leave the White House. Early on, even that one hour away at the tail end of the week felt like stolen time.
What if the president needs me? What if he discovers he doesn't?
But my therapist, a woman who didn't say much but understood that I had to be weaned from my work, had two rules: Failing to show was forbidden except in case of extreme emergency, and I had to say whatever was on my mind — no censoring, no spin.

I did my best. For all the ups and downs, working in the White House was still the greatest privilege of my life. I wanted to do well at it, and enjoy it, and do some good. I wanted to stay, but I needed some help.

8 DOING THE JOB

T
he night before the most inspiring day of his presidency, Clinton rose at three
A.M.
to read his Bible — the Book of Joshua, with its tale of Jericho's fall and the Israelites' conquest of Canaan. He was searching for words as meaningful as the impending moment. In a few hours, at eleven
A.M.
on Monday, September 13, the three thousand folding white chairs on the lawn below his study's window would be filled with witnesses to an unprecedented event. Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Chairman Yasir Arafat of the PLO were going to shake hands and pledge to return the ancient lands of Judea and Samaria to a time when “the land had rest from war” (Joshua 11:23).

The concerns that woke me were less lofty.
What time should we open the gates? Will everyone get in? Who did we leave off the list? What if it rains? Did Safire's column screw us or play it straight? What if it falls apart and everyone blames us?
The president was doing his job, and I was doing mine — a job I first learned in my father's church. That morning, Clinton would preside at a kind of liturgy on the White House lawn. I was his altar boy, hoping to serve peace by serving my president — sweating the details.

A few days earlier, the good news had arrived without warning. Tony Lake picked me up on the way to the Oval to tell Clinton that Arafat had signed the mutual recognition agreement between Israel and the PLO. Clinton responded by repeating what Rabin had said to him on the phone in the Israeli's throaty bass monotone — a sneak preview of the resigned resolve Rabin would later show the world: “After all these years of fighting with Arafat, I can't believe I'm doing this. But after all, you don't make peace with your friends. You make peace with your enemies.” That didn't mean he was ready for a celebration. But the president had nudged his new friend privately and publicly, and when Rabin was convinced that a ceremony would cement the agreement, he accepted Clinton's invitation to the White House.

We had seventy-two hours to make it happen.

Mack asked me to manage the process with Rahm Emanuel — not the diplomatic negotiations, of course, but the ceremony surrounding them. Starting Friday, we convened two “countdown” meetings a day in the Roosevelt Room with staffers from every White House office: the National Security Council, the social office, press and communications, public liaison, legislative affairs, and the Secret Service. All hands on deck asking every conceivable question:
Who's on stage? Who signs? On what? Can we get the table Carter used in Camp David? Who speaks? For how long? Where do the Russians fit in — and the Norwegians? How do we make sure we hit prime time in the Middle East?

Where should the ceremony be? Rose Garden? Too small? South Lawn? Whom do we invite? Former presidents? Secretaries of state? How about members of Congress — they'll all want to come. At least the Arab and Jewish members? Big contributors? Sure, but how many? How do we screen them all in through security? Do we do a dinner? Too festive? What about the press? Anchors on the lawn? What do we say? How do we encourage the peace process without appearing to take credit for something we didn't really do? How do we seize the opportunity without seeming opportunistic?

We all knew that a successful ceremony on the White House lawn would be a political boon to Clinton, but we were careful not to say so: Taking credit wouldn't only be crass, it would backfire. I was responsible for judgment calls, asking the right questions and anticipating the appropriate answers, making sure to preface every decision with “If it's going to help the diplomatic effort, we should …” This wasn't just camouflage. All of us were awed a bit by the moment's potential. We didn't know if peace would last, but the possibility that it might made us more conscientious and humbled us. Getting everything right was now a higher obligation; getting the
chance
to get everything right was a gift.