All Too Human: A Political Education (35 page)

An Oval Office tableau. On the eve of the first government shutdown, November 1995. Left to right: White House photographer, Don Baer, Erskine Bowles, Mike McCurry, Gene Sperling, Michael Waldman,

Plotting strategy with Erskine Bowles (left) and Harold Ickes during the government shutdown.
(Official White House Photograph)

Vice President Gore (foreground), Laura Tyson, President Clinton, Leon Panetta, and me.
(Official White House Photograph)

Saturday morning before Christmas 1995, preparing the president's radio address. The second government shutdown turned out to be Newt Gingrich's Christmas gift to the president.
(Official White House Photograph)

“What?” Clinton, who hated to be left out of
any
conversation, tries to find out what Leon Panetta and I are talking about.
(Official White House Photograph)

The president's ire wasn't reserved for pundits. He was plenty angry at his own team, particularly after the
Harlan County
debacle in Haiti. As part of the pact to return the democratically elected President Aristide to power, the United States had agreed to send 600 troops to Haiti with a UN force that would help reform the military and rebuild schools, roads, and hospitals. But the Haitian dictators who had deposed Aristide weren't ready to leave. When the USS
Harlan County
arrived in Haitian waters with the first contingent of lightly armed U.S. troops, it was blocked from landing by armed demonstrators directed by the Haitian security forces. After a day of deliberation, we pulled the ship back. So soon after Somalia, no one had the stomach for another fight.

David Gergen — who knew the president was upset with Aspin, Christopher, and Lake, and sought an enhanced position on the foreign-policy team — saw this setback as an opportunity. On Tuesday, October 12, he boarded
Marine One
with the president for a trip to North Carolina and made his move.

Whatever Gergen said to Clinton had its desired effect. Minutes after takeoff, the president was on the phone to Tony Lake, screaming about our screwed-up foreign-policy team and demanding to know why Gergen was being cut out of the decision making on matters like the
Harlan County
. Never mind that Gergen had been the loudest voice in the White House for turning the ship around. “I want Gergen working on this,” the president yelled. “The Reagan people were much better at the politics of foreign policy than we are. Look at Lebanon. They went into Grenada two days later and fixed it.”

A few minutes later, as I listened with Sandy Berger to Tony's account of the president's tirade, I couldn't believe what I was hearing.
Grenada? That's how we should handle things? Like Reagan? The answer to losing 250 marines in a terrorist attack is to stage the invasion of a tiny country? If you really believe that, then why'd we turn the damn ship around?
It was bad enough to hear Gergen talk about the good old Reagan days, but to hear it parroted by the president was too much. I made excuses for him instead, almost whispering in disbelief: “He's so angry he doesn't even know what he's saying.” Sandy focused on Gergen's backstabbing maneuver: “It's despicable; it's the Nixon White House.” Tony wondered where it would lead.

My first loyalty was still to the president, but I wanted to protect Tony too. The next morning, the president's aide Andrew Friendly pulled me out of a health care meeting because Clinton wanted to see me. I asked him for a mood check, and Andrew said, “It's not so bad, just tired.” When I entered the Oval, Clinton was reading an interview Tony had given to
USA Today
. “This makes it look like we weren't paying attention to Somalia,” he grumbled.

Often, the best way to deal with Clinton's anger was to divert it. “Mr. President, I talked to Tony about the interview, and I'm sure he defended the Somalia decision. You know
USA Today
, they cut those transcripts to pieces.” But I also took the opportunity to address my deeper worry. The president's displeasure with his foreign-policy team was bleeding into the press. This wasn't only disheartening; it diminished their effectiveness, and it made Clinton look like a weak and disloyal leader who wouldn't accept responsibility for his decisions.

“Mr. President, you just have to …” I started, not quite knowing how to begin. “I know that it's hard now, but you really have to, around other people, you have to stand by your people. You have to communicate confidence down the ranks.” He seemed to hear me, but I didn't push it. After a couple of minutes, we both turned to dumping on the press. When Tony arrived for a briefing a few minutes later, the president greeted him by saying, “Boy, you sure got screwed by the editors over at
USA Today
.”

The rest of that week was spent deciding what to do in Haiti. The dictators were defiant, and the UN peacekeepers were preparing to evacuate. The president was torn. He understood why the military opposed an invasion and knew there would be no public support. But he wanted to keep our word and enforce the agreement, and he hated the appearance of being pushed around by two-bit dictators. Late Thursday afternoon, as the final cabinet room meeting with the national security team approached, he was thinking of nothing else. I was standing in front of his desk, running through some routine paperwork. The president glanced at each sheet, silently marking them one by one with his backward check. Then he suddenly looked up and asked me the question that was agitating him: “So you think I should go in and take them?”

I normally wasn't shy about giving advice, even when I wasn't asked. That's why I was there: I wanted the ball at the buzzer. I was also sane enough to know that I was only one small voice among many.
But what if I say yes and he goes in and it's a disaster? I like the idea of taking out terrorists like François and Cedras. But the whole Congress is against us, Aristide's a flake, and like Senator Dodd said, the last time we sent marines to Haiti they stayed thirty years. Whenever we invade a small country we change it, and not always for the better. Half the people hate us automatically, and we never know how to get out. That's the clincher, I guess. Unless we have a plan to get out, we can't go in
.

“I'm just not sure, Mr. President,” I said. “We don't have an endgame. Maybe later, if nothing else works. But it's definitely too early right now.”

It
was
too early, even for President Aristide. After the vice president called Aristide to talk him through the president's decision to reimpose economic sanctions rather than return him to power by force, Gore returned to the Oval. “He's ecstatic,” Gore reported, shaking his head in disgust. Clinton, relieved to hear some evidence reinforcing his decision, responded in kind: “See, I told you. What would
you
rather do? Go back to Haiti, or sip champagne in Harry Belafonte's apartment?”

But a week later, Clinton revealed something closer to his true feelings about the man he would eventually help return to the Haitian presidency. We were in the Oval, discussing CIA leaks to Congress of psychological profiles concluding that Aristide was an unstable manic-depressive. “You know, you can make too much of normalcy,” Clinton said. “A lot of normal people are assholes.” Then his mind leaped from the present-day freedom fighter Aristide to a memory of one of the greatest. Abraham Lincoln often boarded in rest houses where the guests shared beds divided by wooden planks, Clinton recalled, suddenly distant. “The people who slept next to him said that Lincoln would just sit up in bed … staring into the night.

“Well.” He shrugged, snapping to. “Lincoln might have been crazy, but he was a hell of a president.”

By the end of the year, Clinton was looking like a better president than he had been. Our fortunes started to turn after November's victory on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Not that I can take any credit for NAFTA; I was against making the fight. Maybe Gore was right: It was that Gephardt DNA. Working for Midwestern Democrats who represented communities hit hard by the loss of manufacturing jobs had shaped my thinking, and I believed that we should go forward with the agreement only if it included our promised protections for labor and the environment, which would be a spur, I believed, to higher wages and safer working conditions. I didn't think we could win the NAFTA fight. It was a stick in the eye of our most loyal labor supporters, and our base in the House had been through enough already this year. Why put them through the wringer one more time for a Republican trade treaty?

After I lost the argument, I had the uncomfortable task of trying to prove myself wrong. I was sure we were headed for a defeat that would divide the Democratic Party and divert us from the health care fight. But we needed to win more than I needed to be right, so I threw myself into the battle, working on the undecided members I knew best and trying to keep up a good front.

I didn't always succeed. On October 19, less than a month before the congressional deadline, we were still dozens of votes short, Newt Gingrich (our unlikely ally on this) was publicly calling the president's effort “pathetic,” and the House Republicans were resisting a small border tax to pay for worker training. In an Oval Office meeting on NAFTA, I was chafing at the indignity of being beholden to Newt, nearly bouncing on the president's couch as I opposed more concessions. “Newt's trying to have it both ways,” I argued. “He's setting up a situation where he gets the credit if NAFTA wins and we get blamed if it loses — because ‘we're not trying hard enough’ or ‘because we have taxes,’ whatever. We can't keep caving to these guys.”

“We have to,” Gergen responded. “The Republicans won't be held accountable. After all, this is President Clinton's treaty; this is
our
treaty.”

Gergen's political analysis was essentially correct, but hearing him say “our” just set me off.
Not only do I have to hear Newt Gingrich call the president pathetic. Not only do we have to give up the worker training that makes NAFTA marginally palatable to Democrats. Now I have to listen to a guy who worked for three Republican presidents tell me that an initiative drafted by President Bush is
our
treaty
.