All Too Human: A Political Education (43 page)

Forgetting about getting drafted was a hard story to swallow, and now I was more skeptical on this story. But I still believed that his amnesia was closer to the truth than her allegation, that Clinton's private behavior as governor wasn't necessarily relevant to his performance as president, and that it wasn't fair to treat a flirtation as if it were a felony. That was the core of the argument I would make to Downie.

On February 17, we met over crab cakes in the dining room of the Jefferson Hotel. On the understanding that everything I said would be off the record, I came prepared with notes sketched on a long yellow pad — a political brief for why the
Post
shouldn't run the story. Despite the sordid subject matter, I felt like a man on a noble mission. Not only was I serving my boss, but I was also taking a stand against the tabloid culture. I imagined myself in the tradition of presidential advisers called to solemn deliberations with barons of the fourth estate over how to balance the public's right to know with the president's responsibility to govern.

I began by flattering the
Post
, emphasizing that our extraordinary efforts to keep Paula's account out of the paper demonstrated our respect for the
Post
and our belief that whatever appeared on its pages would rightfully be taken seriously by the rest of the world. Then I turned to Paula's credibility. Her three years of silence, her refusal to rule out book and movie royalties, and her association with CPAC, I argued, all called her story into question. People who worked with her in Arkansas, I added, had also told Isikoff that she was an unreliable employee who seemed to have a crush on Clinton.

Next, I served as Clinton's character witness. I told Downie about the moment when I had told the president about Paula's press conference. When I mentioned her name, I recounted, Clinton had drawn a blank, and he didn't seem to be faking when he claimed that he didn't remember meeting her. Omitting my subsequent doubts, I added that I had seen Clinton fudge before and had believed him this time. Then I went even further, saying that even if you believed that Clinton was a womanizer, it wasn't credible that he had acted this way with this woman at this time. That's just not his style, I said. Why I thought I knew that is hard for me to figure out now, but it made sense then.

I also tried to use Ferguson's testimony to our advantage. Sure, he puts Clinton in the room with Jones, I argued, but you can't take half his story and throw away the rest. If you believe Ferguson, then you also should believe that Paula Jones didn't feel harassed at the time. And if you believe that, then you have no justification for printing her charges three years after the fact, when she has dozens of reasons to embellish her story. Assume Ferguson's story is true: The fact that Clinton flirted with someone when he was governor of Arkansas does not belong on the front page of the
Post
. By printing Paula's charges against a sitting president, no matter how many qualifiers are hidden beneath the headline, the
Post
is reaching a provisional judgment. You're telling the world, I concluded, that her story is true — and we're put in the nearly impossible position of having to prove a negative.

Downie hardly said a word. Polite but imponderable, he heard me out, asked a few questions, took some notes, and thanked me for my time. He was doing his job, and I was doing mine. And though I don't know what role our conversation played in the decision, I was proud of the fact that Isikoffs account didn't appear in the
Post
until May 4, the day after President Clinton retained attorney Bob Bennett to represent him in the impending civil suit of
Jones v. Clinton
.

With the statute of limitations for Jones's legal claim set to expire at the end of the week, Bennett had first tried to negotiate a preemptive settlement with Jones's lawyers. In the initial phone call, Jones's lead attorney, Gil Davis, took a hard line, saying that Ms. Jones was all but certain to file suit and that she was “prepared to discuss the president's private parts.” But when the settlement talks heated up on the afternoon of May 5, Bennett camped out in my office so that he could personally consult with Clinton on the final details.

The president was in the Oval, working the phones for the House vote on an assault weapons ban. Despite intense lobbying by the National Rifle Association, we were within a few votes of victory, and Clinton was doing all he could to put it over the top. I shuttled between the two sets of phone calls, but I should have known after our cliff-hanger victory on assault weapons that Paula Jones would surely file suit. In Clinton's world, good news rarely arrived without a shady companion.

Early in the afternoon, Bennett thought he could buy more time. He called Davis from my easy chair and said that he couldn't “get an answer by today. It's a busy day at the White House, and this is not a decision I can make.” The offer Jones had on the table was for the president to read a public statement confirming that they had met and apologizing for any defamatory statements about Ms. Jones from him or his staff. Although it would later seem like a small price to pay, at the time it appeared unacceptable. We couldn't agree to subject the president to such a public spectacle over an incident he had denied. In addition, the Jones attorneys were asking us to sign a “tolling agreement.” That meant we would agree to suspend the statute of limitations for Jones's sexual harassment claim, and they would reserve the right to file a lawsuit at any time. That was a nonstarter for us; if we agreed to a settlement, it had to be final. We couldn't run the risk that as Clinton's reelection campaign approached, they would concoct a reason to refile the lawsuit.

In his conversations with Davis, Bennett used me as a foil. He said that the president's “political advisers will go nuts” about any settlement, and that we were adamant about holding the line on a public apology by the president. Davis responded with a joke: “You know about the Stephanopoulos bond, don't you? It doesn't mature.” It rankled me a little, but I was happy to play bad cop. The president adamantly denied harassing Jones. I believed him, and with reelection only two years away, I thought it was perilous to admit to a boorish act like that, especially if it wouldn't eliminate the threat of a lawsuit. But Bennett and I did draft a counterproposal that he read to Davis over the phone:

I have no recollection of meeting Paula Jones on May 8, 1991, at the Excelsior Hotel. It is entirely possible that I did meet with her on that date.

If such a meeting occurred, neither she nor I did or said anything of a sexual nature. I regret the untrue assertions which may have been made about her.

I was willing to propose to Clinton that this statement be issued as a written release from the White House press office, provided that Ms. Jones would publicly agree with the statement that the president hadn't said or done anything inappropriate and that the statute of limitations would expire on schedule. I thought at the time that we couldn't admit any more than this: It satisfied Ms. Jones's public complaint that she had been defamed by the
American Spectator's
claim that she had sex with Clinton without forcing the president to admit to behavior that he had denied.

But the tolling agreement was a bottom line for the Jones team, and it wasn't clear that Paula would agree to publicly confirm the president's claim that he hadn't done anything wrong. These conditions fueled my suspicion that Paula would see if she could sell her story and then concoct an excuse to refile the lawsuit as the 1996 election approached. Bennett, while preferring a settlement, was also convinced that he could win the case in court. Within hours, the debate was moot. The Jones team pulled out of the negotiations with the excuse that they needed a tolling agreement because they couldn't trust the White House not to trash Paula.

The next morning, as we prepared for a prolonged legal and public-relations battle, we joked about which one of us would have the privilege of talking to the president about his “distinguishing characteristics.” It wasn't the kind of subject that had come up before in the confines of the West Wing; I didn't remember reading anything like it in Clark Clifford's memoirs or Haldeman's diaries. That the president was in a fighting mood made it all easier. When Bennett and Cutler reviewed the details, he reacted vehemently, without hesitation, and offered to have a urologist examine him and file an official affidavit on the spot. Later, when we were alone in the Oval and he seemed more dejected, I tried to buck him up by saying that we would make history when he was reelected despite all this garbage.

“You
may
be right,” he responded with skeptical hope. “Andy Jacobs [Democratic congressman from Indiana] told me that I'd be remembered with Adams and Truman as a great president who was vilified while in office because he was doing tough things.”

Clinton understood how fierce his enemies were, and he was willing to pay the personal price for advancing his public agenda. He also knew that he had no “distinguishing characteristics,” but he failed to comprehend the complexity of his own character. Had he been able to predict how he would react as Paula's case made its way through the legal system, Clinton would have never permitted it to go forward — if only for the harm it would do to everyone and everything he cared about. Me neither; in retrospect, the risk of a tolling agreement seems painfully small.

But who knew? In May of 1994, Monica Lewinsky was still in college.

11 THE LONGEST SUMMER

The Japanese prime minister had the American president on hold, and Clinton wasn't happy. But his impatience on the morning of May 24, 1994, had more to do with domestic politics. A few hours earlier, the polls had opened in Kentucky for a special election to replace the late William Natcher, a courtly Democrat who had cast a record 18,401 consecutive roll-call votes over a forty-year congressional career. Although no Republican had been elected from Kentucky's Second District since 1865, the president was worried about the race. Shielding the phone with his right palm, Clinton said he wanted to be campaigning: “It's Nazi time out there. We've got to hit them back.”

Afraid that Prime Minister Hata would overhear and misinterpret the president, I talked him down, suggesting that the Republicans' harsh campaign tactics could backfire. “They might,” he replied. “But not if we don't stand up to them.” Then, seamlessly, “Thank you, Mr. Prime Minister, I think you've found your voice in more ways than one. …” Minutes later, after jump-starting trade talks with Japan, Clinton felt better. “I like Hata. Speaks more English than he lets on; caught himself answering my questions before they were translated. But he's a good politician.”

High praise, like Joe DiMaggio's calling someone a “pretty good ballplayer.” Clinton's feel for electoral politics extended abroad; he intuitively calculated the domestic pressures facing his counterparts like Hata, Helmut Kohl, or Boris Yeltsin. Since his biorhythms were tuned to election cycles, he usually knew when to push and when to hang back. Campaigns, he always said, were his “best friend.” But that morning he was blind to his own political predicament. Our Democratic House seat was imperiled all right, but letting Clinton campaign would only have made matters worse. In 1994, the voters just didn't like their president. Republican polls showed that only 30 percent of the voters in that Kentucky district thought Clinton deserved reelection, and even half of the Democrats polled thought it was time to send him a message by voting Republican.

Whitewater, Paula Jones, and other missteps like gays in the military weren't our only problems. By the spring of 1994, even our legislative successes were working against us. The Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban had enraged and energized members of the National Rifle Association, but the general public didn't know yet that crime was down. Voters heard Republicans call our economic plan “the largest tax increase in the history of the universe,” but they had yet to feel the benefits of lower interest rates and stronger growth. Our labor base was depressed by the president's all-out effort on the NAFTA agreement they considered a job killer, but the corporate interests profiting from the pact showed their gratitude by attacking our health care plan. Rush Limbaugh and other talk-show hosts were fanning all of this smoldering resentment into an angry flame, and Republican strategists had crystallized the intense anti-Clinton mood into a single, devilishly clever campaign commercial: the “morph ad.”

Thanks to digital technology, voters in Kentucky's Second District saw a photo of Joe Prather, the Democratic candidate, slowly dissolve into an image of the president as an off-screen announcer ominously warned, “If you like Bill Clinton, you'll love Joe Prather.” Sending a Clinton clone to Congress was about the last thing voters wanted in 1994. Prather lost by ten points, and the Republicans had a road-tested strategy for November's midterm elections.

Turnabout
is
fair play. In 1992, our campaign had exploited voter anger at President Bush for breaking his “Read my lips” pledge by broadcasting a series of commercials consisting entirely of video footage of Bush promising “no new taxes” or discussing the dismal economy. But neither Clinton nor I was in a philosophical mood when we received the early returns from Kentucky. A little before 7:30 that evening, I accompanied the president to a working dinner on our upcoming European trip to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of D day. He yelled the whole walk through the Rose Garden colonnade. “I told you,” he said. “We have
no
strategy. We shouldn't be getting beat this badly. Nobody has our talking points. Nobody knows what we've done.”

Better distribution of our “talking points” wouldn't have helped much, but the president was right. With the country at peace and the economy improving, we should have been in better shape — and those of us on the political team deserved our share of blame. But I instinctively depersonalized the outburst and refocused the president by lapsing into jargon. “We have real opportunities coming up with D day and the G-7 trip,” I said. “Our numbers will rise to match the fundamentals if we have a good performance.”