All Too Human: A Political Education (44 page)

Another irony. We had defeated President Bush, in part, with the charge that he spent too much time and attention on foreign policy. Now I counted on escaping our domestic difficulties by going abroad. Having President Clinton on the world stage, surrounded by fellow statesmen and cheering crowds, would help the country see him in a new light. It had to. Our legislative agenda was floundering, and our poll numbers were plummeting. At a Memorial Day weekend strategy session, Clinton complained that the “American people hired me to get things done, but I'm becoming a prisoner of Congress.” I was starting to take it all personally. The American people were rejecting the Congress I worked for, the president I helped elect, and the policies I cared about most.

But they couldn't take away
Air Force One
. To climb its back steps was to enter a world even more rarefied than the White House itself. Inside the huge cabin are all the comforts of home and office combined: couches flanked by bowls of fresh fruit and candy in the corridors; a conference room with two TVs in the wall and a library of first-run movies; offices with computers, fax machines, copiers, and phones; a full kitchen crew serving hot meals and cold drinks around the clock. Up front, the president has a one-bedroom apartment with an office, full bath, and king-sized bed.

Once we were airborne, Clinton changed into jeans and a flight jacket and patrolled the halls like the captain of a cruise ship. After reviewing his itinerary in the conference room, he joined us for a movie over baskets of tortilla chips and salsa, while Hillary and her staff lounged on the couches outside the door. The president wandered over to catch up on White House gossip and tell tales about how he learned his trade in tiny Ozark churches where they charm snakes and speak in tongues. Hillary had heard it all before, but she seemed to enjoy it anyway, letting him ramble on with an indulgent smile.

From the moment we touched down in Rome, I felt enhanced, like more than an embattled presidential aide or a member of the Clinton team. Here in Europe, half a century after the battles that defeated fascism, I was an emissary of both my country and my generation. My main responsibility on the D day trip was to monitor the home front, but like the rest of our entourage, I was seized by a sense of history and humility. Sure, we hoped the president would get a political bounce from the trip, but we wanted even more to honor the generation that had made our world possible. At every ceremony, with every speech, in every detail, we wanted to express how grateful we were to be “the sons and daughters of the world they saved.”

President Clinton spoke those words across a field of marble bordered by cypress and pine — Nettuno's American cemetery. This speech and every other D day ceremony included a variation on our theme — “We are the children of your sacrifice” — along with heart-stopping gestures of remembrance: At Nettuno, a fighter squadron roared low over the crowd, the jets ascending in unison until a single plane suddenly vanished, like a silver bird plucked to heaven by an invisible, almighty hand. Its mates soared on, an empty space their silent tribute to “the lost flyer.” Over the moist, mown lawns of Cambridge, bagpipes pierced the fog with a haunting “Amazing Grace.” At dawn, from the deck of the USS
George Washington
, fifty years to the hour after D day's first landing, a single wreath was tossed into the sea. Off the cliffs of Pointe d'Hoc, a lonesome gull hovered at attention for a lone bugler playing taps.

I absorbed these moments from the edges of the crowds, assessing Clinton's performance with one eye, appreciating its meaning with the other. At Colleville-Sur-Mer, I sat behind a sunburned man with a snow white crew cut. When Clinton spoke of Corporal Frank Elliott — one of “the fathers we never knew, the uncles we never met, the friends who never returned, the heroes we can never repay” — the veteran started to cry. His wife reached over to rub his back, and I was acutely aware of being two people at the same time. My human side was moved by the sight of an aging soldier being consoled as he remembered his youth, his mission, and his fallen comrades. My political twin was jumping out of his skin.
Perfect. It's working. Clinton rose to the moment again. Even the sun broke through when he started to speak
.

Just as Clinton finished, the man turned around, thinking he would find Dee Dee, whose place card had been on my seat. He had a message for the president: “My name is Frank Callahan. I didn't vote for your man, but I'm a veteran of Omaha Beach. And as a very staunch conservative Republican, please convey to the president how very proud I was of him today. Frank Elliott was with me …” He couldn't go on. The tears were back, unbidden, and he tried to stop them by tapping his fist to his chest. Then he smiled. “Where's that Dee Dee? She's cute as a bug.”

The trip was filled with little thrills. Like standing on an aircraft carrier in the Atlantic and hearing the loudspeakers bellow, “AMERICA LANDING” as your boss's helicopter touches down on the deck. Or jogging by his side through the stone streets of Rome, with Secret Service agents on bicycles clearing the path ahead and kids on sneakers yelling from behind,
“Cleen-ton, Cleen-ton
.”

In Paris, François Mitterrand more than matched his reputation. I couldn't wait to meet him. The moment came just before a joint interview with Clinton on French television. Wendy Smith, the president's trip director, and I were heading to Clinton's holding room when we saw the French president strolling our way, with his head down and his hands clasped behind his back, apparently deep in thought. As we crossed paths, he looked up abruptly and blocked our way — and not (as I fantasized) to make the acquaintance of the young presidential adviser he'd heard so much about.

“Bonsoir, madam,” he said, bowing slightly as he locked eyes with Wendy, a statuesque beauty with luxurious hair. He took her in from head to toe and back again, lingering in appraising silence. I got a nod.

At the state dinner that night, the dining room was a scene from Versailles. Every table had a name (I was at “Begonia”). Candles were the only light for a meal of lobster topped with caviar, followed by quail stuffed with truffles the size of chestnuts. The champagne was tinted dusty rose, matching the linens and walls. After Mitterrand's closing toast, a few of us joined the Clintons for a midnight tour of the Louvre's new wing. “What a shame you can't be here during the day to see the sunlight play,” apologized our guide, the wing's architect, I. M. Pei.

That last night in Paris was a festival of wonderful excess. I stayed up all night, staving off the bad news back home, ignoring for a few more hours the tensions beneath the surface splendor of our European trip.

The trouble had begun on the Saturday before the anniversary of D day. We had just finished lunch at Chequers with Prime Minister John Major, and Clinton was meeting for the first time with Tony Blair, the Labour Party leader. Back at the White House, a small group coordinated by David Dreyer was quickly reviewing advance copies of Bob Woodward's new book,
The Agenda
, and faxing us summaries with suggested responses. The next day, all of Washington would read an excerpt on the
Post's
front page, and the rest of the country would see Woodward in person on
60 Minutes
. We were in for a media blitz.

That was the power of Woodward. What he wrote, people read. His apparently omniscient accounts of how Washington works had toppled a president, exposed the cloistered corridors of the Supreme Court, unveiled the clandestine operations of the CIA, and revealed a White House at war in the Persian Gulf. Now his sights were set on us. For more than a year, he'd been chronicling the economic policy wars inside our White House. His book, as he predicted in the letter I had hand-delivered to President Clinton eight months earlier, would be “the most serious contemporaneous examination of your administration's economic policy.”

In the summer of 1993, several months into his project, Woodward's first call to me had sparked two simultaneous thoughts:
Oh, no!
and
I have arrived
. His books invariably created embarrassing headlines for their subjects, but his sources were assumed to be the most important, connected, and knowledgeable people in Washington. I was wary of Woodward but flattered and curious too. I also considered it part of my job to know what he was up to and make the best of it. We met for a late dinner at his Georgetown town house, where I received the full Woodward treatment.

The polished wood of his dining-room table was topped with neatly stacked, typed notes and a pocket tape recorder. Over home-roasted chicken, he hit me with memos from one of our first economic meetings, then some handwritten notes from another, followed by word-for-word transcripts of what I had said at a third. Woodward's technique is no less effective for being so obvious: He flashes a glimpse of what he knows, shaded in a largely negative light, with the hint of more to come, setting up a series of prisoner's dilemmas in which each prospective source faces a choice: Do you cooperate and elaborate in return (you hope) for learning more and earning a better portrayal — for your boss and yourself? Or do you call his bluff by walking away in the hope that your reticence will make the final product less authoritative and therefore less damaging? If no one talks, there is no book. But someone — then everyone — always talks. The deadliest initial response was my instinctive one: “Well, it wasn't like that exactly. …”

“Really? …
Innn
teresting. … I didn't
know
that. … Tell me. …”

Our dance had begun, the mutual seduction of reporter and source. Woodward's calculated charm was custom tailored to my intellectual vanity, professional pride, and personal loyalty to the president. I knew that Woodward always beguiled sources into saying more than they should. But like so many others who had supped at his table and spoken into his cassettes under the cover of “deep background,” I was arrogant enough to believe that I could beat him at his own game, that my spin would win. I thought it was possible to soften Woodward's negative slant with context and perspective, or overwhelm it with up-close and personal accounts of the president's public-spirited fortitude, intelligence, and empathy.

I knew that there was a risk in openly cooperating with Woodward, but at the time, I accepted it as the price of loyalty. It would
appear
more loyal to ignore Woodward, I reasoned, but it would actually
be
disloyal because it would cede the book's battleground to those who didn't have Clinton's best interests at heart. I was so sure the book was going to be damaging, so sure I knew how to prevent it, and so sure my motives were beyond question, that I took it on as my personal project.

What I couldn't fully admit to myself, of course, was what I surely also knew: that even spinning you think is selfless is an act of self-aggrandizement — especially with a reporter of Woodward's stature. Talking to him in an authoritative way demonstrates that you were in the room and in the know. Working on Woodward's book was my job, but it also fed my ego. Relishing the role of fixer, I encouraged friends and allies like Carville, Sperling, Begala, and Greenberg to cooperate with Woodward. I also urged Hillary to do an interview, gave three interviews myself, and handed Woodward's private letter to the president without telling anyone else about it.

The interview request was masterly; Woodward knew his subject and his potential source. He opened with bland understatement:

I believe you are aware that I am writing a book on government economic policy-making. The book already has a heavy and growing emphasis on your administration.

Followed by intimidation:

I already have accumulated more than 100 pages of typed notes, memos, recollections, charts, and tables on just one of the pre-Inaugural meetings (January 7, 1993, in Little Rock) you had with your economic team. …

Obligatory humility:

But I have wondered many times, what am I missing? A lot, no doubt — too much. My reporting has yielded enough that I am definitely humbled by what I don't know. … Though much of what I have comes from the inside, I've written enough about government and Presidents to know that the most powerful inside account is still really from the outside. It lacks the perspective of the President. …

An appeal to history:

Richard Reeves, in his remarkable new book on President Kennedy,
Profile of Power
, poses the graphic and compelling question: What is it really like to be President? … Reeves was forced to rely on substantial documentary records and the testimony of others near, but not at, the very center. He never interviewed Kennedy. …

A civic-minded slap at the press:

Just in eight months, it's clear you've been on a singular journey. But the published and broadcast accounts of it miss far too much. Public dialogue is at too low a level. Aren't the problems of governing connected to the shallow discourse? Don't Phil Donahue and Rush Limbaugh and the twenty-second update dilute understanding and short-change the public? People ought to know, or at least have the chance to know, as authoritatively as possible, the truth. …

Fair warning and reassurance:

Might it involve some loss of control and some risk? Yes. … [But] I don't intend a how's-he-doing assessment. … No cheap shots. No cheerleading …

And a big, flattering, irresistible finish:

In my last book,
The Commanders
… I ended the introduction with this idea: “The decision to go to war is one that defines a nation, both to the world and, perhaps more importantly, to itself. There is no more serious business for a national government, no more accurate measure of national leadership.”

I wrote that in the spring of 1991. About that time, you made the point to friends and associates that the battlefield had shifted. National self-definition, seriousness, and leadership would next be measured by economic and domestic policy. You were right.

Clinton secretly met with Woodward, and
The Agenda
largely lived up to the promise of that hand-delivered letter. Taken as a whole, in the fullness of time, it is a comprehensive and basically accurate account of how we developed and passed an economic plan that worked. But that's not how it played in June of 1994. Appearing on
60 Minutes
, Woodward boiled the whole book down to a less-than-twenty-second sound bite: “Chaos. Absolute chaos.”
The Agenda
was marketed as the most persuasive proof yet that Clinton was an undisciplined and indecisive president leading an inexperienced, out-of-control White House. The repercussions were immediate.