All Too Human: A Political Education (47 page)

Over the course of 1994, the uneasiness I felt the summer before had deepened into a real depression. The pressures created by the Whitewater investigations, the disappointment that came from watching our legislative agenda go down the tubes, and the sense of professional insecurity and personal estrangement from the Clintons that followed from the Woodward book all contributed to my dark mood. But it was more than that: The power and celebrity I had craved were also exacting their price. Certain that every move I made would be reported and every word I said would be repeated, I rarely let my guard down. Even home was no refuge. A troubled young woman repeatedly appeared at my door and followed me around my neighborhood. She sent me several rambling letters a week, studded with insight into me beyond what she could have known from reading the newspapers. Only after studying them did I realize how she'd learned so much: by commuting to my dad's Bible study group in New York and asking him seemingly innocent questions after class. The Secret Service confronted my stalker, but the intense scrutiny was shutting me down. Increasingly, my therapist's office felt like the only place I could store my frustrations and sort out my feelings without any fear of disclosure.

I couldn't even imagine how Hillary handled the personal assaults she had to weather. Health care and Whitewater made her hate radio's favorite target — G. Gordon Liddy even suggested using cardboard cutouts of Bill and Hillary for target practice. Her late-July bus trip, the “Health Security Express,” encountered intense crowds carrying incendiary signs: “Go Back to Russia,” “Bill and Hillary are immoral homosexual communists.” In Seattle, Secret Service agents confiscated two guns and a knife from the crowd. Hillary was a tough politician, a veteran of her husband's often gothic campaigns, but nothing had prepared her for this. In public she tried to hide it, but inside the White House, her guard was down. Her husband looks soft, but his accommodating nature cushions him; Hillary looks hard, but her often brittle exterior masks a more vulnerable core.

On July 28, we met with Hillary to discuss how to counter our opponents' guerrilla tactics. Not surprisingly, she favored massive retaliation. Our best weapon, she argued, was for the president to go on prime-time television with a fiery speech — preferably before a joint session of Congress. Although I wanted the president out there as much as anyone else, I was back in the position of apostate, arguing hard realities to defenders of the faith. “Congress won't agree to another joint session,” I replied, trying to be neutral. (What I didn't say was how offended they would be at the idea of even being asked. To grant a president one joint session for a single legislative initiative was exceptional; to request a second was a self-indulgent insult.)

“Well, what about an Oval Office address?” she tried, slightly more exasperated.

Again, I was Dr. No. “We should try, but we're probably not going to get it.” The networks had become increasingly parsimonious with prime-time slots. Short of a national emergency, they weren't going to grant the president ten minutes of free airtime. “We should call a press conference in the East Room instead,” I countered. “That's our best hope. But if we do it, it will probably have to be on the day Maggie [Williams, Hillary's chief of staff] testifies, so the president will have to take a lot of Whitewater questions.”

“Who cares about that?” she shot back. “We have to do it. We can't care about that stuff anymore.” With all of us in vehement agreement, the press conference was set for eight
P.M.
the following Wednesday, August 3.

On Tuesday afternoon, I was in the office of Alice Rivlin, the new director of the Office of Management and Budget, for a preliminary meeting on next January's budget, when Hillary paged me: “Need to speak to you urgently, please call.” I called the White House operator. After a brief pause, the operator announced, “Mrs. Clinton on the line.” She didn't mention that Mrs. Clinton was sobbing.

“George,” she gulped, her voice falling in utter frustration, “how did this happen? How can it be that we're having a press conference the night that Maggie and Roger [Airman] are testifying?” Then she echoed the speech patterns of her husband, or perhaps he had learned the litany from her: “I try and I try and I try. I don't get involved. I stay out of your decisions. But people never think; they
just never think.
”

If it hadn't been for the agony in her voice, I might have laughed at the absurdity of it all. But the first lady was crying, and I knew she didn't remember biting my head off just a few days before. Reassurance was all I could offer: “I know exactly what you're saying, Hillary. All I can tell you is that we spent dozens of hours discussing this point. It's not without risk, but we think it's an opportunity. We're trading off a six-minute opening statement — a six-minute commercial, really — for twenty-four minutes of questions. The president is good at this. He can beat back the Whitewater stuff, and we have a chance to really sell what we're trying to do on health care. I don't think we can get out of it now. It would be a worse mistake if we did.”

After twenty minutes, she conceded that going forward was our only option. But I knew that in her eyes I now owned this press conference, so it had better be a success. Thankfully, Clinton turned in a stellar performance, combining passion on health care with cool responses to all of the questions on Whitewater. But I didn't take anything for granted. After gauging the initial press response from Ann Devroy and Andrea Mitchell, and getting the preliminary focus group results from Stan Greenberg, I set up a phone bank to Hillary. First
I
would call, then Stan would follow with his research, and Carville would come in behind with his gut. Buzzing the operator, I waited for her to say:

“The first lady.”

“Hillary?”

“Hi, George, how did we do?”

“Pretty well, I think. My first press calls were positive, and Stan …”

“Oh, there's Stan now …”

“Really? Take it. I'll talk to you later. Bye.”.

But even a month of boffo press conferences wouldn't save health care, which had already fallen victim to the forces that had defeated every other president who had tried. Corporate America, the insurance industry, and small business pooled their enormous resources and invested millions in lobbying and advertising to preserve the status quo. The Republican Party coupled sincere ideological opposition to our approach with pure political opportunism. When they saw, in the words of future Speaker Newt Gingrich, that health care was “a springboard to win Republican control of the House,” they pounced. Democrats were basically united around the goal of national health care, but our various factions didn't trust each other, and we were deeply divided on matters of tactics and strategy.

All of these obstacles might have blocked health care reform even if we had run a perfect legislative campaign from the White House. But we didn't. Presenting a detailed bill to Congress (on the theory that it could be pared down by horse-trading as the legislation worked its way through Congress) turned out to be a serious tactical mistake. While the provisions that threatened a segment of the health care industry became targets of laserlike lobbying campaigns to remove them, all the costly benefits of the bill became effectively locked in once they were printed. We couldn't compromise without cracking apart our coalition.

Besides, compromise didn't come naturally to Hillary. She was driven by the righteous and intellectually sound conviction that only a comprehensive solution would work, but that was more than the political system could bear. In a way, her leadership was more than the political system could bear. It's difficult to escape the conclusion that having Hillary run health care was a mistake.

At the time of her appointment, however, I was convinced it was a masterstroke. By choosing his wife to head the effort, we believed, Clinton was showing how much he cared about health care, and Hillary had all the right tools. She knew the subject cold, she was a tough-minded political tactician who could organize a national campaign, and her public advocacy was brilliant. But the approach she developed reflected both her strengths and her weaknesses. The plan, like the woman who guided it, was ambitious, idealistic, and highly logical; but it was also inflexible, overly complex, and highly susceptible to misinterpretation. Our standard line after the 1994 debacle was that we tried to do “too much too fast,” that “we bit off more than we could chew.” Instead of threatening to veto legislation that didn't meet our demands, we should have articulated the long-term goal of universal coverage and negotiated legislation that built up to it in stages. Here is at least one instance where Clinton's sometimes maddening instinct for the political middle ground might have better served their shared cause.

Hillary was also too juicy a target for the enemies of reform. They supplemented legitimate questions about the propriety and wisdom of having a first lady manage a major legislative campaign with more sinister attempts to cripple health care by turning Hillary into a caricature of a power-hungry radical feminist. Which leads to a final question: not what Hillary did to health care, but what health care did to Hillary. It made her vulnerable. The press cited her quasi-official position as justification for more intense scrutiny of her past, which helped fuel the Whitewater mania. The Republicans and their fringe allies felt that it made her fair game. Inside the White House, her position stifled healthy skepticism about our strategy, and Hillary became the object of some quiet resentment because no one was ever quite sure what the rules were in internal debates. Only Hillary can say if she would take the lead again, but my guess would be no.

On August 26, 1994, Congress adjourned without acting on the Clinton plan, and Senator George Mitchell announced that comprehensive, universal health insurance would not pass the Congress that year. By then it was a mercy killing.

12 CRASH

A
ndrew Jackson was in office when the old magnolia first graced II the South Lawn of the White House. Now, at 1:49
A.M.
on September 12, 1994, that tree was Bill Clinton's last line of defense. A small plane piloted by a depressed veteran was heading straight for the White House. It skidded across the lawn, hurtled through a holly hedge, and winged the branches of the old magnolia before slamming into the wall two floors below Clinton's bedroom. The agents on duty could only duck for cover.

I didn't learn about the crash until 6:25, when I strolled up to the Starbucks next to my Dupont Circle apartment and saw the stack of
Posts
propped against the still-locked door: “
PLANE CRASHES ON SOUTH LAWN
.”

No way. How could this happen? How come nobody called me?
I rushed to work, upset at being out of the loop, unsure if this was a national security crisis or a bizarre prank gone awry. Apparently it was a little of both. The Secret Service agents managing the situation from their West Wing basement control room said that the dead pilot, Frank Corder, had boasted about landing a plane on the South Lawn, but his friends had brushed it off as beer talk. The incident was, however, a severe problem for the Secret Service. Their effectiveness in thwarting threats against the president stems in part from the illusion that their protective shield is impregnable, from the unconfirmed but undenied belief that a kamikaze heading for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would be blasted out of the sky by a heat-seeking missile.

My immediate concern was ensuring that our snakebit White House avoided blame. The way our luck was running, I half expected to discover that the pilot was a first cousin of Gennifer Flowers's who had stolen one of Harry Thomason's planes from Arkansas's infamous Mena airstrip; or that the failure of the FAA's early-warning system was connected to some REGO budget cut. As Leon Panetta and I walked across the Rose Garden to inspect the damage, our mission seemed both surreal and surprisingly mundane. It's Monday morning, the start of another work week, and we're dealing with another crisis that's cropped up overnight — this time a stolen Cessna crumpled up against the White House like a crushed beer can.

Hours later, hundreds of kids and their congressmen and women were scheduled to gather on the South Lawn for an event celebrating Clinton's Americorps national service program. Instead of canceling our “news of the day,” we moved the rally to the North Lawn, and we did our best to deflect questions by designating that all official press briefings be handled by Secret Service and Treasury Department officials.
Let them take the hit for this one.
Of course that wouldn't stop our press corps from writing the inevitable “tick-tock” stories of what the president knew and when he knew it, laced with analysis of what all this said about Clinton. Maureen Dowd of the
Times
pressed me all day for a Reaganesque anecdote — something like “Honey, I forgot to duck,” the line President Reagan was said to have delivered to Nancy after being shot by John Hinckley.

“C'mon, George, you never give me anything.”

“Maureen, I'm always nice to you.”

“But you never give me anything. This is the time.”

“Maureen, I'm not going to give it to you.”

Still, Maureen may have been right. So we actually had a meeting about whether to leak an anecdote showing Clinton handling the “crisis” with equanimity and a sense of humor. All Clinton said when Dee Dee and I went to the Oval to get his story was that after Leon called him he “turned over and went to sleep.” So far, so good. “Can we knock down the rumor that you're going to stop jogging because of security concerns?” “Hell, yes,” Clinton replied. “If I don't jog, I'll get up to two hundred sixty pounds. Be an even bigger target.” Nice, but a joke about Clinton's struggle with his waistline didn't seem to strike the insouciant note Maureen had in mind. Our best spin here was the straight story: He turned over and went to sleep. The less said the better. We didn't want this to be a story about Clinton. We didn't have to prove that he was a regular guy with a good sense of humor. We had to show that he was up to the job.