All Too Human: A Political Education (64 page)

Not the same. In a political speech, it takes a cliche to counter a cliche. Maybe it didn't matter; maybe the man-bites-dog quality of a Democrat's declaring the death of “big government” would drown out whatever words followed. But if Clinton's compromise was too clunky, the editorial decision itself was poetically concise. The fall of a single sound bite to the Oval Office carpet summarized the Democratic Party's journey of a generation: from a party unified by the belief that government could promote the common good to a loose coalition of caucuses alienated from average Americans by a fixation on identity politics. It showed, as speechwriter Michael Waldman said when we left the Oval, “the death of liberalism at its own hands.” Clinton's bold and bland synthesis also revealed a secret of his personal popularity in the face of his party's decline. While striking deep into Republican territory, he covered his flank just enough to keep his fragile coalition whole. The centrists got the sound bite; the feminists excised a phrase; the traditional liberals like me couldn't really complain. A remnant of our idea survived even if the rhetoric wasn't ringing.

The country loved it. Not just the death of big government, the whole presentation — with Clinton's patently passionate delivery of issues designed to appeal to suburban moms: school uniforms and curfews, stopping big tobacco from targeting kids, V-chips to block televised sex and violence. Ironically, though all involved government intervention, the proposals were wildly popular, which was at least half the point. Of course, I was no virgin. Taking a poll, to me, was like taking our temperature, and I had advocated the relatively inconsequential middle-class tax cut in 1992 not only because it symbolized whose side we were on, but also because it scored well. But during the Morris era, it seemed more and more as if we were polling first, proposing later.

My only original contribution to the State of the Union was “a little dig” at our most likely opponent. On the afternoon of the speech, as Clinton practiced before a group of us from a mock podium in the family theater, I interrupted when he reached the section on national security challenges. As drafted, it opened with thanks “to our veterans” for providing America with “fifty years of prosperity and security.” I suggested that the president stop there and single out Senator Dole and his World War II colleagues for special praise. Clinton smiled and made a note on his reading copy.

The maneuver would rankle the Dole campaign, but what could they say? How could they possibly criticize the president of the United States for taking the unprecedented step of praising his prime opponent during the State of the Union Address? Because it was a body blow wrapped in a bouquet. Clinton's seemingly gracious salute was a subtle reminder that Senator Dole's time had passed — and he was already in a deep hole. With the economy humming and Clinton stealing the political center, even a flawless campaign would probably fall short. The crucial contrasts were working in our favor: Thirty-five years of congressional experience tagged Dole as a Washington insider; Clinton was still a relative newcomer who seemed to be in touch with average Americans. The government shutdown, during which Dole had repeatedly appeared in press conferences (and our television advertising) joined at the hip with Newt Gingrich, portrayed him as captive to the most extreme forces in his party, while Clinton had shown his backbone by standing up to them. Clinton had started green, but he was growing into the job; Dole seemed too old to be president.

Morris was so eager to make sure Dole won the Republican nomination that he tried to help him out — in his own way. Two days after the State of the Union, he secretly leaked a polling memo to the Dole campaign that said Dole could not win in either New Hampshire or Iowa unless there was a budget deal. Like one of those aged Japanese soldiers still fighting World War II from deserted island outposts, Dick hadn't surrendered his magnificent obsession. The Dole people thought the memo was bizarre. The questions were clearly slanted, and they couldn't figure out what Morris was up to. But they did take the opportunity to embarrass us by passing it on to the
Post.

When Ann Devroy called Mike McCurry for our official comment, McCurry found Morris, and Morris blamed … me. On the spot, he concocted a convoluted scheme in which I had supposedly stolen a copy of the memo from Clinton's desk and passed it on to Carville, who gave it to his Republican wife, Mary Matalin, who funneled it through to Devroy — all to smear Morris. Dick could prove it, he told McCurry, because the president's copy was missing a line scribbled on the memo that was given to the Dole campaign: “You might want to check this with your own pollster.”

After informing me that I had been charged with treason, McCurry called Devroy, whose copy, I knew, included the handwritten notation that would prove that I had nothing to do with Dick's scheme. But when McCurry, Panetta, and Ickes presented the case against Morris to the president, I stayed away. Not only because I had also been accused, but because I didn't want to watch the charade. I knew that Dick would pay no real price for falsely charging me with the political equivalent of a capital offense. A few days earlier, I had heard a rumor that the Dole campaign had the Morris memo, so I went to the Oval to warn Clinton that they were likely to leak it. “Dick wasn't supposed to do
that
,” he said — a rebuke that was also, I suspected, an inadvertent admission. Morris had probably told Clinton that he would make another play for a budget deal by passing his polls to the Dole campaign, but the president must have assumed that Dick was smart enough not to leave a paper trail.

Which Clinton was sincerely furious about. Leon and Harold came straight from the Oval with the verdict: The president had defended me and chewed out Dick. “Whenever something goes wrong around here,” he yelled, “you blame it on George.” Against my will, my eyes welled up. I guess I wasn't all that detached yet. Although I feared that Clinton didn't fully mean it and knew that nothing would follow from it, the president's spontaneous defense was something I needed to know about. The episode ended with a front-page story by Devroy, a public McCurry wrist slap of Morris, and a Morris apology to me, which I didn't accept. He was sorry for getting caught, and I didn't have to pretend anymore. From now on, no Dick attack on me would stick.

Dole secured the nomination despite ignoring Dick's advice, but he couldn't develop any real momentum. When he tried to use his position as majority leader to pass popular tax cuts and force a Clinton veto, Democrats pinned him down on the Senate floor with amendments on our issues like raising the minimum wage. Then he tried to reignite his run by resigning from the Senate. Although his farewell speech was the most moving rhetoric of the campaign, its political benefits didn't linger. On the campaign trail, he looked lost, almost sad, a man homesick for Capitol Hill. Following our 1992 example, he tried to compensate for his lack of campaign funds by hitting the “free media” talk-show circuit. But Dole's ironic humor didn't always translate well on television; nor did his clipped legislative shorthand, honed over thirty-five years of cutting Senate deals. In the emblematic moment of the preconvention season, Dole argued with
Today's
Katie Couric about whether tobacco was addictive. Taking on America's sweetheart, he seemed crotchety and out of touch. All we had to do was watch.

But I still worried. Dole couldn't match Clinton as a communicator, but there was still the issue of “character” — the contrast between the straight-talking war hero of sterling integrity and the slippery draft dodger under an ethical cloud. Our internal mantra was “public values trump private character” — a refined version of the formula that had worked ever since Gennifer Flowers and the draft. For us, it was now an article of faith that Clinton could overcome personal attacks as long as he kept addressing the “real problems of real people.” That meant, however, that the rest of us had to work even harder to keep the hoofbeats at bay.

In June of 1996, it felt like an entire herd was converging on the White House. Ken Starr won convictions of Arkansas governor Jim Guy Tucker and Clinton's Whitewater partners Jim and Susan Mc-Dougal, and he named Bruce Lindsey an unindicted coconspirator in the trial of an Arkansas banker with ties to Clinton. Senator D'Amato issued a scathing report on Whitewater recommending that several Clinton friends and staffers be investigated for perjury. Even worse, we created a mess of our own when two midlevel White House staffers mistakenly obtained the FBI files of nine hundred Republicans from previous administrations, including former Secretary of State James Baker. “Filegate” was a bureaucratic screw-up, but with its echoes of Watergate and our 1992 attacks on the Bush administration for examining Clinton's passport file, it had the potential to be our most serious scandal yet.

By now, damage control was a cottage industry in the White House. We had a team of lawyers, nicknamed the Masters of Disaster, whose sole job was to handle Whitewater and related inquiries — responding to grand jury subpoenas, preparing congressional testimony, answering questions from the press. Better them than me. From experience, I'd learned that simply gathering facts to answer allegations could spawn new inquiries and additional avenues of attack, creating a cycle that was the political equivalent of a perpetual-motion machine. Anyone anywhere near the activity risked getting sucked into the swirl and spit out with a tarnished reputation and a ton of debt. At approximately $100,000, my legal fees were already high enough. Though I talked to our Masters of Disaster frequently, I had steadily disengaged from the daily scandal patrol.

At the end of June, however, I took myself out of early retirement for a farewell run at the “right-wing conspiracy.” Maybe Jay Stephens made me do it. My old nemesis was now representing Gary Aldrich, an ex-FBI agent who wanted to document the depravity he supposedly witnessed when conducting security checks on the Clinton White House staff. Stephens steered Aldrich to Regnery Publishing, an established conservative publisher. With additional assistance from the Southeastern Legal Foundation — a right-wing law firm with ties to Newt Gingrich and funding from Richard Mellon Scaife (the reclusive tycoon who had donated millions of dollars to groups promoting conspiracy theories about the Clinton White House) — they created a work of fiction and called it a memoir:
Unlimited Access: An FBI Agent Inside the Clinton White House.

The prepublication buzz was hot, and the book broke into the news on Thursday, June 27, when ABC reported that Aldrich's book alleged (falsely) that Craig Livingstone — the White House staffer under fire for obtaining the FBI files — had been hired at the direction of Hillary. The
Washington Post
was working on the same story, and we knew that the
New York Post
and the
Washington Times
were planning front-page treatments of the book's most sensational fabrication — that Clinton frequently snuck out of the White House in the backseat of Bruce Lindsey's car for late-night trysts at the downtown Marriott. Although the charge seemed ludicrous on its face, the media was taking Aldrich seriously. Over the next week, he was set to be seen by millions of Americans on shows like
This Week with David Brinkley, Larry King Live, Good Morning America,
and
Dateline.

To counter the air assault, I first had to read the book. My assistant Laura Capps bought me a copy, and I settled in by my fireplace for a night of study. With a blue felt tip, I underlined each specific charge and ranked it in the margins: “False,” “Innuendo,” “Fabrication,” “Lie.” The allegations (that the social office hung pornographic ornaments on the White House Christmas tree; that when the Gennifer Flowers story surfaced, Washington superlawyer Lloyd Cutler brokered a deal in which Hillary agreed to stand by Bill in return for total control over domestic policy in the White House; that the men on Clinton's staff wore earrings and the women no underwear) were either silly, specious, or provably false. The more I read, the more righteously indignant I became.
How can they even think about broadcasting this crap before checking it out?
But Aldrich's outlandish account also created an opportunity: His fifteen minutes of fame would make him the poster boy of the anti-Clinton conspiracy. If we could destroy his credibility in a high-profile way, the press might be more skeptical of the inevitable flurry of allegations late in the campaign.

The next morning, I worked with our team to document Aldrich's partisan connections and collect affidavits refuting his claims. Then I called the
Washington Post's
Howard Kurtz, a respected media critic whose column would be read by the editors and producers deciding how to handle
Unlimited Access.
Offering him an exclusive first look at the information we'd compiled, I pitched a piece about the ethics of airing the Aldrich allegations. The real story here, I argued, is not Clinton's sex life, it's his sleazy attackers and the state of journalism, adding for good measure that Aldrich's tale “couldn't get past the fact checkers at the
National Enquirer.”
Then I walked to the Washington bureau of ABC News to make my case to the producers of the
Brinkley
show. Although I didn't expect them to be particularly moved by my commitment to their First Amendment responsibilities (and they weren't), I did hope that a full-court press would help ensure that Aldrich didn't get a free ride.
Brinkley
kept Aldrich, but they also offered me a chance to answer his charges in person on Sunday morning.

I arrived at the studio spoiling for a fight, and the sight of an Aldrich handler in the greenroom gave me extra ammunition: Craig Shirley was a paid agent of the NRA and big tobacco, and an unpaid adviser to Senator Dole's campaign. His presence was all the proof I needed to charge that Aldrich was part of a “smear campaign conducted by Republican Party operatives.” But as it turned out,
my
presence was largely superfluous. Like a boxer dissing his opponent in the center of the ring, I whispered “Liar” at Aldrich as I walked onto the set. But he'd already been pummeled by one of the referees, George Will, whose questioning revealed that the Marriott tale was a hand-me-down figment from “Troopergate's” David Brock.
Newsweek
had the same story, and Kurtz's article had raised all the right ethical questions. By Sunday afternoon,
Dateline
and
Larry King Live
had canceled Aldrich, and most of the follow-up focused on his shoddy sourcing and shady connections.