All Too Human: A Political Education (66 page)

But I was also grateful to Clinton — for the chances he had given me and the things he had taught me, for his intelligence and fortitude, for his commitment to public service, for coming through on the biggest issues and becoming a better president every day. And I was grateful that night because he didn't pull rank. After I told him about being treated for burnout, he suggested that I take a six-month sabbatical and then come back to work. Thoughtful, but that wasn't how the White House worked. The conversation drifted. After ninety minutes, I reminded Clinton that he needed his sleep and prepared to leave — relieved. The president of the United States had told me he needed me, but he hadn't commanded my service. All I could have hoped for. On my way out, he asked me to reconsider his offer. “Of course,” I said. But we both knew this was good-bye.

Election day 1996, I slept in. Around noon, I threw on some jeans and a baseball cap for an anonymous walk around Little Rock. I wanted lunch at Doe's, and to wander down Main Street to see the War Room. The space had been rented out for a corporate reception — re-created down to the headset from my phone and the little white sign Carville had hung on the wall: “Change vs. More of the Same …”

The late autumn haze carried me back to the day I first landed — to the mansion, their bedroom, that paint store where it all began.
Clinton's allergies will be acting up. Man, that seems like a long time ago. So much has happened. Ugly sometimes. Didn't get all we wanted. But the country's in good shape, and we did some good things
. … As I passed by the old train station, my reverie was interrupted by a shout: “Are you registered to vote in Little Rock?” A woman in a flowing white muumuu beneath a Medusa's tangle of dark hair rushed toward me with an offering. It was a business card with a caramel wrapped in gold foil stapled to the corner:

VOTE FOR CONNIE HAMZY

LITTLE ROCK CITY BOARD, POSITION 10 —

“TO REPRESENT THE CONCERNS OF THE WORKING POOR.”

I looked down at the card, then back at her face.
Sweet, sweet Connie.
My first bimbo eruption. A candidate for city council. I was getting out; she was getting in.

Later that night, in the presidential suite of the Excelsior Hotel, I told Clinton about it. “Did she recognize you?” I shook my head. “Too bad, she might have flashed.” Roaring, he repeated every detail from their moment in the North Little Rock Hilton. It was safe to laugh now.

Hillary was in the back bedroom, helping Chelsea get dressed. Just before I left for a victory lap with the network anchors, I knocked on her door. She peeked out, “Just a minute,” then came into the hall. Only the two of us were there, separated by a wall from the suite where the returns were being announced and Clinton was holding court. This was our private good-bye. She gave me a hug, then held me at arm's length for an extra second, a hand on each of my shoulders, her eyes shining.

We smiled through the silence. Victory was vindication — even sweeter for her than for her husband. She had paid a higher price, taken harder hits, achieved fewer dreams. Now she'd have a second chance, and I wished her luck. She did the same for me. All the stresses and threats, all the suspicions and resentments, all the times the two of us had clashed because I blamed her for being too rigid and she blamed me for not being as “tough as Kennedy's men” — all that was behind us now. We had survived. We had won. All would be well.

“I love you, George Stephanopoulos.”

“I love you too.”

Staff no more, I walked out the door.

EPILOGUE: ON MY OWN

It was the office, not the man. That was what the historians said, and for once the historians were right. Oh, what a place Washington was, when you were there on the inside. Right in tight, near the Oval Office, where it happened. He'd been there for eight years, an assistant, a President's man. Now he was on the outs. He hated being on the outs more than he hated anything. For a President's man habit died hard, and suddenly he was afraid.

— Ward Just, “A Guide to the Architecture of Washington, D.C.”

A
fter four years, unlike Ward Just's character, I put myself on the outs. Maybe that's why I wasn't afraid. Grateful for the privilege of serving a president, relieved to be leaving in one piece, I left feeling as lucky as I had the day it all began. I would miss being on the inside, miss making decisions and trying to make a difference, miss the events that made history and the intimate moments when the White House felt like home. But I wouldn't miss carrying everything inside, and I wouldn't miss being an assistant. For the first time in my professional life, I wanted to be on my own.

I moved to New York for a new career as a writer, teacher, and television commentator, and slowly adjusted to speaking publicly without first calculating Clinton's position or how it would play. Liberated from the crisis cycles of the White House, I learned how to better balance my life; over time, I stopped taking antidepressant medication. But habit dies hard. After a presidential press conference, I'd leave a congratulatory message with Betty Currie, hoping Clinton would call. When I defended him publicly, Clinton would return the favor by tracking me down. That was enough — twenty minutes of that familiar, sleepy hoarseness talking about the issues streaming through his mind. For the length of a phone call, I could pretend to be a president's man.

Then, on a Sunday afternoon in September 1997, for the first time in months, I returned to the White House to visit Gene Sperling. We wandered around the empty West Wing and popped into my old office — Rahm's now — before stepping across the hall to the Roosevelt Room. Some visitors on a special tour peeked through the door at me with a look of recognition that said I belonged there, which only made me more aware that I didn't. Then Gene and I settled into a slouch perfected over hundreds of staff meetings: gazing at the ceiling with our necks nestled on the backs of our chairs and our knees crossed high against the edge of the wooden table. But our nostalgic talk was interrupted by an unmistakable series of high-pitched staccato beeps from the Secret Service station across the hall.

I bolted upright in my chair, ready to work, as a uniformed agent reached into the room to close the four-inch-thick door facing the Oval's formal entrance. The president was in. My heart beat more rapidly. My stomach floated with butterflies, the kind you get when you're walking down the street and spot a girl you lost but still love a couple of blocks ahead.

A year earlier, I would have walked into the Oval without thinking. During the year of my exile I never would have entered without asking. In each case, however, I would have known what was right at the time. My whole being was wrapped up in reading the rhythms of the White House and the moods of the man. I anticipated his needs and answered his questions before they were asked. I prided myself on being Clintonologist in chief. Need to know what's going on or advice on what to do? Come see me. That was the George that Gene knew best, so he couldn't understand why I was so flustered. To him, I was still Clinton's guy.

But as I stared at the door that had melded seamlessly into the wall, I knew that wasn't true anymore. I didn't know what to do. Walking in on the president during one of his rare moments alone seemed presumptuous. Walking by without saying hello seemed rude. I was suddenly shy, and slightly afraid. This was not my place anymore. Clinton was still president, but I could no longer maintain the illusion that he was somehow
my
president in some special way. Not knowing what to do at that moment was the surest sign that I didn't belong.

We went up to Sperling's office and talked for another hour. Clinton stayed at his desk and shuffled his papers the way he liked to do on Sunday afternoons. Then it was time to go. I had a plane to catch; Gene had work to do. I still hoped we would run into him; maybe I would poke my head into the Oval after all. But when we descended the single flight of stairs and peered around the corner, the door was open and the president was gone. So I returned my visitor's pass to the Northwest Gate and walked up Connecticut Avenue.

That was how my story was supposed to end. But on Wednesday, January 21, 1998, it seemed to start all over again.

Shortly before five
A.M.
, I prepared to check out of the Tutwiler Hotel in Birmingham, Alabama. The night before I had given a talk at the University of Alabama that included my usual riff on the Clinton scandals. By the end of 1998, I confidently predicted, the president would win the Paula Jones case and Ken Starr would close shop without finding any wrongdoing by the Clintons on Whitewater, Travelgate, or Filegate. Now I was rushing home to teach my weekly class on the presidency at Columbia. But when I reached the front desk, the clerk handed me a phone. My new employers at ABC News were on the line. A big story was breaking with allegations about the president and a former White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. They'd had sex. Clinton might have told her to lie. There were tapes. Starr was investigating. Get to a studio immediately. I asked for a fax of the story and went upstairs to put on my suit.

That damn
Newsweek
rumor was true
. The previous Saturday, while the president was being deposed in the Paula Jones case, my friends in the White House were worrying that the magazine was about to print something about Clinton and an intern. By the end of the day,
Newsweek
had told Rahm there was no story, and Rahm had told me that the president’s deposition was a home run. Another false alarm. The next morning to
This Week
, when my colleague Bill Kristol aired the intern rumor, I jumped down his throat and accused him of bottom-feeding from Internet gossip columnist Matt Drudge, who had issued a late-night bulletin about
Newsweek’s
internal deliberations. We quickly moved to other topics, and I hoped that the intern story would be another example of a storm cloud that evaporated under scrutiny. Later, on my way to Alabama, I called Betty Currie from a pay phone at the Atlanta airport with a message for Clinton: “Hang in there, and take Arafat to the Holocaust Museum,” the other big story of the week.

By Wednesday morning, there was no other story. In the cab to ABC’s Birmingham affiliate, I fixed on the
Post
headline —“Clinton Accused of Urging Aide to Lie”—the foraged through the story for exculpatory facts, logical leaps, and questionable assertions. But the telltale signs were all bad: Attorney General Reno had personally authorized Starr’s request to investigate “allegations of suborning perjury, false statements, and obstruction of justice involving the president.”
There must be some hard evidence.
Clinton’s lawyer, Robert Bennett, denied “a relationship” between Lewinsky and Clinton but wouldn’t comment on whether the two had talked about her testimony in the Jones case.
There must have been conversations between them
. Lewinsky’s attorney, William Ginsburg strangely refused to deny that his client had had a sexual relationship with Clinton.
Sbit, they must have bad sex
.
And there are tapes
. Hours of them, “according to sources,” describing the affair in graphic detail, including some conversations in which Lewinsky recounted Clinton’s and Vernon Jordan’s “directing her to testify falsely in the Paula Jones case.”

I borrowed the driver’s cell phone to call the White House. But Rahm said he didn’t know anything beyond what he’d read in the paper—and he sounded sick. His shaky voice brought me back to the worst moments of my old life. The afternoon in Little Rock when I heard Clinton on the Gennifer tapes. The night in New York when I learned about his draft notice. The morning in Washington when I read that Clinton had called his Arkansas troopers to keep them quiet. Blindsided again—and these were the most serious allegations yet. They were about the present, not the past. He was president; she was an intern. If Clinton had asked here to lie under oath, or lied under oath himself, he had broken the law.

A moment from a Sunday morning in late 1996 recurred to me. Monica had approached me as I walked from my apartment to the Starbucks next door. I hadn’t seen her in nearly a year, but I vaguely remembered her as a pretty, busty, fifty intern I’d pass in the halls or see hanging out at Starbucks on weekends. A few times at work, she had tried to surprise me with a double-tall latte, but my assistant Laura Capps would stop her at the door. That morning, Monica had a question for me: “Does your president tell the truth?” I thought her phrasing was peculiar, but people stopped me on the street to say strange things all the time. After mumbling some answer like “He does his best.” I bought my coffee and didn’t think about it again.

Until now, When added to the leaks out of Starr’s office, it seemed like more evidence against Clinton. Although I still found it almost impossible to imagine how a president of the United Status could take such a risk, my gut told me the core of the story was true. As much as I wanted to believe Clinton, I didn’t—and couldn’t pretend that I did. As much as I owed him, I didn’t believe that loyalty demanded lying, and I still liked the president and supported his work, I was lived.
How could be be so stupid? So reckless? So selfish?

I reached the studio just as
Good Morning America
was going on the air. While the technicians fiddled with my microphone and earpiece, I reminded myself to stay balanced. to control both my anger at Clinton and my instinct to spin for him.
Don’t accuse. Don’t defend

Analyze.
When anchor Lisa McRee questioned me, I said that I didn't know much about Monica or her relationship with Clinton, then added my assessment of the situation:

These are probably the most serious allegations yet leveled against the president. If they're true, they're not only politically damaging, but it could lead to impeachment proceedings. But they're just questions right now, and that's why I think we do all have to take a deep breath before we go too far here.

I didn't think I had gone too far. Saying that proven charges of perjury, witness tampering, and obstruction of justice by the president of the United States
“could”
cause Congress to begin the impeachment process seemed to me like an understatement. But to the rest of the political world, it was a leading indicator. Hearing a former close adviser to the president use the “I word,” however qualified, made them think,
“Even apologists like George think Clinton's lying this time.”
The political newsletter
Hotline
made it the quote of the day. Worse, the
Wall Street Journal
editorial page cited me approvingly after years of snide attacks. Although my analysis was accurate, I hadn't realized when I said it that a single word would signal such a fundamental break with my past.