True Compass (49 page)

Suddenly, Vicki was on her feet, cutting me off. "
Please excuse my language, but BULLSHIT!
"

That got everyone's attention. She went on, "This is just ridiculous!" She paused to let that sink in, and I stared back at her. Then she said, "You know, Teddy, if you had lost, it would've been
you
that lost. It wouldn't have been your family that lost.
You
would've lost.

"You
won
.
You
won! Not your family.
You
."

She sat down again.

Her outburst lingered in the air. It has lingered in my mind ever since. I'm grateful to her for it. Her message to me was one I needed to hear--perhaps one I'd yearned to hear.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The Clinton Years

1992-2000

Prior to his election to the presidency in 1992, I didn't really know Bill Clinton. I had met him briefly at the midterm convention in Memphis in 1978, and years later at the funeral of a mutual friend. He had that southern gift of storytelling that kept everyone around him engaged. He didn't forget a name. He loved people. He was a natural politician. After his victory, we established a warm personal relationship. I had longed for a return to a progressive national agenda and was thrilled to see a Democrat back in the White House.

A month after his victory, Vicki and I were invited to a dinner in honor of the Clintons at the home of Katharine Graham. It was a hopeful time and there was much talk of the new agenda. President-elect Clinton said that if he didn't get national health insurance through Congress, he should not be president. Hillary invoked the possibility of tax deductions for educational training programs. Senator Sam Nunn suggested we try a pilot program on national service.

Shortly before his inauguration, the president-elect endeared himself to my extended family when he asked us to accompany him to Arlington Cemetery to visit my brothers' gravesites. About a year later, President Clinton joined us at the rededication of the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. I had heard and relished the story he often told of having been inspired to enter politics after meeting Jack at the White House in 1963, as a Boys Nation "senator." As we walked through the library together, he was fascinated and wanted to take his time on the tour. He seemed most moved by the Cuban Missile Crisis film, where he sat next to Jackie and asked questions about Jack's mood during that period. He was particularly interested in the civil rights exhibit, referring to the historic integration of Little Rock, Arkansas. We agreed about how slow progress had been, and how quickly both younger and older generations seemed to have forgotten the struggle that took place.

When we reached the exhibit on the Nixon-Kennedy debate, I asked him how he had felt during his first debate with President George H. W. Bush. Nervous at the start, he said, but then it was like an out-of-body experience: you had to respond to the question and answer it, but you also had to be thinking how it would stack up in terms of the total TV performance. He said he was sure President Kennedy had felt that way too.

I'll never forget one of my first meetings with Clinton at the White House. He had walked into a firestorm over the question of whether gays should be allowed to serve in the military. (I always thought that if he had laid the groundwork in the right way, he could have changed the policy with the support of the military, and all of the brouhaha would have died down. After all, no less a conservative icon than the retired senator Barry Goldwater fully supported the repeal of the ban on gays in the military at this juncture.) He'd invited all the Democratic members of the Armed Services Committee to this gathering. He went around the room, asking everyone's opinion about gays in the military. Some senators gave long answers. Some were terse. Some were flowery and revealing, and others held their cards close to their vest. It added up to a very lengthy meeting.

I remember it well partly because Vicki and I had tickets to the ballet that night. Baryshnikov was dancing at the Warner Theatre. I'd told Vicki to go ahead and that I'd meet her there when I could. But the meeting went on and on and on, for more than two hours--extraordinary by White House standards. Finally, my turn to speak came. I made a brief comment in support of allowing gays in the military, in which I mentioned that all the arguments against such a policy had already been made--in opposition to blacks, and then to women, serving in an integrated military.

Well, I was wrong about that.
Almost
all the arguments had been used before. The last senator to speak was Robert Byrd, and he came up with a new one on all of us. Senator Byrd stood up and declared to the president in emotional tones that except for his relationship with his wife, his most sacred possession and thought in this world was his grandson. And that he would never, never, never, ever,
ever
let his grandson go off to the military if we were going to have gays there. And then the senator went off into a long story about Tiberius.

He informed us, with many ornate flourishes, that there had been a terrible problem in ancient Rome with young military boys being turned into sex slaves. I don't remember the exact details, but I think the story involved Tiberius Julius Caesar being captured and abused and used as a sex slave. He escaped and then years later he sought vengeance and killed his captors. Anyway, it was something like that.

The room fell silent. The senator continued. (By this time, Baryshnikov was leaping and a lot of the Democratic senators were stealing glances at their wristwatches.) Then President Clinton stood up.

His response was short and sweet. "Well," he said, "Moses went up to the mountain, and he came back with the tablets and there were ten commandments on those tablets. I've read those commandments. I know what they say, just like I know you do. And nowhere in those ten commandments will you find anything about homosexuality. Thank y'all for coming." He ended the meeting and walked out of the room.

Vicki's foot was tapping when I finally rushed into our box and took my seat next to her at the ballet. "Tiberius. Tiberius. Tiberius," I whispered into her ear. "Write it down. I'll tell you more at intermission, but just remember
Tiberius
."

That incident was probably the beginning of Bill Clinton's education on Robert Byrd. He was the president of the United States, though he'd only been president less than a month, and here he was being lectured to like a student. But that was not what mattered to him. Clinton was watching us, and he could see that none of us was interrupting the senator, and no one was leaving. Everybody was sitting there, paying deference to Byrd.

That said something to Clinton. He realized then that Byrd had power. He was learning a lesson about how the Senate works. I think Clinton never forgot it, because when the most devastating crisis of his presidency erupted a few years later, Robert Byrd was among those whom Clinton thought of first.

The most important single promise that Bill Clinton brought with him to the White House, from my perspective at least, was that his administration would, once and for all, reform American health care. Clinton had campaigned on the critical need for national health insurance legislation, and Americans seemed to agree. Two-thirds of them supported the idea of major reforms in health care.

I looked forward to working with him, not only in solving the insurance imbalance, but in fundamentally overhauling the entire costly, inefficient, and unfair system: the massive amalgam of doctors, hospitals, drug companies, insurers, health maintenance organizations, and governmental agencies.

I'd remained active in as many health care initiatives as possible in the years leading up to Clinton's election, enjoying some successes and the usual run of disappointments. Getting the Americans with Disabilities Act pushed through under George H. W. Bush was an accomplishment to savor. Yet other good ideas remained non-starters after months of partisan infighting and exhaustive committee work. I was dismayed by the lack of support accorded the eminently simple and reasonable "play or pay" concept that came out of the Bipartisan Commission on Comprehensive Health Care. Under it, companies would have been required either to provide affordable health insurance to their workers or else pay into a federal fund for the uninsured. The Gulf War of 1990 siphoned off the attention being paid to that idea, and it failed to receive legislative action.

I recommended "play or pay" to President Clinton shortly after his inauguration. I'd hoped that the Democrats could combine it with the moderate Republican John Chafee's bill, which aimed at universal coverage via mandating uninsured individuals to buy insurance from private carriers. Tax deductions and subsidies would make it possible for them to do so. Bob Dole and several other prominent Republicans supported Chafee's bill. But Clinton did not immediately endorse a specific plan.

In January 1993, I began to understand the reason. Word spread through the Senate that the president intended to name Hillary as head of a task force charged with creating a sweeping health care reform bill in one hundred days, from within the purview of the White House. The idea at first seemed thrilling, perhaps even revolutionary. For the first time since the Truman administration, a president was going to battle against a cruelly broken system that perpetuated American suffering and poverty on a needlessly vast scale.

It would not be easy, of course, because all the familiar political enemies of reform were running up all the tattered flags of dissent: health reform would lead to socialized medicine; it would stunt medical research; it would add bureaucracy and limit patient choice. They were aligned with extremely powerful and dedicated groups--the pharmaceutical companies, the insurance companies, the American Medical Association--determined to protect their interests.

I offered the resources of my staff and myself to the First Lady and her people. Dan Rostenkowski, the House Ways and Means chairman from Illinois, was far more cautious, and more prescient, as he later recounted in a lengthy interview.

President Clinton telephoned the Democratic congressman to ask, "Danny, what do you think of me making Hillary the head of this group?" Rostenkowski reports that he shot back, "Bill, I didn't know you disliked her that much." Clinton asked what he meant. "You know, you're not in Arkansas anymore," the congressman reminded him. "You're going against probably the most talented group of lobbyists and trade association people in the country. This is their
job
. You're not going to be able to tell them, 'Well, here's a job for your cousin and I want you to support me.' These people are here, and this is a lifestyle for them."

Rostenkowski (who favored health care reform) then raised another tough line of objection: "The people you're talking about putting together on this issue, Bill--did any of them ever run for sheriff? Did they ever get any dirt underneath their fingernails? Did they ever do anything in their communities for health care, or in the Washington area? You're getting academicians who like to sit back and smoke their pipes and say, Oh, this is the way it should be. That's not the way it is in real life. And you should know this, for God's sake. You're a politician!"

And Clinton, in Rostenkowski's accounting, came back with, "Well, you know, I would love to name Hillary."

He did, which I felt was a bold statement of commitment by the president. He would not have appointed his wife to head a task force if he weren't serious about the issue. In terms of vision, Hillary Clinton performed admirably. But the process clearly got bogged down--and became very complicated.

In March 1993 I tried to move things along by proposing that we include health care as part of the budget reconciliation process. There, it would need only fifty votes to pass, and would not be subject to a filibuster and thus a sixty-vote threshold for passage. With President Clinton's approval, I approached Bob Byrd, to see whether he would agree to waive the "Byrd rule" and allow the measure to go forward. The Byrd rule prohibits the Senate from considering extraneous matter as part of a reconciliation bill debate.

Byrd turned me down.

Public opinion was shifting against the administration's great undertaking. By the time the plan was formally presented in the fall, the task force had dissolved. President Clinton himself had read the signs of disaster and backed away from it, choosing to emphasize his economic program and, later, the North American Free Trade Agreement instead.

I was not ready to abandon the fight. I wanted to get a health reform bill, even a compromise bill, to Congress for a vote in September 1994. A few other Democrats, notably Tom Daschle, didn't want to give up either.

The road got rougher in early 1994. Republicans managed to exploit Whitewater, the overblown and eventually discredited real estate "scandal" laid at Hillary Clinton's doorstep, for its value in undercutting the public's trust in Hillary and her plan. The task force lost a powerful ally when Dan Rostenkowski was indicted on charges of conspiracy to defraud the federal government and was obliged to resign his position. Hard-line conservatives increased their pressure on moderate Republicans, such as Bob Dole, who had indicated an interest in a compromise bill. These moderates were branded by the far right in news interviews as not being "true believers." Dole himself was warned that his own presidential ambitions in 1994 rested on his willingness to abandon a compromise bill.

In June, I steered my Labor and Human Resources Committee to approval of a reform draft similar to the Clinton plan. It faced opposition not only from Republicans, but from members of my own party such as Daniel Moynihan, who'd succumbed to the belief that only strong Republican support would save the day. Moynihan introduced his own bill, whose centrist provisions he hoped he could merge with Dole's.

The air filled now with contending voices. Bill and Hillary exhorted top White House staffers to keep pressing congressmen for positive action; Hillary summoned leaders from groups that until recently had been allies and demanded that they reenergize themselves, stop their internal bickering, and unite behind the goal of universal coverage. Such groups were running short of money.

Well-intentioned alternative efforts began to fade. John Dingell gave up his efforts to get a bill out of his Energy and Commerce Committee. Dole, hearing the warnings from the right, outflanked his would-be Democratic partner Moynihan by introducing a bill made meaningless by its incrementalism: its silence, for instance, on such essentials as price controls, employer or individual mandates, and premium caps. Business lobbies and the Republican National Committee, naturally, loved it. Moynihan watched his own tepid effort get dismantled in committee.