By the summer of 1992, George Bush and a great many of his fellow countrymen were beginning to learn how skillful a politician Bill Clinton was. He had decided to make the race for the presidency and had become an immediate beneficiary of both the end of the Cold War and, ironically enough, the quick American victory in the Gulf War. The former was a boon because it had dramatically changed the American political agenda, and the latter because it had suppressed the ambitions of better-known Democratic politicians. No one who ever knew Clinton thought that his political career was bedeviled by bad luck—some of the good luck he made himself, and some of it was simply the most fortunate of political inheritances. That was demonstrably true in 1992. But his talent was also surpassing. “The best horse I’ve ever seen,” said his first campaign manager, James Carville, and by that he meant that Clinton was born to run, and the higher the office for which he ran, the better he did.
If Clinton’s political career, some believed, had been confined only to running rather than to governance, he would have been a sure bet for Mount Rushmore. One could somehow imagine him not governing, but it was almost impossible to think of him not running. Even late in his presidency, when his wife was running for the Senate and his vice president, Al Gore, was finally running on his own to succeed him, Clinton, knowing that what he said could detract from their races and their sense of independence, could not discipline his irresistible impulse to campaign and seemed determined to run their races for them, always ready, should someone amend the Constitution in time, to run for a third term himself.
Clinton was arguably one of the two most gifted American politicians of the latter third of the twentieth century, sharing that title with Ronald Reagan, whose almost magical political gifts allowed his fellow countrymen to excuse his limitations and failings and see only his strengths—that is, see him as he wanted to be seen. But Reagan had arrived at a time when conservativism was on the rise, when the demographics of America were changing dramatically, and when political power and economic affluence were shifting from the East and Middle Atlantic states to the Sun Belt, a region whose values he shared and came to represent. He was the perfect candidate for a postindustrial, increasingly suburban America, where millions of people, while technically living better than ever, were cut off from their immediate pasts and roots and were restlessly searching for reassuring images of a safer and simpler time. Reagan did not merely reflect these changing political values, he helped drive them as well. He brought the forces he represented from the political fringe, where they had been early in the sixties, when he’d first come on the national stage, to the very center of American life. Moreover, he did that so effortlessly that he never seemed to be a politician.
Bill Clinton, on the other hand, was the candidate of a declining, seriously fragmented Democratic Party and had started his political career as a young, ostensibly liberal Southern governor with the weakest of constituencies. Given the frailty of his base, the diminishing muscle of his political party, and his lack of personal wealth, he was destined for a political life of constant compromise as well as rhetoric that was always a bit grander than his deeds. In rhetoric, he was instinctively slightly liberal, deftly to the left of the center, with a few symbolic conservative acts to balance it all off. In deeds, he was instinctively centrist, as gifted a straddler of complicated issues as the political system had coughed up in years.
Politics was a deadly serious business for Clinton. It was not just his avocation, it was his very being. The only jobs he had ever held for any length of time were political. There had been a brief tour after his Rhodes scholarship when he had served with marginal enthusiasm as an instructor at the University of Arkansas law school. But even there he had devoted himself less to the work of his students than to surveying the political terrain. “Am still doing dull law school,” he had written in 1971 to his friend Willie Morris, also a Rhodes Scholar, who was then editing Harper’s, “laying the foundation for who knows what, but it will be done with a good spirit and a wry grin.” For politics was all Clinton knew and all he did. For most of their adult lives, he and his wife lived in government-owned housing, first in Little Rock and then in Washington. He had come on the scene as a political wunderkind so early and had such staying power that, by 1992, when he was still in his midforties, Sam Nunn, the Georgia senator, could refer to him as a rising star in the Democratic Party in three different decades. There was one other critical thing about him. Given the constancy of the odds against him throughout his entire career, he understood that nothing could be wasted and there was no downtime. Everything he did was political, and everything he did was likely to be politically driven. He was always campaigning. He never stopped. His life, at the age of fifty-four, had been one long, uninterrupted political campaign. He was not merely a brilliant survivor, he was more truly a survivalist, someone for whom survival was the sole purpose of his being.
Clinton seemed to defy all the forces of late-twentieth-century American politics. At a time when high-level politics had become something of a millionaires’ club, he was a man without any wealth of his own. He and Mrs. Clinton did not even own a home until they finally bought a handsome house in New York’s Westchester County, a requisite for her campaign for the Senate, a home that was to be financed at first with help from one of his principal fundraisers. He came from a small, poor state with marginal political leverage, and he was a product of a divided, inchoate Democratic Party. Yet, his political instincts were almost pure. No one could read a crowd and sense what the people in it felt and wanted better than he. Reagan had only to be Reagan, warm and sunny and confident, and the crowd would move to him; Clinton had a weaker base and so had to make adjustments to every crowd.
Clinton was also addicted to polls, and his administration would set a new high in its sensitivity to them. At one point, polling was even done on where the president and first lady should spend a summer vacation, with Wyoming the winner. The country, it appeared, would love to see photos of him in rough outdoor clothes and checked Western shirts, top button unbuttoned. But in truth, his own antennae were so good, his feel for the country and its mood so true, that he needed the polls, perhaps, only as confirmation of what he already knew. He was especially good out in the field, touching voters, seeing them and responding to them and making them respond to him. He had an essential humanity that always came to the surface, on occasion both evangelical and intellectual at the same time. In contrast, when he went into a room filled with a group of academics and policy professionals—the governance-is-serious-business-but-never-fun crowd—he immediately became drier and more didactic, his mood matching theirs. Because of that, there was no telling with Clinton when he was going to be at his best, when he would reach back and come up with something simply dazzling. Once in an open meeting during the 1992 New Hampshire primary, a voter asked a question about what Bush had awkwardly called the vision thing. Clinton, tired and worn-out that night, nonetheless immediately jumped on the question and exploited it brilliantly. “I hope you never raise a child without the vision thing,” he said. “Life would be bleak and empty without the vision thing.”
Clinton’s instinct for the changing moods of people was extraordinary. As president he could, it seemed, get up in the morning, take a walk around the White House, and by the time he got back inside for coffee, having in effect conducted his own poll, would know the national mood. “He sees himself,” said one top member of his administration who worked closely with him over the years, “as the doctor and the country as the patient, a patient who on occasion has been sick, and Clinton feels he knows the patient’s mood and temperature to the most infinitesimal degree at all times. And he believes he knows what should be prescribed at all times—and what should not be prescribed.” Oddly enough that quote from a close Clinton associate dovetailed with something Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s national security adviser, once said of Clinton and his preoccupation with the pulse of the American people: “The president has to do more than take the pulse of the people, which Clinton does with great skill. He has to lead as well.”
One of the most important things about Bill Clinton was his capacity—indeed his need—to win people over. Those who had tracked him for a long time, going back to his boyhood in Arkansas, believed that it was a product of the disorderly home in which he had grown up. Favored in intelligence, but not favored in social position and wealth, he had needed to impress and win over all those around him, teachers, bandleaders, peers, to show that he was as good as everyone else. It was almost a compulsion, this need to win over doubters. He was, thought a number of journalists who had covered him over the years, a lot more interested in reporters who seemed just outside his reach than those who coveted his favors. As Bob Reich, one of his oldest friends and for a time his secretary of labor, once noted, if you’re in his cabinet and you called him often, he would downgrade you. But if you didn’t call him for a time, he’d get nervous and he’d call you.1
It sometimes seemed as if his political skills were too great. In his desire to please various audiences, he occasionally tended toward rhetoric that exceeded his capacity to deliver; he did not merely charm people, he overcharmed them. Many of those listening to him decided that he was the one politician who agreed with all of their ideas, the man they had been looking for all their life. But he often disappointed the very same people who had once believed so completely in him. Those who defended him against criticism like this noted that whatever his failings were, given the political climate in the country at the end of the century, he was as good a deal as they were likely to get. That was probably true, but it did not ease their disappointment.
The Democratic Party, as Clinton rose to power, was very much a minority in national terms, the forces that had propelled it to prolonged hegemony back in the thirties through the fifties long since dissipated. Of its own it did not have a real center; it had a center only when someone as talented as Clinton, with his unerring sense of where the center ought to be and how to balance all the conflicting forces, became the party’s leader. It was increasingly short of a broad purpose as well, overtaken by profound historical and technological changes and engaged in bitter fratricidal struggles. Labor, once a dominating force nationally, was in serious decline because of the critical changeover from a blue-collar to a white-collar economy, the outmigration of blue-collar jobs to countries overseas, and the coming of a modern high-technology workplace. All in all, labor was more powerful within the party than it was within the nation.
One of the forces that faced Clinton and any Democratic politician in the latter part of the twentieth century was the sheer affluence of America and the unparalleled long-term postwar success of its economy. America, especially white America, judged on any comparative international scale, was a very rich and thus a very conservative country. That made it much harder on any party even marginally rooted on the left. The liberalism that had been created in the thirty-year period of the New Deal and Fair Deal, when millions of Americans had been crushed economically by forces outside their control and were grateful for the programmatic aid sponsored by the federal government, had waned greatly in so long a period of seemingly limitless prosperity. What Americans regarded as a brief recession looked like a time of prosperity to most foreigners. Starting in the fifties and sixties, throughout the country, for it was hardly a regional phenomenon, the children of white New Dealers had gradually become more affluent, had moved to the suburbs, and had become more conservative on both cultural and economic issues. In time they spoke of themselves as independents and often voted Republican.
Nor did this change extend only to those Americans who were fortunate enough to go to college and thereby managed to jump upward a grade in class. It included blue-collar Americans as well, workers who had once voted solidly Democratic but who now began to split off from the party. Their alliance with urban blacks, never an easy marriage, had begun to break down in the mid and late sixties. Back in the thirties, forties, and fifties, when both groups were outsiders trying to work their way up the American ladder, they had a shared wariness of the ruling business elite and were allies in an edgy relationship that was probably better on paper than in reality. But by the seventies, blue-collar whites enjoyed enough success to feel they had made it, and the gap between their aspirations and those of many blacks had widened. Blue-collar whites were especially resentful of any new governmental attempts to adjust the existing societal balance in favor of blacks, such as court-ordered busing or affirmative action. The big-city political machines, which had once been able to guarantee the Democrats not only urban control in a number of big industrial states, but the ability to carry those states in national elections, had become pale shadows of their former selves. White flight from the cities had escalated, creating new conservative patches in the suburbs.
On foreign policy issues the Democratic Party was still badly bedeviled by Vietnam. Two Democratic presidents, Kennedy and Johnson, had been the principal architects of the ill-advised escalation, and yet most of the antiwar protest had come from the liberal-left faction of the party, along with some moderate centrist Republicans. That was the perfect description of a family in serious conflict with itself. The Republican Party had largely taken a bye on the issue. In 1968, a seminal year in American life, the tensions over Vietnam had not only pitted two great forces in the Democratic Party against each other, the more conservative hawks and the more liberal doves, but cops representing the last great city political machine, that of Richard Daley, had assaulted the young peace protesters (just as the leaders of the protest had hoped) at a disastrous convention in Chicago. This was the convention where the sitting president was originally supposed to be renominated. Now his vice president stood in as his proxy, his own top political people bitterly divided from those of the president over how many degrees of separation he was allowed at a decisive moment like this. Ordinary citizens, watching on television in their homes, could take away only one lesson from the ugliness of Chicago: that the Democrats had lost control of the convention and the country. Vietnam had put the party at war with itself. It was, said the liberal columnist Mark Shields, as if an unusually violent football game were being played. One team was led by Lyndon Johnson and the people who favored the war, and the other was a team led by Bobby Kennedy, Gene McCarthy, George McGovern, and assorted other Democrats. In the stands were thousands and thousands of cheering fans having the time of their lives—all of them Republicans.2
Those divisions within the party had never entirely healed. The peace that had evolved between the two main factions over the years was not so much a peace as a thinly concealed truce; and, in fact, they soon found other issues with which to challenge each other. For a brief time there had been a faint glimmer of hope that the party might evolve into a Kennedy party, for the Kennedys were seen as both tough enough to handle the old political forces, yet sensitive enough to deal with the new forces now at play, and with the ability to hold a fragile, largely outdated coalition together. But Robert Kennedy was assassinated before the 1968 convention, and thirteen months later, Ted Kennedy drove off a bridge on Chappaquiddick with a young female staff member who drowned in the accident. With that, the increasingly frail dream of a Kennedy party died.
The tensions, particularly in foreign policy, remained. Vietnam evolved into other divisions, once again between hawk and dove, over a broad range of foreign policy and defense issues. Some foreign policy people, uneasy with what they considered the dovish direction of the party, began an outmigration to the GOP in the seventies and eighties. The old-fashioned ability to forge a sort of compromise and come together on something of a centrist policy no longer seemed to exist in the new television age, which tended to create one-issue constituencies. It also created greater egos among the leaders of each one-issue group, with less and less capacity to compromise.
Many old-line Democrats left their party in the eighties to become Reagan Democrats. Jeane Kirkpatrick, a former Democrat, spoke for these dissidents at the Republican convention in 1984. There, her voice ringing with pure contempt, she talked of “the San Francisco Democrats,” as if it were a party of the spoiled, the effeminate, and the anti-American. That was the convention that had nominated Walter Mondale and, in her opinion, had lost touch with the mainstream of America. Ronald Reagan beat the candidate of the San Francisco Democrats by the largest landslide in American presidential elections, in what would be one of the low points in the history of the modern Democratic Party (Mondale had carried only his home state of Minnesota). The post–New Deal political, social, and economic realignment of America was, on the occasion of Reagan’s second inaugural, complete. By 1992, the Democrats had held power for only four years of the last twenty-four.
In the 1992 campaign Bill Clinton negotiated his way through the terrible detritus of his partially crippled party with singular dexterity. It was as if he, raised as he had been in a dysfunctional home with an alcoholic stepfather, had long ago mastered the ability to defuse tensions in a warring and dysfunctional family—which most assuredly the Democrats were. He knew at every moment how bold or how cautious to be, how big a step to take and when to stand still. He knew how to tempt the more liberal wings with winning rhetoric when he chose, and how to straddle divisive issues when necessary. He knew how to charm, to beguile, to cajole. He was unusually good at the implication of his support if not at support itself. He knew how, and this was no small talent, to disappoint those who supported him when need be. He knew as well how to play his last best card, the idea that if the Democrats did not go along with him, they would surely get something far worse from the other side of the aisle.
Clinton was a leader of the New Democrats, a faction of the party that did not want to be tagged as too liberal, which was trying to move toward the national political center. Unlike most Democrats, he had supported the Gulf War. He was more willing than most liberals who had gone before him to speak out on issues like crime, which up until then had been in the sole custody of the Republicans, as if somehow Democrats were pro-crime. He was considered passionate on the issue of race, and yet as governor of Arkansas he had accepted the death penalty, one of the great hot-button issues of American life. He had appalled many hard-core liberals when, as governor and by then running for the presidency in 1992, he refused to stay the execution of a retarded murderer, a man named Rickey Ray Rector, who was so mentally deficient that, when offered his final meal, he asked the warden to save the dessert, pecan pie, so he could eat it when he returned from what was for him just a brief walk. It was the kind of decision the young Clinton and his wife, newly arrived in Arkansas, might once have opposed; it was obviously a terrible thing to do, but failing to do it would open him up to all kinds of charges and recriminations on an issue where it appeared that rational debate had long ago ended.
Clinton was always aware that making the necessary accommodations to the needs of the more conservative voters of Arkansas might damage him nationally. He once told his good friend Tom Kean, a popular, attractive fellow governor, a liberal Republican, and like him a centrist, that both of them could win a national election, but that their problem would be getting their respective nominations. Kean, he postulated, was too liberal to get his party’s nomination, and he, Clinton, was too conservative to win the Democratic nomination.
He projected not merely intelligence and youth but an elemental humanity; he did not seem plastic or colorless, but rather, more than any other quality, engaged. That was clear from the start of his campaign, his innate empathy for ordinary people, his ability to identify with them, listen to their problems, and sympathize with them. The byword of his candidacy and his presidency was the phrase “I feel your pain.” Some eight years later, his tour as president over, a cartoon in The New Yorker showed a couple, presumably watching the inaugural on television, and one asking the other if this meant, the guard having changed, they now had to feel their own pain. Over the years an increasingly skeptical press corps would come to think of Clinton as the national empathizer, believing that he did empathy better than he did solutions to social problems. But he was too good at it for all of it to be faked, and much of it was surely genuine.
Watching him wade into all kinds of different crowds, seeing how good he was at what might be called the empathy thing, Ed Rollins, the former Reagan political consultant, had an epiphany about how dramatically American culture had changed in the twelve years since Reagan’s first election. Driven by various technological, social, and economic forces, that change was now being seen in American politics. Reagan, Rollins believed, had been the final political reflection of the popular culture of his time, derived primarily from the movies of the John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Gary Cooper days when the American self-image called for one lonely man to stand up and do the right thing, whether it was popular or not. That self-image during the worst of the Cold War was comforting; it might not be true, but as they used to say in the West, when there was any difference between the truth and the legend, print the legend. Clinton, by contrast, was the political extension of a new popular culture, the age of empathy television, symbolized by Oprah Winfrey, the need to feel better about yourself in a difficult, emotionally volatile world where the greatest daily threat was posed not so much by the nuclear warheads of a foreign power, or by severe economic hardship, but by the inner demons produced by an unhappy childhood. Indeed Clinton himself was good at telling different audiences that when he was young, he was overweight and unhappy and had not been popular. It was, Rollins said, the Oprah show as presidential politics,3 and a reflection that the country no longer felt threatened by exterior enemies.
During the second Bush-Clinton-Perot debate, a young black woman asked the three candidates how they had been affected by the soft economy. The different reactions of the three men were fascinating and uncommonly revealing. Perot spoke of how he was giving up his private life to run, a sacrifice that few listening thought of as a sacrifice. Bush completely stumbled, obviously greatly puzzled by the question itself. “I’m not sure I get it,” he said. Clinton, of course, nailed it. He walked toward the woman and spoke of his personal experiences as governor of a small state in a bad time, and of the people whose lives had been hurt by the weak economy. He all but embraced the woman; her pain had become his pain. It was a truly memorable moment, indicative of a profound generational change in American politics. James Carville was sure that it was the moment when Bush lost the election.
Good politicians are always audacious, and in his audacity, Clinton picked the perfect year for his presidential run. For 1992 was a watershed largely because of the end of the Cold War. No one realized it at first, but as the campaign unfolded, first in the primaries and then in the general election, it became evident that one era of America politics was over, and another, in the most incipient way, was beginning. By 1992, Gorbachev, the last Soviet first secretary, had not only been defanged, his attempt to bring reform to the dying empire a failure, but he had fallen from power, replaced by the first postwar Russian president.
The post–Cold War world was not, of course, something that was born in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin War; it had been coming incrementally over some twenty-seven years, probably ever since the high-water mark of tensions that had been reached during the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. The two superpowers had still regarded each other with great hostility. But for some time in the minds of ordinary citizens, the sheer terror generated by the other side had gradually abated. People had come to accept living in a bipolar nuclear world, in which there were now slow, systematic, albeit occasionally grudging attempts at arms reduction. By the late eighties, the nuclear threat was simply not as raw as it had once been. The Cold War, driven in its later stages by institutions uniquely powerful in Washington, had probably remained a far more important part of the fabric of life in the capitol than it had nationally, particularly among younger people.
The generation that had fought in World War II was older now. The first representative of that generation who had served at the combat level—Eisenhower had been a commander—to take the presidency, Jack Kennedy, a man who on his election had appeared almost too young to be president, would have been seventy-five in 1992. Now members of that generation were increasingly a minority in political terms, and perhaps a minority in terms of their values as well. Formed by a pretelevision, popular culture, shaped by the Great Depression, World War II, and a general lack of affluence, their values were those of sacrifice, obligation, and personal modesty, which often seemed outmoded in contemporary America. Military service was no longer compulsory. Political candidates were not required to be war heroes; they did not even have to have been in uniform.
The definition of patriotism had probably changed with finality on the day the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and in the period thereafter as the United States began to acquire a vast first-strike capacity—SAC, ICBMs, nuclear subs. Patriotism in its purest sense, which had served the nation so well in the days after Pearl Harbor, was the impulse, both proud and immediate, to defend your country against enemy aggression. It was not necessarily the impulse to go thousands of miles away for obscure political causes in countries where no border had been crossed by an invading army, and where the conflicting forces were not only indigenous but likely to be both poor and raggedy, to fight on behalf of people who did not pose a threat to the United States. Patriotism in an age of distant, political wars was a more complicated concept. Did an ordinary person have to be as patriotic in the present as in the past if his nation had an immense nuclear arsenal and a professional all-volunteer army?
The Vietnam War had divided the country, frustrated the country, and scarred the country, but it never really threatened the country. There was never a danger of North Vietnamese or Vietcong forces landing south of San Francisco and sweeping down in a great arc to capture Los Angeles (although a great many people on the far right might not have been too unhappy if they had). In fact, as the tensions of the Cold War began to move away from central Europe to distant places in the third world where the proxies of both superpowers were aligned against each other, the cause of patriotism became even less immediate. A young American was more likely to be fighting to save an odious local oligarchy and thus prop up a rather debatable domino than to protect his hometown in Iowa.
One of the nation’s less attractive and not very secret secrets was gradually being unveiled in this political season: that the educated, the talented, and the privileged had by and large not served in Vietnam. Some like Clinton had not served because they opposed the war but others who appeared to favor it had not deigned to go for other reasons. Newt Gingrich, a rising star in the House, might now be a hawk, but had not chosen to serve in Vietnam, accepting instead a number of educational deferments. Trent Lott, a soaring luminary of the Southern wing of the Republican Party, already on his way to becoming Senate majority leader, a man who had an ideological affinity for the war and was almost the perfect age to go, had been able to come up with deferments for family reasons. Bush’s sitting vice president, Dan Quayle, with powerful connections in Indiana—the head of the Indiana National Guard was a top-level newspaper editor who worked for his family—found a safe place in the Indiana Guard and yet managed without any inner conflict to hold a hawkish view of the war, a rare combination of both love and abstinence. In fact, it was barely noticed that Dick Cheney, the sitting secretary of defense, had not served in Vietnam though he also had been the perfect age to go and had rather casually told the Washington Post’s George Wilson, when asked about it, “I had other priorities in the sixties than military service.”4
Indeed, that profound generational difference in terms of the attitudes toward their defining wars existed in the home of President George Bush himself. The elder Bush could not wait to sign up as a naval aviator in World War II. His oldest son, George W., like many privileged and well-connected young men, had, by contrast, found a haven in an Air National Guard unit, a place that was in at least the partial lee of the storm in the midsixties. Vietnam was simply a very different war in a different time, creating very different attitudes among the young men who were destined to become part of the leadership class. Those who had wrestled with the moral complexity of whether to serve were by 1992 no longer kids. They were, like Bill Clinton, well into their forties, and they had surveyed a large body of evidence that the war had been a monumental mistake. They were now an important part of the voting body politic—the demographic center, according to the actuarial tables. That meant there was a generation—or even two—of Americans even younger than candidate Clinton, to whom the debate about Vietnam had as much meaning and immediacy as a debate about how badly the British generals had wasted their troops during World War I, sending them again and again into mass assaults against German machine guns.
This profound generational change and therefore the change in issues showed up in the primaries. In New Hampshire, the Democratic candidate who was the early favorite and whose curriculum vitae looked good on paper, Bob Kerrey, former governor of Nebraska, now senator, never found his stride. Before New Hampshire, Kerrey was thought to be a nineties reincarnation of John Kennedy. He was bright and interesting and very attractive, ironic and quirky, never predictable and extremely popular with the Washington press corps. He was, it appeared, a genuine war hero, a navy SEAL who had won the Congressional Medal of Honor for his service in Vietnam, where he had lost a leg. He had won election as governor of a conservative state that did not normally elect Democrats, he had been a successful businessman, and he was a bachelor who dated an attractive movie star, Debra Winger. Or as his rival Bill Clinton had said about him somewhat enviously in one of the conversations with his girlfriend Gennifer Flowers, which she had taped, Kerrey had “all the Gary Hart/Hollywood money, and because he’s single, looks like a movie star, won the Medal of Honor, and since he’s single, nobody cares if he’s screwing around.”5
Kerrey was presumed to be the perfect Democratic candidate because he could reclaim the issue of patriotism, which had rested for so long with the Republicans. If he were nominated, the Republicans, as they had for a number of elections, would no longer have sole title to the flag. But Kerrey was a disaster in New Hampshire. He had undertaken the run largely because a number of more senior political figures in Washington, who seemed to know much more about this than he did, had looked at his qualifications and told him he ought to do it and would do well. He had no idea that, as one of his top aides said, “By running for the presidency in the modern era, he was leaving politics and entering the circus.” Kerrey might have been an ideal candidate, but he lacked the requisite passion (or madness), the all-or-nothing glandular need to make a run for the White House. In New Hampshire, he was appalled by how little he liked campaigning for the presidency and what an extraordinary intrusion it was into his personal life, how little it seemed to be about substantive issues and how much it was about everything he detested in contemporary politics—the theater rather than the essence of governance. Day by day he grew increasingly puzzled about why he was there. Early in the campaign, his visit to a senior citizens’ center in Concord had gone poorly. Afterward he returned to his van, obviously tired and somewhat discouraged. Even as someone shoved a microphone and a camera in his face, Kerrey turned to the reporters covering him and asked, “What the hell am I doing here?”
“You mean being in Concord, Senator?” one reporter responded.
“No, running for president—remind me of that.”6
What the media (and certainly many of his party’s leaders who were tired of the Democrats being portrayed as not loving the flag sufficiently) wanted from Bob Kerrey was to take his biography—his Vietnam War record, his heroism as a SEAL, and his Congressional Medal of Honor—and contrast it with Bill Clinton’s biography. Obviously that matchup had a good deal more drama than a comparison of their respective health programs. But that was precisely what Kerrey did not want. He did not want to run for the presidency as a war hero, and if he had his misgivings about how Clinton had played the draft, he did not want it to be the defining issue of a presidential campaign. It was as if, for him, Vietnam was not only in the past, but it was then and this was now. Most important of all, it was personally painful, perhaps even sacred and not to be exploited. What he had done—the sacrifice, the loss, the comradeship, the loyalty, the pain, the darkness, and, not insignificantly, the love—was between him and those who had served with him, and it was not to be devalued by bartering it for political advantage. For there had been an earlier operation, one before he lost his leg, which still haunted Kerrey and his fellow SEALs. In February 1969 they had conducted a nighttime raid in an area that was completely controlled by the Vietcong and probably had been for three generations. There had been a firefight, and women and children had been killed, as Kerrey and others on his team remembered it. One member recalled it differently and claimed that the SEALs had rounded up the women and children and executed them. The rest of Kerrey’s team recalled the events as he did, as something terrible and cruel that had happened in the darkness and fog of war. But it had always operated—the grimness of his own memory—as a caution when he spoke about the war, especially in political campaigns. Too many ghosts were already there.
There were the rare times when he was with his old buddies from the SEALs and they would sing the bitter antiwar Australian song “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda.” But those were private, not public moments, and they were most assuredly not to be manipulated for public consumption. He had gone to Vietnam, he had paid a high price, both physically and emotionally, and that was all the public needed to know; if it hungered for more, then something was very wrong with the system. Most of his staff pushed him hard to go after Clinton on the draft, especially after Kerrey had faltered in New Hampshire and all the candidates headed to the South for the next round of primaries, but Kerrey was determined that it would not be a defining issue.
Clinton, the all-time natural, took one look at Kerrey in action and knew that he had him, that somehow Kerrey’s heart was not in it. That a man whose strength was precisely Clinton’s weakness would not use it as an electoral weapon in New Hampshire was an early sign to Clinton that the political winds had changed and Vietnam as an overt issue might be less and less important. The press corps covering Clinton had in general accepted him at face value on his draft record and his lack of service; many members of it were roughly the same age, and they apparently liked him or at least saw him as the ablest candidate in the race, which was the same as liking him. In addition, their own relationship with Vietnam in most cases was just as distant as the candidate’s. (On Valentine’s Day, Billy Shore, Kerrey’s chief of staff, irritated by what he thought was media softness on Clinton, wrote a brief valentine poem to the media: “Roses are red / Violets are blue / Clinton dodged the draft / And so did most of you.”7)
But not just the media turned away from Vietnam, thought Stan Greenberg, Clinton’s pollster; it was the country itself. Greenberg was aware of the danger to Clinton from the draft issue and had carefully polled about it throughout the New Hampshire primary, meticulously scrutinizing opinions. From the start he had been relieved to see the degree to which the war was not an issue, even among focus groups with Vietnam veterans. It had little traction in most of the demographic samplings he was taking. Only a tiny number of baby boomers had actually served in the military, let alone gone to Vietnam, and among those younger than the boomers, the postboomers, the number was infinitesimal. Almost none of the people in these two groups wanted the issue of Vietnam reopened.
New Hampshire, nonetheless, turned into a brutal test for Clinton. Early on he did well, the ablest campaigner in an essentially weak field. In mid-January he was leading Paul Tsongas, who was from neighboring Massachusetts, by twelve points in a Boston Globe poll. Then the Gennifer Flowers story—an alleged affair with a young woman who had been an Arkansas state employee—broke in the tabloid Star. Clinton at first dismissed it, saying the report had been printed in a newspaper “that says Martians walk on earth and cows have human heads.” But the story, added to a broad general awareness of Clinton’s philandering—there had always, even among those who admired him, been talk that he had what was euphemistically called a zipper problem—did not go away. Moreover, he ended up making a specific denial of it (“the affair did not happen”), a departure from an earlier decision not to discuss the somewhat tainted aspect of his private life.
With that he began to slip in the polls, and at virtually the same time his draft record became an issue. It began with a detailed story in the Wall Street Journal, which went over what was by then relatively familiar ground. But the Journal story had a new twist. Colonel Eugene Holmes, the ROTC officer at the University of Arkansas who had enrolled Clinton in the Arkansas unit, was now saying that Clinton had manipulated the draft so that he did not serve. That was a major change. In the past Colonel Holmes had defended Clinton’s record on the draft. The Clinton people thought of him as their first line of defense in this extremely touchy area, and they had often sent inquisitive reporters off to talk to the then quite friendly Colonel Holmes. Now Holmes had switched sides. That was bad news.
A few days later, things took a turn for the worse when Clinton’s letter to Colonel Holmes, written some twenty-three years earlier, became public for the first time. Someone had handed a copy of it to Mark Halperin, a producer, and Jim Wooten, a correspondent for ABC. Holmes had befriended Clinton during the tumultuous period when he was at Oxford and was wrestling with his conscience about what would be the right thing to do about Vietnam. Holmes had enrolled him in the Arkansas ROTC unit while Clinton was still at Oxford. The original exchange between the two men had taken place at a moment when the question of receiving his draft notice was in no way theoretical. The timing of the draft notice now being released was also important. Clinton had received a place in the ROTC after receiving his draft notice, which meant entry in the unit was technically illegal, though for a time he denied this. At first, in the midst of the campaign, Clinton claimed he could not remember whether he had already received his draft notice when he started working the ROTC gambit, but later he came around and admitted that he had.
The presumption made when he first entered the ROTC under the guidance of Colonel Holmes was that he would finish his second year at Oxford, return home to Fayetteville, and enter law school and the ROTC at the same time. It appeared quite clear that, as often happened with National Guard units, which were never immune from local politics, the skids had been greased. For if Clinton was not exactly to the manner born, he was by the time he arrived at Oxford to the manner handsomely apprenticed and connected. Already quite active politically, he had powerful Arkansas benefactors on Senator J. William Fulbright’s staff who were sponsoring him. Since appointments to National Guard units, particularly in the South, were always part of the political fabric, his connection to Colonel Holmes appeared to have been aided by influential friends in Fulbright’s office, where Clinton had worked part-time.
So be it. Clinton was not the first bright, well-connected young man to find a home in the National Guard. But then the game had changed. In 1969, while Clinton was still at Oxford, the papers admitting him to the National Guard already being processed, President Nixon, in an attempt to defuse the antiwar movement and separate its leadership from the mainstream of American college kids, changed the rules governing the draft. When that happened, Clinton’s game plan changed, too. On December 1, 1969, with the newly introduced lottery finally in place and in use for the first time since World War II, Clinton found himself with a number that was both literally and figuratively bulletproof—his birthday was the 311th day picked. Just two days after getting so magical a number, he had written Colonel Holmes, the man he had so artfully stroked to get into the ROTC unit, this time withdrawing from the slot Holmes had saved for him.
The letter was prototypically Clinton, reflecting both the best and the worst of him, charming, passionate, manipulative, wildly honest and deeply disingenuous, full of personal flattery for Holmes, and yet containing a serious critique of the war and what it was doing to a young, high-minded, almost pathologically ambitious twenty-three-year-old. In some ways parts of the letter spoke for a generation. Its tone of personal anguish was unmistakable. But at its core was Clinton’s request to withdraw from the agreed-upon ROTC slot because, he now claimed, his original decision to join was unacceptable to him on moral grounds and he had no true interest in the ROTC. Liberated by the lottery from any fear of the draft, he was now resigning a safe ROTC slot he had almost surely received illicitly. The letter and the dazzling series of moves Clinton had put on poor, unsuspecting Colonel Holmes offered a fascinating insight into the man the country would get to know better and better in ensuing years. No one else was quite as smart as he was, he believed, and therefore he could manipulate people and somehow manage to get away with it.
In the end Clinton went into neither the army nor the ROTC. Clinton, David Maraniss later wrote, had “played the draft like a chess player.” His draft record had surfaced on occasion in the past but had never been damaging in part because Colonel Holmes had defended him. Now, twenty-three years later, when he was embroiled in a difficult primary race in New Hampshire, with his entire political future at stake and already shaken by the Gennifer Flowers accusations, his letter withdrawing from the ROTC slot, so full of contradictions, had found its way into the public domain. The timing could not have been worse. Clinton’s approval rating in the polls, which had once been as high as thirty-seven, was slipping badly and was now under twenty. Paul Tsongas was comfortably in the lead. Jim Wooten of ABC was absolutely sure the ROTC gambit had been preceded by a draft notice, though he could not prove it. But he had not put the story on the air immediately, seeking first to authenticate it and then get the governor’s reaction. Wooten went to the tiny airport in Keene, New Hampshire, where the Clintons were to arrive shortly after spending several days in Little Rock, and handed his copy of the letter to Clinton, his wife, and his top political aides, James Carville, Paul Begala, and George Stephanopoulos. Clinton saw the letter and looked ashen, Wooten remembered. The five immediately excused themselves and held a high-level strategy meeting in the ladies’ room of the airport.
At this point Carville’s role was critical. He was both talented and combative, a student of the modern high-technology eye-for-an-eye, or better still one-eye-of-ours-for-two-of-theirs, school of politics. This campaign, he had vowed earlier, would not be a repeat of the murderous Bush-Dukakis campaign; the Clinton people would fire back and they would fire back immediately. Carville was also the least conventional of the Clinton political people. He always trusted his own reactions and experiences, and they were very different from those of most mainstream liberal Democratic advisers. His roots were among the very people with whom the Democrats had done so poorly in recent years, good-old-boy, flag-loving, blue-collar (and often redneck) Southern patriots, who had become Reagan Democrats. Reading Clinton’s letter he was struck by its humanity, its anguish, and the degree to which it spoke, in its passion, confusion, and, above all, doubt, for the young men Carville knew of his generation—not the least of all himself.
For the Carvilles of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, were old-fashioned patriots. James Carville’s grandmother had been a five-star mother during World War II, four sons and a son-in-law serving in the armed forces at the same time. James had been born in 1944 at Fort Benning, Georgia, where his father was stationed during that war. Upon graduation from Louisiana State in June 1966, he did what young men of his background always did. He went into the service as a marine lieutenant, eager to get to Vietnam. All his friends had gone, but to his consternation he served stateside. That bothered him greatly for a time, that he had missed the big show and was perhaps not as much a man as his pals, who might someday hold his lack of combat experience against him. But instead, as they began to return home, he learned something surprising. They thought he was the lucky one. They had by and large hated the war and congratulated him on his good fortune, which until then he had thought of as his shame. His failure to serve had in no way separated him from the defining experience of his generation, he discovered; for a number of his close friends it had been a negative experience and he had been spared it. Carville believed a serious political lesson was to be drawn from that. Now as he read his candidate’s letter, the doubts he saw reflected the feelings of his friends, those who had gone and those who had not gone, as well as his own. They were generational doubts. In fact, Carville wished he could have written that letter himself when he was twenty-three years old. He believed that it was a classic example of something that people in the media and Washington often got wrong, the importance of the role of doubt in how ordinary people felt about complicated issues.
So as he huddled with the candidate in this impromptu Keene airport strategy session, Carville spoke forcefully and with a sure sense of how many of the young men of his generation would react to the letter. Wooten, waiting outside, could hear him, emotional and emphatic in the best of circumstances, shouting at the candidate inside the ladies’ room in language that was distinctly Carvillian: “Goddamnit, Governor, this letter is your mother-fucking friend! This can work for you! You’ve got to distribute it!” The conference was brief and Clinton emerged, the color back in his face, and said, yes, the letter was his, and then he began a period of waffling with Wooten and others about whether his draft notice had preceded his signing on for the ROTC unit. Wooten, some ten years older than Clinton, born of a generation where things like this mattered greatly and candidates always emphasized their service in the nation’s wars, was sure that it was a big-time story and an extremely damaging one, potentially the end of the bright career of an otherwise gifted young politician. In their brief meeting, Clinton assured Wooten that he had not yet received his draft notice when he applied for the ROTC. It was, of course, a lie. “Governor, why don’t I believe you on this?” Wooten asked. “Because no one wants to believe me,” Clinton answered, then added, “Jim, one of the reasons that both Hillary and I love you is because you’ve always been so fair with us.” Wooten thought the story might be a campaign killer, and he was extremely careful in checking it out; he wanted no details to be wrong.
His exceptional fairness cost him a scoop. Nightline, another wing of ABC News, got a copy of the letter and beat him on the story. Two days later, Clinton appeared on Nightline with Ted Koppel to talk about the letter; the strategy was now clear: he was going to brazen it out. Koppel, the most talented live interviewer on television, was at his best, but Clinton was simply brilliant—he was following the Carville line. They had worked out ground rules with Koppel; Koppel, not Clinton, would read the letter on a split screen, with Clinton looking on sagely. It worked. Clinton managed to stiff-arm Koppel and held turf; he had made the issue the war, rather than his reaction to it. He had, in the process, sacrificed his truthfulness to one of the best and most respected reporters in America, and though he won a short-range victory, his lies to Wooten became a cornerstone of why so many other journalists never completely trusted him again. But he had dodged a bullet and survived for another day.
At almost the same time, Carville was busy taking out full-page ads in various New England newspapers, reprinting the letter in its entirety, and within a day or two Wooten realized that he had been wrong about the importance of the letter and the draft. Clinton and the people around him, Wooten decided, had sensed something about the country and its changes before he had. It was like a wake-up call. If there were contradictions in Clinton’s record on Vietnam, they were not that different from the contradictions throughout the country. Clinton, Wooten realized, represented both the strengths and weaknesses of postwar, baby-boomer America, an era in which success came largely without sacrifice. Clinton represented more than a mere ideological gap with the existing administration. Rather, what Wooten was covering and watching was more like a generational changing of the guard. The generation he knew best, and the rigidity of whose values he had often been at tension point with, those Americans of a distinctly more Calvinist era, who had been through both the Depression and World War II, and whose lives had been marked both by sacrifice and lower expectations, were no longer the force they had once been. Replacing them was something very different, a younger, infinitely more successful generation of Americans, surely better educated, whose talent produced not merely higher levels of accomplishment but equally high expectations. Wooten, then in his midfifties, felt himself at tension point with them, too; it was as if success had all come too easily for them, and worse, they had too little respect for the past. They believed their uncommon good fortune was entirely the product of their own hard work and they owed little to those who had gone before them. Like many Americans, Wooten could feel the new political and cultural lines cut through him; he might be politically more sympathetic to the ideas of Clinton and the younger generation, but culturally more sympathetic to those being replaced. The country, Wooten decided, was different now; it wanted to forgive a politician like Clinton because it wanted to forgive itself.
The draft issue turned out to be one that New Hampshire did not seem to care passionately about. Clinton began to close on Paul Tsongas. People liked the way he fought back. Though Tsongas went on to carry the state—as a kind of cross-the-state-line favorite son—Clinton was the real winner, because Tsongas was unlikely to travel well elsewhere. Clinton had hung in the wind for a moment and then come back to do exceptionally well. Whatever else was unknown about him as the primary season advanced, one critical bit of information was now available to the general public and to working politicians and journalists: Bill Clinton could take a hit and keep coming. In that he resembled no one so much as the man whom many of his devotees considered his polar opposite, Richard Nixon. Other men might have pulled out of the race immediately, deciding that whatever office they were seeking was not worth the continuing public dissection. Instead, Clinton seemed to reach back and find new sources of strength.
Whatever the accusations against Clinton, particularly the Gennifer Flowers stories, if the public did not like him, it liked his critics even less, and his real accusers, among the ever more predatory press corps that pursued him on the issue. As a result he was beginning to be perceived by the general public as under assault first and foremost by the media. The press, of course, is never popular, even when it is doing its best work—covering a dangerous foreign assignment or the civil rights movement—because it often brings unpalatable but necessary news to ordinary people.
But this was, given the changing nature of the media, the increased power of television, and the almost compulsive appetite for tabloidlike scandal brought on by the coming of cable television, a very different press corps, chasing a very different kind of story. Moreover, the longer the story went on and the larger the posse of pursuing media people grew, the less popular and the less innocent the press corps became in the public mind. Its members, gathered together outside an airport gate or in front of a high school where the candidate was to speak and, shouting the most brazen of questions, looked like sharks disguised as humanoids, hounding Clinton on an issue that seemed to many Americans private rather than public information.
To some of the more senior people in network television, who had grown up in an age when things like this were not considered legitimate stories, the fierce impulse for tabloid-style reporting was unwanted. They might finally accept that these stories were already in the public domain and therefore legitimate to cover, but the frenzy with which they were pursued, the disproportionate emphasis on them rather than on other stories that might reveal true political character, was troublesome. Yet they went ahead anyway; they might as well do it, they finally decided, because everyone else was doing it. “The crack cocaine of American journalism,” Carville, never short of sound bites himself, once shrewdly called the Gennifer Flowers story and other similar stories that came after it. “You could,” he said, “see the need in their faces, even the top print people. They would be sitting there telling you, ‘I don’t want to do this’ [to write about Ms. Flowers], but then you’d look in their faces and see the hunger, the desperation to do it, and the fact that they were loving it.”
These stories, thought Carville, himself a shrewd student of the new media game, connected now to career; they got reporters onto the myriad new cable talk shows, and that, in turn, with a bit of luck might lead to lectureships and books. But what the public understood in some visceral way, he added, was that the candidates were not necessarily the ones lowering the quality of discourse in a campaign. It was the media themselves, draped more often than not in their own false piety. The justification for the press covering other important stories—the people’s right to know—was not in the minds of many people a powerful rationale in a case like this. About some aspects of a candidate’s personal life (as of some aspects of their own personal life) they were not so sure that the public had a right to know. People looked at the media examining the candidate and rightfully wondered what it would be like if the media stars themselves, instead of the candidate, were being scrutinized, and how much hunger there would be for news of their private lives.
The scenes from New Hampshire of the governor surrounded by a horde of television reporters, all of them bearing in on him and shouting at him about his personal life—“Governor, did you sleep with Gennifer Flowers? Governor, did you do it?”—were ugly. At Ms. Flowers’s own press conference at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, carried live on CNN, another crowd of reporters shouted questions at a young woman who seemed way in over her head (Had Clinton worn a condom? someone asked). Yet accusations of infidelity did not damage Clinton that much in the long run. There was simply too much of it in the media; it violated in the most basic way what many Americans felt was a sense of fair play. Moreover, it was being done by highly paid media people who themselves were influential in society, but whose own personal lives, on occasion equally messy, were permitted to remain private. The Clinton pollsters, appalled at first by the nature of these accusations and worried that they might be a potentially fatal wound, were impressed by what they found in their focus groups: that people quickly came to dislike what the media people were doing to the candidate. Instead, they liked the way that the candidate, a big man, seemed to lean into the media physically during these impromptu encounters—not backing down a bit.
What happened to Clinton when he took the worst of the hits aimed at him was fascinating. He became more committed, more centered, those around him decided. This was Clinton at his best, more focused on his purpose than ever. That was when he showed his true strengths and went from the genial, ever-agreeable young Arkansas governor who was so eager to please everyone to the man who gradually came into focus in the White House, a tough, shrewd, immensely skillful politician capable of making hard decisions, willing, if need be, to jettison almost anything and anyone, no matter how old the friendship, in behalf of his own interests. Empathetic he might seem in his normal public mode, but cold and tough he could be if his political future was at stake. When his back was to the wall, he became the total politician engaged in the one thing he excelled at more than anything else—survival.