As Clinton continued assessing his position and reaching out, one person on his wide panel of informal advisers was Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the Connecticut Democrat who represented the decidedly centrist, New Democrat side of the party. Lieberman, a 52-year-old Orthodox Jew known for his independence and civility, was in bed when one call came after 11 P.M. in early 1995. He later joked to his wife that it was like being a fireman or worse. With a Clinton call, Lieberman had to be able to go from a deep sleep to the full alert of high-intensity intellectual conversation in a few seconds. As a Yale Law student 24 years earlier, Clinton had worked in Lieberman’s successful campaign in New Haven for the Connecticut Senate, so the two shared an old bond. As a Democrat, Lieberman had been a particular curiosity in the Republican year of 1994. He had won reelection to the Senate with a smashing 67 percent of the vote.
Clinton had offered his congratulations. In subsequent calls Clinton sounded to Lieberman like he felt unappreciated. The president indicated he had not been treated fairly. All of the piling on about the Democratic setback had been intense and was directed at him. Lieberman was aware that like most politicians, Clinton was taking it personally. Some were telling him the problem was that he had tried to do too much, more than the public could absorb, digest and appreciate, Clinton said.
Lieberman said that a key problem had been Clinton’s massive health care reform plan, which had gone down to a crushing defeat. It was too much. The reconnection that Clinton as a candidate had made to the middle class in his 1992 campaign had been severed in the health care debate. The middle class, the Reagan Democrats, the New Democrats interpreted his health care plan with its emphasis on universal coverage for some 40 million uninsured people as a step back. Clinton was going to take something from them and give it to those who didn’t work and to the poor.
That was not a fair assessment, Clinton protested, because their health care plan was going largely to help people who were working.
It was a subtlety that had been lost in the debate, Lieberman agreed.
Yes, Clinton said, continuing to insist that the problem with the health care plan was not the substance. He had lost the communications and the political war. That was the screwed-up part.
Lieberman disagreed. He felt that Clinton had forsaken the Democratic center as exemplified by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which Clinton had helped found in 1985. As a fellow member of the DLC, Lieberman had broken with Clinton on his health care plan. The DLC had kept telling Clinton, why don’t you do welfare reform first? Welfare reform, getting non-workers off the government handout, was what would have galvanized the Reagan Democrats.
At the same time, Lieberman sympathized with Clinton’s dilemma. Clinton sat atop a very diverse, tumultuous Democratic Party. The political reality was that many Democrats were liberals. Clinton also had a genuine concern about poverty, inequality, and the plight of the poor. While intellectually Clinton might feel most comfortable with DLC centrists such as Lieberman, the political reality and his personal feelings tugged at each other.
In ongoing conversations with the president, Lieberman reminded him the president had a different role than the Democrats in Congress. There had to be times when Clinton would do things he wanted for the country, for what he determined was best, and for his own political standing that wouldn’t please all the Democrats. The country was frustrated with both parties. He had been elected in 1992 as an agent of hopeful change. He had redeemed many of his promises on the economy and deficit reduction.
“You know,” Lieberman said in the wise, optimistic tone of a rabbi, “people haven’t given up on you. Some people love you, some people hate you. And there’s this group in the middle, which is probably still the majority, that is open to hearing you out. This thing can flip back as dramatically by 1996 as it did in 1994.”
Vice President Gore realized that the 1994 loss of Congress was very much like 1980, when Clinton had lost his first reelection bid as Arkansas governor. In Arkansas, Clinton had been ousted and had to stage his 1982 comeback from exile without his office. In 1994, Clinton had effectively been beaten—his party had lost—but he didn’t have to leave office. He could stage a comeback from the highest office in the land. That gave Clinton considerable advantages, and time to find his bearings.
Gore continued to have some apprehension about Dick Morris. His doubts were at times mild, and at other times serious. Gore considered himself an advocate for the political center, and he thought Morris was a new force in Clinton’s life and was helping Clinton sort out where he wanted to go.
Clinton asked Gore to help him use Morris and his advice, to see if they could find some way to test-drive some of Morris’s ideas and see if Morris could mesh with the White House staff. Clinton wanted to be careful and tentative.
Gore could see that Clinton and Morris were like a straight line and a curve in geometry that get closer and closer together but no matter how far they are extended never actually touch: an asymptote. Clinton and Gore had discussed throwing the long ball, taking strategic risks. They now needed a full, real reelection campaign effort. Campaign money wouldn’t do it alone.
Morris was pushing for a new role.
“Mr. President,” Morris said, “I advise that we set up a team.”
“I can’t do it alone,” Clinton said. He agreed that Morris could assemble a new team, including a new pollster and media consultant for some specific tasks.
Morris was delighted; he considered it a mandate. Gore saw Clinton’s decision as more tentative. They would start by building a media campaign for the Democratic Party and getting on television.
Morris approached an old-time friend and adversary, Robert Squier, a veteran Democratic media consultant. At one time in 1990 Squier could have claimed accurately that he had helped elect 20 percent of the Senate. Squier, smooth and almost boyish, often sported a Florida tan. He was known for his boisterous and frequently stinging humor. Though he looked 40, he was 60. His joke-a-minute style concealed a highly literate and talented filmmaker. Squier had made much praised documentaries on William Faulkner and Herman Melville, and he had spent years working on a Hemingway film. He was also a master of the negative political ad. If accurate, they were an often effective technique because such ads could inflict immediate damage, and the subsequent attempts to present the other side rarely got the same attention as the attacks.
In 1982, Morris had hired Squier to assist in an election eve telethon for Clinton’s comeback as governor. For years, Squier had been media consultant to Vice President Gore and was one of Gore’s best political friends and advisers. In 1986, Morris and Squier had handled media for the opposite sides in the bitterly fought Florida Senate race—Morris for Paula Hawkins, and Squier for Bob Graham. Just before the election, Morris had publicly announced that he had a poll showing the race tightening to within 2 points. Squier responded saying he didn’t believe the poll and charged that Morris was “the Julia Child of cooked polls.”
Then, in 1992, Squier had quietly prepared close to 40 percent of the media advertising for the Clinton-Gore campaign behind the scenes. Morris felt Squier was the best Democratic media consultant and invited him to join the new effort. No one had a clearer record of making memorable, often searing ads. Over months Squier’s ads would subtly connect to each other, building a thematic message.
Six months earlier, Clinton had brought a former investment banker into the White House as a deputy chief of staff. He was Erskine Bowles, who had headed the Small Business Administration during the first part of the Clinton administration. Bowles, a calm, 49-year-old North Carolinian, had done a large study of how Clinton was using his time, and he had been asked to try to bring more order to Clinton’s decision making. “When there is no front door to the way of doing things,” Bowles said, “everybody uses the back door.” He wanted to eliminate the back doors to Clinton. The Morris channel threatened to derail Bowles’s efforts.
Beginning in March, Clinton began calling evening strategy sessions, generally on Wednesday or Thursday nights, in the Treaty Room of the White House which he used as his study. Joining him were Gore, White House chief of staff Leon Panetta, Harold Ickes and the new campaign team of Morris, Squier and two pollsters, Doug Schoen and Mark Penn. Ickes, the standard garden-variety liberal, was going to be the chief mechanic for the campaign. But Morris and his team were going to be in charge of message. At these initial meetings, Ickes was comparatively passive, asking only an occasional question, often on technical issues about polling samples.
The tension between Ickes and Morris was obvious. So Clinton put Bowles, not Ickes, in charge of trying to coordinate the work of the new campaign team with the White House staff. Bowles wanted everyone coming through the front door to Clinton. But Clinton, by temperament and habit, loved back doors.
Hillary Clinton did not attend the evening campaign meetings. She and her husband had decided that her participation would feed suspicions about her role as the hidden hand of the administration. Any direct role could obviously hurt his reelection chances. Her thoughts and advice, which were plentiful, would be given to him alone in their private time together.
The third year of her husband’s presidency was a difficult time for Hillary. She was continually battered in the various Whitewater investigations. And the outright rejection of her health care reform plan was more than an incidental setback. It hit directly at the core of the definition of herself as a competent, if not visionary, policy maker. Her failure on health care also undercut the notion of the partnership she had hoped to have with her husband, and the expected sharing of his presidency. She seemed jerked around by the muddled role of First Lady, as she swung between New Age feminist and national housewife. Her place and her role were not clear. Her high sense of purpose and doing good had been thwarted.
She was reaching out and searching hard.
Jean Houston and Mary Catherine Bateson had followed up their weekend at Camp David with a series of letters to Hillary, proposals and ideas on defining her role as First Lady and rising above the criticism and attacks. Houston had strongly encouraged Hillary to write a book, and Hillary had begun one on children. Hillary invited Houston and Bateson to the White House in the spring. Houston noticed a big picture of Eleanor Roosevelt in Hillary’s office. As a teenager, Houston had met Eleanor Roosevelt about six times, and she recounted those encounters to Hillary. Houston and Hillary talked more about Eleanor and her lifetime of struggle on behalf of the poor and against racism and sexism.
“God,” Houston thought, “this is really a serious Eleanor Roosevelt aficionado.” Clearly Eleanor was Hillary’s archetypal, spiritual partner, much as the Greek goddess Athena was for Houston. In the first month of the Clinton presidency, Hillary had said publicly that she had imaginary discussions with Eleanor. “I thought about all the conversations I’ve had in my head with Mrs. Roosevelt this year, one of the saving graces that I have hung on to for dear life,” Hillary had said February 21, 1993, at a New York dinner to raise money for an Eleanor Roosevelt statue. Hillary had said then that the questions she put in her head to Eleanor included “How did you put up with this?” and “How did you go on day to day, with all the attacks and criticisms that would be hurled your way?”
On a visit to the White House in early April 1995, Houston proposed that Hillary search further and dig deeper for her connections to Mrs. Roosevelt. Houston and her work were controversial because she believed in spirits and other worlds, put people into trances and used hypnosis, and because in the 1960s she had conducted experiments with LSD. But she tried to be careful with Hillary and the president, intentionally avoiding any of those techniques.
Houston and Bateson went up with Hillary to the solarium, a sun parlor with three sides of glass windows perched atop the White House. It was afternoon and they all sat around a circular table, joined by several members of the First Lady’s staff. One was making a tape recording of the session. The room, which Hillary had redecorated and which was her favorite place for important meetings, offered a spectacular view to the south of the Washington Monument. Fresh fruit, popcorn and pretzels had been set out.
Houston asked Hillary to imagine she was having a conversation with Eleanor. In her strong and self-confident voice, Houston asked Hillary to shut her eyes in order to eliminate the room and her surroundings, and to bring in as many vivid internal sensory images as possible from her vast knowledge about Eleanor to focus her reflection.
We admire you, said Houston, who thought Hillary was a great woman. She was trying to create an atmosphere of mutual admiration.
Hillary settled back in her seat and shut her eyes. She had just returned from a ten-day trip with her daughter, Chelsea, through South Asia, India and Nepal—a trip Houston, an old Asia hand herself, had encouraged her to make.
You’re walking down a hall, Houston said, and there’s Mrs. Roosevelt. Now let’s describe her.
Hillary did. She had a wonderful description of Eleanor smiling, outgoing, slightly frumpy, always engaged, always fighting.
Go there to Mrs. Roosevelt and talk about the possible future of the children, Houston said.
Hillary gave a long answer. Children were her subject, 25 years of legal and policy advocacy on their behalf.
Houston asked the First Lady to open herself up to Mrs. Roosevelt as a way of looking at her own capacities and place in history. Houston regarded it as a classic technique, practiced by Machiavelli, who used to talk to ancient men. What might Eleanor say? What is your message to her? she asked Hillary.
Hillary addressed Eleanor, focusing on her predecessor’s fierceness and determination, her advocacy on behalf of people in need. Hillary continued to address Eleanor, discussing the obstacles, the criticism, the loneliness the former First Lady felt. Her identification with Mrs. Roosevelt was intense and personal. They were members of an exclusive club of women who could comprehend the complexity, the ambiguity of their position. It’s hard, Hillary said. Why was there such a need in people to put other people down?
Houston encouraged Hillary to play the other part, to respond as Mrs. Roosevelt. The discourse with a person not there, particularly an historical figure in an equivalent position, opened up a whole constellation of ideas, Houston felt.
I was misunderstood, Hillary replied, her eyes still shut, speaking as Mrs. Roosevelt. You have to do what you think is right, she continued. It was crucial to set a course and hold to it.
Houston thought that in many great people’s lives a period of isolation and betrayal was followed by their most productive years. Attacks made their mission clearer. She had studied 55 creative people and found that most felt they had an archetype, a kind of spiritual partner. But Hillary was facing much greater toxicity and negativity from others than Eleanor had.
Houston explained that the rise of women to a level of partnership with men was not yet accepted. But women became more resourceful through adversity and backlash.
Hillary reviewed various attitudes and setbacks she had encountered. Each time Houston asked her, How would you explain this to Mrs. Roosevelt? And what would she respond?
The White House had been a shock, Hillary said. She had not been prepared for the kinds of attention she had received for every statement or move she made in the first two years. Unintentionally, her allies often isolated her as much as her opponents, giving rise to impossible expectations, placing the spotlight on every aspect of her words, actions and past.
Houston said that Hillary needed to see and understand that Mrs. Roosevelt was not just an historic figure but was someone who also was hurt by all that happened to her. And yet Mrs. Roosevelt could go on doing her work. Hillary needed to unleash the same potential in herself. In adversity she needed to find the seeds of grqwth and transformation. It then would become possible to inherit from these mythical or historic figures, and to achieve self-healing..
Bateson, who was watching more than participating in the session, considered the activity a kind of meditation, reflection or even prayer.
Next, Houston asked Hillary to carry on a conversation with Mahatma Gandhi, the Hindu leader, a powerful symbol of stoic self-denial. Talk to him, Houston said. What would you say and what would you ask?
Hillary expressed reverence and respect for Gandhi’s life and works, almost drawing his and her own lives together with her words, opening herself up wide, acknowledging the level of his exertion, empathizing with his persecution. She said he too was profoundly misunderstood, when all he wanted to do was to help others and make peace. It was a strong personal outpouring—virtual therapy, and unusual in front of a large group.
Talk with Jesus Christ, Houston proposed next. Jesus was the epitome of the wounded, betrayed and isolated, and Houston liked to quote his words in the Gospel of Thomas, “What you have within you that you express will save you, and what you have within you that you do not express will destroy you.”
That would be too personal, Hillary finally said, declining to address Jesus.
After about an hour, the session was over. Chelsea had called her mother earlier and had complained of an upset stomach. Hillary wanted to go see her daughter.
Houston and Bateson said they would be available to meet with Hillary at any time in the future. Of course, they would not charge the government or Hillary for their services, but they wondered if it was possible for Houston to get a reduced government airfare from her home in New York State. It turned out not to be possible..
Most people in the White House did not know about Hillary’s sessions with Houston and Bateson. To some of the few who did, the meetings could trigger politically damaging comparisons to Nancy Reagan’s use of astrology, which had heavily influenced if not determined the schedule of her husband, President Reagan. Astrology only changed timing, and it was a kind of pseudo-science that could be fun or worth a laugh. Yet the Reagans had been ridiculed. Hillary’s sessions with Houston reflected a serious inner turmoil that she had not resolved.
Later, Houston and Bateson gave a kind of seminar for Hillary and her staff at an evening summer barbecue at the home of one of Hillary’s staffers.
Houston told the group that if they were going to have so much work and so much stress, they ought to set up what she called “a creative teaching-learning community.” She proposed various physical and mind exercises to help them nurture one another. One was for individuals to get up and voice their appreciation for one another, the work they did and the support they gave one another. Many got up and spoke, including Hillary, who seemed to love the bonding.
Hillary continued her meetings and in-depth discussions with Houston and Bateson about the parallels between her life and Eleanor Roosevelt’s. Houston was writing her 15th book, a kind of autobiography called A Mythic Life. She sent one chapter to Hillary that was called “The Road of Trials.” Hillary said it really struck home for her. The chapter was built on Sophocles’ notion of “wisdom through suffering.” The sufferings, or “woundings,” as Houston called them, were necessary for growth and could be converted into opportunity. Houston claimed that by going into a trance for five to seven hours at a time over a period of four days she had dissolved a lump the size of an orange in her own right breast—all to the total astonishment of her doctor.
Hillary told Houston that she was moved by the chapter. The First Lady also said that both she and the president had read Houston’s book Manual for the Peacemaker: An Iroquois Legend to Heal Self and Society.
Houston felt that she, Hillary, Bateson and some of Hillary’s staff formed a kind of “old girls’ club.” Within the club they often communicated with a single word, a laugh, a joke or a lifted eyebrow. So Houston did not have to ask Hillary directly one of the key questions from the “Road of Trials” chapter, “Where and by whom were you wounded?” It was obvious that some of Hillary’s woundings had come from the media, her former Whitewater business partners Jim and Susan McDougal, the relentless Whitewater investigations and her husband’s past infidelity. But Houston did not raise these issues, nor did Hillary.
Houston had at least one other deep, reflective meditation session, in which Hillary closed her eyes and carried on an imaginary discussion with Eleanor Roosevelt. Houston’s purpose was to move forward so Hillary could put her “wounding” in the middle of her story, ending with the birth of a new grace.
Houston regarded this as intensely difficult. Hillary was not there yet.
During the 1992 campaign, Hillary had been interviewed for the campaign film biography of her husband entitled The Man from Hope. In sections not used in the final film, Hillary talked about her personal relationship with him.
“Bill asked me to marry him a couple of times,” Hillary said, “And, it was just a hard decision to make because I was very reluctant about, I mean, I was in love with him but I just couldn’t envision what it would be like, leaving all of my friends and my family and moving to a place I’d never been.”
What bound you together? the producer asked.
“I, you know, I don’t know if I can describe it, I don’t know if you could ever really describe why you love somebody or why you are committed to somebody, but, you know, I thought we complemented each other in lots of ways, but I also thought that, um, we cared deeply about a lot of the same things. I mean, it’s real corny. It wasn’t as corny 20 years ago as it is for some people now to say that, Bill and I really are bound together in part because we believe we have an obligation to give something back and to be part of making life better for other people.”
In 1995, this articulate woman of great intelligence, talent, stamina and genuine caring seemed not to know what course she was on or where she was heading.
In public she kept up a good front, declaring that she felt no confusion or pain. She laughed, giggled and dismissed most suggestions or questions about her apparent setbacks and difficulties.
Hillary frequently began the mornings by exercising on a treadmill in the White House residence. She had a speakerphone nearby and called various staff members or friends during her workout. From under her heavy breathing, staffers could get the first hint of her frame of mind and what she wanted to accomplish that day. They referred to these as “the treadmill calls.” The first calls from Hillary were in turn followed by a round of phone calls between her staff in the East Wing and her staff in the Old Executive Office Building, the main offices adjacent to the White House. The essential question each morning was, What’s her mood?
On occasion she snapped at people, even blew up, providing a momentary glimpse of inner rage. She seemed angry, bottled up. Hillary was smart and determined, knew what she wanted to happen. When she was focused and directed, she often seemed not to recognize when she was hurting people. She frequently reduced her personal traveling aide to tears, once because the aide, who was responsible for carrying the First Lady’s belongings, didn’t have a piece of paper that Hillary needed. Unlike her husband, who tended to soften up after a rage, Hillary turned silent, often icy. Such incidents would not blow away, and all was not soon forgiven by Hillary as it was by her husband.
At the same time Hillary inspired intense loyalty among her top staff.
Hillary spent a lot of time thinking about Vince Foster, the deputy White House counsel who had committed suicide in 1993. Foster was from Hope, Arkansas, along with Clinton, and later had been Hillary’s law partner. In the Arkansas years she would have ranked Foster as among the three most together people she knew. The fact that he, of all people, had killed himself was jolting. “From the outside it just looked like he was absolutely rooted, connected,” Hillary told an associate. “Suicide is as old as time so there are some things you really can’t avoid, but really when you think about it, it’s the ultimate example of not being equipped. For whatever combination of reasons, you’ve got to be able to dig deep down and you’ve got to be able to hear your mother’s voice, your father’s voice, your brother’s voice, you’ve got to be able to hear that and you’ve got to be receptive to that.”
Voices were on Hillary’s mind. Whether the voices of Eleanor Roosevelt or Gandhi in the sessions with Houston and Bateson, or voices from her immediate family or her own past, the First Lady seemed to be straining to hear them.
She continued to speak out to her associate, almost as if she were giving herself a pep talk. “Part of being equipped is to know yourself well enough because of the inputs you’ve gotten from other people, starting with your parents, to be able to make adjustments, to be able to say, wait a minute, this is not working, this is not right for me, how do I get myself out of this?”
Hillary remarked that she was sure that good habits were the key to survival. “I really believe you can change the way you feel and think if you discipline yourself. You know, there’s that great phrase, I think it’s in Alcoholics Anonymous, that somebody once told me, ‘Fake it till you make it.’ Because there’s a certain way in which making up your mind that you’re going to be a ‘fill in the blank’—a grateful person, a happy person.”
“Life throws a lot of crap at you,” Hillary added. “When the inevitable crap comes, which it will in anybody’s life, and not just once but several times, that there is a cushion of capacity there, and there is a structure that gets you up in the morning.”
“The more I see of the world, the more impressed I am that the vast majority of people do that every day. You know it’s amazing to me that people actually stop at stop signs, that they do feed their children.”
Hillary was searching for discipline, for order, for the rhythm and routines of life—“Fake it till you make it.” She needed an adjustment mechanism.
This was what Bill Clinton faced at home as he was seeking reelection; to say nothing of the mounting frenzy of the Whitewater investigations, which increasingly seemed to focus on the financial practices, legal ethics and truth telling of his wife.
The Clintons had determined that as long as the Whitewater investigations continued, there was no way they could speak out and win politically. Their private lawyers had convinced them they had to pledge cooperation and hold their tongues—good legal defense strategy to avoid any contradictions that might come out later. In addition, it was impossible to win the public relations war with prosecutors, the lawyers argued. This was very hard for both Clintons—to be pilloried and to run up vast legal debts that could bankrupt them, all in utter silence.
In the first 100 days of the new Congress, Speaker Newt Gingrich and the new Republican majority in the House kept their promise to bring all ten items in the Contract With America to a vote. Every item passed the House except term limits. Gingrich, the Republicans and the Contract were taking virtually all of the oxygen from the political atmosphere, and Gingrich was going to celebrate with a nationally televised speech Friday night, April 7. Unprecedented for a Speaker of the House, he was claiming a role for himself equivalent to the president, delivering his own prime-time State of the Union address of sorts.
Clinton at first planned to answer Gingrich with an education message. Leon Panetta began mobilizing the entire federal government and cabinet for a Clinton speech and a series of proposals on education—an issue that had been central and successful for Clinton as Arkansas governor. Clinton knew that education, including support for everything from job training to school lunches and college loans, was the best possible investment in people and in their future increased earning power. But it was difficult to give the education issue political lift and immediacy. The payoffs in education programs and investments were generally years if not decades down the road. The speech drafts and proposals emerging seemed tedious, cumbersome and old.
Dick Morris believed that Clinton had not defined cleanly and crisply what he was doing in the era of the Republican Contract. Clinton needed to say, This is why I’m president. This is what I want to do. With Bill Curry in the White House as counselor, Morris had some leverage. One night at a meeting with Panetta, Stephanopoulos and several others, Curry made the argument that a Clinton speech on education was not sufficient. “Why not give a speech on ornithology?” he asked sarcastically.
A direct Clinton response to Newt’s Contract, Stephanopoulos replied, would unnecessarily legitimize and elevate it.
“You can’t just make general statements,” Curry said. “You’ve got to figure out what to do.”
After the meeting, Curry pressed Stephanopoulos some more on the argument that Clinton needed to engage Gingrich.
“This is like 1964,” Curry said, “and the Beatles are opening in Shea Stadium, and we can’t open in some little joint across the river.”
Morris and Curry then began crafting an answer to Gingrich. Morris noted that some of the themes in the Contract With America had been part of Clinton’s original 1992 presidential campaign. Morris reviewed the items normally associated with Republicans that Clinton had supported—deficit reduction, welfare reform, middle-class tax cuts, smaller government, tough anti-crime measures. At the same time, Clinton would veto Republican proposals such as one repealing the ban on assault weapons.
On the computer, Morris and Curry developed two categories: “Olive branch” and “Fuck you.” Clinton had to say clearly whether he was going to extend the “olive branch” or say “fuck you” to the Republicans on each of the important or pending issues of the day. Using this formula, they crafted a long speech for Clinton to give setting his course.
On the morning of Tuesday, April 4, three days before Gingrich’s speech, Clinton decided to bring the two strands of his administration together.
He had his chief White House speechwriter Don Baer, a former reporter, sit down with Morris to work out a speech for Clinton to give to a meeting of newspaper editors in Dallas the day of Gingrich’s televised address. Baer, who had been Clinton’s chief speechwriter for a year, read through the Morris draft and found much of it overwritten, flowery and full of clichés. Some of it was downright weird. But underneath the decoration were some strong fundamental ideas.
Baer began to rework some of Morris’s ideas into plausibly presidential language. As they worked together, Baer realized that this was the secret world that Clinton had been drawing on for months in other speeches. The speechwriter now knew that he had collaborated with Morris before—but without knowing it—with the president as the intermediary. They came up with a new draft.
The White House chief of staff did not fully understand what was going on. Panetta had met with Clinton and Morris, and he knew there was a secret world, someone with powerful lines into the president, but Clinton had not made it clear that Morris was the source of all these new ideas. He had only vaguely referred to someone named “Charlie,” a codeword for this secret input. Panetta also knew he didn’t like the angle “Charlie” was providing.
A former congressman and the budget director for Clinton’s first 18 months as president, Panetta had been brought in as chief of staff ten months earlier to address pervasive management problems. He was to help Clinton organize his presidency on everything from policy development and implementation to Clinton’s daily routine. Panetta had tried to have all contacts with Clinton filter through him—especially contacts with outside political consultants. This had proved impossible because no one could keep up with Clinton, who would dial around all hours of the day or night or call people to the White House for dinner or late-night meetings. Even bringing Erskine Bowles in as the deputy to organize Clinton had not solved the problem.
The brutal reality, Panetta knew, was that both good ideas and good people had to be sacrificed for political survival. He now saw himself getting caught in the meat grinder. Panetta strongly identified with Clinton’s desire to craft a program that could be sold with the moral intensity of a preacher. Clinton was looking for the Churchillian message to explain what the war was about, but his search had gone far astray in Panetta’s eyes.
Less than 24 hours before Clinton was to give his speech to the newspaper editors, Panetta was presented with the new draft. This wasn’t the preacher and it certainly wasn’t Churchill. The new course bordered on a repudiation of the Democratic Party. He expressed his opposition.
Clinton countered that warmed-over ideas or federal programs or rhetorical pronouncements about education wouldn’t hack it. The president was particularly attracted to the lines in the new draft that were the purest articulation of the Morris triangulation strategy: “We need a dynamic center that is not in the middle of what is left and right but is way beyond it.”
The speech draft included the line, “The old labels of liberal and conservative, spender and cutter, even Democrat and Republican, are not what matter most anymore.”
Ickes argued against the speech also.
Drafts flew around with revisions and ideas stacking up like airplanes waiting to land over an airport, circling in the air.
Gore liked the idea of a bold centrist direction. But he was concerned about some praise for Republicans that emerged in one early draft. He called the speechwriters.
“Did you get that shit out?” the vice president inquired.
They had.
On the day of the speech, Clinton was able to stitch it all together as he constantly revised and shifted parts, preventing a midair collision.
In Dallas that Friday, April 7, at the meeting of the nation’s newspaper editors, Clinton delivered his blueprint. The speech was an hour long, and at its core was Morris’s “dynamic center.” Clinton even noted that the only two of the ten items in the Republican Contract that also had passed the Senate and been signed into law by him “were both about political reform, and they were also both part of my 1992 commitments to the American people.” One held Congress to the same laws that are imposed on everyone else, and the second limited Congress from imposing requirements on states and local governments without providing the funding, what were often called “unfunded mandates.”
The overall concept of the speech had been Morris’s but the expansiveness was pure Clinton. His delivery was smooth but typical of Clinton as he threw in a vast laundry list of issues, including promised vetoes on matters he considered extreme such as lifting the ban on assault weapons. The additions muddied Clinton’s central message: that he was trying to chart a new direction designed to preempt the Republicans on their issues. The speech was widely interpreted as a classic Clinton smorgasbord of New Democrat, Old Democrat, compromise and veto threats. House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt had called the Republican Contract “unconscionable, reckless and fundamentally unfair.” Clinton’s speech had none of the accusatory rhetoric used by other Democrats.
Gore realized that the speech represented a pivotal moment for Clinton. That day the vice president had lunch with Chris Dodd, the new chairman of the Democratic Party. Dodd had been under considerable pressure from the Panetta-Ickes camp to weigh in against the speech before it was given, which he had declined to do. At lunch, Gore explained why he liked the speech and the approach. It was a bold step necessary for Clinton to regain the initiative. The speech was a declaration of centrism. Clinton was saying that Gingrich and his band of revolutionaries could go their merry way, but he would stop them when they were headed in the wrong direction, and embrace them when he agreed.
Afterwards, Dodd called Clinton to praise the speech.
The president, the vice president and the party chairman—all Democrats—agreed that the old political categories were, as Clinton had said in his speech, “defunct,” and party was no longer what mattered most.
Gingrich gave his nationally televised speech that night, laying out a simple core theme. The federal budget had to be balanced in seven years. This was Gingrich’s great moment, the completion of the first 100 days, though he had had to share top billing with the president.
The next day Clinton was elated. Good headlines. It had worked, he declared. “Why in the hell were we giving a speech on education?” he said to his senior staff. How could they have thought an education speech was the appropriate match-up with Gingrich’s 100 days agenda? “I’ve got to get into this debate,” he said, and the speech had begun to lay out a course.
Panetta was losing control of the White House operation, and he went into a depression. He was supposed to coordinate the ideas and formulate a political and communications strategy, and Clinton instead had vested authority elsewhere. His initial reaction was to resist, and he turned out his staff dogs and underlings to criticize Morris.
“I’m not going to take this shit,” Panetta told one of his assistants. “I’m an adult human being and I’ve been around a long time, and I’m not going to take this squirt running around, gumming up the works.”
How can I do my job? Panetta asked. He realized he had a choice. He could quit. He could continue to snipe and resist. Or he could find a way to accommodate and include Morris.
Panetta had several very blunt conversations with the president.
“I’ve got to have a strategist!” Clinton said. “I’ve got to have someone who’s thinking where we need to be in November.” And that strategist needed to be able to work backwards from November 1996 and provide the steps to get to a winning position.
As Hillary often reminded him, the whole apparatus of the White House was structured to deal with each individual day or week. There was little long-term planning. Morris would serve that role.
“You have to filter out half of what Dick says,” Clinton told Panetta. “He can get wacky.” The president said he could separate the good Morris ideas from the bad Morris ideas. “He’s going to think strategically. He thinks like I do in terms of where we need to be and what we need to do.”
Panetta could see that the reelection campaign was beginning to inhabit the body of the president more and more.
“I want him in,” Clinton said.
“Well, if he’s in,” Panetta insisted, “he’s got to be part of the process that I run.” He proposed that Morris be included formally in the White House process so the senior staff could hear him directly, deal with him, so they could get his ideas, vet them in advance, incorporate them. That way new ideas and speech drafts would not come racing down the pipeline with only 12 minutes to go. More important, Panetta argued, George Bush had lost the presidency to Clinton in 1992 in part because of the dysfunctional, debilitating relationship between the Bush White House and the Bush campaign. The two were never coordinated properly. Panetta said he did not want to oversee a similar big fat trainwreck in 1996.
Clinton agreed and put out the word that he wanted everyone to work together and to work with Morris. Morris would come to Washington for three or four days a week and be integrated into the White House operations.
George Stephanopoulos was going through hell with the elevation of Morris. Stephanopoulos, a former aide from the Democratic Congress, had been like a younger brother to Clinton and was often thought to be the chief presidential soulmate. But Democratic orthodoxy was now less useful to Clinton, casting Stephanopoulos into a state of semi-exile. Stephanopoulos felt he was on a journey through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. He was being pushed more and more to the fringes of important policy decisions and meetings. Still, in the White House he often had a chance to weigh in late on speeches and tactics and was forced to engage that spring in a rearguard action. Clinton obviously trusted Morris’s instincts on how to position himself more to the Republican center. Previously, instincts had been part of the Stephanopoulos portfolio.
Stephanopoulos was surprised by the April 7 speech. Up until that point Clinton had been against drawing those lines against the Democrats. Obviously Morris had immense influence with Clinton. But to have the speech virtually just appear on the day it was given? The White House and administration couldn’t live like that. Something like that couldn’t just be dropped on the whole executive branch as if from the sky without planning, without a strategy for explaining it or communicating Clinton’s intent.
But as Stephanopoulos examined the speech, the reaction and the press coverage, he concluded there was no way to know what the speech meant on an operational level. There was enough on both sides. Was Clinton going to stop the Republicans? Or was he going to be for them? It was ambiguous enough, he figured, that both sides—the new Morris faction and the old Panetta-Ickes-Stephanopoulos faction—would live to fight another day.
Clinton, aware of the fissure, told other senior staff members that he wanted them to continue to deal with Morris, and if there were any questions about what Morris was proposing or what Morris wanted done, they should come directly to him, the president. Of course, as a practical matter that was neither likely nor possible. Who was in charge? What were the lines of authority?
The Clinton White House teetered on the edge of management chaos.
Morris didn’t let up. He was seeking more forums for Clinton. He proposed that the president speak at a service to be held in Warm Springs, Georgia, on the 50th anniversary of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death there. FDR was a huge national symbol and his Little White House at Warm Springs was almost sacred ground.
“Fuck it,” Panetta said. He didn’t think it was a good idea.
Morris appealed to Clinton, who agreed to speak.
On April 12, Clinton addressed the commemorative service. He enlisted the architect of the modern welfare and social services state in his own cause.
“My fellow Americans,” Clinton said, “there is a great debate going on today about the role of Government, and well there ought to be. F.D.R. would have loved this debate,” Clinton declared.
“He wouldn’t be here defending everything he did 50 years ago,” Clinton insisted. “He wouldn’t be here denying the existence of the information age. Should we reexamine the role of Government? Of course, we should. Do we need big, centralized bureaucracies in the computer age? Often we don’t.”
In many ways it was a preposterous speech—trying to speculate on Roosevelt’s attitude toward current government, the information age and the computer. Mercifully, it received little attention. To Panetta, it proved that it would be difficult to separate good Morris ideas from bad Morris ideas, and that his influence could careen dangerously out of control.
Stephanopoulos watched Morris dip into critical issue after critical issue as both conceiver and author, dashing off radio addresses and speeches with incredible speed. Morris once wrote and proposed a full Saturday radio address for Clinton in about 12 to 15 minutes. Stephanopoulos concluded that Morris had no filter between the back of his brain and what came out of his typewriter. The ideas or speeches would often be brilliant, or they would be totally crazy. For instance, on race, Morris argued that Democrats were hurt because they were perceived as too close to minorities—an embodiment of mushy-headed liberal thinking. But Stephanopoulos felt that Morris didn’t understand Democratic voters very well and the importance of the race issue to them and to Clinton. Stephanopoulos was heading a review of affirmative action programs for Clinton, and he could see that Morris was working to undermine both the programs and him. Others in the White House told Stephanopoulos that Morris was constantly attacking him behind his back. But Morris had the cards, the confidence of Clinton. Stephanopoulos wasn’t sure what to do from his weak position.
Erskine Bowles knew. He argued that it was not unusual for a business to bring in a consultant or facilitator to cause the executives to think. Often such people cause great discomfort, but it forced the chief executive officer to plan where he wanted to go. Morris was filling a void, and forcing some needed thinking and planning. The president had to listen to a wider group than the one Bowles referred to as “the little cabal at the White House.” But several times Morris had taken the president’s silence on an issue as a yes, and the wires were getting crossed.
So Clinton agreed to institute follow-up meetings in the Oval Office the day after the evening campaign meetings with Morris and the other consultants. Attending the follow-up meetings would be Clinton, Gore, Panetta, Ickes and Bowles—not Morris. That way they could discuss what the previous evening’s Morris monologue had really meant and what Clinton had accepted and what he had rejected.
Bowles wanted the rest of them to amplify what Clinton had decided, not what Morris wanted Clinton to have decided. As the implementer, Bowles made sure they went over all the issues, then he made sure they all understood the president’s decision, and then it would be over, no more debate.
On April 14, Clinton formally took the first steps to set up his reelection committee. He filed with the Federal Election Commission so they could legally raise money. Terry McAuliffe set up a campaign office in downtown Washington that was almost exclusively a fund-raising operation. The first mailing, intended for 1 million of the most loyal Democrats, was written, reviewed by Clinton and sent to the printer.
“Terry,” Clinton said in a phone call, “I’m rethinking this letter. There’s a sentence I cannot live with.” He wanted a line about his efforts to grow the middle class and shrink the underclass.
“Yes sir, Mr. President, we’ll change it.”
McAuliffe immediately called the printer, who said the run had begun.
Stop, McAuliffe said. The change cost about $10,000.
“In a few days, I will formally announce my decision to seek reelection as President of the United States,” Clinton said in the final version of the letter. As if it was a secret, he added, “Before meeting with the press, I wanted to contact you personally to give you the news.” He invited each person to join his “National Steering Committee,” an honorary position that required no meetings or formal duties. The pitch for funds still remained soft, only mentioned in the postscript and the response card. In the letter to Democrats dated April 19 Clinton was not triangulating. He labeled the Republican agenda “radical and dangerous.”
Money from the direct-mail appeal soon began pouring in, $2 million eventually. Since most of that would be matched with federal funds, the real value was $4 million. After the $400,000 printing and mailing costs, McAuliffe calculated a net gain of about $3.6 million, an unusually high return.
At the end of April, Ickes arranged a long dinner for himself, Morris and Stephanopoulos at Kinkead’s, a fashionable late-night restaurant just three blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House.
Ickes left after about an hour and a half so Morris and Stephanopoulos could talk and get to know each other.
“I want to work together,” Morris told Stephanopoulos. “The president needs us to work together.”
Stephanopoulos said he wanted to work with Morris.
They discussed Clinton, comparing him to FDR. Clinton obviously now wanted the same kind of creative staff tension that existed in the Roosevelt administration with everyone competing and everyone a little off balance, they agreed.
But Clinton liked one big happy family, Stephanopoulos said, and had limited tolerance for family warfare given the violence and alcoholism in his own upbringing. Clinton resisted open discord. “He hates being presented with it,” Stephanopoulos said. “He hates seeing it. And it gets him agitated and very angry.”
Morris saw the point. He too was under tremendous pressure from Clinton to fit in. Morris talked and talked, outlining his theories, the triangulation, getting the Republican issues off the table, trying to figure out a way they could work together.
Stephanopoulos had rarely seen anyone with such incredible ability not to tire of explaining himself.
“I got it,” Morris finally said. “I got it, I got it! I’m the strategist, you’re the tactician.” Morris would be long term, George would be short term. Morris would be outside the White House, George inside.
Okay, Stephanopoulos said.
After five hours, the dinner was over. Stephanopoulos concluded that Morris was a cynical guy and that Morris was trying to own him.
Morris later settled on a basketball analogy. He would be the play-maker; Stephanopoulos would be under the basket.