Hillary was thinking about attending a United Nations world conference on women in China during early September. She wanted to condemn the abuses of human rights and of women, but pressure was mounting on her to stay out of delicate U.S. relations with China.
Jean Houston wrote Hillary a strong letter about her obligation and burden, on behalf of all women, to go and speak out. Houston enclosed letters from two friends also urging the First Lady to undertake the mission for all women.
Hillary said she cried when she read the letters. She told Houston that the appeals had made a difference and she had decided to go. Her speech at the conference in Beijing was front-page news.
Houston was struck by how emotional a woman Hillary was, crying easily, laughing easily, not repressed, expressing herself fully in private. She was a very rich emotional palette. She had not closed down, though in public she was still reserved and careful.
Hillary was being honed in the crucible, Houston believed. It was almost like a Greek tragedy. Houston had found Hillary to be as noble as anyone she had ever met, so much like Eleanor Roosevelt. But Hillary had been a golden girl in school, always the good and the best and the brightest, so the adversity of recent years had been more of a shock for her. Eleanor had endured years of suffering and rejection as a child and young adult, which prepared her for the trials she faced as First Lady.
Houston told Hillary that she was going through as much psychological abuse as anyone Houston had ever seen.
Hillary nodded.
She was creating a new type almost, the woman who could withstand it all.
Hillary nodded, clearly listening, not saying much.
They discussed the woundings from the news media. Houston recalled that early in the administration, Hillary had spoken of heroes and villains, and the need to have enemies who could symbolically be singled out to embody the opposition. That’s the old male hero’s journey, Houston said, and the female journey had to be different, better. “Do we have to have villains?” Houston asked.
Hillary implied that Houston did not understand at all. In politics, debate was always framed that way.
Houston found Hillary enormously warm and empathic, but realized that Hillary was not a soft woman. Her lawyer’s training and her dislike for the news media had made her edgy, full of angles. Houston proposed a series of exercises to help Hillary think about the press differently, to think of them as human beings and respond heart to heart with them, to build up a field of empathy and humanity. She felt that Hillary broadcast her hostility through all kinds of subtle cues. She wanted Hillary out of the warrior mode.
Hillary said she would get savaged anyway. Some of the press had made an industry of demonizing her. She made it clear that she hated being muzzled, being forced to respond to the media projections and definitions of her. But if they won a second term she would have greater freedom to do and be the things she wanted.
Houston could anticipate Mozart getting his hands back again, Hillary her voice. She called Hillary a “world server,” someone who would help all humanity.
Houston had encouraged Hillary to write a book about children, but the first draft had not satisfied Hillary. So in October and November, Houston virtually moved into the White House residence for several days at a time to help. One period was about five days, with an interlude, and then approximately another five days. During this period Houston got to see how intense, stressful and overwhelming life in the White House had become. Bateson came to help, too, at the end. They were spirit raisers, encouragers, idea people. Houston and Bateson did variations of chapters, which Hillary then took and rewrote. It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach Us was published in early 1996 and became a number-one New York Times bestseller.
On and off during the year, Newt Gingrich had openly flirted with the possibility that he might run for the Republican presidential nomination. His public and private comments about those running, especially Dole, were critical, if not savage. He said no one running had come up with a strong message for the presidential campaign. He candidly acknowledged that keeping his options open was a good marketing strategy, generating more news coverage for his statements, the Contract agenda, and his best-selling book, To Renew America.
On September 7, Fred Steeper, Gingrich’s pollster, sent the Speaker a private seven-page memo entitled “Your Public Perceptions.” The news was bad.
Overall, 31 percent of the people polled had favorable impressions of Gingrich. But 52 percent had unfavorable impressions, and many of those used “a variety of abusive terms to describe your personal style—‘coarse,’ ‘arrogant,’ ‘abrasive,’ ‘a loud mouth,’” Steeper said.
“Your expressed interest in the presidency is also being interpreted as inappropriate self-promotion,” Steeper added. “The book tour and the presidential possibility only act to aggravate this ‘out for himself’ perception.
“I’m not sure of your reasons for not discouraging the presidential stories, but my conclusion is that they are hurting your image, rather than enhancing it. You should scuttle the stories, sooner rather than later.”
Steeper said that Gingrich had an “excessive personality syndrome” that presented “a huge challenge.” He added, “I had been thinking, without success, on how to ‘fix your personality.’”
The memo did not persuade Gingrich to close off the option of running, and he continued to openly criticize the Republican contenders. If he won the seven-year balanced budget and the Contract was largely passed and signed into law, he could possibly run on a record of accomplishment. Gingrich and his spokesman, Tony Blankley, insisted that Clinton and the White House staff were seriously misreading Gingrich on the budget if they thought he would compromise. Gingrich was a revolutionary. Revolutionaries, intent on overthrowing the old order, didn’t compromise. Period. Better to fail than to cave in, except Gingrich expected a big victory on the budget.
McAuliffe had spent the summer putting together a fund-raising extravaganza for September, with a series of presidential gala dinners intended to raise about $1 million each. In mid-September, he told Clinton that by the end of the month they were going to have a second quarter total that would exceed the first quarter, unprecedented. The first three months of fund-raising were always the best because the easy money from the devoted followers came in then. But with direct-mail appeals, solicitations by the steering committee and the gala dinners, they would bring in $10 million for the second quarter.
“Mr. President,” McAuliffe said, “we will be able to finish all the fund-raising this year.” They would reach the maximum of close to $30 million by then and with the federal matching funds would have about $45 million.
Gore was delighted. “Mr. President,” he said, “you know we are now in the presence of the greatest fund-raiser in the history of the universe.”
For most of the year, Steve Forbes, the 47-year-old head of the publishing empire that bears his name, had been brooding about Jack Kemp’s refusal to run for president.
Kemp was the natural messenger for all the economic ideas that Forbes was certain could lift the country’s economy and spirits. The core idea: that low tax rates would provide incentives for individuals and businesses to work harder, invest and stimulate economic growth, creating more jobs.
“You can’t walk away from this,” Forbes had told Kemp, arguing that history virtually required him to run. Kemp’s personality and his message of optimism would be perfect for 1996. Was he going to let Bob Dole take over the party? How could he even think of that? Dole was the embodiment of the Eisenhower-Nixon approach. To Dole it was as if Reagan, who had lowered the top income tax rate from 70 to 28 percent, had never happened.
Kemp continued to say no.
Forbes was flabbergasted. He was an awkward-looking man with a puckish smile, a sprinkling of gray hair, and a cratered, uneven complexion. He often rocked his head and shoulders back and forth gleefully when he laughed. But underneath the jolly demeanor Forbes held serious and strongly felt ideas about the economy. He had helped Christine Todd Whitman devise a tax cut platform in her successful run for the New Jersey governorship in 1993, demonstrating that not only could Democrats be beaten, but so too could the economic austerity crowd, made up of the old-line, traditionalist Republicans. When Clinton’s health care plan had been devastated in 1994, Forbes believed the big-government, high-spending old order had just had their last spree.
The Republican takeover of Congress in late 1994 showed even deeper disaffection with the old order, Forbes thought. Republicans as well as Democrats had failed to understand the meaning of the end of the Cold War. In the Cold War, government had shaped everything, even domestic policy. There had been federal aid to everything. Government spending had saved the nation, winning wars, putting a man on the moon, even going to the forefront of the civil rights movement. But without the external enemy everything had changed, Forbes believed. The new economy and the information age, with the personal computer and the microchip, were the opposite of centralization.
The government should shrink dramatically as the economy shifted to global markets. America had to prepare for a century of peace. Some presidential candidate had to get on top of this, insist that the tax code protected the old political order and centralized, outdated business interests. The tax system needed to be dismantled and pulled out by its roots. Dole didn’t and couldn’t possibly understand this, Forbes believed. At best, Dole could only make a tactical accommodation to such ideas.
Kemp agreed with much of Forbes’s analysis, but made it crystal clear he wasn’t the man.
Forbes went to see Phil Gramm, the Texas senator and former economics professor who had been officially running since February. Maybe he was the hope. Forbes wanted a radical overhaul of the tax code, including some form of a flat tax rate of about 17 percent for everyone. It was the kind of dramatic cut that would encourage investment and trigger economic growth. Gramm’s Texas colleague, Dick Armey, the House majority leader and number two to Speaker Gingrich, was pushing a similar flat tax.
“Dick Armey was an undergraduate when I was a full professor!” Gramm said dismissively. Gramm implied that professors like him had the answers, and thundered on about how he was going to cut the government.
Forbes said that was too static a view. In business, cutting costs alone was never enough. Investment, new opportunities, radical overhaul were necessary.
No, no, no, Gramm said. Eliminating the federal budget deficit was everything. He was staking everything on it.
Well, it wasn’t everything, Forbes felt, and he left disenchanted. Gramm clearly had more intellectual candlepower than any of the other candidates, but he seemed to Forbes to think he was so smart that he couldn’t learn very much from others. Gramm’s supporters continued to pursue Forbes, insisting that Gramm wanted to expand his group and needed powerful businessmen like Forbes on the team. “Phil is ready to listen,” one Gramm supporter told Forbes. Forbes went to another meeting with Gramm. After five minutes of preliminaries, Gramm pounded his desk and said, “Now, Steve, let me tell you why you’ve got to support me.” For the next half hour Gramm lectured.
Forbes walked out convinced more than ever that Gramm was not the guy. And Forbes began to wonder, Why spend your time trying to educate? He felt he was locked in the mind-set of Henry Higgins trying to educate Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, trying to create something that did not exist. All they’re going to do is disappoint you, he thought, reviewing the possible field of candidates.
Forbes began to think about running himself, and confided in Bill Dal Col, the president of the Washington think tank Empower America of which Forbes was chairman.
“Are you serious?” Dal Col asked.
“Yeah.”
“I think you’re crazy,” Dal Col said.
Forbes said he wanted to consider it.
“Do you know what you’re going to get into?” Dal Col asked. “From my limited experience, I can tell you. It’s going to be a cement mixer.” Dal Col, 38, was nine years younger than Forbes. A willowy, pale man with a long face and a scrupulously attentive and efficient manner, Dal Col had run the 1984 Reagan-Bush reelection campaign in New York State, held Suffolk County board seats, worked on the 1988 Bush campaign in Washington and then had worked for Kemp. Forbes had worked closely with Dal Col for years.
“Anything you, your father, your brothers, your daughters, your cousins, your aunts or uncles have ever done is going to be on the front page,” Dal Col explained.
“What’s it going to cost?” Forbes asked.
“My guess is $20 to $25 million,” Dal Col estimated.
Jude Wanniski, a former Wall Street Journal editorial writer and serious-minded gadfly economist who was one of the strongest advocates of supply-side tax cuts, had earlier sent Forbes a memo encouraging him to run. He said that the campaign law would permit Forbes to spend his own fortune on his campaign, but Wanniski recommended against it. “This can’t be seen as a money grab by a Forbes rich kid on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” Wanniski, a longtime Forbes friend, said. “Play within the rules.”
Forbes called Jude and said he was very flattered by the memo, though he disagreed with the part about spending his own money. As George Washington said, if you were blessed with treasure as well as intellect and energy, you should share all three with your countrymen.
Forbes discussed the prospect with Sabina, his wife. A stocky, white-haired woman with a toothy smile, Sabina had a welcoming, maternal presence. They had been married for 24 years and had five daughters, ages 8 to 22.
What would it mean for the kids? Sabina asked in her deep, slow voice. What would it do to the family? Did he truly understand the magnitude of what he was considering? Up until now they had lived a small-town rural life in New Jersey—albeit privileged and private. Steve had been all business, shunning the high-profile, jet-set extravagance of his father, Malcolm Senior. This would put him and them square in the limelight that they had avoided.
Forbes said he wanted to weigh it carefully, but he just might want to go ahead. Sabina said she would support it, but he had to talk to the girls.
The oldest girls thought it was crazy. They never had envisioned their father as a candidate, and just didn’t believe he would do it in the end.
Sabina had some heavy questions for him. Did he realize that he would be putting their daughters up on the public stage? And they could get hurt, couldn’t they? If he won the nomination or the presidency, they would forever be public personalities. Is that what they wanted for their daughters? If he lost, what would life after the campaign be for them? Could they withstand it?
Forbes talked with his daughters some more. They were well aware of the publicity that had surrounded their grandfather, Malcolm Forbes, Sr., and his glamorous party-giving lifestyle and homosexual relationships during his latter years. They had read the stories and said they had no illusions that if their father ran, it would be just fun and games.
Forbes’s father had run for New Jersey governor twice and lost. At the time Steve Forbes was a young boy, and he could vividly remember his father’s deep disappointment. Later his father told him he had expected to go all the way in politics and become president. What struck the younger Forbes was how his father had put politics behind him, licked his wounds and gone on with his life in business. His father just buried it all, never hung around, never went back, never said, gee, should I run again? In the mid-1960s before Steve Forbes went to college at Princeton, he remembered his father saying, “I don’t know how I ever did that. I could never do that again.” He just closed out the whole chapter of his life and went on to the next thing. It was the way to do it, Forbes thought.
Forbes had a series of breakfast meetings with Wanniski, his old mentor and biggest promoter.
In urging Forbes to run, Wanniski argued that he would have to find a ground between boldness and the middle of the ballpark, tune his message so it was dramatic but plausible.
“You’re going to make a lot of mistakes,” Wanniski advised one day over lunch. “As long as you keep them in the ballpark, you’ll be fine.”
“Where’s the ballpark?” Forbes asked.
“Well,” Wanniski said, “when you get close to the walls, they’ll scream.”
Later in May, Forbes and Dal Col had met in the Forbes magazine boardroom and Forbes asked what it might mean to the family business.
“Shit,” Dal Col said, “look around this boardroom. There’s three generations standing on your shoulders. You screw this up, it gets Forbes magazine screwed up.”
“Do you know what they’re going to do to you?” Dal Col asked. “You could become the Pierre DuPont IV.” DuPont, the former Delaware governor and a wealthy descendant of the chemical-manufacturing family, had run for president in 1988 and gone nowhere. Finishing fourth in the New Hampshire primary, 28 points behind George Bush, DuPont’s campaign was over less than a week later. He was barely a mention in the 1988 campaign chronicles.
Forbes also had long talks with his younger brother Tim to review the pros and cons of running.
“How would I take it if I lost?” Forbes asked.
“If you fail,” his brother said, “everyone would say rich boy tried to go in the big league and got his head handed to him.” When would you get your reputation back?
Forbes wasn’t sure. “How long would it take me to bounce back?” he asked.
“We’re all salespeople in one respect or another,” his father had told him at the youngest age. The old man had repeated it many times, and the old man had practiced it. “You’re always selling.” In some aspects, Steve Forbes’s entire life from earliest childhood to the chairmanship of Forbes had been the successful, highbrow version of Death of a Salesman, in which Willy Loman’s friend tells him, “The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell.”
Forbes felt that political campaigning would just be another version of selling. He realized he couldn’t outsell Clinton on personality. He had met Clinton briefly three times—twice at White House dinners. Unlike other presidents Forbes had seen at similar state dinners, Clinton had walked around after the meal casually talking to people. Forbes saw the skill, the remarkable charisma, the empathy, the warm, meaningful connection with people. But Forbes was convinced that Clinton hadn’t defined the era. That was a president’s big mission, and Clinton didn’t realize it, hadn’t defined a direction or set a clear course.
Still Forbes wasn’t sure if he was going to run. He wanted to test himself.
On July 8, Forbes appeared on the CNN Saturday afternoon television interview show moderated by Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, the conservative newspaper columnists, to test-drive himself and his possible message should he run for president.
Forbes emphasized the void. “I don’t know what Bob Dole would do as president. Do any of you?
“Where does he want to take the country? Where does he feel the country is right now? Where does he think it’ll go? And unfortunately the whole crop of candidates—no point in singling out Bob Dole—give the impression that they do the political equivalent of painting by numbers. That isn’t art. It isn’t leadership.”
Forbes compared himself to Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine, who had died the previous month. Salk’s approach was not accepted by the medical establishment, Forbes noted, but it worked. “Millions of kids would have had polio if it had not been for somebody who was outside the mainstream,” Forbes said. His vaccine was the overhaul of the tax code.
“Absolutely an atrocity,” Forbes said of the tax system, “anti-growth, anti-honesty, anti-American—scrap it, start all over again.” He wanted a flat tax, he said.
At the end of the show after Forbes had left, Evans and Novak discussed the performance on the air. “I give him high marks,” Evans said. Novak said that Forbes could become the candidate of those who were saying, “Gee, are we going to give Bob Dole the nomination without any serious challenge?”
In August, Forbes met Dal Col for a two-and-a-half-hour discussion.
What about the money? Dal Col asked.
“We’ll take care of that,” Forbes said.
“I don’t buy the bullshit that you’re going to raise any money,” Dal Col said frankly. Without a political base or office, there was no fund-raising apparatus. Everyone would know the personal fortune was available. “They all say, you’re going to raise this, you’re going to raise that. What I think you’re going to find is that everybody who says they’ll write a check for you, when you go ask for it, they’ll find a reason not to.”
“I’m prepared for that,” Forbes said. He would commit the tens of millions that would be necessary, he promised, but he didn’t offer a final number or a ceiling, just said the necessary funds would be there.
What about your abortion position?
Forbes said that he did not like abortion, opposed late-term abortions, opposed abortion for sex selection, opposed government funding for abortions.
“I think it’s going to be a problem,” Dal Col said, noting that Forbes was not really pro-life. In fact, he sounded pro-choice, accepting of the standard first-trimester abortions.
“That’s what it is,” Forbes said.
“I ran three times on a right-to-life position,” Dal Col said, referring to his local races in Long Island, “and that’s not going to cut it. Just say those little words, ‘I’m pro-life,’ and it solves a huge problem.”
“No, I’m not going to get pigeon-holed,” Forbes said and shook his head defiantly.
They discussed Forbes’s eyeglasses. Could he wear contacts?
No, Forbes said. He was almost blind in his right eye and the corrective lens was nearly as thick as the bottom of an old Coca-Cola bottle.
Some thought Forbes had a goofy smile. What should they do?
To Forbes, who had been looking in the mirror for more than four decades, the smile wasn’t goofy. “I am what I am,” he said.
Dal Col said that if Forbes got in, and they bloodied him bad real early and he dropped out in the first three weeks or something like that, it would be awful and more than embarrassing. Once you’re in, you have to be willing to go the distance, he said.
Forbes agreed.
By the end of August, he told Dal Col, “I’m going to do it.” He hired Dal Col to be his campaign manager at $210,000 a year. As Forbes worked on an announcement speech, he realized that he was declaring a two-front war—on the Republican Party establishment and on the media establishment, which would no doubt write him off.
On Friday, September 22, Forbes went before the press to announce his candidacy. At least they showed up, a giant crowd gathered at the National Press Club.
“There is an empty feeling in this campaign so far,” he said. He laid out his flat tax plan of 17 percent. “I want to change the culture of Washington.”
Forbes felt he had pulled it off. Inside, he thought he was going to go all the way simply because he felt he was seeing things in a way the others didn’t—as a radical tax cutter, a genuine optimist, a well-funded total outsider with a sense of the future.
Forbes and Dal Col immediately began with millions of dollars in advertising in the early primary states—strong issues ads passionately advocating the flat tax and pointing up the weaknesses and inconsistencies in the other candidates, especially Dole. Forbes spent $1.5 million on television ads alone in the first month after the announcement, blanketing New Hampshire and Iowa.
Forbes said he didn’t want the ads to be personal, nothing about Dole’s age and so forth.
Dal Col agreed but wanted only one commitment from Forbes. If Dole or the other candidates started attack ads against Forbes, Dal Col wanted to go for their kneecaps and make them pay. “When they hit,” Dal Col said, “we’re going to hit back, but we’re not going to play tap for tap. If they hit, we go for a real hit.”
Forbes approved.
Don Sipple had been watching the Pete Wilson campaign falter for months. Over the summer he had gone along with Wilson on a weekend trip to New Hampshire. Afterwards Sipple wrote a three-page confidential June 26, 1995, memo to top campaign officials Craig Fuller, George Gorton, and chief of staff Bob White. “I believe we need to have a sense of urgency,” Sipple wrote. After listening to Wilson, people “don’t say ‘Wow,’” he said. They needed a message and presentation that said “Wow.” And within the campaign, he continued, “I have witnessed infighting and dissension…no one understands in whom or in what combination of people authority rests.” He forecast “a self-inflicted disaster or series of disasters.”
They came. The July and August fund-raising goal was $5 million. The Wilson campaign raised only $800,000. By September, the campaign hoped that a last-minute television advertising blitz in New Hampshire would boost Wilson into second place behind Dole in local polls, and that in turn would energize the fund-raising. It was a fantasy. The cam-paign was in debt.
On Wednesday, September 27, Wilson met with Fuller and White.
“I’ve written this out,” Fuller said. “Just handwritten. Here’s where I’m at.” The piece of paper showed a campaign debt of $1.5 million.
“We’ve got to get out,” Wilson said. He then picked up a briefing paper and began to prepare for his next event, a group of bankers in Orange County. Even though Wilson knew his campaign was over, he decided to continue with a fund-raiser in San Francisco the next day, and then announce his withdrawal the following day, Friday, September 29.
“I hope I haven’t let you down,” he told a group of supporters as he announced he was leaving the race. “I blame no one but myself.”
Sipple realized that Wilson never had a good answer to the question of his pledge not to run for president. Never. He never even had a good fake answer, Sipple thought. When the pledge issue came up, Wilson’s body language spoke volumes of discomfort. He turned a slighter, lighter shade of gray and just fumbled. It was a gateway to a whole series of issues that Wilson had changed his mind on—taxes, immigration, and affirmative action—and they were going to kill him eventually.
Wilson endorsed Dole, after the Dole campaign agreed that Dole would do some fund-raisers to retire the Wilson campaign debt.
On Sunday, October 1, Reed settled in to watch Dole on the CBS morning show Face the Nation. No matter what he and the others said or did, Dole had a craving for these shows, which seemed to give order to his Sunday. But the shows with freewheeling interchange from well-informed interrogators were high risk. The questioners were always looking for news.
On the current federal budget debate, Dole was asked about the target of $245 billion in tax cuts over the next seven years—a figure that seemed to have been agreed upon by both House and Senate Republicans. But even some of the most conservative senators had privately indicated to Dole that they were willing to compromise more and lower the amount of the overall tax cut. So Dole said, “Will it be $245 billion? I’m uncertain at this point.”
“Shit,” Reed exploded, “there goes my afternoon!”
For House Speaker Newt Gingrich, this was betrayal. The next night, Gingrich started calling some of the Republican governors—Steve Merrill of New Hampshire, John Engler of Michigan, and William Weld of Massachusetts. Did you see what Dole did? Can you believe it? We can’t trust this guy, he declared. There he goes again. Tax cuts were sacred stuff. Gingrich said that as a result he was thinking even more seriously about running for president himself.
Merrill reported in to Reed that Newt was getting happy fingers dialing up the governors at night. Dole called a press conference, rejoining Gingrich. “As far as I’m concerned, $245 billion is the figure,” Dole declared. Gingrich’s chief adviser Joe Gaylord was out of the country and Reed believed the absence meant Gingrich had no one to talk to at 11 P.M. When Gaylord returned, they put things back on track. Soon Dole and Gingrich were meeting every morning so they would be in sync and speak with one voice. Everything—the Republican legislative agenda, the party’s reputation and Dole’s presidential candidacy—rested on some kind of coordination.
But the news of Gingrich’s calls to the governors soon leaked, triggering new reports that Gingrich was thinking about running.
The controversy over returning the $1,000 contribution from the Log Cabin Republican gay organization continued to simmer. Earlier, one of Dole’s supporters in the House, Representative Steve Gunderson, a 44-year-old Wisconsin Republican who is openly gay, had written Dole a stinging, anguished personal letter criticizing the decision to return the $1,000. “Are you rejecting support of anyone who happens to be gay? If this is so, do you intend to now reject my support and request those on your staff who happen to be gay to resign?” Gunderson asked.
“The Bob Dole I know would never sacrifice his personal integrity for political purposes. Please do not allow your historical commitment and integrity to be compromised by the politics of the moment.” Gunderson asked for personal assurances, and released the letter publicly.
Dole called Gunderson at home that night after the letter was released to say that he regretted the decision to return the money, it was a “mistake,” and he wished it had been handled differently. He assured Gunderson that gays were welcome in his campaign, and that he had not lessened his resolve to fight discrimination.
Scott Reed spoke with Gunderson, who was planning to go public with what Dole had told him. He urged Gunderson at least not to say publicly that Dole had labeled returning the money a “mistake.” Gunderson agreed and told reporters just that he had received a reassuring call from Dole. The story of Dole’s call appeared in the Kansas City Star and on the Fox television news in Washington, but it had not been picked up by many other news outlets.
Publicly, Dole continued to defend the return of the money. “What I didn’t want was the perception that we were buying into some special rights for any group, whether it is…gays or anyone else.”
Personally, Dole was still fretting. Were they going to have a litmus test for every contribution? Would they have to pass each contribution through radar saying, “Take, kill, take, kill”? he asked. Finally it occurred to Dole that he should adopt the policy Ronald Reagan had used in his campaigns, essentially, “You buy into my agenda, I don’t buy into your agenda.” That made a lot of sense to Dole, but he remained silent.
The inconsistency was left on the record for weeks until Tuesday, October 17, when Dole was interviewed by some Ohio reporters in his office. He said that his campaign aides had made a mistake and should not have returned the $1,000. “I think if they’d have consulted me, we wouldn’t have done that, wouldn’t have returned it.” He also undercut his own rationale for returning money and the one repeatedly given out by his press secretary. “My view is because you accept money doesn’t mean you agree with their agenda.”
Reed learned about Dole’s comments only after the story hit the news wires in Ohio. Furious, he and Warfield went into the bunker. They refused to release a transcript of Dole’s remarks to other reporters and then issued a bland written statement: “The campaign returned this contribution to protect Senator Dole from distortions of his record.” They declined to answer other questions or return phone calls from reporters.
Dole’s direct criticism of his staff gave the story an added dimension, and the Log Cabin Republicans bombarded reporters with calls to note Dole’s latest, newest inconsistent position. The story made the television news and the front pages of the newspapers, many with headlines about Dole saying his staff was wrong. Political reporters knew that Dole turning on his staff had been an early omen of the 1988 Dole campaign meltdown. Television, radio and the newspapers were filled with the story of Dole reversing himself. Gay rights groups and social conservatives voiced unusual agreement, both criticizing Dole.
Dole called Reed at the campaign three times the next day. Reed didn’t take the call each time, claiming that he was too busy to speak to the candidate. Reed’s anger was mounting. Friends and others in the campaign told him it was terrible what Dole had done to him, effectively rebuking him in public. But Reed wanted time to think. Getting angry and defensive wasn’t the right reaction, he concluded. Given Dole’s record and habits, Reed was no doubt going to be embarrassed many more times before it was over. He thought long and hard. What was the right reaction? The most effective for the campaign? For Dole? For himself? Reed had to get this one right.
The next morning, Thursday, Dole called and Reed took the call.
“How’re we doing?” Dole inquired, using one of his trademark lines.
“We’re not doing well, Senator,” Reed replied. “This was a terrible, terrible mistake that you made yesterday that’s hurting you. It’s not hurting me. I’m a big boy. I don’t really care what anybody thinks about me, but it’s a blemish on your character the way you handled it, not only blaming the staff but by reversing something that you had very wisely gone out and defended for two months.”
“Well,” Dole replied, “I’ve been telling you I wasn’t happy with it. I was sending signals about it.”
“Senator,” Reed responded, still boiling, “if you’ve got a problem you’ve got to tell me, you’ve got to bang on the desk, you’ve got to call me, but don’t send signals through the press that you’ve got a problem because you really don’t. If I made a mistake, and I’ve made many mistakes, it was I should have told you beforehand, but I thought since you agreed with me, it was okay. I can understand a little grumbling but you’ve got to have that relationship with me, you’ve got to trust me and tell me if something’s fucked up, it’s fucked up. It’s also sending a signal that you have no confidence in me and your whole campaign team. And that’s bad—not for me—but we go back to the old Dole.”
“Well,” Dole said, “that’s not true. I have total confidence in you and everything you guys are doing.”
“That may be fine,” Reed said, “but that’s not what the people think now. So we’ve got to go back to kind of square one.”
Dole was willing to take the heat from his campaign manager because he now felt better about himself. Yes, he was getting beat up, but the principle on gay rights applied elsewhere. At least he could face people and say, “I’m not going to discriminate against you, and that’s not Bob Dole’s style whether you’re disabled, black or white.”
Dole and Reed agreed they were going to have differences at times, and the disagreements had been minimal to that point. Soon Dole and Reed were talking about upcoming campaign matters, moving on.
Reed realized that few things could have been better designed to play right into the hands of Dole’s detractors and enemies. Now there would be 45 cartoons. One of the saddest parts, Reed felt, was that just the previous weekend the Log Cabin incident had finally faded out of the news.
Two months later on a long plane ride back from Iowa, I quizzed Dole at length about what had happened, how he felt about it and what he had learned from the incident.
He acknowledged that the campaign staff had made the decision, which he said forced him initially to buy into their explanation and what he called their “plot.”
“I didn’t like to buy into the plot with a straight face,” he said.
“Why,” I asked, “when they told you, did you then go along with the plot?”
“Well,” Dole said, “the old bugaboo: Bob Dole’s trying to run the campaign.” He was haunted by 1988, when he was roundly criticized for trying to be his own campaign manager. If he reversed Reed’s decision, he said, everyone would start saying there Dole goes again. “We lost the straw poll and I’m not too happy about that, then this happened, then the next thing could have happened, Bob Dole’s unhappy with the campaign, da-da-da, he’s trying to run it,” Dole said.
“I think what we learned from that mistake is that there are certain things that a candidate ought to clear,” Dole said. “This gets into Bob Dole the person. It’s not so much Bob Dole the candidate. It’s the person. Is he tolerant? Does he tolerate different views? Tolerate somebody with a different lifestyle?” He added, “This is basic, this is what people ought to know about you. Are you going to just do this because it sounds good politically?”
He also said that he knew and was concerned that everyone was waiting for him to slip up like in 1988. The media and other political figures, he said, always talked about “When Bob Dole makes that mistake.”
“Well, I haven’t made it yet, maybe I’ll make it tomorrow,” he added.
“So my view is, I’ll probably make some mistakes, but I wouldn’t have made that one.”
On October 17, the same day Dole declared to the Ohio reporters that it had been a mistake to return the $1,000, Clinton was speaking in Houston at a fund-raiser.
Referring to the 1993 economic plan of his, first year in office that included a $250 billion tax increase, mostly on the wealthy, Clinton told an audience of high-rollers, “There’s probably people in this room still mad at me about that budget because you think I raised your taxes too much. Well, it might surprise you to know that I think I raised them too much too.” He said he wanted more cuts in government spending and implied that the Congress had made him raise the taxes.
Clinton’s economic plan had passed without a single Republican vote in either the House or Senate, and Clinton had engaged in some extraordinary personal arm-twisting and dealmaking to win the Democratic votes. To get the last vote in the Senate, the president got in a shouting match with Senator Bob Kerrey, the Nebraska Democrat, and at one point grew so angry that he told Kerrey, “Fuck you.”
Upon hearing of Clinton’s reevaluation, Democrats in Congress, especially Kerrey, were furious. Kerrey wrote out a speech blasting Clinton that he planned to deliver the next morning on the Senate floor. He shared his plan with several other Democratic senators in the privacy of the Senate cloakroom.
About 6 P.M. Vice President Al Gore called Kerrey.
“I heard you’re upset,” Gore said.
Yes, Kerrey said.
“You have a right to be,” Gore said.
Kerrey said it was unbelievably outrageous that Clinton would imply the Democrats in Congress had pressured him when he and others had pressed and pressed for more spending cuts in 1993, not tax increases.
Gore said that Clinton would soon be apologizing for the comment or clarifying it. Clinton had been tired at the Houston speech. It had been late and Clinton thought he was speaking to a meeting closed to the media.
Kerrey said he was still going to speak out.
“I hope you’ll reflect on it,” Gore said very politely, “before you give it.”
Kerrey reconsidered. If he gave his prepared remarks and showed his heat, he thought his anger would be the story. He didn’t want that, so he toned down his remarks substantially while still criticizing Clinton.
Clinton publicly offered a modified and qualified retraction. “If I said anything which implies that I think that we didn’t do what we should have done given the choices we faced at the time, I shouldn’t have said that…What I meant to say is I think nobody enjoys raising taxes.” Clinton even suggested that his mother had once warned him about late-night speechgiving.
Some news accounts attributed Clinton’s initial remarks in Houston to the influence and strategy of Morris. How absurd, Clinton told several of his advisers. “Disneyland,” he said. The people in the room in Houston knew what he meant. No one liked taxes, including him.