President Bill Clinton insisted that one item on his weekly schedule remain inviolate. His private lunch with his vice president, Al Gore, could not be dropped unless there was a crisis or one of them was out of town. Though there was no doubt about who was the senior partner in the relationship, Clinton had come to rely on Gore as his indispensable chief adviser. Just as Clinton had mastered campaigning over the course of his lifetime in politics, Gore had mastered government, bureaucracy and even Washington.
At their lunches, in a small room off the Oval Office, discussion inevitably focused on the Clinton presidency. There were no two people who had more to lose if it failed, and by the spring of 1996 Clinton and Gore were heavily involved in overseeing their reelection campaign. The lunches sometimes did not start until 3 P.M. because of other business. Clinton, who had a notorious appetite, tried to eat lighter food. They began lunch with one or the other of them saying a short prayer.
Each week Gore had a formal agenda, but no subject was more sensitive or more important than the discussion of Clinton himself and his development and experiences as president. Clinton and Gore talked about it at length. Understanding the immediate past was central to figuring out a way to win in 1996.
The first two years of his presidency had been more than difficult, and Clinton often acknowledged to Gore that the administration did not have its bearings. The crown jewel of his domestic program, health care reform, had gone down to a crushing defeat at the hands of Congress and the Republicans. He had not yet gained mastery of foreign affairs, though a United States peace initiative had at least temporarily halted the slaughter and ethnic cleansing of the war in Bosnia. And an independent counsel was investigating the 1978 Whitewater land investment that Clinton and his wife Hillary had made in Arkansas.
But Clinton also thought a lot of the criticism he received was unfair. He had expected that his presidency would be defined by how he handled big issues, like Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Instead, incidents like an expensive haircut he had received on Air Force One in Los Angeles and the inaccurate reports that it had delayed air traffic received much attention, becoming a metaphor for his presidency. He had acquired a reputation for indecisiveness, but Clinton felt people were projecting their own anxieties and uncertainties onto him. He believed he was unusually decisive for a president.
Gore had some advice. Clinton always had found excess reserve within himself. He would just have to find more, Gore said. The president was everyone’s target—as were his past, his habits, his staff, his wife. There were no boundaries any more. Nothing was off limits. The world’s troubles were his, as were everyone’s personal grievances. There was only one way to succeed: Clinton would have to absorb the searing experience of the presidency itself, and then step beyond that experience and even beyond himself.
He had, Clinton said. He knew he would have to transcend himself. Bill Clinton the person generally said what was on his mind. His conversation was expansive, though his remarks often tentative, and he thought out loud. He was an experimental person, always reaching out for new ideas and people. He realized that he was going to have to shut down this side of himself, and create more distance.
Gore agreed. The hallmark of 1996 would be self-discipline. In his remarks, ideas and behavior.
Yes, Clinton said. He would have to use the office, use the presidency. He could not just be Bill Clinton. He couldn’t take what was happening that personally, even though he had taken his whole life personally. He had to think of himself as a man of history, not a man experiencing history. It was hard.
On big decisions Clinton frequently told Gore, “I’m risking my presidency on this.” He used the line so often it became a kind of cliché between the two. Risk was the nature of the job, more than either had appreciated. Often, their discussion would turn to the larger consequences of Clinton’s decisions, and one or the other of them would note, well, there goes the presidency again.
“Time to throw the long ball,” Clinton said once. It was a football metaphor for the long, strategically risky pass when you needed to score, and they returned to it time and time again in their discussions. Often it seemed they had several balls in the air at once hurtling through to the end zone.
Gore developed a different but extended metaphor to frame the 1996 race against Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, who was going to be the Republican nominee for president. Clinton would be 50 at election time, Dole would be 73. Clinton and Gore would probably never say it out loud, but it would be the driving image and contrast they would try to create. It was not just about the age or generational difference, but about something more fundamental.
In Gore’s metaphor, there was a patriarch who had built an institution the way he wanted it. Satisfied, the patriarch finally had decided his generation should turn leadership over to the son. This son was full of energy, but he made mistakes, some large, some small. But the son had given it his whole heart and developed a seriousness of purpose. Then the patriarch, because of the mistakes the son had made, says, I’m not satisfied and I want to take it back.
Dole’s World War II generation had already produced six presidents while most generations had only three, and Dole, the old survivor, was the patriarch. The point, Gore said, was the argument they would have to make in the campaign: “It’s not fair to take back the reins.”
Clinton liked Dole and found him a worthy advocate, but he harbored two resentments against him. First, he felt that Dole had waited only about three hours and 15 minutes into Clinton’s presidency before telling him that the Republicans wouldn’t provide any votes for Clinton’s initial 1993 economic plan. That plan included substantial tax increases, mostly on the wealthy, and Dole had said forthrightly that if it didn’t work, they could then blame Clinton.
“I didn’t run for president to be a bare-fanged partisan,” Clinton said. But the Republican refusal had helped make Clinton into one, and his economic plan did not get a single Republican vote in either the House or Senate. Though Dole’s candor helped him realize that the 1996 presidential campaign began the day he became president, Clinton still felt Dole should have been more flexible and at least tried to work for a bipartisan compromise of some sort.
Clinton’s second resentment was very personal. In early 1994, Clinton’s mother Virginia Kelley died, and less than eight hours after her death Dole had gone on three network morning television shows. He had been very sympathetic and praised her as a strong, dynamic woman. At first when asked about the Whitewater scandal, Dole said, “I even hate to discuss these things today.” But then he did. He lashed out at the White House, saying the behavior was “unbelievable” and “mind-boggling,” and “big, big news,” adding, “It cries out more than ever now for an independent counsel.”
Dole’s criticism continued for two days, even as Clinton was burying his mother. Gore realized that Clinton was in inconsolable grief. Clinton’s father had died before his birth, and now his mother was gone. Recognizing the deep emotional dimensions for Clinton, Gore had finally gone on television to try to plead for some civility. “Now doesn’t it bother you a little bit to have the president attending the funeral service of his mother and to have members of the political opposition, as the service is going on, on the airwaves making these attacks?” Gore asked.
Dole issued a statement saying he was “saddened” that Gore had “stooped” to invoke the death of Clinton’s mother to try to stifle criticism. Damage control wouldn’t obscure the facts, Dole said.
Clinton was thunderstruck by Dole’s behavior. For that man to attack me on the day of my mother’s death and the day of her funeral, Clinton said, is just unforgivable.