Chapter Three

CROWN JEWEL

They called him “Eagle.” The Secret Service gives every new president a code name, and this was Clinton’s. “Elvis” had been his moniker with staff during the campaign; the presidency demanded something a bit more elegant. Eagle’s diverse lot of security agents and servants talked to one another through microphones buried in their sleeves and tiny speakers in their ears, and all shared different parts of the same mission: to secure the president and shepherd him through his day.

His handlers walked a treacherous line between solicitousness and suffocation. Borrowing a line from Harry Truman, Clinton liked to call the White House “the crown jewel of the federal penitentiary system.” When Clinton was ready to get dressed every morning, for example, one of two navy stewards assigned to the president would discreetly arrive at the family’s apartment to lay out his wardrobe. Procedures dictated that the president take the elevator, not the stairs, to the ground floor. Equipped with Clinton’s daily schedule (usually simply a rough approximation of when he might actually do something), an elevator operator had long since arrived and was standing by. When the president was ready to go, the Secret Service radios would crackle to life about an impending “movement.” From the ground floor, Clinton would head outside, under a covered walkway supported by white columns known as the White House colonnade, past the Rose Garden, and into the Oval Office. One Secret Service agent would walk several paces in front of him, and two or three more would walk by his side, joined by the valet who carried his papers—all this to cover a distance of perhaps fifty yards in his own home.

It was a rude challenge to Clinton’s long-settled habits. As a politician for all of his adult life, he was certainly accustomed to security and handlers. But he also expected a certain flexibility, to put it mildly, with procedures. During the campaign, this meant heading out for Mexican food in Texas in the middle of the night, if the mood arose. Clinton was above all a man who prized his personal space and loathed being tethered to anyone else’s schedule or expectations of how he should live. Now, as he learned on his first day in the White House, he was not even able to place a telephone call on his own. As soon as he picked up the phone, an operator came on the line to dial for him. (This long-standing arrangement, intolerable to a new president who prized his independence, was soon changed, allowing him to make his own calls when he wanted.) The White House, the destination he had fantasized so long about reaching, was indeed a kind of prison. A sense of physical and psychic confinement quickly became a dominant feature of his new life.

He fought back in different ways. Sometimes he chose passive resistance. When staff would press him on his plans so that they could prepare, he simply hedged or changed the subject. Other times he would bridle angrily at would-be handlers. On one occasion Clinton’s schedule had included a possible drop-by at a book party for his friend Strobe Talbott, the former Time magazine bureau chief whom Clinton had placed as his top Russia expert at the State Department. The president kept hedging about whether he really planned to attend. Then, suddenly, at the end of the day, he announced cheerfully, “Let’s go.” Andrew Friendly, his personal assistant, said it would be quite impossible to leave now. Clinton had given his staff no time to prepare the motorcade (and, though the party was just blocks away at a downtown hotel, walking was out of the question for security reasons). After a gusher of profanity, Clinton asked plaintively, “Why can’t I do what I want?”

The lumbering apparatus of the presidency is part of permanent Washington, staffed by people who stay years, even as presidents come and go. The cooks and ushers and phone operators and Secret Service agents view themselves as professionals, insulated from politics. Even so, during twelve years of Republican rule, a great many of these people had come to identify with Ronald Reagan and, especially, with George and Barbara Bush. The permanent staff did not know quite what to make of this modern new couple and the brash young team who accompanied them. Small matters stirred resentments. The ushers who stayed on call for the first family and their visitors in the White House residence had grown accustomed under the Reagans and Bushes to regular hours; the new crowd liked to stay up late. Before, someone had taken care to send word to the ushers when the family was down for the night. Clinton often neglected to do this, leaving people stewing until late into the evening, uncertain if they were free to leave. Clinton did not like deciding the night before whether he would feel like jogging the next morning, so the Secret Service would deploy two teams in the morning, one dressed in business attire, the other ready for exercise. Once, on the road in Chicago, Clinton left his hotel for a jog so quickly that agents were forced to run along in suits and ties. When he was in town, Clinton’s morning jaunts through downtown Washington were a security and logistical nightmare; in due course they were deemed impractical, and Clinton agreed that he would henceforth motorcade to nearby Fort McNair to run. But he never did stop complaining about the lunacy of getting into a car to go jogging.

Within weeks, these petty irritations would escalate into something more serious. The Clintons were suspicious, with some reason, about the loyalty of the strangers hovering over their lives. One of the ushers was known to have sported a “Re-elect Bush” bumper sticker on his car. The Clintons, meanwhile, thought it was absurd that a Secret Service agent needed to be stationed immediately outside the second-floor entrance to their living quarters, within earshot of anything louder than normal conversation. Hillary Clinton soon complained to her friend and former law partner Vincent Foster, now the deputy White House counsel, about the agents’ intrusiveness. Some of them seemed brusque, even hostile. Then, on February 19, a gossip columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times reported rumors of a terrible row between the Clintons, during which an enraged first lady supposedly hurled a lamp in the residence. The story, nasty but titillating, raced through the capital. The Clintons were mortified. The problem with the permanent staff, once an irritation, became an urgent priority. The president and first lady summoned Foster and a handful of senior aides to the residence for a discussion of cleaning house in both the security and residential staffs. The Clintons felt they knew where one problem was. Harry Thomason, the Hollywood producer who with his wife, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, was living in the White House quarters for much of early 1993, had dinner in Washington with some reporters and told the Clintons that he believed stories about the Clintons’ personal lives were leaking from staff of the residence. Allowing hostile people to be privy to the most intimate details of daily life was intolerable, Hillary Clinton believed. If subordinates were foot-dragging, then she would see to it that the White House staff was populated with Clinton loyalists.

The Clintons felt that they were surrounded by hostile strangers, not just in their private home, but in Washington at large. The most pervasive face of this perceived hostility was the national news media. At the outset of his term, the president did not like Washington reporters and resented devoting even a handful of evenings to the formal press dinners held as ritual in the capital each winter and spring. Most of all, he did not like the forced frivolity of the occasions. It was customary for the president at the press dinners to deliver a comedy routine, taking some swipes at the press but aiming the best shots at himself. Clinton by no means lacked humor, but his natural bent was toward cheerful patter and oft-told yarns. Washington humor is different—ironic and knowing, the sort of detached wit that John F. Kennedy used to beguile a generation of journalists. Sardonic was not Clinton’s style. He was dead earnest about the work of his presidency, and sorely resentful of how Washington journalists seemed to reduce his noble purposes into stories about political process and tactics. Right out of the gate in February, Ann Devroy, the Washington Post’s lead reporter on the administration and the person whom official Washington relied on most to reveal what was really going on at the White House, published a story about the Clintons hosting a getting-to-know-you gathering of cabinet secretaries and White House staff at Camp David. She had great respect for the presidency and regarded the White House as a place of political skill, order, and maturity. Yet she quickly concluded that the Clinton White House was a place of amateurism, chaos, and insolent youth. Under the front-page headline “A Bonding Experience at Camp David,” her story described with bemusement and thinly veiled disdain how the Clintons had invited professional “facilitators” to stimulate meaningful conversation. Everyone was supposed to reveal something personal; the president talked about the pain of being chubby and mocked by other children as a boy. “Don’t try to make this sound weird,” one source pleaded to Devroy. That was asking too much.

Clinton soon personally regarded her as chief battle-axe in the Washington press. It was with this attitude that he appeared two months into his presidency in the giant ballroom of the Washington Hilton for the annual Radio and Television Correspondents Association dinner. One of his lines noted how Washington reporters were upset by Clinton making himself insufficiently available for questions. “You know why I can stiff you on the press conferences?” Clinton asked. “Because Larry King liberated me by giving me to the American people directly.” There was some awkward laughter, but neither the audience nor the capital grapevine thought it was very funny. It was not funny because Clinton was not joking. He had stated loudly one of the preeminent early goals of the Clinton White House: to find new channels of presidential communication, using talk show hosts like King and Oprah Winfrey and satellite interviews with local TV and radio to reach voters directly and transcend what he regarded as a cynical and trivial-minded Washington press corps.

Clinton was on to something with his instinct to soar above D.C. media to reach his audience. Most successful presidents have been innovators in public communication, using new technology to create new politics. FDR had his “fireside chats,” and JFK turned the televised news conference into dazzling entertainment. Reagan used his Hollywood stage mastery to render irrelevant the Washington consensus that he was merely an amiable dunce. While Clinton was right to seek out new forums to communicate his message, he and his young White House team would soon learn that they were wrong to assume that they could use their new leverage to bring the established news media to heel. This is because Washington’s social structure is interwoven with journalists in a way that is like no other American city. Reporters feed off politicians, and vice versa. An assistant cabinet secretary might be married to a reporter for the New York Times. Robert Barnett, formerly the Clintons’ personal attorney, was married to Rita Braver, who covered the White House for CBS News. Journalism permeates Washington culture, yet journalism was the one professional arena that Clinton neither understood nor appreciated.

Begala, Clinton’s traveling aide in the 1992 campaign, came to realize that his boss fundamentally did not respect reporting. All reporters do is observe and criticize, he believed; they don’t do anything. He actually had more respect for his political foes—at least they stood for something.

In short order there was a low-grade war under way between the Clinton White House and the veteran White House reporters who covered it, which became one of the great antagonisms to mark the Clinton years.

The tension flowed from different sources. Most obvious was the press’s bridling over the new White House rules announced by then thirty-two-year-old George Stephanopoulos but inspired by Hillary Clinton to restrict access to part of the West Wing where they had previously been free to walk unescorted. An older generation of reporters bridled at the new team’s style: smart and savvy, and projecting a confidence that occasionally blurred into arrogance. Brit Hume, an acerbic and respected reporter then with ABC News, used to work his crossword puzzle while sitting in the front row of Stephanopoulos’s news briefings, looking up occasionally to drill the young man when he heard a contradiction or some absurd claim. David S. Broder of the Washington Post once said after a heated phone call with Stephanopoulos that he felt like telling him to go to his room.

The dynamic with younger reporters was a bit different. Far from being put off by the breezy, cutting-edge sensibility of the Clinton team, many were at first very attracted to it. A new and activist administration was like a gust blowing away the staid and stale Bush years. Despite the tensions of the campaign, many reporters had grown friendly with Clinton’s aides on the 1992 trail. Now it seemed likely that his arrival would herald their generation’s version of the Kennedy years—when Washington was a sexy place, and famous journalists like Ben Bradlee and David Brinkley jousted with the New Frontiersmen by day but reveled in one another’s company by night. For their part, the Clintonites, too, had assumed that the press basically would be on their side—that journalists generally tilted to Democrats and would be generously inclined to a president trying to achieve big things.

These illusions ended quickly, as the reporters were fed a diet low on accurate information and heavy on political spin, and, as controversies mounted, many on the White House staff came to believe that there was something to the president’s view of the fourth estate. To the Clintonites, the reporters seemed always to assume the worst about any set of facts. Once, Stephanopoulos was trying to assure Ann Devroy that a newsworthy rumor she had heard was untrue. Agreeing to hold off a story, Devroy—from whom threats, laughter, profanity, and cigarette smoke streamed in large measure—rasped, “George, if you are lying to me I promise I will fuck you over!” Then she put Stephanopoulos on hold to take a call from her daughter. “Sweetheart,” she said, her voice metamorphosing into a lovely lilt, “how are you?”

It seemed amazing, in retrospect, considering all the folly and heartache that followed, that the president and his wife actually believed they would win praise for taking on the mess at the White House travel office.

It was peculiar that the mess should have ever captured their attention at all. The travel office was an obscure nook in the permanent White House bureaucracy. It had seven workers whose jobs were to arrange accommodations for the White House press corps when they traveled with the president. Why would the Clintons care about something like this? The answer is that a lot of seemingly obscure matters could reach the top, given the right push. On February 17, when Clinton was not yet a month in office and the day he was presenting his economic plan to Congress, he still found time to read a memo from Darnell Martens, a friend and business partner of Clinton confidant Harry Thomason. Martens proposed that his aviation business, in which Thomason was an investor, be given a consulting contract to review use of nonmilitary government aircraft. With a backward check, the signature of a left-hander, Clinton marked a box labeled “action” and scribbled a note to Chief of Staff McLarty: “These guys are sharp. Should discuss with Panetta/[Philip]Lader,” the two top officials at the Office of Management and Budget. Nothing ever came of this proposal, but all through the winter and spring of 1993 Martens and Thomason kept up a robust interest on a related subject. The travel office, according to Thomason and some other Arkansans on the White House staff, was a shoddily run outfit, and there were even suggestions that fraud or embezzlement might be taking place. Thomason raised it several times with the Clintons. Hillary Clinton in particular was attentive, pressing several White House aides for answers on what was being done. Here was yet another reason to be suspicious of the permanent White House staff, she reasoned. There surely was some good press to be had if the White House uprooted this particular nest of corruption.

This is how “Travelgate” was born, though that name is surely overblown. The decision on May 19 to fire travel office head Billy Dale and six colleagues—offering no advance notice, no opportunity to answer questions, and leveling public accusations of “gross mismanagement” and possible theft—was undeniably shabby. The decision and its aftermath were rife with improprieties and misleading assertions. Still, the whole matter was too absurdly small to justify the “gate” label. Yet the controversy would reverberate ruinously for the Clinton White House that spring and for years after. One reason was the particular target the Clintons chose. The travel office may have been obscure, but Dale and his colleagues were well known and well liked by an important constituency: White House reporters. As it happens, whatever irregularities there were in travel office bookkeeping—the place was rife with shoddy accounting, though no fraud or embezzlement was ever established—was at the expense of news organizations, not the government. The travel office workers were government employees, but it was the media that paid the travel office—handsomely, many millions of dollars each year—for the endless, dreary blur of airplanes and buses and buffets and hotels necessary while covering a president. When the firings backfired, Thomason and others maintained it was because the travel office was feathering reporters’ nests, helping them evade customs by bringing back expensive gifts from foreign travels in the cargo hold of the press charter.

A procession of assertions against the travel office employees was made and then abandoned, creating a cumulative impression of a White House that was neither competent nor trustworthy. It also soon surfaced that Thomason had been involved in urging that his friend Martens’s firm, TRM, be allowed to compete for the travel office bidding. On the defensive, the White House asserted that Thomason had merely “passed on information,” not tried to steer business to himself. This story soon crumbled, as it became clear that Thomason’s role in the housecleaning had in fact been pivotal, and that as business partner of Martens he stood to benefit. Of even greater concern, the White House had summoned FBI officials to help in the investigation of travel office accounting, and publicly trumpeted the fact that an investigation was under way. The next day Attorney General Janet Reno complained sharply that the FBI was called without her authorization, a violation of Justice Department procedures designed to keep the agency free from political interference. Publicly announcing an ongoing FBI investigation from the White House podium was another lapse of procedure. There were more frantic efforts at explanation. The White House asserted that the problems at the travel office came to light as part of Vice President Gore’s “reinventing government” initiative. Then Gore’s office made plain that this was the first they had heard about it. And so on. The deceptions were painful, as was the amateurism.

The president himself professed only the dimmest knowledge of the facts. The day the firings were announced, he was in the Oval Office with South African archbishop Desmond Tutu, the anti-apartheid leader. As often happened, and to Clinton’s vast annoyance, reporters interrupted a joint appearance dedicated to lofty global subjects with impertinent questions about domestic controversies. Clinton said people would have to ask his staff about what happened in the travel office: “All I know about it is that I was told that the people who were in charge of administering in the White House found serious problems there and thought there was no alternative. . . . That is literally all I know about it.” His wife knew more, and there were several people who knew she knew more. One of them was Vince Foster. Even before the firings, he had had forebodings of trouble, urging that more objective evidence of wrongdoing be found before proceeding with dismissals and fearing that the first lady’s role would draw questions. He had spoken with the first lady several times about the travel office problems, and in notes to himself from a May 17 meeting, when he learned the firings were imminent, he jotted, “HRC problem.” Then he circled it.

The HRC problem was indeed the nub of it. Divining her role would be a trip through the looking glass. David Watkins, an old Clinton hand from Arkansas and the man who actually discharged the firings, claimed that the first lady said, “We need those people out. We need our people in,” and that she made it clear there would be “hell to pay” if he did not act. Hillary Clinton testified she had no recollection of that conversation. She steadfastly maintained that she did not order the firings, nor could she recall offering any “input” on the matter. She later expanded that answer to acknowledge that she did “express my concern” that any problems “should be addressed promptly.” This difference—did she express concerns or order firings?—later came to occupy federal prosecutors for the better part of a decade. In 2000, with the administration just months from its conclusion, they issued a report saying that Hillary Clinton had made “false statements” about her role. No charges were filed, since the prosecutors could not establish the statements had been “knowingly false.” What counted as truth anyway? The essential truth, that the first lady had been a powerful impetus for taking action, had been obvious for years. The legal truth was arrived at gropingly, through a fog, long after it had faded into irrelevance. The travel office saga was a capsule of all that was maddening about Washington in the Clinton years.

The controversy was a toxic mix of first family fixations. The firings reflected the first lady’s determination to flush the White House of the old regime. The uproar that ensued, both she and the president believed with some cause, reflected the insularity of Washington and the self-absorbed nature of the White House press corps. Despite their private resentments, the Clintons and their unseasoned team had learned something in this sorry episode about the public dimensions of the presidency. Internal deliberations would not necessarily stay internal. Procedures were important, and actions that seemed small at the time could sow large trouble later. As a practical matter, there would be no more housecleanings. The Clintons would live for eight more years with a residence staff of chefs, ushers, groundskeepers, and others, all under chief usher Gary Walters. Many were of unquestionable discretion, but there were others whose loyalty and/or discretion the first family deeply mistrusted. (Although one deputy usher was fired on suspicion of having spoken about the Clintons to Republicans, both Walters and most of his staff would remain in place for both terms of Clinton’s presidency.)

Every president encounters something like the question Clinton confronted in those first months: On which issues would he challenge permanent Washington to conform to his own style and purposes, and on which ones would he accommodate the capital’s own rituals and expectations? Having forced early confrontations with the press and the White House bureaucracy, the Clintons quickly fell into a sullen retreat. Surely both could sympathize with their friend Vince Foster. As the controversy ground on, the lawyer sat in his West Wing office with a pen and let his feelings flow in an angry free association. Then he ripped the paper up.