Chapter Five

THE CLINTON STYLE

The days nearly always started badly. It did not much matter if the president had gotten a lot of sleep the night before or none at all. He often stayed up in the White House residence until 2 a.m. or later, and usually did not arrive in the West Wing until after nine. A West Wing aide once observed that it was as if Clinton’s body clock was programmed to run on Pacific Coast time. In his morning mood, Clinton was as predictable as morning rush hour, and about as pleasant. In time the president’s staff came to regard his braying as a morning ritual, a way of clearing his throat before facing the day. If he was still angry by noon, then there really was a problem.

Late nights had been Clinton’s preference as a student, and as governor, too. He did not propose to change habits now. This was just one of many predilections that he carried with him to the presidency. In Arkansas, he had governed by instinct and spontaneity. Dealing with the state legislature, he would amble downstairs in the capital and collar a lawmaker when it was time to cut a deal. When his temper flared at an aide or political ally, those people would dismiss it by saying, “That’s just Bill.” In Little Rock he really was just “Bill,” spoken of with affection or disdain but total familiarity in either event. Clinton’s city and state had long since accommodated to his diverse collection of talents and foibles. For his part, after a dozen years as governor, Clinton had the job down cold. Of all the illusions he carried to the presidency, the greatest might have been this failure to appreciate the distance between the statehouse and the White House, between the informality of Governor Bill and the rigid expectations that attach to the words “Mr. President.”

Watching presidents come and go, the denizens of political Washington are quite accustomed to bowing to presidential tastes on trivial matters. On matters relating to power and its rituals, however, the capital political culture has proven uncommonly resistant to change. Presidents are presumed to have certain ways of presenting themselves, of following schedules, of making decisions and announcing them. An especially graceful president, like JFK, can discard old conventions, defy expectations, and create a new style of power. Clinton, less nimble and facing more doubts, ignored these customs at his peril.

The White House reporters had a name for his schedule, or rather his inability to keep to it: Clinton Standard Time. He acted as if he was genuinely unaware—though this was plainly impossible—of how his schedule affected the rest of the world. At any moment, vast numbers of people are waiting on a president; when Clinton was on the road, for example, hundreds of local police and emergency personnel would be kept working overtime, at local taxpayer expense. The main cost was to Clinton himself. In Washington, among the press, lawmakers, and even his own cabinet, his lateness fed a perception of an unseasoned and unsteady president.

Of the many people who labored to keep Clinton on time, one man was most important. Andrew Friendly in 1992 was just twenty-two years old, a Washington native fresh out of Middlebury College. He was the first of four young men to serve as Clinton’s personal assistant. The personal assistants were uniformly known on the White House staff as “the butt boys,” a phrase apparently borrowed from prison lingo. They were handsome, with polite and earnest public demeanors that made them seem, misleadingly, like Eagle Scouts. In private, these men often were raucously irreverent about their boss, whom they admired but whose shortcomings they saw at closer range than anyone. It was Friendly’s job to carry the speech text and place it on the podium before Clinton spoke, to walk with him along the rope line and get the name of whoever happened to hand Clinton a gift or a note, to warn other staff members when the boss was in poor spirits. He was often more chaperone than servant. “Mr. President, it’s really time to go,” Friendly would say when Clinton was lingering in conversation with an Oval Office visitor. “You’re running twenty minutes behind and we’ve got a congressman waiting.” Clinton would not respond, or even turn to acknowledge the comment. The visitor, feeling self-conscious, might make motions toward leaving. “No, no, stay, sit down,” Clinton would say, leaving Friendly to stew anxiously. Even so, the aide recognized that tardiness was Clinton’s way of fighting back at the regimentation the presidency had forced upon him. For all his pose of obliviousness, Clinton usually had a sixth sense of how far behind he could get before the schedule was truly beyond salvation.

Just as aides learned the idiosyncrasies of Clinton Standard Time, so too did they learn to accommodate the contours of the Clinton mind. Clinton was determined that the organizational structure of the White House not prevent him from hearing all his options. This was a laudable instinct, and also a form of rebellion. Isolation is the great peril of the modern presidency. Original thinkers are kept at bay by a staff geared toward presenting the boss with consensus recommendations. Clinton liked to hear dissenting views even when there were none. Once that first year Clinton was called to take a stand on a possible balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. There was no doubt that he would be opposed. The idea was anathema to congressional Democrats, and the entire White House senior staff agreed. So Clinton took it upon himself to offer an impassioned argument about why the amendment was a splendid idea. “He was not for it,” recalled Howard Paster, the congressional liaison, “but it drove him crazy not to hear both sides of the argument, so he made it himself.”

Aides noticed that Clinton would pretend he did not know things just to get the benefit of someone else’s explanation. “Did you see that article in today’s paper?” an Oval Office visitor would ask. Even if Clinton had seen it he would blankly reply, “What did it say?” He did not want to know what the article said. He wanted to know what the other person thought was important about it.

Most of all, people in Clinton’s White House had to learn to understand and react to his moods. His anger would roll in and crash down in powerful waves, then recede just as quickly. His explosions required translation, hard to do for someone new to his orbit. Words that sounded like emphatic orders often were not. Once in 1993 during a moment of frustration over staff failures, the president laid down the law to Roy Neel, a longtime aide to Al Gore who was then serving as White House deputy chief of staff. Clinton named five people whom he wanted gone. Break the news to them and help find them other jobs, he said. Neel dutifully went about this unpalatable assignment. Within days, he learned—though not from Clinton—that all five people had appealed directly to the president, who had reversed the firings.

From Clinton’s perspective, perhaps the most surprising part of life in the presidency was the sensation of being constantly and mercilessly watched and judged. He was judged for his clothes. “The president’s suit, as he stood, looked to be a couple sizes too big,” read the White House pool report for January 25. “Perhaps this is one of his fat wardrobe pieces from the campaign?” He was judged for the company he kept. The Washington press said he was starstruck. At his first head-of-state summit, that spring in Vancouver, he raised eyebrows for finishing his meeting with Russian president Boris Yeltsin, then adjourning to his hotel suite for coffee and dessert with the actress Sharon Stone, the star of Basic Instinct, who was in town filming a new movie. (White House aides hastened to point out that Stone had not been alone in the presidential suite; co-star Richard Gere had joined her.) The parade of celebrities included Barbra Streisand, who filled in as Clinton’s guest to the annual Gridiron Dinner of Washington grandees when the first lady was out of town. When Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward came to Washington, the president and Chelsea joined them for dinner at a downtown Italian restaurant. Most famously of all in those early months, Clinton was judged for his haircut. It was performed under a “personal services” contract with the stylist Cristophe, late of Beverly Hills, whose usual rate was $200 an hour. One day in May, Air Force One sat on the tarmac in Los Angeles for nearly an hour while Cristophe clipped. This forced the closure of two runways, though initial reports that air traffic was kept circling for hours turned out some weeks later to be wrong. By then, Clinton had long since apologized: “The Secret Service asked and they were told there would be no delays. It was just a mess-up.” Too late—this trivial episode had already entered the anti-Clinton mythology.

In popular perception, in his first months Clinton was laboring at once with the reputation that he was a Hollywood-loving elitist as well as an Arkansas hayseed. He was by instinct a casual and accessible man. But this instinct tended to diminish the mystique on which successful presidents relied. So there was Clinton on March 9, during a morning jog on the National Mall, when a woman cried out, “I wanna jog with you!” The president waved the blonde-maned stranger over and they jogged and chatted for the remainder of Clinton’s route. Often as Clinton finished these morning excursions, huffing and dripping with sweat, he’d stop to take a few questions from reporters. These encounters did not elevate the majesty of the office when replayed on the evening news. In a variety of deliberate and unconscious ways, Clinton neither invited distance from the public nor received it. The most notorious example of this came the next spring, at a televised “town meeting” with young people hosted by MTV, the music video channel. A pert teenage girl from Maryland, asserting dubiously that “the world is dying to know,” challenged Clinton on his preference in underwear: “Is it boxers or briefs?” “Usually briefs,” answered the commander in chief, adding quizzically, “I can’t believe she did that.” Others could not believe he had answered.

Even as he sometimes underestimated the value of silence, he lost his voice at moments when he needed to use it forcefully. Clinton was painfully absent from view on the horrific morning of April 19, 1993, when the FBI stormed a compound in Waco, Texas. A religious fanatic named David Koresh, wanted for possession and manufacture of illegal weapons, among other things, had resisted in an armed standoff for fifty-one days rather than surrender to authorities. When federal agents moved in, he and at least some of his followers chose mass suicide over surrender. Eighty-six people, including seventeen children, died as the farmhouse was swallowed in a blaze. Clinton had been deeply wary of the attempted assault, but ultimately consented to Attorney General Janet Reno and the Justice Department’s wish to move in. When it ended in catastrophe, it was Reno who faced the cameras and even won public praise for soberly accepting responsibility. Clinton, meanwhile, was portrayed in the press as trying to dodge.

Tardiness, tantrums, turmoil among his staff—Clinton’s management method could be hard to take. To focus solely on the undesirable features of his style, however, would be a mistake. Spontaneity had its pleasures. So, too, did the restless energy and search for new diversion and excitement that lay beneath it. In cheerful moods, which were more common by far than his foul ones, Clinton was a marvelously entertaining president. For most people, part of the entertainment was simply the spectacle of being with a man who was always doing several things at once, always looking to figure the angles, always loading his plate a little higher at life’s buffet.

One theory among White House staff was that the ideal place to study Clinton’s essential nature was at the card table. Hearts was his game. “Let’s deal ’em up,” he would say whenever he had a spare moment to play and partners who knew how. His games were not for amateurs. On travel days, Clinton and his staff rode by Marine One helicopter from the White House South Lawn to Andrews Air Force Base in suburban Maryland to board Air Force One. Clinton was always trying to set a new record for the number of hands that could be played during the chopper’s ten-minute hop, as the cards were picked up and thrown down in a frenzy. Once aboard Air Force One, the games would continue, sometimes for hours, across the continent or across the ocean. “Why did you do that?” he might quiz another player. “You should have played a spade! Why did you lead the club? What was your strategy?” Clinton could remember the cards in his hand and everyone else’s, and the precise sequence in which they had been played. A mind that instinctually categorized and analyzed political data did it for card games, too. Not that he devoted full attention to the game. He would play his hand while also reading a book, or talking on the phone, sometimes even to heads of state. The only person he reliably stopped playing for was Hillary Clinton when she came on the line.

Jake Siewert, Clinton’s second-term press secretary, came to believe that the president saw cards as a metaphor for politics. Both gave him the chance to study the ways people made decisions and responded to pressure. He sometimes boomed furiously at other players, especially those who had not played with him before, if they had the nerve to drop a bad card in his hand: “You didn’t need to do that! You did that on purpose!” Was this genuine anger or merely bluff? It was a bit of both. Clinton got no deference from more experienced players, veteran aides like Bruce Lindsey or Doug Sosnik. They would tell the new player not to listen to a word Clinton was saying. This president might be as hyperactive as a young boy, and sometimes no more mature. But Clinton was a life enhancer. He had a talent for bringing people more fully out of themselves.

Whether one found the Clinton style charming or maddening, it soon became apparent that he had to change. The defects of trying to make decisions in a free-flowing, spontaneous way were becoming too obvious, never more so than in the tangled tale of Clinton trying to select his first nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States. It had been a quarter century since a Democratic president had had a chance to name a member of the High Court. Republican presidents had filled eight of the nine seats. Now Clinton was getting a chance to change the balance just two months into his term. On March 19, Supreme Court Justice Byron White, the lone Democratic appointee, wrote the president to tell him he was retiring from the Court. The deliberations that followed showed Clinton at his best: earnest, tireless, willing to challenge conventional thinking.

In an exchange with reporters later that day, Clinton pledged to find a nominee “who has a fine mind, good judgment, wide experience in the law and the problems of real people, and somebody with a big heart.” This statement alone signaled a different approach. What did it mean? The American Bar Association had never rated judicial nominees for “bigheartedness.” Clinton knew what he meant: He wanted someone in his own image, with empathy for common folk, who viewed the work of government not in abstractions but with a sense of the concrete human dimension to problems. He was rather less certain about how to meld these laudable but vague intuitions into a workable selection process. Over the next twelve weeks, no fewer than a half dozen people emerged as Clinton’s favored choice to be the nominee. In all but the last case, something intervened to keep them from being announced to the public.

New York governor Mario M. Cuomo was the first infatuation. The president was captivated by the man who he had once assumed was going to be his chief competitor for the 1992 nomination. Clinton wanted a politician rather than a legal traditional jurist as his first choice to begin recentering the conservative court. Someone with elected experience, he believed, could become a leader on the Court, just as former politician Earl Warren had led the Court to a new season of activism. With his passionate oratory and liberal-minded sensibility, Cuomo represented precisely what Clinton meant when he spoke of a big heart. Likewise, the New York governor had the affection of George Stephanopoulos and Gene Sperling (who once worked for Cuomo). Clinton had given Stephanopoulos license to reach out to Cuomo; the governor’s son Andrew, himself a Clinton appointee to the housing department, served as intermediary. But the Clinton team were slow learners about the sage of Albany. Just as Cuomo had wavered about running for president in 1992 and 1988, so he wavered now. Clinton called him once in early April to say he was under serious consideration. The governor, ever alert to evidence of a slight, was offended that Clinton had not made a more direct appeal. On April 7, with a call to Stephanopoulos and a public announcement, he took his name out of the running.

Now what? After Senate majority leader George Mitchell waved off inquiries about his interest, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt took Cuomo’s place as the front-runner, and Clinton was mightily intrigued. Formerly the governor of Arizona, Babbitt had elective experience. He had another advantage, too: After the previous winter’s clumsy effort to promote diversity in the cabinet, white men were back in vogue at the White House. Clinton agreed with several of his advisers (white men, as it happened) that his first court appointment was not the place to make another gesture about diversity.

But as word about Babbitt’s likely promotion leaked, the administration and various special interest groups became tangled in debate about who might replace him at the Interior Department. A vacancy there likely would set off a battle between environmentalists and western senators who worried that Clinton was trampling land-use rights. With the president’s economic plan still facing an uphill fight in Congress, and controversies swirling over everything from Waco to the war in Bosnia, Clinton decided he had no room for another headache. Babbitt’s court prospects faded.

Once more: now what? While the deliberations over Babbitt had been unfolding, Washington’s winds of conventional wisdom shifted again. Diversity was back in. The Lani Guinier debacle was the main reason. Guinier was an old law school friend whom Clinton had nominated to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. She encountered a shower of bad publicity over legal writings that questioned the sanctity of majority rule and praised radical race-based “proportional representation” remedies to voting discrimination. The White House had stood by her for a time, then dropped her after deciding her writings were indefensible. Many Democrats, including Attorney General Reno, thought the matter had been handled deplorably and urged Clinton to make amends with the party’s liberal base by appointing a woman to the High Court. That’s when the name of Alabama Supreme Court justice Janie Shores surfaced. That Shores was a southerner was another plus. For a day or so, she was the new front-runner. It fell to White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum to douse her in cold water: No one in the national legal or political communities had ever heard of Shores. People would think Clinton had lost his mind. And so the White House search continued.

It was now mid-June, some twelve weeks since the vacancy opened. Clinton had now taken longer in filling a Supreme Court vacancy than any other modern president. Things were getting desperate. The original idea of finding a bighearted politician, or some other novelty, had been abandoned. Now Clinton simply needed a justice. Stephen Breyer, a former Harvard Law professor and chief judge on the federal appeals court in Boston, was hardly an exotic choice, but he would be an eminently respectable one, with the liberal stamp of approval of Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy. Breyer was summoned to Washington on June 11, a Friday, for luncheon with Clinton. Thursday night, Clinton ordered White House lawyers to put together a package of Breyer’s legal writing, which the president stayed up most of the night reading in preparation for the interview. The session did not go especially well. Breyer was in pain, recovering from a bicycle accident. Clinton found him a bit cramped and cool in style—not the broad-minded humanist he was looking for. That Friday, Clinton summoned his selection team back to the Oval Office. The meeting started at 11 p.m. and continued well past midnight—a middle-of-the-night meeting for a matter that had been pending nearly three months. Breyer had been asked to stay in Washington and was instructed by White House aides to prepare an acceptance statement. But the president made plain his lack of enthusiasm. Meanwhile, there were questions about late Social Security payments on Breyer’s domestic help, raising the Zoë Baird specter again. Babbitt’s name re-emerged. Could they go back to him? Clinton wanted to know. Meanwhile, a new name had begun to percolate. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a federal appeals court judge in Washington, D.C. By all means, Clinton enthused, let’s bring her in. Ginsburg was reached in Vermont, where she had traveled for a wedding, and urged to come to Washington for a secret Sunday morning meeting with Clinton at the White House.

This meeting went wonderfully. During their ninety minutes, Clinton was impressed with her personal tale of graduating from law school, being rejected at blue-chip law firms, then persevering to a successful career in which she had won women’s rights victories before the Supreme Court. For the time being, Breyer’s prospects were over. Yet there was one more cliff-hanger to come. The day before, on Saturday, Andrew Cuomo had called Stephanopoulos with the news that Governor Cuomo had changed his mind: He would be willing to be nominated if Clinton asked. That Sunday afternoon, as Clinton’s team gathered in the Oval Office, the president confided that he had made his choice. He was going to call Cuomo and offer him a spot on the High Court. “There, he had said it,” Stephanopoulos later recalled. “It was really happening. But before anyone could even begin to make a counterargument, [presidential secretary] Nancy Hernreich walked into the Oval with a note for me: Mario Cuomo was on the line.” Predictably, Cuomo had second thoughts. If Clinton asked him to serve, he said dramatically, the answer would be no.

Ginsburg it was. Judged by results—the standard that matters historically—the Ginsburg appointment was a success. Ginsburg proved in the years after she arrived to be precisely the kind of progressive-minded jurist Clinton set out to put on the High Court. At the time of the decision, however, the process mattered; it was one way the electorate was sizing up a young president. When it was over, Ronald Klain, a young White House lawyer who had worked on the selection team, felt he had had a revealing window into Clinton’s vast potential—and also into the habits that were hobbling this talent. “On the positive side, you could see that he was intensely engaged, and he took an incredibly intellectual approach to studying the candidates and their philosophies and searching for the right choice,” he recalled. “But it was also an undisciplined process, and external influences would lead us to swing from pillar to post.”

In the Rose Garden the next day, Clinton teared up at his announcement of Ginsburg’s appointment, as he listened to her make a graceful statement thanking her family and various mentors who helped clear her path as a professional woman. Clinton expected praise for an inspired appointment. The first question came from ABC’s Brit Hume, who quite politely asked whether Clinton could “perhaps disabuse us” of the perception that there had been a “a certain zigzag quality in the decision-making process here.”

Clinton glared, clenched his jaw, then spat back his answer: “I have long since given up the thought that I could disabuse some of you [from] turning any substantive decision into anything but political process. How you could ask a question like that after the statement she just made is beyond me.” He quickly wheeled off the stage and returned to the Oval Office, bringing Ginsburg’s announcement ceremony to an awkward close.

While presidential flare-ups like this were common inside the West Wing, indulging in them before the outside world imposed a mighty cost. The Arkansas style Clinton brought to Washington put too much of him—his moods, his self-justifications, a certain zigzag quality of his own thinking about the difficult choices he was facing—on public display. The result was a failure of presidential optics. The presidency can take formerly average-seeming men, like the pre–White House FDR, and invest them with an aura of command. Clinton, however, was made to look less impressive than he was. On the cover of Time magazine, just four months after the inauguration, there was a tiny image of Clinton next to a devastating large-type headline: “The Incredible Shrinking President.”