Chapter Eight

PARTNERS

It was a curiosity of the Clinton years that he was often rescued by members of his own party who happened to regard him with disdain. So it was in the first days of August as the wild opening months of the administration reached a climax with the final vote on Clinton’s economic plan.

On first glance, Bill Clinton and Senator Bob Kerrey had much in common. Kerrey was just three years Clinton’s senior. Both had been governors in the early 1980s. As politicians, they were both photogenic men, handsome in somewhat unconventional ways. Both were from the generation of Democrats inspired to politics by JFK and drawn to public office by its promise of glamour melded with noble purpose.

It was in 1992, when both sought the Democratic nomination, that the profound differences between them came into sharp relief. Kerrey was a decorated Vietnam War veteran whose artificial leg was testament to his wounds in a conflict Clinton had taken steps to avoid. In his Washington dealings, Kerrey was coolly detached, with an aversion to blarney and platitudes. He prided himself on a willingness to speak hard truths. Clinton, the chatterbox pol whose instinct was to put a sunny face on unpleasant subjects, was not exactly Kerrey’s type. The diverse resentments between them were mingled with mutual fascination and, doubtless buried deep, some measure of mutual respect.

Even so, Kerrey was the last man Clinton would wish to have control over his political fate. But he had it, as all of Washington knew. Weeks of lobbying and head counting by White House officials and the congressional leadership had made clear that Kerrey was the Senate’s last uncommitted vote—and the decisive one. The Nebraskan had made plain that he did not like Clinton’s economic plan. He thought it did too little to attack the budget deficit and avoided the hard long-term questions of runaway entitlement spending that he believed were imperiling the country’s future. He thought that the plan, like Clinton, was soft and evasive. But for all the bravado of his public image, Kerrey trembled before the implications of voting against Clinton. He would be inflicting a grievous blow on a new president of his own party. Democrats would never forgive him, and his own future as a Democrat might well be over.

After agonizing for weeks, on August 5, Kerrey picked up the phone, called the White House, and asked for Clinton, who was in the Oval Office at the uncommonly early hour of 8 a.m.—an hour that rarely found the president at his best. “Mr. President,” Kerrey said, “I’m going to vote no.”

“If you want to bring this presidency down then go ahead,” Clinton shot back at Kerrey. Self-pity poured out as he spoke. “I was told that this was going to be the good thing to do, and I took on the most difficult problem the country faced and suddenly I’m regretting it. I wish I hadn’t done it. All I’m doing is catching grief for doing what everyone knows is the most difficult problem we face.”

As Clinton’s anger built, Kerrey’s did, too. “I really resent the argument that somehow I’m responsible for your presidency surviving,” came his seething reply.

“Fuck you!” Clinton exclaimed. After more muttered recriminations—“If that’s what you want, you go do it,” Clinton told Kerrey—he hung up. The aides in the room, including Stephanopoulos, had expected the rage of the call to continue, and perhaps turn on them. Instead, the president was oddly subdued. “It’s going to be a no,” he said. Clinton realized he was going to lose on the central contest of his young presidency. For this president, however, the difference between headed for defeat and defeated was significant. He had thirty-six hours before the final Senate vote was scheduled, a long time by the never-say-die ethos by which Clinton lived. The White House senior staff, including McLarty and Gergen, raced to Capitol Hill to tend to Kerrey’s bruises from the phone call and begin their importuning anew. It was to no evident avail, but Kerrey did agree to see Clinton the next morning. In the meantime, the Senate vote would be of no consequence unless the House of Representatives also gave final passage. Late that evening, after a day of frenetic presidential phone calls to the final wavering votes, it passed, 218 to 216. Kerrey arrived at the White House the next morning. He and Clinton, both calmer now, sat on the Truman balcony, looking out at the Washington Monument through a heavy summer rain. They had a searching conversation about the state of the country—Clinton felt perhaps he was breaking through Kerrey’s resistance—but as Kerrey left he repeated his original stance. “I’m still a no, Mr. President,” he said. Clinton, though, told aides he thought Kerry was softening.

He was right. The pressures on Kerrey were nearly as great as those on Clinton. Two of the men he respected most had urged him to vote yes. One was Warren Buffett, the Omaha investor, a constituent and friend of Kerrey’s, and also the nation’s wealthiest man. The other was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the New York Democrat and among Kerrey’s closest friends in the Senate. Both acknowledged that there were lots of flaws in the Clinton plan, but both said it was better than nothing—better for the country and better for Kerrey. By the end, the supposedly clear-thinking, plainspoken Nebraskan proved Clinton’s equal when it came to agonizing and equivocation. He was changing his vote to yes. He called Clinton at 8:20 p.m. that evening to tell him.

That evening, August 6, Vice President Gore, presiding over the Senate, broke a 50–50 tie in favor of Clinton’s plan. Clinton had averted a political debacle. The achievement, however, went well beyond that. Years later, the plan he had crafted, never mind the stumbles and clumsy improvisations along the way, was regarded by the nation’s financial elite as the essential catalyst to a decade of remarkable prosperity. After years of reckless deficit spending, the country had taken a decisive step toward fiscal reason. It was a modestly progressive step as well. There were tax credits that gave low-income workers a clear incentive to keep working rather than fall onto welfare. There were all manner of other, smaller programs, such as free immunizations for poor children. Not bad for six months’ work by Clinton and the Democrats. Not one Republican in either chamber had joined them.

The White House staff gathered for an uproarious celebration in the Roosevelt Room. “Lloyd! Lloyd! Lloyd!” the group chanted when Treasury Secretary Bentsen, an improbable man for chants, strolled in with his usual gravity. Clinton seemed rather detached from the gaiety. Gene Sperling gazed at his boss and saw a man oddly subdued, even a little anxious. Sperling felt he knew why. “He was glad to have won, but this was not how he wanted to govern,” Sperling recalled. “He did not like the fact that this had passed with only Democrats, and he worried the whole process had defined him in a way that was more partisan than he really was.”

Clinton was right to worry. As the autumn of his first year in office approached, the president was widely perceived as an ideologically flaccid leader. Many commentators, and a good many people in the president’s own party, had concluded that the New Democrat image Clinton had fashioned in the 1992 campaign had been a fraud. A succession of controversies since the inauguration—the gays in the military fiasco, the embarrassment over the stimulus package, and now a budget that was identified in the public mind as much for its tax increases as for deficit reduction—had identified Clinton instead as a stale Old Democrat.

Who was the real Clinton? In Washington, efforts to answer this question focused on the jostling camps of advisers Clinton had arrayed around him. Conventional wisdom painted the president as a tortured figure, aiming to please all, but buffeted by irreconcilable advice. By this reckoning there were “moderates,” like David Gergen, domestic policy aide Bruce Reed, and the Democratic Leadership Council’s Al From, and there were “liberals,” like the consultants James Carville and Paul Begala, White House aide George Stephanopoulos, and Hillary Clinton. There was enough truth in this analysis to give it resonance. But it was misleading in one essential respect.

Clinton had very few genuine Old Democrats in his inner circle. Most of the important figures in the White House had gravitated to Clinton because they believed he represented a break from the limp brand of liberalism personified by previous Democratic nominees like Walter Mondale and Michael S. Dukakis. The argument instead was over the tone and direction of a New Democrat agenda. One camp wanted it defined by combat, the other by consensus.

On the side of combat, Carville and Begala believed that Democrats had lost their way in the 1980s by allowing themselves to be sissified. Reagan Democrats had fled the party largely over issues of values and culture, including gun control and abortion rights. There was no prospect of reversing the party’s liberal orientation on these issues. But Democrats could regain a tough-minded profile by de-emphasizing these issues rhetorically and re-emerging as a party “fighting for the middle class.” Political definitions got forged by combat, and Begala in particular relished opportunities for the Clintons to define themselves by whom they were fighting against—greedy Republicans or profiteering drug companies. In this he was joined by the first lady, who by temperament had an instinct for the political fight. She was the principal sponsor of the political “war rooms” established in Little Rock, and again at the White House during the budget battle. Likewise, Stephanopoulos was a veteran of Capitol Hill, where the parties define themselves by legislative skirmishes and the constant battle to embarrass the opposition and “win the day” as judged by the nightly newscasts. In their instinct to rail against powerful foes and portray themselves as a friend of the average man, this side of Clinton’s White House was squarely in a populist tradition in American politics.

On the side of consensus, policy intellectuals like Reed and From fit within a different tradition, one stretching back to the Progressive Era. They believed that Clinton should define himself not by being a more contentious leader, but by being a more rational and civic-minded one. Just as the Progressives wanted to rescue politics from the squalor of big-city boss politics at the turn of the twentieth century, the camp associated with the Democratic Leadership Council wanted to rescue Democrats from the increasingly heavy hand of interest group liberalism. By this reckoning, since the 1960s the party was increasingly the sum of its factions and no longer presented a compelling vision of the nation as a whole. On some questions, such as its support for deficit reduction and free trade, the group was unabashedly more conservative than congressional Democrats. But it angered these people to be portrayed as pastel Democrats, trying to win election by being almost as Republican as the Republicans. There was nothing conservative, they noted, about Clinton’s ambitious AmeriCorps program, in which government paid for young people’s educations in exchange for a tour of community service. Clinton would prosper by transcending partisan warfare and addressing the problems Americans worried about most—the economy, crime, a loss of community, and a decline in values—with the most sensible solutions. Every effort should be made not to insult Republicans, but to recruit as many as possible to a forward-marching cause.

From two different assumptions—the lure of combat versus the promise of consensus—two contradictory political strategies flowed. In different moods, Clinton was sympathetic to each. Little wonder that neither his Washington audience nor the public beyond yet understood who this president was and what mattered most to him.

It was in this atmosphere of strategic disarray that the president pondered, in the wake of his victory on the economic plan, what he should do for his next act. This was a critical choice. He needed to vault from one success to another, and broaden his appeal in the process.

After the exhaustion of the preceding days, the president’s staff was desperate for the Clintons to do what the rest of Washington did in August—go on vacation. A Martha’s Vineyard respite had been arranged, as soon as the first family gave word they were ready to depart.

They weren’t ready yet. The budget vote had been on a Friday, and that weekend the president and first lady summoned senior staff to a series of meetings in their residence to discuss the battles looming after Labor Day. This grueling pace, a credit to their appetite for work, produced resentments from staff members who did not like being treated as if they had no families or interests of any kind outside the office. Not long after this, Roy Neel, Clinton’s exhausted deputy chief of staff, tendered his resignation. Driving away from the White House for the last time, he took his incessantly beeping pager and hurled it into the Potomac River—free at last.

The post-budget meetings were unusually contentious. A main reason was the question of the North American Free Trade Agreement. NAFTA had been negotiated by President Bush, but never passed by the Democratic Congress. It would tear down tariffs and other trade barriers with Mexico and Canada, creating the world’s largest free trade zone. Intellectually, Clinton, an adherent of free trade, supported it enthusiastically. Politically, it was agony for him. Labor, the Democrats’ most powerful constituency, was adamantly opposed. A year earlier, the problem of what candidate Clinton should say about NAFTA had briefly paralyzed the campaign. He had backed the agreement, but slathered his support with a thick mayonnaise of qualifications that rendered his commitment almost meaningless. Now the problem was what President Clinton actually would do about NAFTA: Should he try to push its passage?

The debate picked up where it had left off a year earlier. Stephanopoulos, speaking on behalf of most of the political advisers, noted that even with a full-scale presidential effort, a push for passage was bound to alienate Democrats in Congress and risked a very probable legislative defeat. Why take such a risk to pass a Republican agreement?

Once again, it was Lloyd Bentsen who had the decisive voice in answering the political team’s objections—and Clinton’s anguished doubts. At a cabinet meeting, he slammed his fist down on the table for emphasis in front of the president. The gesture stilled the room. NAFTA was not merely good policy, he argued, it was shaping into a critical test of the president’s own principles. Did he have the nerve to fight for them? Soon after, Clinton decided that he would lead a campaign that autumn to push the trade package to passage. Because it ran against the wishes of labor, this was a decision of historic magnitude for a Democrat to make.

NAFTA was not the only drama playing out as planning for the fall agenda proceeded. For the first time, Clinton’s two main partners in the presidency found themselves in competition. Vice President Gore was eager that the schedule contain ample time for him to publicize a project that Clinton had assigned him: “Reinventing Government”—ReGo, in White House vernacular—a campaign to weed federal agencies of senseless rules, paperwork, and expense. Rage against bureaucratic inanity was bipartisan, and it was especially shrewd politics for a Democrat to take up what historically had been a conservative cause. Gore was determined to make the issue his own.

The talk of NAFTA and ReGo, however, left Hillary Clinton cold. The unveiling of the administration’s plan for universal health coverage, her much vaunted project, had been repeatedly postponed, deferring to the imperatives of the budget battle. The first lady was hugely frustrated—and intolerant of proposals that might compete for presidential time and publicity in the fall of 1993. “We’ve been waiting in line,” she complained at one meeting.

The emerging rivalry between the vice president and first lady was obvious but unspoken. Neither could afford to give voice to resentments, though their staffs increasingly did so without compunction. What each was battling for was primacy as the second most influential player in the administration.

In their approaches to government, they were similar in that both were synthesizers: They had minds that gravitated to unifying theories and systems to explain how the world should work. In Earth in the Balance, the environmental treatise he wrote as a senator, Gore called for the abolition of the internal combustion engine and urged that environmentalism should be “the new guiding principle for civilization.” This was the kind of breathtakingly self-assured statement that Hillary Clinton might make, but not the president; he was a splitter: His mind seized naturally on particulars, which often did not coalesce neatly into a larger worldview. Their minds searched for consistency; his tended to fix on contradictions. It was inevitable that Hillary Clinton and Al Gore would share some of the same frustrations. Both chafed at Clinton’s bouts of indecision. In internal White House deliberations, they valued clarity and closure; he cherished debate and the muddle of leaving options open. It was no accident, surely, that he had sought out these two powerful intellects. Beneath Clinton’s constant whir of activity lay a passive streak. He needed people of emphatic certitudes to help sharpen his own goals, and to give him the self-confidence to pursue them. He now had two such people nearby, throwing elbows at each other.

As jarred as Clinton was by the challenges he faced once he actually arrived in the presidency, the woman who had been his essential partner in the two-decade journey from Little Rock to Washington was doubly shocked. The months since the election had brought persistent personal and professional setbacks. Her father was dead; so was her friend Vince Foster. In the transition, she had dreamed of a virtual deputy presidency, with her reigning over domestic policy. Instead, the proposal to overhaul health care had been subject to repeated delays and postponements. She responded to the frustrations, she later wrote, the only way she knew how: by plunging still further into work.

Eleanor Roosevelt was the comparison everyone liked to make with this first lady. Hillary Clinton, a deep admirer of her White House predecessor, encouraged this. But there was perhaps a better analogy to the role she was fashioning in Bill Clinton’s Washington. It was Robert F. Kennedy. Like Kennedy, who served as his brother’s attorney general but roamed widely in the most pressing problems of the New Frontier, Hillary Clinton in those days kept an eye on many accounts beyond health care. Like him, one role she assigned herself was to impatiently poke, prod, and question an executive branch bureaucracy that often smothered ideas or fumbled their execution. Most of all, like Kennedy, she saw herself as the president’s protector, skeptically judging the motives and loyalty of the staff, legislators, and other courtiers seeking his favor. She took a dim view of many of her husband’s West Wing advisers, including Stephanopoulos and press secretary Dee Dee Myers, whom she regarded as too immature and too worried about currying favor with the Washington press.

The assumption in Clinton’s White House was that Hillary Clinton’s assignment was to do the things that President Clinton did not do well for himself. One such thing was to bring debates to a brisk conclusion. “Hillary is a closer,” boasted her friend Susan Thomases. “She does not let things drag on.”

Aides learned to watch her body language, the way she would hunch her shoulders and rest her elbows quite deliberately on the table at meetings when some aide had droned on too long. “She was the only person in the White House that people were afraid of,” said Jake Siewert, then a young aide in the communications shop.

She had a certain naÏveté about this fear. She believed, or claimed to believe, that she wished only to be treated as a professional colleague. What she regarded as constructive suggestions, her husband’s aides often took as brusque orders. After meetings, she would repair to her own office with aide Maggie Williams or Melanne Verveer and ask guilelessly whether people were reacting to her suggestions on merits or simply “because I’m first lady.” She was surprised and outraged when staff members did not object to things she said at meetings, but then leaked the discussions to newspapers in order to undermine her positions.

From her vantage point, she was hardly omnipotent. To the contrary, she was toiling in the face of constant small burdens and procedural indignities. She regarded her travel as important government business, so that she could speak and solicit opinions about health care. But her trips faced constant problems with logistical support. The military and Secret Service apparatus required for her to move about never seemed to materialize without an argument. The first lady and her staff suspected deliberate foot-dragging. They may well have been right. Once she summoned a young aide to Treasury Secretary Bentsen to her office for a dressing-down. Why could she not get more Treasury financial experts assigned to the health care task force? The young man apologized and said the rules did not allow it. In fact, Bentsen, skeptical of the first lady’s commission, had forbidden it.

Hillary Clinton did not understand the mystique around her, and indeed she had a point. She was a novelty, certainly, as a first lady unabashedly immersed in policy. But she had hardly shrouded her goals or values. She was a woman of intense ambition and deep spirituality, who believed that the Clintons’ brand of politics could have a cleansing impact on American life. In a widely noted speech at the University of Texas, she pondered, “If we ask, why is it in a country as wealthy as we are, that there is this undercurrent of discontent, we realize that somehow economic growth and prosperity, political democracy and freedom are not enough—that we lack meaning in our individual lives and meaning collectively, we lack a sense that our lives are part of some greater effort, that we are connected to one another.” Michael Kelly, writing in an influential and highly skeptical 1993 article in the New York Times Magazine titled “Saint Hillary,” observed that she seemed to be searching for a “unified-field theory of life.”

“That’s right, that’s exactly right!” she exclaimed.

Her spiritual side had a censorious streak. Far more than her husband, she harbored deep suspicion about the motives and tactics of political opponents. One day that fall she got word that a political aide, Rahm Emanuel, who was helping to try to pass the NAFTA legislation, had planned an event for the White House East Room. Many wavering legislators would be invited to hear a bipartisan delegation, including former Republican secretary of state James A. Baker, speak in support of the measure. Emanuel expected praise for creative use of the elegant White House social room, something he believed the administration had been too shy in using to win support for its goals. Instead, he picked up the phone to hear the first lady calling from Camp David, nearly sobbing in anger. “What are you doing inviting these people in my home?” she said. “These people are our enemies. They are trying to destroy us.”

If her problems forging an identity as a working first lady were unique, Al Gore’s problems as vice president were thoroughly conventional. His challenges, and frustrations, were as old as the vice presidency itself. “I am vice president,” said John Adams, the first to hold the office. “In this I am nothing, but I may be everything.”

Like his predecessors, Gore was trying to strike a balance between loyalty and dignity. He was searching for the middle ground that would allow him to serve Clinton as an influential adviser while also preserving the independent political identity he needed for a presidential run that everyone knew was in his future.

Gore responded to this classic vice presidential quandary in a characteristic way: He insisted on a formal understanding with Clinton, in writing. One of the most important items in this contract was a regular weekly luncheon—no aides allowed, just president and vice president, with nothing said between them repeated to outsiders. Clinton was admirably sensitive to this request of his vice president. There were some weeks when the weekly meeting was simply not convenient for him, and occasionally his staff would urge that it be canceled. Clinton, one senior aide recalled, “would roll his eyes and say, ‘Let’s make time for Al.’ ” Once Clinton was running hours late for a planned departure to Europe, telling his staff he was exhausted and desperate to get some sleep aboard Air Force One during the Atlantic crossing. Gore insisted that they hold their lunch at 4 p.m. before allowing the president to slip free. He regarded this time as inviolate.

As a practical matter, he need not have insisted. Clinton liked hearing from Gore. Not only was the vice president smart, but he had actually run for office and won. Anyone who had done this could count on a deeper measure of respect from Clinton. This extended even to people like Attorney General Janet Reno, with whom the president otherwise enjoyed little rapport.

Like Hillary Clinton, Gore took it as his job to push the president. “Get with the goddamn program,” Gore growled once, as Clinton succumbed to doubts during the budget battle. As Gore seemed to recognize, Clinton not only needed to be pushed—he liked it.

Gore was likewise a man with a surprising variety of sides to his personality, some of which could be frustrating. Viewed the way most Americans saw him, he seemed earnest, dutiful, square, and, the word that would become tattooed on his public image, “wooden.” Reporters who spent time with him saw something different: a well-read man, shrewd, self-aware and self-mocking, and a wickedly funny observer of the chaos around him. Why, they wondered, did the vice president not reveal this appealing figure—“the real Gore”—more willingly in public? The answer was that this off-the-record figure, while authentic, was itself only a fragmentary glimpse of the real Gore.

As many White House aides knew firsthand, Gore’s sense of humor sometimes curdled into acid sarcasm, sprayed casually on those around him. His intellect, while admirably searching, could sometimes be gratingly pedantic. For a while, he got on a kick about the Japanese penchant for “reverse engineering,” and seemed to turn every policy discussion into a seminar on that. He was a hawk on the issue of Bosnia, which his fellow interventionist, National Security Adviser Tony Lake, appreciated. Even so, Lake commented to colleagues, the certainty Gore placed in his own views could be a little frightening.

Many West Wing aides soon concluded that Gore’s abrasiveness masked a lingering insecurity. Some of this was due to the nature of his office. But in certain ways he was just another staff member, sharing the same men’s room as other staff, and jostling for position and access. When members of Gore’s staff, like longtime aide Jack Quinn, were recruited to Clinton’s staff, the vice president was obviously resentful, “as though someone had switched teams from ‘shirts’ to ‘skins,’ ” one veteran Gore aide recalled.

While Gore regularly sighed in exasperation at the managerial chaos around Clinton, in some ways he was no more organized in his own work cycles than the president. High-profile public performances in particular seemed to summon his demons. He prepared for weeks in advance of a commencement address at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He stood before his assembled staff—part lecturer, part inquisitor—excitedly writing diagrams and phrases on an easel, searching for the right ideas and metaphors for his address. He toured a horizon of academic concepts, such as “complexity theory,” “massively parallel systems,” and geometric patterns known as “fractals.” Despite these long hours of preparation, the speech was still not remotely done the day before he was to speak. So Gore, guzzling Diet Cokes, pulled an all-nighter and finished his speech as the sun rose before his flight to Boston.

In November of that first year, the White House counselor David Gergen caught a vivid glimpse of the puzzling mix of brashness and self-doubt that battled within Gore. The billionaire Ross Perot, still a national figure after his strong independent bid for president in 1992, had emerged as the public face of opposition to the NAFTA trade agreement. With a vote in Congress just weeks away, the prospects for success did not look especially good. While Clinton would have a majority of Republican support, the president was having little success challenging the pro-labor, anti-trade consensus in his own party. Gore, in a bold move made without clearance from Clinton, challenged Perot to a televised debate on CNN’s Larry King Live.

Gore burrowed into preparation for several days. On the day of the showdown, in the final practice session at the vice president’s official residence at the Naval Observatory, a disaster seemed imminent. “As he stood at the podium,” Gergen recalled, “he was damn near frozen . . . only hours before show time, and one of the most experienced men in politics was barely coherent.”

However, the short drive, alone with his wife, Tipper, to CNN’s Capitol Hill studio seemed to transform the vice president. In ninety dramatic minutes, the momentum of the NAFTA debate shifted abruptly. Gore calmly presented his argument that free trade would produce more jobs than those lost overseas. He needled Perot about contradictions in his record, including his past support for few trade barriers, and how his own businesses and those of his son had prospered from Mexican business deals. Perot, barely in control, sputtered ridiculously, “Would you even know the truth if you saw it? . . . You’re lying. You’re lying now,” and complained about interruptions even when no one was interrupting him. The evening was effectively the end of Perot.

And it was the decisive moment in the NAFTA debate, though there would still be a need for the usual last-minute heroics by Clinton. With NAFTA’s passage secure in the Senate, the House of Representatives was the focus of a furious round of lobbying. A steady stream of lawmakers went to the Oval Office with hands out. They got what they wanted—special deals for everyone from broom makers to citrus growers. But Clinton got what he wanted: NAFTA passed the House by 234 to 200. In victory came a reminder that Clinton was leading a diffuse and divided party. Only a hundred of the House’s 258 Democrats voted with the president. One Ohio Democrat, Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, said Clinton had “abandoned the real core of the Democratic Party” and was “the candidate of Wall Street, not Main Street.” Such comments were a reminder of the risks Clinton had taken in support of his principles. His win, he believed, would create its own momentum for future battles ahead, including health care. A presidency that at Labor Day had seemed wobbly and unfocused was entering the holidays with new assurance.