Chapter Sixteen

RELEVANCE

Stand firm or bend? No one was more eager for the answer than the president himself. It was not true, as Bill Clinton’s most jaundiced observers would have it, that he would do anything for political survival. It was true that most of his principles were sufficiently elastic that they could accommodate political realities without a crisis of conscience. Clinton could not know how far he might bend until he sized up how much leverage Republicans could exert to make him bend. Within months there would be negotiations between Clinton and Republicans over some of the most basic questions about government’s role in American life: How big? How interventionist with its regulations on business? How aggressive in leveling the playing field for racial minorities? Before any of this, however, there would be a negotiation within Clinton himself. The partisan holy war that many congressional Democrats were yearning for looked to the president like a strategy for self-immolation in 1996. Acquiescence to Gingrich’s ideological crusade was no more tolerable an option, nor any more likely to bring political success. Between self-defeating conflict and craven capitulation lay ample field for maneuver.

The spring of 1995 was Clinton’s first good opportunity to explore this field—to measure Republican strength and his own. Gingrich had promised that his House Republicans would act on the ten items in his “Contract with America” within a hundred days of taking power. The hundred-days mythology, born in the New Deal, captivated FDR devotee Gingrich no less than it had captivated FDR devotee Clinton two years earlier.

Marching in disciplined lockstep behind the Speaker, the House by April 7 had voted on all ten items, and had passed nine of them. The larger political community, too, was in Gingrich’s thrall. He had asked for television time to address the nation at the hundred-day mark. Astonishingly, several networks had agreed to give it to him. This was unprecedented deference to a legislative leader, offering him a platform normally given only to presidents, and only on high state occasions. The Gingrich festival was agony for Clinton, and it presented a dilemma for his White House. The president was scheduled that day to make his annual appearance before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, convening that year in Dallas. The White House staff, led by Panetta, supposed that Clinton should not do anything to give the day more prominence than it already had. They planned for the president to stay aloof from the hundred-days hype with a speech about education. Morris thought this was foolish, since Gingrich’s speech would be a dominating event no matter what Clinton did. The consultant wanted the president to use the occasion to advertise that the important question was no longer the bills the legislative branch passed, but what Clinton—leading the executive branch—had to say about it. Morris urged a point-by-point recital of all the important items on the GOP agenda—where Clinton agreed and where he did not.

A well-functioning White House would have settled this dispute with a timely decision about which strategy was right. In the barely functional dual White Houses that existed now, the debate did not happen until it was almost too late. Panetta had given orders for an education speech to be drafted, and writers duly produced a text. Meanwhile, Morris and Bill Curry, an unsuccesful gubernatorial candidate from Connecticut who had recently joined the White House staff as a Morris ally, proceeded busily on their own track. The two speeches collided just thirty-six hours before Clinton was to speak. At an evening strategy session in the White House residence, each side made its case. Panetta warned that Democrats in Congress would feel betrayed by the accommodationist speech Morris was advocating. The partisan warriors on the Hill believed their drumbeat against the “Contract with America” was starting to hurt Gingrich, and a nuanced message from Clinton would stifle Democrats. But there was no contest which speech Clinton wanted to give. He was desperate to regain the initiative, “to get back in the game,” as he regularly put it. Morris’s speech was a way to at least engage the debate. As often happened, he let Vice President Gore deliver the news that Panetta did not want to hear. “We need now to emerge from the shadows,” Gore said.

This decision marked Morris’s own emergence from the shadows. Panetta and Ickes were among a handful of people on Clinton’s staff who then knew the identity of the mysterious “Charlie.” Having lost their fight, they turned to preventing the speech from becoming an embarrassment, as they felt sure it would be if Clinton delivered the hyperventilated rhetoric Morris had urged. The first time speechwriter Don Baer met Morris was in this period, when Ickes paged him and told him simply to get to consultant Robert Squier’s Capitol Hill office by 7 a.m. There he laid eyes on “Charlie” and read his handiwork. The text was indeed far from presidential in tone. Yet the message struck Baer, who had been dismayed since joining the White House staff a year earlier by what he saw as the stale liberal tilt of Clinton’s presidency, as exactly right.

But even Baer’s improved text was not quite what was delivered. At the urging of Gore and Morris—both of whom felt Clinton spoke with more force and fluency when he was improvising—the president largely ignored the text he took to the podium at a Dallas hotel ballroom. The speech previewed the posture Clinton would adopt all through the coming year. The first task was to project a tone of eminent goodwill and practicality. “I do not want a pile of vetoes,” he announced, “I want a pile of bills that will move this country into the future.” He claimed the center, and invited his opponents to join him there: “Ideological purity is for partisan extremists. We’ve got to stop pointing fingers at each other so we can join hands.” But this was a prelude to sterner stuff. Republicans were pushing bills that would impose “loser pays” provisions for civil lawsuits, repeal a ban on paramilitary “assault weapons,” weaken regulations aimed at contaminated food and pollution, and curb the president’s ability to have U.S. troops participate in United Nations peacekeeping missions. Clinton said he did plan to veto them all unless major changes were made. Then he moved to the heart of the matter, the proposed Republican tax cut. Calling it three times larger than what the government could afford, Clinton told his audience it was “not going to happen. . . . Let’s get over it and talk about what we can pass.”

In sum, the message in Dallas was: Let’s be reasonable . . . and do it my way. Panetta was right. The most partisan Democrats, especially in the House, seizing upon the accommodating tone and not the threats beneath it, did not like Clinton’s speech. Morris was right, too. Clinton at last felt he was setting the terms of debate, with arguments that were both politically and intellectually defensible. He was in fine spirits when he left Dallas.

Accommodation, retreat, triangulation—by whatever name, Clinton’s strategy in the spring of 1995 was necessary politics. He would abandon unfavorable ground now to fight on high ground later. The strategy was based on a paradox—he would grow in strength through moves that would be perceived, at least initially, as admissions of weakness. However shrewd the strategy, it carried a psychic cost, for it required Clinton to reprogram his internal navigation—the way he viewed history and imagined moving in its stream. Clinton worshipped the heroic, larger-than-life leaders whom he had begun reading about as a boy. Yet it was hard to assume a heroic pose while in tactical retreat. This contradiction came into sharp relief a few days after Clinton returned from California, when he traveled to a little house in a wooded grove in Warm Springs, Georgia.

The house was the cottage where Franklin D. Roosevelt had taken respite while recuperating from polio, and the place where he slumped over and died from a cerebral hemorrhage during the closing days of World War II. The date, April 12, was the fiftieth anniversary of the death. With Gingrich, the would-be dismantler of government, laying claim to the FDR legacy, Clinton and Dick Morris both conceived of the occasion as an opportunity to make the case that Clinton was the true heir to the activist tradition. The celebration included Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s granddaughter Anna Roosevelt and Jimmy Carter. The Georgian ex-president called it a “travesty” that Republicans “would claim the legacy of my president.” Clinton struck a wistful tone, rhapsodizing about a president who managed to do something that had so far eluded him—to touch “Americans, tens of millions of them, in a very personal way. They felt they knew him as their friend, their father, their uncle. They felt he was doing all the things he was doing in Washington to help them.” He concluded that Roosevelt would be in favor of precisely what he was doing—preaching the virtues of cooperation, looking for a way to reform welfare, and pushing tax credits for education.

Among the people in the audience that day were several with a better claim than he had to speculate about what FDR would be fighting for in 1995. One of them was John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist who as a young man had served in the New Deal. Another was a Roosevelt biographer, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who later went on to serve in the White House of Clinton’s other hero, John F. Kennedy. As a young man, Clinton had devoured A Thousand Days, Schlesinger’s admiring memoir of the Kennedy years. Probably there was no historian whose high opinion Clinton valued more. But he did not have it. In the next day’s Washington Post, Galbraith was quoted as saying, “FDR enjoyed his enemies. I’d like to see Bill Clinton enjoy them more.” Schlesinger was even more pointed: “I think Clinton very much sees himself in the FDR tradition, all things being equal. Yet FDR loved a good fight; Clinton seems by temperament an accommodator. Accommodation has its uses but it can too easily become appeasement.”

Clinton exploded at the White House the next morning when he read his daily clips. A White House aide called Schlesinger at home to warn of Clinton’s displeasure. A letter in the president’s own hand soon followed. “Those who fought me tooth and nail the last two years know well that I believed in and relished the battles,” he lectured the professor. For Democrats, he added, “Now there are two choices—fight on or pile on. The latter is easier, the former right.” Then Clinton did the most natural thing for him when confronted with a critic. He began his seduction. Soon came an invitation for Schlesinger, Galbraith, and a handful of other prominent 1960s-era liberals, including JFK speechwriter Theodore Sorensen, Robert Kennedy aide William vanden Heuvel, and LBJ protégé Joseph Califano. Some weeks later, over a seafood luncheon, Clinton could not have been more solicitous. “What do you fellows think I should do about Dick Gephardt’s tax proposal?” Clinton asked, referring to a simplification plan the Missouri congressman had released the day before. He lamented how “everything in foreign policy is seen through the prism of Bosnia,” thus obscuring other achievements. He emphasized how opposed he was to drug legalization, against which Califano was an energetic crusader, by invoking family history: “We are all prisoners of our experience, and I know that if drugs had been legalized my brother would be a dead man today.” He held forth in immaculate detail about growing disparities of wealth and all manner of other subjects. But most of all he talked about how he was girding for battle with Republicans and relishing a chance to use his veto pen. The delegation of liberals nodded approvingly. But these senior citizens had encountered enough apple-polishing graduate students in their days to be wary of the president’s patter. “I think all of us were both impressed and disarmed by Clinton’s intelligence, vitality and charm,” Schlesinger wrote that night in his journal. “I also think we all felt that if he acts the way he talked, things would improve—but still wonder about the ‘if.’ ” Lots of people, some of them in Clinton’s employ, were wondering the same thing that spring.

Prime-time news conferences used to be moments of high drama. They became for many a form of national entertainment during the early 1960s, the reporters serving as easy foils for John Kennedy’s wit. The sessions crackled with tension a decade later, as Richard Nixon seethed at his inquisitors over Watergate. Ronald Reagan was intentionally entertaining, with his genial good humor, and unintentionally so, as when he mangled basic facts about his own policies or called on reporters who were not in attendance because his notes said they were.

The night of April 18, 1995, was the moment this particular Washington art form—news conferences as popular diversions, no matter what was happening in the news—came to an end. Of the major broadcast networks, only CBS agreed to air it. For its trouble, the Tiffany network earned ratings less than half those of Frasier on NBC and Home Improvement on ABC.

For reporters, the trick in these sessions was to frame a question in which there could not possibly be a scripted answer ready. A reporter for Aviation Week & Space Technology took the prize by engaging Clinton with a question that was nearly as far in orbit as the technology his magazine covered. He invited the president to discourse on the distinction between “family values” and “moral virtue in the ancient Roman or old Victorian sense” and whether 1996 might offer a chance to debate the nation’s “social compact on the basis of instilling moral virtue rather than family values.” ABC and NBC could hardly have been regretting their decision.

Then Clinton answered a question that he had not exactly been asked. The reporter asked whether Clinton worried about “making sure your voice will be heard” if no one was covering his words. Clinton quickly took the bait. “The president is relevant,” he answered. “The Constitution gives me relevance. The power of our ideas gives me relevance. The record we have built up over the last two years and the things we’re trying to do to implement it give it relevance. The president is relevant here, especially an activist president—and the fact that I’m willing to work with the Republicans.” Clinton’s own team cringed as the words escaped his lips. Plaintively arguing for relevance was hardly the best way to establish it. George Stephanopoulos later surmised what had happened. Clinton had spoken aloud the meditations Morris had been delivering in their private séances. This was a classic politician’s foible, to deliver the stage directions rather than the actor’s lines, as when George H.W. Bush had appeared in a New Hampshire diner to announce, “Message: I care.” This was low tide for Clinton and his office.

The tide came back in the very next day. In the middle of a photo opportunity with the Turkish prime minister, Tansu Ciller, White House press secretary Michael McCurry whispered into Clinton’s ear. CNN was reporting that a bomb had destroyed part of a federal building in Oklahoma City.

The news was sketchy. Stay on top of it, Clinton urged, and escorted Ciller to the adjacent Cabinet Room to continue their talks. It was there that Chief of Staff Leon Panetta slipped Clinton a yellow legal pad on which he had scrawled an alarming note: “Half of federal building in O.K. City blown up—expect heavy casualties. Called Janet Reno—she has dispatched FBI.” A truism of the White House life—the constant, lurking possibility of crisis—was being proven anew. The immediate speculation was that this was an act of Islamic terrorism—plausible enough given the bombing at the World Trade Center garage two years earlier. There was speculation about the possibility of a second bomb, and misleading reports that the phones were down in another federal building in Boston. Retreating to the White House’s basement situation room, Clinton rattled off questions and commands. Have the airports around Oklahoma been shut down to cut off escape? What are the death penalty provisions for such crimes? This was not the flapping, self-absorbed Clinton that aides sometimes saw. “Tight and self-contained” was how speechwriter Jonathan Prince described him in those moments. No one yet was focused on the date—the two-year anniversary of the catastrophic federal assault at David Koresh’s Waco compound. But that earlier event did echo in Clinton’s mind in another way. His avoidance of the public after Waco had been widely judged as an evasion of responsibility. Two years later, Clinton better understood the expectations of his job and the role the presidency played in the national psychology in moments of shock or grief. Prince came in with remarks that had Clinton vowing to catch the “cowards” who had perpetrated the act. The president wanted to go further, and when he appeared late that afternoon in the White House briefing room he called them “evil cowards.” He spoke with a controlled rage. “Let there be no room for doubt, we will find the people who did this,” Clinton said quietly. “When we do, justice will be swift, certain, and severe. These people are killers and they must be treated like killers.” Clinton soon discovered that he knew one of the 168 people, 19 of them children, who perished inside the Alfred P. Murrah building. Alan Whicher, who weeks earlier had transferred off the president’s security detail, had just gone to be second-in-command of the Secret Service office in Oklahoma City.

A blessed stroke of luck that day brought the capture of Timothy McVeigh, who was pulled over about sixty miles north of Oklahoma City for driving a car with no license plates. He went to jail on a firearms charge, and was about an hour away from being released when authorities noticed his resemblance to the “John Doe #1” who had been seen near the bombing. This break led to the arrest of fellow perpetrators Terry Lynn Nichols and his brother James. It led also to the warped explanation for this crime. The men were part of a right-wing militia movement whose members loathed the federal government and for whom the Waco tragedy was a bitter grievance. McVeigh and the Nichols brothers perversely regarded themselves as avengers. On Sunday, four days after the crime, Clinton traveled to Oklahoma City to appear before a packed auditorium of eighteen thousand. Citing a biblical verse, he said, “Those who trouble their own house will inherit the wind.” His sermon underscored how the explosion had transformed Clinton’s standing. It was the nature of the American system, where the president is both the administrator of government, like a prime minister, and in a more mystical sense the leader of the people. Clinton, whose emotions were the same as those of citizens everywhere, was helping the nation cope. And even the part of the nation that deplored Clinton in other contexts seemed to appreciate it. The weekend after the bombing, a poll by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal found 84 percent of Americans responding approvingly to Clinton’s handling of the attack at Oklahoma City.

Sensing the opening, Clinton and Dick Morris methodically moved to take political advantage of the fact that the president was for the moment being perceived as above politics. That Sunday on 60 Minutes (the last time he had been on the show was in 1992 to confess causing “pain in his marriage”) Clinton proposed a package of new laws to give the government more power to investigate and prosecute terrorists. In May, he went to Michigan State University to denounce militias. “There is nothing patriotic about hating your country, or pretending that you can love your country but despise your government,” he bristled. “How dare you suggest that we, in the freest nation on earth, live in tyranny?”

White House aides became indignant when reporters asked if the president was trying to reap political gain from the tragedy. But Morris had no compunction about doing exactly that. Just a week after the bombing, his agenda for Clinton’s weekly political meeting on April 27 plotted how to use Oklahoma City to best advantage. “A. Temporary gain: boost in ratings,” Morris wrote in the strategy paper. “B. More permanent gain: Improvements in character/personality attributes—remedies weakness, incompetence, ineffectiveness found in recent poll. C. Permanent possible gain: sets up Extremist Issue vs. Republicans.” The president was relevant again.