Chapter Nineteen

FUNK

As the summer of 1995 came to a close, Clinton had placed huge bets on the two paramount issues—Bosnia abroad, the budget at home—then shadowing his presidency. By September, these twin dramas were on paths toward climax. On Bosnia, Clinton’s gamble was that a combination of force and diplomacy could produce a settlement ending the war, without dragging the administration into an election year quagmire in the Balkans. On the budget, his gamble was that he had positioned himself to force Republicans to strike an honorable bargain with him, or, failing that, to ensure that they bore the brunt of public blame if negotiations failed and a government shutdown ensued. The autumn promised to be an extremely anxious season.

One September day, following a two-day sprint to California and Colorado, the president ambled back to the press cabin on Air Force One. There was a rotating pool of reporters always aboard in a special section at the far rear of the presidential plane. Occasionally, perhaps every tenth flight or so, Clinton would pop his head in. Usually he stayed for only a few moments. This time, though, he was in a mood to talk. Dressed in blue jeans and a denim work shirt, the president held forth for the better part of an hour. He talked about trivial subjects, like his politician’s tricks for staying alert during long days on the road (“drink lots and lots and lots of water”) or the right way to jog (“it depends on breathing”). He talked about consequential subjects, such as welfare reform (where he related how he had been pleading with Republican Bob Dole to help him strike a deal), education reform (including his enthusiasm for encouraging “entrepreneurialism” in the public schools through experimental “charter schools”), as well as the relationship between wage stagnation and social unrest (a phenomenon, he claimed, that he began discussing “at least eight or nine years ago, before I heard anyone else talking about it”). The president ruminated on the breakdown of journalism, in which traditional news was now competing with entertainment-driven “near news,” rather like the “near beer” that people drank “when we were kids.” (“There is a danger that too much stuff cramming in on people’s lives is just as bad for them as too little in terms of the ability to understand, to comprehend.”) He offered his explanation why many voters did not credit him or his achievements, a phenomenon he attributed to his early failures to communicate a larger vision. (“The first two years, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. . . . A lot of it required the Congress to go along. And I would have been better served if maybe we had done—even if we had done just slightly less, if people understood the big picture more.”)

Here was the Clinton mind in full flight. He was facile and entertaining, self-absorbed and self-justifying, undeniably impressive. But there was peril in talking like this in the rear cabin of Air Force One. Despite the informal setting, the president was on the record. Under the rules of the press pool, the reporters he was chatting with had an obligation to share the quotes with dozens of other colleagues flying behind on a chartered news media plane.

Michael McCurry, the White House press secretary, thought it was useful for reporters to see the president in these kinds of settings, which showed him in a more authentic and sympathetic light. McCurry also knew it was courting trouble to let such sessions go on too long. “Time out,” he interrupted at one point, gesturing to the reporters. “This is good food for thought, but these guys need some real food, too.”

Unwisely, Clinton ignored him. Instead, he plunged into an analysis of the surly electorate, including his observation that many citizens were left insecure by rapid economic and technological change, making them “feel like they’re lost in the fun house.” He said he was “trying to get people to get out of their funk.”

“Funk.” In an hour’s worth of words, this was the one that would cause him trouble. “Funk” sounded a bit as if Clinton thought the country was facing “malaise.” “Malaise” was the word people associated with the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter, who in 1979 had warned that the nation faced a “crisis of confidence . . . a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.”

Clinton’s declaration of funk rang panicked alarms in his political team. For months, Dick Morris, as well as pollsters Mark Penn and Doug Schoen, had been urging Clinton to purge his rhetoric of any downbeat tones. Every public event, they argued, should be aimed at conveying a sense of national optimism, highlighting an activist president meeting the nation’s challenges with confidence. This preference for happy talk caused considerable dismay inside administration councils. More progressive voices, such as Robert Reich, thought it was vital to emphasize the continuing problems of the economy and society. How else to build a genuine national consensus for action? The labor secretary and his like-minded colleagues were reflecting a brooding streak—an impulse for national criticism and contrition—that ran deep in the liberal tradition. Brooding, however, did not poll well with swing voters. So Clinton was forced to recant several days later, acknowledging that ” ‘funk’ was a poor choice of words,” and insisting that what he meant to say was that the public mood had been in the dumps the previous fall—when voters rashly lurched into Newt Gingrich’s embrace—but now he believed voters were feeling just as up as he was. The uproar and its absurd aftermath soon passed, though the episode suggested an answer to those who wondered why politicians do not just be themselves and speak more spontaneously.

Clinton’s perception of the funkish public mood that autumn was in truth not so far off. The giddy boomtown spirit later associated with the 1990s did not arrive until the decade’s second half. In any event, he had accurately described his own mood. Several of the topics leaving Clinton uneasy that autumn had a common theme: the vexing divisions between black and white America. His deft treatment of the affirmative action issue that summer had addressed only one of several open sores along America’s color line in 1995.

This was the year of the O. J. Simpson frenzy—or, rather, the culmination of a frenzy that had begun sixteen months earlier when the former football star’s ex-wife and a young male friend of hers were brutally beaten and stabbed to death outside her Los Angeles home. “The Trial of the Century” was an international spectacle of lurid exposures, angry debate, and saturating twenty-four-hour news coverage. Everyone had an opinion about this media paroxysm, which vividly anticipated a paroxysm that lay ahead in the president’s own future. Clinton was no exception. Like most white Americans, he believed the evidence overwhelmingly proved Simpson guilty of the murders. As president, however, he had special reason to fear the toxic passions the case had released. Many blacks believed Simpson had been framed, according to polls, and an overwhelming majority of African-Americans believed the abuses and procedural lapses committed by Los Angeles police justified a not-guilty verdict. Black neighborhoods of Los Angeles had erupted in violence in 1992 when city police officers were acquitted in the Rodney King beating case. These riots became a metaphor for a country unraveling, and were another count in Clinton’s indictment of George Bush’s leadership. On the other hand, an acquittal might fuel white backlash, stoking the Middle American grievances that Newt Gingrich had exploited so effectively a year earlier. As a politician and a citizen, Clinton was deeply fearful of the approaching verdict.

Clinton actually knew the former football star slightly. In March 1994, just three months before the murders, he and Simpson had shared a round of golf while the president was vacationing in San Diego. This coincidence, though inconsequential, highlighted an aspect of Clinton’s new life in the presidency. As most presidents do, he moved now in a world of wealth and celebrity in which he was usually only one or two degrees of separation from most big stories in the news. The famous faces populating People magazine, or Fortune, or the supermarket tabloids, were often as not people the Clintons knew personally.

The Simpson jury reached its verdict on October 2, but Judge Lance Ito delayed announcement of the decision until the next day, in part to give authorities time to prepare for possible riots. As with other Americans, guessing the verdict became a macabre parlor game among the president’s staff. George Stephanopoulos and Leon Panetta both predicted guilty. Dick Morris, cleaving as ever to his polls, correctly surmised that the black members of the jury would never vote to convict. On October 3, however, he did sit with a group of his staff in the office of presidential secretary Betty Currie for the televised announcement of the verdict. Clinton was listening, but worked away at a crossword puzzle rather than looking at the screen. He said nothing, save for a single word: “Shit.” Then he lowered his head and rubbed his palms into his eyes. His public reaction was an austere written statement, read by McCurry, in which he said “our system of justice requires respect” for a jury’s verdict. Within a day or two, the public moved on with surprising alacrity, and it became apparent that the backlash Clinton feared was not coming. This seemed in the nature of the new media frenzies, in which controversies that one moment seemed all-consuming quickly faded into distant and almost hallucinatory memories.

There was another prominent African-American who was contributing to the unsettled mood around the White House that autumn. Colin Powell had left two years earlier as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. In retirement, he had remained one of the most esteemed figures in national life. For a season, this admiration for Powell in Washington and among the general public transformed into Powell fever: a frenzy of publicity for Powell’s just-released memoir and speculation about whether the soldier would follow the path of Dwight D. Eisenhower and seek the presidency. The mania for Powell was driving Clinton to distraction.

The interest in Powell was an implicit rebuke of the incumbent. It was all the more maddening for Clinton because he, too, generally respected Powell, even as he thought his reputation was overblown. He was irritated that Powell had not been held accountable for what Clinton felt was his negligence in the Somalia intervention and indifference to the Bosnia crisis. In addition, Powell was vexing for Clinton at several other levels. There was envy: Powell was in many ways what Clinton wished to be—a national unifier, respected across racial and partisan divides. There was frustration: Clinton had tried hard to win him over with public praise and private offers to join the cabinet. Powell politely turned the offers down and stayed coolly outside Clinton’s psychic reach. Above all, there was fear: Powell’s popularity made him perhaps the most formidable opponent to Clinton if he chose to seek the presidency as a Republican. Clinton was appalled at what seemed to be the patty-cake treatment given to Powell by the same news media that was hazing the president daily. “They’re giving him such a free ride, it’s ridiculous,” he complained to Morris. “He comes on TV like a saint, and those white liberal guilty reporters are so awestruck that they won’t ask him a damn question.”

The consultant felt sure Powell would not run. The retired general could not win the election as an independent, the data showed. He could win as a Republican, but there was no chance Republican primary voters would back someone with Powell’s liberal social views on abortion and affirmative action. Relax, Morris told a disbelieving Clinton, it’ll never happen. The consultant’s polls were right. On November 8, Powell did indeed hold a news conference to answer two mysteries: His party affiliation, never announced before, was Republican, and he would not be running for president in 1996. There was one less thing to worry about—welcome news when Clinton’s list of worries needed editing.

One of the peculiarities of the Clinton years was that the president was widely regarded by his critics as an evasive man, when the reality was that he was far more often an exceptionally transparent man—sometimes to his detriment. As the “funk” comment on Air Force One showed, if a thought was on the president’s mind, it was not likely to remain unspoken. Reporters soon learned that the best way to know what Clinton thought was to listen, not just to his words during the workday, but especially to the ones that came after deadlines, when he spoke at night without prepared remarks to political supporters.

On October 17, Clinton made an appearance that helped illuminate how he could be perceived as both disingenuous and guileless at the very same time. He was in Houston for an evening fund-raiser with well-heeled Democrats. Confident that no news was likely to be made, several reporters adjourned for an evening of Tex-Mex, returning to the filing center just in time for Clinton’s remarks. The president was plainly in a loose mood. He noted how conservatives had “cut us a new one” in the 1994 elections by distorting his stance on gun control.

Then Clinton turned to another delicate subject, taxes. He knew, he said, that there were “people in this room still mad at me because you think I raised your taxes too much. It might surprise you to know that I think I raised them too much, too.”

That few reporters—save for an alert correspondent with the Reuters news service—immediately seized on this comment was a testament to Clinton’s style of argument. The balm of his language and demeanor could make startling assertions seem entirely reasonable. His claim about taxes did have a certain logic. If Republicans had joined him in a good-faith negotiation on the budget in 1993—instead of cleaving to a blanket pledge to vote against any measure with any tax increases—they could have shifted the overall balance of tax increases and spending cuts, and Clinton would have had more leverage in dealing with his own party, since he would not have needed to cling desperately to every Democratic vote to win passage. This was fair enough. But the president’s implication that he had been forced to support higher taxes by his liberal caucus was deeply misleading. He had been the one who lobbied hard for the tax increases in the plan and who pushed many reluctant members of his own party to support the measure.

The next day brought a general uproar. Democratic members of Congress believed the president was abandoning his party as well as the most impressive achievement in his own record. As the anger grew, the White House staff believed the only means of escape was obvious: Clinton needed to recant his remarks and apologize. The prospect made him indignant. Clinton knew what he had intended to say in the Houston ballroom, which was criticism of the Republicans, not of his own party. Everyone in the room knew what he meant. He felt sure the reporters, too, knew what he meant, and were only distorting those comments now to help feed an uproar. The fuss seemed to him a perfect distillation of the literalism and pettiness of modern journalism.

Stephanopoulos, economic aide Gene Sperling, and deputy chief of staff Erskine Bowles collared Clinton back in Washington before he departed for an evening event. As a rule, Clinton hated confessing error—never more so than when he did not feel genuine contrition. In this case, his aides wanted him to issue an apology for an episode in which he believed he was the aggrieved party. He glared at Sperling and scoffed: “Everybody understood what I meant. Everybody who was there understood what I meant.”

Sperling, holding his ground admirably, responded, “Sir, it’s not just the media. It’s Democrats who think we are not standing by our own plan.”

Clinton was still not buying. “You are saying if I say something, and everyone understood what I mean and some reporter misconstrues it, then I ought to clarify it?”

That’s exactly right, Sperling responded. Clinton pivoted and stormed off to his evening event. Then he called from his car phone and gave Sperling and Stephanopoulos permission to put out a retraction. The episode was another odd blip during a season of oddities.

Clinton was in need of some comic relief. It was a bit odd, certainly, that he would find it in the person of the president of Russia. Nearly fifty years of Cold War had yielded few jolly moments between Moscow and Washington. Indeed, even now, the Cold War over, many on Clinton’s foreign policy team did not find much amusing about President Boris Yeltsin and his increasingly erratic ways.

Clinton, however, had made an early and emphatic judgment that this former Communist Party operative, a man who had once helped put down a coup attempt by staring down a tank, was the coarse but authentic voice of a nascent Russian democracy. Clinton had a vast preference for people in the arena of public life—politicians who ran for office, leaders who took risks on behalf of their people—over the commentators and analysts and careerists who spent their time critiquing leaders and policies. He thought Boris Yeltsin, as a man of action and passion, was deserving of respect. Clinton approached Yeltsin with an essential human sympathy that sometimes wavered but never lapsed during the years the Russian was in power.

That sympathy would be tested on October 23, when Clinton and Yeltsin flew by helicopter from Manhattan (where a roster of 140 world leaders was on hand for a United Nations summit) up the Hudson Valley before setting down on a magnificent estate in Dutchess County. Clinton, once again, was back at Hyde Park, invoking the memory of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The setting had a special significance on this occasion. Yeltsin, like many Russians, shared Clinton’s admiration for Roosevelt, and the administration’s Russia experts thought a reminder of the World War II alliance between Moscow and Washington might be well timed to help spur Yeltsin’s support on a contemporary problem. If the imminent start of Bosnian peace talks ended in an agreement, the administration wanted Russian troops on the ground to help enforce the peace, particularly among Serb populations with a historic affinity with Russia. At the same time, it was imperative that these Russian troops fit within a NATO command structure, and not be given exclusive authority over their own sector of Bosnia. Russian troops under their own command, forming a separate power force in this volatile situation, were unthinkable to American policymakers. At the same time, it was nearly unthinkable for the once proud Russian superpower to now be under the command of an American general. The diplomatic trick for Clinton was to persuade the Russian leader of his indispensability while gently coaxing him to accept a subordinate role. Yeltsin, for his part, had to acknowledge the obvious fact of American dominance in the Bosnia matter, while preserving enough dignity and leverage in the process that the hard-line nationalists in his own government would not accuse him of weakness or surrender.

The two began by sitting on the lawn overlooking the Hudson, in the same bentwood chairs on which Roosevelt and Churchill had sat during World War II. Easing into the day, Clinton showed his visitor the typed memo, complete with handwritten corrections, that FDR had sent Stalin, notifying him of the date of the Allied invasion of Europe in 1944. The two men gazed at a life-size bronze statue of FDR—sculpted, Clinton was quick to point out, by a Russian artist. “In such a place,” Yeltsin enthused of their grand setting, “there won’t be any problems that we won’t be able to solve!”

Clinton began the serious talks with an appeal to Yeltsin’s vanity, which also revealed a bit about his own. He played to their shared interests as two powerful leaders, spiced with a dash of their shared grievances. Their aim, he said, should be to “prove the pundits wrong. They want to write about a big blowup. Let’s disappoint them.”

The two made rapid progress. Yeltsin assured Clinton he would instruct his defense minister, Pavel Grachev, to strike a deal with William Perry in which Russian support troops would operate under a command structure with an American general at the top. Through some linguistic legerdemain, the official line would remain that Russians would not be under NATO command, even though the same American general would also be in charge of the NATO force.

If Clinton’s mix of blandishments and rhetorical bridge-building was characteristic of his approach to a delicate negotiation, so too was the Russian leader’s response. Yeltsin started drinking, heavily. Served with luncheon was a delightful white wine from, appropriately, California’s Russian River. Yeltsin quickly gulped down three glasses, followed at a less urgent but steady pace by several more. This had a lubricating effect on the agreement between Clinton and Yeltsin over a treaty governing the position of Russian forces on the country’s western border, which before the drinks had been a contentious issue. Then dessert wine was served. Too sweet, Yeltsin declared. Strobe Talbott was sent in search of brandy, but he came back (by his own choice) empty-handed.

The Russian leader was thoroughly stewed when it came time to face reporters at a news conference at the outdoor patio. He scowled at them, then noted sourly how he had read the predictions that his session with Clinton would be a disaster. “Now,” he said, “for the first time, I can tell you that you’re a disaster!”

One wonders how often Clinton might have fantasized about making such a pronouncement. Hearing Yeltsin’s insult, the president began howling with laughter, literally throwing his head back and shaking with delight. “Make sure you get the attribution right,” he said between laughs. Talbott, disgusted by Yeltsin’s inebriation and concerned that the day was being reduced to a circus, later speculated that Clinton was exaggerating his reaction, to take the edge off an awkward moment and perhaps divert attention from Yeltsin’s drunken condition. If so, it was a convincing performance, for Clinton was literally tearing up with laughter and was unable to resume speaking for several moments. More likely, Yeltsin’s clownishness offered a break from burdens that had been weighing anxiously on Clinton all year.

The bemused appreciation Clinton had for Yeltsin was one thing. For another leader, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, Clinton reserved something much more profound. His feelings were respect bordering on adulation. Rabin, a retired general, had taken extraordinary risks for his country’s future in war. Now, in signing the Oslo accord and pledging to craft a civil coexistence with the Palestinians, he was taking extraordinary risks for a future of peace. Clinton loved citing Rabin’s comment at the time of his dramatic handshake with Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn two years earlier: “You don’t make peace with your friends. You make peace with your enemies.” Clinton placed Rabin in an elite group, which included South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, of leaders of truly historic scale. More than one of Clinton’s advisers observed that the president seemed to regard the gruff Israeli as something of a father figure.

So it was with special delight that Clinton welcomed Rabin in Washington on October 26, and attended a ceremony at the State Department’s majestic Ben Franklin Room at which Rabin presented Clinton with the United Jewish Appeal’s Isaiah Award. The two men, friends now, met for thirty minutes before going onstage. Rabin lamented that he did not know the event he was to attend was black tie; he was not wearing a tuxedo. That is when Stephen Goodin, who the year before had become Clinton’s personal assistant (the second in his string of “butt boys”), came to the rescue. He gave his bow tie to Rabin; it was frayed and a little tight, so Clinton himself helped the older man adjust the tie and trim the edges with a pair of scissors.

Clinton never saw Rabin again. Nine days later, on Saturday, November 4, the president was watching a college football game in the White House residence when National Security Adviser Tony Lake called with the news. Rabin had been shot by a fanatic right-wing Israeli nationalist who was bitterly opposed to the concessions the prime minister was making for peace. Clinton rushed to the Oval Office. A little later, the word came that Rabin’s wounds were fatal. Clinton was as stricken as subordinates had ever seen him. Warren Christopher, who was with Clinton as he heard news of the death, recalled that the president fell perfectly quiet and still “for a long minute, and his silence made me feel almost as if I were inside his mind. . . . In his silence, I think the president was reflecting on his own mortality, contemplating what lay ahead for him and perhaps thinking of the price he himself had committed to pay for assuming leadership of our country.” Returning from his reverie, Clinton announced quietly that he intended to go to Rabin’s funeral.