Chapter Twenty-five

THE QUIET YEAR

As Bill Clinton embarked on a second term, his White House was run by a man who professed that he really wanted to be someplace else. Erskine B. Bowles told everyone who asked and even those who didn’t that he planned to return as soon as he could to his native North Carolina. A Charlotte investment banker and a millionaire many times over from his business dealings as well as the family fortune into which he married, Bowles fairly boasted of his indifference to capital customs. “I’m a creature of the private sector,” he liked to say. “It’s my natural habitat.” On the wall of his office was a framed New Yorker cartoon of a fellow who had been sent to hell to roast in eternity. “On the other hand,” the character says, “it’s great to be out of Washington.” These protests were partly genuine, partly performance. Bowles did indeed dislike partisan warfare and modern Washington’s obsession with scandal. Even so, in a city of cynics, it was natural to suspect that Bowles’s anti-political pose was itself a political contrivance. Colleagues grew a bit weary of his talk about the awesome burden he was carrying by accepting the president’s offer to fill what was typically regarded as one of Washington’s most coveted jobs.

To the White House, he brought an obsession with organizational process. Unlike Panetta, who wanted in on anything important, Bowles was happy to delegate most things. He was fluent in management jargon, often invoking “goals, objectives, and timelines.” To the negotiations with Congress, Bowles likewise brought his business values. He wanted to establish a “common buy-in to the goal,” and build a “framework to get to yes.”

But his real stock was his relationship with the president. They had not known each other long, but their bond was nearly fraternal. Bowles met Clinton in 1992, when the candidate went to North Carolina for a fund-raiser. They began talking about the problems of Bowles’s eldest son, who suffered from juvenile diabetes. Bowles vented his frustration about the Bush administration’s ban on using fetal tissue (obtained during abortions) for research on diabetes cures. Clinton listened raptly. Later, as president, Clinton overturned the ban by executive order and sent Bowles the pen he used to sign it. In that gesture, a powerful friendship was struck. Bowles told Clinton he was ready to go to Washington and do any job Clinton wanted. First it was as administrator of the Small Business Administration, then later as deputy chief of staff. Within the first months after Bowles’s arrival in late 1994, it was clear he had a sway with the president far beyond his official duties. Panetta might have been the chief of staff, but it was Bowles who spent the long hours chatting with Clinton on the golf course. The president was clearly entranced, seeking his comments on all manner of questions about politics, policy, and the operation of the White House. More than once, Clinton told Bowles he thought of him as the kind of brother he always wished he had.

In part it was the similarities that explained the attraction. Bowles and Clinton were separated by just a year in age, both progressive-minded sons of the New South. Both men were faces of the prosperity and national achievement that was possible once the region became liberated from its old hateful obsessions. It was surely the differences, however, that provided more fuel for the friendship. The Clintons had organized their lives around politics, not money, yet they were fascinated with people who had made money and understood it, especially when these people were not conservative Republicans. Clinton knew he was just as smart as and usually more experienced than almost any political operative giving an opinion. But an investment banker like Bowles—now, there was someone worth listening to.

Bowles was fascinated by the performer in Clinton. “He had more personal magnetism than anybody I’d known in my life,” he recalled later. He also believed that Clinton had taken bum raps in his first term because of his failure to implement some basic rules. “I think he’s the best decision maker I ever saw,” Bowles once said. “He could analyze all the factors, all the risks and opportunities, and weigh them brilliantly.” All he needed was a way to get the information before him in an orderly form, and a process for evaluating it so that he would not be influenced by the last old friend whom he happened to talk to on the phone. Establishing such a process was a natural for Bowles.

The new staff chief was an emblematic figure for a presidency settling in 1997 into a kind of mature middle age. The helter-skelter of the early years, in which meetings might start at 11 p.m. and drag past midnight, was over. So too, it seemed, was the contest for Clinton’s soul. There were no more pitched battles to define the ideological direction of the Clinton presidency. The Gingrich challenge of 1995 and 1996, and Clinton’s survival of it, had set the president securely on a centrist course from which he had no interest in deviating. Though Washington remained divided, with a Democrat in the White House and Republicans still in control of Congress, Clinton correctly believed that he had emerged from the election with the upper hand. The continuing strength of the economy validated the bold and politically costly plan he had pushed to passage in 1993. As the president declared a few days before the inaugural, he proposed to use his position of strength to bring the unresolved battles of 1995 and 1996 to a close on his terms. The fact that Republicans had retained a hold, however weak, on Congress was seen as a good thing. “Gingrich’s victory can be the Republican Party’s undoing,” pollster Mark Penn wrote in his weekly memo to Clinton. “On the one hand, the need for Gingrich to rehabilitate his image may drive him to agree to a balanced budget and other legislation, giving us a more workable Congress. On the other hand [voter] dislike of Gingrich provides the 1998 target.”

When he arrived in Washington, Bowles’s mandate from Clinton was to launch negotiations with the Republican majority and strike a comprehensive budget deal. Like Bentsen and the other deficit hawks of the first term, the new chief of staff regarded Washington’s inability to balance its books and find sensible compromises as an embarrassment to democracy—the kind of failure that would never be tolerated in the business world.

Bowles knew one thing it would take to close a deal—keeping Clinton out of the negotiations. This was a dramatic change from the pattern of 1995 and 1996, when Clinton and Gore were often dealing face-to-face with Gingrich. “Clinton will say yes to anyone,” Bowles told colleagues.

The chief of staff firmly told his boss that he would do the negotiating. The president would give him the goals and then step away. “If they call you, you can’t take their calls,” Bowles warned. “Tell me what you want and we’ll find a deal. But if I say yes, it’s got to mean ‘yes,’ not ‘yes, but I’ve got to talk to the president.’ ” Bowles rarely saw the temper fits that others told him were so common with Clinton. On the few occasions he did, his response was noteworthy. One sour morning Clinton dressed down two of Bowles’s deputies in the chief of staff’s presence. Taken aback, Bowles asked his aides to leave the Oval Office, then served notice to the president: “If you ever do that again, I’ll leave.”

On the Republican side, Gingrich, for his own reasons, had decided to absent himself from day-to-day talks over the budget. Thus began a months-long exercise in Washington shuttle diplomacy. Bowles and his White House team, including budget director Franklin Raines, economic adviser Gene Sperling, and congressional liaison John Hilley, were traveling up to Capitol Hill daily to square off with their GOP counterparts, including Congressman John Kasich of Ohio and Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico. These talks were everything that the 1995 negotiations were not. It was far from a game of patty-cake—frustrations and tempers flared regularly—but there was an essential respect between the two sides that had been missing before. There was also an understanding that differences were going to be split—no “train wrecks” this time.

For once, Washington was working the way most Americans said they wanted it to work, valuing achievement over ideological purity. Many congressional Democrats liked this scarcely better than the GOP fire-breathers did. Here, too, Bowles served a purpose—as lightning rod for thunderbolts that otherwise might have hit Clinton. The chief of staff was disliked by partisan Democrats, especially in the House, where there was widespread suspicion that Clinton might sell out the party in his haste for a deal. The regular sessions in which Bowles would brief the party caucus became brutal affairs, with legislators whacking the White House ambassador like a piñata. Once, David Obey, an irascible Wisconsin liberal, flayed him so aggressively that the mild-mannered Bowles finally struck back in his own defense: “I’m a pretty damn good Democrat, too!”

The negotiation-by-proxy strategy worked. When Bowles called to say that the two sides had finally reached a deal, Clinton was on a Las Vegas golf course playing a round with some governors and basketball star Michael Jordan. The president hit par the next three holes. “If you heard what I just heard, you’d be playing like that, too,” he beamed. Back in Washington on August 5, the grand bargain that had eluded Clinton and his antagonists for two years was finally signed into law at a ritual ceremony in the White House Rose Garden. An unknowing observer would scarcely have guessed at the toxic feelings flowing between Clinton and the Republicans—or that these streams would flow again within months. Gingrich lavished praise on Clinton for his willingness to “reach out” to Republicans; Clinton hailed Washington’s new spirit of cooperation. The event showed how comfortably Clinton had trimmed his sails from the ambitious dream days of his early presidency. He had bent to Republican demands that he cut taxes and trim the growth of Medicare spending. In return, he won gains that earlier he and Hillary Clinton would have dismissed as trifling half measures. Nearly 40 percent of House Democrats, including minority leader Richard Gephardt, refused to vote for the deal. (Many conservative Republicans were similarly aggrieved, believing Gingrich had acquiesced to too few tax cuts.) Judged on its own terms, however, rather than against the fantasies of 1993, the deal Clinton had struck was impressive. He was relearning lessons he had first encountered fifteen years earlier, following his defeat and comeback in Arkansas: Scrappy, incremental victories were better than noble defeats.

The moment also offered a high plateau from which to observe all that lay behind. The gamble Clinton took four years earlier that deficit reduction would spur the economy was paying off extravagantly. Annual growth in 1997 was 8.2 percent. The tax revenue this growth produced was erasing the deficit far faster than anyone had projected—it was $22 billion in 1997, compared to $290 billion when Clinton took office. The deficit would be gone entirely by the first week of 1998—a milestone the New York Times called “the fiscal equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall.” Republicans, of course, were not giving Clinton credit for this. Nor were they advertising their own bogus 1993 predictions of economic doom if Clinton’s program passed. Surely few in the GOP’s own business constituency yearned to turn back the clock and try a different course. The 1993 package, passed with no Republican support, and this 1997 agreement, a model of bipartisan comity, had left the government on far sounder footing. Clinton deserved credit for both.

With Bowles running the White House staff and negotiations with Congress, the hope was that Clinton would be liberated to cast his gaze on the large issues facing America on the brink of a new century. During the re-election campaign, part of his strategy was to speak frequently on “values issues”—carefully selected and intensively polled—such as the moral content of television and film entertainment and the desirability of school uniforms. What had begun as a campaign stunt had now grown into something more ambitious: the presidency of exhortation. It was based on Clinton’s belief that many of the nation’s most profound challenges had little to do with bills pending in Congress. Instead, they were issues of national character and values. A president’s greatest influence could be as moral tutor, so the theory went, using his White House pulpit to lead a searching national conversation.

The presidency of exhortation was engaged on numerous fronts. At the beginning of 1997, Clinton’s aides put out word that he would be canvassing the nation to lobby state legislatures, urging them to participate in national standards tests for schoolchildren. Rather than engage the controversy over whether education was properly a national or local responsibility, Clinton said he was happy to let the tests be voluntary and leave the rest to moral suasion. “I want to create a climate in which no one can say no,” he told Michigan legislators in Lansing, “in which it is voluntary but you are ashamed if you don’t give your kids the chance to do this.” On a similar theme, Clinton proselytized on behalf of community volunteerism. In April, he and Gore appeared with retired general Colin Powell at a “summit” in Philadelphia, where Clinton donned jeans and picked up a roller to paint over graffiti along the city’s blighted Germantown Avenue. After having declared the year before that the era of big government was over, Clinton pledged here to usher in a new (and infelicitously phrased) “era of big citizenship.”

Most of all, the presidency of exhortation was to concentrate on America’s original sin, racial prejudice. The plan was for the president to lead a sustained year-long campaign of discussion, travel, study, and finally recommendations about the challenges of diversity. The White House called it “the race initiative.” Clinton liked to note its unprecedented nature. Always before, such efforts had been prompted by crisis—angry protests, burning cities—but he was launching an effort in a time of relative racial quiet. “This is a huge deal,” he explained one night to a group of Democratic contributors. “We can’t hold America together and we can’t maintain our position of moral leadership to be for peace in a world that is coming apart around racial, ethnic, tribal, and religious differences unless we can deal with this. And we need to start now, before we have to figure out what we’re going to do when things start to fray.” Here, in plainspoken language, was a true statement of Clinton’s core beliefs.

The race initiative did have some moments of high symbolism. In May, Clinton issued a formal apology on behalf of the nation for the federal government’s sponsorship of the egregious “Tuskegee experiment,” in which black men were allowed to suffer from advanced syphilis so that scientists could study the effects of untreated disease. In September, Clinton returned to his home state for an anniversary ceremony honoring the Little Rock Nine, the black students assigned to Central High School, where the gaze of a reproachful world had been fixed forty years earlier, when Governor Orval Faubus defied an integration order and forced a reluctant President Eisenhower to send in the National Guard.

Such events had their value. Increasingly, however, they served only as reminders of how the race initiative hurtled off into abstraction and substantive irrelevance. The effort had bogged down earlier on organizational issues: Should the campaign focus on race alone or include such questions as treatment of gays and the physically disabled? (Clinton eventually settled on a narrower focus.) Should the president appoint a high-profile body like the Kerner Commission of the 1960s to issue a report to the nation? (He chose instead a lower-profile advisory board, whose recommendations were made directly to him.) These logistical tussles only skirted the larger problem: What was Clinton really trying to achieve? By the end of 1997, even before the nation was introduced to the charms of Monica Lewinsky and public attention moved to other subjects, the race initiative was a dawdling and aimless exercise that was drawing criticism even from participants on Clinton’s advisory board.

The presidency of exhortation had lost its voice elsewhere as well. After promising to visit state legislatures across the nation, Clinton ended up speaking to just three, and his campaign for educational standards trailed off. Little more was heard about volunteerism. What was the problem? One was the expectations the nation had for him. His approval ratings were high, registering regularly in the upper 60 percent range; but his personal ratings were low, usually scoring in the low 40s. A solid majority of Americans, prosperous and satisfied, had come to a utilitarian view of their president. His job was to run the government and keep watch on the Republicans, who in turn were to keep watch on him. For all the noble purposes Clinton envisioned for himself, moral tutor was not one the public bought. These placid times ill suited his personal and political strengths. A curious passivity had settled upon his presidency by late 1997. For once, he was in flat water. Clinton’s essential personality was intact—he was still a vexing mix of enthusiasm and grievance—but the highs and lows were both more subdued. Time magazine noted disapprovingly how he was spending more and more time on the golf course. The whole presidency had grown just a bit thick around the middle. The chaos and ineptitude of the early days had been replaced by steady competence and clear lines on Bowles’s organizational chart. But it was almost as if order had come at a psychic cost for Clinton: He needed a crisis to engage at the highest level. If so, he would not have to wait long. There were several in the offing.