Chapter Thirty-three

SURVIVOR

Life went on. Much of the time, in fact, it went on like normal, at least by outward appearance. The president would show up in the Rose Garden to talk about his “Patients’ Bill of Rights” for consumers of health maintenance organizations. He would be smiling cheerfully at a party on the South Lawn to salute U.S. athletes who had competed in the previous winter’s Olympic Games. In public, there was no nod to the reality that his own top aides were cycling steadily through the federal courthouse twelve blocks away to testify to Kenneth Starr’s grand jury, or that he himself often spent several hours a day huddled with attorneys.

Foreign policy, in particular, rolled on, seemingly unshaken by the potholes of scandal. There were two preoccupying issues on Clinton’s overseas agenda in 1998. One of them was Iraq, where the dictator Saddam Hussein had persistently defied U.S. demands that he allow United Nations inspectors access to search for weapons. This was a requirement that had been imposed on him by the world after the Persian Gulf War, and that winter Clinton described the standoff with Saddam in dire terms: “What if he fails to comply, and we fail to act, or we take some ambiguous third route which gives him yet more opportunities to develop this program of weapons of mass destruction? Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And someday, some way, I guarantee you, he’ll use the arsenal.”

For the next several months, a military confrontation with Iraq looked to be inevitable.

Clinton was far more hopeful about the year’s other top foreign priority. In late June, he made his first presidential trip to China. The visit was a milestone in Clinton’s long effort to coax a more constructive relationship with China, which had made laudable steps toward a market economy but remained an old-style dictatorship when it came to human rights. As part of the visit, Chinese president Jiang Zemin insisted that Clinton submit to the traditional arrival ceremony for foreign visitors at Tiananmen Square, where authorities nine years earlier had slaughtered pro-democracy student protestors. Clinton accepted this indignity in pursuit of his larger goal, which was to convince the Chinese that their own interests were emphatically on the side of internal reform and cooperation with the external world. There were signs of progress, including a remarkable visit to Beijing University, in which the visiting president parried questions from students and urged them to make “common cause” with Americans. He ended the trip in Hong Kong with a valentine for Jiang, calling him a man of “vision and imagination and courage” who will “put China on the right side of history”—an appraisal that was a bit more effusive than Clinton’s own China experts thought wise. Still, the adrenaline-fueled man striding across China that week certainly did not look like someone burdened by doubts about his survival in office. There was a valor to it.

These impressive displays of discipline and focus put a new word in Washington currency: “compartmentalization.” This was supposedly the president’s great skill. “In the gaudy mansions of Clinton’s mind, there are many rooms,” explained Time magazine. The seamy private problems in one room were not allowed to mingle with the vital public problems in the others. Around the capital, legislators, diplomats, and commentators all marveled: How did he do it?

He did it by illusion. As the group of West Wing aides who worked closest with him knew, the president’s mind worked like most people’s. A problem that threatened to destroy his career and marriage lapped at his consciousness. His anger toward his accusers, and recriminations toward himself, hovered constantly. When his national security advisers arrived to give the president his morning briefing, they would wait patiently for his venting over the latest Starr outrage in the morning papers to exhaust itself. Erskine Bowles would arrive in the Oval Office and find Clinton oblivious to his presence. He was lost in space, absently fussing with the collection of campaign buttons he kept in the Oval Office. James Wolfensohn, a Clinton friend and head of the World Bank, returned from a meeting with Clinton and called back to a White House aide, “It’s like he isn’t there.” These aides weren’t surprised to get calls like this. “It’s almost as if the government adjusted to his limping,” recalled Donna Shalala, the head of the Department of Health and Human Services. “If this had happened in 1994, it would have been disastrous. It was the maturity of the government that saved the year. We all knew how to do our jobs.”

Senior advisers like Rahm Emanuel and Doug Sosnik would take the president’s mood each day. On bad days before the morning meeting they would pull aside a trusted cabinet member like Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and warn, “He needs a little help today. You’re going to have to pick up the slack in there.”

Facing the most severe emotional and political test of his life, Clinton was in a state of isolation from the people who had been his pillars for most of the previous five years. Hillary Clinton, while she had rallied to her husband’s side, was obviously not someone he could speak candidly with about his particular problems now. There was an awkward new constraint in the friendship with Vernon Jordan; their dealings were at the heart of Starr’s investigation. A new chill, likewise, settled into the relationship with Erskine Bowles. Even Dick Morris, who had been intimately involved in Clinton’s politics for two decades, was also out of the picture—banished after foolish conjecture he offered in a radio interview several days into the scandal about the sexual dimension of the Clinton marriage. The president continued to have a narcotic attraction to the consultant. When Don Baer, a former White House communications aide, went to see Clinton in March, he told the president that he had been in touch with Morris. “What did he say?” Clinton asked eagerly. “I wish I could talk to him, but I can’t trust Dick to keep his mouth shut.”

With his old pillars no longer bearing weight, Clinton’s presidency depended on finding new ones.

One of the most important was Bob Rubin at Treasury. As Mary McGrory had noted before the Lewinsky affair broke, “It’s the Dow Jones, not Paula Jones, that determines his standing.”

With the stock market soaring and unemployment near modern lows, the president’s private morals were of little relevance to most citizens. Yet Clinton never would have lasted were it not for the competence voters credited to the administration on its handling of the economy. The public face of that competence, the hero of the day even to many who deplored Clinton, was Robert Rubin.

Clinton and his Treasury secretary were not social intimates. Rubin was not on the president’s late-night call list when he was in the mood to chat. Rubin was almost eight years older—just enough to be of a different generation. Indeed, Rubin, like Leon Panetta and Bill Perry, was a classic Silent Generation type: responsible, understated, unapologetically square in his manner and tastes. For all these exterior differences, however, Rubin and Clinton had similar habits of mind, and it was on this basis that they established their remarkable communion.

Rubin, since his Wall Street days, had been a devotee of “probabilistic thinking.” In the world of finance, he believed, the best minds understood that the future was imponderable. The most one could do was try to shrewdly reckon risks and rewards, and accept that even smart decisions sometimes produced bad results. Only over the long haul could performance be honestly measured. Washington, by contrast, too often imposed a false certitude on policy debates, as though there was one correct answer to problems that hinged on countless variables, some of which were outside policymakers’ ability to control. Rubin had an appreciation for shades of gray and a disdain for absolutes that were very much like Clinton’s. What skeptics often described as the president’s tendency to equivocate about decisions, Rubin viewed as Clinton’s instinct for complexity. Early in their collaboration, Clinton earned Rubin’s lasting trust. On the problems of deficit reduction in 1993, when Rubin was the White House’s economic policy adviser, and in the Mexican currency crisis of 1995, during Rubin’s first month as Treasury secretary, he had always seen Clinton take the responsible course. Who cared how much to-and-fro it took to get there?

In 1998, the Treasury secretary was equally indifferent to certain other matters in the news. People who knew him were sure that adultery was not part of Rubin’s moral code. But he seemed stoically devoid of judgment about Clinton’s lapse, or even of curiosity about what happened. “His view was that the bottom line was all that mattered,” recalled Gene Sperling, who advised Clinton on economics, “and everything else was noise.”

There was some irony in the fact that a man who had run on a “putting people first” platform had retained the support of those people by following Wall Street’s favored economic policies. So be it, Clinton had long since decided. As 1998 churned on, Rubin’s account grew larger still. In late 1997, Asian economies began to flag, in what Clinton initially called “a few little glitches in the road.” By 1998, the so-called Asian flu had become what he now called “the biggest financial challenge facing the world in a half-century.”

From his perch at the Treasury Department, Rubin worked with Fed chairman Alan Greenspan and finance ministers around the world to try to contain the problem. Characteristically, Rubin wanted to keep the mood as low key and panic-free as possible. Several times he had to dissuade Clinton from his instinct, shared by Tony Blair, to convene an international summit on the problem. Too risky, Rubin decreed, while Clinton champed at the bit. Still, more than once in the crisis Rubin remarked to colleagues how fortunate it was that he was working for a president who actually understood currency flows—what Clinton knew, he had learned from Rubin—and appreciated the large stakes at risk. If a Republican president had pursued such responsible economic policies, Rubin told colleagues, “they’d be building a monument to him on the National Mall.”

If Clinton had any complaint about Rubin, it was that his Wall Street life had left him with no sense of the concrete human dimensions of Washington decisions. Each Thanksgiving, Clinton liked to remind his staff to “get out and talk to real people” over the holiday.

“You say talk to real people,” Rubin bridled. “Am I a real person?”

“No, Bob,” Clinton said with a smile. “You weren’t before and you are even less of one now.”

Another man helping hold up a presidency under siege was Mark Penn, the presidential pollster. A few weeks after the Lewinsky story broke, he sent a confidential memo to Clinton based on his latest survey results. “The drip of rumor still has more people believing the story of an affair” than the president’s denials, he reported.

But Penn had some good news, too: All of the questions showed conclusively that “it is not the belief of an affair, but the belief in an illegal cover-up that would give the issue traction.” These numbers suggested a strategy. “All of this shows that we should continue to issue periodic denials, and wait until there is a clear story to respond to. . . . Such a response will turn on people believing that there is a stand-off on whether they had sex and agreement [Lewinsky] was not asked to lie. This will create the dominant view that the investigation was a diversion that should go nowhere.”

Here, in Penn’s note, was the strategy that the president followed for seven months in 1998. Deny the charge, let the world see Clinton hard at work, and wait it out until Starr finished his investigation and showed his best cards.

What Bob Rubin was to Clinton’s domestic policy, Mark Penn was to his political life: the man who knew the numbers. The White House strategy for Clinton’s survival in 1998 was based on several premises. The facts about the president’s relationship with Lewinsky and lies in the Paula Jones case, though still not proven, were bad enough that Republicans in Congress would surely want to impeach him. Congressional Democrats, self-protective by instinct and not unduly supportive of the president, would probably turn tail if the going got tough. The only way to avert this was by maintaining a wide buffer of popular support. Who would want to take on a president with approval ratings at 66 percent, as they were in Penn’s polls through the month of February? The furious attention to survey data that began under Dick Morris was now more urgent than ever.

It was Morris who first recruited Penn and his longtime partner, Doug Schoen, into the Clinton fold. Penn accepted many of the same premises that Morris had. Values were what drove political behavior, he believed, but the way for a politician to communicate values was not with the old campaign baloney. Gauzy ads showing a candidate’s smiling face and attractive children did not work. What communicated values were policies—discrete, concrete positions that signaled for voters whether a politician was on their side. After the re-election, Penn moved to Washington, set up an office a block from the White House, and essentially institutionalized the Morris brand of campaign governance even when there was no more campaign to run. By any reckoning, Penn as a private citizen on contract to the Democratic National Committee was one of the most important members of Clinton’s domestic policy team. In the fall of 1997, when the White House was worrying about how to prevent Republicans from spending the new budget surplus on tax cuts, it was Penn who sealed the argument. The idea of “saving Social Security first,” by refusing to cut taxes until the long-term solvency of the retirement program was secured, scored off the charts—82 percent. Clinton was astonished by the numbers.

Presidential phrases always got “tested” by Penn before big speeches. His data had surprises. Anti-poverty programs could be popular, but not by employing the usual rhetoric emphasizing poor children. That sounded too much like a sentimental liberal. Clinton began emphasizing his plans for “working families.” When Penn’s polls showed that privacy concerns were scoring high in surveys, the Treasury Department was ordered to come up with some policies to meet demand. The policies Penn favored did not need to be sweeping. In March, he sent Clinton an alert that frustration over ATM fees was “an issue missile that concerns 75 million Americans or more.” On some issues, he had close to veto power. In April, the Health and Human Services Department was set to approve a program allowing federal funds for locally sponsored “needle exchange” programs. Junkies could get clean new needles, thus discouraging the spread of HIV. But Clinton had been worried that the issue had the potential to be another cultural flashpoint, like gays in the military years before. Penn’s polls showed 57 percent of Americans were strongly opposed. The morning that HHS Secretary Shalala was preparing her news conference to announce the program, Bowles called to reverse her. Clinton had changed his mind.

In some ways, the nerve center of the Clinton presidency was an obscure office park in Denver, where Penn and Schoen—paid handsomely by the Democratic National Committee—ran a phone bank of operators calling randomly selected Americans. And at least weekly in 1998—sometimes several times a week—those operators were asking about the president and Lewinsky. Has Starr gone “too far”? (Fifty-eight percent of Penn’s respondents said yes in February.) What if Clinton lied under oath about not having an affair, should he resign? (Sixty percent said yes in the first weeks of the scandal.) What about this business of whether something is an “affair”—does oral sex count? (Certainly yes, said 74 percent.) There were some encouraging signs for Clinton in these ludicrously detailed questions as the year went on. The country was becoming more likely to believe the worst—an affair and some deception about covering it up—but gradually more tolerant of this possibility.

The pollster did not cut the most dashing figure in Washington, with his flyaway hair and chronically untucked shirts. Once he showed up for a weekly political meeting with the president wearing shoes that did not match. Nor was he the most popular member of Clinton’s teams. He displayed Jeeves-like attention to the president, but could be rudely dismissive of colleagues. But Penn’s clients were not grading him on style. During the same time he was working for Clinton, he had also been hired by Microsoft. For a time, Penn’s late-night calls were as likely to be from Bill Gates as from Bill Clinton. This gave Penn an arresting vantage point on the 1990s: an adviser to the decade’s preeminent innovator in the realm of politics, and to the preeminent innovator in the realm of business and technology.

With rare exceptions, Clinton’s hours with Rubin or Penn were working hours. When he spent time with Terry McAuliffe, it was usually for play. They were together on the golf course at least once a week. They were together at Camp David, where McAuliffe and his wife had become regular guests. Most of all, they were together on the phone several times a week in conversations that usually began at midnight and stretched into the early hours of the morning.

Clinton and the smiling curly-haired man more than a decade his junior had not known each other when the president came to Washington. But in certain circles of the capital McAuliffe was already famous for a particular skill: There was no one who knew more rich Democrats or had more success in loosening up their wallets than this young native of Syracuse, New York. With his boundless energy and ingratiating personality, McAuliffe had been raising money for nearly two decades, since his early twenties. It was during the re-election campaign that Clinton learned the charm of working with McAuliffe. He performed exactly the way he promised—rare enough in the blustery world of fund-raising. Early in 1995, fresh off Clinton’s mid-term rout, McAuliffe met with a demoralized president and struck a deal: You need to pledge me this many dates for presidential fund-raisers, he told Clinton. Just show up and I’ll raise you every dime you need for re-election. Then McAuliffe did exactly that. A bond was struck.

By 1998, McAuliffe was known in Washington as the president’s new best friend. Longtime friends of Clinton found this odd, and even a little sad. Why would the president be spending so much time with a relative stranger? There was no real mystery. Clinton liked McAuliffe because, at a time when there was bleakness all around him, McAuliffe offered pure optimism. If Clinton was feeling down, McAuliffe would pick him up with reports of his latest chats with contributors. “They love you out there, Mr. President,” he said. “The enthusiasm is unbelievable.” With men like Jordan and Bowles now in an outer orbit, McAuliffe offered an uncritical, undemanding brand of friendship. If Rubin and Penn were the pillars helping Clinton sustain the public dimension of his presidency, McAuliffe was the pillar of the private dimension.

One advantage he had is that he mixed equally well with both Clintons, which not many people did. This made him welcome in their home even at moments of great sensitivity. During the February vacation in Utah, when Chelsea Clinton was not even sure she wished to see her father, White House aides told McAuliffe, “Terry, you have to get out there.” McAuliffe went, and he and a lonely president talked in the living room of the ski condominium through the night.

McAuliffe did not mind playing the jester. Sometimes during their weekly golf games, usually played at the Army Navy Country Club just over the Potomac in Virginia, Clinton would be interrupted with calls from foreign leaders. Before the military aide handed the president his secure phone to talk to, say, Tony Blair or Ehud Barak, McAuliffe would hoot, “Let me have the phone, I’ll solve this problem!”

In their conversations that year, Clinton and McAuliffe would tour all the byways of that year’s scandal. McAuliffe would listen sympathetically while Clinton railed at Starr, or offer his latest intelligence on the mood of congressional Democrats like Dick Gephardt (another old McAuliffe friend) about the unfolding story. But they always steered clear of the matter at the heart of it—the foolish relationship with Lewinsky that started the whole thing.

Not until much later, after the controversy had cleared, did Clinton bring the subject up. You’ve never asked me about this, he noted gingerly. Can I explain? McAuliffe did not really want to hear. “Mr. President,” he said cheerfully, “we all make mistakes.”