Tuesday, October 18, 1994
Thursday, November 10, 1994
John the Doorman whisked me upstairs to the Solarium, where the Clintons were finishing a late dinner with several couples from Arkansas. Attention centered on a mild-looking gentleman of advanced years. The president said he had allowed his old campaign pilot to take control of Air Force One on the flight home today, touching off rowdy jokes from the group about brushes with death at the hands of a retiree cleared only for puddle jumpers. Apparently the man had a reputation for hijinks, such as filing fake flight plans to deceive Clinton’s barnstorming rivals. The pilot smiled through the yarns about him. Clinton later told me he was a terminal cancer patient being celebrated with friends and his wife, who suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease.
The president introduced me as an old friend just back from Haiti, and I did my best when invited to share highlights of the mission to restore Aristide as its first elected president. Everything was new for me—my first trip to Andrews Air Force Base, first ride in a government plane, first landing in Haiti, with Secretary of State Christopher, Aristide, and a host of dignitaries at an airfield dotted with dug-in U.S. soldiers. On the runway, Aristide poignantly received welcome-home bouquets from two young boys who lived in an orphanage he had founded as a priest. Because of security threats, our motorcade became a convoy of ten U.S. Black Hawk helicopters—another first for me—flying over a lurid expanse of squatters jammed with garbage and livestock in Cité Soleil (Sun City) to restoration ceremonies for Aristide on the vast lawn of the whitewashed presidential palace. Six hours later, throngs of Haitians still cheered around the perimeter—crying, “Aristide c’est bon . . . Democracy c’est bon . . . America c’est bon!”—reaching through the fence to clutch any hand in jubilation. Not since the 1944 liberation of Paris, said a military historian attached to the 82nd Airborne Division, did the battle records for his unit contain anything like this month-long welcome.
The Solarium guests nodded politely that Clinton’s policy had turned out all right after all. Haiti itself seemed too foreign or exotic for them. They were subdued until I mentioned that the State Department’s protocol officer had lamented our congressional delegation as the first single-party group on record for a flag ceremony abroad, confiding that Republican leaders had blocked all requests by their members to attend. This political tidbit stirred the Arkansans. They cussed Republicans for bad manners, and conversation turned to haughty insurance companies until President Clinton excused the two of us shortly after ten o’clock.
Downstairs in the family parlor, he recorded sad observations about the recent downfall of his agriculture secretary, Mike Espy. Leon Panetta recommended that Espy must go, and Clinton agreed. Espy had accepted corporate favors that might have been routine for him in Congress, and may never have traded government influence for football tickets or a free hotel, but the appearance of conflict of interest was ruinous to a cabinet executive. Clinton said the clinching revelation was a $1,200 graduate scholarship awarded to Espy’s girlfriend by Tyson Foods, at a time when chicken inspectors under Espy held sway over Tyson’s business. Tyson chickens came from Arkansas, as the president well knew from his friend Jim Blair, and all its goodwill scholarships went to Arkansas people—except for this one to Espy’s girlfriend up in Maryland. (“Maryland is Perdue country,” Clinton said with a sigh.) Worse than fishy, this distant gift derailed a pioneer of special promise. Espy had been the first black Mississippian elected to Congress since Reconstruction. After the 1990 census, he was the only member of the Congressional Black Caucus to request a lower percentage of minority voters in his district, the Fifth. Clinton had been impressed that Espy, when asked why, said a close ethnic balance would make him a better politician. Within two years, as the youngest secretary of agriculture in history, and the first black leader of a sleepy plantation bureaucracy, Espy had eliminated 7,500 unnecessary jobs while pushing through vital reforms in food and farm regulation. The president said he still admired him, and regretted his loss.
Clinton had hosted Russian president Boris Yeltsin for two days at the end of September. By this, their fifth meeting, he said Yeltsin had learned to frame his objectives as requirements for political survival, knowing that Clinton respected such candor among professionals. To beat back the challenge of hard-liners pining for the lost Soviet empire, Yeltsin pressed a need to assert “special influence” over surrounding countries. He called this policy his “Monroesky Doctrine,” mimicking James Monroe’s historic assertion of U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere. Paradoxically, Yeltsin argued that he must look and talk like an emperor to nurture Russia’s fledging democracy. He walked a thin line between theatrical poses and reasonable demands.
President Clinton said he tried his best to accommodate Yeltsin’s pretensions while advancing a peaceful agenda. He tolerated public claims of benevolent protection in the Baltic nations, for instance, but pushed Yeltsin successfully to remove the last of the occupying Russian troops from there. He endured pronouncements about Russia’s right to intervene across borders in conflicts that might compromise her security, but insisted on the need for international observers to make sure any Russian military presence was benign. He contested the sale of covert Russian arms to Islamic fundamentalists in Iran, wrangling over Yeltsin’s stance that he must honor contracts negotiated by his predecessor, Mikhail Gorbachev. Clinton tried to prune back Yeltsin’s campaign for equal participation in Bosnia, and soothed Russian fears of NATO expansion with hints of eventual membership.
On issue after issue, from nuclear weapons safety to the development of commercial institutions, the president said he pressed Yeltsin to dismantle the old Soviet apparatus. Even in theory, this was a difficult task. Clinton said we did not yet have a name for our period in history. We still defined our “post–Cold War era” by what had ended, and Clinton was prodding scholars and diplomats to help coin a term for the challenges ahead. He said grand labels could be a useful tool in politics. Hoping for something like the age of global democracy, he said no strategic clarity had emerged. Meanwhile, he and Yeltsin navigated a perilous transition on grit and instinct. They made headway with a flurry of deals and submerged their differences in personal rapport. Yeltsin straddled a huge gap between the mighty Soviet image and the threadbare reality of democratic Russia, with unpredictable bluster that made their joint press conferences a spectacle nicknamed “The Bill and Boris Show.” (The Russian president entertained White House reporters with his take on the recent summit: “Looking into the future, we tried not to float above this sinful earth.”)
Yeltsin did not always cope with the pressure. President Clinton said his chronic escapes into alcohol were far more serious than the cultivated pose of a jolly Russian. They were worrisome for political stability, as only luck had prevented scandal or worse on both nights of this visit. Clinton had received notice of a major predawn security alarm when Secret Service agents discovered Yeltsin alone on Pennsylvania Avenue, dead drunk, clad in his underwear, yelling for a taxi. Yeltsin slurred his words in a loud argument with the baffled agents. He did not want to go back into Blair House, where he was staying. He wanted a taxi to go out for pizza. I asked what became of the standoff. “Well,” the president said, shrugging, “he got his pizza.”
Amazingly, he said, Yeltsin slipped away again on the second night. Eluding security, he made his way down the back stairs into the Blair House basement, where a building guard mistook him for a drunken intruder. Yeltsin was briefly endangered until converging Russian and American agents sorted out everyone’s affiliation. Clinton thought this incident, although contained within Blair House, exposed even greater risk than the pizza quest. When I asked whether he saw fit to counsel Yeltsin personally about the alcohol, the president said no. He was not sure of his place or the consequences. My question about consultations with Mrs. Yeltsin elicited a carefully indirect response. Clinton called her forceful. As a shadow entrepreneur in the old Soviet Union, she built a contracting business that did not officially exist. Naina Yeltsin agonized about her husband, said the president, while remaining fiercely devoted to him.
On Haiti, President Clinton said he was too tired to review the detailed chronology since our September session on the night before his invasion speech. He did remember that Jimmy Carter had called several times before then, volunteering to seek a last-minute truce as a special emissary. Vice President Gore pushed vociferously to reject the offer, stating that Carter had exceeded his mandate in the nuclear negotiations with North Korea, and Secretary of State Christopher supported Gore. He said Carter should not be trusted a second time. Carter, probably anticipating such opposition, recruited Gen. Colin Powell and Senator Sam Nunn to buttress his team, which prompted Clinton to overrule his own national security advisers. He called all three of the freelance diplomats for hurried talks. He told them their prior criticism of his Haiti policy actually would strengthen the bargaining position of the United States, so long as they accepted the terms for their proposed mission. The goal was to secure the certain abdication of the illegal junta in Haiti. An international military expedition, led by the United States, was under way to do so by force if necessary, and Haiti’s rulers were vowing to mount a suicidal defense of their homeland. If the Carter team could induce the junta’s top three generals to order a stand-down instead, in exchange for a guarantee of safe conduct into exile, Clinton would embrace such a deal to reduce the risk of casualties.
Ahead of the troop carriers, Carter’s group flew into Haiti for frenzied negotiations over the weekend of September 17–18. Their status reports echoed the Haitian generals’ position that the United States was bluffing—that an invasion had no support in Congress or the press, making it foolhardy to support Aristide, whom they called the real tyrant, against a junta preserving hope for a free Haiti. President Clinton said Powell played the bad guy, telling the generals they may be right about the politics but he knew Clinton and the command structure of the United States. Powell warned the military officers about exactly how much firepower was about to obliterate Haiti’s tiny army along with the command headquarters where they were sitting. By Sunday afternoon, a fax from Carter to the White House endorsed the junta’s final offer, which was to step down whenever the reconstituted political authorities of Haiti ordered them to do so. Clinton said he rejected these terms as the same vague smokescreen of the past two years. He used the word “clientitis,” meaning that Carter had come to sympathize with the Haitian generals, and was pushing the United States on their behalf in a reversal of his proper role. It seemed to Clinton that Carter was smitten with Yannick Cedras, the influential wife of Raoul Cedras, the top Haitian general, to the point of insisting that these pleasant people could not possibly rule by murder and mutilation as alleged in Clinton’s speech. The president said Carter resisted instructions to break off talks and leave Haiti. Clinton told Carter he was in danger of being captured. Friction escalated to the point that he threatened to have Carter evacuated against his will. He said he wanted his ass out of there.
Only then did the Haitian generals submit. They agreed to order stacked arms, respect the multinational task force on arrival, and leave Haiti permanently within a month. The president said U.S. intelligence had predicted wrongly that the Haitians would demand large bribes. They held out instead for a tissue of legality by pretending to await the commands of the figurehead civilian they had installed in Aristide’s place. This sham consumed more time under duress, after which Carter asked to stay on and welcome the soldiers arriving unopposed. Clinton refused. If the deal went sour, Carter would be a target. If it held, he would be a distracting proconsul. The three negotiators flew back to Washington late Sunday, and Carter, invited to stay over at the White House, called CNN’s Judy Woodruff after midnight to arrange an interview the next morning before he reported to Clinton on his mission. This conduct, the president said tersely, was not right.
We skimmed over the month-long occupation since, during which the Haitian army’s few rusty big guns were slowly confiscated and the coup leaders in fact did depart. I told Clinton of my introduction to Agency for International Development (AID) administrator Brian Atwood on the memorable trip down to Port-au-Prince. Atwood, while serving among international monitors for Haiti’s first trial election in 1987, had been rescued from panicked crowds when the infamous Tonton Macoutes aborted that contest by hacking to death at least thirty-four would-be voters at the polls. Atwood said he had never been so scared in his life—and that over the seven years since, his admiration had grown for the nonviolent tenacity of poor Haitians seeking democracy in the face of such terror. Professionally, he saw a land of human potential trapped in misery for lack of the most basic infrastructure—water, roads, sanitation, electricity—stripped of trees and much of its topsoil. He hoped careful international assistance could spark development toward Aristide’s modest goal of “poverty with dignity,” building now on the minor miracle of a multinational military operation with zero casualties thus far.
Zero casualties. Clinton frowned when I asked whether this stark empirical success, if not America’s traditional sympathy for the underdog, might turn his gamble on Haiti into an asset. He said I still underestimated political resistance. The press was full of retrospective stories about friction between him and his three prominent negotiators, brimming with innuendo that the entire venture had been needless or misguided. He said the current newsweeklies lapped up criticism by Carter as an embarrassment to Clinton, and this pervasive climate left him wryly philosophical. He said he looked bad but felt lucky. To have averted disaster in Haiti brought enormous relief, and it was folly to expect more positive results.
Many of his advisers griped that Jimmy Carter thought he was still president, but Clinton found this criticism too jaundiced. Carter had spoken with restraint at their joint press conference, he allowed, exhibiting a keen political ear. (“The key to our success,” Carter told White House reporters, “to the extent it was successful, was the inexorability of the entry of the forces into Haiti.”) To Clinton, Carter simply felt that he had earned the right to speak his mind as an international statesman, even about a mission he had accepted for the United States government complete with an Air Force jet. This sense of entitlement could make Carter a thorn, but Clinton thought his value far outweighed the political annoyance. He considered Carter a sterling ex-president. More particularly on Haiti, he said Carter’s team had secured a safer landing for U.S. soldiers in a foreign country. This goal alone justified the Carter mission, and success was a bonus. Clinton said he would make the same decision again. He called it a no-brainer.
The president mulled a larger point. He said he still made a lot of mistakes, and his leadership was not what it ought to be, but he did not hesitate to promote other leaders or make them look good. This was a hard lesson, as most politicians do not like rivals and subordinates to shine. Presidents above all tend to hoard credit, but Clinton thought it was smart to give Al Gore choice assignments. And he did not mind sending Colin Powell to Haiti, despite knowing in advance that the sheer visibility would raise Powell’s stature as a potential presidential candidate against Clinton in 1996. This is precisely what happened, he said, reeling off poll numbers. The president presented no easy formula for such choices. He valued political loyalty as the essential glue in politics. Still, in conflicts between people and issues, he kept telling himself that positive outcomes for the country generated the truest measure of success.
We covered some personnel transitions and the recent state dinner with South Africa’s new president, Nelson Mandela, who had regaled Clinton with tales of his childhood admiration for the American boxer Joe Louis. The president closed with a mordant summary of the 103rd Congress. Both houses had adjourned in deadlock shortly after Senator George Mitchell conceded defeat for the two-year struggle to pass health care reform. Clinton described the political dynamics as vexing but simple. He said the Republicans, upon losing the crime bill in August, had resolved to let nothing else pass. As a unified minority, they blocked routine confirmations, delayed votes, and objected to parliamentary shortcuts. They mounted successful filibusters against sixteen bills and turned abruptly against their own legislation. On “Gridlock Day,” October 5, they stopped everything. They postponed the popular Superfund reform for environmental reclamation, and the Senate killed a public disclosure act that had passed 94–6 on a preliminary vote. Clinton said lobbyists cheered Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina when he left the Senate floor in triumph, having brazenly praised their secretive clout as a shield against meddlesome big government.
Unfortunately, the president concluded, his polls vindicated Republicans so far on the politics. Public majorities favored the legislation they were obstructing, but their scorched-earth tactics played to disgust with Washington as a whole. Clinton said Republicans were betting that voters would hold Democrats responsible for national bickering, anxiety, and stalled hopes. (“Most Americans want us to get out of town,” declared Senator John McCain. “They think we have done enough harm.”) House leader Newt Gingrich had assembled some 350 Republican congressional candidates to endorse a ten-point “Contract With America” for the fall campaign, promising to end gridlock with tax cuts, term limits, and other curbs on professional politicians. Clinton said he had three weeks left to convince voters that this contract, by milking cynicism, would only produce more of it.
First, he must go to Jordan for the breakthrough toward peace. As our session broke up, a strange note of fatalism crept into his parting words. He said he had addressed many items from his ambitious agenda for the first term. If he could revive a few bills set aside at the end of this Congress, he might not feel compelled to seek a comparable mandate for 1996. In that case, he said, it would matter less whether he got reelected or not.
MY NEXT SUMMONS, on November 10, came only two days after a historic rebuff to President Clinton’s leadership. Nowhere in the 1994 elections did a Republican incumbent lose for Congress or governor, while Democrats across the country lost eight senators, eight governors, and fifty-four representatives. Republicans gained control of both legislative chambers in the biggest midterm shift since 1946, the year Clinton was born. At the White House, usher Skip Allen presented an awkward dilemma to me and a tailor from Saks Fifth Avenue. He said our evening appointments were backed up because the president had fallen asleep in the barber’s chair and no one could rouse him.
The three of us trooped upstairs to the little beauty salon next to the dining room, across from the family parlor. We took turns trying to wake the president just enough to ascertain his wishes, offering simultaneously to let him sleep. He rallied across the hall to a large pile of suits in his closet, saying some of them needed overnight alterations before his departure to the Philippines. The diminutive tailor agreed, reaching up to make adjustments. Chalk flew from his deft tucks and tugs as the president stepped in and out of trousers, then jackets. Somehow his chest had shrunk, leaving his coats too loose, but he needed more room in the waist because he had not exercised in weeks. Clinton groaned that everything was backward, and the brisk fitting awakened him to gallows humor about an election to match his sagging body. What a great start for a presidency—with five million new jobs, peace initiatives around the world, headed into a third year of unprecedented deficit reduction—until the crash on Tuesday’s election. He had tried to grin through the shock in a speech at his alma mater, Georgetown University. Newt Gingrich whipped his ass, he said. You didn’t need to be as bright as a tree full of owls to see that. The voters had clubbed him with a two-by-four.
On tape, his energy carried him through his recent travels in the Middle East. Before the peace ceremony in Jordan on October 26, the president had stopped in Egypt to nurse along the Palestinians on their parallel track with Israel. Without much success, he tried to enlist Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to press his guest, PLO chairman Yasir Arafat, toward greater administrative responsibility in the Palestinian territories. Clinton thought Mubarak and Arafat were temperamental opposites. Mubarak suppressed Islamic fundamentalists ruthlessly, while belittling their danger, and said the Egyptian state, resting on three thousand years of bureaucracy and culture, was largely immune to terror or theocracy. Clinton worried that Mubarak was overconfident. Arafat, by contrast, was obsessed by the threat of religious zealots in Palestine. If he came down too hard on Hamas,* which advocated religious war against Israel, Arafat said he would be out of power himself. Clinton said Arafat resisted talk of practical governance in the territories, which was vital to establish his nation, because he felt out of his element. Arafat preferred to discuss plots, deals, and especially money. In fact, laughed the president, Arafat chafed lately because international assistance flowed to the new Palestinian Authority through official channels, with auditors and accountants. He was much happier with the old spy methods, haggling over bundles of cash.
* A foreign-backed group created from the 1987 intifada among Palestinians.
From Egypt, President Clinton flew to the Wadi Araba in the Great Rift Valley, for the treaty signing at the border between Eilat, Israel, and Aqaba, Jordan. He said the United States, mostly through Secretary of State Christopher, had been more involved in the minutiae of this peace agreement than in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. We were the guarantor for security arrangements and complex transfers—150 square miles of land and 65 million cubic meters of water. The ceremonial platform, outdoors near one of King Hussein’s summer palaces, overlooked mountains rising from the Red Sea all the way to Saudi Arabia and Egypt. For Clinton, the only drawback to the spectacular setting was the hot desert sun that beat down through the preliminary speeches. Prime Minister Rabin wore a baseball hat for protection. The president, on the advice of handlers, tried to get by with sun lotion until perspiration carried stinging rivulets into his eyes. Worse, the glare off the treaty parchment blinded him into dizzy spells, and he finally called for sunglasses. “I didn’t want to look like a Mafia person up there,” he said, “but I was going to ruin the ceremony.”
The treaty formally ended forty-six years of war status and nonrecognition between the two countries, since the founding of Israel in 1948. Among other effects, it opened borders that had been permanently sealed with minefields and vast coils of barbed wire, the latter still visible at the Wadi Araba. With the documents finally signed, said the president, strange noises continued in the distance after the cheers and applause died down. They were haunting, ululating cries. King Hussein waved at figures in the distance, and Clinton leaned over to Rabin. “Yitzhak, who are those people?” he asked, and he imitated the reply with an affectionately heavy accent. “Those are the Bedouin,” growled Rabin. “Some are ours. Some are theirs. They live on opposite sides of the border, many from the same family. For years they’ve been getting together only at night. Now they can come and go as they will, and they are very happy.”
President Clinton addressed the Jordanian parliament and the Israeli Knesset on the historic significance of this second peace treaty, after Egypt, with Israel’s Arab neighbors. (“We respect Islam,” he told the Jordanian legislators to thunderous applause, adding that every morning across the United States, “millions of our own citizens answer the call to Muslim prayer.”) Then he pursued negotiations on another front with President Asad of Syria. In Damascus, visiting a palace built for Asad by a Lebanese billionaire, the president said he felt Asad’s extraordinary dominance. Asad controlled everything, having long since imposed his will on a country of simmering ethnic differences. Syria had one of the lowest crime rates in the world, and this manicured order helped explain why Asad was impatient with the raucous, ever-shifting democracy in Israel and the United States. He thought the elusive treaty with Israel would be a simple swap of land for peace on the Golan Heights, which should take about three minutes. He could not understand the political constraints of Israeli leaders, or why their biblical forebears under Moses had argued and feuded for forty years in the wilderness.
The Syrian-Israeli negotiations, said Clinton, were stuck somewhere between three minutes and forty years. In their private talks, when he pressed for a condemnation of terrorism, Asad replied that he opposed the killing of innocent civilians anywhere, anytime, and they rehearsed answers for the huge contingent of international reporters traveling with Clinton. At a joint press conference, Asad managed to keep his composure until the second question, from Rita Braver of CBS News. Clinton told me it amounted to, “Are you still a terrorist?”* Asad exploded with rage to deny that he and Clinton had even discussed terrorism, which he called a pretext for slander against Syria. His outburst obliged Clinton to split hairs between truth and a public rebuke, explaining hastily that Asad meant they did not discuss specific charges of terrorism by the Syrian regime. Afterward, citing enormous stakes for the Middle East, he pleaded with reporters not to emphasize this contradiction. The president wished he had coached Asad more aggressively in advance. He should have prepared him for blunt, snippy, and hostile questions, recognizing that he was accustomed to fawning indulgence. “His press conferences are like Castro’s.”
* The official transcript preserves Braver’s actual questions to President Asad: “Did you in this discussion promise not to sponsor terrorism anymore? Did you acknowledge that you, in fact, do? And can you tell us what the Syrian view is of terrorist activities?”
Despite its stormy conclusion, the president considered the Damascus summit a step forward. Asad still wanted to make peace with Israel before he died. Neither he nor his wife, Anisah, seemed to have much confidence that their son Bashar, the eye doctor and newly designated heir, would have the strength to do so. Clinton, for his part, stressed the urgency of an Israel-Syria treaty to build some sort of stable structure for the Middle East before either Iraq or Iran attacked the whole region. Both those large countries were shaky beneath the surface, menaced by poverty, sectarian divisions, and conflict between modernists and mullahs, but the president thought Iran was more likely to boil over or disintegrate.
A month before, on October 7, Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, had sent troops suddenly toward the border with Kuwait in a virtual replay of the Gulf War, spreading shock and disbelief that he would challenge the world with the bulk of his army killed or disabled. The Iraqis backed down within days, once the United States deployed a rapid strike force of Marines, missiles, and 350 new fighter planes with the George Washington Carrier Strike Group. Intelligence analysts were still debating Saddam’s mysterious, futile maneuver, and one school held that he had misinterpreted U.S. policy in Haiti as an exploitable aversion to military conflict. This notion amused the president. “I guess he figured that if he mounted a provocation,” he remarked, “I would send Jimmy Carter over there to make a deal, and he could wheedle something out of us.”
The president strangely fell asleep again—in mid-sentence, while speaking on a topic that engaged him. Alarmed, and puzzled, I offered to stop our session. It was unclear whether or not Clinton heard me, but he started awake and pushed doggedly into his postmortem on the midterm elections.
A foul omen greeted his return from the Middle East. On Saturday afternoon, October 29, a disturbed man pulled a Chinese SKS rifle from beneath his trench coat and fired twenty-seven shots wildly through the fence along Pennsylvania Avenue. Seven rounds hit the White House before citizens and agents subdued Francisco Duran, a twenty-six-year-old native of New Mexico. Duran, apparently on a loner’s quest to punish Clinton for banning assault weapons, had driven from Colorado with his rifle, literature from the anti-government militia movement, and a bumper sticker that mocked the prophet Isaiah’s vision of peace: “Those who beat their guns into plows will plow for those who don’t.”*
* A trial jury in 1995 convicted Duran on multiple charges, including the attempted murder of a U.S. president. He received a forty-year sentence.
The president said he had been here in the parlor room when the shots rang out, and he heard the muffled sound of at least two bullets striking the stucco—or whatever the north wall of the White House is made of—before agents rushed in to surround him, talking on their radios. He was sorry for the Secret Service, which endured a barrage of criticism for this attack on top of the suicide plane crash. Clinton never sensed physical danger, but, ironically, he felt very much threatened politically by gun zealots like Duran. In Tuesday’s elections, the National Rifle Association had picked off at least twenty incumbent members of Congress on gun issues alone. This was a chilling feat. The president said the NRA stealthily harvested votes from paranoia. “If you don’t smoke them out and confront them,” he ruefully observed, “they’ll cut you to death.”
Clinton claimed his share of blame for the historic midterm debacle. There were too many little scandals. Health care had failed. He said several times that he had pushed change too rapidly for voters to digest, and he confessed a key error most recently in the decision not to deliver a televised address on his return from abroad. There was important news other than the Israel-Jordan peace treaty and the face-down of Saddam Hussein. North Korea had just signed an agreement to surrender eight thousand nuclear fuel rods and accept international inspection of its nuclear facilities. These foreign successes elevated Clinton’s approval rates above either party in Congress. Each was complex. To explain them to the nation was certainly a political opportunity, and arguably a duty, but the president decided that he must choose between statesmanship and campaigning. Trying to do both seemed tawdry. With only ten days left before the election, it might backfire if he followed a presidential address with partisan stump speeches. So Clinton omitted his speech to hit the campaign trail.
The president called this a mistake on every front. The bloom quickly wore off the foreign triumphs for lack of attention. Why should voters appreciate great stakes in North Korea or the Middle East when the president himself preferred to discuss a congressional race in Ohio? Worse, he said, the Democratic candidates steadfastly refused to unite behind a campaign message. Blaming him for their unpopularity, they all demanded to tailor their own individual campaigns, but their disparate slogans seemed puny against Gingrich’s unified call for smaller government and lower taxes. Clinton said he never should have let the Democratic National Committee pass along the money he raised to individual candidates. Most of them wasted it on poorly conceived ideas, and he had sensed momentum fading toward the end. If the campaign had lasted any longer, he thought, the Republicans would have gained even more seats.
Again and again, he fell asleep while talking. His irises rolled up beneath his eyelids and he would be gone for ten or fifteen seconds. I stopped the tapes on my own initiative, saying he needed to rest, but he perked up each time with more theories on the calamity. The Democrats had no centralized message to match the Republicans. Their slogan from campaign consultant Paul Begala—that the nation must go forward instead of backward—did not wash. Gingrich was power-mad, and would make many mistakes. The voters were hurting, and they wanted their government to hurt, too. (“Well, I’m sure hurting now,” he said.) Republicans were channeling widespread anxiety into resentment of minorities, cities, and government. He would have to counterpunch from the center.
The president asked me what I thought of his press appearances since the election. There was a plaintive tone of uncertainty, mixed with political gloom. He kept talking even as I left.
On the way home, I began my dictation by noting that it was scary to see him slip in and out of sudden trances as though hypnotized, or suffering from narcolepsy. “Still combative,” I said. “Still trying to figure out what happened in the election, where the mistakes were. But I think fragile and vulnerable in his exhaustion.”