Wednesday, February 28, 1996
The ushers sent me straight up to the third-floor Solarium, where I found President Clinton watching the Grammy Awards telecast with Hillary and Jim Blair. He wore blue jeans, and they were in suits—Blair with a guest pass around his neck. The Tyson Foods executive seemed more lighthearted than I remembered from his earlier power talk around the president. He saluted Hillary for a best-selling debut, It Takes a Village, in the literary world, teasing about her new place in the arts alongside this bumper crop of female musicians nominated for awards, including Mariah Carey, Alanis Morissette, Shania Twain, and a close-harmony group called TLC. Hillary allowed that it felt much better to be an author than a targeted witness before the grand jury. She happily signed two books I had brought along for charity auctions in Baltimore, but then she disclosed an undertow.
Sally Quinn of the Washington Post was spreading rumors that Hillary had not written her own book. Worse, she was saying Hillary had denied proper credit to its collaborator, a friend of Quinn’s named Barbara Feinman. The book company, Simon & Schuster, had recommended Feinman on the strength of her prior work with its other Washington authors including Bob Woodward and Quinn’s husband, Ben Bradlee, the Post editor renowned for witty bravado during the Watergate scandal. However, said Hillary, Feinman had withdrawn mysteriously from the project since an early promise to spend the weekend editing at Ben and Sally’s. Her retelling wryly identified that location as local shorthand for Washington’s social headquarters. Fortunately, she said, the White House had retained draft chapters in Hillary’s own hand, and her computer-illiteracy became a blessing for once. To verify authorship, she was going through those manuscripts now with ABC News correspondent Barbara Walters. Some of the original content was embarrassing, she winced, like an overgrown garden, and many friends and advisers had helped her cull the weeds. Still, she was countering Quinn’s charge.
What did I think of this mess, which implicated me loosely on several fronts as a former ghostwriter and Washington journalist now writing books also for Simon & Schuster? Stammering, I ducked the publishing dispute. Multiparty book contracts were notoriously complicated, and I knew nothing of Feinman or the editorial process for It Takes a Village. On the feud with Quinn, I expressed a passing wish that Hillary could include Ben Bradlee in direct mediation. He seemed to me amiably detached from Washington’s obsession with status. I confided that years ago, when he was already famous, Bradlee had howled at me over a harsh review of his memoir about President Kennedy. Then he laughed, said maybe I was right, and launched a spirited debate about being too spellbound or disillusioned by JFK. I thought the Clintons could find rapport with Bradlee because he loved journalism the way they loved a good political fight. Quinn would be harder. Even to me, on occasion, she had said she could spare the Clintons from grave mistakes. She took her exclusion from the White House as proof that neither Clinton understood the codes of Washington—which charity boards mattered, whom to entertain, the dynamics within various political couples.
The reply was decisive. “You know,” declared Hillary, “she has been hostile since the moment we got here. Why would we invite somebody like that into our home? How could she expect us to?” From my heels, I suggested that Hillary approach the Washington press corps like swing voters in a tough campaign, but she rejected the analogy. She said Quinn and her friends simply invented gossip for their dinner circuit. They had launched one juicy affair between Hillary and a female veterinarian attending Socks, the Clinton family cat, with tales about how somebody discovered them in flagrante on a bedroom floor in the White House. There was no end to it. Jim Blair, perhaps to rescue me, said stuff almost that bad got printed. He cited a New Yorker essay full of barbed quotes about Hillary from Quinn and Elizabeth Dole, the senator’s wife, plus a popular new novel about the 1992 election, Primary Colors. All she knew of that book, said Hillary, was that she cussed like a sailor and was portrayed in a graphic one-night stand with George Stephanopoulos, of all people. Her aggrieved mood dissolved into mirth. Blair summarized the book, saying its purportedly anonymous author (Joe Klein) did not know Hillary very well but did capture the wildness inside Clinton’s presidential race with thinly disguised portraits built around a staff character just released from an asylum. And so now, laughed Hillary, they have her carrying on both with George and a lesbian vet.
He had not read Primary Colors, the president chimed in, but the bitterness of their critics signaled that he and Hillary must be doing something right. With his remote control device, he turned up the television volume to hear Whitney Houston perform a gospel medley, and he detected a Bob Dylan quality in Joan Osborne’s offbeat pop song about religion, “One of Us.” When the show finally ended, I tried to hurry things along by excusing myself ahead to the Treaty Room. Waiting there, the question was whether to pursue alone with him my hand-delivered letter’s warning about dark moods and the media. I decided to leave it alone. The Grammys had preempted more than an hour of taping already. Starting late and tired, we faced a heavy backlog.
THE PRESIDENT SEIZED on questions about this month’s threats to peace. He was upset first about Northern Ireland. Three bombs in London had killed two people, injuring more than a hundred, with the first explosion only an hour after the Irish Republican Army publicly terminated the year-old cease-fire. Just before that, Gerry Adams of the IRA’s political wing called the White House with a “heads-up” for impending violence. It was a tense, mournful conversation. Adams still opposed the move internally, Clinton believed, but proved powerless to stop IRA military commanders who were determined to blame England for the stalled talks. They were at loggerheads with British prime minister John Major over requirements for “unconditional” negotiations—whether the cease-fire itself was enough, or must be attested by some surrender of the IRA’s clandestine arms. Clinton bemoaned the artificial impasse. He said the renewed terror dropped sympathy for Adams well below 25 percent among Catholics in Northern Ireland, marginalizing his Sinn Fein Party with less than 10 percent of the total vote. The bombs created only a brief spike of sympathy in England before Major’s government was likely to fall. As for the IRA, its commanders virtually confessed their bankrupt strategy by sending word through Adams that they had delayed violence until a decent interval after Clinton’s visit in November. (Before that trip, the president recalled, U.S. intelligence warned that the most extreme IRA factions wanted to break the truce while he was there.) Now he salvaged one hopeful surprise: huge, spontaneous peace rallies in ten cities across Northern Ireland. Catholics marched with Protestants. They created pressure to revive negotiations, prodding the stale imagination of their leaders. In that part of the world, said the president, public wisdom ran well ahead of the politicians.
Bombs also struck Israel only four days ago—one in Jerusalem, another in Ashkelon—killing twenty-six civilians. Hamas claimed responsibility for suicide strikes in its avowed mission to destroy Israel, and the president analyzed trauma reverberating across national borders. He said Hamas sought to undermine not only the Israeli government but also Yasir Arafat among fellow Palestinians. Its leaders calculated that suicide bombs would force Israel to quarantine the Gaza Strip, closing off Palestinians from their jobs and as much as 40 percent of their economy, intensifying the desperate poverty, which would turn Palestinians against Arafat because of his cooperation with Israel. He said the bombs weakened Arafat in everyone’s eyes. Separately, Hamas aimed to bring a conservative Likud government to power in Israel, because Likud also opposed the peace process. Since Shimon Peres of the Labor Party had called for early elections, the bombs accelerated the erosion of his popular majority. Peres was vulnerable. If he could squeak out a victory in May, Clinton predicted, Peres would conclude a treaty with Asad of Syria, but a loss would hurt negotiations on every front. Ironically, said the president, the Likud candidate, Benjamin Netanyahu, had favored Clinton in the U.S. elections of 1992, mostly because former president Bush made no secret of his preference for Yitzhak Rabin. Now, however, Netanyahu opposed the peace alliance on both sides of the Atlantic. While he legitimately attacked Peres in the Israeli campaign—emphasizing the danger of potential concessions to Syria—his Likud agents in the United States joined Republicans eager to stir up suspicion against Clinton’s Middle East diplomacy. So far, said the president, they had not made much headway with Jewish voters, but he called it scandalous electioneering by and with a foreign political party.
He traced a neighboring intrigue from Jordan to Baghdad. “I can’t believe those guys were dumb enough to think Saddam Hussein meant his promise to forgive them,” Clinton scoffed, speaking of the two Kamel brothers who had defected to Jordan last August from high positions in the Iraqi army. General Hussein Kamel fully intended to overthrow Saddam, which at first made him attractive to his Jordanian host, King Hussein, but the leading Iraqi exiles recoiled from association with Kamel. They mistrusted him as one of Saddam’s most brutal subordinates, and the isolated, haughty Kamel became such a nuisance that the king encouraged him to leave. Clinton kept track of the separate Husseins down into their volatile family relations. Last week, blandishments from the dictator Saddam lured home his prodigal kinfolk—each Kamel brother was married to one of Saddam’s sisters—to a royal welcome followed swiftly by extermination in a military ambush. Reportedly, Saddam’s more ruthless son, Uday Hussein, was hunting down the surviving relatives of his slain in-laws. The president worried that such raw political violence dampened hopes for political progress in the whole region. On the other hand, he thought Saddam’s bloody flash of nature would help the international community maintain and defend sanctions to contain his regime.
Then there was Castro. Last Friday, Cuba’s air force had shot down two little Cessnas flown by anti-Castro exiles from the United States. Clinton said most Americans remained calm through the ensuing upheaval. Regardless of international law, many seemed to feel that countries had a right to defend their airspace from trespass, and the Cessna pilots, from a group called Brothers to the Rescue, had buzzed Cuban territory illegally for years to earn bragging rights back in Miami. These flights irritated U.S. authorities, whose efforts to revoke the pilots’ licenses were ensnarled on appeal, and they infuriated Castro. The president said you could hear anger in the intercepted radio orders from his ground commanders to Cuba’s jet fighters, which followed none of the procedures for confronting unarmed civilian aircraft. “They blew them to smithereens,” he said. Air-to-air rockets obliterated the Cessnas and pilots so completely that only small bits of wreckage could be recovered from Caribbean waters. More than the transgression itself, what roused disgust for Cuba was its wanton display of mismatched force. The president said he warned Castro privately that the next such action would meet a military response directly from the United States.
I asked about risks. If his message leaked, might it actually encourage anti-Castro exiles to mount new harassment missions in the hope of drawing U.S. might into a showdown with Castro? After all, this had been a quixotic dream since the Bay of Pigs. Clinton minimized such danger. The communications were secure, and he doubted that Miami’s weekend warriors would trade their lives for a slim chance to provoke war. Still, his threat to Castro seemed to make him uncomfortable with posturing on all sides. He reflected sourly on the paradox of violence. The people who were so bloodthirsty toward Castro, demanding unrelieved hostility as the only effective cure, now cried out that this cruel attack disgraced him as an impotent bully. At the same time they helped tighten the noose of the embargo against Cuba, which further isolated us as a bully in the eyes of the world. Especially since Reagan, said the president, Republicans had harvested the Cuban exile vote by snarling at Castro, but it was only noise. No one bothered to think forward about consequence.
Already, at giant memorial rallies, Clinton’s opponents blamed the Cessna martyrdom on the weakness of Democrats while trumpeting a five-day rush of bipartisan legislation to strengthen the forty-five-year-old embargo against trade with Cuba. “Adios, Fidel,” chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Jesse Helms had cried today on final passage of his bill. Cosponsored in the House by Indiana’s Dan Burton, the law froze assets and blocked U.S. travel for the executives of foreign companies doing business with Cuba. In retreat, Clinton said he had been negotiating to allow exceptions for some personal contact, such as phone calls to relatives still in Cuba, but he would sign the Helms-Burton Act. Castro had brought the hardship on his own people, said the president, but his regime thrived on U.S. persecution and would probably outlive Helms. Clinton felt backed into a policy of proven failure, which he had lamented privately for closing off political engagement toward a peaceful transition in Cuba.
FOR RELIEF, SKIPPING over two gruesome car bombs in Algeria, I asked about recent ceremonial visits from championship sports teams. The Dallas Cowboys managed not to tear up the White House. They behaved like gentlemen, he quipped, to befit the team’s many Arkansas ties. An assistant coach came from Arkansas State, and head coach Barry Switzer had grown up under harsh deprivation in the last Arkansas county with an active Ku Klux Klan. Clinton said Switzer’s father had been a bootlegger who ran into a tree and killed himself in a car chase leaving the home of his black mistress. Left behind, young Barry was rough-cut and quiet, but he was a lot smarter about football than sports pundits commonly insinuated. His players, no less than the president himself, were flabbergasted by a toast from the team’s Republican owner, Jerry Jones. Clinton said Jones had bought the Cowboys with money made drilling oil in Arkansas on licenses from Clinton’s arch-nemesis Sheffield Nelson, who presumably kept him steeped in the most lurid Whitewater allegations. Despite all that, Jones pronounced Clinton good for the Cowboys, and said they must get him reelected to keep winning Super Bowls.
The Atlanta Braves visited two weeks later, and Clinton was fascinated by banter that only one member of the team, relief pitcher Mark Wohlers, had voted for him in 1992. He offered the pitchers a subtle analysis. On a tour for the upcoming Atlanta Olympics, the president told them, he had noticed very little foul territory in the stadium being built for the summer games to serve as the Braves’ future home. In fact, engineers had confirmed that there would be only forty-five feet from the baselines to the stands—well below the major league average of seventy feet. The new configuration meant fewer foul pops would be caught for outs, diminishing the advantage of a superior pitching staff. Would it be harder for the Braves to win more World Series? Clinton said his observations drew appreciative comments from all four of the Braves’ starting pitchers—Steve Avery, Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux, and John Smoltz—while the Braves’ hitters jumped in to argue the other side. Clinton did not expect to win many votes in the rich dugouts and locker rooms of modern sports, but he did seem pleased to impress insiders about baseball.
He turned serious on economics. Three key appointments had just converged for him at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, including the chair and vice chair. Clinton had wanted badly to replace chairman Alan Greenspan with Felix Rohatyn, the shrewd investment banker from Lazard Frères, but he ran into vexing constraints everywhere. Rohatyn himself advised Clinton to reappoint Greenspan instead, arguing that the Republican Senate would confirm no one else. Wall Street could not elect a U.S. president, Rohatyn told him, but it could surely un-elect one. If threatened, financial powers would sacrifice short-term profits to drive interest rates high, hurting blue-collar workers with layoffs and shaky pension funds. In the end, Rohatyn refused appointment to both posts, and Clinton suspected that Greenspan had engineered this result by warning of political friction and terrible drudgery at the Fed. He thought the wily incumbent protected his brittle ego from comparative scrutiny alongside Rohatyn, who was just as accomplished and a far more persuasive, attractive public speaker.
Resigned to keep Greenspan at the top, Clinton described his fallback choice of Budget Director Alice Rivlin for the vice chair position. If she could win confirmation, on her proven expertise as a pro-growth fighter against deficits, she would provide an able counterweight to the tight-money bankers. He further tempered disappointment by noting that Greenspan was not the most extreme of the monetarist ideologues at the Fed, anyway. The chairman could be appeased if handled carefully, and they were managing steady growth with lower deficits. Still, the president confessed lost enthusiasm for the third Fed appointment, which he left entirely to his economics adviser, Laura Tyson. He called her an unsung public servant—skilled and fair-minded in approach, while passionate about the common good—to underscore a contrasting appraisal of Rohatyn. “I was committed to him, and I really think he ducked this fight,” Clinton said with lingering dismay. “He backed out too soon. He didn’t have the stomach for it.”
On politics, the president assessed the primaries and caucuses on the Republican side. “Play” seemed to be his word for the night in handicapping each race, as in, “[Lamar] Alexander didn’t have the money to play in the Dakotas.” Steve Forbes was the only one playing with a sense of enjoyment. Gramm had dropped out, hopeless. Pat Buchanan was mad. Dole was upset. Alexander was overwrought. Forbes, running blithely on his narrow message to cut everyone’s taxes, pulled off a win in Arizona, and Buchanan shocked the party establishment with an upset in New Hampshire. Clinton thought the contests so far exposed weaknesses in all his potential opponents. He said Dole was trying to play with only one lackluster idea, which boiled down to “I’ve been around a long time and deserve to be president.” Clinton still figured him to win the nomination. He said Republicans tended to favor orderly succession, and Dole had accumulated many friends among the superdelegate party officials, who always weighed heavily at their convention. Republicans also relied on an early start for saturation by repetitive message, which required plenty of money.
By contrast, the president recalled, he had not visited New Hampshire until October of 1991, about a year before the general election. He reminisced about campaigning in New Hampshire, as usual, but his point was that it took him months beforehand to hone a presentation for the voters—why he was running, what he would do. Now, while updating that presentation for a second term, Clinton used an incumbent’s free ride through primary season to raise and husband as much campaign money as possible. He said he hoped to cut into an adverse funding ratio that could reach four to one against him if Ross Perot ran again on a third-party ticket.
Campaign finances spilled over into President Clinton’s review of the Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996, which he had just signed into law. He attributed most of its balance and promise to Al Gore, saying the vice president had warned of legislative danger shortly after the disastrous 1994 election. The major broadcasting networks, Gore predicted, would team up with the regional Bell companies to push a freighted agenda through the new Republican Congress. In the guise of free markets, they would strip away the government’s power to promote competition in their rapidly changing industry. Gore called the plan a Trojan horse. Before most people realized the scope of the impending change in communications, he said, the established companies would gobble up outlets for upstart alternatives such as cable and cellular services. By extending control over the potential competition from new technology, they hoped to prevent or slow down the dilution of their markets. Huge sums were at stake, said Clinton, which made for a titanic lobbying struggle in Congress. New companies were springing up to buy licenses into this uncharted territory Gore called “the information super-highway.” They were paying far more than anticipated already, which Clinton called a bonanza for the taxpayers. The only drawback he perceived was that the high prices made it difficult to include small stakeholders.
The president said he was mystified by a dramatic public offer this week from the Australian-American media mogul Rupert Murdoch: free airtime for all the presidential candidates on his Fox network. Murdoch’s declared purpose, to “curb the cancer” of money in the political system, angered his fellow broadcasters and touched off an uproar among Republicans, who traditionally opposed limits on campaign spending. Suddenly, they murmured against Murdoch as an apostate, foreign opportunist, or worse. Clinton welcomed the offer while pondering its motive. He said Murdoch had played very heavily to Gingrich’s side on the telecommunications bill, which meant big contributions to Republicans. They had failed to produce all Murdoch wanted, and perhaps he intended to even his bets.
Clinton saw promise in Murdoch’s idea if it could be coupled with requirements for the candidates themselves to speak directly to voters on camera, without produced images or sounds. Was it possible for such a combination to stigmatize, or crowd out, the advertising techniques that drove so much cost and distortion in political races? Could it be constitutional? Clinton grappled on tape for some fair revision of the Supreme Court’s decision in Buckley v. Valeo, which prohibited restrictions on political free speech. Our session gave out somewhere in these thickets of the First Amendment.