Monday, May 27, 1996
A month passed before the next contact, when Robyn Dickey of the White House Social Office arranged an event to coincide with my parents’ weekend visit in Baltimore. Our whole family drove to Washington on Saturday morning, March 30. We cleared security into the West Wing for a briefing about broadcast decorum—what to expect, cues for silence, warnings not to trip over cables on the floor—then crowded into the Oval Office to watch live delivery of the nationwide radio address. President Clinton argued for legislation to raise the minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.15 per hour. Afterward, by another cue, our group was last among nearly a hundred guests to greet and pose with him on the big blue rug, so that we could duck outside together through the Rose Garden for a brief presentation. The Jefferson Memorial bird feeder, on a rounded white table, waited in gleaming isolation against the dark green South Lawn. Clinton circled it several times with admiring looks, and my dad, while not visibly nervous, mumbled unusually brief replies to questions about architectural details. My mother slid easily from maternal encouragement into Southern chitchat with the president. Macy, then fifteen, leaned over to peer inside at the miniature statue of Jefferson. Franklin was distracted by Socks the cat, who was tethered under a nearby tree with a long rope around his neck. Aides orchestrated photographs. Christy and I beamed at everyone before Clinton was hustled off to the next appointment.
Two more months passed. Our sessions grew sparse through the election year. Campaign frenzy, aides told me, added to fierce competition over a sitting president’s schedule, but it occurred to me that his interest may be waning. Could I blame him? There was a macabre side to our project. We were compiling a million words to be hidden away for distant years, mostly when both of us would be dead. How durable was his intent to leave this record behind? Did he seek a fresh angle? Must I improve our reflection? Was our companionship useful? I kept these preoccupations to myself. Trips to the White House usually upended them, anyway. I never knew what to expect.
A summons came late on Memorial Day. It yanked my working mind three decades forward from the Martin Luther King era, and I rushed to organize questions from a pile of contemporary notes. So much had occurred. At the White House that night, escorted quickly up to the Treaty Room, I hoped to finish last-minute preparations during the usual wait, but President Clinton was already there, talking intently on the phone about poll data in Israel. District by district, he kept asking if that was all, writing down the numbers. Apparently, Shimon Peres had done well in the only debate scheduled with his challenger, Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister held his own by every key indicator. He had gained one point overall in the post-debate polls, building his nationwide lead to 3 percent.
The president looked resigned when he hung up. Three points were not enough, he said. Israeli elections always closed in the last few days toward the war party, Likud. As of today, Peres would lose the election, which Clinton considered a disaster. It would retard the peace process on all fronts, especially with Syria, as Netanyahu was pledging to make no agreement that would cede back any part of the Golan Heights. He said President Asad of Syria could be too brilliant for his own good. Asad was always holding out for the extra ounce. He should have made peace last year.
Clinton was pacing. I asked him to save this material until I could get set up for him to speak directly into my recorders, and he switched subjects. Bob Woodward’s book on the forthcoming campaign was supposed to be coming out soon, but a new letter had come seeking a last-minute interview. He said he would fish it out for me, but his eyes wandered while he touched papers on his desk. I had seen this fidgety mood before. Both his thoughts and his fingertips seemed to jump around. He walked from one shelf to another fussing with his books—feeling them, examining them, rearranging them, even taking scissors to cut out one autographed page for some reason, which made me cringe. On the move, he said his chief of staff, Leon Panetta, had picked up from Woodward that the book would include strange passages about Hillary and Eleanor Roosevelt. The bare truth was that Hillary had asked herself a few times how her predecessor might have handled some crisis, just as Clinton said he had been asked once at a governors conference what Thomas Jefferson might do, but Woodward planned to present this exercise as some sort of witchcraft, as though Hillary held séances to commune with the dead. These were telltale signals about the book. Panetta was trying to talk Woodward out of its most egregious errors, he said, but corrections would never catch up with a sensational focus and tone.
On tape, sitting down, the president reviewed bumpy events leading up to the Israeli elections. In March, to answer the spate of suicide bombings, President Mubarak of Egypt had hosted what was billed as a summit of the peacemakers at Sharm al-Sheikh on the Red Sea. He welcomed Clinton among the leaders of twenty-nine countries. In a historic precedent, Israel and fourteen Arab nations not only met there for talks—with the notable exception of Syria—but also joined the group’s public declaration of measures to combat terrorism. There was progress behind closed doors as well, said Clinton. Yasir Arafat helped restore momentum on the Palestinian front with convincing efforts to crack down on Hamas violence in Gaza. Arafat also vowed to beat a May 1 deadline from the Oslo Accords—by pushing through a formal amendment of the PLO charter to accept coexistence with Israel—and he kept that promise in spite of upheavals shortly ahead. From the summit, Clinton continued his trip to reassure Israelis shaken by the suicide bombs. He described an emotional visit to Yitzhak Rabin’s grave. Privately, he pledged a consistent U.S. policy if the opposition won the upcoming election—vowing never to impose peace terms on Israel—and Netanyahu committed in return to honor the agreements already in process.
No sooner did he leave Israel than Lebanon-based Hezbollah began to fire Katyusha rockets into the cities and towns of northern Israel. Israel suffered some two hundred deaths from random attacks over several weeks, which was roughly equivalent to twenty thousand casualties in the United States. Clinton said Israel had to retaliate. In fact, Peres probably waited weeks too long in anguished deliberations. But then, in April, Peres launched sustained artillery and air strikes without consultation or notice for the United States. His Operation Grapes of Wrath was designed explicitly to drive civilians from southern Lebanon north toward Beirut in numbers massive enough to force pleas from the Lebanese government to President Asad of Syria, who in turn would intercede with Hezbollah to stop the Katyusha rockets. President Clinton called it a Rube Goldberg scheme—far too complicated to work, blind to larger resentments, guaranteed to backfire. By turning nearly a half-million Lebanese into refugees amid credible reports of large-scale civilian fatalities from Israeli howitzers, the bombardment antagonized the Arab states, which had just labored at Sharm al-Sheikh to diminish hostility. Military failure kept Peres from winning over Israeli hawks, and Israeli-Arab voters deserted him in droves. They thought the cold-blooded disproportion showed Peres to be no better than Likud. Arab citizens made up 14 percent of Israel’s population, said Clinton, and 7 percent of its likely voters. Their weakened support could be the margin of defeat for Peres.
A SOMBER MOOD continued through his account of two funerals. The president checked himself briefly, upset that he could not remember exactly how he learned of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown’s death in a plane crash near Dubrovnik, Croatia. This was why we must carve out time for extra sessions to catch up, he said, as though making a note to both of us. He did not like losing memory for the feel and flow of these things, but he recovered a host of stories about Brown—from his rise to head the Democratic Party down to Clinton’s own journeys with Hillary to visit families of thirty-four others killed on the trade mission with Brown. Before a ceremony to receive the bodies at Dover Air Force Base, Brown’s young son swaggered to be brave for his toddler sister, who did not understand, until the caskets started rolling down off the plane and the boy crumbled, wailing, “I want my daddy back.” That was a tough moment, said Clinton. Abruptly, he shifted to rare praise for the Washington Post. He said editors there played the postmortem stories straight. They did not hide from their prior criticism of Brown, and in fact reprised unsuccessful efforts to nail him for corruption, but they added new reports about how Brown had permanently changed Commerce from a stodgy little dead-end department into an energizing ambassador for business development overseas. They quoted witnesses in and out of politics about how much Brown’s service meant. The president expressed gratitude for the balance, wondering again why such attention to actual government had disappeared from most public discourse.
Later, Clinton explored the May 16 suicide of Adm. Jeremy “Mike” Boorda, chief of naval operations. Biographical tidbits spilled forth in a restless search that seemed almost tactile, like his hands wandering over the bookshelves for something invisible. He knew, for instance, that Boorda had married at seventeen and talked his way into underage Navy enlistment in San Diego—she a Southern Baptist, Boorda Jewish. When his best friend’s wife bridled at a Navy assignment to landlocked Oklahoma, young Boorda swapped to take the posting himself. Somehow, it was established that one of Boorda’s Southern relations had sung with Clinton one year in an Arkansas youth choir. The president sketched an extraordinary rise from seaman to top rank, driven in part by the need to keep Navy health care for a firstborn with severe disabilities. As chief of naval operations, in the aftermath of the Cold War, Boorda came to lead a service torn by conflicts from grand weapons strategy down to cheating scandals at Annapolis and intramilitary strife over the Navy’s annual Tailhook convention for young officers. He supported a radio-active investigation into competing claims that Tailhook’s bacchanal rituals instilled command cohesion or shielded hazing to extremes of assault and rape.
In a hidden swarm of disputes over honor, Boorda suddenly shot himself, and the president compared his own helpless, recurring postmortem to Vince Foster’s suicide nearly three years ago. He sensed in both cases a fleeting, spur-of-the-moment despair. At home alone, Boorda had learned of impending media charges that he bent Navy rules to wear two small “V” ribbons for valor. Clinton thought a word of conversation, even a chance phone call, may have allowed the fatal impulse to pass. He saw Boorda, like Foster, as a workaholic who did not realize the extent of his physical and emotional depletion. Deeper than that, he said, some mysterious weight in them plunged through normal defenses along with any understanding that these attacks were just politics.
We escaped to memories of his trip with Hillary through Asia in April. There was something perfunctory about his update of policies in South Korea, Japan, and Russia. He sketched familiar complexities of trade and political reform, scarcely pausing even to describe a visit to the wondrous Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. The president kept mentioning a standard omission from his Asian itinerary—China. “You know, I haven’t been there,” he said. The Chinese government—furious over the reelection of President Lee Teng-hui in Taiwan—had swapped saber-rattling statements with Taiwan during Clinton’s trip. Clearly nagged, he said he would not go there before the election, but everything may change. Maybe he should be more candid about this emerging great power. Just because we are profoundly upset, he said, by the violent suppression of democracy at Tiananmen Square, that doesn’t mean we can gain much influence over China’s internal behavior on human rights. On the other hand, the United States is only 22 percent of the world’s economy, but we are buying more than 40 percent of all China’s exports. We should get something for that.
He digressed at length into this unmet challenge, from the details of two thousand AK-47s smuggled recently into San Francisco all the way back to the general outlook from Chinese history. They still feel humiliated to have been occupied by foreign powers since the nineteenth century, most recently Japan, and they are fearful—terribly fearful—of breaking up again into warlord territories. That’s why their leaders, said Clinton, are determined to maintain political control—all the more so because they sense an inevitable loss of economic control. Mountains of new money are breaking loose from the old state-run bureaucracy. In that context, the president reviewed his impasse with China’s leader, Jiang Zemin. Everywhere else in the world, he would stand or fall on his best efforts to blend personal interaction with strategic interest. Not China. “If I’ve made one mistake in foreign policy,” he declared earnestly, “it’s a failure to develop a relationship with China, and specifically with Jiang Zemin.”
I asked about stories that President Yeltsin of Russia had just begun his reelection campaign with infinitesimal support in the polls, measured as low as one percent. Could that be true? No, said Clinton. Boris was never that bad. His negatives did start above 70 percent, with Russians furious about the brutal transition from the old Soviet system, but hard campaigning had reduced that number. The opponents, led by the hard-line Communist Gennady Zyuganov, still figured to win, and the president disclosed reports, in fact, that Yeltsin threatened to hold power by canceling the elections in advance. Clinton said he had called Moscow immediately to remonstrate over the Russian constitution. He reminded Yeltsin that all four statues in his Kremlin office honored seminal reformers in Russian history. There was no Communist like Lenin, nor any socialist. The four were Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, plus Alexander II, who freed the serfs, and Nicholas II, who pushed for a republican Duma before getting overthrown by the Bolsheviks. They were all czars. “Boris,” Clinton told him, “you can still have those guys as your heroes, but you can’t throw out the elections.” Reformers don’t go backward, he argued, and Yeltsin recanted toward the end. “Yes,” said the Russian president. “I put in the constitution, and I must live or die by it.”
CLINTON PAUSED TO take a phone call from state senator Charlotte Pritt of West Virginia, congratulating her for victory in the gubernatorial primary. It was all over now, he said repeatedly, and he would urge her fellow Democratic leaders to “get in the same boat and row.” Hanging up, he remarked (correctly) that she may lose because of ill will from her “terrible mistake” four years ago, when she opposed West Virginia’s popular Democratic incumbent. Skimming through collateral events, the president said Al Gore had endured gibes since a security presentation on the infamous domestic terrorist called the Unabomber, who turned out to be a fellow Harvard graduate.* Wags teased Gore that Harvard had too many students, including demented ones, and would train them for anything. Clinton did linger fondly over a round of golf with actor James Garner, who scored 78 despite advanced age and bad knees from years of performing his own film stunts. The president fared many strokes worse. For our record, he recalled individual shots plus random details about Garner’s older brother, a 3-handicap and club pro at seventy.
* Theodore Kaczynski, a former math professor, had sent sixteen mail bombs for more than a decade to targets mostly at airlines and universities, killing three people and injuring twenty-three. FBI agents arrested him at his remote cabin in Montana on April 3, 1996. Kaczynski was sentenced to life without parole. His cabin became an exhibit at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.
We covered one belated achievement from Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America.” Asked why the line item veto suddenly passed without explanation, after being stalled more than a year, he said the answer was simple. He had made a private deal with Gingrich and Dole not to use the new veto powers at all in 1996. Until this promise, he said, Republicans had stifled their own legislative majority for fear that Clinton would veto their pork barrel projects selectively in the election year. From the president’s perspective, it was worth the wait to secure a new deficit-fighting tool for the future. Republicans eagerly hid their motive for the deal. They may denounce spending, and ridicule governance itself, Clinton said, shrugging, but an awful lot of them love federal projects before elections. In fact, he and Leon Panetta had been joking that they should use the line item veto only in districts whose representatives hate the government, to help cure hypocrisy. When I asked whether the line item veto would make much difference, he said it was hard to say. If the law survived challenge in the courts, he thought the first applications would be crucial to set an evenhanded precedent. At best, he expected marginal restraint on the budget as a whole, and he noted subtle evasions already in the works. Republicans had rigged the law to make line item vetoes more difficult on tax preferences than on regular expenditures, which would steer more new programs into the tax code.
The arrangement with Dole led us into presidential politics. President Clinton reminded me that he had expected Dole to prevail for the nomination even in February, just after he lost the New Hampshire primary. The GOP rivals just didn’t “have any tall,” he said, in a new Clintonism I took to mean they lacked stature or command. He said Forbes and Alexander didn’t have any tall in South Carolina, for instance, certainly not with the Christian Coalition. Dole’s hold on the nomination was secured so early that he had spent weeks experimenting with issues for a general election campaign against Clinton. His delivery was still poor, the president observed clinically, and his two trial speeches on shame had flopped. First, Dole’s address on the shame of Clinton’s liberal judges drew minuscule attention, partly because he was too mannerly at heart to demagogue on abortion. It was probably unnecessary for the president to answer, but he insisted that every attack be parried at once. Surrogates cited surveys finding Clinton’s appointments to be more moderate—representing the electorate—and far more qualified than judges from Reagan and Bush. “We killed him on that,” the president concluded. He thought Dole gained some traction with the second speech, on welfare as the shame of liberalism, by attacking Clinton for his veto of a Republican welfare bill. Democrats were airing rebuttal ads to point out that experimental waivers to thirty-eight states had helped reduce the welfare population by 1.5 million people, reciting Clinton’s objections to the GOP’s punitive approach.
He said Dole was staking out “free enterprise” positions on three salient issues—tobacco, guns, and gambling—by arguing that government should not interfere with business or consumer choice. Clearly, Dole believed it was good politics to collect these ample war chests, and history supported his judgment. No presidential candidate of either party had campaigned actively against these industries, but Clinton resolved to be first. Committed already, he had appeared at rallies to defend the Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban from repeal. On tobacco, he described his recent speech at “Kick Butts Day” in New Jersey, plus a White House conference with state officials on ways to combat teenage smoking. Here Clinton stressed the merits. He vowed to oppose the illegal sale of cigarettes to minors as a growing, predatory epidemic, which was sadly ignored or blamed on the minors themselves. As for gambling, the president said he would push through—despite scalding objections—a first comprehensive study on the modern era’s proliferation of casinos and state-sponsored lotteries.* Gaming interests were mobilized to block or hamstring the inquiry. They accused Clinton of treating legitimate corporations like gangsters. Their lobby, while led by Republicans, included plenty of Democrats because the neon lure of jackpots was brighter than partisanship. The president himself sheepishly volunteered that he had accepted a lunch in Las Vegas with casino magnate Steve Wynn, who had raised “a ton of money for Dole.”
* Two months later, on August 3, President Clinton signed the National Gambling Impact Study Commission Act of 1996. The commission published its final report in 1999.
Dole also had hired three attack ad consultants, including one expert in anti-gay messages. Clinton said the working premise, based on two decades of poll trends, was that roughly 45 percent of the voting population remained viscerally offended by the gay lifestyle, with far less remorse and misgiving than other haters, which offered a base toward winning elections. Still, all these experimental issues so far did not add up to a big enough vision for a presidential campaign. To complement the hard, specialized tactics, Clinton expected Dole to emphasize character themes on the stump. He might spice up his ticket by running with a moderate Republican woman—such as former governor Christie Todd Whitman of New Jersey—but the president thought it would be smarter for Dole to pick Senator John McCain. A ticket of paired war heroes would drive home the contrast with Clinton’s nonservice in Vietnam. The president had pioneered this novel strategy of matched strengths, rather than bookend balance, with his wonkish peer Al Gore from Tennessee, right next door to Arkansas.
Most people thought Dole was correct to resign from the Senate in order to concentrate on the presidential race. He had explained the rationale to Clinton in a courtesy call just before the announcement on May 15. First, Dole did not have time to be a presidential candidate while also serving as majority leader, which required him to manage a hundred egos and fool with Gingrich every day. Second, he realized that he did not want to be in the Senate if he had to step down as leader, which more or less made the decision for him. This seemed candid and reasonable, the president told me, although he wondered whether anyone would appreciate that he, Clinton, also was running a campaign, plus the entire executive branch, while fending off about six lines of torment on Whitewater. He and Dole merely wished each other well. Theirs was a remarkably civil competition, he said, especially since Dole’s recent letter apologizing for his televised attacks back on the day Clinton’s mother died. On tape, Clinton paraphrased Dole’s gracious wish that both their mothers could have lived to see them contend for the presidency. He also quoted from the thanks he gave Dole in person, confessing that this particular injury had eaten at him for more than two years. “Bob, I’m going to let that go now,” he said. “I won’t mention it or carry it around anymore.”
DURING THIS PREVIEW of the campaign, Chelsea popped in the doorway to say she was sorry she may have disturbed us. She had been singing to herself in the hall, and did not realize we were here. Before he could reply, she vanished, and while I was rewinding the tapes shortly afterward, the president rummaged around the big Ulysses Grant desk. A decade ago, when she was about six, he said Chelsea had skipped into a ceremony at the governor’s office with a briefcase, which he was obliged to open in front of everyone. He showed me a photograph of little Chelsea doubled over in laughter as Clinton squeamishly displayed a boa constrictor inside. His daughter was cheerful and courteous, he said, but she was mischievous, too.
He had fooled me in turn. I said I thought he was searching again for his letter from Bob Woodward. No, and he was pretty sure he would decline the interview. Woodward’s book was shaped already around the Republicans, as he had completed about a dozen talks with Dole before approaching Clinton. The president thought any interview now would give a false impression of parity, and his feelers drew no contrary advice from me. It seemed too late for him to gain much, and I shifted to parting concerns. Esquire had approached me to write the pro-Clinton essay for its election issue, I began, and the president quickly interrupted. He knew more about the magazine’s internal plans than I did. Richard Ben Cramer had agreed to argue for Dole, he informed me. Cramer was good, and he liked Dole in a folksy way that would be effective. The president hoped I would defend him, but I demurred. How could it be done without jeopardizing his oral history? Nearly everything I knew about his presidency came from these interviews taped for posterity, whose existence was a precarious secret in the White House fishbowl. With David Kendall’s help, we had been lucky so far. On my end, when curious friends asked about a canceled dinner, or sudden trip to Washington, I got by on a truthful capsule summary about renewing old acquaintances through confidential talks on historical preservation. However, if I put firsthand stories from our sessions into print, people rightly would question my access to such detail.
Feeling trapped, I divulged risk on another front. Senator Alfonse D’Amato’s Banking Committee had subpoenaed me for its Whitewater investigation. In fact, FBI agents had visited me already at home. This news seemed to shock President Clinton for once, although I tried to make light by telling him that I had framed my summons from D’Amato as a trophy of the absurd. The myriad questions were about Hillary’s law firm records—had I seen them, or something like them, in specified rooms, on certain days, or discussed anything similar, with people not limited to the following? Utterly foreign to me, they were all answerable no a thousand times. According to Paul Sarbanes, my Democratic senator from Maryland, Republicans on the committee had voted to interrogate me along with everyone else who had spent a night at the White House when the records may have been there, including some two dozen of Chelsea’s sleepovers. Sarbanes was negotiating to quash subpoenas for these girls, and spurned my impish notion that he might do better to acquiesce. Perhaps such a spectacle—the televised inquisition of teenagers—could break the fever of Whitewater at last into farce.
Clinton sighed. Democrats were too nice at times, but Sarbanes was right to oppose a gratuitous ordeal for the kids. By then, as I was leaving, he had absorbed my concerns and withdrawn to his thoughts, brooding again on the move, with a golf club from a stack in the corner. It was a driver, the last club Ron Brown had acquired. “Ron was worse than I am,” the president mused, “both as an addict of golf and a terrible player.” Even by mail order, Brown was always stockpiling new clubs. They were like magazines now—everybody sold them. Clinton took several swings on the Treaty Room’s Heriz rug. “I can hit it pretty far,” he said, “but this club’s a little short for me.”