CHAPTER 14

ONE THING THAT BILL Clinton almost never did as a presidential wannabe was read from prepared statements. On the campaign trail, prewritten remarks were anathema to the improvised jazz that made the Arkansas governor click with his audiences. The stories were legendary about his compulsive need to listen intently to everyone’s question, shake every hand in the room, and commit each day’s new names and faces to memory. Here was someone who was so engaging and comfortable in his own skin, he made even his most seasoned rivals for the 1992 Democratic nomination look like bumbling neophytes in comparison. Working from a script was an amateur move—a crutch for those poor souls running for president who didn’t have “It.” Bill Clinton had it. And Bill Clinton did not read from prepared statements.

But on a snowy sidewalk in Nashua, Clinton found himself with paper in hand, reciting the words that his vaunted team of so-called “gurus” had penned that previous weekend during an emergency powwow in Little Rock. The move was born of desperation. Clinton’s lifelong dream of becoming president of the United States was fading away. No one had any doubt about that. With just eight days to go before the New Hampshire primary, the double-digit lead he had built against his Democratic rivals had long ago vanished amid the double-whammy of allegations that he had dodged the Vietnam draft and had engaged in a twelve-year-long extramarital affair with Gennifer Flowers. Three weeks earlier, Clinton and his wife, Hillary, had appeared together on a post–Super Bowl edition of 60 Minutes to deny the charges that Flowers had levied in Star magazine. Flowers came right back at the Democratic front-runner the following day in a press conference, in which taped phone conversations appeared to show Clinton coaching her in how to fend off questions about their trysts. But it was the draft-dodging charge, which Clinton also denied, that was really killing his hopes of winning late converts in veteran-heavy New Hampshire.

And so he read from the prepared statement, intent on making sure that he made every point that he needed to make with his political life on the line. “Let’s face it,” Clinton read to the assembled press pack, encircling the distressed candidate like ravenous lions ready to pounce on a wounded gazelle, “for too much of the last couple of weeks, this election has been about me, or rather, some false and twisted tabloid version of me.” He sounded rehearsed, uninspired, and nearly defeated. It went on like this for a while longer. The mood among Clinton’s staff was grim.

After Clinton finished his statement, he climbed into the front seat of a three-row SUV. In the middle row behind him sat Hillary and John Broderick—Clinton’s New Hampshire co-chairman. In the back row were James Carville and George Stephanopoulos—who held to his ear one of the first clamshell cell phones that anyone in the group had seen. As the driver shepherded them to the next event at Stonyfield Yogurt in Londonderry, no one spoke for about five minutes. What was there to say? Finally, Broderick decided it was time to lay down a marker.

“Governor,” he began. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” Clinton replied.

“Why’d you do that?” Broderick said. “That was sad. If you’re gonna run the campaign like that, you might as well go back to Arkansas now because it’s all over.”

At that, Carville and Stephanopoulos perked up. The dual-engine powerhouse of Clinton’s national political machine was not used to state-level operatives dressing down their candidate like that. But Broderick wasn’t relenting.

“Do you want to be president of the United States?” he asked. “Or do you want to let that guy who wears the pocket protector be president?” Broderick was referring to Paul Tsongas—the wonky former Massachusetts senator who had overtaken Clinton in the polls.

“Well,” Clinton finally replied after his New Hampshire aide came up for air. “What would you have me do?”

Broderick reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. But this wasn’t another prepared statement. It was a two-page memo that he and Terry Shumaker—Clinton’s other New Hampshire co-chairman—had drafted to make their case to the candidate for how he should approach the last week of the campaign in New Hampshire. Neither Broderick nor Shumaker had been invited to the strategy session in Little Rock. Although they lacked the larger-than-life personality of the Ragin’ Cajun and the golden-boy glow of Stephanopoulos, the two veterans of New Hampshire politics had plenty of their own ideas about how Clinton could make his comeback in the state that they knew best. At the top of the list: Get out of the bubble. Early on in the campaign, Shumaker had helped convince Clinton not to ask for Secret Service protection, knowing that added security would prove an obstacle to him getting up close and personal with crowds. Still, up until this point, Clinton had stood behind too many rope lines and was generally reluctant to dive full-bore into the swarms of people who came out to see him. He had to change that reticence and do it the New Hampshire way. His only shot now was to act like the underdog he’d become.

As the van rumbled north along Route 102, Clinton ingested the memo and then passed it back to Broderick. “Goddamn it, George,” Clinton snapped to Stephanopoulos. “Why do we keep doing this stuff?” Broderick and Shumaker took the candidate’s displeasure as a full-fledged endorsement of the new plan.

When they arrived in Londonderry, a newly emboldened Broderick offered some guidance for the still-disheartened team. “Nobody leaves this van unless they’re smiling,” he said. For the benefit of the gathered cameras, everyone did as they were told. As the junk-food-loving governor entered the yogurt shop, Stephanopoulos and Carville approached Broderick, who worried that he was about to be told his services were no longer required by the campaign. Instead, the duo offered a tepid acknowledgment that maybe the New Hampshire guys’ ideas weren’t so bad after all. It was a good start, but when he entered the venue himself, Broderick noted with frustration that another constrictive rope line had already been set up inside. It looked like change wasn’t going to come easily.

As the event was coming to an end, Clinton and his team were walking out the back door when the governor turned to Broderick. “How’d you think that went?” the candidate asked. “I thought it was terrible, sir,” Broderick replied. “Terrible. You’re like a caged lion in there with all of the ropes. You’ve got to break out of the ropes.”

Clinton made clear that he understood now. As he and the rest of the group made their way back out to the SUV, which was parked behind the yogurt store, they encountered a woman and her young son standing alone. Out of range of the press pack that was still assembled inside, the woman asked Clinton if she could speak with him privately for a moment. Clinton turned to his wife and aides. “Why don’t you get back in the van,” he said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

Clinton chatted with the woman for about five minutes. Meanwhile, his aides inside the van were becoming increasingly agitated. They had a schedule to keep, and they were running well behind as usual. But Clinton was still talking, and now he had his arms around the woman and her son. A few moments later, he finally wrapped it up and climbed into the van. That’s when someone made the mistake of telling the candidate about how they were now running even further behind schedule. “That woman just lost her husband,” Clinton snapped. “And she said her son admires me, and she asked if I would speak to him. I thought that was pretty important to do.”

From that day forward, there were no rope lines to be found at Bill Clinton’s events in New Hampshire. Clinton frequented diners. He went to the Mall of New Hampshire, where shoppers approached him one by one and told him not to give up and that they were rooting for him. He famously told voters at an Elks Club meeting in Dover that if they’d give him a second chance, he’d be there for them “until the last dog dies.”

After a solid week of campaigning in the manner in which Broderick and Shumaker suggested, Clinton’s spirits remained down nonetheless. The reason for his consternation was known only to a small group of people within the campaign: their internal poll numbers showed Clinton finishing all the way back in third place, behind both Tsongas and Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey. A third-place finish in New Hampshire would kill Clinton’s campaign. With the Democratic candidates all ceding the Iowa caucuses to hometown senator Tom Harkin that year, New Hampshire was the very first testing ground of the nominating contest, and Clinton just could not afford to win the bronze. Sure, he might try to spin it as a respectable showing that would allow him to continue on in the race, but there was no way that the broader public—and particularly the press—would buy it. This was the guy who had risen from relative obscurity to the top of the heap—the centrist who had been poised to lead the Democratic Party out of the wilderness and give it a real shot to win back the White House for the first time in sixteen years. A second-place finish behind Tsongas—who hailed from neighboring Massachusetts—now, that was something the Clinton campaign definitely could spin into a moral victory. But third? No, that wouldn’t cut it.

Early on the night before the primary, after the latest round of bleak internal polling had come in, Clinton and his aides dined at the Puritan Backroom—a Manchester casual-dining institution since 1917 where the fried chicken fingers were almost as good as the barbecue back home in Arkansas and a single serving provided almost enough leftovers to feed a family of four for a week. After Clinton finished licking his fingers clean, he retreated to the kitchen to greet the staff and thank them for the meal. He was antsy. When he had no one else to talk to in the back of the restaurant, he came back out front again and shot the breeze with the few diners who were finishing their meals on this late Monday night. And then Bill Clinton decided that he wanted to go bowling. A few staffers and members of the press accompanied him to the local candlepin spot, where he bowled a couple of strings and chitchatted with some locals who had expected a low-key night at the lanes but instead found themselves hanging out with the future president of the United States.

On Primary Day, Clinton surprised even himself by taking second place in the New Hampshire primary, losing to Tsongas by 8 percent but comfortably beating Harkin, Kerrey, and former California governor Jerry Brown. It was a result that would have been perceived as a significant blow to Clinton only a month earlier. Up until that point, no one had ever lost the New Hampshire primary and gone on to become the president of the United States. But after nearly collapsing, Clinton now had something more important on his side than history: momentum. By exceeding his own hopes in New Hampshire, he didn’t have to fake a happy expression when he addressed his cheering supporters at a hotel in Merrimack and issued one of the most famous lines in the history of presidential politics. “While the evening is young, and we don’t know yet what the final tally will be, I think we know enough to say with some certainty that New Hampshire tonight has made Bill Clinton the Comeback Kid.”

Broderick went on to become chief justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court, and Shumaker was appointed US ambassador to Trinidad during Bill Clinton’s second term. Shumaker remained especially active in state-level Democratic politics and was a prominent backer of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign in New Hampshire. Soon after the former secretary of state launched her second White House bid, I sat down for a conversation with Shumaker in his Manchester office. As we started talking about the current political landscape, my eyes began wandering around the room. I noticed that among the campaign paraphernalia on display was a framed poster with various missives scrolled in Sharpie from members of Clinton’s 1992 New Hampshire team. One particular message stood out: “Terry—What, me worry? Thanks, Bill Clinton.”