THE MOMENT that most sticks in my mind was the
meeting we had with Clinton on Jan. 7, 1993, in Little
Rock. We met with him for six and a half hours on what the
budget strategy ought to be. From the beginning what we
[the economic team] recommended was that there ought to
be a dramatic change in policy, with the view that deficit
reduction should create lower interest rates and spur higher
confidence. Before the meeting George Stephanopoulos
told me this was going to be hard, [that Clinton] would have
to make that decision over time. But after about a half hour
at the meeting Clinton turned to us in the dining room of the
governor’s mansion in Little Rock. He said, “Look, I
understand what deficit reduction means [in terms of public
criticism for program cuts], but that’s the threshold issue if
we’re going to get the economy back on track. Let’s do it.”
Bumpy Beginnings
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS,
Senior advisor to the president, 1993-96
WE CAME INTO the White House on Inauguration
Day, and there were no computers. They’d all been
disemboweled, all the hard drives taken out because of the
various investigations going on in the White House. And we
were already managing a crisis. Zoe Baird, Clinton’s
nominee for attorney general, was flaming out on Capitol
Hill. Her background check had belatedly turned up that
she had failed to pay Social Security taxes for her
household help and that the workers were illegal immigrants.
She had to go, and we couldn’t even find a word processor
to type a letter from Clinton accepting her withdrawal. She
agreed to step aside only if the White House agreed to take
the blame. My new deputy, David Dreyer, finally drafted a
letter that stressed that she had fully disclosed her domestic
situation to the transition team. Late that night, Clinton came
to my office to sign the letter. He was dressed in
sweat-pants and a baseball cap and was munching a banana
smeared with peanut butter. He told the group of staff
waiting for him in my office that he was disappointed to lose
Zoe, but added that he was happy to end it with a measure
of grace. After he signed, I introduced him to Dreyer.
Clinton stared at Dreyer’s long beard and asked when he
had started.
“Yesterday,” Dreyer said.
Clinton smiled. “Well,” he said, “it sure didn’t take you
long to screw everything up.”
Showdown with Newt
LEON PANETTA,
White House chief of staff, 1994-97
THE GOVERNMENT had shut down, and there had
been a huge snowfall in Washington, I think about 20
inches. So the city was pretty much shut down because of
the snow, but the country was shut down because of the
government. And we were sitting in the Oval Office, and
we’d gone through a series of negotiations. The president
always had a hope he could cut a deal with [House Speaker
Newt] Gingrich. As much as they had different philosophies
and different views, the president always felt Gingrich was
smart enough to see it was in his interest to cut a deal.
Those of us who had experience on the Hill kept telling him
it was impossible for Gingrich to compromise, particularly
after leading the revolution on the Hill, that he was under
tremendous pressure to hold the line. So I presented the
president’s last offer and Gingrich and [House Majority
Leader Dick] Armey said they couldn’t accept it. Finally the
president just looked at them and said, “You know, I just
can’t do what you want. I can’t go along with what you
want for the country. I think it’s wrong. It may cost me the
election, but you know, I’m not going to do it.”
I think Gingrich had been playing the same card the president was
playing—thinking that eventually the president would have to give
in—and for the first time he realized it wasn’t going to happen.
The line was drawn, and I think it was a turning point for the president,
and probably one of the key turning points that led to his re-election.
The Monica Mess
MIKE MCCURRY,
White House press secretary, 1995-98
WHEN A REPORTER from the Washington Post
called one day in January 1998 to tell me that an
investigation of the president and a young woman named
Monica Lewinsky was not mere rumor, I suddenly knew
we were in for a huge and devastating story. But I didn’t
know then how that story would further pollute
Washington’s sulfurous atmosphere over the course of the
coming months. The Internet helped drive the nonstop
drumbeat of the endless news cycle and made it impossible
to focus on anything else, even the telltale signs of an
approaching crisis in Kosovo that would lead America to
war. I dreaded my daily drilling, walking into the press room
each afternoon knowing that the reams of information in my
briefing book would yield to queries from “respectable”
news organizations that were dredged from Drudge. Even
the humorous asides that we concocted in advance—”I feel
like I’m double-parked in a no-comment zone”—didn’t do
well as body armor.
The great irony of the Clinton presidency is rooted in
both the promise and the excess of the Information Age:
President Clinton successfully guided economic and
regulatory policy in a direction that allowed the Internet and
the New Economy to blossom. But the Internet also helped
make whispered rumor and bitter argument a defining
feature of political discourse. The new technologies of
communication gave life and legs to a story that might have
run its course sooner, doing damage to the president’s
ability to govern. The reinforcing cycles of Internet and
cable television kept extending the shelf life of the story,
turning it into a soap opera. We couldn’t find the “off”
switch. I’d see these CNN promos under their “Crisis at the
White House” logo, announcing that they planned to carry
my routine daily briefing live. So I’d call CNN and ask
“Why are you airing my briefing?” And they’d say,
“Because that means we get 100,000 more households.”
But simultaneously, those same technologies, especially the
Internet, improved productivity and strengthened the
national economy, which, in the end, rescued the president
from the embarrassment of impeachment and scandal.
Midterm Blues
MICHAEL WALDMAN,
Clinton’s former chief speechwriter
THE 1994 MIDTERM election was a hammer blow,
just devastating to Clinton and those around him. It was the
worst electoral backlash for a new president in a century,
and it was hard for him to escape the sense of personal
rejection. But his mind was churning. He talked about how
the public no longer wanted a strong, permanent governing
class, and he saw the election as revealing just how
profound was the distrust of government. He knew
progressives had to do something to restore that
confidence. If people thought government couldn’t manage
a two-car parade, they’d never trust it to be involved in big
things like health care. “We have to start having some small
successes,” he told one meeting at Camp David. A few
weeks later he delivered a State of the Union address that
was an hour and 20 minutes long. All the pundits mocked it
and it looked like his presidency was in the ashes. But it
was a clear return to the centrist theme he had first run on.
His recovery, in fact, had begun.
Rider on the Storm
GENE SPERLING,
national economic advisor
WE’RE IN THE [WHITE HOUSE] family theater,
going through the [1998 State of the Union] speech, the
world outside is dominated by scandal allegations, and there
he is, at this lectern, with his glasses on and us sitting in the
crowd and he’s up there like the maestro, rewriting, firing
questions to his policy staffers, and he comes to the punch
line Michael Waldman [Clinton’s chief speechwriter] and I
had written: “Save the surplus for Social Security.” And he
looks at it and says, “No, that’s not quite right. Why don’t
we just talk about the surplus and then we’ll just say, ‘I can
answer in four simple words: Save Social Security first’.”
And everybody just said, “Perfect.” And he said, “I still got
it.” There he was, able to do every single person’s job in
that room as well as they could, and everybody is looking at
him work, while all this is going on and thinking, “This guy is
amazing—his concentration is amazing under this type of
circumstance.”