Friday, Jul 4, 2008
He began his second term with talk of national healing. But Chief Justice Rehnquist knew what the president could expect: "Good luck. You'll need it." Part 1 of an explosive new White House memoir.
May 5, 2003 |
Editor's note: It was a time of "Italianate conspiracy," in Sidney Blumenthal's words, when "intrigue supplanted debate" in Washington: "Plotters brandished the law as a stiletto to try to destroy the president they considered illegitimate." And Blumenthal, who served as a senior advisor to President Clinton during his second term, was at the center of this political drama, as Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's ceaseless and baseless Whitewater inquiry morphed into a fevered sexual inquisition. Blumenthal, who had met the Clintons in 1987 when he was a political reporter and they were the rising young "it" couple in the Democratic Party, was labeled "Sid Vicious" by the anti-Clinton plotters for his bare-knuckled defense of the president and first lady. As a confidant of both Clintons, he would find himself drawn inexorably into the scandalmongers' web, accused of smearing the White House's relentless political enemies and dragged into Starr's grand jury chambers as well as the Senate impeachment trial's bizarre endgame.
Blumenthal, who wrote for the Washington Post and the New Yorker before his White House tour of duty, offers a riveting inside look at this sordid Washington era in his new memoir, "The Clinton Wars." No other journalist has ever enjoyed -- or suffered -- such a vantage point from which to chronicle the underside of American political history. From Monday through Friday, Salon presents exclusive highlights from "The Clinton Wars," which will be published later this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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By Sidney Blumenthal
May 5, 2003 | About two weeks before Clinton's second inauguration the president asked me to come over to the White House. It was a Sunday night. Clinton was dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a sweater with an American flag stitched across its front. He led me to the family kitchen, in a part of the residence I had never seen. It was unlike the large White House kitchen on the ground floor, with its long steel counters and huge refrigerators and sinks, where presidential meals, including state dinners, are prepared. This kitchen was indistinguishable from any kitchen in an ordinary suburban house: Formica surfaces, chairs around a small table, a range, wood cabinets. Clinton set out mugs, boiled some water, and made tea.
Now we had a chance to discuss his inaugural address. I suggested to the president that he use the occasion to deliver a valedictory to the 20th century. He would be the president presiding at the turn of the century. He had campaigned on millennial themes, and he should continue to develop them. From the vantage point of the end of the century, he could describe the transformation of the country and then swivel to describe the demands of the 21st century. He could define the progressive unfolding of the American experience and set himself and his program within it. Gertrude Stein had remarked that America was the oldest country in the world because it had been the first to enter the 20th century. It was always seeking to become a new nation, its oldest identity.
We reviewed the campaign and how it had ended: his frantic but failed efforts in its closing days to help Democrats win the Congress. Clinton wasn't angry, just disappointed, not particularly by his own result, but by the Democrats' lacking the majority. He still had to maneuver his way through a Republican Congress to reach his goals. But his demeanor was of one who felt far more secure and knowledgeable about wielding his power than he had in 1992.
Clinton was frustrated but almost philosophical about the pseudoscandals. He knew that the Republicans knew they had been ginned up for political effect -- and the Republicans knew that he knew that they knew. He related a conversation he had had with Senator Alan Simpson, the Republican from Wyoming, who was retiring.
"You know there's nothing wrong that Hillary and I did in Whitewater," Clinton told him.
"Of course," Simpson replied. "We all know there's nothing there. It was just politics. And it just got out of hand."
Clinton shrugged. He told me another story. He and Bob Dole, his Republican opponent in the presidential race, had become even friendlier after the campaign than they had been before, when they bonded over Newt Gingrich's antics. They were two veterans, no longer competitors, who had a love and respect for politics.
"Let me ask you this," Clinton said he told Dole. "Do you think that politics are dirtier or cleaner since you came in?" Here Clinton was the younger man asking the older one about gritty reality before his own time.
Dole, during the race, had billowed clouds of smoke about campaign finance scandals at Clinton. Now the race was over. "Much cleaner," said Dole. "No comparison." He related that politicians literally used to stuff their pockets with payoffs. He recalled long-forgotten Senator Herman Talmadge of Georgia, who had had the misfortune of getting caught.
Clinton wondered why politics was depicted as dirtier. "What accounts for the difference?" he asked.
"The media," Dole replied. He explained his view that campaign finance laws gave the media endless grist for their mills, and the details were mostly blown out of proportion. So even if politics were cleaner, they were reported as dirtier.
Clinton shrugged again. The scandals were not going to disappear, but they were more an undercurrent than an engulfing wave. In Hillary's terms, they were more "chronic" than "acute."
After we reviewed the inaugural address one more time and rummaged across the political scene, he posed a question. "Do you want to come work with me?" the president asked. He wanted me to help him develop and communicate his political ideas and policies. His ambition was not necessarily confined to domestic affairs, for he thought there might be an international influence for the kind of progressive politics he was pioneering. Clinton was renewing a political party that had been considered hopelessly encrusted in the past. Within the last year I had introduced him to Tony Blair, who was engaged in a similar project with the Labour Party in Britain. There would be an election there in the coming year. We discussed Blair's prospects.
Then Clinton brought the talk around again to his question. "What do you want to do?" he asked.
I accepted his offer to join his staff. "Leave it to me," he said.
On January 20, at the Capitol, overlooking Independence Mall, Bill Clinton took the oath of office again. And then he spoke: "At this last presidential inauguration of the 20th century, let us lift our eyes toward the challenges that await us in the next century." He reviewed the progress of America to put the moment in perspective:
"It is our great good fortune that time and chance have put us not only at the edge of a new century, in a new millennium, but on the edge of a bright new prospect in human affairs -- a moment that will define our course, and our character, for decades to come. We must keep our old democracy forever young. ... We began the 19th century with a choice, to spread our nation from coast to coast. We began the 20th century with a choice, to harness the industrial revolution to our values of free enterprise, conservation, and human decency. Those choices made all the difference. At the dawn of the 21st century, a free people must choose to shape the forces of the information age and the global society, to unleash the limitless potential of all our people, and, yes, to form a more perfect union."
As it happened, this inauguration day was also Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday.
"The challenge of our past remains the challenge of our future: Will we be one nation, one people, with one common destiny -- or not? Will we all come together, or come apart? The divide of race has been America's constant curse. Each new wave of immigrants gives new targets to old prejudices. Prejudice and contempt, cloaked in the pretense of religious or political conviction, are no different. These forces have nearly destroyed our nation in the past. They plague us still. They fuel the fanaticism of terror. They torment the lives of millions in fractured nations all around the world. . . . Our rich texture of racial, religious, and political diversity will be a godsend in the 21st century. Great rewards will come to those who can live together, learn together, work together, forge new ties that bind together."
Clinton, whose father had died before he was born, often reflected in public on mortality. He had done so in an inaugural address as governor. Now he quoted Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago, who had recently died: "It is wrong to waste the precious gift of time on acrimony and division."
Those on the podium shook his hand and offered their congratulations. Chief Justice Rehnquist, however, had been chilly and inexpressive toward the president throughout the morning. He was grim while swearing in Clinton to his second term, with Hillary holding the Bible. Now Rehnquist turned to speak to him. "Good luck," he said. "You'll need it."
"They're going to screw you on the Paula Jones case," Hillary said.
The president waved to the crowd.
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It's a cliche that working at the White House is like living in a firehouse. Without notice, an alarm would sound and I'd be racing. But at other times the White House was like being on the floor of the Chicago Commodities Exchange. Instead of trading in the pit and shouting bids on pork bellies and wheat, I'd be trading policies with other presidential aides: Health care! Climate change! Guns! We lobbied each other to muster support before meetings: What do you feel about pushing for funding heart defibrillators at airports? Should we advocate this safe food standard this week or that environmental program? How about doubling the Peace Corps budget? Why don't you come in on African free trade? The pace never ceased. The White House was like a 24-hour pickup basketball game that just kept going and going.
President Clinton's staff in the second term was different from the staff in the first. The Arkansans whom Clinton had brought with him either had left their positions or were in secondary ones. The youthful network put in place by George Stephanopoulos had lost more than its central organizer; most of those who had been close to him were gone or dispersed, and the 20-somethings within the complex did not see themselves as a distinct corps but were layered into the operations. Many on the staff had extraordinary political histories; almost all of them had come from working- or middle-class backgrounds, having accomplished much professionally, and having wended their way up on Capitol Hill, in campaigns and public interest groups. They were like the classic cast in a war movie about a platoon on the Western Front. I worked every day with people from West Virginia, Iowa, Idaho, Brooklyn, North Carolina, Texas, Vermont, and California. Nearly half the staff were women, including some of the most seasoned political operatives in the Democratic Party, and they were as battle-tested as any of the men.
The West Wing during Clinton's presidency was the most integrated place I've ever worked in. Blacks held positions of responsibility throughout the staff. They were anything but token figures, as they had been in Republican administrations. They attained a critical mass at every level, from director of the Office of Management and Budget to deputy legal counsel to political director to chief speechwriter. Members of the first generation of black professionals made possible by the civil rights revolution, some had been activists in the struggle, and at least one I knew had witnessed firsthand as a child, like Clinton, the integration of Little Rock's Central High School. They were perhaps the greatest meritocrats of all. Their loyalty to Clinton was profound, heartfelt, and unwavering. They took the attacks on him personally, as attacks on their own progress. Terry Edmonds, the chief speechwriter, spoke for them when he wrote that Clinton was "a brother in the struggle. ... So, in black America the question is not why we love the man so much, but why you don't."
If there was any ethnic deficit in the Clinton White House it was of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males, especially wealthy ones. Only chief of staff Mack McLarty and his successor Erskine Bowles qualified. At many meetings there would be none -- only conglomerations of Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Jews, Hispanics, and blacks. At one such meeting, Clinton joked that he was the only WASP present. Gore made two.
Clinton had promised to appoint a cabinet that looked like America, and he did. Forty-four percent of the administration appointees were women. There were seven black cabinet secretaries. And there were the first openly gay appointees in any White House.
In the Oval Office, President Clinton sat behind a massive oak desk, called the Resolute desk, which had been used by President Kennedy. It had been built from the timbers of a British frigate, HMS Resolute, and given as a gift by Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880. Or he sat in a gold upholstered chair in front of the fireplace that was flanked by two long couches. If I was alone with him, or with just a couple of others, he might stand up and walk around while he talked, the better to gesticulate or wrap his hand around your arm as he made a point. On the wall he had hung Childe Hassam's great impressionist painting The Avenue in the Rain, filled with American flags fluttering above New York's Fifth Avenue. In a corner he had stationed a large Native American drum. On a table behind his desk he displayed medallions and trinkets he had received from every state. Around the room were busts of Benjamin Franklin, Harry Truman, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr. On the desk, amid pictures of Hillary and Chelsea, were busts of FDR, JFK, and a world leader Clinton revered, Yitzhak Rabin, the only non-American represented. The shelves were filled with volumes of his personal library of biographies of the presidents. On a coffee table, Clinton had placed a rock from the moon, to remind him, he sometimes told visitors, of how short was his time in this place.
When he was among his advisers he spoke directly about his views of the memos they had given him. Sometimes he played with his reading glasses and sometimes he read memos and magazines or even worked on a crossword puzzle while he was being briefed. If you thought he wasn't listening to every word, you were wrong. He'd interrupt on a nuance and ask you to clarify it. He rewrote every single speech, marked up every memo that crossed his desk, and circulated daily to his aides and friends dozens of newspaper and magazine articles he had read, almost always underlining key parts and writing comments in the margins: "Unbelievable ... I wish ... Good point ... What can we do about this?" After rewriting his speeches, he would read portions aloud: "How does that sound?" Someone would make a suggestion and he'd knock off a word or add a phrase. He'd read it again: "That's better." He disliked obsequiousness, regarding it as distinctly unhelpful. He didn't mind arguing over a point and often demanded an argument. He did not like simple assent. He wanted a discussion in which all potential criticisms and pitfalls were raised.
If a speech was settled, the mood would become relaxed before it was time for him to deliver it, and he might launch into a rambling political tale from Arkansas -- like the time he faced down a lobbyist from the National Rifle Association and challenged him to a shootout. He'd be laughing until the last moment before he had to step through the double French doors to the Rose Garden to speak. He liked to tell jokes and stories and laugh uproariously. But he also had an ironic sense of humor that he mostly kept hidden because it revealed a sharp edge to his observations.
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