Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Clinton's talk in private was endless but not loose. It always had an objective. He was working through some problem, testing a proposition, trying to elicit a reaction, seeing whether a particular idea would be supported or not, or expressing his frustration with a political opponent. He rarely showed off his superior knowledge. He was confident in his intelligence but never used it to appear superior. If he had any arrogance, it showed in his incorrigible lack of punctuality. Even when world leaders were kept waiting, he took his time, seeing sights, reading, and dawdling; usually he was also figuring something out. Another sign that he was in a ruminative mood was that he would start rearranging objects on his desk, moving things slightly here and there.
His humor and his cloudbursts of anger always had reasons behind them. Clinton was genuinely spontaneous and conscious that he was spontaneous. He understood his effect on people while he was having it, an unusual combination of instinct and self-awareness. Being oneself is the hardest thing to achieve in politics, and it demands an undetectable self-control. "If an actor can become a president," Clinton said, "a president can be an actor."
His preferred mode of communication was often the telephone, and his preferred call was placed around midnight. He padded around his study, sifting through memos and articles and books, fielding calls, rocking in his chair. He would talk about basketball, the intricacy of a new government proposal, the motives of this or that senator, golf, something a foreign leader had said to him about a diplomatic initiative, something that someone he had run into at a recent Democratic event had said about what he was doing, something he had just read. In the middle of this patter, he would often say, "Let me ask you a question." And then he would.
Clinton played cards for hours with the staff, Secret Service agents, and visitors. He played hearts, and also other games he picked up, like "oh, hell," which Steven Spielberg taught him one night. He liked to keep score and comment on how the other players were doing. He was a card counter, paying close attention even when it seemed he was just talking. He would take risks but not risks that endangered his hand. He would play double solitaire if he was alone. Once, at one in the morning, in a hotel room in Cologne, Germany, at a G-8 economic summit, I found him playing cards by himself, watching the news on television, reading memos, and talking to Hillary on the telephone all at the same time. He would play games to the very end. As tension built outside his presidential limousine as it pulled up, with people awaiting him, Secret Service at attention, crowds murmuring, sometimes Clinton would be finishing a game in the back seat with his staff.
Clinton's thorough knowledge of government policy was prodigious. Rarely did anyone in the room know more than he about a given policy's details or implications when it was discussed. For his aides this was a burden and a relief. If you wanted to have an effect you had to have mastered the policy, too -- why else were you there? -- but you could also depend on his knowledge. It was reassuring that he would make the decision. He understood that policies were politics, that they were means and ends at once. He saw them both on their own merits and as elements in strategy. But he frequently made difficult decisions on the logic of the facts, overriding his political inclination.
Throughout the fall of 1997, President Clinton gave speeches and launched initiatives to advance civil rights. Racial equality was his earliest and most passionate motivation in politics. He returned to the source of his commitment on September 25 to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the integration of Little Rock's Central High School. The nine black students who had first walked the gantlet of taunting whites once again marched up the steps, and the president opened the schoolhouse door for them. (Goodie Marshall, whose father had been the lawyer for the Little Rock Nine, accompanied him.) Clinton's political career was an outcome of the struggle at Central High. The line from Faubus to Clinton was from the Old South to the New South. And some of the segregationists who had whipped up the crowds 40 years earlier, like Justice Jim Johnson, were still plotting against Clinton in the shadows with the Arkansas Project. The past was not another country; it was operating differently in the present.
For Clinton, the anniversary was a moment when he could address the nation's whites, too. "Like so many Americans, I can never fully repay my debt to these nine people," he said. "For with their innocence, they purchased more freedom for me, too, and for all white people." He sought to restore the ideal of integration. Jim Crow had been banished, but American society still remained fractured by race and suspicion. "Segregation is no longer the law," he said, "but too often separation is still the rule." Soon he turned to another aspect of rights and separation.
In October 1997, Matthew Shepard, a young gay man, was brutally beaten to death in Laramie, Wyoming. Shortly after, President Clinton was invited to speak at the Human Rights Campaign annual dinner, the biggest event of the main gay rights group. No president had ever appeared at a gay event, though Clinton had attended numerous private gay fund-raisers and had been the first president to welcome a delegation of gay leaders to the White House. Within the White House a position had been created for someone to be a liaison to the gay community -- an important and overwhelmingly Democratic constituency. Clinton saw gay rights as akin to other rights movements. Richard Socarides, a softspoken and politically adroit New York attorney, was appointed director of the Office of Public Liaison. I joined him and others on the staff in advocating that the president speak at the HRC dinner.
On November 8, Clinton delivered the first presidential speech placing gay rights within the American tradition. He addressed programmatic measures -- the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, increased funding for research on HIV and AIDS, and an executive order banning discrimination against gays in the federal government -- but his speech was especially notable for its statement about the essential relationship between the establishment of rights and the function of the presidency:
"Our ideals were never meant to be frozen in stone or time. Keep in mind, when we started out with Thomas Jefferson's credo that all of us are created equal by God, what that really meant in civic political terms was that you had to be white, you had to be male, and that wasn't enough -- you had to own property, which would have left my crowd out when I was a boy. Over time, we have had to redefine the words that we started with, not because there was anything wrong with them and their universal power and strength of liberty and justice, but because we were limited in our imaginations about how we could live and what we were capable of and how we should live. Indeed, the story of how we kept going higher and higher and higher to new and higher definitions -- and more meaningful definitions -- of equality and dignity and freedom is in its essence the fundamental story of our country."
Only two days later, Clinton convened a White House Conference on Hate Crimes at George Washington University. Three years earlier he had gotten legislation passed increasing the penalties for hate crimes, and one year earlier he had created the National Church Arson Task Force to investigate a plague of church burnings and prosecute those responsible for them. Now he proposed new laws that would make violence because of gender, disabilities, or sexual preference hate crimes. (As a direct consequence of these initiatives, the number of hate crimes reported by law enforcement agencies to the Justice Department more than quadrupled, from 2,771 in 1991 to 12,122 in 1999.) "All Americans deserve protection from hate," he said at the conference. A heckler interrupted, shouting, "If you murder Vince Foster, it is not a hate crime!" The tangled paranoia of the right wing, like underground steam building up pressure, had burst out. "We have the First Amendment, even here," Clinton replied evenly. "But I think the hate's coming from your way, not mine." This tiny, isolated incident tellingly demonstrated how Clinton's efforts at social conciliation provoked the right. It was not that he was vaguely misunderstood, but that he was seen as devious, hypocritical, and criminal.
Under Clinton, poverty among black Americans had dropped to its lowest level in American history, homeownership among blacks had risen to its highest, black enrollment in colleges had increased from 48 to 59 percent from 1992 to 1997, and black median income had risen almost 15 percent. Moreover, the income of the poorest fifth of Americans had grown at a 5.4 percent annual rate, compared to 3.9 percent for the top fifth. Of course these gains were the result of Clinton's overall policies that encompassed minorities, not specifically as a consequence of the One America initiative, but the initiative coincided with an immeasurably important change in the American self-image, and it was an emblem of Clinton's intent. He did not want to reiterate the old debate of the 1960s or even that of his first administration, which had centered on affirmative action. He wanted to turn the discussion to the theme of the national strength that could be found in diversity. The country was receiving new waves of immigrants from Asia and Latin America as well as assimilating the repercussions of the civil rights revolution. More than his economic policies, his renovation of the welfare state, or his education programs, this recasting of the national ideal ranks as among his most lasting accomplishments. Clinton's notion of inclusion was at the root of his idea of the country.
The private president was even more adamant about this theme than the public one. In front of the cameras, Clinton used his persuasive powers for conciliation and understanding. He tried to convince, to reason, and to appeal to emotion. But when he was not on public view, when there was no chance that what he said would be reported, he was more insistent.
Once, a small group of about six senior advisers met to brief the president in the Oval Office. We presented the policy options and the political implications. We thought we had covered all the bases. Clinton waited patiently for us to finish. Then he said, "You are the dumbest bunch of white boys I have ever seen." He reprimanded us for coming into the Oval Office as an all-white, all-male group. He mentioned the names of several minority women whom he expected to have included the next time. "Don't let it happen again," said the president. It didn't.
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President Clinton's deposition in the Paula Jones case went well. That's what I was told. It was Monday, January 19, 1998. Hillary was told the same thing. The media had been building up the tension leading to this moment for months, and now it seemed that another would-be scandal had turned into another nonevent. It was more than an anticlimax: it was a triumph for the president. "They didn't lay a glove on him," Robert Bennett, his lawyer, told me. "On a scale of one to ten, it was a 15."
Clinton had testified on Saturday, January 17. I had gone to Chicago for the weekend. On television network news, I watched the presidential limousine drive to Bob Bennett's office at the Skadden, Arps law firm, a short distance from the White House, and then, when the deposition was over, depart. Nothing amiss was reported. Bennett prided himself on his street-smart Brooklyn origins -- he had been an amateur boxer -- and, unlike his brother, the conservative ideologue William J. Bennett, the pragmatic Bob was a consummate Washington player, who shuttled from his corporate clients to the Hill, from media interviews to the White House. His manner was more jagged than silken, but that was how he liked to project his aggressive, savvy defense. He knew his way around the city's Byzantine mazes and cleverly led his clients to safety. Bill Clinton would be only the latest to be rescued. Yet Bennett confided to me that the President seemed "down" to him after the deposition. He didn't know why. Bennett said he told him, "You did a magnificent job. The worst is over."
I had been speaking to Bennett fairly often about the Jones case, especially since the Supreme Court ruling in January 1996 that the President could not postpone depositions until after his term of office was over, and through all its bizarre convolutions thereafter. Regardless of the media attention and publicity, it appeared that Clinton would win the case without complicating judgment. Jones had spurned Bennett's reasonable effort in August to settle it, despite the urgings of her lawyers, Joe Cammarata and Gil Davis. Her husband, the underemployed Steve, had believed he could make a much bigger killing. He demanded $1.2 million and began chasing a lucrative book deal. Their lawyers warned the Joneses, "A perception of greed and hatred on your part will lose the public relations battle for your good name which your lawyers have worked long and hard to build up."
At Steve's instigation, Paula Jones fired these lawyers in September and hired new ones from the Rutherford Institute, a tiny foundation on the far shores of the right wing that advocated a literal interpretation of biblical scripture as a replacement for civil law. Its inspiration, R. J. Rushdoony, was a Holocaust denier who favored the death penalty for homosexuals and doctors performing abortions. The person responsible for recruiting the Rutherford Institute to the case was Jones's new adviser and makeover consultant, Susan Carpenter-McMillan, a conservative antiabortion activist from suburban Los Angeles whose full-time occupation was to appear on radio and television talk shows. She managed to gain control of Jones's legal defense fund -- and rewarded Jones with a nose job and a white Mercedes. (In 1999, Steve left Paula and they divorced. Carpenter-McMillan also divorced her husband at the same time, fantasizing on a TV talk show about having an affair with John F. Kennedy: "I know he's dead, but if I could raise him from the dead . . .") Meanwhile, Jones's unofficial lawyers, the right-wing "elves," as they came to be known, worked behind the scenes to destroy any settlement efforts and to continue the case as a political weapon against Clinton. Jones's lawyers relied on the elves to write their briefs, but they never knew of these secret and successful maneuvers to derail the settlement.
From the moment in 1994 when Jones was introduced at the Conservative Political Action Conference, she had time and again altered her story about her encounters with Governor Clinton to make it more salacious. Her shifting account, undoubtedly not of her own invention, was fuel for her hidden handlers in their media campaign against Clinton. They would load stories in right-wing media from the Drudge Report to Murdoch-owned outlets like the New York Post and Fox News to the Moonie-owned Washington Times. Then the rest of the media would clamor after the unproved but irresistible tales, justifying coverage by their prior circulation. One Newsweek reporter, Michael Isikoff, was an exception to the rule in mainstream news organizations in that he carved out a special beat on the sexual folderol swirling around the Jones case. As he darted from sex rumor to rumor, competing news organizations felt increasingly obliged to follow or risk losing an edge.
When in October 1997, Jones added a new twist to her evolving charges, now claiming that Clinton had "distinguishing characteristics" on his genitals, George Conway, a key elf, rifled this bit of imagined pornography by e-mail to Matt Drudge, who promptly posted the story on his website for days. It was soon widely reported elsewhere. "This was just an effort to humiliate and embarrass the President, and at the appropriate time we will show that it is absolutely baseless and without merit," Bennett declared. And Clinton's doctor signed an affidavit stating that it was completely false.
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