Transcript
February 3, 2000
James Young
We’re ready to begin this session. I’d like to welcome Boyden Gray, former counsel to Vice President Bush and to President Bush. Just a few words I think for the tape to make everything clear, first I’d like it to be clear amongst us, what the ground rules are, and what the disposition of an ultimate destination of the transcription of this session will be. The ground rules are laid out in the briefing books which everybody has, and basically, they amount to—on our part, that is the people who are doing the interview—that nothing said in the room goes out of the room. We do this, and we follow it as a strict policy, because we ask for candor in return. In the terms of the written record, I think that is also clear, and I think Mr. Gray ought to have the opportunity to give us any thoughts or concerns he may have on this subject. You have control over the release of any words you speak here. The transcript that will be made of this will be copy edited and forwarded on to you for your revision, review and such stipulations as you may want to make concerning access to it. We’re producing these materials for archival purposes, as you know, so that the copy of the tape, the transcript that you approve, will be filed at the Bush Library, and also filed at Miller Center, subject to any such stipulations as to access you may think appropriate. If—your concerns on this subject would be welcome for us to hear. If you have any at this point, put on the record of the tape.
C. Boyden Gray
Well, in other words, I have complete control, so I can say anything negative I want to about somebody that I wouldn’t make public. So good, no, I think I—
Young
Brief introduction. The important thing for these sessions is to have the respondent, each of the respondents, and most particularly Mr. Gray, speak to history about those things they think will be most important to understand this Presidency, what it did, what it didn’t do, as it comes to be examined in the light of history. So we’re making an effort here to record thoughts, memories, accounts of this Presidency that are not likely to be found in a written record, but will be important to preserve after you, and everybody else, and I—I don’t know how young some of you are—are gone from the scene, when this resource will no longer be available. So, we as scholars have some questions we think are going to be important for future scholars and people who examine the record to want to find out about, when they go to the Presidential Library.
But again, the most important things are what you, who knew this Presidency from the inside, as most of us here did not, think are most important to understand about it, things particularly that were missed or misconstrued when it was sitting in office. If you’d like to start out with any of those things, you’re welcome to it. Otherwise we can start with a general agenda and you can—
Gray
Well, I just want to put a place holder in, and we were talking about this yesterday at lunch, make sure we get to it or someone gets to it at some point. But most of this is going to be on domestic policy, because Jim said that there would later be an opportunity to get into the foreign policy stuff, and there are some foreign policy things which are all loosely related. There’s the—of course Iran-Contra business and there’s the [Dave] Obey amendment, the leveraging issue of very, very early on. Then there’s Contra Aid Agreement, the flap with Baker, which actually isn’t very important—it’s interesting, but not very important—and then the Gulf War, of course, which is very important in my opinion. All of those encompass things, I mean I assume we’re probably not going to get into.
What I wanted to do was to make sure that the record reflected—because I think people have misconstrued his domestic policy, that he really did have one. He was not very good articulating it because of his upbringing and his mother’s voice ringing in his ears, “Stop talking about yourself, George. You’re talking too much about yourself, George.” I mean, so he always—he did have a vision, he just thought it was pompous and arrogant and gratuitous to talk about it. But he did have a sense of what he was about, domestically, which stems quite organically, as it would for anybody, from his background as a businessman and coming from a business background. His father was a distinguished banker before he became a politician. The Bush family and the Walker family had very distinguished business backgrounds, and he himself had been a successful businessman, probably more successful than any other President in our history.
So he had a very firm sense of what the free market was all about, and, as Jim was acknowledging, he was an economics major, and a Phi Beta Kappa one at that. So he was not illiterate in these matters and he did have sense of what he was about that permeated much of the domestic policy initiatives that he put forward. They just weren’t explained very well. There was an effort to explain it, or start to explain it, in one speech that he gave at the conclusion of the day the Gulf War ended. How could anyone know the speech was planned weeks in advance and he had a place, and he had to go and it happened to be the day the war ended? Of course, it got snowed under. I think only one newspaper reported it, because it was domestic policy and not foreign, there’s no reason in the world why, because of the different reporters covering, why it couldn’t have been covered. I think the press said, “Aha! We have an excuse not to cover it,” because they probably didn’t want to. But he had started to lay out some of that in that speech, and it got deep-sixed and that was another one of the many examples of—he gave a press conference right before he went to Rio to talk about not only his, but the country’s, environmental record vis-à-vis the other countries, and the networks refused to cover it. I mean it’s just outrageous.
And those kinds of things repeatedly happening discouraged him, and he said, “There’s no point in wasting my time, because no matter what I say, it’s going to get deep-sixed and so why bother.” I think he gave up too soon, too much, it was compounded by the fact that—and this is, you know I say this off the record, but it’s also being recorded—Darman didn’t agree with many of the things he did domestically. All Darman wanted to do domestically was a master budget agreement and everything else was secondary, so Darman intercepted efforts to, or impeded efforts to get this stuff out. I can remember one famous series of meetings in Sununu’s office to go over the content of our speeches, that he was to make, a series of graduation addresses where the hope was that he could embellish on what I’m talking about and spell it out, and Pinkerton was the resident genius who supposed to be putting this all together and Darman just hated him and destroyed him, just killed him and it was a very, very, sordid, ugly series of meetings.
And so again, the effort to try to articulate what was the thread tying all these things together, they just simply got lost. But there was a thread. It does all make sense. It all has to do with his sense of what the marketplace is about. A Thousand Points of Light never gets discussed, but it was a central part of his being, of what he was all about, and it was the notion, of course—I suppose you could, might even think of it as the origin of compassionate conservative, but a part of what he thought was that the communities ought to be doing this, not to be discouraged or displaced by hyperactivity by the federal government, that local communities ought really to do a lot of these things and could do them much, much better than the federal government can. But all that related. It’s just that it wasn’t articulated well and when it was, it wasn’t reported, and I think he got very, very discouraged, and frankly, kind of gave up on it at the end. So I just wanted to put the—and one other thing that we talked about yesterday, I asked Jim, as the bully pulpit, “How does the President really express all of this?” And Jim said the obvious thing: speeches. One thing that people don’t understand is that Vice President Bush had a far superior speechwriting staff than President Bush had. How could that happen? In fact, he graduated most of the Reagan speechwriters, with the exception of Peggy Noonan, who were all graduates of the Bush farm team. Peter Robinson, Josh Gilder, and Clark Judge, who was the chief speechwriter at the end of the Reagan years, were all hired originally and trained by—
Young
Was Dana Rohrabacher too?
Gray
No, but he wasn’t—I’m talking about the second term. Dana sort of—the first term, I’m talking about the second term now, saying all with the exception of—and the second term is the exception. But some of the great speeches that were written, you know, about the evil empire and what not were second term speeches, Gilder and Clark Judge especially, and they’d been hired and trained by Bush. [Ken] Khachigian was first term and Dana Rohrabacher primarily first term although they sloughed over into the second term. But with the exception of Peggy Noonan, the principal speechwriters in the second term were Bush hires and trainees. They were all fired—they all wanted to stay—they were all fired the day Bush became President.
Young
How did that happen? Did President Bush want that?
Gray
Well, that’s a good question. I mean I don’t know why he let it happen. Why he let it happen, I don’t know, but [John] Sununu and [Richard] Darman determined that it would be far better to have a second-rate team than a first-rate team, and Darman’s motivation was—
Young
They deliberately wanted a second-rate team.
Gray
They deliberately wanted a second-rate team, and the reason was, I think—I mean, I don’t know—but I think that Darman persuaded Sununu that there was a lot of illicit policy making in the speechwriting shop that always bypassed Darman’s control. He was a control freak. And there was, in the Reagan years—It went into clearance, these speeches did, and Sununu had to chop on it with nothing, you know, that lacks the clearance process. But when the speechwriters sat down with Ronald Reagan and they all got together, funny things happened and Darman usually wasn’t there. He didn’t like anything happening that he wasn’t there for. So his determination was to make sure that this ugly policy making did not occur in the Bush administration outside of his control. The result was we had a second-rate speech staff, that didn’t have mess privileges, da, da, da, da, da, and so one of the reasons why—but it’s just sort of jarring thing that you have a better speechwriting staff when you’re Vice President than you’re allowed to have by your own staff when you become President.
So that’s another one of the reasons. It’s not the only reason, I mean, but it’s another factor in what deprives him of the capacity to, or impeded his capacity to speak, and he wasn’t, of course, gifted like Ronald Reagan was anyway, as a public speaker. He wasn’t bad. He was much better than Ronald Reagan at back-and-forth jousting with the press in a press conference, that’s where he was at his best, and there he was quite good and did well, but those are not places where you can set forth something in a coherent way because you’re always passing back and forth between questions and answers. So I just wanted to say that by way of sort of introduction to all of this, because I think there are points that—of course he’s responsible, he’s ultimately responsible for who he has working for him so, some of this was self inflicted, but there it is, nevertheless.
Young
Wouldn’t it be important then to start with Bush as Vice President, which is when you joined him, and then move—you can carry us through the transition to Bush as President, and then later we’ll want to talk about some of the specific accomplishments and what are the things you did as counsel and as a policy person in the Bush Presidency. But maybe we should start on the record, at the beginning of your association with Bush and how that Vice Presidency—
Milkis
How it began and evolved?
Gray
You mean how I got hired or how—
Milkis
Yes, you can start there.
Zelikow
Did you know Bush before 1981?
Gray
No, I did not. No. Not before he interviewed me, I’d never met him. My father knew his father, of course, but they were golfing companions.
Zelikow
Gordon Gray knew Prescott Bush. Going back to the Eisenhower and even perhaps before?
Gray
No, when he was in the Senate, my father was in the White House. And there were other members of my family who knew the Bushes. I have a first cousin who’s a leading Republican in the state legislature in North Carolina, who’s a very good tennis player who had played tennis with the Bush sons. Gerry Bemiss, a childhood friend of President Bush, is a cousin by marriage of mine and of my first cousin, a cousin of my first cousins and the one who, as I say is a high-ranking political figure and a very good tennis player. So Gerry Bemiss is as far as I’m concerned a cousin; that’s another connection that was there before he ever knew who I was.
Zelikow
Did you know each other then from the Alibi Club?
Gray
God, no.
Zelikow
That was much later?
Gray
I was admitted to the Alibi Club in 1982 or ’83, but my father was a member, and of course, as I say, my father knew both Prescott Bush and then Vice President Bush. My father was in the intelligence community and of course was on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and knew Vice President Bush—who knew the then CIA director Bush from that capacity. So my father knew both. I got the job because I had represented the Business Roundtable, you know what it is, it’s a business consortium, and fighting a thing called Illinois Brick [v. Illinois] in antitrust legislation. Illinois Brick was a case that the Supreme Court ruled that direct purchasers can sue for antitrust damages, for treble damages, which basically eliminated mass tort consumer class actions, because consumers usually buy only indirectly from manufacturers. So it’s a big, big case, and the state Attorneys General and the liberals and [Edward] Kennedy—Kennedy was head of the Judiciary Committee—this is little known, but in the four years that he was chairman of the judiciary, he never got a single bill out of the Judiciary Committee, because the first bill was Illinois Brick and there was this jihad by the business community to stuff the toilet, so that everything else behind it got backed up. And the chief counsel of the committee, who went home to New York after three years of getting nothing out, was none other than Dave Boies, sort of an interesting coincidence, and he was succeeded by Steve Breyer, and Steve Breyer used that connection to get into the first circuit even though the judgeships had been shut to—
Zelikow
It’s not of totally trivial interest.
Gray
But I had represented the Roundtable, I was really almost too young to do this, but it was a big job and I had represented the Roundtable in fighting this bill, and during the course of the legislative fight, Deanne Siemer, one of my former partners who was then general counsel of Defense Department, came to me and said, “Everybody in the administration says we’re going to win this bill. We’re going to get this bill because the Carter administration supports it.” She said, “Of course it would be devastating to us,” because there were several key defense suppliers who had treble damage exposure and had the legislation passed, it would have had a huge budget turning impact with the Defense Department, so they were rooting, quietly, for me to win. And she said, “Now [Harold] Brown will go to the White House and use his chits if he thinks you’re going to lose, and we’re going to win. So what’s the story here? He doesn’t want to use his chits if he doesn’t have to,” and I said, “I know this may sound counterintuitive, but we’re going to win.” And she relied on my judgment and it turned out to be right and she was very grateful.
So when it came along, she had gotten to know, in her capacity as general counsel, a man named Admiral Murphy, who had gotten to know Bush when he was at the CIA on transfer and then finished his career at the department and worked a lot with Deanne and he was Bush’s first Chief of Staff. Bush says to him, “Find me a Washington lawyer who really knows his way around town,” he then goes to her and says, “I want someone just like you, I picked you, but you tainted yourself by working for Carter. I want someone just like you.” And she said, “Gray’s your man.” So that’s how it all started, and that’s why I was interviewed, but it didn’t hurt of course, that Gerry Bemiss, who was bird-dogging a lot of things, of course knew me, and it didn’t hurt that my father knew him and it didn’t hurt also, and very, very, key that Buck Bradley, who’s old family, had been a roommate at Andover or Yale, I can’t remember which, who was then the general counsel at Eli Lilly on whose board he had sat at his invitation. And Buck Bradley was one of the three or four people who were part of my control group, three or four companies who were monitoring what I was doing. He was one of them and he said to me, “I’ve told Bush that if he doesn’t pick you, I’ll never talk to him again, and if you don’t accept, I’ll never talk to you again.” I always thought it was sort of a nice cute—So that helped in my getting the job. So that’s how I got the job.
I didn’t have clue what I’d be doing, neither did he. He was laughing, “I don’t know.” I spent a lot of time during transition, with his permission, working on the regulatory issues. That was a task force or whatever that had fallen between the cracks; Meese was famous for letting things fall between the cracks. It was an old joke, if you let him get whatever it is into his briefcase it will magically disappear. And so a guy named Mike Ullman organized a group, he had been a roommate of my brother’s at Yale, sort of conservative-libertarian fellow traveler, and he’d pulled me in and said, “We need to write an Executive order, and I said, “Yes, we do.” That would put the centralized rulemaking review in the White House, and so I wrote that Executive order when I was still at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, and it became—with some alterations and the review—it became law. It was signed by the President less than a month later. That was one of the great, great satisfying things in my career, but I had no idea. I’d finished the Executive order, given it to Jim Miller, who was part of this group, he was slated to become the first OMB [Office of Management and Budget] regulatory—
Milkis
He was OIRA [Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs], the first OIRA head, right?
Gray
Yes. Actually, we’d become great friends, and I said, “Jim, I guess I’ll never see you again.” And then a day later, they put together this Presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief, and all of a sudden I had the dream job that I couldn’t have imagined that I would end up doing. It was just extraordinary. Anyway, that’s how that I got started doing all of that and I never intended to stay working for him for more than two years, but it kept being fun, so I never left, and I stayed there for twelve.
Zelikow
For the benefit of whoever transcribes this later, Mr. Milkis was referring to OIRA, O-I-R-A, a not-very-well-known agency.
Young
Well, what else did you do for Bush when he was Vice President? How was the counsel’s job there anything like what it became here?
Gray
No, no. I mean what else did I do?
Young
Yes.
Gray
Of course I had ethics requirements for the Office of the Vice President, OVP as it was called—smallest zip code, most exclusive zip code in the world: 20501. There is no zip code with fewer addressees than the Office of the Vice President. The President is 20500, but we’re 20501. Anyway, a very small staff, so there weren’t many—
Zelikow
You took this as good sign?
Gray
Yes. There weren’t many ethics problems in a small staff like that. There were a few, but it was really—and we took our guidance from the White House counsel anyway, so that was not much of a deal. The highlights—the outline here, the time line, there’s a reference to Reagan announcing, I think in 1982, that he would junk the Pershing missiles if the Soviets do something. What you leave out of the time line is when the Pershings got deployed, which was key, one of the most important foreign policy events of the eight years, and that’s not in the time line.
Zelikow
Fall ’83.
Gray
Yes. Anyway, it was very, very important, and not there. I didn’t have anything to do with it, I’m just saying it was important. It was very important for President Bush because he was the one who did the whistlestop tour, right, you know what I’m talking about? And prompted the headline in the Washington Post that said, “George did it” and they weren’t referring to Shultz. I’ve always thought that that was—they were referring to the other George. He closed down the task force in August of ’83.
Zelikow
The task force you’re referring to?
Gray
Regulatory task force. He did not want to be accused of shilling for the special interests during an election year—precisely what, of course—Clinton not only shilled for, but actually—Bush didn’t want to be accused of doing something he wasn’t going to do anyway. Of course Clinton did it and never got accused of it, so it depends on which side you’re on. But anyway, I mean they were really buying and selling stuff, as we know, like crazy. Anyway, he’s cleaner than Caesar’s wife—he said, “No, I don’t want to be accused of this, and I don’t want Reagan to be accused of it.” So he shut it down, later regretted it, and reestablished it right after the election, but he shut it down and during that period we did a thing a called the Nower Project on Financial Reform, something that he wasn’t so worried about because it wasn’t a hot button like OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] and EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] and Health and Safety.
And we did this big project with Richard Breeden running it as my deputy, which later formed the basis for FIRREA [Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act]. So it was an important exercise because later Richard Breeden was brought in to put together the savings and loan cleanup. Had his recommendations, the Bush task group on financial services, had that been adopted in ’84–’85, I think the recession, I know the recession, somewhat shallow, but still the white-collar recession of ’90–’91 would not have occurred. I mean we would have cleaned up the S&L [savings and loan] banking problem way in advance, but it just didn’t and that’s another story to spent a lot of time on, but it just got thrown away by the Treasury and that’s just too bad. But it later got enacted, six years later, many hundreds of billions of dollars later, basically as part of FIRREA, the cleanup legislation. But that occurred and there was also the Ferraro debate, which I was in charge of, which was great fun. Very elaborate debate preparation, which his son is not doing, and it’s showing and if he doesn’t do it he will lose, I can tell you right now he will lose, if he doesn’t sort of straighten up.
I remember Vice President—for the first debate preparation, for the first real session, Lynn Martin played Geraldine Ferraro, and did, by the way, a much better job than she ever did, of playing herself, you know. She really got into the thing and she learned all of her positions and she was very enthusiastic and she was much better, and so when Bush confronted with a rather mild version of Geraldine Ferraro, I mean it was a piece of cake. It was cakewalk. And she eventually became Secretary of Labor as a result. It was a great—There are some anecdotes I wish I could tell, I just can’t put it on tape; but anyway that was a great, great experience, it was about three months’ work, but it was a great, great experience.
Then there was the election and then, because we were in between Chiefs of Staff, switching over from Murphy to Fuller, we had this trip to Africa. God, what a glorious trip! It was the only foreign trip I was ever on, but I was in charge of it, so it was really quite a challenge and there are a lot of funny anecdotes about that I could tell. Wonderful trip though, and it ended up because, we had to delay it because the State Department didn’t know what they were doing. We had to delay it two weeks and then it jammed up against a trip to Grenada and Brazil and Honduras and in between he would have come home except that [Konstantin Ustinovich] Chernenko dies, so we go to Moscow, which is when [Mikhail] Gorbachev is elevated. High excitement, and you know, like five continents, 80,000 miles in thirteen days, it was one of the high points of—a lot of anecdotes about that.
And then he reestablished the Task Force on Regulatory Relief, which then occupied most of my attention until the campaign. And the one thing that I remember vividly about the campaign before the political people totally took it over at or about the convention time, there were two things that stick out. I was, when—what was his name, he became deputy counsel to—I’ll think of his name in a minute, he’d worked for Fuller. I’m sorry. I can’t remember his name. It’ll come to me. He went over to become deputy, he’d been in charge of all the of the Drug and Addiction stuff after Murphy left, and he then was hired to be deputy counsel to the President, went over about eighteen months before the end. I’ll think of his name in a minute. So then the question, who would take his place? And I remember Craig Fuller asking me, “Do you mind taking over this portfolio?” and I said, “No, it’s sort of a natural for me and I’ll be glad to do it, but I want to just make one request. That if it ever becomes a political issue, the drug stuff, I want to have control over it. I can’t have someone else doing the politics of that with me trying to do the substance. I want to have the whole thing.” “Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure,” he later regretted having said that, but he said, “Sure. Fine.”
It turned out, a year later, the economy was going all right and it turned out that Teeter’s polling showed that the only double-digit concern of the public was over drugs and crime. So he decreed that for the whole period between the two conventions, the only issue that Bush would address, the only speeches he would give, would be on drugs. And so we embarked on a crash course to teach him about drugs, and God, it was great fun. We brought in all these experts from the President’s NSC [National Security Council] staff and as part of all this, when he heard loud and clear, I mean there’s one anecdote, he had a bunch of experts come in, and there were women in the room when this happened, these experts from Phoenix House in New York, he said, “What is so special about crack? Why is it so addictive?” And there was silence around the room. He said, “Come on, tell me, what is it about crack?” And one of the—a black guy from New York, one of the experts, said, “Well, if I can say, Mr. Vice President, it’s like four or five orgasms rolled into one.” Now the President looked up and said, “What are we all waiting for?”
Young
I was just going to ask you how Bush took these sessions and you’ve answered it without asking.
Gray
Oh, God, he was one of the funniest—he was one of the funniest. I mean there are lots of—he was a funny, funny man, and I tell jokes or anecdotes about him and his humor and people say, “Why didn’t we ever see that?” and it’s true, he would have been reelected if they’d just seen the humor. Funny man. Great sense of humor. Many, many funny—But anyway, one of the things that we heard loud and clear from all of the South American people we consulted was, and heard this over and over and over again, we don’t want aid, we want trade, and that became—“Trade, not aid.” “Trade, not aid,” and that was the beginning of what became a bilateral approach toward the foreign countries. It was very important for NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], because all of a sudden, “Ooh wow, I see, I see,” and we had plenty of evidence that when you shut down the Caribbean Basin Initiative, a lot of problems with it, people walking away from sugar. Sugar was the real problem. You shut down the sugar, and what do people do? There are stories, you know, people walking across the street to grow cocaine and marijuana because they couldn’t grow sugar. Anyway, sugar is a critical piece of all of this drug stuff. So it was a very important part of his education about free trade and about aid.
Zelikow
Critical because of the American protection on sugar and subsidies?
Gray
Yes, but critical to his own understanding of what they wanted. They wanted to compete legitimately and this is all part of, again, what I said earlier, about free markets and the private sector and government aid. One time, I mean, this didn’t involve him so directly, but he was encouraging me to be tough on the State Department, AID [Agency for International Development] was a big part of this trip to Africa, and I didn’t know what they were doing. What was this trip all about? I went to him and said, “Kennedy has just come back from starving Ethiopia holding all these children. What’s the point of going there if all you’re going to do is hold starving children?” And he said, “Exactly, Boyden. If we don’t have a reason to go, don’t go. The State Department works for us, not vice versa. They tend to forget that, if they ever remember it, but that’s what we’re all about and if you don’t have them we’ll cancel the trip.” That’s why it was postponed, in fact.
Anyway, the advance team comes back and I’m saying, now what are we going to do, and I’m looking at the schedule here and I just didn’t have a clue, I don’t know anything about Africa. What are we going to do? Well, first I run down the mock schedule, and then I was getting more and more—eyes were glazing over and I said, “Now, what’s on the schedule for Tuesday afternoon?” “Well, we’ve got a great event,” said all these—the very bushy-eyed nature of little boys about to get their hands in the cookie jar, made me very suspicious of what this trip was all about. “Oh, well, we’re going to have him dedicate an AID-financed pontoon bridge.” Now remember, it hasn’t rained in ten years, that’s one of the reasons we’re going over there, is to pray for rain, and to survey the drought. I said, “A pontoon bridge over what?” “Well, it’s a beautiful bridge.” I said, “Over what? Is this a sick joke or what?” Anyway, that night, that’s the way the whole thing went down. It got postponed two weeks, that night I happened to having dinner with Ambassador Wisner, Frank Wisner, who was then actually head of the African Desk, and went on to be ambassador to Egypt and India, should have gotten, was going to get Paris, until—
Interviewer
[Averell] Harriman?
Gray
No, was going to get Paris in this administration after Harriman, when Lazard bought it for twenty million.
Zelikow
You must be referring to Ambassador [Felix] Rohatyn.
Gray
Yes. He paid twenty million, that’s what Vernon’s going to get, that’s the price of Paris. Anyway, Wisner says, now he pulled me aside and says, “What are you doing? What are you doing to my staff? My staff came back, they’re all just totally in shock. They said, ‘There’s this nut in the Vice President’s office named Gray asking us for things that we didn’t have staff there to answer. He’s asking all these impossible questions, and who is this guy anyway?’” Frank looked at me and said, “What were you doing?” and I said, “Frank, you know I don’t know anything about Africa, I couldn’t ask a question to stump anybody.” He said, “Exactly.” I said, “I was asking two questions.” He said, “What were you asking?” I said, “You really want to know?” He said, “Yes, I really want to know.” I said, “I kept asking over and over again, why are we going, and what are we going to do when we get there?” So that’s my view of the State Department, but anyway. Never mind.
Zelikow
Can I bring you back to drugs for just a minute?
Gray
So back to drugs, this is what the State Department was telling us, but what they were telling us, the South Americans were telling us, we don’t want your aid, we want your markets.
Zelikow
Remember [Manuel] Noriega?
Gray
Yes.
Zelikow
Noriega, May 1988. The Reagan administration is working on a possible deal with Noriega, there are some intricate legal issues involved in the structure of the deal. Vice President Bush decides to speak out publicly against the deal, distancing himself from the administration. Because it involved drugs A) and B) some legal issues. Were you involved in this question?
Gray
Not that I recall.
Zelikow
Ok.
Gray
This was in May of eighty—
Zelikow
Eight.
Gray
Yes, I was, but I just don’t remember. If I went back and looked, I don’t recall it being that big a deal, let me put it that way. And I don’t know that it ever got up to Reagan. I don’t think it ever—I think he intercepted it before it ever actually got to an official—he was heading it off. Now maybe I’m wrong about that, but that’s my recollection.
Zelikow
It’s not worth digging if it’s not something of which you have firsthand recollection.
Gray
There was always tension between the State Department and the Justice Department over this stuff, and I remember this being my first exposure to it. There’s an extraordinary vitriolic, bureaucratic tension between the two departments, you know, the prosecution running up against, you know, and it was a bitter shoot-out, but I think the shoot-out occurred before it was ever finally resolved, although Bush’s involvement made it resolved in one area, in one direction, but what was ever finally resolved by the NSC staff. That’s my recollection.
Zelikow
You also got pulled into Iran-Contra surely by—probably 1986?
Gray
I want to get to that in a second. I just want to finish this, the drug thing.
Zelikow
Sure.
Gray
One of the interesting things was, and I often wondered how this must have irritated Baker, but Bush came out of the Democratic Convention, given—with their eight to ten-point typical bounce, seventeen points down. By the time the Republican Convention started, six weeks later, he was even or ahead in some polls. Now, and all he talked about in the interim was drugs, now is that what was responsible? I don’t know, but halfway through this period, I was basically in charge of the campaign, because all he was talking about was drugs, and I was the one who Fuller put in charge of drugs, so he was stuck with it. And we didn’t do a bad job, because obviously he didn’t screw it up, he moved out in front. And of course Baker couldn’t take credit for having eliminated the deficit because he didn’t take over until the end of the convention, when Bush was already ahead. He saw me, he ran into me halfway through this six-week period or however long it was, and said, “We’re never going to get this issue back from the Democrats, are we?” and I said, “No boss, no we’re not.” But we did. It turned out we did, and it was a very satisfying thing.
On Iran-Contra, he sent me and John Schmitz to look into what was the law, I was talking about this at lunch, what was the law and what was violated, we did a long paper for him and determined that probably no law had been violated. I think in retrospect, maybe the Economy Act, a very obscure statute called the Economy Act, may have been violated by the Defense Department, specifically Colin Powell. That might have been something they could have looked at, but they didn’t, maybe because they didn’t want to go after Colin Powell. They never really went into the Economy Act. Of course, the Israelis were in violation of end use certificate regulations, but that wasn’t the White House, that was the Israelis in trouble there and so—
Zelikow
Well, if we knew the Israelis were going to violate the end use certificate—
Gray
Would we have a problem?
Zelikow
You could have an argument.
Gray
You could have an argument, yes. But I do think they had a vulnerability. But other than that, there was this business I was talking about at lunch about the Boland Amendment, the intelligence authorization back in 1985, which had all these loopholes being exploited, and Congress never really wanted to turn the Contras down. At one point in my research, I recollect now, I had to go back and re-create all this, [Edward] Boland said on the floor because of all of the third country, third party aid that was being raised—the Saudis were putting money in and the Sultan of Brunei put money in and that all this third party aid that was going in plus the humanitarian aid, plus whatever—Boland complained on the floor, he said, “God, the Contras are getting more money now than they were when we were authorizing aid.” Which was probably true, but the Congress never really wanted to shut it down, they wanted to have it both ways.
I remember seeing this again play out in the Gulf War. I don’t want to get into the discussion of that, but the Nunn-Mitchell resolution, which would have denied the President the authority for a year to wage war on the Gulf, was characterized by [George] Mitchell after the fact, as authorizing him to. I mean it was total double talk, and the press gave him total carte blanche to just double talk their way through all of this. But that’s typical Congress—to have it both ways, you hedge your bets—bets perfectly hedged. Wall Street could learn how to hedge with futures, you know, could learn how to hedge the way the Congress did. Michael Beschloss once said to me—he said, “I don’t know how you got him elected given this albatross,” and I said, “Well, in fact, he was never vulnerable.” And you know, I’ve never actually sat down with Beschloss to go over it with him. The thing that killed him in the ’92 election—and it may have actually nipped a victory in the bud—was that last minute reindictment of [Caspar] Weinberger—not with any legal problem, but with an interview he’d given to [David] Broder in August of ’87 or something like that, five years earlier, about whether or not he was in the loop. So there were constant arguments, was he in the loop, was he not in the loop?
Milkis
The report showed that he was in the loop, is what it was?
Gray
No, well, no.
Zelikow
There was language in the reindictment of Weinberger specifically referring to Bush that gave a—
Gray
There was a reference to a meeting, which had been publicly known, and publicly understood, but the press was led to believe that it was a new disclosure, and so they said, “Oh my God! Bush in the loop!” And the indictment of Weinberger was treated as the indictment of Bush. If you go back and re-create the press at the time, and [Lawrence] Walsh’s explanation to Griffin Bell later was “Oh, I didn’t see anything wrong with it, because it wasn’t new.” Well, of course it wasn’t new, but it also wasn’t relevant either.
Zelikow
No, and actually within his office there were some arguments about whether to include that language in the reindictment, so they knew very well what they were doing.
Gray
They knew what they were doing. They knew very well what they were doing. And I think that’s just the most outrageous thing. Just absolutely unforgivable, and I think it cost them the election. A lot of other things did too, but that was one “but for” that occurred at the very, very end that I think that he would have overtaken.
Milkis
Four days from the election.
Gray
Was he in the loop, or not in the loop? There were some funny things that occurred, you know, the pajama meeting. He didn’t attend the pajama meeting, all this has been laid out in reports that we did and stuff, it’s all in the file somewhere. One of the interesting things was, he was rarely at, and his complaint was there never had been an NSC meeting where people could be put down for whether they were for or against and nobody had a record of what happened. They never had an NSC meeting, and he missed most of the organizing meetings, although not all of them.
Later, of course, he was out campaigning and missed most of the briefings where the issue might have come up, and at one point, David Hoffman, who was then the White House correspondent covering the Vice President, now I think he’s in Israel or maybe Russia, I don’t know, wrote this long story about how he was in the loop, he attended all the intelligence briefings, a long story that was going to be front page, and this is the way Washington works. [Bob] Woodward, who didn’t like how Hoffman wanted to dethrone Watergate as the operative ethical scandal standard, and he was trying to get Don Gregg’s scalp and of course Woodward wanted to hold onto Watergate as the ultimate benchmark, so his interest was to screw Hoffman. Meanwhile Fuller was trying to screw me because he didn’t like me—I can’t remember what all the details were—but he had this sort of funny thing that every time I leaked something to Hoffman, Woodward would then hurt Hoffman, Hoffman would get pissed at Fuller and Fuller would get pissed at me and then I would turn around and do something more, so it went around in a circle like this, this sort of leaking and whatnot, it was just comical, almost.
At one point I was excommunicated from the staff, not given access to any papers. What had prompted it was that Woodward had come to me with a printout of the article that Hoffman was about to publish in the next day’s paper. He came early in the morning, eight o’clock or something, interrupted my staff meeting, “I’ve got to talk to you.” “Yes, yes all right, Bob, what is it?” He said, “Well, I’ve got this article here, what can we do about it?” And of course I was going to take the opportunity to trash the article if I could, so I quickly read it and it dawned on me that I had to shout out, “Find out how many times Bush was out the office in ’86 before the election!” It turned out more that half the days, he was on the road. “Great,” said Woodward, “That’s all I need. Great.” And he rushed out and he wrote a competing story that said “Bush out of the office more than half the days” that made the front page and Hoffman’s piece was relegated to page A-46. Hoffman was pissed, so he then goes to Fuller and Fuller then excommunicates me.
And during this period, you know, the Federalist Society wants to get him to speak about criminalizing foreign policy and that was going to be the topic and Fuller kept trying to scratch it. President Bush finally comes over and says, “Now here’s what you’re going to do. Fuller’s not going to let you do this, but I want to do it. So you’ve got to call Brad. Go outside and call Brad Reynolds, and ask him to call me and then I’ll call Craig and tell him that Brad’s asked me, the Department of Justice has asked me, and then you’re out of it. You don’t have to worry about it. And then we’ll do the speech.”
John Karaagac
What was the motive of Fuller to excommunicate you for—
Gray
Because I had screwed Hoffman.
Terek Masoud
Yes, but you had helped the Vice President.
Gray
That doesn’t matter! God, that doesn’t matter. Get with it! You understand that there are two rules of Washington politics, which if you understand, my whole session here for the two days will have been worth it. The two rules are that you’re either a target or a source. You’re never in between, you’re never nothing, you’re either a target or a source. If you can understand how those two interweave, you understand all you need to know. I’ll tell you a little anecdote about my father. When he was Under Secretary of the Army, about to be made Secretary of the Army, James Reston, newly installed Washington editor of the New York Times calls him, has him to lunch at the Metropolitan Club and says, “All right, Gordon, you’re a star of your generation, we don’t know how high you’re going to go or how long you’re going to be up there but you’re going to be one of the great stars. And I for my part, will write, as the Washington editor of the New York Times, the newspaper of record—” which it was in those days—“I will write the first draft of history. I will write the history for you, your children and maybe your grandchildren, and I will guarantee your place in history if you will cooperate with me, a little leaked document here, a little leaked hmm there and whatever, and if we can work this thing out, we’ll have a good—”
My father said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Reston, but I wasn’t brought up that way,” and he never leaked anything, and do you believe that I actually checked that he was never once mentioned in the New York Times until he died, until the day he died. I then understood why, after I checked this out, why he refused to see the New York Times in his house. He would never get violent about it, but if I ever walked in with the New York Times under my arm he’d say, “Trash can, trash can. Take it out. Throw it in the trash can.”
So do you understand how all this works? That’s why Fuller didn’t want me, he just viscerally didn’t want the Federalist Society, “They’re conservatives, God, trash them.” And then we had to write the speech. And I did a rough draft of the speech and sent it to him and it got trashed in the circulation process, it never got to—the President calls me down and says, “What’s going on here?” And I said, “They don’t want you to write the speech that we’ve written for you.” He said, “Who are they?” And I said, “You know who they are. I mean, I don’t know,” He said, “I know who they are.” He said, “Look, I will write the speech myself, they can’t trash that, can they?” I said, “No, I don’t think they can.” He said, “Well, you go upstairs and I’ll call you in about an hour, and we’ll see what we can do.” So about an hour later he calls me and he’s written this thing out in long hand. It is absolutely faultless. It’s brilliant, and of course, they couldn’t touch a word. Oh, it was great, great fun. That’s the way—
Zelikow
Back to Woodward—
Gray
I’m sorry. I mean there are many stories. There are nine million stories in the naked city.
Zelikow
I want to get, this would be story 8,746,334. In February, 1987, Woodward gets a three-page document from a source in the Vice President’s office that makes it clear, in Woodward’s eyes anyway, that Bush was privy to conversations in Israel that show that he knows about the arms for hostages trade.
Gray
The Nir Memo, the famous Nir Memo.
Zelikow
Yes. And then the point of the leak, Woodward’s reading of the point of the leak is to remove the sting of the information by getting it out now, here in early 1987, and not letting it kind of sit there for a year and come out in the campaign. Do you vaguely recall this at all?
Gray
It isn’t vague at all. Not a bit vague. But this is—who’s the guy who worked in the White House counsel’s office for a while for Clinton and then went out and became sort of the talk show guy, always yakking away, what’s his name? Lanny Davis. When he was in the White House, he brilliantly handled, taking a leaf out of this and other books, brilliantly handled the financial scandals, the campaign finance. What they would do, and the committee was furious, but they couldn’t do anything about it, he would leak, in advance, all the damaging documents, get a little story written about it, and then say proudly on the day that the committee met, with great crescendo, sort of present it, saying, “It’s old news. See it’s old news.” And that was—I said, “Selective leaking, preventive leaking, Lanny, brilliant job.” He said, “They weren’t leaks.” I said, “What were they?” He said, “They were private placements.” So this was private placement in Lanny Davis’s—
Zelikow
But he was taking a leaf out of a book that you’d already helped—
Gray
Yes, but I didn’t learn that. I didn’t learn that. I mean, I didn’t make it up. It’s an old leaf. It’s a very old leaf. And I had trouble finding a version that didn’t have classified stamped on it. But someone from the Hill gave me a version in a little brown paper bag, and that’s the one I gave to him so that I wouldn’t violate the—
Zelikow
Although Woodward calls the document a top-secret document.
Gray
Well, it was top secret, except the version I gave him, the draft I gave him, didn’t have top secret stamped on it. I mean I just was—
Zelikow
When you were White House counsel, did you judge that removal of the stamp declassified the document?
Gray
I didn’t remove that stamp! I didn’t remove the stamp. I was given a copy of the thing that happened not to be stamped. Now does that mean it was legal? I don’t know, but the statute of limitations has passed so I’m not [inaudible due to laughter.] I don’t know. I don’t see why a Vice President or a President can’t declassify anyway. I mean that was sort of a de facto declassification, so I’m not sure. I remember it was very nervous making to do this. But I had to do it. Woodward said later to me on several occasions, “That saved the President, you know, because had this come out during the campaign, when we wanted it to come out, it would have killed him,” and it probably would have. But I remember it was Sunday morning and it turned out to be a bigger story than I thought it was going to be and I was just terrified and I had my—
I don’t know how old my baby was, but six months old or something like that, a year old, something—and I’m trying to feed it and whatnot, and the phone rings, and this voice says, “It’s the Vice President, hold on, sir.” Oh, God, the sphincter tightens, and he gets on the phone and says “CB, not bad, old boy, not bad. The Israeli ambassador’s copacetic. Good job,” and hangs up the phone. Ah, such relief, such relief. Anyway, that’s—the Iran-Contra thing could be a topic that could take two hours to go over all of that, but—
Zelikow
Well, it subsides for a little while, there’s—after the ’88 campaign, there’s a little flurry in ’89 about handling of documents, and you get involved to help out.
Gray
Yes, I was saying to someone this morning, I saw that and I just do not remember a single bit of that, I do not remember.
Zelikow
But we can come to back to it because it really doesn’t get very serious involving you again I think, more until ’92.
Gray
I mean the Obey amendment, the stuff in there about the Obey amendment, the leveraging statute, all that, that was really, really, really ugly, and difficult. Really ugly and difficult, but we won it, and I thought it was a very important victory to win. But that was after he’d become President. That was in the fall of ’89.
Zelikow
Back to the campaign then.
Gray
The other thing I wanted to mention, that I wanted to make sure—before the campaign was completely transferred to the political people, which occurred during the convention, earlier on, he had lost Iowa, he won New Hampshire, which is how Sununu became Chief of Staff, basically. It was a great job Sununu did, and a great job Bush did to pull that out. He then heads south to South Carolina, and this was where, South Carolina of course today is the big test, although much bigger now for his son than it was for him, I think. But it was a big deal, and I ought to view this—and I say this because I view this as being one of the most important things he ever did and it was done before he became President. The goal was to knock him off on protectionism, and I really believe this is critical, both because of what reveals about him, his courage, his beliefs, and what it meant for the country. The whole thing was going protectionist and even, what’s his name from Virginia, Pat Robertson had gone protectionist, even Jack Kemp went protectionist, so they had the whole lineup of all the debate candidates, all the candidates, going protectionist. They had Strom—
Zelikow
Because of textiles in South Carolina?
Gray
Because of textiles. Roger Milliken had put a million bucks into this, and it was a huge, huge thing. And Dole was getting support from Strom Thurmond gone protectionist, everybody was protectionist, everybody came in, and President Bush refused to do that. Now we had some information that the political people didn’t have, which was—And they were furious at us, but we still control the pen, we were still writing the speeches at that stage, still had the staff, basically, hadn’t been built up enough to take it away from us and we knew that the factories were operating at full capacity, so there wasn’t an unemployment problem that we had to worry about. But Bush refused to buckle, and he was the only one who stood up for free trade and he won going away. He blew everybody out, and I read later that the AFL-CIO said that set back, because of us, protectionism for more than a decade.
Karaagac
Where was Lee Atwater in this?
Gray
That’s a good question. I think he was with us. I think if he had not been there, we would not have prevailed in the fight. But it’s a good question and one worth—
Karaagac
He had worked for Dole, had he not at one point earlier?
Gray
Well, he’d worked for Thurmond, he came out of South Carolina. He worked for Thurmond, he worked for Dole, I don’t know about Dole, but he worked for Thurmond, that’s how he got his start in national politics. And Thurmond had gone protectionist, so I don’t know where Atwater was, good question.
Karaagac
Where was Atwater—sorry to put into, since we’re on ’88 and it’s not that important certainly, compared to others, but where was he in the New Hampshire thing? That was Sununu who really—the Sununu show.
Gray
That was really Sununu.
Young
And Card.
.
Gray
And Andy Card. Andy Card, very critical in all that. Card and Sununu were pretty close.
Sid Milkis
I was just going to ask if you had any role in preparing the Vice President for debates in the ’88 election, as you had in ’84?
Gray
Well, I think I played Pat Robertson, and I know I played—this is a funny anecdote, but I played DuPont, I was thought to be patrician and wealthy and whatnot, therefore I portrayed Pete DuPont, and I’m trying to explain this to the current Bush staff, they don’t understand. I said to Condi [Condoleezza] Rice, she thinks debate preparation consists of forcing the candidate to watch tapes of himself, I said, “No, Condi, this is an elaborate thing you go through. People play roles.” “Oh really?” I said, “Yes, how do you think Jim Baker became Chief of Staff?” “How?” I said, “Well, because he organized the debate preparation, and Nancy Reagan said, “God, we’ve got somebody who can organize.” But this anecdote, again, underscores the importance of these debate things. You may recall he did this great put-down of DuPont by saying, “Ok, Pierre.” Well, you might be interested to know that that was practiced on me, and it came off almost—and this is the great thing about these debates, that if the debate preparation is done right, you anticipate almost exactly to the word, every single question, and the thing came up in the context of Social Security, just as it did in real life. And I was so into the role that when he said, “Ok, Pierre,” I felt personally humiliated, even though I knew it was only a game. I felt personally deflated. And it was obvious to people watching on the monitor, you know, all the guys back there watching the monitor, and they said, “Go for it. It works!” And so he did it.
Milkis
Did you say, “Use his first name when you”—in the practice did you say, “Call him Pierre?”
Gray
No, I didn’t have anything—I don’t know whether it was spontaneous or whether they told him to try it out. But he did it. It’s what he did. I kind of came up exactly as it did in the real debate and I made some comment and he said, “Ok, Pierre.” And incredibly deflating, even though of course, I was just play acting, right? Anyway, the sequel to the anecdote was about five days later, he’s in South Carolina, and I think he calls me up over the weekend morning, early. I’m barely able to get awake and he wants to know about [Doug] Ginsburg, apparently this when Ginsburg’s drugs stuff surfaces, the marijuana, and he wants to know what kind of a guy he is, “Didn’t he work at OIRA?” Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and then after he finished getting what he wanted he said, “Ok, see you around, Pierre.” Very cute. But it was a big deal, these debate things were big deals, you know, and I just can’t get the Bush people to understand. Anyway, I’m sorry, I interrupted. Somebody was going to ask—
Philip Zelikow
We were just kind of bringing you back into the narrative flow of the campaign and the transition to government, back in ’88.
Gray
Right, before I forget, one of the other things that I had a hand in—that I was proud of at the time—was again over the objection of the political people. I arranged, because he wanted it, I arranged a meeting so that he could have an excuse to say, “I want to propose a capital gains tax cut.” And they said, “Oh God! You can’t do that, you can’t do that.” And of course he did, and it was an important part of his campaign, and it just didn’t fly in the fall of ’89. I believe, and there’s a lot that ought to be researched there, I think a whole book could be written or a monograph anyway about why did the affirmation of Darman, did he sort of take a dive on this, could it have been done? Did we try as hard as we could have? What is this BS [bullshit] about super majority vote to get it? Rules of the budget, blahdy, blahdy, blah. We had fifty-seven or -eight votes, we just didn’t have sixty-one. And Mitchell said, oh, you’ve got to have sixty-one because it breaks the budget, blahdy, blahdy, blah. I never understood that, but had he gotten the capital gains tax cut then, rather than it coming later as it eventually did, I believe he would have inoculated himself against the tax increase of ’91. So it was big deal that he didn’t get it in 1989 or 1990. Very big deal. But I just haven’t done the research.
Another thing that happened was—and this is part of the Clean Air Act—I’d been pushing these alternative fuels, I thought with his approval, mostly because they were natural gas centered and they were good not just for the United States but they were also good for Texas. And people have always misconstrued much of what I was doing because they thought I was for ethanol. That was there too, for Iowa, but the real thing was natural gas. That was the real motivating thing. And we’re going to eventually get the fuel shifting. The only question is, is it going to be natural gas or methanol from natural gas? But that was the thing. Bush called together all of his wildcatter friends that [Robert] Mosbacher helped him organize, and I was invited to a room filled with all of these big hitter guys, who’d raised money for him and had wildcatted with him. And I said, “Oh my God, this is going to be the death of me, for all this alternative fuel stuff,” because the big oil companies hated it. And Mosbacher said, “Now, George,” he said. “All these people here, and what the bottom line is, and they’ll explain it to you, is that you’re right on this alternative fuel stuff. Don’t let up, keep going, don’t worry about the big oil companies, because your bread and butter, and the country’s bread and butter, is in the natural gas drilling, not in oil because we don’t have any more oil left.” So that was a huge sigh of relief that I hadn’t misgauged that and it eventually fed into the Clean Air Act.
Although he did have a thing with Saudi Arabia. I remember it was something like, are you asking the Saudis to raise oil prices? I don’t remember that very well. Anyway, so that’s—what else?
Zelikow
Shall we move on?
Karaagac
I have just one last question before we get to ’88 and it can probably be knocked in one sentence. We know a lot about their relationship before ’80 and a lot after ’88. How would you describe Bush’s relation with Baker during the Vice Presidency? During Bush’s period as Vice President? What kind of communication did they have? Did they talk?
Gray
They talked all the time. They talked all the time.
Karaagac
About policy?
Gray
About everything. They talked all the time. I mean, I’ve read that it’s a difficult relationship, that it’s complicated, not difficult, complicated. But I never saw much of that interaction.
Young
What about relations with Reagan’s staff, generally, and the Vice President’s staff? How did that work out?
Gray
I thought it went very well, I never knew of any friction. Remember that he was, and again this is getting into another field and I wasn’t personally involved in most of it, but he was basically the de facto NSC advisor for the first two or three years. There was so much turmoil with NSC people changing and Haig bouncing around the State Department and [William P.] Clark [Jr.], and Bush was the one who sort of had the steady hand on the tiller. And was made crisis manager, you know, and I think that must have irritated a lot of people. Basically until Shultz came in to really steady things down, Bush was—and you know, the Pershing thing was a great piece of evidence of that. There wasn’t much friction. When the Ferraro debate came along, they all treated—they sandwiched Bush in between the two Reagan debates on the grounds that he was going to flub it. And as you remark in your time line, he [Reagan] loses the first debate, the debate to [Walter] Mondale. He was disaster.
And it partly was—I was lucky to attend all the debate preparation because they wanted to make sure it was coordinated, so I was clued in on everything, went to Camp David for the first one or the second one. I can’t remember which one was in Camp David, which one was in the White House, but I do remember the first debate preparation dissolving in a series of jokes, Reagan just cracking jokes, cracking people up. He was a very funny raconteur, which I think is publicly known and [Edmund] Morris captured some of that. He just had a thousand jokes, and he kept cracking jokes and every time somebody tried to get serious and settle him down to start the play, he’d crack another joke. And as a result, he totally destroyed himself in the debate. He got lost on Highway 1, you know, on the closing at the end, he got water all over the goddamn place. And the tracking polls had the thing just in free fall and I remember [Paul] Laxalt glaring at me because now my ass was on the hot seat, “Boy, if you screw this up.” You know. So when Bush did well, it was great. By the time the second debate rolled around, his tracking polls were back up to where they were before he’d screwed up. So the Ferraro debate turned out to be a fairly important thing in the ’84 campaign, and earned us a lot of brownie points with the staff. But I always worked—I mean I had people, Don Gregg came out of the NSC staff operation, so he got along well, Fuller had come off the White House staff, so he got along well with everybody there because he came out of there.
I think the staff stuff worked very, very well. There is a great—and I don’t know the truth of this, all I can do is recount what has been recounted to me by one of the speechwriters, that at the President’s Dinner, the so-called President’s Dinner at the big convention center, 4,000 of your closest friends, that’s when Reagan endorsed Bush, and the staff speechwriter says, “give us—he’s going to endorse him.” So our speechwriters did a simple paragraph, “This is a man who’s been by my side, who has a distinguished record, and I endorse him.” I mean it wasn’t very elaborate. Apparently, according to the speechwriters who saw this, Reagan himself took this and added two more paragraphs of very generous and very warm remarks, and when it finally came out of the system, it cut back to one sentence. And Nancy Reagan apparently insisted that the whole thing come out and she excised it. But it would be interesting to try to go into the historical record and see if that draft is still there that is alleged to have existed, where Reagan writes in all these generous remarks and then somehow the final speech contains nothing. It would be interesting to try to get to the bottom of that.
Young
What about the transition from Reagan to Bush and staff relations then, but also your role—you were counsel to the transition?
Gray
I think it all went fairly—one of the sad things was, and this is the more important point, is that most of the early Reagan people had just drifted off. There was no one left except Baker and Darman, basically. There was no one left, because people had run out of money, run out of energy, run out of whatever. And so there really weren’t the hardcore Reagan people, the really fervent Reagan people had long since gone. So there wasn’t much. There was a lot of tension about people losing their jobs, but it didn’t have any philosophical or ideological or intellectual edge to it because most of the people had gone. The sad thing was that Miller had gone. Miller had to quit because he was on his third mortgage and he just had to quit. Reagan and Bush told him—according to Miller who told me this story later—Bush said, “But you can’t quit, Jim, you’re going to be OMB director.” And Miller said, “But sir, I’m bankrupt at the end of the week if I can’t make a mortgage payment and I’ve just got to quit.”
Milkis
So you think if Miller had not left, that he, instead of Darman, would have been OMB? I had never heard that before.
Gray
He would have been. And Miller said to me not more than a year ago, he said, “You know I still feel that I was ‘but for the want of a nail, the shoe was lost, but for the want of a shoe,’ but if I had hung in there, there would have been no tax thing, no you know.”
Milkis
Because he didn’t go into OMB until ’87 or something like that, right?
Gray
What?
Milkis
Miller didn’t go over to OMB until about ’87.
Gray
’86.
Milkis
Was it ’86?
Gray
’86 or ’87. So I think the staff—there was one thing he regretted, which was, the one thing I remember vividly, is the brouhaha over the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration]. What’s his name, [David] Kessler, had maneuvered his way into getting the Clinton people, and doing this when he’s in the Bush administration—the guy’s a real sleaze, I think, for doing this—but he talked the Clinton people into retaining and not firing Kessler. To keep him there, so that he wouldn’t have to go through another confirmation. And Bush told me a dozen times how deeply he regretted that. Biggest mistake of the transition, in his view, was not getting rid of Kessler. Not firing Kessler, making an exception for him from all of the other resignations that he’d asked for.
Zelikow
Now you’re talking about the ’92–’93 transition.
Gray
Oh, I see, okay.
Milkis
I was talking about the transition from Reagan to Bush.
Gray
All right, okay.
Zelikow
Which is where you started.
Gray
There was no—I mean, I’m sure there was this resignation thing, but I don’t really remember it. What I remember of course, is the whole [John] Tower business, and the difficulties I was having looking forward. I just don’t remember much.
Young
Maybe we ought to start talking about that.
Karaagac
Can I talk to him about Tower?
Young
Not only Tower, but also your role in confirmation and the selection when it came to Supreme Court justices.
Zelikow
Jim, would you mind if maybe first we just—perhaps just ask you for your job description. You’re going to be White House counsel. I’ll tell you, the way you define the job of White House counsel is not the way Peter Wallison defined it. So you need to tell us, explain to us how you decide to define the job of White House counsel.
Gray
Well, I didn’t decide to do anything. I mean I didn’t want to work on the Clean Air Act, which normally would not have been a White House counsel function, and the President let me do it, although I think he was looking kind of askance, although now, he understands very well what I was doing, and it was a carry over from all of the regulatory stuff. I’ve said publicly, in [Bradley] Patterson’s book, and I think my vision, my understanding of the job is the same as my predecessors and successors, which is basically four sorts of components. One is the ethics component, overseeing not just the White House, but that the overall government complies with ethics, blahdy, blahdy, blah. It’s actually a fairly big job, as we now know. One of the things we want to do, for example, is run the clearance process before you announce that you’re going to nominate somebody, because if the announcement comes out before, you’re mouse trapped. And we were able to knock a lot of people out because we found things out before they were announced, whereas the Clinton people did it just the reverse. They announced and then they did the check and they couldn’t knock people out. I mean really dumb. But that’s a key thing, and the pressures are to give in. There are all kinds of outside pressures to give in. And I want to make sure I tell at some point the story of Rich Armitage.
Zelikow
I’ll make a note.
Gray
As to how the clearance process works and how nasty it is.
Zelikow
So, first is the ethics.
Gray
Ethics. And the clearance. Second is I’m chairman of the Judicial Selection Committee, which of course includes the Department of Justice paramount, but Legislative Affairs, State and Local, Chief of Staff, but I’m the one who chairs it, as did Fred Fielding before me. Then the third thing is chairman of the war powers group it’s called, which includes Joint Chiefs, Defense, State, Treasury, Justice. Fairly important. A lot of action in that little thing.
Zelikow
Is Nick Rostow in that group?
Gray
Yes.
Zelikow
So he would have represented the NSC in that group?
Gray
He would have represented the NSC. That’s another interesting thing is how the NSC, as a result of Iran-Contra was worked out. What Brent [Scowcroft] and I worked out was, he would pick his own counsel, [Nicholas] Rostow, but he let me have Rostow’s deputy. I appointed Rostow’s deputy, who did all the work, so it worked out fine. Steve Rademaker, who is now the chief counsel of the House International Relations Committee. Very smart guy. The fourth thing was just to, as President Bush said, just to preserve or expand the powers of the Oval Office vis-à-vis the Congress. Or to make sure you don’t lose anything. He felt that—and that has to do with vetoes, it has to do with executive privilege, it has to do with independent counsel, it has to do with signing statements, it has to do with all of the things that relate to the separation of powers where you’re heavily relied on the office of legal counsel, but you’re the point person in the White House to do all of this. And that’s a very interesting part of the job.
President Bush felt that Reagan had given a lot of things away, and he was determined not to make the same mistake. There was one great anecdote, the airport’s authority where Secretary Liddy [Elizabeth] Dole had divested herself, or the government, of National and Dulles and whatnot into this tripartite interstate compact, and the Congress at the last minute had insisted on superimposing a board of directors, which they would appoint, all for the purpose of, as you see from John McCain, making sure that they could fly to their airports without having to go to Dulles—so they could keep their parking places, the routes and parking places. It was unconstitutional as hell; it violates the appointments clause, separation of power, multiply unconstitutional. But [Richard] Thornburgh for some reason or another agreed to support it. And predictably we, the government, lost. Now we’re in the next administration, court appeals rules against the government. At that point, during the court of appeals, going to the Supreme Court, you can sometimes change positions. So I called up—because I didn’t talk to President Bush about this, but this was a classic case of where you don’t give this power up to the Congress voluntarily. So I called all this legal counsel and said, “Can we reconsider? We’re going to lose in the Supreme Court, so I want to get on the right side of the issue, because President Bush feels strongly about these things.” And it wasn’t a few hours later I get this call from Thornburgh screaming at me, it’s the only unpleasant conversation I ever had with Thornburgh, screaming [makes screaming noises]. I said, “God, Dick, please. Please, Mr. Attorney General, it’s not that important. We’re going to lose anyway. The outcome is ordained. Look, if I’d wanted to call you, I would have called you. This is not that big a deal. Please, please, please forget that I ever mentioned it.” “Okay,” he calmed down.
About a week later, Sam Skinner calls. He’s secretary of transportation, “Boyden, I hear you’re messing with my airports.” And I said “Sam, they’re not your airports anymore.” and he said, “Boyden, what’s the problem here?” and I said “Look Sam, if you go to the airport, you can see what happens. If you’re a Member of Congress, you get a parking place. If you’re a member of the Supreme Court, you get a parking place. Hell, if you’re a fancy enough foreigner, you get a parking place. But if you work in the lowly White House, do you get a parking place? No, and I just think that’s outrageous, Sam.” Silence. And then he comes back “Well, Boyden, if it’s a parking place you’re worried about, maybe we can work something out.” Well, anyway, that was my favorite Sam Skinner story. Anyway I’m sorry I interrupted you.
So anyway, those are the four categories. Now there are some things that I did like the Clean Air Act, that went beyond that, and I don’t regret having done it. It was an outgrowth of the regulatory relief stuff, and I had a lot to offer, and the President’s attitude was as long you got your work done, you can do it. By contrast, you know, the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act], people attribute that to me and I suppose in a political sense, yes, from the Vice Presidential days, but I spent almost no time on it in 1989, when Thornburgh and Sununu and others were negotiating the details. I spent almost no time. I didn’t have time. I was up to my eyeballs in red FBI envelopes and you know, the clearance stuff, and I never had time to work on it. And I did some critical things, but in terms of total hours, maybe ten or fifteen hours the whole year on it. It’s a big misconception that people think that I did the ADA and in 1989, I spent maybe a day on it, maybe two days. But I had time in 1990.
Zelikow
Well, we’re going to tell them to take your name off that handicapped ramp. But let’s come back to the first role, because this is where Jim’s question started, was the ethics issue and screening confirmations. And let me cue you: Armitage.
Gray
Yes, well, the big mistake everybody makes is, and I’ve tried to scream to the rooftops, the clearance process is very, very difficult. The financial disclosure stuff is designed to drive you crazy, because you cannot honestly fill out your tax return and answer the financial disclosure form without committing perjury, because the definitions are so messed up. And you couldn’t ask for a more difficult—If the Office of Government Ethics would use the same definitions of income, capital, blahdy, blahdy, blah, it would make life infinitely easier. It helps a lot that you can wash your capital gains out; that is, you can launder your capital gains by rolling it over. That helps a lot on the ethics clearance, because it allows people to sell. We didn’t have that provision, so we struggled with people who didn’t want to sell, because they were having a—of course, a drop in the capital gains tax also helps. But those things are very, very difficult and there are multiple forms you have to fill out. And then there’s the FBI side, and people are always lobbing grenades in and it’s a reflection of just how powerful the government is.
But I remember the simplest way out of this is to give the counsel, on the day the President’s elected, or the day after, give them, I asked, begged, Craig Fuller, “Give me a hundred names, let me make up my own list of a hundred, because I can guess right in almost all cases and start them in the process now. Don’t wait until January, because you lose two months.” But everyone waits. You know, they know 50 or 100 people are going to get jobs someplace. They all wait until they’ve actually been chosen for the job, and by then it’s—you’ve wasted two months. But we were slow, and I was the bottleneck because names started cascading in after he was in the West Wing, but we wasted two months, three months. Anyway, he holds a staff meeting for the principal purpose, I think, of embarrassing me, which, I mean, look, I was the bottleneck.
Young
Who is this?
Gray
The President, the President does, in early February. And it’s the only staff meeting he ever had that he attended fully. And so he says, “I want to hear what my staff’s doing. Go around the table.” Sununu didn’t know why Bush was doing this, so started him around the table in the wrong direction, so he had to go through almost everybody before he got to me. And I knew he was waiting to get to me because he was so bored, he kept drumming with his hands [makes finger tapping sound], eyes were rolling. He knew who he’d hired. He knew what they were doing. He hired them. When he got to me his eyes lit up. “Boyden, why can’t we get So-and-So cleared for nomination? He worked in the Reagan administration, he was confirmed once, what on earth could be the matter?”
And he had picked the one person out of 200 for whom I had a legitimate excuse. Well, I said, smiling, “Oh X, sir? Because he hasn’t filed any income tax returns since he left the country.” “Oh, I guess I better come up with a better example next time.” I said, “Yeah, boy I dodged that bullet.” Then, two weeks later, I get this phone call. Uh-oh. And he’s calling me and I think Scowcroft’s in the room. “Why can’t we get So-and-So cleared? He was confirmed not once but twice in the Reagan administration, once in State, once in Defense, what could be the matter?” And I said, “Well, sir, do you really want to know?” He said, “You work for me, don’t you?” And I said, “Yes, sir. Well, apparently, allegedly, we haven’t gotten to the bottom of this yet, but apparently accepting sexual favors from foreign countries.” Silence. “Um, sexual favors?” and I said, “Yes, sir.” Silence. “Male or female?” the voice came back, and I said “Female.” And the fist comes down. “Goddamn it, Gray, loosen up. Loosen up.” We didn’t go with him either.
The third time—three strikes you’re out—he calls me down and he said—there’s nobody around, no secretary, no one—he says mano a mano, “Why can’t we get So-and-So? He’s an elder in the Baptist Church in Texas, and if he is not clean, nobody’s clean.” And I said, “Well, Mr. President, it’s because of the disconnect. It’s not that he’d done anything illegal, but he’s not as clean as you think he is, and you’re putting him in a sensitive job where he’s purporting to be this pious person and he’s not.” “Really, well what has he done?” I said, “Well, he has this thing about riding horses bareback, only it’s not the horse that’s bareback. It’s he that’s bareback.” Bush looks at me like this, sort of twists and says, “Boyden, you obviously don’t know anything about riding horses in Texas.” I don’t. I thought that would disqualify but I guess not. He’s the boss. I said, “Well, his big fetish is skinny-dipping with Boy Scouts.” The fist comes down, “Boyden, that’s why we started the Boy Scouts, so we could go skinny-dipping with them.” He says, “Get out of here. Get out of here. Get out of here.”
So we didn’t go with him either, but the point of the story is the second guy was Armitage, Rich Armitage. And we didn’t know at the time, but this thing about sexual favors was a plant by Ross Perot, who hated him. And you know, Armitage lost his opportunity to serve in a Senate confirmation job because of Perot’s viciousness. Now that happens more frequently than you can imagine. People have enemies and they want, for policy reasons, for personal reasons—the Tower stuff, was nothing but his ex-wife venomously pouring stuff into the record and it was enough to overwhelm Tower. Anyway, that’s why I wanted Armitage to be teed up. The selection process is highly politicized.
Zelikow
I was just trying to remember. I thought maybe Armitage, but I must be mistaken because I thought Armitage was able to get confirmed in the Assistant Secretary of Defense job?
Gray
He may have been. He may have been later, but in the beginning it cost him. Yes, he probably did later, but at the time—when we finally figured out where this thing had come from.
Zelikow
And this is because of Armitage’s involvement in POW-MIA [prisoner of war/missing in action] issues. Actually taking the position that there were no live prisoners?
Gray
Yes, but, a little more. See what happened—this is what cost Bush the Presidency, it’s related, and it’s another thing that cost him, another “but for”—I don’t know how it happened to begin with, but Perot got interested in the POW-MIA thing in the Reagan administration and asked for and asked for and got this—
Zelikow
Well, he actually—Perot and that issue goes back to Nixon.
Gray
It goes back to Nixon, OK. But he got this sort of unofficial ambassadorial thing and he turned it into a big deal. All of a sudden he thought he was sort of ambassador to all of Southeast Asia, and Armitage got uptight about it. Colin Powell, his best buddy, who then was NSC advisor, was upset about it, the Defense Department was upset about it, everybody was upset about it. They were all determined that they had to get Perot out of this role because he was messing up U.S. diplomacy. Not just the POW stuff, but all stuff. And so it fell to Bush to tell him that he was canned and so Bush told him and Perot never forgave him. Anyway.
Zelikow
Tower?
Gray
But that’s the interesting—because had I been asked, I’m sure—but this was a White House thing—I’m sure I would have said “no.” For ethical reasons, you can’t let someone—with that many economic interests all over the world, it’s a conflict of interest. You can’t do this. You can’t give him this. If he had been offered the job of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Far East or whatever I said before, he never could have been confirmed, because he had too many conflicts.
Zelikow
By “he” you mean—
Gray
Perot. Yes. But he was able to do this unofficially, and it was a huge mistake and it violated the ethical rules and got everybody into huge trouble. It just shows how important—
Zelikow
This is back in the Reagan era.
Gray
It just shows you how absolutely critical these rules are. Absolutely critical. Because everybody’s trying to make a buck off something. You know, it’s just—anyway, sorry.
Zelikow
On the ethics issue, the thing you got the most flak on right away was Tower. In the first couple of months, is there—I mean you’ve of course read more closely than we what the press has said about this, and is there anything we need to understand better about what happened with Tower? You’ve already commented briefly about it.
Gray
Well, yes, it wasn’t—I mean the record was filled primarily with stuff from his ex-wife, but another factor exploiting all this was, of course, [Sam] Nunn’s dislike. It was a personal and policy dislike. And Tower—who was a really smart guy and picked a very good staff, very smart staff—there’s no question that the locus of defense policy making, which had been, thanks in large part to Tower himself, and no small part to Nunn too, the locus of a lot of the policy making that had been residing in their collaboration on the Armed Services Committee was now going to really go over to the Defense Department. So there was a lot of staff jealousy involved, and I think Nunn didn’t want to lose this power, you know, turf thing. I think that was what motivated him.
Also Nunn, I think, generally just viscerally reacted to Tower’s sort of swagger, and his former drinking, although I think he’d licked his problem. And I could never find anybody who could remember him inebriated in a professional context. But Nunn eventually made it a command performance, a party line vote. Demanded of Mitchell that he make it a party line vote. And so Tower never had a chance. I tried to—I at one point advised the President, “I think you ought to pull his name, because he’s not going to make it.” Boy, he glared at me [whispers] “It’s none of your damn business,” because he was going to be loyal. He was going to see it through and he was going to make the Democrats pay a price for pulling down a nominee. And I think in the end, Bush won more than he lost. He got a terrific Secretary of Defense out of this, somebody who might have been better than Tower, in fact. And he really did earn some brownie points with his own party and his relationship with Dole in the process, so I think he won far more than he lost. But, in the beginning, when he didn’t look so good, people were taking shots at me and blaming me for all this when I’d advised—
Zelikow
For not having vetted Tower adequately.
Gray
Well, I vetted him adequately and told people not to nominate him, for Christ’s sweet fucking sakes. I mean it was all BS [bullshit], but I wasn’t going to go public and say so. You know I couldn’t do that. But I had argued against him, but they were determined to go forward and I predicted he was going to be defeated before he was nominated. I predicted he was going to be defeated after it. I urged that he be—There were several points along the way where I said, “Hey, don’t do this. It’s just too much.” I also—because the President said, “Is there really any fire there?” And I kept going back and saying, “Believe it or not, there isn’t any, the guy doesn’t drink anymore, and he hasn’t done this and he hasn’t done that.” There were some great stories about him and the women, but he was, you know. Either he was—In the days when it was occurring, the stories of the womanizing and drinking, he was far too drunk to perform. I mean nobody could have performed as drunk as he was supposed to be.
Milkis
So the stories were contradictory. He was either a drunk or a womanizer but not both.
Gray
Not both, right. It increases desire, but dulls performance. There was one great anecdote, I shouldn’t probably tell, but he’s dead, and I take some liberties with these files. But there’s one great anecdote of him plopping down at some retreat, some hotel room, and these people milling around there having sort of a hospitality room and he sits down next to one of the aides, an attractive young woman, who’s aghast. He’s drunk and his food’s spilling all over the place, and he said, “Well, Molly,” or whatever her name was, “you’ve got three choices. We can do it right here on the couch, or we can go to your room or my room.” She told the story. I mean it was a total joke because the guy could barely stand up. I mean that’s why he was plopped on the couch.
Anyway the notion that he was womanizing was just silly. And I determined that there just wasn’t anything there, but there was enough for Nunn to use to knock the nomination out, which I think he wanted to do for other reasons. And later, let me just finish this up. Later, I believe, I don’t know, but I suspect that it was the request he made of Mitchell for a party line vote, that later Mitchell turned on him and said, “All right, on Iran—on the Gulf War, I want you with me against.” And so Nunn had to join the Nunn-Mitchell. That’s why he joined. Totally out of character for Nunn to do that. Totally out of character and I think it really, really curtailed his career because I think in Georgia they just couldn’t understand why he would be voting against the war. Anyway, so I was interrupting.
Karaagac
I was interrupting. Forgive me. Who were Tower’s supporters in the administration other than the President?
Gray
That was mainly—Tower was not a popular man. He’d made lots of enemies because he was intellectually very arrogant. Very smart, didn’t suffer fools gladly, smart as a whip, but he was not a friendly guy. And he did not have many friends in the Senate. That’s another reason why it failed. There wasn’t a single person who was willing to stand up and say, “Goddamn it, I am with you, John.” There was nobody willing to say “Hey.”
Karaagac
Except McCain
Gray
Except McCain. Oh, except maybe McCain. I don’t even remember McCain there. He wasn’t enough. McCain was not strong enough to say it.
Young
Was there anybody appointed to politically manage this nomination?
Gray
No, it was like an orphan, nobody wanted to have anything to do with it. Fred McClure who had actually worked for Tower.
[Break in continuity]
Gray
(continuing) help manage judicial nominations because that’s my job, but nonlegal Cabinet posts, no. And I was stuck with the job. They took—Sununu went on one very critical trip to the Far East, right in the middle of this fight, leaving me all alone. They were in Asia. And for me to get blamed that—one of the stories was that White House counsel was obviously not ready to operate—well, we weren’t supposed to. And I was running down there, I was the point person for this nomination basically. Cameras following me around, and it was a great learning experience for me. I made lots of friends and I forged a great relationship with Dole and some of the others. Warner, to this day. And Nunn too. And Nunn too. To this day, Warner greets me, “Boyden, Boyden, you still got holes in your shoes?” Because he’d seen that I had holes in my shoes. I made a lot of friends and learned an awful lot about how the White House works, so for me it was not a bad thing long term, but short term, it was really agonizing.
Milkis
You and Jim Baker regarding ethics.
Gray
Yes it’s interesting, and I don’t how substantively important it was or how much that endangered my relationship with him, or nonrelationship with him. One thing is that while it was painful, both for me and for him, to have this problem right at the beginning, it was a long-term godsend because it scared everybody. I mean I think it was one of the things that just scared the bejesus out of everybody, and made it much easier to enforce the ethics regime. So in that sense, while it obviously wasn’t planned, I think it turned out to be beneficial. My rule was always to—and now people are very grateful, but at the time, boy, were they mad, they were so mad at me, I mean really, really mad. And Baker was mad, Baker’s people were mad. But I think now we see why—I’m trying to explain, I mean I think it’s so evident of why it is so important. My general rule was, if it feels good, stop. If what you’re doing is fun and it feels good, you’re doing something wrong. He came to me, my memory of the rule changes is somewhat fuzzy now, but in 1987 or ’88, OLC [Office of the Legal Counsel] did an opinion that made it more difficult to grant waivers for these conflicts of interest. Maybe the Congress changed—I mean I have to confess I just haven’t reviewed this and so I can’t remember whether it was Congress or OLC or both, or Office of Government Ethics, or somewhere else in the Department of Justice, but it made it more difficult to grant a waiver.
And Baker sent Sherry Cooksey to me as an emissary in December. I remember her saying, “Do you think it would be all right to grant a waiver for his Chemical Bank stock?” And I remember saying, “Well, I’ll look into it,” and being utterly stunned that he had been able to hold Chemical Bank stock all the while he was Secretary of Treasury. I just couldn’t understand that. But Chemical Bank had the largest vulnerability of the Third World debt. That was obviously an issue any State Department secretary is going to have to deal with and so the answer was clearly no. I just think it was a no-brainer, the answer is no. So I communicated that back and boy, he was pissed, boy he was pissed. We didn’t get the waiver, but he didn’t sell either. I gather he didn’t sell.
When I got into trouble I tried to explain to Walter Pincus and a lot of other reporters that it’s okay, assuming there’s no conflict of interest, it’s okay for high-ranking people to hold large blocks of stock or interests in financial institutions or private ventures. There was a long history of it. Liddy Dole’s family, flower warehousing operation, Salisbury, North Carolina, which is my grandfather’s hometown. Paul Nitze—When he was doing arms control stuff for a whole bunch of administrations was the founder and key owner of Aspen Ski Corporation. What’s his name, the Veteran’s Affairs guy, was a former Congressman—
Zelikow
[Edward] Derwinski?
Gray
Derwinski. Had a family S&L—Baker, stock that his grandfather, bank that his grandfather started. There were other examples that I now can’t remember. But there was a long history of these—and I said, “Why shouldn’t I be able to be a nonexecutive, nonpaid chairman of a family company, as to which I have just multiple disqualifications anyway? And besides, it’s an independent agency that regulates it: FCC [Federal Communications Commission]. We’re not supposed to talk to them anyway, so I’m doubly, triply insulated. Why should I have to give up my nonpaid, nonexecutive chairmanship?”
So that was where he got the information about the ownership of the Chemical Bank shares. He later told me—but it’s a matter of public record, it’s all on file at the Office of Government Ethics, it’s publicly known, it’s publicly disclosed. He later told me that what prompted him to write about it was when he was quizzing Margaret Tutwiler about some different, but not totally unrelated matters, I can’t remember the details, and she volunteered that he had sold his all of his stock. And he went and checked it out and found that he hadn’t sold it all and that she had lied to him, he thought, and so that’s why he dinged him in the papers. And of course their reaction was, well, I leaked, so somehow that’s a defense, that it’s a leak, makes it okay. I mean, I didn’t understand the reasoning, but in the world of Washington, where you’re either a target or a source, it actually is a defense. If I had leaked it, therefore it was—you know.
Zelikow
So you were both the source and the target.
Gray
I was both the source and the target. And he sold it. Of course, after he sold it, the stock plummeted. And so I think I saved him one hell of a lot of money. But that’s another story.
Zelikow
But he’s never thanked you.
Gray
He’s never thanked me for it.
Milkis
Do you think that affected in any way you can tell your relationship with the other people in the Bush administration thereafter? Were you isolated or marginalized?
Gray
No, I think what really made Baker mad, and what really upset him, was more the refusal to grant him the waiver to begin with and then later the flap over the Contra aid agreement where I criticized it. And that was the result of a Jim Cicconi leak to the press. Again, this is again the funny way that Washington works and I don’t know whether it’s worth—because it really isn’t all that important substantively—but I was going to visit a power plant on the Ohio River prior to going to Florida for Easter, the first Easter, in 1989. And right before I was running out the door, someone said, “Hey, we’ve got this thing coming up from the State Department, would you review?” My staff said, “Look it’s a one House, one committee veto,” and I said, “Oh yes, sure is.” But of course, the agreement had already been signed, sealed and delivered, so we were commenting after the fact. There was really no point in commenting because it was a done deal. So I said, “Well, that’s a good paragraph, I’d buy it. So just file it and say, for whatever it’s worth for future purposes, this is something that one shouldn’t do normally,” but it had already been done.
So I go off. And then that’s—Thursday and Friday and then I go down to Florida, and then Saturday morning—stop me if this is wasting too much of your time—Saturday morning, my stepmother, I’m at her house, it had been my father’s house when he lived, says, “There’s this old man calling you.” I come in from the tennis court and I go back out and I come back in and she says, “There’s this old man calling you.” And I said, “What old man?” “This old man who’s calling, he wants to talk to you.” I said, “I don’t know any old man, I’m not going to talk to anybody. I’ve got a tennis game or I’ve got somewhere I’ve got to go.” I came back in and I had just taken a shower, I was about to get a drink and my stepmother, she’s now on her high horse and she can be a very imperious lady. I usually—this is an inelegant way of putting it but, the command in the voice is best judged by who of your colleagues can get you out of the men’s room. Now clearly, Vice President Bush could always do that. President Bush is calling. One of my assistants would come. If the President wants to talk to you, you’ve got to—it’s like when you clear the head in the Marine Corps, you clear the head, baby, I don’t care what you’re doing, you get out. Now who, who’s not official can get you out of the can, off the throne? She could do it. She can still do it. She said, “You will talk to this poor old man.”
I get on the phone and it’s Robert Pear of the New York Times, some old man, and his quavering voice. Once he gets me he stops quivering so much. I mean it was brilliant of him to do this, and he says, “All right, did you see Contra aid agreement?” And I said “No.” “Before it was done?” And I said “No.” And he said, “Well then, let’s talk about it.” And I said, “Whoa, hold it a second, what are the ground rules for this conversation?” He said, “What do you mean?” I said “Well, it’s off the record, isn’t it?” He said, “Okay.” I said, “Okay.” And so we talked about it for about five or ten minutes, and he was laughing and joshing me, but it was all off the record and he honored that in his story the next day. All he said was, all he quoted me, was that I hadn’t seen it. He didn’t quote anything that I said that was critical of it. All he quoted, if you go back and read the article, I think, is that I had said that I hadn’t seen it, and that was all. He honored my—but he trapped me into saying that much, and at the time, I didn’t even think that he trapped me into saying that. I thought I’d caught it in time, but I was still recovering from the quivering old man, you know, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.
But of course, after I got off the phone call I said something is wrong here, how would he know about this? And at that point Andy Card calls and says, “We’re getting calls here about the Contra aid agreement.” I said, “Yes, yes, yes, I’m not surprised if there’s a leak out there and Andy—” he was subbing for Sununu, who was off duty—“I said there’s something going on, because I got a call from Robert Pear and I don’t know how in the hell he knew. And so somebody’s leaked something, Andy, and if I were you, I’d get on top of this and I would find out where in the hell it’s coming from because I smell trouble here.” And that was the end of that.
The next morning, an old friend of mine calls at about 7:00 and gets me up and he says, “Are you ready, are you sitting down?” And I said, “Yes.” And he said, “Well, hold on to your seat, and let me read you this.” And he reads me the front-page story, and then I said, “What did the Post do?” He said, “Well, they did something on page A-5.” “Did it quote me?” “Um, yes, but—it cites you, but doesn’t quote you directly.” And I said, “Well. I never talked to anybody. I didn’t talk to Anne Devroy.” She was the one who had written the Post’s story. Well it wasn’t long after I got off the phone with him that the President called me. He says, “President Bush here, Camp David, about to go off to church, Easter morning, Happy Easter, CB. Now we’ve got a very angry Secretary of State in Houston who’s about to go and meet the press, and what is this all about?” And I said “Oh God, sir, I don’t know. I mean I did a brief paragraph critical of this thing. Of course it was meaningless, it was irrelevant because it had already been done, but somebody’s leaking something to something, and I don’t know who it is, who’s been leaking, but it certainly wasn’t me, I was in Kentucky yesterday and the day before and I don’t know where the in the hell this thing is coming from.” He said “Well, I think when you get back you better make your apologies to Jim. He’s really hot, but I think you can handle it, just be sure and apologize to him. Well, off to church, see you later.” So that still is not very reassuring, is it?
So he gets on television, I watch him after my very lousy tennis game, which I’ve totally flubbed because I’m so terrified of this, and sure enough, all they do is ask him about this stupid thing on TV and so his whole plan to get some message across is totally queered. He is really pissed. Oh God, I get home that night and my voice mail is just stacked, literally, figuratively as high as that. And one of the people who’s calling is [Rowland, Jr.] Rowlie Evans, the columnist, “Hey, Boydie,” he calls me, he calls me Boydie, “Oh Boydie, what a hero.” I said, “Oh you mean I’m a hero, well, you ought to wait.” I said, “God, I am really in the doghouse.” He said, “Oh, it’s a great doghouse to be in, Boydie. This is your crowning achievement, this is really, really great.” Of course he didn’t like Baker and a lot of people didn’t like Baker, so they loved this. He said, “You know, you’re going to go through a lot of pain the next couple of days, but boy, this is one of the best things you’ve ever done.” And I said, “I’ll believe it when I see it, Rowlie.”
I get to the office the next morning, I got my three-year-old, four-year-old, whatever she was, in the back seat, to go to Easter egg roll day, and the only time it ever happened to me, I’m stopped at the gate by the guards, “The President wants to see you in the Oval Office.” So I dump my baby off, luckily someone was in the office to take care of her, I go down to the Oval Office and he is not pleased. But it turns out he’s not really angry at me. He wants to find out who was the leak. He hated leaks, just hated leaks. There was a leak on him on [William] Reilly at the Rio about some treaty thing. He was furious about it. He hated leaks. And he’s quizzing me, he’s like a vacuum cleaner, I can’t keep up with him, he’s quizzing me. “I want the tape, exactly”—he’s trying to piece together where the leak came from. And he’s actually helping me think it through. The guy’s amazing. He could have been a brilliant lawyer. He’s a very, very smart man. He’s leading me through all this, and of course, he knows more than I know, but he’s still leading me through it all, and he says, “Ok, I get the picture. Come by, bring Eliza by later, let me say hello to her.” So I did and it was, you know.
The next day there’s a big front-page story in the Post, lead story, “Gray Taken to Woodshed.” And I’m reading the story and sitting there at the staff meeting, waiting for Sununu who’s late coming in from the Oval Office, you know, burning because I know everyone is staring at me, and this story says I’ve been taken to the woodshed. And of course, I hadn’t been taken to the woodshed. Sununu said nothing to me. And the President is not mad at me, he’s mad at the leaker, whoever that is. Although he’s not—I’m sort of tarnished by this whole thing. But Ed Rogers comes in ahead of him and Sununu’s sort of coming in behind. Ed Rogers says, “I don’t know if I’m looking at the woodshedder or the woodsheddee.” Meaning me, although Sununu had just been taken to the woodshed and the President had apparently just ripped him up for not having taken care of this thing better: A) for not having circulated it to me, so that I was not out of the loop, B) for leaking the subsequent comments that I filed that I would normally file routinely.
And later Sununu called me in and said, “Now what’s happened here?” And I said “John, you better figure out who leaked this thing, because let me remind you that this story was circulating Saturday, because I got called and so did Andy. Now when did your office get this, and Andy was totally confused as to what in the hell I was talking about when I talked to him. Go get the time stamp and show me when your office officially got my comments.” He said, “That’s not available.” And I said, “Go get it.” He came and it was dated, time stamped, 2:00 PM Sunday afternoon. And I said, “John, when did the phone calls get made? When did the Post and the New York Times publish their stories? Sunday morning John, right? That’s before 2:00 PM Sunday afternoon. Is it not, John? Are you getting the picture? Did somebody leak this before they gave it to you, John? Get it?” “Oh, I get it,” says John. And I said, “Ok, John, glad you could get it.”
Now I think what happened is that Cicconi leaked to the press, for what purpose I’m not sure, but I asked Anne Devroy, who had a three-year-old like me or a five-year-old, whatever, ran into her at the Easter egg roll, and her husband was there. I said, “I have a witness.” Anne said, “Where were you this weekend? God, I tried like the devil to reach you and I couldn’t find you. Where were you?” I said, “I was in Florida, but the New York—Robert Pear got me. What’s wrong with you, Anne?” And she said, “You got a point there. I guess my people just aren’t as good as the New York Times.” I said, “That’s right, but I do have a witness to it, don’t I?” And I’m looking to her husband who was a journalist for the Baltimore Sun, “You did not talk to me, did you?” And she said, “No, I didn’t.” And I said, “Then how did you get your story?” and she said, “Low-level White House, to low-level State to me.” Meaning Cicconi, to Tutwiler to [Ann] Devroy. Now why Cicconi leaked it, I do not know. This is not the last time that Cicconi would leak on me and on Sununu. But I think Sununu got the picture about not being able to trust Cicconi from there on after. Anyway that’s again another great Washington story. Not a nice town, not a nice town. You’re either a target or a source.
Zelikow
Also it’s not clear why Tutwiler would leak on the person to whom she was most devoted, just about in the whole wide world.
Gray
Well, it made me look bad, not Baker, although initially—
Zelikow
Baker did not believe that it made him look good. Because it stepped on his story. They’d been working out for two months to have a grand roll out, and this stepped on his story.
Gray
Well, that’s a good question. I don’t know why Cicconi would leak to her, why she would leak to the press. I have no clue. Absolutely no clue.
Milkis
Could I just ask one question about your being out of the loop on this issue? Do you think—
Gray
But, the point I’m trying to make—but she clearly had this story. She clearly had the story. And she couldn’t have gotten it from me because she didn’t talk to me. But she clearly had it. And from what Card said, there were other calls. So this thing was out, it was out, beyond Robert Pear, it was out there and who did it I do not know. I’m sorry, go ahead.
Milkis
I was just going to ask do you think your not being in the loop in this matter was a repercussion from the ethics issue or was it just that Nick Rostow was in the loop and that was the appropriate—the attorney at the NSC, wasn’t he?
Gray
No. I know there was a story that implied that. But Baker said to me, “Look, Boyden, it’s not my job to make sure people get circulated in the White House. I had no objection to your seeing it. I assumed you had seen it. I would assume you would see it. You should see it, but that’s not my job.” And I said, “Yes sir, you’re right.” Of course that didn’t answer who leaked it. What he was objecting to was my saying that I hadn’t seen it. Which wasn’t meant to be a reflection on him, but it was used to be a reflection on him and the reason Sununu was taken to the woodshed was because it was a reflection on Sununu. He had not circulated it. It was Sununu’s job to make sure that I got it and the Department of Justice got it, not Baker. And Baker was right about that. But the whole thing never would have come up if somebody hadn’t leaked the thing to begin with. Does that make any sense?
Zelikow
Uh-huh. It’s a story that may not be substantively very important, but is illuminating in its details, just about the way business works and the atmosphere. There’s one more ethics issue we’d like to plague you with and then move on, which is the matter involving John Sununu. In re: Sununu, 1991 there is—and this story is well known, you don’t need to recapitulate it but we—I’d like to invite you comment on A) is there something about this story we need to understand, that isn’t obvious from the media, aside from the evident awkwardness that you’re in, investigating the Chief of Staff? And B) your judgment of the relationship between the whole brouhaha over the aircraft and the final decision to fire Sununu at the end of ’91.
Gray
Yes, there’s a lot I don’t know. There is a connection between that and the firing. A lot of people again are either the target or the source. It could have been Teeter. It could have been who knows, but a lot of people wanted Sununu out of there because they didn’t want to come into the government. They wanted to run the campaign from outside and they wanted Sununu out. Because Sununu would not have given up control over the campaign the way Skinner did. And why Skinner did it—boy, the guy’s a total idiot. But Sununu would not have given it up, so they were determined to get him out. What Sununu did on this and other things was just simply not bad enough by itself to drive him out. People were using it, as is often the case, using it to exploit it for different ulterior motives, of that I’m quite certain.
Now what he did was perfectly in line, although the quantity was certainly eye-raising. But what he did was certainly in line with the agreement understanding that Howard Baker had before him and the fact of the matter is it’s like using a limo instead of waiting for a cab. It’s just an extension of that. But when you’re in that job, you do not have time, you do not have time to flag a cab, you do not have time to get stuck in some godforsaken airport with you bags. You do not have time. And John McCain, the great reformer John McCain, rightly defends his right to use corporate aircraft. You do not have time when you’re running for President to sit there and get stuck in the goddamn snow. So Sununu was right to do this and it was a cheap shot at him, although I must say discretion would have had him occasionally not take the plane, but he didn’t and he, I begged him, “Just once, John, just once for atmospherics, on your trip that you’re going to take to Philadelphia next week, take the train.” [yells] “No! I’m not going to!” I said, “John, take the train. On your knees, take the train. I’ll go up with you, and I’ll play the violin for you. Take the train, and announce that you’re taking the train and have a press conference on the train. Take the train.” [yells] “No, I’m not going to do it!” He wouldn’t take the train and then he took the goddamn limousine to the stamp auction and that was it. That was it.
But I did write this all in defense of each of these and I was told by the people at the Post it was noon day reading and when they took lunch breaks they would read portions from them just for comic amusement, like comic relief. They gave me a pass on this. They liked me and so they let me get him off the hook, and he did get off the hook. And I remember Maureen Dowd writing a sort of a period to the end of this particular paragraph, a sentence to this particular chapter, she wrote a story on the Saturday, in a Saturday New York Times, front-page story about the ‘Odd Couple’ and despite their different backgrounds had come—Do you know this story? And she said here’s the tall, rich, thin, patrician southerner and the short, fat, squat Lebanese immigrant from via Cuba and what an odd couple they were but somehow they managed to save each other or whatever and she said in a typical, classic Dowd-ism. I was like—because we’re both stooped, he’s short and stooped—I was like a parenthesis to his comma. A wonderful metaphor.
We were going down the steps the following Monday, actually going to Kennebunkport, to Andrews Air Force Base with Thomas, for the Thomas announcement in Kennebunkport and I said “John, did you read the papers over the weekend?” He claimed he never read the papers, he read only the White House summary, Red Rodgers gave him a briefing and he claimed he hadn’t read the papers, although I don’t know. He was so quick as you’ll see. I said, “Well did you read, do you know about Maureen Dowd’s piece?” He said, “No, tell me.” I said, “Well, she said the odd couple and the airplane flights and you know, this tall, rich, lanky, patrician southerner and the short, fat, squat Lebanese immigrant and I was like a parenthesis to your comma.” I’m sort of telescoping the conversation, “She said I was like a parenthesis to your comma, John, don’t you think that’s pretty funny?” He said, “With all due respect, Boyden, I’ve always thought of you as a colon.” Just like that. Just like that. The guy was quick.
Zelikow
Fast on the draw.
Gray
But he was burned out by all of this and he clearly had to go and it was too bad because he—had he not been so burned out and so under siege, under pressure from all of this, some of it self inflicted, you know the campaign could have been very, very different because Skinner just simply couldn’t handle the job as well as Sununu could have, a healthy Sununu. But that’s politics, that’s life. And it’s a hard job being Chief of Staff for four years, it’s a burn out job. Very hard to hang in there for four years because it’s just the pressures are just inhuman.
Karaagac
You never felt the pressure in your job? You said it was fun for twelve years.
Gray
No, I don’t know if I said it was fun. I would never do it again. I mean I felt that I—you know, why tempt fate twice? I felt that I was half a step ahead of the sheriff when I got out. No, in retrospect, in retrospect it was brutal, but the job I had was nothing like being Chief of Staff, constantly on the firing line, constantly. I mean I had my share of knocks, but it wasn’t daily. It wasn’t daily. One of the things that I mean—The thing that I have a lot of resentment about the press—What they did to me, what the New York Times did to me was and still is unprecedented. They went after me, front page, editorial page, op-ed page, all three pages, going after me in choreographed effort to knock me out.
Zelikow
When?
Gray
In early February, the—something about the family company, this was all part of the Jeff Girth—President Bush always thought that Girth was trying to pay me back for having exiled him, blowing the whistle, helping blow the whistle on him when he accused then Vice President Bush of a criminal violation of reporting the income from the sale of his Texas house. And the Times had to run a huge retraction and he was suspended for a year and it really did impede his career. But that wasn’t all me that did that, that was other people who helped do that, who helped get the New York Times to do the retraction. But I think he blamed me, at least President Bush always thought he blamed me. So that may have been part of it, I wish I knew what had motivated the New York Times, but the story, again it’s a great story about how Washington works. I get a call from [William] Safire in December, or maybe it was early January, I don’t know, saying, “All right, I need all of your financial disclosure forms.” I said, “Well, Bill, I don’t have them here with me. I’m going to have to go down to the Office of Government Ethics, all my old ones and Xerox copies and of course you can do that, that’s what the Office of Government Ethics is for, to make this stuff available to the press.” “I don’t want to bother with that, Boyden, I want to have this stuff delivered from you.” “Okay, okay, I’ll do it.”
So I knew there was something he was really obviously—but he wanted all of the past, which are all public, that’s why they’re there, to be public. And I don’t know what angle he was working on, but Office of Government Ethics had approved this arrangement. I mean I had no choice. This was a company that was in trust, so I couldn’t have divested myself of my family’s interest, even if I’d wanted to. And the answer was to file a disqualification, which I did every year with my financial disclosure. I had been approved every year for eight years, when I was in charge of regulation. Now I have a new job where I have to give up the regulation job and do other things, and so it was seen to be less relevant than it was before, but I knew something very peculiar was up. Well, long about this time, because I remember because it was around the time of my birthday, Woodward and Pincus call up, and they say, “Look, the New York Times is about to go after you. They’re promoting a huge weeklong effort to cashier a senior White House official and we know it to be you, and we’ve done some looking into this and think they’re making a mountain out of a molehill, but there’s nothing there, I mean there’s something there, but there’s certainly nothing to wage a weeklong campaign to knock you out and we’re willing to help you. We will do an inoculation story, but you have to cooperate with Walter and explain some things that are in your financial disclosure forms, which he’s been studying for a week. He has a few questions and it won’t take long, if you’re willing to talk to him at four o’clock this afternoon. If you don’t want to talk, we won’t do it, and if you do, we will, so it’s up to you.”
I’m not used to this, I’ve never done this before, so I go and ask Fitzwater what he would do and he said, “Boyden, I wouldn’t touch those guys with a ten-foot pole.” I said, “Would you give me some help?” “Oh, you’re on your own, Boyden. You’re on your own.” “Thanks a lot, Marlin.” I go to Sununu. “John, what should I do in this situation?” “Sue ’em, sue ’em, sue ’em! They have no right!” I said, “John. No, no, no, no. That doesn’t help, that doesn’t help.” So I’m on my own, I have nowhere to go for guidance, I don’t want to bother the President with this, so I say what the hell, I’ll talk to them. So I spent about 45 minutes on the phone with Pincus, and the next day, Saturday they run a just above the fold, across the middle of the page, “Gray Refuses Blind Trust” or something to that effect. Well, I didn’t have to do a blind trust, and we hadn’t really talked about it, but that was the ounce of flesh that they were going to get from me. I had to end up spending a hundred thousand dollars to set up a blind trust for which I was not required. But it was all right, a small price to pay for peace. And so they did this long story and they basically knocked the legs out from under the New York Times story, which is what they were trying to do.
And what the New York Times was going to do was run a front-page story on Sunday, editorial and op-ed on Monday, front page on Tuesday, editorial and op-ed on Wednesday and then reconnoiter Thursday to see if there was anything left of me. Well, nobody can withstand that. Nobody. Nobody can take four days of that kind of front-page assault, so I would have been a dead duck had the Post not come to my—So they write this story. It forces Girth to somehow get his story into the Saturday papers, but he can’t do it in time. He has to give up his Friday night to call from his dinner with his family. He’s pissed at me the next day. I said, “Don’t get pissed at me, Jeff, you little nerd. Why are you mad at me? You’re the one who started this whole thing.” And he’s mad, because he tries to get it in the—but he can’t get it in the national edition. It only appears in the New York edition.
A friend of mine calls up, a guy named Tim Clark who was publisher of Government Executive magazine in Washington, one of the founding editors of National Journal. Father’s Blair Clark, who was head of CBS [Columbia Broadcasting System] news for a long time, very much into the journalistic world, and he says, “Dad’s got this article. It doesn’t sound good. Call him if you want him to read it to you.” So I call, I said, “Mr. Clark.” He said, “CB, oh, I’ve got a very interesting piece here. Let me read it to you.” It was not nice, and I said, “What do you think?” And he said, “I don’t understand a single word of it, Boyden, but the tone—and I take this as a journalist—the tone is brutal. And you’re dead meat unless you can figure out who’s the source of this. You’re finished in my opinion, so find out who it is so you can defuse it.” I said, “Well, you know the Post did this inoculation piece.” He said, “Oh, that may explain why they ran it—I see it’s not in the Washington edition. Well, you may have a hope. I’m not being very positive, Boyden, but I’m just telling you you’ve got to find out—” At this point the Wall Street Journal is calling. They want to help. They’ve got to know who the source is, got to know who the source is. And it’s like a diagnosis. If it’s a convex fracture and you get it concave, and you do the wrong thing, diagnose the wrong antibiotic, you know it’s—and I don’t know who the source is.
Finally, the Wall Street Journal, about midday, says, “We’ve done a lot of scurrying around here and we think,” this is [Robert] Bartley calling, an editor with Gordon Crovitz, a deputy editor, “we think it’s Baker.” And I said, “I do too.” “We’re going to proceed on this theory and we’ll do an editorial tomorrow that I think you’ll be pleased with.” And they did, which helped enormously. And so all these people pulling in to sort of help me, and by Wednesday, Safire throws in the towel and writes this column saying, “All right. All right. White flag, white flag, Gray pulls off one of the great dances of the big feet.” And writes this column saying, “Boyden, all I wanted to do was get your attention. Say hello, say hello. Let you know I’m out here.” Sure, Bill, sure. So there you are.
But I had—in order, and this was never published—but I had to negotiate the terms of my arrangements with my family. This is outrageous when think about it. To me, this is absolutely outrageous. Safire said, “You’ve got to resign from your family trust.” I said, “Isn’t it enough that I resigned from being nonexecutive, nonpaid chairman?” “No, you’ve got to resign from the family trust.” And I said, “Well, I can’t do that. It would take months. I have to go to court. There’s no guarantee a court would let me. Do you know anything about—It’s a state law. It isn’t something the Department of Justice can do. Do you understand? Do you know anything about this, Bill Safire?” “No, I don’t really know.” And I said, “Well, I can’t just resign from a trust that was set up, I can’t do that. I mean not just unilaterally.” And he says, “Well, then you do it de facto.” So I had to negotiate with him the terms of the letter that I wrote to my brothers that said, “Please do not ever discuss the family company with me, ever.” Can you imagine this? “Unless one of you dies, and I have to break a tie.” I mean it’s ridiculous.
Of course, one of them did promptly die, in part because of this, I think. I’m still bitter about it. He was trying to fill my shoes, and it wasn’t that he couldn’t do the business side of it, but when you’ve got four brothers, there’s all kinds of—we know with families feuding and what not. Look at the Koch brothers. Look at the Bingham family. It’s very tricky and I was picked by my father to run this thing because I was the only one who could relate to each of the other three. Everyone else had some problem with somebody. But I was the only—middle brother. I could do this. So when I’m pulled out of it there’s this huge vacuum, all hell is breaking loose, all the family sandbox feuds were spilling out over everything and my brother died of a heart attack at a board meeting in Atlanta and I blame Safire for this. I just could never get it out of my head that mucking around in this. No—I mean absolutely totally gratuitous BS. Anyway. You’re either a target or a source. So that’s my—end of ethics.
Zelikow
Let’s turn to another subject.
Milkis
Confirmation?
Zelikow
Judicial selection committee. There are no judges that you worked on selecting that were more important than the Justices of the Supreme Court.
Gray
Right.
Zelikow
And I’d like to get you to recall a little bit about first the selection of David Souter to the bench. The story that I’ve read is that you initially advocated Ken Starr for the slot that had been vacated by Justice [William] Brennan. And that Thornburgh and Sununu thought Starr wasn’t conservative enough. You want to correct that and kind of take the story from there?
Gray
Well, President Bush had seen what happened to [Robert] Bork. Reagan with Bork and Ginsberg, and he didn’t want to have his hand forced by the media or by a now Democratic, for three years now, Democratic Judiciary Committee. So he had me and Thornburgh for lunch very early on and said, “Look, I don’t want to be caught with my pants down on this. You get your short list ready to go. I want to make the decision in 48 hours when I get an opening.” So we were prepared when we got this message and—
Zelikow
Would you stop for a moment and tell me—not everyone will know this. How did you go about putting together a short list to fill a vacancy on the United States Supreme Court?
Gray
Oh, it’s common sense. You canvass the available candidates. It’s a mix of who’s, on paper, qualified, just legally, just mentally, IQ-wise and what not. But then you have to look at what are the politics at the given time. Who’s confirmable? What champion does a person have? How conservative can you go? Et cetera, et cetera. It’s common sense when you think about it. But it does require some thought. You have to go through a matrix of things to worry about.
Young
There is lobbying for these positions?
Gray
Oh God, yes.
Young
Intense.
Gray
But the point of—
Zelikow
But you’re doing this now, before the vacancy has arisen.
Gray
The point of doing it early is to get out ahead of the lobbying. And of course there’s internal lobbying too, but it should be within the family and therefore much easier. Preparing a short list for example—the bad luck was—I mean I don’t know whether he would have been ultimately picked, but he certainly was on the short list, was [Laurence] Silberman. But he had just issued the opinion reversing the convictions of North and Poindexter and it was just politically impossible to do. That just gives you an example. It might have been his hour. Silberman might have made it, and he would have, from a conservative vantage point, made a much better Justice than Souter, but it was politically impossible. That’s a totally off-the-wall event. He was on the short list when Senator Thornburgh and I set it up, but by the breakfast the morning that we discussed it, he had to come off, because the decision had come down a week to ten days earlier.
Anyway, I’m about to go out and play tennis and I get the call. I’m at home changing. I get the call from Air Force One. Brennan’s resigned, and I get the call from my office, and then Sununu calls from Air Force One. They’re coming back from someplace. And this is a big mistake. He says, “Who’s your man? Who’s your choice?” and I said, “Well,” without giving it any more thought. “It’s obvious it’s Ken Starr. That’s why we talked him off the DC circuit, out of the SG’s [Solicitor General’s] office, to give him a shot at—there was no guarantee that he would get it, but it was understood that he would be on the short list, and I for one can’t think of anybody better. He’s as conservative, he’s not the perfect conservative, but he’s by far the most conservative we can get confirmed. He’s well respected, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Well, in retrospect, it was a huge mistake, and I didn’t know Souter well enough at the time, but he then goes to Barr, and that’s when they form this sort of long-term relationship. Barr hated Starr, both professional jealousy, plus a dispute over some goddamned thing that never got to me in the White House, but it was a huge fight in the Department of Justice. And by breakfast the next morning, he is nonnegotiable. He is off the short list. He is nonnegotiable. Take him off, no further discussion.
Well, I didn’t have a plan then. I did not have a plan. With Silberman also off, I feel like I just don’t know what to do. Edith Jones is an obvious possibility and she’s a woman, but she was young. She was not seasoned. Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe we should have gone with her. Souter had extraordinary backing in the conservative community. Had the fight over Ginsburg/Kennedy gone on another week, Souter probably would have been nominated by Reagan. Warren Rudman is one of the most effective people around, and he had almost got Souter into place. But in any event, he was well regarded in the office that did the vetting in the Department of Justice by all the conservatives. One of whom was now working for me, a guy named Fred Nelson. A card-carrying conservative, no one could ever question his credentials or his intelligence or anything else. He worships Souter, worships Souter, so that was a plus for Souter. I had had lunch with him before he went on the court of appeals and my staff had said, “This guy may be someone we think about for the Supreme Court.” He was that impressive. I remember having a long lunch with him saying, “Jesus, this guy is fabulous.” Thornburgh had independently come to the same conclusion, so they became the two obvious choices, when—
Zelikow
Thornburgh and Jones?
Gray
No, Souter and Jones.
Zelikow
I’m sorry.
Milkis
We knew you didn’t mean to say Thornburgh.
Zelikow
No, it was a slip.
Gray
The President wanted Thomas.
Milkis
For the first time? No kidding?
Gray
For the first time, and we said he’s not ready. Hasn’t been on the court long enough, just don’t know. Both Thornburgh and I independently came to that conclusion. The President was very disappointed, but he accepted it. So almost from the very beginning it was between Jones and Souter. And God, I spent a lot of time with Souter’s opinions and could tell that he was a master craftsman and he was bright and an extremely good writer, an extremely good thinker, a gifted personality, wonderful person, but I couldn’t tell how he’d vote on some key conservative issues. New Hampshire Supreme Court, the stuff he had done on the first circuit just didn’t give you any clue. So I kept going to Sununu and saying, “John, where is this guy?” Sununu said, “Boyden, I’ll tell you, the most important thing I will have ever done, including this job, is to appoint Souter to the New Hampshire Supreme Court. This guy, believe me, he’s okay on these issues.” Now we weren’t permitted to ask [whispers] “Hey, what are you going to with the Roe v. Wade?” We weren’t allowed to do that. That’s unconstitutional. It’s impermissible. It’s dynamite. It’s trouble. Any time they ask George W. why he doesn’t have a litmus test, you can’t do that. No President can do that. But you can normally tell, from a person’s jurisprudence, how they think. With Souter, the record just wasn’t there because the issues the State court gets just—Sununu kept saying to me he was okay. He was okay. He was okay.
At the end of the day, I mean I don’t really know how the judgment ultimately got made, but I think Sununu probably tipped it to Souter in way that I may not know about, and I don’t think I know all the details, but Souter got picked and at the time it didn’t seem to me to be, I mean I could have gone either way with the two nominees. And Souter has in fact proven to be a great addition to the court, you know intellectually and what not. It’s just that he hasn’t—Sandra Day O’Connor once told me at a bridge game, she said, “David Souter is one of the most lovely men in the world, I just wish he could vote with us more.” That’s how it happened.
Zelikow
I’m surprised to hear you say, though, that you don’t really know all the details. Because it’s hard to imagine that you would have been far from this process at any point.
Gray
I think—I just don’t know at the end of the day what made the President—I do know on the next one, the next go-around.
Zelikow
Did the President directly ask you for your advice as to whom he should pick?
Gray
Yes, he did.
Zelikow
And whom did you suggest?
Gray
I said Souter. I don’t know that that’s why he went with Souter. I do know more about the Thomas. You see in the beginning, my relationship with Sununu was not—I just didn’t know, and he was—Sununu was almost out of it by the time Thomas came along.
Zelikow
And you didn’t know what happens really then with the President? He goes back behind closed doors.
Gray
He goes back behind closed doors and he comes out three hours later with this decision. How much of it depended on me, I told him, I said, “This is a very close case, and I don’t think you can make a mistake going either way.” I said, “But I do worry about her brittleness, her youth, and her confirmability. How will she handle a question because she is so conservative? How hard will they go after her? Because I worry about that.” But I said, “This is a very close case and you’re not going to make a mistake in my opinion going either way, given Sununu’s assurances to me about where Souter’s mind is.”
Young
How would you judge confirmability at this early stage?
Milkis
Yes, how did you figure out just conservative, but not so conservative that he wasn’t confirmable?
Gray
Well, he had Rudman as a sponsor. Now that’s good and bad. I mean, it all but guarantees his confirmation. Knowing now what I know, it also guarantees something else too, that he won’t vote right. But at the time, I wasn’t quite as suspicious of Rudman as I am now. Rudman was bad on Iran-Contra. He was incredibly disloyal to President Bush. Of course, he had a candidate, Bob Dole, so he was always trying to shitcan Bush on Iran-Contra. He was difficult for us on the civil rights bill. Rudman is the most difficult person I’ve ever dealt with. He’s just difficult. And he’s been a big McCain supporter. I mean, there are rumors, I saw in the paper today, he may be the Attorney General if McCain gets—that terrifies me frankly, but never mind. I now realize what a clever guy Rudman is. At the time, we didn’t think Rudman’s support was a red flag, you know, was a problem. We took it as a plus. This is a guy who will get him confirmed in the same way that Danforth was a critical element in the Thomas hearings.
Milkis
What other issue besides abortion were you concerned about?
Gray
Let me finish.
Milkis
Oh sure, I’m sorry.
Gray
Edith Jones, didn’t—I mean we talked to Phil Gramm and we—but I didn’t detect in my discussions with Phil Gramm the same enthusiasm for Edith. He doesn’t know her. Nowhere near the same enthusiasm as Rudman had for Souter. So that’s part of the—you see what I’m saying? These are all hard judgments to make. But we’re dealing with a hostile Judiciary Committee. We’re dealing with a hostile Judiciary Committee. So anyway, I’m sorry to—where were we?
Milkis
I was just asking, besides abortion, which you mentioned as one example, what other issue were you worried about with respect to Souter, on how he would vote on what, what kinds of—
Gray
Oh, quotas, you know, Adarand [Constructors, Inc. v. Peña]. How’s he going to vote on that? Some first amendment issues. How’s he going to vote on vouchers, school—We don’t know yet, do we? We’ll find out pretty soon. We’re going to find out this term probably. I’ll be very, very disappointed if Souter goes south on racial preferences and I’m afraid he will. I’m just afraid he will.
Zelikow
You also then were a bit of the manager for Souter’s confirmation for the White House and here you do have more—
Gray
Yes, yes. For a judicial nomination, I am, in the same way I would be responsible, if you will, for the general counsel of the department, or any big Department of Justice nominations.
Zelikow
And there was some pretty nasty stuff that was beginning to get floated around Souter, when he was coming up. Now ultimately in the end, he won decisively in the Senate, but the homosexual rumors were really getting out there at one point. Do you recall that as—
Gray
Yes, sure. And I asked him the question, “Are you gay?” and he said, “No.” Now the story that recently came out about someone calling and him deciding not to and up until two o’clock in the morning, and Rudman persuading him not to back out, I never knew that story. That’s very interesting, I never knew that.
Zelikow
But how would you then go about trying to—
Gray
The obvious thing, here’s a guy, single, lives with his mother, you know, obvious prescription for questions.
Zelikow
How would you go about trying to deal with allegations like that? I mean just politically, how would you go about trying to contain something like that?
Gray
There’s really nothing you can do to contain the rumors, but we had done enough homework to think that there was so little substance that the press wouldn’t go with anything. Thomas is a different story. Obviously, you know what happened there. It’s always a worry. I mean this is the big—It comes back again in the ethics thing, you know. What’s that great line from All the King’s Men? Between the deity and the you know, the whatever, there’s something on everybody, you know, they say it’s the judge. Get something on the judge. Well, the judge is above reproach. No, there’s something on everybody. There is something on everybody. Go get that quote. Oh, it’s brilliant.
Masoud
Beyond asking the question, “Are you gay?” would you do any other research to find something like that out?
Gray
Sure, we would ask all kinds of questions quietly, and of course, the FBI is doing this when they do their search. They’re looking for this. When it came to Thomas—I mean, this may be getting ahead of the game—Thomas had been the most vetted individual in the history of mankind. He’d gone through five, count them, five full field investigations. Nobody’s been through that kind of clearance. He’s gone through two ABA [American Bar Association,] hostile ABA reviews. That guy had been—there isn’t a corner of his life they hadn’t ripped apart, taken apart, put back together again, and yet still, Anita Hill surfaces. What can you do? One of the reasons we picked him is he had been through five of these efforts. At the time four, when we picked him, but Jesus Christ give me a break!
Karaagac
What was the great thing about Thomas then? What was so great about Thomas?
Gray
He’s a great man. Believe me, he is a great man.
Zelikow
Let’s run forward to how Thomas comes up. You’ve gone through Souter, then you kind of go back and say all right, time to have a new short list. Scratch Souter. Now I’m just imagining it’s now 1991, the new short list might, unless Starr was struck down and remains struck, if that’s true, then he’s off.
Gray
Starr’s off forever.
Zelikow
Does Silberman get back on?
Gray
Silberman’s off forever, basically, unfortunately.
Zelikow
So now Edith Jones would still be on that list.
Gray
Edith Jones would still be on the list.
Zelikow
Clarence Thomas may not be—
Gray
Edith would be at the top of the list probably. Except for what I’ll tell you.
Zelikow
Why don’t you take the story from here, since you actually know something.
Gray
Yes, I know, but what happens is that I’m supposed to do some celebrity race for the cure, some walk, run, whatever, for breast cancer. And I don’t know why I’m doing it except that they begged me to go do some celebrity thing. I can’t find the celebrity tent. I’m wandering around at nine o’clock Saturday morning, “Where’s the celebrity tent?” And this voice says, “Boyden, Boyden! Boyden, Boyden!” and I turn around and it’s Clarence and Ginny. And he’s not in the celebrity tent, and I figure if he’s not, why should I go? He says, “Let’s go do this together.” So we walk, we do this five-mile hike around Capitol Hill and back. Great chat with him. I hadn’t, you know, since the early go-around—and it occurs to me by the end of this hour, or two hours, however long it took to do this walk, “Boy, he’s ready.”
He says to me, not because he knew there was going to be an opening, because Marshall was—there were no new rumors or anything. He said, “Boyden, I can’t thank you enough for putting me in this job. This is my life. I know this is what I want to do. This is the best thing. I had doubts, but now I know it’s wonderful. I love my colleagues. I love my work. This is the best thing that ever happened to me.” And we chatted, we just ranged all over the place, and I remember for the next twenty-four hours saying, “Jesus Christ, he is now ready. He’s ready. This guy is ready.” And then about a week later, Marshall retires, and I called up and I said, “Are you ready to take another long walk?” And he laughs and says, “Sure.” But this time, the President was very, very—“I don’t want to do black on black. They’ll say I’m doing a quota and I’m against quotas.” I said, “Oh God, don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it. He’s ready. He’s ready. You’ve got to do it.” Both Thornburgh and I said, “You’ve got to do it.”
So he overcomes his initial reluctance. He loves Thomas and he wanted to do him in the first time around. It’s just the optics of black on black, but he gets over that.
Milkis
So Thomas was sort of the immediate candidate, the obvious candidate, I mean to say.
Gray
Thomas was early, from the very, very beginning. We never really got into much else.
Karaagac
What did Thomas—you hinted a little bit, in the course of talking about Thomas—maybe not now—you hinted a little bit about President Bush’s political philosophy, voluntarism. Did he talk to Thomas about that? Did he—how did their views correspond? Was there a natural fit, do you think?
Gray
Oh I think the President was, as we know from the civil rights fight, very antiquota. I mean he didn’t wear it on his sleeve in a way to try to poke people in the eye, but he didn’t like quotas. He didn’t like group rights. He doesn’t like group rights. And Thomas, of course, fit that perfectly. But I think what attracted him to Thomas was he admired the man. He admired the person, you know, coming up from where he came from to reach the pinnacle of his profession from the most hardscrabble background. I think that’s what really is overwhelming. He said, “I had to rely on you, Boyden, for his judicial, jurisprudential skills, but I want that man on the court. I want someone who represents what he represents on the court.” So you know, the importance of education, it just spoke so many volumes about what—I think the President wanted someone who came from, whether he was black or white, wanted someone who came from that kind of utterly impoverished background, you know. I think he wanted to promote that kind of person to the court.
Masoud
Now with the Souter confirmation, that is something that you managed—
Gray
He liked, he liked, he generally liked—he knew him and liked him and admired him enormously. But anyway, go ahead.
Masoud
No, I’m sorry. But you managed the Souter confirmation, but with the Thomas confirmation, Ken Duberstein is brought in to manage that. What happened there? Why was that?
Young
Is that true though? I mean did he really manage that?
Gray
No, I mean I think we did it out of our office. I think we knew this was going to be a huge deal and we wanted more firepower.
Zelikow
Why did you think this was going to be so much harder than Souter?
Gray
Come on, you know the answer to that question.
Zelikow
Just because Thomas—
Gray
A black conservative. Jesus, a black conservative. Stood for everything the liberals hated, and he’s black. So we knew we were in for—I remember what President Bush said, according to Thomas. President Bush never told me and I wasn’t there, but he pulls Thomas into his bedroom up in Kennebunkport and says, “OK, Clarence, this is going to be the roughest ride of your life, and I’m going to stick with you. What I want from you is a commitment that you’re going to stick with me. I will not blink, but I want you to promise me you will not blink. Because this is going to be horrendous.” What perception. What perception. And Duberstein did a great job. Duberstein did a great job, but at the end of the day, you know, he’s not a lawyer and you’ve got to sit there, and you know, you’re playing legal angles at the end of the day. And you’re playing legal back shots and you’re trying to figure out what was Anita Hill doing at the law firm of da da da da da, why was she—what was she—you know, that gets really beyond what Ken knew because he’s not a lawyer. So I don’t think the fact that we picked Ken is not a reflection on me. It was just trying to make sure that this thing had the most solid footing when it went to the Hill, where I wasn’t going to have time to spend full time on the Hill, which is what Ken did.
Young
Was he your preference, your choice for doing this?
Gray
Oh, yes. Oh yes, and I there never was any friction or anything. I don’t think there was ever any talk of any friction.
Masoud
No, no, no. I wasn’t suggesting that.
Milkis
I remember in those hearings before the Anita Hill thing broke that Clarence Thomas had distanced himself or denounced a lot of his writings, which were very conservative, particularly when he was at EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission], as philosophical musings. Was that part of the coaching with Ken?
Gray
Yes, part of the coaching. You know, the debate preparation is—It’s like debate preparation. I remember when Souter—the first mock hearing we did with Souter, he was a disaster. He’d never been—he didn’t have any problem with his confirmation with you know—if you go on the first circuit, so he hadn’t really been tested. It was just a perfunctory thing, but this was big time and he’s terrible. And I remember going, “My God, what do we do? This guy can’t put one word after another.” In public, he just freezes. But after two or three more sessions, he was fine, and he was brilliant when he went on television. He gave such a lecture, such a display of, mastery of—and I keep trying to tell the Bush people, you know if you can train a guy like Souter, to be sure who is very smart, but he’s never had any public speaking, to train a guy like that, to dominate a hearing like this, you can surely train a guy with real skills. “Oh, no, no.” It infuriates me, just infuriates me. He’s going to lose if he doesn’t—anyway, Thomas, by contrast, had been testified fifty-five times or something like that—another reason why he was picked. We figured, “God, this guy won’t crack. He’s been under more pressure than practically anybody we know.” And he didn’t crack, but he came awfully damn close, I must say.
Zelikow
Did Anita Hill come clear out of the blue? Did you see that coming at all?
Gray
No.
Zelikow
Or is that just—
Gray
I could spend a whole weekend talking about all of that, and there just isn’t the time.
Zelikow
Is there an account of it that you’ve seen in print that you can commend to us?
Gray
Yes, well, [David] Brock’s book is pretty compelling.
[Two pages redacted]
Zelikow
Well, if believing that of course then I can understand how both you and the President must have felt very strongly indeed as this thing got hot, the tension got higher and higher and higher. What a difficult period it must have been for you and for the President.
Gray
Oh, it was awful. It was terrible—but difficult—The guy it was really difficult for was Thomas. He was sitting in the bathroom throwing up and all this kind of stuff. I mean, the guy was just reduced to practically—you know, what courage for him to come back.
Karaagac
Other than outcome, how would you compare the Tower affair and this affair?
Gray
Oh, Tower was nothing compared to this, because there was so much more at stake here. I mean this is—they were fighting to the death, because, you know, a conservative black who’s antiquota. He threatened the whole—He threatened so much. He still threatens. He’s a threat to a lot of vested interest. And Tower wasn’t a threat to anything except for Nunn’s sort of turf. But this is a big time threat, Thomas, and he’s going to be there for forty more years, you know.
Milkis
Yes, he’s also young, very much another factor. He’s not only a conservative black, but he’s very—What is he, 42?
Gray
I think we’ve won this quota fight. I think now there’s sort of a consensus we’ve tipped over to the other side now, where the people say, all right, group rights, not right, not right. But at the time, at the time we were not there. We were not there. The Adarand has come down since, but we knew this was going to be trouble. The President knew this was going to be trouble. The President knew this was going to be trouble. We had no idea they’d go this length.
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Milkis
Did you or the President have any discussions with Justice Thomas before he came back and gave that famous rebuttal?
Gray
No, there were people talking, Mike Luttig was in touch with him, Mark Paoletta at work, from my staff, was a key player in all of this.
Zelikow
What was the name again?
Gray
Mark Paoletta. Very key, very key player in all this. Maybe the most, single most important person in this whole confirmation fight, outside of Ginny and Thomas himself was Mark Paoletta. Someday you might want to even talk to him.
Zelikow
Are there any more issues concerning or any concerning Supreme Court appointments that you’d like to comment on before we depart from this subject?
Gray
Well, we only had two.
Zelikow
Right, but I mean dogs that didn’t bark that are worth noticing or other—By the way, after Thomas is selected, I’d be curious to note who you then put on the short list had there been another death or resignation?
Gray
Ah, good question. You know, I haven’t really thought about that.
Zelikow
You did not have the energy to conjure up a new short list.
Gray
No, no.
Zelikow
You were so exhausted?
Gray
We so exhausted. We were spent.
Young
Is it—do you have anything to say about what you think’s important about the selection of federal judges below the Supreme Court and your role in that?
Gray
Well, I’m very proud of what we were able to do. I mean I think that we got very good judges, very high quality judges that, from our vantage point, were ideologically or philosophically where we wanted them to be. That was one of the very satisfying exercises and we did it right and—
Young
Did you have any memorable fights over confirmations?
Gray
No, there were not really. The thing went fairly smoothly. There were a couple times when—see for appellate judges, we were able to make it stick that they really are the President’s choice. Of course, the district court judges, historically, senatorial courtesy, and so we had a couple of fights—one with [James] Jeffords over one of his guys. I remember [John] Heinz had tried to propose someone, or [Arlen] Specter, I can’t remember which from Pennsylvania—who was corrupt as hell we thought, but it wasn’t an ideological thing. It was just a case of simple ethics corruption, whatever. I don’t remember huge fights at the appellate level, and we had a good working relationship with Murray Dickman at the department, Mike Luttig was terrific, in the beginning. He later went on the bench himself, but we had a very good working relationship with OLC and it went smooth. The department in the beginning was a little slow getting off the dime, getting organized, so I had to crack the whip, but things got going and it was a very—And I had, Lee Liberman [Otis] was terrific. She is terrific, was and is terrific. That was one of the more—except for the Thomas glitch, of course, not glitch, the Thomas explosion, and the mistake that we, I suppose, philosophically, made with Souter, it was otherwise—it went very, very smoothly.
Young
And on all these, you worked with the Department of Justice?
Gray
Totally collaborative, totally. Never any friction. Never. The current administration, I don’t know. They’ve demoted OLC. They’ve kicked it off the sixth floor. They don’t listen to them anymore. As Lee Liberman said when I asked her if she would talk to one of my former partners, who’s up for confirmation, a guy named Randy Moss, she said, “You know, I’ll talk to him, and I’m sure he’s a nice guy and I’m sure he’ll be confirmed, but anybody who agrees to take the job is by definition unqualified.”
Young
Okay, we might want to turn then to another one of your hats which you wore, that was as guardian of the Oval Office.
Gray
Let me just finish and say, I just want to say one more thing. I mean it’s not historical, but Thomas is a great man. I mean this guy, I mean a great jurist. He’s a great jurist. And people are still reeling from his dissent in the most recent campaign finance case. It is just a delight to read. He rips everybody else just to shreds. He makes them all look like idiots and forces Stevens to say money is property. Well, that’s a concession, right? To say that money is property? That’s a big concession. I’ll take that. I’m sorry. He’s going to be, I mean, sure, he’s conservative, and you can differ about that, but his craftsmanship, as Breyer told me, you know I mean he can be quite [inaudible] about it. Not long ago, he said, “You know, Thomas is one fabulous individual,” and that’s fine praise coming from Breyer, who doesn’t say many nice things about many nice people.
Zelikow
I dare say he’ll never utter that publicly in the foreseeable future.
Gray
Probably not, no.
Zelikow
Well, a court, too many whirlwinds.
Young
Yes, that is you’re the President’s lawyer and you have a position and a responsibility with respect to getting the relations between President and Congress and the President’s constitutional prerogatives adequately protected. We’d like to hear something about that role and what it involved. And one of the reasons this becomes an interesting question for the Bush Presidency is because you’ve got an opposition Congress that you’re also dealing with here and a central constitutional issue. You mentioned earlier that President Bush had wanted you, had specifically mentioned protection of the Presidential prerogatives, constitutional prerogatives, so you might start with there, and somewhere in this story we’d certainly like to hear about the story as you know about it and as you were involved in it, of the Persian Gulf Operation and the votes that were taken in Congress. So this is a batch of things to cover there.
Gray
Yes, well, he felt very strongly that it was one of his duties of office to fight for the powers of his office, that the Framers set up—a pretty sophisticated view, for someone who’s not a lawyer—that the Framers set up this system of shared but separated powers, of competing powers and that fighting for the power of your office is almost as important as what you were fighting for. In the largest scheme of things, the best answer will come out only if you uphold the oath of your office. So he was very, very firm about all of this and felt that having been in Congress and whatnot, that the special interests were—God, the Congress was supposed to be the hotbed of special interest, but that the Presidency was a counterweight to that. And that therefore, you know—this is where the ethics come in, the President’s got to be clean because you’re not going to expect the Congress to be clean. And so he was constantly in favor of, constantly pressing me for allowing him more leverage over the Congress. Now some of this obviously was political, but he was constantly—I’ve said this I’m sure many, many times, you know the great thing about foreign policy is that you really do have a relatively free hand, and in domestic policy, you’re just torn in a thousand different directions, and I think he felt that the Presidency needed to be able to defend itself against what can be but a factional interest, in the Federalist Paper sense.
So he was always—I mean I was telling you one story about, I mean I don’t know how much I told you at lunch, about the search for a line-item veto. For him it was important, because it was a way to give him, again, some sort of leverage—not just budgetary, but overall leverage over Congress—and he constantly pressed me to do that and of course we had this very conclusive opinion by Chuck Cooper, one of the most conservative OLC heads ever and one of the most conservative departments ever with Meese as Attorney. There is no Steve Glazier article, something, something, something, whatever it is, and you know, veto just doesn’t exist. My God, he was on my tail all the time to get this power to him, and I just couldn’t. I finally came up with a great scheme that would do this in ’90 and he asked me—he was so identified with line-item veto, and it had been one of the things that Reagan had started and he was really—and eventually of course it got enacted although then struck down by the Supreme Court. They did it wrong. But he was—I can’t remember when it was. We were flying in early spring 1992 and he’s waiting for Card to come over from transportation to do some strike photo op, and Darman’s not there, which is why I think he’s picked this time to do it, but Skinner is and he’s trying to send the message to Skinner who just isn’t listening. And he says, “Now, Boyden, BOYDEN.” He was trying to make sure that Sam heard, “I want you to find me the equivalent of the line-item veto,” and of course Sam is just in one ear and out the other. He’s not getting this. But I got it. I mean, I got it.
So I spent a couple of weekends just going around and around and around. What am I going to do? And finally it dawned on me. The light went on. I see the way to do this. We do it the right way. We go back to Congress, and tell them they’ve got to repeal the Impoundment Control Act, and get him the impoundment back, the way most Presidents had had for nearly 200 years. That’s what we’ll do. What’s the leverage? Well, the Congress had already had a test vote, 165 Republicans voted for it to vote down the appropriations bill that authorizes the congressional staff, and so we knew—and I later talked to [Dick] Armey and he said, “This is a brilliant idea. We’ll get you the votes. Don’t worry. You only need twenty more votes. You pick up some blue dogs, easy, easy, easy.” We’ll say to Congress, you want your staff? Okay, you give us back our impoundment authority. You don’t give us back our impoundment authority, I veto your authorization bill and I dare you to override it. We’ve got 180 votes. And it was easy, right? Except that Darman just couldn’t stand the idea of doing this. He said, “Well, they’ll bundle it together with all the other appropriations bills and force us to veto the whole thing.” I said, “Fine, veto the whole thing. Shut the government down. That’s all right, even better, even better.”
Meanwhile, I didn’t know why the President was so keen at this point. He’d always been on this issue and he had had Charles Allen Wright come up a year or two earlier when the issue was hot—or maybe when he was Vice President—had Charles Allen Wright come up and explain to him why this Steven Glazier idea was goofy, and Charles Allen Wright says, “Look, he’s a student of mine, and it’s goofy, Mr. Vice President, and the reason it is, is that if it existed, somebody would have thought of it before now. You wouldn’t be the first Vice President to think about it.” But it was back now, and it turns out that the campaign was very concerned about Perot and trying to think of what way to get the Perot voter away and there’s this memo that’s in the book, the book about the Bush campaign, about the ’92 campaign, written by a Newsweek reporter, whose name I can’t remember—
Interviewer
DeFrank?
Gray
DeFrank, yes. There’s a memo at the back from Fred Steeper saying the way you’ve got to do this—from early in 1992—the way you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do a line-item veto. Even if you don’t have it, even if you lose it in court, do it, because it shows that you’re—obviously reflected to Congress, to the President, shows that you’re against the special interests and you’re going to stand up for the public interest against the special interest. And this is what Perot’s doing as the campaign finance related thing and this will symbolize—it will be like Boston Harbor or whatever. You know it will be a symbol of—so that’s why he was so keen to do it. I didn’t realize this until long after the election was over, but I can see now why he was so keen on it. And I can also see why Darman was so keen to block it. Darman took every artifice to stop and to block this thing. And I kept going to the President early in the morning before Darman got to work, before Sununu got there, and he said, “Boyden, I like this. This is great. I’ve checked the right box, but you’ve got to stamp it out. I can’t do this without stamping it out.” I said, “They keep blocking me. I don’t know what they’re doing it for, but you’ve got to get it stamped out.” I can’t just check the box.
And he understands without it, I can’t do it, but what he really wanted to know was where his Cabinet was. So since Darman kept blocking any staffing paper I tried to put in, I went and canvassed all the Cabinet myself. And every single one of them said, “brilliant idea” and I called Howard Baker and he said, “brilliant idea” and I called Stuart Spencer who’d just been through a fight like this with [Pete] Wilson in California. He said “This is brilliant. This will get back.” I called John Harrington, head of the Republican Party in California, he said, “You do this, we’ll get you out here and sign it with Reagan standing on the beach in Orange County. We’ll get Orange County back.” He said, “I won’t guarantee you’ll win California, but we’ll get you Orange County back.” And I was on a roll. I said this thing—I had everybody. Howard Baker said, “You want me to come in and persuade the President, I’m there in fifteen minutes.” So I was feeling very, very good about this. And he had a meeting set up to go discuss it with the President and every time, Darman would nix the meeting. God it was infuriating.
Young
How could that happen?
Gray
Well, because he had Sununu wrapped around his finger and any time Darman wanted anything, Sununu genuflected, or Sam—
Zelikow
You know, because this is in ’92.
Gray
It was Sam. You know Darman ran circles around—Skinner made the mistake of saying to the National Journal after [inaudible]. “Well, Darman’s a nice young man and he’ll have a role in my White House.” Darman then set out to destroy Sam Skinner and he succeeded. So by the time this rolls around, Skinner is in a nervous breakdown, and he can’t—and he’s still like this and Darman just—Darman’s running the White House. Darman’s running everything and because he’s got Baker in the wings to come over and he’s Baker’s man and Baker’s going to run the campaign only. I mean that’s where the power comes from. And Skinner has no patronage. And Darman’s speaking for Baker, or rather he’s invoking Baker, and people—no one’s going to cross Baker.
So meetings got canceled, set up, canceled, set up, canceled. Finally, Darman says we’re going to put together a white—you know a black book or a white book of initiatives so the President can read each of them. You know, study more. I said, “We’ve got to get this thing done. We can’t just spring this thing, you know, at the end of September, because then it will look like a campaign gimmick. It’s going to look like a campaign gimmick anyway, but you can’t—” “All right, what we’ll do, we’ll put this in the book, and do the memo and we’ll put it in the book and I probably, I won’t change your memo. I’ll put it in as word for word and if I dissent, I’ll add a dissent and I’ll tell you I’m adding a dissent, but I won’t let you change my dissent either.” And I said, “That’s fine.” Well, he didn’t tell me he was putting in a dissent, so I assumed he didn’t put in a dissent. I was later told by Cam Finley, who was Sununu’s chief of staff basically, a lawyer in Chicago, that Darman put it in except that he whited out or took out the one bullet point that was necessary, the only reason for it, which is who supported it: All the Cabinet, plus Harrington, plus Spencer, plus Baker, plus others. That was taken out. Well, I don’t know. Nothing ever happened with the book. I’m not sure the President ever got the book. I’m not sure the President reacted on anything in the book. I don’t have any idea what happened to the book, but it would be of intense interest to me to find out whether Darman really did, as Finley said to me, take out that one bullet point.
Young
Do you have a memory of when this book was prepared?
Gray
Before the convention, in the spring.
Young
This is a document we might look for in the library sometime.
Gray
I’d very curious to—it’s got to be—It can’t have disappeared. Whether it actually went to the President, I don’t know, but I did see the book. I mean I saw it and obviously it had things in it. I mean that could have made a difference. I don’t know. But the President was—
Zelikow
You never saw the piece of paper ticked back with the Presidential decision on it, against you?
Gray
No.
Zelikow
It just disappeared?
Gray
The record has papers where he checks yes in a box that hadn’t gone through the clearance process. But he wanted something that had gone through all the clearance process before he chopped on it. That’s what he had to have in order to have it be legitimate.
Zelikow
Were you on decent terms with Cicconi? Because Cicconi would be a person who could help you track paper going in and out of the President.
Gray
Yes, but he was gone by then. And no, I was not on good terms. I think I’m on good terms with Cicconi now, but at the time I was not. He’s the guy who leaked, I think, on me with the Baker thing. He was leaking constantly on the civil rights fight, to his old buddy, I mean you know, Vernon Jordan was a former and again to be later partner of his at Akin, Gump [Strauss, Hauer & Feld], and he was leaking to the civil rights people. He made life very difficult for me. But he’d gone by this stage. He was back at Akin, Gump. He’s a nice guy, and he’s very smart, but he was a Baker ally. He didn’t owe any allegiance to me.
Karaagac
Mr. Gray, there’s a recurring theme—I’m sorry, did I interrupt?
Young
Well, if it’s a follow up for this then it’s fine. I was just going to suggest that this raises a lot of interesting questions about how the White House actually worked. I mean it’s kind of striking that after Sununu, Darman could block meetings of this kind, and it raises a question about how that White House worked before and after Sununu, from your perspective. I mean the obvious question to a student of the Presidency is why didn’t Bush do something about this if it was not to his interest to have—
Gray
He may not have known all the details. I didn’t go to him and say, you know, Darman is blocking—he didn’t want to hear staff infighting. I mean in retrospect, I should have probably said something, but I thought—I mean Darman was so clever. The guy was demonically clever. I thought I was always going to—you know Lucy and the football, at the last minute you pull it away. I thought I was going to get the meeting. I thought that I was going to get the meeting. I always thought it was going to happen. And by now, I realize how I got burned by Darman, who—God, he’s charming, funny, and just, you don’t want to disbelieve the guy, because he’s so funny, and he’s so brilliant. You don’t want to think he’s a goddamned liar. But he is. He was. And so you get head faked all the time and I should have realized, Jesus Christ, this had gone on too long. I’ve got to figure something else out. But there’s really almost nothing, I don’t know what you do in a situation like that. And that happens, I’m sure that happens in every White House. I’m sure it does. There was a lot more structure to begin with, within the Bush White House, than ever has been with Clinton. So you know, you’re talking about a drop off of a very high standard of organization.
But [Michael] Boskin apparently never had a single one-on-one meeting with President Bush the whole four years. Here is his economic advisor, never met alone with him. Darman wouldn’t let Boskin in there without him, you know. And Darman knew how to manipulate the paper. He had been the Cabinet secretary or whatever it is, the paper guy—
Zelikow
Staff secretary.
Gray
Staff secretary in the Reagan years. He knew better than anybody where the pressure points were and—
Young
So that on the domestic side, at least, on the domestic side there was a real difference, apparently. The NSC, and the national security and foreign policy side worked. And this whole domestic side of the Bush White House is a little bit hard to understand. It’s not only the question of what initiatives and beliefs were behind, as you mentioned earlier, it’s also a question of how this situation actually worked in terms of production and advising and delegation. There’s considerable evidence to at least believe that Darman and Sununu ran the show between themselves—
Gray
They did.
Young
Which raises an interesting question about—
Gray
I had independent access to the President, so—I was the only person who did though, and neither Sununu nor Darman had any competence in legal matters. I mean you could hand the civil rights bill to Sununu and Darman and they wouldn’t know what to do with it. I mean Darman, as brilliant as he is, couldn’t decipher the Greek in that document. So the legal stuff, which covered quite a lot, I had a clear shot, except for my mistake by tipping him off to Starr, you know, the first Supreme Court nomination. I never shared with Sununu again.
Young
But on the impoundment issue, that was a—
Gray
I had to go, but that was a budget issue that was really, technically speaking, Darman’s turf, so he had the call on it just the way I would normally have the call on a strictly legal issue. And in a sense I was lucky to get as far as I did, but Darman could—because it dealt with the budget, he could always trump me.
Zelikow
And he could trump you only because he had a reliable alliance with the Chief of Staff. He could get the Chief of Staff to deliver, and now that it’s later, Skinner. But Skinner has to deliver, and he had to deliver on these fairly detailed matters: meeting, no meeting. This is very nitty-gritty stuff, and Skinner has to deliver. And you, I guess had not been able to forge even a closely comparable relationship where at least Sununu or Skinner says, “I’m going to be an honest broker and, as an honest broker, let’s just air out this difference of opinion. Let the President hear from Darman and hear from Boyden.”
Gray
The problem with Skinner was he was so dysfunctional that doing nothing was always the default position. And so, it was much easier to knock something out with him than to get something in with him. So.
Karaagac
Why was Skinner even chosen?
Gray
I don’t know. He had a good record at the Department of Transportation. He had handled the Alaskan oil spill well. He had proven executive abilities.
Karaagac
He lobbied for the job, didn’t he?
Gray: I think he’d lobbied for the job. He was—the family knew him well and liked him. Skinner had long been a favorite of the family going way back. [James] Thompson, the former Governor, was his sponsor—so there were a lot of things going for him. It’s just that when push came to shove, he took the job—He agreed to take the job without any power because he agreed that the campaign would be run outside the White House. So he had no power going into the job. He had no power. And Darman, who was speaking for Baker, who did have the power, and for Teeter, all those guys on the outside—Darman was their guy on the inside. He was able to—Am I making any sense? So, he was able to turn everything into a campaign issue and trump—and totally emasculate Skinner and that was the rubric under which it was done. And I had no campaign role at all. The core group, the core group—I never got into the core group. Looking back on it, I was glad I was never allowed in the core group—but I had less to do with the ’92 campaign than any prior campaign. I had much more to do with ’84 and ’88. In ’92, I was totally excluded.
Young
This is kind of interesting that Darman is taking a strong hand in the campaign.
Gray
Yes, he ran the campaign, basically.
Young
The thought was, it was going to hell in a handbasket and rescue was needed and Baker was brought in to—
Gray
But Baker only operates through Darman, Baker didn’t do anything except through Darman, so Darman was running the show for the whole year. Even after Baker came over, it was Darman.
Karaagac
Well, what did Darman really want of the President other than—
Gray
I don’t know. You’d have to ask him.
Young
You know Darman doesn’t—I don’t know him at all, never even met him. I hope to someday in a room like this, but he certainly strikes me as one of the classic examples of the inside-the-Beltway politician, not the campaign.
Gray
Of course, he didn’t like campaigns. He thought that the worst thing you could do is put a policy initiative up for grabs in a campaign and let the public decide. He thought that was just the worst thing. So his idea, especially in 1984, was to clean out as many issues as he could, to make sure nothing got discussed, because that might interfere with his agenda. Can’t have his agenda put up for grabs because Lord knows the voters might not go for it. I’m exaggerating, but not too much.
Zelikow
This is back to your point of the control freak issue—
Gray
He didn’t like campaigns deciding issues. The notion that President Bush could invoke a campaign to get a capital gains tax cut. What kind of bullshit is that? Can the public have any say about capital gains? Jesus. That’s not for the public to decide.
Zelikow
Did you find that your access to the President as the term went on—that your access to the President became harder, that your access to the President seemed curtailed?
Gray
No.
Zelikow
After the budget deal, for instance?
Gray
No, but I did find in the depths of the campaign, down toward the end, that it was harder to get in to see him. But I would occasionally find a glimpse. I remember, and I want to—there’s one—I was trying to think of something I was going to say about—I want to come back to that, but I want to—You know, turf, this that and the other, a couple of things. Darman hated Reilly, constantly ridiculed him publicly. He hated the Clean Air Act, even though his own deputy, [Robert] Grady, was out there running it for him, or running it. And I said, “Dick—” Dick would come and just throw huge elephant turds on everybody in the room in Sununu’s office. And we’re going—let’s say it’s strategy on the Clean Air Act, and he would be criticizing down to the last word everything that his deputy Bob Grady had done the week before. And this would happen again and again and again, “Oh God. I agree with you, Dick. Tell Grady to shut up.” He said, “Oh, I can’t control Grady.” I said, “He works for you.” Oh, it was just infuriating.
But we took the hit for ADA. We took the hit for Clean Air Act. He ran away from his record and when we got into the campaign, there was never a word extolling the virtues of the ADA. [William] Kristol kept saying, “God, we’re not going to take any hits from the small business community. We’ve already taken those hits. Why not try to get some disabled people? There are forty million of them.” “Oh, we can’t do that. Can’t talk about the Clean Air Act. Might irritate somebody. Can’t.”—He ran away from his record.
Zelikow
By “he” you mean?
Gray
Darman. Darman ran Bush away from his own record. Of course the President let him do it, I suppose, so the President has to take responsibility for it. But it puzzled the hell out of me. I found out later from Reilly—I found this out at the Hofstra conference, and it answered a lot of questions that I didn’t know because President Bush compartmentalized. He was such a compartmentalizer, but Reilly told me that Atwater had come to him, and Atwater’s death is really the key why President Bush lost the election in my opinion. As a “but for” that was the biggest of all the “but fors.” Atwater had gone to him early on and said, “Look, the President’s going to give you a huge leash. He’s going to put you in the driver’s seat. He’s going to give you a big, big push in support of what you want to do on the Clean Air Act. He’ll let you run all the things. And the reason is this: it’s not because he likes you so much, Bill, although he does, it’s because his views on abortion are frozen and concrete. He can’t change it. I’m not sure he wants to change it, but politically it’s impossible, so forget it. Now we endanger the soccer mom, Republican suburban women vote by the abortion thing, but the way we’re going to get it back or neutralize that problem is with you, because they’re almost as much a tree-hugger as they are for abortion. So you’re the key to getting back the soccer mom, and he’s going to give you a lot of leeway. And that’s why, and don’t forget it.” And of course, Darman was trying to block that. Everything he did was to try to block Reilly’s ability to carry out what Atwater assigned to him, what the President assigned to him. Very puzzling.
So we get into the campaign. There’s no appeal to the people who might appreciate this landmark civil rights bill or this landmark environmental bill. But the thing that struck me as being—and I hadn’t realized this until it was all over—the only time I was ever on Air Force One was in his last trip to Houston. And there was a little home movie that [Dorrance] Smith put together to try to amuse people. And it was jokes and anecdotes and some film clips to make it look like it was a professional job, some great anecdotes in there, some great anecdotes. You ought to try to get a copy of it. Very funny. I was wandering back to my seat and I came across Rich Bond and Mary Matalin and they were just holding each other up in tears and I said, “Why are you crying?” And they said, “Because we watched this film and we get the rush of emotion and adrenaline from the film clip that was there, from him visiting the troops in the Gulf, before the Gulf War and Thanksgiving and whatever, and it was just so emotional and, you know, we realized that we never ran a single ad on the Gulf War in the campaign.” Never ran a single ad. Now this is one of the great victories of all time. Why can’t you bring yourself to run one ad talking about the Gulf War victory?
Young
Well, can you shed any light on why?
Gray
I can’t shed any light. I can’t shed any light.
Zelikow
I can shed a little light on it, because I actually knew something about that problem, but I’m not the person being interviewed here.
Milkis
We’re interviewing you tomorrow.
Gray
I mean not invented here. I mean Darman didn’t have anything to do with the Gulf War, so therefore there wasn’t any use to take up time with the Gulf. To go back to your question, there was a period at the end—again a lot of this is—if there’s a pattern here, I haven’t got very many nice things to say about Darman, which is—but he was in charge of the debates. And uniformly, Bush’s early debate performance was terrible. Now what Darman did in organizing the debates was to cut out all the institutional memory. That is: Scowcroft was cut out of the debate, Boskin, Roger Porter, myself, nobody who had been with President Bush for the most part of those four years was included in the debate preparation. Now what kind of nonsense is that?
Young
Who was included?
Gray
I don’t know. Dorrance Smith was, but he came in late. I mean I don’t know who was included because I wasn’t there, but not Scowcroft, not Porter, not Boskin. This may explain why there’s no—and what Dorrance Smith told me and, who knows, he didn’t like Darman either, he was speaking to the choir with me. He said what Darman kept trying to do—he was both in charge of the debate preparation and he played Clinton, a huge conflict of interest—and I mean what he kept trying to do is he kept attacking the President on the no new tax pledge, forcing the President in the debate preps to defend his decision. Well, that’s an attack that he would get from Pat Buchanan from the right—
Zelikow
Or Perot.
Gray
Or Perot. It was not an attack he was going to get from Clinton. What’s the point of all—well, he just wanted the President to constantly defend his, Darman’s, decision. So the debate preparation—finally at one point he was supposed to stay in Washington, and undergo debate preparation and I was in talking to him and saying, you ought to say this and you ought to say that, and you ought to say this and you ought to say that, and then I had to shut up because Baker would come in, and I had to shut up. I wasn’t supposed to say anything about that. He was so fed up, I think, with the debate prep, he finally said, “I’m going to Camp David, guys. Bye. Forget about the debate prep. I’m going to Camp David.” And he came back in and for that debate, he was the old Bush. He was the one I knew. He was the one that people have asked me, “Why was he so good in that debate and never got—?” Well, he just threw this whole debate stuff off. You know, the way he’s being handled, and started doing the things that he wanted to do, and attacking Clinton on the right things and it’s just a shame. It’s just a shame. Don’t ask me what was motivating all of this, and other than what I’ve said—the speculation is he wanted Bush to defend the tax thing, the budget deal.
Young
One of the puzzles will be, I think is to—What explains Bush’s deference to staff even when he’s the one who’s on the firing line for the campaign? He’s very loyal down to his staff.
Gray
He’s loyal down, but if you don’t—I mean you can’t operate except through staff, and I as I said, I think the biggest “but for” was Atwater and there wasn’t anybody—People were very skeptical, for example, during the campaign in ’88 about my ADA thing. I mean they were probably more skeptical because it was me personally, than it was putting rating on the merits, because I wasn’t supposed to be involved in the campaign and I wasn’t, but this was a campaign pledge that he made and Atwater was enough of an honest broker to say, “No, you may not like Gray, and he may not be supposed to have anything to do with the campaign, but this is the right thing to do, politically. Leave it to others about whether it’s the right thing to do legally, but politically, this is a goldmine.” And he was very generous to me later in print, said, “Boyden was absolutely right. There were a lot of people who were skeptical. He was absolutely right. This was a critical part of the ’88 victory. Winning a big share of the disabled vote, which traditionally had been 90 percent Democrat.”
We never went back to try to tap that vote again, and I’ll use that as an example. There was no Atwater there. Matalin wasn’t strong enough. Teeter wasn’t strong enough. Nobody was strong enough to stand up to all of these great pooh-bahs and the party just hadn’t found—we still haven’t. I don’t think the Republican Party still has got anybody to replace—you know, the Democrats have their [James] Carville. I mean Clinton in many ways, if he hadn’t had Carville to defend him out there, cracking heads, he would be in much worse shape. He wouldn’t have held on to his job in my opinion, if Carville hadn’t been there. And the Republican Party doesn’t have its Atwater, its Carville, its bad dog. Atwater was brilliant. Atwater was philosophical. He played the good old boy image, the, you know, down home, but he read philosophy. He read history. He was incredibly well educated, incredibly well informed, and there just wasn’t anybody there to play this political hand. You know, Darman didn’t like campaigns, he thought campaigns were illegitimate.
Young
So there was nobody in charge of the campaign the way Atwater was.
Gray
Nobody.
Young
Until Baker.
Gray
Until Baker came in, which was very late.
Young
Very late.
Milkis
What kind of an RNC [Republican National Committee] director do you think Bill Bennett would have made?
Gray
I think he would have made a terrific director. And there’s stuff in here, which reminds me of my saying, “Gee whiz, he ought not to be taking these paying jobs that look like a conflict of interest.” I just can’t remember how critical that was to his not taking the job, but I think he would have been good. Was he an Atwater? Is he an Atwater? No. No. He’s good on policy, but for the political nuts and bolts, just not in the same league.
Zelikow
Back to Presidential prerogatives. That’s the theme you had opened up earlier, Jim. Let’s go right away to the Gulf War issues. I guess one big issue, there are some others, but certainly the obvious issue is the debate of the President’s war powers in the fall of 1990, and the way that debate intensifies as there’s growing uncertainly about what the congressional action will be. And indeed the President’s own decision as he reports it that he was going to go to war whatever Congress did. I presume that’s a judgment he would not have arrived at without at least the benefit of your opinion, I don’t know whether you agreed with it. So let me just—if that’s provocative enough to get you started in reflecting back on what you knew about in the deliberations about war powers in that period.
Gray
Again, because of the way he compartmentalizes, which I hope—you can never be sure you know everything, but I think on this, I do know everything. There’s this marvelous anecdote of them doing their doing their book down in Houston, and you’re there in the room and they can’t even remember when, you know, some goofy question about—how do you remember all that? Well, of course I was in charge of it. It was my responsibility, and so I do remember. But he asked me—he came—he asked me, right after we got back from vacation after Labor Day, he called me and said—I had more one on one meetings on this issue with him than on any single issue. And he said, “You’ve got to work through what I have to do with Congress.” He said, “I don’t—” as I recall now, I may have notes that reflect better, but what I recall him saying is, “I want to avoid the Korea-Vietnam thing. I want to know if I have to go to Congress, and if so, how to do it.” He didn’t say that his mind was made up that he wanted to do it, but I clearly got the impression from him that he thought he probably should, and was looking to me less for an answer than for the rationale to persuade everybody else. That’s the impression I got. Although that’s not the word he used. I said, you know I think this guy really wants to go and he wants—so we convene meetings and we called in great pooh-bahs and—
Young
Could I interrupt just a minute? If you could place that in timing—at what stage in the development of this crisis was he coming to you?
Gray
I think it was early September. Now there’s a memo that he actually includes in his book and I don’t know what it is. If people got that book here—the book of letters. The memo that he sends to me through Scowcroft from Brazil or someplace in South America. I don’t know when that memo is dated, but that dates some of this. I think that memo is sort of late September, but my first meeting with him—and again if I had my calendar or his calendar I could pinpoint with precision, because I’m sure it was recorded. You couldn’t go in and see him without it being recorded. I think. Maybe there were some times early in the morning when I went in, but they’re supposed to record every—
Masoud
Yes, and we have those records at the Miller Center.
Gray
All right, so you can find them. But there were a handful of meetings with him, and I remember the first one being early September, and he said, “I want you to work your way through this. Don’t go to the Department of Justice for help. Your staff’s bright enough to do this. You don’t have to go to the department. They’ll leak it, and I can’t have that. You’ve got to keep this internal.” So you know, I worked with Steve Rademaker and I think Nick also and John Schmitz and Lee and—I had a really smart group of people and the conclusion you came to, that one you had to come to, is that he has to go Congress for authority. That basically—and in December I had—everybody else wants to do—Scowcroft wants to give notice on the war powers, and satisfy the constitutional political problem that way, so that’s what Nick is arguing. Steve Rademaker, of course, being loyal to me, or at least not being loyal to or owing any allegiance to Nick, is supporting me or independently saying, “No, that’s not right.”
Zelikow
No, that’s not right. You don’t have to invoke the War Powers Act?
Gray
You shouldn’t. You can’t. You can’t. I remember having—I’ll get back, I just want to—I remember having a breakfast with Les Aspin, and it was at the Metropolitan Club in mid-December, maybe it was earlier, asking him, “All right now, Les, what’s the state of play here?” And he said, “Look, it’s very simple. You can give notice under the war powers resolution, and you’re home free, at least for 60 days. And you won’t have any political problem, but you will have bought into the war powers resolution, which no President’s done before.” And I said, “Thanks a lot, Les. I understand that.” “And we’ll remember this when we get the White House back, Boyden,” said Les. I said, “Thanks a lot, Les.” And then he said, “Or you can go for a vote, now Danny and I will get you the vote here. We think with enough margin for a big push into the Senate, but I can’t guarantee you how the Senate’s going to come out, but I can guarantee you how the House will come out. We will get you the votes. And I think you can do it in the Senate, and my advice to you, if you’re really asking me for my advice, is go for it. Go for it.” And I said, “Well, I don’t want to be the first White House counsel to concede the Constitution out of the war powers resolution, so I’m inclined to go for it.” He said, “Well, I’ll be with you. Just let me know.”
Zelikow
Do you remember when you would have had that meeting with Aspin?
Gray
Well, I think it was mid-December.
Zelikow
Okay.
Gray
Now before that, the President had been trying to put Mitchell on the spot, and Mitchell kept begging out, “No we’ve got to wait for the new Congress, no we’ve got to do this—” There were meetings in October and again in November, one or two or three. I can’t remember how many leadership meetings where he would press and say, “I want to tee up the issue.” “No. We’ve got to wait for the new Congress,” said George Mitchell. And at one point [Robert] Byrd objected and there’s some sort of not very flattering stuff going on here and then at one point, Baker’s person, Janet Mullins, is making noises about not doing this. And finally, one time the President asked me, “What’s going on here with the State Department?” And I said, “Well you know, Janet and George.” “That’s right,” he said. They were having an affair. You know this, right? Janet Mullins and George Mitchell, and so this is an ugly thing to have to contend with when you’re trying to get—you know. So she was doing what George Mitchell wanted, which is nothing, so that was a problem.
And so this drifted along, but I think I had, I don’t know when I had a meeting of the minds with President Bush where I thought I knew what he wanted to do. I can’t remember when that was, but it was clear to me all along that he wanted to do this, and that [Danforth] Quayle was also supportive and thought he should go for a vote. But nobody else wanted to do it. And everybody else was fighting it. Baker didn’t want to do it. Scowcroft didn’t want to do it. [Richard] Cheney didn’t want to do it. The Attorney General didn’t want to do it.
Zelikow
Didn’t want to go for a congressional vote?
Gray
Yes. Didn’t, I think, because they didn’t think they could get the votes. But I had this inside information. Not inside, but I could count votes, and I had talked to Aspin. Nobody had had the brains to go ask the chairman of the Armed Services Committee in the House, but why not, you know? And he was very firm, and he was very firm about this. So, then the shoot-out came at—not the shoot-out—but a decision was made by President Bush at a meeting in his little—the Monica [Lewinski] office, the first Friday afternoon in January of 1991. There’s a picture. I have a picture on my wall. To commemorate this, there was a picture taken. He’s sitting in his lounge chair, sunk deep and on the phone. He’s on the phone to Baker, and I’m sitting in his chair at his desk, and Scowcroft’s sitting somewhere else, and we’re waiting to be told the decision. And he gets off the phone and he’s about to go out to Camp David, Sununu’s not there, in part because he’s packing his bags to go to Wilson’s inauguration in California, but he’s not there, and I think that’s deliberate. The President didn’t invite him. And he says, “Ok, Brent, I’m going with Boyden. We’re not going to go give them notice on the War Powers Act. We’re going to go for a vote. I’m going to write some draft letters over the weekend and I’ll have them to you Sunday night when I get back.” And I had this little note, I got both of them to sign it, and the President says, to me on the note, the President says, “Thanks very much, Boyden, for leading us through the thickets of the Constitution and then the right thing to do. Yours truly, President Bush.” And then Scowcroft writes this little note, “What do you mean you support the war powers resolution? Best wishes.” And he was being very gracious in this little note, and that’s in my house, and so that sort of locks in when the thing was done.
He writes letters over the weekend, Fred McClure comes back from the weekend that he’s on and finds these draft letters on his desk, and says, “What in the hell is this?” Sununu’s off at Wilson’s swearing in, so he can’t block it all, so the whole thing is launched, basically, that Monday. Sununu comes back that night or the next morning, finds out that the decision has been made in his absence and he hits the roof. “Ahhh! We can’t do this. We can’t do this!” So he convenes a meeting of all the lawyers. The decision’s already been made, you know. I don’t know what day that was, Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday. I can’t remember the record. They all come piling in, and I’m sitting there, and you know [William] Barr is pounding the table and people are pounding the table. “Oh we don’t have to this.” “Oh I don’t think we have to go.” “We can’t do this.” “The President’s got the authority.” Pound, pound, pound. And I’m sitting there, and the President’s sort of winking at me, and I’m sitting there and we’re listening to all of this, and the President’s going through this charade, having already made up his mind 72 or 96 hours earlier. I think the President was there. Yes, he was there.
About one o’clock or so, after the meeting’s over, I get this call from [Michael] Luttig—or from, I think it’s—no, it was Luttig—Yes, Luttig. Luttig’s still there. Luttig says, “Boyden,” He has this low voice. “We’ve got to talk to you, got to talk to you. We’ve got a crisis. We’ve got a constitutional crisis.” And I said, “Mike, what’s the problem?” He said, “Well, we got to go for a vote. The whole country’s going to blow up if we don’t go for a vote.” And I said, “Mike, relax. We’re going for a vote. That’s been decided. It was decided last Friday.” “What do you mean?” I said, “It’s been done. You can come on up and we’ll talk about it, and I’ll show you the letters, but don’t make the trip unless you really want to come up here.” I can’t remember whether he did or not, but he said, “It’s already been decided?” I said, “It was decided on Friday.” “Oh, I didn’t know that.” I said, “Well, no Mike, Bill doesn’t know it. You don’t know it. Nobody knows it.” I think it was done because President Bush didn’t want Sununu crashing around like a—So anyway, this was all, you know, very much a charade.
Anyway, he went for the—We had a leadership meeting to draft the resolution, and all high drama. All these people come in. [Stephen] Solarz is leading the way. He’s going to be the point man, meeting in the Cabinet room of all—and we repair, a smaller group into the Roosevelt room to actually sit down and draft, and Solarz is sitting there with a pencil in his hand and he’s drafting. You know, he’s drafting. And it’s high drama and Janet Mullins says, “No, no, no. It’s too strong. It’s too strong. You can’t give that much—” Solarz is getting more and more irritated at Janet Mullins, and finally he says, “Young woman, this is my resolution. This is my House of Representatives, and if you can’t get with it, I’m going to have to ask that you be removed from this room.” That shuts her up. So he goes ahead and continues to draft, and that’s the amendment, with a few changes, that is voted on not too long later, with a narrower margin than I had sort of hoped for, which made the thing in the Senate a little more dicey, but we eventually pulled the votes together. And on that Saturday afternoon—it’s fifty-two to forty-eight or whatever and—
Zelikow
Fifty-three to forty-seven.
Gray
Fifty-three to forty-seven. One of the high points in all of this—I don’t know whether it’s one of the high points or low points, depending on your point of view, is to rally—once the decision was made to do this, now we had to rally the Senate. We have the vote in the House. It’s coming over, and there’s a meeting in Dole’s office, a leadership meeting. And it’s Cheney and Scowcroft and I, and Dole says—I can remember this as though it were yesterday, although of course, memory is faulty—Dole says, “Okay.” There are all the Republicans in the room, every single one of them was there I think, which is very, very rare that they all would be there, and he said, “Okay, here’s the state of play: we have the votes to defeat Nunn-Mitchell, which would deny you authority. But we don’t have the votes to adopt the Solarz amendment. I think we can get the votes, but we don’t have them now, and there’s a risk we won’t get them. My advice is to pocket the authorization you have from the House, defeat the negative from the Senate, and isn’t that enough?” And Cheney and Scowcroft sit there, mute.
What do I do? This is one of those great moments in life. What do I do? It’s not enough. So I say, not having authority to do this, “No, Mr. Leader, it’s not enough. We’ve got to go for the whole boat.” “Okay, if that’s what we have to do, that we will do.” Oh God, and I didn’t get any back talk from Scowcroft or Cheney. They just sort of sat there saying, yes, yes.
Zelikow
Well, you wouldn’t. I mean, think about it from Scowcroft’s perspective. He doesn’t know whether you need it or not. There’s an argument that I could make as a constitutional lawyer, that you don’t know whether you need it or not, because you’re in uncharted ground. You feel that there’s some congressional assent that’s needed, but the form of that congressional assent is not in any black letter law. You crafted a form of congressional assent, and you’re also crafting how much congressional assent you think you need for the requirements that you postulated.
Gray
But remember, the President—I know this and I don’t know whether he said this to them, but he said it to me. He said, “I want to know what’s right, morally, legally, politically, constitutionally.” There are several parts to this. Part of it was political. I want these bastards voting with me so that if the thing goes south, they’re with me, and if it goes north, and they vote against me, I want to nail them in the next election. All right. Of course, we didn’t nail them in the next election, which is you know, [pounds fist] I mean God, God, God! Anyway, but that’s another story. But that was part of it. Now, it wasn’t the deciding thing, but that was part of it. And now the thing does fit, you know the law is not an ass. The politics are supposed to fit with the Constitution, with the morals, with the—and in this case, they all fit. But anyway, he did it. They didn’t object, and of course another thing he wanted to do—go back. Remember I just, because of the recent book about—I mean the flap about poor George W. and the [Dean] Acheson book. I went and reread—you know McCain’s given all this great praise for having read the book and that he knows about when Acheson marches in to [Harry] Truman’s office and says, “The North Koreans have attacked,” and Truman says, “We must not let this stand.” And read the book, and of course, Truman is in Independence, Missouri, when the attack occurs, and Acheson doesn’t march into his office. He gets on the telephone and calls him from his farm in Maryland.
Zelikow
Right, Truman didn’t make the decision—
Gray
For another week.
Zelikow
Well, that’s another story, another oral history.
Gray
Or whatever. Or whatever.
Milkis
We’re going to do that one next, right, the Truman?
Gray
But in any event, McCain’s never read the book. But surely the decision here about—and the book does come to the conclusion, and I agree with it—and this is what was on the President’s mind—the book says that Acheson urged or advised the President to ask for congressional approval, and that the President was talked out of it by a Republican—by a Senator. But the book concludes that he could have gotten it, that the country was with him in the beginning. It was only later that they lost support, and he could have locked in support, which would have made a huge difference in the outcome. Well, President Bush didn’t want to repeat that. He didn’t want to repeat the [inaudible] He didn’t want to go through all that again. And later, Cheney was very gracious to me. He said that was the single most important thing in the Gulf War, because they had the whole country behind, and the President didn’t want to send people to risk their lives with this country split. He didn’t want to do this again. So there are a lot of different aspects of this that went beyond whether there was legally some court rule against this or not.
Zelikow
But let me—on this you’ve—with some good and creative lawyering that serves all the needs of the client, you’ve crafted this, or at least certainly played a leading role in crafting this approach to the problem. Which is a very good solution if it works. And you, yourself now, in the way you’ve described this, this is a high rolling play. If it wins, it wins big. If it loses, there’s a downside. So the question for you is: How did you analyze the downside? If it goes down in the Senate, and my memory of this is that there was nobody who was complacent about doing this in the Senate.
Gray
Well, we knew we would defeat the Nunn-Mitchell.
Zelikow
But if you go for it and lose in the Senate, what’s your plan? What’s your legal advice?
Milkis
What’s your contingency plan?
Gray
Probably go anyway, but it’s too awful to contemplate losing it. And it’s one of those things in history, you know, we didn’t lose. We didn’t lose. I don’t have to answer your question.
Zelikow
Well, the President did contemplate it though.
Gray
Oh, I don’t know.
Zelikow
He says he did.
Gray
He says he did. Well, of course, you know a lot of things were said. You know I read—Now, you remind me, someone put out a statement, “I would have gone anyway.” I don’t know. I’m sure he would have. How much did he—? What I remember vividly was, at the time, all the statements, that was all window dressing. The key thing was that he had his victory in the Senate, and that was the end of it for me. I don’t remember doing anything else more on the issue. I went out and played tennis and never thought about it again. So whatever statements were issued after that, I didn’t have anything to do with.
Milkis
So losing in the Senate, that possibility was not discussed at length, because it was just unthinkable?
Gray
It was not discussed. It was unthinkable. It was not contemplated. It was not going to happen. We were not going to lose it. And I’m not wanting to ask the question, what would I have done? God, I suppose my record and my life were hanging in the balance, because if—I’m told—there’s one awful, delicious story that I’m told of someone who was there watching in the State Department, seventh floor or wherever, the inner sanctum. After the vote is over, Margaret Tutwiler turns to Janet Mullins and said, “That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. I think I’m going to be sick.” They just won the victory and she’s saying this is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. I’m told that’s what she said.
Young
What does that mean?
Gray
Well, what does that mean? I don’t think Baker wanted to go to war. I don’t think Baker ever wanted to use force. But I don’t know. Hey, I don’t know what it means. Ask them. Anyway, and I think that’s one of the reasons why it never was exploited during—either to nail the people who voted against us or to run advertisements. So, that’s what I think. “Not invented here” kind of thing. I don’t know, but we certainly—I mean, the politics of this should hang together. One of the reasons, I believe, that the benefits of the war, both in terms of the specifics of Saddam Hussein and what he’s done and thumbing his nose at the U.S. since then, and the Middle East peace process and whatever other benefits, tertiary benefits flowed from this original thing. One of the reasons a lot has been frittered away is because it wasn’t reaffirmed in the election. I believe that. Because this is what the election is all about. They’re about reaffirming, and you know, it wasn’t an issue in the election, therefore it didn’t matter. And it wasn’t binding on people who followed. And it allows people—it allows Democrats to say, well, you didn’t go to Baghdad and therefore you know, blahdy, blahdy blah. It just opened up all kinds of criticism, when it should have been reaffirmed.
Young
There’s also another part of that, that’s perhaps relevant on the domestic side. That after the resolution, after the Gulf victory, or the conclusion of that, the campaign on the domestic side might have been started or—to benefit, if it’s possible to do this, benefit from the roll the President was on. So it was a very late start to the campaign on the domestic side.
Gray
Well, this again comes back to Darman. I don’t know, because I just don’t know everything, but there are a whole bunch of things people wanted to do to—Some people had an idea on the economy. Let’s call the Congress back and get them to enact the transportation act, which had a lot of pork, you know construction work and stuff, and that’s what Fitzwater wanted to do. You really ought to talk to him. He’s the one who really is more, I think bitter about this than a lot of people on the White House staff. And Darman kept saying, “No, there’s a rhythm to American politics. You can’t do any initiatives when you get around to fall, because everyone’s waiting for the State of the Union. That’s the only time you can do anything. Wait for the State of the Union.” I wanted to have the President say, I feel your pain, you know. We’re in this recession. It’s not going to last long. It’s the result of the S&L bailout, we had to clean up the banking system. It’s going to pass, believe me. Hang in there with me. We’re already in recovery. It’s just the jobs haven’t caught up. But I feel your pain. I feel your pain. I feel your pain. We were all agitating. Do something, as there’s this execrable slide of the poll, going in after the war is over. The war is won. Thomas has won. The civil rights bill has won. Hey, things are going great, and then all of a sudden, off a cliff. Nothing more. Nothing more.
Karaagac
Do you think deep down, despite saying, we’ll nail the opposition on the vote to go to war, that Bush was somewhat reluctant to play politics?
Gray
I don’t think so.
Karaagac
You don’t. No. There wasn’t that—
Gray
But it wouldn’t have been for him to do it as President. It would have been for the Republican Senatorial Campaign committee or the Republican Party to go into each individual state or district and embarrass people. That’s the way it would have been done, not by him. It would have been sort of injudicious for him to do it. But he could have on the affirmative side of things, he could have said, “Look, I won the Gulf War,” and all of this. He could have done that in some of his advertising. Those film clips are really stirring. And it would have made great ad copy, you know, but there was nothing. There was just nothing.
Zelikow
Yes, they actually made that ad. They just never ran it.
Gray
Oh really? Tell me more. You’ve got to tell me more.
Zelikow
Well, there was an ad made, a foreign policy ad, a TV ad that was made. I was told. I never saw it though. I was told it was a great ad.
Gray
And why didn’t they run it?
Zelikow
Because the campaign had decided the American people didn’t want to hear about foreign policy and that to reinforce the President’s foreign policy image would reinforce a negative. I rather strongly disagreed with that view, but that view was very strongly viewed in the campaign.
Gray
Well, they didn’t want to talk about domestic policy. What did they want to talk about? Nothing, which is what happened.
Zelikow
But let me—I asked you an earlier question and you said hold on to that. I want to come back to that, and it was the question that referred to whether your access to the President had been curtailed, or reduced, after some time in the midpoint of the administration.
Gray
Oh, I didn’t come back to that. It had been, in the thick of the campaign it was reduced, but for various reasons. I can’t remember, maybe it was because of the independent counsel. I don’t know when the timing of the “passport-gate” came out, but that required me to go back into the Oval Office a lot, and I think that was the reason why I had an excuse to go in. And it was in that context that I started talking to him about, God, you know, you really ought to nail Clinton on X, Y or Z. The character, he’s a waffler. Nail him on the waffle. Nail him on the character thing. That’s where you’re going to win. You’ve got to nail him on the character thing. And the President did that in the last debate and did it very, very effectively. On the Gulf War for example—Clinton, very Clinton-esque. It was clear how he would later behave, because he was already behaving that way. “Would you have voted for the Gulf War resolution?” “Well, maybe I would have, maybe I wouldn’t have, maybe I would have, it all depends on—” I mean, you know, Mr. President, nail him on that, because the guy is trying to be on both sides. Nail him on this character issue. And he started to do it, but it was much too late.
I’d wanted the campaign to go after whether or not he’d actually ever finished two years at Oxford, but they totally missed the boat on this Oxford experience, totally missed the boat. There are a whole bunch of things they just didn’t do. I wasn’t involved, but I couldn’t understand it. The only time I was ever in the core group, ever in Baker’s office, was when this most curious event—I think it was September, September or October, I can’t remember. Baker calls and says, “I want you to take notes of this,” so I must have taken notes. Wherever the notes are, I don’t know. What are you—
Karaagac
I’m just wondering where the notes are too.
Gray
I think I took them. Anyway, it was Keith [Kenneth] Langone. Do you know who Keith Langone is? Keith Langone is the investment banker who did Home Depot. He had—and had done a lot of work for, and I think he took EDS [Electronic Data Systems] public originally for Ross Perot, very close in his circle to Ross Perot. He had actually taken Home Depot before it—I mean to raised initial capital for Ross Perot, and he was offered you know, controlling share, a big event, for two million dollars, and Ross Perot turned it down. And Langone told me, just six months ago, that as a result of that, he had to go out and raise the money and he still had three people who invested fifty thousand dollars apiece and never sold any stock, and guess what they’re each individually worth now in Home Depot stock? One hundred and eighty million dollars. Eat your heart out, Ross baby. That two million would have been thirteen billion. Anyway, Keith Langone, he was close to Perot. And kind of a slimy guy actually, but I guess respected on Wall Street, because he was at this meeting with Jack Welch and Bernie Marcus, who I guess is a very close friend of his. He’s obviously respected by the bigwigs and I never found anything wrong with him in my association with him, the two or three times I’ve met him. Or read anything negative about him, but I think he struck me as always being slightly—maybe it’s because I didn’t like Perot. I don’t know. Anyway, he calls up and he says to Baker, “Here’s the deal, Jimbo. Perot will pull out of the race and throw his support to you and guarantee your reelection, but it’s not free. He wants to be named economic czar after the election.”
Zelikow
Now who is speaking in this conversation?
Gray
Keith Langone talking to Jim Baker with me taking notes.
Zelikow
Okay.
Milkis
So that’s where President Bush got the idea to make Baker czar.
Gray
Where Baker got the idea. I don’t know. I think Baker already had the idea. I don’t know. But at the time I thought it was goofy as hell. And I thought Perot was goofy as hell and didn’t have much of an attitude, but you know recently when I saw Langone again in the company of all of these fancy people like Welch and Marcus and da da da da da da, and the head of Chrysler, da da da da da da, it was a fund raising thing for tort reform, he was there with all the greatest and near great. So I kept thinking, you know, looking back on it, not a bad thing, maybe do that. Maybe he should have done that. I don’t know.
Milkis
Was it just rejected out of hand?
Gray
It was rejected out of hand. I’m not even sure the President was told. I don’t know what the President was told. Interesting—
Zelikow
Did Baker discuss it with you?
Gray
Not much, no. Not that I recall. Except I think he said, “Ah, what a stupid thing.”
Milkis
Did you give your notes to Baker afterward?
Gray
I think I may have given them to Baker. I don’t know who I gave them to. I don’t know what happened to those notes.
Young
Did you have any further—we’ve got only five more minutes before we take a rest and then have dinner at seven o’clock.
Gray
I’m trying to think of what else about the Gulf War—
Zelikow
Or Presidential prerogatives.
Gray
Well, the Obey amendment was a key thing. And it grows out of Iran-Contra, but the leveraging thing. Baker was just terrified that his hands were going to be tied, and we cut the thing way, way back. I had a lot of bad press about it. But—and eventually won, and it was a very, very important piece of—because what Obey wanted to do was say you couldn’t—I mean it was a real free speech issue. You couldn’t—if you were giving aid to a country, you couldn’t ask that country to support you on anything that maybe Congress hadn’t approved. It was a real restraint on Presidential authority. The most, I think, the hugest restraint on Presidential authority that one could imagine. And that was very intense and in the closing moments of the congressional session, I recall, and really ugly, but we won.
And of course, what it did by winning, in a sense we sort of, in a back door way, I think kind of vindicated what happened during—because there was a lot of leveraging, if you will, going on in Iran-Contra. In other words, they were trying to get money from the Saudis. They were getting money from the Sultan of Brunei. It’s interesting, the Sultan of Brunei—the Iran-Contra is just a long—there’s so many details, but the Sultan of Brunei, was trying to make—with fifteen million, was trying to make up the bridge loan that wasn’t getting paid off. See, what happened was they went into this deal with [Manucher] Ghorbanifar, [Adnan] Khashoggi and all those jokers in the Middle East. What they were going to do is make a huge profit selling some second-rate stuff to the Iranians, at a huge mark up, and then take their own cut and then give the remainder to [Oliver] North and [Amiram] Nir for their little slush fund.
Well, the reason the slush fund never got going was because A) the Iranians realized they were getting schlocky goods and wouldn’t pay the price they thought they were going to get, and then Khashoggi and all those other guys took so much of the profit that by the time it got to the end of the daisy chain, there was nothing left. And they couldn’t even pay off the bridge loan. And this was this guy [Roy] Furmark who was a friend of, an old colleague of [William] Casey’s. And Furmark went to Casey in October of 1986, and said, “We made a bridge loan. We didn’t make an equity investment in this deal. And we’re not getting that money back. And if we don’t get our money back, we’re going public. Right after the election, we’re going to go public. And I don’t think we’re going to get that money back. So heads up, Bill, Al,” whatever his name is. Okay, so Casey goes to [John] Poindexter, and says “You better clue Don Regan in on this because you don’t know what’s going on and he has a bad Irish temper and if you don’t clue him in, all hell can break loose.” Well, Poindexter didn’t clue Regan in, so when the thing appeared, as it was told it would appear, on November 6, or whatever in the Lebanese newspapers, Regan went apeshit, and started pointing fingers and blaming X, Y, Z. What a mess.
But the fifteen million—they were trying to get the Sultan to come with fifteen million in time to pay off Furmark before he went public with it, but the check didn’t get cut in time.
Zelikow
One other issue of Presidential prerogative that I’m sure you dealt with is the issue of executive privilege and I want to distinguish here between executive privilege asserted against claims arising out of judicial proceeding as opposed to executive privilege asserted against claims of Congress for documents. And because legally I think the issues are distinguishable, and I suspect that you would agree. I don’t know. So let me press you on the issue of executive privilege as against Congress. Now you have congressional document requests that are coming in for executive branch material. An easy example of that, for instance, is the “Iraq-gate” furor in 1992. And you must have deliberated at some point about whether or not you would insist on asserting executive privilege against these congressional demands. Now do you remember any—I did not note that the President ended up deciding to assert his prerogatives. He did not assert executive privilege.
Gray
Right. There was a whole book written around the notion that this is a most vast cover up of whatever, mass claims of executive—the President, I think, claimed executive privilege only once in four years, over a procurement matter. He did not claim executive privilege on any “Iraq-gate” stuff, notwithstanding the fact that what’s-his-name, [Nick] Rostow had many, many meetings. Some of the meetings were so ridiculous I walked out of them, and I said, “I don’t know what the point of this is,” and I wanted out of there. He didn’t claim executive privilege once except for this procurement thing and a—
Zelikow
Why not?
Gray
Because—He just didn’t. I didn’t recommend it. Why did I not recommend it? Because—
Zelikow
Stand up for the power of the President.
Gray
No, there was nothing in the—there was no principle to be vindicated. I mean I have to go back and reconstruct what happened, but there was no reason to, and no reason to provoke a fight over it. These are always political—Now, by contrast, when I was—you know we had Bill Litton come in and make the presentation to the President because of the potential conflict with me, but in Iran-Contra the question is, would he assert attorney-client privilege?
Zelikow
This is now Bill Litton. We’re now talking about the autumn of 1992?
Gray
Yes.
Zelikow
Okay, go ahead, I’m sorry.
Gray
And Bill Litton and the President are determined to go ahead and assert attorney-client privilege, knowing how uncertain it is, about whether it really exists, again, because of the prerogatives of his office. Now, the Clinton people totally frittered all of that away. They went and litigated it, when you never litigate an issue like this. You want to keep it always in tension. Does it or does it not exist? And the President knew what he was doing. He was trying to—he wanted to assert it. He didn’t want to give it away. He certainly did not want to litigate it, but he didn’t want to give it away. So he was very afraid. That was a gutsy call on his part. That was a very gutsy call. But the Iraq-gate stuff—There was no issue. There was no issue. Why for no purpose at all, just claim executive privilege—
Zelikow
Right, except to protect the—
Gray
But there were not prerogatives of the Presidency at stake. Now Nick had all these meetings trying to identify prerogatives, and I kept asking the question, “What is at stake here, Nick? What are you trying to protect? I mean, what are we doing this for? What documents are being released that reveal Presidential deliberations or that reveal a compromise in the deliberative process? What are you talking about? Where’s the deliberative process compromised about any of this?” And he could never demonstrate. I mean there are a lot of documents involved.
Zelikow
Here’s the argument, and you can evaluate it, which is: the documents you’re turning over to Congress, are of course, documents, internal executive branch documents for Deputies Committee meetings, et cetera. State department memos, NSC documents, and so on. And now we have a situation—now of course this has gotten much worse in the Clinton era, but now we have a situation where everyone I know in the executive branch tells me that record keeping in the executive branch has been chilled, because of the fear of congressional subpoenas. And that staffing procedures in the executive branch are now seriously handicapped because of the fear of congressional subpoenas. Subpoenas against which arguably there is a plausible claim of executive privilege, because it’s not clear Congress has a right to these documents. That’s a claim of privilege you did not choose to assert, true against pretty feckless—I mean the substance of the documents may not have been very interesting and you did not want to fight, but of course, a lot of the fights that you have over prerogatives are not about the substance of the particular issue there, you’re fighting for the prerogative.
Gray
I do not believe—and I still—I mean I have to go back and look at all the documents again—that what I kept asking in these meetings, “Where is a key procedural aspect of deliberative process being compromised? Where?” And the documents that were being sought did not compromise the Deputies Committee, did not compromise anything.
Zelikow
You just judged the documents weren’t sensitive enough to warrant executive privilege.
Milkis
It wasn’t a good case to make a—
Gray
It was a terrible case to make. We probably would have lost it, and there was nothing, there was no deliberative process at stake. Now, I’d have to go back and look at the documents again, but that’s what I kept asking in these meetings. You know what, there were a lot of documents about—I mean factual material, a lot of factual material that was being released. You know how many grains of whatever had been shipped to whatever, but they were factual things, factual things. Not deliberative notes at key meetings where struggling with policy, so—
Zelikow
Unless there are any other major issues of Presidential prerogatives that you recall making decisions to defend or not defend—
Gray
Well, there are others. I mean I spent a lot of time on this and we did a lot of signing statements where the President said, “I’m not going to comply with this” or “I’m going to in effect constitutionally veto that.” The law review article was written about it and you can go and read the record. We spent a lot of time on that and I’m trying to think of what other—
Milkis
We’re going to talk about the civil rights stuff tomorrow.
Young
I think we’ll have to do that tomorrow.
Gray
I’ll think overnight if there are other Presidential—It was a big issue and a big theme throughout. And of course—
Milkis
If I could stop you, I just wanted to ask one question. One of the things that confused me a little bit was your position on the special prosecutor law. There was something in here that you wanted to apply to Congress.
Gray
That was a rhetorical device. We’ll accept it if you apply it. We knew that wouldn’t happen, but it was a rhetorical device.
Milkis
All right, that was just a ploy.
Gray
That’s another gamble—
Milkis
Because at the end of the administration the President takes a—after the Walsh hearing and he pardons [Caspar] Weinberger he takes a very principled position against—
Gray
He was very much opposed to the independent counsel statute.
Milkis
Was that being too clever by half though, in retrospect?
Gray
No, it was rhetorical device. It was never going to happen and the President, I think, felt that—another example of where Reagan should have vetoed it anyway and tried to. I believe firmly and I think he believed that you’re going to get a bad decision out of the Supreme Court if you don’t stick up for your own guns. If you don’t take the fight yourself, the political fight yourself, you can’t expect the courts to back you up. And we got an A1 decision against us, which I bet you we could have won the case if Reagan had vetoed it. But you know, that was another example of the President saying I just don’t want to give that kind of stuff away. It’s just a terrible thing. It’s a terrible thing. And it was a terrible thing. And, I mean I think it took a lot of guts for him to do the pardon. But that’s again part of the Presidential authority.
Milkis
Another thing we can talk about tomorrow.
[BREAK]
February 4, 2000
Milkis
You said at the outset yesterday you wanted to put on the record, that is, to talk some about domestic policy, first in broad strokes. And then once you’ve done that, we’d also want to have a chance today to have you talk about civil rights, which is an issue we didn’t get into yesterday. But I thought, if, as a start today, you might connect some of those strategies that you wanted to connect yesterday regarding domestic policy and maybe talk a little bit also about why it didn’t come across. You did mention some things about that yesterday.
Gray
Well, everybody is a product of this background, and in a sense, Reagan’s obsession with marginal tax rate cuts and his rather indifference to capital gain cuts represented, I think, reflected his own experience with 90 percent punitive tax rates when he was earning a salary as an actor. President Bush had a sort of different—I don’t know if obsession is the right word, but a different sort of focus on it because he was an entrepreneur and had made his money through equity rather than through salary. His focus all his life was really rather more on the capital gains tax. Reagan’s first tax bill did not have a capital gains tax cut. There had been a big cut before he became President in 1978 that Bush engineered with—I’ve forgotten now the Congressman—remember the name in a minute—who later, [William] Steiger, I think he was from Ohio, who was on Ways and Means, with then Congressman Bush. It was quite an accomplishment to get a tax cut through that was opposed by Carter, in that environment. But it cut it from fifty down to—I’ve forgotten what the cut was, down to 28, I can’t remember. Fifty down to—anyway, it was a fairly sizable cut in ’78 and it was a Democrat who put it into the Reagan tax cut as a further cut. This is something Bush wanted to do and he proposed, promised during his campaign in ’88, to cut even further.
As I said yesterday, what happened, Mitchell threw up all kinds of obstacles, procedural obstacles, parliamentary obstacles, the capital gains cut was going to cost revenue, which of course it wouldn’t, it increases revenue up to a certain point. This was proven with the [Calvin] Coolidge tax cuts, with the [John F.] Kennedy tax cuts in 1962, and then it happened again. It happened again in ’78 and then again in ’82 and then again, again, and again. It always happens. Now if you reduce the marginal, I mean the capital gains tax rate, to zero, you would indeed lose revenue, but where the curve comes no one really knows, but up until now, we’ve still been on an upward slope. But nonetheless, apparently, without too much objection from us in the White House, Mitchell ruled that the cut would cost revenue and so it was blocked.
As I said yesterday, I do think that if he had been able to get that, it would have given him insurance, cover, whatever for the subsequent tax increase. And I view the loss of the capital gains tax cut, which was the centerpiece of his campaign, as the fatal sort of flaw, the fatal mistake. Mitchell was a very tough adversary.
President Bush, then Vice President Bush’s, role in the Reagan Regulatory Relief Task Force was something that came naturally to him. He didn’t like red tape. He had been a pioneer in offshore drilling with Zapata Oil and he had to fight a lot of red tape, and this all came very naturally to him. He did a great job with it. He was very much a hands-on person in the beginning to make sure it was launched correctly. Because he wasn’t very good at taking credit, he never got, I think, the proper credit for what he did. An example would be Woodward and Pincus’s series on candidates. When they got around to doing one on Bush for the ’88 election, the Regulatory Relief Task Force effort merited I think half a sentence. When they got to Quayle—whose work at the Competitiveness Council, he refused to do regulatory work until we suckered him into it about a year and a half into the administration, tricked him into it basically, my staff and I. He got a whole damn article on it, praising him to the hilt, what a wonderful job he had done. Typical sort of media response.
But what President Bush did, then Vice President Bush did, was, I think, one of the two or three most important building blocks for the economy we’re now in and I don’t think there is any question about that. I’m not being as coherent as I’m saying the whole plan was, but I did go yesterday into part of—a subset of this was the banking reform effort, which Baker’s Treasury shitcanned, which really irritated us, had Bob Zoellick come over and tell me that it was the worst piece of public policy crap he had ever seen in his life. It really irritated me.
But it became the building block for the FIRREA reform legislation in 1989, which was a critical piece of deck clearing. The Japanese still haven’t done it yet. The Japanese still haven’t cleaned up their banking system, but Bush bit the bullet at a cost of about three to four hundred billion dollars and a recession, a white-collar recession, financial services recession. This was a lock up, a lending lock up that occurred as a result of the difficulties and that cost him, in a sense, another “but for” that cost him reelection, but he did bite the bullet. His mistake was not to say to the public, “Look, I’m going to take a hit here. I’m going to take a write off. We have to have a corporate write off and it is going to be painful, but we’ve got to do this in order to grow in the future and things are going to be all right, believe me.” He never did that. We could never get him to do that.
I had a friend named John Aldridge, who was a law school classmate, founder of Long, Aldridge & Norman law firm in Atlanta, which is a very good law firm, young, compared to King & Spalding and some of the others, but he is one of the leading, if not the leading, work out specialists in the country. He sees all this stuff and saw what was coming because he is so deeply involved with S&Ls and banks, and he kept coming to me and said, “Now, Boy, the cost is going to be one hundred billion,” and then six months later he said, “Boyden, it’s going to be two hundred billion. You better get on this, you’ve got to get this stuff out of the banks.” Then he said, “This thing is going to happen. It is going to happen later in California. The recovery is going to be later in California. You’re going to lose California unless you anticipate this.”
He laid out the whole thing. It was astonishing. He knew everything and predicted everything that was going to happen. For a while I thought he was kind of goofy—not goofy, but I mean, I didn’t really take him seriously. But then I thought, Oh my gosh, so I brought him in for a meeting with Sununu and Boskin and Darman and he came in. He laid the whole thing out for Sununu and said, “You have got to start to get the Fed and the OTC [over the counter] and the da, da, da. Dump this property out into the marketplace so we can get the banks cleaned up, otherwise they won’t be able to lend any more.” President Bush meanwhile was wrangling, complaining, “God, they’re prosecuting everybody, there’s no lending going on.” There was a freeze up. I remember, I was told—Ed Rogers who was in the room, Sununu’s assistant, told me that after we left, sort of ushered out unceremoniously—Sununu said, “Could that be true?” and Darman said, “Nah, that’s all a bunch of shit.”
That’s secondhand to me, so I don’t know if it’s true. Darman didn’t want to dump all this stuff because he didn’t want to have to reflect the write offs on the budget numbers, even though later of course, when the money comes back, when you make money on all this stuff, as you eventually do—what goes down goes back up again—it will show up as income, which of course happened. Only the income showed up on Clinton’s watch not our watch, which it would have if he had been reelected.
But they did start thereafter to begin to unload these properties and begin to privatize them if you will, dump them out. Ultimately it worked. But to go back to the task force on financial services, the key thing there was building the road map, getting consensus from the agencies, which was really the key part of it, getting unanimity of all the thirteen agencies as to how to approach this. So that when 1989 came along, there was buy in for some of the hard things that had to be done. There were some mistakes in the legislation too, some bad mistakes, but on the whole it did the job, crudely. Of course, having people there to run it, who had worked for me earlier, was also critical, because the expertise didn’t—wouldn’t have otherwise existed had this not happened during the Vice President’s—President Bush had been a banker. He had been on the loan committee of TCB [Texas Commerce Bank] I think, in Houston, in between his government service and run for the Presidency. He knew what this was all about. Could he articulate it? Did he articulate it? He just knew, he knew intuitively. No one had to tell him. He had the banking experience, knew exactly what had to be done. So he went ahead and did it. Didn’t say what he was doing, he just did it. Told us what to do, helped guide it. An astonishing performance.
He was also, as far as the Regulatory Relief Task Force work, he was also keenly interested in FDA reform. As I said to you yesterday, his one big regret he kept expressing to me was not firing Kessler. Why would someone like that be so knowledgeable and interested in one administrative officer? Well, he had been on the board of Eli Lilly for several years. He knew all about the drug approval process. He watched it very, very carefully. I don’t have any doubt that the rope he gave me and the push he gave me and the guidance he gave to Jim Miller and all the others on the drug stuff, in which he was very interested and signaled his interest, was a great deal responsible for the biotech revolution we are now experiencing. He deserves credit for this, some credit for it, not all the credit. He didn’t invent the Internet, but he deserves some credit for it.
I remember in early session with Richard Breeden—by the way, I mentioned him yesterday, was the guy who ran the task group for financial services—and it was during that effort that Don Regan actually cried, cried, burst into tears in my office.
Karaagac
Over what?
Gray
We had proposed giving, transferring the controller’s office control over national banks to the Fed to consolidate the regulatory oversight. “I’m not going to be the person—” cry, cry, cry—very funny. We ended up compromising. This was the big fight that held up the bank reform bill that just passed. You know, the fight over the Fed and the Treasury over regulatory authority. So, anyway. But early on, [James] Scheuer came in. Scheuer was involved with the drug industry in an oversight capacity in Congress. He and Vice President Bush had been big buddies when they were in the House together. Scheuer said, “Now George, I know you’re wondering what a liberal Democrat Jew from Brooklyn is doing talking to a WASPy [White Anglo-Saxon Protestant] conservative Texan, but it is drug, FDA approval, George, and I know you’re interested in it. Let me show you how you could do it. You don’t need legislation. You don’t need to come to us. Here’s how you do it.” And he had these three books that he started to go through. It was a Friday afternoon and eyes began to glaze over on both sides. Eyes glazed over. I mean, they were into the weeds: phase 2, phase 2b, phase 3, post-marketing phase 4, eyes glazing over. Although Vice President Bush knew exactly what he was talking about, both of them just kind of—Finally, Scheuer reached out and said, “George, George, let me tell you what the problem is here. It is the goddamn fucking arrogance of the goddamn fucking bureaucrats.” And Bush looked at him and said, “It’s just the phrase I’ve been groping for, Jim.”
But all that sent signals to us to go, go, go and do good works. Go and do this stuff. There was once—and be creative and push. There was once, in 1982, a front-page article about an inventor that I had gotten involved with who had invented something that really would have revolutionized the internal combustion engine, and for that reason, of course, was going to be just stiffed forever by the “not invented here” denizens of Detroit. But it was a very interesting thing and I got involved and got Congressman [James] Broyhill involved and we had government financing for a test run, which the media distorted and the government falsified and the guy ended up being the subject of a front-page column of a Wall Street Journal article slam job, just a hatchet job, that destroyed his reputation and everything. I was in there a little bit and also by implication Vice President Bush was actually named in the article without really criticizing him. I thought, God, he’s going to kill me for this. I was always looking for ways to cut the red tape, and if you cut the red tape that allows an intervention through that cuts more red tape because it solves a problem, then that’s as good as taking the red tape out, that’s supposed to solve the problem. If you can do it by invention, rather than by rule, even better.
I went to him and said, “Oh God, Mr. Vice President, I’m so sorry about this article.” And he said, “Why are you apologizing?” I said, “Well, it is not very complimentary.” And he said, “Boyden, do you think the Wall Street Journal would devote that much ink to an inventor who didn’t have anything?” I said, “I hadn’t thought of it that way.” He said, “No, they’re only devoting that much ink because he’s got something, he’s right. There are a million inventors who are wrong. He’s right. So keep going, you’re getting warm, obviously, keep going.” That was the way he was. That was what he did. Go on. Push the envelope. And, in that sense, he was really kind of an amazing risk taker. He didn’t care if we got slammed as long as it was in pursuit of something that maybe the establishment didn’t want or the entrenched interests didn’t want. So much the better. If you got in trouble for that, then you must be doing the right thing. This permeated everything that we approached on the business side. And the FDA continued to be an interest of his all the way through. Still is. He still grumbles about that Kessler.
But we did do, I think, very major things over the course of this period, and for that he has not really gotten credit. So, if you look at—if you start with the Presidential years, a key thing, as I said yesterday, was this South Carolina primary. He was a committed free trader. The one thing that I do have to credit Darman with, and it is a big thing, is that Darman was unfailingly, unblinkingly free trade. Any time there was any hint of managed trade or any of those sort of wonderful ideas, he would just totally destroy the person who uttered the thought. And so the administration was completely committed to free trade.
At the end of the administration, I remember, [Lawrence] Eagleburger saying he was an acting Secretary of State, I think it was at the last Cabinet meeting, saying, “Mr. President, your legacy—” I think he was quite prescient actually, he said, “Your legacy is not going to be the Gulf War. Your legacy is going to be the commitment to free trade, GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade], NAFTA, and the whole range of things having to do with free trade and free market.” I thought it was quite an amazing thing for him to say, having been through the Gulf War and all the Kosovo, Bosnia, Czechoslovakia, all that stuff. “No, no,” he said, “The biggest thing is trade and economic policy.”
So I’m trying to think. The ADA was all—of course, the thousand points of light, the ADA was all part of this in his mind. He was credited as being oh a gushy, warm liberal. Isn’t he wonderful? He’s giving sort of an entitlement program to the disabled. But that’s not what the ADA did. The ADA was not a quota bill and didn’t provide for any funding. It was a barrier elimination bill, if you will. It was an empowerment bill. It was, in a sense, the first try at welfare reform. And the disabled are a much bigger welfare population than Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The AFDC program is very small compared to the disability program. And that was what he was trying to do. To him it was empowerment. It was not some sort of handout. This never got reported quite right, because try as we might to say that this was meant to be empowerment and welfare reform—no, no, no this was welfare, not welfare reform. No matter what we said, it always came out as, “Isn’t it wonderful how liberal he is being here?”
He pioneered and pushed us to make possible—in fact he made [John] Ashcroft the head of a commission, but I’m not sure that it was ever reported because he didn’t get reelected, but he kept pushing very hard on getting HHS [Health and Human Services] to grant waivers to states on welfare reform. And I think if you went back and looked at the record, one would find that a lot of experimentation that [Tommy] Thompson was doing, that his own son did in Texas, that other states had done, was a direct result of his encouragement of the waiver process by which the cracks began to open up to show that you could get these people off the rolls and back to work. Someone would have to do research on that, but that is one of the things that he repeatedly, repeatedly came back to and pushed us on. “Get those waivers out. Get those waivers out there.”
The civil rights bill, which we are going to get to, is not something he proposed. It was something that was imposed on him by Congress as a result, as you all know, of a series of Supreme Court rulings that came down in a block. I’ll get to that in a minute, but that was not one of his initiatives. The Clean Air Act, however, was, and there the thrust of it was this free market allowance trading innovation that he put in for acid rain. The testimony of—Reilly testifies, there are more marked incentives that have been built into this bill than have ever been proposed or adopted by Congress ever in the history of regulation. And about that he was right. And EPA continues to ignore these things, but the acid rain program is really an absolute miracle as to the way it is done. It is about 165 percent ahead of schedule and since you never get more than 80 percent yield on—80 percent of what your goal is—on a command and control program, basically what happened is we doubled the yield of the regulatory program at about a fifth or better of the cost.
Now, you would think that EPA would be scrambling to find ways to apply this success to other programs, but instead, they look for ways to avoid having to apply this to other programs, and it has always infuriated me that the press sits there and says isn’t EPA wonderful. EPA has lost in the DC circuit two out of every three cases—two out of every three of its rules in the last seven years. This is in the Clinton administration, in a regime where you are supposed to get Chevron deference. That is unbelievably pathetic. It’s because they stick to this command and control stuff. They won’t look to the market. The reason they don’t like the acid rain, here is the biggest pollution reduction program in the history of mankind, and it’s being run by about three people in EPA. It doesn’t produce full—
Zelikow
You’re contrasting the emissions trading model versus the command and control model.
Milkis
There was some of both of that in the Clean Air Act.
Gray
You have to command the goal.
Milkis
Don’t you have to put some hammers in there?
Gray
Sure, you have to command the goal in order to make the market work, but that is always the case. I’m saying in terms of how you enforce it, you have to let the sector enforce it, not the bureaucrat. But that was an extraordinary breakthrough that EPA didn’t want to do. We had to cram it down their throats and down Congress’ throat. We had the basic command and control of the free market, as a friend of mine said. But it worked. It worked marvelously well and it has just sunk, the whole thing sunk, as though it never occurred, it never happened. And it’s just one of the curiosities. It’s too bad. But it was a great, great intervention and I hope if a Republican gets elected the next time around, it will get a revival of interest.
Zelikow
When you say it’s worked and it sunk—
Gray
Well, if you don’t get it, you don’t get it, as the Post says. Well, of course, it worked, but the example has been lost. Because EPA has sort of deep-sixed it and the press has—the environmentalists never liked it. The environmentalists hated, hated, hated it.
Zelikow
Deep-sixed it by not enforcing it or—
Gray
No, no, no. By not spreading, not using it. In fact, doing just the reverse.
Milkis
I see. I see.
Zelikow
And the model does have some following. I know Rob Stavins at Harvard—
Gray
Oh yes, he was key in helping us get it through, as was Tim Wirth. But—
Zelikow
And it had a strong influence, so you can comment on whether it had an adequate influence on our approach to, say, the Kyoto meeting.
Gray
It has had, since EDF [Environmental Defense Fund] was the one, was the group—I know Dan Dudek, was the one who designed, at my request, designed the acid rain program. He infiltrated the White House at the right time to get them to reverse, after the first four years. For the first four years they junked the so-called joint implementation approach. Then Dudek went in and infiltrated and became a mole and flipped that all around, back to joint implementation, which we had espoused in the Bush years. And jump-started it again. So the whole—and then [Stuart E.] Eizenstat, who was a regulatory reformer from way back, from the Carter days, he got it and he’s done it or proposed it for Kyoto. But that’s just proposals for something that is not yet in place. I’m saying at EPA, itself, they have refused to do it.
Zelikow
What you’re describing—
Gray
For other air pollution programs for which it would be a precisely appropriate means of enforcement or implementation.
Zelikow
What you’re describing sounds like a dramatic, conceptual, intellectual innovation of regulation, which is the way it was perceived by a lot of people. Then, when the Clinton administration comes in, there is a large-scale disagreement between some people in the administration who want to pursue that mode, you’ve mentioned a few names, and a lot of people who actually, as you put it, “don’t get it,” want to go back to the older model.
Gray
Who do get it, and just don’t want it.
Zelikow
And that battle has, unfortunately in your view, been inconclusive. They have not been able to extend the model effectively. You think the model could be applied, for instance, to auto emissions?
Gray
Sure, of course it could. The only way we are ever going to get the fuel cell technology is to introduce some competition. I went around, schlepped around, it was one of the most grubby things I ever did with a friend of mine who had a business—who had started—made the market if you will, in the acid rain allowances. He had done the first trades with a lot of help from us in the White House. When the market took off, he made a small fortune until the big guys came in and sort of commoditized the margins, so he figured well, there’s not that much money to be made anymore, but he had done his duty, done his thing.
We went around to all the car companies saying, look, the way you want to do this—you can dramatically cut your costs. Of course, what they understood—cutting their costs, and what is correct—the thing is not cutting their costs. It was cutting your costs as consumers and it was eliminating the arbitrage that they were capturing the margins. They were capturing as the producers of the pollution control equipment, and if you put that up to the market for grabs, what the acid rain program shows is that the margins get driven by competition down to nothing. They were basically monopolizing the pollution equipment market. That’s what they’re doing. They are making money off of it and they are laughing their way to the—Every time EPA—they cry don’t throw me in that briar patch, and then they laugh their way to the bank because they captured the margins on the pollution control equipment. But anyway, go ahead, sorry.
Zelikow
Did you take a strong stand on CAFE standards?
Gray
Yes.
Zelikow
C-A-F-E.
Gray
Corporate Average Fuel Economy.
Zelikow
On both CAFE standards and Clean Air Act—you may have gotten into this before I arrived—but could you just take a moment to explain how come the White House counsel is playing a key conceptual role for the White House in fashioning pollution control strategy?
Gray
Well, I think I went over this a little bit—
Zelikow
This is bureaucratically an interesting question.
Gray
Although Reilly didn’t object at all. He was quite happy.
Zelikow
I’m not objecting either, but I’m curious.
Milkis
He’s just curious how you got involved.
Gray
Sununu was very curious. Sununu was most curious. Complained to the President. The President sort of, you know. It was an outgrowth of the work I did on the Task Force on Regulatory Relief. Of course, my job changed when I got into the White House, but Quayle refused to continue the work on the—He changed the name to the Competitiveness Council. He inherited the idea, he changed the name to the Competitiveness Council, which is actually a better name, but he refused to carry on the work.
Zelikow
Quayle did?
Milkis
You mentioned that earlier, that he wouldn’t and that you tricked him—
Gray
We tricked him into doing it, yes.
Milkis
If you could tell us about that, as you’re explaining.
Gray
As the transition took place, I was wearing two hats and I was still wielding the most enormous power up until January 20th, because Bush had delegated to me all these regulatory decisions and they could only be overruled by the President, Reagan, personally. It was wonderful. So I had all these Cabinet people coming to me, “I want to do this—” I said, “All right, get President Reagan to call me up.” It was wonderful, the most wonderful job. I hated to give it up. But because during the transition I was both counsel to the transition, but I was still head of the regulatory program, I did a lot of things, not being totally punctilious about which hat I was wearing, but I commissioned—I asked the EDF to design a program during the transition, after we’d won, and it was legitimate for me to do that because it was still part of my job up until January 20th. But I lost it all before I left the White House for the White House, if you will.
That’s how I got involved. The Clean Air Act didn’t command any attention until 1989. If it had, I wouldn’t have been able—I wouldn’t obviously have had time. But by 1990, things had broken through enough. We had broken the back with the clearance stuff and I had time. I sat through all the endless meetings in Mitchell’s conference room as we went over this, that and the other.
Zelikow
Going to those meetings wearing what hat?
Gray
Acting as counsel.
Zelikow
Was Reilly an ally?
Gray
He was an ally.
Zelikow
An indispensable ally, I would guess.
Gray
Of course.
Zelikow
Because if Sununu wasn’t an ally, then you kind of had to have somebody in one of the executive departments—
Gray
Rosenberg, whom I helped get the job, Bill Rosenberg who was the administrator, which is the only job that really mattered at EPA. Certainly for the Clean Air Act it was the only job. Rosenberg and I worked very, very closely together. He is not a committed free marketer, had to sort of prod him—“No, Bob, that’s not the way you do it.” He had to be prodded from time to time to keep his eye on the ball, but he was good. I remember when the thing got to a critical point and Dudek discovered something, which—I mean I just hadn’t been focused. I hadn’t been spending that much time on it. He said, “You know, we don’t have a cap. We get to the end of the road in the year 2002 on the reduction, and economic growth can start to move the numbers back up because there is no cap. We need a cap, otherwise currency inflates.” I saw immediately what he was talking about and said, “Why don’t we have a cap?” He said, “I don’t know, the Congress didn’t—we didn’t propose it. It’s partly our fault, partly EPA’s fault—” I don’t remember all the details. He said, “We’ve got to have a cap.”
I said, “Okay, draft it for me.” So I plugged it into the system. Sununu went apeshit, I have never seen anyone explode, not even my ex-wife at her worst. Nothing I have ever seen, this volcanic explosion, although unlike my ex-wife it goes, it’s like a squall and about five minutes later it’s gone. But he said, “Oh, it will kill economic growth, the lights will be shut off.” And Bob Grady was opposed to doing it. Bob Grady I think was opposed to doing it because he knew it would work and he didn’t want this thing to work. But I called up Reilly and I said, “Bill, you’ve got to help me out here. We’ve got to put this cap in here to stop the emissions, determine internal emissions. We’ve got to cap it there so it doesn’t go back up again. Otherwise, why are we doing this?” And so he pitched in and we barely, barely squeaked it in, and of course, it was critical, because if you don’t have the hammer, you don’t have the—
But that’s the—Reilly was the guy who put it over. Without him—But it just shows you how much of this was in the White House. The EPA didn’t want it, was not involved—was not really that much involved with it. As I said yesterday, we’d be in these meetings over the bill and Darman would come in and complain to everybody about something his own deputy had just done the day before. It was the most bizarre thing.
Milkis
I just had a quick question. Was Reilly able to accomplish this because of the trust he had on the Hill? When you say he was able to squeak it through, who was he able to influence to get it—?
Gray
Well, he had the President’s ear.
Milkis
Oh, the President.
Gray
I told you yesterday, why—in retrospect, what the explanation was, but the President liked him, respected him, and anything Reilly said—I’m not even sure he went to the President. All he had to do was say, “Look, can I see President Bush?” I’d be, “No, no, no, that’s all right. We’ll do it.”
Zelikow
So CAFE standards. Where did you stand on that one? Were you a strong supporter of the CAFE standards?
Gray
No.
Zelikow
You were strongly against them.
Gray
Strongly against them.
Zelikow
Did you attempt to find a way to apply your market approach?
Gray
There is a way, but we never found an opportunity—
Zelikow
Setting standards is the hammer, but allowing trading to work underneath it.
Gray
There is some averaging as you know in CAFE, but we didn’t—we never really had the opportunity to do that. I remember one huge shoot-out with [Slade] Gorton. This just shows you how rent seeking shows up in the funniest places. Gorton is a fairly conservative Republican Senator, but he is the single, largest, proponent for CAFE standards. You know why?
Zelikow
No.
Gray
The more you destroy the U.S. automobile industry, the more the Japanese had to ship through his ports in Seattle and the richer his state gets. That’s it. That’s all you need to know, to understand that story. There are nine million stories in the naked city.
Anyway, I’m not sure we could have gotten anywhere with a Democratic—the reason acid rain went through is because Mitchell knew that he had not been able for ten years, or eight years, to do anything on this using the command and control approach because he couldn’t solve the Midwest/West, high-sulfur/low-sulfur coal shoot-out. The Simpson-Metzenbaum vitriol was as bitter as any fight you could find anywhere. There were shouting matches that would just make you cringe. The only way to cut through that regional, geographic sort of fight was to say the marketplace is going to sort this out. We’re not going to have politicians decide. Let the marketplace decide it. And it worked. And Mitchell was going to allow it to happen. Mitchell needed it. The politics of acid rain, you should understand. The politics of high-sulfur/low-sulfur coal—[Bruce A.] Ackerman’s book, Clean Coal, Dirty Air—all of that is really a key part of the regulatory history of the United States. It’s why Mitchell got to be majority leader. Because Byrd as the protector of high-sulfur coal was under assault, both by the Northeast his receptor and by the Gulf Coast that wanted to sell more natural gas to displace his coal. And the combination—
Zelikow
When you say receptor, you mean receptor, of course, of the acid rain as the result of burning high-sulfur coal?
Gray
So the politics of acid rain have played a very powerful role in the politics of the second half-century’s politics. Which made what Bush did all the more remarkable. He could resolve all of these totally intractable problems. And, as a result—I got a lot of criticism from Bill Niskanen and Cato [Cato Institute] and all my conservative friends for having unleashed this regulatory juggernaut that was going to destroy the economy and look, we have the best economy in the world and the cleanest air in the world. I mean, we did it right. But the key was keeping EPA out of it. On the clean fuel stuff was keep the EPA out of it. EPA had fought cleaning up the gasoline because it was such a big hit. You clean up the gasoline and you get such huge reductions, you don’t need all this regulation. So, ergo, if you’re EPA don’t—It’s what I call the root canal theory of regulation. Never go for the cheap fix first. Put that off to the end. In fact, never do it. Save it for the Armageddon. Never do the easy thing. Never do the quick thing. Root canal theory of regulation. Anyway—
Zelikow
Did Bill Niskanen ever get after you about ADA?
Gray
He got after me about everything.
Zelikow
The regulatory hierarchy that ADA has created and the issue of unfunded mandates. Because ADA has spawned quite a layer of regulatory authority and additional costs.
Gray
I haven’t followed ADA.
Zelikow
You can weigh the benefits against it, but it has had a big effect in federal, state and local regulations.
Gray
I haven’t followed ADA. I don’t know—I just haven’t followed it closely enough. A lot of the criticism of Philip Howard’s book—full of criticism of the ADA and a lot of it, most of it, is misplaced. He is blaming the ADA for other statutes and other regulatory regimes, which is again a form of rent seeking. In other words, trade unions in New York City, ah-hah! We can rent seek here. Anybody who knocks down a wall in their apartment has to make the whole thing wheelchair accessible. Now the ADA doesn’t apply to people’s private apartment buildings to begin with and even if it did, the trigger for retroactive application, if you will, to these standards only if you build something new or so totally gut—that you’re in a sense rebuilding. It wouldn’t happen if you knock down a wall. But in New York City, if you knock down a wall, if you sneeze, you break a window and all of a sudden you have to completely reform—look at the jobs that that created.
But that is all blamed on the ADA and the ADA has nothing to do with it. It’s the idea that—and then there is public law 94 and 42. There are lots of laws that deal with the handicapped that are mischievous and make mistakes, but the ADA takes the blame for all this because it’s sort of a symbol. But most of it doesn’t have anything to do with the ADA. So that’s part of it. Part of it also is the fact that the ADA that was passed didn’t have private litigation remedies. It was to be enforced by the EEOC and Department of Justice, but it was a civil rights bill, which we haven’t gotten into, which introduced the private sector or the private lawsuit and that’s where, from what I know about the act, where most of the abuses have occurred. Even then, it’s not all that bad because of a lot of the horrendous district court decisions have been reversed on appeal and, I’m told by employers who follow this, and lawyers who follow this, that things are really not even near as bad as they’ve been portrayed. So, I still don’t know the extent to which—I do have one anecdote though, this may be quite dated now, but there was a guy from Walmart, one of the founding executives of Walmart, used to come in and talk about the civil rights bill. He wasn’t there to lobby me on ADA, but he would needle me and say, “Why are you doing this on ADA?”
At the end of the Bush White House he came in to say goodbye to me and say he was actually retiring himself, and how much he enjoyed the meetings and whatnot. He said, “You know, I owe you an apology about the ADA. I was always sort of kidding you about it, but it turned out, it has almost revolutionized our business and our disabled employees that we’ve hired in part because of the act have turned out to be the most loyal, effective and productive employees and the amount of traffic that we’ve increased in our showrooms has many, many times over paid for the changes that we had to make in order to get them in. This has been one of the most untrammeled successes of our corporate life.”
So I don’t have any apologies for what we did on the ADA. I do regret some of the lawsuits, but I think that’s all going to get washed out. I do blame the Clinton administration for not watching this stuff more carefully. You can, if you are careful with Amicus briefs and whatnot, help shape the way the law is developing in the court system and I don’t think they did it. But I’m not really an expert. I just haven’t followed it that carefully.
Milkis
Before we get to the civil rights legislation, could you just say a bit about tricking Vice President Quayle into doing the Competitiveness Council?
Gray
Well, we kept begging him and his staff. At the beginning, Kristol wasn’t there and later Kristol said, “Okay, we’ll give you the shot.” And I can’t remember what it was, recycling or something, I can’t remember, I’d have to go back, but it was something where Reilly, God bless him, had really gotten way out on a limb he could not stay on, he could not defend. We knew we could win a big internal victory to embarrass Reilly and make Quayle look good with conservatives and it worked better than our wildest imaginings. Reilly came in to defend this thing with the most goofy reasoning and he was totally blown out of the water. Later he would laugh about it. He said, “God, God, did they mislead me, my staff.” But it launched— “This is fun. This is fun,” Quayle said, and then he was off and running. But Darman had been the one who I think had blocked Quayle from doing it. That’s what Quayle told me. What I was told and it was third, fourth-hand. You don’t really know if it’s true. But Byrd had said, Byrd and—Oh God, the astronaut—[John] Glenn, he said to—Glenn had committee responsibility over the OIRA and OMB. He said, “Look, if you want to do some budget stuff, we’ll play with you on the budget, but you have to give us the regs. Stay out of that. Don’t mess with our regs.” Imagine the Hill telling the White House, “Don’t mess with our regs.” But that was the attitude.
Milkis
That was the trade that Darman was willing to make because he wanted to strike a deal on the budget. He wasn’t as interested in regulations as OMB directors in the Reagan administration.
Gray
There were a couple of articles that got written, one in the National Journal—
Milkis
Called “The Regulatory President,” right? I remember that article.
Gray
And there was one in the Wall Street Journal and the Vice President sent Darman a note, which I later saw, saying, “Is this true? Can you respond?” So Darman staffed it out and the OMB response was, yes, it is true, which he never sent back to the President. He blocked the report and never let it get to the President. I think the President found out about it and he called me and he said, “I know you and Dick—You can’t have your fingerprints on this but what we’re going to have to do is—I really can’t stand this. This is not right.” So that’s when we did the moratorium and all that stuff in the final year. The number of nonlegislative rules, that is, the number of rule makings not triggered by new legislation, jumped 40 percent, and that is a sure sign of mischief, a sure sign of mischief.
Karaagac
On regulation, before we leave regulation, I want to ask you just a few questions, or just one question, about direct supervision, and just the politics of it. I don’t know whether we can—Could you just talk about the choices made in the Bush years, perhaps contrast the choices not made in the Reagan years?
Gray
Well, the Reagan people wanted—you could do it, keep shoving stuff under the rug. And of course, Jim Wright didn’t want to do anything. REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT Wright was trying to destroy the reputations of the enforcers. It was really nasty, nasty stuff. There is a long, long history of all this, which we haven’t got time to go into here. But President Bush knew all this. He was after all from Texas. All this stuff, he knew and he was determined to clean it up. He knew he was going to pay a price for it. This is like taking a write off. I mean, you have to show a huge loss. There are consequences to it. But as I say, the Japanese still haven’t done it. The Japanese are still struggling with it.
Karaagac
How did he feel about Neil [Bush] being drawn into it?
Gray
Of course, he resented it deeply. It was greatly unfair, grossly unfair. I think he said some things to me that led me to believe, very elliptical and mumbling when he was puttering around in his little office back there, the Monica-Monica office, but I got the impression that he was putting off the campaign in part to limit the amount of crap he knew his family would get the minute he announced his campaign. He was really sensitive about Neil and it really hurt him what happened to Neil. It was incredibly unfair. But the Neil problem was directly responsible for him not being able to use the S&L issue against the Democrats. It was a checkmate.
Zelikow
And that was a conscious effort, he believed, on the part of the congressional Democrats?
Gray
Yes. Deliberate, to neutralize. REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXTREDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT McCain got trapped, as part of the whole S&L fallout. He was trapped by this S&L fundraising juggernaut REDACTEDTEXT REDACTEDTEXT which cost the country 300 billion dollars, and cost Bush reelection, but he had the courage, what I’m trying to say is—
Zelikow
Cost Bush reelection because of the recession?
Gray
Clean up—and had Wright not been able to stall efforts that Baker was making to—at one point, you know in 1985 and 1986, the cost of the clean up was fairly cheap, but it kept geometrically exploding every year. Anyway—There were other things that happened. There were other things on the business front. I think Bush resented the lack of money supply and growth of the Fed of the Bush years. I don’t think he knew what to do about it. I’m not sure that Brady handled that as well as it could have been handled. I don’t know who deserves the blame for lack of real harmony with [Alan] Greenspan, but I do think the money supply figures are really quite startling if you see them. The minute the election was over they shot up. It is quite a stunning graph if you look at it.
Zelikow
The money supply figures for—I’m sorry. I just want to be sure I understood you. Shot up after which election?
Gray
After Clinton got elected, ’92.
Milkis
And you are suggesting that it was because of the tension between Bush and Greenspan.
Gray
I don’t think it was personal between Bush and Greenspan, but between his economic team and Greenspan.
Karaagac
Greenspan’s economic team?
Milkis
Bush’s economic team.
Karaagac
Specifically Boskin?
Gray
No. No. Bush’s economic team was Darman, Darman, Darman.
Milkis
Darman et al.
Gray
There was a name for the negotiating team. What was the name? It was Nick, something, and Prick. Nick, Dick, and Prick. Prick being Sununu. The bargaining team was known as Nick, Dick, and Prick.
Zelikow
Although Darman gave that story to Woodward, really slamming Brady very hard, which implies they were something less than the very best of friends.
Gray
Oh God, they were terrible. That’s why I say the economic team really was Darman, Darman, Darman. Darman trashed everybody, except for Sununu who he needed. He and Sununu just had this mutual admiration society, always embracing each other, throwing puns back and forth. Occasionally a friend of mine would throw a pun in. But he—the staff meetings were love fests. Who can top whose pun? It was funny, but if you were on the receiving end of the pun, it wasn’t so funny, which Boskin and Porter were rather continually.
Zelikow
Boskin was an ally of yours on—
Gray
Oh yes, absolutely.
Zelikow
Especially on the regulations.
Gray
Especially on the regulations. Boskin would tell you—I mean any economist would tell you that this regulatory stuff is critically important, not necessarily more important than marginal tax rates but certainly as important.
Zelikow
Is it true that the Executive order of the moratorium on regulations and the effort to make a big push on deregulation was stimulated by joint memo that you prepared with Boskin?
Gray
Yes, that’s right.
Zelikow
Maybe in early ’92. Does that sound right?
Gray
I think I went to Camp David for Christmas—
Milkis
I remember that being in the State of the Union message—
Gray
I remember going up to Camp David I think that Christmas, the day before Christmas, Christmas Eve. Anyway, it wasn’t a hard sell with him. Bush had such a long history and he knew the last thing he wanted was for the bureaucrats to go crazy in the last year. He always attributed Reagan’s victory in part to the fact that the regulatory stuff got away from the Carter people with the hostage crisis and everything else. They just lost control and the rule writers just went haywire. I think, in the last year of this Presidency, you are going to see the same thing. The bureaucrats are just going to go crazy as people worry about reelection stuff. And he was determined not to let that happen. So I think that was the principal motivation for doing it. Just to send a signal to the bureaucracy, don’t go crazy just because I’m on the road campaigning or because my team is on the road politicking.
Zelikow
Shall we turn to civil rights?
Milkis
That was what I was going to propose.
Zelikow
On civil rights, just to set the scene a little bit, you have the 1989 decisions that effectively overthrow Griggs v. Duke Power, and the disparate impact standard for review in employment discrimination cases. This then creates an initiative on the Hill, not in the White House, but on the Hill, to overturn Wards Cove and the associated decisions. The legislation that emerges, that becomes the first point of discussion in 1990 is Kennedy-Hawkins, if my memory serves.
The press has you as a principal opponent inside the administration of Kennedy-Hawkins, arguing that Kennedy-Hawkins is a quota bill. Let me just be sure—before we get into the bureaucratics and the process, just to understand your position on the substance. Griggs v. Duke. Did you believe that basically Griggs v. Duke Power’s standard, the disparate impact standard was essentially—that was a quota case and a quota standard, the disparate impact was inherently a quota standard?
Gray
Yes.
Zelikow
Because if I understand your position, anything that restores disparate impact standard is going to be a quota bill.
Gray
Well—
Zelikow
If it creates a prima facie case of discrimination simply by virtue of disproportionate representation in the workforce.
Gray
Ideally you don’t have disparate impact at all, but you could write disparate impact in a way that it doesn’t hurt and you can write it in ways that are very binding. But ideally, you wouldn’t have any disparate impact at all.
Zelikow
In the bill, you mean, in the legislation?
Gray
I mean ideally—Sununu—I mean this gets into the weeds on this thing, but Sununu insisted on the bill, the compromise bill that we proposed. The alternative bill had the disparate impact, a weak or empty disparate impact standard, but he insisted on putting it in. I think we could have gotten by without it, but he insisted on putting it in and he was Chief of Staff and we had a lot of fights over it.
Zelikow
Over what the disparate impact would be?
Gray
No, as to whether there should be any shell or not.
Zelikow
Well, wasn’t the Hill going to insist on a disparate impact standard?
Gray
I don’t know. We won at the end by putting in the standard for disparate impact. It was the ADA that didn’t have disparate impact. So I think we won. I haven’t followed the case law since. I’m not sure if in the case law we’ve actually won, but this has not been—We’ve had a hostile administration, hostile to this idea anyway, for seven years now, enforcing a law in the ways that they want to. I just haven’t followed the course of the litigation. But the standard that was put in, the compromise at the end, was language out of the ADA, which is not a quota bill.
Milkis
The second bill that was finally signed?
Gray
Yes, the one that the President would sign.
Milkis
You mean business necessities?
Gray
It is out of the ADA, the legislative history of which says this is not a quota bill. This is not a numerical numbers game. Now, how the courts have enforced it—It turns out that not many cases have been brought and disparate impact is kind of, not evaporated, but it’s kind of dissipated somewhat in the workplace.
Zelikow
Oh really? In employment discrimination law, there are only two ways to get there. I mean, you prove discrimination inferentially from statistics or you have direct evidence of discrimination. It’s either one or the other. And Griggs v. Duke Power legitimized the first. Discrimination can be proved by its fiscal inference, then putting the burden of proof on the defendant to rebut the prima facie case presented by the numbers. So I mean, either the legislation restores the legitimacy of statistical inference in a way or it doesn’t.
Gray
Well, I could go—I’ve written an article about this, which you ought to read if you haven’t. It was the—what law review was it in? I can send you a copy but I’ve written an article—
Zelikow
That would be great.
Gray
I’ve written an article that lays out all the details and it’s very complicated because there is the burden of proof, there is the showing of necessity to get to—
Zelikow
This is the necessity issue—That was then the response, because you could defeat the prima facie showing of discrimination by showing business necessity, and so one way then to handle this problem would be for him to allow statistical inference—
Gray
That’s what we did—
Zelikow
—but strengthen the business defense of business necessity.
Gray
That’s what we did.
Milkis
But it depends on how you interpret business necessity.
Gray
Now, our standard of business necessity was basically a green light. There was almost nothing the defendant had to do in order to defeat the inference—but that was what the fight was over, was the definition of business necessity, and the burden of proof, and the showing, could you just, without more, allege disparate numbers without trying to show causation, and we got in no, you had to show causation, you have to allege something that you say causes this disparity, you can’t just do the numbers alone. You have to allege something that shows disparity and you have to prove causation eventually, in addition to the defendant having a chance to say no—you have to read the article. It’s quite complicated. But we—the sentiment for garnering in, the language that we used was language from the ADA, which was decidedly not a disparate impact regime. And I wrote an article—the President said, “I want you to write an op-ed piece explaining this, explaining how we won.” I wrote the piece, sent it off.
Meg Greenfield calls me back, I mean in ten minutes. She said, “Boy, this is going to be fun. You watch for the explosion.” I said, “You think this is going to cause a controversy?” She said, “I don’t think, I know, Boyden. This is going to be fun. I’ll let you know of any of our edits that you want to take a look at later this afternoon.” So the next day, the day after, it was published, and sure enough Coleman and [Vernon] Jordan and what’s his name—Coleman and Jordan went absolutely apeshit and they wrote a counter piece that just was total incoherence and totally wrong and totally full of lies and everything else, saying nobody had won. And so that’s the way it stood. I wrote this article. They wrote an article, totally muddying the waters. Theirs did.
So the fight, as always in these cases—90 percent of the law is in its implementation—the fight still goes on as to what actually happened on the floor in that, because the fight still goes on. People say we lost and we say, “No we won.”
Zelikow
The op-ed piece and your law review article would then be authoritative guides to your view of the substance?
Gray
Yes.
Milkis
When did you write that op-ed piece? Was it before the legislation was signed?
Gray
No, it was right after.
Milkis
Right after. There was some question—
Gray
Fred Barnes, who was then, I don’t know, the Weekly Standard didn’t exist, but he was recognized.
Milkis
He was writing for the New Republic then, wasn’t he?
Gray
He was with the New Republic. He calls me up and says, “How did you win this?” He saw it right away, the next day. “How’d you win this?” I explained to him, but he never wrote a column saying, “You won.” It just infuriated me, because the perceptions, you know, if the press reports X and it’s really Y, as far as the world is concerned it’s X, because the world gets its news about what the law is from, you know, if you don’t get it, you don’t get it. So very, very difficult.
Milkis
I was just going to ask you about the controversy leading up to the actual signing of the legislation. As I recall, you wrote a draft signing statement that caused a great deal of controversy and eventually had to be discarded in favor of a more moderate signing statement. Is that true?
Gray
Yes—
Milkis
Can you shed any light on those battles? The Democrats eventually boycotted the signing, didn’t they?
Gray
I think maybe they did, and I had to go out and do the ritual apology, “I screwed up.”
Milkis
The ritual mea culpa.
Gray
Which satisfied the media, once I said, “I screwed up”—which, of course, I hadn’t. But—
Zelikow
Then why did they make you say you had?
Gray
What you have to do—
Zelikow
Because it would then undermine the credibility of your op-ed and everything else.
Gray
No, the op-ed didn’t have anything to do with the signing statement.
Milkis
That was after, right?
Gray
It was a different issue.
Zelikow: But if it was an op-ed right after they repudiated your efforts to interpret the bill.
Gray
No, well, maybe, maybe. I can’t remember the sequence, which happened first. I think the article actually came later. I just don’t remember. The records would obviously reflect which came first. I just don’t—One of them came first. One of them came second. I just don’t remember. [laughter]
One thing you ought to remember throughout all this fight, the media—I remember once, Andy Rosenthal got Maureen Dowd, who was a personal friend, we have a great mutual friend who is a New York Times correspondent in Moscow. So she is a friend. They had been friends on the old Washington Times. She calls me up and says—
Zelikow
Celestine Bohlen?
Gray
Yes. She calls me up and says, “Andy wants to have dinner. He has something he has to tell you about this.” So I say, “Okay.” So we have dinner and Andy Rosenthal says, “Now Boyden, we do not appreciate the position you’re taking on the civil rights bill and if you continue in this we are going to have—frankly, we are going to have to make life very difficult for you. Our advice to you is just to get out of it, you know. They don’t need you. It’s a little unusual for the White House counsel to do legal policy to be sure, but it is something traditionally done by the Department of Justice.” And I said, “Look, Andy. Look, I’m with you, baby. I never wanted to get into this. The Vice President keeps pulling me back into it, pulling me back in, pulling back into it and I have no choice here. I can’t get out of it.” “Well,” he said, “you’re going to be in for a rough ride.” And, of course, they went after me.
I used to get rocked by the Post from time to time, and then I’d go to dinner at Kay Graham’s house and I’d be embraced by Mary and Donnie [Mary and Donald Graham] and whopped on the back, what a hero you are, what a man you are, what a hunk. Mary said to me, “What a hunk.” So—
Milkis
Civil rights hunk?
Gray
“It’s the lousiest bill. Just the worst bill. You’re a hero. Hang in there, kid. Hang in there, kid. Hang in there, kid.” I remember once playing tennis with Kay Graham. She threw down her towel, “I can’t tell you how much I hate those quotas.” And then the next day they’d blast me in the paper. It just infuriated me. Well, you own a newspaper you can do pretty much what you want.
Anyway, the night of the settlement, the afternoon of the settlement, they were gearing up for another assault on me, the media was. I think it was NBC [National Broadcasting Corporation]. It was John—oh God, who was the reporter? John Cochran, I think he was NBC and later switched to ABC [American Broadcasting Company] or maybe vice versa. I can’t remember. The thing was settled. Kennedy came in, under a lot of pressure from the southern Democrats in his party, came in with a deal at five o’clock. I remember sitting in Dole’s conference room and he came in. We were dumbfounded—at, although—that he would concede so much. Makes one wonder whether we’d asked for enough. But he was under pressure from [Dale] Bumpers and all the southern Democrats to stop the nonsense and his staff was furious looking, Kennedy’s staff was. But he made it in about five o’clock and we spent the next four hours tying up the loose ends and closing it, as it were, drafting the language to make sure it complied. And I didn’t come up for air until about 9:30 when one of Dole’s staffers came in, and we broke out some champagne and the staffer said, “Did you see the news tonight?” And I said, “No, obviously I was mired in this stuff.” He said, “Well, we taped it. Let’s rerun it for you.” And it was John Cochran accusing me with graphics, this, that, and the other, of lying to the President about what was in the bill. It was just brutal, just brutal, totally dishonest, totally made up. Just infuriating.
The next day, the morning, Marlin Fitzwater said, “They’re going to do a thing on the civil rights. I mean, the whole press conference, the whole press briefing is going to be on this bill. And rather than me being down there and keep turning to you, why don’t—I’ll just introduce—I’ll answer a couple of questions that are unrelated and just let you take it over, let you have it for an hour and good luck to you, because that’s all they want to talk about.”
One of the first questions out of the box was John Cochran, “Did you see my newscast and did it have any impact?” And I said, “John, you know, the truth be known, the deal was made at 5:30 when Kennedy came into Dole’s office and I never saw your newscast until after we had finished writing the thing. I’m sorry.” You never saw such a crestfallen look on anybody’s face because he thought he had provoked the settlement and, of course, he didn’t have anything to do with it. That’s the way the media is. Another one of the nine million stories in the naked city.
Zelikow
Where did the story come from?
Gray
He made it up. Oh, I don’t know. Somebody on the Hill who wanted to—
Milkis
Kennedy staff maybe leaked it.
Gray
Probably not Kennedy’s staff, [Warren] Rudman or somebody a little nastier. Kennedy’s not that nasty actually. There are people who are a lot nastier. Somebody nasty. I don’t know. Anyway, it didn’t have any impact because we had already settled it.
Zelikow
Running back to Kennedy-Hawkins in 1990—
Gray
And I want to get back to the signing statement.
Zelikow
Then why don’t you finish that?
Gray
The signing statement—what we had done—the key part of the signing statement remained. I mean, that’s one of the ironies of all this. The key purpose of the signing statement was to lock in for the executive branch what we thought was the proper spin, if you will, interpretation, for administrative law purposes—what the bill meant. And that stuck. That wasn’t taken out. That was the pay dirt. What caused the controversy was something we never thought would be controversial. It was the President simply saying in light of all this, in light of the ban in the bill of race norming, which had never gotten any—and that didn’t originate with us. It originated with Henry Hyde, but the bill actually banned race norming, this very ugly practice of indirectly imposing quotas.
But, in light of all that, what we said was the President—we should do a review of all the set-aside preference and quota programs in the U.S. government to see whether they pass muster under the bill. It was a fairly anodyne thing. It referred only to employment. It was not anything else. Well, the press—immediately the Post and the, you know—gurgling on about FCC preferential—Of course, the tax thing, the black front thing has since been washed out. A lot of things have been washed out since. But it didn’t have anything to do with the FCC. Or the small business set-aside program, or the Defense Department minority contracting. It had nothing to do with any of that, but the press immediately assumed that it did and pitched the whole uproar on things that this precisely and explicitly did not do. It was one of the most infuriating things. So many infuriating things, so many stories. It didn’t do that.
Zelikow
It actually would have had a rather healthy effect. There was an ongoing litigation at the State Department that was absolutely founded on the old Griggs v. Duke Power standard. This actually would have had some impact on that.
Gray
One of the ironies is—someone would have to go and lay it side by side, but I am quite sure that there really isn’t any material difference between what the signing statement requested and what Clinton requested after Adarand came down. The exact same review. And ours caused this explosion. It’s just part—when an edifice begins to crumble, there are—the forces of reaction fight back. But this was part of the crumbling of the quota edifice and it continues to crumble and I think it’s a very good thing for the country. Remember, what our bill was about was education. It was less about employment than about education. What the bill was really all about was sending a signal to the business community. You can require excellence. You can require—You can hire on the basis of quality.
At the time the bill was being debated, the only employer in the country, see if you can guess it, that could insist on a diploma as a condition of employment—because after all what was Griggs all about? Diplomas. The only employer who could actually insist on a diploma as a condition of employment was? Guess. The military. And they had a very first-rate workforce and they had a black rate of—22 percent of the military was black, of the Army anyway. Eleven percent of the population, so twice—So the diploma thing was raising, and encouraging and hoping, and da da da da da. It wasn’t hurting. Totally counterintuitive if you believe Griggs was good policy, forget the law part of it.
So, what this said was you could ask—In order to do something about the school system, you have to have choice at both ends. You have to give parents choice of picking a better school if the one they’re in they don’t like, but also the people who take from the schools and universities and employers have to also have some choice about who they pick. Otherwise, if it doesn’t matter whether you flunk out or get an A, then it won’t matter whether you flunk out or get an A. And, I’m happy to say that businesses now put huge demands on the high school systems in their areas, which was freed up by this bill. So I think the bill was a great success from that vantage point alone, which was the key thing. What Coleman wanted, he said to me, and this has been published, but he said to me that, “I just want another generation of quotas and then I can dispense with it.” But another generation, we couldn’t live with another generation in my opinion. One time we were having lunch—I was having lunch with Jordan and Coleman and they were complaining about Wards Cove [Packing Co. v. Atonio]. And Jordan or Coleman, I can’t remember which one said, “You know, that [City of Richmond v. J. A.] Croson case, we lost that case because of that damned woman who owes her seat to a quota,” meaning [Sandra Day] O’Connor. Now how about that for a vicious comment?
Jordan used to say to me—Vernon used to say to me, “You know, I never got benefit of no quotas when I was coming out.” “Exactly, Vernon. You did it without quotas.”
Milkis
You’ve probably heard that comment made about Clarence Thomas too, I bet. When he votes against quotas, you probably heard—
Gray
He claims—of course we have. He claims that nothing in his education was the result of quotas.
Zelikow
This sounds persuasive on the merits, so why did they make you do a mea culpa? Why did they—
Gray
They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round. Come on. One of the biggest things you can do wrong, one of the biggest sins you can commit in Washington is to commit the truth. There’s a joke about it. Telling the truth in Washington is one of the most dangerous things you can do. If the town is not ready for the truth, best not to tell it. I—hell, damn, full speed ahead, tell the truth. Anyway, what was your question, sorry, I interrupted you.
Zelikow
How did it happen?
Gray
How did what happen?
Zelikow
That the White House said, we’re going to change the signing statement and basically put you in a pretty embarrassing position.
Gray
I blame Fitzwater for this. Somebody on Roger Porter’s staff leaked a version of the signing statement that had been circulated for approval. Now everybody approved the signing statement. We had clearance for the signing statement. Even Lynn Martin, who would be the one most likely to raise objections, she said, “Fine.” The signing statement was cleared. But there was a woman whose name I forget who worked for Roger Porter, who didn’t like it. She leaked it. At least I’m pretty sure she leaked it. She described what it did. Of course, what she leaked may have been a badly worded version of what actually ended up being put in the system. She may have leaked the version that was circularized. I think we tightened things up to make sure, because of an objection. I can’t remember. The record would reflect all this. But she leaked the version that was not the final version. She leaked a draft, a very early draft. Which may have had loose language, which could be interpreted as affecting the FCC, the Defense Department, I just don’t remember. But it’s bad enough to leak the real version. It’s especially mischievous to leak a preliminary version. I’m not sure that what she leaked was even the one that was circulated to the rest of the Cabinet. I think it was a version even prior to that that she somehow got her hands on. Very damaging.
I was again playing tennis. I seem to be playing tennis at crucial moments. I get a call. I’m actually at the Columbia Country Club, supposed to play I guess paddle tennis. I get a call. Something is going on—uh uh uh. You know like the mischief on the Contra aid memo. I cut the game short. I realize as I was getting into the second set, I’ve got to get back. I rush back and Fitzwater wouldn’t let me talk to the press. He forbade me to talk to the press and he wouldn’t direct anybody to me—I could have, I think, put a lid on what they were doing because I realized what was happening, that they had some early version and that that wasn’t the version that had actually been circulated, let alone the one that was going to go to the President. But he wouldn’t let me. He blocked me from doing anything. I never got into the—and the President was making a speech that night, so the whole White House in effect moved with him to the speech and that’s where all the reporters were and I couldn’t get to them. Had it been a normal night, they would all have been milling around the White House and I could have talked to them, but they were all at this other event. I could have chased them down at the other event, but it just made life very hard since the whole White House, as I said, moved.
I woke up listening to CNN news and listening to a description of the New York Times story that Steve Holmes, who was one of the better reporters on these issues, black guy actually, but he understood all these things and he and I had a good relationship. We didn’t talk about this issue on this particular occasion, but he was a smart guy and he wrote accurately what the signing statement, the one that had been circulated, did. I said, as I woke up, “Hey, this is all right. This is okay. It just orders a review of employment practices. That’s going to be all right. We’ll handle that.” But the Post had the FCC, and the—
What Holmes had was the statement that had actually been circulated. He had not been in on the leak and what he had was the real thing and he had written it up right. I mean, it was the lead story in the New York Times, as I recall. He had it right. Everybody else had the spin doctors’ version, the much earlier version, and so were off to the races and the New York Times got overwhelmed. So that’s what happened. So what I was apologizing for was the misrepresentation basically, assuming the misrepresentation to be correct, there was a screw up. But that’s what you have to do.
Zelikow
Was the signing statement changed to eliminate the administration’s review?
Gray
Yes.
Zelikow
Who made the decision to change the signing statement and eliminate the review?
Gray
President Bush did.
Zelikow
Why did he make that decision if—
Gray
Because the thing had gotten out of hand.
Zelikow
He didn’t want to take the flak?
Gray
He didn’t want to blow up at the signing statement and everything else.
Zelikow
Were you involved?
Gray
At this point, what the signing statement actually did was irrelevant, because the Post had printed that it did all these things that it didn’t do and that overwhelmed what the New York Times had written.
Zelikow
Right, but of course, pulling the signing statement appears to validate the Post articles.
Gray
Well, if the signing statement had said that we were going to yank the set-aside programs at the Department of Defense, da, da da da, if that was what the signing statement said, it should have been pulled. So we were pulling a mythical—we were pulling something that wasn’t there to begin with, but never mind—You have to understand, the world is not how you think it is. The world is what the Post says it is. If the Post says X and we say no it is not X, then it is not X, even fine, even if X was never there to begin with. Am I making any sense?
Zelikow
Right, but were you a participant then in the decision when President Bush decided to pull it?
Gray
Yes, and I said, “But Mr. President—” He said, “Boyden, it’s too late, it’s too late. This thing has gotten away from us.” And I didn’t say, “Well, thanks to Marlin it’s got away from us.” I didn’t say that.
Milkis
He said, “It’s gotten away from us”?
Gray
Something to that effect. We’re not dealing with reality here. We’re dealing with what the press says.
Zelikow
Going back to ’90—
Gray
This happens, I’m telling you, this happens all the time. It is happening to AOL [American Online]. It is happening to Microsoft as we speak. The reason why Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, as I explained last night, the reason why IE toppled Netscape is because of AOL, but you’ll never read that in the papers because it’s not convenient for them to support the case, so you won’t read it. So as far as we’re concerned it didn’t happen. Am I making any sense?
Zelikow
I understand.
Karaagac
Can I smuggle in a general question on top of that? What does this say about communication control in the White House, in the Bush White House? Is there a general point to be made about that?
Gray
No. I think on the whole, Marlin was a good soldier. But leaks do occur. The problem wasn’t Marlin really, the problem was this really disloyal staffer who had her own agenda who leaked this thing, and those things happen. And when they happen you get screwed. You get absolutely screwed.
Karaagac
Leaks happen in every administration. It’s a rule of thumb. Was there a fear of God in the Bush administration? Was there an enforcer?
Gray
Sure. We had the President. As I said, he really went after—I think it was Dave MacIntosh who is running for Governor now in Indiana who leaked a document on Reilly that really embarrassed him in Rio. President Bush had me commence an investigation. I knew I’d never get to the bottom of the truth and I knew who it was but I knew I could never prove it, it was a stupid thing to go after, but President Bush just wanted to show he hated leaks. He just hated it. And he hated people talking on background or off the record. He said, “If you can talk on background, you can talk on the record. I want you to nail them there.” Well, there are some times when it just didn’t work to name names, but he hated that kind of stuff. He had a passionate hatred for it. But sometimes things get away from you and the Post is worse than any other newspaper. The New York Times is bad but the Post is terrible. They write things to make their own agenda.
I went back and looked at the clips on the Gulf War. The papers wrote a lot of stories in the fall about Bush is not going to go to Congress to get authority, but after Bush did go to Congress and did get authority, I think the Post wrote absolutely nothing about it. I think, if you read the Washington Post you’d never know that Congress approved the use of force in the Gulf. I mean, if you read the Post you wouldn’t even know.
Zelikow
Well, there was this news story the day after the vote that did note that this vote had occurred the day before. There was a news story in the Post that did say the Senate had voted. It’s not like they ignored what had been covered on live national television for the entire country.
Gray
Yes, but it was a pretty—I went back and looked at the clips. It’s a very truncated story and you barely get a picture of what happened. Sure, they reported it, but—
Zelikow
I take your point. I can see your point.
Young
But getting back to the leaks. There are leaks in every White House and every President. Reagan said I’m up to my keister in leaks and there were lie detector tests proposed in the Reagan administration, which became a big flap. What was Vice President Bush’s feeling on that?
Gray
On what?
Young
On the lie detector. The proposal for lie detector.
Gray
I don’t know. I don’t remember.
Zelikow
According to Baker, anyway, who would know, since he was the key figure in the matter, Bush and Shultz and he all joined very strongly in quashing the polygraph idea after Bill Clark and Ed Meese tried—well, actually had persuaded the President to issue an order in the fall of 1983. And Baker and the Vice President and Secretary of State all essentially forced a meeting in which Reagan rescinded the decision.
Gray
But, on the civil rights bill signing statement, I think I’ve covered it. There was a press conference, I think, where reporters were telling each other, I have the transcript somewhere, where they were telling each other what the signing statement did. It was comical, because it had nothing to do with the signing statement. But no one bothered to read the signing statement. They were all just reading their own press. This is the way the media operates. Sometimes—but the fault, in the beginning again, was the leak. If we hadn’t had the leak, there wouldn’t have been anything for them to do.
Zelikow
I want to go back a little bit on the civil rights bill, back to 1990. Because, really, through 1990 and actually much of 1991, the President gets a lot of really bad press, the way this debate is evolving and some of that has to do with the way the negotiations with the Hill are being managed. There is a decision made in 1990 to make Bill Coleman a key player in these negotiations.
Gray
A decision made—for who to make?
Zelikow
I don’t know who made that decision.
Gray
Make him the key—He wrote the bill. I mean, he was a key player whether anyone made a decision to make him the key player. He was the key player. He was the author. He was the central organizer, instigator. He said to me, “I want a quota regime.” He had to put together a coalition. He had to get the women’s groups. He had to put women—He had to get the trial lawyers to include all the damage stuff, the lawsuit stuff, which of course retroactively amended the ADA, so he had to have a coalition of interests, but his goal was the quotas.
Zelikow
But was Coleman in any way entering these negotiations as a representative of the administration?
Gray
He was representing himself.
Zelikow
Because the press has Coleman—
Gray
Coleman, sure, said he was acting on behalf—He may have said that.
Zelikow
Well, then tell us—
Gray
He may have said, and of course, again Cicconi was doing mischief here, doing things side bar for Jordan who was his once and future partner. I can remember once, we had these long negotiations down in Justice, and a bunch of us and a bunch of them—and Ralph Neas was on the other side and we were over here at Justice and at one point I just happened to notice a glance from Ralph Neas. And I sort of triangulated and it had to be Cicconi. This sort of nod. So I said, I think it was Fred Nelson, [whispering] I said “Go out and see if the two of them are talking. I think they just made a signal to go to the men’s room together. They both got up and walked out about the same time after this sort of glance that I just caught out the side of my eye.” Sure enough Fred Nelson came back and said [whispering] “They’re whispering in the men’s room.” Cicconi is telling this guy Ralph what our negotiating position is. So Coleman, Coleman, Coleman is at the center of this. We never deputized him.
Zelikow
Who was the point person for the administration?
Gray
I was, and Thornburgh.
Zelikow
Why?
Gray
Because the President wanted me. I told you, as I said earlier. I kept trying to get out of this and he kept yanking me back in.
Zelikow
Because there was an assistant attorney general for civil rights in there.
Gray
Right, I’ve forgotten what his name is now. The President didn’t—I don’t think the President trusted him.
Zelikow
Apparently so—
Gray
He was from New York. What was his name?
Zelikow: Dunne, perhaps?
Gray
John Dunne, yes. John Dunne, if he had been left to do this, he would have caved on everything.
Zelikow
So the President made you the point person for handling the administration’s part of the negotiations of the most important civil rights legislation of his Presidency?
Gray
No, the ADA was more important. And I was not the point man for that. But anyway, go ahead. If you want to flatter me by saying I was the point man—
Zelikow
Certainly—
Gray
It was an important piece—
Zelikow
It was an important piece of legislation. Coleman tells the press that basically—Coleman tries to portray to the press a story in which President Bush is personally committed to writing a bill that will overthrow Wards Cove.
Gray
As Dick Thornburgh was fond of saying, “Those guys were always reaching into their bag of tricks.” You ought to get Thornburgh on this. Or get Joe Biden on the subject of these people. It’s bipartisan. The bag of tricks is endless, bottomless.
Zelikow
The question directly is, was President Bush committed in principle, and did he tell people that he agreed with the goal of writing legislation that would overturn Wards Cove?
Gray
I don’t think so. His public statement, which he interlineated himself—he put in the word “quotas” himself, for talking points in the Rose Garden, an important speech during the course of this. He said, “I will not sign a quota bill.” That wasn’t language I wrote for him or any other speechwriter wrote. He interposed, verbally, himself, on the spot, spontaneously in the Rose Garden, in front of a lot of black leaders including Bill Coleman. You can get into whether Wards Cove is not a quota bill. Of course, Coleman used to come and say stop using the word quotas because he knew—it was all semantic games with him. The guy is a master. I mean, he wrote the brief in Brown versus Board of Education. The guy is brilliant.
Zelikow
Coleman?
Gray
Yes, and if you don’t use the word quota in it, it is not a quota. If you don’t get it, you don’t get it. I mean, it’s—overrule Wards Cove—It all depends on what you mean by the word “is” is. It all depends on what the word overrule is. All depends on what Wards Cove is. It all depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is. I mean, boy, Coleman can get you so tied up in semantics you won’t know what in hell, or where in the hell you started.
Zelikow
I’m trying to figure out if the President got himself caught in that knot, because the press then portrays the President as caught in an ambivalent or even contradictory position in which, on the one hand, he has committed himself in principle to overturning this decision, on the other hand he said he is opposed to any quotas bill, and yet a lot of people in this issue, yourself included, say that any true overturning of Wards Cove would necessarily be a quota bill.
Gray
It all depends—
Zelikow
But if you return to Griggs v. Duke Power, you’re returning to a quota system.
Gray
If you return to Griggs, right.
Zelikow
And that was, of course, what Coleman was trying to negotiate.
Gray
No, Coleman—This is all in my law review article. What Coleman wanted was a lot more than simply restoration of Griggs.
Zelikow
I may have underestimated his ambitions.
Gray
Oh, God, no, no, no. I told you what Coleman wanted. He said, “I want a generation of quotas.” He told me what he wanted. So, I trusted him. What the bill would have done would have codified—This is all in my article. What Coleman wanted, what the civil rights groups wanted, what the Inc Fund wanted, was a codification of the EEOC guidelines. That’s what they wanted. And that is a much further step than simply restoring Griggs, or reversing Wards Cove or anything else. It is much different and much worse and much more terrifying if you’re worried about group riots and dividing America, et cetera. He wanted to codify the EEOC guidelines. In my article I set out theories as to why anyone would want to do that. I think the business community was getting more and more restive about it. It was coming out. You couldn’t even ask for a diploma and, you know, the education gap was growing with the information technology and all, and I think he felt that he was going to have to get in there and lock this thing in before the Supreme Court does another iteration of Wards Cove and waters it down even further and we are going to lose these EEOC guidelines altogether. So that’s what I think. But read my article and then if you want to, call me up and ask me questions. I can do that, but I think you have to read the article.
Zelikow
But mostly, you see, what I’m getting at is trying to get at where President Bush was and what President Bush understood. Because, as I say, there is a portrait in the press and the purpose of these sessions is in part to get the record straight.
Gray
Of course, remember John Cochran portraying me as lying to President Bush. Great thing to do. Everyone revered President Bush. Everyone knew that he was a fair man. If they could paint me as the demon and him in favor of quotas, then we’d be all set. All I’m saying is that President Bush didn’t like quotas. He didn’t like quotas and he kept dragging me into this and he kept making me the point man. And that was done for a purpose. And he didn’t hesitate on vetoing that bill the first time. I was terrified because I didn’t know where the political side was. It wasn’t until months later that Mary Matalin said, “You know, that didn’t hurt us in the black community. We had a higher percentage of the black vote in the ’90 by-elections than we’ve ever had before.” She said, “What you did was absolutely right, from our vantage point, from the party’s vantage point.”
Zelikow
Vetoing Kennedy-Hawkins?
Gray
Yes, vetoing the first version.
Zelikow
And you of course advised the President to veto Kennedy-Hawkins.
Gray
Of course I did. I didn’t have the benefit of the politics. Now he may have, but I didn’t.
Zelikow
So you made that—so you advised him to veto Kennedy-Hawkins, even through you were handling a lot of the negotiations on that for the administration without a clear read of what votes you had on the Hill.
Gray
Oh, I knew what votes I had on the Hill.
Zelikow
You knew you had—
Gray
I didn’t know where the public—the polling was.
Zelikow
Right, but did you know you had the votes to sustain the veto?
Gray
Yes, because there had been a test vote a week or two earlier. I remember I was at Russell Train’s house for dinner and my staff called me to tell me that we had won this test vote by one vote, and I remember just almost knocking the table over. That was a surprise. I mean, I didn’t think we were necessarily going to lose it, but boy—so we knew, we knew when we went into the final vote that we were going to win because we had this test vote a week earlier or something. I don’t remember when it happened.
Zelikow
That’s a pretty high order calculation, because the margin is so close. If you felt that you reliably counted to that level of precision, that speaks well for Fred McClure. Of course, you had a test vote.
Gray
I mean, we had a test vote. Look, you have to be really idiotic not to know where your votes are on something of this magnitude. And we knew we didn’t have the votes a year later. That was a much different picture. Once Kennedy had caved and gave us what we claimed we needed on the quota side, not on the damage side, on the quota side, having one-half of what we were asking for, and the thing that really was important for us. At that point, we couldn’t hold on any longer and President Bush said, “Yes, I know. We didn’t get everything, but we got what we needed,” and so it was go.
Zelikow
Now Danforth, from the press accounts, is not as big a player in the Kennedy-Hawkins—
Gray
Remember, he wants me to write that article. He orders me to write that article—
Zelikow
Bush orders you?
Gray
Bush orders me to write the article.
Zelikow
Tell me about the role of Danforth in the ’91 bill and how that changes the dynamics—
Gray
He made life very, very difficult for us. He was not helpful. He was hurtful and it always struck me as something of an intellectual disconnect, because as he is fighting us on this bill, he is promoting Clarence Thomas whose views were totally anathema to his on this bill. You go figure. I mean, I can’t figure that out.
Zelikow
Well, the press reading of this was that this is easy to explain, that Danforth had basically fought like the dickens for Clarence Thomas and this is a way, in fact, of reassuring his colleagues and his constituents of a symbolic position on civil rights; even though the substance might not have been substance Clarence Thomas would have approved. Danforth felt the need to balance what he’d done for Thomas with his movement on—That’s the press portrait.
Gray
I understand the press portrait, but I’m just saying it is intellectually incoherent. I mean, politicians do it all the time. You know, on the one hand, on the other—be on both sides. God, Clinton is a master of it. He is always on both sides of everything. Might have approved the Gulf War. Might not have approved the Gulf War. It just depends. It all depends. It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is. Politicians are frequently on both sides and Danforth was on both sides. But I admire Danforth and the damage he did to us on the civil rights bill in terms of the process and everything else just paled by comparison to the good he did us, if you will, in getting Thomas confirmed. So I have no quarrel with John Danforth at all. I’ll take that trade any day.
Zelikow
What about the—by ’91, by late ’91, the fight over the civil rights bill is a really big-profile public issue for an administration contemplating a reelection campaign. So tell me about the politics behind you in the White House as the negotiations on this bill are reaching their height. Do you feel like you’ve got the allies in the White House?
Gray
Well, I had what Mary Matalin told me earlier. She said this is a real plus for us. It is not a negative.
Zelikow
So you did not feel pressure from the White House to cut a deal.
Gray
No.
Zelikow
You’re really then getting everything you can with White House backing based purely on the vote counting you can do on the Hill.
Gray
Yes, I’m getting as much as I can to avoid a veto override.
Zelikow
Were you ever tempted to try—
Gray
And we got it. When Kennedy came in, you know, and the argument against me from my staff was—and then from Gordon Crovitz who was very bitter at me because he had been an editorial writer supporting us for the Wall Street Journal, he said, “You know, those caps are going to get lifted.” That was the argument. The caps are going to get lifted. Well, the caps have never been lifted. They haven’t been adjusted for inflation. So—but I hadn’t followed just what those caps have meant for the damage side. I can say this: that the introduction of litigation into this field has been very damaging as was predictable. We were right to try to keep the tortification of employment law out, to keep the trial bar out, the trial lawyers out, and we didn’t succeed. We just didn’t get it. That was something the business community should have fought more for on their own, but they were kind of chicken. They were hiding behind us and that was just more than we could get. It was a mistake and it has not been good. But there it is. We got the best deal we could.
Zelikow
That’s all I have on the civil rights bill. Unless anybody has anything else, I’m ready to move to another subject.
Young
Please do.
Zelikow
Let’s talk for a moment about the [Communications Workers of America v.] Beck decision and use of union dues to support political candidates. You get the decision in ’89, and there is an issue within the administration over whether or not the Justice Department should energetically enforce Beck. Tell me, where did you stand on this?
Gray
I don’t begin to have any consciousness of this until ’90 or ’91. I don’t remember when I first began to be aware of it but we didn’t really start to do something about it in a concentrated way until ’91, ’92. God, it was a long time coming. We couldn’t get the Department of Labor to do it right. We couldn’t get the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board]. The NLRB played rope-a-dope with us. It is the most impossible agency to deal with. They’ve done all of their—
Zelikow
NLRB or Labor?
Gray
Both are hard, but NLRB even worse because they’re independent. Who are they anyway? And they had done most of their rule writing by case, by case-by-case. Very rarely engaged in rulemaking. I remember one very important case involving the NLRB, which I had written a draft opinion on for Justice Warren—for Justice Warren when I was a law clerk, and they changed their opinion in oral argument. They were writing rules basically. What a way to operate. They were writing rules on oral arguments to the Supreme Court. How about that? I had to sit there and pore through the transcript to figure out how to write the opinion, which is really bizarre. What they said in oral argument bore no resemblance to what they said in briefs, bore no resemblance in turn to what the rulemaking record said. But they operated on a case-by-case basis. What we wanted them to do was to issue a rule. Well, that’s like pushing a wet noodle. A case will come to them and you can force them to decide that in a certain way maybe, but to get them to affirmatively propose a rule, boy, where is the leverage to do that? At one point we even thought of appointing Charlton Heston to the NLRB to get things jump-started. And he was willing. He was willing to do it. I think Baker vetoed it. That was fairly late in the game. But it was a cute idea. He was going to do it. It was impossible. I can’t remember how many meetings in my office. It was just, just infuriating, frustrating. Of course, Lynn Martin did ultimately cooperate, and we did an Executive order and they issued a couple of rules. It wasn’t totally satisfactory, because without the NLRB you can’t have all the pieces in place.
Zelikow
You’re talking about the Executive order in 1992.
Gray
Yes.
Zelikow
Was pressure from the right on the campaign trail, the Buchanan or Perot insurgencies a factor?
Gray
No.
Zelikow
In the issuance of the Executive order?
Gray
No, no, I don’t think so. This is something that I very much desperately wanted to do myself, especially given what I’ve told you, and what I know about all the fund raising stuff. I was the—Greg Walden and I were the basic authors of the President’s campaign finance reform bill. I don’t know if you know that he had a bill, but there were so many people on the Hill, you know, like the then heads of the senatorial committees and what not who just—they controlled this money so they don’t want reform. There were a lot of Republicans who didn’t want to see it, and the media of course didn’t want to see Bush as being a reformer so they didn’t print it. The fact that Bush had a bill therefore didn’t—you don’t get it, you don’t get it. The Washington Post refused to acknowledge that Bush had a bill and there were Republicans who were trying to suppress it, so no one ever knew we had a bill. But I had a long history with all this and I desperately wanted to see Beck done, and Phil Graham would noodle me from time to time. He is a friend, a personal friend. He would noodle me and he would say, “Boyden, this is very important,” but the only pressure—the only one that ever talked to me was Phil Graham, and I don’t remember. Of course, I don’t know Perot, never met him. And I don’t think this had anything to do with Pat Buchanan.
The fact of the matter is that the amount of money they spend runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars and—
Zelikow
When you say, “they spend”—
Gray
The unions spend—and Bush—I tried to advise the campaign how to handle this McCain thing, the Bush people, but they won’t do it and if they don’t do it it’s their problem. But McCain doesn’t fix Beck. I remember having Governor—Senator [David] Boren come over. I was flattered. He came all the way up to my office, sat in my office. Didn’t ask me to come down to visit. He came up to my office and said, “I’m here to cut a deal with you on campaign finance reform.” I said, “God, I can’t believe it. I mean, I’m so flattered, you should come up here.” He said, “Well, no, no, you proposed a very good bill. We can accept every piece but one.” I said, “What’s the one?” He said, “It’s a deal breaker.” I said, “Well, tell me what it is.” He said, “Well, it’s Beck. You can’t put Beck enforcement in here. We can’t enforce Beck. It’s a deal breaker.” I said, “But it’s constitutional law, for Christ’s sweet sake. It’s a Supreme Court decision.” “Sorry, Boyden, deal breaker. You take Beck out. We’ve got a bill.” I said, “I can’t take Beck out.” He said, “We don’t have a bill.”
Zelikow
Now you’re talking about McCain—McCain doesn’t have Beck enforcement in it, but it doesn’t try to overrule or contain Beck, does it?
Gray
No, but Beck without enforcement is no Beck. If you don’t get it, you don’t get it. If you don’t enforce it, it doesn’t exist. Imagine Republicans defying a ruling like that. I mean a ruling that was contrary to their interest. People yelling, you know, constitutional crisis.
Zelikow
In theory, a Republican President can enforce Beck and here you had a Republican President, President Bush, who in 1992 actually issued an Executive order trying to get this going.
Gray
Right, I’m just telling you how difficult it is when the key piece is the NLRB. What is the NLRB? What is it? When you get into these multihead agencies, very hard to move things. I mean the SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] is the same way. The FCC is the same way. These multiheaded independent agencies are constitutionally an anomaly. I think they’re unconstitutional. I think the notion of an independent agency, Humphrey’s Executor [v. U.S.], has been washed out by the ruling in Morrison v. Olson, the independent counsel case where basically the court said there is no independence anymore. You can knock out the rationale of Humphrey’s Executor. I think the President could today fire every member of the FCC or the SEC or whatever, if the independent agency didn’t follow—but there is still this law out there that these independent agencies exist and they are constitutional orphans. They don’t have any anchor in reality. [John] Dingell used to say to Richard Breeden when he was making his tour, he would always refer to the SEC as my agency. They are independent only of the White House. They are dependent on the Congress. And that is unconstitutional. Congress is not supposed to execute the law. That is an executive function. Anyway, that’s a long story. That’s another story.
Zelikow
A good story, though.
Gray
A good story. But the Beck thing was part and parcel again, if you will, of the President’s desire—you could also say it relates to his desire about Presidential authority, but we just had a hell of a time with the NLRB. Couldn’t push them. That’s why we were trying to get Charlton Heston, name him to the board, fire somebody, get somebody off, get somebody on to do what we wanted. Then of course the first thing, the very first Executive order Clinton rips up is the Beck order. Anyway, it’s a fascinating issue.
Zelikow
And it’s still hanging around.
Gray
It’s still hanging around.
Zelikow
The Beck decision is still there.
Gray
I told the Bush people they ought to nail McCain and say, “Are you for school reform or not? You say you’re for vouchers, but unless you eliminate the ability of the teachers’ unions to outspend their opponents the way they do, it will never happen,” which is in fact what happens.
Zelikow
In other words, Beck enforcement as a lever into the education issue.
Gray
I mean, the people who started the voucher initiative in California unsuccessfully got beaten by the teaching unions. And they’re the same people who did the paycheck protection, same people, at Indianapolis. Most people don’t know that. Most people don’t make that connection. The Bush people don’t seem to have the brains to make the connection that Beck and school vouchers are the same issue, the same issue. School reform, that’s civil rights. All these things tie together. They all do tie together and not surprisingly because the teaching unions don’t want competition from the parents. They don’t want competition from employers. They don’t want to be held accountable. And if you have a situation where employers are hiring people from one school rather than the other school because one school produces better kids than the other school, boy, that’s a judgment on the teachers. And that’s the last thing they want, any judgment rendered. They don’t want it. They want tenure. They want to be home free. Just like you are when you get tenure. You want to be home free. No more grades. Sorry, but—we’re making headway.
We’ve got the Washington Scholarship Fund in Washington. We’ve got kids on private scholarship. We’ve got a bourgeoning Charter School movement. We’re going to get there. John McCain’s not helping any, though.
Zelikow
Getting back to the issue of the NLRB.
Gray
We’ll make it. We’ll make it. Believe me, we’ll make it.
Zelikow
Of the NLRB. It seems like a good transition to broader issues of appointments, which brings us a little back to some of the things you were talking about yesterday.
Gray
I’m headmaster. I’m head of a private boarding school, head of the board, had my term up, thank God, after thirty years on the board. St. Mark’s. It is the most—this world of private education is the most competitive damn thing in the world. They scratch for every damn student. And that’s why—I’m on the board of NCS [National Cathedral School], where my daughter goes. They scratch for every teacher, every student. I’m telling you it is so competitive, and you lay that against the public school system, which is totally brain dead. God, just take a tenth of the competition that you see in these private schools, and inject it in the public schools. Boy, this country would explode. God, just take one-tenth the energy. I’m sorry, but I’m supposed to be teaching you, right? This is my soapbox, right?
Zelikow
Absolutely, and in fact, just to give you a chance to preach further, if you have a mind to, and you may have missed a calling here a few years back, but you are in the press and reported as really trying to recast the whole civil rights issue as an issue of education reform, crime. In other words, reframe what the civil rights issue is all about, and, having made a conceptual effort in the Bush administration to do that—using terms like empowerment and so on. You alluded to some of this yesterday.
Gray
Well, I think, this is—I’m not having—I remember having a lunch, go ahead—
Zelikow
I said what I meant to say.
Gray
I was not discouraged—whereas the President kind of looked at me funny on the Clean Air Act. Well, Sununu looked at me funny. I was not discouraged. I was dragged into this thing. I remember Mrs. Bush. What’s her big thing? Literacy.
Gray
She knows how the public school system has disserved children. I had lunch with them once, and boy, she was outspoken. She stunned me with her awareness and knowledge of what was going on and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she wasn’t doing a little pillow talk with him on this subject. She knew as much as he knew. I was stunned with how much she knew. This was not something—I was pushed, I was dragged into this, and—not dragged into the civil rights bill. The other education issues, Beck and vouchers and things like that, but they all relate. They all have to do, if you will, with empowerment. They all have to do with real opportunity and I think we’re making headway.
To say that civil rights, you have to recast as an education issue, come on. What is the first great case? Brown v. Board of Education. Where are all the great desegregation decisions? They have to do with desegregating education. Griggs is an education case. It has to do with what education requirements can be applied against entry-level employees. All of the key stuff involved education. So why is it such a radical revolution to try to cast it as education? Because that is where it all started, and that is where it still should be. That’s where it is.
Zelikow
Well, let me, then, bring you back to issues of appointments and ask about your relationship with Chase Untermeyer. You’re clearly involved in the employment process for judges. We understand that. You are also clearly involved in the employment process for a number of other senior federal officials because of your role in assessing FBI reports and the results of field investigations. It seems that you were one of the people whom Chase Untermeyer and others working personnel issues would have to interact with constantly because of the role you had to play on a lot of these appointments and I’m wondering then whether in that role you had had opinions about people, about the kinds of philosophies people had and what philosophies the administration wanted to espouse, because you’d have a lot of information about these people and their backgrounds that might give you some insight as to what really made them tick. So I’d be grateful for some broader insight into your role in the employments process beyond simply the narrow role of legal vetting. Did this person—Because you are exercising a lot of judgment on people. Not just is this person scandal-ridden, but you know more about the backgrounds of these people often than Chase Untermeyer did.
Gray
I’m not sure I know what your question is. I mean—
Zelikow
How did you—
Gray
I got my assistant and him married. How about that? Chase and Diana, best thing that ever happened. And then Lee Lieberman ended up marrying Bill Otis, who had been seconded to us from the Eastern District to help on Iran-Contra, and they fell in love defending against [Lawrence] Walsh. So I was a hotbed of marriage.
Karaagac
Matchmaker.
Gray
I was the matchmaker.
Zelikow
Romance was in the air of the White House counsel’s office.
Gray
Romance. I made a couple of great marriages.
Karaagac
You didn’t have anything to do with [Janet] Mullins and Mitchell though?
Gray
No. I didn’t. They didn’t get married either. I had responsibility, obviously—
Zelikow
But what—appointments—beyond the legal requirement you described yesterday.
Gray
In the transition, of course I had—because of the legal stuff—I had a lot to say with Thornburgh about the staffing of the Department of Justice, not conclusive say, but a lot to say. I was also consulted on all of the regulatory jobs, key regulatory jobs during the transition because of my regulatory—and also with the general counsel of the department. So regulatory and legal, in the transition, a lot to say. After that, there was really no more involvement. I mean, no more systematic involvement. I remember Untermeyer coming to me nine months into the administration or whatever it was and saying, “You need to get a read on this guy [David] Kessler for the FDA. He’s coming off of Hatch’s staff and we need to know about him.” and I said, “God, let me see what I can do.” I didn’t have time. Too busy to find out about Kessler, so I called Chris DeMuth who is head of the AEI [American Enterprise Institute], had been the OIRA head and the deregulator during the Reagan years, and I said, “Chris, can you run some stuff on this guy Kessler for the FDA and let me know. I just don’t have time. I’m just too busy.” He said, “Sure.” He got back to me and said, “Guy is great, terrific. Go with him.” So I went with him. Huge mistake. And I always nail Chris and he laughs. So I made a mistake, but I got the best advice I could get. And I was not consulted on appointment side as opposed to the ethic side much after the transition was over, except in the case of Kessler, which I remember.
Zelikow
But surely a lot of people would have been lobbying you from the conservative side, worried that people who were going into the jobs did not really share the convictions that they thought the President had on issues like education and civil rights and so forth. You’ve already mentioned a broader role with respect to appointments in the Justice Department. I was wondering for instance whether you’d devoted similar attention to appointments to, say, the FCC or the Education Department.
Gray
Well, the FCC, I was disqualified from, so I wouldn’t have had anything to do with it.
Zelikow
Why, because of Summit Communication?
Gray
But the FTC [Federal Trade Commission], in the beginning, in transition, I think I did. Later, no. I don’t recall.
Zelikow
Education?
Gray
No.
Zelikow
Like the Office of Civil Rights in the education department?
Gray
No. I just didn’t do much except for Kessler. One anecdote I remember—I forgot what I wanted to say about the personnel process and now I can’t remember what it was. Maybe it will get back to me. But Chase and I got along. It was not easy in the beginning because I was his bottleneck. I was this huge bottleneck and it partly was the transition team’s fault, as I explained because they hadn’t given me many names to start in November and—very, very difficult. He used to come in, I used—Diana Untermeyer, Diana—forget what her maiden name was—as a buffer. Every now and then he’d see me in the men’s room, “That Deanna of yours is really making life difficult for me,” he was fuming about something “Deanna” had done, but they ended up falling in love and getting married.
Young
I was going to say we have about twenty minutes left for some overview—
Gray
One quick anecdote to tell you the difficulty—the ethics. I don’t know why I thought of this and the difficulty of it all. I’m in the transition office, it’s January, December or January, before he’s sworn in and I get this call from the President and he says, “Boyden, I got a problem here and you’re going to have to solve it.” I said, “What’s the problem?” He said, “Well, we’re trying—I want to announce a package, a bunch of people including Carla Hills, at two o’clock in room 450. Carla tells me they haven’t worked out a conflict of interest problem involving Rod, her husband, and I want it solved because she is going to be on the stage at two o’clock, Boyden, so please solve it for me. Thank you very much.” Down with the phone.
So I called Carla and I say, “Carla, what’s the problem?” She says, “Well, we finally wrestled with this. My husband Rod, the first board he was ever on—” and he was a federal mogul or something—“they do steel imports and we just can’t get around it and it’s too big a part of my job and he’s going to have to get off the board, but—” I said, “Why is that a problem?” She said, “Because he’s on an airplane and I’m not going to surprise him with it, it’s his board, I’m not going to tell him he’s off without getting his permission, obviously, he’s on a plane.” I said, “What’s the problem with that?” “Well, it doesn’t land until 3:20.” I said, “That is a problem.” She said, “No, it’s not my problem. It’s your problem. I’m not going on that stage unless I have Rod’s approval, and if I can’t talk to him until 3:30, I guess I can’t go on the stage until 3:30.” I said, “That’s a problem.” She said, “Yes that is Boyden. It’s your problem though. Goodbye.” Slam—
So, what do I do? The President is going to announce her at two. She won’t go on the stage at two. What do I do? Well, we broke the rules and we actually got the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] to agree to call him up to the cockpit and I talked to him from the cockpit to get his approval to get off the board. And about 1:30 I finally make contact with him and I was finally able to call her about ten minutes of two and say, “I got him in the cockpit.” She roared with laughter and said, “Okay, I’m going in.” Anyway, that was one of the high points of high drama. You’re not impressed with that story.
Zelikow
I certainly have never been able to place my phone calls with that skill—
Gray
Well, I think it violated every known rule in the book but the President, after all, is the President, so he can waive the rules for himself.
Young
We are committed to letting you out of here pretty soon, and Tarek, why don’t you open up the overview?
Masoud
I’m going to ask this kind of ineloquently and I hope at the end of my rambling sentence, you’ll kind of get what I want us to get into, but I guess we’re interested in how you think this administration should be viewed in history. Your impressions of the administration, its greatest successes and its biggest disappointments. That’s it. What do you think?
Gray
I think obviously the Gulf War. Presidents sort of get typecast for one or two things that they’ve done and obviously the Gulf War and the complex events surrounding the collapse of the wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, that’s probably what he is going to be remembered for and his management of all that, which was terrific. So that clearly, and that won’t be muddied by a lot of competing interests where there are continuing interests. Some domestic policy history in effect is not just the history of the past, it helps define the future, the way it is written in the present, and so that is why it’s fought over so hard. Why it’s so difficult to get set, because some people like free trade and some people don’t. Some people like deregulation and some people don’t. Some people like quotas, some people don’t. So there is constant tension over that and it takes a much, much longer time for that to sort itself out when you have so many political forces.
But the three things that he—maybe four things that he did—the Gulf War, Soviet Union, Berlin and then the whole free trade thing that [Lawrence] Eagleburger talked about, the whole fostering of free markets and free trade, export of American values, both economic and political abroad. I think those are the things, and they’re all tied up with the collapse of the wall. There was a great debate at a summit that Scowcroft put together. Bush called it the “has-been summit” out in Colorado Springs. You probably remember, and they had a big debate, everybody there, Gorbachev and Maggie Thatcher, [François] Mitterrand was still alive and still alert, although very frail, and [Brian] Mulroney. Everybody but [Helmut] Kohl was there. And the big debate as to why the Berlin wall fell and why the Soviet Union collapsed and Maggie said, “Oh, it’s the SDI [Strategic Defense Initiative],” but Gorbachev said, “No, we could handle that. It was the damn fax machine. It was the damn fax machine.” And then the most interesting comment was Mitterrand. He said the wall fell because of consumer advertising in East Germany. These people saw all these good things sold and said, “God, why can’t we get it?” and in a sense, that’s a shorthand way of saying, it was the market forces, the forces of economic freedom that collapsed all of this.
So I think they’re all related and that’s what I think Bush will be remembered for and what the administration will be remembered for. I think on the domestic side it’s much cloudier because these things are still being fought over, but I would hope—even though I can’t predict it—I would certainly hope that people would understand his domestic policy in terms of the market, empowerment, individual deregulatory local initiative, thousand points of light, charity, all those things—private charity, all those things. I hope that’s what will come through. They are, in fact, very old-fashioned values, but he was an old-fashioned man. In that sense, it’s sort of an old-fashioned family. I hope that is what will come through after a hundred years have passed.
Young
I doubt if it will take a hundred years. Among the things that will be talked about more, I think, and in far less than a hundred years, will be how this President performed in a situation that was adverse to him in many ways on what we call domestic policy.
Gray
Just let me add, in case I didn’t do it yesterday, the ethics stuff. It is first do no harm. It is not screwing up and that is not easy. One of the great things that the Carter administration, I mean the Clinton administration did. [Robert] Rubin didn’t screw up the economy. That is, he didn’t do things and keeping your hand out of the till is harder than you think. Anyway. First, do no harm. Do no harm. I’m sorry, I interrupted—How did he deal—I thought he dealt well given the iron—What is it called? The velvet hammer of Mitchell—Mitchell’s leadership was just relentless, just relentless. I mean, he is the finest opposition leader that I’ve ever watched and given how good he was, I think what President Bush got with the hostile Congress was nothing short of amazing.
Young
Well, this is the point I was going to mention, though a lot that was reported at the time looked like failures or defeats, when the press stories finally leave the scene and you look at this President as not only a traditional President but one who dealt with an opposition Congress, and you evaluate how that relationship was managed and what it produced in terms of legislation and starts on things that had a long-term effect that did not benefit him for reelection, I think that is going to figure far larger in the literature than any revision of the Presidency. Another question will be about the loss of the election and that, too, is—
Gray
Well, there are a lot of factors there, the principal one being a lot of “but fors,” which I’ve alluded to all along, from my vantage point, but the fact that the economy—one little anecdote. The third quarter gross figures came out in early October and they were 2.8 and the press jumped on it, as I recall, saying, “See, they’re falsifying the data. Two point eight? It couldn’t have been as high as 2.8.” Actually, it was later revised up to 3.7, but the press just totally jumped all over that. “No, no, no, of course, we’re in a recession. What is this?” And the negative press, all throughout this period was very, very damaging. But there was a kernel of truth in it. The unemployment rate was very high, very sick. It was one of the last things to come down and so that—it was triggered in a sense by the S&L cleanup and I’ve talked about that. So that was the stage. It was very hard to win when you have that kind of negative sense out there about the economy, even though the economy is booming at the time he is thrown out of office. The gross rate in the fourth quarter was four point something. That wasn’t the perception. So that’s the first thing.
The second thing, Atwater not being there to help deal with this. Third thing was the period between the Gulf War and the—we talked about this—State of the Union. Darman just saying it’s a black hole. You can’t fill it, and he throws up on the Japanese Prime Minister. What a dismal, dismal period that was.
And the fourth thing, the straw that broke the camel’s back was the reindictment of Weinberger. I think Bush still could have done it. Mary Matalin thinks he still could have done it. I think Bush internally still thinks he would have done it but for that, just an explosion of bad negative news in the last four days triggered by Walsh’s reindictment. So those are among the—and the fact that he had the thyroid thing and the medication. They were trying to calibrate it. He was a little slow off the dime, a little sluggish during much of 1992 until they got it right. That was a harm. And again, this reluctance—nervousness about putting his family through all this. I think that was as much a reflection of the thyroid, and just not feeling the energy in the beginning. That all entered into it.
Masoud
Earlier you mentioned that one of the problems was also the President not getting out there and not getting his message out. You had ascribed that to a number of reasons, one of which included his personality and not wanting to brag—
Gray
“Stop talking about yourself, George.”
Masoud
Can you really have the kind of political career that George Bush had and have a hang up about talking about yourself?
Gray
Yes. Yes.
Karaagac
Did Prescott have a hang up about not talking about himself?
Gray
I don’t know. You mean his father?
Karaagac
Yes.
Gray
I don’t know. His influence was his mother. There is one great story. I was down in Florida and I ran into [William] Bucky Bush and his mother was then still alive. She was in a wheelchair but still alive and she said “Hello.” She couldn’t have been more gracious, that woman. She was amazing. And Bucky said, “You know, everyone called Mom on Christmas Day, including the President,” he said, “but the call came in from the White House switchboard from Camp David and Mom got: ‘Mrs. Bush, the President is on the line. Hold for the President.’ And then Bush got on, and her first words were, “George, can’t you dial this phone yourself?” Or something like that. “Can’t you make the call yourself?” But anyway, that’s the way she was. She would not defer to any pomposity and that is the way the President was. That’s just an old-fashioned thing, a lot of influence of his mother. I understand this because it’s sort of the way I was brought up. It’s a very old-fashioned, maybe kind of WASPy thing. You just don’t boast. But Reagan had a sign on his table—don’t forget it—on his desk, “No telling how far a man can get if he doesn’t care who takes the credit.”
So Bush and Reagan shared this in a sense. The difference was that Bush was not gifted with soaring oratory the way Reagan was and he was especially crippled when he didn’t have a speechwriting staff that could help him articulate some of this. In the Reagan years the speechwriters were right there, making more policy than the domestic policy staff was. They were in there cooking things up with the President. And, as I said earlier, Darman just did not want that to happen in the Bush years. He did not want to lose control over what was going on. So Bush was deprived. He let himself be. It’s his fault, I guess. I mean, he’s the President. He let himself be deprived of the very staff he had hired to begin with. Imagine being told he had to fire Clark Judge and Josh Gilder and Peter Robinson, the very people he had hired four years earlier and then given to Reagan, who used them to great advantage.
Masoud
Would anything have been different had the administration been reelected, had Bush been reelected?
Gray
What do you mean, would anything have been different?
Masoud
Would things have changed in the way the administration handled itself?
Gray
Well, I think Baker would have had an overpowering role. I think that would have been a big change. Baker would have ended up being the economic czar, which is what he said he would be. He made speeches about that. I think that would have happened.
Young
One of the puzzles—
Gray
The thing that I regret the most, of course, is that there are these two Supreme Court positions, not that I don’t like—in a sense, I helped both [Ruth Bader] Ginsburg—This is somewhat anecdotal, but when I was representing the Roundtable, we shut down—because we controlled the Judiciary Committee even though we were a minority because of this Illinois Brick stuff—and they shut down appellate judges. Some of the district court judges could get through because a Senator would say, “Strom, I want this,” and Strom couldn’t say no, but the appellate judge was shut down, basically. Well, they wanted to get some—Democrats wanted to get one individual through and they said, “Well, how do we do this? How do we get through this Republican hold?” Well, you have to get to the Business Roundtable. “How do we get that? We’ve got to get Boyden Gray.” So I was asked to have lunch with this candidate, to vet the candidate on all the issues that business cared about, you know antitrust regulation, securities. I said, “Terrific! Let it go. Damn! God, Republicans ought to be nominating people like this.”
For twelve years this judge sat on the DC circuit, and voted absolutely the way I would have hoped. You know who that is? Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And she and Thomas had the closest voting record. Of course when she gets to the Supreme Court she kind of goes off to the left, but I was, in a sense, responsible for both Ginsburg and Breyer, but I would have preferred to have our own people there, not those people. But anyway that’s a long story, so that is what I would rather.
Young
What about the way the Bush White House was run or not run, after Sununu departed. This is all speculative about a second term. You think Bush would have taken a different stance with some different people?
Gray
I just don’t know. I hadn’t really thought about what would have happened. I’ve blanked it all out because it didn’t happen. So I had not thought about it, partly because I’m not sure how long I would have stayed. I was telling people once I get the judicial selection thing in the right hands and set up, I’m out of here. I was exhausted. I was just exhausted.
Young
You think there were some ways in which he was ill served by his staff?
Gray
I’m quite convinced he was ill served, but there was a vacuum. Atwater was not there.
Young
Do you think the President would feel the same way?
Gray
I don’t know. I never discussed this with him. If he wants to talk to me about it, I’ll talk but I’m not going to say, “Hey, George, what do you think about, you know—”
Young
I didn’t mean it that way, but did the President show any signs of discomfiture or displeasure at the kind of service he was getting on the domestic side from his staff that would suggest—
Gray
Well, I said yesterday that I thought that he was demonstrating—because he’s so polite. He doesn’t throw things or curse. You can see those steely eyes glare at you and you know he’s really mad. He was clearly, in my view, discomfited by the debate preparation and he then said, “A pox on all your houses. I’m going to Camp David. The hell with all of you.” That was a rather dramatic demonstration of, you know, “this is not serving me” when he junks the whole set of debate preparations and blahdy, blah that had been scheduled for weeks.
Young
But those seem to have been fairly rare.
Gray
Yes. I think he was mad at Sununu on the tax stuff. He was livid. My recollection—I wasn’t in. This was a budget—It was not mine. But I remember him being so livid about that. I think that he felt he had been totally double-crossed. Now, he could have fixed it. He could have gone out of the room and said, “This is not my plan. My staff misled me,” or figured out some way to get out of it, but he was mouse trapped into that. He was mouse trapped. It was a typical Darman move. Typical—that is my assessment. Typical Darman move. He was mouse trapped and he just didn’t want to fire Darman. Say, “All right, you’re fired!”
I remember once on this question of the government shutdown—I’ll tell you this anecdote. The White House is a tough, tough, tough environment. Because in September of ’91 I had been focused on the Gulf War, the do-you-have-to-go-to-Congress thing.
Zelikow
September 1990.
Gray
I did not focus on this problem of —I don’t know if I have time to express it—I did not focus on this problem of the budget sequester versus shutdown. What Darman was telling people is that we were headed for a sequester, and therefore we had to have a budget deal. Now remember, Darman’s excuse in defense of the budget deal, the tax deal, the tax pledge was that we had this war coming up, except the tax cave-in came in June and Iraq didn’t invade until August. Hey, how did he know? How did Dick know they were going to invade? I mean, it just was not true that this was the reason. But getting after then, getting into September, Darman was threatening sequester as to why we had to have a budget deal, why we had to do certain things after the tax pledge had been broken.
The budget deal was still being negotiated as I recall, and he was threatening sequester, which is a 30 percent across-the-board cut. And a 30 percent cut in the military when you are building up the forces in the Persian Gulf is not just devastating, it is cataclysmic, and so everybody was being spooked. I didn’t focus on that until the end of September as we were getting sort of into the sphincter-tightening mode of what happens if the government shuts down and who sends notices out and it began to dawn on me that it couldn’t be. There wouldn’t be a sequester.
You can only sequester a budget, and if there is no budget, and you’re operating on continuing resolution or you’re operating and the government is shut down, you can’t sequester a shutdown. And, what’s operative in a government shutdown is not a sequester, but the rules relating to the Antideficiency Act and those rules, because of a memo in the Carter years, meant that for weeks if not months, you operate as though only nonessential personnel are cut. The military keeps militarying, the air traffic controllers keep controlling, and Social Security checks keep going out. The only people who don’t go to work are the people at the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institute, the potties on the Mall and nonessential people in the government, which is a lot of people.
I remember when the government shut down in the early times. I was ruled not essential in one of the Reagan shutdowns. That was the most devastating thing that ever happened to me. I was supposed to be a White House staffer and here I am, I am not essential. I didn’t leave my house for two days for fear that somebody would see me and say, “Hey, you’re not essential.” It was the most devastating thing.
When I was White House counsel, I could decide who was essential and who was not essential and believe me, I ruled myself essential. Anyway, I realized that government shutdown would come first and that wouldn’t hurt anything. So I remember saying to—and Darman, because he was locked into the sequester mode, couldn’t do the letters that told the agencies the government is shut down. Tell nonessential people to stay home. He couldn’t do those letters because for him there wouldn’t be a shutdown. There was only going to be a sequester. So I had to keep my staff up all one night, writing the letters to get them out at the last minute because the OMB people wouldn’t do it. Darman wouldn’t do it. And it was traditionally OMB’s job.
The next day, I remember going down to a wedding rehearsal. Maybe it was Chase Untermeyer’s, I can’t remember. Anyway, stopping off at Sununu’s office about five o’clock in the afternoon, Friday afternoon saying, “John, you know that if there’s a government shutdown, nothing bad happens. At least not literally. I mean politically maybe bad things happen, but literally, the most important things keep on cranking for as long as you want.” “Really? Does the President know?” I said, “John, I don’t know what the President knows. You never include me on any of these meetings.” So he said, “Better tell the President.”
I run back up to my office and of course, everything is shut down. The computers were all stopped. There is no secretary, no typewriters. We don’t have typewriters anymore. We have word processors. I don’t know where the disks are. I don’t know anything. I am in a total panic. Luckily, the President calls, “John tells me you’ve got something to tell me. You’d better come down.” Dick was coming over from the West Wing. Sununu was deliberately not in the office. He was in the White House, but he wasn’t—The President says, “Okay, what happens if I veto the CR [continuing resolution] tonight, at midnight, and we have a government shutdown? We wake up tomorrow and there is no government, right? What happens?”
Now, this is what lawyers have been trained for. This is what my job is all about. So, I take a deep breath and before I get to fill my lungs, Darman swoops in underneath and begins a brilliant five-minute disquisition on the Antideficiency Act of 18— Citing precedents all the way back to the War of 1812 and he’s got footnotes and quotes. I mean, he is absolutely brilliant. If you had taped it, you could have put it into the Harvard Law Review without editing a single word. But, you want to know something? The whole thing was made up. He made the whole thing up. Astonishing, utterly astonishing.
Now, that is when I should have said, “Darman, you are the biggest fucking liar I have ever encountered in my life. I’m out of here, Mr. President, I cannot stay in the same country with anybody as evil as this.” I should have gotten up and walked out. But I didn’t. I pulled it back and I said, “Well, it’s not quite this way. Not quite that way. Not quite this way and furthermore you’ll sustain the veto and da, da, da, da, da,” and by the end of another fifteen minutes I had Darman sort of walked back, all the way back. By this time Sununu had showed up. “We haven’t go the votes to sustain—” I said, “History shows you have the votes to sustain the veto,” which of course he did. But the shutdown only lasted to the morning and then they caved and—
Zelikow
Who caved?
Gray
Bush. I wasn’t included in any more meetings. Believe me. That was the last meeting I ever attended, because I was giving the message that they didn’t want to hear. Mosbacher was agitating, “God, stick it to them. Stick it to them. Don’t cave in. Shut the government down. Keep this going.” And, of course, as we know, if you’re good at it, like Clinton, you win. You win the shutdown fight. Congress loses. So why did Bush cave? Well, don’t ask me because I wasn’t there. I don’t know. Anyway, I just tell you that story. Another of the nine million stories in the naked city.
Young
That’s quite a story on which to end, but you do have to go and I want to thank you very much.
[END INTERVIEW]