Bruce Reed Oral History (02/2004)

February 19, 2004

Riley

I thought we'd begin by asking you a bit about your background before you got hooked in with then-Senator [Albert, Jr.] Gore. You're from Idaho.

Reed

I'm originally from Northern Idaho—the back woods. It's what we now call a "red state," the most Republican state in the country at the moment. But I grew up in a Democratic family. My mother was a political hack of sorts, and she pinned my diapers with [John F.] Kennedy buttons and had me knocking on doors and stuffing envelopes at an early age. So I got an awful lot of experience on how to lose campaigns. In those days we did have some Democrats, including Senator Frank Church, who was in the Senate for four terms. I spent some time working on his campaigns for him in Washington. My mother eventually became a state senator herself, after my sister and I left for college. She was eventually the minority leader in the Idaho State Senate, at a time when they had 31 Republicans and four Democrats.

I grew up in politics, but never really thought that I'd end up working on a winning campaign. It didn't seem like a sensible profession to go into.

Riley

You came to work for Church when you were in school?

Reed

I was an undergrad at Princeton majoring in English literature and took a semester off my sophomore year to intern in Church's Washington office. That was in 1980, the year he was defeated. I pledged to myself that I would never come back to Washington. I finished my degree at Princeton, went off to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship and got a masters in English. I was torn as to whether to become a writer or to pursue a foolish interest in politics. I tried to balance those: I wrote my thesis at Princeton on the political writings of George Orwell and Charles Dickens, and studied political literature as part of my time at Oxford.

Riley

Were you at Oxford for two or three years?

Reed

Two years at Oxford.

Jones

Which years?

Reed

1982-84.

Riley

Chuck was a don there for how long?

Jones

Just one year. I had a chair at Nuffield College in '98-'99.

Reed

That's wonderful. I was at Lincoln. I came back with a masters in English Literature. My wife was starting law school at New York University, and I was singularly unemployable. I tried to go to work for a news magazine, but it was in the midst of a journalistic recession. Finally, I succumbed to the temptation to look for a job in Washington and wrote to a handful of Democrats who looked like they were going somewhere, including Bill Bradley, Tim Wirth, and Al Gore. Al Gore was the only one to write back, so I came down to interview with him. I ended up becoming a speechwriter for him, starting in May of 1985.

I thought I'd do it for a short time. It seemed like a nice balance of writing and politics. At that point—it was his first year in the Senate, but he was already a rising star—I guess he must have been 37. He was being talked about as a possible Vice Presidential candidate. I didn't expect to stay in Washington very long. My wife was living in New York and commuting. But I got the bug and in 1987 decided that I wanted to try working on a Presidential campaign.

A good friend of mine, Ron Klain, to whom you may talk at some point, was working for Senator Joe Biden, who had declared his candidacy, and they were looking for a speechwriter. I interviewed with them and they offered me that job. I went to tell Senator Gore about it. I asked him if he was thinking about running. He said, "Well, as a matter of fact, I am," which put me in a surprisingly awkward position. So I had to put the Biden offer on hold and wait for a couple of weeks for Gore to make up his mind.

He ended up deciding to run, so I became the speechwriter on his campaign, and learned an enormous amount. He was the last candidate in the race. We got last dibs on all the talent. We didn't have a very good idea why we were doing it, so we had to learn a lot on the fly, but it was a tremendous learning experience. We were making all kinds of mistakes. He ended up doing better than expected. But along the way I became a total addict and couldn't wait until the next hit on the Presidential campaign narcotic.

Jones

Would you say a bit about what that means? What were the rewards for the addiction?

Reed

Working on a Presidential campaign is a miserable experience. It's hell for your family. The pay is terrible. The candidate is almost never happy. Campaigns are like poorly run small business start-ups with a whole bunch of people who don't know how to run a business.

Jones

Sounds swell so far. [laughter]

Reed

But it's the closest peacetime parallel to combat, to the intensity of war. There is nothing quite like being in the center of things. I can remember when I was writing speeches in the Senate on issues that didn't seem to matter. The most consequential thing we accomplished in the time I was in the Senate was to get the Senate on C-Span, which was a good thing. Helpful to history, but not an earth-shattering event. I'd go to work every day wondering, Is this what I should be doing? In a Presidential campaign, you never have to wonder whether it's worth it. It's such an intense experience that if you survive it, you're hooked for life.

So I came back from the war, told my wife I'd never do that to her again, and then looked around for the next opportunity to sign on to a campaign. I stayed with Gore for another year in the Senate—again, agonizing whether to get out of politics altogether and to try to start a new life as a journalist. I stumbled onto the Democratic Leadership Council. I'd gotten to know Al From and Will Marshall a bit in the '88 campaign because they'd sponsored some debates. Gore had been one of the great hopes in that campaign—

Riley

Bruce, can I stop and ask you a question before you move into that? There may be a question or two about Gore in the Senate. The writing you were doing for him was primarily for speeches? Or were you also doing—

Reed

I was the first speechwriter he'd ever had. I helped him develop his trademark wooden style. [laughter] I was, I guess, what you'd call his "idea guy" as well. My role was to try to find new things for him to speak about. He had a deep interest in being at the cutting edge. He'd made a name for himself as someone who could see around the bend. So I'd bring in thinkers to talk with him about issues. He was relatively unknown, so he wasn't going to [Thomas] Jefferson-[Andrew] Jackson Day dinners every weekend. But a lot of people were interested in him. He was a genuinely curious intellectual figure.

I came to the conclusion in the '88 campaign that the speeches would be a lot better if we came up with some ideas to put in them. We got into the campaign so late we hadn't had a chance to think through what he wanted to do as President. In the '80s there was a great fascination with "message." [Ronald] Reagan's success as a communicator—the Reagan White House bragged about how it could make a bigger impact if you turned down the sound and just watched the picture. Politics had become hollowed out in that period. People had forgotten that the heart of what we were trying to accomplish was actually to get some things done. So that the '88 campaign was, maybe, the nadir of issueless campaigning on both sides.

[George H. W.] Bush invented wedge issues like Willie Horton, and [Michael] Dukakis was so worried about falling into the traps that previous Democrats had fallen into that he didn't say anything about anything. One of the reasons I was attracted to the DLC [Democratic Leadership Council] was that the job was about policy, it wasn't just about speeches. I thought it would be a chance to do better the next time.

Riley

I want to ask you one more question about Gore before we move on to that. Do you know why he was so late getting into the campaign that year?

Reed

He was only 38 years old when he decided. One of the reasons he was able to get into that campaign is because a lot of the bigger names decided not to, including Sam Nunn, who ended up not running. So there was an opening for a southerner. Washington was looking for a fresh face. A lot of people talked him into it. He was on the cover of the Washington Monthly with the headline, "Is Al Gore Too Good to Be True?" There was a whole group of fundraisers—Impact, they were called—Nate Landow and 40 big fundraisers who were looking to crown a candidate. They fell in love with him.

He had always wanted to be President. He was raised to think that he was a failure if he didn't become President. He saw an opening. I think, in some ways, it seemed like a low-risk proposition. There was one Clinton note about that period. The first time I can remember thinking about Bill Clinton was standing in the press room in Al Gore's Senate office, heaving a sigh of relief that this young Governor that I really hadn't heard of had decided not to run in the spring of 1987. I'd never encountered him, but as soon as I read the profiles of him, as he chose not to run, I realized he would have been a formidable candidate, and would have made life much harder for Gore.

Jones

Can you talk a little about the speechwriting process with Gore, how that went? Was it a back and forth sort of thing? Was he a speech reader, or did he go off on his own? How did he treat a speech?

Reed

I ended up being the first speechwriter for Al Gore and for Bill Clinton, so I have a lot of memories on the subject. Gore was a writer himself. He has often said that if he hadn't gone into politics, he would have liked to have been a journalist. He has a deep interest in words and metaphor. He's not a natural politician. His father had been a gifted stump speaker, a famously populist orator who would jump to the podium at a moment's notice. Gore was a much more thoughtful and studious person. He used a relatively high percentage of the speeches I wrote.

There was a lot of back and forth involved. He was a meticulous editor. I can remember going through numerous drafts of important speeches with him. He was also a "just in time" kind of person. He loved to work until the last possible moment. So I spent several nights at his house staying up all night, both of us consuming mass quantities of Diet Coke, working on articles the night before they were due and speeches the night before he had to give them. He developed an interesting style of writing. He'd gather scraps of paper for days and cut little strips of notes and arrange them. We were always worried that someone would open the door too quickly. He was a perfectionist, and hard on himself. Speaking didn't come naturally, so he wanted to spend a lot of time on the words.

If we want to talk about speechwriting with Clinton, we can come back to that, maybe. If you like, I can go on.

Riley

Whatever you're most comfortable with. If you're on this and you want to go with it—

Reed

The job of a speechwriter is to get inside a person's head. Sometimes that's easy to do, sometimes not. Some people are comfortable with that, and others aren't. I think that with Gore, the challenge was that he had a very complex mind, and thought in pictures, not in straight lines. He would draw speeches, sometimes with complicated doodling. He was more a scientist than a politician. So it took a while to figure out how to think the way he thought.

With Clinton, the challenge was different. He was a very accessible person and open with his thoughts. It was easier to know what he was thinking. But he had much less use for a wordsmith. I think some staff members had occasionally tried to help write things for him. He never found it the least bit useful because he could always give a better speech than anyone could write for him. His most famous experience with a speech, up until that point, was in 1988, when the Dukakis people forced him to give a written speech that had a lot in it that he didn't like. It was a disaster, and nearly ended his career.

Jones

This is the nomination.

Reed

At the convention. Writing speeches for Clinton, and to some degree, making policy for Clinton, was a challenge because I knew that most of the time he'd do better if I just got out of the way. But that wasn't always possible. I think also, he needed an editor more than a writer. He was capable of giving three great speeches back to back. The necessary discipline of a written text sometimes forced him to think through what he was going to say in a more disciplined manner than he would have otherwise. Because he had always been the most gifted speaker in the class. He could speak off the cuff and bring people to tears. So lots of times because he could wing it, he usually did.

At first it was very hard, like trying to capture a wild horse. He was capable of speaking so well that he was impatient that we couldn't keep up. I can remember one speech, early on, a Georgetown speech—one of the first speeches we had to do.

Riley

This is during the campaign?

Reed

During the campaign, where we didn't have a tape recorder to record what he was telling us to write. I was scribbling as fast as I could to try to keep up. He dictated something for the New Covenant speech, the first Georgetown speech in October. He said something that made all our jaws drop, it was so good. I wrote it down as best I could, but I missed a few phrases. And he was disdainful of what amateurs we were. To this day, I still can't quite reconstruct what it was that he actually said.

But once he got used to the idea of speechwriters, he was very easy to work with because he was relaxed about every speech he ever gave. I almost never saw him nervous. He didn't have to agonize over it. Lots of times we would work for days and days and days on speeches, and most of the time we didn't get it done until the last minute. But he was never worried about that because he knew that we were just doing the best we could and that he would take it to another level. We knew that too, that if we wrote a mediocre speech it wouldn't matter, that he would still give a great one. That made for a much more relaxed relationship on our part.

I don't know how it looked from his standpoint, but he wasn't needy. He was happy to take whatever thoughts or lines that we had—more thoughts than lines, actually. He was almost allergic to sound bites. He had a natural eloquence of his own, but he didn't like saying cute things. It just didn't sit well with him. So whenever we tried to write clever sound bites for him, he usually mangled them.

I have mixed thoughts about the speechwriting profession. By the time I had done it for five years for Gore, I was pretty hollowed out myself, and concluded that speechwriting was a great thing to have done, once you were done with it.

The best aspect of being a speechwriter is that—particularly in a campaign because it's such a draining job—the speechwriter is the one person who always has deadlines, always has to deliver the goods. A young person can have responsibilities far beyond his or her experience or abilities. Campaigns, like war, are an exciting opportunity in that respect anyway. A young person can have a greater impact at an early age, and experience at higher levels, than they would in any other field. That's particularly true in speechwriting, where a 25-year-old can go to all the same strategy meetings and be present at the creation, when important things happen. It's possible that if I'd started off in some other aspect of politics, I might not have become quite so addicted. Part of it was just being so close to the flame.

Jones

I recall the session when the Miller Center did the [Jimmy] Carter Oral History Project. We had a group of speechwriters, and I was a regular. I was at the University of Virginia, so I was in on most of these. I almost decided not to go to that one. When I went, my conclusion was: this was a group of people seeking to determine who this man Carter is, and how we could know enough about him so as to make him talk the way he wants to talk. It was an absolutely fascinating session because of that. They spent more time working on who this man was than anybody else.

Reed

That's true. At key points in the Clinton Presidency, the speechwriting department was where the rubber hit the road, where the conflicts within the administration had to be resolved. Clinton could always give a good speech no matter what the rest of us did, but he ended up using his State of the Union Addresses as his blueprint for governing. Every key strategic move that the White House would make tended to involve a speech or some kind of written words. So that's where the dysfunctions of the administration have to be ironed out.

Jones

I had put down two descriptors of your experience with Gore: interactive and developmental, as a process. But I couldn't come up with something with Clinton. [laughter] Do you have a couple? I put "stimulative," but that didn't work, "integrative," but that didn't work, "organizational"—but none of those seem to me to be it.

Reed

Speechwriting with Clinton was more like brainstorming. It wasn't trying to bang out the words. It was deciding which of the many great speeches he was capable of giving he would decide to give. The interesting thing about it is that I can remember one time briefing him in the Oval Office about a speech he was going to give to some group—I can't remember which one it was. He was very tired. I said to him, "Just say what you said to the Conference of Mayors yesterday. That was a great speech. Just give that again." And he said, "What did I say to the Mayors?" [laughter]

He had an unusual gift. He could go spin this magic and have little or no memory of what he had done. He could go and do it again, but it would never be the same. In the campaigns, he had a stump speech, but it wasn't mind-numbingly disciplined the way many good candidates' are. What's the famous story about Robert Kennedy? He had some line at the end of his stump speech. One time, just as a joke, instead of saying, "Thucydides," or whatever it was, he ended by saying, "And now, back on the bus," to the traveling press corps. Clinton wasn't like that. No two speeches were the same.

Riley

Well, you said that with Gore, you were always cutting and pasting mechanically. The way you describe Clinton it's almost like his own mental computer has all that stuff already in there. You're pushing to see which of the little segments will be—

Reed

I don't know if it's more like painting—I don't know what exactly is the metaphor. Gore had a computer-like approach. Clinton was much more impressionistic.

Riley

We hear jazz references all the time.

Reed

That's exactly right. He loved to riff.

Riley

Improvisation. Chuck, did you have something else on that? Obviously, this speechwriting component will be important throughout. Why don't we go back to the DLC? I think that's an important enterprise for us to understand as it relates to the development of the ideas that go into the administration. Historically, that's a kind of important enterprise. Tell us your transition, what you were doing there.

Reed

As I said, I wanted to work on another Presidential campaign. I didn't think Gore was going to run again any time soon. I needed a different job. I couldn't write speeches anymore full-time. So the prospect of doing policy and working with Clinton, who was about to take over as chairman of the DLC, was very exciting. I started there in January of 1990. George Bush was at 70 percent in the polls, and shortly thereafter went to 90. So there were plenty of times when I thought, What the hell am I doing?

The DLC was still in its early years, and had a mixed reception within the party because it was seen as primarily a white, Southern, conservative operation. In fact, the kinds of ideas that the DLC had begun to work with were more radical than that. But it was really Bill Clinton who transformed the DLC into a successful enterprise. Because he was the one who made it possible to get out of the traditional left/right box that seemed like a zero-sum game within the party. The Democrats had run campaigns that were perceived as somewhat too far to the left. But understandably, people didn't want to just change labels or shift their principles. Then Clinton came along, and he was neither fish nor fowl. He had some liberal passions, but conservative governing values. He'd also thought through the difficult issues in a way that others hadn't. We quickly realized that he was perfectly suited to bridge the divide in the Democratic Party because he was new and young and exciting, but had to govern in a tough, relatively conservative Southern state.

I spent the first couple months in the DLC working for Sam Nunn, who was the archetypal conservative Southern Democrat. I was trying to remember on my way down here the first time I set eyes on Bill Clinton. I remember the first time I talked to him, because he called. We were working on what we ended up calling the "New Orleans Declaration," which was the first manifesto of the DLC. We mockingly called it the "Mississippi Manifesto," but we decided that really wasn't a particularly compelling name—from any standpoint. The DLC convention, when Clinton was going to take over as chairman, was going to be in New Orleans in March 1990.

We decided we'd write up a defining set of principles and a short platform—what we thought the party ought to stand for. We started work on this. Will Marshall and I went through draft after draft. We sent one down to Clinton. I knew this guy was going to be different when he called one morning and spent an hour dictating to me on the phone what the education plank of the platform ought to be. His ideas were far and away more compelling than what we had written. He proved to be the perfect leader for a political think tank. That's what he was. His head was a political think tank.

The first time I heard him speak was when he took over as chairman in March of 1990. That was in a ballroom at the Fairmont Hotel in New Orleans. I knew right then that he would be President someday. It was a spellbinding experience. You could hear a pin drop in the room. People had never seen anything like it. He was the first Democrat I had ever come across who talked about values instead of programs. He absolutely captivated the audience and looked at the issues in a completely different way. We didn't know whether he was actually going to run for President. He didn't know. Our job was to come up with the ideas and the themes for a Democrat to use in a Presidential campaign. We didn't know for sure who that Democrat was going to be.

The DLC had always attracted lots of potential Presidential candidates. Sam Nunn was thinking seriously about it at that time. I think actually at one point in 1991—I was terrified because five people I knew pretty well were all thinking about running for President and wanting me to work for them. I didn't really know how I was going to juggle that.

Jones

Who was it?

Reed

It was Clinton, Gore, Nunn, Jay Rockefeller— for whom I'd written jokes—and Dave McCurdy—an unlikely candidate, but interested nonetheless.

Jones

I'm so glad that somebody wrote jokes for Jay Rockefeller. [laughter]

Reed

It was fun! One of them was in Newsweek. It was about how, when he was a kid, "All kids play with blocks. I played with blocks when I was kid. Mine were Madison, Park, Lexington." It was great writing speeches for Jay Rockefeller because he had a wonderful sense of humor and loved making fun of his background. But that's another story.

After he took over as Chairman, Al From and Deb Smulyan—who was the Deputy Director of the DLC—and I went down to visit him in May at the mansion in Little Rock. I will never forget that morning. We came from a breakfast meeting. We sat with him at the table in the mansion. They brought out a tray of biscuits and breakfast for all four of us and Clinton ate everything. [laughter] Never saw anything like it.

Riley

He ate all four servings?

Reed

It was for four people and then some. It was a phenomenal display. But he also had all kinds of ideas about what he wanted the DLC to do. He had used his legislative sessions in Arkansas to develop his own kind of platform. He put out a booklet I still have. I'm sure the library has a copy of it. It was an Arkansas agenda, more detailed than most Presidential campaign agendas. It was extraordinarily good work, and it was really almost all his own doing. He didn't have a big team of policy advisors. He had good people, but he'd spent so much time going to NGA [National Governors Association] meetings, Renaissance weekends, and going to reunions, stealing ideas from people wherever he went. Much of the time we were taking ideas from him, not the other way around. But his real gift was that almost immediately he knew the themes that he was going to take to the country.

We set up state chapters in about 30 states and sent him around to go and find and meet with New Democrats around the country. He started honing what became his stump speech. It was all about opportunity, responsibility, community, and reinventing government. I can remember him giving that speech in New Hampshire, in '91 in front of the Texas legislature. He was practicing. He didn't know if he was going to run or not. He had a heck of a time in 1990 in the Governor's race in Arkansas; he came close to getting beat. So he really wasn't able to focus full-time on higher aspirations until the end of 1990. We didn't talk about it as preparation for a campaign because he was mostly interested in the ideas and themes. It was clear that the kind of things that he was doing would be useful if he decided to run.

Riley

I'm curious about how Clinton differed from his predecessors in that particular role. The impression I get is that he was much more proactive, and interested in leveraging this into something, making this a kind of personal platform. The impression that I'm now getting from you is that you were willing cooperators in this enterprise.

Reed

That's right. As I said, the DLC had always attracted people who were thinking about running for President. In 1988, [Richard] Gephardt, [Bruce] Babbitt, and Gore were all closely associated with the organization. So there was no shortage of future Presidential candidates at DLC meetings. And both Nunn and [Charles] Robb had used the chairmanship as a kind of national platform. But Clinton saw it as an opportunity to travel the country in a way he couldn't otherwise, and introduce himself to the Washington scene and the chattering classes through ideas, not just through campaigning. We had to twist his arm a little bit to get him to go and do all this travel. He had a day job. We were probably pushing him to go out and go on the stump more than he was.

But he absolutely loved the ideas and the chance to meet people who had new ideas. He first got interested in national service at a DLC meeting in '87, when he ran into Charlie Moskos. He would come up to our offices and give us a bunch of ideas to write about for our magazine—pump people for information about different issues. He had almost no experience in foreign policy. He was learning about that, too.

He liked hanging around with Les Aspin and Sam Nunn and seeing how they thought. I don't think he had any master plan. I think he was feeling his way along. I think that he was too much of a procrastinator about the decision to run to have done all of it for the expedience of it. There were lots of ways he could have used that time that would have been useful to him in putting together a Presidential campaign that he didn't do. He didn't put together a fundraising network, he didn't have a campaign staff. He put off a lot of the important work a methodical Presidential aspirant would have done.

But he loved the intellectual challenge of trying to figure out how we were going to change the Democratic party and be competitive against Bush. He'd written an article in the New York Times, an Op-Ed in '80 or '84, that he was very proud of later. It was about how the party had to change.

I heard him say many times later that one of the values of the DLC for him was that it made him realize that he wasn't alone. There were other Democratic politicians around the country who thought like he did and other wonks who saw the world the way he did. So it was a kind of sounding board for him and a confidence-builder, that he was onto something. We called it a grassroots movement. It wasn't really a grassroots movement, but it was a movement of sorts. It had a philosophy; it had a set of ideas. I think that's what excited him most about running for President. The rest of it was work, but that was play.

Riley

Let me follow up with one question. I know my colleagues have some follow-ups too. This one is derived from your comment that there were others he was interacting with. As you already said, there were a lot of prospective Democratic aspirants that you're working with at that point. This must be a frightening experience for them, to see this meteoric rise of this figure that's taking the enterprise and doing all sorts of creative and interesting things with it. Were you getting some resistance from some of these other folks, who were concerned that his star was—

Reed

Well, first, Clinton was easy to like. Some of the people who most naturally might have felt threatened by him, like Sam Nunn, liked him a lot. They had completely different interests. So I think Nunn probably felt less threatened by Clinton because Clinton was a domestic whiz but knew nothing about the things that Sam Nunn cared about. I think the clearest tension that I can remember was when we were going into the May 1991 conference in Cleveland. We had to put together a program, and by May of '91 the campaign hadn't started yet. There was no announced candidate. But it was show time, so everybody who was thinking about running for President wanted to be at that meeting.

Putting together the program for that was an enormous challenge. We ended up making Clinton the keynote opening speaker and Gore the closing speaker the next day. They were both nervously eyeing one another. Clinton was angry at us for giving Gore such a prominent position. I'm sure Gore was nervous about how Clinton would do. As it turned out, Clinton came in, gave the speech of his life. Gore gave not one of his better speeches, and it worked out fine. There was enough uncertainty about who was really going to run that we were able to table that question most of the time. The other thing that helped was that Bush was at 90 percent in the polls. The nomination didn't seem all that worth having that time around. That's why everybody was hesitating about whether to do it and why they felt a little less threatened by one another.

Jones

Also probably explained why we have ten this time. [laughter]

Knott

I should have jumped in sooner, but I'm interested in finding out—what was it that drew you to the DLC? Did you perceive the Democratic party as being too far to the left?

Reed

My parents were liberal Democrats; I worked for a liberal Democratic Senator. My first impressions of politics came from trying to hand out Democratic bumper stickers at county fairs in Northern Idaho.

Knott

And you survived? [laughter]

Reed

To guys with pickup trucks and gun racks. I learned to experience rejection at an early age. I remember feeling late in the Carter administration that I had a lot of progressive ideals, but I was tired of defending government for its own sake. Certainly tired of defending what the generation before me had done. I guess I considered myself a neo-liberal in those days. I was a passionate follower of the Washington Monthly, which I tried to work for, and the New Republic, which I tried to work for. And Gore considered himself a neo-liberal. I remember one time his yelling at Roy Neel, "How am I supposed to be a neo-liberal if you surround me with all of these paleo-liberals?" The practice speech that I wrote for Gore to get the job as speechwriter was a hypothetical Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner for the Mississippi Democratic Party on what the party needed to do to change in order to be competitive again.

It was a time of deep despair in Democratic circles. I think my attraction was twofold. First, I was tired of writing speeches without ideas in them. And, secondly, I really did want to figure out how to reform the party because it was clear to me that the country wasn't buying what we were selling. A lot of Democrats in Washington blamed the country. Like the old dog food joke about something being wrong with the dogs because the dogs won't eat it. I just thought that we could do better.

I was attracted to Gore and to Biden and eventually to Clinton because I saw them as the closest thing to a Bobby Kennedy of my time, somebody who could bring together working stiffs and the more liberal parts of the party. I wouldn't have liked the label "conservative." But one of the great things that happened while we were—I can remember one of the first meetings I went to at the DLC while we were trying to figure out where to go. We came to the conclusion that we couldn't win this battle for the soul of the party if we tried to define it as a conservative vs. liberal or moderate vs. liberal fight. We had to make it a fight between new and old.

One of my jobs, in addition to being policy director, was to edit this magazine called the Mainstream Democrat. I spent my first year at the DLC in a concerted effort to change the name of it because mainstream was about being moderate to conservative, not about being new and interesting. Eventually, with Clinton's help, we decided to rename the magazine the New Democrat, which became the phrase that captured the movement. That was just a symbol of what Clinton was able to do. He was able to excite Democrats of all stripes because he made it about the ideas and about breathing new life into the party, and not a strictly ideological fight, although it had considerable ideological consequences and a deep ideological underpinning.

I think what he realized was that ideas and policies were what made Democrats feel good about themselves and what drew them to the enterprise in the first place. Then, if you could get beyond the battle over labels that had gotten us nowhere—for a decade, by that point—you could get people excited again. They would suspend their bickering in favor of finding a new synthesis that had a broader political appeal but also was more likely to get something done.

Jones

Would you say something about the everyday operation of the DLC? Who was in charge, that kind of thing? That is, DLC minus Clinton.

Reed

It was a very small outfit. We were on the third floor of a bank building on the corner of Third and Pennsylvania Southeast, on Capitol Hill. We had about ten employees. Al From was the founder. Will Marshall had been his sidekick and was head of the newly formed Progressive Policy Institute, which was part of the DLC. Deb Smulyan was the executive director, I was the policy director, and Linda Moore was the political director. We had about half a dozen young kids, who worked with us putting out a magazine, putting on conferences, building a network of public officials around the country.

We had a few outside affiliated thinkers, like Bill Galston, who was at the University of Maryland, and Elaine Kamarck. We had one kind of full-time thinker in addition to the rest of us on staff—Rob Shapiro, the Vice President for economic policy. That was about it. There were, at that point—I don't remember exactly—50 or 75 members of Congress who considered themselves DLC-ers, a couple hundred around the country. We put out occasional policy papers. In part, it was trying to do for the Democrats what Heritage had done for the Republicans. We probably had a million dollar budget.

Riley

The funding sources were?

Reed

It was some individuals, some trade associations. Clinton had promised to raise us money—never did. He raised the organization a lot of money after he became President, so he made up for it.

Riley

Indirectly.

Reed

Indirectly, right. We had some ties to Congress, but we weren't all that welcome there. The DLC essentially represented the Governors' wing of the Democratic Party. There was a much deeper split then than there is now. At that point the Governors were the thriving part of the Democratic Party. There were 30-some Democratic Governors, and they had to solve problems all the time. They had to govern in a bipartisan way. They didn't have the luxury of having partisan gridlock. They actually had to balance a budget every year, make progress on schools and health care. So we were philosophically and emotionally closer to them, or temperamentally closer to them.

We spent a lot of time looking at what states, and to some extent, what cities—because there was a kind of urban renaissance going on—what they were doing that worked. We compiled ideas that worked at the state and local level, where government was actually functioning, and tried to bring those to scale at the national level where it wasn't. The Democrats in Congress were at their nadir. That was the time of the House banking scandal. Both parties were at each others' throats. It's when the term "gridlock" first came to be applied to politics. In our view, they didn't have to answer to voters the way Governors did. So a lot of members of Congress didn't like us very much. Some thought that we were a conservative force. Some saw us as just too radical for them.

Jones

Did you have any connection with the Democratic Study Group?

Reed

No. There was no formal connection. We were too small. Brookings was full of serious scholars. We could hardly call ourselves a think tank. We were just a tiny little applied science, research and development group that would find ideas that would work in a campaign—and hopefully in governing—and put those out there. We didn't try to, we couldn't compete in the Washington think tank world. We just didn't have the horses. But we did have a ready audience in Governors and Presidential candidates. And as it turned out, the Governors after whom we modeled ourselves had figured out pretty much what the country wanted: a less ideological, more pragmatic, approach to policy and politics that appealed because it worked.

Jones

Yet you had Senators, House members, who were active.

Reed

Yes, we had some. At one point we tried to start something called the Mainstream Forum in the House of Representatives. It's how I got to know Dave McCurdy. About two dozen Democrats would meet in his office once a week. But mostly it was just a gripe session about the Congressional leadership. They were members from conservative or moderate districts that felt House leadership didn't understand their concerns—made them vote on things that were just going to make it hard for them to stay in office. On the Senate side, the moderates were more influential because of the way the Senate works. But Congress wasn't doing anything.

There were a number of wonks in both Houses who liked to come to our conferences because they found it intellectually interesting. But almost nothing was getting done. We were talking the other day about how, in '89, I think, S. 2 and S. 3 were DLC bills, one on national service, and the other on—I can't remember, some aspect of budgeting. So we were occasionally useful. But that wasn't our game.

Riley

Let's go ahead, then, and transition to the campaign. You get drafted fairly early to go with Governor Clinton?

Reed

Yes. As '91 wore on, it became more apparent that Clinton wanted to run. As I said, he gave the speech of his life at the Cleveland meeting, which was still one of the best political speeches I've ever seen anyone give. We'd written a few things for him, but Craig Smith, his chief of staff, had said, "Don't worry, he knows what he wants to say." I watched him that morning backstage at Cleveland prepare for the speech he was about to give. He wrote 20 words on the page. They were just reminders, "Opportunity, responsibility—" I can't remember what they all were.

Then he went out and gave a 20-minute speech that was perfect pitch. Not a word out of place. It looked like something he had rehearsed time and again. And in a way, he had, because it was a variation of the speech he'd given on the stump, at little DLC meetings all over the country and elsewhere. The national press corps was blown away. They, for the most part, had never seen this guy, except at the '88 convention. They had no idea of his talents. In that speech he laid out the basic themes of his campaign: that for too long, Democrats had failed to represent the economic interests, defend the values, and stand up for the security of the forgotten middle class.

The response to that speech was so overwhelming I think we all knew that if Clinton decided to run and was able to put together a halfway decent organization, he would be a force to be reckoned with. At that point we didn't know what he was going to be up against. We still thought Mario Cuomo was going to run. No one knew where the party's heart was in a battle between those two guys.

Clinton spent the summer mulling it over. Almost no practical work on the organizational front was done, because I think the people closest to him in Arkansas were genuinely unsure what he would decide to do. They'd been through this once before, in '87. I wasn't around in '87, but I've talked to others who were there when he had walked all the way up to the edge and had all of his closest advisors come down and spend the night at the mansion. A lot of people thought he was going to announce that day that he was going to run, and then he announced that he wasn't. So they were not in a position to start putting a campaign together.

Riley

Bruce, can I ask you one question about that? David Maraniss and others have said the meeting Clinton had with Betsey Wright the night before, in '87, had been instrumental. Is that consistent with what you—

Reed

Yes. My impression was that that was the general reason why he decided not to run that time. I think there were a few things that still held him back in '91, in addition to the inevitable scrutiny that it was going to bring. Chelsea was only 11, I believe, at that point, maybe 12. He loved being Governor. He always referred to it as, "A job, and a life, that I love." And Bush was still at 70 or so in the polls. Cuomo was still the toast of the party.

There were lots of reasons to hesitate. I don't know if he knew how good he was. No one from Arkansas had successfully run for President—or really come close. He had real doubts, as did some others. There were some people at the DLC who thought that he was such a fluid manager that he could never put a decent campaign together. He'd had half a dozen—or close to it—four or five chiefs of staff in Arkansas. No one really knew who was chief of staff most of the time. He just didn't put a premium on that sort of thing.

He was so much better than anybody else at politics that he felt like he could run the whole state himself. We'd asked him to raise money for us; he hadn't done anything. So there was serious doubt if he had the discipline to raise the kind of money necessary to be an effective candidate. Al From and I were so smitten with his talents that we didn't worry about that. We thought that the rest of the country would swoon for him the way we had. Our biggest worry was just that he would decide for some reason not to run. But in August he decided.

Riley

I'm going to interrupt you right here because we can pick back up easily and I'm sort of overdue to give you a break.

Reed

So he decided to run. Craig Smith called us and told us that he had decided to run. Bruce Lindsey called and asked if I could come down and spend the week before his announcement, the last week in September in '91, working on the announcement speech. So I did. Wrote a draft that he said he liked. Frank Greer also came down for that week. He wrote a draft, which I'm sure Clinton liked. We spent the better part of that week, Frank and I, arguing over our respective drafts and trying to meld them into one. Clinton had given a brilliant speech at the DLC. He'd also given a brilliant speech to the DNC [Democratic National Committee] in Los Angeles that was in most respects the same speech, but it highlighted different aspects of his repertoire. So Frank and I had this kind of shadow debate that went on for several days.

Riley

Was Clinton engaged at this point?

Reed

No. I guess he was keeping an eye on us, but he wasn't focusing on the speech. The debate was really over how reformist the speech should be, how much it should push the envelope. Frank was more of a party regular, and I was the insurgent troublemaker. Eventually, Stan Greenberg came down to help, but Clinton was busy with other things. There wasn't really a campaign yet. Skip [James] Rutherford had found a place to house the campaign. We spent some time working out of that old paint store, but there was no campaign organization. No one had much idea what they were going to do. Bruce and I kept meaning to talk about what specific role I would play, and eventually, before I left town, we decided I would be the policy director.

We didn't have a campaign manager. They had just decided to hire George Stephanopoulos. No one was that worried about it because we knew we'd be able to put a team together. I think the biggest worry was finding a campaign manager—because you can't have a campaign without a campaign manager—and putting together a fundraising organization.

Riley

But it was a foregone conclusion that he was going to run and you were going to go with him.

Reed

At that point, the seas had parted. All the other people I thought might run had decided not to.

Jones

Cuomo was still thinking?

Reed

Cuomo was still thinking about it. I guess Clinton had asked Al From and Eli Segal to put together a search committee to interview people and make recommendations on who should have what job. They had decided early on that whatever my title would end up being, I'd be the policy guy, continuing the role I had played at the DLC.

But first, we had to get him to actually say the words—that he was declaring for the Presidency. He finally decided to focus on the speech, the night before. We were working out of the Governor's mansion. I think he read our draft and it wasn't right. It wasn't his yet. He decided to start from scratch in his own way. I vividly remember Hillary [Clinton], who I hardly knew at that point—I might have met her in passing, but I hardly knew her—bringing us plates of food and shaking her head about how disorganized he was being. Chelsea was practicing ballet in the foyer of the mansion.

We started working, and eventually I set up shop downstairs in the computer room, typing a finished draft. Frank and Stan were upstairs with him as he went through it. They'd all come downstairs and give me new material. Clinton was interrupted repeatedly to make phone calls. There were fires he had to put out. I think he was still soliciting advice from people as to whether he should run. This went on for hours.

I was well prepared. I had spent most of my time with Gore staying up all night working on speeches. We hadn't finished Gore's announcement speech until 3:30 in the morning the night before he was to give it in Carthage, Tennessee, in 1987. Clinton had the good sense of scheduling his speech mid-day so we could stay up all night and still get a little bit of sleep—in theory, at least. He went to bed—he was happy by about 2:30 or 3:00. But we still had a bunch of work to do to enter his changes. So Frank and Stan and I huddled around the computer until about 4:00.

Then Frank took me back to the place I was staying. He came and picked me up around two hours later, at 6:00. We went back to work on the computer. Clinton was up, and we talked about the speech and added some lines that we thought about in our spare time. We had a finished draft that we were all happy with by 6:30. He went off for a run. He asked me at 6:00 in the morning on October 3rd if it was true to our DLC principles. I said, "Yes," and gave him a few lines to add to make sure of that. He said, "You're here to keep me politically correct." [laughter]

He practiced the speech later that morning; he ran through it once. Our biggest concern was the last big speech he was known for was the convention speech in '88, which was, I believe, 33 minutes long, but seemed like an eternity to him and to the listeners. We were terrified that if his speech went on too long that that would be the only story of the day. "Here comes Clinton with another long speech." So we kept trying to keep it from going too long. It ended up being 38 minutes long, I believe, but it was well received. It didn't drag and people didn't cheer just because it was over, the way they had in the last convention—

Then he went off and gave it. He ad-libbed something at the podium, which was a lovely addition. I can't remember exactly, but he was talking about civil rights, "Here, in the shadow of this state house," because it was at the old state house where Arkansas had voted to secede from the Union in 1861.

The speech was a great success. Then we had to figure out how to put together a campaign. Al From has a story that I don't remember of Clinton saying something to that effect, "Now we have to put together a campaign." I have an identical story from the Gore campaign. When Gore announced his intention to run, in spite of everything, he just scribbled out five things on a legal pad, went off and gave that speech in the Mansfield room. One of those ideas was a mission to Mars, believe it or not, which was about as popular then as it is now. [laughter] We came back to the Senate office with his family and little Albert, who must have been four or five years old at the time, said, "Now, what do we do?" [laughter] Which was a perfect summary of the plight of the Gore campaign.

But that's the situation we found ourselves in '91 as well. I came back to Washington. We had decided, actually, I think, before he announced—he was up in Washington. The first time I showed him the draft of the announcement speech, we were meeting in Greenberg's office on the Hill. I proposed to him at that meeting that we give a series of policy speeches as a way to follow up the announcement speech because we felt that was his comparative advantage to the other candidates. He had a better idea of what he wanted to do as President. We made a point of saying in the announcement speech, "It's about time we had a President who knows what he wants to do for America." It was a good contrast with Bush, who didn't have much of an agenda, and with the other Democrats, who hadn't thought it through.

In the Gore campaign, we had given a series of speeches—three policy speeches, starting at Georgetown—as a way to distinguish him. That had been very successful, to a point. He had given a foreign policy speech urging the party to abandon the politics of retreat, complacency, and doubt. Got a lot of positive press off that speech. Then he had to give the economic and social policy speeches, and we realized we didn't have anything to say. We decided to repeat that exercise with Clinton, and set up the Georgetown speeches. As soon as the announcement was over, I came back to Washington and started work on that.

We decided to give a social policy speech, an economic policy speech, and a foreign policy speech, in the reverse order of what Gore had done, because Clinton knew the most about the first and the least about the last. I was still working out of the DLC because there was no campaign to join yet.

I wrote the first draft of the New Covenant speech, the first Georgetown speech, in a hotel room in the suburbs of Pittsburgh because the Pirates and the Braves were in the playoffs that year. The Pirates managed to squander a three-games-to-two lead and lose the playoffs to the Braves. We'd gone over to see the sixth game, hoping to see the Pirates clinch the pennant. They lost, got shut out by the Braves. I spent a day in the Holiday Inn, writing the New Covenant speech. Then the Pirates lost again. Drove back in the middle of the night and finished the speech when I got back to Washington.

Riley

So should we read that speech carefully to see if there's disappointment dripping through it?

Reed

Yes, there's a good deal of repressed hostility. No, it had a hopeful beginning. I couldn't believe we would actually get shut out again, in the seventh game. But we sent Clinton a draft that Friday. He was, at this point, traveling all over the country. We just kept working. We had a conference call on the speech that Saturday night—when I would have been at game one of the World Series if the Pirates had made it, but they weren't there, so I had time to work on the speech.

It was on that conference call that we decided that this speech was great but it needed some news—a policy proposal that would make news. I suggested, "What if we called for an end to permanent welfare?" We decided to call for an end to welfare as we know it. There was no doubt that Clinton was going to make welfare reform a big issue. He'd done that as Governor and one of the striking things about his speech in Cleveland was that he was saying people on welfare who can work should go to work. That was the centerpiece of the first Georgetown speech. But of course he still hadn't engaged on that speech either.

We gathered the night before the speech was to be given in Frank Greer's office. We wrestled our way through that speech with him. That was the speech where he lost his temper with us, with me, for not being able to keep up as he dictated a better speech. But eventually we got a speech he was happy with.

We did the same thing a couple weeks later on the economy. The first New Covenant speech was my favorite because it distilled his philosophy in the most refreshing way. To go back to his announcement speech—in the key paragraph of that speech, he announced his intention. He said that, "Government has a responsibility to provide more opportunity, and people have a responsibility to make the most of it." It was the first time he'd ever said it quite that way. Those were his words. I've always thought that his biggest intellectual, philosophical contribution to the Democratic Party was to restore the link between those two concepts. Almost everything that he did that mattered combined more opportunity and more responsibility.

The DLC had been plumbing in that direction, had put forward ideas that illustrated that concept even before Clinton had come around. National service was a good example of that. But Clinton was the one who put it into words. He wasn't the first Democrat ever to have done that—the Kennedys had given speeches about challenges, not promises. But that, more than anything else, got the Democratic party back in sync with the country—the notion that we should help people get ahead, but that everybody had to pull their own weight. In the '70s and '80s the country had lost faith that that's how Democrats thought. It really was the essence of the American dream that most Democrats lived and most Americans talked about. Republicans had successfully suggested that Democrats had lost touch with those values. A lot of Democrats had forgotten about them, too.

Anyway, the first Clinton speech—the New Covenant speech—was explicitly about that. The phrase "New Covenant" was also in the announcement speech. We had a long discussion about whether to use that phrase or not. Clinton liked it because it had religious overtones, but we didn't think it would—well, it was a little high-falutin' and not likely to catch on. Over the course of the campaign, we spent more time agonizing over that phrase than just about any other. The concept, as I said, of a bargain between people and their government was the most important thing Clinton was saying. But the phrase "New Covenant" was hard for a lot of people to get their arms around. The consultants hated it because it was at too high a reading level—

Jones

"New Bargain" didn't— [laughter]

Reed

Right. Every Democratic speechwriter has tried to come up with a better phrase than "New Deal," and everyone has failed. "New Frontier" was good in its day, but it didn't really mean anything, or didn't have as concrete a meaning. But the second Georgetown speech was one of the most quintessential writing experiences with Clinton. The first Georgetown speech was October 23rd, the next one was sometime in mid-November, November 12th maybe, I'm not sure. So we had a couple of weeks to write it.

This was the economic speech. We had a lot of the material for it. We'd been gathering it for years. So I wrote a draft of that speech with help from Rob Shapiro and others. I sent Clinton a number of drafts, but kept working. He focused on it the night before, once again, in Frank Greer's office. This time, he just wasn't comfortable. He didn't think we had gotten all of his ideas into it. We went round and round for hours. It just didn't look like we were going to get anywhere.

Finally, about 11:30, he went off by himself and wrote an outline of the speech—wrote the 15 or 20 ideas that he thought needed to be in the speech in the order in which he thought they made sense. After he had done that, he was completely at peace with the whole exercise. He gave that to me. Then Rob Shapiro and I spent from midnight on trying to rearrange the speech into this outline he had suggested. I guess George Stephanopoulos was around for part of it, too. They went home around 3:00. I finished at 6:00.

I took the draft over to Clinton's hotel room, met George, and he and I took the speech in to Clinton at 6:00 in the morning, which was not Bill Clinton's favorite hour. But he was in high spirits, read though the speech, liked it, then walked over to his briefcase on his hotel bed, and pulled out a stack of about 50 memos from various people around the country he had met, that he'd known for years, and whose ideas he'd asked for. He pulled out several of them, and started thumbing through, pointing out to us ideas that we hadn't put in the speech yet, that he wanted to have in there. [laughter]

At that point, I knew that I was lucky if I would just be able to keep up with the guy. So we added a few more things to the speech. Then we had about a month to write the next one, which was on foreign policy. The only thing that I remember about that speech is that, at one point, I think Will Marshall and Sandy Berger were talking to him about defense policy and going on and on and on. Clinton said, "I never thought I would come across a policy that I didn't want to know everything about, but I think I just have." [laughter]

We finally found a campaign manager in David Wilhelm. We eventually found a fundraiser, Rahm Emanuel. I did everything I could to avoid getting relocated to Little Rock. I found a little bit of office space in D.C. that was unoccupied. I worked on policy out of there for a while. They put a little cartoon on the wall in Little Rock of a bird with a caption saying, "I'm on my way to Little Rock," It had my name on it because I kept promising I'd be down there.

By the time we turned out the three Georgetown speeches, Clinton was the toast of the chattering classes. He'd won the ideas primary, won the thinking man's nod. He had an enormous head start in that regard because he'd gotten to know the press corps. There were a number of extraordinarily smart reporters on the case who agreed with his analysis of the Democratic Party's problems and the country's problems. So we had fellow travelers in the movement who were press corps. They weren't Democrats, they were honest reporters. They thought we were onto something. Joe Klein, Ron Brownstein, Michael Elliot, who was with the Economist at the time.

Clinton became the Democratic frontrunner almost entirely on the force of his ideas. There was still no evidence he was going to be able to put together a formidable campaign organization. No one knew at that time what a tremendous fundraiser Rahm Emanuel would turn out to be, or how disciplined Clinton would be at it. We never had a really good campaign organization. We ended up having, I think, four campaign managers—four people who played that role but didn't necessarily have that title. But Clinton was his own best strategist. Organization didn't matter a whole heck of a lot to him.

Riley

When did [James] Carville and [Paul] Begala come on?

Reed

Carville and Begala won the Pennsylvania Senate race and Clinton met them. In December they decided to sign on with him. We had daily conference calls with about 20 people on them. We were a campaign with an excess of advice. There was still a continuing tussle over the soul of the campaign. Clinton knew where he wanted to go. But he had drawn people from so many different circles that every conference call, every event, was a debate over what kind of person, what kind of candidate he was going to be.

Because it was working, by the time we got to New Hampshire in January, the contours of his candidacy had mostly been set. He discovered, as we had hoped, that ordinary people were desperate to hear a politician who was talking about real answers. That was particularly true of New Hampshire, which was devastated by the recession. People were hungrier for specifics than anyone had ever seen them. Paul Tsongas, at whom we'd laughed when he came to see us at the DLC in the spring of '91 to tell us he was running, seemed like such a nice guy, but such an implausible candidate. He'd produced a detailed, 100-page booklet on what he was going to do.

We decided to write a campaign booklet as well. I sat in the Washington office and wrote a version of that, which we then boiled down into a shorter version that Clinton put in his advertisements. He gazed straight into the camera, saying, "I'm the man with the plan. If you want a copy, call me, call my office, or call my campaign." We mailed it to every New Hampshire voter. Voters loved it. It was how he formed a bond with them that enabled him to survive the things that then came down.

Knott

You mentioned a few minutes ago that there were factions. You talked about the conference calls—20 people involved, various factions. I was wondering if you could just tell us who these factions were?

Reed

The good thing about it was that there were divisions, but there weren't quite factions. People didn't line up predictably. There were people who were more traditional Democrats, who were in the political department. Frank Greer's wife, Stephanie Solien, her job was to talk to Democratic constituents. So she, naturally, didn't want to offend them. Susan Thomases, who was the scheduler, had her own views about where the party ought to go. We had a bunch of consultants: Greenberg, Greer, Mandy Grunwald, Paul Begala, who at that point were still sorting out their pecking order and didn't always agree.

It was just chaotic. There wasn't anybody in charge. So almost every decision was kind of a jump ball. As I said, it wasn't organized factions, the way we'd later have in the White House, where people would scheme with one another. I think he kind of liked it that way. He knew he was his own best strategist; he liked being able to make the decisions. So he didn't worry too much about the fact that his advisors couldn't agree.

In spite of the fact that people had disagreements, we had a lot of talent. Almost everybody was good at their position, and Clinton was the best candidate any of us had ever seen.

There was a myth that emerged in the '80s, and to some extent in the '90s, that handlers were the most important thing, that they make campaigns. My view is somewhat different. I think there are good strategists and bad strategists, good handlers and bad handlers. But the job of a campaign is to execute the strategy of the candidate. Our campaign was—not in the primaries, not in the general—not anywhere near as good as the mythology around it. We had capable people, but the reason it was a successful campaign is that it didn't make mistakes and we didn't screw up. And we had a candidate who knew what he wanted to do as President, knew what he wanted to say, had his finger on the pulse and had a bond with the electorate that allowed him to hit perfect pitch.

In any campaign, eventually a gulf develops between headquarters and the plane. Tensions occur. The candidate and the people traveling with him on the plane always have a much better sense of what works and what the moment calls for than the people down in headquarters. So the people in headquarters get most of the credit; they're the ones who talk to reporters. They think that it's the ads that make the difference, and this strategic difference or that. I think that Clinton, had he chosen to become a political consultant, would have put them all out of business.

Later on when we talk about the general election campaign, when I spent more time traveling with him, I can talk about how much he ran his own campaign. The job of the campaign—especially in the general election, but this is to some degree true in the primaries— was defense—to defend against the inevitable attacks that come from the other side, or from the press.

In the primaries, the best thing his handlers did for him was help him have the confidence to get through the scandals. He was tough as nails. He had a very thick skin, was kind of a robo-candidate. No matter what came at him, he'd keep going. And he had a team around him that was that way, too. They weren't quitters. There's no question that the way that the campaign responded to Gennifer Flowers and the way they succeeded in showing how much of a comeback he made in New Hampshire was enormously helpful to him.

Jones

Let me ask a couple of staff questions. Were you involved at all in staff building?

Reed

I guess I was consulted on some decisions, but not really.

Jones

My other question concerns something I've always been curious about. In that particular election, you had a number of what people in advance thought would be obvious candidates— Gephardt, Gore, Cuomo—who decided not to run. I wondered if you could say something from the point of view of the professional kinds of people staffing up a campaign. Was this group sitting around waiting for a candidate, and some ended up being left out? Was that taken at all into account by your folks in the Clinton operation?

Reed

First, we had to find a campaign manager. We wanted one that understood Clinton, and ended up going outside Washington to find one. David Wilhelm was recommended by Mayor [Richard] Daley. That was a good fit because as I said earlier, we were more simpatico with Governors and mayors than the Washington style of campaigning. George almost went to work for Bob Kerrey. He wanted to work for Kerrey; he said he had a crush on Kerrey. But Clinton made him an earlier offer and he decided to take it.

Most of the rest of the people would only have gone to work for Clinton. Greenberg and Greer had known him for quite a while and had worked on his gubernatorial campaign, and Grunwald came with them. Carville and Begala surveyed the field and could have gone to work for anybody. They didn't make their decision until after all those other perspective candidates were out of the race. People like Harold Ickes were personal friends of Clinton, going back a while.

In the primaries, I don't think Cuomo's decision would have affected the staff much. We would have ended up with pretty much the same team. If Gephardt had run, Stephanopoulos, Begala, and Carville would have been more likely to go work for him because both Paul and George had worked for him in Congress. If Gore had run, I would have been in the miserable position of probably not being able to work for either one of them.

We had a talented campaign. It was a small operation. Because it started late, and because we didn't think Clinton was going to be able to raise that much money, we didn't hire a lot of people. It was in Little Rock, so that dramatically narrowed the number of people who were willing to sign on. You remember that in 2000, Gore moved his campaign to Nashville—in part to get rid of a lot of the hangers-on. Little Rock, though I resisted going there, saved the Clinton campaign for a couple of reasons.

First, it was truly an outside-Washington campaign. There was no way we could think like Washington insiders, when we were eatin' at Doe's, and walkin' the streets of Little Rock. It was so far away from the beltway that we had a perspective closer to what the voters had. That was immensely helpful. Second, we spent, as a result, a whole lot less time talking to people inside the beltway and being influenced by the ups and downs—

Jones

Most of whom were sure they knew better than you did.

Reed

Yes, and it wasn't just that their advice would have been bad, although it might well have been. It was that the mood swings of Washington are devastating. I don't think the Clinton campaign could have psychologically survived the Gennifer Flowers and draft stories if it had been based in Washington. My wife stopped going out over those two months because everybody in Washington had given up on Bill Clinton and she was tired of hearing about it from them.

In Little Rock we knew that we had problems, but the people we ran into on the street hadn't lost faith in Bill Clinton. We didn't have to spend all our time spinning our friends, and talking to reporters, fighting the daily conventional wisdom. That was enormously helpful. It was far more efficient. We spent our time doing our jobs, instead of trying to win the invisible primary. Once we got used to the isolation of the place, we all came to be grateful for it.

Just one other thing about an unrelated point. I believe that one of Bill Clinton's greatest political assets is that he spent his entire adult political career in Little Rock and not in Washington. So he spoke a different language from every other candidate. He was much more likely to know what was really going on in people's heads. Even though he's a competitive, partisan person, he didn't see the world in partisan terms. He had to work with Republicans. He had friends who were Republicans, or even more likely, independents that didn't belong to either party. He saw the world a different way, and spoke about it a different way. It allowed him to run circles around the guys from Washington he was running against.

Jones

Was it viewed as an advantage or a disadvantage that essentially the Iowa caucuses were not something you had to deal with because Tom Harkin was a favorite son?

Reed

That was a real blessing. Clinton was a bridge candidate, but he was a moderate. His positions were moderate, not liberal. And organization was not our strong suit. If we had had to compete in Iowa, he might very well have won, just because he was better at retail politics than anybody else. He was just a better candidate than the other candidates running at the time. But if he had to go head-to-head against Mario Cuomo in the Iowa caucuses, that would have been a tall order. Whereas in a place like New Hampshire, or in other primary states, his strengths would have come out.

No one really knows what to think about Iowa anymore because in this last go-around it behaved more like a primary. It seems like organization was not really the most important thing, but political talent was. But at the time, we were convinced that the Iowa caucuses were the epitome of everything we were trying to steer the party away from. I wrote the speech that Gore gave pulling out of Iowa in '87. He went there and we thought we were going to wow the political press by going into the belly of the beast, speaking to the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner and saying, "The politics of retreat, complacency, and doubt may do for others, but they will not do for me. I want to win Iowa in November, not in January." Something like that.

Anyway, there were seven candidates. He spoke at midnight, on a Saturday on the weekend that Douglas Ginsberg had admitted that he had smoked marijuana and all the other candidates had gotten asked if they had smoked marijuana and Gore had to admit that he had, too, so the speech got no attention whatsoever. In any event, it was clear that Iowa would be the least receptive place to go and try to change the party. We were grateful we got to fight it out in New Hampshire. And New Hampshire was well suited to Clinton's strengths as a retail politician, and as it turned out was desperate for answers, as I mentioned earlier.

Riley

You went to Little Rock when?

Reed

I joined the campaign formally and went on the campaign payroll in December. Went down to Little Rock several times. The campaign essentially moved to New Hampshire in January, so I never really set up shop in—

Riley

You went to New Hampshire?

Reed

I went to New Hampshire and spent a good part of late January and early February in New Hampshire. I went up there to write the health plan. I was there for the scandals. As a policy guy, my phone stopped ringing from the time of the Gennifer Flowers scandal to the end of the primaries. I'm not sure what I have to add about that period. There is one story that has always struck me as indicative of why Clinton survived. I was in Little Rock, at the mansion at the end of January, early February, after both scandals—the draft and Jennifer Flowers. Greenberg reported to Clinton that his numbers had really started to drop. He had been ahead in New Hampshire. He had been on the cover of Time. He was the national front-runner, but he was also in the 30s, I think, in New Hampshire before the scandals. Greenberg reported that his numbers had dropped into the teens.

Riley

Those are not approval numbers.

Reed

No, those are head-to-head. He was losing badly to Tsongas and headed in the wrong direction. The campaign was in complete panic. He was scheduled that next day to do an event on putting forth a proposal we called "Lifeline," to enable people whose houses were being foreclosed on because of the recession to hang onto their houses until they got their jobs back and things turned around. We'd worked on it with a friend of Clinton's who was a banker up there. It was something the people of New Hampshire were really interested in.

All the consultants were in despair and trying to figure out what to do. Clinton had just been told that his political future was probably over. His reaction was to pull me aside and ask me a whole bunch of questions and make some suggestions on what we should do to refine our proposal that he was going to announce the next morning on this Lifeline.

The consultants had a totally different view on what he's got to do. After the meeting was over, Begala, Stephanopoulos, and I went back to headquarters and wrote a new speech—that I think Carville had asked for - that was all this political language about, "No matter what happens, I'm gonna fight like hell." It was just a classic politician speech. We all thought it was the thing to do.

He went to New Hampshire. He was confronted at the airport by Peter Jennings with the [Col. Eugene] Holmes letter. Then he went and did this event and stood in the snow, all alone on the front yard of this home and gave this tinny, "I'm gonna fight like Hell" speech. The press thought he was toast. They smelled fear. Our campaign people in New Hampshire were devastated and said, "What are you doing? Everybody up here wanted to hear about what you're going to do to help them keep their homes. They can't believe that you talked about all this other stuff."

And sure enough, Clinton, after weathering those couple of days, went back to talking about what it was that New Hampshire wanted to talk about, not what the national press wanted to talk about. The people in New Hampshire, at the end of the day, didn't really care about Vietnam or Gennifer Flowers. They were willing to take his word for it, that those weren't big deals. That's when he said, "The hits I've taken are nothing compared to the hits that you've taken." He made it about them, not about him. They loved that about him.

In the last week of the administration, we went back to New Hampshire, back to Dover where he'd given the "I'll stay with you till the last dog dies" speech. I showed him a copy of the policy book that we put out in New Hampshire. He held it up for people, and you could just tell the gratitude and the special bond that he felt towards the people of New Hampshire for actually caring about real issues and not just about politics.

The political press, and the Republicans—the White House—didn't understand that. They thought that they could have another campaign like 1988, which was about nothing, where all the politicking would work. But the country was hurting, and there were real problems. People really did want somebody who was going to talk about them.

Riley

You mentioned earlier that the interval from there to the convention, you were pretty much toiling to yourself. Are you constructing the policies that later get—

Reed

We emerged from the primaries. It became apparent, almost right away after New Hampshire, that he was going to win. It was just a question of holding on. By the time we clinched the nomination, we were damaged goods. We were running well behind Bush. We were running third in the polls when [Ross] Perot was included. So we thought we would try to rehabilitate our image by giving a series of policy speeches between the end of the nominating process and the convention. There wasn't anything else to do. Once a candidate clinches the nomination, the press stops paying attention. We couldn't afford to go off the radar screen completely because we had so much baggage.

We started giving the policy speeches we hadn't had time to give during the primaries. He gave an economic speech at the Wharton School of Business, where he attacked the ethic of the '80s. He gave an environmental speech in Philadelphia, a family speech in Cleveland, an education speech in South Central L.A. It was a terrific opportunity for us to fill in the blanks and write the remaining chapters of what would become "Putting People First." He enjoyed it because he was a wonk and loved to talk about policy. It got us nowhere because the press wanted to know what we were going to do about our image problems. They didn't care about our ideas.

It did produce one quintessential Clinton speechwriting moment. The education speech that he gave in South Central L.A. was one of the most difficult because as I mentioned earlier, education was a topic where he knew more than anybody. He certainly knew more than I did. He had me gather a circle of all the people that he respected on education and pump them for ideas and put together a speech. Paul Begala and I wrote a speech and gave it to him—before the speech in Los Angeles—and he gave it back to us. He had carefully crossed out every line for the first three pages and written his own speech. Paul Begala and I both treasured that as the best example of what it was like to write for a guy who didn't need you.

We had the Manhattan Project that the consultants worked on, which I wasn't a part of, how to rehabilitate his image. We made some strategic decisions about whether to stay in Little Rock or go back to Washington. I was there at the meeting in Little Rock when they presented the four options for how to rehabilitate himself. One was "Putting People First." Another was "Reinventing Government." I can't remember what the other two were.

Riley

But there was substance.

Reed

For the most part, yes. I mean, part of it was telling the Hope story. I don't think anyone had a convincing theory of the case at that point. We set about writing "Putting People First." A group of us, John Kroger, who was my deputy, and I, and some others wanted it to be an edgier document. We wrote a draft called something like, "Ten Ideas to Revolutionize America." The consultants wanted a safer—they wanted a slogan with some substance behind it—but didn't want to have to spend all our time talking about the substance. Then Bob Reich and Ira Magaziner, who were informal advisors to the campaign, had a completely different vision what it would be. They had their own book that they wanted. Eventually we had to gather in Little Rock and reconcile our various drafts of the book. We put out "Putting People First" in June of that year, and that gave a little bit of a boost.

But what really turned the campaign around was the decision to pick Gore as the Vice President. Since I'd worked for both of them, I'd started telling friends and reporters that spring that I thought they would be a very interesting match because they had complementary interests and strengths. That, in fact, Gore was strong in almost all the areas where Clinton needed help—and vice versa. The big question was whether they could actually get along. They'd been natural rivals. They were Presidential wannabes who had almost run against each other four years earlier. They had eyed each other, as I told you earlier, about running in '92. Both young, competitive, from the same part of the country, which defied the convention of ticket-balancing.

Gore made the short list because he did have a lot of strengths that Clinton needed. I pleaded with the vetting committee that actually they'd be a good fit, that Gore was a Southern gentleman and a good soldier, and that they'd get along. When they met, they got along famously—much better than they'd expected. Roy Neel, who was Gore's chief of staff at the time, famously referred to them as two guys who had gone to college together but hadn't known each other in college, and met at their 25th reunion and decided to drive across the country with their wives, which is what happened. They went on the bus tours and became friends.

But the decision to put Gore on the ticket strengthened Clinton in ways even beyond what people had anticipated. I think the consultants were divided. They leaned more towards Gephardt or some of the others on the short list. [Harris] Wofford was on the short list, as I recall. They razzed me when George told me, the night before, that Clinton had picked Gore. I told them that they were going to love him, that it would work out fine. But then I got to stay up all night writing both of their speeches. [laughter] Which I guess is a test case of your earlier question about what it's like to write for the two of them.

Clinton used everything that I wrote about Gore, and Gore ignored most of what I wrote about Clinton.

Riley

I don't know what that says, do you, Chas?

Jones

I'm working on it.

Reed

I stayed up all night that night writing both of those speeches. The reason it turned out to be such a boffo success was first, it reinforced Clinton as a New Democrat, that this wasn't a ticket-balancing exercise, that this campaign was really about something—that he was confident enough to pick somebody who believed in the same things he did. And second, in a way that no one really anticipated, the sight of these two young men of the same generation, with young families, turned the election into a generational contest that we hadn't really expected. It wouldn't have happened if Lee Hamilton had been the choice, or Harris Wofford—or anyone else.

The remarkable thing was the degree to which Clinton wasn't threatened by Gore. I always thought that it was because after he chose him, he realized what a good choice it had been. Every time he might have been threatened he was reminded of what a good choice he had made. I'm sure that winning a Presidential nomination does a fair amount for your confidence. But he really had, in the course of the couple of years that I'd known him, gained a sense of security and confidence that was enormously helpful to him, and even more helpful to him as President, and it continued. By the end of his Presidency, I often thought back to the early days, when I first knew him, when he seemed not so much insecure, but in need of affirmation, and threatened by things that he later would have the self-confidence to dismiss.

Riley

I think you already addressed this, but I just want the record to be clear. You don't think that you had any particular role in helping pave the way for Gore?

Reed

No. I wished later that I had sent Clinton a memo expressing my feelings on the subject, because he ended up coming to the same conclusions that I would have suggested. But I felt that I had a conflict. I didn't feel right pushing him to pick him when he'd been my boss. The only small role that I played was in reassuring Warren Christopher's team—Jim McPherson, and others—that contrary to what most people thought, I figured that they'd get along quite well, that Gore would be honored.

Most people thought that Gore was too proud to be Vice President. I thought that he would be very proud to be Vice President, and wouldn't resent being picked at all. The only time that I can remember shuttling back and forth between the two of them before he got picked was when Clinton gave that environmental speech. He wanted to know Gore's opinion because Gore had just written a book on the subject. So I called Gore and asked him to read it. At that point there was still some of that tension that I'd felt when we scheduled them as bookends of the Cleveland conference.

Riley

It strikes me, listening to you talk about this, that this may be one of those instances where the President was not particularly beholden to his pollsters? Is that an accurate assessment?

Reed

Well, I don't want to downplay their role. I think, on this decision, on many, many decisions, as a candidate and as President, his political advisors were often divided. That was fine with him. He wanted their advice. He didn't want them to make the decision for him. If you haven't talked to Greenberg, I'm sure you will. I'm sure that Gore did fine in whatever polling they did on the subject. But I think that decision was so personal. He really wanted to find somebody he could get along with and would be comfortable with stepping into his shoes and would say something about his politics. So he was taking into account a lot of factors that a political advisor wouldn't, just by definition.

Riley

What you identified was something that comports with my own memory, which was that the dynamic of that decision, after it was made, took a lot of people by surprise. It's not the kind of thing that I think would show up very accurately in a poll. Chuck, do you have a question? Or Steve?

Jones

Yes, I do. We had some latitude, since Bush had chosen [Dan] Quayle. Before we get too far ahead of the convention, what about Perot, the effect of Perot on your policy?

Reed

A very interesting point. Perot was a very helpful influence on the '92 debate. Despite the fact that he was an odd bird, he was onto something. He was concerned about the deficit. He had tapped into Americans' concerns about how Washington was broken. Clinton's natural instincts were in that direction. He had some of the same feelings. He had a fair amount of gubernatorial contempt for Washington.

Riley

Jimmy Carter helped that along.

Reed

Perot reinforced his own instincts. He saw a competitive need to—he didn't want to get beat to the reform punch by Perot. So he kept pushing us to read Perot's work, come up with our own ideas in the same vein. So I think it had a significant kind of gravitational impact on the race, and also underscored how open the country was to dramatic change. It led to a lot of head scratching within the campaign, because we were running third.

There was considerable debate taking place in June, before the Vice President was picked, about whether we should we be aiming for a majority or a plurality. There were advocates of what we called the "34 percent solution." I don't think Greenberg was alone in this, but I think that was his first instinct, that if it was going to be a three-way race, he felt that our best shot was to make sure that our 34 percent showed up. I think that influenced his views on who would be the right Vice Presidential pick. The New Democrats had set about from the outset to expand the party's appeal. We thought a 34 percent solution was a disaster, that if we aimed for 34, we'd get 25. That was limiting Clinton's appeal in a self-defeating way.

It was a parlor game. There was no way of knowing whether Perot was going to go the distance and whether we could win the reform votes back from him. Thankfully, Clinton dismissed the 34 percent solution out of hand. He felt that that was a false choice. There was nothing about what he was saying to the swing voters that was going to alienate the 34 percent.

I think one of the reasons he picked Gore and not someone who was more of a party regular was because he thought that would expand his chances in expanding the party appeal. The combined slingshot effect of first picking Gore, and then, to our surprise, having Perot drop out of the race, propelled the two of them to a huge lead coming out of the convention. It was nothing we had ever expected. If we'd gone a different route and aimed for a more modest piece of the pie, it wouldn't have worked out as well. But everything broke our way.

The convention was something of a struggle. I was assigned to work with Gore on his speech.

Riley

"It's time for them to go?"

Reed

"It's time for them to go," that's right. Gore didn't have a name as a compelling speaker. We had the benefit of low expectations. But meanwhile, they were trying to sort out having the same old debate: how much a reformer vs. how much of a party regular to be, as well as how much to make the speech about what Clinton was going to do, and how much to make it about who he was and where he came from. I wrote a draft over the Fourth of July that was very much about what he was going to do, rather than who he was. He liked it, but he said he thought the consultants were right, that he had to tell more of his own story.

The speechwriting process for that convention speech was something of a nightmare. They ended up at one point with like six or seven thousand words, and they knew that they were going to hit an hour and a half if they didn't figure out a way to get it down. I think they were all disappointed in what they gave him. They just didn't have enough time to get it to the level they wanted. As it turned out, the essence of what Clinton had to say was so good—and he was so good at delivering it. And the film beforehand, and the story of "The Man from Hope" was so powerful. He hadn't had a chance to show that as much on the campaign trail. This time, you watch the 2004 race, and biography seems so central to it for most of the candidates. It was important then, but they didn't talk about it nearly as much. But both Gore and Clinton, in their convention speeches, bared their souls a bit. So the combination of people meeting this guy and hearing his story—I think one of the most interesting things that the Manhattan Project found was that most voters thought that Clinton was the son of privilege. They thought that that since he'd gone to Yale and was a Rhodes Scholar and a lawyer that he must be rich. They had no idea what he'd gone through. That's what "The Man from Hope" story was trying to correct. We went straight from there to the bus tour.

Jones

Could I back this up to Perot again? Did his campaign, in a sense, complement your overall strategy as far as policy concerns?

Reed

Absolutely.

Jones

To break out of an issue-less of American national politics—

Reed

That's exactly right. I wouldn't call him a wonk, but he had a detailed platform. He had a book. He was talking about a couple of real problems, mostly the deficit, but he was a big advocate of campaign and lobby reform, changing the culture of Washington. He had charts. So he was—like Tsongas, like Clinton—preaching specifics. As it turned out, of the three of them, Clinton was the only gifted communicator. The other guys just weren't regular guys. But Perot definitely both reinforced the importance of dealing with real issues and reinforced the desire to change Washington, which ultimately worked entirely to our favor.

Later, there was a lot of speculation that Perot's being in the race took votes away from Bush that we couldn't have won. I was always convinced that, even though Perot voters said they were sort of 50/50 Democrat/Republican, we would have gotten more than our share of his votes because they were votes for change. In some way, it's a shame for Clinton that Perot got back in the race—though on policy he probably was a helpful influence. If Perot hadn't gotten back into the race, it might have been better for us. Clinton would have come in with a considerable majority and one that he would have been forced to work hard to maintain.

We rejected the 34 percent solution and went for a majority. That enabled us to do well in the campaign. But we won with a plurality. We came into office with a 43 percent solution that was halfway between what the old Democrats and the New Democrats wanted. It left Clinton without the strength of his own convictions to govern from a majority standpoint and forced him, in the first two years, to govern as a Democrat, rather than as a Democrat with considerable appeal to Independents and Clinton Republicans.

Jones

Do you think Perot ever thought that he might be selected by Clinton as a Vice President?

Reed

No. At that point, he would have been thinking the other way around, probably, because he was leading us in the national polls. We were third at the time he got out. I don't know how they got on personally. They must have known each other a fair amount beforehand, because Perot's first interest, as a policy wonk, was education. And they were from neighboring states, and so on.

Jones

He did state that Clinton was the better candidate.

Reed

Yes he did give us a boost that way. As a person, no one knew what to make of the guy. But as a force—

Jones

That's why I ask—do you think he thought—

Reed

Who knows?

Riley

We haven't scheduled an interview with him yet, but I suppose that's a possibility. I want to refine this one more notch, because you're the policy guy, and the policy Perot was pushing most was, arguably, I guess you could say—political reform. But deficit reduction—was that a factor in how you were refining your own? Because deficit reduction is not something that you would have elected to put on the top of your list.

Reed

Our philosophy in the campaign was that we would demonstrate that we were fiscally responsible by keeping track of our promises and not making more promises than we could afford. We didn't try to put out a detailed plan to balance the budget because the country was too much in the hole. We just didn't see any gain in running a castor oil campaign. Clinton, at one point early in the campaign, went on Meet the Press and said that he'd balance the budget in four years, which we then had to refine to suggest that he would cut the deficit in half.

"Putting People First" was detailed enough to show that we were actually keeping track. It was reasonably responsible and unbelievably detailed by traditional campaign standards. So it was good work. The one area where we fudged was health care, because we had a deep division in the campaign between the health care policy wonks, who thought that universal health care would cost a fortune, and Ira Magaziner, who thought it would save money. You'd have to say the preponderance of policy opinion was in the wonks' direction.

When we were having this debate, my wife had gotten sick and was in Georgetown Hospital and ended up spending three or four days there. It's a teaching hospital. They kept running more and more tests that were to no effect. I became an instant convert to Ira Magaziner's view that there was a lot of waste in the health care system. On the conference call, when we decided, I was in the hospital waiting room on a pay phone. I suggested that since there was a difference of opinion we should just decide that one way or another health care would pay for itself. It would come out about even. So we took it off budget, which made the rest of the numbers of "Putting People First" work.

Later in office, we discovered that it did, in fact, score as costing a fortune. We couldn't pass it, in part, because of that. In any event, the deficit was a hard issue to campaign on in a recession. Perot was willing to look under the hood. His answers on the deficit didn't really work, but nobody paid any attention to the details of what he was saying. It was a useful pressure because it forced us to come up with specifics, and we had a lot of specific programs we were going to cut. People made fun of us because of what they were: the mohair program, the honeybee subsidy, a whole bunch of things. They were stupid programs, and we at least had the courage to stand up to the mohair producers. We wiped out the mohair subsidy. I believe it's back.

Riley

It's not an Idaho-based industry.

Reed

But we cut something. Clinton loved having a contest of ideas. I can remember after I slaved away in New Hampshire putting together the 11-page outline of our health care plan, knowing very little about the subject as I started and trying to broker Ira Magaziner and the wonks' interests. Clinton already had a full-blown view of what he wanted, which I had to translate into this policy paper. So we went through all that. I thought I had perfectly captured what it was that he wanted. Then a couple of days later, he said, "Did you read Paul Tsongas's health care plan? I really liked that. There's a lot of good stuff in there. We should do some of that."

Ours was a play-or-pay system. Tsongas's was entirely based on managed care. So we spent the next eight months in the campaign trying to reconcile those two plans. In any event, he didn't feel threatened by other people's ideas. I think it was an instinct that he developed as a Governor, realizing that no one Governor has all the answers, and that the whole point of getting together with other Governors was to see what other people were doing, and that that process was the best way to find the right answer that would work as a governing philosophy and would also attract the most support. I think he very much welcomed the direction that Perot was tugging him in.

He had mixed feelings about elite opinion that went further and further south as the campaign went on and they dumped on him more and more. As the chattering classes gave up on him he thought worse of them, but he was a serious thinker and didn't like the charge that Tsongas had started that he was a pander bear. He didn't like being thought of as irresponsible. He felt that he had given more thought to all these problems than anybody else, so it made him feel better to be more responsible on the deficit.

Riley

We made it past the convention. You were on the bus trip?

Reed

I did go on the bus trip.

Riley

Tell us about that.

Reed

It was an amazing experience. I deeply regretted that I didn't buy a video camera in New York City to film the whole thing. We went into it not expecting much. It seemed like just an extremely slow way to campaign. The idea of spending five days on the bus to St. Louis was not something that most of us would have done with our free time. But it became clear almost immediately what a fabulous idea the bus trip was going to be. From the very first stop, we were astonished by the crowds. It was just a different way to see people and see what they wanted. It's like the old ads about, "See America best by car." It was so different from tarmac-to-tarmac campaigning.

We had a rough patch in the first half hour because we got through the tunnel into New Jersey and realized one of the people on our bus—there were five or six buses—was actually a stowaway. I think they were homeless and just climbed on the bus. We'd been talking to the person. We just thought it was a new campaign staffer. [laughter] So we had to pull over and the police had to come and take this person away. Delayed the bus tour for a little bit. Our first thought was, This is going to be a very long trip.

We started in New Jersey. I can't remember if we made it to Pennsylvania that first night. We must have. The crowds were larger than expected. At the kickoff in New York, before we left, I realized as Gore was giving his speech that what he really should do is to repeat his line from the night before, that it was time for them to go. So I sent a note up to him, but he didn't get it in time. But he tried it at the next stop. The crowd loved it. By the end of the trip, everyone else was wishing that I had never brought it up because they'd heard Gore say it 100 times at that point.

We were talking earlier about Clinton speeches. The Clinton stump speech was always different. The Gore stump speech was always exactly the same. The press kind of lost interest in what these two guys were saying, but they were amazed by how the country seemed to feel about them. I most remember going through Illinois and seeing young kids lining the streets, holding sparklers and flags, and coming into Vandalia, Illinois, close to midnight on probably the second or third day of the trip. Clinton gave a remarkable speech about how [Abraham] Lincoln had been there. I can't remember if that was the state capital at that point.

Knott

It had been the state capital at one time.

Reed

We could just tell, it wasn't so much about us anymore. It was about how desperate the country was for change and how excited they were about the prospect of change. There were a couple of occasions where we literally had to pull over and stop because the crowds mobbed the road and we could not go any further. Some of it was a well-designed trip. They picked the locations, it was well advanced. But to a large degree it was a spontaneous eruption like we hadn't seen in that campaign. It happens every now and then in Presidential politics where the people get excited, more excited than the politicians had any right to expect, and this was one of those occasions. Clinton and Gore turned out to be a pretty good road show.

Riley

And you proved to be prophetic in your sense about the relationship between the two of them.

Reed

It was a great chance for them to get to know each other, because no matter how you slice it, there was still a lot of time between stops. We'd go for 14 and 16 hours. A good half of that was road time, so they got to know each other and their wives got to know each other. Clinton really hit it off with Tipper, and Gore hit it off with Hillary. At every stop, all four of them would speak. They were having the time of their lives. It was a remarkable way for them to become friends. Everybody was having fun.

Then we got to St. Louis. They liked it so much they told headquarters, "When can we do the next one?" Over the course of the fall we did—I don't know—seven bus tours? The one I remember best was the Lake Erie bus tour because my wife flew out to Cleveland to join us to tell me that she was pregnant. Then of course she had to come along on a three-day bus tour with morning sickness.

We had entire bus trips in Georgia and North Carolina, in every target state. I still have a whole dresser-drawer full of t-shirts, because for every bus tour, there was a t-shirt trying to surpass the last one. And the voters everywhere loved it. It was something they hadn't seen before. It was a way to do retail campaigning that could reach enough voters to matter. The crowds were huge and it was just such an American thing to do at a time when a lot of other Americans were taking road trips. That's what you do in late summer. It was an inspired way to make the most of Clinton's talents.

Jones

And your role consistently was that of preparing—

Reed

On the bus trips, the staff's role was survival. In the primaries, George Stephanopoulos, along with Bruce Lindsey, had been Clinton's travel mate, his policy and press guy on the plane. He came back to Little Rock to be communications director and asked me if I wanted to take his spot on the plane. So I did. By that time we had a dozen people traveling. We had Dee Dee Myers as press secretary, Paul Begala, a political guy, Bruce Lindsey—a few other political people and some technical people. Paul and I would occasionally write bits for speeches. When we announced new policies, as we would over the course of the fall, I'd explain them to the press corps. I'd try to manage the policy operation back in Little Rock by phone.

But as is often the case in this kind of campaigning, some days there's policy and some days there isn't. On a bus trip, it wasn't about the new ideas we were rolling out, it was just about rolling along. Just staying awake, not getting sick. Somewhere in Iowa, we took Bruce Lindsey to an event at the county fair and took him on some rides. He was devastated; he was sick for days. [laughter]

Knott

That's a revelation.

Reed

Every day there was a certain amount of talking with the press corps just to make sure that they got it. Some of them were still writing, filling in the dots on Clinton so they could write policy stories—so there was work to do. Mostly we were all just familiar faces for Clinton to stare at on the bus.

Jones

Did you learn something, then or later, that affected policy development?

Reed

I'd say that the whole ordeal of campaigning throughout '92—I felt like, from Clinton's standpoint, we were negotiating a contract with the American people. In his view, these ideas weren't just promises to get votes. He felt that the pledges he was making were the reason he was getting anywhere, the reason people had kept him in the race when they might not have otherwise.

I learned from watching him campaign on the stump, in addition to just seeing how good he was at it, hearing the promises over and over again and seeing how much the country wanted a different kind of politics. How much they wanted to change—not just Washington, but change both parties and how they did things. It confirmed what we'd thought, but deepened and broadened our understanding of the phenomenon in a way that would be very useful once we took office. As I said earlier, in the first couple of years we got off on a different road. But when we came back to that road that we campaigned on, all those miles on the bus were very useful.

Riley

Were there any major modifications in policy or approaches to policy in the fall campaign? We talked about the deficit earlier. Obviously that becomes important in the first year.

Reed

We re-did our health care plan to make it more market oriented, to incorporate more of the managed care phenomenon, which was a modest struggle within the campaign. It involved yet another all-nighter, where the folks in Little Rock fought, and fought, and fought, and produced this speech that Paul Begala and I both concluded was hopeless, so I stayed up all night re-writing for Clinton, which he then basically rewrote himself. He felt sorry for me. He couldn't have been nicer. It was one of those bonding experiences where we were just shaking our heads together about how stupid headquarters was. Every candidate gets to that point relatively early in the campaign, where they think that the folks back at headquarters are complete idiots who don't really understand what's going on.

Mostly we put out new policies. He gave a speech in South Central Los Angeles about his urban agenda. That was a productive all-nighter. He gave a welfare speech in Georgia on the bus tour that filled in some of the details. It was mostly a new layer of depth, rather than big changes in direction. There were some unanswered questions. He had to take a position on NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], which he did in a speech in North Carolina. Maybe that wasn't on the bus trip. That involved a big campaign pow-wow, a big internal struggle—probably the most protracted traditional Democrat/New Democrat battle in the campaign.

Riley

With George representing the traditional side?

Reed

Yeah. At one point we met in Little Rock with a couple of us on the free trade side, and somebody from Gephardt's office representing the anti-NAFTA view. Then we met at a hotel in Rosslyn with the entire campaign leadership—I mean, with the First Lady, Wilhelm, others, and I don't remember where everyone was. Greenberg, Carville, and George were against it. Mickey Kantor and some others of us were for it. Then we ended up having to write that speech a few days later in a different hotel in Washington. It was a speech that, more so than most with Clinton, was so evenly nuanced that the reporters covering it felt like it was a basketball game that went down to the final shot. They didn't know where it'd come out until the very end. I'm trying to think if there were any other dramatic—there were the debates, of course.

Riley

Were you involved in the debate preparation?

Reed

Yes. We had a big team of people that prepped him for the various debates. Debating was not his strong suit. In the primaries, he was good on his feet and knew his arguments cold. But in the primaries, he had lost his temper a few times. He came close to punching Jerry Brown in the New York debate when Brown attacked Hillary for being on the Wal-Mart board, something like that. Anyway, he did not blow away the field in the primary debates, so he wanted to practice quite a bit.

Riley

Did he invest himself in the practice? Was this a disciplined exercise on his part?

Reed

It was a pretty disciplined exercise. He watched some tapes of himself, which was not something he ordinarily did. He had an unusually good sense of how others perceived him. Then we had, let's see. I presume that Bob Barnett played Bush. I don't remember who played Perot off the top of my head.

Riley

It wasn't McCurdy, was it?

Jones

McCurdy played a role at some point.

Reed

It was just methodical. There were no great surprises, no epiphanies, just grinding it out. That's the way that he was in all the debate preparation I ever saw him in. He was always terrible the first time and he knew it. The experience of getting beaten by these other amateurs inspired him to a higher level. I think maybe Mike Synar played a part.

It was just disciplined practice for him, and he got better each time. I'm trying to remember which order they went. The last one, I think, was in Williamsburg, but I can't remember the first. There was one in Kansas City, maybe, and a third one—

Riley

The one everyone remembers is the one with the format change.

Reed

Right, with him on the stool and Bush looking at his watch.

Jones

Was that at Wake Forest?

Reed

That one was at either Williamsburg or Richmond. It was relatively uneventful. My strongest memory of the Williamsburg preparation was that, for the second year in a row, the Pirates had lost to the Braves in game 7, blowing a 2-0 lead in the bottom of the ninth, thanks to Francisco Cabrera. I wore black the next day. Then Clinton went off and campaigned in Pittsburgh and commiserated with the people of Pittsburgh, but made clear that he had no idea what actually happened in the game. He said it was too bad that the catcher dropped the ball, when the catcher hadn't even gotten the throw. The winning run had slid in before the ball arrived. He was never much of a baseball fan.

In any event, I'm sure that blood pressure was a little higher during the debates. We were confident that if we didn't screw it up, we were going to win. If I ever saw him nervous, it might have been before the first debate. But he never got very nervous. I think in the first couple, Perot's performance was better than expected. There was no clear winner, no clear loser. It was only in the third one, where Bush was perceived to be out of touch and Clinton bit his lip and felt the pain of the woman whose question Bush hadn't really answered.

Jones

You had to prep the guy to whisper to the President, "What time is it?" [laughter]

Reed

Yeah, Gore's question was on his mind, I guess. Because that's how it'd always go, "What time is it? It's time for them to go." I don't really remember any other tense moments.

In the final days, we had a 36-hour fly-around, where we went to nine cities in seven states and literally campaigned all night, ending up in Little Rock the morning of Election Day. We knew by that point that we were going to win. We had a crowd of several thousand at four in the morning in New Mexico in 20-degree weather. I feared for a moment at one point on the Kentucky stop that I'd cost the President a swing state because we borrowed a football the Governor had given him along the way. We were playing touch football while he was giving a stump speech. One of the advance men threw the ball into the crowd and broke a woman's nose. Kentucky was very close, so we were worried that the news would break just in time.

Jones

Lost by a nose. [laughter]

Reed

Exactly. As it turned out, it was more painful that I had to break the news to him that we had lost his football. But to back up just one second, there is one bus trip story, I think from the Lake Erie trip, that it was telling. As I said, these bus trips were unbelievably exhausting. But Clinton was the opposite of everyone else. He was energized by the experience. He fed off the crowds. The more people he saw, the stronger he got and the more energized he got.

At one point on that trip, we pulled into Erie, Pennsylvania at 3:30 in the morning. There was a crowd of a few thousand waiting for us. Everybody on the trip was just dying to go to sleep. But there was a rope line, and Clinton decided to work the rope line, which had all of us groaning. The reason I remember it is that instead of just shaking hands, he was actually talking to the people he met. A young man asked him what was his plan to pay for college. Clinton gave a seven-minute answer at 3:30 in the morning to one voter in Pennsylvania, and would have gone on longer if the kid hadn't looked like he wanted to go to sleep. [laughter]

He just had an enthusiasm for campaigning that somehow didn't wear him out. He did almost no preparation. Other candidates I've been around have a briefing book. They want to know who's going to be there at the next stop. They're nervous, understandably, about going to a new place and getting the name of the town right and speaking to the right local concerns. Clinton was so at ease with his abilities that on the plane or on the bus between stops, if he wasn't talking to somebody, he'd either sleep or read mystery novels.

He was the most relaxed candidate I've ever seen, and that was in good times or bad. It wasn't just a function of being five points ahead in the polls. It was something he thoroughly enjoyed. In fact, one of the striking things about him was that he's the only politician I've ever seen who loved everything about politics, all the jobs that a politician has to do. He liked fund-raising, he got a kick out of talking to people about how they made the money they were giving him. He loved meeting voters. He loved giving speeches. He didn't resent any of it. You know, he would get into quarrels with the headquarters over why they had him campaigning in this market rather than that market because he knew, almost down to a precinct level, where his best chances were. He loved the game, and was sorry every night when he had to go to bed.

Knott

Did that include the media as well?

Reed

Well, you know, that was different. That changed over the course—Initially, he really liked talking to reporters, liked talking to them about ideas, enjoyed the challenge. He got tired of it when all they asked about was women and the draft. I think he felt resentful—and this carried on into the Presidency and deepened—he felt that he had been held to a standard that nobody else had ever been held to, and that it wasn't fair. I think he was somewhat scornful of the press for the way they had behaved in that. It took some time repairing his relationship with the press after he took office. It was never very good. It got a little better for a while.

Knott

Did you see—and I may be asking something you can't comment on—Mrs. Clinton and her attitude about the press? Did she share her husband's attitude? Did she have a different attitude?

Reed

I'm not sure I have that many campaign memories of her feelings. They were extraordinarily protective of Chelsea. That was their number one worry about the whole enterprise, and about the press in particular. They just wanted her to have as normal a life as possible. They thought she was the best thing they had done together. They were reasonably happy about how the press had respected that.

I think that, as with every political couple that I ever seen, they shared their resentments about the kind of treatment they were getting. As a general matter, he had a harder time holding a grudge against anyone. He was famously gracious to his enemies, some thought to a fault. She was a little more normal in that respect. She remembered when people were unfair to us. But I don't remember anything extraordinary about her feelings.

The other thing that happened that was of some consequence that summer was that the Manhattan Project did a good job of figuring out how to project Clinton's story. But the campaign was still somewhat at sea over his direction. "Putting People First" was a brilliant slogan in some ways because it showed where Clinton's heart was. But it was, not necessarily intentionally, vague. It allowed a lot of people to see different things. That was a good thing from a marketing standpoint, but not necessarily from a strategic one. You could be an old-style Democrat and say this, you could be a new-style Democrat and say that. It was apparent that the campaign needed a little crisper direction.

At one point in the summer, before the convention, when we weren't on all cylinders, we were doing better, but we definitely were not back in the lead. Hillary reached out to Al From, brought him in to meet with Clinton and to kind of lay down the law to the rest of the campaign that running as a different kind of Democrat was going to be a central part of our advertising and a central part of the message for the fall campaign. It did become the defining theme of the ads, which were primarily about crime and welfare reform and being a different kind of Democrat.

Hillary—as she often was, over the course of the Clinton years—was one of the first to sense that the campaign wasn't sufficiently focused, and brought in people who, she thought, had helped get him there.

Jones

Was there confidence you were going to win, from the convention on? And, in that context, can you also say something about Perot's re-entry?

Reed

We had died a thousand deaths by the time of the convention. So when we suddenly woke up and found ourselves in the lead, we were delighted. But we knew not to take it for granted. We didn't think the Bush campaign was very good. It was clear they couldn't get their act together the way they had in '88. The '88 campaign, shallow as it had been, was a well-run campaign in which they knew, from beginning to end, what they were doing.

The '92 Bush campaign was much more typical of an incumbent campaign, where there was a deep division between the folks who were governing and the folks who were campaigning. They seemed to be at odds and at war with one another. They came up with a strategy that was mostly an attack strategy towards Clinton. We didn't think it would work, because we thought a lot of that stuff had been asked and answered in the campaign, but you never knew. And Democrats hadn't won in a very long time.

The fall campaign had none of the nail-biting moments that the primary campaign had had. There was never a point where we thought we were going down in flames. Perot's re-entry was a surprise. But at that point, he had discredited himself as a potential President by the strange things he had said about Bush. We didn't think he would tip the competitive balance, but we didn't know whether he was going to come in in single digits. I think everybody was surprised by how well he eventually did, given his limitations as a candidate.

Jones

He's the only third, or Independent party, candidate who actually increased his numbers during the campaign. Most go down, like John Anderson. He actually increased his numbers.

Reed

From the time that he got back in. He obviously was much higher when he got out. No, I think that's right.

Knott

Serving as policy director for the campaign—did that include national security and defense policy as well?

Reed

In the primaries, I was a convener. I brought Sandy Berger, and Tony Lake, and Will Marshall and others together. I wrote the foreign policy speech that we gave at Georgetown. Or, I should say, I typed it. I'm not sure I understood enough of the nuance to—I could recognize discordant notes. Sandy Berger and Tony Lake, old friends from the Carter years and old friends of Clinton's—at least Sandy was—were in charge of foreign policy, almost from the beginning of the campaign. There was almost no foreign policy in the campaign. Every now and then we'd give a speech or make a statement just to show that we could, but those were the years the Cold War was over, we were spending the peace dividend, we were to the right of Bush in a couple surprising ways. It was almost of no interest to anyone.

The other political phenomenon introduced that year—it was, I think, the year of the town hall. There had been town halls before, obviously, going back forever. But Clinton was the first to really show how well it worked as a political tool,. Perot did some of it too, but Clinton had done a little bit of that in New Hampshire to good effect.

We spent a lot of time doing those in different markets around the country. The reason I brought it up is that the town halls were a magnificent leading indicator of what people cared about, and they never asked about scandal. That was true from New Hampshire on. There was such a striking difference between what the press asked and what the people asked. I think that's one reason why that last debate was so pivotal. We finally had a debate where people got to ask the questions. The things that were on people's minds were good for Clinton and bad for Bush.

They asked about strange things. I remember from that famous visit, the campaign trip to Seattle that gets mentioned in that Post article. That same night, we did a town hall at one of the stations, and a guy asked Clinton's position on warlocks. [laughter] He didn't really have any idea—

Riley

Did he look to you?

Reed

No. He made some policy in some town halls on the fly, but—

Knott

The accusation was made, at the time, that Candidate Clinton was not particularly interested in defense or national security policy, and that sort of persisted through his Presidency, fair or not. You told a story this morning about how—

Reed

The story I told notwithstanding, I think going into the debates and then very much so as President, he began to see foreign policy as a new field to conquer. It was an intellectual challenge for him. He knew everything about every other policy, and here was something, finally, that he'd have a chance to learn. I think he relished the challenge of proving to people that he could master it. Gore's arrival helped precipitate that too, because Sandy and Tony were terrific, but they were advisors. They weren't politicians.

Gore was someone whose views on the subject Clinton respected immensely. I think Gore enabled Clinton to relax a little bit about the subject, because he knew that as a team, we were going to have a good answer to everything. But also, Gore ended up being a good teacher and maybe a bit of a competitive spur. He got very interested in the issues that Gore had been interested in.

I wasn't there all the time, but I suspect that they spent an awful lot of their time on the bus talking about foreign policy, global warming, and Gore's enthusiasms, science and technology policy. Clinton was a very good listener, a good sponge. He loved to soak up other people's ideas. Nothing could possibly ever move him as much as education did, or welfare and anti-poverty policy did. No Governor is going to forget how much those mean. The first State of the Union we did we were criticized because it was 7,000 words and we dedicated maybe a hundred to foreign policy. There was so much of a foreign policy consensus suddenly that there just weren't a lot of issues to address.

Jones

Was it not also the case that President Bush did not make it an issue? This was presumably his strength, and yet he didn't make it an issue or a set of issues, in part because you folks earlier in the year portrayed him as only interested in international, not interested in the domestic sphere, that the economic problems were a priority in part because he wasn't paying attention. Isn't that at least possible?

Reed

Absolutely. The DNC had t-shirts about all the countries he had visited. They kept tabs on how long he was gone. He was in trouble—not by our doing, just by the press's doing—for throwing up on the guy in Tokyo and not knowing what a grocery store scanner was in New Hampshire.

I think that in a different time, Bush's strengths in foreign policy might have proved more politically useful, but against Clinton, unless he could prove that Clinton actually had gone to Russia and signed up with the Communists as a young man, or make some hay over the draft, the country was so desperate for some kind of domestic attention and progress that Bush had to spend all his time trying to prove he could speak our language, rather than Clinton having to spend as much time having to learn his.

Jones

Could we use my earlier question about confidence as a segue into the transition to ask: At what point did you begin thinking seriously about the transition? While the campaign was still underway?

Reed

I guess by early October we could tell we were on a trajectory to win. There wasn't any new policy to develop. So those of us with an inclination started worrying about the transition. Mickey Kantor had taken on the task of formally setting up the mechanism of a transition. He had Cheryl Mills, who was one of his associates at his firm, working on the policy aspects of the transition.

This was pre-election. Those of us in the campaign didn't know what to make of that. It seemed like Mickey had undertaken that of his own volition. We didn't know if it was an officially sanctioned operation or a rogue one. There wasn't really anyone to ask on that subject.

Jones

Was a group involved?

Reed

Not really. We were determined not to take the election for granted, so we didn't do what some campaigns had done and advertise the fact that we were setting up a transition. We thought that was the height of arrogance and that it might jinx it. I think that Clinton really didn't want to delegate too much of that because that was going to be fun for him, too. Carol Browner was also assigned, maybe on the Vice President's behalf. I knew her from working in the Senate office together. She started working on the personnel side of the transition, trying to find names of good people to occupy jobs. It was all haphazard.

On the policy front, my deputy John Kroger and I spent the last couple of weeks of the campaign—he actually went back and read up on previous transitions. We wrote a ten-page memo on policy transition, which we finished typing on that all-night fly around. We handed it to Clinton when we landed in Little Rock on the morning of Election Day. I don't know if he ever read it. The essence of our advice was, "Don't let the personnel hunt dominate your transition. Try to keep the focus on your ideas." The transition was a spectacular disaster from that point of view. If anyone read our advice, it had no impact whatsoever. From the get-go, the transition and the top people on the transition—the President-elect, the Vice President-elect, and their Chiefs of Staff—focused almost exclusively on who was going to get what job in a methodical public manner.

At the same time, the swarm of the Democratic Party and of official Washington, which hadn't seen the inside of the White House for 12 years, descended on the President's agenda and started throwing it overboard. We had one story after another of how Clinton was going to back away from this promise or that promise. There was one about how he was going to back away from the White House staff cuts. And variations on the theme of, "Well, he may have promised it, but he's not going to deliver."

That was not the impression that Clinton or the rest of us wanted to convey. It was mainly because we had a process that was beyond control. The guys in charge were focused only on putting a team together. The Washington part of the transition was a mess. Whatever preparation had been done was of almost no use. The policy stuff—

Riley

That was Mickey Kantor's.

Reed

They'd done fine. Cheryl had done a perfectly good job, but she was only one person. There was no way only one person could have done it. The personnel search started from scratch. Everything was a jump ball. I can remember setting foot in the transition office in Washington, looking around, and realizing that the whole place was overrun by the very people we'd campaigned against. Which, I suppose, is a common phenomenon, and to some degree necessary.

To step back a minute, the Democratic Party bench was badly depleted by 12 years in the wilderness. We didn't have very many people who knew what they were doing who were in a position to step in and take these jobs. Most of us, like me, had never set foot into the White House, didn't know anyone who had worked on a White House staff, had only a newspaper reader's inkling of how the place worked.

We knew how politics worked, we knew how Washington worked, but we didn't know how administrations worked. That was true across the board, so what happened instead was, the expertise that we had as a party in Washington—Congressional expertise—made its way down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House and pretended to know what it was doing in an administration—but in fact, for the first couple of years, tried to run the White House like it was the Democratic caucus instead of understanding the full power of the Presidency.

Riley

Were there former Carter administration people who were looked to for advice?

Reed

There were a few. The biggest voice of relevant experience that most of us sought out was David Gergen, who was a friend of Clinton's and who had the most recent White House experience of anyone we knew. He hung out at campaign headquarters, or transition headquarters, in Little Rock and told us what it was like to work in the White House and gave us advice on how to do things.

You know, the Carter White House wasn't a great training ground either. It had ended badly. That was an administration that had come in from outside Washington and had never quite figured out how the place worked. I sat down with Stu Eizenstat, who was extremely helpful in explaining to me how the place worked. But there weren't many others like him.

Riley

It was considered almost a disqualifying experience?

Reed

Well, no, but there weren't a lot of Carter people who wanted to come back in. My sense is that—next year, four years from now, eight years from now—that the White House experience was, in the main, such a good experience for all of us that we'd love to do it again. You got the sense from the Carter people that it was the most memorable period of their lives, but not necessarily in a good way.

Jones

And they were 12 years into another career—

Reed

That's almost a generation. Most of them couldn't afford to do it, or had lost touch with the political world. Carter and Clinton were different. They didn't click well. There was remarkably little overlap between the Carter universe and the Clinton universe, given that they were both Southern Governors, from just a couple states apart. Clinton, understandably, blamed Carter, in part, for his defeat in '80. I'm sure there's natural, maybe in some ways more natural tension between Presidents of the same party than different parties, just because you're sharing some of the same glory.

But in any event, for the most part, there just wasn't much valuable talent around. The best political talent in the party was outside Washington, and they didn't know anything about how Washington worked. We felt like we pushed the rock all the way up the hill in changing the party. We came into the transition and realized that we really hadn't changed the party at all. We changed perceptions of the party, and we were taking the party in different directions, but we hadn't convinced most of them to come along. They wanted to come and run the same kind of administration that they'd always thought of running.

Jones

Let me ask you to do a comparison. When you're talking about the decision to run and developing the campaign organization, some of the description of that sounds very much like the description of getting the transition organized. So why was the former successful—the organization representing, as it did, Clinton's preferences—and the transition, not? Does it really go to the man?

Reed

I think that it goes to the size of the enterprise. Clinton knew where he wanted to take the party and the country. By temperament and perhaps by design he wanted to leave a certain amount of latitude for people to come to that conclusion. He was intellectually a reformer and constitutionally someone who wanted everyone to love him equally. That ended up being a potent mix, but it meant that at transition points, there was a lot more work to be done to make sure that we kept going in the direction that he wanted us to because he tolerated a lot of points of view. We felt like we had a good sense of where he wanted to go, but a lot of people could talk to him and come away thinking that he agreed with them.

I think that's one of the things that's necessary—your ability to inspire that in people. But in the campaign, it was a small enough universe that we could have the battle, we could come to a conclusion, we could more or less stick to it. Mostly because in a campaign, the only thing that mattered was what the candidate said and who he was, so he could control it. The campaign did an excellent job of not screwing it up, and of keeping Bush on the defensive, and not failing. But the best thing we had going for us was that Clinton knew exactly where he was going. In that sense, as long as we kept the campaign more or less in the right direction, it'd be fine.

When we grew into a general election campaign, we went through some of the same growing pains. We had a whole bunch of new people come in. Some of them got what we were doing, some of them didn't. Eventually, because once again, Clinton was all the country saw, we were able to stay on course.

When we got to the transition and into the first couple years of the Presidency, it was far beyond his ability to control where the party was going. In an administration, or in a transition, the President isn't the only voice any longer. There's a whole host of people who are instantly deputized to represent the incoming administration's views. It's harder to keep them all going in the same direction. In those first few years, we never had an enforcer, someone who would read people the riot act. Even if they flatly opposed what the President said in the campaign, they didn't get taken to the woodshed over it.

In a campaign, the longer it goes on, the more people get it. They live with the message and the cause long enough that even if they didn't start there, they end there. In the transition, there are suddenly thousands of people who watched the campaign on TV or read about it in the newspapers but didn't live it. It wasn't their worldview. If they disagreed with it, they could easily just say, "Well, he just said all those things to get elected, but now that he's in office, he's going to see the world the way we do." Or they just flat didn't get it. They selectively tuned in to parts of what Clinton had said over the course of the campaign. They didn't hear the part of the speech where he said that we were going to fundamentally change Washington. Either they didn't notice it or they just thought that was campaign window dressing.

Or some of the more experienced ones recognized "Hey, guess what? It's a whole new ball game. We start over now." So every job was, in some ways, a battle over the direction of the party. Every campaign promise, whether we'd keep it or not was a battle. For most of us from the campaign, it was whether we were going to be keepers of the campaign flame. It wasn't just a New Democrat versus an Old Democrat thing, it was, "We made a set of promises. Are we going to keep them or not?" The people in the campaign, across the ideological spectrum, were deeply committed to making sure we made good on our word.

Gene Sperling, who had started with Cuomo and who had started way to my left, and I were both compatriot keepers of the flame for the campaign agenda. That's what Clinton looked to us to do to make sure the new people around him didn't forget the promises that had gotten him there. But there was a whole new set of players who had no stake in the campaign agenda. Some of them thought parts of it were stupid, or it was at odds with everything they had worked for.

Jones

And yet, you were to depend on these people—you had moved from the independence of the campaign to the dependence of governing, in a sense.

Reed

That's right. So we paid a terrible price for it on a lot of occasions. I had a painful experience with the first budget because a couple of the new people who were wise in Washington ways—Lloyd Bentsen and Alice Rivlin - argued that just because he promised welfare reform as a candidate didn't mean he had to put any money in his budget for it. We could do that later. They convinced Clinton he didn't need to do that, which caused a big blow-up with [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan and almost destroyed our health care agenda. It made it impossible for us to do welfare reform for the first couple years, which had devastating political consequences—led us to have to fight a much harder battle a couple of years down the road.

That played out in a less dramatic fashion in a host of different areas. New Democrats were badly outnumbered in the party. At the DLC we used to joke that we won before we were ready. When I came to the DLC, their view was that the cause was not going to ripen until '96. They had no real expectation of being competitive in '92. I was much more impatient. I didn't want to work on another losing campaign just for practice. I was much more of a wishful thinker. But in any event, we just hadn't won enough converts to staff an administration. We also ran into some resistance in getting the people—even the true believers—into the jobs they wanted.

But even setting aside the New Democrat/Old Democrat distinctions, there weren't enough campaign people to have a critical mass in the administration. Some of the campaign people, the consultants, didn't want to work for the government; they wanted to remain consultants. They were just kibitzers—important kibitzers—but not really in a day-to-day role. So we had the combination of a party that really wasn't sure it wanted to go in the same direction as Clinton, and a new team that had no idea what it was doing in the White House. We had a good agenda for the country, but we had almost no experience in the White House and almost no understanding of the Presidential perspective.

Knott

You've been talking about some of the difficulties in the transition. If I recall correctly, the President-elect did not appoint his Chief of Staff until late into the process.

Reed

Yes. I would say the transition was perhaps the most miserable experience of my life, and I think others felt that way. We felt that this crusade, which we had miraculously survived and succeeded at, was all melting away before our eyes. Obviously, all of us were deeply uncertain about what we were going to do ourselves. But more than that, the whole thing seemed to be spinning out of control from the press conference that the President did in Little Rock, where all of a sudden, gays in the military became the most important issue he campaigned on. I'm not sure, if someone had asked me, I could have even identified the fact that we had made that commitment during the campaign until it became an issue in the transition. That was repeated, time and again, on a host of issues.

The President and the Vice President were having a great time picking the Cabinet, but they were being very methodical about it—and there was no one else picking the rest of the team. So they eventually got the Cabinet they wanted, although the President was, I think, frustrated.

He pitched a fit about the bean counters, how he was having to balance a variety of interests in trying to put together the Cabinet. But it just brought back memories of the Vice Presidential search that [Walter] Mondale had gone through. Every bad memory about how the Democratic party made decisions—just doing it all in a public, indecisive way, where all the different voices of the party got to scream so much that no matter what you did you looked like you were caving to somebody. And organization was not his favorite interest, so putting together a White House staff was lower on his list.

Knott

Do you think this was something that he recognized or understood about himself—that organization was not his strength?

Reed

Well, he'd been told it a number of times. I think that his entire experience to that point was that it wasn't his strength, but he was good enough that it didn't matter, that he could compensate for it with his other talents. I think his experience of the transition and the first few years in the White House was the depressing discovery that even though he was at the top of his game, it still wasn't enough to compensate for everybody else's deficiencies. He routinely complained in those first two years that being President obviously didn't seem to carry much weight around the place. [laughter]

My experience was that getting the President on your side on an issue was only about 10 percent of the battle. Because there were no clear lines of authority and there was deep division about which way to go, the way to get something done in the White House was to just wear out a lot of shoe leather knocking on doors, reminding people that we promised something in the campaign, pleading with them to stay on the program, and go around the building, knocking on door after door. But by the time you got to the end of the line, the first person you spoke to had changed their mind again, so you had to go ride the circuit again.

Clinton was not an indecisive person, by any stretch. He had strong feelings. He had the ability to make smart decisions, was an incredible synthesizer. But he was a very patient decision maker. He wanted to have every available bit of evidence and not make a decision until he absolutely had to. In an administration with little structure, that became a problem because people took advantage of it. They tried to keep decisions open longer than they needed to be.

There was a perception that even after the President made a decision—there was that famous story of the bill he'd vetoed in Little Rock and then had gone in over the weekend with a coat hanger and pulled it out from under the door and unvetoed it. So even though Clinton knew what he was doing and where he was going, his willingness to hear everybody out made everybody think that every decision could go into overtime or double-overtime. There was always a higher court to appeal it to.

Riley

Could I ask a question about this? Chuck probably remembers this. Some wise old man at some point said, "Every President needs somebody who can tell him ‘No.'" Did you encounter anybody during the campaign season—let's talk about that first—who had that kind of relationship with Clinton? That is, an outside source of advice who could tell him, "This is far enough. Stop."

Reed

There were a few people with that rapport. First off, Hillary was a very good reality check. And there were people like Al From, who from an ideological standpoint were more than happy to come in and tell him no. And Betsey Wright was that kind of person. Interestingly, even though he was a non-confrontational person, he didn't mind having confrontational people around him. He actually liked having people telling him no. He was not the kind of boss who punished you for disagreeing with him. Quite the opposite. He respected people more if they mixed it up with him. I often wished I disagreed with him more, because it was clearly something that he valued. Sometimes he resented it, sometimes he would fight about it. Then, when he cooled down, he was glad that people had told him that.

That said, in the first couple years we had a whole lot of people who didn't know if the answer was yes or no. That was a problem. Bruce Lindsey was another person who could be brutally honest with him, and Clinton looked to him for that. But what was harder to do in the early days was just to kind of tap your watch and say, "We have to make a decision now." Partly that was because the White House didn't have a sense of the rhythm. We were, from the beginning, on the defensive on a couple of fronts that were hard to control, like gays in the military.

Mac McLarty, who was a wonderful man, was the least confrontational person in the world. He was an unbelievable gentleman. Unfortunately, the role of the Chief of Staff— particularly in a new administration that hasn't found its feet—tends to be less, "Let me hold the door for you," than, "Don't let the door hit you on the way out." So Mac was just too nice. Nobody knew what roles to play, what positions to play.

Riley

Forgive me for interrupting, but I want to press you a little on this. The willingness to entertain dissent is a different character trait from the willingness to accept the disciplining influence of somebody whose judgment you trust, in some instances, more than your own.

Reed

True. There was no—if this is where you're going—wise man to whom Clinton would often turn, or who would step in and say, "Mr. President, you have to do this." Not really.

Jones

Not Vernon Jordan?

Reed

Vernon Jordan was the closest. I was just about to say.

Riley

He didn't come inside.

Reed

No. Clinton was a political genius. There was no one in his league. So there wasn't anyone obvious to do that. Some people tried to fill that role. Vernon Jordan did, to some degree, for some things. And David Gergen did, for a while. They were wiser than Clinton in the ways of Washington, but there wasn't anybody with infallible advice.

Riley

The basis of the question is getting to the notion, as we get through the transition and onto the Chief of Staff question, which you already dealt with a little bit. It is: If the President has a certain disposition in this regard, then it may be that it was not possible to create a formal position that would have imposed something on him that he was naturally inclined to follow or accept. Thus my question about whether there were people in his past who—you suggested a handful of people, maybe Betsey Wright, when she was the Chief of Staff for a while. But I don't know enough about that period even to know whether that was ultimately—

Reed

I think that what we lacked was someone willing to rise to the occasion of taking responsibility for how the place was run and all the things that the President didn't necessarily do as well as some others. We had a lot of people who wanted to take responsibility for a little piece of it. We had a fair amount of people who didn't want responsibility at all. That's what consultants are. They provide advice, but they're detached. They're not in a formal decision- making role. Clinton liked advice, liked people who, whether they were consultants or not, were essentially in a "minister-without-portfolio" kind of role. We suffered for the lack of a person or group of people who truly wanted to fill that void and put their neck on the line for how the place was going to be run. Leon [Panetta] was better than Mac in that regard. Erskine Bowles was, perhaps, the best of the lot in that regard. I don't want to fault Mac in particular. I don't think he sought out that job. Even if we'd had someone more temperamentally suited to it, there were just too many people, in too many positions, who didn't know what their roles were supposed to be.

Clinton had never had a formal structure around him. In the campaign, we were a very flat organization. People had roles, but the roles did not have firm boundaries. Clinton was the kind of guy who would listen to political advice from me, even though I was a policy guy; he'd listen to policy advice from a political guy; he'd listen to governing advice from one of the waiters he'd brought up from Arkansas. He thought that he was capable of synthesizing an infinite amount of information, and that's what he expected from people.

Jones

In the same line of questioning, it's said that any leader—certainly a President—needs somebody whose status is derived from a source other than the President, or the leader. Who's going to worry about him personally, the effect of decisions on him, forward-thinking as to what this is going to do. A lot of Presidents have had such people. In Carter's case, he had [Charles] Kirbo, who was much more active, we find, than was thought at the time. Some said this was Nancy's [Reagan] role—of course it derived from him—but her sole focus was the effect of—and, I take it there was no such person. You've said that. But I wonder also whether the confidence Bill Clinton has in his own capacity prevents any such person.

Reed

Well, it's interesting. Obviously, we had a disastrous first couple years and then, suddenly, performed at a much higher level. I think there was always a certain amount of chaos around the Clinton White House, even when we got our act together. It was creative chaos. When we learned what we were doing, it became very useful to Clinton and he thrived on it. I think the bigger problem that we had in the first couple years was that we just had a bad game plan. Clinton was new to town and he had some native guides who sold him a bill of goods.

As I said, we adopted a Congressional mentality very quickly. I've worked on the Hill. There are a lot of things valuable about Congressional experience. But there was a confusion of interests. Most Democrats in Washington—many of the people who had worked on the Hill who came to work for the White House—thought that the interests of the Democratic Congress and the interests of the Clinton White House were the same. In the aggregate, that was undoubtedly true. But in the particulars, that was not necessarily true at all. The President had his own agenda. Much of his rapport with the voters stemmed from the fact that it was a different agenda; it was at odds with his own party. His independence was an extraordinarily important trait to have in that period—perhaps always, but it was particularly important then, when people had lost faith in Washington. His independence derived from his willingness to chart his own path.

So a number of people—for perhaps intelligent reasons, hoping to avoid the Carter experience of a new President from outside Washington coming in, unable to get his agenda done because he alienates the key committee chairmen—bent over backward the other way and had Clinton in the position of deferring on things that mattered a whole lot to him—deferring to the old bulls in Congress and sanding down his agenda so it would be acceptable within the party. It turned out to be a fiasco, from the standpoint of presenting that agenda to the people of the country.

Our game plan with Congress was that on a host of issues—budget, health care—that we would send a bill up to the left of where we wanted it to be, knowing that the Congressional process would move it towards the center, where we had campaigned. The impact that that had in the political sphere was that when we would announce a policy, the press would accuse us of departing from our campaign principles in deference to Congressional pressure. Time after time we ended up with a centrist agenda that looked like we'd taken the most circuitous route.

Health care was an example of that. In fairness to the Congressional guys who took us down that path, it's not clear that any other path would have necessarily worked, either. The Congress was bitterly polarized. Republicans signaled early on that they weren't going to help Clinton with a darned thing. We came in with a minority electoral mandate, a plurality.

Maybe we wouldn't have been able to build a majority-governing mandate anyway, because the Republicans wouldn't have wanted to come along. But my view was that we followed the wrong model. We reacted to the Carter model, tried not to get rejected as the new guy in town. We should have followed the Reagan model, where he took his case to the country, got the country behind him, and the Congress immediately folded their cards and followed suit. It was much easier for a communicator like Clinton to persuade a majority of the country than it was going to be to persuade a majority of Congress. So we wasted his talents that way and looked bad doing it.

Jones

But was there discussion among those who were in the campaign, who were very likely to be on the White House staff, like yourself and George and many others, that the first thing to do following the election in order to have this refined game plan is to get that staff put in place, as soon as possible? Also satisfying the questions about who's going to get what. As a way of preparing, which the long transition period is kind of designed for, to have the game plan ready to go.

Reed

Probably everybody was worried about it. Some people were too busy with the campaign to spend much time thinking about it.

Jones

I'm talking about after the election.

Reed

None of us had ever been through a transition before. We knew it was awful, we didn't know that it was unusual. We thought maybe this was the way transitions were supposed to happen. There wasn't anyone to go to. I became for a while a sort of political football in the personnel game—

Riley

We want to hear about that, when you finish.

Reed

When I wanted to plead my case, there really wasn't anyone to go to, other than all the way to Clinton. That was something you could do on the campaign because he was accessible and he had the time. There weren't that many decisions that had to be made, and he had the time and capacity to make them. Once he became the President-elect, there were too many decisions and he didn't want to make them all. There wasn't anyone else to go to who was willing to simply make the point. One of the smartest things that George Stephanopoulos said during the campaign was that, "In a campaign, 90 percent of the time it doesn't matter what decision you make. You just have to make a decision." The campaign can move on to other questions. If it turns out to be wrong, you can always change it.

We were in the position in the transition where no one was in charge, no one was capable of convening the discussion, of figuring out what was wrong. We had gotten through the campaign with a certain amount of dysfunction. As I said, we had four people who played the role of campaign manager at various times. No one was ever really in charge. I think Mac, who would have been the titular person to go to, was almost totally consumed by helping the President pick the Cabinet. I think there was widespread recognition that it would be a good idea to have a White House staff and to figure out who they were. But every job was a battle. My job was a battle.

Riley

Can you tell us about it? How did this come about?

Reed

After the election, none of us knew for sure what we were going to end up doing. We had a general idea of what part of the White House we'd end up in. We didn't know if new people, older people, would be brought in to carry the baton to the next level. It was an extraordinarily young campaign. Some of us who were in our 30s felt like we were old hands because the campaign was mostly 20-somethings. So we didn't know. We'd been gray-hairs in the campaign—senior people—but we recognized this was a new level. Our boss was President now, and he could have anyone he wanted in any role he wanted.

I first got a taste of this in the transition, when I thought I was going to be in charge of domestic policy for the transition. Al From and I talked about it, and he thought that I would be that, too. He called Clinton to press the case on my behalf, and Clinton asked Al why didn't he do it, and I could be his deputy? Al later said that he should have said no. But he was flattered to be asked, and you don't say no to the President-elect. He didn't realize how much more difficult that would make it for me at the next phase. It was fine.

Al had no interest in going into the government. He was my mentor, my old friend, so we put together the policy transition. We had a whole team of, I think, seven different areas, with two or three people in each. We churned out a fat book of what the President could do right away with executive orders and what his legislative game plan should be in the areas we cared about. I delivered it to Little Rock to the transition. There really wasn't anyone to give it to, so I left it off at the mansion for him.

Riley

If a historian finds this in the archives—

Reed

I still have a copy of it. It's there.

Riley

I guess my question is, was it of any consequence?

Reed

We followed it. It became our bible back in the White House. I doubt that Clinton ever made his way through it, or anyone else. There was a lot of speculation inside the campaign, which eventually spilled over into the press, about what they were going to do with the domestic policy job. At one point, I guess in late December/early January, out of the blue, [Robert] Novak wrote a column about how I should get the job, but instead, in deference to the bean counters, Clinton wasn't going to give it to a New Democrat. I can't remember if it named Carol or just suggested that I wasn't going to get it. It was, in one sense, I suppose, good to have somebody arguing my case. I certainly wouldn't have picked Bob Novak to be my main advocate. So that bubbled around in the press for a while.

The people who were working in Presidential personnel—we proposed to them a somewhat different organization that would enable Clinton to have it both ways. We proposed that Carol take the job of being in charge of the Domestic Policy Council, and that I head up a team of ten or fifteen people who would come up with new ideas. We'd have a kind of think tank in the White House. At one point, the transition told me that that's what they were going to do. But for some reason that deteriorated. Then they decided over Christmas—I don't remember—I was reading in the New York Times, on the way back from a Renaissance weekend, that I was going to be the deputy. They didn't say who my boss was going to be. I tried to plead my case to Clinton.

Riley

But how you got the news was—

Reed

Yes. I didn't know whether to believe it. It was just a leak in the New York Times, but I didn't take it as a good sign. My fear was twofold. One, obviously, I wanted as good a job as I could get to be in the thick of things. But, second, since my job from the first day on the campaign had been to keep him politically correct, I was terrified there wasn't going to be any New Democrat in the first tier of White House officials who would carry on the campaign flame and argue for his agenda.

So I tried to make that case directly to him. I couldn't. I made that case to Mac. Mac was very sympathetic. Mac was less concerned because he was a New Democrat. He felt Clinton was a New Democrat, the Vice President was a New Democrat, so what was I worried about? In the meantime, I don't really know what the competing interests were. How much of it was just balance on the staff. The transition was so mysterious that I didn't know whether this was just happening by default, by design, or by accident. I complained about it. I vaguely remember talking to Susan Thomases, who was involved, and complaining about it.

They got worried that maybe I wouldn't go to work for the administration at all—that that would be a problem, if they didn't have any New Democrats. If, in fact, they had New Democrats who were saying no. I hadn't said that, but I was trying to be insistent and loyal at the same time, and not really sure how strongly to plead my case. In any event, they called up Bill Galston and invited him down to Little Rock. They figured they needed to have at least one New Democrat who would sign up. Then they decided that they would have us both be deputies and decided against splitting the job between me and Carol. I liked Carol; I'd known her during the campaign and we always got along well.

I'd spent so much time with Clinton that it didn't hold me back within the administration. I was still able to pursue the issues I wanted to. Being deputy was still a great job, but it did mean that I wasn't there at the table when others who hadn't been part of the campaign were saying, "Let's not have welfare reform money in the budget." I lost a lot of battles I wasn't present for.

George was just about the only person from the campaign who was at a high enough level to do damage control. He had a different theory of the case—not ideologically—but he was a Congressional guy through and through. He was Dick Gephardt's floor guy. So it was a frustrating time, mostly because those of us who had been on the campaign could see that our ability to follow through on the promises was slipping away to some degree.

Riley

Did you have a formal understanding or a division of labor with Carol about issues?

Reed

Bill and I sat down with her when Ira was there too. He was a senior advisor for health care, but he was part of the same team. So Ira did health care. We just sat down and divvied up the issues. We took turns picking. I picked welfare reform and crime, and political reform.

Riley

Urban?

Reed

I guess urban. And Galston picked education and national service, and I guess training was his other one. I can't remember if there was anything else. There was more than enough work to go around. My daughter was born in the first hundred days, so I was at many times grateful that I had defined, discrete responsibilities, so I could go home at night. The issues I got to work on were good ones for that period. And the domestic policy world worked reasonably well, even under the chaotic circumstances. Health care was another story. I was not involved in it at all, so I don't know anything other than my office was right there next to Ira's, so I watched it happening. I didn't go to any of the meetings.

Jones

I was going to ask about costs of a difficult transition. Was this an example? Your troubled appointment—was that an example of the cost of the transition? Or might that have happened even in a more efficient transition?

Reed

Any administration has a tough call as to how to fill the key jobs. I remember having a conversation with a reporter, with Ron Brownstein early in '92, where we both agreed that if, for some reason, Clinton ended up winning, I was going to end up with a Jim Pinkerton job as Deputy in the Domestic Policy Council. I wasn't that surprised or devastated by where I ended up. The process in which it happened was extraordinarily painful and unnecessary.

Other people went through a similar experience. —There was resentment that we didn't have our act together. There was resentment—this wasn't true in my case because Carol had been with Clinton even longer than I had, but in other cases—that people who had worked their tails off for Clinton were getting jobs working for other people who had been in his way. One of the guys who'd been at the DLC early on made the joke during the transition that, "I knew that campaign experience was going to be important, I just didn't know it would be with the Dukakis campaign." [laughter]

So there was just a sense of unfairness that made life harder. It was just one more burden on top of the fact that we didn't know what we were doing anyway. It was somewhat balanced by the fact that we were just over the moon about having won and being able to work in the White House. It is a wonderful place to work. So even though we were doing so badly in the early days, it was still the coolest experience we'd ever had. We weren't really crying in our beer. We adjusted. Eventually, we got over the initial shock. Those of us who'd been on the campaign figured out that we cared a lot more about getting this stuff done than the new people who were in our way. We were going to figure out, one way or another, how to get past them.

So on issue after issue we just out-hustled everybody. We took advantage of the fact that there was no organized structure. That also meant that no one could tell us not to go negotiate a crime bill with Congress. I think there would have been far fewer instances of wrong people—not that it was in my case—the wrong person in the wrong job. There were instances where people who really weren't with the program got assigned to key roles, and that came back to haunt us. That wouldn't have happened in a more methodical, thoughtful, less desperate way.

Knott

I don't know if you'll feel comfortable doing this, but who are these new people?

Reed

Not necessarily saying bad people. First, the native guides who led him astray. Howard Paster, the legislative affairs director, was good at leg affairs. But he saw his role as matchmaker between President and Congress rather than somebody who was going to get Congress to do what the President wanted. So I quarreled with him repeatedly, especially over political reform, lobby reform, campaign finance reform. He thought we were a bunch of whippersnappers who had no business telling Congressional chairmen how to live their lives. We told him the President wanted to insist on—I can't remember if it was a gift ban or lobby reform provisions. He said, "Well, that may be the President's personal position, but that's not going to be the position of the White House." So he was a leading advocate of the wrong strategy.

Jones

Much sooner have the electorate do that.

Reed

George had an inherent conflict of interests that he took too long to recognize. He was loyal to his old boss and started off trying to do his old job, helping us find the mid-point of the House Democratic caucus. In fact, what we needed to find was the center of the country. Although he was, at times, an ally for Gene and me. He knew how much Clinton cared about the campaign promises. A lot of the grown-ups from Washington just thought that they knew better. They thought campaigns are one thing, governing's another.

The Cabinet was full of politicians. Clinton viewed them as his ambassadors to the rest of the Democratic Party. They were invaluable in that regard. But it also meant that they had big differences with him on policy. In the first six months, we had a front-page New York Times story about how [Henry] Cisneros was opposed to welfare reform. Over time, we had a number of initial battles with [Donna] Shalala. I had repeated battles with Janet Reno, where I had to go to her time after time to convince her that the President's promise to put 100,000 cops on the street was a good idea. At first she thought it was just a made-up number. It didn't matter how many. Eventually, she came around and became a champion of it.

Understandably—I think this is true in most administrations—if you're going to come in and do a job as important as Cabinet Secretary, you want to have some impact on what the agenda is going to be in your area. You don't necessarily want to be bound by a bunch of campaign promises that you didn't sign on to. Since Clinton didn't construct his Cabinet on the basis of how close they were to his ideological worldview, there was a fair amount of friction in getting them to accept some of the basic premises of the campaign.

There was a ripple effect. People who were a few degrees off in their own way fought to bring in staff below them who thought like them, not like the White House. So we found ourselves fighting on a host of fronts. It wasn't vicious fighting. But it was constant. It required a lot of persistence to actually prevail internally.

Often, over the course of those years, we'd try anything. We'd go find an ally on the Hill. At one point, I sat down with John Kerry, who was enthusiastic about the 100,000 cops program. He thought we should be funding the whole thing, not just half of it, which is what OMB [Office of Management and Budget] had said. I took that information back to the White House. I went around and lobbied and lobbied and pressured to try to get them to up the ante. Sometimes I'd reach out to Al From or others and get them to send memos to the President. I was trying to bring some kind of counter-pressure to the pressure from around the agencies.

Jones

Did the manner of developing the health care proposals affect, perhaps, this set of problems you ran into? After all, talk about developing outside of the departments—

Reed

That process was, obviously, unfortunate. The process affected the outcome more than normally it would have. The most immediate impact it had that I saw was that it actually was a good object lesson for some other processes. I started co-chairing the welfare reform working group in June, right after the health care task force had finished its work, after it had become a public whipping boy.

Everybody who was involved in that process was determined not to end up like the health care process. Secretary Shalala was determined to be more engaged with the White House, more cooperative. David Ellwood, who was one of my co-chairs, and I were constantly watching what Ira did and doing the opposite, because we could tell what he was doing wasn't working. Even the welfare working group, which was consciously designed to avoid the pitfalls of the health care working group and had a whole bunch of smart people involved in it who cared about the issue, turned out to be a total nightmare. What we found out painfully on that issue was, as we did on others—

Jones

You're talking about welfare?

Reed

Welfare, yes. A process can't cover up intellectual differences. The White House became increasingly over time a very good distillation of Clinton's worldview. The Cabinet members were Clinton's ambassadors to the party. The agencies were a pretty good reflection of the party. Over time they became more loyal to Clinton, less like the rest of the party. In the early years, on every issue we were fighting the same battle we had fought in the campaign. We were going back to square one to argue first principles. It was impossible to run a fair process in an honest broker way on a divisive issue where the range of opinions was so broad. It meant that on almost everything we had to take the issue all the way to the President.

On 90 percent of the issues, I knew where he was going to be. If the makeup of the administration was closer to the worldview of the President from the outset, it would have been much easier to play well together. These were good, sincere people. They weren't disloyal. They just thought they were getting into something different from what they got into. For those first couple years, we paid a real price for the fact that in contrast to Tony Blair, who remade his party before he took office, we had to remake the party while we were in office, and the party didn't like it one bit.

We might not have succeeded in it all if we hadn't fallen flat on our face first. We were forced by necessity in the '94 elections to go back to the drawing board and start governing the way we had campaigned. Eventually, that worked as a governing philosophy, and the party decided they liked it more than they thought they would. It took hold. But we met with a real allergic reaction within the party in those first couple years.

We were not in our top form. The dynamics of the campaign, which had pulled us to exactly the right point, weren't working within the administration. We didn't have the ability to—there aren't Independents and Perot voters in Congress. There are Democrats and Republicans. Because we decided to play the whole game between those yard lines, rather than play the game in the country and let the Congress follow, we just couldn't win for losin'.

Jones

It's fascinating, isn't it, that devotion to campaign promises comes to be confusing to Washington?

Reed

Yes, it drove Clinton crazy. I remember a number of times, him saying, "What do I have to do to get people to do what I want?" As frustrated as we were, I think he was even more frustrated that he couldn't push a button and make the government do what he wanted. It drove him crazy that he was having to fight with HHS [Health and Human Services] over welfare reform. He had spent his career as a Governor fighting with HHS over welfare reform. He thought he was finally in a job where he could tell them what to do. And they wouldn't! And that was true on a host of issues.

He liked the Congressional leadership. He wanted everybody to win. He was happy to share credit with them and defer to them. But he thought they had the worst political instincts. He'd plead with them to try to take a bigger interest in the crime bill, for example. They told him, "No, that that's not going anywhere." He pleaded with them to pursue welfare reform at the same time as health care. "No, it's too divisive, it'll destroy us." And he pleaded with them to recognize that campaign finance reform done right would be good for them. It wouldn't cost them their jobs. I remember [Tom] Foley saying to us, "You just need to understand that when you talk about campaign finance reform and lobby reform, you're telling members of Congress that first you're going to cost them their current job, and then you're going to cost them their next one." It was just a different mindset.

I guess I should backtrack just for a second to say, in 12 years of being out of power, in 12 years of not controlling the White House, Congressional Democrats had adapted and found a survival strategy that they liked. They knew how to deal with a White House of the other party. They knew how to get attention. They knew how to be important in that regime. It was frustrating to them that the Republican White Houses were doing bad things for the country, but they figured out how to stop most of the bad things.

So they liked detente. It was an incredible adjustment for them to get used to dealing with a White House of the same party that had its own ideas that they couldn't fight with without looking disloyal. They also knew that they could push us around, so they did. At any rate, it took at least a year and a half for Clinton to fully come to terms with the fact that his interests were different from Democratic Congress's. The summer and fall were politically disastrous.

After we lost, he moved with remarkable dispatch to take back control of his administration and make sure that everybody was taking orders from him, not doing what somebody else wanted. He was quoted saying that he felt like he had been lashed like Ahab to the mast of Congress. He felt liberated to some degree to no longer have any doubt that his interests and Congress's interests were different. That it was, in some ways, easier to get our way doing battle with the enemy than it had been in a friendly negotiation with our friends.

Knott

You mentioned a few moments ago about the frustration the President felt that he just couldn't push a button and get members of his own party to follow his agenda. Was he aware of some of the people in his own administration who you described as not being on the same page?

Reed

Yes, he knew we had problems with the agencies. That was evident to him from the beginning, that we were going to have to get them on the same song sheet with us. He was genuinely convinced, in the early going, of the necessity of a Congressional strategy. He had a big agenda, a lot he wanted to get done. He didn't want to be like Carter. He was betting the farm in the first two years on health care. His Congressional advisors' view was anything else you tried to do that offended Congress would come out of health care's hide.

He was willing to go along with that strategy because he thought it was the way to get health care. In the end, when it turned out not to work for that either, he lost faith in the whole thing. I don't think he viewed it that there were traitors in his midst. It wasn't really that way. He probably didn't know the degree to which people would try to shade every decision he made.

Knott

This is a scenario where a more assertive Chief of Staff might really—

Reed

Yes, maybe. It happened much less later. It's hard for me to sort out whether, to some degree, that was because people who thought more like him got moved up over time and people who thought less like him either left or got pushed aside. We had more assertive Chiefs of Staff who made the place work better.

My guess is that the first two years would have been painful in any regard. If we had the courage of our convictions, we might have been successful in a centrist strategy. But it would have been extremely painful because we were medicine that the party was not ready to take yet.

Riley

We're getting close to the end of the day. I've got a couple of questions. You can deal with these as you wish. I was out for a moment, but I don't think this element was dealt with, the extent to which the economic package of the first year was a factor in this process of alienation of people on Capitol Hill. We've already discussed the extent to which the deficit was or was not mentioned in the campaign. Yet there's a period in the transition where all of a sudden this becomes the central focus of the administration in a way that I think surprised an awful lot of people. It meant a considerable amount of political pain because of the budget cutting.

Reed

It just made our life a lot harder. We met at Blair House in the transition. The economic advisors presented the President with the real deficit estimates. It was a very sobering meeting. I joked later that I knew we were in trouble in the Blair House meeting when I saw Bob Rubin's mind wandering and he went over and started gathering souvenir pens. This is bad news. We've got nobody here who's done this before and we're all still wowed by the circumstances. But it was one of Clinton's finer hours because I'm sure that Rubin and Reich and Gene and the others who were presenting the information thought that he was going to take their head off. His reaction was that good Presidents have to face big challenges. This just was a greater challenge for us. He seemed excited about it in a strange way.

As time went on, it became apparent just how painful it was going to be. I don't know if it was alienating to Congress, in a way. The first draft of the package that we sent forward actually didn't go quite far enough in deficit reduction. Congress complained and pushed it a bit more. The fly in the ointment of the whole package was over the BTU [British Thermal Unit] tax, which became the gas tax, which had taken the place of middle-class tax cut. I think there was a maybe willful suspension of disbelief by the administration that somehow we were going to be able to get away with that.

I remember being in the Oval Office for some other reason, talking to the President about the reinventing government initiative. The Vice President, who was an enthusiast for the BTU tax, was marveling to the President about a meeting they had the night before where Bentsen said maybe it might fly. The Vice President said, "The earth moved." My reaction was if they thought we were going to be able to get away with abandoning a middle-class tax cut and offering a middle-class tax increase without a heavy load of resistance, they were missing something. I've never looked back at the numbers to see if there was a way to do it differently. Obviously we couldn't have done a middle-class tax cut.

We ended up not getting much out of the gas tax. Yet it immediately limited the playing field to just Democrats, because there were no Republicans who were going to vote for any kind of tax increase. I don't know. They might not have voted for the package anyway, because we were raising the top rate on individuals. But I think that was not an unpopular stand and they might have joined us.

It's a miracle that package passed, given how we were swinging and missing at every other pitch. You have to give the Congressional team credit for getting that done, and Clinton for being persistent enough to strong-arm everybody into doing it. But keep in mind there was a powerful head of steam in the country for doing that. That had been, in some ways, the biggest issue in the '92 campaign, a bigger part of the political debate in '92 than health care.

Health care was a bigger priority for us, but not necessarily more urgent for the country. What Clinton recognized, from that announcement speech on, was that the American people wanted us to do a lot more. But they also wanted us to restore confidence that we knew what we were doing, that we would reform government, not just expand it. The only way they would let us expand it was if we first proved we could reform it. We had a perfect sense of that in the campaign and forgot it or hid it under a bushel when we got in office. The country just wasn't ready for something as ambitious as health care reform without more proof that we were going to change government at the same time.

Riley

I have one more question, but what I'd like to begin with tomorrow is to talk about the decision on the sequencing of priorities. In the first year, especially, after you get through the budget package. We can pick up on that. I want to end, and we can carry it over to tomorrow if there isn't time to answer it sufficiently, with more of an organizational question that, I think, relates to the budget process too. That is, there was a major reorganization of domestic policy that happened in this White House by hiving off the economic end of the NEC [National Economic Council]. Can you talk a little bit about the implications for that and how well you feel that worked?

Reed

It's funny. It was a little proposal in the campaign. I don't even think we mentioned it in the Georgetown speech. I think it was down the list of items in "Putting People First." Since I had never worked in the White House, it seemed to me just something to say about the economy. It never struck me as having any real meaning. But it turned out to be a fantastic idea for both economic and domestic policy.

In retrospect, I don't know how domestic policy advisors in previous administrations were able to do both, or if they really did both, because they involved a completely different set of players in the Cabinet, a different set of skills and interests, a different kind of staff. It helped that Rubin was so good at the role and that he was a true, honest broker. Even though he had never worked in politics, he commanded enormous respect and knew how to run a process. So the economic team was extraordinarily strong from the outset.

It helped domestic policy because Clinton had such a big domestic agenda that we could barely handle the workload as it was. It enabled us to focus on his domestic priorities in a way that we couldn't if we were all reporting through one person who was then reporting to the President. I came to the conclusion later, when I was Domestic Policy Advisor, that it was impossible to use the domestic Cabinet in the same way as the economic team. The players on the economic team had an overlapping set of issues to discuss that gave them a reason for meeting on a regular basis.

The domestic Cabinet loved to kibbitz on one another's issues, but there was no overlap between Dan Glickman's agenda at Agriculture and Janet Reno's agenda at the Justice Department. Every time we tried to bring them together, all we got was Cabinet Secretaries telling other Cabinet Secretaries what they should do in their areas, or a kind of longing for greater inter-disciplinary capacities of government. Janet Reno gave the same speech at every domestic policy meeting we ever had—how Baltimore had successfully integrated Justice and Health and Human Services and other capacities. It was mostly because she was often as interested in what Donna Shalala was doing as what she was doing.

The economic team each had expertise that could be brought to bear on the same problems. The domestic people didn't. The biggest problem for the domestic team was that it had so much ground to cover. You just needed more people on the case. You couldn't find staff members who had years of expertise in agriculture and criminal justice.

So I think it was a tremendously successful innovation. The Bush administration initially resisted it, but wisely kept it. Although they have other problems in how they make policy. I do hope that it lives on as an institution because it was good for the White House. It was good for the White House to have—we were never really on the same level as the National Security Council. It has a staff of a hundred, an institutional memory going back decades, and an inherent professionalism that you couldn't replicate in other fields. But having three equal policy councils that could master their areas of responsibility worked extraordinarily well from the President's standpoint and from the rest of the White House's standpoint. You knew who to call, who was responsible for what.

There was the occasional issue area where we overlapped or fought or drew straws. I was always of the view that immigration was fundamentally a foreign policy issue. The NSC felt it was fundamentally a domestic issue. But in the main, a good thing.

 

February 20, 2004

Jones

—quite extraordinary, even within the Clinton White House, where there was a fair amount of staff movement. That continuity is important.

Reed

I felt like I'd done pretty much the same thing for the same people for about 15 years. [laughter]

Riley

In fact, you did. Right? You had that experience with Gore, which ran about five years. You had two years with the DLC, which, from my perspective, I had not realized how thoroughly integrated Clinton's rise was with his work through the DLC. I knew there was a connection, but that part of the history I hadn't been familiar with. Then, of course, the work you do in the White House.

We have a kind of one-size-fits-all regimen around here. In approaching Howard Paster, for example, we would probably do the same style of interview with him, despite the fact that he was with Clinton for all of nine or ten months. In this case, I'm happy that you're amenable to talking more. It's been very fruitful and it would have done some harm to our enterprise if we had tried to skip over things. So I'm grateful for your willingness to entertain us a bit longer. Let me go back to what we were talking about yesterday and ask you about some of the major policy areas. I had mentioned the first year's economic plan. Is it true that you and the people who felt like you did, who were coming out of the DLC background, pretty much agreed that the deficit reduction package was something that had to be the first priority coming in?

Reed

Yes. From the time of that Blair House meeting, it was clear that the deficit had to come first. For the first time in a long time there was considerable pressure from Congress, even on the Democratic side, to finally tackle that problem. Ross Perot had put the nation on notice. Clinton was more than happy to take it on. It wasn't all castor oil. It was an opportunity to get the funds for a number of his new initiatives, including the EITC [Earned Income Tax Credit].

We didn't see it as just clearing underbrush. It was an opportunity to get a few things done. I wanted to get some more things done; that didn't happen. Both health care and welfare reform got shunted aside in the economic package. Nevertheless, it was the right thing to do. In retrospect, it's remarkable that we were able to convince as many people to be for it as we did, considering that before it, we were only able to fish in the Democratic pond.

Riley

Were you an active participant in the meetings?

Reed

No, I was not. I would scramble around trying to make sure that the right things were happening in those meetings. As I said before, I think George was the only one from the campaign. Gene was in on them a fair amount of the time. The other thing that was going on was that most of us had never put a budget together. Clinton had never put a budget together. I was in on some of the meetings as he became familiar with the budget line by line. But I spent most of those first few months trying to keep welfare reform from getting shunted completely aside and working on a bunch of executive orders that he had promised or that we felt he needed to get out. Launching the reinventing government initiative, and then just figuring out my way around the place.

Knott

Let me paint an interpretive scenario to start, and get your reaction to it. That the campaign, in part, was designed to be reassuring to Independents and disaffected Republicans. This was going to be OK, the middle class tax cut, the connections with business, this was going to be OK, not to worry too much. At least make it comfortable to cross over, or Independents to vote for Clinton. Then, in the very first weeks, you get a kind of clearing of some legislation that Bush had vetoed: family leave and the Brady bill.

Reed

The Brady bill came later, but family leave came right away.

Knott

With some executive orders. And welfare reform not first. And an economic stimulus package that was being designed. So that the groundwork was laid for a different interpretation from a partisan point of view. Therefore, Republicans in Congress who were not that moved to cooperate anyway were provided with a kind of rationale. Here it comes again. It's more of the Democrats come in and it's back to the old form of more liberal. And deficit reduction and concern about budget balancing comes later rather than initially. That's the interpretative scenario.

Reed

No, I think that's exactly right. The campaign succeeded in large part not just because conditions in the country were bad, although that helped, but because Clinton didn't fall into the same traps that had kept Democrats from winning other elections they should have won in the past. He convinced the country that he was a different kind of Democrat and that they didn't have to worry that he was going to raise their taxes, forget their values, or be weak on national security. Throughout the campaign, we had to fight back the contention that it was just an electoral guise, that we were just saying that to win, that we didn't really mean it.

The press corps was sometimes skeptical. Many in the party were skeptical. Some, who didn't want him to be a different kind of Democrat, thought that it was just a wink to the electorate, and that he really was going to govern the way they wanted him to when he took office. Once we got into office, through the transition and into the early months of the administration, we set off all those alarm bells all over again. The press, who had watched Clinton say time and again he was going to be a New Democrat, was poised to jump every time they heard a discordant note in office. There were plenty of those in the transition. It looked like there were promises we were going to put off or not keep.

The pressure of 12 years of pent-up Democratic demand forced us to deal with a whole bunch of things that seemed more partisan. He signed a half dozen executive orders on abortion on his first day, which would have been fine in and of itself, but it came against a backdrop of a flap with the military over gay rights. Just one thing after another.

We were able to stop the bleeding when he gave a magnificent address to the nation that sounded more like the way he had campaigned and struck the same themes. But I think you're exactly right that moderate Republicans—and there were many in those days—were open to the idea of working with us on the kinds of issues that we'd campaigned on. But our stumbles in the early days made it easier for the "over my dead body" caucus in Republican party ranks to say, "If we just say no to everything, maybe we can beat these guys."

The stimulus package was a big part of it. Clinton was a big believer in the idea that the right kind of pump priming could help the economy. When he came in, he asked the agencies to put together a stimulus package that could show that we were taking immediate action to get the economy going again. The agencies put together a long laundry list of their favorite pork barrel projects that had been sitting on the shelf for a long time. It wasn't designed with an economic focus. It was designed as a way to get what they wanted anyway. So that was a big, fat target for the Republicans to come after us with.

I remember Clinton saying he was shocked by the junk that was in there, swimming pools and all kinds of things unrelated to the economy. That was our first big defeat. We ended up rescuing a tiny stimulus bill. The one we put back together again, which I worked on, included more money to hire police officers immediately. Stuff that was tangibly related to jobs and not so much related to an agency wish list. We spent a good six months undoing the impression we had worked so hard to create and instill in the campaign.

Jones

Was there discussion of that possibility? What's happening here in regards to overall image?

Reed

That's about all the press could talk about. I wasn't in on the upper-level political discussions, to the extent we had them. Every now and then the President would demand that we take some remedial action. So we got a couple weeks into the administration, we had our first good day when he gave a welfare reform speech to the NGA. He actually insisted that he was going to keep his campaign promises. There was a big round of applause in the war room, back in the White House, after that happened. We announced the reinventing government initiative in early March. He did some other executive orders on cutting the federal bureaucracy that were more in line with—they were actual campaign promises that he was carrying out.

From time to time we'd steer into the skid to try to correct things. It was hard to keep going in any consistent direction. I think six months in, the President realized he had a serious problem, and that's when he brought in Gergen to try to provide some counter-balance. The truth is, as I said yesterday, most of what we were proposing was consistent with what we promised in the campaign. But the way we packaged it and the way we kowtowed to the Congressional demands and interest group demands made us look like we were something different from what we had promised.

Jones

Was there someone in the White House who was sort of a monitor of how this is looking? Often you'd think that's a role of a political director, Chief of Staff, somebody savvy enough to say—

Reed

Yes. We had a handful of people who played that role. Rahm Emanuel was the political director, and he was alarmed. He complained so much about how things were going that he actually got sacked at that job and was given another one. The consultants, Greenberg, Carville, and Begala and Grunwald, occasionally sounded the alarm, but they weren't there every day. They didn't quite know what to do to fix it. Some people thought we were just doing things that we had to do.

The short answer is nobody in the White House thought things were going well. But most people were so busy trying to figure out what they were supposed to do during the day that they couldn't figure out how to fix it. We were having just basic problems. How do you protect the President from having to make every single decision? How do you control access to the Oval Office? I can remember having some question about an event, one of these executive orders we were signing, and asking Ricki Seidman some small question about the event and she said, "Hang on, let me ask the President." He was forced to decide everything because we didn't have a chain of authority in place to make rational decisions.

Jones

It struck me at the time that welfare reform might, in coming first, have corrected all of the rest of this. At the start, the administration didn't appear to be all set to take on a big issue like welfare reform, which was consistent with the general pitch during the whole campaign. By appointing Hillary as the head of health care reform, that seemingly, image-wise, seemed to make that the priority. Whatever else the economy—that was going on as well, that seemed to place a priority on that that fed also into this image. That's the welfare reform story you know so well. That's why it's a big story.

Riley

This is exactly the question I was going to pose, but I was going to come at it from a slightly different angle. My question was about sequencing. Was there a widely held understanding within the administration, as you saw it, about what the sequencing of major initiatives was going to be? With welfare being part of that?

Reed

Well, throughout his career Clinton was a master of political balance. The New Democrat agenda was not simply one centrist initiative after another. It was an effort to make sure that we didn't list to the left in a way that would undermine public support for our overall cause. The President assumed we could do everything, that we could just flood the circuits with all these ideas. Because we had a big agenda, and we didn't have all that much time, we ought to get started on all of it.

In Arkansas, he'd been able to force the legislature to deal with a whole bunch of things at once. I think that there was a deliberate effort early on, led by the communications department, George, and others, to make clear that we have four priorities, which I think were: the economy—meaning the budget package and the stimulus package—health care, national service, and campaign finance reform. I don't know why those four were chosen. They were all good things, but—

Riley

You think they were basically George's choice?

Reed

The campaign had thrived on the war room mentality, where we had a chalkboard that said three things. So I think the hope was that somehow repetition of these four things would take hold and keep us focused. Remember, we were trying to change the subject from gays in the military and everything else that was going wrong. I think that those of us from the New Democrat true believers were hanging our heads the whole time. We felt that the ship was listing badly in one direction, that the items on the agenda that we put there to make sure we stayed balanced kept getting dropped. When he did the executive orders on abortion, we had an executive order that we wanted on teen pregnancy, and Shalala wouldn't do it.

We wanted to make sure the economic stimulus package had money for centrist ideas, not just liberal-sounding ones, so we tried to get money for cops. We eventually got it, but it was too little, too late to do much good in that battle. The biggest battle, or biggest loss, was on welfare reform, where as best I can tell, the decision was made to drop the money from the economic plan for welfare reform because a couple people on the economic team opposed it for other reasons that may have been political, may not. I wasn't there, but I was told that Bentsen and Rivlin were the ones who said to the President, "Don't worry, the Republicans are for welfare reform. You can do that later. They'll give you the money for it."

The best counterweight we had, the best possible reassurance we could have provided to people that we were going to fix government as we sought to do more with government was welfare reform. It got deep-sixed in the economic plan. That led to a series of public eruptions from Pat Moynihan, who didn't want to send a health care plan unless we were going to send a welfare plan. I tried to convince the President that we should amend the economic plan and put money in for welfare reform. We came close to doing that, but Moynihan had calmed down by the time we came up with a package of amendments. So the White House decided not to.

I think we were handicapped by the fact that on welfare reform, as on health care, we had a lot of details to fill in. Time-limited welfare was a brand-new concept that we put on the political scene. It hadn't been on Washington's radar screen. Nobody had a bill to put on the table. We knew we were going to have to spend some months getting it ready, just as on health care they knew they were going to have to spend some months.

Both health care and welfare reform, because they needed some more work, got left out of the economic package.

Riley

Although Ira and others tried to get it embedded in the economic package.

Reed

That's right. The First Lady was angry at the economic team for leaving health care out. Because the implications of doing that for both initiatives was that the economic package set the parameters for the budget debate for five years. Under the PAYGO [pay as you go] rules in place at the time, any other new initiative we wanted to do had to pay for itself. As we found in both health care and welfare reform, in an extraordinarily tight budget environment it wasn't easy to pay your own way for an initiative. Especially if Republicans wanted to trip you up for other reasons.

It was excruciatingly hard when we got around to trying to finance welfare reform, because Republicans didn't think that welfare reform should cost anything. They thought it should save money. Later on, in late '93 and '94, it took us months to come up with any acceptable package of pay-fors because nobody wanted to give us money to do the kinds of things we needed to do. In any event, I appealed to the President on several occasions about how welfare reform was getting left at the station.

We went about our work, trying to get a bill ready. It turned out to be very difficult to reach agreement within the administration because I had to go and fight with eight different agencies. Nobody at the White House wanted us to finish our work. They wanted us to take as long as we could possibly take. The Hill was pleading with us never to send a bill.

Riley

The Democrats.

Reed

The Democrats. As a practical matter, welfare reform had to go through the same committees as health care. Health care was taking too long getting to the Hill and was going to take too long getting through it. So there was a bottleneck in the committees. Moynihan was the only public pressure we had to carry through on the Welfare Reform bill. As it turned out later, what he really wanted us to do was to recognize that welfare reform was more important than health care reform. But he didn't want to enact legislation on either one. So he was using our failure to do welfare reform as a way to express his distaste for the health reform process.

Riley

Did you have conversations with Moynihan?

Reed

I did. Moynihan was something of a hero to all of us, the President included. He worked with him on the Family Support Act in '88. Moynihan had summoned me to his office during the campaign to say that he was pleased by what we had to say about welfare reform in the campaign. He offered to introduce a bill in '92, carrying the President's water. Of course, at the same time he was telling the press that welfare reform was "boob bait for the Bubbas."

David Ellwood and I had a series of delightful meetings with Moynihan in '93. We couldn't bring our third co-chair, Mary Jo Bane, who was from New York and had been the welfare commissioner in New York, because Moynihan hated her. He had fought with her over the implementation of the Family Support Act. So David and I went. Moynihan would always get one of his books down from the shelf and read to us from key passages from welfare fights in the early '70s. He told us stories about how much he hated the welfare left.

At one point we were talking about welfare reform. He said, "Anyone who comes into my office and is willing to admit that they don't have all the answers will always be welcome with me," which was a reference to how much he hated Ira Magaziner and how the health reform process was doing. The First Lady was quite concerned about Moynihan's apparent opposition to health reform. She encouraged us to cultivate him as much as we possibly could.

The sequencing of health care reform and welfare reform flared up again at the start of '94 because they had a Cabinet meeting right after the New Year in '94. They discussed it and the New York Times reported that we were going to put off welfare reform and just do health reform. I believe that George was quoted in the article as having said that at the meeting. Moynihan exploded, went on Meet the Press and attacked the administration for abandoning welfare reform, then called for an independent prosecutor into the Whitewater affair.

I talked to the President about it. His view was that we should be doing both at the same time. Not only for political reasons, but because he thought they were directly related, that in order to move people off of welfare, you had to make sure there was health care available. But he completely understood that for moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans, welfare reform would make it easier for them to be for health reform.

The Congressional leadership didn't understand that at all. For them, welfare reform was a big fight within the caucus. They did everything they could to avoid dissension. They pleaded with Clinton not to send a welfare reform bill. After we did send a welfare reform bill, Bob Matsui, who was on the Ways and Means Committee, head of the subcommittee that had jurisdiction over welfare reform, attacked David Ellwood at a hearing, saying putting forward a welfare bill in an election year was going to destroy the Democratic Party because it would become way too conservative as it was debated in Congress.

I went to a meeting with the political consultants at the White House in the Roosevelt Room sometime in early '94. They argued that we shouldn't do welfare reform in '94 because it was an issue that Republicans wanted to work with us on and we'd probably lose some seats in the midterms, but we might be in a better position to work with Republicans on this as opposed to other things. Turns out they were quite prophetic. [laughter]

Everybody on the welfare team, even though we had differences over the exact contours of the bill, desperately wanted to get a bill out there. The more liberal members of the working group, like Ellwood, saw what the consultants had said and were terrified by it. They wanted to press our case while we still had a solidly Democratic Congress. They thought the longer we waited, the worse off we'd be. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the administration would be better off if this issue was out there as opposed to us studying it forever.

Now, there was enough resistance in the bureaucracy that it took forever to reach agreement on the most obvious of questions. There were plenty of people at HHS and elsewhere who didn't want to do the whole thing. The biggest hang-up was how to find money to pay for it. We looked at every possible pay-for, and they were all unpleasant. I won a battle of sorts when drafting a section of the '94 State of the Union on welfare reform, making it a big part of the State of the Union. In that State of the Union, it was on a par with health reform. It got nearly equal weight. I wrote into that draft that the administration would send Congress a welfare reform bill this spring. We kept that promise. We sent a bill to Congress on the morning of June 21st, 30 minutes before the start of summer.

There were other dynamics going on. I think that it's entirely possible that Lloyd Bentsen didn't want to do welfare reform because he knew Pat Moynihan wanted to. It might not have been anything more than that.

The other miserable experience that we had was in the development of the welfare reform bill. We had this big task force full of people who were of mixed minds about the whole enterprise.

Riley

How big was it again?

Reed

It was 32 members from eight agencies. There were a lot of smart, good people on it, but it leaked like a sieve. We had an incredible run, the worst run of any issue I can recall in the administration, of front-page, damaging stories in the New York Times about how we weren't going to keep this promise or that promise. By the time we actually came out with the welfare reform bill, we'd done a pretty good job of convincing most outside observers that we didn't really believe in welfare reform.

All that was merely a symptom of the fact that, much as Clinton wanted to do welfare reform, his party didn't really want to. There was a faction in Congress of moderates who were desperate for us to do it. They introduced their own bill in '93 and pleaded with us to do something. But the Congressional leadership, and most of the party, wanted to do health reform and didn't really like welfare reform. It scared them.

Riley

Another factor was NAFTA.

Reed

There was another sequencing debate that was after the economic package. The day after the economic package, we introduced the crime bill. But the real debate was over how to spend the President's fall. Should he spend his time fighting for NAFTA, for health reform, or for reinventing government? That's the first time I remember the word "sequencing" being used in politics. They had endless debates over in which order we should roll out those initiatives, what relative priority they should have.

Riley

The President was involved in these meetings?

Reed

I think, probably. I wasn't, but they were endless. That was probably the beginning of the first manifestation of the three major power centers in the White House: the President, the First Lady, and the Vice President. The President, in this case, was for doing all three all at once. But he was the biggest advocate of not ignoring NAFTA. The First Lady wanted health care to get the most attention. The economic team didn't like the health plan and wanted NAFTA to get attention instead. And the Vice President wanted to make sure that his initiative got noticed. I can't remember how they resolved it.

The President did all three and expended the most political capital on NAFTA because it was debated on that year. He scored a pretty big political victory by getting that through. We set up what we joked was 1-800-ASK-LEON because he was Budget Director at the time. Every Democrat who voted for it wanted a bridge or some other consolation. We got about 40 percent of the Democrats in the House to vote for it, which was enough.

I don't know what else you want to talk about in '94.

Jones

One thing I think we should do before we get too deep into the whole period is for you to say a little bit about how you settled into your job. How you organized and how you started to make connections on the Hill and with the agencies and so forth.

Riley

Exactly. You mentioned something to us last night over dinner about your decisions about your own schedule. That might be worth repeating, if you want to talk about it.

Reed

Well, first we realized that the place wasn't working. There weren't normal channels. A lot of us hadn't gotten as much authority as we had hoped. But we also knew that the President was looking to us to carry the flame for his agenda. So we adapted—Gene Sperling in the economic realm and me on the domestic front, with help from a handful of former campaign aides who came to work on the domestic policy staff. We fanned out and tried to run the best guerrilla operation we could to make sure we stopped the "squish-heads," the word that we used for the people who opposed the President's priorities. Stop the "squish-heads" from getting in the way.

We had our first dry run on the cops initiative. We saw the stimulus package was going down. We figured out that we might be able to help rescue it by including some money for something the country actually wanted. So I enlisted Gene's help and said, "Why don't we include money for cops in a new, slimmer stimulus bill?" He mentioned that to the President in a meeting in the Oval Office. He paged me from there saying, "How many could we do?" Jose Cerda, who was the crime policy aide in the campaign at the White House, and I figured out we could do two or three thousand. So we paged him back with that. The President was very excited about the idea. We referred to them as "beeper cops," because of how we had communicated. Gene had me come over and talk to the President about it.

We did that on a bunch of other issues. We went, as I said, door-to-door to OMB and to political, and to inter-governmental, trying to build internal support for the next budget. Even in the early days, we were trying to fill in the blanks of the economic plan, to be able to show to the outside world that we were at least making a down payment on these campaign promises. There wasn't money in the budget for 100,000 cops, but we were able to find money for something like 30 or 40,000. Then we went to Eli Segal at the National Service Initiative and said, "Can we count on 10,000 of the national service slots to be in law enforcement?" We were able to put together a package that we could show to the outside world that suggested that we hadn't thrown everything over.

We pushed executive orders through OMB on reinventing government and cutting the bureaucracy. It was exhausting because there was so much resistance. Not all of it ideological resistance; a lot of it was just plain old bureaucratic resistance. OMB didn't want to change its ways. Nobody had any money, so it was hard to fund any of the initiatives the President had promised.

We found allies wherever we could. Rahm Emanuel was Political Director at the time and agreed with us that the administration's political priorities were out of whack. So he helped conspire with us on crime and welfare reform to get us onto the schedule wherever we could. We didn't have secret signals exactly, but it felt like a small band of revolutionaries trying to overcome all this resistance. Every time we could get to the President, he agreed. We knew he was our biggest ally. We just didn't know how to take full advantage of that, as he himself later admitted. Even when he decided the administration should do something, there were a whole lot of people who wouldn't take his word for it.

Knott

Any other persons with heft in the White House or in the Cabinet?

Reed

McLarty was sympathetic, but not able to push buttons. It varied from issue to issue. On crime, we eventually had a great ally in David Gergen, who believed that was an essential part of what the President had promised. He became a co-conspirator and one of our best allies at the highest levels. We had the President and, in many respects, the Vice President. But at the key level of Assistant to the President, as I had feared going into it, we didn't have enough allies. The people who were there weren't necessarily enemies. They just weren't looking out for our interests the way we needed somebody to do.

Riley

From the outside, the natural question is to ask about Carol Rasco's role in this. She was placed at the head of your operation. She didn't cut a very wide swath in the administration. Reed: She'd stick up for whatever Bill Galston and I suggested. She was loyal. She'd been with Clinton in Arkansas, so she knew how much he cared about the kinds of ideas we were pushing. But she didn't have the clout with others at high levels. She got cut out of a lot of the key decisions, too. The First Lady—I remember how furious she was about the decision not to put health care reform in the economic package. There was no one from domestic policy, period—not Carol, not anyone from the First Lady's operation—present in forming the economic package.

So Carol was helpful when she could be, but she didn't have sharp elbows. I'm sure she was swamped with health reform, which, from the early days, was an organizational fiasco. Ira did not take direction well. So I think she spent most of her time at that.

Jones

I can just imagine from your description and hearing others talk about starting up—I mean, it really is astonishing, isn't it, that we cut off the head of the government totally with an election. Then what has to be created is a structure to permit this person, sometimes from the outside—like Clinton—to, in his fashion and suited to his preferences, if he can articulate them well enough, replug into—Coming into that situation, even if you're familiar with Washington, you're faced with a terrific problem of staying in the know. What's happening where? Where everybody is seeking to do what you're trying to do, as well as show some direction, some movement. The question is, how do you do that? How did you stay in the know as to who's having influence, who's planning what, and so forth? Meetings, of course, but did you have ways of developing a system of communication within your operation?

Reed

We spent a lot of time pumping everyone we knew for information.

Jones

Where were you located?

Reed

I was located in the OEOB [Old Executive Office Building], on the second floor. Ira and I had the corner suite and Bill Galston was in the tiny office on the second floor of the Oval. I think it would have been easier to get more information if I'd been in that little office in the Oval, but even people who weren't necessarily sharing our cause were happy to share information. Gene Sperling and I would tip each other off whenever we heard anything that would affect the other's agenda. Rahm was helpful. Carol was helpful in telling us when others in the West Wing were doing things contrary to the DPC's [Domestic Policy Council] interest. George and Gene were close, old friends. So Gene could sometimes find out from George what was going on in the meetings we couldn't get to.

But a lot of the time we were operating on night vision. We knew how Clinton thought. We knew how a lot of the players thought. So we could predict a lot of the moves. We knew who was with us, who wasn't, who to worry the most about. We got to know the career folks at OMB, who ended up being very helpful. There were temporary little alliances on lots of things. Donna Shalala and I later fought over whether the President should sign the eventual welfare bill or not. But in the early days, she was enormously helpful as an ally, because she agreed with me that it had to be a big priority. When I found out from Alice Rivlin that the money wasn't going to be there, I called Shalala to complain. She called Moynihan to complain, and Moynihan complained to the world.

There were plenty of campaign aides who, from across the ideological spectrum, were sympathetic to what we were trying to do and would occasionally help us out. It was definitely the most challenging period. But it got to be very satisfying in its own way because the one thing we had going for us was we knew what we wanted to get done. We had a clear agenda I put up on my wall, the Washington Post list of the President's campaign promises they published the day he took office.

A friend of mine, the only person I knew from the Bush administration, had been at EPA [Environmental Protection Agency]. He told me to make a list of your top priorities because otherwise, you'll get lost in the sea of paper and the day-to-day. So I made a list of the things I had to get done: 100,000 cops, end welfare as we know it, change the way Washington does business by reforming lobbying and campaign finance, reinvent government, cut 100,000 bureaucrats. (I think that was the other one.)

We had clear objectives and we knew that the President would be with us if we could figure out how to get them done. We just persisted. Every time we could get to the President, we did pretty well. In the February 17th address to the nation, the draft that was written was absolutely awful. We all saw it the morning he was supposed to give it and panicked. The First Lady called a meeting to rewrite it. We met in the Roosevelt Room and we rewrote the whole thing. We were able to help him give a speech that sounded the way he campaigned.

The State of the Union that he gave a year later was the same way. The White House was always hungry for events and things for the President to do. We figured out early that if we came up with an action for the President to take or an event that he could do that would highlight our agenda, we had a better chance of advancing.

The biggest problem in the first year—and I think this was an organizational challenge that every White House faces—was that it took a long time for the West Wing to figure out how to have the people who knew what they were talking about at the meetings where those decisions on those issues got made.

The biggest nightmare for us was every morning the senior staff would get together, read the papers, and decide to march off on some reactive tangent with no knowledge of how that might conflict with what the President had already said, or the facts of the issue. Sometimes Carol would call and tip us off to how the senior staff meeting was about to go do something, "And you might want to know about it." Then we'd try to put the genie back in the bottle. But it was a chronic problem that people who were making political judgments didn't know the substantive facts of the case and they were reacting to events.

Knott

And they were reacting to what the coverage was.

Reed

I think that's probably a common problem. I read Ron Suskind's book about Paul O'Neill. His major complaint about the early years of this Bush White House is the same. Too many decisions get made without enough evidence to make them. We didn't have enough sympathizers to have a man-to-man defense, but we had a kind of zone defense, with people who kept their eye on various sectors to make sure that they didn't go wrong.

Jones

Isn't it interesting, when you were describing the campaign and you were identifying Clinton's strengths in the campaign, that he was successful in keeping his eye on what I think you called the "campaign issues," and not the issues created by the press. Here, you're reporting, in governing at least at the level of the senior folks, that they're letting the press determine—

Reed

That's true. We completely lost control of the agenda and of public perception of the administration. Part of that was that the administration is so big. Instead of one megaphone that matters, you have several. It took a long time to wrestle that to the ground. Also, we were constantly being pressed by a set of Washington demands that weren't raising the questions we wanted raised, but were raising other ones. We reacted.

You asked earlier about my own work habits at the time. My daughter was born in the first hundred days. That happily led me to the conclusion that I should try not to burn the midnight oil. I decided that if they weren't going to listen to me during the day, I wouldn't stay late. I did my best not to work weekends and paced myself in a way that made it easier to last the duration, although it wasn't always possible to fight a guerrilla war that way.

Riley

As you suggested last night, that partly explains your longevity in the administration, in that you weren't burning your candle at both ends. In effect, it allowed you to be around for the long haul and maybe enjoy some victories that you might not have otherwise.

I wanted to ask you about three sets of relationships. First, you mentioned Moynihan on a number of occasions. I'm wondering about other people on the Hill that you may have developed important relationships with. Secondly, your own relationships with the press. Were there any surprises? Did you find yourself in hot water with the press at any point? Did you make a conscious effort to avoid interaction with the press, or did they seek you out? The third set of relationships would be your former colleagues at the DLC. I guess that would include not just the people on the staff, but the Governors, the people that you described as the Democratic Party out in the real world. What can you tell us about your ongoing relationships with those three different groups? Especially focus on the first couple of years.

Reed

I was looking for allies wherever I could find them. Although the Congressional leaders weren't necessarily helpful, there were a lot of members of Congress who saw the world the way we did and wanted to help. Over the course of '93 and '94, when we were putting together a crime bill and trying to get the administration to realize how important the crime issue was, Joe Biden and John Kerry and others on the Hill were very helpful in trying to get us to keep our promises and occasionally putting pressure back on the White House in ways that we couldn't.

That was true on some other issues as well. In some instances, the Hill wasn't too happy to see us coming. I was assigned to work on lobbying reform; Michael Waldman was doing campaign finance reform, two things that the Hill really didn't want to do, for the most part. There were some members, like Carl Levin, who were big proponents.

I can remember some cheap shot in the Wall Street Journal making fun of Michael and me, saying that if they really cared about these issues, they wouldn't assign a 32-year-old and a 33-year-old to work on them.

Knott

Given their complexity, they meant younger people should have worked on them? [laughter]

Reed

I guess. There was a group of moderate New Democrats in the House who were helpful on welfare reform. A lot of the Senators had good political antennae and wanted us to succeed. Moynihan, although we quarreled later, was a great ally in trying to remind the administration that welfare reform mattered. So we enlisted their help wherever we could.

Riley

Did Howard Paster and Pat Griffin—

Reed

Ugh! Pat Griffin was fine, but Howard Paster thought that we were the bane of his existence, partly because we were pushing reforms that made members of Congress uncomfortable, but also, he didn't want us interacting with the Hill. What we came to discover was that the West Wing was really only capable of handling whatever was the highest priority of the administration that day or that week.

On the things we cared about, we had to be our own legislative affairs shop, had to be our own press shop. We had to come up with our own events, because otherwise, none of that would get done. Paster tolerated it on some issues, where it was us or nobody—like crime. But he didn't share much information with us about what members of Congress were telling him. We fought with each other quite a bit. Later, leg affairs directors were grateful that we would take some of the burden off of them because there are more members of Congress than they can deal with.

I think that the leg affairs role was the difficult one, because the people in that shop have to know enough of the substance not to give away the store in discussions with members. But there's no way that they can know the wonky details of a hundred different issues that are before the administration. But Susan Brophy, who was a deputy to Paster, was an early and longtime ally. So the short answer is that we took friends wherever we could find them, including on the Hill, and occasionally the Governors. Clinton had an extensive political network of people, of politicians, he talked to frequently. On welfare reform in particular I can remember talking to Lawton Chiles and other Governors about keeping this on the agenda.

The DLC crowd was torn between euphoria over having won the election and despair over how badly the administration was veering to the left. Except for Bill Galston and me, nobody had gotten positions of any consequence.

Riley

Was that by their choice?

Reed

Well, Rob Shapiro desperately wanted a big job on the economic team. He got offered an assistant secretaryship at Treasury, which he should have taken but didn't.

Riley

Unless that was Roger Altman's position—

Reed

Yes, well, that wasn't. Some of the New Democrats held out for too much and weren't willing to settle. Galston and I settled, and it worked out fine.

Riley

Elaine Kamarck?

Reed

Elaine Kamarck eventually got a job with the VP. Will Marshall, I don't know if he really wanted something or not. But he probably felt snubbed not to have been offered something. Al never wanted to go in. But there was no way they could have looked at the way the administration was going and felt like their voice was being heard. Al wrote numerous memos to the President trying to offer advice. There was a third part—

Riley

Press relations.

Reed

That was a difficult transition because most of the campaign press corps became the White House Press Corps. They were people I had lived with, essentially, for the last four months of the campaign, if not longer—seen every day, talked to every day. They were the most attuned to the struggles of the White House and how we weren't governing the way we had campaigned.

I think, in the transition, I tried to avoid talking to them because I didn't want to do anything to cost me a job. When we took office, they were desperate to figure out how the White House worked. They didn't know who to call. They would phone bank the entire West Wing and OEOB trying to find anybody that knew what they were doing or knew what was going on. For a little while, I would talk to reporters because I thought they could tell me what was going on. But it was embarrassing to explain to them repeatedly that I didn't know what was going on.

Some people dealt with that by pretending they knew what was going on, with disastrous results. There were all kinds of blind quotes in those early days; people who said things that weren't true just to make themselves sound in the know. I wasn't going to play that game. I didn't really like the idea of speaking on background anyway. I thought that it was a cowardly thing to do.

So since there was so much work and I was trying to get out at a reasonable hour, I decided about two months in that I just wasn't going to talk to anybody unless it was on the substantive issues I was working on. Reporters could talk politics forever and eat up your whole day. It didn't seem to me that it was doing me any good to talk to them, so I stopped calling them back, and eventually they stopped calling. There was an opportunity cost to that because they would call other people who didn't know what was going on. Those people would sometimes lead them astray. But I decided that the press was a lost cause and that I'd better spend my time elsewhere.

Jones

I'd suggest, as a way of thinking about these first two years, where you had real success, why that worked, and where you had—if not a failure, things not going well—and why not.

Reed

The major success of those first two years that I worked on was the crime bill, which was typical of a lot of the struggles we faced inside the White House. The President had long thought that crime was an important issue. He'd given a big speech on it during the campaign; it was central to his campaign advertising. In the first year of the administration he pulled Tom Foley aside and said, "You'd better watch this issue. This is a rising concern in the country."

He'd made an extensive list of promises that we wanted to keep. The signature initiative was 100,000 police officers. Then there were a number of initiatives to get guns out of the hands of criminals: the Brady bill, the assault weapons ban. It was also an issue typical of the partisan gridlock that bedeviled Washington in that period.

The Democrats had been trying to pass a crime bill since late in the Reagan administration. The Brady bill had been sitting up there for seven years. Democrats were in favor of gun measures, for the most part, and in favor of spending more money on preventing crime. Republicans were opposed to those two things and wanted to spend more money on prisons. Democrats were split down the middle on the death penalty. So it was hard to put together 60 votes in the Senate on the issue because nobody liked everything.

When we took office, our first battle was just to try to find money to say credibly that we were putting a down payment on 100,000 cops. Then we set about trying to negotiate with the House and Senate on the outline of a crime bill. We could tell from the beginning that this was not an area where it would be helpful for the administration to write the bill and then have the Congress debate it. The differences between Joe Biden, who was the judiciary chairman in the Senate, and Congressman [Jack] Brooks, who was the chairman in the House, had been well established in the crime bill battles of the previous years.

We got together with their Chiefs of Staff to try to work out an acceptable compromise to both. Then we thought we'd let them introduce respective bills, fight it out in their Houses, then go to conference. That took several months in the spring and summer of '93 because they had deep divisions over guns. The Senate wanted to include the Brady bill. Congressman Brooks, who'd been supported by the NRA [National Rifle Association], didn't want to do any gun measures. They had differences over the death penalty and habeas corpus reform and a bunch of issues that weren't big on our agenda but were big on theirs.

One of the President's promises was to create a police corps that was an ROTC [Reserve Officers Training Corps] program for police officers. Biden was an enthusiast; Brooks hated it. So it took us the better part of the summer to figure out how we were going to paper over these differences between them. We were finally able to reach agreement on something in August, which we announced right after the President signed the economic bill. That was the blueprint of a crime bill. It wasn't everything we wanted. It was only 50,000 cops, but that was all that we could get OMB clearance to be for, because money was tight.

I spent months and months in '93 meeting repeatedly with Attorney General Reno, trying to convince her that 100,000 cops or 50,000 cops was a good idea. Right down to the formal announcement of the crime bill, she was trying to convince the President not to make a concrete promise in that area because she thought that it was all smoke and mirrors, that the money wasn't really going to be there. She didn't want to make a promise we couldn't keep.

I can remember arguing with her outside the Oval Office right before the President was making the announcement. By that point, we had one ally in the senior White House staff. That was David Gergen, who went to the Hill with me on repeated occasions and helped fight internally to help get it on the schedule.

Then, fortuitously from our standpoint, crime exploded onto the national scene as a major political issue. Not because of what we were doing, but because a series of horrible high-profile crimes caught the nation's attention. This brought an issue that had been brewing for quite some time to the national political consciousness. There was the murder of Michael Jordan's father in North Carolina, and the murder and abduction of Polly Klaas, a 12-year-old in California, and the murder of a couple of German tourists in Florida.

Suddenly, crime seemed to be careening out of control. In fact, the crime rate had been inching upward; the murder rate had been climbing upward for several years. As we'd pointed out in the campaign, Washington hadn't done anything about it, even though the Republicans had made a lot of political hay over the issue.

That fall, I think in November, Washington State passed a referendum for a "three strikes and you're out" law. The Senate suddenly realized that this was a big issue and they'd better do something. To our surprise and delight, a bipartisan group of Senators got together. At the suggestion of John Hilley, who at that point was Chief of Staff to George Mitchell, the Senate Majority Leader, and who later was our Congressional liaison, they decided to pay for the crime bill by enacting into statute the personnel reductions that we had promised as part of the reinventing government initiative.

This was the unusual circumstance of Congress actually doing a better job of keeping the President's promise than the administration had done. The President had promised in his convention speech in '92 that we should put 100,000 police on the street and pay for it by reducing the Federal bureaucracy by 100,000. We had made those proposals in independent speeches a few months earlier. I'd suggested to Paul Begala that we link them. The President said that in the convention speech and then everybody forgot all about it.

When the Vice President started working on the reinventing government initiative, I urged him to come out with a specific recommendation of how much he was going to reduce the Federal work force because I thought that would be a tangible reform that people could latch onto. He did. We went to him and said, "Why don't you suggest, when you release your report, that some of the savings from this would go to the crime bill?" He thought that was an excellent idea.

When the President and the Vice President announced the REGO [Reinventing Government] Report, OMB let us start promising that we would pay for 60,000 cops, not 50,000 cops. That was in September. The Senate reached this deal in November, paying for all 100,000 cops and paying for the rest of the crime bill. It was a $30 billion package that included more prisons, more prevention, more police. The assault weapons ban, to everyone's surprise, passed on a close vote on the Senate floor in that debate. All of a sudden everything we'd promised in Putting People First on crime was in one bill that passed in the Senate, I believe, 95 to 4.

We couldn't contain ourselves, the few of us who were working on crime down in the White House. Gene Sperling gave me a hard time the next day, saying about hitting the lottery and what a big-spending liberal I was, getting a $30 billion package at a time when everybody else was begging for chump change for this or that program.

So I pleaded with the West Wing that since the Senate had, by an overwhelming margin, just passed the crime bill we wanted, why didn't the President say he would sign it and call on the House to do the same? It seemed like an opportunity for a quick and much-needed victory. The President was tempted, but the Congressional affairs reaction from George and from Howard was, "No, the House needs some time to pass its own bill and feel ownership of the whole exercise."

Instead of striking while the iron was hot, we let the moment pass. The House then proceeded to take most of '94 to debate the crime bill. They didn't take it up 'til April. We succeeded in getting them to pass the assault weapons ban by a two-vote margin. But they also passed a potential poison pill called the Racial Justice Act, which called for suspending the death penalty unless it could be demonstrated that it wasn't racially discriminatory. The NRA got a number of Democrats to vote for that in the hope that it would torpedo the bill. The House had also added a whole bunch of social spending to the bill because they thought the Senate bill was too much punishment, not enough prevention. So they added midnight basketball and programs for the arts, and a whole host of items that turned out to be a ripe target for opponents of the bill.

Because of guns and because the Racial Justice Act passed, the House was reluctant to go to conference. They didn't know if the Racial Justice Act was stripped out, whether they could hold the liberal votes. They didn't know if guns were still in whether they could hold the moderate votes. So they did nothing. The NRA launched a national advertising campaign attacking the crime bill for midnight basketball. They didn't really care about any of the social spending in the bill. They just wanted to defeat the assault weapons ban. Their focus groups showed them that these were the most vulnerable points.

By the time we actually got to conference, it was July. The bill came out of conference with guns in, Racial Justice out. The leadership thought that it would still pass. But we lost the vote on the rule to bring the bill to the floor by a 15-vote margin, a devastating political defeat for the administration and a complete surprise to the press corps.

We weren't that surprised because we'd been counting heads and we couldn't get past 200. But we figured the House leaders never bring a rules vote up unless they have the votes to pass it. But they didn't. We convinced the President that if he was going to save the crime bill he had to barnstorm the country for it. He spent eight days speaking on it. He went that next day to a police convention in Minnesota, gave a speech saying, "We've got to pass this bill."

Finally, we came to the conclusion that we weren't going to be able to pass the bill without further changes. Panetta convened a bipartisan summit on the Hill. He essentially ran a conference and made enough changes to get enough moderate Republicans to go along with the bill. Then after it passed in the House, the President lobbied half a dozen moderate Republican Senators. We had a very public fight over the heart and soul of Nancy Kassebaum and a few others. Eventually convinced them to vote for it and it passed over [Bob] Dole's objections on the Senate floor. It came to the President in mid-August.

The direct consequence of that—the Congressional leadership, before the crime bill had tanked, had said, "We're not going to go home, we're not going to let Congress have a recess, unless we pass health care reform," which they weren't getting anywhere on. It was the grumpiest August in memory because there was no prospect of a recess, which everyone desperately wanted. We were struggling on the crime bill, failing miserably on health care. As soon as the crime bill passed, the air went out of the balloon, and the papers reported the next day, "Crime Bill Passes, Health Care Dead." The leaders gave up on health care and said they were going home.

Jones

Did you take any gas for that?

Reed

Let's say it foreshortened our victory lap. [laughter] It was hard to run around high-fiving people when everybody else looked like they just died. But it was a perfect parable of that period, because if we'd done what was in our own interests, as opposed to deferring to Congressional interests, we would have seized the moment at the end of December. We would have gotten ourselves a bill right then, or early in the year. Hard to say whether that would have been enough to save health care, but it would have been a big boost in political capital at a time when we were desperately draining it.

There's no question that it left us having to fight a two-front war in the summer of '94 and expending every last ounce of energy just to get a crime bill, which—again, a good parable for our times: A crime bill that was essentially equivalent to that which had passed the Senate in November of '93 by 90 votes took all the President's remaining energy to pass by a whisker in August of '94.

It was our own fault. Any time a significant faction of Congress shows better political instincts than an administration, you know you're in trouble. The biggest failure of that two-year period, from my standpoint, was our colossal inability to get anywhere on welfare reform. We've talked about that a lot already and why that happened.

The instant we lost the Congress, the President, the First Lady, and almost everyone in the administration realized our mistake on welfare reform. Mickey Kaus wrote a cover story for the New Republic. The headline was, "They Blew It." It was about how we failed on welfare reform. If we'd done welfare reform first, or at the same time as health reform, we would have succeeded. The President and First Lady both agreed with that and resolved not to make the same mistake again. Welfare reform immediately became our top priority for the new Republican Congress.

Riley

One final question about the first two-year period, and then we'll move on. Maybe you've already answered this question. Was there a point at which the tracks might have changed? Where you might have been able to get the welfare reform idea jumpstarted and move ahead on the agenda? Where, in retrospect, might have been the most fruitful moment for that to have taken place, if at all?

Reed

Well, I think it's possible, if we'd had some money in the economic plan, we might have been able to get somewhere. Although not very far, really. I think that, with the administration divided and Congress against it, there was no way to overcome the tide. It's possible that if in the transition the President had put the First Lady in charge of both, or signaled in some way that these two were joined at the hip, we might have been able to get it done. It might have worked out the way the President hoped, that the two issues balanced each other politically, substantively.

Jones

But then, wouldn't both have to be in the economic plan?

Reed

That would have been easier, but both foundered for other reasons, not just the fact that they weren't in the economic plan. Health care foundered because by the time the administration sent up its plan, everyone was convinced that it was a big government nightmare. The process was a disaster.

Riley

Were you picking up those signals at the time?

Reed

It was a public relations disaster almost from the first day. Not the First Lady's involvement. That was actually a plus. She was making a good impact on the Hill. People were impressed with her. Republicans were impressed with her. But Ira's operation was secretive, cumbersome, and taking too long, and it scared everybody. The health team recognized that. They knew that. They hoped that the President could rescue it with his speech to Congress, which was the speech in September. It was a very good speech even though the TelePrompTer didn't work.

There was still, even into the early summer, the prospect of reaching a deal. What killed health reform was the insistence in the '94 State of the Union, when the President held up the pen and said, "If you send me anything less than universal coverage, I will take this pen, the people's pen, and veto it." This came because of pressure from the Hill. They didn't want to settle for anything less than 100 percent. Some people in the White House liked it, because it was a sign of strength. But it was a hell of a way to negotiate, to say, "Give me everything or we're not interested."

There was a deal on the table that [John] Chafee and Dole were willing to take in the early summer of '94. It was an individual mandate, not an employer mandate. It was 95 percent coverage, not 100 percent coverage, and the White House walked away from it. I think that was because there were divisions in the Congressional ranks. We had a significant branch of the House caucus that wanted a single-payer system that thought an employer mandate was a sellout. It was just a classic instance of the base wanting too much and ending up with nothing. All that aside, I think that health care reform could have succeeded if we'd played our hand a little better and been more attuned to the warning signals.

Welfare reform would have been extraordinarily hard. Even later, when he was agonizing whether to sign the welfare bill, the President said he wasn't sure, if he ever got a Democratic Congress, that they would be willing to send him the kind of welfare reform bill that he wanted. It cut against the grain of the Congressional party. It was the best instance of an initiative that Democratic Governors, and the gubernatorial wing of the party, desperately wanted and had no concerns about, while the Congressional wing of the party thought it was the worst idea they'd ever heard.

Riley

Did you see it coming in November 1994?

Reed

I knew we were in a big downdraft. The President knew we were in trouble. He campaigned furiously in the last few weeks of October trying to reverse that. His message was that we're for welfare reform and reinventing government, the campaign agenda that we had gotten done.

I thought that the critical mistake we made, although it might not have affected the outcome, was that when the Republicans put forth their Contract with America, we debated how to respond. I thought that we had agreed to develop our own reform contract, that we were going to make it a contest over who had the better ideas to change the country. Instead, at the consultants' insistence, at Greenberg's insistence, we decided to attack the particulars of the contract and try to scare people about what was in it, which played right into the Republicans' hands. It made us look as if we were trying to defend the status quo and the Republicans were the party of change.

The more we campaigned, the worse it got. It was clear to me, by the weekend before, that we were likely to lose everything, or come close. It was such an unimaginable prospect that we held out hope we might survive. It was an awful day. I couldn't bear to watch the returns at the White House, so I just went home and watched it with my wife. People who were there said it was like a death. Losing Congress, having Cuomo defeated, it was a collapse of unimaginable proportions. It turned our world on its head. I remember going in the next day and asking Susan Brophy from the leg affairs office, "Will anyone from Congress ever talk to us again? What will we do with the rest of our time in office?"

The President was in a state of shock. Rahm Emanuel and Don Baer and I had written a memo to the West Wing in mid-October, saying that the White House had to do things a different way, that after the election we had to get back to the agenda we campaigned on. We called it militant centrism. We had to make a virtue of our centrism and stop hiding it.

In late October, the White House convened the "472 Group," I think we called it, or maybe it was 476. You should ask Mark Gearan when he comes in, because he was in charge of it. It was in recognition of the need for—and I think it started work before the election—a more radical agenda on reinventing government and more new centrist ideas. We came up with a bunch of them. That group convened into November and eventually made a series of recommendations to Leon Panetta in December.

One of the suggestions that some of us argued for, I guess after the election, "Well, the Republicans put forward a plan to balance the budget, why can't we?" But Gene and the economic team said no, it was impossible, there was no way to do it. You couldn't do it without destroying Medicare, destroying the government. So we took it off the list.

Later, after Dick Morris had arrived, he encouraged the President and Vice President to keep pressing that case. Eventually, after the President and the Vice President asked that same question often enough, the economic team figured out a way to do it over ten years instead of over seven. In any event, after the November elections, there was no denying what many of us had been saying throughout the first two years—that we had to govern the way we had campaigned.

The President, after he had recovered from his initial shock, decided to take charge of his own administration. We didn't know everything he was up to. I can remember talking to him about the election in December or so. He said that the country had given us a good country licking, but that they hadn't given up on us. They were just reminding us to go back to what we promised.

The first public evidence of the new approach, in mid-December, was when he gave an Oval Office speech calling for a middle class bill of rights. After losing the '94 elections, a lot of us felt the same way we had felt after winning the '92 election. We were suddenly all very uncertain of our place in the political firmament. The President had, understandably, lost confidence in his government. So none of us—even those of us who were arguing for a different course— were sure whether he was going to listen to any of us or try to find new advice. But he brought Don Baer and me in to write this address. We wrote something and went up to meet with him in his study in the second floor of the West Wing.

He dictated something completely different. It wasn't that different, but he dictated an entire speech about a middle class bill of rights. We thought it was a great speech, but it was so uncharacteristic. It wasn't the way we were used to editing. He almost always reacted to something you gave him. He hardly ever had his own speech that he would suggest to us in its place. He had notes. I guess that was the tip-off. He was perfectly capable of dictating another speech, but this one he had written down what it was he wanted to say. That was unusual. We didn't know what to make of it.

So he gave that speech. The '95 State of the Union process was a marvel of intrigue. The first State of the Union, in '93, we had to retrofit because it came out so badly. The second one, in '94, was a pretty good process and ended up about the way we wanted it to. In '95, Leon asked Don, and me—and maybe Michael Waldman, I'm not sure—to head up the process. So we produced a draft over a series of weeks and worked with the President on what he wanted it to be, presented that to him and, unbeknownst to us, Dick Morris was in some closet in the White House residence producing another draft. So it was like that December speech, where we sent in one thing and the President came back with something significantly different. Not necessarily all that philosophically different, but it required more reconciling than usual in these circumstances.

We were all so unsure of ourselves that I had concerns. I still thought the speech had some significant shortcomings. It wasn't New Democrat enough. Even though I was, with Don Baer, the lead draftsman on this speech, instead of just making the changes that I wanted, I actually wrote a memo with the changes, sent it to Al From, and asked him to send it to the President because I knew Al still had the President's confidence. In fact, probably had the President's confidence even more, because there was no way Al could have been implicated in the '94 failure, since it was the best confirmation of everything he'd ever told the President.

So From took my page-and-a-half of suggestions for the speech, added a page of his own from a memo he'd sent before, and sent it to the President the day of the speech. When Don and I went up to the residence to meet with the President, he said, "From just sent me this great memo. Why don't you just put this in the speech?"

Jones

He sent it directly to the President, not to Baer?

Reed

No, he sent it to the President. That was the whole point. For him to lobby the President, to make the changes that we wanted. So he gave that to us. By this point, it was about four or five o'clock in the afternoon, for an eight o'clock speech. Don and I went downstairs and I frantically typed in two-and-a-half pages of single-spaced memo right into the speech. We barely finished the speech in time to give him a draft. He never got a chance to practice it.

Because the speech represented a high point of organizational dysfunction, we set the modern-day record for length of a State of the Union. I believe it was 89 minutes. It went on and on. People stuck with it. It was a successful speech. But there was an enormous amount of time spent on part of that speech that talked about the role of government. There were two factions within the 472 or 6 group. There was the more liberal faction headed up by Podesta, more moderate faction headed up by me and Rahm. We fought over exactly how to define the role of government in that speech. I think what he ended up saying was relatively unremarkable.

As I mentioned earlier, the one thing that the '94 defeat did mean, as our consultants had prophetically suggested, was that welfare reform was something that Republicans wanted to do. So we had one area in common, one item that was at the top of their agenda and at the top of our agenda. We had some significant, substantive differences. We quickly concluded that even though the Republicans could now control both houses of Congress and controlled a majority of governorships, that we could exploit two fissures in their ranks. First, that there were still some moderate Republicans in the Congress who weren't going to be comfortable with the harsher elements that some of the conservatives wanted. Second, that the conservative Governors didn't like mandates from Washington, whether they were liberal or conservative. So we knew that we had a small chink in the Republican ranks, in the Congressional ranks, that didn't want to do what [Newt] Gingrich and others wanted to do, and that the Governors would be our allies in avoiding an overly prescriptive bill.

We decided to have a summit at Blair House and bring the Governors from both parties to meet with leaders from both parties in Congress, to show that the President is committed to welfare reform, and have the Republicans start fighting a bit amongst themselves. The other thing we decided to do early on, which was indicative of the time, was we decided that the best way to pressure Congress—we decided we didn't know what Congress was going to do. We'd have to step up our efforts to take executive actions ourselves, because we didn't know if Congress was ever going to pass a bill. The best way to influence the debate was to start doing executive orders and signing welfare reform waivers for the states, and so on.

Over the course of the next couple of years, we wrote probably close to a dozen executive orders on welfare reform and child support enforcement. The administration approved more welfare reform waivers than all previous administrations combined. It did have exactly the impact we hoped. It showed Congress that we were going to reform welfare whether they did or not. We shamed them into realizing that if they were going to get any credit, they were going to have to send us a bill we could sign.

I don't know if we want to do the whole welfare story now, or if you have other questions you want to get to—

Riley

Well, let's see how it goes. We'll get through what we can get to. It's easy enough to mark the stopping place and I can be prepared for follow-up.

Reed

If you want to save that whole long story for another day, and you want to do more about Morris and the aftermath of '94, we can.

Riley

Yes. Why don't we do that right now, because we've only got something like under a half an hour left. There are some areas worth exploring—most of the welfare comes to fruition a year later anyway, so there are some other things going on. One question I have is: A lot of the Contract with America deals with domestic issues that are, aside from welfare reform, obviously—I'm wondering if you're part of internal conversations within the White House about how you're going to deal with those other domestic policies. I guess, more generally, as a part of your discussions, is there a sense about are we going to be reactive, are we going to try to become re-assertive and force our way ahead on the agenda? Can you tell us a little bit about your effort to come to grips with this new and unpleasant world you were dealing with?

Reed

Well, the elections knocked us flat. The White House had been trying to battle the Contract in the campaign, explaining why certain aspects of it were going to devastate the government. That offensive continued into '95 and through the end of the year. At the start of '95, we had a lot of convincing to do, just that we mattered at all. The conservatives were in ascendance. Gingrich was on the cover of every magazine. They claimed a mandate. They didn't necessarily have a mandate for the Contract, but they claimed one.

We knew that we still had the veto pen, and that they weren't as strong in the Senate as they were in the House. But I think our strategy in the first few months of '95 was just to hold on to some shred of relevance. As the President famously said in April, "I'm still relevant." And not get beaten so badly in the House that we would look even weaker than we already were. We knew that the President was better than '93 and '94 had suggested, that our message was more powerful. We knew we still had a winning formula that might well work if we ever tried it. But we didn't know if we were really going to get a second chance.

There was some risk that the Republicans, having been handed the center stage, might perform well there. If Gingrich had not—luckily for us, the Republicans proceeded to make the same mistake in '95 that we made in '93 and '94. If they'd shown a shred of humility and settled for 80 percent of what they wanted instead of trying to force it all down our throats, they could have solidified their majority and expanded it, and made life excruciating for us. But they genuinely believed that the '94 election was a referendum on their way of thinking, as opposed to just a rejection of the previous two years. So they overplayed their hand.

They pretty much steamrolled us in the first couple of months of '95. They had no problem passing the first nine items of the Contract in the House. Welfare reform turned out to be the hardest for them. It was the last one that they passed. They didn't get it done until the very end of the hundred days, maybe just after the end.

We were just trying to throw tacks in the road. We did better than we expected. They decided that instead of trying to pass a bill like what was in the Contract on welfare reform—which was very much like what we had supported in our own bill, it was just paid for entirely by cutting benefits to illegal immigrants. They realized that now that they controlled the governorships, they could go further and push a welfare reform block grant, which they knew would drive the left in Congress crazy. So they started pushing for that. It occurs to me that if I start down this road we'll talk about welfare reform for the rest of the time. Maybe we should get back to the mood in the White House.

Jones

Understandably, your reaction would be like everyone else's in the White House to the election itself: stunned, knocked flat, as you point out. But wasn't there another, obvious side to it as far as you were concerned? That, look, if we had been faithful to the overall direction of the campaign, the reassurance part that what we were in this for is to reform some things, associated with what the DLC is for and everything else. Here was an opportunity. That seems obvious to me, just from what you've spent a day talking to us about. Was that not obvious to others as well? Did you still see that there were obstacles in the way of reorienting in the direction you thought you were going in the first place?

Reed

Well, there were still obstacles, but the argument over whether or not we should go back to the New Democrat agenda was over. That was settled. There was no longer any White House resistance to making welfare reform a big priority or putting a more assertive centrist face on our agenda. All of that resistance died overnight.

The President and many others were emboldened to recognize—I think there was probably a general recognition, although it was harder for some people. The White House woke up and realized that the President's interests and the Congressional Democrats' interests weren't the same. So the day after the election, we stopped taking orders from Democrats in Congress. Now they weren't in position to give orders anyway. They had even less power than we did. But we still tried to maintain good terms because we needed their votes to support the President's veto. But the President knew that he couldn't listen to his native guides any longer. He had to chart a new course.

For some of the White House, that was in their blood. They weren't capable of thinking a different way, or they were still reluctant to change their ways. There was a lot less resistance. As I said, the bigger problem was trying to figure out whether we had missed our moment, whether it was too late now for us to convince the Congress that we were really centrists. Whether it would be possible to do so when we were trying to fight off Republicans who had an ambitious change agenda. We knew there was a crazy right wing agenda that went too far in the other direction, but we didn't know whether the country would see that.

Riley

Were there components of the Contract that were seriously considered as points of departure? Did you sit down in the White House and look at this and say, "There are some pieces—"

Reed

We thought that we could make lemonade on welfare reform, that the differences were not impossible to bridge. Eventually, we decided to do the same on balancing the budget, although that took a much longer fight within the economic team. The President liked the Perot elements of the Contract. There were institutional changes in Congress, like term limits, that didn't trouble us. But there was a lot of it that we knew was going to be difficult to compromise. You know, I honestly don't remember beyond—welfare reform was our agenda. Raising the minimum wage was something we called for in the '95 State of the Union. Just about everything else was playing defense.

Riley

Since we have only about 15 minutes, let me steer in a slightly different direction. This builds on something that you talked a little bit about also at dinner last night. If you feel comfortable doing this on the record, this relates to Mrs. Clinton. Her role has been tied up in health care reform up to about this time. Does she become a more prominent player in some ways in the domestic policy shop because she's freed up? Or is it the case that, since the health care reform is so discredited, she kind of fades into the woodwork? The thing that I remember you saying last night was this illustration of the glass being half-empty or half-full.

Reed

She was very involved. She was particularly concerned about domestic policy and Justice Department appointments early on. She kept her eye on the domestic front in the first two years, but health care was all-consuming. When that was done, she made a conscious decision to take a step back from any public role.

I think she continued to advise her husband privately. I gather that she was influential in getting Dick Morris to come in. So she remained a very influential figure, but she spent that time trying to sort out the lessons of health reform and come up with a new role that, over time, became focused on a handful of issues where she could work with both parties in Congress on ideas that she cared about: child welfare, adoption. She was always a forceful advocate within the administration in the areas where she cared deeply. She had a good staff that made sure those issues didn't get ignored.

She was a big believer in the President's campaign promises. She was a campaign person like the rest of us. She wanted the administration to do what the President promised and do what the President said. She didn't like it when the agencies resisted. I think that was a tough year for all of us. Certainly for her, because the loss of health care was such a big disappointment. Nobody wanted to give up on the goal, but it took a while to figure out what to do, how to get started again.

Riley

Temperamentally, she's very different from the President.

Reed

Yes. I think philosophically and ideologically they're remarkably close. For the last 30 years, they've had what they called, "the conversation," where they talk about issues and came to agreement on a host of things. I think Clinton's success as a synthesizer owes a lot to all those years of conversation. She was always very supportive of his efforts to show that he was a different kind of Democrat. She was supportive of welfare reform from the get-go, and a big believer in personal responsibility. She was concerned about the coarsening of the culture. As I said, she was dedicated to keeping the President's campaign promises.

They were different people. He was the eternal optimist and she's much more of a realist. He wakes up every day thinking it's going to be the greatest day ever, no matter how bad the previous day was. She wakes up thinking that there's a good chance today might be a lot like yesterday.

Jones

Is that a Midwestern attitude? [laughter]

Reed

At one point, at a farewell party in the second term, we were both bidding farewell to one of her staffers. I think it was Jen Klein, who had worked for both of us. The First Lady said there are two kinds of people in the world: people who view the glass as half-empty and people who view it as half-full. That her husband, and a lot of the people in the administration like me, were people who always saw the glass as half-full. And that she was grateful for all the people in the administration who agreed with her that the glass was half-empty.

I think that her realism was an important constant reminder for him. She was also much more disciplined. She didn't run late. She wanted decisions to get made, not to fester. But she was also very protective of his agenda. She wanted to make sure that the government did what the President wanted.

Riley

Do you think it's the case that she's better able to serve this function for her husband after health care is out of the way? Is it the case that she's so—I don't know whether distracted is the right word, or invested in this policy area for two years—that maybe she's not as locked into that protective role and that advancing role as she was after 1994?

Reed

There's no question that she had to spend an enormous amount of time on health care, and because of her role had to be an advocate for the issue within the White House to make sure that it didn't get shunted aside, it got enough of the President's attention. She knew that just as being President didn't mean that once you made a decision, things happen that way, that being First Lady and convincing the President didn't mean that things would necessarily happen that way.

She wisely had a good staff of people who fought the battles in the trenches. She didn't try to appeal to a higher court when she lost at the lower levels. Her staff played by all the rules that everybody else did, once there were rules. I think that there were plenty of times in the first couple years where she played the role of protecting the President, protecting the President's interests. I already talked about the one with the first State of the Union, where she stepped in and averted a disaster. But I think it was extraordinarily difficult to be the First Lady, head up the administration's top agenda item, and be the President's favorite advisor all at the same time.

Jones

I wonder whether she viewed what happened in Congress as some others did. That it was not just a defeat, it was a death. The issue was, at least for the time being, because of process and so forth. Some people viewed it as having been more than defeated. Pick it up next term or whatever. But combined with the '94 election—

Reed

We're still having this argument in the Democratic Party. My view, which I expect is the President's view and the First Lady's view, is that health reform failed because we bit off more than we could chew. We accept full responsibility for an ungainly process, for leaving ourselves open to a heavily funded special interests assault that stopped us from getting where we wanted to go. There's no question that failure, along with all the other failures we had over the first two years, influenced the '94 elections.

But I think, and I suspect they think, that the '94 elections weren't just about health care. They were a rejection of the Congressional Democratic philosophy. They were a kind of market correction that was long overdue. There were a number of Southern seats that we'd held onto longer than we had expected to because the Democrats in those seats distanced themselves from the National Democratic Party. Once the traditional Democratic philosophy was in place to some degree across the board, there was no escape for a lot of members of Congress in those districts.

Our mistake was listening to, deferring to, Congressional Democrats too much, and not trying to steer our own course. I think that the Clintons did that for understandable reasons, because they wanted to bet the farm on health care. But as I said yesterday, they got sold a bill of goods on what it would take to get health reform done. They thought that meant giving in, putting campaign finance reform on the back burner and letting welfare reform wait, and deferring to the Congressional leadership on the questions of whether health care had to be universal or it wasn't worth doing.

The Clintons were told that was the way to get health care. It turned out to make it harder to get health care instead of easier. So I think they resolved never to make that mistake again. But you're right. It was a devastating personal loss for both of them. Health care was one of the things they'd been having that conversation about for all those years. At that point, it wasn't clear how to put everything back together again. The President felt personally sorry for the members of Congress who had voted for his economic package, had voted for the assault weapons ban, lost their jobs, he thought, because of it. So it was a very sad period because everywhere you looked, there was a reminder of how we'd failed, and what might have been if we'd steered toward a majority path from the outset.

Jones

One thing I would plead for in another session is a discussion also of the effect of Dick Morris coming in on your operations and in doing so, looping back to our earlier discussions of someone for the President to turn to and discuss that. But in particular, from your perspective, what it meant for you and others in the White House.

Riley

That's a good point of departure. Bruce, we're very grateful for the time you've given us thus far and the willingness to carry on. We still have a lot to do, but we covered an awful lot of ground. As I was telling Chuck earlier, there's so much rich material here, I think this is going to be a very useful transcript for folks to look at in the future. So thank you much.

Reed

Thank you. I'd be happy to come for a whole day if you guys can stand it.

Riley

I certainly can and I think there is enough material for us to do that.