Douglas Sosnik Oral History

April 13, 2006

Russell Riley

This is the Douglas Sosnik interview, part of our [William J.] Clinton Presidential History Project. I want to thank you for coming to Charlottesville to do this. I know you're busy, and it's a pleasure to have you here.

We normally do a couple of administrative chores at the beginning of the interview. The first is to repeat the fundamental ground rule of the interview: it's being conducted under a veil of confidentiality. We do this to encourage you to speak candidly to the historical record. Nobody at the table is free to repeat what is said in the room except you. We've all taken the pledge and are veterans of the process, and we will abide accordingly.

The second thing is a voice check to give the transcriber some help in identifying who's saying what. I'm going to ask everybody to identify yourself and say a few words so the transcriber can hear the voice and the name. I'm Russell Riley, an associate professor at the Miller Center.

Doug Sosnik

I'm Doug Sosnik, and I'm up.

James Pfiffner

I'm Jim Pfiffner from George Mason University.

Paul Martin

I'm Paul Martin, an assistant professor at the Miller Center.

Jeff Chidester

I'm Jeff Chidester, research director for the Clinton project. I'll be note taking today.

Riley

Doug, tell us a little bit about your background and how you got involved in politics.

Sosnik

I was always interested in politics. I grew up in North Carolina. I went to Duke and took a semester off in 1976 and went to Connecticut to work as a volunteer doing errands for a Senate campaign. I went back to Duke, graduated, and went to Connecticut in early 1980. I was Chris Dodd's driver in his first Senate campaign, and that's where I learned politics.

I had a nice middle-class upbringing and a nice education, and I basically just went through life doing what I enjoyed. I enjoy politics, so I took it from there and ended up going to Michigan in 1981 to work for a former colleague of Chris Dodd—Bob Carr was his name. They served together in the House. In 1980, Congressman Dodd was elected to the Senate, and Congressman Carr was defeated. I went out to Michigan in 1981 and ran his campaign. He ran against the guy who beat him, and in 1982, he won. I came back as his chief of staff in Congress and stayed at it.

Riley

How long were you with Chris Dodd?

Sosnik

You mean when I was his chief of staff?

Riley

Yes.

Sosnik

I took some time off, went around the world, worked in politics in Africa and South America. I came back to Chris Dodd in early 1991 to be his chief of staff. At the very end, I went to Connecticut to run his campaign in '92 and stayed with him until around January of '94. That's when I came to the White House.

Riley

I can't let the reference to "doing politics around the world" go by. Tell us about the kind of work you were doing. It was Africa, but you were also doing work in South America?

Sosnik

Yes. After I left Congressman Carr at the middle to end of '85, I went to South Africa and was working for the opposition party. That was a particularly bad time with the apartheid government. The head of the opposition was [Frederik] van Zyl Slabbert. He was a legendary Afrikaans rugby player, and he was head of the opposition in Parliament, which really bothered the Afrikaans, since he was one of their own. But despite the fact that he was part of the opposition, he felt that just by being in the system—even as part of the opposition—he was in some ways legitimizing the process.

So his intention was to resign and have all the members of his party resign and then run for election on the platform that if they got elected, they wouldn't serve. He thought that would be the most democratic way to try to bring down the government. I was there to run the national campaign.

He resigned and about half his party resigned. The other half of his party didn't resign, so he wasn't able to make the political statement he wanted to make. I spent almost half a year doing that. Then I traveled some and came back and worked a little bit and ended up going to work in Central America—El Salvador and Aruba, and some other places. I went to Argentina in the middle of '87. They had democracy for the first time. There were some seminars, and I was a speaker at one of them. I talked about how to run campaigns in an emerging democracy. That's where I met the woman I ended up marrying.

Riley

How readily did the lessons from the United States apply in these other settings?

Sosnik

They did only barely. For example, the first thing you do in a campaign is try to organize lists. When you're in a country with a culture that has not had a democracy, the first thing you do when you get a list of the opposition is go find the people on the list and do something bad to them, so getting people to organize and keep lists required some culture change. There were a lot of other differences, but that's one of the most basic.

Martin

How did you get involved in some of these activities? What was your inroad?

Sosnik

There was always a relationship or contact. In the case of South Africa, Stan Greenberg was a good friend of mine. He used to live in South Africa and was a professor there, wrote some books there. He knew several people. I met him through the Dodd campaign in '80 and hired him in Michigan in '81, '82. He connected me with the people in South Africa.

Riley

You were doing campaign work for Dodd in '92, right?

Sosnik

I went to the campaign for the last 60 days and then went back as chief of staff.

Riley

Did you have any involvement in the Presidential campaign in '92?

Sosnik

I had no involvement in '92.

Riley

Did you go to the [Democratic National] Convention?

Sosnik

I did go to the Convention.

Riley

Do you have any specific recollections of the Convention?

Sosnik

Nothing in particular. I served as a whip for the Clinton people in three or four states. All these guys in the Clinton operation were my friends whom I grew up with politically. I was with them, but I didn't have a formal role in the campaign.

Riley

You weren't invited to join the campaign at any point?

Sosnik

It was irrelevant. When I went to work for Dodd, he was in real political trouble, and I was his chief of staff. I wasn't really interested in doing the campaign, but I was spoken for. Actually, I didn't really have a desire to do Presidential campaigns, never had. In '88 I did three months at the end, but I didn't have a wanderlust for it.

Riley

Had Clinton been your candidate going into the campaign season in '92, or did you have a preference for somebody else?

Sosnik

Again, this was my business—my line of work, at least. I spent a lot of time around these guys and the people who worked for them. I thought that by the middle to end of '91, it was really clear he was head and shoulders above the field, although I didn't think he would win.

I was with him Wednesday night, and he was talking about a speech he had given Tuesday night in New York about why he was a Democrat, the difference between a Democrat and a Republican. It was a fundraiser in New York. He said if you look back to his speeches in the middle to end of '91—the foundation of what he ran for President on—what he said during the '92 campaign, how he governed throughout his Presidency, and what he said that night about what he had said the night before in New York, you could see the intellectual framework of it all. It evolved, no doubt, but it was still the same pitch and the same symphony, so to speak. I made a comment to him about that, and he readily agreed.

I grew up as a Democrat thinking that basically Republicans were people who worked in the White House and were Presidents, and that wasn't an area Democrats really had a possibility of even engaging in. I didn't realize it was possible, and I think Republicans felt the same way. That was part of the shock when Clinton won in '92. I didn't think there was any question he was the superior candidate in the field, but I was skeptical of his being elected President.

The speeches he gave in Georgetown in the fall of '91, the midterm speech he gave in Cleveland, and a speech he gave in Chicago in '91—you can see now how clearly he knew why he was running for President. He told me the other night that he had spent a lot of time thinking about why he wanted to be President but had not spent a lot of time setting up how he was going to do it. Why he wanted to be President was the most important thing in terms of being successful.

Bruce [Lindsey] and I spent a lot of time together on the road. Bruce tells the story that one day in the fall of '91 Clinton called him and said, "I'm going to announce later today that I'm running for President," and Bruce said, "You are?" Bruce called the phone company, because he had to have phones to have a campaign. He had to give them his credit card to guarantee payment if they didn't pay the bills. Governor Clinton spent more time figuring out why he wanted to be President than he did thinking about the machinations of what it means to set up a campaign.

Rahm Emanuel and most of the people who worked on the campaign are all my personal friends. I was involved with them and in their thought processes in early to mid-'91 as they were trying to decide who to work for, so I was very familiar with the workings of Clinton as he was going through this.

Riley

In '93 you're on the Hill?

Sosnik

Yes.

Riley

Do you have any recollections about the transition period? Were you approached at that point about going—?

Sosnik

I was not, but my friends were in the middle of all this, having been part of electing a President. There was a whole sweepstakes or trauma for them about where they were going to land. I was with them most evenings as they were discussing the internal workings of it. It was pretty chaotic. I had never met Clinton. The [George] Stephanopouloses of the world, Greenberg, [Frank] Greer, Rahm, Mandy [Grunwald]—the people who had been the political class in Washington—were our friends. But I didn't know the Arkansans and the non-Washington political class; I had never met them. I wasn't involved with the campaign.

Pfiffner

What was your perception of how those two sets of people interacted? How was the White House staff put together in terms of the Mickey [Michael] Kantors? There was a lot of conflict there. Do you have any observations about that period of trying to set up the White House staff before the inauguration?

Sosnik

It was pretty much conventional wisdom. Sometimes conventional wisdom can be right. They probably did it backward. The lessons I learned from it were that the first thing you do is get a chief administrative officer, chief of staff. You hire him first, not last. The second thing is focus on the big four Cabinet posts. Those are the ones that matter: Treasury, Defense, State, and Justice. You build your White House operation and your Cabinet around that. That was somewhat inverted in the Clinton case.

Clinton is so gifted. You see the Bob Doles of the world who could run the United States Senate out of their hip pocket—which is pretty remarkable, but they did. George Mitchell pretty much just went down to the floor, had a card, and ran the United States Senate that way. It's pretty impressive. But you can't run for President and run the White House that way. Part of the system of putting these candidates through the hazing is to weed out people who really don't have the temperament and the organizational capacity to run a government, as chief executive, as President.

Riley

By "hazing" you mean the primary season and everything they have to go through?

Sosnik

Just the whole hazing of the nomination and being elected. Bob Dole shows that you can't run for President like you run the United States Senate. I wasn't there, but my impression was that Governor Clinton and his wife [Hilary Rodham Clinton] largely ran the state of Arkansas out of their pockets. Their campaign was a nontraditional campaign in the sense that it wasn't hierarchical. It either lacked structure or it changed structures. The President and the First Lady didn't run the whole campaign out of their hip pocket, but they had a big influence on it.

They approached setting up the White House a little bit like they approached how they'd run the government in Arkansas, and they learned a lot of lessons through all that. I served for six years—all four Chiefs of Staff—so I essentially hit most of the eras. I've done this for people writing books; I'm just reviewing in my mind how I did it. There were four or five eras for the Clinton Presidency, depending on how you want to do the math.

The first era was '93-'94. The second era was '95 and '96, which was the campaign and the complete overhaul of the White House operation, applying a lot of the lessons learned from the mistakes in '92. The third era would be '97—or you could compress '95, '96 and '97 in one era; I probably would do that. The third era, if you do it that way, would be the '98 impeachment era. The final era would be the post-impeachment era.

He had to repair the airplane as he was flying it, at the end of '94, the beginning of '95—to undo the mistakes that were made at the beginning, at the end of '92.

Riley

I'll broaden the question to include your colleagues on the Hill and the Governor himself: At the time were you detecting problems during the transition that you thought, I'm not sure these guys can pull this off?

Sosnik

Absolutely. You could detect it either watching it on television or talking about it at dinner at night. I don't know if you've had Bill Daley here yet. Bill was summoned from Chicago to Little Rock to accept the post as Secretary of Transportation. He got the call and was going to Little Rock. But by the time he got there, he wasn't the Secretary of Transportation because they had come up short on Hispanics in the Cabinet. It was clear from different angles—and I had some unusual angles, given my friends—that it was pretty chaotic.

Riley

I want to ask a generational question. You and I are about the same age. Did you look at this and wonder whether the people you saw getting these jobs were ready for prime time? Or did you have confidence that these guys—mostly guys, I guess there were women too—were mature enough to be taking on these jobs in the White House that for so long had gone to much older Republicans?

Sosnik

At the time—probably still, but at the time—a disproportionate number of people who covered the White House were the same age as people in the White House—and were Democrats. For a lot of our press coverage, there was some inherent envy that this was their generation doing it and it wasn't them. It affected their coverage. I joke around with reporters that after watching the [George W.] Bush White House now, through five and a half years, and being told the adults had come to the rescue, I say, "Bring me back the kids"—which they all get.

You get this in your life when either you or your peers start landing in places you used to read about. You scratch your head and wonder if it's the same—I can remember at one point a woman in the White House—as things were particularly chaotic later on—said to me, "I wonder where the real White House is? This can't possibly be the real White House." But I think there was a pretty good mix of young energy. The White House staff itself was youngish, but the Cabinet wasn't youngish.

It's interesting; it's very unusual. You're looking at a guy like me and a number of the people you've interviewed, telling you stories about ten years ago, and we're 50 years old, 49 years old—guys who had done things relatively early in their life that normally a generation older would be doing. That's different.

There's a big difference between the Democratic view of serving in government, in the White House, and the Republicans' view. I think for Republicans it's a prerequisite to come in there and check the box as part of the overall package of what you've done in your life. For a lot of the Democrats who worked in the Clinton White House, that was the prize, which is why you'll see the [Gene] Sperlings and the [Bruce] Reeds and the others go wire-to-wire for eight years—because why would you leave? This was the whole point: to be able to affect policy at the highest levels.

Pfiffner

I wonder how things looked from the Hill—Clinton's first budget and the decision not to go after the middle-class tax cut, but to go for deficit reduction. How did the dynamic between the campaigners and the deficit hawks look from the Hill?

Sosnik

When I came to the Senate as the chief of staff in '91, I had been around town for a while and knew a lot of the staff guys. This was a different era; the Democrats had control of the Senate—we had 54, 55 Senators, I don't remember exactly—and a large percentage were progressives or liberals. Several of my colleagues and I set up a group of about 10 or 12 fellow travelers of Democratic Senators: [Patrick] Leahy, [Carl] Levin, Dodd. We would meet as a group of chiefs of staff, pretty much almost weekly.

At one point, we were in an environment in which the squeakiest wheel got the most grease. The newly elected Democratic President and his administration tended to lavish most of their attention on people who caused them the most problems. The people who caused them the fewest problems were the ones who got the least amount of attention. At one point, I had renamed our group the "bozo caucus." We were the guys who got together and were always there for an easy vote, but we never got asked to anything. Our bosses didn't either.

I'm on the Hill almost every day, but I periodically go back to meet with the AAs [administrative assistants] and the seeds of the AA group that the Democrats put together. They meet in smaller rooms now; it's a smaller caucus. But they remember their roots in the bozo caucus. That would be the summary of how we felt up there.

In fairness to President Clinton at the time, the Senate is largely composed of people who think they should be President. He came in from the outside, really without any roots in Washington—which is ultimately partly how I got hired. It's the only stop Clinton made in his life where he left with no more real friends than before he got there. He never really took to the town; the town really never took to him.

So in fairness to him and his crew, there was a group of people on the Hill who were altogether predisposed to find problems anyway. But there was clearly a lot of discontent. Actually, there was a lot of shock, of people walking around in a daze in '93. It never occurred to the Republicans that they would lose the White House. Now they were the opposition party, and they'd never been. (I guess they'd been the opposition party in the mid-'70s.) They didn't even know what their job was. It took them something like a year, about nine months, to figure it out. Then they at least figured out that their job was, if nothing else, to make life miserable for the Democratic President.

Democrats didn't know what it was like to have the White House and Congress, so there were a lot of people fumbling and stepping all over each other in town. It was just something people weren't used to. There was clearly a lot of discontent. It gave the impression of a very free-flowing sort of chaotic "reward the squeakiest wheel" environment for the Democratic caucus on the Hill.

Pfiffner

What was the partisan dynamic? Did Dole say that there would be no Republican votes for Clinton's budget plan? I just vaguely picked that up because there were no Republican votes on any of those through the summer. They were very close votes.

Sosnik

I'd have to go back and look. They were in a daze until around May or June. But then the Republicans did figure out that if they can't agree on what they're for, they can at least agree on what they're against. They took themselves off the table.

All of a sudden you look at the softest, weakest links in the Democratic caucus, and that's where all the focus was. Bob Kerrey and others really became ground zero for what was going to pass or not pass. Clinton's role was all so public and so personal—essentially he kept raising the stakes with these guys, or they kept raising the stakes with him because of his personal involvement. It was not a very seemly process.

Martin

What was your strategy in terms of responding to that as chief of staff for Dodd? Did you attempt to become more difficult or become squeaky?

Sosnik

No. I was his chief of staff. I worked for him. That was not who he was or who he is. He shook his head. He was the longtime champion for the first piece of legislation that Clinton signed into law, the Family and Medical Leave Act. But Dodd's MO [modus operandi] is not to cause problems just for the sake of causing problems or to get more attention, so I didn't pursue that. Despite all the problems, I had amazing access to the White House because all my friends were working there. I didn't have problems with my phone calls. I didn't have problems with any of those kinds of things.

But we did not have a particularly central role in the more important things like legislation and votes—and also appointments and other kinds of things that Senators like to have a role in. Senator [Joseph] Lieberman wasn't up, and he was much more active early for Clinton in the campaign. In a sense, Lieberman was really the first among equals—in Connecticut anyway, in terms of appointments—despite the fact that Dodd was more senior. It's understandable.

Riley

You mentioned that there were people trying to learn how to deal in a different environment. You had a Democratic President and a Democratic Congress at the time. Would you reflect on how you do that in an ideal world? Whose job is it to figure out in that kind of environment how you're going to make things work? Is it just the President's job, or do the Speaker and the Majority Leader have a special role to educate or convince people that this is a new environment? We know how it worked. My question is how might it have worked differently?

Sosnik

The most important thing underlying your question is that politics is all about people, all about relationships. In the course of an eight-year Clinton Presidency, for example, if you're stacking up specific titles and positions and then putting underneath those titles or positions who had them when, on almost every one, the jobs are different, even though they're the same titles. People's effectiveness—both in terms of their ability to get along with other people and also their command of their area—determines how big or small those jobs are. There's no how-to kit. It's all based on personalities.

But, at the end of the day—and this White House is a good example—it's most important for a White House to internally figure out what it's doing and what its objectives are and then to go sell or persuade or impose their will on the legislative branch. It's better to have a cooperative arrangement. The Bush operation is an example. They essentially went to the Hill and told them what they were going to do and which direction to march and how to march. They largely were able to pull that off, with a lot of grumbling, for the first five and a half years or so. But now they're going to start paying the price for that.

You make a first impression only once. What was remarkable about the Clinton first term was his ability in the middle of the term to make a first impression a second time on the American people and to also basically redo how he built his White House. What you do rolling out as a new President early on has a lot to say about how your Presidency will go.

If you look at the eight years of [Ronald] Reagan, the first 18 months probably occupied about 90 percent of the intellectual framework and what he accomplished in his Presidency, at least domestically. Clinton made an effort—and the Washington crowd would say he finally did it. The people who said, "Come to Washington and don't let those people get you in the muck" also said, "I can't believe he started it this way."

He went to a dinner—I think at the [Averell and Pamela] Harrimans at the end of December—and he brought the Speaker and the Majority Leader. Official Washington greeted him. He was trying to show that he was going to try to become part of the town, so to speak.

As far as the early decision on whether to go with welfare or health care—obviously second-guessing now—there was a lot of pressure inside the Democratic caucus to go in the direction he went rather than the direction he probably wanted to go.

Pfiffner

You mean doing health care first rather than welfare?

Sosnik

Yes. Looking back on it—and I think they would tell you—one of the reasons they were so disciplined and focused in the campaign was that they were in the middle of nowhere in Arkansas; they did nothing but this because there was nothing else to do. But, as importantly, they weren't stuck in D.C. in the culture of D.C. and the chattering class and all the rest of it. If you're sitting around this table 30 or 40 years from now talking about a President who just finished, people will still understand what we're talking about. The power and influence of the Washington chattering class will always be there. But it's becoming less central because of how our society has changed, the role of the Internet, and the fact that we're not looking at the voice of God reading the news every night on TV. But it was still quite important then and had a lot of influence then.

As the town says, "Presidents come and go, but we'll always be here." It's trying to figure out that right balance. But being grounded internally on what you want to do makes it more effective as you then engage with the Hill. There was lack of clarity in the Clinton White House going into the transition. You look at Reagan's transition—which by all accounts was the best transition—it was quite orderly. Heritage had produced all these briefing materials and everything else. This was much more chaotic.

Your strengths are also your weaknesses in life. Part of the strengths of Clinton himself and his Presidency was the free-flowing ability to improvise: not putting people in straitjackets, but giving them opportunities and letting them blossom. But it also was our weakness. If you look at the Bush operation versus Clinton's in the execution of almost anything, you'll always see they're much more punctual, much more fastidious. Everything is much more buttoned down. But it loses a lot as well.

In the transition and in the early years of the Clinton administration, the softer, weaker side of that showed more. Clinton is disciplined in terms of learning, and smart, obviously, and incredibly hard working. I think he internalized and learned a lot of lessons in the first two years that he applied in reshaping his White House in his final six years.

Riley

What about the formal congressional affairs shop? Give us your sense about the effectiveness of Howard Paster in that job, from your perspective on the Hill. Was Paster widely respected on the Hill, or was he suspect in any way?

Sosnik

He was a creature of Washington and from Washington, at least professionally, so he had a lot of people who liked him and knew him from way back when. I think he had a UAW [United Auto Workers] background, so there were some of the "moderate" Democrats who had some skepticism toward him. But to the mainstream, progressive part of the party, he was a well-known and well-liked commodity.

The job is one of the worst jobs in the White House because in some ways everybody is in charge of congressional affairs. Everybody has relationships and everybody's running around. Howard's ability to try to manage that—He was right in the sense that you have to have one head to this body. You can't have five people in charge of the Hill. But he got worn out trying to impose that kind of discipline and control. Howard enjoyed working there, and Howard was good, effective. It would have been nice if he could have stayed.

Riley

You've said that you had friends up there. My assumption is that you must have been using some of the channels that maybe caused Howard's headaches.

Sosnik

Oh, yes. As I said earlier, every position is totally determined by who's in it in terms of their effectiveness, their centrality. I'm not sure that anyone in this room right now could name the head of congressional affairs for the Bush administration.

Martin

Fred McClure.

Sosnik

No, that was Bush One.

Riley

Isn't it Candice [Miller] somebody? You're proving the point.

Sosnik

We have a Candice somebody.

Riley

I know it's a woman who's been under some heat.

Sosnik

Howard was a very visible head of congressional affairs, which probably helped him and hurt him.

Martin

What kinds of things were you trying to communicate to the Presidency during 1993 from a Senate point of view?

Sosnik

Our frustration was that the weakest links or the squeakiest wheels—whichever clich? you want to use—were driving the debate. Everything was being dumbed down to them. But you got into a situation that was hard to get out of from the White House's standpoint. If you look at '81 with Reagan and '93 with Clinton, those are the two starkest differences in how you operate the first year of a term of a new President.

My guess is if you did a statistical analysis, Reagan probably did a quarter of the number of events that Clinton did, a quarter of the number of initiatives, probably worked a third of the number of hours, however you want to stack it up. But they had a very clear message they were trying to convey to the American public, a very clear sense both visually, through words and through policy, how they were going to try to communicate that. It was all built on the campaign message.

With Clinton in '93, it was indigestible to the American public. There were so many events, so many messages, so many things being put out that no one knew what to make of it. It didn't add up to anything larger, and it was quite reactive. It was an agenda that became reactive. There's nothing in Washington that succeeds like success.

On the flip side, the more trouble you have, the more trouble you get. They stumbled out of the gate with gays in the military, and it just seemed we were losing momentum rather than gaining it as the year went along, which made it harder on whatever the next thing was. It was quite frustrating.

Riley

Can you tell us anything about the perception of Al Gore as Vice President? That's one place where you might have expected, at least in the abstract, some Senatorial experience and leadership to have been exercised, because you have someone coming out of the chamber who's admittedly central to the administration. Was that the perception on Capitol Hill at the time?

Sosnik

Actually, both in the House and the Senate, there was a fair amount of stability at that time in terms of Members who had served with Gore in the House, even though he had moved over to the Senate quite some time earlier. Obviously, most of the Senators had served with him. There wasn't that big a turnover in the '92 Senate class, I don't think, so a majority of the people had served with him. He was well regarded intellectually inside the Senate, but was not considered someone inside the Senate who was part of the old-boy network or who was going to go up after work in the evening and hang around and play poker and drink bourbon all night, like Lyndon Johnson might have done.

I don't think people thought of Gore that way as Vice President, because they didn't think of him that way when he was a Senator. He certainly had had a big impact on policy, but it was not the personal, more liaison type of role that you suggest.

Pfiffner

Did you have a perspective on the personnel recruitment process from the transition to when they took office and how that operated from your perspective on the Hill?

Sosnik

That was very frustrating. I think the tag was accurate—that they were filling out lists of diversity and other kinds of things as opposed to going for excellence. There's a way you can do both, but a lot of the hires appeared to be more driven by diversity. But in the appointment process itself—and in hindsight, when you look through the first year or two of Clinton and Bush and others—Clinton wasn't as far behind as it felt at the time. Part of it comes with the turf, but it was really frustrating on the appointment process because of the inability either to get answers or for decisions to be made.

And the senior Senator in Connecticut—theoretically with regional appointments and other kinds of things—would have a fairly significant role in these things. But the difficulty of making stuff happen was really palpable in that first year. It's a hard job. Whatever number of posts you have to make people happy, there are ten times as many people who aren't going to get it, who aren't happy, so the numbers never work for you. That was quite frustrating, and the feeling at the end of the day was that we didn't get a lot.

Riley

There must have been huge pent-up demand.

Sosnik

There was, because—depending on how you want to do the math—we had had four years since '68 when a Democrat was in a position to make these kinds of appointments. [Jimmy] Carter really was Georgia-centric when he came to town. Actually, a pretty important underlying point of some of the questions you had about the transition and early years of Clinton was that there really weren't a lot of people Clinton could have drawn upon who had experience in the executive branch.

There were the Carter people, but it had been 12 years since they left. There was a lot of feeling that the Carter White House, while it had some strengths, also had some weaknesses. Most people had never referred to the Carter years as a role model of how you want to run a White House, so we really didn't have a generation of people who were in a position to come in to say, "These are lessons learned of how we did it." If a Democrat were to be elected in '08, it would be quite different in terms of the number of people who are 40-something or 50-something who have five years plus in the executive branch. That compounded the problems of having basically been in the wasteland for so long. You really didn't have a class of people who were trained and had experience in how to set up a White House.

Riley

Did you get any reading from the Hill in reaction to having Mrs. Clinton issue the health care portfolio? Was that something that people thought was a smart decision?

Sosnik

Think about how our country has changed, how controversial it was—and for how long—that she took her maiden name, or made her maiden name her middle name. It's hard to believe that was in our lifetime. So, as she broke the mold on a number of things, it took a long time for people to get used to it. Having an overtly active First Lady was something people had not experienced.

If you go back, there was the perception and the reality that Pat Nixon was not even the slightest bit a factor in her husband's Presidency. Betty Ford changed social mores using the bully pulpit of the First Lady. People felt that when she weighed in, she had an impact. But she really wasn't at ground zero of the Ford Presidency and driving it. Just having Rosalynn Carter sitting in on meetings without saying anything ruffled people a lot. People thought in some ways it was edgy that she even had the audacity to sit in the back of the room. She had some influence, but it was muted.

Nancy Reagan was perceived to be quite powerful, but it was always in a very discreet, behind-the-scenes, almost mysterious way. Barbara Bush had more of an impact than people probably were aware of, but nevertheless, certainly from the optic standpoint, she stood back in a more traditional way.

Then you have Hillary Clinton, who cracked every one of those stereotypes and shattered every mold starting with—at the time it was one of the more back-page-dominant stories—her request for an office in the West Wing rather than the East Wing. Then "with one you get two," or whatever the quote was when Clinton was running for President: "Vote for me and get my wife as a bonus." That was all new ground for people at the time. A lot of people had a hard time getting their brain around her taking on the health care role.

Riley

Were you ever in meetings with her and Members of the Senate when she was making the rounds to sell the health care?

Sosnik

Maybe just a couple of the hearings. But Dodd was not central, and I certainly wasn't.

Riley

I was trying to find out whether the fact of her position had the effect of altering people's behavior around her. It wasn't so much the reaction they had—"Boy, this is really new"—but the fact that she was the First Lady. We've heard from some people that that could have the effect of causing people to pull their punches. If they had a problem with something, that they felt a bit—

Sosnik

That's probably accurate. There was a back-and-forth in the House during one of the hearings where [Richard] Armey sort of artfully pushed back on her, but you could see how difficult it was for him to do that and do it in a way that was effective. I think he pulled it off; actually, she pulled it off. What it meant then was that it probably had a bit of a chilling effect on people on our side of the table because she's the First Lady as well as head of health care.

The other side probably had to pull their punches in public, but they didn't have to pull them in the slightest in private. Not vis-a-vis her; in terms of undermining her. Looking back on it, I don't think there was a deal there that could have happened but didn't. I don't think the fact that she was the First Lady is the reason health care didn't go through. But it did change things, to answer your question.

Riley

What were the two or three big things on Dodd's agenda in '93? How responsive was the White House to those things he considered most important?

Sosnik

It turned out, as I said earlier, the first thing the President signed into law was the bill Dodd had authored in the '80s. Dodd was not chairman of anything, and we were quite cognizant at the time that it's quite different being a Democratic Senator under a Democratic President. A Democratic President's agenda is the party's agenda, so a non-committee chair Senator understood that while he had particular interest in Latin America—and was the ranking member on the Southern Hemisphere in the Foreign Relations Committee at the time—the reality was that in the broader set of agendas and priorities, as a member of the governing party (and a member in good standing, as opposed to a squeaky-wheel member), you had to wait for your President. That was frustrating for these guys. Dodd had never served in the Senate under a Democratic President.

In the '80s he spent a lot of time in Latin America and a lot of time against the Reagan administration and their policies in Latin America. But he didn't have to sit back and wait for the President, for him to figure out how to maneuver around. He did have to sit back in terms of "the President sets policy" and then react to it, but he was a free agent, so to speak. But with Clinton—whom he largely agreed with on most issues—we really were dependent on getting cues from them on where they were headed. The appointments part was something we were quite involved with, but from an agenda standpoint, we were really dependent on cues from the White House.

Martin

How did you strategize or deal with people like Bob Kerrey, the people who would be more of the squeaky wheels within the Senate? Did you attempt to work around them?

Sosnik

I was chief of staff to a Senator who was not on ground zero of the Senate caucus with the White House—I don't know if there was a ground zero in terms of the inside guys. [William] Frist has served that role for Bush. But Dodd was not in a statutory position or historic personal relationship position that he for the most part, had to deal—or was part of trying to deal—with the Bob Kerreys. The Bob Kerreys of the world, though, largely dealt with the White House. They didn't deal through the Senate leadership. We tried to have some impact, but ultimately Kerrey was able to deal directly with the White House.

Martin

Did the other chiefs of staff you would meet with have more key positions in terms of trying to deal with Kerrey?

Sosnik

The Senate Majority Leader, and perhaps the Whip—depending on what matter was up—and the committee chairmen, were really the only people outside the White House who did—or personal friends of Kerrey, [David] Boren, with the BTU [British Thermal Unit] tax controversy and all—but outside of institutional or statutory or committee jurisdiction or personal relationship, it's the White House's deal.

We got into a bit of a Turkish bazaar with these guys. If three or four of them were key to something, and you made guy number one happy, then the last two or three guys remaining saw what the floor was on the bidding. The most public display of that was NAFTA [North America Free Trade Agreement] in terms of the Turkish bazaar nature of the bidding, which was publicly done, with the President very visibly doing it. I used to cringe looking at front-page photos in the New York Times of the President or Howard Paster sitting there making phone calls, publicly negotiating. It just ran the bidding up with these guys.

Riley

How was Dodd's relationship with Clinton?

Sosnik

It was good. Dodd's first wife had gone to college with Clinton, so he knew Clinton that way. In fact, I was Dodd's driver in the 1980 Senate campaign, as I said earlier, and Clinton came to Connecticut in 1980 to give the keynote speech at the nominating convention for Dodd to become a Senator, so he had had that relationship.

Riley

Did you meet him then?

Sosnik

I guess I did meet him in 1980.

Riley

Did it register?

Sosnik

Just to say, "How are you doing? I drive for him." [imitating Clinton]: "Well, that's good. I used to drive for Bill Fulbright."

Pfiffner

What were some of the things you thought the administration did well or poorly with the Hill in respect to the health care issue?

Sosnik

I didn't have a background or interest in health care. My boss was not in the middle of that debate and discussion, so I wasn't well informed and am not well informed in terms of what we should have done. I have some knowledge of it, like anybody who reads the paper, frankly, in terms of the complexity of it and the mistakes made on the more incremental approach—and the importance at some point of figuring out what you can live with and going for it and taking it rather than holding out too long. But I didn't feel I had a unique perch on that.

Riley

Do you have any specific recollection of things—again, from the Hill perspective—that they did particularly well during that first year? Conversely, do you recall any specific instances where you were just pulling your hair out thinking, I can't believe these folks?

Sosnik

The second part of your question, back to your original question: it seemed that it almost aimed at a process as much as an outcome, in terms of the meetings and steering committees and advisory committees, and groups, and—

Riley

You're talking about health care.

Sosnik

Yes, health care, and then the complexity underneath it all. It just seemed to get more complicated and more difficult rather than easier and narrow in scope throughout. For the most part, though, for year one, there was more disappointment than happiness. Even when you had a positive outcome, the process was so ugly and so public that it was hard to see the political dividends from it even when there were some.

Martin

Was there any sense in that year that you could watch and say, "OK, at least they're learning a little bit"?

Sosnik

You could, but first of all, it's hard to identify a problem, it's hard to fix a problem, and it's hard for people to see that you fixed the problem. That's a very long process. One of the problems or challenges that Clinton had in the first term was inheriting all these problems in our country, figuring out how to solve them through the legislative or executive process, having people feel their life being changed and improved because of all this—and then being able to articulate it because they felt it. That's turning the big old ocean liner around. And in real time it took us the better part of three years in the first term before the President could go out and do rope lines or go out in America and have people say, "We're on the right track. I can feel it." It took three years, literally, to do that.

In terms of answering your question about when as an insider you could start seeing the thing, you had to get into the middle of the third year to see the change. The reality is that '93 into '94 was learning—learning curve, improving. The reality is we pretty much did what we did in '93 and '94, and Clinton, after the midterms, took about 90 to 120 days to figure out what he learned from all that. Then he really changed a lot of what he did, based on that, so there wasn't, in year one and two, a lot of incremental change that got him to where he did get. It took, to some extent, burning the house down to save it following the midterms and quite a period of time of reflection.

He then went about really changing, in a profound way. I guess, though, as I'm talking out loud, thinking out loud, I don't remember: [Leon] Panetta came in July, I think?

Riley

May '94.

Sosnik

July '94, I think it was—something like that. You could see by Labor Day, inside the White House—I was there then—there were changes in terms of some order. You couldn't just walk into any meeting. There was some process and some theory of the case. It didn't manifest itself visibly in any way because we were in the middle of taking on all this water. Then after the election, as I said a minute ago, it took the President several weeks or months to figure out how he wanted to do what he wanted to do and then make the changes. I guess, at least internally, you could see some changes by Labor Day of '94, but it didn't really manifest itself in a meaningful way for another half a year.

Riley

You mentioned the BTU tax earlier. There was an energy tax proposal. The impression we get from the outside—and I think it was this way—was that the Senate felt like it had to walk the plank on this, and then the House reversed the White House position. Do you recall that?

Sosnik

I don't recall the specifics. I do remember the debate in the House in '94, though. I think they put a nickel on the gas tax that the House guys were pushing. I remember the Congressman from California—I think it was Dan Hamburg—sitting up in the House caucus and saying he was supporting a gas tax increase, and he has the courage to do it, and if he gets defeated, so be it. He got defeated 60 days later. I don't remember the back-and-forth.

Riley

This was a '93 question. I was going to use that as an entree into one final question about the bicameral situation at that point. We asked you mostly about your perspectives with respect to the Senate, where you were, but I didn't know whether you had any observations about differences in the House and Senate.

Sosnik

That's a good question. I'll give you a couple of interesting statistics to make a point. When Bill Clinton got elected President in '92, fewer than half the Senators were of his party that carried the state. That means, if you look at the states that Clinton carried or Bush carried and look inside those states, fewer than half the Senators were of the same party of the state that the President carried. Now I think it's over 75.

Two things have happened: one is that the Senate now is much more a reflection of the Presidential vote in terms of who's in there. But the other is that there's probably (I don't know if it is now, you can obviously do a chart and see) a much higher percentage now of Senators who served in the House than any time in our history.

The cultures of the House and the Senate are much more blurred now than they used to be. The cultures of the House and the Senate in '93 and '94 were quite different from one another. While they're still different and the rules are different, they're culturally more similar than dissimilar now, in part because of the influx of what my guys would call right-wing House guys who became right-wing Senate guys and brought the culture with them. But that culture was more pronounced then—the differences between the two worlds. It really had an impact, as you're trying to govern with control of the House and the Senate. Democrats in the House were—and in fact continue to be (probably even more so then than now)—much more liberal than the Democrats in the Senate. And the rules in the House were different from the rules in the Senate.

Those two together made the job more difficult in terms of trying to get a Democratic consensus on moving forward. As an example, Clinton had an appetite for or an interest in campaign finance reform early on that the Democrats—in the House in particular—really fought him on. It's personal to them. That's their livelihood. In 1993, you were 15 years or so into post-Watergate reforms and the law of unintended consequences. The Watergate Democratic babies of '74 were the authors of the system that was undone in '02 and that became law in '04—the irony of that! But the House Democrats, in particular, were really culturally and politically different from the Democrats in the Senate.

So getting that consensus, you get back to these so-called moderate Democratic Senators who really held the key as to whether something got done or not. As a result, the focus was much more toward them. As you said earlier, the Republicans took themselves out of play, so you had the President largely hanging with the liberals, the progressives in both bodies, so they're there. Then the question is do you get from here to there and how do you do it? The answer is "with most of the moderate Democrats in the Senate." That's where the bazaar opened up and where the bozo caucus assembled—to watch.

One last thing on that: what happened in the second term, starting with the budget act and vote in June of '97? Welfare reform in August of '96 was essentially Clinton. The moderates, in a sense, came to a place and then jawboned or leveraged the left to come with them. It was the opposite of the first half of the first term, which was, "Take the liberals to the White House and then try to get something done with the moderates."

I'm jumping ahead, but there was a hell of a lot of kicking and screaming by our Democratic "friends" on the left as we did welfare reform. In June of '95, Clinton's ten-year balanced-budget plan had most of the West Wing staff and all of the House Democratic leadership staff in an uproar that he would do something like that. But at the end of the day, his successes were essentially political successes, to go with the moderates, so to speak, and force the left there. In the first two years, it was the opposite.

Bush 43 essentially has done the opposite of what worked for us. He went to his right and then basically forced the moderates to get there. They had a combination of reasons why that was successful. For one, their numbers: there aren't that many moderates. Two is the culture, the hierarchal nature of the Republicans. And three is that I think by all accounts, people consider the weakest-backboned people in politics in Washington are moderate Republicans. But anyway, there were lessons, at least on the Democratic side, in how it worked and didn't work.

Riley

Anything else on this?

Martin

Clinton seemed to have pushed a number of tough votes early in 1993. I think of the famous story of [Marjorie] Margolies-Mezvinsky having to take the tough vote and then, of course, losing in 1994. Then there's the BTU tax that comes in '94. The House had taken a tough vote, and then the Senate didn't take the vote. Did you have the sense watching this—especially in 1993 from the Senate side, or even colleagues in the House—that Clinton wasn't concerned enough for the electoral chances of the House or the Senate?

Sosnik

There was, both from my perch on the Hill in '93 and then for the next six years in the White House going up to the Hill, the sense that part of it just comes with the turf. You see it today if you go on the Hill with the Republicans and what Bush has done. There has always been a feeling—and there was a feeling throughout the Clinton years, from the Members of the House in particular, but also the Senate—that Clinton was never sensitive enough to their political needs.

Part of that just comes with drinking the water, but part of that would be walking these planks. But it was something they felt. We had a number of political meetings in August of '96 about what to do in the fall, and [Richard] Gephardt in particular came up with what his needs were politically to take the House back—which were not inconsistent with Clinton being reelected. One big decision we had to make in the fall of '96 was whether to try to win Florida with its six or seven media markets with not many House races down there. The question was, do we go in and try to win Florida—which, according to Gephardt, we didn't need to be elected President, and which was perceived to be hard, if not a long shot at the time (even though we did win it)—or do we take that money and spend it on these targeted House races?

We ultimately went into Florida, and I suppose this is a story where everyone could say they were right. We won Florida; Clinton was right. He was about the only person at the table who wanted to do it. I suppose Gephardt could make the argument that if we had taken the money we spent in Florida that we didn't need anyway to win the White House and spend it on these House races, we might have taken the House back.

It comes with the turf. Having those tough votes reinforces the tendency for you to get there anyway, and campaign-funding decisions reinforce that. Gephardt and Clinton developed a pretty good working relationship, but they were just different guys. And then Gore was always there. Even at that time, going back to the hangover from the '88 campaign with Gephardt and Gore, Gore was already in his own mind thinking about running for President in the second Clinton term. There wasn't the personal bond there that helps you get through these tougher times, even though I think Gephardt and Clinton worked their way to a pretty good workmanlike relationship. I think Clinton and [Thomas] Daschle had a stronger personal relationship.

Riley

This has been very useful for the background. Let's take a five-minute break and come back and get you in the White House.

[BREAK]

Riley

Tell us about how you were approached for taking a position in the White House.

Sosnik

I was working for Dodd in early December of '93, and Pat Griffin was getting ready to be hired to replace Paster. I had known Pat from the Hill—not personally, but from his lobbying Dodd on the securities bill. He approached me and said, "I think I'm going to be hired. I'm not 100 percent sure, and I don't know what I'm going to get when I get there. I've inherited a staff, and I don't think I can do a lot with that. But I'd like to at least get one of my own guys in there." I had House and Senate background and knew the town, so he said, "If you're interested, I'd like to create a slot for you."

I was bored in Dodd's office at that point. I had been in the House, been in the Senate, but really never thought of working in the White House. It was actually interesting for me. Throughout my professional life, when I went for jobs in the '80s, I had always gone up against the Carter White House candidate. There's always a job opening, and those were the guys who had been around last. I was always up against one of them as a non-Carter White House guy.

I had been really at the center of a pretty small mountain, I guess, the opposition party of the Democrats. But when Clinton and all his guys came to town, they took over the party, so all of a sudden, as a guy who had been around a long time and knew everybody and had relative influence in that context, the world was beginning to pass me by again. I didn't really know what I wanted to do, and I also knew the price I was going to pay for being in politics but not being part of this crowd down the road, so I was interested.

Pat came back to talk to me. I think he was negotiating a slot for me as part of his negotiations coming in, just in terms of how he wanted to do his own operation. He liked most of the people there, but he didn't have relationships with any of them.

Riley

He was talking to Mack [Thomas McLarty] at this point?

Sosnik

Yes. Without getting into a lot of detail on this, my understanding was that Mack had a keen interest in that role and had not gotten along particularly well with Paster. I think he had learned a lot of lessons from that episode, and he wanted to get this one right in terms of the negotiations, so Pat came back to me. As you know, they have Assistants to the President and Deputy Assistants and Special Assistants. He was negotiating two things for me. One was a title—he was able to get me Deputy—and the money. Among the mistakes we made during the campaign was voluntarily going for a 20 percent cut, both numbers and staff. I don't recall if they cut the top number of staff or froze the amount of money that could be paid, but it bedeviled us for eight years. We had all kinds of creative ways to get around it while honoring it.

He came back and said, "I can get you the title, but I can only get you $90 or $95K on the salary," which was a pretty steep pay cut for me at the time, about $30,000 or $35,000. He said, "Best I can do." That wasn't really complicated for me. I just said, "Fine, I'll take it."

Riley

Were you married at the time?

Sosnik

I was married. Up until a few years ago, every job I've had in my life, I've always done for free, so the fact that they paid me was a bonus. As it turned out, as a strictly financial matter, it was probably a good investment for me to forgo the $30 grand. So I was hired that way. It took me about 30 days or so to actually start. He was creating a spot in a department in which all the oxygen had already been used up, so he was not only coming in to run a department in which he didn't hire the people, but he was also bringing in one of his guys and creating a role that didn't formerly exist. Finding the right way to do that and space for all concerned was not easy.

Riley

Can you tell us how you managed that? It wasn't clear in putting together the briefing materials precisely what your first title was.

Sosnik

I was Deputy Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs. That was my first title.

Riley

But not Director of Legislative Affairs at that point.

Sosnik

I never ran Legislative Affairs.

Riley

It was something we had run across. This is one of the things we encounter all the time when we're doing preparation for these. We get conflicting reports about particulars that to most normal human beings seem completely inconsequential, but for those of us fascinated and fixated on organizations, it matters. But back to the more fundamental question about how you managed to come in and create this new role for yourself in an existing organization.

Sosnik

Part of it took care of itself in that Pat started a few weeks before I did. Within a week or ten days into his job, he learned that he was going to be saddled with a scandal—or somebody was saddled dealing with scandal. He could do that, but it was going to really cripple his ability to do the legislative work of the Legislative Affairs department.

Riley

You mean handle the congressional side of the scandal or the whole thing?

Sosnik

The congressional side. You have investigations, you have hearings, you have to get ready for them, you have to negotiate. He learned within about a week or ten days how much—and this was early on. I don't think even Pat would have dreamed in his wildest worst-case scenario that it would become as consuming as it turned out to be for the next six years. But he quickly figured out that this was going to be a problem for him. He wasn't personally attracted to that kind of work to begin with, so he had decided that he would let me have that brief. Certainly it would fill my time. As I used to say, that's how I got to meet everybody in the White House: they all got investigated.

They gave me some other issues that—in theory at least—I was monitoring in terms of Defense and some other things. But it really is what took up all my time in '94. I remember, before I started in the White House, about ten days before the Roger Altman hearing, Pat had already figured out this would be an excellent opportunity—growth area—for me (i.e., not for him). I came down to the White House to meet the guys who were going to work on all this stuff.

[John] Podesta was Staff Secretary at the time, down on the ground floor, so I went down to his office to talk with these guys and figure out what we were going to do and how we were going to do it. He wasn't there; he was at a meeting, but Todd Stern, his Deputy, was there. Have you interviewed Todd? He would be well worth seeing. He did four or five years in the White House and then was Larry Summers's guy at Treasury. I'll give you his information.

Anyway, Todd was there, and Neil Eggleston was there. If you' haven't seen Neil, he's also probably somebody worth seeing to the extent that you're interested in the lawyering side of the scandals. I think he was an associate White House counsel. He handled a lot of this before he left. Neil and Todd were in Podesta's office, and they walked me through all the problems that were coming down the track in terms of the investigations, the hearings. It was the first time I'd been in the White House. We spent about 45 minutes going through the list of issues on the table.

I said, "OK, now when do I get to meet all the people who are going to be dealing with this stuff?" Todd started laughing. He said, "You're looking at them, buddy. Podesta will be back. That's it; it's the three of you."

Then David Dreyer became more involved, and eventually it became a growth industry within the White House. That was my indoctrination to the White House. I spent a good part of '94 dealing with this on the Hill.

I had a nice big office in the East Wing that opened up into the line streaming through the White House to take tours. It was interesting. I had a nice parking space. I had interesting walks under the White House and through the White House to the West Wing for meetings.

Riley

Close to Treasury.

Sosnik

But it was not in the middle of anything, and increasingly I found myself spending most of my time in the West Wing. It's not a big deal to me how big my office is. There was a barbershop in the [Richard] Nixon White House down on the ground floor. Do you have diagrams?

Riley

I don't have one, but we've seen—

Sosnik

Down in the basement there was a series of offices across from the White House Mess. There were three and a half offices back there: the barbershop, which turned into an office. Jane Sherburne had an office in the barbershop at one point. It's all glass, kind of an interesting room. Sid Blumenthal had it for a while. But anyway, there was a back office behind it that I had at some point. It had a big walk-in closet—that's where I put Mark Penn during the campaign.

Then there was another office back there that [Harold] Ickes had in '94, '95 and '96. There's a closet off his office there, directly below the Oval. It was a fairly large closet, probably the length of that table; it's where the White House taping system was that Nixon used. That's where he set up the machinery for his White House tapes, and they just ran the wires up.

Riley

Straight through the roof.

Sosnik

Yes, but off the barbershop in the old days was the sink room where you got your hair shampooed before you got your hair cut. That was a long, narrow space—again, similar to that. It was recessed so you could put a bowl in there for the water to shampoo your hair.

Riley

Maybe 10 feet by 4 feet.

Sosnik

You had no problem sitting in a chair and working, and you could have two chairs there. But for a person to move from the far chair to get to the door, the other person would have to stand up because you couldn't get through. And it had a phone there. I ended up thinking what an excellent place it would be for me to squat. I was increasingly doing work with the lawyers and increasingly with Ickes.

Riley

Was there anybody in that office?

Sosnik

No. That became my West Wing office in addition to my East Wing office. Probably from the early summer all the way through, that's where I hung out all the time. People thought it was my place. They didn't memorialize it by changing my official office space, but I was parked there. Again, titles are titles, but personalities determine everything. Ickes became increasingly involved in the scandal management, as did Jane.

Riley

Podesta left at some time.

Sosnik

I remember very well when Panetta came in—in July or August—and within 60 to 90 days Podesta was functionally out the door.

Riley

Ickes took over the overall scandal management.

Sosnik

Ickes and I got to know each other through my work on the scandal. I was working for him, and increasingly, he also had politics as his brief. That was something I knew something about. I was not the political director at the time—we had a political director—but increasingly, in an informal way, I had a role in that world. The political scandal world is really what my brief turned out to be. I hung out with the lawyers and Ickes and tried to deal with the hearings on the Hill.

As an example, there was a hearing in the House in July or August, the same day we came back from one of the hearings and found out that [Robert] Fiske had taken himself out of this. We thought we'd done reasonably well that day, and then came back to deal with that. I remember negotiating that our guys wouldn't be sworn in—or if they were, they weren't going to be sworn in as a group, because we didn't want, the next day, ten more White House staff being sworn in, take the oath, testify. Those were the ways I spent my time.

Riley

So when you first came in, scandal management was pretty much all consuming.

Sosnik

The Altman hearing and then the fallout from the Altman hearing.

Riley

One question about your departure from the Hill. Were there sore feelings about your taking off, or were people wondering if you had taken leave of your senses to want to go into the environment in the White House as it existed in December and January?

Sosnik

Just a reminder: everything is relative. When I left the Hill to go to the White House, the perception of the mood was substantially better than it would be a year later after the midterms. After the midterms they might have had that reaction: Have you lost your senses? But I don't think there were any hard feelings about my leaving the Hill. I'd been with Senator Dodd for several years, and I think people felt that things had gone well on my watch. It wasn't as if I was abandoning ship. I think everybody would like an opportunity at some point to work in the White House if they could.

Riley

What about upon arriving? We've heard you talk about how your brief came about. Any surprises? Do you remember your reaction to going into the White House for the first time?

Sosnik

I'd never been there before. Other than that first meeting I described, I'd never set foot in the gates before. I was surprised at how small it was. It looked more tattered than I would have expected. Not the Oval, but the hallways and the carpeting and the walls. The White House press room had rats running around.

Riley

Literally?

Sosnik

It was small. The West Wing is really small. You have two kinds of directly opposite competing emotions going on all the time when you're there. One is you're in the White House. It's unbelievable that you're in the White House. You see things you just can't imagine. You see so much of it every day that you can't even process it. I was there six years. The flip side is you can't walk around for six years of your life and be awestruck every moment about it. At some point after six years, you forget. I got out of college in less than six years. It's hard to be saying, "I'm in the White House" for six years. Those are completely conflicting things, and you can feel both all the time.

I can remember walking back from lunch in the diplomatic entrance in the lower side. You walk through the driveway, and you come in, and there's a waiting area. It's the old White House press corps before they renovated it. I think Nixon renovated it. But in the old days, that's where the White House press was. Now it's a holding area for the diplomatic entrance. People sit on sofas and wait to see the President. I walked in one day, and there's the Dalai Lama sitting there. He wasn't in business formal. I'm thinking, There's the Dalai Lama just sitting there, and this is the White House. I had six years of it.

It took me a while, though, to get that balance; I was awestruck for quite a while in the beginning. Being a new guy, it was a little bit like starting college in January when everyone has been there for the first semester and you haven't. Even though I knew a fair number of people there, I didn't know the Clintons, and I didn't know any of the Arkansans. It took a while to settle in and feel comfortable.

Riley

You think the same thing was true of Pat?

Sosnik

I had a lot of advantages over Pat in that Pat was on the line from day one. I really, in a sense, always had somebody above me, and ultimately it was their watch or their responsibility. It enabled me to burrow in and figure things out and get to know people. I didn't know how long I would stay. I thought I would stay for at least a couple of years, and I wanted to do it right. My nature is to do things more gradually anyway.

I don't think Pat had that luxury. I was able to navigate around and figure out how the place worked. It took a long time. When I was being deposed—for whatever it was I was being deposed about—and Lord knows I had an opportunity to see a lot of different styles of people and how they deposed people—there were very few people who could ever understand how our White House worked, how it functioned in a real live way. I was always puzzled why the investigators didn't get someone who understood how the place worked. If you didn't understand how the place worked, you never knew what kind of questions to ask.

It was really hard for me to figure out how the place worked—really worked, not on some chart. I was sitting on the sofa at the end of the '96 campaign. We had Residence meetings every Wednesday night. I don't know if people always sit in the same chairs, but human nature is you often go to the same meeting and sit in the same places. For a year I always used to sit on the sofa with Stephanopoulos at these meetings. I remember turning to him at one point—a year and a half, two years into this thing—and saying to him, "George, you know when you leave, I'm going to be the leading Clintonologist here" because I'd figured it out. He said, "You'll be the leading Clintonologist unpaid."

But eventually I was able to figure the White House out. It took quite a while, and ultimately—in the second term in particular—I was part of the culture of driving the place. In part it was my understanding of it and adapting to it in terms of how the President really worked and how the place really worked.

I do a lot of work for Governors. I tell people, "If you give me the Governor's—or in my case, the President's—schedule for a week and we go through it, and you tell me how these things got on the schedule, I'll know how this place works." It took me a long time to figure out how the place worked. But again, to be successful in any environment, particularly in that environment (it's probably the same in academia), you have to get along well with people, you have to understand how the place works and the culture works. I had the advantage that Pat didn't have: time to settle in and really figure out this strange world.

Pfiffner

Tell us a little more about how you figured out how it worked. Political scientists look at organizational charts and so forth, and you've emphasized that those don't mean very much. Tell us about how you went about understanding it and how it worked when you were there.

Riley

We may need to park on this for a while.

Sosnik

I drove a lot of the schedule in the White House in the second term.

Riley

This was later.

Sosnik

In the first term, I had a big impact on the schedule of the President for '96 on nonofficial (i.e., political) issues, in that I was very involved with the campaign, obviously, knowing where we needed to win, who we needed to get to when we got there, what we needed to say and all that. I wasn't in charge of his schedule, but when we negotiated as a staff how he spent his time, I had a big impact.

Riley

I want to clarify for the record, since we've been following this rough chronology, that this is largely stuff that occurred after you left congressional affairs and moved into your new post.

Sosnik

I moved to political affairs in January or February of '95. By June of '95, as we were beginning to lay down political travel on top of official travel, I was—probably more than anybody on the White House staff—supposed to know what our political objectives were. I had a big impact on that.

As we moved into the second term, I helped set up the long-term planning for the year in terms of what we would do. One thing we should park on later that's really important is the organizational way we ran the White House each year. It was based on the budget and the State of the Union. We ought to come back to that. It was really the driver of how we did our business.

So increasingly I had an impact on the schedule. The short answer to your question is I learned it by doing it and paying attention and thinking about it in terms of how it really worked, and the schedule. Ultimately the Chief of Staff always made the final call, but I knew—because of the time I spent with the President, and having been around this thing—what he liked, who he liked, who he didn't like, what he liked to do, what he didn't like to do, and what he didn't like to do but was going to be forced to do. Again, if you give me the schedule for the week, tell me how it got on, I can tell you how it's going to come out.

It would be a small group, a larger group, and eventually it would go to the Chief of Staff. Then we'd meet with the President and give him the schedule. I would often say in the scheduling meeting, "This is a stupid thing to do; we shouldn't do it. But put it on the schedule, because even if you say we're not going to do it, it's going to end up with the President. Even if we meet the President to say we won't do it, someone's going to call and lean on him to do it. The President is going to agree to it, so unless we want to torture everybody, why don't we just save ourselves some time and put it on the schedule?" We'd essentially go around the same track every year. Everything happens in a cycle.

But going back to the more specific point, it's a combination of things. It starts with people who have briefs and influence and relationships. And their ability to affect the schedule (as an example) or other things is directly proportional to their ability to have ideas, be effective, get along with people, and have a relationship with the President. You could see it in any department meeting. When some people talk, it's a good time to go to the bathroom. When other people talk, everybody puts their pen down and listens. It's the same everywhere; in the White House it's just more so. Understanding how the place works and who has influence and what the President likes to do or doesn't like to do but what the President needs to do helps you figure out how it actually works.

Pfiffner

Who could make the President do what he didn't want to do, like meet with somebody?

Sosnik

The '92 campaign is a perfect example. It was true in the operation of the White House. Regardless of titles or positions, you end up at a table something like this, maybe with a few more chairs. That ultimately is the decision-making process of a big organization or a big operation. In the '92 campaign, [James] Carville had some weird title no one has ever heard of. Most people think he was the campaign manager, but he wasn't the campaign manager. Eli Segal recently passed away, and in his obituary it said something like he was the chief of staff in the campaign for everything except communications.

These were arbitrary things; they were all built around the personality of the people. Titles didn't matter. Who was around the table was a rolling thing in the White House depending on what year it was. You had a version of this in terms of the people who were in a discussion with the President about something he didn't want to do. Part of it might depend on what the topic was. Some of the people who were in a position to get him to do things he didn't want to do were Panetta when he was Chief of Staff, [Erskine] Bowles when he was Chief of Staff, and Podesta. Part of my job—increasingly in the second term—was to get him to do things he didn't want to do but that he needed to.

Pfiffner

In the campaign?

Sosnik

No, noncampaign in the second term.

Riley

You omitted Mack.

Sosnik

I wasn't around Mack with the President, so I don't really know.

Riley

I didn't know if that was a conscious omission.

Sosnik

I worked in the White House and dealt with Mack when he was Chief of Staff, but when I was in the White House, I was never around Mack in a meeting like that.

Riley

Fair enough. Somebody 20 years from now reading the transcript might interpret that omission in a different way.

Sosnik

I don't know about Mack. Podesta certainly could. Bruce would, often. Nancy Hernreich could. I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but it gets to your point. It's true at all times, but particularly in the [Monica] Lewinsky phase: you cannot do a Presidential movement without going by the press. (A movement would be if we were going from a building here to a building there and the press pool was in the path, which in a nonenclosed area, it always would be.)

Particularly during Lewinsky, we would literally have to meet briefly with the President every single time, in a crisis or whatever, to talk about if he was going by the press. They're going to shout questions at him, and either we didn't want him to answer them or we felt he had to answer them. Or maybe we wanted to go by the press. There might have been a bombing overnight in the Middle East, and we were moving from the hotel to the first speech, and it was time-sensitive to put a marker down that we would need to go by there and say something. (Reagan was always famous for not being able to listen to the pool screaming.) Sometimes on movements we were stuck going by the press, so we would have to meet with him briefly literally every time he did a movement when we didn't have complete control of him.

The extremis version of that would be that before press conferences—depending on where we were in the cycle—we would have to go through a prebrief with him a minimum of an hour, usually at least a couple of hours, on the press conference. We would generally do a small group of us before the prebrief, or the prebrief would be staggered in three: Podesta, Rahm (Rahm could also get him to do things he didn't want to do), generally a foreign policy person, and the lawyers—particularly if it was scandal-related and we didn't want to infect the policy guys with it, so we would do a small little thing there.

Then we would do a bigger prebrief in the Roosevelt Room or the Cabinet Room and go through the different policy Q and As. At the end we'd do one small group again before he'd go out. We'd go over two or three of the questions that were going to be the hardest to answer. Understandably, he would hate doing that.

Pfiffner

Going over it before going out to the press?

Sosnik

The whole thing, just having to go through two hours of the staff asking him all these questions. We often would not start on time for things in general, as you might have heard, but he really would dislike that. We'd all be sitting in the Cabinet Room waiting for him, and usually Podesta or I would go into the Oval to get him. I used to joke, "Well, I think he might be in there reorganizing his sock drawer, something important, and doesn't have time for us." Often I'd go in there, and he'd be rearranging the pens on his desk. I don't blame him. Anyway, we'd have to get him in there. He hated doing it, but he knew he needed to do it.

But, in fairness to any of these poor guys: 19 people are watching them or whatever, 90 percent of their time for the next three months is already planned for. It's not as if he has any options. There was an article, by the way, on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, I think in '95, on how Bowles would come in and change the schedule and time management. It's really an important article to read; it's an accurate article.

There was a constant struggle to both let this guy breathe and do what he needs to do, but also get him to do things he has to do that no normal human being would want to do. How you do that, when you do that, and who can do that—there were a handful of people whose job it was. I was on the road with him for most of '96 and most of the second term. Figuring out the right balance for him to do things and know who he could trust and listen to was a big part of what I did, and a handful of others. The more stressful the environment or the times, the more important and difficult sometimes that would be.

Pfiffner

Was the tough part asking him the nasty questions to get him ready for what you knew was going to be asked? Would he naturally just not want to do it but realize that you had to ask him because he had to be ready to answer them out there?

Sosnik

That was the tough part for him, not for us. We knew he had to do it, and we needed to do it with him. What I really always respected about him was that, unlike a lot of elected officials, he didn't care if you disagreed with him. You had to be respectful and all, but as long as you were respectful, he didn't really have a problem if you were confrontational with him. I don't think he'd want you to be confrontational with him in front of a foreign leader, but in a prebrief in the Cabinet Room with staff around the table, he didn't have any problem with us being confrontational or taking him on. But you better be in a position to back up your position on the substance. In fact, if anything, he probably respected you more for that.

Pfiffner

It seems to me it's really important for any leader to be able to listen to people who disagree and hear it. Some leaders, who shall not be named now, don't do that. They send signals that they don't want to hear bad news.

Sosnik

Absolutely. Just think about the fact that I ended up as political director in the White House for his first term, getting reelected. I don't want to overexaggerate my role, but at least I had the title. I was a guy who ended up with the office next to the dining room adjacent to the Oval Office, the only office in the West Wing where you could go to the Oval without going through the main door, a guy he never even met before he got elected President. The fact that he would let someone like that in is pretty amazing. My ability, and others', to take him on says a lot about him and his willingness to have people around him with whom he felt comfortable—and he's pretty good at figuring out who he has and what they're good at and what they're not good at and what he listens to them on and what he ignores.

One time we were coming back from somewhere on the plane. The Middle East was blowing up, and he turned to me and asked me what we should do. I said, "Mr. President, I don't want to live in a country where a guy like me is giving you advice on the Middle East." [laughter] He said, "Yes, you're right." But there were things that he would listen to me on where I was qualified. We had an environment in which he knew what he needed to do even though he didn't want to do it. Often in these prebriefs, for example, he would say the things he felt he needed to say and get it off his chest so he wouldn't say it out there.

Riley

I wanted to follow up because there's another way to interpret this. Biographically, he's a guy who is a fabulously quick study about everything. He got through Yale by borrowing notes and not going to class and just having his own innate brilliance carry him through. This is a guy who's such an accomplished improvisational artist that he chafes at the constraint of being forced to prepare for something. Is there anything to this interpretation?

Sosnik

Well, again, our strengths are our weakness. What you said is true, but on the other hand, too much improv is not great. He also has an innate sense of limits; any person's limits when they're so close to something like their own life—sometimes they need some perspective, or people on the outside.

[Richard] Morris is a good example. He knew Morris's strengths and weaknesses as an advisor and knew how to filter out, for the most part, what he needed to. He had an innate ability with most people to figure that out. He knew intellectually that you can't go into a briefing just on pure improv, even though he didn't like to do it. Actually, this is a really important point to understand about how the White House worked. The White House settled down to a sort of rhythm from which things evolved, based partly on who the Chief of Staff was, because it sets the culture.

But from, say, Labor Day of '95 through the end, it was an IBM [International Business Machines] framework, and the one before that was an Apple. There was a way the place worked. Do you know how the mornings were set up in the White House schedule-wise?

Riley

Go ahead and tell us, because it did vary, and I'd like to hear—

Sosnik

It really helps you understand how the place worked. It evolved from Panetta. There were tweaks and changes, but basically, around 7:15 a.m. there was a CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] briefing with the Chief of Staff and the National Security Advisor.

Then around 7:30—and this changed a little bit to 7:45, quarter to 8:00, 8:00—sequentially there would be a small Chief of Staff meeting with the small group of advisors that the Chief of Staff at the time felt most comfortable with. You'd have an NSC [National Security Council] person there, foreign policy person there, and what Reagan used to call "the boys." They used to say to Reagan, "Where are you going?" He'd say, "I don't know where the boys are sending me today." You'd have the Chief of Staff, Deputy Chiefs of Staff, Rahm, [Paul] Begala, me, [Michael] McCurry, or [Joseph] Lockhart depending on—but that was largely it. Sperling maybe.

Riley

No more than a dozen.

Sosnik

Less than a dozen, probably not Sperling—six or eight. That would be the "What are we doing today? Who leaked this thing in the paper?" meeting. The Assistants to the President meeting, the Chief of Staff bigger meeting in the Roosevelt Room, was every morning at either a quarter to 8:00 or 8:00, depending on who the Chief of Staff was. We had 20 or 25 Assistants to the President in the room. It depends on the morning. Say there was a bad headline: "President to be indicted." How are we going to handle the staff that morning? or Which of the Cabinet people leaked this report they shouldn't have leaked and who's going to call them? Or the President called one of us at midnight; he got a phone call from someone or saw something on television he's unhappy about. It was really a center of gravity for the morning: how are we going to handle the day? We had the lawyers there—I don't know how I missed that.

This was something that Rahm and Paul and I would be dealing with. When Rahm left, Paul and I would be dealing with it, and then Paul left, and I would deal with Podesta. But again, forget about titles. You'd have simultaneously Sandy Berger, the National Security Advisor, saying, "There was a bombing overnight. We have to get the President out; there's nothing more important; we have to send a signal right now. It's 4 o'clock in the Middle East, and if we wait three hours, it's going to be—"

And then you'd have Chuck Ruff or one of the lawyers sitting there saying, "There is nothing more important than the President not saying anything between now and 3 o'clock this afternoon because the judge in Arkansas is getting ready to rule on this, and if we say anything it's going to—"

So we would have to square those circles. This was a regular challenge we'd have to figure out. There are different ways you can do that, but that first meeting often would be the first sign of how we were going to. Going into the day, we always had a message of the day set.

Riley

That was determined?

Sosnik

Weeks in advance. That's another part of the discussion about how we ran the White House and the message and all that, which was really a very important element. We would have theories and things set, but then we'd have to operate in real time to adjust. Sometimes we were forced to do things we didn't want to do or we found opportunities we didn't know would present themselves. For example, we'd read in the paper that the Republican Majority Leader said blank today, so we should pounce.

Every morning we'd have to figure it out. We seldom would tear down an event, but often we'd put a topper on it: "I'm here today to talk about education, but before I do, I just want to say a couple of things about what happened last night in the Mideast." That would be our topper. That would probably be the news of the day even though we'd already planned an event to roll out an initiative about whatever we were rolling out that day.

In real time we'd have a theory of the day coming into the senior staff meeting at a quarter to 8:00 based on this initial meeting at 7:30. Then we'd do the senior staff meeting. This was all the Assistants to the President for intergovernmental affairs—

Riley

This is open based on title?

Sosnik

Title and a little bit of personalities and whatever, same old stuff. You have 25 people in the room. The Chief of Staff would run the meeting. If the Chief of Staff wasn't there, the Deputy Chief of Staff would run the meeting: "Let's go through the day. Let's start with the schedule. The President is doing" this or this or that. Then they would go around the room. Sandy or the deputy, Jim Steinberg, would say, "Well, overnight—" They'd give reports.

In the middle of the scandal of '98, there'd be four out of five days you would have no idea, then you'd turn to the lawyers and say, "Is there anything you want to report on?" and most days they'd say no. But there would be this parallel universe where, in fact, what we put out actually was true. Ninety-five percent of the White House staff did their jobs—as in the case in '98, Lewinsky—no matter how bad things were on the front page of the paper or whatever. Ninety-five percent of the staff had no dealings with it. You could go through many senior staff meetings where it wouldn't even come up.

Sometimes, if things were really bad, the Chief of Staff would feel compelled to address it, so we'd have senior staff meeting at a quarter to 8:00. Then at 8 o'clock, there were about three or four of us who were essentially part of this—the concentric part of the circle, that shaded area that hit all the different circles—and we'd go from that to 8 o'clock when there would be a communications meeting in the press secretary's office. It would be about how we're going to put the message out today.

We'd have to put the topper on the education speech on foreign policy, so we'd need an NSC press guy there saying, "I'll get to Sandy, and we'll do the language." We would discuss maybe, "Let's get some sound and kick it out to some of the secondary markets around the country and this person." It was all just a discussion about how we were going to pump out the message we just worked on, with the communications guys just at 8:15.

Then at 8:15 I'd go up again, the concentric part of the circle—I want to make sure I get the right order here, it's been a while. At 8:15 we'd go up and see the lawyers, what's happening, depositions are coming, whatever. They'd say the judge is this, the judge is that. The Hill today is going to send us a letter or whatever. We'd have to figure it out. We'd stay there and drill down. At 8:30, the policy part of government, an actual policy war council, so to speak, would be in the Chief of Staff meeting.

[Robert] Rubin would be there every day, would always sit in the same chair at the head of the table, and would always have a file of papers he was working on—just to keep an eye on everything. If he heard something that was interesting in his area—you'd have the domestic and foreign policy apparatus there to talk about what we were going to do about a complex problem like waivers for states on Medicare and problems with the Chinese on the yen, or what we were going to do about our policy about tobacco. We had to really make substantive policy decisions. They would be happening there.

A few of us would regroup roughly a little after 9:15 or so, just to make sure we had everything nailed down for the day. At 9:30, McCurry or Lockhart would do the gaggle, which was a not-on-camera, not-for-attribution look ahead for the day that incorporated everything we just did, now for the press in his office. They would all be crammed in there. He would either say with guidance or signals, or they'd say, "What are you going to do about whatever?" He would in part say, "I'll address that at the podium at 1:00." Or "I think the President will have something to say about it in the first half of his speech today at noon."

It was all part of our dance. Often we would see an article, like on A10 in the Post, or maybe on Good Morning, America—and part of that 7:30 summary would be the morning news, and the press guy would say whatever.

Say there's a story that may be a problem for us in the press that morning. We would use the gaggle as a way of figuring out where the press was going that day. We were either sending them signals, or they were poking around to figure it out—it went both ways. After the gaggle, we would get a readout from McCurry or Lockhart about whether there was a lot of interest in that story. We can't just think it's going to go away, so we have to figure out how to deal with it. Maybe we need to go back to the topper and add this or a little more. That was the last part of the feedback of this loop.

Around then, the Chief of Staff—again there was a little bit of variance—had the first meeting of the day with the President. Obviously, every day is different depending on whether he's on the road. It was a little game we had. We would put on the schedule "9:15: Oval Office meeting." The President would always know we were cheating; it was supposed to be 9:30, and he'd always know if he thinks 9:15. Anyway, at some point in that orbit he would be coming to work for the start of the day, and there would be a briefing with the Chief of Staff and Deputies and generally Rahm and me. It depends on who was in what job when. Basically it would be Podesta and me and [Stephen] Ricchetti or the deputy saying, "Mr. President, we put a topper on your speech today because of this, and Chuck Ruff says we can't do it. Sandy says you need to do this. There's a story here that we're chasing over there. Call Secretary Such-and-Such about this leak."

Then he would give us his thoughts whether we wanted them or not, and we'd have to figure it out. That was how the day would get racked up. We'd do a different version of the same thing at the end of the day. In the middle of the day we'd have to get ready—we'd have to regroup again. If we were in town, we did this every day no matter what, but it became much more relevant if we were in the middle of a scandal or the middle of a crisis.

We'd have to regroup in McCurry's office or in Lockhart's office 20 minutes or half an hour before he'd go out on camera and go back through all this stuff again. Then he'd go out and we'd watch—I used to be able to—I talked to the press all day. I could often be out of the loop doing whatever, and so I'd have no idea what was going on if I was called away or was on the Hill or even on the road. If I was on the road, I was with Clinton, so he wouldn't be briefing. We could get the transcript of McCurry's briefings or Lockhart's briefings without knowing anything, and I would know, wherever he went, however far he went, I could do that far—up there and no more—and be safe. He put it out as our policy, so it didn't matter where I was or wasn't. I knew I could talk to the press that far.

Riley

How quickly did you get the transcripts?

Sosnik

I think an hour and a half.

Riley

No kidding.

Sosnik

It was pretty quick. But the point is, to get to the point of him putting things out, particularly in a stressful, complicated scandal, whatever period, we didn't wing it. That would be a road mark in the middle of the day. A lot of this is going to change now because the world has changed.

Around 5:00 or so, McCurry or Lockhart would be poking around the network guys figuring out where they're heading on their evening news. [Sam] Donaldson would often say at 5:00, "I'm doing this story tonight on whatever. It's up to you. If you guys want to say something to me on the record, on background or whatever, I'm going on at 6:30." He'd be on the air at 6:30, so sometimes, literally at 6:15 or :18, we'd be in the Chief of Staff's office figuring out what he's going to say to Donaldson, and then walk down the hallway at 6:20, 6:23, and Donaldson would say, "I'm second up tonight, at 6:38." McCurry would say whatever, and Donaldson literally would walk out, put his gear on, whatever it's called, and do the stand-up.

Back in the Chief of Staff's office, usually, we watched the networks to see how they covered it. We knew what the print guys were doing at that point, or thinking they were doing. They would watch the national news also, which might affect where they were going to go. Then, depending on who the person was among us—it's that concentric circle—we'd probably have to make one more lap around the track with the print guys who were getting ready to finalize their story. That basically was our day. Then we'd wake up the next day and do it all over again.

How we organized that says a lot about what our problems were. We would meet in the Chief of Staff's office. Leon started it, then he stopped it and John started it. There'd be a second round up around 6:00 or 7:00. We used to go to the lawyers' office at 6:30 to watch the news. During the scandal we'd watch it up in Ruff's office with the lawyers because based on that, we had to, in real time, deal with the print guys who were going to advance the story.

By 7:15, on a normal day—whatever that means—we were sort of down. It's becoming much more complicated than that now with Internet and 24-hour news cycles. Just to jump ahead, when we'd go overseas to China or somewhere where we were 12 hours ahead, we were challenged, because we were dealing with a traveling press party. If it's 10:00 at night in China, it's roughly 10:00 in the morning here. If we're in China with the press corps, they have all these guys back in the States covering all this. They know more than we do in some ways.

So on the road we had a different version of what I just described to you. We would often have two conference calls a day on the road, one in the morning and one at night. Often on the road our morning was their night, and their morning was our night, but there was a 24-hour news cycle we had to deal with. In the States it would be 8:00 in the morning, and that whole thing I just described to you when we're home has already happened. But we're on the road, and it's a completely different time period. We have to figure out what's going on here because either the press would be hitting them on the road because it's a different part of the day, or conversely, we might be 6:00 in the morning on the road and it's 6:00 at night back in the States, and we have one more shot at the news cycle before they put down for the day. When we were all together at home, we had to organize what I just described on the road.

I'll give you an anecdote in a minute that gives you some insight into how this matters. We'd have to do that on the road as well, which made it even more complicated. I can tell you as an example, one of the problems the Bush White House had with [Hurricane] Katrina was that it happened when the staff was spread out. They weren't all in one place.

The worm started turning for us on impeachment in '98 after the elections. By the way, the Washington Post did a story in last Sunday's Outlook section by the former press secretary for [Dennis] Hastert who had a tour with [Thomas] DeLay, an "I was there" piece. He talked about the DeLay operation and scandal and these guys. I don't know if you saw the article. It talked about the impeachment.

Anyway, they sent us a series of 70 or so questions at Thanksgiving. We were still lumbering toward beating this thing back at that point, in the two-week run-up. It was softening a little. We got ready to leave for Thanksgiving that weekend, and we didn't quite get the answers right. But just as important, we weren't ready day one or day two or day three to fight the fight about how we answered the questions or didn't answer the questions. It really started slipping away from us because we were spread out and weren't tightly organized around it.

That's a perfect example, though, of the price you pay in that kind of environment of hand-to-hand combat when you're spread out and you're not organized and people aren't on the job.

Pfiffner

It sounds to me as if there's a key group of people who are trying to put all the pieces together and integrate them and make triage trade-offs and so forth. Usually we would think of that as the Chiefs of Staff. So tell us, in terms of function or personality, who was part of that group? Who made the whole thing cohere?

Sosnik

Well, it would depend on when. In the Panetta time, in the land of "forget titles and positions and concentrate on the functionality," Panetta was without question the final arbiter of these things. His operation was certainly more hierarchical than Mack's but a little more informal than Bowles's. In Panetta's structure, Panetta was the final word. I believe he was the only person who briefed the President first thing in the morning. Sometimes he would go over to the Residence to do that.

His structure was largely built around his two Deputies, Ickes and Bowles. If there's a meeting with three staff guys and the President, it would be those three. Generally it was one or three. Either Panetta would meet with him or the three would meet.

When you move beyond that, it was sometimes [Anthony] Lake, but Berger had a big role in foreign policy as the deputy at NSC at that time. McCurry was someone he relied on quite a bit press-wise. Then Evelyn Lieberman came in and replaced Bowles. At one point they were going to move Berger in at Deputy Chief of Staff, but they decided at the last minute not to, and he remained as Deputy at NSC. I'm trying to remember the sequencing. There was a lot of stuff moving around there. At some point Evelyn moved in there, I guess when Bowles went to North Carolina.

Ickes had the political brief as a Deputy Chief of Staff, and that became increasingly a big piece of business in the run-up to the reelect. I reported to Ickes and worked for him, and Panetta really relied on him for that brief. We probably ought to talk about the Morris stuff—that's in the middle of all this. Evelyn, on a more personal level, essentially had the First Lady's brief, the communications brief, and she had the basic functioning of the West Wing brief. He relied on her on a personal level as well, so she became an important person.

Stephanopoulos was someone Panetta relied on for policy and rapid response and message stuff. Off the top of my head, those were the people who really were at his core. When Bowles came in, he was more hierarchical and wanted to have people fill roles so that if the person left, whoever came in to fill that role became that. It was more about the role than the person, but personal relationships mattered as well.

He also, in a sense, took himself out of the scandal business at the beginning of '98, and Podesta filled that niche. That's a big piece of real estate to take yourself out of. I think he would say this to you himself. But in the Bowles period, he had the Deputy Chief of Staff model. He had Sylvia [Mathews] and John as the Deputies. He brought them in with him to serve the President. Then Rahm came in and took George's place, and he relied on Rahm quite a bit as well. He relied on me in this world and Paul Begala. Lockhart was around as a Deputy and was quite important, as well as McCurry when he was still there, and Chuck Ruff as in-house counsel.

Ickes, again, back in the Panetta days, in many ways had the brief on the scandal stuff, which was a big piece. Harold had quite a bit of that. But Bowles really relied on Podesta for that more than anybody else.

Riley

Where did Bruce Lindsey fit in all of this?

Sosnik

It depends on the year. I think Bruce was quite involved on everything in '93 and was in the middle of all the scandal-related stuff in '94. He traveled with the President the whole time, and the President relied on him quite a bit on the road. Bruce had sort of a "God pass" in that he could walk into any meeting. But at some point Bruce got pinned down by his own stuff as a functional matter. Then it became not only a functional matter but a psychic matter in terms of the toll it takes on you.

Just as a brief aside—as my mother would say, "apropos of nothing"—I had to get up the other day at 5:00 in the morning to get a plane to Seattle. I remember getting out of bed and thinking to myself, I feel awful. I remember what it was like. I felt this way for six years. In some ways you never recover from that. I'm physically not the same person I was. Part of it is that I'm older, but it took a toll on you that you can't get back.

It took a cumulative toll on Bruce. I don't know how he stayed as long as he did. At some point, he got less involved. It's hard to be meeting with your lawyers all afternoon and be involved in everything. But he could always come in and out of anything, and putting title aside, he traveled with the President basically full time until he started paring back some time in '97. In a sense, I filled that role on the road—not apples to apples, because there were all sorts of things in their relationship and history that I didn't have and wasn't ever going to have. In fact, during the campaign in '96, Bruce would always make a big deal with the President about me. For example, when we'd go into New Hampshire, he'd say, "Mr. President, when we come to New Hampshire it's important that we show Doug around. He didn't spend a lot of time here and doesn't know a lot of the people. He thinks that when you come to New Hampshire you always come in a big plane."

Bruce started paring back, but while he was traveling with the President, and any time he was ever there, he was the first among equals. (He wasn't the first among equals; he was the first.) But he was both paring back his travel and paring back his role when he was traveling in terms of his involvement. I don't know how to describe it except I can remember I hit a wall sometime at the end of '99 when I didn't think I could physically climb those steps and get on Air Force One again. It sounds ridiculous hearing someone say that, but you just reach a point. People say to me, "How did it feel when you left the White House?" I say, "I think I went to the best all-you-can-eat buffet in the world and had one plate too many."

Bruce was a constant presence throughout. He had a major hand in personnel from the day he got there 'til the day he left. When did he leave?

Riley

I don't think he left. I think he went out on that last airplane.

Sosnik

The interesting thing, by the way, on personnel was that there was a small group of people—and they were all Arkansans—who controlled, ultimately, the personnel for the Clinton administration from day one until the end of the time. Bruce was always at the bottom there.

Pfiffner

So it was [Richard] Riley and then Bruce—

Sosnik

Bruce was there early on, and then Bob Nash was there, Craig Smith was there, Marsha [Scott]—they're all Arkansans, and smart. But Bruce sat in the meetings on any appointment of any significance, and had a big role in the overall legal strategy.

Riley

He wasn't somebody who was a routine presence in the core of these daily message meetings, the small meetings?

Sosnik

Sometimes he would go to the Chief of Staff meeting, the early meetings, and sometimes he wouldn't. He would always go to the bigger staff thing and the lawyers' meetings, but he would not go to the communications meeting or the policy meeting. Is this jumping ahead helpful or hurtful?

Riley

It's all fascinating, very helpful.

Sosnik

Just to understand the place, an example would be the week the Lewinsky story came out.

Pfiffner

Tuesday or Wednesday?

Sosnik

I think it was in the Tuesday paper. There was a dinner or a reception or something at the White House that Monday night. I wasn't there; I was in Baltimore. Anyway, they knew that night the story was coming out. Just to give you a sense of how the world has changed: if you wanted to get the next-day paper, you went to the Washington Post loading dock at 10:20.

The scandal mavens, Podesta and Lloyd [Cutler] and David Dreyer and I—this was part of our humor just to get through it—would be sitting there, and I'd say, "I don't know about you guys, but I'm thinking about the Washington Post tonight." That night, though, they knew it was the Washington Post night; they knew they were working the story. The story came out Tuesday night, so it was the Wednesday morning paper, because we had interviews that Thursday.

We had 48 hours or so when we were running around not knowing what was going on. I think by Friday night, though, Clinton had gotten [Mickey] Kantor to be his "lawyer," and because Kantor was a lawyer, it gave him attorney/client privilege. Kantor is probably best known for his role not as a lawyer, but as other things. But nobody knew who was on first.

I think by that Friday we had established the rules of the road: this is a legal matter first and foremost because it doesn't matter what political points or communication points you score on any day. You can win every daily battle in politics and communications, but if you lose the legal battle, you've lost the war, so then it became a lawyer-driven/political guys' deal. Lawyers ruled, but they had to deal with the political guys. Bruce was part of the core lawyer group, a sprawling combination of the White House counsel's office, which was Ruff and Bruce, and Cheryl [Mills]. It depends where we were in the cycle. [Abner] Mikva was there and [Jack] Quinn (Whitewater). Then you had [David] Kendall and Nicole [Seligman] as the lawyers for the President.

By statute, Bruce was part of the White House complex, but he was really Clinton's guy. That lawyer group became the core driver. You'd have lawyers popping in and out: [Robert] Bennett would come in on this thing or Craig on that one. They would have their own deal before they would meet with us—us being that group of wandering guys who went from meeting to meeting: Podesta, Begala, Rahm, me, Lockhart, McCurry.

They'd meet, and then we'd meet. Basically they would tell us what they could tell us and wouldn't tell us what they wouldn't tell us. It became a lawyer-driven operation. Bruce was at ground zero of that throughout. There would be times when he wouldn't travel because he was pinned down by either his personal stuff or just the stuff involved.

Riley

There's a lot there that we'll want to park on later, but I think we ought to hold off on that. Jim did you have some more questions you wanted to ask about? We have a lot on the table.

Pfiffner

At some point I want to talk about Dick Morris—not only his relationship with the President, but also with the rest of the staff and how that affected either policy development or political—

Sosnik

I know a lot about that.

Riley

Before we get to that, maybe the thing to do is dispose of your congressional affairs experience. You were in the congressional affairs shop for about a year, is that right?

Sosnik

Yes.

Riley

And you were dealing almost exclusively with the scandal portfolio?

Sosnik

To be honest about it, I was part of the Legislative Affairs operation. I had some jurisdictions like banking because of Dodd and Defense because of who was sitting there.

I was responsible for White House liaison to DOD [Department of Defense]. I don't know anything about Defense. I would go to DOD and meet with some of the people over there. I knew some of them. I pretty much am what I am. So I'm with John Deutch, a brilliant guy from MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], and we're walking down the hallway. He asked me some complex question about some military system and my theory about rapid deployment.

I said, "John, save it. I don't know anything about that stuff. I'm not going to pretend to. Test is over." He started laughing. We got along great. We went to a baseball game. Anyway, I was DOD liaison. But the fact is I reported to Pat, and I got all that off their plate. I had a House and Senate background, a lot of political background, so I had the scandal brief, and into the midterm, I had a pretty loosely organized White House in which I was able to become entrepreneurial. I moved over to the shampoo room and hung out with Harold. The scandal stuff was my primary thing on the Hill in '94 and that's where I got to meet everybody.

Riley

I want to make sure that there aren't some things about that experience we should be aware of. Did you think it was all a colossal waste of time? Was there something there that historically has some importance that we should know?

Sosnik

The things I dealt with on the scandal stuff I thought were a colossal waste of time. It was all politics, all just part of a strategy for a Republican Party that was still in shock about having lost the White House that they felt they were as entitled to as we did, just based on history. The only thing that held them together at that point was their opposition to Clinton in any way they could express it through scandals to achieve their political means. But it wasn't on the level. I don't think that's a unique view.

I was a guy coming into the White House having had no role in helping the guy get elected, with a background in politics and government that pulled me into that world in which I was a stranger in a strange land. To the extent that I moved into that world and became part of that world for an extended time, the '94 period was really my indoctrination. Unfortunately, that world was pinned down by scandal. It could have been, at another time, something else.

For the context of the rest of our discussion, that year was my learning the place and people getting to know me and my getting to know the people. I still hadn't met Clinton at that point. I don't know where you're going next. I don't know if you want to talk about it much, but I was very involved with Harold and the midterms.

Riley

Yes, we definitely want to get to that. This is a common topic of these discussions: your perceptions about people, record keeping, and the confidentiality of conversations and things of that nature. Evidently you're trying to prepare people to testify on Capitol Hill. Are you finding that there's a reticence on the part of people to put things in writing when you come in?

Sosnik

I've never been brought into an office or an environment where things are going great. I only get brought into environments where things are bad, because if things are great they don't need a guy like me. When I started in politics in the early '80s, it was the modern era, but I came from a culture of "Why in the world would you write anything down?" as a starting point. I was astonished when I was in the White House by how much people were writing down.

There's one really important thing here. I don't know if you caught it: it was the impact of the [Robert] Woodward book in '94 on the White House and the Clintons. It was huge. There was a sense after that that there were a lot of people writing down a lot of things in meetings because they were going to be writing books. I was astonished that people continued to put things in writing. The [Joshua] Steiner diaries might have helped break people of that habit. But I was surprised by the amount of things people did put in writing.

I remember at one of my depositions, almost before my rear end hit the chair, the first question was, "What's in your file cabinet?" I said, "Well, I think tennis shoes and workout clothes." They said, "What else?" I said, "I think some pepper and utensils from the White House Mess in case I get carryout. Why do you ask?" They said, "Because you have no records anywhere, and we don't believe it. Do you have them at home?" I explained to them that I don't have them. I wrote things on index cards, and when I was done with them, I threw them out, so when I got subpoenaed, I had to fill out a form to assert that I had no records.

Stephanopoulos was really interesting. He created an edifice, based on his interpretation of the law, that made it possible for him to talk to his friend who kept the records, as a way of not having records but keeping the records.

Riley

Like [Harry Robbins] Haldeman?

Sosnik

Yes, and Clinton kept tapes of his Presidency for a book, and [Kenneth] Starr—

Riley

To be clear about this, this isn't like an Oval Office—

Sosnik

No, just little mini tapes. You should check this. Has this come up?

Riley

In a sort of vague way.

Sosnik

My recollection is that Starr was aware of these tapes but did not subpoena them.

Riley

There's a heavier legal barrier to cross to get at the President's own personal stuff than for anybody else.

Sosnik

The main point is people did write things down early on. I remember Mark Gearan's memo. Harold said, "They'll fuck you blue if you release this." Then there were people who tried to figure some creative ways around that, like Stephanopoulos and others. But it got to a point that unless you were writing a book or you were a moron—I guess you could make the argument that doing this kind of project and doing it before people die is probably going to be more important in the future rather than less because of people not putting things in writing.

I remember there were some great memos to the files, however, that people wrote. I didn't see a lot of them, but my recollection was that in the '95 and '96 period, some of the longer-term Clinton guys were reading some of [David] Gergen's memos to the files and marveling at his efforts.

Pfiffner

I wanted to ask about Gergen, too.

Riley

The inference is that there may have been a more favorable gloss on one's role—

Sosnik

It was a memo to the file for posterity's sake. The point is he was putting things in writing.

Riley

That's important because somebody 30 years from now will stumble across that and might very well otherwise treat it in an uncritical—

Sosnik

I don't remember reading them. I just remember their marveling at them. But to get back to your question, this is a guy who's probably one of the most sophisticated people in terms of the Presidency and role of staff and what you do or don't put in writing and how you think about history and all of those things in one place, so he adapted to his environment. The notion of Haldeman diaries is inconceivable now.

Riley

In your own case, you just treated the cards you made as disposable sources of recollection for a short period of time?

Sosnik

Always did.

Riley

I don't know whether technically those are Presidential records.

Sosnik

It doesn't matter when I throw them out. I'm not doing it here, but normally, if there were things I wanted to make sure I said to you before I leave tomorrow, topics or whatever, and I'm thinking as we're talking—I don't worry about Morris because I can just see in your eyes that there's no way you're going to leave today until I get to Morris. But let's just say there are six or eight things that have come up that I want to make sure I remember—I would write them down on my card. I know how my mind works. I'd write "Morris," or I'd write "Gergen-file." I'd have those eight things. I'd be working off them, adding to them, and then marking them off. Then when I leave here today, I'd throw that card out because I don't need it anymore.

Riley

Shredder or burn bag?

Sosnik

Just tear it up. If you picked up my card, you wouldn't even know what it meant.

Riley

Exactly.

Sosnik

But I wrote it that way. I wasn't writing for history. I wasn't memorializing my place in history in terms of my view of working for the President. I was there to serve him and do the best I could. I wasn't worried about memos to the file or creating a legacy. I was just doing my job.

Riley

This basically confirms what we've heard from a lot of other folks. Do you think this in any way throws sand in the gears of activity? It may be that you train yourself so well to get by without written notes that it doesn't matter, but one of the questions from the outside is whether having to rely on your memory as opposed to having more elaborate prompts interferes with your ability to do your job well.

Sosnik

I thought you were going to ask the question differently. You're taking about how this affects your ability as a staffer to function, rather than what it means for history.

Riley

We've already pretty well established the history part. You have Harold Ickes, Senior's, diaries from the FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] time, just completely unedited records of things as well as thousands and thousands of elaborate after-action memos and things of that nature that were commonplace in the Presidential libraries up until fairly recently. What we anticipate is that the paper trail in the Clinton White House is going to be not as informative as it would have been for previous administrations.

Sosnik

That's guaranteed.

Riley

The second point I was asking as a corollary is the absence of this kind of contemporaneous record keeping. Is it also an impairment to good government? Could one also make the case that because you don't feel comfortable putting these things in writing, the gears slip sometimes? This morning we're having a conversation. I screw up in getting your title wrong. We know that our memories will fail us, sometimes in minor ways, but perhaps sometimes in major ways.

Sosnik

A little bit. But as someone in politics, one of the things I can tell you is a challenge that people find in every business sector right now is that you're not immune to it either in your line of work in general or this specific project. There's no replacing diaries and all the rest of it, but the world is changing, and with the Internet and cameras, there's more transparency now. There's much more information available for history's sake, so it's going to be different, but in some ways it will be more illuminating. Whether you put your thoughts in writing or whether you have ten times more video clips of what a guy said in public—that's changed only in the last five to eight years.

I would just say two other things before we break. One is a quick story, and for the other I'll make a broader and more serious point. The quick story was that through all my efforts to not have records, not leave a trail, be very discreet, you don't see me—I wasn't trying to be in the paper for being in the paper's sake. I'm in a lot of articles; I'm just not on the record. I grew up in the old school of you're a staff guy, you work for—

In many ways, I prefer the culture of the Bush White House in terms of being more of a slave to the principal. I used to describe a lot of the White House staffers I worked with as peacocks. They were strutting around showing everybody their feathers all the time.

Pfiffner

Which Bush White House, the first or second?

Sosnik

The second, just in terms of "It's about the President; it's not about the staffers." Charles LaBella was brought in from San Diego to run the campaign finance hearings at one point. He would have become the Special Counsel if [Janet] Reno had put one in. I had three lawyers all the time for I don't know how many years.

In his first week on the job, he wants to bring me in. My lawyers call. When it happens 25 times, it puts a damper on your day. I go over with my three lawyers to see LaBella. He has just come to town, and he has this big barren conference room. He comes in, takes his jacket off, turns his chair around so he's straddling it, and says, "We're going to spend a lot of time together. I just want to get to know you." I say, "Oh, really?" He says, "Yes, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to put white butcher-block paper all around the room here, all four walls, and we're going to put your schedule for the last two years on this wall. Then we're going to use your schedule as a way to help me put this case together. Because from what I can tell, you were in every meeting, everywhere, all the time. You and I are going to work on this project together." I walked out and said, "My life is over." I did have a hard copy schedule that was there for the record and I kept that.

The broader point, though, is that it's difficult to express in words what a different era it was then. The world has made one of these once-in-a-generation changes, and it happened in the last four or five years. Although I was in the White House six or seven years ago, in many ways it was 30 or 40 years ago.

The example I often give is an analogy from the early- to mid-'60s. If you're a guy in college in 1963, you're in a suit and you're drinking martinis and listening to [Frank] Sinatra. If you're in college in 1965, you're wearing jeans and a t-shirt and listening to the Beatles and smoking dope. On the calendar that's two years, but in other ways it's 20 years. It just happened to be compressed. That's the kind of change that has happened in our country in the same period of time, a compressed period of time is an analogy I use from 40 years ago.

So as you think through and talk about something that was relatively recent, in many ways it's a completely different era. Part of it is pre-/post-9/11, but it's much more profound than that in terms of how our lives are organized, how we get information, the mood of the country. It's easy to underestimate something that enormous when you're living in the middle of it. It's difficult to catch it and process it in real time, so when you start talking about how we did stuff—going to the loading dock at 10:20 as opposed to going to the computer at 10:20—and all the aspects of how we did our stuff, it's from a different era.

Riley

We're off to a great start. Let's take a break for lunch.

[BREAK]

Martin

I wanted to explore the bargaining with Members of Congress on policy issues. I know you focused mostly on Whitewater, but I assume you had to have at least some policy portfolio to do this with.

Sosnik

DOD.

Martin

And there were a number of important things that came down the pipeline in 1994, especially things like the assault weapon ban. What kinds of tools were available to you and the people in your shop to bargain with Members of Congress?

Sosnik

I was ultimately not bargaining with Members of Congress. However, what you basically do is sit with somebody whose support you're trying to get. You find out what their concerns are. Concerns can be narrow or broad. What you try to do is figure out what it's going to take to get their support and try to give it to them. Some Members of Congress don't like the language of the proposal, and they want more of this or less of that. Some of them subtly—and some of them less subtly—will talk about things that are important to them personally or in their district. If you can fix X, I'll give you Y.

There's no "one size fits all." When you're the President of the United States speaking for the administration, you have a pretty wide reach on what your assets are. Sometimes it's explicit, sometimes it's implicit, sometimes it's implied. To put it differently, the art of making law is sometimes inelegant, but the process often produces a good result.

Riley

Is that another way it looks like sausage?

Sosnik

Making the sausage is different from eating the sausage. As a communications matter and as a bargaining matter, you're far better off keeping the making of the sausage out of public view, both because it doesn't send a good message, and because it costs you more in the bargaining. The more you're out there, the more you're out there. You have to try, within reason, to match the price of whatever the guy's telling you. And the more public it is, the more costly it often is—not to mention that at the end of the day the public sees it how they see it, which is generally less than pure.

All White Houses do it, some more effectively than others. Occasionally you'll see it. The assault weapon ban didn't work; the 3-M [Representative Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky], when we got her to get the vote, did work. You saw it this past year in the House with the Republicans where they kept the vote open for five hours. In the Senate there are rules; in the House there are rules. In the House, you have the Rules Committee, which means that in the House, as long as you control the Rules Committee, you control the floor. Democrats lost the House of Representatives when they lost the rule on the assault weapon ban in August of '94.

You don't like it, but there are times when you're forced to go to a vote in the House. I just gave you an example of Republicans with DeLay and Bush. I'll give you several examples of Clinton Democrats. There are times when you'll go to the floor on votes when you're three or four short and the clock is running. You're going to back people into a corner, or you're just going to—There's an old saying in Washington: the only reasons we ever pass laws are congressional recesses and nonrefundable airline tickets for vacations. That's what forces people.

There are times when you get down to the end and don't have the votes—because of all the levers of power and pressure and everything else, you're just a few short. But you're just going to get them on the vote. That's the way you do business in Washington. To the extent you want to look in general at the Clinton episodes, our mistakes were that they were far too public, and we had Clinton way too much personally in the middle of it, both publicly and privately.

Martin

Did Clinton's direct involvement change over time?

Sosnik

Yes, it changed. To belabor a point for a minute, it's difficult to overstate the mistakes made/lessons learned from '93 and '94 and how, in some ways, you had a Clinton White House functioning one way for about 5-1/2 years. In a sense you had '93 and '94 function as it was; '95 with the hundred-day speech with the Dallas publishers, the first hundred days of the "Contract for America" Congress and all.

A parallel universe came together that week in terms of his speech. Off of that and going on down behind that, essentially for about 5-1/2 years, the Clinton White House operated in much the same way. Clinton told me beginning in '95—which I think I've said somewhere on the record—that he was too much of a Prime Minister and not enough of a President. He was in Arkansas negotiating with a more conservative, sometime Republican legislature. He just would go in there, as I said earlier, out of his hip pocket and just—So he moved into a different mode where he became more of an element that could be used when needed. Panetta was uniquely qualified as a former Member of Congress, OMB [Office of Management and Budget], terrific relations in the House, which we were thinner on than the Senate.

Bowles followed the same mold. The best example of that was the budget that passed in June '97, the Balanced Budget Act, where Clinton was much more likely to get briefed by his guys. They knew when to go to him to say, "We have this decision to make. What do you want to do?" Or they'd come to him to say, "We need you to do blank."

He became used much more that way. As an example, when they got the votes in June '97 on the budget, he was on the golf course in Vegas with Michael Jordan. He was getting periodic briefings on the golf course, but he wasn't making a bunch of calls and everything. It became quite different.

Riley

Is that because he was a better chief legislator, or because people got better in their jobs?

Sosnik

I think both. What's ironic now is that there were questions when he got elected President about whether he was up to the job, and there were questions in the first several years whether he could understand foreign policy—all questions that now you don't even remember being posed. There was a learning curve, and we got better. When you make mistakes, one of two things happens: you learn or you're not in the job. There was a lot to learn. And we had more experienced people in these jobs, either because they'd been on the job or because they had background. Panetta was carrying a lot of weight on his shoulders as Chief of Staff.

Martin

When you first came in, were you working for Griffin?

Sosnik

Yes.

Martin

Were you told, "This is the set of things you could offer in a negotiation with Members of Congress"?

Sosnik

No, it doesn't work like a hardware store.

Martin

We don't have a great sense of how it would work.

Sosnik

Let's assume at a certain point you've figured out what you want to do, and you have the guys on the Hill, but you're 12 votes short. The first thing you do is figure out who's the best person to engage with that Member or that office. Every office is different. There were some older Senators who were somewhat non compos mentis; there were some who were more detached than others. You know to go to So-and-So, the Chief of Staff, who everyone knows is running the place.

And there were certain Senators who changed staff every week. It didn't matter who the staff was; they didn't speak for the Senator. Then you would know this Senator is best friends with Senator [Dale] Bumpers from Arkansas, so we'll figure out who's the right person to go to Senator Bumpers. Or you go to Senator Such-and-Such. Once you figure out the move on that person, or however it's decided—It could be we'll invite Such-and-Such to the state dinner, put him at the table, and ask him.

It could be that we're going to be in Kansas next week with this guy or tomorrow with this guy, and we'll have the President ask him on the plane. Then there's a conversation after you've set it up, from which that person reports back to say, "This is what it's going to take to get the vote." Or, "This is what they say it's going to take, but this is what I think we need to do to get it." Or, "I don't think it matters what we say, we're not going to get it." Or, "He said it's this, but this is really what it is."

The reverse answer to your question is that it's not necessarily what you give them, but rather what's driving this person is often very personal. It could be a pique about a snub, or their best friend wasn't appointed to this judgeship, or he promised to come and campaign but he didn't. It's often not what it appears to be in terms of what's really at bottom. It's not necessarily what they'll state.

Again, they often will not necessarily state what it is that will get them over the finish line. But there's a riddle there that you try to figure out and solve. You have to decide whether a) you can solve it, and b) whether it's worth the price.

Martin

At what point do you have to seek approval from higher-ups to say simple things like OK, tickets to the Kennedy Center or the box or something like that?

Sosnik

It's the same as anybody in any line of work: you know when you can speak without checking with the home office. It depends on who's having the conversation. The bar Panetta has to clear to give an answer on the spot is a different bar than Griffin, a different bar than me, and a different bar than someone else. The lower you are on the food chain, the more likely you are to have to go check with somebody; or, conversely, the higher you are on the food chain, the more able you are at that point to make a decision.

Martin

From a social science point of view, we're always looking for some sort of systematic process, some pattern. Do you see any patterns in terms of the kinds of things certain kinds of Members of Congress would ask for versus others? Or was it idiosyncratic?

Sosnik

To some extent, it's all idiosyncratic. But you can discern some trends. There are some Members of Congress I can think of (without giving the names) whom we would call "highly transactional." It meant that they were open for business, that they did business, and that to get their vote, you had to do business. They were often on the a la carte menu.

But just as a public policy matter. You had Ted Stevens this year. His whole filter for how he relates to his Senate colleagues is how they are on ANWR [Arctic National Wildlife Refuge], or what they did or didn't say about the Bridge to Nowhere. There was a series of things that [William] Frist allowed [Arlen] Specter to put to the floor this year that were backed by the White House because the White House wanted Specter's support on the Supreme Court nominations in the committee. That was his price. I don't know if that was his price, but that's how you do business. There's no systematic shelf that you can say Specter-judges-asbestos. That's the legislative process.

Riley

How do you get from congressional affairs to political director?

Sosnik

It took about three or four months to get there. I didn't know Clinton; I still hadn't met him at that point. But I should back up.

In the run-up to the '94 [election], I was very involved in the politics informally from my perch in the shampoo room with Harold. But I was sensitive to the fact that Joan Baggett was the political director, and I wasn't trying to crowd her. She's a very capable person. There was an effort to keep President Clinton somewhat away from the day-to-day of the campaign and not give him the full picture of what kind of trouble we might have been in. This is when he began to reengage with Dick Morris. In October Morris started to rekindle his relationship with the President—

Pfiffner

Ninety-four.

Riley

I erred in running past '94 without parking on that for a minute.

Sosnik

Morris was beginning in October to tell Clinton how bad things were, and that was not the message Clinton was getting in the White House from the briefings on the run-up.

Riley

That was coming out of the political director's shop or coming out of congressional affairs?

Sosnik

I don't know. Times were tough out there, and he had a lot of things to do in the world, and the notion was to continue to try to win the election but not to bring him in the middle or bring him down to do all these things.

Riley

But some of you were aware that things were—

Sosnik

Totally.

Martin

This is an important question. How do you keep a President from being aware of something that you know? Clearly he has seen the same news. How do you control that information?

Sosnik

It's like we're sitting here in April right now, and I don't know whether the Democrats are going to win the House or Senate back. Everybody says now that they knew Clinton was going to be reelected in '96. But the reality was that in '95, no one thought he was going to be reelected. In September, on the run-up to the '94 midterms, it wasn't conventional wisdom that Democrats were going to lose 50-some odd seats. Looking back on it, it's easy to talk, to Monday- Tuesday- Wednesday-morning quarterback. Things were bad in September; they got a little bit better; they went up and down. You have to make a decision about how much you know for sure, how much you need to share, and all that. Decisions at the top—I wasn't at the top—were made, I think, to not give him the entire picture.

First of all, nobody knows the entire picture with any certainty. But early in October and throughout October, Morris—who has never met a shade of gray—had staked out what turned out to be the accurate picture with the President about what was coming. I don't think that's what the President got in his own briefings. They weren't saying we're going to win everything, but I think it was a rosier picture than the outcome.

To some extent then, the totality of the loss—and it was a total wipeout; they won every single open seat in the Senate and knocked off [James] Sasser and [Harris] Wofford on top of that. They won 52 seats in the House. Now, I don't want to spend too much time on the whys, but a series of self-correcting things happened in '94 that were bottled up through the '80s and in '92 that all headed for that perfect storm. The Democrats had gerrymandered the House throughout the '80s. We had a 100-seat majority in which we probably had a 6 percent majority in terms of electoral preferences, but we were able to gerrymander the House in a way that we had far more Democratic seats than the country was Democrat.

That did not express itself in '92 the way it normally would after reapportionment and redistricting because of the Bush performance in the '92 election. You had a lot going on that normally would have washed itself out, at least partially, normally in the first year of that five-year cycle. We also had an inordinate number of retirements in the Senate. If you look at turnovers historically in the Senate, incumbents rarely lose, but when they lose, it's generally due to scandal or something like that. When you look at a transfer from one party to the other, normally it's open seats. There were seven open seats that year, and Republicans won all seven.

You saw it in the South here where you had five southern-seat retirements—[John] Breaux, [John] Edwards, [Robert] Graham, [Ernest] Hollings, and [Zell] Miller—five of them. If the Democrats had not retired, we probably would have held four out of five, or maybe all five. When all five southern Democratic Senators retired, it was not surprising that we lost all five seats. You had that in '94 as well: a confluence of events happening at the same time. And Clinton's numbers were down too, by the way. All that created a perfect storm that the President was not expecting. I don't think there was any scenario on Election Day coming out of the White House that predicted that.

Morris had predicted it, and that began a period of reflection by the President. The First Lady was dealing with her own stuff on health care, was becoming more entrenched in her own world and regrouping. The President was basically trying to figure out what to do with the rest of his Presidency. At that point he was, in conventional wisdom, a one-term President. He went through a very tough time.

I'm getting ready to move out of my knowledge secondhand to my knowledge firsthand. This was when I was starting to get to know him and spend time with him. He went through a very tough November and December and a pretty tough January and February, and started climbing out of it more around March. For me, the low point was when he had Tony Robbins do Camp David in January for a weekend.

Riley

That was '95? You weren't ready for the "giant within"?

Sosnik

I'm still not today.

Riley

You made an interesting comment over lunch about the timing of the '94 election. You said that it was good that it hadn't happened earlier.

Sosnik

I don't know that it was good that it hadn't happened earlier, but it would have been worse if it had happened earlier. In the mid-part of September, our polling showed we would have lost more seats. If and when you have Stan [Greenberg] back here, you should ask him. He was very much in the middle of all that—as were Harold and I. That had been off the heels of the gunboat, and I believe the Contract [Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America"] had just rolled out around then. We did do some work, probably inadvertently, or, in the worst of times, I used to say, "No matter how hard we try, we can't get Clinton's number under 40." We hit a really bad period there.

Then, in part due to the job—which required him going overseas to the Middle East and other places—his numbers moved up some in October. He got less in the middle of the fray. They were running ads where Democratic Members of Congress were being morphed—He was becoming detached more from the day-to-day politics, which brought his numbers up enough that it was then a question of relative drag on the people on the ballot.

He wanted to campaign when he came back, and we got him places to go. If the election had been in early to mid-October, we would have had a bad cycle, but we could have managed down by the factor of a quarter or a half. It wouldn't have been as devastating as it turned out to be.

Riley

Morris said in his book that he had encouraged Clinton not to go out on the campaign trail then because he looked Presidential overseas, he looked political here.

Sosnik

He was right. I read his book, although I haven't read it in quite some time. He deserved a lot of credit for a lot of things, but because there were places where he got carried away in terms of his recounting, some people discount the totality of what he was saying. They couldn't figure out fact from fiction. There was more than enough fact there, and if you just kept it on fact in terms of what kind of impact he had, he would have fared better.

I wasn't privy to his conversations with the President in October of '94, so I don't know if he said that, but I believe, based on the conversations with the President after the fact, that Morris had pretty much, in his view, called it right in terms of what was going to happen in '94.

Then we go into this period in which the President was trying to decide how he wanted to finish out his term. What he told me when I met with him in January or February—

Riley

Was that pretty much the first time you were meeting with him?

Sosnik

Yes, it was. The one thing he said to me was how much he was looking forward to the campaign, and I said, "Yes, me too. How are you?" [laughter] But he was saying a couple of things: one was that he was going to have a forum to talk about his record, because of his enormous frustration about the fact that he had made some tough decisions and begun to get the country on the right track but people had not felt it or given him appropriate credit for it. There were lots of reasons for that, which I'll get to in a moment. The campaign was going to allow him to talk about what he'd done. It was going to require the press to cover it and was going to give him a platform to talk about his record.

The second thing he said was he looked forward to a campaign in which he was going to be running against somebody else rather than just some idealized version that he would never be able to match, an opponent. He was looking forward to that. He went on to say that he had made a big mistake in his first two years in that he wasn't sure he was going to get reelected, but he thought he would. But whether he did or did not, the one thing for sure he was going to make sure of was that he had his Presidency the last two years and ran the campaign the way he wanted to do it and not the way someone else wanted to do it.

He had felt the first two years like he was a President working in a White House in which he was, in a sense, doing his job and running the place the way others had wanted him to more than the way he wanted to, and he was going to change that. Win or lose, he wanted to have no regrets after the election about whether he gave it his best shot based on how he wanted to do it. And that's when he said he wanted to be less of a Prime Minister, more of a President. One example is the decision memo process that moves up to the President. That's my sense of how the Reagan White House worked: things made their way to the Oval Office desk, and the President said yes, no, or maybe.

He was much more interested in creating a White House environment where things were coming from his desk down. He told his people what he wanted done, and it was their job to do it and come back and tell him what they did or didn't do or what they needed. He was very much looking forward to running the place; he wanted to regain control of his Presidency.

Riley

You said this conversation took place in January or February?

Sosnik

Yes, it was my interview. I don't know where I was in the process, but I don't think I was the first, second, or third choice for the job—or maybe fourth or fifth. After the midterm, there was this job sitting there. It was in the paper all the time. I'm not offended if I'm not the first, second, or third choice. If I get hired, I'll be happy with that. But at some point when you're not the first, second or third choice—you're still there and you're not getting hired—it would be prudent to have a plan B.

So early on I got a plan B: I went out and got a job offer. They said to me, "We really want to hire you, and this offer stands." They gave it to me in writing. I explained to them that if I get this job—They said, "If at some point we need to fill this job, we'll come back before we do and say it's yours or you're going to lose it. If not, we'll just keep it and you can—"

I had that in my hip pocket, and it gave me peace of mind. I just stayed at it in the White House, doing my stuff. Eventually, Harold Ickes was my rabbi and the person who had worked with me in the triumphant '94 midterm. [laughter] He was the one who pushed me all the way through. I may have met him right before; there was a meeting of Governors in January and I was there with another guy in the Roosevelt Room to warm him up. I remember Bowles was Deputy Chief of Staff at the time, and I think the other Deputy Chief of Staff had not thought I should be the person for this job.

This other guy and I warmed the Governors up before they met with the President. This was after our midterms. It was a very tough meeting. They were very critical of the administration, what we had done, hadn't done, how we treated people on the whole. We went up to the second floor of the Residence, up in the study, and there were about five of us doing a prebrief, this other guy and I, Panetta and Bowles and, I think, Harold.

Leon said, "Mr. President, we're here to brief you on the Governors; there are some issues coming out." He went through them. He said, "These guys have been in the room meeting with them before, and they might want to add something." The other guy gave him an upbeat sort of assessment. Then they came to me, and I said, "Mr. President, we were in the same meeting, but I had a slightly different take. They're unhappy about this." And I went through the list of things.

Bowles walked away and told me later, "When I saw that, I said, 'That's the kind of guy I need in that job.'" But I was not somebody they were looking for to put in that job. Eventually, for whatever reasons—they couldn't identify who they wanted, or they could identify who they wanted and they didn't take the job—I was sitting there for quite a while. I became a bit of a joke in the press about filling it or not filling it. Eventually they gave it to me.

Riley

Was the other job offer on the Hill?

Sosnik

No, it was downtown. It was in communications.

Pfiffner

I'm fascinated by how the White House staff works and serves a particular President, and how it works given Clinton's relationship with "Charlie" [Dick Morris], and when you knew about it and when you didn't know about it and what effect that had on the overall interaction with the President.

Sosnik

As the President went through this period of reflection (three or four months, depending on how you keep score), I think he was feeling increasingly alienated from his White House staff in that he had lost confidence in them. I think he thought they were more liberal than he was in pushing their agenda more than his agenda. I think he had questions about the competence of some of the staff—not Panetta; I'm talking about the whole culture that had gotten him where he was that day.

In a sense, he needed the functioning of government to continue, and that's what White House staffs do. But in terms of making strategic decisions about his political future, he started going offshore, and it started with Morris. I don't know what I'm going to do with the transcript, but at least I'll tell you what I think. Morris and [Robert] Squier had an alliance going back a number of years in campaigns, particularly in Latin America. Dick used to tell me that he liked dealing with Bob because Bob would do what Dick told him to do; that was his idea of a partnership.

Doug Schoen, of Penn and Shoen, had done a lot of the work in this collaborative effort. Morris had reentered the Clinton constellation in the run-up in October, as we said earlier, and then November, December. In fairness to Gore and Clinton during their relationship, they had a political partnership, a very good political partnership. Gore was a real asset in that political partnership. In what was written at the time and has been since about their partnership, the personal relationship aspect of it has always been exaggerated. It was characterized like those two guys in a Dockers ad, if you remember those TV ads. They were not best buddies; they were in a political partnership.

Their personal relationship, I think, was exaggerated through the years, but Gore's influence in the White House, while it has been described as considerable (although when you look at [Richard] Cheney now, I guess Cheney will be the new modern yardstick), and while Gore has gotten ample credit in the press for his influence in the White House, it has been underreported. He had more rather than less of an impact than people knew—and people thought he had a big impact.

Squier was a long-standing Gore guy. Morris partnered up with Squier, both as a political matter inside the White House in terms of getting Gore brought on to the offshore team, and as a functional matter because of having had the relationship in the past. This new offshore political center of gravity outside the White House started then with Clinton and Gore and Morris and Squier meeting.

Jack Quinn was the Chief of Staff, so he was part of this very small meeting, and Schoen was. I wasn't there, and I don't know the sequencing. But this thing morphed 'til in the end the whole gang was there. It took increments and changed. But the core stayed intact largely until—well, it went through several phases, but it really went to a different size probably at the beginning of '96.

These meetings started in the Residence, usually on Wednesday nights. You'll have to check, because I wasn't in the room at the beginning. But I think Panetta and then Ickes got integrated into this thing. There were about eight of them who met once a week starting sometime around March or so. I don't remember exactly.

Riley

That would be about right, because the story is that Panetta was unhappy to discover this. I don't think he had been told directly that the channel existed originally.

Sosnik

Right, that's correct. But Panetta found out about it and told Ickes, who had a long history with Morris, all bad. Somewhere in that period, I was aware of the stuff because Harold told me. This thing was always managed, but there were periods when it became harder to manage. They hit a sort of equilibrium sometime in the spring, in which there was some sense of the rules of the road.

I think they brought Penn in at some point, at the six- or eight-people point. They kept Stephanopoulos out until after Labor Day. I was in there before he was.

Pfiffner

This is '95 now?

Sosnik

Yes. Dick had been told to memorize this script about how Leon is Chief of Staff, he's just here as a political advisor, and we're just throwing ideas out, so they hit this place of managing this thing in the spring. That was its smallest incarnation. Then it became the organizing principle from which the politics of the reelect began. I was made political director in February, January, '95. I don't know how long they met—maybe a month, I'm guessing—between whenever they started meeting and when Ickes got brought in. Bowles was part of it early on, and I think he tried to help manage the pieces because there was so much stuff going on: the Gore world and the Clinton world and the West Wing world and the offshore political guys' world and they were trying to manage all this.

Riley

And you're still trying to regain your equilibrium.

Sosnik

Right. The White House staff (I assume you've been told all about this) had been working on an education speech for the Dallas 100th-day anniversary he was giving for newspaper publishers. I remember being in the room with the West Wing staff guys with the President going over a draft of the speech. Everybody thought it was pretty good. Clinton may have even pulled out a different speech that Morris had been working on. He ended up giving the Morris speech or the Morris version of the speech. Morris was poking around trying to find some allies to work with him on his noble cause, and he had salted away Bill Curry as his guy in the West Wing, so he became the new guy in school everybody decided to hate because he was Morris's guy.

I knew about Dick before most people, but I didn't know about him in terms of being with him in meetings at that point. But after the dueling speeches, he gave this mystery speech that was Dick's coming out, so to speak, inside the West Wing. There was a third force—or a second force, whatever you want to call it—going on. Dick went door-to-door. I think he met with George and tried to become an ally; he was on his charm offensive.

Then Harold and Erskine and a handful of others started meeting as a group, Dick and his guys and our guys, over in 180 in the OEOB [Old Executive Office Building] across the street. We'd meet once or twice a week and plan together. We tried to create semiequilibrium there. Then somewhere along the way, I started getting invited to the Residence meetings, since I was technically political director. It was probably sometime in the late spring or early summer; I don't remember exactly when.

There were about eight or ten people there. It was in the second-floor study of the Residence. It would be the same meeting every week. I assume you've gotten, not the original, but the second or third printing of Morris's book?

Riley

No, I was looking at the first printing last night and didn't realize that the second printing has—

Sosnik

All the agendas. You can get it on Amazon. You'll see all the agendas look the same. We'd have the same meeting every Wednesday night. It would start with a presentation of the polling, where we were. It was still a pretty small group at that point.

Riley

Everybody in the same place?

Sosnik

Yes, everybody sat in the same seat. In fact, there are two stories you should read on this. The better one, which no one read, was the National Journal story that talked about the Residence meetings. Shortly after that, there was a New York Times story written by Rick Burke.

Riley

That was in the briefing book.

Sosnik

I didn't go through all the clips. Does it have the seating chart in the briefing book?

Riley

I don't think so, because I think those things are copyright protected.

Sosnik

But the Times ran a story with the actual seating chart, which really gave it the zip. When they ran the story, the meetings had opened up to Bruce Reed and Gene Sperling; George was in there, a bunch of people. It got even larger, but the Burke article was probably in the fall. He actually had, "Harold stands up and paces," and they had Harold's footprints where he would pace. [holding papers] This is it. When was this?

Riley

July, late July.

Sosnik

That's pretty early.

Riley

The chart must have been there before the graphic.

Sosnik

Yes, you have to get the chart to get the full flavor. But the National Journal story that was written before it was more informative.

Sosnik

Sometime in the late spring I started going to these meetings. If that's in July, then probably sometime in June, the meetings moved out of the study next door to the Yellow Oval, which is the main room upstairs. It was the room, incidentally, where we did our rounds of apologies after Monica. We met the Cabinet in there; we brought the House in and then the Senate. That Yellow Oval room has a direct shot out on the South Lawn to the Washington Monument.

Anyway, the meetings had been moved to the Yellow Oval and then the whole gang—very capable people. Clinton had real talent around him: Ron Brown, Henry Cisneros, Alexis Herman, and some people who just insisted on coming. We ended up with a large crowd with a lot of people to contribute. But it was largely Bill Knapp who worked with Squier who ran the video, and increasingly Penn more than Schoen—although they did it together—talked about the polling. It was Dick holding forth.

Riley

Tell us how he does that.

Sosnik

Well, let's see. You'd have to start with the seating: you'd have two sofas on each side, as we moved into the Yellow Oval and started creating an amphitheater effect with banquet chairs behind them. You had the run here. I would sit here, and George was here.

Riley

The arena.

Sosnik

The courtside seats were here. We had four principal chairs up here. Clinton sat in the same chair every time, and Gore would sit in the same chair.

Riley

Next to him?

Sosnik

I think it was next to him, yes. Dick would be there in one of the big-boy chairs.

Riley

Facing them or seated next to him?

Sosnik

Seated next to him. Dick has a funny way. He processes whatever he processes, and comes up to whatever he comes up to, so we would have premeetings before the regular meetings to get us together. He would describe things. He would say, "They're on the defensive now; they're in their hunting-and-gathering mode." He'd go through this whole thing. Then, in the meeting, it was almost like he put the same tape in because he processed the same thing, described it the same way. His large view was built on triangulation, taking issues away from them, raising money to buy TV [television] to get our message out.

Every week he would demonstrate how it was working through polling that showed these magical increases in our ratings everywhere we bought TV ads. He had policy ideas. It was almost like he was kept in a cage with the government, but he often would get out and go deal with the government. Lots of people in the government were offended by this guy. Most of them didn't find his charm offensive to be very charming, although he also was a smart guy and there was a real vacuum there that he filled. He did a lot of very positive things in terms of politically helping the President.

Then there got to be a point in midsummer where Panetta basically said to the President, "There can only be one person in charge here. I'm not being a prima donna, but I'm either your Chief of Staff in charge or I'm not. If I'm not, that's fine, but I'm out of here." Panetta, I think, was truly offended in a very visceral, personal way, not only by Dick and his presence and all that Dick stood for and all the ways Dick acted and everything else, but also he had a real notion of what was appropriate in government and not appropriate in government in terms of roles of outsiders. Basically, he put his marker down with the President.

The President did not have a close personal relationship with Panetta, but he respected him a great deal and valued him. Panetta's value was endless, or countless, to the extent of being an effective Chief of Staff, understanding how government worked through his job at OMB in terms of where the money went, his relations on the Hill (particularly in the House), his being the face for the administration on Sunday's shows. He really was carrying an unbelievable load on his shoulders. The President recognized that.

So in this back-and-forth of figuring out the right balance of Dick and managing Dick, after that brushback, or blowback, from Panetta in the summer—You can find the date because there was a golf game Panetta played in. Panetta didn't play golf a lot with Clinton because he had a job and couldn't be on the golf course and run the country. But he played golf with Clinton late July or early August, and it was around that period that all this transpired. It all came loose after that.

First of all, on the financial side, Dick was pushing aggressively for the President to opt out of the campaign finance system, which would have meant unlimited raising, unlimited spending, not bound by the $42 million limit, which at that point most people considered inconceivable. If you look at the proliferation of spending in politics in the last quarter century, there are probably two pressure points on it before the '04. One was in the '80s cycle, particularly the negative ads from NICPAC [National Conservative Political Action Committee]. But the advent of television in the Senate races really created a whole different level of money in politics starting in the '80s.

The second proliferation was essentially the turbo-charging of the arms race in politics by Morris losing the argument of opting out. There was a lot of pressure not to opt out. There was skepticism that we could raise the kind of money we would need to raise. There would be a lot of political blowback from our colleagues on the Hill who felt we were taking money that they weren't going to get, and the amount of time it would take just to raise the money.

Dick was always very relentless about whatever position he had and never had any doubts about whatever position he took. Generally he could demonstrate—whether with facts or with fiction—that he was right on whatever it was he was advocating. He was capable of saying he made a mistake, but that wasn't often.

Dick, in a discussion with the lawyers at the middle to end of the summer, had figured out there was a possible loophole in the campaign finance laws, so he issued and advertised in the DNC [Democratic National Committee] that he could still get what he wanted. Two things were particularly fortuitous for us. One is that the most disliked guy in America, Newt Gingrich, was the face of the opposition. And the other was that our most likely opponent was the minority leader who was attached to him, creating one name, Gingrich-Dole.

But understanding there was a loophole in the law that our lawyers felt we could drive through, he backed down from opting out. (Incidentally, [John] Kerry did an interview this past weekend on Meet the Press, and to the "biggest mistake" question, his answer was "staying inside the system. We should have opted out." That was Kerry's analysis of this last election.) But once Dick had found a loophole to be able to get what he wanted—going a different way but getting to the same destination—we had meetings starting right after Labor Day, in September of '95. We went about the process of doing issue advocacy ads with the legislative nexus, the DNC.

Now we started to move into real money. There was a lot of money to be made in this, and Dick and Squier and Penn and Schoen and Knapp had created a company that was going to buy, place, and get the commissions on the ads. A lot of people were offended by the notion that it was a completely (but vertically) integrated company, and that the people who had given you advice on how to spend the money and where to spend it were going to get the commissions on it—and in some nontransparent way in terms of how they divided it up. I think Dick was going to get 40 percent. It was political muscle.

That was what they proposed. This was incrementally done. In other words, it was going to be week by week, see how it goes. Harold was tasked with negotiating the contract with the boys. Penn and Bill Knapp were the delegates from the consortium of these guys who were going to negotiate their contract on their behalf. Harold and I were the representatives from the other side trying to come to an agreement on what their contract would be.

We generally would meet in my office down in the basement. I had now moved out of the shampoo room into a back room we called the "air-lock." It was a windowless office in the back with a wonderful walk-in closet that Mark Penn lived in for a year with me. We put a political computer in there. We would generally negotiate every week in there. I said, "You guys call this the time to negotiate. I always call this the time every week when I shine my shoes." This was like a kabuki game where we were negotiating a contract that I don't think was ever agreed to. This went week to week, I think, for almost a year.

We had a de facto verbal understanding until we negotiated. There was a tentativeness to this arrangement that was really week by week, so as we go into the shutdown period, we're pumping these ads out. There's a negotiating team around the President. The Vice President was very effective and important in this. Leon was very important in this. There were a lot of people. Dick was pushing to get a deal, get a deal, get a deal. Get welfare reform, take all these issues away. There was a real fear that Dick was too caught up in the desire to get a deal to show people the President could get things done. Our guys in the West Wing, Gore in particular, were concerned about giving away too much. There was this sort of "Perils of Pauline" feel to that whole period in which Panetta, in particular, was instrumental in staying in the middle of every negotiation.

Their negotiating team was Dole and Gingrich and Armey. Our negotiating team was Clinton and Gore and Panetta and Pat; I think Pat was in a lot of that. Their guys were petrified every time Gingrich went in a room with Clinton that he was giving away the store, and our guys were petrified that Clinton was going to give it away, so there was all this mishigash going on.

Pfiffner

Could you step back over that? This is a really important and crucial period in the whole Clinton Presidency: how you saw the shutdowns, how you framed the issue, how you strategized it and saw it, and how it changed through the various shutdowns. This was a big win for Clinton; it made a huge difference. How did you see it coming down the pike?

Sosnik

To be clear, that was the beginning and the end of the Presidential campaign. That's when Clinton got reelected, when people could understand in real terms what this fight was about in Washington. When on a Monday—or whatever day it was—they would go to a monument and find it closed, or they'd go to the passport office and it was closed, people understood what these guys were fighting about. Then they looked around at which set of guys were which and what they were for and what their mien and demeanor was, and they came away thinking that we were reasonable and were trying to get something done on behalf of the American people, and these other guys were playing politics and were haughty.

Pfiffner

And that didn't happen by chance.

Riley

No, exactly. How do you frame that when you're the one who's refusing to sign—?

Sosnik

Actually, you can go back to June of '94 when there was a deal on the table for health care and we didn't take it. There was easily a deal on the table for Republicans (and if they had cut it, it would have killed us) but they didn't take it because they basically weren't interested in a deal. They weren't interested in being reasonable.

Penn and Morris really drove a process—that then Harold got saddled with—which was taking the lead on getting it funded to drive our message out. They were very effective. They did a very good job of taking a debate three or four steps down the road and then coming back afterward in terms of how you move around.

What I mean by that is we'd have a position; they'd have a position. We'd test our message about what we're for. They would then test the other guy's messages, what their best response would be.

Pfiffner

Focus group tests?

Sosnik

They did mall tests and polling. They would then test our response to their response, and then their response to our response to their response. If you want to buy a car and the sticker is at 24, and you say, "OK, I'll offer 16; the guy will do 22; I'll do 18, and we'll settle on 20," you just did that same process. They would do that on the substantive argument with the right language and words to put them in the most unreasonable light and make them political. We also soldered Gingrich and Dole together as one.

I was told—and I believe it to be the case—that Dole knew that Gingrich was driving him off a cliff. But Dole knew that he was stuck with him because he couldn't be perceived to have taken a walk on Gingrich and still win the nomination. That's more difficult to process right now than it was then because everyone sees Gingrich now for what he is; but at the time, Gingrich was a freight train. Remember he'd been on the cover of Time magazine; the networks gave him network time on the 100th day of the Contract, so beyond gaming out the first, second, third, and fourth moves back and forth on a hit, counter, counter-counter, counter-counter-counter, it was also attaching Gingrich and Dole together and going after basic things that affect people in their lives.

We would then push out in our DNC media—there was probably some middle ground between Dick and crew every week demonstrating how effective it was by showing poll numbers moving extremely high, and then other people dismissing it out of hand. The fact was, for months and months and months, we were putting these ads up, all on this, without any response from the Republicans in these markets. That had an ability to create this negative buzz. Now it's inconceivable ten years later that that would happen, in part because in politics you've learned this lesson, but also just the information flow is such now that—I described earlier how we organized the White House each day. That would be an archaic way of doing it now. We would be so far behind the news cycle if we did it that way now, because of how much the world has changed.

The "who we are, who they are, what we're about, what they're about"—this story had all the ingredients you like: it had personalities, it had conflict, it had winners, it had losers; it was the only thing to cover. And there was another thing the Republicans very much underestimated: the advantage you have in a negotiation as an executive branch versus a legislative branch. It wasn't a fair fight. We took advantage of it, though.

Then you had a process that Clinton managed in terms of who he listened to about what, and when he listened to them, how far. Morris was really pushing the envelope on framing this thing up, spending the money to be out there on this, pushing the system to raise the money, with Panetta and these guys—who were actually the negotiators with him—to not give away the store. Morris wanted a deal at virtually any cost and believed that the President couldn't lose if he got those. Panetta and these guys were thinking, Basically, we have them cornered, and if we let them out, shame on us.

The one thing I drove by earlier that I should mention: in the sequencing I mentioned earlier, a big event was in June of that year, on the run-up, again with virtually the entire West Wing against doing it and Morris, in particular, pushing hard for it. Clinton was going to New Hampshire and doing a handshake with Gingrich on reform, and then Clinton on his own was doing the ten-year balanced budget against the seven-year. That was universally opposed by the House Democrats in particular and most of the West Wing staff. Why bail your enemy out when he's hanging himself? Clinton's view was, "I'm the President; I have to be more than just playing politics. You can't be against something unless you're for something."

That was the place where Dick and his crowd—I'm oversimplifying—were an offshore operation. After the speech and the integration of the offices, the outside/inside was somewhat fragile but maintained equilibrium. When they took the handshake and then, subsequent to that, the balanced budget plan by Clinton, that really began to frame up the fall debate.

The main thing was that the President understood all the things that all these kinds of people could bring to him. He also understood the inherent limits of all these folks. He was pretty good at sorting out what you listen to, what you don't listen to, how much, and all that. He made clear to me that it was important to him that Dick was there. Harold was there; that was important to him. To the extent I could, in my capacity there, make that work better, he would like that, so I viewed that as my job. I was always loyal to Harold, but the President made it clear about Dick.

Dick would come to get my approval on things when I was with Clinton. I'd play it straight. If I didn't like something, I'd say it, but I was often trying to get things done on a tight deadline. We really were remarkable on that. We'd read the paper in the morning at 9:00, and at 10:00 have a meeting and decide to do a poll or do an ad. Then we could be in the field that afternoon and be on the phone that night at 11:00 with the results. Or, we could put up an ad or change a rotation. See something in the paper, recut the ad to include the quotes, get the script in front of the President, have him sign off on it. Get the ad rough-cut done. Today we'd do that on this phone: we could send in the ad and look at it on the phone. But in those days it was a little bit more complicated. It required moving in real time. I was often in a position to make those things go and work.

Pfiffner

Was that because Morris was there running it, and if you talked with him and said, "We want these words out," he could get it out immediately—as opposed to having to call somebody by phone?

Sosnik

No, it was more the other way. A decision might be made in theory to do something, but then we had to implement it. We'd do a poll, we'd do an ad, we'd do whatever. First it was that process of figuring out what we're doing. Then it would be going from the outside into the Oval for sign-off. We're not going to put an ad up until Clinton has seen it. Clinton might want to look at the poll. It was more getting through the system and then organizing a meeting.

I had input in some of this and facilitated some of this, but it became a practical challenge on a daily basis. You had the two principal guys in this, Harold and Dick, who really didn't get along with each other and didn't have much respect for each other. Dick was really driving the reelect and the campaign. This was message stuff, which is important, to say the least. But it was one element of a vast political enterprise, and the vast political enterprise was basically run by Harold, all of it. And a lot of the "all of it" was the shitty part, the legal part and the "Oh, yes, great ad," but you have to raise the money to get it in. Harold was responsible for all of that. Dick was more interested in spending it, and also Dick was getting all this money on top of it, so on top of all the history, it made for a complicated set of personal relationships.

I was thrust into the middle of all that. I worked for Harold, was loyal to Harold, but I go through my life trying to do my job. Also the President made it clear, Dick is important, so I used to be an intermediary between them. Dick called me "Luxembourg" because I was the neutral national state. [laughter] But anyway, Dick invited me to lunch at the Jefferson one day. He'd had similar conversations with Rahm and a couple of other people. He said to me, "We work well together; I want to talk about this. I think you're more capable than Harold, and you should be doing Harold's job. And if you sign up for my team, I think I can get it worked out. You can replace Harold."

I thanked him and told him that wasn't really the way I operated. I didn't necessarily agree with him, but even if I did, that's not my deal. He thanked me and said, "Loyalty is a nice thing," and so we went on our way. But I spent a lot of time shining my shoes and working with those guys.

Riley

Did the money-raising part of this become a prominent part of your portfolio?

Sosnik

Yes.

Riley

Because that really begins to dominate a lot of '96 overall, I think.

Sosnik

Into '95 and into '96. You know, it doesn't really matter how much sleep President Clinton gets the night before, he's always tired and cranky in the morning. It doesn't matter how little sleep he had the night before, he's always wide-awake at night. He really is the happy warrior in terms of campaigning. People like to vote for people who, when they're campaigning, look like they're enjoying themselves and not taking medicine. Clinton really liked politics and liked campaigning. He enjoyed being around these people and—believe it or not, even grading on the curve, this was closer to real people than most of the rest of the time in his life. He certainly didn't consider us in the West Wing "real people."

He had an amazing ability to work endlessly. I have almost never seen him ask people for money, but he will sure go to an event and give a speech, or go to a dinner and talk about what we're doing and why it's important. I spent one hell of a lot of time involved with that in '95 and '96 and testifying about it in '97 and '98.

Riley

Were there internal alarm bells about the fundraising aspects of it in '95 and '96? I could see two places where there could be some complaining. One is just the magnitude of the task before you. It might well be that someone quite conscientiously could say, "This is a monumental task ahead of us; it's going to take us away from doing other things that we might need to be doing." Then secondly, there's just the question about the optics of it from the outside. I'm trying to get your sense of it.

Sosnik

The third that you didn't mention is the legalities, so let's go through these. On the first one, no matter what you say about Clinton in the White House at that time, it's hard to say that we weren't working hard or taking care of business, so I think you take off the table the magnitude of the task (if the task in question was whether you could get it done based on the appetite that Morris and those guys had for spending). But we made it very clear to both Gore and Clinton at the outset, before we embarked on this, what it would require of them, of their time, to raise this money. They understood that and accepted what that would mean for their time and did it, in terms of putting the time in, so the first one was not an issue.

Let's do the third issue I raised, which was the legal, and then come to the optics. We were very careful and got legal rulings on all of these things. One could say we pushed the limits. We pushed to the line without crossing the line. Someone could argue we went to the line and crossed the line, but based on plenty of years of investigations and millions of dollars of looking into it, they didn't for the most part find us crossing the lines, and certainly not as an intentional thing. The lawyers told us what we could and could not do; we followed that.

Then there's the optics, the second point you raised. That's what politics is: you raise money. That's how it's done. At one point someone said the crime here probably wasn't what was illegal, but rather what was legal. But as a legal matter, it was legal. I've done all the time sitting with the lawyers and everybody else. We have the certificates to prove that it was not illegal because of all the investigations that went on. Harold was really saddled with the worst of all worlds here, because he not only had to deal with Dick and all that, but also, ultimately he was the person responsible to make sure the money got raised.

Harold was not a fundraiser by nature. It's not a labor of love to be raising all this money for a guy you don't like for something you don't really believe is working. Most people, I think, would agree with him on that. And if you look at the amount of money that was raised, and look at the number of instances that were raised as issues, it was a negligible amount of money. It's still money, but in its totality there turned out to be no "there" there—particularly when you look at what has been going on the last few years. But it was a big, time-intensive task, and it required a lot of fundraising and a lot of time at coffees and lunches and dinners, and he did it.

Riley

I promised you a break, so why don't we take a few minutes.

 

[BREAK]

Pfiffner

I'm interested in the transition from the shutdowns in '95, spring of '96, and the Lewinsky thing that seemed to start sometime during the shutdowns; the dynamics of the White House; and how you and the rest of the White House staff dealt with this. What was your understanding of the increasing problem it was causing leading from there up to the impeachment?

Sosnik

I don't know what the relationship was with the President and Lewinsky and all that, but outside of whatever sort of murmurings you might hear inside the West Wing, beyond a handful of people, Lewinsky was not really an issue inside the White House until a few weeks before it came out in the Washington Post. There were so many things flying around in so many different places that it's hard to nail down which rumor was what. The President was in some form apparently dealing with managing that during the campaign and after the campaign.

There was a pretty big period of time there between November '96 and January '98, so I'm not sure I'm the best person to talk to about that period of time when he was trying to manage that in whatever form it was. But the Lewinsky matter, as we used to call it, really became more of something inside the West Wing to deal with in January of '98.

Pfiffner

I'd like to get a little sense of that. That's a major crisis. Clinton came out of it, but it was tough during that period.

Sosnik

It was awful. I can't remember if it was Tuesday or Wednesday.

Riley

Just to clarify, by this point your position has changed again.

Sosnik

The election was over in '96, and they made me counselor to the President. It must have been the end of '96, the beginning of '97. I didn't want to be political director anymore. Bowles had confided in me, or wanted my advice or whatever, in the run-up, about whether he should become Chief of Staff, and I helped him with some of that. I had known his father from politics. I met and worked for his father in politics in North Carolina in 1972. I had spent a fair amount of time with Bowles throughout, and he wanted me to stay there, so they gave me the job of counselor to the President.

I started traveling with the President. I dealt with some of the communications and with three or four other people became part of that message, policy, politics, crises, whatever intersection within that mosh pit. Then in November of '98, I became senior advisor for policy, replacing Rahm Emanuel who had replaced George. I stayed there until I left.

So when Lewinsky came out, I was on the road. There was a Chief of Staff on every trip. If you're the Chief of Staff to the President and you go on the trip, you're the Chief of Staff. If the Chief of Staff to the President wasn't on the trip, someone from the Chief of Staff's office would go on the trip, and that would be either me or one of the Deputy Chiefs of Staff. When Podesta was the Chief of Staff, he didn't do many trips because he was running a lot of stuff back in the home office. Then it was Sylvia Mathews, who took some trips but not a lot of trips.

I became the traveling Chief of Staff on the road, and you can define that as largely or smally as you want. I tended to define it for what it was: I was running these trips. But if Bruce was on a trip and had a view on something, we were going to do it the way Bruce did. We would discuss it, but I would defer to him.

If I was the Chief of Staff on the trip and the National Security Advisor had a view on something, I generally would defer to the National Security Advisor. But there had to be a head to the trip, the person who would make decisions and report back to the home office and those kinds of things, so on these trips, increasingly, beyond doing that, my job would be to manage on the road what was burning back home and be the liaison to try to coordinate and manage things.

I described to you some extreme examples, but it happened throughout in less extreme examples: going overseas and being in different time zones and trying to contain news cycles at home and on the road in these parallel universes. There are a number of stories throughout the impeachment where things were happening on the Senate floor at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and we're in Ireland or Russia at 10 o'clock at night and reacting in real time. It's happening in the States at 3 o'clock, and we're dealing with the press at 11 o'clock. It was endless.

My role was to try to coordinate and hold that together. In addition, this was the President of the United States and we were going around the world and doing policy things. That wasn't what I was in charge of, but we had to connect all these things and it had to add up to something.

So in addition to the Lewinsky thing, really, in terms of the White House operation, throughout '97 toward the end, there were all these other related or unrelated issues the Republicans were putting out there that we had to deal with: Kathleen Willey, and so on. In early January, late in the afternoon of the Friday before the week when the story came out, I got a call from Time magazine that they had heard that Newsweek was running some story on him and Lewinsky. I said, "I don't know anything about that."

I went to see Podesta, and he said he'd gotten a call from Newsweek saying that they had heard that Time was running it. We've been at this a long time. It's like walking through a house of mirrors; we can't tell what's real.

So we sat around on Saturday—you know we work all the time. Saturday is great: you wear different clothes than Friday, but that's the only difference. We saw the early stuff coming out; things seemed to be kind of OK. We're trying to figure it out: something was going on; it wasn't going on. It wasn't in there, or is it in there? Then [Matthew] Drudge, this and that—we couldn't get our arms around it.

We kept hearing this buzz, and it kept getting louder, but we never could sort through what was real and not real. We were picking up different pieces. As I was trying to describe to you earlier, there was rhyme and reason to our roaming around the West Wing. Five or six or eight of us were going to meetings together all day dealing with this stuff; we always did.

Riley

The lawyers by that point presumably knew that something was going on because of the questions they asked the President in his deposition, I guess in December.

Sosnik

Right, yes. I'm trying to keep all the depositions straight. I think this was the deposition that caused him to cancel the dinner he was going to have that night.

Riley

That's correct.

Sosnik

I think Bruce came back with him. I don't know if I was with him that weekend or that Monday. What I know now is what I've read. Unlike a lot of the stuff I'm telling you, what I'm telling you now I know from either secondhand conversations or what I read. Bennett made a big deal of saying he didn't understand any of that. You're in the land of not quite knowing what's going on, no matter who or where you are. I think he knew—or at least was puzzled by—a series of what appeared to be extraneous questions in his deposition.

He had told me after the deposition that it went fine. There were a few things that didn't make sense, but it was no big deal.

Riley

So there wasn't really an alarm sounded by the legal team that was being communicated to you.

Sosnik

The problem is you imply that there's a mechanical device that's an alarm that makes a certain noise. But you're really dealing with sometimes it's loud, sometimes it purrs—there's a constant background noise of alarms going off, and you don't know if they're real or not real.

Riley

That's very helpful, because I think there's a tendency on the outside to oversimplify this. What you're saying is that having lived through five or six years of all kinds of chaos and innuendo, when one other innuendo pops up, your sense is, "What else is new?"

Sosnik

You know they're out there dumping all this crap. There's always denial all across the board; there are always little twists that come up that you didn't expect. When you're dealing with this stuff, you just don't know what's really going on; it's just not that simple. But we'd been at it a while, and we worked well together. I talk to Time; he talks to Newsweek. We're always coordinating, so we'll say to McCurry, "We got these calls, poke around; if you hear this—"

So the story comes out. In the old days, if you were going down the driveway to the diplomatic entrance behind what used to be the swimming pool (which is now the press room) and you look up into the private Residence of the President, the second-floor corner is the kitchen, and the one over is the President's bedroom. There's an old story of Nancy Reagan looking out the window one day and seeing the press sunbathing in the yard, so they put up this little fence so you can't sunbathe in the yard. They try to have some decorum, but things had gotten kind of ratty out there in the old yard in terms of the press taking it over. They had set-ups, and the grass was all gone. Anyway, there was a land rush that day of the press all going out to do stand-ups.

The evening news was out there doing Live from Washington; Tom Brokaw in the yard. It almost became the deathwatch. We had chaos that day, everywhere. I remember saying to someone walking through the West Wing, "This must be what it was like running around Stasi [East German Secret Police] the week after the [Berlin] Wall fell." Everyone was running around in the East German Ministry offices; it was just chaos. Nobody knew what to do. I remember when I saw the President that morning, his eyes were swollen. He has allergies, and also he doesn't sleep a lot. His eyes were puffy. He was icing his eyes down.

We were in there trying to figure out what we were going to do that day. He said, "You know, this isn't the way it appears; there's a lot more to it. It's more complicated." We were kind of shutting it down, saying we don't want to talk about this, so as I said earlier, until the end of the week, we really didn't have much ballast.

We made a decision—which I think was a mistake—to put him out on some interviews. We had previously committed to some interviews on Thursday, and we decided to stick with them, which was probably in hindsight a mistake. He did remarkably well, given the circumstances. We played back the tapes later, and most of what he said there wasn't ever used. It was the following Monday's "I never had sex with that woman" that was played back.

But we kept up with his interviews. We did the prebriefs with him. I sat in with him in the Roosevelt Room. I think he did McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, maybe Roll Call with Mara Liasson. He did a couple of interviews that day. We had settled down by Friday. We figured out the lawyers would be in charge. We met on Saturday to set the rules of the road: this is how we're going to operate. We settled some things down and agreed to do the Monday event. I believe that over the weekend Harry Thomason had gotten with him and put up a script. What happened on that Monday was he forgot her name. When he said ,"that woman," he just couldn't remember her name for some reason.

Riley

You said that a decision was made that the lawyers were going to be in control. You mentioned that earlier today and just reiterated it. Do you remember any of the discussions that led up to making that decision?

Sosnik

Speaking as a political guy, it was the right decision. We had to make real decisions in real time. Bowles was folded up in terms of not engaging on this. Every action has a consequence, and when political guys make a smart political decision, it might not turn out to be the right legal decision. My recollection was that Bowles convened a meeting in his office—I believe it was that Friday—where he basically set the rules of the road. Chuck was there. There was some tension between the lawyers and the political guys (it's sort of natural), but the people liked each other and got along well.

The political guys resented some things like the August speech to the country before he went on vacation. I'm jumping ahead, but he finished the deposition that day at 4 o'clock. He started with Starr at 1 o'clock. We have these boxes in our offices that show POTUS [President of the United States] in Oval, POTUS in hallway, POTUS and Vice and all that. We were in Chuck's office, 1:20, 1:15, and it said "POTUS in infirmary." That's not what we expected.

I went over to the infirmary. The infirmary was next to the Map Room where he was doing the interview, and he was meeting with his lawyers. That's all it was. I went in there and said, "What's happening?" They said, "We're just in here figuring this out. What are you doing here?" I said, "The box said 'Infirmary.'"

I went back up. Then we decided not to make a decision about whether to put him out that night until after the deposition. It was a big mistake to put him out that night, as it turned out. It was our mistake. We felt a lot of pressure from reporters, but we should have backed—he was in no position—can you imagine, after everything he's been through that day?

I'm filling in the story to make a point, but to finish. I told you that real-life example, how do you deal with a Sam Donaldson? We knew that as long as McCurry and I could talk by 6:29—or 6:25, rather—he was going to have the network guys in his office and through one phone call from me to him relaying a decision, he could then say to them, "The President is speaking tonight," or "The President is not speaking tonight." They step out in the yard and can announce to the country. So we knew we had a 6:25 deadline.

I went over there a little after 6:00, and he was in the infirmary; they were finished talking with the lawyers. I said, "What do you all want to do here? How'd it go?" I pulled the lawyers aside. He was over here. They said he did well. I said to him, "What do you want to do?" He said, "I don't know, I can go out, not go out. What do you all want me to do?" I said, "Our consensus view is it's up to you. If you're not up to it and don't want to go out, you shouldn't, but if you are up to it and can go out, we think you should. We'd prefer that." So he said, "I'll go out."

The lawyers said at 6:30, "We're going to go up with him for a few minutes and debrief the testimony; then you guys come up and we'll work on the script a little bit." I think he was going out at 8:00 or 9:00; I can't remember which.

Riley

By this time, do you know what the content of the testimony is?

Sosnik

We were briefed that afternoon. I have to think back. There were a couple of dumps we got, though, that were shocking to us, including Chuck. I have to remember which dump that was. Maybe it was the Starr report? Chuck was shaking with me after he had not known.

Riley

Physically?

Sosnik

Yes. He was a cool-as-they-come guy, a great guy. The lawyers went up at 6:30 with the President, and we're over in Chuck's office waiting for our call. But we never got called. I think Begala went over there about ten after 7:00 or something, and Rahm and I went over. This was a place where we had friction with the lawyers. They basically were holding him and shaping the speech. We went over there and fought it out, what the text would be, and it was not acceptable.

Pfiffner

What was the perspective that you wanted him to project as opposed to what the lawyers wanted him to say?

Sosnik

The lawyers across the board had legal protection, what they didn't want him to say or did want him to say. Then there were judgment calls about what to say or not say, and that becomes less legal and more political and more judgmental. Most of the lawyers—not all, but there was what I used to call the "Hezbollah wing" of the Clintonistas: "Show no mercy, show no weakness." Then there were the political guys, including me, who thought this was a time for contrition and to try and move on.

What happened at the end of the day was a compromise of contrition on the front and Hezbollah on the back, and so the press took Hezbollah. That's what they reported on. I've gotten off track here. The main point was that we largely had very good personal relationships between the political and the legal guys. The political guys understood that this was first and foremost a legal matter. But there were inherent tensions.

There were leaks, but ultimately most of us in this combined group knew who was doing it and who wasn't, so there was pretty much trust among us. There were some authorized unauthorized leaks. We always felt they didn't tell us enough, but by and large it worked pretty well.

We sent the lawyers out one Sunday. The political guys said the lawyers should go out; it was a terrible mistake and they didn't do well. It was really not their fault: it was our fault for putting them out there in a political setting. They were lawyers. But overall we worked well together.

I have to say, just as a broader proposition, that if any of you have had it in your life, then you've seen it, and if you haven't had it in your life, you may at some point. When you're in tense, stressful, pressurized environments, you really learn about people; you see the best and the worst of people come out. I've seen plenty of that in six years.

Riley

Do you care to comment on individual cases? I'll not ask you unless you want to volunteer the worst, but were there people you felt that you saw the best of?

Sosnik

I'll generalize maybe to give you a few positive examples. You saw who were real fighters, and you saw people who were out there for self-aggrandizement. You saw people who were leaking, and other than maybe establishing their own importance, you couldn't understand why they were doing it. Maybe people who were under the pressure would just sort of wilt. Then there was that roaming group of advisors who bounced around from meeting to meeting in this concentric part of that circle. You have a bonding experience. You have it in wartime—I would imagine it's the most extreme bonding experience you can have. If you're not in war, political campaigns or these kinds of fights are the next closest thing, and you do get a bonding experience and respect for people, their durability. They get up every day and keep up the fight.

In the core group of people who stayed at it, some friendships developed and some friendships probably fell off because of it. But the professional relationship was pretty impressive.

Pfiffner

Was the White House active in terms of the censure possibility as opposed to the impeachment vote in the House?

Sosnik

There was a lot of back-channeling going on for a long time by a lot of people. This was like the problems for Howard Paster in year one in terms of everybody being in charge of congressional relations. There were a lot of people in charge of back-channel relationships. To some extent, it was whatever worked worked, and whatever didn't work didn't work. But there were a group of institutionalists who just thought it was a bad thing for the Senate, in particular, and for the country. Some of the older Republicans—I think Dole wrote all this at some point.

Pfiffner

Thought that impeachment was the wrong thing?

Sosnik

Yes. But for most people outside the White House, it wasn't "impeachment or nothing"; it was "impeachment or something," and the process of coming up with an acceptable "something" involved lots of back channels and trying to bring in [Gerald] Ford and all that. Chuck Ruff (obviously someone you're not going to talk to now [1939-2000]) was an important part of some of these back channels. There were a lot of efforts at different points. There were more efforts starting in September, after the report was dropped on the Hill, when the House started catching momentum in October.

They had the midterm elections in early November, and when the incumbent party picks up seats in the middle of all this, it must say something. Then there were some efforts to try to seal the deal in November with some of these guys. They picked it back up in part around that Thanksgiving period when they were able to find something—in this case, it was our response, or lack of response, to the questions. Then there were efforts by a bunch of the Senate types to try to either not get it to the Senate or get it into some other form before it got to the Senate.

Then you get into January, when it was moving to the Senate. This thing moved around a lot, but there were a lot of efforts made to get Republicans to help come up with a solution. Some of the older Republicans in the Senate didn't want this to come over there.

Pfiffner

It sounds like DeLay played a crucial role in making that happen for them.

Sosnik

Yes, you're right. Both Houses are run by the extreme wings of the party, and the political imperative of satisfying the base was such that it kept these guys alive.

I was in Seattle a few months ago, and I ended up at a dinner with [James] Rogan. I can't remember if he sent Clinton a book or Clinton sent him a book, but he's rather circumspect about the whole thing now. I think Preston Gates is the law firm he's with.

A lot of the managers had a rough time—and the Senate guys. There's this whole Senate/House thing. It's still there, even though it's less, as I said earlier. They're really looking down at these guys. We had problems because the articles got through, but the politics in that committee: there were all these guys forcing their way into the discussion. A lot of them are really awful. The Senate is looking down, saying, "My God, this thing is coming over to us. Who needs it?"

Riley

In some sectors there's a kind of congealed conventional wisdom that if the President had "come clean" in January when this first broke, there would have been a storm of activity, but it would have purged the poison out of the body politic and things would have been smooth. Do you believe that?

Sosnik

I don't believe that, and I don't believe he believes that.

Riley

Why is that?

Sosnik

Because there was such a poisonous, mob-like atmosphere. All you had to do was take a walk down the North Lawn of the White House once this thing got some momentum: the red meat, the lust. The political environment was such that the Republicans were out to destroy him. Among the Clintonistas, I'm one of the least conspiratorial, but I think in that context that they were trying to destroy him with nothing, and he armed them with something. The machinery that was in place and the press institutions that were there—Jonathan Turley, what a joke. He's a TV personality now, ten years later. A whole generation of people made a career of this; this was bigger than OJ [Orenthal James Simpson].

It had momentum of its own. I don't think an apology would have fed the beast. If you look at what they did later on with what they had, you can imagine what they would have done with some admission of something. Why would the Republican Congress—DeLay, and Gingrich at that point—with the midterm election coming up, a Presidential election coming up—why would they have shown any—? Other than not wanting to empower Gore and making it harder to beat him as President, what restraint would be on them to not get their pound of flesh? It's counterintuitive.

Riley

Personally, I agree with you, but I've heard this from other sectors. Jim, you were living in D.C. at the time, and I was. There was about a two-week window of time when it was dicey that this President was going to—

Sosnik

You're right, and we were concerned. We're back to this cell of six or eight of us. We were concerned about staff resignations, particularly women. We informally took some temperatures to see where we were in keeping the Cabinet members. We didn't settle down until some time in February. This is something you ought to talk to Penn about. We figured out through the polling at some point that the life jacket we needed to wear to stay afloat was that we could never let the American public think that the President's problems and his personal life were affecting his ability to be President.

At some point, if his problem became their problem because it affected his ability to serve on their behalf, that could bring us down. We feared people would say, "Life's not fair, yes, but it's a full-time job, and we need somebody who's going to focus on it." That was our third rail. It gave us some ballast going forward. Whatever the issue du jour or the leak du jour was, it would be responded to with an architecture of "middle of a judiciary process," "facts will speak for themselves," "you'll see at the end; he'll be exonerated," "we can't comment on that"—make the pivot and talk about what we're focusing on. That became our modus operandi going forward. The press was covering Clinton then like they were going to the stock car race and waiting for an accident.

Cable would take his education speeches live, which they never would do before. We would let people know if we were going to speak on the matter of the day as a topper or as an insert. We needed to let them know. We would give them a heads-up. We went through a period where the President needed to apologize several times before he got it right in their mind; so we wondered whether he might give another apology. There was this whole period when we got a lot of coverage on substance, because they were there waiting to see if there was going to be a car wreck.

The other thing I said to the President—and I don't think I was the only person to think or say it—I remember early on telling him that the Democrats never got rid of Nixon, the Republicans did. At the end of the day, we can handle the Republicans, but we can't handle the Democrats in terms of defection. That became another secondary rule of the road: to try to keep all of them in line and close.

I made an effort on the road. Often we would have programs before the President spoke. Now, I'm sure this White House, as an example, would not have a nine-person program with the President sitting there. There might be a preprogram with four or five of them and then a couple of people. The President would come out and have a really enthusiastic crowd. Then by the time everyone sits down and you get to the ninth speaker (the President), the crowd is exhausted, they're bored, some have already left. But I thought it was always important to never have him isolated. I'd much rather have a long program with people standing with him. The rally we had after the vote was part of that viewpoint.

But what happened was we then got into a zone that I called, "putting it on the credit card." After we got our ballast, after we figured out what we needed to do—in March, April, whatever—we were in a zone where we had a way to get out of whatever the question of the day was: "pending legal matter, exonerated, time will tell." This is what we focused on. We had a pretty damn good run there for quite a while, but we were putting it on the credit card in the sense that we hadn't gone to the end where we had to deal with the "pending legal outcome" part of the equation.

We had a fairly strong middle of '98 in the middle of all this, because we had figured out how to operate in this environment. Then, when you look at the totality of it, the two periods of time when we were in the most danger of losing it were in the three-week/month period in January after it came out, and in the August period after he gave the speech. I was with them on that vacation; I was the Chief of Staff on that trip to the Vineyard [Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts]. That was a very difficult time in terms of the Democrats barely staying with him and everything we had to do to keep them in line.

Riley

I'm afraid we're going to have say goodbye to Jim.

[BREAK]

Riley

You indicated that you saw the President the following day when he was applying the ice packs. You said that he said that things were more complicated than they appeared, but you didn't go into a lot of details.

Sosnik

What he said was, "It's not what it appears. It's more complicated than what it appears; it's a little more complicated, but it's not what it appears. When it all comes out, you'll see."

Riley

Did you have subsequent conversations with him about it, or does it become a legal problem for you if you do?

Sosnik

I was physically around him probably as much or more than anybody besides his family for the next year and a half, and several times he would broach it. But either he would stop or I would stop him. I didn't get into it with him nor did he with me. There certainly were legal restrictions that we were all aware of, but in addition I think he got a sense from me that I wasn't interested in pushing the line.

Riley

When did you conclude that what he ultimately confessed had happened, had in fact happened?

Sosnik

If you get away from what any specific particular was and put them in zones of what they were (as I said, in this land where you're not quite sure what's what), I had concluded fairly early on that there was some "there" there. I assumed it was more than he had indicated. If I put myself in his shoes, I probably would have handled myself similarly. But I felt pretty certain pretty early on that while what he had done was a mistake, I had no reason to think throughout this—including the conclusion of it all—that it merited the reaction of his political opponents, so I felt quite comfortable in defending him and working for him. I didn't feel any need for him to bare his soul to me or to apologize to me.

Riley

You mentioned that you had informally but in an organized way taken the pulse of people around to make sure you didn't have problems cropping up with the staff. Is there anything more you can tell us about that? Was that something that Erskine was riding herd on?

Sosnik

No it was something that John and I and a few others were. It almost relates to your question earlier about the conventional wisdom in official Washington—whatever that means—if he had—

Riley

Bob Woodward said it.

Sosnik

So that's official Washington: "If he had just come clean." I think they were looking to find a couple of staff people, preferably women, who could be martyrs and throw their White House security tag on the North Lawn in disgust and storm out the gates and say, "I'm never coming back." They would have made that person into a martyr, whether it was a senior White House staffer or a member of the Cabinet, particularly if they were female.

If you think sequentially, all this stuff is going on. The first thing you do is try to figure out what to do, what's going on, as you try to make an assessment of how everybody's doing. Then clearly you ought to be, in a very rational way, on top of whatever, and say, "This seems like a place where I would definitely want to check on our female employees and staffers and Cabinet and take their temperatures as a leading indicator of how we're doing." So there was a process of informally dividing them up and checking to see how we're doing.

Riley

Did you get good feedback from them?

Sosnik

Yes, for the most part. Women were as rattled as the men and vice versa. I don't remember a member of the Cabinet or the staff who was on the ledge and we had to talk them down. I don't remember that ever happening once. It was not just a one-shot deal. It was something somebody had to keep monitoring.

It was very similar in September with several of the Democrats in the House and the Senate. There were a number of Democratic Senators we were worried might flip on us.

Martin

Did you have any heads-up before Lieberman made his speech on the Senate floor?

Sosnik

Yes, we did. In fact, I alluded to that earlier. We had a heads-up. I don't recall whether we were en route or had landed, but at one point he was prepared to go out on the floor when we were in Russia. I think he was talked back on that. We were in the Kremlin, actually.

I think he felt more comfortable doing that when we were in Ireland. I remember when we were in the Kremlin, we did these prebriefs with the chandeliers. I assume the entire Kremlin is wired for sound. We did the prebrief with the President before he went out, and a joint press conference with [Boris] Yeltsin. There were three questions. I don't remember if it was three and three, but the President got three questions. A reporter from the Times or Reuters may have been the one who asked the second one, but of the three, two were about either Lieberman or Lewinsky; they were scandal-related. I remember how incensed the President was and expressed it to the press about their obsession with this.

You can check the records, but my recollection is that we went from there to Ireland. In fact, if I have my timing right, he was staying at Ambassador [Jean] Kennedy Smith's house outside of town. The Clintons were out there. I was in town. I believe it was while they were there that I had to go out to let him know what was going on. You need to check that. I definitely went out to the Smiths' house to let him know what had happened. It was on that trip.

Martin

You mentioned earlier that you thought the key thing was keeping the Democrats in line. Other than Lieberman, who was giving you trouble?

Sosnik

Well, there were a number of Senators for a variety of reasons. Start with the Gores; I think they were rattled by it on a lot of different levels. Senator [Robert] Byrd, Senator [Daniel] Graham from Florida. Congressman Gephardt was really—the reports we got. I don't know if it was the guys who were going to take a walk on us, or the guys who were just the most affected by it, but however it came down, those were three: Lieberman—Senator [Dianne] Feinstein I know we had—[Harry] Reid. Those were some off the top of the deck.

Martin

Not slouches—significant players.

Sosnik

That's the whole point. But a slouch could probably be propped up into a midlevel slouch, but these were people who were well regarded.

Martin

I'm sure you have to be very careful at this point. You can't necessarily negotiate in the same way you would normally negotiate with a Member of Congress over a bill or something like that.

Sosnik

No, it's the same conversation I had with you earlier. We had the names, so we would figure out who was going to make the call. Take their temperature. It wasn't negotiating to get them to vote a certain way; it was either to take their temperature or to see if they could at least take a few days to let calmer heads prevail—or however you want to characterize it. And there were a handful of Senators—Senator [Robert] Torricelli, Senator Dodd—who were calling the President to see how he was doing. A number of Senators wouldn't return his call.

He was up in the Friedman Compound, a large attractive piece of land on the Vineyard with a relatively small main house. There was a cabin right down the hill from there. I don't know if it was a guest cabin or what, but in effect it served as the President's office. He spent a lot of time in those couple of weeks on vacation reaching out to Members. We had a hard time getting a lot of them to return his calls.

Martin

Did you have any back channels to people like Henry Hyde during the House impeachment side?

Sosnik

Yes, and Hyde was sending mixed—My recollection was that Ruff was OK about Hyde early on in the process, having known him as a reasonable guy, sending reasonable signals. Hyde kept moving. Hyde would come out of every caucus in a different place than he came in. Then he coughed up his 45-year-old "youthful indiscretion." (I checked with my wife, and it would not qualify in her house as a youthful indiscretion.)

He was somebody who turned out not to be where we thought he was, taking a guy at face value based on what he said and what he did.

Riley

I want to go back. I know we keep weaving back and forth, but that's fine. In January, you have a State of the Union message coming up. Was that a week after—

Sosnik

Ten days.

Riley

Was there ever any serious consideration given to addressing the problem in the State of the Union message?

Sosnik

There may have been a five-minute conversation about whether to give the speech, but we quickly got to the point of "Of course we're giving the speech." Then there was maybe a seven-minute conversation about whether to bring it up. That was pretty quickly dismissed. There were several points of real concern about going somewhere and getting the kind of reaction we were going to get.

Three come to mind: one was that speech. Two, we had a pattern—part of an organizing pattern (if we don't get to it today in terms of how the White House worked, we ought to talk about it tomorrow). We would always use the State of the Union as one of the building blocks for the year, the other being the budget. Before the State of the Union, we would leak the substance of the speech to dominate the month and frame the speech. Then we would always go out in the country afterward to parts of America and basically give the same speech locally and talk about how it ties into people's lives.

So there were three moments in particular that we, or I, had a real concern about the reaction of people. One was the speech that night—not even so much the television audience; we'll just see where we come out—but the Members in the hall. Being in the back, I was with him going up. I don't think I rode in the car with him. I think I was in the car behind him, but I was with him in the back before he gave the speech.

One was the reaction in the hall. Two was the next day when we went out to America, and then the third was when we left the island in August after the vacation and went to Worcester. We were concerned about leaving the island and going out for the first time and the kind of reaction we'd get in America.

Obviously where we went had to be strategic. But that night, on the run-up to the speech, probably it was therapeutic for him to be focused on the substance and not have to deal with this other stuff. It's a ritual: you drive up to the Capitol, you get out of the car; you are greeted by the leaders and the Sergeant at Arms or whatever, and they walk you to the hallway. All these people are in the halls. You go into a room, and the official leaders are all there. One by one, you mingle: How are you doing? Then they leave, and he works on the speech for ten minutes, and then he goes out and gives it. Both parties came back there. They didn't overdo it in their warmth and enthusiasm, but they were quite polite and respectful and proper. That helped a little bit. There were some friendly people in there as well.

Then he just went in there and plowed on that speech. I think we had focus groups, dial groups, that night or something hooked up to test reactions of people watching the speech as well as the post-election.

Martin

Dial groups meaning that they had a dial they moved based on their response to—

Sosnik

Yes. We'd taken the issue out of play for a moment, and just dealing with him as President and what he was talking about, you could clearly see that we could keep connected.

Riley

I've thought, in my own analysis, this President had some episodes of bad luck in his administration. I thought it was a wonderful piece of good luck that this State of the Union message was scheduled right on the heels of these revelations. It didn't have to be that way. It could have been crushing for many people. But the fact was he had a venue that allowed him to become Presidential again in the nation's eyes. Is there another venue that would allow you to do that?

Sosnik

That's probably true, although my recollection was we didn't really turn things around right away after that. But maybe it helped stop some of the bleeding. I don't know; I'd have to look back at some timelines or something to be able to—There was a place where we did settle it down, but it took a while. He did pull it off.

Riley

One of the most remarkable things about this President is his resilience and his ability to take a punch and keep going. Could you help us understand the personal reserves that he draws on that allow him to be this way? What is it about this man, his almost superhuman ability to—? I think he once said to Newt Gingrich, "I'm the toy clown you had as a kid; you punch me and I pop right back up."

Sosnik

Slightly off the point, but guys like me who work for those guys with political talent—we called him the Secretariat [a champion thoroughbred racehorse] of our generation. He had it all: the politics, the policy, the people skills, the hard work—he was really amazing. He had a loving mother. He had breaks along the way where people like teachers and others showed an interest in and helped him, but I think at the end of the day he grew up, accurately, with a mindset that he was on his own. He could only count on himself to get ahead and stay ahead. That's what it was going to take, and that's all he knew. He had ambition and drive to do better, and he may have some wealth now. I think he's glad to not worry about money; he can pay off the lawyers and all. But he never really cared about money. He could have made billions of dollars probably if that had been all he cared about, but he wasn't motivated by that.

At the end of the day, that's all he knew in terms of his self-image and his background, but also he had real ambition. I suspect that the more you go through life and understand and see that resilience, the more it gives you something for the next time it happens. When you think about the President going through whatever he's gone through, challenges-wise in his life, whatever mountain he climbed or had the resilience to climb, it just made the next one that much easier. He kept pushing and pushing and pushing.

Probably at some point he met his match here, and he was able to still climb it. It's a remarkable achievement to watch how he's been able to do that. There are several major elements like that in the nine years he was in this play, from the New Hampshire primary in '92 until third place in June '92 to December of '94 to the Lewinsky thing. He had Marc Rich. He's had a number of episodes that most people would fold up on. He picked himself up.

I'll tell you one quick story that probably relates to it. We were in the Oval one time, and somebody he thought was a friend disappointed him. I said to him, "Your problem is you don't know who your friends are. All you've been is a Governor and a President, and everybody is going to be nice to you." He got quite angry at me and said, "How dare you say that? I lost for Governor in 1980. I found out better than anybody who my friends were when I was out as Governor. I resent your saying that to me." It was right, by the way. I think he learned a lot in that experience, too, coming back after being defeated for Governor in 1980.

So some people get better from those experiences or fold up; some people learn from them. He probably learned and grew from each of them.

Riley

One of the places you would naturally look to for support would be the family, but that's something that by the very nature of the issue in '98 was also at risk. Were you picking up anything from him about what he was experiencing at home?

Sosnik

I was. Only briefly: I'm not going to get into this. It's correct to say that that's the best place to go for support, and it's accurate to say that in these unique circumstances around this problem that was one place, for quite a while, that was not going to be a source of support for him. That was true, and the President has said this publicly, so I don't have any problem saying it here. I think he said one of the low points for him in the mistakes he made was having his daughter and her friends at Stanford able to go on the Internet and read the Starr report. That was something he particularly regretted in terms of the impact on his family.

He said other things about his wife on the record as well. He was quite isolated for quite a while.

Riley

You went with him on vacation, and you mentioned that he spent some time working the phones trying to touch base with Members of the Senate. I would also assume that that is a period where he's trying to patch things up with his family?

Sosnik

I think that was a time when he's not really in control of that with his family. That was a point in his life where he had to basically sit back and wait for them to be ready to be in that process. I don't know that it happened up there, but it was really out of his control. But I think it's fair to say that they worked through that.

Martin

You talked about a couple of instances where you guys thought you were in pretty serious trouble, where things could go either way. You omitted Bob Livingston's resignation and I was curious about how you in the White House read that.

Sosnik

Have you had Lockhart yet?

Riley

Yes.

Sosnik

That was an interesting day at work. Lockhart was at Aspen in politics last year and did a comedy thing where he used this line. Lockhart, Podesta, and I were together. At the end of that day I remember him saying to us, "You know, other than getting impeached, I think we had a pretty good day today." It was one of Lockhart's kickers at an Aspen comedy festival.

We were in the Chief of Staff's office that morning, getting ready for the vote that afternoon; it was at noon, actually. We had made a decision that morning about doing the rally that afternoon in the yard. The TV was on but the sound was off. We see Livingston on television announcing his resignation. Normally that would be enough to fill a day up, but after we watched that for about eight minutes, we had to go back to work.

Then Lockhart came in and said he was very concerned, and we needed to really move quickly. I hadn't thought about it, but he was totally right. He was concerned that there was going to be a move afoot to say, "Livingston stood aside for the good of the country. We should call on the President to stand aside for the good of the country. We need to move on. We need to heal. We have problems." Lockhart was pushing us to quickly head off that happening, because it was a real danger. He was right, and we did.

Actually I would not, on the surface, have thought there was any danger there, except they were imploding. But I think he was right, and we did set this thing up to make it about Livingston and keep it in that sandbox.

Martin

What was the speculation on Capitol Hill about what had set that up? Did people think Tom DeLay had manipulated things? Were there any back channels to you filling in the gaps what had happened in that story?

Sosnik

I can't speak for everybody and every place and everything in our sprawling operation, so I have no way of knowing who was doing what with whom about what. I know it was news to me. It wasn't news to me about Livingston messing around and flirting around and all that. But it was news to me that it had hit a point of critical mass, such that he felt compelled to resign. I assume he resigned not so much for what was out, but for what was coming: they'd be able to link girlfriends, lobbyists, legislation, and all the rest of it.

In terms of how it popped out there, I don't know. My recollection was—I don't know if it was in the public or not—that Larry Flynt was running around and trying to put some stuff out. For me—and I think for the guys I was hanging around with—it was news to us. But I can't say it was news to everybody.

Riley

I'm not sure we ever completely finished the question about the apology speech. You said you felt that it didn't go over well. Did we ever hear about the internal loop of feedback and the external loop and then how you decided to go about demonstrating more contrition?

Sosnik

The speech itself. We had a meeting up in the sunroom on the very top floor of the White House Residence. The First Lady was there, the lawyers were there, political guys were there, Carville was there. We went back and forth on what he would say or not say. Then Rahm and I went down with him when he was with the barber down there, getting made up, going through stuff. They took a speech we didn't like and watered it down, and it turned out to give everybody what they wanted.

We went up to the sunroom and watched him give the speech and then watched the commentary following it. Of course, they killed him in the commentary. He came up and we went back there and gave him the readout of the coverage.

Riley

You gave him the readout, meaning—?

Sosnik

"How did it go?" "Well, Mr. President, they killed you on the reaction on TV."

Riley

But you weren't doing dial groups or anything like that?

Sosnik

I don't remember, but I don't think we did. I'm not 100 percent sure. I think we went into the field shortly thereafter, though. We gave him the word that it didn't go too well. I think his reaction was, "That's Washington."

We had to leave the White House the next day, so we had that walk to the helicopter. Many times when the President goes to the helicopter, he just leaves and goes to the helicopter. There are occasions where we will discuss the walk and setup—put somebody with him. One time the press thought McCurry was in the doghouse, so we would have McCurry walk with him. But that was one of those where we talked about the need to think about what we were going to do here, and we decided that this was something we weren't going to manage.

They did the walk, and I think Chelsea [Clinton] grabbed his hands and took him out, and I think he had Buddy with him. Mike and I flew up with him in the helicopter to Andrews, and then we took a small plane up to the Vineyard. It was a pretty quiet plane, a pretty quiet trip. We got up there and they did a rope line, and then they went to the house. We all went to the house. I stayed right off the compound there. We sat there for a few days and realized that we probably hadn't gotten all our business done.

Riley

By this time you're getting polls?

Sosnik

Yes, and we're getting killed everywhere. All our parents are angry at us.

Riley

That's a poll not even Dick Morris can match.

Sosnik

He couldn't clean that one up, so we went through our contrition phase for a while. We had some false starts. Then we got on an apology watch. The press was looking for take three, take four. I remember at one point saying to him, "Here's what we're going to do now. We have to clean this thing up. I don't know how you want to do it; I don't know when you want to do it, but my advice is you just do it when you damn well please. That way no one can leak you, because no one's going to know."

The Vineyard has a long history of a large and vibrant African American community that has gone there for years on vacation. We went to a church there that was primarily an African American church. I think that was the apology he gave that no one knew was coming, and it was well received. I think that was the first time we finally got over that hump.

Then when we came back, we did the trip to Worcester, which went well. We had an awkward moment in the car ride, the motorcade in; we went by a dry cleaner's and the sign on it said, "If you'd sent the blue dress here, we would have gotten the stain out." That was on their sign, and the press noticed, but the President was well received. We came back to the island and thought that was good.

Then we came back, and he basically had to meet with his Cabinet. I don't remember the order, but in the course of about two days he met in the Yellow Oval upstairs with the Cabinet, then we had the House leaders, a large group from the House, and separately a large group from the Senate. He tried to explain himself and let people get out whatever they needed to get out—this was 60 days before an election—and try to move on.

Riley

There was a prayer breakfast somewhere.

Sosnik

There was a prayer breakfast. That was a preassigned thing where he gave a pretty full-throated assessment of things. He ended up having sessions with a couple of these ministers for about a year. I think both of them were there; one of them introduced him.

Riley

I think we've abused your good nature today. Why don't we call it quits? We covered a lot of territory. It will give us a chance to consolidate our thinking and start over again tomorrow. We'll meet back here at 9 o'clock and run until noon and then turn you back over to your family. It's been extremely productive. You've been very cooperative. Thanks.

Martin

I would like to double-back tomorrow to the '96 campaign. I think we skipped that.

Riley

And there are the long-term-planning aspects, which were a core part of your portfolio that you've mentioned two or three times—how you set a year up, what the message is.

Sosnik

We'll drill down more on how we drove our message each day. We had a process.

Riley

All right, that's it.

April 14, 2006

Riley

Doug, you're a hearts player. You were one of the hearts players?

Sosnik

I am.

Riley

Did you play hearts before you got to the White House?

Sosnik

Yes. I didn't play golf before I got to the White House; I didn't play golf after I left the White House or while I was in the White House, but I played a lot of cards growing up, so that was an easy, natural fit for me with the President.

Riley

Can you tell us about what the card games were like? Did you play only when you were traveling?

Sosnik

Several of us who worked with the President were at dinner the other night. The traveling aide left a deck of cards on the table at the restaurant just in case we wanted to play. We didn't play. But we played a lot, countless hours. It was interesting. The President really enjoyed it, and he was quite competitive. We often played hearts on Air Force One. Normally there would be a movie on while we were playing hearts, and the President would be doing a crossword puzzle and he might be eating and telling a story. He was a pretty good multitasker.

I think it was therapeutic for him to be able to relax, and we didn't talk business except when we needed to. If we played for long hours on long flights, there would be chunks of time when I might say, "Mr. President, I know you're relaxing, but there are several things we need to deal with before tomorrow." I was sort of waving the flag that we were talking about work. We would try to confine it in that little window. But for the most part, we didn't talk about work that much on the plane. It was really a way for him to wind down.

One of the things I think people really liked—not only the staff, who obviously were there to play with him a lot, but guests, in particular on Air Force One—was sometimes when we were in cities, a Member of Congress or a friend or whoever would be traveling with us, and they would play with the President. He really enjoyed that. One of the things I would often do is after the game I would take the score sheet and have the President sign it and give it to the guest, which they were thrilled by.

Riley

It wasn't considered a taunting move if he had won?

Sosnik

Well, most people were intimidated by him, but the President really, at the end of the day, mostly respected people who had beliefs and things that set up for him. He would respect you if you could beat him in hearts. We did a Presidential Library dinner a few years ago in Atlanta. Gordon Giffin had been appointed by the President to be Ambassador to Canada, and he went and was Ambassador and came back to Atlanta. He hosted a dinner for the library in Atlanta. When we came to the house for the dinner, the first thing that Gordon did was take me into his study and show me the scorecard from a game of hearts on Air Force One that he had laminated and put into his library. We played a lot of cards on airplanes as we traveled around the world.

Riley

He's a serious card player. He concentrates while he's doing other things.

Sosnik

Yes, he's quite good at it. He's close to being able to count cards and remember them.

Riley

And you?

Sosnik

I'm a pretty good card player; I'm not a card counter, though.

Riley

Did he get upset when he lost?

Sosnik

He would, from time to time at work, get upset, which is sort of normal: things were stressful and he might get more upset. But I always found the way he got upset, even if he were yelling—and he could yell—was not very threatening or unpleasant. It was never personal. One of his traits would be to get upset, and once he was upset he'd be done with it. He'd feel a little better, and then he always inevitably would feel bad about being upset at somebody. You would always see him trying to make it up to them.

Riley

Who else played cards with him?

Sosnik

Bruce always played. Bruce is a very good player.

Riley

Does Bruce count cards?

Sosnik

Bruce is pretty close to being able to count cards. Bruce was a regular player. I don't know about Mack, but the other three Chiefs of Staff all played when they were on the road. Lockhart was a regular player—and me.

Riley

Only hearts?

Sosnik

No. After several years he started playing a card game called Oh Hell! that I played a few times, but I didn't enjoy it as much. That was moving into the last phases of his White House, when he was switching card games, and I was wearing out.

Riley

No poker?

Sosnik

No poker.

Riley

Who did he play golf with?

Sosnik

First of all, he played by himself if no one was around. He played with Terry McAuliffe, he played with Senator Dodd a lot, and Secretary Daley in the second term. In the second half of the second term he'd play with Steve Ricchetti fairly often, and he would pick up games periodically with other Members of Congress. But those were the people he played with most regularly.

Riley

What else would he do to unwind?

Sosnik

I think [Dwight D.] Eisenhower put the putting green in on the South Lawn of the White House. In fact, there were still places where you could see scuff marks of Eisenhower's golf cleats in the entranceway leaving the Oval. The President would spend time out on the South Lawn putting all the time. He ran, but he had problems with his legs. At some point, he had a cardiovascular machine up on the top floor of the Residence, a room off the solarium where he would exercise. He ran a lot. That was one of the things I was most impressed with about him. Most people would say, "Big job, busy," but he would knock out two or three books a week while working, having that job and reading books simultaneously. He was a big reader. I was really impressed by his ability to just inhale. He has a hard drive, almost, in his brain. When he learns something, he just keeps it there and is able to retrieve it—ideas, people—

Martin

What did you talk about when you were playing cards that was off business? You figure for the President of the United States, everything is business. The entire world's his business.

Sosnik

There would be a movie on in the cabin, and we would talk about it, the actors, the actresses. I'd talk about sports. We'd talk about politics. I'd say it was a narrow definition of not talking about business. He wouldn't talk about the office and shop, so to speak, but we'd talk about politics. He would talk about people he met that day on the campaign trail, and he'd tell little stories.

Riley

Do you have recollections of particular movies he found enjoyable?

Sosnik

I would say he has wide-ranging tastes in movies, and there were entire zones of movies he liked that I just can't imagine any adult could enjoy watching. He had a tremendous range in terms of comedies and action movies—he had very broad tastes. He was a little hard of hearing, I think, so the sound was really loud in the conference room with the movie blaring.

I remember the other night Lockhart turned to me and said, "All we need now is a movie on too loud. We'd feel right at home."

Riley

Can you tell us about any of the genres or particular movies you thought, What does this man find interesting about this?

Sosnik

He liked a lot of action movies and movies with a fair amount of violence, and comedies that I found kind of silly. He liked them all—the same with books. He also really was interested, as people know, in meeting people from all walks of life, but also people in movies in Hollywood. I think we were in New Zealand one night for dinner and—

Riley

While he was in the White House?

Sosnik

While he was in the White House. I can't remember the actress's name from New Zealand, Wonder Woman or something, not [Linda] Carter; she had another role.

Martin

Xena [Warrior Princess].

Sosnik

Yes. We had dinner with her there. That's the kind of movie he'd like. He'd say, "We're meeting Xena," and I'd say, "Who's that?" "She was in the movie whatever." I'd say, "What was that?" At one point he showed me the movie on Air Force One, and after about 30 seconds I said, "You've got to be kidding me."

Riley

Did he have a whole library of movies?

Sosnik

I guess at least in a loose informal way if not a formal way. The advance team reported to me or at least I directed them. Part of that was a discussion we would have about what's happening today, the schedule and how it was set up, so when we'd go on trips—particularly long trips, to Africa, to China, extended trips—or even domestically on three- or four-day trips, we would be able to get Hollywood movies for the plane.

But I also would have the advance team get food for the plane, for our next leg. I told them how important it was that the President of the United States enjoy the culture of the country, and part of the culture was the food. If we go to Kansas City, of course, we should get ribs. The President had a special rib place there that he liked. When we were in Maine, of course, he'd have to have lobster. We would get food that was indigenous to the area and make that part of our cultural experience. We also would have movies loaded up for our trips.

Riley

These were first-run movies?

Sosnik

First-run movies.

Riley

You'd get from [Jack] Valenti?

Sosnik

We'd get them through the different people who represented the studios out there. For at least a year, when we weren't watching the movie, we would just have movies on. For about a year there, we'd have Austin Powers on a lot without the sound, because it's really a movie you don't need the sound for; it's great visual gags. I remember when we were overseas—I think it was in Africa—we had AWACS [Airborne Early Warning & Control Systems], the military communications guys, pull down off the satellite the NCAA [National Collegiate Athletic Association] Final Four games and tape them. It was an overnight, and we'd watch them the next day with the President. They have now Direct TV on Air Force One, I think.

Martin

I'm not sure if this whole line of questioning seems strange to you, but as historians I think we'd kill to have someone who played hearts with [Thomas] Jefferson or [Abraham] Lincoln 100, 150, 200 years ago. As someone who was intimately associated with President Clinton, had a lot of downtime with him, what about his personality have historians missed, and what would you like to impart 50, 100 years down the road about Clinton that we just haven't picked up on yet?

Sosnik

It's fair to say you can learn a lot about a person if you play golf with him for 18 holes. It's fair also to say you can learn a lot about a person at a card table. I don't know that I could say I would learn something new about him, but I would know the things that people got to know about him better in the sense that people know he's competitive. He has an unbelievable amount of knowledge about a lot of things that you hear about in a card game. But I don't know that there's some secret about the card game that I learned about him that I didn't know from being around him, or people who studied him would know.

I do remember one game at the end of the campaign. Our last event was in South Dakota in '96, and then we flew back to Little Rock and went back to the hotel. He was sort of excited and wasn't ready to go to bed, so he and I and Panetta and Bruce ended up playing hearts almost until sunrise on the day of the election. I beat him that night. I said to him, "Well, I guess I'm going to have you sign this one for me on your Election Day. I beat you." He started yelling at me. "It's my own damn Election Day, and you don't let me win at hearts? What kind of staff person are you?" I have that in a box somewhere.

Riley

I would think that that's part of the reason you were hired into the higher position: the fact that you were willing to impart uncomfortable views at a crucial point.

Sosnik

Let me back up. There's a rhythm to the President's days, in part just based on the press. But there was a rhythm to his body and personality as well. As I said yesterday, he's not a strong morning person; he's generally tired and cranky. Our policy events were generally in the morning because we wanted to get out early enough in the day for media. Between the start of the day until some point midafternoon, it was almost like he had one kind of day. Then the second part of the day would be the second half of the day, when he had a different kind of day and he was in a different zone. As he got into the day more, he would be less in the pure substance of the job and political events and speeches, and we would travel a lot so he could start the next day.

As you moved deeper and deeper into the day, he would be more relaxed and kick back and be more alive in some ways. And as he would be—not unwinding—reloading for the second eight hours of the day, he would often, particularly on the road, get in the limousine and play cards between the airport and the first event.

When we would arrive at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington to go back to the White House, unless it was inclement weather or there was a tent set up on the South Lawn, we'd helicopter from the tarmac at the plane onto the South Lawn, which is really one of the most thrilling experiences of your life. You're taking a helicopter into Washington, you buzz around the Washington Monument, you almost touch it, and then you drop down to the South Lawn. He would always play cards in that short ride.

Also, on a staff person's last trip with the President, before they were to leave (over the course of eight years, most people left), we would put them up in the cockpit of Air Force One, and they could watch a landing with the pilots. It was a secure area; that's where the telecommunications data guys are. We could arrange it. They were nice about it; we could put them up there to watch a landing of Air Force One, which was nice.

I would give up my seat to a younger staffer, and they would fly back to the White House on the helicopter with the President. We almost started taking it for granted because we did it so often, but sitting here talking about it, I'm reminded that most people don't get that chance.

Riley

That's a nice touch.

Sosnik

It's a nice thing for people. But he would always play cards; he'd sign the card and give it to them.

Riley

What about yourself? How did you manage to keep body and soul together during a very long, arduous period of time? You told us yesterday about standing at the bottom of the steps of Air Force One trying to figure out if you could get enough energy to go up. You have a wife but no children at that time, I guess. When are you leaving the house in the morning and coming home?

Sosnik

It was interesting. First of all, I had a wife and no children by design. I could never imagine having children through this. I would feel guilty about the fact I was doing neither my work nor my parenting well.

One thing that was really interesting for me was—I was there six years. I parked in front of my house, and I parked in front of the office, so it didn't matter what season of the year it was; I wasn't outside much. Generally I drove to work before rush hour and drove home after rush hour—not generally, always. Most of the time, depending on the season of the year, it was dark. One of the things that was interesting for me, though, was that Washington grew an enormous amount between 1994 and 2000, a tremendous population increase, and I had no idea how much it had grown until I started driving in traffic like a civilian during the day in 2000. It was like a different city to me. There were so many more people, and there was so much more traffic. I had no idea how much it had grown. I remember feeling how odd it was for me driving home at 5 o'clock in the afternoon. All these people were driving home.

Each day you have to return calls or make calls, and I remember each day thinking I had these two three-hour windows basically, four-hour windows. And only in those windows could I return my calls or make calls, because those were the narrow windows when people were at work, so it was from 9:00 to 12:00, those three hours, and 1:00 to 5:00 or so, 5:30 or 6:00. That was the second block. There were these whole chunks of time in my day where most people weren't working, so I had to adjust to that.

I had a much harder time when I left the White House adjusting to the physical effects from all this, not the psychological. I would have thought the opposite. I would have thought it would have been a really hard transition psychologically to be leaving the White House. I did go into a different field in a different city, which I think made it a lot easier—I wasn't sitting around all day driving two blocks from the White House and going to work and telling people I used to work over there. But the psychological transition for me was much easier than the physical.

Riley

Where did you live when you were working in the White House?

Sosnik

I lived in Northwest D.C., about 12 minutes away. You know, when you're tired and you're worn down, your immune system is not really strong, so the last couple of years I was always on the brink of being sick, just a little bit, or not quite well. I didn't feel the pressure as much. At some point you just get inured to it. Some people like pressure more than other people. But the notion at 9:30 in the morning that I'd been at work for two hours, 2-1/2 hours, and it was only 9:30 in the morning—

We worked pretty much five days for sure, just wire-to-wire, and then Saturdays maybe we'd come in at 9:30 and leave at 5:30, which is a short day, but by most people's standards, I would say it's a rather full day for a Saturday. Sundays usually were half days. The biggest problem for me was thinking at Monday morning around 10:00, I'm exhausted and the week is just starting.

On the Hill you'd work long hours, but you had in session, out of session. You never had out of session in the White House. It was your watch on weekends as much as during the week. Weekends were different, but you really never had any downtime. That was really a challenge of physical endurance. You make a lot of mistakes when you're tired. I think about the kinds of things I wish I had done, or should have done or thought of in year four, five, or six, but I was just too tired. We used to say, "Just try to keep the puck out of the net."

Martin

In terms of Clinton dealing with his staff, I have this impression that most of the staff would have been from more middle- to upper-middle-class backgrounds, and Clinton had a not-so-middle-class background, at least his earlier years. Did you see that as having any effect, or did that ever come up in his interactions with staff?

Sosnik

Well, what you say is probably accurate, and I think that as a politician with his background, he was really able to relate to the body politic much better than a lot of us who didn't grow up in the middle of it culturally as much as he did. I don't think it did, although I do recall a meeting—I think it was an economic meeting, which is a different version of your question—it's a religious version of your cultural question. At one point as he was leaving, he said to me, or he may have said it out loud in the room, "There were 18 people in the room and 17 of them were either Catholic or Jewish." And there he was, the Baptist. He was just making a comment that he had a different group of religious advisors around. He hadn't really hit the entire spectrum of religious affiliations in terms of his advisors around the room.

I don't think it was irrelevant in terms of some underlying ways you see things, but I don't think it was relevant as it related to how we got along or consciously talked about it. But we did have largely a bunch of people who had been educated at elite universities in the country.

Martin

As had he.

Sosnik

He shared that with them. But he was quite proud of his upbringing and his mom and the people and environment he grew up with. He wasn't the slightest bit self-conscious about having not necessarily come from the same background as some of his advisors.

Riley

My question was about your relationship with your co-workers and the extent to which the tensions become difficult to manage in that environment. My assumption is that there are various clusters of people you get along with or you don't. I'm just throwing that out to see if you have any specific recollections about having difficulties with anybody in the White House.

Sosnik

We had a freewheeling White House: we had people doing a lot of talking to the press in the first couple of years, and there were a lot of bad feelings about that. Again, there were two White Houses. There were the first couple of years, and then there were the last six years. If you focus less on the first two years and more on the second six, there was a White House where people got along. There were disagreements, and people would have problems with each other, which was normal. I certainly had my share as well. But for the most part, we got along very well, and we weren't diving at each other in the press.

To some extent, we didn't have time to have our internal skirmishes because we were fighting—it was life and death in terms of winning reelection. There was a really fractious White House in '95 and '96 in camps in that period we talked about yesterday—with the offshore advisors and the few people inside the White House who were triaging with them—and then the West Wing guys. That was a very divided White House that would periodically flare up in the press. It was functional, but it was always teetering on not being held together.

The second term was different in that they really did rebuild the plane after the election of '96. The President and Erskine knew what they wanted to do in terms of structure and people. At that point, the culture of the Clinton White House was one, if you were put up for a big job and didn't get it, that was a good thing, because that put you further in front of the line for the next job. The other was, the best way to get a big job in the Clinton White House was to get in there and for people to get to know you and check you out. That's how people moved up. You look at Bowles or Podesta or Rahm, or any of the people who wound up at the top of the White House. You can see their progression go up through the years.

They really knew what they wanted in the second term. It was pretty cohesive. Then we had life or death during the Lewinsky period. But through all that, people reacted, as I alluded to yesterday, differently in times of great stress and crises. People's different reactions affected their relationships with other people. But we were very good, I think, at putting it aside at the time.

Riley

At least a couple of people had very sharp elbows—Ickes and Rahm come to mind. There must have been other folks as well. Evidently they were not polarizing inside the building, is that fair to say?

Sosnik

In both cases—Ickes and Rahm as examples—I don't think anybody questioned their loyalty or their commitment to the President or their hard work for the President. There were no doubt a number of people inside the White House who didn't like either one of them, or had problems with them, and that's true for probably everybody, but I don't think they questioned their loyalty—or for that matter, their competence. At the end of the day, they may not have liked them, but I don't think they thought they were incompetent or didn't have the President's best interest at heart.

There were probably three really distinct periods of the White House. There was the first two years, which were the more chaotic. There was the bifurcated second half of the first term, and then there was the second term. Particularly in the second term, it was a White House that was built based on experience of what the President wanted, and there was a culture of staff people who understood what the rules of the road were and what the game was, the culture of the game. These were, almost without exception, people the President and Bowles knew and had worked with. They knew what kind of person they were bringing into this culture, and they really created a culture then based on what they wanted and on firsthand knowledge of people.

Riley

Let me alter the question slightly. I'll do this one way inside the White House, and then ask you a corollary question. Were the First Lady's staff and the Vice President's staff, for the most part, fully integrated into the rest of the White House? Or was there a sense that you had independent teams of actors there who had to be accounted for as you were going about your daily business?

Sosnik

When I got there in the beginning of '94—I have a feeling that this started from day one, but I wasn't there for day one; I was there for day 356 or whatever it was. There was an agreement and a process in place in which, basically, for any meeting of any significance, there was always to be a Vice President staff person there and a First Lady staff person there. They had their person there; that was the rule of the game.

Fairly early on, I had a conversation with Ron Klain, who was Gore's Chief of Staff in the beginning of '98, and we agreed that there didn't need to be a Gore staff person at all of our Lewinsky-related meetings. Things did change quite a bit after that. I failed to mention that in our round of early-morning meetings. The First Lady and the Vice President each always had a person there. Then they had their own operations, which really were quite separate.

So back to your question, the answer is both, yes, in that they were fully integrated, and yes, they had completely separate operations. I would go over to the First Lady's office once a week to talk about the schedule and our plan and everything else with the staff. They were separate worlds, but they were integrated.

Martin

What role did Gore's person or Hillary's play in those meetings?

Sosnik

There was a guaranteed role—this shouldn't sound as nefarious as it might—they were there, for sure, in every meeting, to report back to their boss what was going on. But there would be issue areas of concern to their principals, and then they would be more forward-leaning in these meetings about it. For instance, if there was a meeting about the environment, throughout the eight years Gore might have more than one person there. They might be pretty assertive about policies or the views of the Vice President. After a while, we knew what pieces of real estate each of the principals was interested in.

This is a whole other line of questioning, but all the more interesting: we moved into the State of the Union in '99 and 2000 in which we had three sets of equities on the table; 2000 was probably the most graphic, but you had three different equities on the table there. You had the President of the United States, who is still President of the United States and enjoyed the job and still thought he was President and wanted to have as much of a role as President in year eight as he did in year one. There was the Vice President, who was positioning to run for President. And you had the First Lady, who was positioning to run for the Senate.

So that clarity of understanding of which principal had taken the lead on which piece of real estate got a little fuzzy as you got into the end of the second term in terms of all the players having different interests, which is pretty unusual. Obviously, if you take the Bush White House as an analogy right now, you have the President not running for reelection; you have a Vice President who no one thinks is running for anything; and you have a First Lady who's not running for anything, so you go to more of a traditional, or semitraditional, model, because often you have a Vice President running for President. But as you see the wind-down of the second term for Bush, it's quite different from the wind-down of the second term of Clinton in terms of active players around the table.

Martin

How would President Clinton's staff respond? Say the issue would be the environment, and Gore's staffers would be more assertive in these sorts of meetings. How were they responded to in general?

Sosnik

It was mostly on the merits. There were tensions increasing throughout the second term between the staffs. Part of it is a normal thing. You probably saw it on the Hill: these Members have to get along with each other, but their staffs are supposed to do their jobs, and they're off fighting with each other. The relationship was more strained as the second term went on between the President and the Vice President, as everyone knows. There was certainly back-and-forth between the staffs. But the notion of Vice Presidential prerogative had been well established.

The Chief of Staff for the President, as we're talking about this period, is Podesta, and he didn't have a problem understanding that the Vice President's staff had opinions on issues and they were going to express them. That was not an intellectual problem. There were other White Houses in which the President's staffs treated the Vice President's staffs with contempt or didn't invite them to meetings. This wasn't the case at all. There were, increasingly throughout the second term, problems between the staffs, but they would have to do more with our view that Gore might announce something and not give us a heads-up about it. Their view was that there was something we had decided that they didn't hear about. Sometimes it was true and sometimes it's in the course of doing business.

But there was a culture established from day one of the Vice President and his staff having a very active role in policymaking.

Riley

I'd like for you to tease out this train of thought about going toward 2000. I guess you left the White House fairly early in 2000.

Sosnik

Yes, February.

Riley

But you must have had some observations, both firsthand from the inside, and firsthand from the outside, as well as feedback you're getting from people inside about what was going on with the Gore people as they were approaching the campaign. The sense we get is that there were some significant tensions between the White House and the Gore camp about how he was doing business and then ultimately how he approached the campaign and lost. I'd like to hear you talk a little bit about that.

Sosnik

The self-interest of the Vice President and the self-interest of the President were virtually identical from the first day of the first term up until election night of '96. Starting with the day after the election in '96, their interests remained, early on, almost identical. But with day one of the second term—or day one after the reelection in November—there was a point at which they weren't, by definition, any longer identical. There were things that the Vice President began to need to do that weren't necessarily in the President's interest.

In '97, for example, it was probably 95 percent identical, but, in a sense, you started moving every day to its being slightly reduced in terms of what their exact self-interests were, which causes natural tensions. The President's guys felt that the Vice President and his operation had not appreciated early enough how in one respect nothing had changed in terms of how the press was starting to view the Vice President, because they were at some point waiting for the President to be a lame duck. He's out looking for the next campaign, so they were going to start holding him to a different standard as a potential candidate.

We felt they were a little slow off the mark making the transition in terms of how the press was going to perceive them. They probably started resenting at some point that we had the opinion that they weren't doing such a great job. Our job was to take care of the President of the United States and the Vice President, and the President was the President. I think they were increasingly, as we moved into the second term, feeling the need, appropriately, to be looking out for the Vice President in terms of boosting his profile and giving him more credibility on economic matters. We were mostly focused on the President.

There was a fault line that started probably on the day after the election in '96 up until Lewinsky. That was one period. Then there was the Lewinsky period for a year until we got through with the Senate. Then there was the post-Lewinsky period. On the run-up to Lewinsky, I think it was largely managed, tried to be contained. But we had policy disagreements. There were some things in the environmental areas that they were substantively uncomfortable with, and didn't feel we'd advised them often enough on.

Riley

They wanted you to be more proactive and more aggressive on environmental stuff?

Sosnik

There were some actual positions. I can't remember. As an example, you get these difficult public policy matters in which you have different points of view from different members of the Cabinet. One was on drugs, for instance. [Barry] McCaffrey wanted a certain policy on needles, and [Donna] Shalala had a different view. How do you balance that?

It was the same on the environment with emissions. He would have a view on that. Some were policy disagreements, and there were personal, internal disagreements. There were political disagreements. We might do something they felt was insensitive or that might help Gephardt or someone they thought might be running against them, so there were those kinds of things in the run-up. They would think that we weren't telling them things, and we would think they weren't telling us things. Sometimes they'd bubble up to the principals.

We felt that the President and Vice President had negotiated a deal that they would have access to everything, but it didn't work both ways. They were across the street doing their own thing. The rules were they got anything they wanted from us, but we got no heads-up from them. I'm sure they had their own interpretation of this; everybody has their own. It was not a good situation, and it was exacerbated. The President and the Vice President would meet once a week. They'd call it lunch, but it increasingly was at different times of the day. The Vice President had negotiated that with the President after being named Vice President before they won.

So the Vice President had an hour a week, and he used those hours effectively: he would always come prepared with a stack of papers, a list of things. The President usually just came in and sat down and sat there. The tensions would often reverberate from those meetings. There would be some things the Vice President would say to the President that didn't happen or he was concerned about, and it would come back to us. It became more of a problem rather than less of a problem in the second term.

In the Lewinsky period, the Vice President and his people got out of the way and didn't get in the middle of it, for which I don't blame them; it was not in their interest. But still it would have been easy—he was very careful to make sure that none of his people ever speculated in any way, shape, or form about the President not making it to the end of his second term and the Vice President taking over. They were very good about that.

We also worked with them at the end to have it based on fact, but it was not based on a lot of fact. When questions came up about whether the Vice President helped the President on the Hill in terms of Members, the run-up to the votes and all, he really wasn't very involved—but he shouldn't necessarily have been involved and didn't really have a lot of sway on the Hill anyway. But we worked with them to make sure he cleared that bar, that he was part of the team and did all that.

There were resentments on their end toward the President for having made a mistake and the kind of political impact it was going to have on Gore and his election in 2000 that not only lingered but grew over time. After the Lewinsky period was over and we were moving even closer to the 2000 election, the tensions got more pronounced.

When the Lewinsky stuff was over, they were really up. I don't think they felt that we were stepping aside very gracefully for the Vice President. We felt we were working for the President, and he wanted eight full years.

I wasn't there, but they were telling the story at the Convention that once the Vice President had become the standard-bearer of the party out in LA [Los Angeles], they had taken over the DNC. The next day, they had taken over all the cars, so all the guys who had cars the day before suddenly lost their cars, so large and small, there were tensions

It got pretty bad in 2000. I wasn't out in LA for the Convention; I didn't go. I wasn't close to Gore and his people, and they didn't want my help, so I wasn't there for that. I had watched and kept my mouth shut, but I was really appalled by some of the political background. I was astonished at the way they were running their campaign on the run-up to the election. While I expressed that privately to the President and some of the senior staff, and I was very careful not to talk to the press about it; I know the Gore people knew I felt that way, and I think that probably exacerbated the tensions as well.

One time the President called me. I was having concerns about how they were setting up their campaign as early as '98, and I shared that with him. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was told later that the President was sharing my concerns with Gore. The President didn't really say a lot to me. (You should make a note, by the way, about what the President says and what he doesn't say and what he means and what he doesn't mean. I can decode all that for you.) Anyway, about a year later he called me up and said, "Doug, you were right." I said, "Of course I was, sir. What are you talking about?"

He said, "You were right; this Gore thing's a mess." I said, "It's a shame. I can't believe they're squandering this." But they may not know that. I didn't say anything. I didn't need to say anything.

Riley

You think with Gore this was psychological or organizational or what? I guess the conventional wisdom is that he just wasn't able to make this a continuity election. He wanted to make it an election about change.

Sosnik

He was really complicated. I believe there was a feeling by some people around the Vice President—perhaps including the Vice President—that a lot of what Clinton had done to get elected in '92 was very similar to what he was running on in '88. These were competitive people: same age, same part of the country, so I think you start from there. They're fundamentally very different people.

And as I said yesterday, they didn't really have any kind of personal relationship going in. This was not a friendship; this was a business matter, but they were very good business partners. I think you start from there. I think the Vice President very much wanted to do it his own way, before Lewinsky; and Lewinsky affected their relationship in that the Vice President thought that the President, through his reckless behavior, had endangered his chances to become President.

The combination of all those things made it such that he didn't want to run for a third term, and I don't think he should have run for a third term. But what happened was he ended up with the worst of both worlds. He had none of the credit for what the administration had done. And the way he handled it—he made Clinton an issue. I remember saying to the Gore people a year out, "The most important thing for you to do about Clinton in this campaign is to make sure in October 2000 he's not an issue. Just take it off the table. If he's an issue in any shape or form, it's going to be bad for you, because you're going to have to get elected on your own and convince people that you're up to the job."

I think they mishandled him from the start on that. They should have used him enough that people couldn't say they weren't using him. I told the President this. I don't think he agreed with me necessarily. I would not have overused Clinton in the fall of 2000 if I were the Gore people anyway. But I would have handled it much differently. He did not have a team around him that was ready for the campaign with a theory of how they were going to get him elected. To me he appeared to be running the campaign with his family and whatever set of advisors he had around that day, in an episodic way. He came off as someone who was really inauthentic and someone the American public really didn't warm up to.

I'm writing a book with the pollster for Bush, Matthew Dowd, coming out in the fall. One of the things we have in the book is a joke from the Bush campaign in 2000: "Things are going great, time for a change." In 2004, their new joke was, "Things are really screwed up, stay the course."

If you think about the position Gore was in in 2000, he had so much to work with. He's a smart guy, and he had a lot to do with a lot of the accomplishments of the Clinton-Gore eight-year administration.

Riley

That's the mystery for those of us on the outside.

Martin

What about before Gore secured the nomination? Were there discussions between you and other folks in the White House about other potential nominees for 2000?

Sosnik

The President made it very clear from the start that Gore was going to be his guy—no ifs, ands, or buts. If you remember Reagan in '86, '85, he sat out the whole thing. Clinton made it very clear from day one that it was a Clinton-Gore project. Clinton saw it as part of his legacy that Gore would replace him, and I believe, appropriately, it was in Clinton's best interest.

Three things can happen when you leave office, three possibilities. You have a person come in and basically treat it as a third term; you have someone come in who's muddled; or you have someone come in whose sole purpose is to dismantle everything that happened in the eight years before. That happened in '81 when Reagan came in after Carter: essentially it was whatever Carter did, let's do the opposite, just for the sake of doing the opposite, if nothing else.

Clinton understood the dangers of someone coming in and trying to dismantle what he had built in eight years, so he had more than a passing interest in making sure that whoever replaced him, if it wasn't a third term, at least it was a muddled version of it, but it wasn't someone wanting to dismantle his Presidency and undo everything he had done, so he made it very clear from day one that Gore was his guy, and that we as Clinton guys were going to help the Vice President. I don't think any of us really pondered alternatives in any way, shape, or form.

We were not enthusiastic about Gore, but he was part of the team. I don't think anybody questioned his competence. The President made it clear what his wishes were. I can't think of a single person who would have contemplated not supporting him.

Riley

We have two things out that you suggested we come back to. One was something I didn't quite get: the President says what he says and—I need you to deconstruct that.

Sosnik

When you spend a lot of time with him, you understand what he's thinking and can process what he's saying. There's an old saying in Japan that no doesn't necessarily mean no. With the President, I gave you an example yesterday. He never would ask people for money at a fundraiser, but he talked in a certain way that he asked them without asking them.

If I said to the President, for example, "Mr. President, we're going to go to dinner tonight and we're thinking of going to a steakhouse, OK?" He'd say, "That sounds good. I hear they have a lot of other different kinds of foods here in this town, too." Now that meant he didn't want to go to a steakhouse. But he didn't say, "I don't want to go to a steakhouse."

So early on, when people came out of a meeting with the President, they would hear what they wanted to hear. The President would say later, "I didn't really say that." When you're with the President and you know him really well, you can interpret what he's saying to know what he really means even though, to the naked ear, he's not necessarily saying, "I don't want to eat at a steakhouse." He was not, by nature, someone who was directly confrontational.

It was very interesting, though, when he would talk with people. The one mystery I always had with the President, even though I spent as much time with him as I did—One of the things I failed to mention, which ties into this, is that one of the first things we would do every morning with the President was tell him a summary of the clips from the night before. We used to joke in the White House because we'd come in at 7:00 in the morning, and we'd have clips in our door that would be about this tall—

Riley

He's indicating how high.

Sosnik

Xeroxed from all the papers. George started this and then Rahm took it, and when Rahm left, I took it. One person was designated every day to go through the clips and mark them and send them to the President so that he had this big stack marked in terms of what he should read. I'd mark the article, maybe mark the quotes he needed to see.

We used to also joke that on bad press days it was always better to read the clips in the actual paper because it didn't feel quite as bad. Somehow when you see a bad article in the Xerox, it doesn't have the same effect as when you're looking at it with the full paper. That was one way we got through the days. We'd send it over to the President.

But one of the mysteries I will always have about the President was that it was never clear to me what he had read and what he hadn't. There would be things he would know that I'd be surprised he knew, and there would be some things he didn't know that I'd be surprised he didn't know. One of the things he did in general with people is, if you're talking about something—maybe it's about an article and you bring it up to the President—even when he had read the article, he would always have you go first to hear what you thought of it. I watched him do this. He did this with almost everything. He was interested in hearing a person's take on something even though he'd already read it, processed it, and had his take. In a way, he was like a sponge drawing information out.

Even if I'd say, "Did you see the article on whatever in the paper?" he'd say, "What did you think?" I'd tell him what I thought. Sometimes I might say, "What did you think?" Depending on the article, he would often not even tell me what he thought, or he might answer something more general, that wasn't specific to the article itself, about the topic. It was always hard for me. I never could quite discern what he read.

Riley

So it's conceivable that rather than saying, "Tell me what he said," he would say, "What's your take?" You might infer that he had read it but was interested in your gloss on it, when in fact there was a good chance he hadn't read it.

Sosnik

He would turn it back to me without me knowing if he had read it or not. There would be times I'd mention things that he didn't know about. But the main thing was on reading. It was never clear to me what he read and didn't read. In dealings with people, in an exchange, he was always interested in getting something out of the person, in having them go first. His response on things would often, I think, have people hear what they wanted to hear, which led to a lot of misunderstandings early on.

Take welfare reform as an example. Say someone is coming in to talk to him about what he should do on it. He's much more interested in hearing the opinions of someone with a position that he's likely not to take. He really wants to hear the best arguments against what his instincts are to do. On a close call—even if he decided to go a different way on an issue—there were often aspects of the other position that he'd still agree with. He would normally pick up on those disagreements that he agreed with and agree with the disagreement part of that, so the person would come away taking a different interpretation from it.

Riley

Were there occasions when you would say, "Mr. President, I think he may have heard something different than you intended to communicate"? Did you ever have to double-back and grab people out of meetings and say, "Let's be clear about this"?

Sosnik

Yes, there were times he would do that. You just had to listen very carefully to what he was saying to understand what he was thinking. It was almost like once you figured out that riddle, then everything was easy.

Riley

How long did it take you?

Sosnik

It took me about three years, but then it became very easy for me. When I would have a discussion with him where he wasn't explicit, but I understood based on the inputs, I knew exactly where he came down. I remember it was on a scheduling matter. I think it was the Young Presidents of America group. Every year it would come on the schedule, and every year I'd say, "We're not doing it." Every year we'd say we're not doing it. Every year McLarty would call him up and say, "We have to do this thing." Every year Clinton would come back and say, "We're going to do it," and we did it.

So by year or four or five, when he'd be at the meetings on scheduling, I'd say, "Let me just say a couple of things: we should not do this, one. And two, we're going to do it. The only issue is whether we're going to make him work for it."

Riley

The other thing you said we ought to come back to is the impeachment day, so why don't we get back to that now?

Sosnik

We knew the day was coming. The day started, I think around 10:00 a.m. Livingston was on television, so it was a full day. We met early that morning with the lawyers and the political guys. The White House was a circus out on the North Lawn with all the press there. We were planning for that day. The Speaker designee, Livingston, announces that morning he's going to step aside.

The vote was scheduled for about noon. The President was scheduled to meet with his ministers for an hour in the Oval, I think about 11:00 or so. First we had to make a decision about what we were going to do that day in reaction to that. Back to the original thought that the Republicans can't remove him from office but the Democrats could—we determined how important it was that he never not only lose the Democrats, but appear to be isolated, so we made a decision that morning to, after the vote, invite Democrats down and have them stand by him and make this partisan politics rather than some thoughtful view from the House of Representatives on how to deal with the President—which in fact it was. History has already shown it for what it was.

So we made the decision to invite them down. We had no idea, frankly, up until the Democrats coming over to the East Room after the vote, whether the First Lady was going to be there or come out with them. We left that to however it came out. We made that decision. We checked with the Hill. They indicated to us that yes, they would come down; yes, it was a good idea to do that. The vote was at noon.

I went back to the Oval. Nancy Hernreich was outside; she ran the Oval Office operation. I said, "What's he doing?" She said, "He's with his ministers." I said, "The vote's going on starting now. I'd probably better get him out of here and get back; he probably ought to watch this." I think she slipped him a note. I left. Then I came back 10 or 15 minutes later, and he was still in there with them. I popped my head in the room and said basically, "You should go to the House, sir." So we ended up going to the dining room. There's the Oval Office, there's the hallway, there's the bathroom. There's a study to the left, and then straight ahead is a dining room that had a set of TVs.

He came in and watched the vote with Podesta and me. It was interesting. He was really watching the vote rather dispassionately. It could have been on the gun bill or anything else. You probably have taken this up with the lawyers, but I think of the four articles that came over, one of the strongest was voted down by the House, so in some ways they didn't bring their best case to the House floor. I think my dog was with me. I used to bring my dog to work there.

Riley

What kind of dog?

Sosnik

I call her a D.C. shepherd. She was a dog-pound dog, and I used to bring her to work. They had Belgian German shepherd dogs that would sweep the cars for bombs and drugs, so I used to have to alert them coming in that I was bringing my dog to work: "Your dogs may go crazy and try to eat this dog." She was great. She used to play with Buddy [Clintons' dog].

We were watching the vote in the dining room with the President. After about the second or third vote, the Vice President came in and joined us, so it was the four of us. The Vice President was very gracious, saying, "It isn't fair, Mr. President. This isn't the right thing to do." We watched the votes, and we decided to go ahead and bring the House guys over. We ended up over in the East Room. It was really strange.

He came out, 50 or 75 of them came over, and there was real anger in the room about what had happened with him. It was an odd setting. In the room, it was sort of last minute. I think we ended up in the southeast corner of it. The President spoke, and some other Members spoke. Given the context, it was a really good thing for the President, since he had these people not only standing with him but about as angry as he was about what the Republicans had done, which I think was a good thing for him.

Then we set up the event outside the Oval. I believe the First Lady was in the East Room. Have you done Podesta yet?

Riley

We had a short interview with him; we hope to get more time.

Sosnik

You can double-back; a couple of other people were in the room. I believe she was there. Then the President, the Vice President, the First Lady, and John walked over from the Residence through the South Portico and went out, and we did a rally out there, of defiance, basically. At the end of that day we sat there and made the decision that all in all, given the fact that the President had been impeached that day, we had a pretty good day. That was an important day for us, holding our Democrats together under the notion that Republicans can't remove him from office, but Democrats could.

Riley

You made an interesting observation about the House not coming with its strongest case. Was he dispassionate enough to say something like that to you?

Sosnik

Oh yes, a very clear analysis of what they had done, what they hadn't done, the mistakes they had made.

Riley

Was he dispassionate enough to say, "This is where they could have gotten me"?

Sosnik

No. "This article was stronger than that article. I don't know why they're bringing this one across; it doesn't make sense to me."

Martin

Were there Members of Congress, obviously Democrats, whom you expected to come over to the White House who either didn't show or made it conspicuous that they hadn't shown?

Sosnik

No, I don't think—if Gephardt or someone in the leadership hadn't shown, that would have been a real problem. They all came. I don't think anybody walked into that day necessarily knowing what they were supposed to expect. There was no playbook.

But, having said that, I don't think people left that day surprised that the day had gone the way it went. While they had expected the articles to pass, once they did, I don't think they expected a large number of Democrats to come to the White House. And I don't think they expected a large number of Democrats to stand with the President, Vice President, and First Lady on the South Lawn and do such a public reaction to that.

Riley

There were a couple of instances through here—and I can't remember whether this day fits the bill—that had some crucial foreign policy things going on.

Sosnik

The reason I didn't bring it up was that I can't remember what it was. There was something that afternoon that he had to deal with. I don't remember what it was specifically, because I was otherwise engaged. But there was something that afternoon on foreign policy that he had to deal with.

Riley

By that time, in your work in the White House, would those routinely be meetings you would sit in on?

Sosnik

If I sat in on them, it was just that, sitting in on them. I had no real operational role. No one turned to me in a meeting and said, "Should we stop the bombings or start the bombings?" I did start going to some of those meetings, but I was not by any remote stretch of the imagination a decision maker.

Riley

You made a comment that you weren't sure what the First Lady was going to be doing in this instance, which leads me to wonder whether the relationship with the First Lady's office—you talked about these clusters of people—was impaired through 1998?

Sosnik

Not in the slightest—in fact, if anything, to the contrary. During the most difficult periods, having relationships at the staff level was more important, not less important, because it enabled things to go on. I had a very good relationship with her staff. Patti Solis Doyle was the prime person I dealt with. Things like vacation—where they were going, when they were going to leave—we often would deal with at the staff level anyway. It made it even easier when there were problems between them.

I would say things to her like, "We have this walk from the Residence out to the helicopter; we're not right in the middle of this, but just remember we have that." She's very capable and very smart, and she'll do what she wants with that. We talked to her about our plans for that day: just have it, do what you want with it, it's not for us to say. There were tensions, but I think for the most part, the relationship of the President's staff to the First Lady's staff was very good, always.

Riley

OK.

Sosnik

The relationship between the Vice President's staff and the President's staff was not always that way, and the relationship between the First Lady's staff and the Vice President's staff was not always that way. I had a very good relationship with the staff, and Podesta had a very good relationship with the staff and with the First Lady, and others. That worked very well.

Riley

Did you read the Starr report when it came out?

Sosnik

I read parts of it; I didn't read the whole thing.

Riley

Did the President read it?

Sosnik

I'll tell you a quick story on that. I don't know. I would be surprised if he hasn't read it. I think he made a point at the time not to read it so he could say he hadn't read it.

I have one vivid memory that's not exactly related to your question. The day they were putting out the videotape, the deposition, we were at the UN [United Nations] in New York. We were in the hold in the back before he went out to speak. I can't remember the exact time, but there was a 20-25 minute overlap between when we were in the hold and when the videotape was being run, and I told the staff guys, "Make sure the TV is off." This is a guy who could do anything and focus, but he still did have a big speech to give. He could have watched the deposition, if he wanted to, on TV, but we didn't have it on. I think we talked about the fact that it was happening. We didn't pretend it wasn't happening, but we also didn't watch it.

He went in, and he got a big round of applause, a standing ovation, which was at the time virtually unprecedented. He told me the story that afternoon. He went down and waded into the delegates of the UN. I think it was an ambassador or a delegate to the UN from Uruguay who told the President, "We have coups in our country as well, but we do them with guns." Anyway, he didn't watch the video, that I'm aware of, or the Starr report either—although I'd be very surprised if he hadn't read the report or seen the videos at some point.

I don't know what he watched and what he read. And that's good, because I could honestly answer. Throughout all this, first and foremost I worked for the President and was loyal to the President, and I still feel that way. But I also dealt with the press all the time. I never wanted to betray the President, and I never wanted to lie to the press, so I had to constantly straddle those two worlds. I didn't feel like I had dual loyalties: I was loyal to the President, but I also didn't want to be in the position where I was lying to the press. That's not the right thing to do; it's bad for business. There were ways I could honestly not lie to the press because I honestly did not know things.

Riley

Did you think the decision to let all that stuff out in the public domain was good for you politically?

Sosnik

By Starr?

Riley

Yes.

Sosnik

We got a debrief immediately following the deposition. Other than the highlights on the substance, we were interested in the tone and all these other things—the press, political guys—in terms of what kind of TV is this going to be? Were any bombs in the substance? Our reports from our lawyers were that he did very well; he didn't lose his composure, so we had a very good handle on that.

There's an old saying: life is not whether you win or lose, it's whether you beat the spread in terms of expectations, so we had set up with the press a bar that we knew Clinton was going to clear by a mile, not losing his temper and all these other things. We could honestly say, "We haven't seen the video." But we thought—particularly based on what they were expecting—they were going to come out of the videotape more inclined to think how well Clinton did and think less of Starr, so we set that up to happen.

There was something almost creepy about the investigation and the release of the data. I know the President has the view that at the end of the day the public has good instincts, is basically more fair than unfair, and will see things for what they are. So while we were astonished and offended—starting with the spectacle of the delivery of the reports with the trucks and all the rest of it and how they handled that, all the way through the length of the reports, what was in the reports—we also believed that as painful as some of that was, it was politically probably helpful to us.

Riley

Let's take a break and come back and finish up.

[BREAK]

Martin

I wanted to double-back to the 1996 campaign, especially early or middle '95. There was a Washington Post article in August that had you going out and doing advance work for the campaign, and it suggests that you're laying the groundwork against any potential primary challengers. I want to get your sense about what the White House or you guys were thinking at the time in terms of potential challengers.

Sosnik

It's easy now, looking back, to think about the President and the inevitability of his reelection: everybody knew he was going to beat Dole. The reality is that he was largely considered a lame-duck President at the beginning of year three, based on the outcome of the first two years in the White House as well as the midterm elections. We were concerned about a primary. If you look back at the way the Bush people set up their reelect in 2003, 2004, all you have to do is take a look at history—which we did—to see that if an incumbent President has a primary, he loses, period.

So we knew that at all costs we had to avoid a primary, and we went about figuring out what would be the best ways to dissuade someone from running against us. One way was to raise early money, so we had a series of meetings culminating in the decision—I think it was around April 1995—with the President, Vice President, First Lady, Tipper [Mary Elizabeth] Gore, Harold, Leon, George, Morris, Penn and his group, and me. We decided we were going to aim toward the June 30 FEC [Federal Election Commission] report and put some big numbers on the board. By doing that, the Vice President would have the first event to raise big piles of money for the reelect. We did do that. We had an event in Chicago, an event in New Jersey, an event in Arkansas. Step one was to show strength in our money.

Step two

one of the first things I did with Craig Smith, who was working for me at the time, was to have meetings with our friends and our people in the key states we needed to win the election. We didn't worry about the politics, whether we had diversity or people from all different cities. We brought in to Washington our key people, and I think we had about 15 states.

Riley

This was '95?

Sosnik

Early '95, right at the heart of your question. State by state, we would basically say, "What happened? Where are we? What do we need to do politically to get going? How are we going to deal with the Senator?" We followed that up with a more formal political meeting, state by state, where we brought to the table all the players we needed based on politics as well as the substance of trying to get reelected. We began a process then of locking down these states—hardening the silos, so to speak—to make it harder for someone to be able to run in a primary against us. We had the President meeting with the leaders we identified and then collected.

We took all our key people, then all the key people in each of these states—regardless of how close we were to them—and we started working them. We worked them through organizing meetings; we worked them through bringing them to town and meeting with the President. We would work them when we went out to the country, by bringing them in around the President, and by giving them car rides and locking them up.

We made a systematic effort to do that so that by Labor Day of '95—which was really getting late for someone to come in—we tried to suck the oxygen out of anybody's campaign efforts with the inevitability of Clinton as the nominee. It was really important for us to do that. Then we did a lot in Iowa and New Hampshire. The President-elect was very strong and remained emotionally involved with New Hampshire through this '96 effort. But also in Iowa, where we were less strong historically, we were very assiduous about tying those places down as well and not giving anybody an opening.

Martin

When you were raising money early on, were there questions you had to deal with from the donor base about performance over the first few years? Or were they generally supportive?

Sosnik

No, we had some challenges. It moved from one set of problems to a second set of problems. The first set was convincing people or having them feel that we were doing a good job. The second set—which is where we spent a lot of time and which is not a great place to be, but it's better than the first set—was our failure to communicate our accomplishments, and that was real. We spent a lot of time with donors dealing with that problem.

We brought all our donors to town in June of '95, and we had a briefing in the Mayflower Hotel ballroom. Terry McAuliffe and I did the briefing, as we did around the country. He and I would go together around the country to cities with our host committees two months before an event and set up a host committee dinner. Terry would talk about the fundraising and the pitch and how we needed their help, and I would tell them we were going to win, which was pretty easy to do in '96, but not as easy to do in '95.

We'd had that first meeting with our major donors from around the country in June, as I said. It was important for us to have them leaving town feeling that this was something that was doable. I think they came away, if not completely sold, more sold that it was doable. The first fundraiser we had was in New Jersey. I remember coming with the President and First Lady and the Vice President and Tipper into this armory or barn in New Jersey. It had a low ceiling and not a single piece of cloth in the whole building, so the noise was bouncing everywhere—off the walls and ceilings and floors. It was loud and rowdy. But there was a tremendous amount of enthusiasm in the room and a large number of people. It's almost like they crawled out of a hole they'd been in for half a year, saw that there was still some political strength out there, and realized We can do this thing. Terry McAuliffe had put the event together. There was an increasing feeling, then, that this was doable, and we were able to push it down the political community and choke off anyone running against us.

To be honest with you, I don't recall now anyone I'm aware of who was moving around and considering it. It would have been crippling for us.

Martin

When you said there were some concerns about your early record, were the concerns that there weren't a lot of accomplishments or that you weren't communicating them well?

Sosnik

I think early on people weren't convinced that we were doing the right things and really making the country better, because we weren't doing a very good job of communicating that. In private settings we were able to have more in-depth discussions, which you're not able to do retail in America. And over time, economic numbers would come out and we could point to ways to keep score that would reinforce our point that we were doing better. But that was our initial challenge, convincing them.

Once we had done that, then there was a long discussion about our failure to communicate properly. The President kept pushing us to get these index cards that people could carry around. At one point in '94, early '95, they'd go to a dinner party, everyone would be trashing the President, and they would just sit there and look at their plate and say nothing.

Our next step, which was getting better: they'd be at a dinner party where everybody would be trashing the President, and they were ready to defend the President, but they didn't know what to say because they hadn't figured out all of our positive message. But at least that was a step in the right direction. Then once we could get that dinner party where everyone would be trashing the President to the point where they would be willing to defend him—and actually arm them with information on what they could say—that was another positive step.

Eventually we got to the dinner party where people were going 50-50, and the people on our side were able to articulate the message about why they liked him. Finally we took control of that dinner party, and there was a consensus by the majority of the people that he was doing a good job and they could tell you why. That was our challenge, though, and our evolution.

Martin

You said in retrospect you don't think there was anybody seriously flirting with the idea of challenging Clinton. But at the time did you have people in mind you were worried about?

Sosnik

Oh, yes. First there was a generation of elected officials who, as it turned out, were never going to be elected President because they chose not to run in an election they didn't think anyone could win.

Martin

You're talking about '92.

Sosnik

Yes. So Clinton won. I think they were getting buyer's remorse that they had missed their shot. It's nothing personal; it's just business here. There was a generation of Democratic politicians who, if they saw an opening—and the bar was pretty high to be able to go out in the political community and say, "I'm running, and it's OK that I'm running."

Riley

Was there anybody in particular on the horizon?

Sosnik

You had Gore there, also, who was thinking about his own. Gore wasn't going to run against Clinton, but the dynamics of a messy '96 election, not to mention losing and having to move out of NavObs [Naval Observatory, the Vice President's residence], but also, his own personality. I think Gore was also obsessed with Gephardt as a possible person running.

Martin

In '96?

Sosnik

Yes.

Martin

What about people like George Mitchell? Were they on the horizon?

Sosnik

I always felt we had our destiny in our own hands. Rather than sitting around worrying about who might run, if we fixed our problems, no one was going to run.

Martin

If you didn't have anybody in mind, did you think there was a potential hypothetical candidate—say somebody flanking from the left—or were you positioning yourself? Were you worried about those kinds of things at that point?

Sosnik

Not really. We were worried about cleaning ourselves up.

Martin

We can probably fast-forward to when Dole gets the nomination. My memory is that nothing really happened in between those two times.

Sosnik

Except we won the election because of the shutdown.

Martin

Sure, we hit that yesterday. Can we fast-forward a little bit to after Dole gets the nomination? I'm curious about how you strategized to beat Dole in the '96 campaign, specifically when he was still in the Senate.

Sosnik

There was concern by some that [Colin] Powell might run. He was sort of the intergalactic third force. I never thought for a second he was going to run. My wife tells the story all the time: I have these rules. As an example, I have a Blackberry, it's really important to me. There were six months, a year, of stories that Blackberries were going to lose their patent and they were going to shut them down. I just made a decision that Blackberry is not going to lose its patent; they're going to figure something out. I'm not going to read one story about it; I'm not going to worry about it.

The baseball strike: I just said, "I'm not going to read a single article about the strike; I don't care about it." So, Colin Powell: I said, "He's not going to run. I'm not going to read a single story about it. I know he's not going to run." I knew someone who knew someone who knew the family. They convinced me he's not going to run; it's just not going to happen, period, so I made the decision I was not going to read a single story about Colin Powell running, I wasn't going to worry about it; he's not going to run.

One night around midnight, the President called my house. It was on a Sunday night. There was a long "is he or isn't he running?" in the Post, a front-page story about Powell that day. Powell tested very well. I remember lying on the floor saying, "Mr. President, I didn't read the article; he's not running. I'm not worrying about it. You can worry about it if you want, but if I'm not worrying about it, why should you be worrying about it? He's not going to run." My wife always tells that story to our friends about how I would deal with the President.

But there was a lot of concern by some that he could run, and in fact if he had run it would have been a serious problem. Maybe I was just lucky in my guess. Then there were some disagreements about who would have been the strongest candidate to run against. Morris, who constantly had these back channels with Republicans all the way through, was trying to figure out ways to decide. I personally always thought that Lamar Alexander would have been the strongest person to run against him. I don't believe at the end of the day we ended up monkeying around in there.

We did poll, though, with Republican primary voters in some of the early states to see for ourselves what was going on. There were some disagreements about Dole, but I think the consensus of a lot of people, myself included, was that the continuation of the shutdown of the Gingrich-Dole message was what we were prepared for.

We had an enormous advantage—as did Bush against Kerry in 2004—in having an opponent who has a primary and you don't, and the planning you can do to be ready to control and dominate. I gave the same speech for a year and a half about the phases of a campaign. There were five phases, starting with that June speech in '95 in the ballroom of the Mayflower, all the way to the end. Then we had the phase between the beginning of it until the primaries. We had the primaries as the second phase. The third phase was post-primary and pre-Convention. The fourth phase was the Convention; the fifth phase was the general.

We always used to say that third block of time is the most important. It was the definitive block of time in the 2004 election, with the $100 million the Bush people dropped in March defining Kerry as a "flip-flopper." That's really what stuck. We always viewed that post-primary, pre-Convention phase as the most important period in the whole campaign, and that was what we wanted to own. We had our money prepared to be spent that way. With the benefit of no primary, we were able to test our messages against Dole, and we wanted to take what we'd done on the shutdown and brand it even deeper into Gingrich-Dole in terms of their priorities.

Dole ended up giving us another element, which was "the past versus the future." We had a conference call culture in that we would always play a conference call off something. For instance, Dole's speech at the Convention: we planned a conference call right after it to talk about what our reaction was going to be. There was a line in there that focused on the past as his message.

Riley

The bridge to the past.

Sosnik

Yes, that was the seed from which "bridge to the 21st century" came, so it became a "past versus future" election as well. But that period of time that you've identified was the critical one. When you run for President, you're a better candidate by far when it's all or nothing. If you're running for President but you have a hedge in your hip pocket, it affects you psychically. We saw it in the last campaign when Edwards announced he wasn't running for the Senate no matter what. He became a better candidate. We knew that as long as Dole was stuck in the Senate and the trappings of the Senate, the language of the Senate, the schedule of the Senate, it was to our advantage.

In fact, when he retired in May, he did give his campaign a bit of a lift. We were surprised by that. There were only a couple of times that we were surprised by Dole in the whole campaign. One was that, and the other was when he picked [Jack] Kemp. That was about it.

Martin

What kind of coordination did you have with Senate Democrats to try to tie Dole up in the Senate? They were very effective.

Sosnik

We had a very good relationship with Daschle—Clinton on the personal level with Daschle, as I said yesterday. We worked hand in glove with him. We had weekly meetings on the Hill with the House and Senate Democratic leadership staffs, and our congressional affairs people would go up to the caucuses each week. Remember now, with Gingrich in the House and Dole in the Senate, we needed both the House and the Senate; it was helpful to have them both on board.

These were people who had known each other a long time, in different capacities. The guy who ran the Senate ended up coming to the White House, and some of the House guys came—there was a group of us who had worked together for 10 or 15 years, so when we met, it was often the same people meeting with different jobs over the years. That was a very central part of knowing the schedule, knowing what we could do to pin them down on the floor, knowing how we could bleed the House over to the Senate.

We were very organized. We were very sensitive, conscious, of when they were in session and out of session. We really took advantage of them being out of town.

Martin

Were there particular issues you wanted to see the Senate address or not address during that period when Dole was still in the Senate?

Sosnik

Anything on the priorities for the American public and to reinforce them being against the working people of this country. Part of it was off the shutdown and Medicare.

Riley

We had tremendous activity during '96. The Republicans made a decision at some point, consciously or not, that they needed some productivity to show to their constituencies, and that gave Clinton victories that helped him against Dole, right?

Sosnik

Oh yes, welfare reform. Congress is always famous for waiting for a parade to line up and then they'll get in front and lead it. But I remember we came up with one issue: when women gave birth, the kids were required to get out of the hospital after 24 hours. We came out for 48 hours. Somehow they got the gumption and the muster and were able to get that into law in a couple of months; but they did move quickly to try to have something to show for their two years. Morris was the biggest proponent of anything you can do to demonstrate you're an effective leader by getting things done is going to be politically favorable to you.

The House Democrats in particular were of the view that getting nothing done was politically advantageous for the cause—or certainly for them. We had some rubs with them about that.

Riley

You want to elaborate on that for just a bit?

Sosnik

We had the problem in '97 of them kicking and screaming all the way to the end when we got an agreement with the Republicans on the balanced budget. And that same mindset applied to not giving them any victories on welfare reform. Clinton would go up and shake hands with Gingrich, he would put up voluntarily his own balanced-budget plan for ten years after they had run on a pack of lies in '94—a lot of Democrats felt they should be not bailed out but rather forced to make choices and either do what they claimed they were going to do and let people see what the cuts were, or don't make the cuts and ultimately do what they said they were going to do in terms of balancing the budget.

There was almost a cultural mindset difference that ultimately was resolved only because the President had a bigger microphone than the House Democrats. As a result, they came over with us kicking and screaming.

Riley

We should park on a couple of things you mentioned yesterday. One was the scheduling for the year. Then there was the discussion about the internal messaging—

Sosnik

And they're connected. The first time we figured it out was '96, and then we used that model for the second term. In a sense, we always viewed the test of how successful a year was by going back and rereading the State of the Union for that year and seeing how relevant that speech was. The more relevant the speech, the better year you had; the less relevant the speech, the worse year you had. That's still a pretty worthy test, by the way. If one could look at Bush's State of the Union from last January and look at the year and then look at his speech for this year—and it's already April. We wanted the President to be President as long as possible.

We wanted to take advantage of the bully pulpit, and we wanted to make him not political, so one of the fights we had (that my side won) was we never announced the President was running for reelection. We never wanted to formally make him not a President but a candidate; we never said he was running. We viewed the '96 State of the Union—which is how we adopted our model in subsequent years—as essentially our reelection announcement, doing it in the well of the House with the entire government sitting there—applause, Dole and the rest in their little chairs as one of 535. That was the right framework to address the country.

That became our organizing model in the second term. The two anchors then were the budget, which is where your real priorities are at the end of the day—and we had real budgets, we didn't just put up phony stuff. The State of the Union was our rhetorical device to talk about our values, so we began in July planning the next year. In July we would begin the process of getting the budget ready and getting a State of the Union draft ready, pointing toward a series of meetings and processes that eventually made their way to the President, so we had a pretty good cut by the end of December on what our budget was going to be—with the understanding that we were going to get the budget done by usually December 20, before Christmas. We would have made our decisions about our priorities, made all our decisions about what we were going to do with the Pentagon, spending, the rest of it. And we'd try to have a draft of the State of the Union that the President could take with him over the holidays.

That was our beginning plan. We would then have subsequent drafts by January 1. Even if the speech wasn't ready—and the speech was seldom ready by January 1 because the President didn't write a speech and give it to his speechwriters and have them clean it up. We would meet and they'd talk about the speech, what it would look like. They'd come back and give him something. He would almost inevitably say, "This is not what I wanted." They'd come back and give him something else. He'd say, "This is not really what I wanted, but I'll work off of it." Then he'd write a speech from their speech. But even if he had hadn't written the speech and hadn't gotten the rhetoric and everything down, we knew at the beginning of January where we were going. Remember now, we never take vacation; we're always there.

By the end of December, we would have a leak strategy for the run-up to the speech. One of the things we learned in the White House was that no one cares about what the "it" is the day after "it" happens, but people always care about the run-up. It's like the Super Bowl: people don't spend a lot of time reading about it two days after the game or even the day after the game. But boy, a week out, five days out, the run-up is nothing but—

So before the end of the year we had a leak rollout strategy of what we were going to do, either in terms of the President's budget or the President's State of the Union, or both. We were going to frame up the entire month of January when they were out on recess with the whole town to ourselves. We didn't view the State of the Union as the night he gave the speech; we viewed the State of the Union as a month to define the year. Then we would leak. Generally, in the Washington Post paper that started the year—Sunday or Monday depending on the calendar—we'd lay down the President's priorities, the agenda and all that. We'd set up the whole month with that first piece. And we had a leak strategy.

Riley

Why a leak instead of just straightforward release?

Sosnik

First, when you do a straightforward release, you don't get as much coverage. But if you give it to somebody, if we parcel out stories to each, slices to everybody, everybody has their day for a slice and their day to have a paper that people want to read. You give them an exclusive, they're going to put it on the front page and make a big deal about it because it's news. If you put a release out for everybody, it's news, but everybody has it.

Riley

Forbidden fruit is sweeter.

Sosnik

Yes. We would start the month, then, with that three-week run-up on the speech by leaking the contents of both the budget and the speech. Then we would view a couple of days following the speech as our opportunity to go to America and not only in a sense give the same speech again, but also really make it touch people's lives more directly by going out in America and talking about how it connects to people. We'd get another couple-day ride from that.

I believe it was '98. After the State of the Union we had to go out the next day—this was after the Lewinsky stuff. We had to figure out where to go and how—I think we went to Illinois and somewhere else. The President got good responses out there. We were leaving, I think it was Illinois—I can't remember why, maybe it was due to runway length, but we were not on the 747 Air Force One, but rather on one of the old-looking 737s, 727s. As it turned out, it was the plane that brought President [John F.] Kennedy's body back to Washington after he was assassinated. In fact, it was the last Air Force One that was tagged Air Force One with the President on it; it was the last flight for Air Force One.

Anyway, in the context of all this stuff going on, the pilot was taxiing on the runway to leave, and he ran off the runway and the plane got stuck in the mud. It's not like a car; you can't get a tow truck, so we had to get another plane.

Riley

You had metaphorical problems.

Sosnik

We definitely had metaphorical problems there. I said to the President after about an hour, "You know, you're a pretty good sport about this whole thing." He said, "Well, can you imagine where they're going to send the pilot after this?" So anyway, we went cruising around America. We gave the same speech to people, to connect.

Then about ten days later was the time, by statute, you had to release the budget. We would make big plans on the budget release because the deficit was being reduced so precipitously over our time. We learned from Republicans the importance of visual aids and graphs, so we would always have a chart—which usually showed the deficit going down. The one year we got it to zero, we had a chart with a zero. We made a big deal about the unveiling of the budget every year because it was one of our priorities and it also was our strength.

That, basically, was the framework for our year. Essentially, whether it was a budget priority or something off the speech as a priority—and obviously the world changes and you react to it—that was really the foundation of our ideas and messages. That was our organizing principle for the year. We essentially did that the rest of the year off those two elements. That's how we kept our center.

Martin

Your description of this makes it sound so obvious that that's what you should have done. What was happening in those three years before you came up with this model?

Sosnik

There was the one year when the President was writing the speech on his way up to the Capitol and then the TelePrompTer broke. I often would say to people about our White House, "You know, we got pretty good at this stuff. Now, it helps that you get to go eight times around the same track. At some point after the third or fourth time, if you don't start figuring it out, you're a dope."

It's hard work. But we did learn more about the power of the Presidency and the power of the bully pulpit and how the anticipation of something gives you an opportunity to do all kinds of things, and the period of time after it doesn't. We could not only "do it before, don't do it after" but we could do more than we ever thought based on knowing the interests and the lessons learned.

In a sense, the Clinton White House took quite a while to recover from the transition. If you don't get the transition right, then in year one you're constantly trying to fix what you didn't fix on the run-up to year one. I don't think we knew if we were coming or going after the '94 election and making the turn into the beginning of '95. But we did settle down, and the circumstances settled down a little bit. We did get into—I guess it was a five-year rhythm.

Riley

You said that the daily message management was a derivative of this.

Sosnik

We had a process of knowing how our year was organized around the State of the Union and the budget. In December we could lay out the next year in things we knew. There were rhythms to the year, just like there are rhythms to the academic year; it's the same every year.

For instance, we knew in December what the congressional schedule would be for the next year. We also knew that a legislative opposition is not as effective as an executive branch position. But when they're in town, they're much more organized than when they're out of town, so the first thing we would always put on the calendar is when they were in town and when they were out of town, knowing that we had a wide-open field when they were out of town and knowing that we could always reload. If we had a bad period of time when they were in session, we always knew we could do a page-turner, if we planned it in advance, so that when they left town, we could change the dynamic and make it recede as quickly as possible.

The first thing everyone would do is lay down the next year on a 12-month calendar. Things like, when is the State of the Union? When is the budget? When are the Governors coming to town in February (because that was always a big event)? When are the mayors coming to town? When is the Easter recess? When is tax day, April 15, and how are we going to deal with that? April 15 was also when kids got their letters for colleges. We knew that depending on the sliding scale in May, kids were going to go home for the year, so how did we want to close that? Make a decision on which commencements we were going to do. He did a rotation of the militaries. You already knew in December that it was the Navy's turn or the Marines' turn.

So in 1995 we would sit around, think about '96 and say, "Let's do some industrial Midwest state commencements, like the University of Michigan or Michigan State." We can make those decisions then. Or we would task out to find out when these schools were doing their commencements so we could then decide whether it's Michigan or Michigan State; it may not make a big difference to us because it's Michigan. We could plan all of that in December.

Fourth of July. Memorial Day addresses. We could decide in December we were going to do "food safety" on the Fourth of July, which was one of the biggest Presidential Saturday address responses we ever got—food safety. We knew, throughout the entire year, APEC [Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation] summits in Asia, and these dates are in November, so we already knew a big chunk of the year in December, based on the rhythm. Obviously, a million things happen around that.

For instance, when I told Podesta I was going to leave at the end of '99, he said he was surprised, that's fine, but we needed to lay out next year before I went, so in that last year in December, we took the Presidential calendar and laid out our trips for the year. Sandy would come in and say, "These are the three things we have to do; these are three things we need to do. And we ought to just expect we're going to have to go to the Middle East twice because we always go to the Middle East twice."

The President said he wanted to go to Vietnam, and we decided to do Vietnam after the election just in case such a trip was not going to be a good thing politically. We wanted to have it at least outside the political spectrum. We stayed away during the New Hampshire primary and thought that was a good time to be off the stage and out of Gore's way, and it also enabled us to nail down one of the trips we had to do anyway. We laid down the whole year in December for what we called our long-term planning.

We then would take a monthly schedule and make it much more granular. We'd go through each month in terms of "the President has to go to Arkansas for his mother's birthday here," or "he's down these two weekends with Chelsea." We have the UN on this date. We'd look at the month more specifically to make plans.

Then we'd take the month to say, "What message are we driving this month, each day?" And we'd have a message plan in theory for the month. Then we would have weekly meetings to really drill down on the message each week. Say we decided at the end of March we're going to do education the second week of April on the Monday and Tuesday. Maybe we're doing a fundraiser in Detroit on Monday. Two weeks out, in our meeting for the month coming up, we would say, "OK, Bruce Reed, we're doing education the second week in April. What policy do we want to highlight?" He'd say, "We've been working on three things we can have ready: one could be college credits for kids going to community colleges." We'd agree a month out or two weeks out what the message was going to be.

Then we'd turn to the scheduling and advance guys and say, "Let's time-out our fundraiser or move our fundraiser; we need to do this message thing in Michigan before." Generally our fundraisers were in big cities, but we wanted to do our message events in suburban areas rather than in big cities. We had to figure out the drive time, the fly times, and all that. Bruce would say, "There are a couple of really good places in Michigan on this program we want to do; one's in Macomb County." So we'd start timing out the day in terms of how we were going to get there in time and what time we could make it to Detroit.

Whatever political person was in the room—say, Craig Smith—we'd say, "Craig, the lunch is at 2:00. Find out if people in Michigan can have lunch at 2:00, because that's the time it's going to take us to get there." Bruce would be working on a policy, and we'd send an advance team from that meeting that day to figure out two different sites where this might work. Then a week later we'd have a weekly meeting and say, "What are the words going to be on the podium at this event? Is it going to say, 'Education For All'? Let's talk about what the podium is going to look like; let's go through what the program is going to be."

That was how we worked the process.

Then for the President, once a month in the Cabinet Room we'd have big boards up and say, "This is what we're planning for the month; there are 10 or 12 events. We're thinking about doing this, we'll run it by you." I was very central to this. The President would say, "I got a call from a guy I went to college with, and he wants me to do this." I'd say, "Sir, we can't do it because this is what we want to do. Let me explain to you why we can't do it and why we want to do whatever."

We'd walk him through it, and he might agree or he might disagree. Sometimes he'd say, "We can do that event and then fly that night and stay over in that town. I'll do the event the next day. I'll only be President for two more years. I have the rest of my life to sleep." That's what he would often say.

So we would be a week out, right?—and we'd be going to schedule the President. John and I would do it. He'd say, "This is crazy. You're going to kill me. Why are we going from here to there?" I'd say, "Well, sir, if you remember we had this discussion in the Cabinet Room. That was the day you were wearing the yellow tie with flowers. We explained to you why you didn't want to do this, and you said you wanted to do it." He'd say, "OK, I think it's a mistake." But I would remind him.

Many days, we'd start the day with, "Mr. President, this was in the paper, so we changed your topper and this is your schedule today." Many, many days he would say, "I don't know why we're doing this. This is a mistake; this is a crazy thing to do. The speech isn't ready. You guys are killing me." Then we'd go to the event, and he would do really well. We'd be leaving in the car and he'd say, "You know, that was a great event. I'm really glad we did that. And I think that thing I did in the speech, where I tied it from the local to the international in the past, I think that thing worked pretty good, too." It probably wasn't even in the speech, but he'd thought about it and figured it out. That was the way we organized ourselves. We were always message driven. Every day we had lessons learned from '93 and '94. We had to let them know what we were doing, and we had to do it in terms they would understand.

Riley

That's a wonderful synopsis. That will be very helpful for folks trying to figure out how these things are done. I've done probably a hundred of these interviews, and I don't think I've had anybody in a succinct fashion like this march us through from start to finish.

Sosnik

The lesson that the President said he learned the first two years in the Presidency is the importance of doing the right thing and making people's lives better, and two is the importance of letting them know what you're doing in terms they can get. I don't know where he is on this these days, although I suspect he may be where he was. I think he felt generally very good about what he'd accomplished, and I think he felt very good about his ability to communicate it to the American people.

The one area he thinks he did not do a good job with—I think he thinks he did a good job on policy, but not a very effective job on communication—was trade and the importance of fair but free trade. That was the one place he felt we failed to communicate effectively to the American public how it fit in with their lives and would make their lives better.

Riley

That's a hard thing to do. It seems to go contrary to people's natural inclinations—at least Americans' natural inclinations.

Sosnik

I don't think right now anybody in India is opposed to it.

Riley

I have some bits and pieces of things I want to go back and pick up. On one of the breaks you were talking about John Harris's book [The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House]. Did you read it?

Sosnik

I know John very well. I spent a lot of time with him when he was in the White House, and every day on the phone with him. I haven't read his book, but I have his book. I spent a lot of time with him on it. I think he completely got the culture of the White House. He was a cub metro reporter at the Post assigned to the White House in '95 to work as the second to Ann Devroy. She was considered the most dominant reporter in the White House newsroom of her time and was the one who—through force of her personality and coverage—set the tone in the press room as to what was a big story and when a story was over.

John completely got Clinton, picked that lock of understanding how we worked. John is the kind of person who literally could on a Friday have been a White House Washington Post reporter covering the Clinton administration, and then could have easily, on that Monday, become the White House press secretary, spokesman for the President, and not missed a beat, but know the cadence of how to answer the questions and what Clinton was really thinking. John really got it. But I haven't read his book.

Riley

I'm always shy about quizzing people about what they've read because I don't want to jump to conclusions or put people on the spot, but if you had read it, I was interested in your take on whether it was an accurate portrayal. That would be very helpful here. Are there other things you've read since you left the White House that you think, Boy, that resonates; this person got it? Or conversely, are there things you would warn us away from?

Sosnik

Actually, I mentioned this yesterday and didn't follow up on it. I'm going to answer your question, probably not the way you intended it, but it's something that's really important to understand. The Bob Woodward book of '94 [The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House] had a significant impact in the White House in the following ways. My recollection was that he and Elizabeth Drew both came out with books at the same time. Elizabeth Drew's actually had a lot more substantively than Woodward's. She has a writing style that's not accessible, and Woodward is Woodward. But Woodward's book, I think, as much as any single event, really changed the culture inside the White House for the principals in the following way.

They were astonished at how indiscreet the White House staff was, both on the record and off the record—or at least not for attribution—with Woodward about meetings and about what the President was thinking, about what the First Lady was saying. It really had a chilling effect in the White House going forward when the President and the First Lady understood that essentially—except for a very small handful of people in a very tight meeting—they had a bunch of people around them who were writing books. It was not a private meeting.

As a result, the First Lady stopped going to meetings, would send her aides much more. And with the President there was an inverse relationship: the more people in the room, the less likely he was to say what he thought. It obviously depended on who was in the room.

It put a real chill on them in terms of how they conducted themselves going forward in the White House because they basically—and I believe accurately—felt they had a bunch of people working for them who were on the make. Several people left the White House and wrote "kiss and tell" books while he was still President, a number of them.

That was their first tip-off to what kind of town they were dealing with, what kind of operation they had in the White House. Things calmed down considerably in the second term with a different kind of culture in the place and different kinds of staff people. They felt a little less nervous about that, but it didn't change their modus operandi.

Riley

I thought a decision had been communicated that they wanted people to cooperate with Woodward.

Sosnik

This was before my time, but by all accounts, McLarty had told staff to cooperate. But if you take the contents of the book, there are ways to cooperate and there are ways not to cooperate. I do believe that people were authorized to talk to Woodward, but it was what they said that—

Riley

There was never another Woodward book on this White House? I'm trying to remember; I should know this.

Sosnik

I think there was a second book on it. But the major point I'm trying to make is the effect, in terms of how people operated—particularly the principals changed because of that book. To get back to your question, books have been written.

Riley

There's Stephanopoulos's account.

Sosnik

[long pause] Morris's book is full of embellishment and his own view of the world. I was around for a lot of that, and a lot of his book is accurate. It's more accurate than inaccurate. What other books or articles were there?

Riley

I'm thinking of the internally written ones, Stephanopoulos's, but that may have covered mostly the period before you.

Sosnik

I was there, but that book was about George.

Riley

Sid Blumenthal.

Sosnik

I think Sid's was the view from the bunker. [Robert] Reich's book is not something I would spend much time on. I can't think of any of the right-wing psychobabble books. My sense is that the Harris book is the closest to the Lou Cannon Reagan book.

Riley

Did you ever read David Maraniss's book?

Sosnik

I read Maraniss's book, and I think he really nailed it.

Riley

This is the biography, not the—he wrote some shorter books.

Sosnik

No, the biography. I think the President thinks Maraniss had a pretty good handle on it.

Riley

I'm not sure that there's a parallel to that book. I've often told people I thought it was almost poetic in places, how well he did.

You just mentioned the Reich book, and one of the follow-up questions I had intended to ask when I was talking about circles in the White House was a question about Cabinet officers and members of the Cabinet. Who was considered to be strong? Where were the problems?

Sosnik

Let's go back. First of all the Cabinet has atrophied in size; when we had a Cabinet meeting, just figuring out how to get all the chairs in the room was a challenge because of the number of positions that had been added over the year. Nixon really ran a Cabinet-based government. I think they met once a week.

All Cabinet officers weren't created equal in our White House—or statutorily. The President really did not have a Cabinet-run style government. Having said that, if you compare our use of the Cabinet in the Clinton years to Bush's use of the Cabinet, we were much more aggressive about using it to amplify our message. With Bush, you can't name five, other than [Donald] Rumsfeld and a couple others you can't name. The Secretary of Commerce could go anywhere in America right now with a sign under his chin that said who he was and no one would recognize him, so we were certainly better than the Bush guys at taking advantage of our Cabinet members to amplify our message.

Just to get off track for a second. I personally met with almost every Cabinet member fairly regularly to walk them through what we were trying to do politically in '95 and '96 and explain how they could help us. I had different meetings with each of them about their travel, what cities we wanted them to spend time in and focus energy on. We used them, but as a way of running the government, it was not a Cabinet-run government.

One of the Cabinet people he was closest to and spent the most time with was [Richard] Riley in Education. He had served with him as Governor, and I think he served the full time and was really a strong and effective, steady voice for us. He was someone the President always could count on. That was an important issue for us as well. Donna Shalala, to be honest, had a bumpy start, and there was a feeling in the West Wing early on in the administration that she was a bit of an open field operator on her own with her own agenda. Whether that was fair I don't know, but over the years I think she was able to clearly demonstrate her competence and abilities, and became in fact not only a team player but an important team player in the administration. She had a big strong hand.

He had a real comfort level with [Mickey] Kantor. He had ups and downs with him over the years, but Kantor was someone he relied on when he was USTR [United States Trade Representative] as a negotiator and also at Commerce. And Bill Daley at Commerce was someone he relied on a lot. He was very close to Ron Brown, and he was personally rocked when Ron died in the plane crash. He spent a lot of time with him, really respected his political skills, people skills, and he was an integral part of his planning for the '96 reelect before he died.

He was very close to Henry Cisneros and was horrified over what happened to him with the independent counsel. He relied on Henry and his judgment considerably. Charlene Barshefsky he was not close to personally, but she really had a very strong role in the trade negotiations, particularly with the Chinese in the second term.

Obviously Bob Rubin was someone he had a very strong working relationship with. Panetta, from OMB into the White House, was somebody important. Bowles really developed a relationship with him beginning with the '92 campaign, but through his work at SBA [Small Business Administration] Clinton began to know him personally and he became an important member, obviously, when he moved into the West Wing.

I'll tell you someone he respected a lot: William Perry in the second term over at Defense. He had a tremendous amount of confidence in him. Someone who had an enormous impact on his foreign policy—more so than people are aware—was Sandy Berger. Sandy was a person he relied on. He was his in-house, not lawyer, but in-house foreign policy advisor. Sandy had more of an impact and influence over the course of the eight years than people are aware.

Riley

This is true even when he was Deputy?

Sosnik

Yes, and they had a relationship going back to the '70s. Eli Segal, who passed away, is someone the President had a long history with and was very close to personally. He relied on him and had pet projects that were important to him.

Riley

Anybody you can recall who was particularly a problem for him, freelancing?

Sosnik

It's fair to say if he could have done it over again he probably would have approached the Department of Justice differently. We touched on this yesterday under lessons learned. Hiring a Chief of Staff and figuring out State, Defense, Justice, and Treasury is probably how you put a government together. Probably at the end of the day, in the handful of biggest mistakes was Louis Freeh.

Riley

Yes, I was going to ask you about that.

Sosnik

In fact, it came up the other night, as it does most nights. Just from day one that was a big mistake, and he knew it. Some positions matter more than others, and that was a big problem. He also had a lot of confidence in Alexis Herman, both on the White House staff and then when she went over to Labor. He relied on her. I can guarantee you that if he were President of the United States during Katrina, he would have picked up the phone—Alexis has roots in New Orleans—three days before Katrina hit and would have made Alexis part of the team dealing with it. The notion of five or six days of not knowing—So Alexis, when she was over at Labor in particular. The [Les] Aspin time at the Pentagon was a bumpy time for us, too.

Martin

How about Hazel O'Leary?

Sosnik

She came from the old days with him. Like [Jocelyn] Elders, she didn't occupy a lot of time or conversations with him. I could say to someone just looking at this dispassionately that there were some appointments made that perhaps, with more thinking, could have been done differently. I don't know on a personal level; I don't remember him ever talking about them. But she probably wasn't somebody who was a big asset for us.

Riley

Let me steer this in a slightly different direction and take you outside the Cabinet to the DNC heads. I'm assuming that this unusual relationship where you got the co-chairs, Don Fowler and Chris Dodd—you must have been in the middle of that.

Sosnik

Well, it's funny. We couldn't come up with a consensus person, and I went to Harold with the suggestion of Dodd and someone else. We kind of backed into Dodd and Fowler. On paper, it made pretty good sense. If it had been implemented the way we envisioned, it could have been a really good thing, but I think Fowler thought that basically he's there every day running the place, and he should be the chair—or at least most of the chair. I don't think he wanted to have a subservient role or be a backroom implementer. This is the world Don came from. He wasn't just passing through. Functionally, it didn't work badly, but it was a very laborious process, getting people on the same page and coordinating and all the rest of it.

Who was head of the DNC in the second term? Joe Andrews? The reality is he put in David Wilhelm in '93, his campaign manager in the '92 campaign. I don't know if that was the best choice given the times, but the reality was that, at least in the first term (in the second term, the DNC became more Gore's province), regardless of who the chair was, ultimately Harold was the person in charge of the DNC contract. That was his de facto—that was his guy, really.

Over the years, McAuliffe—who became the chair—was the time the President was most involved with the DNC chair, and that was after he left office. For all intents and purposes, Harold ran the DNC.

Riley

That's not uncommon in a White House?

Sosnik

It depends. When you're the President of the United States, you're the Commander in Chief of the United States and you're also the head of your party. Regardless of how you package it, the President runs the party. Now, in the case of this President [George W. Bush], for example, he has his guy in there: [Kenneth B.] Mehlman is his guy. That arrangement is probably more direct in terms of how he runs the party than more indirect, where Clinton had Harold who was running the party, but then dealt with somebody else. But the bottom line is the same.

Riley

You talked yesterday about the problem of depletion of personnel resources being a marked difficulty for the current administration. By contrast, it was not a problem for the White House you served in.

Sosnik

Until the very end.

Riley

It might be worth addressing that here.

Sosnik

When you take a President—particularly a two-term President—First and foremost, we're all disposable. My view, having been at it for six years, is that the government can really run itself most of the time day-to-day without an engaged President. However, there are going to be times—they're small, but incredibly significant—when who's in the White House matters, who's the President matters, and what decisions they make really matter. You have to fit every White House staff to the President. But if you have enough resources devoted to dealing with the problems of the Presidency, enough people, and it's organized in a way that works for that President, there are different ways to get the same job done. But you have to have enough resources or people-power at the table to throw at it.

In the course of the White House I was in, when you have some immutable clusters or silos, you have some foreign policy and domestic and legal policy things that matter. But at some point with these silos built, you have to figure out how the place works in terms of getting belts that work around and integrate all those and make it go.

In our case, for most of the Presidency, we had a half dozen people—in terms of the actual running of the White House and taking these silos and making it add up to something—who were somewhat interchangeable. If Rahm Emanuel was out for a week, Begala could step in and take the clips and get them to the President. He could look over the drafts. He would go up and meet with the lawyers and come down. We had enough people around this process that we could cover and get the job done on how the President worked.

In fact, you need a balance in there, throughout an eight-year period. You need mostly people the President knows, and who know how he works and how the place works. You have to be grounded in that. But you need to figure out a way to keep rejuvenating this ecosystem with new blood and new energy.

In our case at least—and it's probably even harder in the Bush case—you have this ecosystem that works based on the needs of the President. This ecosystem does not easily take new species because it's a fragile thing. But if you have people over an eight-year period who are moving their way through this thing and gradually getting prepared so that the ecosystem can accept them, and you keep replenishing, ultimately it serves the President best. It's a balance grounded primarily in the status quo stability of that core group of people with a constant need to keep it fresh over a period of time.

The President was very good at taking different kinds of advice from different people with different backgrounds and being open to people who were with him or weren't with him from day one. He did not view people disagreeing with him as an act of disloyalty, but rather, if they could back it up, it was something he would appreciate. He was able to largely keep the system regenerating throughout his eight years, so he didn't have just-hired people, but he also didn't have only strangers. If you go through the White House, the second term really reflected what he wanted in terms of how his world was set up.

In the first term, in the first couple of years, he learned a lot of lessons. In the second term, he tried to improvise around that, based on being in the middle of what he was in the middle of. It's always easier to build a house than it is to renovate a house, so I think he did a good job through Leon's leadership of making the second half of the first term much more to his liking. He had only two clear shots in a two-term Presidency to set forth how he wanted to do things: what is the best and cleanest from the start, and the second best is the second term.

So the second term really reflected what he had in mind. At the end of the second half of the second term, we really got it closer to the framework, at least, of what he wanted.

Riley

But toward the end of the second term, what you're suggesting is that the momentum had—

Sosnik

You had a White House that really psychically and in every other way, came out of Lewinsky, the beginning of '99, February or March of 1999, so you're really on the backstretch here. You can always get people to come into a White House, but it gets harder as you have less time left. In the case of Podesta—who as Chief of Staff really was hands-on—he and Panetta worked very similarly in terms of their styles and the amount they took on their shoulders.

Bowles and McLarty are much more delegator types. Bowles was more a delegator type and valued a more hierarchical structure. But, at the end, it was just easier to take what you had around you and skip through it than go through interviewing people and bringing them in. But I think it would have been good to have had probably a little bit more infusion at the end than we had.

Riley

Two books that should come to mind when we're talking about the literature is the First Lady's memoir and his own. Have you read them, and do you have observations about them?

Sosnik

I don't think I read the First Lady's. Actually, I read the second half of the President's book before it came out. A handful of people—Podesta and Lockhart and I—went up to Chappaqua and spent a day with the President after the book was in galley form and before it came out, before he did the 60 Minutes interview, to go back through the painful episode of getting the President ready for his interview.

It was just like "back to the future." I remember being in the solarium in his house. He came in and basically said, "You know, I read this book. I don't really know why we have to be sitting around doing all this Q & A [questions and answers] stuff before an interview. I don't know what the deal is. It's an autobiography. I'm the only one who can answer the questions," so I said, "You're probably right, sir, but I can give you a couple of questions as examples of why there may be some benefit to going through this exercise."

I gave him a couple of examples of questions that it might be good to think about getting answers for. (No, I'm not going to tell you what they were.) So I asked him one of them and he said to me, "Well, Doug, how would you answer that question?" I said to him, "I know how I'd answer it for me, but I don't know how I'd answer it for you, sir." Anyway, I did read that part of the book before he did the interviews.

Harris's book is the best, the definitive book. It's hard to write a book about yourself and get the whole scope. I pretty much know Harris's book from knowing Harris and talking to him about the book during the book. But I think [Edmund] Morris's book on Reagan came out—when was it?—about 15 years after Reagan's Presidency?

Riley

A little less than that, I think.

Sosnik

It felt to me like about ten. Harris's book felt to me a little too early, timing-wise. You need a little more time—obviously, this is 30 years ago. I think Morris really blew it. I was always looking forward to that book, and when I found out how he wrote the book—the creations and all the rest of it—I didn't end up reading it. But the amount of access he had to information, the amount of time he had to work on it, and the amount of distance from when Reagan was President to when it came out, struck me as the early gate from which you could really walk through and start gaining some sort of reasonable balance, some sense of things.

Harris's book, at least after the fact—and maybe over time—may have been too early to come out, just chronologically. The point—and the point of this project—is to become very important primary source material for people 30 and 40 years after the President leaves office, when he's in a position to start writing history with an ink pen. It's still way too early to be able to make assessments for historical purposes.

Riley

Would you ever go back in?

Sosnik

I have two little kids, one of whom has a lifestyle he's grown accustomed to. I have no interest in going back in for a number of years for a couple of reasons. One is I can't afford to. But secondly and more probably importantly, to the heart of your question, if a Democrat got elected President today and wanted me to come back in the White House tomorrow, I couldn't possibly do it. I don't have the energy; I don't have the drive. I personally felt, for my background and my interest, I had the single best job in the United States of America, my job with the President. For that I'm eternally grateful, and I think it's unlikely—even if I wanted to go back into the White House—that I could ever end up in a position that I found as enjoyable or fit me as well as that did.

When I left the White House in my early 40s, I certainly didn't want to feel like that was the end of my life. But I also felt it was something like—I don't know if I had aspired to it, but if I aspired to anything, it probably would have been that. I really found the right fit for me and a President who was easy to work for. I thought he really made a difference. I'll leave it at that and assume I'll never go back to work there.

Riley

Well, we have here a very broad definition of public service. We talked about your earlier public service, but we think people coming and spending large amounts of time with us here on this enterprise are also doing a substantial public service. I think I can speak for everybody at the table when I say that this has been one of the most enlightening interviews we've done. It was enjoyable, but also you helped us to create a very rich source of documentation that doesn't exist anywhere else. It doesn't surprise me that you spend a lot of time with John, because I'm thinking as I'm going along, how difficult it would be to capture the essence of this Presidency accurately without having a good long session with you. Not just because of what you saw, but also because of the way you process things and your powers of recall, which I think are extraordinary given the fact that you said you don't spend much time revisiting this period.

Sosnik

But still I have not read Harris's book.

Riley

You've done us a real service by coming down, and we enjoyed it. We thank you very much.

[END OF TRANSCRIPT]