Richard L. "Jake" Siewert Jr. Oral History

This is the Jake Siewert interview, part of the Clinton Presidential History Project. I want to thank you for coming down and being with us and giving of your time for the enterprise. There are a couple of things we usually do at the beginning of the recording. The first is to repeat the most fundamental of the ground rules, which is that everything is being conducted under a strict veil of confidentiality. We just talked about this off the tape and you’re aware of this, but again, I want to formally assure you of our commitment to making sure that this remains confidential until such time as you get a chance to review the transcript and clear it for future use.

The next thing we typically do is go around the table and identify ourselves, say a couple of words to help the transcriber. So I’ll start. I’m Russell Riley, I’m an associate professor at the Miller Center and heading up the Clinton Presidential History Project.

I’m Jake Siewert and currently work at Alcoa, but I spent a number of years at the White House from 1993 until 2001 with one break.

I’m Darby Morrisroe, I’m an assistant professor at the Miller Center.

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

I’m Cindy Boyles. I’m a graduate student.

A good place to begin usually is with your own personal story. Did you grow up being a Democrat? Were you interested in politics when you were in high school?

I’d say my interest in politics goes back pretty far. My parents were both active locally in the Democratic Party on Long Island where we grew up. Both public school teachers. My father taught in Queens at a public high school in the New York City system, and my mother taught in the local school system in North Shore schools, a town called Sea Cliff where I grew up.

I was born in Manhattan in 1964 but grew up primarily on Long Island. I was involved at a very young age in some very local politics, literature drops and the like. At the time my father was very active on the local town committee. They’re actually still active today. They live in Massachusetts, and I think my father still serves on the Democratic town committee at the ripe age of 79. They’re both very politically engaged in a lot of ways. They’ve become radicalized in their old age.

A lot of people have at 60 or 70.

They were just in town the other day, and they’re more liberal than I remember even. So I was pretty active in a local way. My significant memories of growing up in politics were following [Richard] Nixon and the tail end of the war in Vietnam and Watergate particularly because my parents hated Nixon with a passion. My parents’ names actually happen to be Pat [Siewert] and Dick [Siewert]. So they were very resentful that their names had been tarnished by the Nixon legacy.

My parents didn’t allow us to watch much TV. We were a newspaper-reading family, read the New York Times and Newsday at a pretty young age. We didn’t really have TV, but when Nixon got in a lot of trouble, they caved and got a television so we could watch the downfall, the “Saturday night massacre” and the rest.

I didn’t do much on the political front in high school and college. Went to a local Catholic school for a couple of years on Long Island. Then went away to Sweden for a year, which was interesting in a lot of ways and certainly from a political perspective, because, like most European countries even today, with a center-right government like in Sweden, it’s a very different political perspective. Even the far right there would be to the left of Ralph Nader in this country in many ways.

This was with your family?

No, I went on my own. My father is not Catholic, my mother is. My mother didn’t particularly want me to go to Catholic school but didn’t have a lot of confidence in the local public school system at that time, even though she taught in it. Maybe that’s why. They sent me off to Catholic school for a couple of years. But it was very old-fashioned, learn-by-rote education, so they thought I needed something more broadening and decided to send me away for a year. That was pretty interesting. Came back and went to the public school, graduated, went to Yale.

At Yale I thought at first I’d study more political science, but those classes felt a little too much like reading the newspaper and not really different enough from what I felt I already knew at the time. I ended up studying the classical humanities. There’s a major at Yale that involves going back to Greece and Rome and going slowly through the Middle Ages and right up to modernity, and that’s what I ended up studying and did most of my studies in either comparative literature or history in that area.

Outside of your coursework were you involved in any campus politics or political campaigns?

Not particularly. Yale has a very active political union with a good roster of guest speakers, so I would attend that. I think I was a member, but it was very much dominated during the [Ronald] Reagan years by a clash between the one or two Reagan supporters who were actually quite visible. A couple of them went on to work in the [George H. W.] Bush White House, I know them pretty well. Then the predominant more left-of-center approach. I remember being at the debate but finding the debate itself a little stale and not terribly interesting. But there were some good guests and I remember particularly some of the debates around Reagan’s reelection. If you lived in New Haven at the time, you would have thought he would have been roundly defeated but it turned out not to be true. But I wasn’t terribly involved in politics. I think a friend of mine ran for selectman and I helped a little, but I wouldn’t say I was particularly engaged in politics.

I went to graduate school for a year, thought I might study literature and had a scholarship to study with a guy who was this preeminent James Joyce biographer who then died when I got there.

Where was this?

At Emory [University], a guy named Richard Ellmann who was a Joyce biographer who taught half the year at Oxford, half the year at Emory. I went there specifically to study with him and he died, so that was not a good—But in general I was still finding my way, trying to decide what I would do with my life. Ended up like a lot of people who can’t quite decide what they want to do, going to law school. I went to law school in California.

Again, I was not at that time terribly engaged in politics, not that interested in politics. Followed it, obviously read the papers, but wasn’t actively engaged until I got my first real taste. I did work in Atlanta on a Senate campaign, volunteered for Wyche Fowler who ran for Senate in the fall of ’86. I worked one summer at a law firm in southern California that was very politically active, Jerry Brown had worked there, Susan Estrich who ran [Michael] Dukakis’s campaign had worked there. The guy who ran California for Dukakis worked there. It was the law firm—It’s an old TV show at this point, but it’s the law firm that the guy who wrote the TV show LA Law wrote about. He had worked at that law firm and it had a bit of that feel. It felt a little like Hollywood.

There I got much more interested in politics again and started working on the campaign in ’88 on Dukakis with some of the legal partners, and worked on a couple of campaign events. But that was the first time I think I’d ever really come near a Presidential campaign and did nothing at all significant in that campaign but got a little taste for it. Didn’t really enjoy the law firm life, even in the summers. So by the end, I decided I didn’t really want to pursue that and spent a little time thinking about what I did want to do and ended up going to New York and looking for a job in more the government-political sphere.

Did you finish law school?

No, I didn’t finish the law degree. I decided I didn’t want to do that and went to New York. I was looking around for a job in city politics, the city government, or one of the interest groups that was working around city government. It was a tough time to get a job in that area and it was silly because having a law degree I could have easily gotten a job at a law firm, but I didn’t want to do that. I could have easily wrapped that up. But I felt a little as though I was just wasting my time.

I went to Washington one weekend just because I thought there might be more possibilities there and almost immediately found a couple of interesting positions, met some people, ended up going back there for a longer period of time, staying with some friends and meeting people who would turn out be very influential in my career. It happened very quickly. I met a guy named Bob Farmer, who was actually a very close friend of Clinton’s, some big fund-raiser, had been Dukakis’s fund-raiser after getting involved in politics as a rich guy from Boston. He had worked on the John Anderson campaign and raised money. I guess that was ’80. Then got involved with Dukakis and raised money for him, had become a big Democratic fund-raiser.

I met Bob through a woman named Katie Whalen who had worked on the [Walter] Mondale campaign and was involved in Democratic politics. She worked at the Democratic Governors Association [DGA], was a friend of a friend. She actually now works, oddly enough, for Arnold Schwarzenegger but that’s another story. She was a college roommate with Arnold’s wife, Maria Shriver. So Katie introduced me to Bob, and Bob was looking for someone to help him write an op-ed about campaign finance. At the time he was treasurer of the Democratic National Committee [DNC].

I worked with Bob a little bit. Bob introduced me to Mark Gearan who ran the organization that Katie worked at. Have you talked to Mark?

Yes.

Mark’s now president of Hobart [College]. Mark was the executive director of the Democratic Governors Association and ran that group on a shoestring budget, but it was a very impressive set of people at the time. It was Mark and Katie and I think two other staff. They had just gotten some money from Pamela Harriman, who was the other major fund-raiser along with Bob in Washington. Pamela had given the money because she really liked the Governors. It was at the time Ann Richards, who just died, Roy Romer, who was Governor of Colorado, went on to the LA [Los Angeles] County school system, Mario Cuomo obviously, Bill Clinton of course.

There were a lot of Governors and Mrs. Harriman, at a time when Washington politics was a little bit stale, wanted to showcase ideas that Democratic Governors had. She felt there was more innovation in the states and more interesting thinking on the Democratic side of the aisle out in the state houses than in Washington at the time. Washington was in this love-hate relationship with the older Bush where they rallied around him during the war then fought with him over the budget, but it was a pretty stale dialogue in many ways, still is. She had this idea, and she gave them a fair amount of money to put more emphasis and attention on the policies in the states, education policy, economic development, health care, et cetera. Mark was looking for someone to help him run that project and hired me out of the blue really. I met him once or twice and he hired me to help him run that project. That was complete good luck because the Democratic Governors Association itself turned out to be a core part of the early days of the Clinton campaign.

Even though it was technically unaffiliated, [Douglas] Wilder, your former Governor, was running at the time and was a Democratic Governor. Mario Cuomo was thinking of running and was a Democratic Governor. But Bill Clinton had been the chairman of the organization, had used it very effectively to help build his national political base. He was, I think, the longest- serving Democratic Governor at the time even though he was still very young, and he had close ties with Katie and Mark personally and with Bob Farmer. He ended up recruiting Bob to be his finance chair for the exploratory committee. It was a real hotbed of activity in the early days when Clinton was thinking about running.

These fora around different policies ended up being one of the ways, along with the Democratic Leadership Council [DLC], that Clinton gathered people to discuss his platform and the politics surrounding the election.

What year was this?

This was in ’91, I guess I started in April of ’91. I may have started a little earlier. I think we did the first session in July or August of ’91 in Aspen, Colorado. You typically did it somewhere nice because it makes it easier to get more Governors there. Also makes it easier to get guests to come, and you bring donors of course to help fund the operation. So it was typically done somewhere attractive. We did another thing, which had not been done well before and if you think about it today it is still not that effectively done. When the party is out of power—And at the time they had leadership in Congress, but it felt weaker than that. Remember, no one was running for President.

To back up to when I moved to Washington, I thought I wanted to work on a Presidential campaign. I had gotten that in my head. It wasn’t a complete accident that I ended up working with the Governors Association. I met a lot of people then, looking for a job. I knew a lot of folks. I met George Stephanopoulos and went to talk to Dick Gephardt about running, I met David Dreyer who ended up working the White House and also was working for Gephardt. A friend of mine who was working for Tim Wirth introduced me to Al Gore. I met a lot of these people and they were all thinking about running. No one ended up running except Clinton. But Clinton, at the time, was a marginal candidate in many ways.

What were your impressions of him in this early period?

In a roundabout way that was what I was starting to get to. The first time I think I met him, one of the things we tried to do was bring the Democratic Governors, the smarter ones who were really engaged in national politics, together with the leadership of Congress. We tried to create some platforms that they would all work together on. That was part of my job. It hadn’t been done before and Mark was trying to do it.

We arranged to meet, I think with Tom Foley, Speaker at the time. Foley hosted the meeting in his office in the Capitol. One of my jobs was just to get Clinton in there. That was very simple. You did everything in this organization. Mark said at the time, “You’re going to be a policy director or Communications Director,” I don’t remember what I was called. He said, “But the reality is you’re going to lick envelopes and stuff envelopes and drive people to the airport and things like that. You’ll do everything in this job.” There were only about five of us.

I remember picking up Clinton to go to the meeting. I had to go out to Independence Avenue, right next to the Capitol. I was going to get him and show him where it was. He had been to the Capitol but didn’t really spend much time in the halls of Congress. He’d worked there briefly years ago for [James] Fulbright but hadn’t been there in a while, hadn’t spent much time there.

He came in a cab from the airport. I don’t think he traveled with security out of the state, or if he did, it was very light. As we were walking on the Capitol grounds, Doug Wilder went by with a huge motorcade because he was, of course, just across the way and he had state troopers and all this stuff. Clinton and I just walked by. Wilder didn’t stop to give us a ride, not that we had very far to go, but he just waved at Clinton and cruised on by. At that time both of them were thinking about running for President. I remember thinking, This guy has a slightly better Presidential operation going than Clinton.

But I spent a little time with Clinton that day. I sat in on the meeting. It was interesting to me, I’d never worked in Congress but what I distinctly remember was the Governors had all these ideas and this energy. Clinton himself had huge ideas about how they could create a coalition and unify around some ideas and show particularly a Democratic domestic platform, not so much national security. The folks on the Hill had no time for it.

They had the meeting. They did it because someone had asked them to do it, it was on their schedule, but they clearly were more engaged in the battles of the day in Congress and had no sense of the overarching message that it was giving out to the population at large. Whereas Clinton was much more focused on trying to create some unity in the party but really felt at the time as though—I was struck by how little credence and attention the senior leadership on the Hill gave to a guy like that.

Later that fall, in some of the speeches, he started getting in trouble for talking about the “brain dead” politics of both parties in Washington. He really struck a chord outside Washington but got a lot of anger from the Hill. I was with him 100 percent of the way because I felt that here were these people who came—Wilder too, and Cuomo and others, with some big ideas, and Romer—with a vision for how to transform the debate that was going on in the country at the time. The folks in Congress just had no use for them.

How much of that was that they had a sense that ’92 wasn’t winnable at that time, that George Bush had outstanding poll numbers probably at that level?

They certainly didn’t see Clinton as Presidential material. I think they’d been in power for ages and there was a lot of complacency. I don’t think they thought there was any real threat to their hold on the House. They hadn’t lost the House since the ’50s. They were much more engaged in the typical, what they’d done their whole careers, battling a bit with the administration over money, but they weren’t that wedded to trying to reshape the dialogue in the country at the time. That’s probably a little superficial, but they certainly didn’t think the Presidential election was winnable. Even if they did, they didn’t think it was winnable by Clinton or any of these Governors.

I think some of them held out hope that Cuomo would get in. They saw him as more of a transformative figure. But they didn’t have much use for these folks who they saw, I think, also as very centrist, relative to what was a pretty liberal caucus at the time. It was really an outside Washington thing. These were people who had been in Washington for a long time and had the trappings of power and were intent on holding on to it.

Did you detect any tension between the Democratic Governors you were dealing with and the DLC at the time?

The active caucus within the Democratic Governors Association was very pro DLC. The other two who were thinking of running were not big DLCers. Mario Cuomo hated the DLC, disliked them intensely. Wilder had his own particular issues with Al From and the DLC. I think ideologically Wilder was straight down the middle in many ways. I think he equated the DLC somewhat with the old southern Democratic Party in an effort to bring it back to its core conservative roots, which in his mind was old fashioned and something he had been fighting his whole life.

Other than that, if you looked at the Democratic Governors who were out there in Wyoming and Tennessee and places like that, they were very much in tune with the DLC’s message, not necessarily that involved personally but Clinton was obviously. A lot of them, honestly, just wanted Clinton to run because they wanted someone who wouldn’t embarrass them from an ideological perspective. There was a good meeting.

After that short meeting where I spent a little time with Clinton, I spent a lot more time with him in Aspen that summer. We had some meetings that were really Governors only with a couple of staff where they were talking about the race. [Paul] Tsongas came out and talked to them. They obviously had no interest in Tsongas, but he was the only person running so we had him come out and speak. He had a good platform that he put together in the shape of this call to action or whatever it was, this plan. It was fairly centrist in message, but I think they just didn’t have much use for him personally. They didn’t know him. He was another Massachusetts Democrat, didn’t matter that he wasn’t particularly liberal, they just didn’t really want to stand next to him in their own states and run.

I remember distinctly they were sitting around a table not much bigger than this, in a small room in the Hotel Jerome in Aspen, talking about the race informally one morning. At the time, everyone knew Clinton was thinking about it, but he wasn’t that deeply engaged yet and it wasn’t clear that he would run. It must have been June or July. [Ned Ray] McWherter from Tennessee, who was an old sort of hillbilly Governor in some ways, that’s what he called himself. He’s much smarter than he lets on but he plays very much a southern guy. He said, “We need someone young with new ideas, someone we can stand next to.” Clinton is sitting over there reading the newspaper, not paying that much attention, but you hear him prick up his ears.

McWherter went on. “Someone new and with a fresh face and a full head of hair.” McWherter was totally bald. At this point Clinton has a full head of hair and he’s getting all excited and he thinks Ned Ray is going to endorse him on the spot. McWherter then says, “We ought to put that Bayh boy up, Evan Bayh. Boy is so good looking he could be one of my grandchildren.” He was clearly teasing Clinton because Bayh wasn’t in the room, he was coming later that day. Bayh at the time was probably not much older than I am. But they wanted someone they could stand next to and campaign with who wouldn’t hurt them with their base. But that was the real—the Governors who were most active: Mike Sullivan from Wyoming, McWherter from Tennessee, [Lawton] Chiles too.

Did you get a sense of how the other Governors viewed Clinton at that point?

McWherter’s thing was emblematic in many ways. They knew he was very ambitious and they would tease him about it. They had a huge amount of respect for him. Even though he was younger they had a huge amount of respect for his intellect and the connections he had and his political skills. But they knew him pretty well also. They were aware of some of his—of his ambition, the downside of that too. I think they were comfortable with the idea of him running, a little worried about what might come out in terms of his personal history. They’d spent a lot of time with him.

The Governors are out of state, they’re getting together and it’s a little looser than when they’re in state. So I’m sure they’d seen him, late at night, hanging around in the bars, not that he drinks, with attractive young women. Not that they saw anything, but they would worry about something like that. Everyone had heard the rumors. Anyone who seriously thought about him running for President asked the question.

By that time, he had already been through this experience in ’87 and ’88 also. There were rumors then.

The rumors then had been pretty pronounced. So that was my first real contact with him, that meeting in Aspen. I have to say he was singularly impressive. He is today. I saw him the other night. He’s just an impressive individual. Even in a room of Governors with large egos and political skills, he still stands out and his mind works faster than anyone else’s. He has a certain amount of charisma. With the Governors he tones it down because he’s in a working meeting and is very practical, but I remember being distinctly impressed by working around him at the time.

It has to be an interesting dynamic because these are all politicians who are proud of their own skills, right? So there’s a bit of measuring up while at the same time, I guess you don’t want to be overly effusive because that’s not what Governors do with their peers.

No. The McWherter story in that way was a perfect one. They knew he was going to run, they very much respected him, but they were also not afraid to put him in his place and remind him that he was just one of many Governors at that point.

Clinton really helped us put together the agenda for that meeting. I remember Bob Reich came out and spoke, Ira Magaziner came out and spoke. I invited these people to speak but I didn’t really know who they were. At the time his range of friends and people he knew who were thoughtful ended up being important. I can’t remember if [Robert] Rubin came out or not, he might have. I know he was at one of these sessions. But Clinton helped us put that agenda together. I think it was partly so he could talk to some of the people he wanted to talk to about running. But his range was pretty impressive. No other Governor had quite that same match.

If you went to the average Governor and said, “Hey, I’m trying to put together an agenda to talk about health care and education and economic policy,” they would come up with their own circle of advisors. There might be a couple of people outside their state, but Clinton, for a guy sitting in Little Rock, his range of connections was really impressive. I remember he really helped drive that agenda.

It was a short meeting, but I’m sure he got a sense privately, one on one, with a lot of the Governors, where they were, and it was pretty clear at the time they wanted someone other than Paul Tsongas to run, and they were comfortable with the idea of him running.

I don’t have the exact chronology down, but we had a meeting with the National Governors Association [NGA], which meets every summer, later that year. That was in Seattle. I remember at that point Clinton was much more serious about running. I think we might have, at that point, formed an exploratory committee. But at that meeting we had some very serious discussions. We had a whole room reserved. Frank Greer, who was the media consultant for Clinton, and Stephanie Solien, his wife, who worked for the Governor of Washington, were helping him run political traps because it was in Stephanie’s state. Booth Gardner was the host Governor for that. At that point there was a lot more politicking going on where Clinton was meeting with people one on one.

I think we had a couple of the political consultants out there as well, Stan Greenberg. There wasn’t a formal race going on, but Mark Gearan was very much involved in helping orchestrate this. I don’t remember if Bush came and spoke or not, typically he would. But I remember they forced a couple of votes even though they don’t matter, it’s all very staged, on NGA policy to try to embarrass the Bush administration and take some shots at them. It worked out relatively well. Clinton had to duck one vote because the Republican Governors were trying to force him into taking a position on an issue on taxes that might have hurt him later.

At that point Aspen felt like an interlude where people are thinking. It was not very real at that point. When we were in Seattle later that year, it was just a couple of months later but it felt very much as though we were almost in the middle of a campaign. Things were starting to gear up.

Before we head toward the campaign, I want to backtrack just a moment. You talked earlier about when you were in Washington and you were looking maybe to work on a Presidential campaign. You mentioned meeting with several what I would consider top-level folks. I was hoping that you could talk us through a little bit about how you go from being—

Unemployed—

From college—

A law school dropout.

Exactly.

How do you meet these people?

I’d have to say it’s very random. It’s funny to think back. They post jobs occasionally in Congress and you’d go put your résumé in. I thought I had a good résumé. I was summa cum laude from Yale, I went to law school, I’d done this. Nothing would happen at all. You’d never hear a word, might as well not have bothered to go by the office and talk to anyone. It’s a cliché but you just spent time talking to people and pulling out whatever you knew. The guy who ended up helping me quite a bit was the guy who worked in Tim Wirth’s office who was the ex- boyfriend of one of my friends in college, a woman who had been the best friend of my college girlfriend.

I knew David [Harwood] pretty well because the period they dated David was very much a guy from Washington. His father had been an editor at the Post, and his brother, John Harwood, is the political editor of the Wall Street Journal today. He’s very connected. He was working for Tim Wirth on the Hill on climate change issues and environmental issues. David lived in Capitol Hill, worked in the Senate, introduced me to Katie [Whalen] who worked at the Democratic Governors Association.

A law school friend of mine who had been a Rhodes Scholar with George Stephanopoulos introduced me to George. Another person I knew introduced me to Tom Nides, who worked for Foley. So you just met these people. I wouldn’t say that it’s easy, but it’s also not hard to get in to see people, particularly if you have some reasonable connection. In Washington it just works that way. People are very used to seeing people who don’t have jobs and are looking for jobs. To this day the quintessential Washington thing is someone comes into town, you don’t know them at all but someone else introduced you to them, and you introduce them to five other people and sooner or later they find a job.

I always tell people if they’re looking for a job in Washington, just move there and start working and sooner or later you’ll find something. But it was really people I knew who knew other people. Mark was a great fit because I think he was still in law school when I met him, going to law school at night. His father had been a public school teacher. He and I hit it off immediately. He also didn’t want to practice law, had been interested in politics since he was a young, young child. We had a lot in common. He saw someone who could help in that. He hired me. Probably paid me $35,000 a year, and I was a bargain so it was a pretty good fit.

Did he teach you how to play the telephone?

He did, but not the way he can. He’s the master. Has he done that for you?

I can’t remember whether he did or whether we just talked about it. We should have gotten a demonstration. Although the transcript wouldn’t read properly.

One of the things Mark did with his friend Susan Brophy, I saw her the other night— Susan used to work in the White House too. Mark and Susan, back when they were younger, worked on the Hill and they learned early on, when conference calling was still very new, Mark used to learn how to dial—He’d dial two people together, connect them, and listen. They thought they’d called each other. So he had a lot of fun trying to find interesting matches, like two Congressman Smiths. Then you’d listen: “Congressman Smith, this is Congressman Smith” and play it out like that. They connected the embassies of Iran and Iraq when they were at war with each other and things like that. He was very good. He looks like an altar boy so he gets away with a lot.

He was an altar boy.

I’m sure he was an altar boy. Turned 50 this week apparently. At the end it was pure happenstance that I met Mark. But Mark was a perfect match for me in some ways. He had been looking for someone to help him do this project, was feeling a little overwhelmed, but I didn’t know him at all when I walked in to see him the first time. Mark was very central.

His part in the campaign, particularly that summer, was very low key, but he was really at the center. Then George Stephanopoulos came down to interview with Mark for a job helping him run the campaign. David Wilhelm, who ended up running the campaign for a while, came down and interviewed with Mark. The campaign at that point, even though it was pre-Internet days, was a virtual campaign in many ways. There was no headquarters for quite a long time.

It worked. Mark Gearan, Frank Greer, who were very close friends, Stephanie [Solien], Frank’s wife, Stan Greenberg would interview people in their own offices. We had to be a little careful too because we were technically an organization that existed for all the Democratic Governors. But in that summer and fall, Mark and some of the other folks helped create that campaign. It existed by conference call too.

A lot of the early decisions were made on these conference calls. Even though I was curious but I had no formal role in any of this, Mark would let me listen in on a lot of calls. That’s how I learned a lot about the campaign in the early days. But helped Clinton get set up in Seattle too there and helped him do a little of his press. I don’t think he traveled at the time with a press person, so Mark and I would help him deal with a lot of the press. The national political reporters all go to that Governors Association meeting every summer, because it’s a good chance for them to see the new talent, see what’s going on early for the Presidential campaign. That was my first exposure to a lot of the big-time reporters who all wanted to talk to Clinton about what he was doing, David Broder and others.

Mark had known most of them and helped introduce me to a lot of people because he had been the national spokesperson for Dukakis and knew most of the major political reporters. This meeting itself was a bit of a bore because they sit around this huge conference table, about 45 Governors typically show up, a couple missing. There’s a very formal program, nothing much happens, it’s all happening on the margin. Mark and Katie had the idea of creating something that would be fun because most of the social events aren’t fun either, so they created—I think it was that summer, it might have been the first one, this “after” party that was like the party to go to because it started at 10 o’clock, really late. I don’t think Clinton himself went, but all the political reporters came and I remember pressing all the staff at the time, although they weren’t official Clinton staff, on what was happening, what was going on.

The other event that summer or maybe early fall, there was a meeting of the Clinton exploratory committee that Mark and I and Stephanie and Stan Greenberg’s office all helped set up. That became a fairly famous meeting afterward because it was where they really gathered the people who would be essential for the campaign and had a two-day session, talking to them frankly about what was going on in the campaign, trying to—I think Mickey Kantor chaired it. Joe Grandmaison, who was the former head of the Democratic Party in New Hampshire was there. They clearly had gotten ready to answer the question about their personal life in that meeting, which they then tried out before the press. They road tested it in that setting. I think that was the first time I’d met Mrs. [Hillary Rodham] Clinton too.

I think it was set up, but someone asked them in front of a room of about 50 people whether they thought their personal lives would be a problem, his personal life to be more specific, or whether they had had trouble in the marriage. They answered it together, very much the way they ended up answering it pretty much that whole fall, acknowledging they’d had trouble in the marriage and that they hadn’t been perfect but that they were committed to each other, had worked it out. It was a very strange moment for me personally because just watching this couple deal with this, trying to put that story behind them in front of the people and allay those concerns. It was pretty interesting. I’d obviously heard the rumors, but I didn’t know anything about them personally.

Even after a couple of initial meetings with the President, seeing him in a couple of different settings, I could see why people were concerned. Just his manner and style, you wondered if there was more there than met the eye. You could understand why people were concerned. But watching them address it together was very impressive. I think most people in the room walked out saying, “Oh, it was fine.” But that was a very interesting discussion about what it would take to put together a campaign. I, at the time, had probably an incredibly naïve view of what a Presidential campaign really was and looking at the people they had arrayed around them in the room and seeing all the pieces you needed to put in place was pretty eye opening for me personally. The amount of money that needed to be raised, the policies that needed to be done, the organization that needed to be put together, the scale of it was just remarkable.

Was there a sense at that point that Bush was vulnerable, that this was a doable proposition?

I think most people, a lot of people in that room, because they knew Bill Clinton very well, felt that it was possible. He certainly felt as though it was possible. I think a lot of people who don’t know him think he ran just because he could run, that it was a pretty wide open field, he might get the nomination, that he would set himself up pretty well. That’s not true. He thought he could win. He might have been the only one, the whole way through, who thought he could win. I think he honestly had a deep sense that Bush had not really connected with the American people, that his support around the war was just the usual rally around the flag. That they had essentially no domestic agenda at a time when a lot of people felt like America had sort of lost its way. He personally felt that he could create that more optimistic vision around where the country was going, address people’s fears about being left behind and globalization or whatever you wanted to call it, that he could take on Bush.

I think most people in that room had some confidence in him but realistically thought it was going to be a tough fight. I didn’t know at the time, although I guess I probably was part of it, but I underestimated at the time how much people want to be around a Presidential campaign. Nowadays, I completely understand, some people just want to work on a Presidential campaign. They really don’t care if the candidate wins, if they have a shot, they just want to be there. This is why Pat Buchanan would run every year. It’s a great way to go around the country, you get to talk to people. You can essentially make it an occupation for a year and a half of your life.

That’s rarely true for the candidates. Most of the candidates really think they can win somewhere in their own hearts, but there are a lot of people who get around them who just want to be part of the campaign. That part of it I didn’t really understand until I saw that meeting where a lot of people were maneuvering to be in a position on the campaign, either in some sort of consulting role or running the campaign. But it was a very impressive group of people in many ways. Clinton had somehow managed, I forget how old he was at the time, he’s 60 this year so he must have been 45 or 46 in ’91, almost the age I am today. The network of friends and people he knew and people he could count on and call on and rely on to help him put together an undertaking like this was pretty formidable.

Any themes or people that stood out from that early meeting?

I was very impressed by Mickey Kantor because this was an unruly group of egomaniacs at some level, but Kantor ran the meeting very well. He’s not a physically impressive guy, he’s a small guy and he has kind of a Memphis twang, but he really pulled that group together.

Bob Rubin was there, but Rubin was so low key and quiet. The only thing I remember about Rubin, from that meeting, is that when he did speak everyone listened. They would hang on his every word. I think it was because he probably made more money than everyone else in that room combined. But he didn’t have the presence that he later came to have in many ways. He is still very low key. There were a couple of other folks.

This was much more a nuts-and-bolts political meeting. It was a strange meeting in a lot of ways because it wasn’t really a working group. It was too big to be a working group. I think it was a way to let people know Clinton was serious. By showing up they pretty much guaranteed that they were going to be on his team. They had an option essentially to opt out. Anyone who showed up for that meeting was pretty much on the team. It was I guess what we’d now call very Clintonian in that it was just this massive, somewhat unwieldy group of people like the Renaissance Weekends that he used to go to or this initiative that he’s doing in New York. You get four hundred people in a room, what in the world is going to come out of that? But it’s the way he’s used to working in many ways.

I think most Presidential campaigns typically start with five people sitting around in a room, very close aides, and they sort out exactly who is going to do what. Clinton did some of that but this was much more his natural milieu, a bigger group.

So when did you officially join the campaign?

I didn’t ever officially join the campaign at all. I was always paid by the Democratic Governors Association, but I worked with Mark on the campaign. Mark ended up running the campaign in the early days with people like Mickey Kantor and David Wilhelm. But no one had titles at that point and it was all done on phone calls. I don’t think I ever had a job on the campaign.

My job was to tie the Democratic Governors into the Presidential campaign. Those were his core supporters. I think we had five endorsements on the Hill. The two Senators from Arkansas, a couple of Congressmen from Arkansas, and then a couple of other Congressmen maybe, tops, but Clinton didn’t have any real support in Washington.

When he traveled and did events or when the primaries came up, we leaned heavily on the Democratic Governors who were his allies around the country. When Cuomo decided not to run and Wilder got out of the race, it became a lot easier to deal with. At one point Mark was asked to go on the campaign, but his wife was having a baby and he ended up deciding not to run the campaign but offered to take some role with Mickey. He only joined the campaign officially when they picked Al Gore to be the running mate and they put Mark in as Gore’s chief of staff to ensure that there was a lot of coordination between the two.

But we certainly felt like we were on the campaign. Every day it seemed to be about helping, using the Democratic Governors to help get Clinton elected. I spent a lot of time in New Hampshire with Mark getting people up there—getting the various Governors in. We ended up working closely with his old Arkansas staff, whom I knew pretty well, to get people up from Arkansas to testify on his behalf, the Arkansas Travelers I think we called them.

Who were the people you worked with on his Arkansas staff?

Carol Rasco. Carol had always been the policy person who handled the Governors’ meetings. Carol was his person when he needed to go to a Governors’ meeting and talk about education policy or whatever. Carol was the person who could help us. And I worked a lot with the researchers on the campaign who were researching Clinton’s history to be able to defend him with Carol because I knew her pretty well, just putting together the whole history of his votes and doing the defensive research.

Then Craig Smith, Craig was the political guy. The first three times I met Clinton, Craig was the only person with him. Craig would travel with him outside of the state and do all his politics. Craig went on to the White House and the Democratic National Committee, but Craig was the first person I met who kind of helped out Clinton.

So Craig and Carol and then Bruce Reed came on and opened up a Washington office. The initial Washington office was very small, probably just three or four people, but we worked quite a bit with them in the early days. I’m trying to think who else. Schedulers and the like, people like that, Stephanie Streett who is still there.

From your perch in working with the Governors Association, you had had this earlier meeting on the Hill that in your description didn’t go so well.

Yes.

Was there any effort for Clinton to use the Governors Association to tap into their congressional delegations?

Not really, no. There were probably a couple of instances when we did that. But we did a lot of events with the Governors, and we relied more on their ability to get press and political support in their own states, not so much in Washington. I think he gave up on getting a lot of Washington support until he started winning some primaries. We were mostly focused on using the statehouse press corps and the statehouse press to rally support around Clinton. It was much more geared around the fact that every Governor has that megaphone in their own state to get attention and to dominate the debate, and we used that more than anything else.

It seems like a logical thing. You win Presidential races state by state so why not—

And they’re a lot more useful than actual members. Members of Congress run, a lot of them have very safe seats. Their political networks are geared around keeping them in power through primary elections, and they’re not incredibly useful for a Presidential election on some level. Obviously it doesn’t hurt to have support, but there are tons of Presidential campaigns that have done well with very little congressional support. And the reverse is true, lots of Presidential campaigns that have foundered despite having widespread support in Congress.

In any case, I spent the whole campaign doing a variety of things for Mark that crossed the boundaries between straight campaign work, helping the Governors Association, doing that. I think by the end of the campaign I knew virtually everyone and had worked with almost everyone who was running the campaign. In the early days I helped [Paul] Begala and [James] Carville because they were running [Harris] Wofford’s race. We were working with [Robert] Casey at the time, who actually didn’t like Clinton very much, but to help them. I met them when they were running the Wofford race against [Richard] Thornburgh. Clinton didn’t know them at all, didn’t know Carville and Begala, but they made such an impression during that race that Mark or someone contacted them and asked them to help out.

I remember the first time meeting James and Paul—They came to one of the first speeches he did at Georgetown, one of those three New Covenant speeches—and being very impressed by them. They make a big first impression, particularly James. But by the end of the campaign I had worked with virtually everyone on the political side. The campaign has such a scale, it’s really tremendous.

Did you travel much?

Yes, I spent a lot of time in the states. We did a couple more of these seminars around policy and pulled those together. Spent a lot of time in the mountain states because Clinton was convinced that if he could hold some mountain states you could really put Bush on the defensive. So Governor Romer and his political staffer B.J. Thornberry and I put together a series of stops in some of the mountain states and tried to put Bush on the defensive around there, and then worked with Lawton Chiles and his political staff, a woman named Debbie Kilmer, and some other folks to help put together a bunch of the southern Governors to try to put more of the southern states in play. Chiles had a particular gift for that, McWherter and others.

We ended up winning, I don’t think we won Florida in ’92 but we won Tennessee, we won Colorado, and we won a lot of states, mostly because of [Ross] Perot. We spent a lot of time doing various events, either with Clinton or with surrogates, in those red states I guess you’d call them now, working to keep some of those states in play, keep Bush on the defensive. We did an event in Montana, we did some stuff in Wyoming with Mike Sullivan. There were a lot of very red states at that point that had Democratic Governors. It’s actually true again today.

Did you ever go down to Little Rock?

Oh, yes, I spent a lot of time in Little Rock, both with Mark and with political staff there. I think Craig was running the political staff and the war room and others. We used the Governors a lot to do rapid response, in different parts, to coordinate message and the like. So I spent some time in Little Rock.

In addition to Chiles, who among the Democratic Governors was most useful to the Clinton campaign and in what capacity?

I think Romer was particularly useful. Romer took on Bush a couple of times as the head of the Democratic Governors’ Association. So we had a couple of opportunities to really confront Bush in that January of ’92. There’s always a Governors meeting in Washington where they meet at the White House. And Romer really went after Bush.

It’s typically a very polite meeting where the Governors are really nice. If they say anything nasty about the President, it’s usually afterward somewhere. But he did it right in the Cabinet Room. It made a big impact. Bush’s people tried to undercut him, but it had a big impact. Romer also drove a lot of the surrogate work on the Governors’ behalf. He was pretty good. Chiles was very good. I don’t think Chiles was quite the Clinton fan that Romer was. Romer really liked Clinton, connected with him. But Chiles had enormous credibility in that southern tier of states and was a superstar, so we worked with him quite a bit.

We worked very closely with Ann Richards and Jane Hickey, her chief of staff at the time. Texas was never really in play, but she had a lot of star power and she would travel around quite a bit. There were a couple of others, and McWherter. I’ve worked three different Presidential campaigns in Tennessee now. It seems untouchable today. It’s hard to understand exactly but McWherter had the ability to help shape the debate in a state like Tennessee. Worked quite a bit with him in trying to keep that state in the mix. It’s hard to describe.

I learned a lot in that campaign but in a lot of different little things. I was very much a utility infielder, backup utility infielder. Helped Mark out a little bit with the Gore debates. I was involved a little bit with Mark but in a very—I didn’t necessarily know what was going on when they were picking Gore too, because Mark was in the middle of that and it was very confidentially done. They arranged some clandestine meetings and all that.

One of the things they did, which, looking back on it, was one of the more interesting things, was Clinton had very little background or profile at all on foreign policy. One of the things we arranged—and I forget how we arranged it initially; I think some professor at Johns Hopkins [University] set it up, but—we set up a meeting with Boris Yeltsin. This was before there was much of a serious campaign staff on foreign policy at all. I don’t think Sandy Berger was involved yet. He was probably around, but I don’t think he was formally on the staff.

We did a meeting, which I’d never done before. Now I’ve done so many of them, but I’d never done a bilateral meeting between the President—at the time obviously he was the Governor— and a foreign leader. It was after the primaries so he had a political staff, but this was sort of— Mark was concerned that this was a real opportunity to show Clinton on a world stage. He wasn’t going to leave the country or do anything in a big foreign policy way between then and November, so this was an opportunity to show he was serious.

God knows why Yeltsin met with us. Clinton was in third place in the polls, he was badly wounded coming out of the primaries, but Yeltsin agreed to have a meeting with him. We did it in Blair House right before Yeltsin went across the street to see Bush. We set up this whole little bilateral—I had no idea what we were supposed to do. We brought in a woman, Anne Edwards, who had done State Department work in the [Jimmy] Carter administration. She had a lot of experience but was a little difficult to work with, notorious among the press corps.

But she knew what she was doing. She knew how you set up a bilateral, what it’s supposed to look like, all the protocol things. We did this meeting right in Blair House. This was the first time I think I was in the New York Times because as Clinton and Yeltsin came out, there was a picture somehow of all of us there and I was in the photo. But it was very interesting to me, because Yeltsin came in.

I think it was Bruce Lindsey, myself, and Toby Gati, who was a professor or at one of the think tanks and spoke Russian. So Yeltsin came in. Yeltsin was late, of course, and he looked like he probably had a rough night. It was first thing in the morning. They didn’t know each other. Hadn’t met. Clinton had been to Russia and was well briefed on some of the issues. But Yeltsin came in, he had a lot of advisors. So they were like, “Oh, we’d better have more advisors.” So I got to be an advisor. I think I sat next to Bruce and tried to take notes or something like that. There were a lot of strange little things I remember doing on the campaign like that. But that actually worked pretty well.

Do you have any recollections of the time when the campaign was taking on so much water in New Hampshire?

Oh, yes, because Mark at that time wanted some help and literally the kind of help he wanted was to take phone calls, phone messages. There were so many panic meetings. There were a lot of advisors and there wasn’t a clear hierarchy, which was true of most of that campaign. We went through tons of campaign managers. But in many ways, no one was ever really in charge and that was part of our problem.

I remember helping Mark, and it was dealing with the deluge of calls while he was off trying to figure out what in the world they were going to do. I remember very distinctly a couple of phone calls that were happening because Clinton was flying all around and the advisors were still spread out. Little Rock wasn’t yet the center of gravity during the primaries. I’d never met Rahm Emanuel. Now he’s a good friend, but Rahm I did not know well at all at the time. I’d met most of the other people who were typically on these phone calls and had some sense of them. But I remember Rahm and James were particularly forceful on this series of phone calls around the time that Clinton was really hemorrhaging. There was a big debate, which I think now has been chronicled in numerous books. But the big debate was, do you rehabilitate Clinton first or do you take out Tsongas and just kill him and move on? A lot of people in this campaign wanted to do it all. They wanted to show that Clinton was really a family man—No one knew he had a child. They didn’t know he was still married.

They’d done a lot of polling around the country and they had determined that people just had no idea who Clinton was. They didn’t know he went to Georgetown [University]. They thought he literally popped up out of Arkansas soil, was elected Governor. They didn’t know he’d been a Rhodes Scholar, that he was worldly and traveled. They thought he was just some hick Governor, as Bush liked to call him, a failed Governor of a small state or something like that. That message had really resonated.

They didn’t know he had any ideas, he was just sort of charming. Tsongas had a plan. It used to drive Clinton crazy because Tsongas, Clinton always said, thought of himself as the darling of the centrist, smart, intellectual journalists, the Joel Kleins, the Ron Brownsteins. And as it turned out, Paul Tsongas had seized the high ground there. He was the New York Times op-ed page hero. He was the guy who was getting all the accolades for being thoughtful and Clinton was seen as the crass politician.

So a lot of people wanted to rehabilitate Clinton, show a rounder picture of his background and history. And at the same time win. But I remember Rahm, who was the fund-raiser at the time, on these phone calls, and James saying, “We can only do it, we have ten days between now and Illinois” or whatever it was, or Michigan. “We can only do one fucking thing; we can only do one.” These guys both have the foulest mouths, both Carville and Rahm, if you’ve ever seen them, and they would just say, “We can only do one fucking thing.”

On the call, especially on a conference call, 15 people on, there’s a tendency to split the difference and just say, “Oh, you do that, you do that” and you task the things out. I just remember the discipline that those two folks showed in saying, “In ten days you’re not going to rehabilitate this person. The only thing you can do is win. The way to win is to discredit Tsongas’s plan.” They were very forceful and carried the day on that. I remember thinking, Who is this guy? He’s the fund-raiser. But he was totally right. In many ways, the campaign probably could have taken a couple of different turns and Clinton probably would have survived, but the focus and intensity that Carville and Rahm brought to the campaign was, for me, a huge lesson in politics. I’ll never forget.

Later on Clinton got a lot of credit for focus like a laser beam on the economy, “It’s the economy, stupid,” and all these things that Carville said. It wasn’t so much that it was the economy, it was more that James recognized that in this cacophony of noise out there on a political campaign, there’s only a limited number of things you can do in a short period of time and you have to bring focus and intensity to it. I remember that period very distinctly because there were so many people around Clinton who knew him well and felt like the full picture of who he was and his complexity and his intelligence were not being communicated to people.

I think it was typical of a lot of campaigns, they say, “If only people knew Clinton the way we know him.” It’s never going to happen. The general voting population is never going to understand that person in the way the people around him do. Versus the people just want to drive a message that will get people to vote for their candidate. I think this is essentially what, in many ways, the book Primary Colors was all about. It was about that fundamental choice. It is portrayed as evil, a Hobson’s choice. Clinton ended up with the more evil of two options where you rip apart a good person in order to win. I think it was not quite that black and white, but the reality is a lot of people had a bad feeling about having to do that. Mandy [Grunwald], who did the ads, they were very good ads, working with Frank, but I think Mandy wrote the ad that really attacked Tsongas. That was the driving message for a long time and Clinton hated it. He doesn’t mind being negative, but he hated having to rip apart a plan that he knew in many ways was a very solid plan and one we ended up doing quite a bit of when we were in office. But he also hated Tsongas so much at that point that he was OK. And Tsongas didn’t make matters better by being very nasty to Clinton and calling him a “pander bear” and all of that stuff. He didn’t endear himself to Clinton, so Clinton didn’t feel that bad when they ripped his heart out and won.

It was an interesting debate, it was really about stopping the bleeding on the personal stuff to the extent it could be done and trying to find a message that would allow Democrats, particularly downscale Democrats, to pick Clinton over this intellectual, northeastern, elite person. For me, being a northeastern elite who liked Paul Tsongas most of his life, it was an interesting dilemma, but at the same time you knew Tsongas was never going to beat George Bush and Clinton had the opportunity and the chance to do that.

Did you go to the convention?

Oh, yes, I went to the convention.

Anything memorable about your experience?

I think I gained 20 pounds. I had gone briefly to Atlanta, but I was not connected in ’88. This was really the first time I got deeply involved in the working of the convention. Again, I was mostly playing the role, we had our whole satellite TV operation set up where you do a lot of home state interviews. I was running that for all the Governors, trying to keep them on message.

At that point, the convention was doing the part we just talked about, that we didn’t do during the campaign, which was rehabilitating Clinton’s image. There was the biographical film that was put together with Harry Thomason and Mandy and others to showcase the family and partly lay out a vision. But it was much more about who the person is and reintroducing him to the American public and trying to use some of the Governors who knew him well to do that. But the convention—It’s something of an archaic tradition, but for me it was just an enormous amount of work. It is the most intense media crunch that you get other than the debates. I also did the debates and again did surrogate work around the debates so that in the instant spin room afterward and also with the satellite TV operation, you’d do as much media as you could, reinforcing the method and the base.

I was in Richmond, which was widely seen as a turning point, Bush checking his watch. I was still a bit player working mostly with Wilder in Richmond and Romer and some others to help reinforce the message of what Clinton—That was interesting. I ended up doing quite a bit more in ’96 on the debates, but watching how quickly an image from that one debate became the defining moment and watching how Begala and Carville and others worked that and made that the lasting image of that debate.

To me it was a very important communications lesson. It wasn’t clear at the time watching that debate that Bush had completely blown it. He didn’t connect with people quite as well as Clinton. This was the town hall format. Clinton was obviously better in that format. But turning that one little glance at his watch into the defining moment of the debate was constructive. It didn’t have to happen that way. But they drove it very hard. They made it into a symbol of how Bush essentially didn’t like people, didn’t like ordinary people, didn’t want to connect with them, didn’t want to talk with them, wanted to just get through this and wanted to be President but didn’t think he had to earn it. They drove that message eighteen hundred different ways to show that he was out of touch and not really engaged.

How did Clinton’s relationship with the press develop over the course of the campaign?

I don’t have any particular special insight into that. I guess I was involved a couple of times. I was driving with him somewhere because it was early on in the campaign and there was that—Newsweek does that book where they embed—I think it has changed a little bit. They used to embed a reporter very early on. Newsweek and I think ABC [American Broadcasting Company] would put someone in the campaign very early on and they would spend an enormous amount of time with the candidate. At the end of it a lot of what they reported was sort of off the record and then they reported it after the campaign.

I remember driving with Clinton somewhere, we did an event in D.C. at one of the local high schools. There was not much of a campaign staff so I think I was with him to help brief him on the event. There was this reporter in the car with us I think, got out of the plane with Clinton or something. I remember in the early days, there was a small group of reporters, Mark Miller, who was with Newsweek at the time, was writing this book. Mark Halperin, who is now the political editor at ABC but was at the time just a scrub producer who was following Clinton. They would spend an enormous amount of time with Clinton. It was very relaxed and informal. Joe Klein often would travel with him. There was not really a barrier between him and the press that much. He was pretty candid with them; it was pretty close. They traveled with him more than a lot of the staff did, so they knew him very well.

Mark and Mark and Joe Klein and some others, Ron Brownstein too, from the LA Times, would all spend a lot of time with Clinton. Then New Hampshire changed all—After the draft and Gennifer Flowers, there was this enormous barrier between him and everyone else. It was much more managed. I wasn’t handling his press at all, I just would see glimpses of it from time to time. But in the early days it was very relaxed and informal. But he felt burned by them obviously. I don’t think he’d ever gotten that kind of nasty personal press before. He’d been beaten up a little bit in Arkansas over the years, and there were some conservative columnists he hated in Arkansas who were always writing nasty things about him. But by and large he’d always had pretty good relationships with what he’d considered the thoughtful, mainstream press.

But the combination of the personal reporting that went on about his relationship with Gennifer Flowers, the draft, then this notion that the intellectual press had gotten around Tsongas instead of him really changed his relationship with the press for the rest of the campaign and through the early part of the administration.

I think that’s one of the things we’re going to want to track.

Throughout the time we spent at the White House, Mark and I spent a lot of time trying to rebuild bridges with reporters, arranged a lot of sessions with him, off-the-record sessions at the White House, and tried to get him out of this attitude that he didn’t need to deal with the mainstream press. There’s a lot of writing about that obviously. I think there’s that one context where he says, “I have Larry King, I don’t need you.” The notion that he could talk to the regional press rather than the mainstream press has always been blown a little out of proportion, but certainly those kinds of comments that he would make are rooted in his experience in February, January of ’92.

I’m watching the clock. We’ll want to take a break and come back and deal with the transition, but we haven’t talked any about Ross Perot’s presence in the campaign or how they were figuring out how they were going to deal with it, or your perceptions about whether the senior people were perplexed by Perot at various stages or whether they pretty much had him figured out. I’m just throwing that out.

Clinton occasionally felt about Perot about the way he felt about Tsongas. He couldn’t believe that somehow Perot had become an intellectual heavyweight and the truth-teller in the campaign when he felt he owned that territory in many ways. That was a source of enormous frustration.

In terms of dealing with him specifically, I think we learned a lot from the way he handled the press. He didn’t have much of a press operation. He ended up being burned a bit by the press at the end. But his way of connecting with people was through these presentations with the charts and all. A lot of people think Clinton invented some of these things that later became the town hall meeting and the going directly to the voters and communicating directly with them.

Larry King.

Yes, Larry King. A lot of that Perot did at the same time or first. Clinton did Arsenio [Hall], he did Larry King and others. But a lot of the less traditional ways of talking on the campaign were Perot’s as well. I don’t think Perot was a total innovator, but a lot of the things we now associate with Clinton were things Perot was trying at the same time and that were very much not being done by Bush. We always tried to learn a lot more from Perot—Maybe I’m thinking of the early days in the White House.

In the early days in the White House, we had a whole project to track who Perot appealed to, what he promised, what he’d done. Clinton was intent upon showing that he had done what Perot had promised to do in terms of restoring fiscal discipline to Washington. So we had an entire project. “Here’s everything Perot promised and here’s what we delivered.” Not everything, because there were certain things we didn’t agree with him on. But here are the kinds of things Perot promised to do.

By the time of the convention, there was a lot of agonizing. That was around the time I think we did this Yeltsin meeting. There was a lot of agonizing about how you differentiated Clinton from Perot. There was a big headline right as Clinton came into New York that Perot faded. There was one poll, who knows whether it was an accurate poll or not, but clearly at the convention the idea was to ride the momentum out of New York by rehabilitating Clinton, telling the story of what he would do to push Perot into the background and create Clinton as an alternative to Bush rather than Perot as an alternative to Bush. I don’t think I was that close to some of those discussions. But there were definitely times we’d see something Perot did that connected or worked and we’d say, “We can do that too.” I don’t think we got hit as much on copying him as we probably deserved. I don’t know what else around the campaign.

Why don’t we take a break? If you think of something over the break we can come back to it.

[BREAK]

OK, transition period. You’re in Washington.

Yes, Mark worked on the transition with Alexis Herman who was the director of that. So I went and worked for him.

Officially.

Officially.

You were getting paid by the transition?

I don’t know, but that was my only job. I might have still have been paid by the Governors, I’d have to check with the lawyers on that. Yes, I worked with him, I had an office right next to him, and we were up on Vermont Avenue.

He was doing issues or personnel?

He was doing both. My project was pretty simple. Even though I still had never really had a press job per se, Mark and I talked a lot about the press, dealt with a lot of reporters, and Mark had some confidence in my ability to recognize what a reporter might find interesting. So there was a major project to put together these briefing books for the transition and my job was simple. A guy named Jonathan Sallet ended up working for Gore, and I and one or two other people had to read all the briefing books and edit out anything we thought might create a story.

“Clinton to consider consumption tax.” From anything that dramatic to just stupid little things that people might write in this process, because this process was very diffuse and very complicated and not particularly well run in many ways. But there were all these little clusters working on policy books, briefing books for the new Cabinet Secretaries, we didn’t know who they were yet, and briefing books about the White House, about how it was structured, how it was organized. My job was not to run that process or set it up, just to read them and make sure they were squeaky clean in case they were leaked to the press, which they always are. I almost think they were more often leaked to the press to create—rather than really for the Cabinet Secretaries in many ways. Because a lot of people are trying to get positions. This is when the lobbyists try to get involved and try to get their points of view across in the early days. The campaign has moved to Washington in many ways.

Clinton kept to Little Rock in those days and made most of the important decisions down there, big personnel decisions, with Warren Christopher and Vernon Jordan. A lot of the policy making was going on in this Washington office. Bruce Reed was involved, Bruce Lindsey was a little bit involved. This effort was a good introduction to the government because I think I read half the books and Sallet read the other half and there was someone else who read a bunch of them. Sometimes two people would read certain ones because they were especially sensitive, particularly anything about the White House. It was an interesting eye-opener for me.

It was a brutal schedule because this was chaos. Democrats hadn’t run the White House in 12 years, no one knew what they were doing. The people who did know what they were doing were inherently suspect because most of them who had worked for Carter—Very few people who worked for Carter had wormed their way into the Clinton campaign. There was this tension between all the young—even though I think it is a little overstated—there was a tension between the campaign staff and the Washington apparatus.

Clinton had run very much against Washington, so all these Washington people getting involved created some natural tensions. I think part of the tension played out in a lot of these books. There was a young core of people around Bruce Reed who were really trying to bring a fresh approach, sort of a DLC approach, and there were a lot of tired, stale ideas that came up that were more Washington ideas coming up in the course of these briefing books. That was a pretty interesting job. It was absolutely brutal.

I think I went home for 24 hours for Christmas and came right back and just kept reading. Ended up doing a couple other little things in that period. And there was a lot of uncertainty about who was doing what so that added to all the complexity. But my job was basically like the job of a graduate student squirreled away in a room reading, marking up papers.

Did you find any howlers?

Oh, yes, there was a lot of stuff we just killed. It was easy. I used to say to people, “Do I need to ask anyone before I kill this?” “No.” I just went ahead and did it.

What were the basic guidelines that you were working on in terms of what to kill?

It was very loose. I would occasionally bring something to Mark and say, “This seems to me a little—I don’t know this area very well, is there someone I could talk to?” I ended up calling a lot of people and talking to some of the people who had written the things and saying, “This seems a little controversial, but maybe you can lay this out for me in greater detail, explain what the dynamics were.”

One was to try to bring some balance to it so everything was hedged in some way. So if you said, “We need to do this” it was a little bit—There was some more context around why this policy had been heading in one direction, but there was nothing on paper. No one ever sat me down and said to do it this way or that way. But I knew the campaign—I knew Putting People First, I knew our platform, I’d worked a bit on some pieces of that and knew all the people who had helped put it together. I knew Gene [Sperling] and some of the National Security people. I had worked enough with the policy people to know what was inconsistent with our policy and that was a clear “kill it.” But it was more the stuff that really wasn’t covered, and there was a lot that wasn’t covered in the campaign. There’s a hell of a lot of government policy that gets made that candidates never talk about. Those were the trickier areas. The main job was to keep stuff out that had the potential to be stupid and create controversy.

You mentioned lobbyists. Were Congressional Democrats at all involved in seeking to influence the briefing books or—

Certainly not at my level, but yes, they were trying to work some of that into—At that point also, all the Democratic congressional staff is trying to position themselves for jobs in the various departments. Very few people came off the Hill into the White House itself. But tons of them obviously went into agencies, and there were a lot of people trying to take their congressional member’s agenda and trying to get them worked in.

I knew Josh Steiner pretty well—He had been at Yale with me and then went to work on the campaign and ended up being [Lloyd] Bentsen’s chief of staff in the early days. I think Josh and Roger Altman and Gene Sperling were putting together the economic piece. That one was buttoned down tight. Rubin was in charge. Josh and Gene and Altman had worked together on Dukakis. They all knew each other. It was really well done; you didn’t need to worry too much about that. There was not going to be anything wrong in there. But then there were other areas where there was no one on the campaign who had ever thought about this issue, it was a pet issue of a congressional caucus of some sort. They were trying to help run the show there.

So who would actually write these books that you were editing?

They were written by these various committees. There was a team on economic policy, a team on domestic policy, a team on—It more or less mirrored the way the White House was organized, but they didn’t all sit together so it was all floating around. But there were some of the drones that ended up—The research department would probably collate them, but I think they were a lot of times written by God knows, just various teams of people putting them together.

I actually think, looking back on it, they were relatively useless documents for the most part. I think most Cabinet Secretaries probably came in and reinvented the process on Day One. But in some instances, this is what the department is. In many cases, we had collectively very limited knowledge about these government agencies. Even when you broadened it out to include some people in Washington who had congressional oversight over those Cabinet—The Democrats had had pretty hostile relationships with the agency so the agency didn’t exactly let them in the door. So many times we were getting the first look inside some of these agencies and how they worked, how many people there were, what the political jobs were, who did what. Some of them would have some useful information in terms of who is really influential in the department, here are the career officials.

I remember sometimes you’d read one and say, “Hey, if I were the Cabinet Secretary this is useful.” I’d say 60 percent of them, if I were a Cabinet Secretary I’d read it once and throw it out. You’re just going to create your own policy. You’re going to make your own judgments about people. It was the 101 guide to the agency in many instances. The real action was on jobs. That’s what anyone cares about in that period. What job am I going to get? While everyone is doing some work, what people are really trying to do is get a job. That’s where all the action is. It makes for a somewhat unruly process. There’s a lot of activity geared at so-called getting ready to govern, but at the same time, 90 percent of people’s attention is on, “Where am I going to end up?” It’s a game of musical chairs.

A couple of things conspired to make it difficult for me personally. I was working with Mark, I assumed I’d work with Mark, and I assumed Mark would have a job, but we didn’t know. Honestly we had no idea. Mark had been as close to this campaign as anyone and assumed he would probably end up in some sort of position in the White House, but we didn’t know whether he was going to get the job as Intergovernmental Affairs, a job he could do in a heartbeat, or Communications Director. But he and Stephanopoulos were in that exact same space. Dee Dee [Myers] was clearly going to be the Press Secretary but there was some thought that Mark might be the spokesperson at some point. I don’t know half of the conversations he ended up having because he kept that to himself for the most part, but he obviously didn’t know. He really didn’t know.

What happened at the very end as we were getting ready for the inauguration, the White House slate really got decided at the very last second. There was a lot of uncertainty around that team. There were some brand new players. I worked with the Governors my whole career in Washington, which had only been about a year and a half, but I remember when the slate came out they had picked a person to run Governmental Affairs no one had ever heard of.

Marcia Hale?

No, a woman named—I don’t remember. I won’t think of it in a thousand years, because she was a nobody, no one knew her. No one could even figure out how she got picked. We figured out later. She was from Texas; her name was Regina something.

Regina Montoya?

I think that’s right, from Texas.

We haven’t interviewed her.

I remember she got selected. At the end, what happened with me was pretty simple. Mark was slated to be in a communications role and Harold Ickes was going to be Deputy Chief of Staff. Then this controversy erupted around Harold, which somebody clearly drove. I’m sure Harold has his suspicions, but to this day I’ve never figured out who drove it. But basically the New York tabloids went after Harold in a big way around these [alleged] mob ties that Harold had to the union. There was an investigation of some sort, and Harold became red hot. I guess Clinton or Mack [Thomas McLarty] or Bruce or someone decided they couldn’t give Harold a job in the administration yet.

So Harold, who was indispensable in many ways and was all geared up to be Deputy Chief of Staff, got pushed aside at the last second and they looked around and said, “Well, how about Mark?” So they gave Mark this job as one of the Deputy Chiefs of Staff. It hurt me in the short term because I was slated to go into a bigger organization that Mark had, whether it was Government Affairs or the Press Office or the Communications Office. But when he is Deputy Chief of Staff, the Deputy Chief of Staff has no staff. They run all these departments and all that.

It ended up meaning that I sat on the sidelines for a little while. But when Mark later moved into a different role he brought me on or maybe even a little before that when he knew he was going to get the role. I think I joined the White House in the summer of ’93 or something like that.

So you just went back to the—

I went back to the Governors Association. Right where I was.

Can I ask a quick question about the DGA? I don’t want to take us off course, but the role of the DGA, at least after the convention. Obviously preconvention it was doing some work for Clinton, is that a typical role for the DGA to—after a convention or some point— become—

I think it depends.

Or is it a function of the staff—

It depends a lot. I think the Republicans had used it more that way in the past. There’s a guy named Chris Hennick who worked for Bush I, pretty close to Lee Atwater, I think he’s from South Carolina, and I knew Chris because he was Mark’s counterpart. Chris had run it a little bit more as an arm of the RNC [Republican National Committee] and the Presidential campaign in Presidential years.

The first and foremost mission of the Democratic Governors is just to get more Democrats elected in the statehouses, absolutely. It’s mostly about sharing knowledge among the campaigns and fund-raising in ways that they can’t fund-raise in the states. But helping shape the slates to the extent you can and doing whatever you can to help them get elected in the states. But I think the RGA [Republican Governors’ Association] had more effectively used the Governors in some of the Presidential campaigns and Mark had looked at that, studied that. He had seen in the Dukakis campaign the lack of effective coordination of the Governors and wanted to try to change that. Then it was a perfect match for Clinton because that was his political base, those were his people. Those people knew him. He thought politically like a Governor. He understood the political sway the Governors had both from a media perspective and from an organizational perspective. So he really drove that.

I don’t know what has happened since. Certainly while Clinton was in power it was used that way. Gore didn’t know that many Governors. He knew them obviously, but he didn’t have that connection. So in 2000 it was a little different. I think in 2000 it reverted a little more. I think Katie was running it or maybe one of Romer’s staff, but they ran it a little more like a pretty traditional—ran it to get elected.

So I went back there. I knew things would work out eventually. We did a couple different projects with the Governors around building support for the economic plan. Frankly it was a good break because I was exhausted.

I remember spending a little time that spring trying to figure out what I would do next but also getting a little break. It also protected me in retrospect from the absolute craziness of the first four or five months of the White House. A lot of my friends were working there and the stories were legendary. A lot of big mistakes. They literally didn’t know how things worked in many ways.

I went with Mark at one point to the White House during the transition. I remember thinking—I think he and Susan Brophy and I went over. I think we met with Andy Card, I’m not sure, someone Mark knew from Massachusetts. We didn’t know anything. We didn’t know how the system worked. We’d been there once before to talk to Ron Kaufman, who was Bush’s political director, on a totally different mission, had almost nothing to do with the Presidential campaign.

So we’d been there and we’d been there with the Governors a couple of times, but we didn’t know really basic things about how the White House was set up. I remember Mark and Susan and I came out thinking, God, we’re a long way from running this government. We didn’t know where people sat. They’re showing us basic schemas around the White House. There really weren’t many people in that West Wing, you could look it up, but in that West Wing I don’t think there was anyone who had ever been there before, maybe a couple of assistant types who had come over. Ann Edwards, whom we worked with on the Yeltsin visit, had worked for Carter a little bit but she was a press logistics kind of person. Very few people knew anything about how it really functioned.

That period I’m sure you’ve covered extensively with other people. I watched it more or less from the outside and joined the White House with the first big reorganization. Mark had taken a new role as Communications Director. I think it was around the time that we got the economic plan passed. So in some ways things were going pretty well, but there had been a lot of—There obviously was a big reorganization, because things generally weren’t going particularly well.

Looking back on it, the press operation was really a shambles, it was a mess. You’d taken a lot of people straight off the campaign. They continued to operate more or less as they had during the campaign. Dee Dee, who was extremely smart—I assume you’ve talked to her. She was put into a job where it was almost impossible to succeed. She didn’t even have the office. She sat in a small office off to the side. Mark had the main office. George Stephanopoulos had had it before that. She didn’t have quite the authority you needed to do the job, and it’s a brutal job. It really is a brutal job, and the campaign doesn’t really prepare you to be the White House Press Secretary. It’s a totally different magnitude.

Dee Dee had fundamentally been a campaign spokesperson. She’d worked for Frank Jordan in San Francisco when he was mayor, but she was fundamentally a campaign person. There’s no training to do that job at all. They would undercut her in some fairly significant ways. I don’t think it was that anyone disliked Dee Dee, but there were times when there were things that were personal to the Clintons where they would have Mark brief on issues, like some of the Whitewater stuff Mark would do. That was later, but there were times they would send Mark out to brief the press rather than Dee Dee. I think when they did their taxes they had Mark do it or something like that. It was a clear signal that they had trust in people other than Dee Dee. And George briefed too. There was no clear rationale between when George would brief and when Dee Dee would brief.

They did a lot of little things that have been well documented, just to alienate the press. They closed off the door, which was just silly. A lot of other things. They talked about how they didn’t need the mainstream Washington press. They did some things on the campaign that I think any President does, but they talked about it more, about going to the regional press directly, town meetings, satellite interviews, using the regional press office in the Old Executive Office Building [OEOB] more effectively than the White House press corps.

It’s a basic, fundamental fact that the White House press corps is much more obsessed with process and who’s up and who’s down than they are with policy. That’s the reality. It doesn’t mean that you don’t deal with them. But they hadn’t learned that lesson yet. I missed a lot of that, but I came in and Mark had a good opening to restore some order to the process and bring a different era of relationship with the press. And George—It’s ironic, because George is now a big-time media guy, but at the time the press absolutely hated him. He had a couple of good personal relationships with a couple of reporters, but they really disliked George and it was visceral. The main White House press corps had no time for him at all.

What was the source of the animosity, just the decisions made with respect to the President?

It was a perception that there was this arrogance in the young White House press corps. They were going to do things differently and they didn’t need the mainstream press corps. Also, if you actually read his briefings, they’re not particularly helpful, not particularly good. People always talk about Ari Fleischer being a machine, just spinning out the party line and not answering any questions, just saying what he wants to say. If you look back at what George and Dee Dee used to do in the interviews, they either weren’t helpful because they didn’t know things or they were still very political. They weren’t engaging the press on the level that the press felt they should be engaged.

We could talk more about the briefing, but the briefing is a very artificial environment because everyone knows the most important conversations with the most important reporters don’t happen on camera. Anyone who has a good story is not going to share it with the rest of the world. So it’s staged. It’s important, but it is staged, it’s theater, and it’s particularly theater for the TV folks because they don’t have anything else to do. They want some footage of them whacking around a White House official. There’s a lot of cat-and-mouse there. The cat keeps swiping at the mouse at the podium and the mouse keeps ducking.

But the conversations that really matter were the ones that happened after the briefing when the reporters call to ask. “I’ve got a source that’s telling me you guys are going to back down on gays in the military” or whatever it is. “I’m going to write this and I want to talk to the National Security Advisor or the Chief of Staff.” Or “You need to have a response to me on this issue.” Those are the stories that drive the news the next day. They rarely happen in the briefing room. The briefing room is primarily about playing defense.

I think we made, in the early days, some crude efforts to try to play offense, but it was largely ineffective because there were so many issues we weren’t managing that well. From a policy perspective, we were just getting run around. I wasn’t there but I read the briefings. I watched at the time and read a lot of them afterward when I was gearing up to be a Deputy and then the Press Secretary. It was a pretty difficult period. Mark had a reputation for being very straight. He had the benefit of not going out and having to actually brief on camera very much, so he didn’t have to go through that particular piece. There were some simple little things he could do like opening up the Press Office that would help restore credibility, getting reporters into more events and making it easier for them to see Clinton one on one. He did things like that that had a big impact.

My job was pretty simple though. One, just to help Mark get a grip on the job. There were a lot of things he couldn’t do to have a more systematic program of dealing with the elite reporters because that was still very catch-as-catch-can, and then getting a better grip on message-of-the- day kind of things. Mark was Communications Director and the Communications Director is supposed to be long-term planning, which we always used to joke at the White House meant tomorrow as opposed to today.

My job was to look at calendars, work with scheduling, look at the big events, identify the main message opportunities coming down the road, and find out what people thought our message was and decide what we should be driving. Then I would work with the people who were writing the talking points of the day, the talking points of the week, those kinds of things, and try to shape a coordinated message around the chaos that was the schedule. His schedule was a disaster.

We had too many open events. We were doing too many things. He had no time to think. We’d travel like crazy. That didn’t change for a while. It changed only after Erskine [Bowles] came in and did a sort of McKinsey [Consulting]-type study showing him that he was wasting away his time, which he sort of knew but hadn’t really gotten a grip on. Only when Erskine came in and Billy Webster became the scheduler was there a substantial difference.

While I was there that first year we still were dealing with a hell of a lot of chaos in terms of his schedule and trying to find ways to pull together the message out of some of that chaos. I worked with the team on the NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] vote and a couple of other key initiatives at the time. But I just sat in a room over in the OEOB with a guy named Jonathan Prince who had worked on the campaign, a very close friend to this day. Jonathan was a writer and would help devise message-of-the-day kinds of things. I was supposed to work with Jonathan and a bunch of other young people. Michael Waldman was there, Bob Boorstin was there. They all had pieces of this agenda and were responsible in some ways for the communications component around the agenda.

It was an interesting period, it’s a real blur now. This is a good time to ask questions because those were years when you were working very hard, but in retrospect it was not well organized or well managed. It became a cliché but Mark used the phrase once, and I don’t even think he was the first one to use it but it came to be attributed to him, the image of the seven-year-olds chasing the soccer ball and all gathering around the soccer ball. That’s what it was like.

Everyone wanted to work on whatever the hot issue of the day was. It was literally “of the day.” Early days on Whitewater, I remember when that happened, Michael Waldman and I started constructing a timeline of what had happened, because no one knew. It was all ancient history and Bruce knew some and the Clintons knew some and Joel Klein had been brought in to do some of this stuff, but we started rewriting it. We were very naïve at that time, but after that first subpoena, where they subpoenaed all the stuff, someone told us this was all subpoenable material we were creating, so we stopped doing that. I’m trying to remember, I think it was around Christmas of ’93, I think it was the last day—

Yes, when the Whitewater stuff starts.

I remember very distinctly trying to get out of there for a day or two. I didn’t know Joel Klein well at the time but Joel was clearly doing whatever—He was working with Mrs. Clinton and her team—It’s all very confusing, but there was a lot of activity right around then that was somewhat mysterious at the time. It later became much more public.

That was a very exciting period, there was a lot going on, but now looking at it from a management perspective we were not well set up. Mark did quite a bit to pull a little more order into the communications schedule and into the discipline around the message and interviews. But from a macro perspective, we were still trying to do too many things and lacked focus. There was a limit to what you could do.

One of the bigger historical questions people will be grappling with is whether there were missed opportunities or things that could have been done in the first six months to a year that would have put the Clintons in a better standing with the White House press corps. You mentioned that the general relationship with the press was positive until the New Hampshire primary, and then people become polarized. The candidate is mad at the press because he feels he and his family are being mistreated. The press feels it is being mistreated because it is obviously being spun and there are some things that aren’t being told. From your perspective, was this fixable at some point, and if so how might—I know this is a hypothetical but how might it have been repaired so that in subsequent years in the Presidency they’re not dealing with such a highly aggravated set of preachers in the press room?

Look, everything is always fixable. For every problem there is some way to address it. Things were never quite as bad as the cliché that holds up over time. Even when George, as I said, was kind of hounded out of that first job, he still had great relationships with some very key reporters. Mark had very good relationships with a lot of reporters. Clinton himself never got to the stage where he despised the press corps as an undifferentiated whole. He just had particular—He was aggravated by it, but anytime you would go to him—with the exception of the time around impeachment and [Monica] Lewinsky—almost anytime you went to him and said, “It is very important you sit down with a reporter. We’ll just do it off the record, but you just need to start seeing some of these people and reestablishing some ties with the Joel Kleins, Ron Brownsteins, and E.J. Dionnes, and people like that, Mary McGrory,” he’d do it.

I think it was fixable. I think our problems had much more to do with not so much communications. We had policy issues and we weren’t focused enough, we weren’t trying to work on one or two key deliverables. We got the economic plan done and that took everyone’s attention. When that was done there was this profusion of things happening. While we got the economic plan done we endured one distraction after another that kept us from handling it. Because of that phenomenon, everyone working on that one thing, the second it was over people scattered and looked for the next big thing. There wasn’t anyone saying, “These are the next two or three things we’re going to do.” In the campaign when I talked about Rahm and James and others saying, “We can do one or two things,” the White House has to do more than one or two things, but there was never a super-clear sense that we were driving toward one or two very clear objectives and not being dictated to by schedule. I think that only came a couple years later.

But if you’d done more at that time to bring some order to the policy agenda, I think the press could have taken care of itself. The press likes winners and if you’re winning I don’t care how much you actually treat them badly; they will give you some respect. But when you’re floundering a bit, it doesn’t matter how nice you are to them. In many ways the lesson of the [George W.] Bush administration is that we were much too nice to the press. I think there was a tendency in the Press Office particularly, specifically, to blame things on the President, in little things, not big things, but to blame things on the President rather than take the hit for themselves.

I think what Ari and his staff did very effectively, and I saw him a couple of times at the White House, they just took the hit themselves so the President was the good guy. The animosity of the reporters was all directed at Ari and his team and not at the President.

The relationships with the press corps and the press staff throughout the Clinton administration were always pretty good. Some of my close friends particularly would throw the President under the bus rather than throw themselves under the bus because they were young and wanted to be liked. No one ever told them, “You do not blame the President for this.” So when he’s late for something, it’s the staff’s fault, not his fault. When he doesn’t do an interview it is because you said it, not because he said it. He doesn’t really hate the reporter, you told him not to do the interview or something. I can give you thousands of little examples, of instances where we in the Press Office would keep our relationships alive with the press corps by blaming someone else, whether it’s the President or someone else. I think we could have fixed that. I think it was fixed for certain periods of the Clinton Presidency. But at least in the early years, you needed a lot more discipline around the calendar and the schedule and the agenda, and we didn’t have it.

During that early period did the press approach you differently because you were Democrats? Was there any sense that they expected—now it seems that there was, especially with the current administration—that openness with the press differs by party, at least the two administrations. Did they bring any of those ideas to you early on?

The White House press corps has no agenda, no policy. To the extent that they have political leanings it’s not obvious at all when you’re actually dealing with them in a professional context. So in that sense no. I think there was a little more of what I was just talking about. The press corps and the people in the Press Office were pretty close in temperament, in background, in socioeconomic conditions.

If you go through the reporters, Ruth Marcus, John Harris, Marc Lacey, John Broder, Bill Nichols, these people are pretty good friends with a lot of the Clinton people who were there at the beginning and are still friendly with them today. A lot of those people are pretty tight, E.J. Dionne and Gene Sperling, E.J. and Ron Brownstein, Bruce Reed and all those people, they’re pretty close in a lot of ways. Not ideological per se. Maybe that’s in the background. I think with some of the more columnist-type reporters they have real discussions about policy. But the people who are covering you day in and day out are obsessively concerned with the game, with who’s up and who’s down.

I think the level of candor was probably too high, so they saw a lot more of the sausage-making than you would in a Bush White House. I think that had a lot more of an impact than anything else. There was a level of openness and transparency to what was going on that was essentially not very productive from a communications perspective. There was never anything like the discipline around the process of dealing with the press that there was later in the administration or in the Bush administration. But there was a high degree of openness at all levels.

I think there was a certain tendency to blame. There were a whole bunch of stories, particularly Ann Devroy who had never been part of the campaign and sat outside the kind of back pole access. She was an older, more experienced reporter who had given Bush senior fits and was tight with the senior Bush people, [James] Baker and others, but she had plagued other White Houses in the past and she plagued us too. She wrote a series of stories essentially blaming the kids in the White House. Blaming their lack of professionalism for a lot of the miscues. A lot of the miscues were policy decisions. The kids didn’t create—David Dreyer. David worked for George and then for Mark, a very unique individual.

David has this whole routine. “It wasn’t the kids who screwed this up.” He goes on for policy and policy and policy. There was this openness that made some of the miscues worse because they saw the process that led to them in many cases.

These are folks who are professionals, who have been around forever, and then you get a new White House with folks who, as you were describing, don’t really know what they’re doing so much.

That’s certainly true. There were a lot of reporters—There are really two sets, more than two, but for simplicity’s sake there’s a set of reporters that cover the White House and have covered the White House forever. They know how the White House works better than anyone who has ever worked there, to the extent you can know being a press person. But they know how the little things work, how the big things work, and they’ve been around. Ken Walsh is kind of the classic, been there forever, covered the organization forever, was never part of the relationship with the—He wasn’t really the campaign person who spent all the time with George and Dee Dee and others, but he had been there for a long time and knows how it works. And there’s a set of senior reporters who have been in Washington for a long time. Susan Page and those people never—Those are longtime professional Washington reporters who know the names of the Secret Service agents and the people in the White House band. They know the ushers. Things that even after eight years you barely know how some of that stuff works.

Then there was a whole core of people who were more or less contemporary to the people who were running the White House, who came out of the campaign and were personally close to the White House. Half of them covering the White House as well. So there were really two dynamics there.

The group you described is very much like that. You have no idea what you’re doing. This is the least professional press operation I’ve ever seen in the early days and a lot of cynicism and skepticism about how things are being run. And they didn’t have any personal connection with Clinton. Whereas the other reporters knew Clinton pretty well because they covered him, spent a lot of time with him on the campaign, despite New Hampshire. They’d still been around and seen how it worked, and had some close relationships and that was with Ruth Marcus and Mark Halperin who had been on the campaign. John Harris was in later on.

But back to your question. I think the press relationships were always solvable as long as you solved some other things. Later on when Leon [Panetta] came in and Erskine, when we got a better grip on the day-to-day—Mike [McCurry] came in too—the place ran a whole lot differently within a pretty short period of time. It worked well for a little while. It worked much, much better for a little while.

Mike was particularly good. Mike returned the Press Office to its classic mode, probably the best way it could be organized. We were organized probably eight different ways in eight years, but by and large, McCurry came in and had the authority to do whatever he wanted to do, to find out whatever he did, had the background from being at the State Department handling the foreign policy issues. He had a good relationship with reporters and was obviously not seen as a Clinton apologist since he’d attacked Clinton in the early days when he was with [J. Robert] Kerrey.

So Mike came in and restored it to a level of professionalism. I think Dee Dee got beaten up for a lot of things that were not in her control. But there’s no doubt that Mike’s job description, the way he came in, allowed him to do his job much more effectively than Dee Dee had done it. That changed the White House substantially in that period. After that, even though there were still a lot of ups and downs, after we lost the election in ’94 and some other issues that came up from time to time, but the period from—When did Panetta come in?

Mid ’94.

Mid ’94 through the election period when, compared to the early days, there was a high degree of order and discipline. I think that largely, with the exception of the chaos that grew up around Lewinsky, that more or less ranged for the rest of the administration. There were a lot of different personal styles, but after that model was created with a stronger Chief of Staff, a more disciplined approach to the press, things functioned a lot more smoothly.

I wanted to ask you some organizational questions because there’s always a question about the relationship between the head of communications and speechwriting, the head of communications and the Press Secretary and so forth, because obviously the roles are different. I wonder if you could, from the point that you come in, tell us a little about how things were organized.

I talked a little bit about when George was Communications Director. I think Dee Dee reported to him. I wasn’t there early in ’93 but my understanding is that George was Communications Director and had some other things in his title. I think Dee Dee worked for him. I’m not positive but Dee Dee had the Press Secretary job, but she was a Deputy Assistant to the President and had the smaller office. Then Ricki Seidman was sort of a free-floating—We always had a couple of free-floating people, but Ricki was in the office in between. She moved on to be scheduler. Mark was Deputy Chief of Staff. I wasn’t there for that period; I couldn’t really speak to that.

When Mark came in, it was restored a little more to the way it typically—It was still a little strange because Dee Dee still had her own operation, which was the press operation, but Mark more or less ran everything that we would typically call the Press Office along with the Communications Office.

That was at the same time that David Gergen came in?

Yes. Gergen never had line authority. Gergen came in and was a kind of counselor. He didn’t want—He’d been around. It’s a great job. If you ever go to the White House, take the job of counselor. That’s what you aspire to. George thought it was a demotion when he first got it. I don’t remember what his exact title was but it turns out that’s the job you want. The people who had that job, you’re not responsible for anything but you can go to all the meetings and you have time to do other things like talk to the press, go to lunch, and do all sorts of things.

If you stay effective, the President trusts you, then you’re still in the mix. Running something in the White House is not a lot of fun, it’s a thankless task. It’s a machine that only deals with crises. You’re dealing with people, there are no HR [human resources] systems. There’s nothing like what you’d see—There are no organizational charts per se. Trying to pull together a staff and deal with the mechanical pieces of things is very complicated while you’re dealing with a crisis. So if you ever want to work in the White House, aim for counselor or something like that with no line authority. No one reports to you but you have access to all the meetings.

Mark had this job where a lot of different people reported to him, including people who didn’t really report to him.

That’s very helpful because if you look at an organizational chart—

You look at it like this. You’ve thrown some people into—Ricki got moved down to scheduling, I think, if I remember right, and Rahm took the office in between Mark and Dee Dee. Rahm had been this big powerhouse, had run the political operation and run a lot of different things. He had an undefined portfolio in many ways but being in that job after not having been in power for 12 years, and you’ve raised the money and you’re sitting in the White House, you’ve got to take care of everyone. His Chicago experience comes in very handy then because everyone wants something, whether it’s a job or tickets to the radio address or something. Rahm didn’t have much interest in taking care of all those people because he’d rather have someone else do that, and he did have other people do that. But he needed to take some of the calls because there were some people who were really critical, but he also wanted to be playing more of a policy/communications role. So he gets demoted and he reports to Mark. But as a practical matter, he’s free floating.

Actually, enormous credit goes to Rahm. A lot of people thought he was disgraced and had lost his portfolio.

I thought he got fired.

He did. He got fired, but he stayed in the White House and he worked for Mark and he got a nice office. What I described as the chaos of ’93, a lot of people were fighting about Clinton’s time and schedule and the words that would come out of his mouth. Rahm was one of the first people who figured out that you could drive a hell of a lot just by having an office in the White House. You didn’t need really the President’s time so much, or even for him to do any events.

Rahm would just drive certain things. He’d pick an issue that no one else was working on. He didn’t have a war room. There’s this whole health care war room that was trying to drive policy. Rahm would just take an issue he cared about, that he wanted to work on and that the President cared about too. He wasn’t disconnected from the President. He would just drive it on his own. That is how he did the crime bill. There was a spate of shootings and a whole bunch of things that drove the crime bill to the top of the public agenda, but there was no war room for crime. There was almost no one who worked on crime. There were two people in the policy office. Rahm would use letters to Congress. He’d bring in victims of crimes, of shootings. He’d bring in mayors, have little meetings that didn’t even involve the President, bring them out to the stakeout at the White House and get energy behind an issue to the point where the President would say— He wouldn’t go to all these scheduling meetings and try to get the President’s time; he’d do these things on his own. Then the President would say, “Why aren’t I doing more crime events? That seems to have some real momentum, not this damn health care.”

Despite having been fired, Rahm was able to create more momentum around some issues than some of the people working in a more traditional way. But Rahm worked for Mark. Dreyer worked for Mark. Dreyer was always a bit of a free-floater, worked on a bunch of different issues. Mark ran the whole speechwriting operation at that time. He ran everything that you’d consider communications, but he also ran media affairs, which is really the Press Office.

It’s the regional press, radio, TV, who is on the Sunday shows, we’d coordinate the Sunday shows. He ran 90 percent of what you’d consider the Press Office and Dee Dee just ran the Press Office that was the briefings, the briefing book for the briefings, and the lower press office, which were the Deputy Press Secretaries and the Assistant Press Secretaries. But the regional press operation, everything that is situated across the street from the Old Executive Office Building was under Mark’s control.

I don’t remember all the titles, but these people you have listed here all worked in that area. Research was an adjunct to speechwriting by and large, but also worked a lot with David Dreyer who ran communications around some of the big issues. News analysis was just the process of gathering news and presenting it to the President. Waldman and Bob Boorstin were both sort of free-floaters, worked on a lot of different issues. I worked a lot with them because they were thinking about what’s coming next, what’s coming down the pike. Jeff Eller ran the regional media operation, which throughout the Clinton administration was a big deal. I think one of the innovations was to use that kind of operation much more actively to go over the heads of the Washington press corps. I think everyone has always done that, but I think Clinton used that very aggressively.

We would do a lot of things around trips, around travel, around radio, around TV, to reach out to the regional press corps. The regional press corps, to this day, is still much more interested in policy and what’s happening and what the real proposal is rather than what’s behind the proposal. But that is more or less the way it ran.

This by the way is wrong, that’s the one thing that’s glaringly wrong. Alexis never ran this, this is Jeff Eller. On page 2 of 2. If you see here, Jeff Eller is Director of Media Affairs and you flip it over and Alexis is in there. Alexis was running Public Liaison. Jeff ran this operation. These people all did—Lisa [Mortman], Ernie [Gibble], Jess [Sarmiento], and Josh [Silverman] were the regional press people. Dave [Anderson] did TV and he particularly did cable TV if you think about it. He was in charge of things like MTV [Music Television network], special events on ABC, the town hall we did with children, and things like that. Dave is a very MTV-generation guy. Dave was always doing more alternative cable TV and helping us connect with those people.

Richard [Strauss] was a radio guy forever. Also when the talk show explosion happened, Richard was the person who was helping us monitor that. Jock Gill, written as Special Projects Coordinator, I have no idea where he is today, but in many ways he was the first person to drive the Internet as a mechanism of the White House. If you think back to ’93, ’94, we were using email. It was a pretty archaic system but we used email. Later I think we got Lotus Notes, but at the time it was sort of a self-created email system that I think came out of DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency], literally out of the NSC [National Security Council], which had been around at the White House through—Ollie North got in trouble over emails. It had been around. But Jock was the first person to understand, along with a guy named Tom Kalil who was actually in the National Economic Council. Jock and Tom were the first people to understand the power of the Internet as a communications device.

Jock was probably one of the first people who had the Internet, whatever it was, on his computer. At the time it was, what’s the Internet? Tom got someone to donate a bunch of monitors and we put them up on the fifth floor of the OEOB, and he would try to drag people up there and show them what it was capable of. So you could go up. It was just an office with pretty primitive browsers and you could go up and look at the Internet. But Jock helped drive the creation of the White House website, which really changed the Press Office.

At some point we should just talk about technology. Whenever I’m asked to speak for 45 minutes about the Press Office to someone, what I’ll really talk about is how technology has dramatically changed the way the press interacts with the White House. Not just the White House, but changed the way the press interacts with society at large, business, and everything. But Jock was the first person to grasp the possibilities there.

The rest of this is all right. I don’t remember chronologically who worked when, but those are all the people who worked in that office. If Dee Dee had reported to Mark, or vice versa, it would have been an absolutely logical and coherent operation. If everyone had reported to Dee Dee it would have been a logical and coherent organization. It’s hard to pick up from looking at this, but there’s a lot of interaction between the Press Office, which is dealing with everyday matters and what is coming up. Particularly the lower Press Office, which is directly tied into the White House press corps and these people in these boxes here. Having them in two separate organizations never makes a lot of sense. The reality is you work as one organization. No one pays much attention to the boxes. We’d all have a meeting every morning in Mark’s office, everyone would be there. All these people, all the people from the lower Press Office would meet in Mark’s office, and Mark and Dee Dee would run that meeting in advance of the gaggle, which is the morning press event.

Do you know if there was ever any serious consideration given to either of those two scenarios you’re talking about?

It was all complicated by the fact that—As you know, Dee Dee at a certain point was under a lot of pressure and waged a campaign to protect herself.

She got fired too, didn’t she?

She did get fired eventually.

Fired and—

Fired and kept, right. But until she got fired no one was ever going to demote her. They had an opportunity when they brought in Gergen, moved George out, changed Rahm’s job, and brought Mark in, to make it all logical and they didn’t take that step. Dee Dee lobbied hard to keep her job and she kept her job then, lost it later when Leon came in and brought Mike in. Because Dee Dee was out there publicly saying she wanted to hold on to her job it was very hard to—

The political cost of doing so would have been—not political cost—

Not political cost. But at a certain point you’ve either got to get someone out or keep them and stick with them. Someone else tried to split the difference and that was probably unsatisfactory on a lot of different levels and led to some organizational issues.

If you flip the page, there’s another key player who shows up by this time and that’s Don Baer.

Yes. Now Don came in, Don was angling for the job for a while, had a lot of—He was one of those reporters—We say Clinton had bad relations with the press. Don was at U.S. News, had a good relationship with the President, talked to him a lot. There were other people like that. Don was angling for some sort of job in the White House for a while. It wasn’t quiet, you’d hear about it from time to time. Mark was helping manage that, but Don was definitely trying to get in, in some ways to take Mark’s job too. Honestly, I don’t remember if Don reported to Mark or not.

When Don came in, he wanted almost immediately to have not just speechwriting, which he had to start, but kind of broader control over the communications agenda. I think initially Mark still ran those operations. But I don’t remember if Don reported to Mark or if Don got a—It would be strange, though, if he was a Deputy Assistant and reported directly to the Chief of Staff. Don was brought in to give us, and was very good at giving us a—David Kusnet is a brilliant guy and a great writer, but he didn’t really run the office per se and wasn’t a big player in the organization in terms of the West Wing and the meetings. It was a little more like he was being told what to write by various people. The speeches always become, in any White House, an opportunity for people to lobby. You need someone strong to say, “This is not in the speech, that is not in the speech” and to litigate and settle those debates. The Chief of Staff fundamentally has to play that role, and the President. But on a day-to-day basis, you need someone pretty strong in that role who can weed out a lot of the different agendas that come in from various players within the White House. Don was that person.

Don served that purpose.

Don came in and brought a lot more of that discipline. Until then it was a little like when Ricki ran scheduling. Ricki is a great friend of mine, but when Ricki ran scheduling, the Scheduling Office was open as long as Ricki was there, which was usually until two in the morning, and anyone could get something on the schedule if they wanted to. If you made a persuasive enough case to Ricki, you’d get on the schedule. When Billy came in, you had to submit it on a piece of paper and it was open from nine to five. It wasn’t really, but he would almost literally shut the door at five, and it would stop and it was done and there was no more litigating and the schedule became more coherent.

There were times when that was overly rigid and he would lose a battle and something would get added that hadn’t been on the schedule, but both scheduling and speechwriting in the early days were a little bit freeform. If you could get to David or you could get to the speechwriter you could work something in. Don brought a lot more discipline to it. He had strong views. He was not a control freak, but he was on top of every single speech and wanted to make sure that it kept to what he considered the core communication. And Don has a very centrist capability, good ties to the DLC. David was obviously a lot more to the left of that. But I don’t think that was really the key difference because Clinton was who he was. It was more that there was a consistent viewpoint and a consistent way of approaching some of these speeches.

It all got incredibly complicated because Don’s rise in this role, after he got the job, coincided with the [Richard] Morris appearance. I remember distinctly, at the time I was polishing up talking points for the day that someone had written for Mark. Mark knew what was going on but I had no idea. It was to the Association of Magazine Editors in the summer of ’95. There had been a long process, which Mark helped run with someone else, maybe Harold, after ’94, within the administration. It was called Project 486 because we met in 486 at the OEOB.

There were really two schools of thought. One was basically tack center and try to occupy the middle ground, play more to the values—do welfare and the like. It was a great process, but people wrote these long memos about history and the Presidency and where we ought to be going. There was some great stuff that came out of that process. Another was to be a little more populist. The classic run a little bit to the left but a bit more of a populist message, anti- Washington message.

That’s very crude but Stan would be on one side, Rahm and Bruce would be on the other more or less. Stan and some of the—and George certainly, would be on one side, Rahm and George on the other. Not that clean. Anyway, there was this big debate, and I think most of what Clinton ended up doing came out of either camp. It was portrayed generally as moving to the center. But a lot of the ideas came up from people like Waldman who can play it either way. But Clinton had no confidence at that point—not no confidence, but he wasn’t really listening to anyone who was involved in that process. I think that process put a lot of things on the plate that ended up being used in ’95 and ’96 to restore Clinton’s power over Washington, over the agenda. But Dick was the one Clinton was actually listening to and we didn’t know he was listening to him, at least for a long time, in that January/February period.

I don’t know exactly when he first started to talking to him, but Don came in around that time. Don came in before that, but Don was definitely a channel for them. Don would talk to them, and Mark was not in that loop but knew about it, found out about it at some point.

So when we’re giving this speech one day, we had a speech drafted with a pretty basic message and we were putting it together. All of a sudden Mark handed me something. He said, “I think this is really going to be the message of the speech.” I looked at it. First of all the paper had a different format, it hadn’t been printed in the White House. I said, “Where did this come from?” My first reaction was, where in the world is this from? I said, “Can I get a disk? Can someone email me this?” He said, “Just retype it, don’t worry about it. Don’t bother.”

Clinton went on to give that speech, which laid down the gauntlet to Congress in the spring of ’95. Even though Dick was seen as a centrist, that speech was basically about a pile of vetoes. He said, “I’m going to veto this, I’m going to veto that.” It was very confrontational, in some ways a “lefty” speech. It was trying to create the clear divide between, “These are the things I stand for and I’m not going to put up with these” and trying to reassert his prerogative in many ways. It was aggressive, feisty, the way Dick Morris is, but it wasn’t necessarily quite that centrist in its policy scope as that period is later characterized. But it was a hell of a lot better than the post- ’94, “I’m still relevant” press conference, which showed Clinton was floundering a bit and looking around for policy.

Don was connected to Dick, who for a long time didn’t appear on the scene personally and was referred to in all the meetings as Charlie. We all knew who he was but he was referred to as Charlie. It was not on the table that he was helping us out. I don’t know exactly why everyone decided to keep it secret for as long as it did. But it came out, sooner or later, that Dick was involved. Don and Bill Curry who came in were the Morris access.

A lot of it gets portrayed in the reading as ideological, I think, but it was a question of them having Clinton’s ear at that point. He gave a speech not too long after the magazine editors at the NGA meeting. I don’t remember where it was but in ’95 we were going to talk about welfare. Dick came to the speech meeting, and we had the meeting over in the Old Executive Office Building. It was the first time I’d seen him working.

He brings his little computer in and he’s typing away on the computer and firing off all these things. He’s a quick typist so he’s saying what he wants to do and writing it at the same time and obnoxiously in charge of the whole meeting. There are all these people who have been working at this White House for a while and feel as though they own these issues—We’re going to talk about welfare and a couple of other issues. I still remember the meeting. It was his assertion of being in control and “I’m the only one that matters” that really drove people crazy. Rahm Emanuel and Bruce Reed, who were always pushing Clinton to be more aggressive on welfare, were the ones who always said to the bureaucracy and the Cabinet and Bob Reich and others, “Make it work. I don’t care if it’s complicated, make it work, make it happen. We don’t have much time for the niceties of how the law is actually implemented. You’re going to have to make this happen.”

A lot of this had to do with trying to do some things through Executive order that could be done in bypassing Congress. I remember at one point Rahm or Bruce or both started objecting to Dick and saying, “Dick, that’s not the way it really works.” They became like the voice of the Cabinet saying, “No, it’s much more complicated and you don’t understand.” I thought for them to object that strongly to something that if it had come out of their mouths would have sounded absolutely perfect just showed it was more about personalities and about power, who had power at that point, than it was about ideology.

Dick did a lot of things, and ended up pushing us to do a lot of things he didn’t even—or he took credit for things that got pushed. There were things that were laid out in January, February, and March when we were talking about whither the administration post ’94. But his personality was so obnoxious in so many ways, annoying in so many different ways, that you couldn’t help but object to what he was saying. I was a fly on the wall, I didn’t matter. But it was an interesting process. He revived the energy around policy making, which was good in a lot of ways. Everyone learned to live with it sooner or later. There were not a lot of tears shed when Dick got his comeuppance in ’96 at the convention, but he, and to some extent Don and others, deserves credit for pushing forward some things that were on the table. It’s not as if they hadn’t been thought of, but they had Clinton’s confidence and got it done. During that period there was still a fair amount of uncertainty.

Mark was still running a lot of the shop, but a lot of the ideas were coming through the speeches and Don and Dick. Particularly in the early stages there were a couple instances where there were two drafts, the AME [African Methodist Episcopal Church] was one. Two drafts of the exact same speech floating around under entirely different processes. But it worked out faster than all that, mostly because Leon wouldn’t tolerate a lot of gray. He was not a big Dick Morris fan, I don’t think personally, but he managed to find a way to channel those ideas and channel that energy into the White House.

Curry came in and never quite got—Don was more successful in many ways because Don—This was one of those times where Don had a real job and Don had the speeches, which is a very powerful platform. Don was able to use the speeches to establish himself and become relevant. Curry came in too kind of as Morris’s guy, but Panetta put him on the fifth floor of the OEOB. He didn’t have anything to do. He would write memos to Clinton, which Panetta would make sure Clinton didn’t get. Curry wasn’t as successful in establishing himself as a presence in the day-to-day of the White House. But still had some influence during that period.

The speeches became much more important in a good way. There was emphasis on a couple core speeches to really drive the agenda. But at the same time, remember, Clinton would go out and do press conferences and things like that, which were still well outside the range of Don’s role.

I was going to ask you about your own exposure to Clinton during this period. Were you seeing the President very often?

I’d see him at events occasionally. If I’d worked on an issue very closely I’d go on a plane and do a trip. But the vast majority of the White House people, even in a White House that is not as choosy about who goes to what meetings as some, see the President for 15 minutes before an event or maybe see him on a plane. I saw him at the White House doing events and speeches, but I didn’t have a lot of personal contact. He knew who I was as much as he knew who anyone was, but I’d go in and brief him. All along I would write speeches for Governors’ events and I’d be very involved in planning with the Governors. I did a lot of planning around certain things like G8 [Group of 8] summits where I’d spend a little more time with him, but not at all senior-level interaction.

To the extent that you were working with him, were you happy to be—not to be working in the White House, but was this somebody who was frightening to work with when you actually had the opportunity to work with him? Was he intimidating? Was he easy to work with? Did you have a hard time connecting with him personally?

I’d always had, from the first day, a huge amount of respect for his skills. I think also from the first day I’d been very aware of some of his flaws. Certainly my understanding of him developed over time. I always felt he was fundamentally in the right place on the issues, had great political skills, and got angry, of course, from time to time, blew up. But I never had an issue with that.

I come from a family where people blow up at each other over dinner and they wake up in the morning and everything is fine. I think he grew up that way too. He was used to high degrees of drama but then could go on and live his life the next day. I always felt pretty comfortable around him, was not intimidated by him personally in any way. As long as you’re working hard and trying to put an idea in front of him, he’s not dismissive of his staff at all. He’s pretty open to ideas, sometimes to a fault.

I remember one of the first times I dealt with him a lot in a way that sort of set me up, that I ended up doing a lot more of later on, we used to do—I don’t know why, but we used to do this ABC kids’ town hall, which was live TV with a bunch of children that ABC had preselected from around the world. It sounds harmless and tame and all that but it was a nightmare, an absolute nightmare. It’s a lot harder than a press conference in many ways because you can’t—In a press conference, you can talk over the heads of the press corps directly to the American people when you get a snotty question. Or you can turn the people against the press by talking past them and making them look small. Can’t do that with kids, right? They already look small.

If I were ever working at the White House again, I would never, never put the President with children, especially when the media is hand-picking the kids. What they would do is they’d canvass all the stories they’d done at ABC News over the last year, and stories they hadn’t done, and find some great sympathetic stories and go out and do some original research. They’d find kids with really compelling stories. They didn’t just pick random kids from the Washington suburbs. They’d bring in a cattle rancher’s kid whose father was worried about losing their farm because of Clinton’s new grazing rights. Or some kid who lived underneath an electromagnetic field and was worried about some obscure energy regulation and how it was going to turn their house unlivable, everybody was going to die of cancer or something.

They would find very sympathetic stories, they’d preshoot huge sections, so they had the stories behind the stories. The rancher one I remember particularly because they would have the kid riding out on the farm with his father. “We’ve owned this land for 300 years and Bill Clinton is going to take it away.” Because it was kids he wouldn’t concentrate on it until the last second, and we did it on a Saturday morning or something in cartoon hour. But it was a huge amount of work and the kind of work that always happens and you’re preparing Q & A for him about a whole range of issues, but it’s impossible in this instance, because you don’t even know what they are.

Then the last day, and it was always a negotiation issue with ABC, a day out you’d get the list. Then you’d go frantically—You’d have a whole bunch of researchers trying to find out as much as you could about these kids. You’d find out a rancher’s son from Wyoming. You’d know the issue was going to be grazing rights or whatever it was. But there were a whole bunch of those things. It was my job to brief him on this thankless task.

Of course Saturday morning he wants to take off, wants to play golf, wants to do the radio address and leave. And he’s got to spend an hour and a half in front of kids on live TV. So he hates being there, taking fire from these kids who have been coached by ABC. It’s a nightmare scenario. It was one of the first times I’d really dealt with him in that setting where—My thinking about it was that you just—Any question you get you just say, “Let me explain this to the rest of you. This is what really happens. There’s a battle here in Congress and some people think this, but this is going to work out in the end.” But you talk to all the kids in the room, not to the individual kid. Because if you talk to the individual kid, you have too much back-and-forth. You keep the issue up here and you’re in explaining mode, not in defending mode.

But you had to understand the issue. So we’d give him a fair amount of detail. The ranching one, I remember, I’m sitting there that morning and he says we have to find out what’s the riparian rights of water under this, that, and the other. I call the Secretary of the Interior. I think I called Bruce Babbitt. I’m not going to go waste my time trying to find the policy person. Nobody in the White House knows anything about that issue. So you’re calling over to Bruce Babbitt or the Bureau of Land Management guy. You get them and you say, “Clinton’s on TV in half an hour and I need the answer.” You’d get some answer and Clinton would ask a more technical question. It would be like, “These are kids! They don’t know anything. The kid is going to say you’re going to take away his farm, and you just need to reassure him that things are OK.” The level of detail that he wants for that was really eye opening to me because I’d prepared a lot of stuff for him in the past in various roles. But actually seeing him ask, and I knew this a little bit from these policy issues on health care and things that I did with him back when he was Governor, that his level of knowledge was incredibly detailed, but wanting to know it all and wanting to understand the particulars of the issue and what was driving the politics of it too.

Then he got in the room and of course he actually answered it the way I envisioned answering it, much more artfully than anyone else I know could have done. He would say, “I understand why you’re afraid, and here is all we’re trying to do.” He would answer it at a high level, using none of the material we had scrambled to try to get Carol Browner and Bruce Babbitt to cough up on a Saturday morning, but he did want to have it in his head. He wanted to understand that issue in a great deal of detail. These are times when he was under a huge amount of stress on some other things.

I don’t know exactly what was happening on that issue, but there were a couple of times when I dealt with him in situations like that where I got much deeper understanding of how he worked. But by and large, in this period I’m not sitting there giving him advice about anything major.

You are doing some speechwriting?

Yes.

As you’re writing a speech does he want to meet with you and go back and forth with you? Does he practice? Does he stick to the text?

The average speech he doesn’t stick to a text and he doesn’t practice much at all. He does practice for big speeches. He’ll practice for the State of the Union. He’ll practice his press conference openings. He would practice a couple of key speeches, reluctantly but he would do it. You’d put the time on his schedule, you’d go to the family theater, and he’d practice. The average event, he takes it and marks it up and does it. There’s no interaction. Big speeches—I’d say there was a big speech once a week, sometimes twice a week. Eventually, further out you would have some premeetings with him, sit down and talk to him about what he wanted to accomplish. How do you want to drive the agenda?

He spoke so often as President that I think—It’s interesting, because I get tired of listening to politicians. You get tired of listening to them talk. I never really got tired of listening to him because if I begin to think about it the way he thinks about it, he is constantly improvising. He has a very good ear. People say he likes to talk, but he has a good ear for what resonates and what works. So even a really humdrum speech, he will notice things that even as a close observer you would not notice about the audience reaction. But he’s looking at the audience, seeing what registers with them, and incorporating that into his next speech.

I think that’s one of the things that set him apart from most politicians. Most politicians either read what they say or they just chat, but they’re not watching as closely how people are taking it in. He would have conversations with people after the speech, working a rope line, not a conversation but chats. You’d say, “Why is he wasting all that time?” But he was gathering his own information about what had resonated or how people were thinking about a certain issue. It was one of the few ways he had, being in the bubble, of getting that kind of feedback other than polls and data. He’d drive people crazy because he’d work a rope line and he’d stop to talk to someone who was crazy, clearly off the wall, had a sign up saying, “Clinton is a murderer” or whatever. He’d talk to them about something. They’d be wagging their finger in his face. Most of the people in the front are very sympathetic and they just want to shake his hand. But there are people who have an agenda, they get there early and they want to harass him about something.

They’re usually respectful but you’re just like, “Why is he wasting his time talking to that person?” You get back in the car afterward or get back in the helicopter and he’d say, “That person was crazy, right?” “Yes, sir, they were totally crazy.” He’d say, “But they had a really interesting view on—” “Yes, really, I’m sure it was really interesting.” But he would do that. Now most people won’t bother, they just won’t bother. They go talk to the people they know, they know what they’re trying to communicate, what they’re trying to persuade.

But invariably he would say on an important speech, “My speechwriters gave me some notes and I threw them away.” The speechwriter is tearing his hair out and all that. But that was not really what it was like. He would read the speech; he would write on it pretty extensively. This is a speech that is not going back and forth much. He would write on it. But if you look at what he actually said afterward in the transcript, it’s a cross between the two. He’s still improvising quite a bit and adding a lot of material, usually from what he has picked up in the room or picked up that day or stories heard recently. But he is using what he considers the key part of the text.

You can tell when you read speeches what part the speechwriter really worked on and what part is just filler. He would pick out that material and invariably work it.

Did he have a TelePrompTer for most of this stuff?

Not for most, but for the big speeches, yes. The State of the Union, things like that, there was a lot of chaos getting there and you’d work over it, but he would more or less read those speeches, not quite as prepared but—I don’t know why, but I worked with him—This is another time I interacted with him a lot early on for whatever reason, but it was some speech, I don’t even remember why I wrote it. I have no idea what it was even about. I remember it was given at the Pentagon. That’s why I’m puzzled because typically the Pentagon is a National Security speech, written by the National Security speechwriters, cleared through them, it’s a separate process from the usual speechwriting process. Bob Boorstin was the National Security Council speechwriter for a while. We had a whole separate—Obviously it went through the White House at a certain point, but it originated in the National Security Council.

Anyway, for some reason I wrote a speech and I got to ride over with him in the car. That was one of the first times I saw him do 18 things at once, which he’s famous for, and I got to know very well from traveling with him a lot. But it’s the two of us in the car and Bill Perry was there. Bill Perry is a pretty serious guy, very disciplined, and straight to the point. Clinton is talking on the phone, doing the crossword puzzle, half looking at the speech, and asking what seemed like kind of lazy questions about the background and what the event was. I can see Bill Perry is terrified.

He’s thinking, We just took him out of something else he was doing, he has no idea what he’s doing right now and he’s not really listening when I talk to him. I think I was sitting in the jump seat and Clinton was there and Perry was there. Clinton is waving at people. He’s doing what he does, talking on the phone. It’s only a ten-minute drive. I can’t even tell you how many things he was doing. He literally worked on the crossword puzzle for part of the time, looked at the speech, jotted some notes on it, all in ten minutes.

Perry, I think, is petrified. For him this is a pretty big deal. He’s worried that Clinton is going to blow it. Clinton went there, nailed it, did a great job. Remembered all the names that Perry told him. It was one of those times when I got a much deeper appreciation for how he can just get something, amidst all the chaos get something and really make it work.

We’ll break for lunch in about ten minutes, but one question from the earlier period I wanted to follow up on. Bob Woodward.

Oh, yes, that’s a good one actually because I was very involved in that.

I would like to hear how—

I was not involved in the book. You’re talking about the book, the process—

The book, access—

I wasn’t in a decision-making post at the time. No one really had responsibility for managing that book, but to the extent that anyone was coordinating, I guess Mark was. Mark certainly was worried about it, knew Woodward well from the past and was concerned about how this would play out. The way Woodward works is not complicated. He accumulates a huge amount of detail around certain key events and meetings, and he uses his knowledge of a certain meeting, which isn’t necessarily even a key meeting in some ways, but it becomes the key meeting because he makes it that way, to scare people into telling their side of the story.

Little things. He’ll say, “You were drinking orange juice and So-and-So was eating off your plate” or something like that. So people think, Oh, my God, he must know everything. They get panicked and tell their side of the story to the point where some people would just turn over reams of material.

Sounds like police interrogation strategy.

It is, it’s not complicated. He works little things. Just reading All the President’s Men. It’s not complicated, it is like police work. He’s low key, very low key, not intimidating in person, very sympathetic to talk to. I’ve never personally done an interview with him because he focuses on policy makers for the most part. But he worked a couple of people into giving him a lot of information. I don’t even think they were people with a big agenda, which I guess is the book. But at a certain point essentially the dam broke and everybody dove into the turbulence. At that point it was somewhat out of control.

I think there was an effort early on to manage it, schedule the interviews, but a couple of people didn’t play by the rules and were worried that the budget hawks were taking over the story and that this was going to look as though the political people got rolled by the sensible, smart policy people. The problem is his books are clichéd. Fundamentally there’s always—At the end there’s always a hero. Someone who broke through and got the President to go off in the right way.

Mark’s view is somewhat indifferent to who won and who lost, but let’s make sure that the President is portrayed as having made the right decision. Let’s not worry too much about some of the sausage-making that is going to be in every Woodward book. Looking back, I think we overreacted to the book. There was an obsession with the book. I think that’s because a lot of people hadn’t dealt with Woodward before, weren’t familiar with him. People obviously talked too much, way too much. I think we worried, not just worried too much, but we planned a whole reaction to it, which ended up giving it more life and a higher degree of visibility.

You planned a reaction because—

We were worried about it. David Dreyer and I were back at the White House, and someone else too, and we had to read the book. We got an advance copy, just a day or so, and had to read the whole thing, pick out the worst parts, fax it all off to Italy—Clinton was in Naples at the G8 meeting—and then help coordinate a response. But most of the players were over there.

That was not my idea certainly. I think it was smart to try to figure out what was in the book, but it became a little too much of an obsession. In terms of handling it, it wasn’t really handled. I got involved in dealing with some of the reaction, but there were too many people who felt as though they were cornered into talking and gave him a huge amount of information. It was a bit of a caricature of what happened, but not inaccurate by and large.

Who made the decision to give him the access in the first place?

I don’t think anyone did. I don’t think there was a big decision to cooperate at any point. In fact, I think there was an idea to manage it, but I think he got enough information from a couple of people—I think there were a couple of people who were outside the White House, either because they’d left or were tangential to the White House itself. I won’t name names, some of them are still friends of mine, but certainly someone around Alice Rivlin gave out a huge amount of information. So he had this whole perspective of Alice Rivlin. Alice Rivlin was involved, she was by no means an absolute key player, but that agenda had all been laid out there.

Then I think Begala, who was also outside the White House at the same time, felt he was getting a bit railroaded by the story. Woodward obviously—I’m not sure this was the sequence at all, it could have been the other way around, but Begala seemed to see him very much as opposing more of a populist view against—I felt like he gave him a huge amount of information. At a certain point he had enough information to force others—

Gene plays by the rules, Sperling. Gene wants to talk to reporters and he can talk in enormous levels of detail and complexity, but if you tell Gene not to talk, if someone says, “The President doesn’t want you to cooperate,” he won’t talk. But I think someone like Gene was in a position where he had to, to preserve his integrity and preserve what he saw as the President’s decision- making process around it. I don’t think it was a coordinated decision to go overboard with helping Woodward.

Woodward got started at a time when the White House was in a fair amount of chaos and no one was really calling the shots. I think if the book had started when Panetta was in charge, there would have been more of a process for dealing with it. But by the time I think Leon—The book was what, ’95?

That sounds right.

I know it came out during a G8 meeting when Clinton was in Italy. He had gotten going pretty early on. I think there was an issue around whether Clinton talks to him, which you could control. There were certain pieces of it you could piece together, but by and large, the view in the White House was that by the time we came to deal with it, we’d already lost the war. You’re waging a series of battles. Having said that, historically, it put Clinton in a pretty good light. He made the right decisions, he backed away from some things on the campaign that were not workable, a lot of it dating back to the attacks against Tsongas.

A lot of what we ended up doing in the ’93 plan was things Tsongas had first championed, then Perot after, but the political advisors had gone after Tsongas and then as a differentiation against Bush pushed the middle-class tax cut and the like. But in retrospect it shows Clinton in a way that I think John Harris’s book does better if you’ve looked at that. John Harris portrays it as a series of decisions that Clinton makes and basically has on the political/policy decision, shows Clinton listening to a lot of different advice and generally making a decision that stands up pretty well. That’s more or less the same way but there’s panic around the book and the drama. I was afraid to put my name on the fax sending it to—Dreyer and I were debating how to send this. I think we ended up just sending it like it was a—We didn’t use the typical format, “Memorandum to the President re Excerpts from Bob Woodward’s Book” or anything like that. You couldn’t fax the whole book.

These days you could probably send a link, you could scan it or whatever. We just did a ten-page summary of the worst stuff that we knew would get circulated in the press. I think we just sent it blind. We didn’t want to be attached to all that, a lot of little personal details in there. But Dreyer made a stamp afterward, which was legendary because when the press reads something the staff secretary’s office stamped this on everything. Oftentimes there’s a note around what day it was seen or something like that. Dreyer made up a stamp afterward that said, “Bob Woodward has seen” and he would stamp all his stuff, “Bob Woodward has seen.” Because clearly people just took whole files and gave them to him, made copies and handed them over. That was never anyone’s plan, but the process had gotten out of control.

Why don’t we break for lunch? We have a lot of ground to cover.

[BREAK]

We’re back. Is there anything that came to mind about the period before you went to New Hampshire that we ought to deal with?

Nothing really. I helped Mark get set up in the Peace Corps, which was interesting. If we ever did a Mark Gearan oral history project I’d tell you about all that, but it was very interesting to try to get him up because it was still in the middle of Whitewater at some level, a lot of hostility between Congress and the White House and we had to get Mark confirmed because it’s a confirmed position. We not only had to get him confirmed, but we had to get him confirmed by Jesse Helms.

When your typical Ambassador comes in, it’s a businessperson or whatever, you might have an issue, but he would go out of his way to make life rough for politicians, people he saw as very political. Even Bill Weld, whom we nominated to Mexico and he ended up killing it and then even Jim Hormel and some other people. So we thought Mark could be really tough. But anyway, we got him confirmed.

Erskine played a critical role because Erskine goes way back with Helms, their fathers knew each other. They know each other from North Carolina, they know the names of each other’s hunting dogs. Get Mark confirmed, get him set up. At that point I was working for Don. Don and I had worked together quite a bit at that point. But for me it was a good time to make a change. I give McCurry a lot of credit for having thought this all out. I didn’t work for Mike, but Mike said, “Look, I don’t want to answer political questions from the podium. We don’t have a campaign; we’re not going to have a campaign until June of ’96.” This was in the fall of ’95. He said, “We have a small campaign office, but the story about the campaign gets written in New Hampshire, and Iowa sometimes, but usually New Hampshire, and particularly because Clinton skipped Iowa, the story in ’96 about the election will be framed in New Hampshire and we’re not there. We want to be there and help tell that story.”

He gave me an assignment that was pretty clear. Mike had a vision. At this point it wasn’t clear whether we were going to have a primary or not. He said, “Go to New Hampshire. There will be a field operation, which is designed to ward off an operation, but I want you to run a small communications operation that is designed to help tell a story about how Clinton went to New Hampshire in ’92, promised that he would change things, that things have changed for the better essentially.” I don’t even think he went into that detail, but he said, “Let’s frame the election through the lens of New Hampshire. Every reporter in the world descends there, and personally you’ll get a lot of on-the-record experience. When we win, come back, work for me, and we’ll figure it out. It will be good for you because you do a lot of stuff for the press now, but you’ll be on the record, you’ll be on TV, you’ll do all that.”

It worked out more or less exactly that way. Mike really protected me. There was a small campaign at the time, but Mike wanted to be able to rely on me. I didn’t work for him, because he was in the White House, I was up there. I worked, I guess, a little bit for Harold, but Harold was still in the White House and Doug was still in the White House. I talked a lot to Harold, Doug, Mike about things. But I was really on my own.

There was a team of about 10, 12 people, and a guy named Nick Baldick doing the field operation, who was running the state and then I ran the press. The New Hampshire press corps knew Clinton pretty well. There was a good story there to tell about how he’d survived, come back as this conquering hero. He was never as popular in New Hampshire as people remembered. A lot of people thought they’d voted for him when they’d actually voted for Bob Kerrey or Paul Tsongas, but by ’96 everybody wanted to be with him. So we used the fact that everyone had grown to accept him and respect him and was happy with his presence.

He had put the Republicans off in a corner too. The message was that these Republicans don’t excite anyone. They have no message that’s not negative and they’re increasingly, because you do in a primary just move increasingly to the right, and that’s the message we drove in New Hampshire and beyond really, that Clinton has brought a renaissance of some sort to the states. He delivered on his economic plan, is in touch with the mainstream, and is popular. So when he came to New Hampshire we would orchestrate—We only did two or three visits, but we would orchestrate these big rallies. You can do that at the White House, you can do that if your President is popular. It would make the Republicans look really small.

Phil Gramm would have trouble getting 50 people in a room. Bob Dole would have maybe a couple of hundred. Pat Buchanan was up there creating all kinds of trouble too, and Steve Forbes. So the Republican support was really diffuse. Clinton would come in and five thousand people would show up outdoors in the winter for him. We were able to show the White House press corps and the press corps covering the campaign how popular he was. I worked more with Clinton in New Hampshire, personally, than I did with him in the White House. When he came to New Hampshire there were just the couple of us running the show there. We worked a lot more with Mrs. Clinton there than I’d ever worked with her because she came up as the surrogate a couple of times. She spent the day with me before she went to testify before the grand jury. A huge media horde had followed her up there because she went and did several campaign events. No one at the time knew she was going to run in 2000 but watching her deal with that very political issue, it was incredibly impressive how well she handled the unbelievable tension around that grand jury appearance, which was on live TV the next day, and just handled New Hampshire. That campaign, it was not really a campaign it was more about framing the general election.

It’s an interesting experience to go from the White House where you have everything to being in a campaign office where the phones don’t even work and you’re doing everything on a shoestring. Harold was really running the campaign from the White House in many ways and Harold is cheap. He’s proudly cheap. Nick and I were fighting to get an extra phone line. He’s like, “What? No. You go over seven phones, there’s a whole new rate scheme.” So we ran this campaign on the cheap.

The idea was very much to hoard money for later in the campaign, to spend it on media. We did run media. But we got an enormous amount of press and most of it pretty good in that period, for a pretty small investment. That all worked pretty well. The campaign played out perfectly. Anyone who was actually exciting kind of fell by the wayside, not that they were super exciting, but Dole emerged and he got beat up along the way enough that he came out kind of wounded and a little bit weakened and having been dragged to the right by Forbes and others.

How careful did you have to be to make distinctions between campaign activity and official activity in the White House? You said you reported to—

I reported I think to Ann Lewis, because Ann was, I think, in the campaign office in Washington. There was a woman there named Stacie Spector, who worked for her, whom I’d interact with some. You could coordinate around trips. The White House was trying to figure some of that stuff out, because it hadn’t been done by—Well, it had been done by Bush, but they didn’t tell us anything. The last time you could really piece together, which was our playbook more or less because Bush was the bad model, was Reagan in ’84. But a lot of that predated some of the technology and some of the changes.

So between email and phones, and all that, a lot of cell phones, a lot of that stuff was changing. But eventually the White House got it right. You needed to able to talk to people in the White House. Those were your bosses.

You did that. You talked directly to Harold and others?

Yes, Harold and Doug and those people. Eventually the White House got very disciplined about it. Early on I think it was a little fuzzy, but the lawyers got involved and said, “OK, separate phone lines,” et cetera. But a lot of that was a little messy early on, got him in trouble with the coffees and all that stuff, which I think was letter of the law probably appropriate, but in many ways looked not appropriate, but legal and looked inappropriate in many ways.

I left the White House right before the budget shutdown and the pizza party, the famous Lewinsky episode. At that point it hadn’t really been sorted out, but by the spring they had it set up so there were duplicate systems, but we didn’t have a lot of instructions out there. There wasn’t a high level of coordination. We would pretty much run things—It helped to have been in the White House to know what they were thinking and to be able to anticipate. Then you’d coordinate around the trips and the like.

That went very well. The only time they were really interested in Clinton in the primary was in New Hampshire. The rest of the primary season shifted entirely to the Republicans, which is the main story. I did a couple of different things in that period. I ended up working at the Democratic National Committee, which Harold had put in place, Harold and the President had put in place a two-tiered structure with Don running as chairman and Don Fowler running executive director.

The other Don being?

Don Fowler and Chris Dodd. Dodd was a sitting Senator; Fowler was the party guy from South Carolina who had come into this job. The problem is that no one ever said, “You do this and you do this.” So there was a lot of chaos there. Different staffs with the same roles. Harold was concerned about how the DNC was going to spend its money and making sure they were coordinating some things that you do early on—a lot of things that could go wrong in that period.

He sent me over there to work with B.J. Thornberry who he had put in. B.J. had worked for Roy Romer, I knew her very well from when she was his deputy chief of staff and his political person. B.J. was, I think, chief of staff, although Don Fowler didn’t really talk to her. B.J. and I were essentially, especially in that spring, the conduit between there and the White House. Then I did communications planning around the convention, which ended up being pretty straightforward aside from the Dick Morris incident.

Did you have a piece of that?

No, I remember talking to McCurry. I think I got the story sooner than anyone else because I knew the researchers pretty well and they had gotten an advance story from the Star or whatever it was. I remember showing it to McCurry. I think the Hilton was the headquarters hotel. Mike likes anything that is mildly amusing and particularly likes anything amusing about Dick Morris. So here you had a combination of something that was not just mildly amusing but wildly amusing and then the combination of something that was humiliating for Dick Morris. It was almost too much.

We’re reading it and all of a sudden we notice that this big crowd has started to cluster, including a lot of reporters, and Mike says, “We have to go upstairs.” At this point no one really knew what was going to happen. Within a day Erskine had told Dick he had to leave and Dick cleared out pretty quickly, and the convention went incredibly smoothly. I had a little experience at the convention in the past, but this was a time you really had to button things down.

The convention was smooth. After that I worked on the debates and I worked with Steve Ricchetti. Have you talked with Steve?

No, but he’s on the list.

Steve would be very good to talk to. Steve was out in the private sector at that point but had worked as deputy I think for the Senate in the early part of the administration, had spent most of his life either lobbying the Senate or working in the Senate. Steve and I were tasked with getting Senator [George] Mitchell ready to play Bob Dole in the debates.

It was a great assignment in many ways because we could basically put together the playbook against our boss and again, that was something you wanted to do very quietly. We did it at Steve’s office in D.C. We had the other people who put together all the briefing books. What we were doing was learning what arguments would put Clinton back on the defensive and how to construct them. Mitchell was too busy to spend a lot of time on it. He was in Ireland as Clinton’s envoy negotiating the peace agreements most of that time. So Steve and I just did it. It was a great job.

I knew a little bit, Steve knew even more, just from observing over the years what really set off the President. Then we would sit down with the different policy shops within the White House. We’d do it off campus, but sit down with Rahm, sit down with Bruce Reed, sit down with Gene and go through the arguments that would set Clinton on edge and then put together a debate plan for Mitchell.

Mitchell was great. He knew Dole well. We also looked at all Dole’s tapes, sorted out back to ’76 and what Dole had done over the years, what tacks he was likely to take, what set him off too. But we focused on, if you’re Bob Dole what’s the playbook that would put Clinton on the defensive?

Do you remember any of the points?

Oh, yes.

Tell us about some of those.

We went to Chautauqua finally. We had no interaction with Clinton. We’re not prepping him; he’s being prepped by a whole other team. We did it more or less the way you do a typical debate. We had that for the mock debates, and I think we did two or three days. We did half a day of just asking Clinton some questions and getting him used to it as you would do for a press conference. Then we did an actual debate, with interruptions, not a full-on dress rehearsal.

We had to stop twice because Clinton blew up at Dole, I mean at Mitchell. He was supposed to call him Dole. You know you’re supposed to play as though it were real. I don’t think they— Yes, they were standing up on this little stage. He twice called him, “I can’t believe Senator Mitchell would say that.” “Sir, calm down.” [John] Podesta or someone would say, “Let’s take a break.” I can’t remember who was running it, but we’d take a break and go outside and calm down.

You don’t remember what—

Yes, I know what they were. One issue that he hates is late-term abortions, absolutely hates partial-birth abortions, whatever you call it. He doesn’t like that issue. It’s a tough issue for Democrats, especially for a mild, kind of conservative, religious person like him. He had vetoed the bill at that point. I don’t know if it had ever made it to his desk or if he threatened to veto it. I can’t remember the process. But he always felt on that issue that he didn’t like the position that he was being put in of opposing this legislation. So whenever you asked him about late-term abortion, he would go into excruciating detail about the procedure to a point that would have alienated anyone. But he’d obviously spent a lot of time studying it, he was trying to understand it from a moral point of view. He really wanted to understand what it was.

So he’d start talking about the procedure. You’d go, “Sir, come on, enough.” If you ever did that on live TV you would lose the election, probably on that one issue. That was one that set him off. Then anything about Mrs. Clinton. At the time a rumor had surfaced in Newsweek that she was going to be indicted over Whitewater or something like that. So you indirectly drag Mrs. Clinton in with some broader question about his moral integrity and you use the fact that his wife—that would set him off. That was one of the times I thought he was going to hit Dole, or Mitchell.

There were certain things also, health care, her mismanagement of health care. If you went at him on the whole issue of how that had screwed up his Presidency and how it had squandered an opportunity and how it had miscast him as a liberal and how she was responsible for that. He would get very defensive. But there were others. Somalia, famously. He would always be in a very defensive position about Somalia and pulling out. There were certain issues that he—He had ways of answering them, but more likely than not you could throw him a little off his game.

Mitchell did it really well because Mitchell also used a somewhat sarcastic Dole tone. Clinton’s funny in some ways. He has a sense of humor in some ways, but it’s not Dole’s sense of humor at all. That sense of humor, where you tease Clinton’s self-importance, Mitchell could do very well. Clinton sometimes wouldn’t get it, but he knew he was being made fun of. So that would also work very well.

Mitchell did a really good job. Sometimes I think he did such a good job, Clinton would go out and joke about it afterward. He told the press corps, “Senator Mitchell kicked my butt in there.” The press corps didn’t believe it at all. They’re all hanging out watching. I remember we were playing football afterward. Clinton walked out. Some of the press corps gathered. “Yes, Mitchell kicked my ass.” No one believed it because they just had a hard time—At that time Clinton was seen as sort of bulletproof and invulnerable. They could not imagine that a guy like Mitchell could throw him that far off his game, but it was true. He really didn’t do very well, but the reality is Clinton was so good at learning from experience. It happened a lot in press conference preps too where he’d get on edge, he’d say something that he knew he shouldn’t have said, and then he’d say afterward, “OK, I’ve got it, I’m not going to say that, don’t worry.” He would almost always say what he wanted to say in his heart of hearts in the press conference prep, and then say what he knew was more palatable publicly. I don’t mean politically palatable. He would give a more polished response. But in the debate prep, it was a good chance also to review what we had done, what had or hadn’t worked well for him.

Our main fear was that he would go into those debates too arrogant and a little too overconfident and that Dole would eviscerate him in one debate, and he would all of a sudden be on the defensive. There was no need for that. We were winning, we had a big lead, and we just needed to protect our lead. He ended up doing a good job and Dole frankly wasn’t that good. He wasn’t as good as Dole can be in the debates. We went to Hartford that first debate and Clinton did fine. I wouldn’t say he even won it but he didn’t need to win it, he just needed to get through it. Actually Dole hurt himself a little bit in that debate.

Trying to get Clinton to be sunny and optimistic isn’t always—90 percent of the time he’s pretty sunny and optimistic, but if you catch him at that 10 percent on the public stage, it almost always hurt us for a long period of time. So getting him in that sunny, optimistic mode for the debate and contrasting with Dole’s negative, Washington, sarcastic side was a victory for us, and we needed to make sure we did that. So the second debate, the rest of it was a blur but we weren’t nearly as concerned after that.

The last part of the campaign I went to Tennessee. We were worried about losing it. Gore was worried about losing it. We knew we were going to win the election but we were worried about the impact on Gore if he lost Tennessee. So we went to Tennessee and that was interesting because Gore had a whole team in place. We didn’t fire any of them, we didn’t move anyone, but they weren’t doing the job so we put a whole other team in place and that was me and a bunch of other people who went down there. We operated in tandem in Tennessee. We spent a huge amount of money and won by 10,000 votes or something like that. Clinton came down to visit a lot.

Clinton was not hugely popular in Tennessee, but he could be very effective in that context. Gore himself actually, despite everyone saying he’s not well connected with Tennessee, when he came down he almost always helped himself in the state. But not a very dramatic election in many ways. We were much more concerned about the Senate and about Tennessee at the end. I remember when we drove down to Little Rock. The only thing we were paying attention to on the way down, we’re calling in, getting polls and results on the drive down there, was the Senate, and we weren’t that focused on our own state but not focused on the national election.

Not even the threshold of 50 percent, was there a—

I think that was a media thing a little bit, for us it wasn’t. I don’t know. Some storylines just develop out of nowhere and take on this importance. I’m sure Clinton cared about it, but I wasn’t spending that much time with him on that. He was more concerned about winning some states he hadn’t won before. He wanted to win Florida, that was a big focus. He had a theory about Florida long before most, that that was a state that could go Democratic in Presidential elections, and spent a lot of time and money on that. We wanted to win Tennessee for Gore’s sake, a couple of other states. But he thinks more that way, state by state.

If you asked him tomorrow, “What does Hillary’s electoral map look like?” it doesn’t mean that he wants her to run or whatever, but he can tell you in excruciating detail, “OK, you get 200 here and then 50 here and 70 there and another hundred here” and he’ll go through each state, he knows them all. That’s more the way he thinks than national elections.

One of the storylines that came out, at least in the treatments afterward, was that there was a decision made to focus on the House and Senate races, that he was spending time in places working on that, whereas if you had focused on getting the 50 percent threshold you might have been able to do that, by driving turnout.

We were more focused on the Senate. I wasn’t sitting in Washington at that point, I was in Nashville, but we were really focused on Senate races. I remember Tennessee was a Republican sweep, but we didn’t come down to—Tennessee was the exception to that rule. He was spending time in Tennessee despite the fact that we didn’t really have a shot in those Senate races.

Anyway I cleaned up a little bit of stuff for the DNC in November, took December more or less off, and then came back to the White House in January with Gene. I don’t remember exactly how that got started, but it was a good position for me. Again, I think it was more McCurry’s and Gene’s advice than anyone else’s, but I learned a policy area really well as a way to prepare to work in the Press Office. So the options were really NSC, which has a Press Office, or the NEC [National Economic Council], which has a Press Office, or the Budget Office.

For a lot of different reasons, I think partly because Gene is particularly interested in the press and communications, they thought NEC would be a good fit and I’d worked with Gene before. That job I don’t remember a lot about. Somehow I was very confident—It was a bit like the first term. I knew someone would take care of me. In the first term I knew it was Mark, because I had worked for Mark for a while. I knew he’d find a place, even though I didn’t start right away. I knew it would happen. In the second term I just figured I knew enough people and enough of what was going on that something would work out. That was a good job. I don’t remember how it all happened but Mike really helped drive it.

Before we get into that, I had another question lingering from the campaign. Even at the very beginning of the primary season, did you and the Clinton White House have any sense that there were Democrats who were going to challenge—

Yes. Not a sense, just a fear. You always remember the last campaign. In ’92, Buchanan just killed Bush up there, just killed him. Bush in many ways lost the general in New Hampshire. Bush was very vulnerable in the fall. Even though Clinton made some good speeches, his numbers came up a little bit, people started to recognize who he was, but Bush was really in good shape.

The story that unfolded in New Hampshire of this whacko, not really a mainstream character, but Pat Buchanan, a TV commentator, former speechwriter comes up to New Hampshire. No one is taking him really seriously and he goes after Bush on the tax issue and on the economy more broadly and throws off his whole game plan. Then Clinton and all the other Democrats beat each other up a bit but focus also on the economy and what’s happening badly, and all of a sudden the race is out of his control. The whole dialogue has moved into this referendum on the economy, from George Bush, diplomat, world leader, savior of Kuwait, to just hapless, out of touch, off in the mall buying socks, trying to improve the economy. It happened really quickly.

It wasn’t a single definable person. Some thought Jesse Jackson or whomever. It was more just a fear than anyone—New Hampshire is a pretty inviting stage. Almost anyone can go up there, Steve Forbes, you know, spend $10, $12 million and all of a sudden you’re a major figure driving an issue. There’s this fear that we’d catch all the crap because Clinton had a tenuous grasp on the Electoral College at that point. Democrats always have a tenuous grasp on the Electoral College. We needed to show complete strength in New Hampshire and not allow anyone to get in. So even people who were on the fringes of New Hampshire politics, we pulled them in as much as we could. Nick Baldick knows names and home phone numbers of every person in New Hampshire. They were all on the team somehow or other. We had one or two state reps. New Hampshire is a crazy system anyway. Kids in college are state reps. We had to show that they were all on our team one way or the other. That was the idea. There wasn’t a definable person, it was just the fear that the dialogue could slip away from you. Maybe if the Republicans all seized on one particular issue and drove it.

Especially if you think that if you don’t jump in in ’96, you figure Gore has the nomination in 2000, I would think there would be a lot of folks chomping at the bit.

Itching. You never know. There were still a lot of Democrats in Congress who didn’t like Clinton very much. They felt that he cost them their control of the House and Senate, that he was not truly in touch with where the Democrats on the Hill wanted to go. There was this notion that someone up there might just get it in their mind to pull Clinton back to the left or maybe not even the left, but just to show him and go after him a little. So the idea was to not allow anyone to do that, like a Congressman who decides, hey, why not introduce myself to the national population?

A lot of people thought at that point that Clinton would lose the general because he wasn’t—He had survived the budget showdown and he was a lot stronger than he was, but he was clearly a guy with a lot of weaknesses. If someone had gone after him, it wouldn’t have helped much.

A lot of his strength gets generated by the legislative successes of ’96, which occur after those decisions were made. So you’re right, it’s easy historically to look back—

To think he was a juggernaut. He wasn’t a juggernaut at all. We were deeply concerned that someone would come up. You’re fighting with Newt Gingrich and Dole and you’re in the midst of these budget shutdowns. No one knew how that was all going to pan out. Democrats in Congress were just starting to gel around Clinton on that issue because they were so mad at him, they thought he hung them out to dry on the tax cut, he screwed up health care. There was a lot of anger up there.

Only by taking on Gingrich and Dole did you start to create some unity around him. But he was by no means beloved up there. What looked like a really strong victory, I think, was certainly not foreordained. A lot of people think the economy is growing X percent. Tell that to George Bush. The economy was growing in ’92 and he didn’t do so well. The economy is growing right now and his son is not doing so well.

We’ve got you in the NEC.

I’m at the NEC. The NEC was an interesting job for me. The issues you focused on there in theory were mostly the budget battles, trade issues, so you’d build the coalition around the trade vote, which were Republican coalitions for the most part with 20 Democrats. I think we did GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade] while I was there. We approved GATT, maybe China, PNTR [Permanent Normal Trade Relations]. But anyway, no, I think it was the China vote, but I’d worked on GATT in the first term so I knew those issues pretty well.

We built a coalition around China but what ended up happening, obviously, was the Asia financial crisis took a lot of time. It was an interesting time because there was a huge emphasis on Lewinsky and the scandal and all that. At the same time there was this obsessive interest in the business pages around what was going on with the global financial crisis and what the administration was doing. It was a nice refuge to go to work. It really was. To work with economic reporters like Paul Bluestein at the Washington Post and Michael Philips at the Wall Street Journal. All these reporters who didn’t care at all about what was happening on the front page because they were never going to get on the front page, any more than I was going to get on the front page with Mike and my story. They were going to be on D1 and I was going to be on D1 and our issues were going to be on D1. But they would still be avidly followed. It wasn’t a lack of interest. There was a huge amount of interest in what Bob Rubin and Larry Summers and the President were doing.

For me that period was time to work on a bunch of—It was a little like being in a Cabinet Secretary’s office but one that’s in the White House. You’re still interacting with people all the time and seeing what’s happening in and around the scandal and the like, but at the same time you’re working on a real issue that people care about.

Tell us a little about how you coordinate press relations when you’ve got three different Press Offices in the White House. You’ve got the main Press Office, you’ve mentioned the NSC, and your own.

First of all, you prepare every day. It’s your responsibility to handle any major economic issue that is going to come at the podium. They still came. Even in the midst of a lot of chaos. Mike would still get a question because someone was probing to see where we were on these. So you’re responsible for the Q & A, keeping track of those issues. It’s not the first thing he reads, but it’s your chance to get in front of him and say, “Hey, there are two things—” knowing he may not have even read that part of the paper. “There are two things people care about. They want to know if we’re going to put together an IMF [International Monetary Fund] package for South Korea, and they want to know whether Clinton is going to put pressure on the G20 to do X, Y, or Z.”

You’d meet with him on a daily basis to do this?

Mike? Yes. I’d always go to the morning press meeting and then the prebrief before the formal press briefing.

But you wouldn’t usually sit in on the formal press briefing.

No, you’d watch on TV. If you’re the NEC person, unless you’re doing that event of the day, you wouldn’t sit in. Occasionally Mike would have fun with it because all people would ask about was the President’s sex life, and Mike would have—So they started televising them live. I remember Mike asked me to put this together. He said, “They’re going to televise it live and we’ve got to stop this. So I want a long explication of something that has nothing to do with—something out of Gene’s world.”

So we’d have these Hope Scholarships. We got this education policy guy, Bob Shireman. Bob and I came into the briefing room and went on live TV for hours about this education program to show that the White House was still at work. Then I think he brought Bob Shireman up to talk. Finally the average American is going, “What the hell is going on? What are they doing talking about education?” News producers all around the country are killing the briefing, things like that.

Mike was always interested in going up and showing—It was true. It happened to be true. The reason Clinton survived was that the work of the White House went on. Clinton, to the extent he would talk to us about stuff, would say, “I want you to focus on doing your job, what the American people put us here to do.” The work went on. Reporters had a really hard time understanding that not everyone was sitting around working on the scandal. What was there to work on? There was really nothing to do. No one, Mike included, was going to go to the President and ask him what happened, for obvious reasons. We all had our own theories about what had happened or not, but there’s nothing to do.

It was a massive press feeding frenzy, but you still had to do your job. People would work on whatever the issues were and we’d find ways to put it out there, whether it was through the regional press, the trade press, the economic beat reporters, or the like.

Can I ask you to go back to January ’98 and tell us how you came by the news that the Lewinsky thing was breaking?

I think I was there on a weekend, I don’t remember the exact day, but I remember I was there before it was in the paper. I had heard some rumblings here and there, the way you do if you’re clued in. But Newsweek was always pursuing some story about a Clinton scandal. Mark Hosenball and Mike Isikoff and these guys were always working on some Clinton scandal. So you could never tell whether it was real or not or how real it was.

I asked someone who was there at the time. Because I had left the White House and wasn’t working there when Lewinsky was there. You see people, hangers-on, who are spending too much time in the waiting room outside the Oval Office. You develop your theory on them. Typically, it’s just some young person who is more interested in working in the White House to be in the White House than to do anything. There’s a source of tension. People like Evelyn Lieberman and others would chase them out as soon as they found them, but there are always people floating around, and you worry about them sitting around with nothing to do. They seem to be more interested in hanging out. She was certainly that kind of character but I never worked with her. So I asked a friend of mine who had worked with her very closely and he said—And this is not a guy who worries that much about things; he usually feels like it’s not—He said, “This one worries me; this one makes me nervous. She had the time, and from what I remember, she had the opportunity.”

So from the beginning, before it even broke, I thought, Oh, this will be interesting. In my mind the question always was, What’s he going to do about it? I assumed there was some reality to it and was curious how he was going to handle it. I had no say in the matter, most people didn’t. I was very surprised by people who somehow believed him when he said he did not have sex with that woman. For me, when he said that, I just felt that I’d worked with him enough to know clearly something happened. His body language, if you look at it, said something happened.

I don’t know that I spotted the legalism at the time but at certain times when he was asked certain questions by the press and I’d see him with the press, to me he was really saying, “You have no right to ask me that question.” But he doesn’t say that. If he had said that, he might be in better shape. He’s really saying to back off. I remember talking to a couple of my friends and we all had drawn the same conclusion. We don’t know what, but there was something going on. But you, not withdrew from it, but there was nothing much you could do about it.

How did it affect the morale in the White House?

It wasn’t that bad. There were certainly people who believed it, believed him, and got caught up in this and couldn’t imagine that it had actually happened. I think a lot of us who had worked there for a long time felt, Well, it happened, we’re just going to have to live through this. We don’t know what’s going to happen, we’ll just fight. It was deliberately done, but I think Hillary’s comment, the right wing conspiracy comment, was designed as much to rally people against something as it was to deliberately describe something that happened.

There was a lot of noise and some of it originated in the right wing obviously, but she wanted people to have something to fight against out in public and even internally, wanted something for people to rally against. When it became about impeachment, that was even truer. Then it was, “OK, this happened, and he lied, but we have to fight this, this is completely inappropriate.” The whole team rallied together around that goal of fighting what they felt was an illegitimate effort to dethrone the President over a personal mistake.

In the early days, there was a lot of nervousness and people were watching the plot. But you have to remember, people in the White House live there, work there, end up there because they like drama. It’s never as dramatic as The West Wing but while you’re going through this it’s in a perverse way, kind of fun. There’s a lot going on, there’s a lot of attention. The TV cameras are around. This is a thing where, “It doesn’t hurt me, I didn’t do anything.” It’s not like screwing up the Iraq war. This is not like we made a series of policy decisions collectively, as a group, that got us in a lot of trouble. We work for a guy who made a mistake.

It’s a little hard to describe, but the staff wasn’t dragged down by it so much personally. Were there squandered opportunities because of this? Of course there were. And there were a lot of things that people had been pushing from a policy perspective that didn’t happen because you’re distracted or there was no political will to get things done or you’re busy fighting impeachment. All completely true. People tended to blame the Republicans for that. Not entirely fair. But they would say, “Why don’t we just get back about our business?” Or they blamed the press and they formed their own kind of enemies and they were always outside the White House.

The interesting thing, I always felt, was that no one quit. No one ever walked out the door and said, “I quit because of this.” Some people withdrew a bit and got disengaged and some people were furious at him. But no one ever walked out the door and said—I always thought if someone had done that it would have really changed the dynamic. People quit the State Department over our Bosnia policy, right? They were midlevel people who were probably going to go to law school. They probably weren’t quitting because they were that disgusted. Not to be callous, but there were some people who left who were clearly on the way out, trying to get some attention. That drove policy.

Midlevel staffers in the State Department quitting over Bosnia. That drove change. People were saying, “Oh, my God, we’ve got to do something.” If someone had quit the White House because they were so disgusted with the President, it would have been a different story, but I didn’t think anyone—It must have occurred to someone. You could have been on Larry King the next night and everyone knew that. There was a certain rallying around, not necessarily him, but maybe each other, that was fine. In fact, I’d say morale, in a weird way, was strengthened by having to deal with the crisis and deal with the enemy. No one jumped overboard.

Was that true with McCurry as well because he was—

Mike was in a brutal spot. But we all rallied around Mike because Mike was in this horrible position. He finally figured out a way to deal with it. Mike is a happy warrior for the most part. I think he kept our spirits up. He personally took a lot of abuse and had to deal with a lot of garbage that the rest of us didn’t have to deal with. We’re not at meetings with the President deciding what to say about the issue. Mike and [Douglas] Sosnik and others were. But Mike would have to go out every day and get beat up. Mike is a likable guy, huge amount of loyalty in the staff. He had a staff that wanted to help him out. So for us it was a period where you found your heroes or the people you wanted to help out in the White House and worked with them.

When you said he figured out how to deal with it, what was it?

It was very simple. He just said, “I’m not going to ask the President, not going to answer the questions. You can ask, I’m not going to answer.” Created the Lanny Davis role with some help after a little while and all garbage questions. It was one thing when it was Lewinsky, to just say, “Oh, that should go to counsel’s office.” But it became an excuse to deal with any garbage over time. It was just, “You have to talk to Lanny about that.” Whether it was Chinese money or whatever the scandal of the day was. Talk to Lanny Davis.

But there had been a significant amount of experience with dealing with garbage up until this time.

Oh, yes. No, it wasn’t like—In this case it wasn’t Lanny actually, it was outside the White House, it was [Robert] Bennett. But Mike had developed a way of handling dicey issues that had more to deal with the personal lives. It started out of Whitewater. Because I’d been at the DNC, I worked on the Chinese money scandal in, I think, ’97, another great scandal with congressional hearings, all kinds of seedy allegations, interesting characters. But it was all done through the counsel’s office. Mike basically pushed it out to Bennett and if it was something that technically was a White House issue, he’d push it all to the counsel’s office.

Was that quarantining strategy effective? Do you think, looking back, that people should view that as an approach to take in similar circumstances?

You know, it was such a unique instance. I don’t know how else you deal with it. Mike couldn’t have been there, been like the apologist for the President. It would have been awfully hard. The problem is, there might have been a more effective strategy for the President to deal with how he answered the question. I hope there is one, in retrospect. Their calculation, his and Dick Morris claims credit for it, was just, “We’ll warm people up to the idea.” It was a calculation. “We’ll deny it, warm people up to the idea that it happened, and then either we’ll never get forced to actually admit it or, if we’re forced to admit it, it will be old news at the time.”

That’s the somewhat raw calculation that allegedly Clinton and some others made. I don’t know if it’s true or not, I’ve never asked him. But once the decision was made to deny it, what was Mike going to do? I don’t know that there’s any other way to handle your daily job and to deal with it. I think the Bush administration, leaving aside personal scandals, they haven’t had a significant personal scandal, but they’ve largely adopted this attitude of “We’re only going to talk about what we want to talk about here” much more than we did. They push everything out. “We’ll talk about this. Everything else, talk to someone else about it.” I think it worked for them pretty well until recently.

Can I go back to the policy making at the NEC?

Yes. That’s the kind of reporter we like.

There are a couple of interesting things coming out of the NEC, one of which was the Hope Scholarships and the tax expenditures on education.

Right.

How involved were you in discussions in developing that policy?

In developing, a little bit. Gene is very inclusive. If you are willing to stay up until three in the morning with Gene, you can have a seat at the table. He’s not sitting around with just the policy person in that area. Gene really understands the nexus between policy and communication and the marketing of the policy. Hope Scholarships certainly, we learned a lot from the way Zell Miller sold it in Georgia originally. We spent a lot of time thinking about what it was, the appeal around that, how it was packaged and sold and how it worked, as much as we did around the policy itself.

Gene, more than most, was a real honest broker, but he didn’t set out to dictate policy in a lot of areas. He was trying to take what had been committed to and make it happen. He has an occasionally infuriating management style. He doesn’t really manage. He lets a lot of people come to him with ideas, he works crazy hours, and he can go through things in endless detail. But he does have a strong understanding of how the ability to communicate something can have an effect on its actually happening. Sometimes, to some people, to a fault, he’s more obsessed with the communicating of the idea than with the policy itself. But I think Gene is as effective a person in that role—maybe not with the stature of Bob Rubin or someone like that, but is as effective in that role as anyone. Even when he was Rubin’s deputy and [Laura] Tyson’s deputy, he drove a huge amount of the policy making ideas that happened.

Any sense in this situation, especially looking at the education tax credits. You in the White House have a lot of different tools you can use to make policy. Why develop a tax credit for education versus going another route?

I think that was probably a fundamental acknowledgment of the reality of what you had to deal with on the Hill. You were not going to get massive new expenditures for new programs. It’s hard enough fighting the Republicans to fund some of the programs we had already created. But getting a program authorized and then appropriated in that environment would have been really difficult. Whereas, to a large extent, once you can get someone to agree to the idea of an education tax credit, you’re just arguing about the details, the scope, income limits, and size and all that. That was an area where Bill Archer and others were willing to talk. If we could sell the idea of a credit to enough people, you could work on the targeting of it.

Would something like that have created a fight between NEC and the domestic policy shop?

Gene and Bruce were usually in lockstep. No, it was the Education Department that sometimes wouldn’t like something like that. It wasn’t [Richard] Riley, Riley himself was very dry eyed about what was possible and what wasn’t, but there were certain people in the Department of Education who wanted a more traditional grant program. But I think Gene and Bruce typically were more or less in lockstep. They thought alike, sometimes to a shocking degree. But that would get hashed out internally. I wouldn’t say there were big battles between them over some of that stuff.

Bruce largely left anything, even in the education area, economic and tax incentives, to Gene mostly. Bruce was a little more concerned with some of the standards issues, but a lot more on the crime and welfare side than on the education side. That was really Gene’s baby.

One of the senses from people who try to understand this is that this policy seemed to come out of nowhere. They can’t trace it to interest groups or the Education Department. Do you have any sense where the—

The Hope Scholarship?

The tax expenditures, lifetime learning credits.

You really have to ask Gene. I’m sure it has an intellectual forebear. I don’t know exactly. Bob Shireman, the guy we threw up on TV, was actually Gene’s education guy. There was a guy named Peter Orszag who is at Brookings [Institution] now. Peter probably, and Bob, and others put the pieces together.

Hope Scholarship certainly came out of Georgia. We’re still always connected then because of a guy named Keith Mason who worked at the White House and some other, we always connected him to Zell Miller and what was going on in Georgia. Clinton and Begala and Carville worked in Georgia. We knew a lot about that program. I’m sure that that came from somewhere too.

But there were issues that occupied a huge amount of time in that period. The IMF crisis where Rubin really drove the show, but Rubin and Summers and Tim Geithner leaned a lot on the White House to make sure their message was working and wanted to coordinate with the White House in terms of dealing with the whole array of other issues that were underway at the time. Also, Rubin had a lot of respect, eventually took David Dreyer who had worked at the White House, over to Treasury, Bob Boorstin who was in the White House went over to Treasury. Rubin, it appeared, when some people didn’t want to work at the White House, Rubin took a lot of talent and brought it over. So we had really deep connections with them and a lot of coordination in the middle of some of these difficult times with the State Department, around Indonesia and South Korea, pretty interesting period.

I think there were people who were very worried that the entire financial system of the world could unravel, which sounds hyperbolic. But at the time it was a very real fear. Congress was in no mood to give us money for the IMF, which is almost, in the Republicans’ view, as evil as the black helicopters at the UN [United Nations]. It took a lot of work to get them, in that atmosphere, to acknowledge that the refunding of the IMF needed to be done.

So did you have a better relationship with folks like Bill Archer—

Yes. Archer was pretty helpful and some of the Senators were pretty helpful at the time. They would work with us on that issue. But I remember putting together a coalition for that vote was pretty dicey.

What’s interesting is that almost throughout the White House, there were pockets of the White House, Ricchetti is a good person to talk to, because he did a lot of trade stuff. There were parts of the White House that would work with the Republicans all the time on issues because there were a lot of votes we got done. I would struggle to find a vote in this past administration that passed with more Democratic support than Republican support. There might be one, but I’m not aware of it. Whereas we had them fairly often, I’d bet you that IMF was more Republicans than Democrats. I’ll bet you that all of our trade votes, NAFTA, GATT, and China, were all done with more Republican than Democratic support. Welfare earlier on.

We had a pretty good string of winning these battles with Republicans, kind of against our base, even in the middle of some difficult times. People like David Dreier were extremely helpful, not the White House guy but the Congressman. People like that would work with the White House in any period, responsible, good people, and the Senate too.

Anyway, the NEC was interesting. At the time it almost felt that it had been around forever, but it was a relatively new institution. Bush talked about abolishing it, but I doubt they ever will because it plays a really critical role in coordinating policy in a way that the NSC has to do too. In this day and age you have too many issues that cut across State, Treasury, the multilateral institutions, Labor, Education, and others. You could have a generic policy shop with a strong economic component, but you need some policy shop and the Council of Economic Advisers has never been, sometimes an individual in the Council of Economic Advisers has some influence, but as an institution it doesn’t seem to have a lot of influence in any White House that I’ve followed.

Can you think back to the period when you were at the NEC. Were there other places either in the White House or elsewhere in the government that really were giving you headaches? I don’t mean headaches in the way that the Asian financial crisis was, but where were the natural enemies so to speak?

Within our own government?

If any, there may not be.

No, there were coordination issues. For whatever reason, OMB [Office of Management and Budget] was sometimes difficult, which is in the White House too. But sometimes you’d have issues with the Budget Office. I don’t remember who was running it then, it wasn’t [Jacob] Jack Lew I don’t think yet. It wasn’t Leon. Who succeeded Leon?

Alice Rivlin, wasn’t it?

No, she was there before, wasn’t she?

She was deputy.

She was deputy early on? Maybe it was Alice Rivlin, that would explain it. She’s strong, independent minded, never really a team player and all that. I just remember dealing with the press guy a lot. He was always like, “Where is this coming from?”

Jack was there for a long time.

Jack was there as deputy. Jack was very reliable, but a guy named Larry Haas, the press guy, would occasionally drive us crazy because stuff would just—It was a coordination issue. It wasn’t really a policy issue, just a coordination issue. Stuff would pop up, and where in the world did that come from? Labor, oh, Bob Reich was—When did Reich leave?

We were talking about this yesterday, I can’t remember.

Reich was difficult. I don’t remember whether that was while I was at the NEC or whether I was at the Communications Office, but Reich would go off on a tangent on something and really be—Gene and he had a good personal relationship, but he would drive anyone batty, even his friends, I think. So he would occasionally be off on something, doing something you couldn’t understand at all where that was coming from and it wasn’t coordinated.

One issue was particularly difficult. I know the people there pretty well and have a lot of respect for them, but they clearly were waging a little bit of a campaign, in public, on an issue, and it was giving us a headache. It was not nearly on the scale of some of the other issues, but this rule about diesel engines and particulate matter. Carol Browner and Loretta Ucelli, who worked for her, Loretta came to the White House eventually and was Communications Director, but I think she was with Carol at the time. They were just driving, using the press in many ways to say, “This has to be brought to a head in this way.”

There was a lot of competing scientific data. We wanted to give the President a clean shot at it, and we felt we were painted into a corner. That was one of those areas where you couldn’t possibly undo what they had done so you were stuck. They were pretty straight shooters, but that happens all the time, it literally happens every day. That was a big issue. It was on the front pages because the Times and the Post like to write about environmental issues from time to time. They almost always take the side of whoever is the furthest green on that particular issue. This was one where we probably knew where we were going to end up all along, but it boxed the President in.

Gene felt strongly that it was our job to give the President a decision with recommendations. It would say So-and-So is here, So-and-So is here, So-and-So is here, you make the call, there’s option A, option B, option C, but give him that shot before everyone has articulated their views in public. That was one.

Climate was another that I think suffered from some lack of coordination. There wasn’t one White House person pushing it per se. The Vice President had a big piece of it and Katie McGinty and the Council on Environmental Quality [CEQ] had a big piece of it, but there was a huge piece around the negotiations at State, in which Katie was worried about the policy, State was worried about trying to get an agreement at Kyoto.

I knew Tim Wirth well, who was setting the State policy. Katie had worked with Tim over the years but had been always in Al Gore’s camp. There was always some tension between Wirth and Gore even though they’re friends. Because they had been rival centers, both after the same issue and leading on the same issue. That was one that was incredibly complicated.

Then Tim left to go to the Turner Foundation to run the UN Foundation and Stu Eizenstat came in. I didn’t know him very well, but Stu was very low key, an honest broker kind of guy, and ended up helping put that into a pretty good place. But that was one where there was a lot of tension. The NEC was very much in the middle of it. But the NEC didn’t even own all the issue because CEQ and the Vice President’s office owned a lot.

But it was all sort of small compared with some of the others. Things at that point in the White House, aside from the headlines, worked pretty well. Erskine had issues dealing with the Lewinsky thing, but from an operational policy point of view both Leon and Erskine ran a pretty tight ship with Sylvia [Mathews] and others.

Going back to ’98, did you have any conversations with the President in ’98 or did you give—

Yes, but about policy stuff.

Did he say anything—

He was always—

Or distracted or—

He was focused. I’m sure there were times he was tired, I’m sure there were times he was distracted, but by and large the guy is pretty used to dealing with what anyone else would consider a life-wrenching experience and just coming back to work the next day and doing it. He had had to do it in the campaign in ’92, he had to do it in all of ’98. He got pretty good at it.

He was always happy to see us. The reality was that when Gene and I and Jack Lew walked into the office, he’s talking about something he likes to talk about. That is just the reality. He would be happy to talk about a budget battle or something like that. If you’re a lawyer and walk into the office and tell him Ken Starr just did this or that, it might be a different story. But I’d have to say, when you were dealing with him on those kinds of issues—I would go into the press conference briefings a lot of times with Gene or with Gene and McCurry to do the economic piece and I’d stay for part of it. Typically, we’d luckily get thrown out for the session around scandals.

When you were in the room, it was a little more like—You’d been forced to fight in the heavyweight ring and all of a sudden you see a bunch of lightweights coming in, it’s like, oh, this is easy, back to his sweet spot. So for me that was in a lot of ways a pretty good period, worked on good issues. The first term in the White House, you literally got pulled from issue to issue to issue so quickly, every day, particularly in the beginning. To work in an area where you’re focused on three or four things didn’t feel like a nine to five job, it felt much more ordered and structured and like we had what we needed to do the job.

You have done a lot of press work and read the press. What was your initial reaction to the President’s August ’98 statement?

You mean when he admitted that—

Yes, exactly. This is when he came right out of the grand jury room.

I was just relieved. A bunch of us from the White House were actually on vacation for a couple of days down in the Outer Banks. We were just happy—You knew that sooner or later he was going to have to confess and it was just—You don’t get much detachment when you’re working at the White House, because you’re always in the middle of something.

Even if you’re not dealing with a person, you’re around people who are dealing with it. But we were at the beach for a couple of days, we watched it on TV, we weren’t obviously in the middle of writing the remarks or dealing with it at all. It was just nice to have it behind us. You could almost watch it in a way, how’s he doing this? Focus more on the mechanics of how he did it and what was really going on then, than having to feel any personal responsibility for it.

Was there any discussion internally about whether he had been sufficiently contrite? That was one of the criticisms of that first—

I thought at that time Starr had so overplayed his hand that Clinton could get away with still being a little defiant. The whole Starr report was so over the top. The mood had swung back in Clinton’s favor on a macro level so he could get away with being a bit belligerent. He’s never going to give you the total—He’s not going to lie down, because in the back of his mind there are still bad people after him and trying to fatally wound him and he’s never going to give them that. He’s too much of a fighter.

The biggest thing going on in the White House in the six-month span of time after that was the impeachment. Do you have any piece of that or are you just watching it on the sidelines?

I worked on impeachment, because at that point [Joseph] Lockhart came in after McCurry, when there was a respite from all of this nonsense. When Joe came in I went in with Joe. I don’t remember if it was simultaneous. Then all of a sudden Joe was dealing with impeachment right away. So I worked on that. But that had the feel, honestly, of a legislative battle.

The guy I used to share the office with when I first started at the White House, Jonathan Prince, was helping do a lot of communications and the writing of the speeches, working with Cheryl [Mills], working with Chuck Ruff. Jonathan and I were always pretty close to it. I knew what was going on and was in the middle of that. Joe deflected most of the questions, but at that point we felt like we were much more playing offense, trying to push back. Joe by nature is pretty combative. He was always trying to take on the Republicans, not that you had the moral high ground, but you could work that one to your advantage. It didn’t feel at all like the early stages of Lewinsky where you’re just trying to kill a rumor that’s true. There’s no way to do it.

Dealing with the press in that situation, the press calls at that point are all about atmospherics. The question was what was it like, how is he, is he tired? Those are all questions that in some ways are very manageable, but the fundamental public relations challenge in that period was trying to kill off something that happened to be true. Most of us sort of knew it was true, so it became a public relations challenge there, a communications challenge. How do we talk about something else and change the topic?

Fundamentally you know you’re not going to change the topic. But you also have to recognize that not everyone wakes up every day wondering about what happened between the President and the intern three years ago. So you’ve just got to find ways to talk to them.

How did you end up moving into the Press Office?

That’s funny, that was always the plan. Even in ’95 when I left for New Hampshire Mike said, “You’ll either come back and work for me or you’ll come back and work for Joe.” I think when I came back after the campaign I had a chance either to work in the Press Office itself or to go to the NEC. Mike thought it would be better if I went to the NEC, Gene wanted me to work there, so I did that. But I was always going to move over, it was just a question of when.

Mike and Joe were very close. I think they had a plan that they’d worked out a long time ago. Mike never wanted to work that long. He wanted the job, negotiated with Leon to get it. He always wanted Joe to be the spokesperson on the ’96 campaign, which he made happen. But Joe didn’t want to start right away because Joe was making money in the private sector. I didn’t even know Joe at that point. Now he’s a very close friend but when I started in New Hampshire I’d never met Lockhart. I only met him much later.

Mike said, “You go to New Hampshire, Lockhart will be the spokesperson for the general.” He never let me think I was going to get that job on the campaign. So he said, “You go to New Hampshire, Joe will take the campaign job in the spring. You can either work for him or whatever, we’ll take care of you. Then when you come back, you can work for us. Joe will be my deputy and I want to leave.”

So the idea originally was that Mike would leave after another year, Joe would come in, I’d be a deputy. Mike told me at the time I had a shot at doing that, which I thought was crazy. I had literally never been a spokesperson. He said, “You have a chance of doing this job.” Mike had set it up a long time before that I would come in, be Joe’s deputy, and have a shot at the job. So it was a question of when it was going to happen, rather than if.

Mike got delayed, Joe got delayed, so it all happened later than anyone wanted. Mike wanted to leave, but he couldn’t leave during Lewinsky. Joe wanted to leave but he got started late and then he got distracted by impeachment. He only started having fun toward the end.

Joe brought me in. At that point the Press Office was very disciplined and very well run. Joe was particularly good. He doesn’t tolerate a lot of nonsense. He’s a lot of fun to work with but he makes things happen and delegates well. He doesn’t want to control everything so he’s perfectly happy saying, “Jake, you deal with this or you deal with that.” Those were just your stories, you worked with all the reporters. Almost every Press Secretary gets to the point where they don’t want to talk to reporters anymore.

Mike and Joe got there sooner than the others because of what they had to deal with. Those were good jobs. The deputy was a good job because you got to deal with issues—They just hated talking to reporters after a while. So they’d do the briefing and they’d talk to the people they liked to talk to, and you dealt with everyone else. After you listened, you’d sit around a lot in the office listening to them talk to the Post or the Times and then you go off and deal with all the other reporters because you’ve heard enough of what is supposed to be said that you just handle it.

Joe had a good sense of fun, as did Mike. We were so beat up in general that some days if we had an opportunity to really drive a story that was kind of a freebie or just for fun, we would go to town on it and they would not hold back at all. So ABC—We had to do a lot of unusual interviews during this period because if Sam Donaldson comes in or Ted Koppel comes in, they just want to ask about Monica, Monica, Monica. So we set up this interview.

But these news organizations are so big and so extensive, and they’re asking for all kinds of things so you pick and choose sometimes. We’ll do that interview, that interview. There was a huge dispute when ABC requested through its entertainment division an interview with the President on global warming, and Leonardo DiCaprio was going to do the interview.

So we were like, “Oh, that’s an easy one.” Leonardo DiCaprio and the President are not going to sit around and talk about Monica Lewinsky. We agreed to that, we set it up with ABC. We checked it with the bureau chief. They had to use the White House news crew, the cameramen, the lighting people. When Ted Koppel and Sam Donaldson find out that ABC is using a chit to get an interview with—At this point DiCaprio is huge; he’s coming right off Titanic. They go ballistic and start attacking us for doing this interview.

“You asked for the interview.” Then ABC made the mistake of saying that they hadn’t really asked for the interview and they went and made—David Westin, who still runs ABC to this day, lied. Maybe he was told the wrong thing, but he made it sound as though DiCaprio were walking around the White House and that Clinton, being the “star chaser” that he allegedly was, wanted the interview with DiCaprio. So Leonardo was filming at the White House and Clinton grabbed him in the hallway and sat him down.

He tried to imply—and they felt that Clinton was weak at this point or—that we’d let that one ride. They tried to weasel out of all the flak he was getting from his Washington bureau by saying that Clinton had pursued this interview rather than vice versa.

Joe’s sister worked at ABC so he said, “I can’t do this one, but you know what to do.” So we killed them. We absolutely killed them. We gave them a chance to retract, he never retracted. Then we released photos of the crew shot, which was 25 people they brought in. We released emails and transcripts. Then they couldn’t decide whether they were going to air the interview because they’d already done it at that point. It was all done.

They start backtracking on that. So we had a whole campaign to “Free Leo.” It was like a perfect distraction from what else was going on. Clinton went in and did a whole series of jokes about it at the White House correspondents’ dinner and just ripped apart ABC, and they ended up backing down and not doing that. The White House, at a certain stage things settled down, even during impeachment I would say, even though it seemed very high stakes, no one seriously thought—We all felt as though we could win that battle.

It would be complicated and it would be ugly but you’d win. Particularly Podesta, even when Erskine was in charge, Podesta kept people running forward, focused on their job, and would make sure nothing got lost. John has a very broad sense—like Rahm did—of what the White House is capable of doing even at its most distracted, and would use all the levers of power, bully pulpit, et cetera, to continue to move ahead whether it was environmental issues, economic issues. In fact, you had people who had been around so long, Gene, Bruce, John, others, that you could continue to get a lot of things done even while the headlines were off on another topic.

Are you actually in the President’s company more?

A lot more, yes. I started traveling some when I was at the National Economic Council because we were trying—and almost got traction—to get Social Security on the agenda. We spent endless hours trying to figure out how to do the politics and the media around that. The reality is that anyone on either side of the aisle would tell you, if you get ten smart people in a room and sit them down and say, “Forget about the politics, just work this out,” Social Security, particularly at that point, was very easily fixed. With the surplus coming on, there was a huge opportunity to do it at the time in ’97.

Gene had a good dialogue with Lindsey Graham and all these other impeachment managers. We were really working with them on how to get that done. We did a lot of town halls around the country with Clinton. I spent a lot of time with him on that issue. As I said, those were periods when he was happy to be talking about Social Security. There were always other things going on, but we could usually get that going.

We spent a lot of time with him around, it was particularly important at that time to put some emphasis, partly because of some of the storm clouds out there, on the financial crisis. It was particularly important to reinforce how strong the economy was and the fiscal picture in the U.S. There was a huge prize coming from the Deficit Reduction Act with all this money starting to flow in a very virtuous cycle. We were worried that all of a sudden the pressure would build up for a huge Republican tax cut, which happened but not until the next administration. We were very intent upon having that off.

So there was a huge plan to start talking about Social Security, remind people about the fiscal challenges that were coming in the out years, and use the attention on Social Security to safeguard the surpluses. That worked. While everything else was going on, that really worked. The talk about Social Security reminded people that there were billions and billions of dollars in surpluses coming due, but we did have something that we needed to focus on longer term, we couldn’t go spend this money now.

Rubin and Summers particularly, and Gene, were very fearful that all the discipline would fall apart as the surpluses came in, on the Democratic side and on the Republican side. So we did a lot of events on the surplus. We needed to raise awareness about it at the same time as raising awareness of the challenges ahead. That was a topic Clinton had a lot of appetite for and was very interested in.

To the extent that he felt like part of his first term had been, some opportunities had been lost, he felt like the one thing he really bled for in the first term was that economic package. He was starting to reap the benefits of it in the second term and even if he didn’t get to reform Social Security, he wanted, in many ways, to have set the stage for the next person to reap the benefits of fixing the fiscal picture and doing something about the long-term challenges. So a lot of time and attention were spent on that.

By the time you get into the Press Secretary’s office, the foreign policy is beginning to—

Is dominant.

There was a lot. Is that a big piece of your load or does that get—

It gets done, it’s the Press Secretary’s job clearly, but in the same way that I brought over the economic issues, the NSC Press Office and Communications Office bring all the issues in. That was the first period where I dealt with a lot of foreign policy issues in and around the Asian financial crisis, but when I was the deputy you end up dealing with a lot of them. You’re just on duty, you’re traveling, you do foreign trips. A lot of times Joe would stay behind; you’d be the only press person on the trip. You’d end up dealing with a lot of stuff. You’re not forming any of the questions, but you’re starting to get a grip on them.

It’s funny looking back sometimes because I’ll read—I was in here reading some quotes about things I don’t remember knowing anything about per se. That’s one of those times you do feel as though you’re a mouthpiece. Also, Joe had no time to deal with the Japanese reporters and the Indian reporters and others. So certain issues and certain topics that arose were yours. He was obviously deeply engaged on Kosovo and [Slobodan] Miloševi? and all that, but a lot of the other issues you would pick up and learn how to handle. But the questions themselves and the policy making all came out of the NSC press shop. There was this guy, P.J. Crowley, who is actually working with Podesta now at the Center for American Progress. He was a career guy who came out of the Air Force, a lieutenant colonel, and he was very much the career guy and was very not political at the time. He would always make sure those questions—There is a tradition of having someone in the NSC office who is neutral, comes in clean.

Now that he is retired from the Air Force he is a total, unbridled partisan Democrat. He’s always attacking Bush. He’s on the talk shows all the time, but at the time he was very much the straight shooter who gave you the general answers. But even having gotten a little of that experience, when I took the Press Secretary job, you need a serious crash course in that. There’s nothing that prepares you for it.

That’s why Mike had such a huge advantage over Dee Dee by learning at the State Department because the nuances of what you’re saying around the world are just too difficult to understand if you’re doing it as a part-time job. When you actually take that job you spend days on end getting ready with all the national security, the staff on Europe, the staff on the Middle East, the staff on the Balkans.

Even if you say the words, you need to know every nuance behind them and why certain phrases. I was very close to Jamie Rubin, who was at the State Department. He’d spent his career on the Hill working with [Joseph] Biden, was at the UN, was at the State Department, even he sometimes would get himself in huge trouble just by a nuanced phrase here and there.

Now that you’re returning in the second term you’re in a good position to compare communication operations from the beginning and now near the end. Can you talk a little about the important differences in that period? You also mentioned technology earlier.

Yes, the Press Office, from the time Mike took it until the end, ran really well. The Press Office owned most of the mechanics of the Press Office, from regional press to Internet to TV to radio. You had a system set for doing the talk shows, the radio shows, and all that stuff. It functioned. The people had a lot more years under their belt. You were getting more quality people, because they’d spent time in an agency or somewhere else. You had a pretty good operation.

Technology changed everything. If you think about the early part of the administration, no Internet, CNN [Cable News Network] was really the only major cable news station. It worked more or less in ’93 the way it worked in 1981, without a whole lot of—When you talk to Marlin Fitzwater about how it worked under Reagan and Bush, it was a relatively sedate lifestyle compared to what we had at the end.

You would deal with the wires in the morning and the morning shows. Someone was on duty to deal with them but it was relatively straightforward. There were AP [Associated Press], Reuters, and you’re dealing with the overnights essentially from Europe. So anything that happened in the Middle East, you’re answering questions, you’re dealing with whatever the morning shows are talking about, 90 percent of which, if there’s anything on the White House, you already put into play the night before and set up a package on whatever the President was going to say that day. Then you got ready for the briefing. You did the briefing, most of it wasn’t televised, just the top.

In the afternoon you dealt with the network news shows and then the print after that. So you see the network news, deal with the print people around 7 or 8 o’clock, and you go home. It’s a pretty normal day, pretty predictable. By ’95 it had totally, completely changed.

Also, all the chatter that happens in Washington literally happens in Washington. It’s happening at cocktail parties, at lunch, whatever. It’s not spreading out beyond that. Very little of that inside knowledge is making its way into the mainstream press. It may show up as a comment in an analytical piece. Someone might say something on one of the roundtables on the Sunday news shows, but very little of the rumor, innuendo, even the process. Very little of that makes it into the press even in ’93, ’94. By ’97, ’95 even, it’s a totally different world.

There are five cable news shows, all going around the clock. The Internet has spawned between all the various, there weren’t blogs quite yet, but the Drudge Report and some of the other—The news organizations were still printing the paper the same way they always had, but they’re starting to learn how to update their stories during the day, print them later in the day. The clock is thrown out the window because everything is happening all at once now. Nothing is waiting until the end of the day at all. People are breaking stories throughout the day.

Even though most Americans are still getting their news from mainstream news organizations at night, reading the newspaper in the morning, the typical radio driving to work, back and forth, in Washington, everyone is seeing the news all the time. So in the past, only a few people had instant access to all the news, the chatter at the cocktail parties, all the straightforward news—all the stuff that is in the live feeds and TV. It’s like editors and a couple of other people, maybe a couple of traders on Wall Street have real-time access to news. Everyone else in America is getting it in these discrete chunks, morning, middle of the day, night, more or less.

All of a sudden, everyone has access to that stuff instantaneously. And the democratization of information devalues information. Reporters no longer get that jazzed about just imparting information to people. Reporters have always wanted to get the story first. But all of a sudden everyone has everything first, all at once, or they’re rushing to get things out before it’s pretty cooked and there’s a lot of that, a lot of stuff that normally pops up. Everyone is seeing the chatter.

If you have an Internet connection or a cable TV package, this is what we have today, but everyone is seeing all the garbage floating around in Washington and all the speculation. What is called analysis, but is usually rumor-mongering or really superficial punditry, is much more valued than the information is. The information is there. The news media thinks everyone knows what’s behind it, but the reality is not everyone does. Very few people are still accessing that information at that period. But they put a huge value on the spinning of it themselves and the speculation. That reached fever pitch around Lewinsky, but it was true about everything. You dealt with an incredibly different environment. The day didn’t have much of a pattern anymore, and reporters could literally write and rewrite stories until later and later in the day.

If you talked to the main reporter at the New York Times or the Washington Post they wouldn’t bother starting a story until the end of the day, until 8 or 9 o’clock at night sometimes. If they wrote a story at 3, their editors would say, “I’ve already seen that so you have to write something new.” So by 8 o’clock you have to have a new story. They wouldn’t even bother writing until the middle of the day, and the third-string reporter would write something for the website during the day and the top person would wait until after the evening news.

Now they might have theories or a couple of ideas, and they probably have put pen to paper, but the cycles really, really accelerated throughout the administration. By the end of the administration we had also mastered a lot of technology. A lot of time in the White House used to be spent getting information out, faxing, handing out paper, moving that stuff around. The website took away a lot of what you’d call the transactional stuff in the business. It’s all instantly available to everyone on the website. You weren’t spending time getting people transcripts or information. All of a sudden you can spend a little more time managing this chaos. But that was a very different environment than we had at the beginning of the administration. Probably a third of the jobs in the Press Office early on were very functional in nature. By the end, almost no jobs were. There were still people shepherding the press around a little bit, and a little care and feeding, but a lot of the jobs were just dealing with the flood of analysis, speculation, and rumor, things like that.

How does that change your personal relationships with the press? If the White House press corps gets the same information at the same time on the website.

In some ways it’s very infuriating. It’s constant motion. Even the people you like are incredibly impatient or they’ll drive you crazy because they won’t—I talk to John Harris or Marc Lacey, they won’t even write their story until the end of the day. John says, “Don’t call me after 8 o’clock. I’m just starting.” In some ways you hate them. On the other hand, because there is so much of the basic information available to everyone, in some ways you need each other more. In some ways I think it pays off to do what old-fashioned press secretaries do, cultivate relationships, understand the way people think, help them with ideas for stories. Reporters have always wanted exclusivity around a story and that’s even more valuable when so much information is widely available.

This has two contradictory forces. It makes the entire press corps a little more short tempered and on edge, particularly in that period when they haven’t figured a lot of this stuff out and they’re constantly being forced to respond to a [Matthew] Drudge or something an editor saw or heard that they wouldn’t have heard ten years before. On the other hand, they really need access, which is why, in this administration, which is really tight on access, I think there’s a real dividing line between the reporters who get a little bit of access to Karl Rove and [Daniel] Bartlett and some of the people around there. There’s a huge dividing line between them and the mass of the other reporters. It was really evident in the coverage of the Iraq war. People who were closest to them got the story the most wrong. So the people like Judith Miller obviously but others, who really had the inside thinking, were the most off and the Knight Ridder folks, people like that who had no access, actually poked a lot of holes in a lot of the stories because they didn’t have access to the White House.

I think it makes the top edge reporters much more reliant on that. You need to spend a lot more time talking to a broader range of people because there are a lot more people out there talking. All these pundits. We used to have a thing on Thursday afternoon or Friday afternoon, we brought in five or six people, and you’d talk to them about what was going on because you knew they were going to be on TV. They were the friendliest of your pundits who were out there. By the end you couldn’t fit them all in a room. There are so many people between MSNBC and CNN and Fox [network]. You couldn’t do it in that way at all. You had to figure out more effective ways of getting information to people, between the explosion of talk radio and the punditocracy and all those things.

We only have about 45 minutes, and I have some notes about the last couple of years. Did you have any piece of the Elian Gonzalez—

Yes, that was an interesting piece. We knew the people who were working with Elian’s father because they had worked in the White House. We were very frustrated with the Justice Department because they let this thing spin out of control. It was one of those stories that never should have happened. Obviously it was a sympathetic story, but sympathetic stories about Cuban refugees pop up literally every day.

I remember one, a guy windsurfed from Cuba to Key West or something like that. I like windsurfing so I said, “We should have this guy in the White House.” “No, no, it’s a bad enough story as it is.” Their guy had windsurfed to freedom. What’s better than that? We should welcome him to America. People said, “Too many politics around Cuba.” The basic rule, anything around Cuba, let’s just try to keep it over here, keep it in the Miami Herald, right? So you learn early on that anything regarding Cuba is way too explosive. The issues are fundamentally difficult. The Bush administration I’m sure feels the same way, even though they’re different on the politics of it. It’s just that you never make anyone happy on that issue. So you’ve just got to kill the story.

We were very frustrated with the fact that it spun out of control. Once it spun out of control, the only solution we saw was to somehow put a face on the family from Cuba. I didn’t orchestrate, God knows, I can’t speak for the whole White House. But certainly we put a huge emphasis on, as long as we know we’re going to have to turn this guy back over to the father, let’s get a face on the father because right now it just looks like there’s a sympathetic family that has this kid in captivity. And they’re being able to tell the whole story and dominate the story. We knew there was going to be an ugly shot of the rescue. I didn’t get too involved in that, but you rely on—I’m sure there were some conversations between [Janet] Reno and Podesta or whomever. She didn’t listen to us much anyway, so it didn’t matter. But at least on the staff level, let’s try to do this in the way that is least disruptive.

Once we saw the pictures, which were horrible, absolutely horrible, I remember I was working, I think it was a Saturday, it wasn’t a regular workday, there was a huge scramble. The father and son were flown up to Andrews [Air Force Base] or somewhere in New York or D.C. in a private plane. We put a lot of focus on trying to get a good photo of the father. The White House wasn’t involved in that flight, but we knew everyone who was arranging it. I think it was Greg Craig who had been at the White House and Ricki Seidman who had been at the White House. We did everything we could to help get that photo of the son and the father and the son clearly happy to be with the father as quickly as possible and circulate it so it was in the same news cycle. Try to show as much as you could of that family together.

It was a frustrating—Gore obviously disagreed with the White House, which was relatively easy but I think he went out of his way to make it a slightly bigger disagreement than he needed to. We tried to do what we could to just say, “He’s free to take his own positions” and try to tamp that down. But the press obviously loved that because it showed Gore breaking off on his own. He’s starting to create a political base. But it also made him look cravenly political. That was an interesting episode.

Again, had fun with that one later when it settled down. We did the White House correspondents’ dinner and Clinton had a whole slide show of things, I don’t remember all the videos. Greg Craig, the lawyer, who’d worked at the White House on impeachment, actually had taken one or two of the photos of the father and the kid together. So when we went to the correspondents’ dinner, Clinton had some picture of himself on Mt. Rushmore with all the other Presidents. Then he said, “What does that say in the corner?” And they blew it up and it said, “Photo by Greg Craig,” because there were a lot of conspiracy theories that we faked the photos and that the kid and the father weren’t even in the same room and they didn’t like each other. So all the right wingers thought Greg Craig had doctored a photo of Elian Gonzalez and his father.

You brought up Gore. Do you mind if we go off on that a little?

No.

That’s an interesting story for the last year and I’d be interested to hear your observations about what’s going on with Gore as Vice President and then as a Presidential candidate.

Gore ran the campaign very much on his own obviously, talked about being his own man as we discussed. We had pretty close personal relationships with the Gore staff. Some of my better friends are people who worked their whole careers for Gore, still work with him today. But somehow the campaign staff and Gore staff never collaborated much during the campaign.

It was interesting because there had been a lot of collaboration, a lot of personal friendships, a lot of closeness. And there had been a lot of closeness between the two of them, which obviously fell apart toward the end as Gore went off and ran the campaign and after Lewinsky and the like. Gore had his own issues with Clinton as a lot of people did. But it’s strange that in some ways all the expertise—By the end of the White House there was a very good professional staff that worked well, it was professionally run. There was a lot of campaign experience.

You had people in that White House who had worked on the first reelection of a Democratic President since FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt]. The first successful electoral strategy since Carter stumbled into a victory in the wake of Watergate. You had a lot of people who felt they had something they could pass along to the Gore people. The real old-timers felt that Gore got plucked out of thin air from the Senate and there were a lot of other choices. He got plucked out of thin air, at that point the election was quite winnable. When Gore was picked as the Vice President it was the cusp of the period when Clinton went out ahead of Bush and took the lead and the bus trips and all. But there were people who had been there a long time and felt, We won this election, we thought it all out. Gore came along and contributed, but he never ran a national campaign in his life.

There was tension between people who thought, We’ve done this, we know how it’s done, it can be done, you have a record to run on. Then Gore seemed to take a different direction and not draw much on those people and on that expertise that had been built up. The Bush people have it. Between father and son, they’ve run three successful elections and been involved in probably closer to a half dozen when he was Vice President and the losing election. So they have a lot of experience.

The Democrats have a lot of experience. But a lot of the people surrounding Gore were people who had lost some elections in the past and wanted to do this on their own and win one. I think there were a lot of miscues and a lot of stories about this tension between the two, which wasn’t really productive. In a way it worked to Clinton’s advantage historically. The best result for Clinton would have been if Gore had come on and cemented Clinton’s legacy fiscally, internationally, domestic policy, and the like. But at least in a very superficial sense, the fact that Gore couldn’t win an election showed how good Clinton had been to have won.

It is an uphill challenge as a Democrat to put together the electoral strategy. Gore’s failure to do that showed—There were a lot of stories written during the campaign that said Gore didn’t seem to have learned what Clinton knows. A lot of the stories were political reporters commenting on the discrepancy between their skill sets. I wouldn’t say there was a lot of tension, I think a lot of that was overblown. But there are always plenty of people at campaign season who think the candidates ought to be listening to them. They let their views be known. There were a lot of unconstructive stories in the spring when Gore was stumbling a bit, talking about how Gore was losing it and didn’t have his act together. A lot of it sourced out of Clinton folks.

Then Gore ran this campaign that distanced him from the White House itself and from the Vice Presidency where he started wearing black sweaters instead of ties and acted as though he were just a regular guy, Al, rather than the Vice President of the United States, and walked away from the Clinton legacy, which would infuriate people in the White House. That storyline led to a lot more stories in the course of the campaign. Even simple little things like their schedules in and out of the convention became highly sensitized and big issues.

Whenever they would meet at a funeral of Mel Carnahan or somewhere in the middle of the country the stories were overwritten and over dramatized in a way that was not very productive. I wasn’t working on the campaign, but I felt there was a way to cut off that story early on and deal with it. Gore needed to distinguish himself from the President’s personal faults and not from his policy achievements, and he didn’t manage to do that. He could have said truthfully, “I did not have sex with that woman.” It would have been true, right? In a way, that would have brought it to a halt.

Clinton would look at a poll. There’s a lot of writing about how Clinton would use polls. Clinton would look at a poll as a snapshot and as a way to persuade people, what are the stronger arguments, what makes people move, what makes people think. Gore would look at a poll saying Clinton is unpopular in Michigan and say, “I can’t talk about Clinton.” That’s probably overly simplistic as to what went through his mind, but the reality is, you look at a poll that says the President is personally unpopular. There’s still a way around that issue and there’s a way to solve that problem.

I think the fact that a lot of swing voters in critical states didn’t like the President’s behavior didn’t mean you had to run a campaign as though you’d never met the guy. It wasn’t a source of constant friction, Gore just wasn’t there. He didn’t come to the White House. His staff was on the road. The policy staff that was left behind wasn’t that engaged in the politics. So he disappeared and went off and ran the campaign.

We’d run across him here and there, but in a way it made running the White House easier, one less person to worry about, but a lot of these stories about the tension and the bad blood between them were a little bit overblown.

Did you hear from the President on occasions where he would say something to the effect—

I think the President was fundamentally OK with the decision not to put him out there and have him do a lot of rallies and events. I think he understood that. He likes to campaign, he likes to go out and work the campaign trail, but I think he also understood why that wasn’t particularly the right thing for Gore at that point. Gore did need to establish himself. Clinton would play a role in motivating the base, but he’d also play a role in alienating some swing voters.

I think he had a hard time understanding the doggedness with which they seemed to try to portray themselves as somehow independent from the administration’s record over the seven or eight years. There was no reason to run away from the policy record, and they seemed to ignore it entirely. Bush did it very simply, he said, “I’m kinder, gentler.” That was a theme that allowed him to sort of say, “Hey, I’m a Reaganite but I have—” But he recognized that the times were changing, and he needed to show a compassionate conservative side as his son would say. He managed to find a way to nuance the difference and use that gentle lever, gentle language, to distance himself from the hard-edged conservatism of Reagan. There’s easily a way to do that because the policies were pretty uniformly popular.

I think Clinton knew how Gore would govern, he’d govern much like Clinton did, so why act as if he wouldn’t?

A corollary to this is that evidently there was a decision taken at some point during Gore’s campaign to take a more populist approach.

Which I think Clinton didn’t fully understand. Clinton had always won elections in Arkansas—The populist-centrist distinction is a little artificial. You can be quite centrist on your policies with a populist edge to your language, and Clinton would do that. He would talk a lot about rewarding those who played by the rules.

You talk a lot about people, you appeal to people’s inner sense of fairness, but without a have- and-have-not message. I think Clinton is fundamentally a populist in many ways. He, more than anyone else, knows how to talk to people who feel disenfranchised from the system. But the policies are fairly centrist. What I don’t think he understands, what he didn’t understand about that campaign is that there was this kind of let’s divide the world into the haves and the have nots, the people and the powerful. That’s never been part of Clinton’s vocabulary. That kind of populist rhetoric has never been—He had always tried to be inclusive and talk about giving everyone a chance to win in an opportunity society or whatever you want to call it. Actually, a lot of that language Bush used. Talked about a shareholders’ society, opportunity, and the like.

Clinton’s whole key to victory in ’92 was creating hope. He talked about being the man from Hope and about creating opportunity. That’s his vocabulary. Does he know how to draw a line between bad policy, bad people, good people, good policy, and does he do that a lot on the campaigns? Yes, but it’s not the predominant theme. I think that rhetoric mystified him to a large extent.

Were there ever attempts from the Gore campaign to draw White House folks to “join our side”?

Not really. There were some people who went and worked. I remember very vividly, early on, before Gore really had a campaign, he was going to talk to the Detroit Economic Club. I have a hard time placing the exact date, but it was before he had left the White House. He was still around. He was going out to give a speech in Michigan. Anytime you go to the Detroit Economic Club, it’s a significant speech. He had the ill fortune that it was the day Chrysler announced it was selling itself to Mercedes Benz.

We all had these nightmare visions of “the Nazis’ tank maker is buying the Jeep maker” and all that. It could have played out in a very populist, anti-German way. You weren’t sure what the unions were going to do, so Gore got a little panicked and once in a while he would pull people in. That day Sosnik and Sperling and I went in to talk to him. I think he was going to talk about partnership for a new generation of vehicles and clean hybrid vehicles, but as an opportunity for Detroit and not a threat. All of a sudden he had to deal with this thorny political problem. So he would reach out but it never worked well. That meeting was a disaster. We just had a totally— He has a different style of working than Clinton and that really—

How so?

Much more me-staff. He was here. Staff would come in. The briefing didn’t look exactly right so the staff got sent out. They came back in. He had asked for something, they weren’t there, the staff was sent out. It was more hierarchical. I remember commenting on it because I felt we were sort of in a classroom and he was the teacher and we were supposed to be there to help, but Clinton was always much more collaborative.

Gore was a great person to have with Clinton when you were getting Clinton ready for something because he had stature and gravitas enough to take Clinton on, lighten him up a little bit, beat him up a little bit playfully, and was great at that. That’s mostly where I’d seen him, in that environment where he was coming in before a press conference and working with Clinton to get Clinton in the right frame of mind. He was very good. But no one did that with Gore. Everyone was much more deferential and they weren’t in a listening mode. He has a good sense of humor in many ways, but in the staff room it’s much more tense and forced and doesn’t feel loose.

You know he’s obsessive about certain things, which a lot of politicians are, about the way his notes look, certain ways things are done. He’ll pull all-nighters to write speeches and things like that, much more than Clinton. Clinton fundamentally wants his staff to do it. Just a different personality. Generally, there are a lot of people there, Sosnik, others, who had run Presidential campaigns, been very successful, and I don’t think they got a phone call.

What about Bill Bradley? How did that work? As soon as there was a primary.

We were still very much a Gore shop. When I describe this frustration it’s more like the attitude was, “Why can’t we do more to help?” I went and worked, even though they honestly didn’t ask for much help. I had a lot of New Hampshire experience and I knew the staff pretty well. As it got closer to the election and Bradley was in the thick of it, I went up on vacation to help Gore out for a week and work with his Press Office with Marla [Romash] and some other people. But my instructions from home were, “Don’t do this in any visible way” as the Deputy Press Secretary.

So you’re allowed to go out and help a candidate, but it’s a little bit unseemly to be helping. It was clear that we were behind Gore against Bradley, but it all had to be done fairly low key.

What about Mrs. Clinton’s campaign that year, was that a source of some tension?

That was almost the polar opposite of the Gore campaign in many ways. She drew almost entirely on people who had worked with him to pull her election together and she learned. In many ways it’s an easy story to write and it’s a little oversimplified, but she learned all the lessons from him that Gore didn’t learn in some ways, or that Gore’s team didn’t learn.

Here she was. She was the person who actually was betrayed by him in the Lewinsky scandal, and yet she managed to win and not have the race be about her personality. She knew early on that if the race was about her personally, particularly if it were [Rudolph] Giuliani, if it was about her personality she would be at a disadvantage. If it was about who could do a better job as a Senator, who could listen to the people in New York, she would win or at least have a good shot at it given the New York demographics and the political landscape.

So she went out of her way to listen. She had the “listening tour” where she went out and tried to undercut this image of—She and he had done that before in Arkansas after he lost the gubernatorial race. They developed this way of going out, hearing, listening, and not being seen as these arrogant Georgetown Rhodes Scholar, Yale elites coming in to run this state. They had developed a way to go out and be seen as people who were responsive and would serve the people’s needs in the state house. She did that very effectively in New York. She didn’t go up there and lay out a bunch of big policies or have a bunch of health care workshops or anything like that. She went up and spent a lot of time listening and made the campaign pretty boring, about just policy in New York and what should be done, and not about the personality.

So she learned. If the race hadn’t been about Gore himself, and Clinton as Gore’s compatriot, Gore probably would have won. On the straightforward policy issue, Gore had Bush beat in some ways. But Bush cleverly managed somehow to almost associate himself as someone who was more in touch with some of Clinton’s policies. Not that he didn’t have a very distinct policy and he did talk—He ran anti-Clinton in the sense of bringing honor and dignity back to the White House.

That campaign, we spent our vacation in the summer in upstate New York. We spent a lot of time, we would go to the state fairs in New York with her. She also needed to step out from under his shadow in many ways, but they found a way to do that where he would be in the crowd listening and introducing and playing a role, very unique challenges, but they figured out how to do it.

One of the things people will inevitably be interested in about the last part of the Clinton term was the terrorism issue because of what happened subsequently. So I feel like I need to ask you about that to the extent that you were exposed to consideration of terrorism. The USS Cole I guess was—

The Cole was during my period. That one I saw a little more from the inside. When I was deputy I worked on some of the issues in a tangential way, but I hadn’t realized until I spent a lot of time at the NSC getting ready for the job in the spring of 2000—I didn’t take the job until August I think, but I spent a lot of time in the spring learning about the depth of the level of knowledge within the White House.

I had heard rumors but I hadn’t really dealt—I had encountered him and he’s an interesting individual, but I’d never dealt with [Richard] Clark and that whole crew. I had heard about this, it used to be described as an Ollie North-type outfit that was doing all this very spooky stuff. I remember Joe had to share a house with Clark once when they were on vacation somewhere I think in Park City or something like that. He said, “There’s some spooky stuff going on. I thought I’d seen everything” because Joe had been much more involved, a lot of war planning on Kosovo and the like. But in some ways the Pentagon, I’d even dealt with the Pentagon on a lot of different things, in some ways very straightforward. It’s hard to understand the bureaucracy, but they’re pretty straightforward. The Clark thing, you never knew what they were really up to over there.

I knew Michael Sheehan at State personally because he was friends with Jamie Rubin, but I hadn’t begun to appreciate the depth of how much work was going on in that area until 2000. Clark has written a book, it’s all public record, but there was a high level of attention to and understanding of the issue at the time. Clinton knew the issue really well. Sometimes he would go on and on and on about terrorism and germ warfare and all this other stuff. Some people were saying, “What is he talking about?” because it wasn’t really on the public’s mind in a prominent way.

Certainly he and Sandy Berger and Clark had spent a lot of time together analyzing the threats and worked on it. Most of that, of necessity, was happening very much behind the scenes in the White House. But when something like the Cole would happen it would all spring into action, become more visible, and you’d go there and they would have a plan. They knew what was going on. They were ready to go. Obviously caught off guard by what had happened in that instance but there were people within the White House, you didn’t have to go out to the agencies, there were people within the White House who had a high degree of knowledge about [Osama] Bin Laden and al Qaeda and they were tightly connected with Berger and the President.

There’s a lot of back-and-forth politically now about what Clinton told Bush and whether Bush ignored it. Clark more or less had the last word on that issue. I don’t think there’s any doubt Clinton spent time—I was with Clinton when he talked to Bush when Bush came to the White House. He definitely spent time on the issue with him.

You were there?

I wasn’t in the room, but Clinton and I were talking in the Diplomatic Room when Bush came in. He made a point of showing up early because Clinton was perpetually late, so he came in a couple of minutes early. I was standing there—I didn’t mean to be there. Literally the picture of him coming to the White House is me, Clinton, and I’m sort of—Clinton went up with him for a couple of hours and I saw him right after. There was a lot of interest.

I said, “What did you talk about?” I don’t have a note or anything like that, but he said, “We talked about the scary places in the world. I talked to him a lot about the Middle East.” Whatever they said should probably remain between the two of them, but I don’t think there’s any doubt in my mind that Clinton felt as though they were still dealing much more in a kind of “great powers” mindset and not so focused, not terribly interested in solving the Middle East peace process. They felt like Clinton had spent too much time talking and that they should just let things play out there and let Israel do what it wanted to do. After [Ariel] Sharon got elected, they largely did that.

I don’t think they spent nearly the amount of time and energy talking to North Korea. They said specifically, “We’re not going to do what Clinton did there.” Certainly on Bin Laden and terrorism, I don’t think their initial appreciation of that rivaled what Sandy and Clark and Michael Sheehan and others had brought into the White House. But the inside out of who bombed what when and whether or not, that’s particularly prominent now since ABC has stirred it all up. There has been a lot written on that, and who knows where the exact truth lies?

But you were there with the Cole. One of the criticisms of Clinton has been that there wasn’t a response.

I think that was a tough one. In the initial stages we spent a lot of time trying to help the investigation function, and there was a lot of pushback from the Yemeni government. In some cases I think some real frustration at our own Ambassador at the time. Most of the focus was on trying to get the investigation to work and figure out what exactly had happened.

An unwillingness to take an action unless the hard evidence was there?

Right, and we were very frustrated trying to get hard evidence. Some of those people who slipped through the grasp of the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] at the time, we have managed now to piece together a little more about who did what. But in the early days it was not crystal clear who had done what, couldn’t piece together that network that quickly.

Were you surprised at the flurry of pardons at the end?

I wasn’t surprised by the flurry. I was surprised by Marc Rich. I think everyone was. We knew Clinton was considering a couple of pardons that would be controversial. I think for the most part John Podesta, Bruce would know more about this, but Podesta knew which ones had the potential to blow up and gave me a heads up on some of them. Some of them we deliberately floated.

Michael Milken we floated, Webb Hubbell was floated. That was a natural one for people to speculate about. Patty Hearst I think was floated. We didn’t end up doing Milken or Hubbell because we got a taste of what the reaction would be. I think had someone really thought Rich was on the short list, we would have floated that one too and we’d probably have gotten a negative response. Jack Quinn and Scooter [Lewis] Libby were working it, but the team that was working that one did a very good job of keeping it off the radar screen of most people inside. I don’t know who knew about it before. I think Bruce probably did, I think Cheryl may have, but I don’t know who knew the back story on that because when we announced it, the day of, nothing happened. No one in that briefing room knew who Marc Rich was, and there was no flurry of activity around that.

The people who had been close to the case heard about it and started venting in the days ahead. At that point staff is dispersed, no one is around, there’s no one to respond, you can’t find the papers, no one could piece together who had said what to whom, you can’t even find anyone. You can’t find any of the lawyers who were involved. It was hard to mount the defense because you had no story.

Typically, when you’re looking at something that controversial, you try to give the President some indication of the probable reaction. We didn’t know enough to do that in that case and I think it hurt us. Remember, the last couple of days were preoccupied, which did surprise me too, because it was done entirely in the legal office by the deal he worked out with the independent counsel. We had planned a very traditional last briefing day as sort of fun. We looked at what other press secretaries had done, and we had a party set up for everyone. All of a sudden, that morning getting ready to go out and Bruce Lindsey grabbed me or Podesta and said, “We’ve got a piece of paper here I want you to distribute in the briefing room.”

So my last press briefing was in many ways by far the most intense, because it was carried live on all the networks. Aside from some things we did around the Middle East and around the Cole, there was never that level of intensity around the briefing, but it largely faded within a day or so.

Did you talk to Ari Fleischer before the transition?

Yes. He came in and we sat down and talked. He came in a couple of times and we helped his staff out. We showed them around. Having worked on the ’92 Bush/Clinton transition, I felt as though the Bush people probably didn’t like us very much, we’d beaten them. They were all scrambling to get jobs. I’m sure there were some good, decent people in that process, but they didn’t go out of their way to make it easy.

I felt like, look, this is the transition between a democratically elected President or whatever and a Supreme Court-anointed President. But this is the biggest, greatest democracy in the world, so we ought to be able to help each other. It’s hard enough to do the job on a daily basis. So we went out of our way. We invited his staff in, we helped him. Ari was always decent and actually invited me back a couple of times afterward. But I’m particularly disappointed because Ari could have put a stop to a lot of the garbage that was said in the days after that. The White House could have put a stop to it by just saying, “There’s some stuff that happened, but half of it is just the normal cleaning that gets done, you’re moving five hundred people out and in in a day. There’s going to be some nastiness.”

I was in the West Wing the morning of the 20th and the place was spotless. It was clean. Whether there were some stupid things that happened around, probably, but we dealt with much the same when we came in. Ari, generally, was always a gentleman to deal with.

Did you ever get a full understanding of where that story came from?

No, you never do. It may not have started deliberately because a lot of times things just get spread around. It played into the media’s preconception of the unruly Clinton White House and the orderly Bush White House, so it was a good story for them to ride for a couple of days. I fault the Bush White House only for not stopping it. Not for starting it because it’s easy enough to whine about that stuff to the press. You find someone took away a couple of keys on a keyboard or redirected the phones. They could have just said there were some minor incidents, which turned out to be the case. It turned out to be pretty small-bore stuff.

We’re very close to our appointed time. Do you have a couple of things that you wanted to get to that we didn’t get to? Do you have a couple of favorite stories that you wanted to remember to include?

I told the story to John Harris and he put it in his book, but to really understand President Clinton you’ve got to play cards with him. We spent a lot of time playing cards together. You’re on helicopters and planes and you’ve got a lot of dead time.

Are you a Hearts player or an Oh Hell player?

Both. I did better against him and others at Oh Hell than I did at Hearts. At Hearts he really is a master. He’s very good at Oh Hell, but I could beat him at Oh Hell. I rarely beat him at Hearts. I play cards the way I think most people play cards. I have a good sense of what is going on around me, and I have pretty good recall for the cards, but I don’t really think so much about how the other person’s mindset is approaching the game and how the other person is playing and what sequence they’re playing their cards when they’re leading or when they’re just sloughing off cards. Clinton himself is absolutely phenomenal in that respect. He uses every tool in his arsenal to win because he really wants to win.

People think he’s a compromiser. He always wants to win. He is very frustrated sometimes when he doesn’t win. He has respect for you if you beat him a couple of times, but if you finish playing your hand and you might have won—I’d already forgotten my hand by the time—he’d say, “Why did you play the two instead of the eight when you had a chance to play the eight instead of the two and then you could have played the jack?” I’d say, “I don’t even remember what cards I had in my hand.” It wasn’t so much that he had recall, because a lot of people have recall. It was more that he was thinking through not what motivates people but how they envision what it is that they’re doing and what it’s going to take for them to win or how they play the game.

He also used intimidation. He’d beat you up a little bit. It’s intimidating. The President is yelling at you, and new people to the game would back down or let him win or something like that. Here’s a corollary: some people were talking to some two-bit tennis player at the U.S. Open. They said, “How are people to you on the tour, you just qualified, maybe made $2,000?” He said, “Roger Federer was really nice but everyone else ignores me.” I think Federer goes out of his way to be nice to the nobodies, because if that nobody is actually playing him in a tight game, they might cut him a little slack, which is true, like no Congressman wants to lose an election. But if you feel nice about the guy, you might take a little bit of the edge off.

It’s not the same, but Clinton wants to understand how your mind works, and this is his real political genius. Constant thinking about what that person is thinking, what is it going to take for them to win? You saw that in full display. I went to Sharm el-Sheikh with him, we’re talking to [Ehud] Barak and [Yasser] Arafat and some of the Middle East leaders. He would spend time idly chitchatting with some of the Arab kings and the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] guys until all hours of the night. I’d think, Why is he wasting his time?

Then of course he’d come back and say, “You know, I think what they’re really thinking about is this.” You’d say, “I thought you guys were talking about the movies, or Middle East history.” There are certain Arab leaders, not Arafat, but other Arab leaders that Clinton would say would never have a conversation. You’d talk an hour with them and no event has yet happened in this millennium. It’s all happening back in 900 or 800 BC and things like that. But he learns more, takes more out of the average day and the average meaningless conversation or just the throwing down of a card than most of us can even envision. He gets more out of those kinds of interactions than anyone I’ve ever seen.

That’s why, when you asked me did I like working for him—fascinated, every day. I don’t have the same energy level physically maybe, but just the energy level to devote to that pursuit of understanding how things work and what motivates people. This phenomenal—Most people just want to get through the day, live to go home and sleep. He’s always thinking.

You’ve mentioned John Harris’s book a couple of times. Do you find that that account rings true?

Better than most. I’ve had these conversations with John. I think John has, occasionally, an overly simplistic, not simplistic, but somewhat predetermined way of viewing certain things. But I think he has tried harder than anyone else to understand the way Clinton made decisions. Compared to a lot of people like Joe Klein—I think Joe Klein is writing about himself when he’s writing about Clinton. He’s not writing about Clinton; he’s writing about Joe Klein’s psychology. Joe Klein went through his love Clinton period, hate Clinton period, respect Clinton period, hate him again, and grudging respect. But it’s really about what Joe Klein thinks about Bill Clinton today. It’s not about what’s really behind Bill Clinton.

A lot of what Joe Klein writes on paper is quite accurate, and I think he spent a lot of time studying Clinton, knows his history, but it’s very hard for a reporter or a historian to see how the White House really operates and what people are thinking on the inside. When someone asks, “What was the mood like?” and you say, “It was actually pretty good,” people think you’re lying. But that was the reality. Most days, the mood was fairly good. Reporters think you’re spinning them. But given those caveats, John did a pretty good job trying to capture it.

I promise I won’t keep you much longer. Other than the oral history transcripts, which we’ll take as a given here, of the things that you’ve read, what are the things that make you think an author really has captured him or a particular piece of the administration. Or, alternately, if a future student of Bill Clinton is looking for an event or a speech or something like that that you think, Boy, that’s illuminating and authentic, where would we look?

Where would you start?

Yes.

That’s a tough question. It’s hard, I don’t read that much about it because a lot of it I find very clichéd and uninteresting. It’s like reading the newspaper at a certain point. OK, I’ve read the newspaper before, I don’t need to read it again, the same bleak stuff. I rarely stumble across an original thought most days. I’d spend a little bit of time—I’ve never done this myself. I’ve done it on a daily basis but not in a studious way. Take ten or 12 speeches and look at the first draft that he marked up and the second draft, an important speech, and then look at what he actually said and try to understand how his mind works.

Unfortunately, you don’t have tapes; it’s too bad. You have tapes of this, but you don’t have like the [Lyndon] Johnson tapes and the Nixon tapes. You’ll probably never see them again, and he wasn’t an email guy, so you’re not going to have the email trail to look at unfortunately. You’re going to miss quite a bit, because a lot of it is trying to reconstruct the conversation. He’s a very verbal person and the conversations were always pretty interesting. But you get a lot of insight into the way his mind works by going back and looking at a speech that he ascribed importance to in advance and think about how he actually—Don’t go to the books; he wrote that book and all that—Even Putting People First is a good record, because it shows the policies—but that other book that was put out, or even his own book, that’s fairly carefully constructed. Whereas when he’s talking you get a lot of him.

We’ll see Bruce in about two weeks. We’re hoping that he will spend time with us. He agreed in principle several years ago to do this. One of the reasons we haven’t gotten to it until now was we felt it was a better strategy to talk to a lot of people to get a body of knowledge developed from people who really know before we could fruitfully spend time with him. But whether we’re actually going to be able to pin him down and get the time is another question, but we’ve been told the same thing, that talking with him is an illuminating experience.

Yes, it’s totally different from what you see on paper or what you see even in a public speech.

If you’ve got influence—

I’ll work on it.

I’d like to say here that we’re deeply grateful for the time. I know you’re very busy. It’s good of you to come down here and see us. I usually say at this point that we haven’t exhausted all of the possibilities, but we’ve probably exhausted the people. This is fascinating work for all of us because we really feel like we have a front-row seat to interesting times and interesting people. I can assure you that you have given us an awful lot of food for thought and not just for us, but you are leaving us a strikingly good record for people to mine for a long time to come. So your public service didn’t end the day you walked out of the White House.

Thank you. It was interesting. One thing, this was helpful. I should have gone back and looked at a lot of the notes. I didn’t keep a diary because Josh Steiner is an old friend of mine and his got subpoenaed. So I stopped then. But you do keep things that remind you of certain things.

One thing I would do is ask people to go through their closets and bring down three or four things that remind them of certain incidents.

That’s a good point.

Sometimes that visually—Seeing a piece of a note he wrote you or something you kept for some reason helps you remember a hell of a lot of a particular place and time. It’s like Bob Woodward talks about the white tablecloth on the table and people think, Oh, my God, he knows everything. I have to confess my soul to him. If he knows that, what else does he know? But it’s true that a lot of those things, little things—A friend of mine keeps tons of memorabilia and he’s very orderly about it. He was an advance guy mostly who did production around the events. He keeps this unbelievable library of stuff. His name is Josh King, he works up in Hartford, and he keeps a lot of stuff. He’s very organized and disciplined and he’s very visual, because he used to do a version of the [Michael] Deaver job, which worried about the picture every day. Josh always kept the photos and did a lot of preadvance, where he’d fly off to Vietnam or whatever, and look at the site and what would work.

When you go to the library there are some things you see and it’s like, “Collection of Josh King.” He has a collection. But when you see some of the things he kept, you’re just like—This incredible visual stuff that he’s kept really brings back a lot more than just chatting about it.

OK, we do the best we can.

I’m going to have to run off.