Stephen Goodin Oral History

This is the Stephen Goodin interview, a part of our Clinton Presidential History Project. First, let me again thank you for agreeing to see us. Coming into Manhattan, too, makes it easier than us having to go out and find you beyond.

We just had a conversation, just for the record, about the fundamental ground rules, but to reiterate, the most important thing to understand is that this is strictly confidential. Nobody is allowed to leave the room and talk about anything we talk about in here, with the exception of yourself because they're your words. We have an unblemished record of maintaining these confidences from interview to interview. Nobody we subsequently interview will be aware of anything you've said to us, either. We want you to feel free to speak perfectly candidly, recognizing that the most important audience is those generations on down the road who will want to come to this material, as well as similar materials, to find out what the Clinton Presidency truly was like. You have a view on that that's unique and unlike anything anybody else has.

You're from Texas?

Yes.

Tell us a little bit about your background.

I didn't set out to work in politics per se. I studied at the University of Texas at Austin and graduated with a degree in psychology. I had an interest in the field of community psychology. Community psychology is an offshoot of clinical psychology that seeks to prevent pathology in individuals by addressing systemic pathologies or systemic problems. In an offshoot of that line of thinking, I had concluded that the social system with the greatest impact on the largest number of Americans, and arguably on many people in the world, is the federal government of the United States, so I set out to do my own—"study" is a bit generous, but to get a better feel for the federal government. I went to Washington, D.C., with designs on trying to figure out ways to do this.

I looked for a job on Capitol Hill—I graduated in 1990, and tended bar to pay off some student loans, or pay them down a little bit, for a year in Austin. I then moved to Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1991. There wasn't extra employment anywhere in the country at that point, perhaps save the U.S. military, and Capitol Hill was no exception. People weren't leaving jobs there, so I didn't find a paying job. I waited tables at a couple of different places and took a couple of internships with an eye toward finding this position.

During the course of the internships, I caught the campaign bug by first volunteering on Harris Wofford's campaign, which was a special election in 1991. It was a bellwether in the sense that—at the time, Dick Thornburgh was the Republican candidate—it ended up being a referendum on the [George H.?W.] Bush Presidency in many ways and a test case for a number of campaign issues and for styles of campaigning.

Perhaps not ironically, Paul Begala and James Carville, who would go on to serve important consultant roles for President Clinton's campaign, were leading the campaign for Harris Wofford. I did not meet them on that campaign, but that was my first experience on a campaign and my first exposure to the power of politics for positive change. I was idealistic at the time, hopefully still somewhat today, but it was an incredible experience for me, an incredible exercise in, as I say, the power of politics for positive change.

It was a case of an entrenched status quo representative candidate on one side and an underdog candidate who was, in the person of Harris Wofford, someone who had dedicated his life to public service in nonpartisan ways—academia and other ways. He was definitely the underdog, but prevailed in the election and really was, by many people's interpretation, the first sign that then-President George Herbert Walker Bush might be in trouble or might be vulnerable, even though his poll numbers were so very high at that point.

One of the things that happened as a result of that campaign was that the issue of health care moved center stage nationally. I don't know what kind of campaigning you were doing, whether you were doing field work or what, but from your own experience in the campaign, was that clearly above all the other issues, or was it more of a referendum on Bush, as you were explaining?

From a message perspective, Wofford's campaign definitely focused on it. In my role—Let's not overblow it, I was knocking on doors of lots of people—I think it was symptomatic of people struggling and wanting to feel like the government was doing something to help them with their struggles. One of the most pervasive areas where people were feeling it—and perhaps thought it was an area where the government should step in to do something to help them with their struggle—was health care. For me, it was more about that broader issue, of people thinking—not that they wanted any kind of a socialist government or anything—Hey, when we're struggling and we're having problems, we want to know that our leaders in government are going to do something about it, are going to help us out and pay attention to our concerns. Health care happened to be the most resonant concern at the time.

How did you decide to volunteer for the Clinton campaign and at what point in the campaign did you do that?

The first time Bill Clinton ever crossed my mental awareness, I think I had planned to do the volunteer stint in Harris Wofford's campaign but hadn't done it yet. I was already thinking about campaigns with an eye toward taking that assignment when the announcement speeches started occurring in October of 1991. The Wofford election, I think, was in November, a typical Election Day thing. I don't think it was an October date, even though it was a special election. At any rate, I knew I was going to take this assignment and go up with the DNC [Democratic National Committee] groups to the Wofford campaign. I started thinking about other campaigns, and was encouraged by one of the people in Congressman [Jonas Martin] Frost's office, where I was interning most of my time, to get involved in campaigns. I think he had some alternative motivations why he was encouraging it for a young, single man.

I started thinking about the Presidential election and giving some thought to the candidates, which candidate would I support if I were there. The two announcement speeches that really stuck with me—First and foremost was Jerry [Edmund G.] Brown's announcement speech, which was in Philadelphia. It was very populist. He was very reform-minded, very populist in tone, and appealed to my personal politics. When I've said that to some people, they laughed, because Brown, by the end of that campaign—His overall reputation is a little more on the fringes, but his announcement speech and the message of the majority of his campaign was very populist in nature. I really liked it.

To be honest, I liked his announcement speech better than all the others, but then Governor Clinton made his speech—I think it was after I had seen Brown's already—and he struck a chord. In thinking about today's interview, I realized that in that announcement speech, I saw something that was very true to form of his Presidency and his style of governing and leadership. He had a certain aspirational call that transcended the wonkiness of policy in his message and how he presented things and how he framed it, but it was anchored in a pragmatism and a practicality that were definitely telling of how he governed and much more realistic.

As evidence of that, he had a thematic framework in that early point of the campaign called the New Covenant. You would have to ask someone else why they dropped it as a rhetorical framework, but throughout his entire Presidency, he kept the same themes that were represented by that when, later on, he would talk about opportunity and responsibility. It was almost spiritual in nature, not surprising with the choice of words.

I think that's why it was dropped.

Yes. I think it was too religious. That's my understanding as well, which is a shame and ironic, given how the course of time has now brought Democrats to be seeking ways to make themselves more faith oriented. But he was practical, and if it was going to turn people off—I'm sure there were polling numbers showing it turning off more people, certainly in the primary campaigns, than it was bringing in. Anyway, it was that aspirational nature of shooting for something high, and appealing both on rhetorical and emotional levels.

But in that same speech he was talking about the forgotten middle class. As practical political positioning, it was more on economic terms than on the antiestablishment terms that Brown was presenting it. It was really the same thing, but he talked about the economic issues in a more detailed and more practical way than Jerry Brown was putting out there. That's really what caught my attention about his announcement speech. I started doing more and more research, finding out more about his positions, and at the end of the day I said, "This guy has more of a chance."

After the Wofford campaign, you went back to Capitol Hill?

Yes, I went back to Capitol Hill.

Working as an intern, still, for Frost?

But I had the bug already. I'd already been thinking about the Presidential campaign, so I concluded the process of shopping for my candidate, concluded that Governor Clinton was the one for me, and fired off letters to the campaign headquarters in Little Rock. I got the polite, pro forma response: We're going to need help in every state and Governor Clinton will count on your help.

You probably still have those letters somewhere.

I do, yes, because I ended up knowing and working with the woman who had penned the letter at the time, although I had no idea who she was then. That was thanks but no thanks, so I started thinking, Well, there's more than one way to skin a cat. If they don't see the benefit of hiring me down in Little Rock, then I'll go where the campaign is. Where's the campaign going to be? Iowa happened first, but Tom Harkin was running and that was not going to be a contest. New Hampshire was going to be the first real contest.

I phoned up information, dialed up Clinton for President in New Hampshire, and said, "Hey, I want a job. Are you hiring anybody?" The person I spoke with was a guy named Ned Ertel—"Nertel" was his nickname—and Ned said, "Well, just do what I did. Come volunteer. When they see how useful you are, they'll give you a job." That sounded good to me, so I started saving up money. Again, I was waiting tables, so I started picking up extra shifts.

You were doing that while you were interning?

Yes. During the day, I would do Congressman Frost's office three days a week and the DCCC, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, two days a week, then at night wait tables. I started picking up extra shifts and skipping out of the internship one day to pick up a lunch shift or whatever, saving up some money. Nevertheless, I had sent a letter and my resume off to the New Hampshire campaign office, too.

The night before I was going up there, I was packing my car to drive up to Manchester, New Hampshire, and I got a telephone call from a woman named Wendy Smith. She would be my mentor and is still a very good friend of mine to this day. She had also gone to the University of Texas. She had pulled my resume out of a stack of letters they had there and decided to look into this guy from Texas. She called me up and interviewed me over the telephone. I said, "Look, if you want to just wait, I'm going to be up there tomorrow." She said, "What are you talking about?" I said, "I'm about to drive up there so I can volunteer." She said, "Well, I think we'll find a job for you when you get here." That week, I took a job for $500 a month on the campaign staff and that's how I got involved.

And you went to Manchester?

I went to Manchester. There I faced the choice of either going to one of the field offices—We set up 13 campaign offices around the state, which was—I don't know if "unprecedented" is the right word—not common because the majority of the population is in the southern part of New Hampshire. To set up an operation in every single county in the state—I don't think many campaigns did that. Nevertheless, we did. The field team for that was being assembled for deployment the week I showed up, so I had the choice of going to one of the field offices or staying in Manchester and working for this woman, Wendy, as her assistant, though she graciously called it her deputy.

The second night I was there, she got into a knock-down, drag-out discussion with a guy named Mitchell Schwartz, who, to my mind, was the campaign director for his state. Later I found out that Mitchell and Wendy had been hired as a team to be the co-directors, but of course, New Hampshire being a somewhat traditional, conservative place, it was deemed—You don't want co-heads and you don't want a woman to be the head of the campaign staff. Mitchell got the title of being the campaign director and Wendy was playing the subservient. I didn't know anything about the dynamics. I just saw her telling off the campaign manager to his face, and I thought, I want to work with that woman. I hitched my wagon to her and worked with her throughout the New Hampshire campaign.

How far in advance of the primary did you get up there?

It was the second week of December, December 10 or something along those lines.

Did you go home for Christmas?

I think I made one trip away from there. I'm trying to think back, because all my family was in Texas. I didn't drive away from there. I may have flown from Boston to Texas once around the Christmas holiday. Maybe I had just gone to Washington, but at any rate, there was only one time I left, from December 10 until February 14 or 18, when the primary was. Otherwise, I was living in this flophouse the campaign had rented, where about ten to twelve of us, at its peak, stayed every night.

Sleeping bags and mattresses?

Yes. I had a plastic-coated pad that may have been a crib mattress or something, but that's what I slept on, in a room with two other guys. One of them had a sleeping bag and one of them had a cot. The cot was fancy, because you were off the ground, which didn't matter much because we would be in the office by 8:00 a.m., work until 10:00 p.m., go to one of the bars and talk smack to the other campaign staffs, then go home and sleep for a few hours and do the same thing again.

There was a period later, as you got closer to the primary date, where all hell broke loose, but there was an interval before then. I'd like to get your impressions about the interval before the storm. Were you feeling good about the direction of the campaign?

It's very interesting. I have a couple of thoughts on that. The first is one of the greatest pieces of advice for campaigning I ever heard. Mitchell Schwartz, to his credit, from the first day he started addressing the staff, would always talk about the flow of campaigns and the fact that some days were peaks and some days were valleys. That was very good advice for both ends, as it turned out, because December started to become a very nice peak.

The reason was that Mario Cuomo was the elephant in the room of the Democratic primaries at that point, because many people were speculating whether Cuomo was going to run for President or not. He ultimately decided not to run, of course, but until he made that decision, there were many people holding out hope that he would get in the race. Perhaps what was more important, it froze a lot of money that ultimately we were able to take better advantage of as a campaign. At some point in December, and maybe even early January, Cuomo announced that he wasn't going to run.

At the same time, we were doing the things on the ground there in New Hampshire that we needed to do to be successful, so we started gaining momentum. It was palpable; you could feel the momentum the campaign was generating in New Hampshire. I was looking at a couple of timelines in preparation for this and I don't think it was a coincidence—not to be too conspiracy oriented—that those attacks on Bill Clinton happened after this point, because it's not hard to imagine that you would run a very different campaign against Mario Cuomo than you would against Bill Clinton. Nonetheless, he started gaining this momentum and we had these peaks, then the valleys came along.

The two deepest valleys were, first, Gennifer Flowers, and then there was a story about the draft treatment that Clinton received. Those were some weeks apart from each other. Once he had withstood the Flowers thing, boom, here came the draft bit. Before that time, there had been a very strong sense of momentum, excitement, and positive energy in the campaign, then these stories broke. First, the media attention was coincident with the New Hampshire primary becoming closer in time, but also having the feeding frenzy of a scandal, especially when it involved the emerging front-runner and sex. You could sell a lot of newspapers with that. It was a crush of press.

I remember two experiences the nights these stories broke. The Flowers story broke and I was out working on an event in another town, waiting for them to come from Claremont, and they were horribly delayed. I don't think they ever made it, because the story broke when they were at Claremont touring a brush company or something like that. They immediately had to go into crisis mode. When I say "they," it was the traveling campaign staff, including Governor Clinton, who was there. That threw the whole schedule out of whack.

Then, ironically, the day after the story came out, I was out doing advance for another event. It was a health care event, a message event. The way you set up a campaign, you have crowd events, message events, or press events; those are the basic modes of doing an event. This one was a message event, so we were sitting in someone's home in Nashua, I think it was, in their living room, talking about the health care crisis, the problems they were facing, and how his plan would address those problems. No one in the press was interested in that. It was way oversubscribed in terms of the number of press people, because they all wanted to follow up on the draft story, so they sat there and quasi-politely listened to the health care stuff, but no one was going to write about that.

What they wrote about was after the event; Governor Clinton had a brief press avail at the end of the driveway, where he made his famous "I'm going to fight until the last dog dies" statement. That was the mentality. We were under siege. Those golden days of gaining this momentum, these peaks, were behind us. True to form, Mitchell Schwartz said this week was definitely a valley, and it was. It was quite an emotional ride to go so high, come so far down, then come back up to persevere and keep fighting; to come back up and come in second place, and not a super close second place, as I recall.

It was interesting that in '96, in the White House then, we made a campaign trip to New Hampshire. As often happens, someone locally wanted to make up commemorative T-shirts that they gave to all the staff, the advance team and people like that. The T-shirt for this one made some reference to Clinton winning the New Hampshire primary. It was a testament to revisionist history, but people had overlooked the fact that he definitely didn't win and, in fact, he was second, but that second place was such a victory in and of itself.

He wasn't knocked out. When did you first meet Clinton himself?

The first time was maybe a week or two into December. I went out to help advance his arrival in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. They landed at midnight, coming in from California or someplace else. This was an interesting thing, too, to see the difference. My first experience was there, going out to pick him up at the airport.

Portsmouth had a base that was later converted into some sort of industrial complex. I went out to the Portsmouth National Guard Field or whatever and met the jet. The "motorcade" consisted of two cars. I drove a minivan, the second car in the motorcade; my colleague, the guy who really taught me to do advance in great detail, drove the lead car, a sedan, and we picked up the traveling party, which consisted of Governor Clinton, Bruce Lindsey, and Mort Engelberg, a former Hollywood movie producer who did a lot of advance for President Clinton and continues to do many trips. He's done many of the most critical events, including working on his announcement speech. For some reason, Mort was traveling from the event to New Hampshire, and there was one magazine reporter with them. That was the "traveling press."

That was the first time I met him. He got in late. We took him back to the hotel in Portsmouth and that was pretty much it.

Anything memorable about him? This was your first time meeting him. Were you thinking, Oh, this is a good guy, or He didn't give me the time of day, or—?

He wasn't particularly overly friendly or stuck up or anything. He was tired, but he wasn't tired and crabby. It was a bit of a quasi-nonimpression. We got them to the hotel, they went to their hotel rooms, then Andy Frank, with whom I was doing advance, and I were in the room regrouping, talking about the next day's events. He popped in with a cowboy hat on that he had picked up somewhere earlier in the day to ask a quick question, then lumbered off to go to bed. I was thinking, That's the next President of the United States, huh? Not an unimpressive first impression, but not an impressive one, either.

At some point, I guess early on, you had the New Hampshire campaign, then there was the Little Rock base. Were you seeing much of the back-and-forth or was that occurring at another level?

A little bit, not tons. It was a very functionary role, but we had the classic tension that any organization has when you have a corporate headquarters body and you have a field office operation. We in New Hampshire were on the ground. We were doing the work and "Little Rock," which was a term for the senior management of the campaign, would sometimes throw out what we on the ground considered wacky ideas.

Because I was working with Wendy, whose primary focus was scheduling and communications—Scheduling is where the campaign happens, in many respects—we would get involved in tugs of war between what we thought was the best thing to do and what the campaign headquarters thought. That became irrelevant because, particularly after these scandals erupted, the gravity of the campaign, as the primary approached, went to New Hampshire. Almost the whole headquarters staff ended up in New Hampshire, because not only was New Hampshire happening, it became such a do-or-die thing. If we didn't do well in New Hampshire, the campaign was going to be dead. That disappeared toward the end of that period because the headquarters staff came up and was our staff at the same time.

Obviously, you were successful in impressing people during the campaign. How did you do that? Could you relate the stages of your upward movement in the campaign?

To put it in some context, I'd have to say first that a campaign is the closest thing to a meritocracy that I've ever experienced. Obviously, people have connections to get involved or have this or that way to come into it, or maybe a credential that gives them a chance to do something, but once you're there, if you succeed, you get the call. If you do something well, then they're going to come to you increasingly. If you do something well, you get a bigger assignment, a better assignment. You keep doing a decent job and you get more and more responsibility.

That's what I attribute to going from volunteer to—After New Hampshire, I was the deputy director of advance under three or four directors of advance in Little Rock. Part of it was my mentor, Wendy. She had such a strong reputation and was very highly regarded by the Clintons and Bruce Lindsey. She went on to become the trip director in the White House. Part of it was that I had her as a champion, making sure I didn't slip through the cracks, teaching me and guiding me. I learned a lot from her.

The other part was being able to do something that worked out well, doing a good job for her, and doing a good job with the exposure I had to people from the campaign headquarters in spite of—or you would have to ask them, maybe even because of—some of the back-and-forth we had. After the New Hampshire primary, it was a depressing experience. We spent so much money trying to stay in the race in New Hampshire that there were a lot of staff reductions right after that. It was one of those situations where essentially everybody got laid off after the primary day, then some people got rehired for different jobs around the country. Many people had to pack up, pick up. OK, I lost my job in New Hampshire; I'm going to go to Illinois. People did this.

Our team from New Hampshire disbursed across the country. A few of us were lucky enough to be picked up and go straight into another job. Others of us had to go to another place where the campaign was happening and re-earn our jobs. This is also a testament to the team: almost all of them did go out and plug back into the campaign in different places because they did a good job.

I was lucky enough that the national scheduler, from dealing with me and from knowing my reputation with Wendy, had seen something in me and asked me to—Well, she didn't really have a job for me in Little Rock yet, so she sent me to Florida for a couple of weeks so as not to fall through the cracks. I worked on some events down there, but I realized later on that what she was doing was keeping me working so I wouldn't disappear, so the campaign wouldn't lose me, and so I wouldn't lose the campaign. After doing that for a couple of weeks, she brought me into Little Rock to be the deputy to the advance director. Now, the advance director was busy doing other things. In fact, I didn't meet my boss for a good month after I took the job. He was in Illinois, which is another one of the big battleground states for the primaries, then eventually started getting pulled into the Vice Presidential selection process and other things.

Who was this?

Gary Ginsberg. He's now an executive at News Corporation. Gary was my boss even though we had never met each other. He certainly didn't select me. He was told that he was getting me. When Gary formally moved on to another position, other people were brought in, but his responsibilities were being pulled in different directions. The lack of another leader left me to build the advance operation as we went from the primary campaign to the general election campaign, and, what was most important, as we launched the bus trips.

They were how we kicked off the general election campaign, which was a huge logistical challenge because we were going from a set number of advance people, a set number of events, and a set budget, et cetera. Everything was scaling up so dramatically. The bus trips really drove it home, where we were covering 1,000 miles a day, doing nine to ten campaign stops, and needing an advance team in every location. Then there was a traveling party comprised of—I don't know how many buses ended up being in the bus-capade group, but maybe a dozen buses and a traveling party of 200 people.

Contrast that to what I described as the first experience, and we had to create the capacity to manage all that logistically. A huge part of the traveling party was managing the press traveling with him. Here I was, with no formal management experience but having done an OK job at these other tasks, set to build out our advance operation. This amounted to about a $7 million budget for internal advance capacity and producing events. I was trying to structure a budget to support that, which was definitely a big task for me.

Let me ask you two questions. First, I want to take you all the way back to New Hampshire, then we can leave this behind. Were you rattled by the accounts you were hearing about Gennifer Flowers and the draft? Did you go home at night and think to yourself, My God, what have I gotten myself into? How did you personally respond to that?

I don't think it ever gave me any doubts about the candidate, ironically. Part of that was being so wrapped up in the movement I felt I was a part of. You could have said they found a dead body in his trunk and maybe I would have said someone put it there. So what would have been part of my attitude, which is maybe a little cynical, but the Gennifer Flowers tapes had all these issues about their authenticity. I would think about them a little bit differently. With Flowers, I was very dismissive. She's lying. She's making it up. Look at her—she's in it for the money. Even if anything ever happened, so what, that was ages ago; even if it wasn't, what's the relevance of it?

Then they did the 60 Minutes thing and dealt with that.

They dealt with it in as head-on a way as you could have in that situation. That was very real and genuine. I'll leave it to professionals like yourself and psychologists to figure it out, but that was that. On the draft bit, I probably would have thought more about that. At the time, it didn't give me much pause, but I can see where I would have thought about that a bit more.

You didn't suggest this, but what I heard when you were asking the question was did I think I picked the wrong horse, either from winning the campaign perspective or is this guy genuine and do I believe in him? Neither of them rose to the level of me questioning those things.

The Vietnam stuff was probably a little more—I could see the case in attacking him around that a little more. I could see the fibers of merit around that. The irony is that the same thing—I don't want to get too political here, but you look at what [George W.] Bush and [Richard] Cheney did and if you objectively—Obviously I can never be objective about this, but if you were to objectively compare, there's no question in my mind—I don't know the real truth of Bill Clinton's heart, but there's no question in my mind that the circumstances appear as though there was some thought as to whether or not he was ready to go off and fight in Vietnam. The things these other guys have done, in which the case is so much stronger and to the extent that there is avoidance, are so much more clearly demonstrated, and it's like nothing. Sorry, I went off on a tangent.

No, it's not a tangent at all. It directly relates to the question about the psychology of people who are involved in the campaign. It helps set the stage for questions we will have later, too.

You said there's the routine organizational tension between the field office and "Little Rock," then you go off and become part of the Little Rock operation. Did things look different from Little Rock?

I'm sure I ended up being in "Little Rock" in many people's minds, but in my mind I was explicitly an advocate for people who were by definition on the road, what we called an advance person on assignment. Most of them appreciated that on a couple of different levels. One, I was a fairly effective advocate on their behalf; and two, I was one of them in many respects. In fact, after we launched the bus trips, in spite of my "meritocracy" comment, I wasn't going to get the director of advance job. I thought, Well, I want to go do advance myself, so I went on the road and did that. Even though I was down in Little Rock, I was one of them. I was someone from the field who happened to be stationed there at the time.

You were on the road, then, the better part of the last part of the campaign?

The last two and a half months I was on the road.

Do you have any stories from the campaign trail, especially as they relate to the candidate? Were you spending much time with him? If you were doing advance, he must have been coming into your area.

Yes, we would see him. It's funny, because I still never felt as if I got to know Bill Clinton until I served as his aide. Every week I would go to some new city, then sure enough, he would show up. One of the running jokes was about a T-shirt that said, "Who is Bill Clinton and why does he keep following me around the country?"

An advance person is always going a step ahead, so you don't inhabit the same city as the candidate very much.

You do for just a few minutes, and that's exactly the point. You go there, work your tail off for a week, then the plane lands. Here they come and you tell him where to stand when he goes out on the stage, and that's it. That's the extent of your interaction.

Then you're both off and he'll see you again—

They're off and you're off and you do the whole thing again.

Did you have any big successes in the campaign that you looked back and thought, Boy, I really managed to pull this one together?

I was very proud of the job I did in that advance position down in Little Rock. I was still learning things. I don't at all want to give the impression that I had mastered things. That's one of the great things about the area of advance—you continue to learn and grow, or at least you should, every trip you do. I had the good fortune of organizing a rally in Austin, Texas. That was quite a personally meaningful and enjoyable experience, because I graduated from the University of Texas. I assume you are probably familiar, but where the LBJ [Lyndon B. Johnson] School is, there's that big fountain and that bowled lawn.

I know of it, but I've never been there.

The LBJ School itself sits on a hill up from the main part of the campus of the university. On the grounds of the LBJ School, there's this natural, sloping, bowled meadow around a large fountain. When I was a student at the University of Texas, it was one of my favorite places to study. That is where we organized a rally that had anywhere from 20,000 to 47,000 people. For me that was a salient memory because I had a chance to create and be part of this thing. It only lasted two hours, so it wasn't that meaningful for a lot of people, I'm sure, but it was a good event. It was also something that I had a chance to build and negotiate with the university in a relative position of power. After being one of 50,000 students, to sit across the table from all these university officials, pull off the event, and have it be a success, that was a very positive memory of mine.

So you were doing advance through Election Day. Any piece of that final marathon travel day? Did you do any advance work for that or were you back to Little Rock for the celebration?

I went back to Little Rock and had lucky timing, too, on my trips. Everybody wanted to get back to Little Rock for election night, not surprisingly, and most people did. To the campaign's credit, they figured out a way to get most of these advance people down there to celebrate that night.

I was lucky enough to go down there maybe three or four days before election night. I wasn't on one of the marathon trips of the last few days; of course, I was disappointed about that until I got to Little Rock and realized, I'm here for election night. I helped a couple of people on a couple of events, but had no deep, substantive role or responsibilities. That was great because I still maintained an apartment in Little Rock, so it was coming home even though I hadn't been there for a couple of months. I had the chance to, for the most part, enjoy election night, to soak up and appreciate what had happened there. It was a powerful night and a good payoff for all the efforts of the last few months with many or most of the friends whom I had come to know on the campaign there as well. It was a very nice experience.

Did you start looking ahead to see if maybe there was going to be a place for you in Washington in the Clinton administration?

Yes. The transition period was probably the ugliest period in terms of just degrading—people doing all kinds of things to try to position themselves or secure a position and make themselves look good. As a quick observation, I thought politics was pretty political until the last few years of my life, when I spent time in corporate America. The internal politics of corporate America is ten times worse than the internal politics of politics. I wasn't aware of this truth at the time, so I thought people were overtly political and jockeying for position, stabbing each other in the back, and trying to kiss up, all kinds of things.

Another good piece of fortune occurred for me during this period. By full swing of the campaign there were probably anywhere from 400 to 600 advance people, people who were doing one or more trips for the campaign. Twelve people were selected to form a transition advance team, and I was chosen as one of them. By mission, we were supposed to do the same thing, advance, for Governor Clinton during this time. As a practical matter, he certainly didn't go to message events or policy speeches and such. That meant that what we did, for the most part, was advance them going out to the movies and mostly sneak in people who were coming to interview for potential Cabinet positions and the like. There were some announcement events when he named people and things like that.

You were on the federal payroll at this point?

Yes. At that point, I became a government employee.

I'm sorry; I stepped on your line. You said you were doing advance work, getting them to the movies or trying to bring potential job candidates in stealthily.

That's right. We had a minivan with tinted windows that we called Stealth One. We practiced the angles at which you could drive into the Governor's Mansion and not have a clear camera view into the back of the minivan through the windshield. We perfected the art of—There's a saying in advance, "walk with purpose," that if you portray enough confidence about something and you do it with a certain air of authority, you can do anything. We would convince people at the airport—It was a different time—to let us drive our car out there and sneak in Sam Nunn or Les [Leslie] Aspin.

You got onto the runway, the tarmac?

On the tarmac. We'd take them directly off the Jetway, down the steps of the Jetway into Stealth One, and drive the minivan off.

I was wondering about that, because it seemed to me that there might have been reporters stationed at the airport trying to eye people coming off the planes and identify them.

That's right. This was a constantly escalating game of cat and mouse. The first couple of times it was about getting them into the Governor's Mansion in a car that the press might not suspect. Then they started to identify the cars we were using, so we made sure we had the tinted windows. Then they started staking us out at the airport, so we would have different routes of walking through the airport. Before you knew it, we had to talk our way into driving the car out on the tarmac because we couldn't get through the airport without being spotted by the press.

Did you have Secret Service agents with you when you did this?

Oh no, because they protect the President; all these other people are left on their own. We utilized this walk with purpose to convey that we had the authority somehow to be driving out there on the tarmac, although I was a 24- or 25-year-old.

With a minivan, the extent of your authority. [laughter]

There were people who made some parking credentials, "Official Campaign Vehicle" and things like that, to try to avoid parking tickets. This was another kind of racket advance people had fun with.

At what point did you begin to realize that you were going to have a position in the new administration if you wanted one?

I wanted to say something else about the transition period. Not for a very long time is the answer.

The good and the bad thing was that most of the jockeying for positions was occurring in Washington. On the one hand, we were insulated from that by being in Little Rock. To many people in Washington's minds, we were fine because we were getting to do all this stuff during the transition, but to our mind we were out of the game. We felt that people were in Washington mostly working on the inauguration, but in the process of working on the inauguration, they were kissing up to people who were leading the transition working group for whatever agency they were interested in working in. The Plum Book became a very ubiquitous and necessary tool, which is the—They publish it every four years—the listing of all the administration, Schedule C jobs, the political jobs. Of course, it changes somewhat from administration to administration, but it's where you do your shopping of where you want to identify a job.

I spent a lot of time looking through the Plum Book, trying to figure out where I would want a job, bemoaning the fact that I wasn't up there in Washington to be kissing up to the right official, then trying to take advantage of the strings we had by being in Little Rock. As a joke at one point, I took my resume and put it on a roll of toilet paper. I can't remember if I snuck it in the bathroom or presented it as a gift to George Stephanopoulos. I was telling him, I want to get your attention one way or another and if this is the only moment where I can occupy your attention, then that's what it takes. In spite of the things I had done and the good reputation I had established with people in good positions, there were not many jobs being offered at all. Most of the people were worried about their own skin, so there wasn't a lot of looking out for people going on, because people had to look out for themselves.

Andrew Friendly was another one of the people on this transition advance team. Most of us ended up doing all right. Andrew took the job I would have wanted in the administration, which was good because ultimately I was able to succeed him. I didn't know anywhere else I would want to go in the administration. It wasn't so much that there wasn't anything, but I didn't have the capacity to figure that out. I liked campaigning and politics, and by this time a PhD in psychology was not something I was remotely thinking about, so I started helping David Wilhelm, who had been the campaign manager, the youngest national campaign manager, and then youngest chair of the DNC. He became the chairman of the DNC.

I helped with a couple of things when he was campaigning for DNC chair, because the process is that you're formally elected by the Democratic National Committee. Once he became chairman, I helped him by working at one or two events, then I was invited to join his staff at the DNC. I thought this was great. Government, per se, wasn't holding tons of appeal for me and the positions at the White House, which is the place within government that I'd want to be, were either taken or not of interest to me, so I took this job, with David as the DNC chair, and it was fantastic.

Between traveling with the President and traveling with David Wilhelm, I visited every state in the United States, which was a huge milestone for someone like me. I grew up in a very small town in Texas; most of my cohorts were really breaking out if they moved to Dallas from where I lived. To go to Washington, D.C., let alone to see the entire country—I hadn't even traveled internationally. I got to travel with him everywhere he went—a series of [Thomas] Jefferson-[Andrew] Jackson Day dinners, which is what the state party gala is typically called in every state—and got to see the inner workings of the party apparatus.

One of the questions in your material was about the difference between being at the DNC versus being in the administration. An interesting observation of that period was we very much felt like we were part of the administration at the DNC, but that sense wasn't shared by different people.

On the one hand, we felt like we were in the trenches day in and day out of what was happening and an important piece of the administration, but meanwhile, many people in the White House and in other Cabinet agencies viewed the DNC as a place you go to get your money to pay for the tent you have to put up on the South Lawn for this big event or such, not as someone around the table. It was like the redheaded stepchild of the administration in many ways, but very important politically. For me it was a great chance to learn from one of the most decent people who is in politics for all the right reasons. David Wilhelm I'm talking about. It was a great experience for me.

Did he make you a Bears fan?

I did go to a Bears football game. I'm like Mark Twain—August in Chicago at that football game was one of the coldest winters I've ever spent. The wind coming off of Lake Michigan was something else. But yes, lots of trips to Chicago. Not surprisingly, Chicago ended up being the host city for the convention in 1996.

How long were you with David?

I was with David from early in '93—I worked at the DNC from early '93 until October of '94, which was when I went to the White House. I traveled with David exclusively all of '93. In the early part of '94, there was a reorganization of the Finance Department, the fundraising operation for the party and, arguably, the most important thing the national party does. I joined an incoming finance director as her chief of staff.

At that point, the fundraising itself was going well, but some of the mechanics and the politics around the fundraising weren't as smooth as we would like. My job was to address those things and see to the management of the department as well as to the politics of what we were doing and to be the liaison between the fundraising operation and the White House. Our point of contact was the Political Affairs Office at the White House. It was a management job. It wasn't a fundraising job.

Between the experience of traveling with David, sitting in on meetings with him, and this finance experience, it gave me an opportunity to get to know every significant contributor to the party. This ended up being a great asset at my job at the White House, because I knew the standing of people we would see at different events around the country. I knew their political clout and their range of financial contribution, but I wouldn't know exactly how much they had given. That was a tremendous asset in serving the President later on. He knew most of these people as well. In serving him it helped, because many of them knew me already. Instead of them having to choose between demanding to talk to the President or talking to someone they knew could also understand their concerns and listen to them effectively—It made me not quite a surrogate, but it gave me the chance to expand his "ear width."

One other question about the party. I wonder if you can recall what you were picking up from—You said you were traveling a lot with Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners. You were talking to Democrats all over the country at this point. Were you finding during that interval that the party was a happy party? Was it a disgruntled party? Were there people who felt like Clinton was not doing what he said he was going to do? You were in a good position to take the temperature of the party during a period when, looking ahead—In November of '94 there was a kind of earthquake. What I'm trying to see is whether your seismograph was picking up any of this.

That's a very good question. First, my degree of sophistication at that time, in the moment, was probably not deep enough to see this, but in hindsight, I can definitely see the fault lines and the patterns I was being exposed to in the way you're talking about.

Specifically, the conventional wisdom that had, for a very good reason, settled in—that things were not effectively managed, especially early on in the administration—was pervasive out there. From a party perspective, the degree to which that was made possible by powerful Democrats on the Hill was completely lost in the conventional wisdom scope of things. The Democrats on the Hill were a bigger problem for the early Clinton administration, I would argue, than the Republicans were. Then they became emboldened by it, everybody became emboldened by it. That was a party that wasn't used to having the White House, and certainly a President and an administration that probably came in in an off-putting way to the powers that be, including the Democrats in Congress.

You were picking some of this up at the time?

Let's take gays in the military, an issue that made everyone angry that it was the first issue he "chose," which he didn't choose, of course. It was rammed down his throat, not well managed on the administration's part. He got outfoxed and had to deal with this issue. It became what everybody saw as his first priority in terms of policy and action. People were saying, "I can't believe that's the first thing he's going to do," and "We are people who don't think gays should be in the military and we're part of the Democratic Party," and "We are gays and lesbians and we can't stand the way it's come out." We were catching it from all sides. There was all kinds of unhappiness on each side of the issue in terms of it being chosen, in terms of the poor way it was handled from a communications and a messaging perspective. "We elected him to deal with the economy." There was a lot of frustration around that.

The other two issues that fed the Republican tide of '94 were guns and the health care program. I definitely can see, in hindsight, us experiencing that in the party. I was closer to that in '93, when I was with David, but the same thing would come up when donors would talk about things at events and such in '94.

The assault weapons ban was another issue where we lost the framing on it. It played poorly in places like Michigan, where it's taken for granted to be a pretty good Democratic state, but where there are a lot of people who are very fond of the Second Amendment and their guns. Now it seemed Bill Clinton wanted to take them away.

We lost control of that and then health care. In the end, the administration as a whole put too much faith in how policy can trump politics, as it pertained to health care, in designing such an extensive plan. The plan was very extensive in its details. I don't think it was the way it ended up being painted, as a government takeover of the health care system, but it lent itself to that because it was so complex and so involved.

There were probably two naive expectations: one, that policy would trump politics; and two, that we needed to listen to those powerful Democrats on the Hill and do what they said. Part of the legislative strategy was driven from the Hill; it's what allowed the program to be the death of a thousand cuts. We saw that at the DNC, even as we were being asked to organize national grassroots campaigns in support of the health care initiative.

Somebody was brought on board to go to the DNC?

Yes, Dick Celeste, former Governor of Colorado and a very well regarded man. There was a good effort, but we lost the message framing and no amount of grassroots organizing could overcome that. That's probably not entirely true. We didn't have the message hooks.

The other thing was while we were trying to organize a campaign in support of this policy proposal, the proposal was, through this death of a thousand cuts, changing as it made its way through Congress. All of a sudden it was, "Such-and-such a component is no longer sacrosanct? What are we really fighting for here?" It ended up being a good Rorschach for the criticisms being leveled at the administration.

I wanted to ask about the '94 election. To what extent was it anticipated that it would turn out so badly for the Democrats? What kind of reaction was there at the DNC?

This was very interesting for me, personally, in the sense that I started at the White House October 12, I think it was, in '94. It was not anticipated in the volume that it happened. At the DNC, there was a sense that it was going to be tough. I can't recall specifically any projections in terms of seats, up or down. What was the swing, like 50 to 70 seats? Nobody thought on that magnitude. Nobody was thinking that. All along, Presidents lose historically in midterm elections. Everybody knew that factor and everybody knew it had been a tough couple of years. People just didn't see it coming, not to that size.

On the other side, in October I started—We did a lot of campaign travel in October, to the extent that people wanted us, because this is a time where the ads were running that were morphing candidates into Bill Clinton and his numbers were—Of course, I wasn't in the administration throughout the throes of the impeachment process, but I know it wasn't this way then. At that point, in October of '94, he was definitely an albatross.

This is more hindsight, I must say, to qualify this, because I didn't have much of a sense for the person at this point, but I think that was painful and frustrating for President Clinton, because he likes to take action. When the chips are down and his back's against the wall, that's when he gets it going. While the size of the wave wasn't anticipated, it was clear that people were under the gun and, rightfully or wrongfully, he was the reason why people were under the gun. He was definitely a liability in many of those races. He wanted to get out there and do something, but the invitations weren't there. Why don't you come to a fundraiser for us at about 9:30 at night, after all the newspaper deadlines have passed, you know? The deployment he was able to engage in was not one where he felt like he was in the thick of things or one where he could contribute to the message or anything like that. That was frustrating.

After the election, this wave was—It would be hard to not have taken it personally if you were in his position. The Republicans were talking about how great it was to be able to campaign against you and the Democrats were talking about what a weight it was to have you. I'm fabricating those comments, but those sentiments were definitely out there. It was definitely a period of introspection and trying to figure out how to chart a course on this.

Some of the news accounts at the time suggested the President was really depressed after that. Was that your observation?

Without the PhD, I don't have the clinical standing to say that. [laughter]

But neither did the reporters.

That doesn't stop them, right, so why should it stop me? I wouldn't say depressed, but he was definitely affected. It was a time of circling the wagons and trying to figure out—I'm completely projecting, but in '94, I could easily see him feeling, I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't. If I try to do things on my own, then Democrats in Congress, who were no longer the majority, are going to beat me back. If I try to work with them, it's going to fail for different reasons. What am I supposed to do?

As time told, in some respects it became an asset to not have the majority. In '93, and this may be unfair to the [John D.] Dingells and the [Thomas] Foleys and the Democrats in Congress, but they really made it tough. He made it tough on himself, too, but that was no longer there. Then you had this newly minted, although too-powerful, foil in the person of Newt Gingrich, and it set the stage for him to be able to position himself better.

Let's circle back and pick up a couple of points before we get too far down the road on that. I want to ask one more question about David Wilhelm. How was he communicating what you were finding out in the field back to the White House? Was he personally at the White House to talk to the President a lot about this or did he write memos?

There were regular political meetings and he had very good relationships with the assistants to the President who had political responsibilities. He had relationships with George Stephanopoulos, with Rahm Emanuel and Joan Baggett. He had all those channels to communicate.

Was he feeling pressure from the White House frequently, too?

I've never heard him talk about this, so this is just my observation. He came in as chair with a very forward-looking vision for transforming the party, some things that, to my view, if we had acted on them in '93 and '94, would have borne fruit in 2000.

What are the kinds of things you're talking about?

Investing in technology, marketing better to youth, and building more of a presence around the entire country. Those were examples of his thinking at the time. Frankly, probably anyone who would diagnose what was going on with the party and what it needed, to position moving forward, to build databases, and things like that, would have made those assessments. Those efforts were thwarted because of the reality of the time; one of which was a matter of practice and one of which was a matter of necessity. Maybe both were matters of necessity.

The DNC was the piggybank for the White House. If there was polling or consulting or anything else political in nature that couldn't be done by the government, the DNC had to foot the bill. That was all mandatory stuff. That's like the White House saying, "Oh, here's the contract with Carville and Begala," or Stan Greenberg or whomever. I'm not picking on them; I'm just using names everyone will know. "You have to pay for it." As I said, "We're going to do this event on the lawn. It's a state dinner, but we're having so many guests and so many of them are political, we can't pay for this with taxpayer funds. You have to pay for it. We're going to do this travel on Air Force One for candidates, and Air Force One costs $25,000 to $50,000 an hour to operate. The DNC is going to pay for the political portion."

All these things were mandatory large-ticket items. That carves into your resource space already. Two are discretionary items, but are coming from the White House or driven by the necessity of the White House's situation. The economic package in the spring/early summer of '93—failed Presidency. If we don't pass this deficit reduction bill—failed Presidency. Oh, by the way, the unions aren't happy about this and this group's not happy about that and the middle-class tax cut isn't what we wanted it to be from the campaign. The traditional interest groups of the party can't believe that this Wall Street guy, Bob Rubin, is calling the shots and that the bond market is dictating—all of this. Nevertheless, it was very clear that if that didn't pass, we were in for a really tough ride. The health care campaign—item after item. There was always something happening that was very critical. If we didn't spend resources at the party to support the initiative, then it was in trouble. That left no—

What about NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement]?

NAFTA. The DNC chairman was very much in the middle on this because it was very clearly an administration priority, very clearly something we deployed resources to try to support, very clearly something the labor community was up in arms about. He had many tough meetings around that. You're the punching bag, as DNC chairman, for a sitting President. It's a much better job for someone who doesn't have a President in the White House.

How did you get to the White House?

I was doing the work at the DNC. Obviously, the President's aide is a very demanding job, and on an occasion or two, when Andrew [Friendly] was going to be out, I filled in for him. Come to find out, he was starting to think about how to get out of that job and who could take his place. In hindsight, these were tryouts. Nonetheless, I did the job a couple of different times, then when it was time for Andrew to leave, I was asked to take his place.

You said you did it a couple of times. You would come in for two days or you would travel with the President?

I did a couple of days in the office. My first trip was—This may have been before I took the job full time. I guess it was. Maybe one of you guys know the date—[Richard Milhous] Nixon's funeral to Yorba Linda, California. I did one domestic trip with him and a couple of days in the office. During my time at the DNC, I had also done one international advance trip to Rome. That was the body of tryout work, but Nancy Hernreich, who, of course, ran the President's immediate office and was his longtime confidant from Arkansas, was also working out of the basement of the Governor's Mansion during his transition period. That was relevant because Nancy had some exposure to all of us and developed a sense for me and who I was, as did Bruce Lindsey, who was also working there at that time. They knew I was someone who could do a good job and was trustworthy, et cetera.

It was Nancy's initiative to say if Andrew is leaving, Stephen is probably the best person for the job. Then Erskine Bowles, who was coming in as Deputy Chief of Staff, interviewed me. They asked the President also; I had a running joke about that. The first day I showed up to work, Betty Currie politely said, "Oh, Mr. President, Stephen's here." [imitating Clinton] "Oh yes, I know Stephen. Hi Stephen, where's Andrew?" "Sir, he doesn't work here anymore." [laughter] Anyway, he was stuck with me.

Erskine Bowles was the trigger to say yes. He hadn't started as Deputy Chief of Staff. I think he was still an SBA [Small Business Administration] administrator, but had started putting some things in place. When Leon Panetta became Chief of Staff, Erskine became Deputy Chief of Staff. I think my first day on the job was Leon Panetta's third or fourth day on the job. All this was part of the reorganization. Andrew was by no means part of the reorganization; he was just burned out. He became the trip director, as you know from your conversation with him. He didn't get to go that far away, but he got out of the day-to-day grind of it, which was so demanding. That's how I got the job.

Since you mentioned Leon Panetta, I'd like to follow up on that. The first couple of years, the Clinton administration had a reputation for being overly disorganized and chaotic. Panetta got a lot of credit for bringing some order to the White House. I was wondering if you could comment on what he did to bring order to the White House and what you observed of this.

He definitely brought a lot to the White House. It's unfair to characterize some of the things as being so chaotic before his tenure there. I'm very mindful—There was this often-cited notion out there that anyone could just walk into the Oval Office under the Mack [Thomas F.] McLarty regime, which was never really the case.

The two points that circulate are that too many people attended the meetings and the meetings never ended, and that decisions were never made.

I wasn't there to know for sure, but I think that's a pretty valid assertion. Leon had a focused demeanor, which was then amplified by Erskine Bowles as his Deputy Chief of Staff, who is a businessman and takes a very businesslike approach to things. There's no doubt that they brought a different approach and order to things. Whereas Mack was more—I love them all, I have to say that first, but Mack was—It's hard to be the Dr. No to someone who is your lifelong good friend, Bill Clinton and Mack McLarty. Whereas, if you are a former Congressman with a wide base of standing and good substantive accomplishments, and were on Nixon's enemies list, you'd probably have better standing to put your foot down to someone like that. They had different skills.

Any person in that first period of time, when everybody was finding their way, including the President, would have had a hard time of it. The President had grown and advanced and understood the office a bit better by that point. Certainly, many of his staff had matured. On top of that, Leon came in with a different approach, so the combination made things—which of course weren't completely fluid, but—smoother by comparison.

Leon—I have a tremendous spot in my heart for him because a) we bonded immediately—We were both in this new place trying to figure it out—and b) he loves to laugh. The Presidency is very important and serious stuff, but it's also a series of absurd moments, one after the other. You have to have some sense of humor to maintain your sanity and to conquer it fairly well. That served him well.

Did you talk to Andrew before taking the job?

Yes. We were very close friends, also, through the campaign experience and particularly this transition period. I talked to him about it and what he thought, but I never at all equivocated about whether this was something I wanted to do. My only challenge in thinking about it was to not leave my now boss at the DNC, Laura Hartigan, the finance director, high and dry. She was tremendous about the whole thing. She said, "Of course you have to take this, how can you not?"

You said that you did interview with the President, or not?

We never sat down and he never offered me the job, but I know he was talked to about it. Nancy and Erskine Bowles were the ones who hired me, with the President's approval. They had to go back to him and say, "We want to hire this guy, Stephen Goodin, and here's this and that about him, is that OK?" "Sure"—I don't know what he said.

Could you describe the job of the Presidential aide? What's the formal title?

It's the best business card, because it's "The President's Aide." There are many Presidential aides, but there is only one called "The President's Aide." I always thought of it as like Tigger, because you're the only one. [laughter] Of the positions in satellite to the President of the United States, there is a support system and a rotation scheme. If you're a military aide who carries the "football," the launch codes, there are five military aides; there's one from each branch of the services, so you take shifts. If you are the Secret Service detail agent, there's a lead agent on the Presidential protective detail and a deputy—They're called SACs, Special Agent in Charge, but there's a SAC and a DSAC, a deputy—and they rotate, then they even have four underneath them. One of those six is always on the President's body for the Secret Service. If you're the White House Physician, there are three of you. It goes on and on, but on this job there's only one.

You would find ways to spell yourself in different situations, but for the most part, you were stuck there. You lived every day of his life with him. You were the only person to see things through his eyes. A good example of this was when we would travel a lot, we would see a few mistakes with events and I would always, in talking to the advance director or the advance teams on the ground, explain to them that they only saw one little mistake with their one event, but we were making five stops a day and every single one of those five stops had a mistake. We were experiencing five mistakes a day. That's what he experienced, because I experienced the same thing he did.

The job is to get him through his day, help him navigate the day. Ostensibly, your job is to keep him on schedule, so you get your briefing book, which includes the schedule and all the materials for the meetings you're going to have or the events or the speeches, and he has the same thing. You have a book exactly like his. There are three of them like that: his, yours, and Nancy Hernreich's.

Nancy because she's the supervisor?

Yes. Really, my job was her job, but I was the one executing it. Nancy was more stationary and I was mobile. Wherever he was going, I was going, but she was there in the office doing whatever. You have your schedule, the things that are going to happen. You have your briefing materials to tell you a little bit about everything that's going to happen. Your job is to help him get through it successfully. Success is defined by not being too late, not having any political or media snafus, and making sure that whatever the message of the day or the external accomplishment of the day that is the most critical, or the several that are most critical, isn't thwarted by him or others.

The first area of focus is him. Is he prepared for what he needs to do? Is he awake, is he dressed, is he briefed, has he read the material? If he doesn't have time to read the material, how are you going to explain it to him in bullet points? People have said I must have developed writing skills from that. No. The only writing skill from that time was being able to put something on a 3x5-index card and convey the briefing material succinctly. I certainly didn't take liberties. If there was something substantive and he didn't have time to read all the material on it, I wasn't going to say, "Well, here's what you need to do about the Bosnian policy, sir." My job in that case would be to make sure Sandy [Samuel R.] Berger or the National Security Advisor, whoever the substantive expert was, had the time to convey to him verbally what he needed to know.

The job also included reading through his speeches, making sure they were in order. If he had the speech and had changes to it, facilitating incorporating those changes, translating his handwriting, which was very difficult for many people to read. That's all around him, making sure he had what he needed to do.

The other thing was looking at a Chief of Staff/senior staff priority—It's important that he make time to see Congressman So-and-So when you're at this or that reception. I would layer onto my agenda to know that Leon Panetta thought he needed to do a pull-aside with Joe Biden at this event, and I'd try to facilitate that, make sure that happened.

The third domain was—and this was often the tripwire for whether I had to be with him at something or whether someone else might be able to cover some of the responsibilities—the press nature of something. What was the communications or the media component to something he was doing? Was it newsworthy? Was it open to the press? Was there something happening in the press that would make an otherwise mundane event a problematic event? Was someone going to yell questions to him when he was going to the helicopter because a certain story was breaking?

The job included anticipating what the media pieces were and trying to look ahead to see when he would have press exposure, so if someone wasn't already proactively doing it, I could point out that this story was breaking. That was a chance that he was going to be exposed to the press, so we needed to make sure he talked to Mike McCurry before that happened or that he knew what the message was or has read that article if there was a breaking story, those kinds of things.

What were the biggest impediments to getting him through his schedule successfully? Are there a few predictable regular impediments?

Yes. He would have to be the first one anyone would cite in answering that question because he loves people. He loves to interact with "real people," so any time he was going to be exposed to someone who had a compelling story or represented something compelling, you knew that was going to be an opportunity to be in trouble.

A very dark, but very powerful, example, one of the most searing memories I have is the—Well, death throughout the administration as a theme, but as the President, he was called on to officiate at different funerals and services and such. When Ron Brown's plane went down, we were at a service at Dover Air Force Base when the bodies were returned to the United States. He had to go room to room to room and visit all these families who had lost loved ones on the plane. Many of them were—Alma Brown, Secretary Brown's wife—people he knew very well. That's an extreme example, but anything where he was—

Were you trailing him or with him during this process?

Yes, staying outside the room and ridiculously, for him, trying to remind him and push him that there were, in addition to these 30 families, several hundred people up there in this hangar; employees of the Commerce Department, things like that, who were sitting out in the cold waiting for him to go deliver remarks about Secretary Brown, which is an absurd position. I know you're talking to these people about their lost loved ones, but can you pick it up a little bit?

Why would you not have gone in a room with him? I'm trying to understand the dynamic here.

The personal nature. The press thing I use is a good trigger. In the office on a day-to-day basis or in meetings out and about, if it was a note-taking situation, there would usually be a staff expert from the Domestic Policy Council or the National Security Council or what have you who would sit in and take notes if it were appropriate. The example I was just talking about, visiting with family members, was a personal, private thing for the families; there really was no vested interest for the government to have anybody else in there. Just to respect the privacy of the situation. If there were a situation where someone needed to be taking notes, but there wasn't a relevant person, I might stay there so there would be a "witness" or whatever to what was being said.

[BREAK]

The broad question was about impediments.

Clinton as the number-one impediment, which isn't too surprising, given what everybody knows about him. One of your jobs, then, was to move him along and encourage him gently and not rudely. If you weren't in the room with the families, how could you do it?

In the example with Secretary Brown's family, he had to come out of a room to go to another room.

At that point, you would say to make the next one quicker?

Yes. In that example, he was—Not surprisingly, after about three times of this, and the strain of having to face all these families who had lost a loved one—My first point is that this was not an isolated behavior or responsibility of his in the job of President. You have to deal with a lot of death. This one was somewhat unique in the sense that he knew many of the families personally prior to the incident in one way or another. I'm sure he felt this in many instances, but he was the one who sent Brown on this mission that ended up this way. He never talked about this, but I can imagine he felt a certain degree of responsibility, which he must have always felt, but more saliently here.

After about three times of that, no matter how gently you try to explain that there are people waiting out in the cold and it's such an emotional moment, he not surprisingly let me have it, and rightfully so because he was feeling, What am I supposed to do? Say, "Oh sorry, we don't have time to talk about your dead loved one because we have people waiting in the hangar"? That was part of the job. In that case, the Vice President and Mrs. [Hillary Rodham] Clinton were there as well. It was emotional for everybody. I had friends on that plane, too. Thankfully, they jumped to my defense, but it is a trick, how to keep pushing, because if you don't push it's not going to happen, but not push beyond an appropriate line for whatever the circumstances are, but also not be on the line where you're no longer effective.

I guess you were also getting pressure, maybe not in this specific case, but you must have been getting pressure from members of the advance team.

And the Chief of Staff, yes.

"Why is he running 45 minutes late?"

Exactly. In the role of the aide, you have to push in the other direction, too, if he's 20 minutes late to a non-press-covered event of people who are already supportive of him because he's talking to Chelsea [Clinton] on the telephone to help her with her math homework. Letting him be a human being, and the value of that for his sanity and his effectiveness, far outweighs the downside of being 20 minutes late.

Is that a real event, him being late for meetings because he was helping Chelsea with math homework?

That's very likely to have happened. I don't want to make anybody feel second best, but his family was his first priority. That applies to Chelsea and Mrs. Clinton, Senator Clinton now, or his mother when she was alive, or his brother, Roger [Clinton], within reason. Obviously, there were some instances where he couldn't put the event on hold or something, but if something had to do with his family, and particularly Chelsea, that was always a top priority. Trying to give him the space for those kinds of things was part of the job, too.

If he was in a meeting in the White House, say in the Oval Office, and you had allocated a certain amount of time for that, were you in the room during those meetings or were you waiting outside the Oval Office?

Usually it was more effective to—My presence itself was usually a cue, not so much to him, because many times this was directed at the others. Let's say it was a meeting with staff people. If you're on the White House staff, you're sitting in the Oval Office and I walk in, you need to wrap it up.

I see. You would quietly open the door and appear?

Yes, and start escalating my presence until the desired outcome was achieved. A little pop in, a little tug.

What about getting started in the morning? Tell us about that. You get the impression that President Clinton is not a morning person.

He's definitely more of a night owl than a morning person, although he would surprise you a few times, too. Getting started in the morning was always better on days that he got up and did his exercise. I think it would be very hard—It's hard for me to maintain an exercise routine, but with the demands of the job of President, it would be really hard to do. It became easier for him after he had his knee surgery, which was '96 or '97. About two-thirds of the time it was hard for him to maintain a routine around his exercise, although he would exercise frequently. Mornings where he got up and did his exercise—as with any person, that's a great way to start the day.

He ran when he first came in. What exercise was he doing? I'm assuming he must have stopped running after his knee.

With the knee, during the period of rehabilitation, he had to. He did jog after that, still, but he did a lot more weight training. He diversified his exercise routine out of necessity. He wasn't one to have a personal trainer, but the physical therapy and the team worked with him on that. As with any person, again, when you have that routine and other people who are helping you push it, it's easier to maintain. In the process, he diversified his exercise, the things he did for exercise. Those are good mornings, a good start there.

What would make a bad morning a bad morning?

Staying up late the night before.

Would he be grouchy, disagreeable, snapping at people, that sort of thing?

Staying up late, and therefore sleeping in when there was something urgent to do early in the morning. That's the perfect storm.

Did he miss things in the morning because of that?

No, he never actually missed things, but we would be late to things. On those days—Usually the night before, I would have a glimpse as to what the next day looked like, on a general basis, or at least know enough to say, "At 8:00 a.m. we have to be downstairs at the National Governors Association breakfast and you don't want to keep the Governors waiting" and blah blah blah, and "We have a bi-lat [bilateral meeting] with the head of state right on the heels of that. Therefore, if you're late to the Governors, the whole thing is screwed up." That would be a critical type of situation. I would know that in advance and I would plan my morning accordingly.

On a morning like that, I would start my job back at the house. I had ways of figuring out what the situation was. I'd check with the operators and figure out what the call log was like the night before. If the calls went on until 2:30 or 3:00, then you know you're going to have a tough one. If he went upstairs to the Residence at 9:30 and the last call was at 10:15, thumbs up, we have a shot here. Then I would start calling the valets and figure out—Has he gotten up? Did he go exercise? Is he in the shower? Is he still sleeping? Is Mrs. Clinton there? Are they together in the room? I'd just try to figure out and track their movements. I don't know what degree of awareness he ever had that I was snooping on him so much.

This would start at, what, 7:00 or 7:30?

Yes, depending on the time. I might be at my house getting myself ready and using the phone to—

Where did you live?

We called it the Clinton ghetto, but the Adams Morgan area was very popular. I lived in Adams Morgan in a couple of different places in the Dupont Adams Morgan area.

Did you have a parking place at the White House?

Yes.

So you would drive to the White House?

I would drive, yes. It was a five- to ten-minute drive. It was pretty easy.

You weren't far away?

No, not far away and fortunately, with no periods where I was on a train or something where I couldn't be on the phone if I had to be, with our Motorola flip phones that were so cutting-edge at the time.

[laughing] You're showing us; they're about the size of a brick.

Not quite the bag phones or the ones with the hard antenna, but they were still pretty big.

Anyway, I'd start tracking that and figure out if I needed to—I didn't wake him up most of the mornings, because he would usually set a wake-up call with the White House operators. I would follow up and make sure the call had been received and any follow-up calls he may have asked for were received. If one wasn't set, or if three follow-up calls had been set and received and he still wasn't—I knew from my other channel—in the shower getting ready, then it was time for me to pick up the phone directly to call him and remind him. Usually I wouldn't just say, "I'm calling because we have to be at the Governors' breakfast," but would try to succinctly say, "If we're not at the Governors' breakfast on time, you're going to be late to—" I'd always try to find something more in his interest. Telling him he was going to be late and the Governors weren't going to like that was not as effective as saying, "If you're late and we don't do this, then you won't get to be home in time to help Chelsea with her homework." I made that up as an example, but I'd try to find something motivating for him.

So you weren't just a nag.

Exactly, so I wasn't complaining to him that he has to be on time [sarcastically], but explaining the consequences of why we want to be on time.

Right, plural.

"We." Yes, that was another device. It's not about you, personally, doing anything that's going to make us late, sir. It's about our collective effort, mine and yours together, to not be late.

Another aspect of not being a morning person is that sometimes somebody who is not a morning person is not completely pleasant in the early hours. Was that a—

Yes, maybe a little bit. Two points on that. First, his temper or crabbiness as a general theme is way overblown. Having said that, certainly plenty of people had varied and long interests in his mood at any particular point in time on any particular day. There were always people trying to gauge his mood and what mood he was in, and I would certainly put myself at the front of that line. Yes, an early morning after a late night, not a good thing for anybody who is not a morning person, but never in a bad mood for the sake of being in a bad mood or I don't feel good so I'm going to take it out on you kind of thing.

You said that Clinton himself was an impediment to implementing the schedule well. Were there any other regular or predictable sources of uncertainty and delay that you needed to deal with?

The news cycle would be the second impediment, because you couldn't control it. Whatever was in our nice little, well-organized book and detailed plan for the day could be completely thrown off by whatever happened in the news cycle, positive and negative, directly related to us or indirectly or not even related to us. That was the other thing, arguably completely beyond our control, certainly not something you could program.

Would there often be some event that would cause you to completely throw out the schedule for the day? For example, when 9/11 [September 11, 2001] occurred, President Bush, I assume, threw out the schedule for the day? Did you often have to divert substantially from the schedule because of events?

Yes. Because there is such a support structure, there were few cataclysmic events. Nothing, certainly, on the scale of 9/11; that one's a no-brainer. There were events that would dramatically alter the schedule. In terms of trying to think of a frequency of that, maybe once a month something would happen that would make us make a major change in the day's schedule, and maybe once a quarter something would happen that would take away a big piece of the schedule and replace it with reacting to whatever that thing may have been. National security issues.

A couple that are top of mind, but not necessarily reflected in the right priority—What was going on with Bosnia occupied a lot of attention during the time I was in the White House. There were so many moments where we were right on the brink of something either very positive or very negative happening, even on the heels of prior successes or failures. That one would frequently come up. The contentiousness, legislatively, of the time of the divided government was another theme throughout the time I was there, so having a budget showdown or him vetoing something or having to issue a veto threat, those were the kinds of things that would pop up and occupy a good amount of his time. Those are the two examples that pop to mind.

Put a bookmark in it right here and why don't we take a break.

[BREAK]

We were talking about press cycles.

We were talking about press cycles and how it interrupted your scheduling. Were you there when the Oklahoma City bombing occurred?

Yes.

Could you tell us about that day, what happened, what you did, and what the President did?

I would have to look at notes to put this into context, but some other news was expected out that day. I want to say it was the verdict in the O. J. Simpson trial. I don't know if the timeline would bear that out. There was already an eye on the news, which in this case was like keeping an eye on this circus that wasn't really going to affect us, but everybody else was going to be talking about, in that category. We had TVs on in the outer office, which we wouldn't usually have had on that day. Because there was such an uncertainty about what had happened, this was one of those cases where we saw it on the news before we could get any formal report about it, because the channels that had it were trying to figure out what exactly had happened before they percolated it up there. We were watching the news and caught it there, as I recall. I'm sorry; I don't have many specific recollections of the actual date. Was it April 19?

Maybe that means it didn't have that much of an impact on what happened in the White House.

It definitely did in the sense that there was such disbelief that this had happened, first of all, and secondly—This was a point I wanted to make. I was trying to draw up the observations to support it. The President didn't overreact. A lot of people were speculating as to what had happened and who did it before it started to emerge that this was actually a "domestic terrorist" incident. What year was this, '94 or '95?

Recall that the midterm elections had happened and the day before was the date he had declared, in response to a press question, that he was still relevant as President. Then this occurred, I think within 24 hours.

This was another classic example of—I called it death, but, the symbolic nature of the Presidency and the cathartic national role he plays. This was an incident that he was tailor-made for.

A Republican Senator was particularly contentious with us at about this same time, but the first thing the President did was to start reaching out to the appropriate officials there on the ground as well as the Congressional delegation. "What can we do? What's the situation?" That Senator was—I feel like there were many people like this, which is the reason I'm mentioning it—the kind of person who couldn't stand Bill Clinton, hated Bill Clinton, very happy to attack him rhetorically and publicly all the time, then through the course of this, the response to this, he gained a new respect and appreciation for who he was and how he managed things. I remember conversations of that nature during the day.

I remember him being shocked and outraged, but also very reserved about who was behind this, because people were already coming up with ideas of what it was and what it was about. One of the connections that people made, and I don't know how the trials bore this out, but the date was chosen because it was the anniversary of Ruby Ridge, right?

I thought it was the Waco fire.

The Branch Davidian fire?

They may all three have been related, for all I know.

They're the same date, which is great for conspiracy theorists.

April is not a good month.

I'm sorry I'm so scattered about this. I'd have to refresh my memory.

In some cases your memory will be very sharp and other cases it won't be. Part of our job is to figure out where those places are where your memory is better and more refined and to get you to reflect on that time rather than asking you to talk about things where your memory is not as sharp.

I have more salient memories about the aftermath and our trip down there. I'm sure September 11 was like this 20-fold if not 100-fold, but it became a very escalated time. I remember it clearly, our motorcade trip from the airport into Oklahoma City. This was maybe two or three days after. The President ended up speaking at the public arena there in Oklahoma City and met all these family members of people who were missing or known killed at that point.

On the way in from the airport, an Oklahoma Highway Patrol motorcycle officer, as the motorcade was zipping past—First, it was much more clipped and clear and clean about the security detail. Sometimes it felt a little laid back and other times you could tell it was much heightened, the security and the tension of the agents. What was more important, because the agents were always pretty even-keeled, you really couldn't tell much by looking at them, but the local police and the other institutions that didn't deal with this stuff quite as much would get all worked up.

On that ride in, I remember clearly us passing a tractor-trailer that had been pulled over out of the way of the motorcade. There was a highway patrolman up on the cab with his pistol drawn, pointed at the guy in the truck. Everybody was so on edge and so nervous. I'm sure it was nothing. There was a perfectly logical explanation. The agents had two concerns: to talk to these guys and make sure nobody overreacted, and to brief Brian Stafford, or whomever the Secret Service lead agent with the President would have been, so that he could explain when the President asked him. It was very clear; we went right by it. There was no way he didn't see it, either, unless he was looking the other way. They would be prepared to brief him on [imitating Clinton], "Why does that man have a gun pointed at that truck driver?"

In the end it didn't shake us out of our innocence so much, maybe because it ended up being a domestic terrorist incident, but for those few days around it, it was a wake-up call and a moment of renewed awareness of what our exposure was in a free society.

Tell us a little bit about your work with the Secret Service and the security details. You must have had to have been consistently interacting with them because you were out on the rope line working with the President, too. How much tension was there between the President and the Secret Service at the stage that you came on board? He's a gregarious guy, right? He wants to be out, and that's not where the Secret Service wants him to be.

No. I have the sense that this has changed with the current realities as against the current Bush administration. They're much more regimented and I can observe through their events on television security measures they do that we often wouldn't do. It's a basic underlying tension between being in touch with the people and being secure.

The staff would like to think they decide what the President does and the Secret Service's job is to make that safe. If they can't take the measures to make that safe, then they'll escalate their concerns. Usually this played out on the ground between the two advance teams, the Secret Service and staff, but there were incidents where it would get escalated as high as the Chief of Staff's office. The head of the Presidential protective detail would tell the Chief of Staff, "We really think this is not a good situation and here is why," or "Here are the steps we think need to be taken to keep him safe." Then there would be times where the President would have to either acquiesce to their requests or not. A good example is when he'd go out to the first day of baseball season to throw the opening pitch. Was he going to wear a Kevlar jacket or not? Was he going to wear a vest underneath his baseball jacket?

It does interfere with your release point.

[laughing] It does, especially if you're not a pitcher, by nature anyway.

[laughing] Is he not a pitcher by nature? Is that what we're hearing from you? President Clinton was not a pitcher?

Any hypothetical President.

Not just a saxophone-playing President?

Right. He would practice his pitches beforehand.

If they had their way, they'd put bulletproof glass around a stage everywhere he speaks outside. There was always give-and-take around arranging the venues of his events, but that was something I rarely would have to get involved in, except to be aware of what the situation was. The Secret Service did a very good job of marketing to us what they were trying to do, in an effort to help us understand what they were doing and co-opt us a little bit in their mission. They would take us to their training facility in Beltsville, Maryland.

"Us" being who?

Staff people.

Nancy?

Nancy went, but I don't think she went the time that I went. Doug Sosnik was in the group when I went. I can't remember if I went out there twice or once, but two or three times a year they would take a group of 30 staff people. They'd focus on staff people who traveled with the President or who were otherwise around them when they were trying to protect him in more difficult situations. They'd show us their training techniques and explain to us the perspective of how they do what they do to help us understand so we could stay out of their way at times or even do things that could be supportive of what they were trying to do. Now, I'm not talking about tackling someone who pulls out a gun or anything.

A good example is the President working the rope line and shaking hands with lots of people. They would teach us and help us understand their formation and the role of different people in the formation so we could identify ways we could be right there with him on the rope line, but stay out of the way of what they were trying to do. They would explain to us the things they would look for and the things they were trying to do, and gently suggest, if you did this or that, it would help us. Not in a heavy-handed way whatsoever, but it was a very smart thing for them to do. Of course, we got to shoot their guns out there, too, which was fun.

Did you get to keep the target?

President Bill Clinton executed what I thought was a very successful J-turn. I don't know if you know what that is, but that is when you take a car and you build it up to a certain speed. You sling the wheel and slam it in reverse at the same time. You're going forward, you sling it around, and it's like a K-turn when you're in the street, trying to turn through a parking spot, but it's very fast, like 40 or 50 miles an hour. You swing the car around, slam it in reverse, cut the wheel, then slam it back into drive and end up turning in the other direction.

You see this all the time in chase scenes on TV.

You're reversing your direction overall, but not losing any of your speed or momentum of action.

The President did this?

Yes.

How many practice trials did he get?

He only did one or two, but he did it very well.

So he went to the training facility also. What did they do with him at the training facility, the same thing?

Yes. I did go twice, because once I went just with a group of staff people. I think the second time he was part of the group of people out there. That was also part of their marketing: they got enough people to go out and see it, to see how fascinating it was, to convince the President that he needed to go see it, also.

Did he shoot the guns?

I believe he did.

Do you have any recollection about how good a shot the President was?

He was a very good shot, as I recall.

Better than you?

Much better than me. I was with the Uzi, just making lots of holes in the target. I think he used one of the rifles. For all my Southern-ness, he has much more experience hunting and things like that than I ever did.

That was an interesting thing, politically, for him. It got him in trouble with a fair number of Southern Democrats because of the so-called Bubba vote in '92, since here was a guy who knew about hunting and pickup trucks and was going to be safe on that issue and turned out, at least in terms of perception, not to be.

Again, it was a messaging battle that we lost and a public policy accomplishment that's recently been lost because the ban was overturned this past year. We weren't able to get the message out that it was not going to keep you from buying guns. It was not going to interfere with all these different ways of using firearms.

There are not many deer hunters using assault rifles.

What need do you have for armor-piercing—? How many 12-point bucks have a Kevlar vest? That's what we should have done, politically, made a cartoon of the buck and the bulletproof vest to show how ridiculous it was.

So the President went to one of these Secret Service events, too. Do you remember anything else about his experience there?

The J-turn was the most memorable thing. I think it was in the afternoon, like a two-hour program. Yes, there was the same objective, for him to understand better why they nag him in the ways they do.

Did you ever have to wear the vest?

I wore a vest one time internationally when we went to Bosnia. There were lots of moments to show you where you fell in the pecking order around the President of the United States. When we went to Bosnia and visited three countries in the Bosnian region, we changed aircraft in Italy from the 747, which is typically Air Force One, to a C-17 cargo plane.

On the cargo plane, they had installed armor plating in the front cone. I don't know if you've ever been on a C-17. It's a very large cargo plane. There's a flight deck, then there's a little cabin underneath the flight deck, not like a sleeping cabin, but another space, where the crew would sit. They have typically cargo on the rest of the plane. Well, this one had been fitted with bench seating in lieu of the cargo space and still had the little crew area. They installed armor plating for the crew area underneath the nose of the plane.

That's where the President of the United States sat when we took off and landed. Everybody else, from Dan Rather to Stephen Goodin, sat in the back of the cargo aircraft, which, of course, did not have any armor plating, so they requested we wear Kevlar vests. They gave us flak jackets to wear. Because every single member of the Secret Service detail put one on, even though they already had their Kevlar vests underneath, I thought it was probably a very good idea.

Why would you have not taken Air Force One? My assumption is that Air Force One is heavied up. Is that an incorrect assumption?

Not so much. Mainly because it's such a visual target. We were going to a forward-placed base. There wasn't active tank fire, but there were live incidents of snipers shooting at aircraft coming in and out.

The feeling was that it would be too easily identifiable if somebody wanted to make a point?

Exactly, to keep it from being a target. To keep him from being a target, you put him on a cargo airplane. Cargo airplanes were coming in and out, but cargo airplanes coming in and out had consistently been shot at, mainly by heavy machine gun fire, maybe some incidents of firing little mortars or something. There had been no successful attacks with mortars, but plenty of successful hits from machine gun fire, enough such that it really was a good idea to put your jacket on.

You weren't sitting on your helmet like in Apocalypse Now, were you?

No. They gave us helmets in the back there, too. Of course, when we left—Have you ever heard the stories about how 757s and 767s are capable of taking off on a much more accelerated ascent line than they actually do? They don't do that because they don't want to scare the passengers. Well, I experienced the military version of that, because the C-17 airplane has a huge belly, has four engines comparable to what is on, I think, a 767, and has tremendous power. When we left, to minimize the exposure to sniper fire, we took off from either halfway or a quarter way up the runway, and we just took off. It was terrifying, but relieving at the same time, because we felt like we were not going to get hit by the snipers.

Did you happen to go on the trip to Pakistan?

No.

That was supposed to have been another case where there was a great deal of concern.

Yes, understandably so. That region is crazy and then the crowds—I wasn't on his trip to Africa about the same time, so this would have been maybe early '99? There was an incident in Africa; you should talk to Kris Engskov about this because I think it was during his time. There was an incident in Africa where the crowds were out of control.

The largest crowd I experienced when I was there was Romania. It had to have been a 100,000-person crowd easily, maybe more. It was a rally when they were denied entrance to NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] in the NATO expansion. The holding area was the Presidential Palace, where [Nikolae] Ceausescu was shot just outside the window. We were in this beautiful mahogany library room—I'm sure he had wonderful hours there before the end—and this huge crushing crowd—When I first saw them I thought, Oh this could be a little interesting, since we're here to tell them no thanks, but he was very well received there.

Do you ever recall having anxiety on a domestic trip? Were there any incidents on rope lines or with crowds?

There were a couple of incidents of suspected explosive devices in bleachers. I don't recall anything being at the stage, but things that would potentially hurt crowd members at events. They got as far as delaying our arrival there, but—There may have been one where there was some sort of explosive, but not anything dramatic, never a time where I actually feared.

Were there any cases you recall where the Secret Service had to get rough with somebody in the President's presence?

No.

We were interested in getting your impressions of the President's personality and behavior and attitude and things of that sort. A while ago, you said his reputation for being angry and throwing and yelling is overstated. I was wondering if you could expand on that and say what would provoke him to get really angry, and how often did that happen.

The thing that would most certainly make him angry would be when he discovered that someone hadn't been treated right, a Member of Congress, but probably more importantly a member of the public or a group of the public.

Frequently, things would happen where someone involved in a trip who was a local—I'm sketching this hypothetically. It definitely happened, but someone who was involved in a trip who was a local would overpromise what they could deliver. The net result would be that a group of people would think the President was going to come by and shake their hand or say hi at some point. When someone promises something, does something, or otherwise disappoints someone, he thinks that is treating them wrong.

At its basic level, it's not treating them the right way; at its most significant level, it might be politically damaging. Mainly it was, "We can't treat people like that," which is a little bit ironic when you think about his habit of being late at things. On the one hand, one might make the case that that's not very considerate, but on the other hand, he was extremely considerate in thinking about people. With the big exception of making a point to be on time to every single thing, he was incredibly considerate of people. He would always become angry if it was someone on the staff who had misrepresented something or misled someone or created a situation where they were breaking faith with people, even in a somewhat insignificant way: you're not going to get to shake the President's hand when you thought you were at some point.

Those kinds of things would always make him most angry, because to expand on it a little bit, he didn't like people to be mistreated. He thought it was stupid to create problems that could easily be avoided.

Especially when it's his staff.

Yes.

He felt like he ought to be able to control the quality of the staff.

He strove to treat people in a certain way and he expected his staff would do the same thing. He never articulated that, but I just know that. Nancy was a very good keeper of this mandate. She frequently would think things through, like, "Bill Clinton would never want someone to be treated this way or that way," and would cite it as a reason for making decisions. That's the thing that would make him most angry.

He had a polite but resolute temper with—I'm thinking of Gingrich and [Robert] Dole and the budget, meetings before the budget shutdown that I wish more people could have seen, because he was unfairly labeled as being one to capitulate a little too much. As it turned out, those were great examples of him digging in his heels and getting political benefit from doing that, but I don't think he saw political benefit in it. He had to dig in his heels because they were pushing, pushing, pushing. I only caught a little bit of this by passing through the room. One of the photographers filled me in on the rest. He was staring them down.

The reason people react so much to his temper is because he has a very strong presence physically anyway, his aura. He's very tall. When he does get angry, he shakes that finger at you and he's the President of the United States at this point. Those things combine to make the force of his wrath magnified. He turned this, in the Oval Office, on Gingrich and Dole and basically said, "If you want a budget like this, that cuts Medicare like this, and cuts housing like that, et cetera, then you're going to have to put somebody else in that chair over there, because I'm telling you, I will not do it." That's not so much about temper. I don't mean to get off point.

No, it's very much about temper, because there's always a question with someone who has a bit of a temper, whether it can be instrumental or not. You're suggesting that in some cases it could be instrumental.

I think he used it this way. Unfairly sometimes, his temper gets placed in something about him being childish in some way, but overall, I'm trying to register that I saw his greatest temper when it had to do with issues of fairness, particularly issues of fairness of how people were treated on his behalf. This budget was an example, where his sense of fairness on behalf of the American people, but also fairness in terms of how you, Newt Gingrich, and you, Bob Dole, are treating me, because in the context of that moment, he had made a lot of compromises to get to that point, which probably emboldened them to keep pushing. Here he was drawing the line. He and the American people were being treated unfairly.

One of the reasons the Republicans pushed so hard, and they said this, was that they thought he didn't have the stomach for a confrontation, that he would capitulate. Did you ever see anything along those lines, that he was really somebody who wanted to reach agreement, that he wanted to make everybody walk away from the table happy, that he didn't like a confrontation?

I would cite this story as an example. That characterization of it sounds more like a kumbaya: I just want everybody to be happy. Can't we all be friends? Not at all did he care about that. To go back to what appealed to me about him to begin with, there was a practicality about him; politics is the art of compromise. That's a somewhat un-PC [politically correct] thing to say, but you can have the highest aspirations for any policy outcome, but if you can't make progress toward that or advance the issue in some way, who cares? You can win the battle but lose the war.

I don't think he was interested in consensus for consensus's sake or compromise for the pleasure of everyone around the table. He was interested in getting things done. That's what would lead him to make compromises in the name of progress. This particular incident shows that even with that practical level, there were certain lines he didn't want to cross. In the context of that moment, I don't think there was any evidence for him to think that was going to be politically beneficial. In fact, you probably could make the case, as the Republicans clearly would have thought, that people were going to blame him if the government shut down. Obviously, that's what they were making their bet on.

They were definitely banking on that.

It's not as though he were reading the winds and thought this was a good moment for him to look strong or anything like that. This is evidenced by the fact that I don't remember any public rhetoric on his part then that was chest thumping or macho or at all tough in the way he was being in the Oval Office with just those people, with no press around. That's when you know what someone's really about.

That's why we talk to people who were there. You're much more likely to get an accurate portrayal from the inside than you are from people trying to read inside the black box, so to speak.

I wish I had four examples to rattle off to you off the top of my head, but one of the things I definitely feel is that his toughness and his willingness to engage conflict on things that mattered to him may have been underestimated. It certainly was underestimated by his adversaries in the example we're talking about. I'm thinking of other difficult Congressional meetings in the Cabinet Room again, once the press is out. For him to listen to criticism and take people on, he's pretty tough. [laughs]

Let me ask about one other place where you occasionally get reports about his temper. One place where this shows up is in George Stephanopoulos's book about the first year in particular, that he would often bristle at press accounts. You could tell he had been reading the morning papers. At that point, evidently George and probably Andrew were doing a bit of this, too, temperature taking.

I think they used to try to hide certain clips from him during that period.

Was it any different during your period? Had he adjusted to the realities of—?

Probably somewhat. You start with the fact that there's this so-called liberal media, you're a Democratic President, and the New York Times editorial board is one of your most challenging foils. What? There's a level of disbelief about that. I think every President feels this. They've all expressed it in different ways. You go back to even [Lyndon B.] Johnson. I think every President feels persecuted by the media at some point and in some ways. That's maybe a strong word to choose, but I think they feel unfairly treated by the media. Probably even Presidents back when they were much more successful at manipulating the media still felt that way. That's in spades when these institutions that are supposedly part of the progressive or liberal or Democratic establishment are eviscerating you day in and day out. He probably was a bit mystified by that from time to time.

As someone who has been in the position I had in the administration—and I don't mean the President's aide, I mean just being inside—you come to realize how often the press gets it wrong. Not out of any malice, but there is a tendency for them to put forward their reporting as fact. It's the fact as best they can discover it or demonstrate it, but I've noticed it myself.

If I had the skepticism about other topics that I have about politics and government that's a direct outgrowth of my experience on the inside, I would have a lot more skepticism. I read things about politics and government with a healthier skepticism because I have a deeper understanding. I completely digest what they say about baseball or weather or anything else, all of which still comes across as the gospel truth. For anyone on the inside, there's an inherent feeling of unfairness around that.

The interesting thing is that during the Clinton Presidency, the heat was turned up on that because the news cycle was in the midst of this transformation, not overnight but over the eight years of the administration and even beyond that, going back to '91. It really has changed. The media has changed from the lead newspapers and those three old white guys every night telling you what's fact to this completely new world where there are all kinds of voices out there. The three old white guys didn't always get it right, but people felt, rightfully or wrongfully, a certain faith and integrity in what had gone behind them sitting down and telling you that.

Now we're in this new world where there are all kinds of voices out there. They almost have the same platform, even if they don't have the same reach. [Matt] Drudge doesn't reach a fraction of the people the CBS Evening News reaches, but what happens on the Drudge Report has at least as much, if not more, impact on the news cycle than what Bob Schieffer will sit down and say, or Katie Couric, whenever she sits down and says it.

Let's talk about the government shutdown. How was it decided who was going to work and who wasn't going to work?

Good question. I don't know. Within the White House, the Chief of Staff's office would have made that determination on some level. There were two technical shutdowns in that period. If I recall correctly, I was "nonessential" in the first one and "essential" in the second one, because of events that started unfolding during that time. Either something changed or some rules or parameters in the legislation around the budget process determined that. The interpretation of who within the White House fit within those rules would have been made by the Chief of Staff's office. I was told I wasn't essential the first time and I was essential the second time.

So how bare bones was the staff at that time?

It was not super well staffed for what we were trying to do. It would have been pretty bare bones. I wasn't there. I technically couldn't go in. I even asked to volunteer for those days. I couldn't even go in. I don't know, but from what I understand, it was pretty bare bones.

Thinking about it from the political angle, when the Republicans decided to shut down the government, it started redounding to the President's benefit. What attitude was there in the White House through this?

Leading up to it, there was a general—This was a game of chicken. There was disbelief on their part that we wouldn't acquiesce, and there was disbelief on our part that they would push the tactic so far that it would result in that. There were many people on the White House staff, beginning with Leon Panetta, who had a lot of legislative experience through other contentious periods. Nobody thought it was going to come to that.

Was there some point at which people started thinking, We're doing it; we're kicking their butts; we have them on the run?

Between the first and the second one, there was a sense that this was not only the right thing to do, but this was a good thing to do, not to shut the government down, per se, but to hold the line on what we were pushing for. I would imagine that after the first one, people—and I'm speculating here, but I imagine—could see the ways and the mechanisms that you would use to atone for that closure. Maybe the negative impact of doing it made them think, We can do this. It's accruing to our advantage and we see the way we're going to make it right by people anyway, so yes, we're not going to give an inch now. That's a general sense I have.

This was also a case where some of the more liberal factions of the administration's staff didn't want to—This was in the midst of triangulation and trying to work with a Republican Congress. There were many people who were very happy to rally around him, stand up for something on principle, and do something they internally felt was very geared toward the liberal, pro-little guy—certainly from a fiscal policy perspective—issues and positions that attracted them to the campaign in the first place. Plus, we'd been getting our butts kicked from '94, so people were probably happy to feel like we were doing the right thing and winning.

You showed up in October of '94. The midterm elections were a month later. Right around that time, we know there was a mysterious presence that started showing up in the White House. Were you aware of that? Were you aware that somebody named Charlie [alias of Dick Morris] was coming in?

Not for a little bit. I knew of Charlie's existence and Charlie's code name long before I knew what Charlie was.

How would you—because it was on the President's schedule?

No. It was very hush-hush. There were phone calls, then there was a staff member who came in as Charlie's inside person, if I recall correctly. Once that person was outed as the mole, they were never that highly regarded. I was not even aware for a time, then there was a period where I was aware of this person named Charlie, who was offering positioning advice.

Did it strike you as a little odd or cloak-and-dagger?

To my view, it really progressed, again, with someone who felt emboldened. I honestly feel like, from President Clinton's perspective, this was always a channel of input as to how to position things. I haven't read any of Dick Morris's books, but I would suspect he would say he was not valued for his policy thinking or acumen, nor did he have policy power, but he did start to try to assert influence over what policies were surfacing. That's when he overplayed his hand. That's not what he knows.

I would argue that he had a perspective that was helpful to hear during that period. It's kooky that there wasn't a way to formally structure a channel for that input. It had to be done in this clandestine way, initially, then there was a point where he was outed. After that, a more formal channel was set up to bring in his input. He started to overplay the domain of that input and influence. That inspired a lot of action against him internally, which probably, if he hadn't blown up the way he had, would have been his undoing shortly thereafter. That's my personal opinion.

It's fair to say there were some contingents in the White House that were not enamored of the idea of having this guy around.

Oh, yes. There were people who, understandably, neither understood nor appreciated any secret channel. There were people who thought—when the person behind this channel was discovered—that this person was a kook. Then there were people who had ideological problems with it. I don't know if at the time he was freshest off of working with Trent Lott. That's part of how it was resurrected, the President and Lott had established a good rapport. I don't know that Lott suggested it or anything, but it seemed to start happening about the same time. Yes, many people were not happy with the process, but most of the dissatisfaction with the process was quite easily attached to the person behind it.

It's true. You've already said the Democratic Party structure existed to provide support for any political advice the President wanted. If he had wanted to go through those channels, he could have. This isn't problematic. The absence of any formal channel is problematic if people prefer not to use the formal channels because of the optics of the person who's involved and the controversy of the person involved.

Yes. This was a guy who was helping Republicans, so why should we let—On an emotional level, it's very similar to the reaction to David Gergen showing up.

Tell us about that.

I was at the DNC at this time. I'll speak to my own feelings: We worked so hard to beat the Republicans so we could hire one? And of all the ones we're going to hire, we're going to get this old-school, establishment—? I happen to respect many things David Gergen has done and said and far be it from me to question his long career, but—

He wasn't with you in New Hampshire.

He definitely wasn't with us in New Hampshire. I don't want to take a hatchet to anybody in history, but he wasn't "all that and a biscuit" as it turned out. If we had done it and gotten the most brilliant—Maybe he was the best there was, I don't know.

I was interested in talking about the Presidential bubble. President Bush is widely seen to be in a bubble, and because of that, insulated from everything going on and not able to keep in touch. I was wondering what you observed of President Clinton's ability to stay in touch with what was really happening in the world, unfiltered by advisors and such.

He had an uncanny ability for that. It started with where he came from and the friendships he had, the lifelong friendships that he made a point to nurture throughout his time as President. This was a big part of Nancy's focus around him, to keep those channels open, both in terms of keeping him in touch with that out of his sense of loyalty to people and to help him maintain his humanity as a person and stay in touch with who he was.

That's very important to him. It was a very clear priority for him and has served him well. He'd stay in touch with people on the telephone or we would go out of our way to see them. Every town we traveled to, there was somebody who went to Georgetown or went to Yale or is an Arkansas traveler or is the cousin or the nephew or the sister or the something of whomever. We always made it a point to find those people, to bring them to the events, to say a quick hello in the holding room, even if it was just in the hallway going from the loading dock to the ballroom. That was very important to him. That was a big piece of keeping him in touch.

What kinds of conversations would he have with people like that? Would it be substantive?

They wouldn't be, "What do you think about the Welfare Reform Bill?" They would be, "How's Jenny Sue?" and "Oh my gosh, I can't believe you're in college now." Just classic, as if you were catching up with a relative.

One of the problems Presidents have is that when they do talk to their friends, the friends all say, "You're doing a great job." How do they keep in touch with what's happening in the world as opposed to what their advisors might want to tell them?

I don't think his friends would use those as a policy platform. At the same time, I'm sure when he'd talk to them and he'd say, "I'm working on this Kosovo thing. Do you think anybody in Bentonville, Arkansas, is going to be with me on this Kosovo thing?" I'm sure he would solicit opinions or they'd say, "We really don't understand why you're doing this," or "Yes, people get it and they appreciate what you're doing about that," or "That's not really playing so well." Those conversations would give him a channel to that kind of feedback. He had a private ZIP Code. People would send him correspondence that would be as detailed and he would—I don't know why, but the first people who pop to mind are Taylor Branch, who's a historian and expert. He just did his second volume on Martin Luther King [Jr.]. Harry Thomason. I'm thinking of diverse viewpoints.

He had all these friends with standing in different fields who had very strong opinions and views about things. He would either actively seek their advice or, in the course of their conversations, would get input from them. It was rare that I saw someone pushing a particular issue, even if it was important to his or her heart, let alone to his or her financial interests, but there were people from various fields whom he respected for different reasons. He actively kept the channels open to those people. Naturally, he would have criticism as well as compliments from those people and that kept him in touch with it.

Then there were silly little things, too, like his crossword puzzles. That seems like a silly thing, but to the extent that there are pop culture clues in crossword puzzles—The Sunday New York Times is the hardest one, because they get harder throughout the week. I never noticed many pop culture references in the Sunday one, but I'm sure the Monday one might have one or two. He loved to watch cheesy movies. We'd be landing in Moscow, but he wanted to see the last minute of Dumb and Dumber before he walked off the plane or something.

Does that get him charged up, the last minute of Dumb and Dumber?

He likes action movies better. All of this is to say he actively cultivated these lifelong friendships. By virtue of who he is and the life he's led, those friendships are totally across the spectrum of "real people." He has such capacity to take in everything. He'll have as much joy talking about the latest biography of [Abraham] Lincoln as he will about the most ridiculous scene in Dumb and Dumber. He has so much real estate in his brain for these people and relationships and knowledge, and he kept himself open to as many channels as possible.

When executives get information from their advisors, subordinates, and staff, the way they receive that information is very important. If they snap at people who say something bad, those people are going to learn not to say anything bad. What would Clinton do when people came and gave him a report of something that maybe he wouldn't want to hear?

Depending on what the implications of that were—I can think of him in situations where what they're delivering him is information that backs him into a corner in terms of actions and it's a situation where if he or the team had been proactive they might have avoided being backed into the corner. Those are situations where he'd feel like Great, thanks a lot. Now all we have to do is A, B, or C, which I don't want to do. In those situations, he might react a little more negatively.

He had a style of fostering discussion and debate in the pursuit of reaching a decision, sometimes to a fault. Some people have said he would like to talk about this side and that side of it too much. There were many times where I saw him in a meeting watching body language. Someone would articulate a position and he'd say, "But you don't agree with that, why?" or "You don't think that's such a good idea?" He would prompt people to bring forward their points of view or disagreements, which had the effect of making people sometimes try to fight over the meeting manifest. In that situation, if you were advancing your position and you knew he had some misgivings about it, the last thing you wanted was for him to be able to present the misgivings.

One observation is that people would sometimes try to head that off by seeking to manage who was represented in the meeting, but as far as his style, he always sought to surface that. To play out a hypothetical scenario, if he knew a staff member was inclined to take issue with your position, but the staff member wasn't there, he might ask in the meeting, "Well, what did So-and-So say about this when you talked about it?" If he weren't getting that alternative perspective, he would seek it out, which is how you guard against that. Any leader getting bad news from staff or whatever is not going to like it, but he did a good job of actively trying to make sure he was hearing the differing points of view on it.

Another element of the bubble is how Presidents are limited in where they can go. I've heard that Presidents usually don't carry a wallet and may not even have money with them.

That was a concern that my job would always try to anticipate. [laughter]

Did you have a wad of cash on you in case the President wanted to go buy something?

I would try to make sure I had cash on me whenever we were in a situation like that. He typically did have cash. He had an ATM [automatic teller machine] card. He never went to the ATM. Can you imagine the security video? In the White House complex, there's a credit union in what was the Old Executive Office Building, now the [Dwight D.] Eisenhower Building.

He was typically pretty good about it. If we knew he had a trip coming up, either Nancy or I would remind him or he would proactively have Nancy go get some cash for him from the ATM, then the advance people and I would make sure to think, when we were looking at the scheduling, Oh, we're going to be touring the marketplace this afternoon in Denmark. We need to exchange some of his money. We made sure he had some money and would exchange his money for kroner, or whatever the currency happened to be, and anticipate it that way. But often it would just—in the U.S. for example—go as far as me asking as we were getting out of the car, "Do you need some money?" when we were going to a coffee shop and he would say, "Yes, I have some," or "Oh, yes, but it's in my briefcase on the plane." Usually he would have some, but in those instances where he wouldn't?.

Are there other ways in which Presidents are cut off from ordinary life? They don't drive, that's an important feature.

Yes, definitely. The security conundrum is the main source of it.

Did he chafe under that?

Yes. In a mildly good-natured way, he liked to tease the Secret Service agents about his gilded cage and make jokes about that. We would be on freight elevator trip number 9,653 at 1:30 a.m. and he would say, "You know, for once, I'd like to walk into the lobby of a hotel." He would make comments about that. There are some simple pleasures of life you are forbidden to do in that role. To do something spontaneously, anywhere from 20 to 200 people have to mobilize. That precludes you from doing it, or when you do do it, there's such a ripple of chaos that it creates problems for other people.

Do you remember any instances of his insisting, "Damn it, I want to go out and do some Christmas shopping this afternoon?"

Yes. Fortunately I would usually get out of this, but almost every year he would go Christmas shopping at one or more of the malls in the D.C. area and decide relatively at the last minute. The service might know he may or may not do it.

First, we had a practice, perfected in the '92 campaign, of doing OTR, or off-the-record, events. They were multipurpose. One was to put him in a more real-person-like situation for his own benefit and for the media benefit of having him seen in that situation. This was perfected into a practice, but began with him as a person. Going back to New Hampshire, on a trip where he came in late, instead of going to bed, he wanted to go to the Dunkin' Donuts and sit and talk to the truck drivers or whoever. That's what he liked to do. That's how he liked to spend his time, so we perfected the practice of, from an advance perspective, going into a city and figuring out, besides the formal events, what was there that he might enjoy, that might be pleasant for him to do, and that might create a positive messaging opportunity. For him to be seen as a regular guy is a good message to get out there.

We'd have to balance this because sometimes we would shoot ourselves in the foot. We'd have a big policy speech in the afternoon, then he'd go buy a donut somewhere, and the picture in the paper the next day would be of him eating a donut instead of the big policy message. We had to be mindful of not stepping on ourselves when we did this.

Because of his nature and because of the benefit we were able to create by perfecting those techniques, it became a normal part of any domestic or foreign trip, to look at the cultural activities he might enjoy doing that would keep him in touch with regular people and might be fun for him, and might even present a good picture for us. People would look for these things whenever they would travel. We might go into a day and on the schedule there would be nothing about this, but we might know we had an off-the-record opportunity to go to the marketplace. There's this great little antique store with jewelry and such and Mother's Day is coming or whatever. There were people thinking about this for him, not that he was asking anybody to, but just proactively.

In the run-up to the '92 election, President Bush had one of the worst examples of advance work ever. They took him to a Penney's store and he bought some socks. The scanner.

He was like, "What is that?"

He marveled at the scanner, which everybody else had seen. That must have loomed large in the consciousnesses of all advance people. Were there things you would do specifically to prevent that sort of thing from happening after that? The scanner was not your problem.

You always, as an advance person, are very mindful of that incident. You always think about what might be unusual or not second nature about touring somewhere. When you're looking at a plan, you try to identify or anticipate those things. For President Clinton, to go back to your other point, somehow he was usually aware enough of those things from watching Discovery Channel late at night or whatever. When you'd try to explain to him, "Now you're going to see this thing"—to use that example—"that's called a grocery scanner." "Oh yes, I know. They pass a UPC code [Universal Product Code] over it and that tells them what the price is." He would tell you before you tried to tell him. He somehow managed to stay on top of those things.

You mentioned a couple of times having these special, sort of scheduled unscheduled events in the daily schedule. How successful were you? You had a President who was routinely on Clinton time, routinely running X number of minutes late. Did you build a fudge factor into your schedule to account for that? Did he permit it or did he find ways of getting around the fudged schedule?

Yes. People would pad the schedule in different ways. One of three outcomes could occur in that situation. The best one was that you actually fooled him and you had the padded time to use to make up time. The more likely one would be that he knew it only took 20 minutes to drive from the airport to downtown New Orleans and not the 45 minutes they had put on the schedule. Or he became so accustomed to this—it's like the boy who cried wolf. He'd get so accustomed to the padding that he'd assume there was padding in there. When you said, "No, it really takes 45 minutes," then you were stuck with being late. It was a dangerous game to try to outfox him in that way, but it wasn't that people didn't try.

What did he like to do to unwind?

Reading was one of his passions. He still is the most voracious reader I think I'll ever encounter. It wouldn't be uncommon for him to be reading three or four four-inch-thick biographies simultaneously. Unfortunately, for me, carrying his briefcase, he might want to take two or three of them for our overnight trip, but he would get through one of them in a night. He has an amazing capacity to read.

And he would multitask. You mentioned the crossword puzzles before.

The crossword puzzle was his cigarette, I guess. A crossword puzzle, cards. He loved to play hearts. The crossword puzzle or playing a game of hearts or a combination of the two was his favorite thing to do on the airplane or on the helicopter to go from the White House—even while there was a discussion by one or two of the people, the Chief of Staff or whomever, on the helicopter about A, B, or C, be it the press story of the day or the policy decision of the day or the events we were going toward. He would talk through these things, play cards, and work his crossword puzzle, all at the same time, with a real zeal for getting in as many hands as possible between lifting off from the South Lawn at the White House and setting down at Andrews Air Force Base. I don't know what his record was, but he would always delight any time—"Come on, I think we can get another hand in."

Did you play hearts?

No. I played hearts one time at the directive of Mrs. Clinton when we were in a palace in the Ukraine, I think it was. Unfortunately for the President, there was only room for one staff person to stay at the palace, so he didn't have any partners to play cards. She didn't want to play cards with him, so she wrote up a little pretend directive mandating that I play cards with him. That was the one time. [laughing]

I take it you didn't do well?

He's incredibly good at it and I'm not a card player, but people who are card players follow the suits and keep track of how many cards have been played of this and that. With his intellect, he has a great ability to do that. I couldn't even hold a candle. Consequently, I'm not a particularly fun partner, but also, I always tried to stay away from him when it was his personal fun time. He doesn't need the little badger who's always whining to him about time to be his buddy as well. I tried to give him as much space as possible for that stuff.

This isn't particularly insightful, but I always thought it was interesting. He was meticulous about the things in the Oval Office. He could tell you the story about the tiniest, most insignificant napkin that this little girl with leukemia gave him in Seattle the other day. He could tell you the whole story about that as well as the huge sapphire in a case that belongs to the people of the United States: where it was discovered, how much it weighs, and what it was worth. He had a real passion for the history of those pieces and the people who were behind the little trinkets he had. The Oval Office was full of these treasures, both real bona fide treasures and sentimental treasures to him. He was constantly in a state of repositioning them and circulating them.

He was like a master curator and his museum was the American experience or something. It included all these great true works of art and all these little knickknacks that were cheesy to anyone's eye but really meaningful to him because of what they said. He had a constant flow of those items; they would go from the Oval Office to his study to the Residence to the archives and back into circulation or stay out or whatever. Whenever he had a major decision to make, one of his nervous habits was to rearrange everything. That was an interesting process. I could always tell when something was weighing on his mind because if he had a free five minutes and was walking around the office repositioning everything, then I knew he was thinking. That's how he would actively engage in ruminating about these things.

He also had a putting green outside the office and in good weather he'd go out there from time to time and putt around the putting green. Sometimes he would go for a walk around the driveway out there. Those are some of the ways—

Did he like to play golf or was that just a way to kill time?

Oh yes. He loved to play golf. I'm not a golfer, so I can't tell you the milestones of going from A to B, but his game improved over the course of time. He would try to find moments to play, particularly whenever we would travel. He was, to my mind, a power player in the sense that he would play with an eye toward getting as much in as he could. He really liked it and he still does, I think.

Who did he like to play golf with?

Vernon Jordan was one of his friends to play with. When we would travel, it would be a mixture of whether he got to play for sheer joy, and therefore asked whomever he wanted. In those cases, he'd try to use this network to find an old friend of his or someone like that. Then there were instances where he would have to go play with Members of Congress as a relationship-building outing.

I can't imagine that would be much fun.

I wouldn't think so, but few were the Republican Members of Congress who would bash him all day but refuse an invitation to play golf with him.

What about your personal relationship with him? Did you talk about your backgrounds? You're both people from fairly modest backgrounds, right?

Yes. We shared some similarities in background. I would go out of my way not to inject personal issues into the relationship. He would ask me about things from time to time. He must have asked other people, because he had a much better understanding of my history and my background than we ever spoke about. This came to the surface in the '96 campaign. Bob Dole had accused him of surrounding himself with elitists. In the debate, the President said, "I have a young man on my staff who grew up in a trailer park," and he was talking about me. I have a great picture in the holding room, where I'm cheering for him talking about me. He's on the picture in the background making the point. He was very happy about defending my honor, as he thought of it.

To set the record straight, I didn't grow up in a trailer park, but my family did live in a mobile home. It was manufactured housing on an acre and a half, but definitely not a fancy upbringing. He identified with that, definitely, stood up to my defense around that, and appreciated my appreciation of the role because he himself was not a bad student of history. He was able, from time to time, to step outside the situation and appreciate what a great experience it was for me, to encourage me, say words of encouragement for me to enjoy the time. He'd make an observation when we were somewhere touring a site of great historical or cultural significance and from time to time make a comment like, "Can you believe it? Here we are, two guys from the sticks." Even though you happen to be the President of the United States.

I read your grand jury testimony. I really liked the part where the prosecutor asked if you engaged in much chitchat with the President and you said your job was to help him make efficient use of his time and talking about sports scores was not an efficient use of his time. Was there any temptation to engage in this or was this in the nature of things that you weren't going to have time to do that?

Oh, of course there was temptation. He'd like nothing better than to talk about how the Razorbacks did in their basketball game last night. There's a point where it becomes rude not to engage in it, but yes, who wouldn't like to shoot the breeze with the President of the United States? It's an incredibly ego-feeding opportunity. I don't know, it's a hyperbolic sense of duty I had.

Do you know if Andrew Friendly felt the same way about the position?

I don't know, probably to some extent. We all probably felt that way about it. I'm talking about the President's aides now. We all had different characteristics that we brought to the dynamic, to the situation. I'm sure the relationship was probably different for each of us, yet common in the sense that the reason we were chosen and the reason we were successful was because loyalty was the fundamental piece for us. That wasn't just a blind loyalty, as if we must help him cover up this or that. There was nothing on those lines, but we believed in what he was trying to do and we believed in him as a person to try to accomplish it. The first order of business was to support his ability to do that. I viewed this as flowing from that a little bit. We're all human beings, so who wouldn't want to chitchat with their boss from time to time, especially if they're the most powerful person on the planet?

I would think a lot of it would be waiting offstage for an introduction and you have 30 seconds, and you're trying to fill the time with, "Are you feeling OK? Did you catch the game," something like that, but my guess is those moments don't stand out in your mind. Are there any particular moments that do?

I have some great photos of backstage. My most fun moments around that were—The card game was an interesting one. Backstage before he would be announced or backstage after he came out of an event, we would always have some fun exchange about the event or about something. Andrew and I were—I mention him because he was trip director, so we were together many of the times we were traveling, even though he was doing a different job. We became good critics of his speech because we heard it all the time. Every single time. We would sometimes tease him or make a playful suggestion or comment about how to improve it, sometimes make jokes, where he was the butt of the joke, but nothing mean-spirited or anything like that. We would have fun, light moments around that.

He was fantastic about people's birthdays, comings and goings when someone would leave the staff or join the staff. He'd be asking what was going on. I remember a trip to Fort Worth where many of my family members met him for the first time. He was always incredibly gracious, friendly, and warm. I would gain more insight about how he felt about me or what he thought about me in those moments than during the course of our everyday business. It wasn't something we would broach.

Have you ever talked to President's aides from other administrations?

Yes.

I wondered whether the position changes much from one administration to another or is it well institutionalized?

Some elements are fairly institutionalized; that, therefore, creates a common thread. I don't know them that well, but Doug Band [Jr.] knows [George W.] Bush's aides. His second one is departing now, I think. I sought out one of the first Bush's aides. This was well intended but a little naive, as it turns out, but when I first started the job, I wanted to develop a little historical context for it.

I took the learning of how Andrew approached it, but I also tried to incorporate some of the "body of knowledge" around the President's aide and how people have served. To that end, I reached out to a couple of the former Bush aides and had a brief conversation with one of them. Never particularly insightful, but this common thread is what I call the Tigger factor, where you're the only one. That creates a unique experience and the nature of the relationship, where it's a professional relationship but it's so close that it's impossible for it not to be personal, too. Because of the loyalty, you're emotionally engaged with the leader at the same time. Those are the common threads. Each President, and therefore their aide, has conformed to their personality or their needs or their dynamics.

One of the ones for Herbert Walker Bush was a military person. He took one of the military aides and transposed that person. They tended to be older under George Herbert Walker Bush. Again, I didn't find a deep body of knowledge about the job, so there's not much documentation. The ones W. Bush has had have been younger than we were when we had the job, but I think we were younger than the norm up to that point.

You would think as much as any job in the White House, the nature of the job would be contingent on the personality of the President himself. At least Herbert Walker Bush and I think the current Bush are both very disciplined people with their schedule. The current President goes to bed at 9:00 at night according to his wife's commentary. That would have to alter the dynamic completely.

To build on what you're saying, at a very basic level, no matter how you slice it, in that situation the job is about feeding the structure they have. For us—and this may be a little unfair to President Clinton—it was about trying to push him into a structure that was not his normal. Left to his own devices—He certainly appreciated the need for it or he wouldn't have subjected himself to it. To toot our own horn, we had to push the stone uphill a little bit more.

Does the President have a good sense of humor?

Yes.

Is there any way to describe for us what his sense of humor is? Does he tell jokes?

Yes, he always had a good, southern joke or a story. I would say his sense of humor is a little corny. He liked to tease and make clever jokes in passing on the plane or something.

Situational humor? Did he pick at people? I don't mean in a mean-spirited fashion, but was that part of his humor, too?

No. Only when it was—like when we were talking about this bubble thing. The only kind of humor directed at people was often, I'm the President, stuck in this prison, and the Secret Service—or even other staff, the scheduling staff—you guys are trying to kill me by overscheduling me. That would be the only humor in that vein.

Was there much self-deprecating humor? Was he comfortable making jokes at his own expense?

Oh, yes. There's no reason people would see this, but he and [Albert] Gore [Jr.] both were very funny in self-deprecating situations, most evidenced at staff farewell parties, where frequently there would be a running joke that was part of the program or a skit or something like that. They always played their comedic roles and often came up with the idea for what they were going to do or how they were going to do it. Frequently that would be self-deprecating humor.

It is interesting that Gore's name first comes up in our conversation, after four or five hours of talking, in discussing senses of humor, which would seem counterintuitive.

He's incredibly funny. This is the tragedy of 2000. If people had a clue about how funny he can be and how fun he can be in some situations, which speaks to what a real person he can be, things might have been different in 2000.

I've heard that President Clinton was not terrifically comfortable with the Washington press circuit humor at press club dinners and things like that. Does that comport with your—I don't know whether you had to go through many of those or not.

I don't think he would have been kicking and screaming, but—He always had a good time at those events when they came around, but leading up to them—they're so Washington. We're going to be adversaries by day, then we're all going to go have fun at our fancy white-tie dinner and tell jokes to each other and be one, big, happy establishment family. It was very antithetical to what he was all about. I would guess the inherent hypocrisy of it didn't always sit well with him.

Let's take a break for a couple of minutes.

[BREAK]

Some components of your job didn't involve trailing the President around and being his companion; you had some desk responsibilities. The two things I'm thinking about are the gifts cataloguing, a piece of your portfolio, and helping fill out the actualities of the daily diary.

We called it the "annotated schedule."

I'd like to get you to talk about both of those things so we have that on the record.

Sure. The gift thing is part of being there. Part of the mission was the annotated schedule, then we got stuck dealing with the gifts. You can tell which one I didn't like. You'd have your briefing book and your schedule included in it; part of the mission was to document the reality of what happened as against the schedule. You'd do that by physically noting on the schedule when a meeting started, when it stopped, who attended, and other issues like that. Other records support that and go into the archives.

I'm mindful of one that's a status symbol in the West Wing, or was. This dates us a little bit, but there was something called the First Family locator box, which the Secret Service maintained. That would have the five principals in our case, because Chelsea was on there, too, and where they were at any given moment. When the Secret Service agents with that principal would move, they would call in to the base and they would update the box. I noticed it was frequently wrong or would be off by a couple of minutes or so. I mention that because there were other sources of it, but the annotated schedule was meant to be "I'm right there with the President. This is when the meeting started, this is when it stopped, and this is who he was with during that time."

This is very important for historical purposes, because that's the type of document historians and other scholars would look at to get an accurate representation. Your sense is that it's pretty darn accurate.

It's fairly accurate. The mission, as it was explained to me, was about his official functions, so some of these—When we took a picture with someone in a holding room on the road, you're not going to find every single person there, but when there was a meeting to talk about the budget and there were 12 people in the Cabinet Room, it's probably pretty definitive about that.

Would you say it's relatively more likely to be accurate and inclusive in the White House than it is when you're on the road?

Absolutely, owing to the physical challenge of the person charged with maintaining this also having to live and function and do things during this time. You could probably sit there and take notes on what he's doing and that would occupy not every minute, but a good part of your day. If you have to be doing something while this is happening, you keep up with it as best you can.

As a cataloguer of gifts, could you tell us about some of the more unusual or surprising gifts the President received?

We had some fun at one of his birthday parties after his leg injury with some of the more bizarre canes people sent in to him. There was that. There were a few themes. That one was timely: Oh, you hurt your leg; I'm going to send you this cane. One of the funnier ones had a rearview mirror and a little horn so he could let them know when he was trailing by.

Because of his love of golfing, people would frequently give him drivers and putters and such. I don't know if Andrew mentioned this, but we both were scarred—mainly me, but both of us—by what we called the Tip [Thomas Philip] O'Neill putter. When we went to Ireland, a huge trip in so many different ways, there was a putter presented to him as a gift that had been used by Tip O'Neill at St. Andrews and had passed to this person or that person. Somehow, it was then presented as a gift to President Clinton. Before we could get on the airplane, the Tip O'Neill putter came up missing and he never let us live that down.

You keep up with things the best you can, but you can't physically get into the motorcade in his car and put this thing in a van four cars away without relying on some help. No one to point the finger at but myself, but somehow, between him being presented it and me passing it off to someone to put it in the van and us unloading the van to get on a helicopter, it wasn't there anymore. Others would make jokes about it and I'd say, "Don't bring it up, don't bring it up." Statistically, we had an incredibly strong record of keeping up with things and safely seeing them back. A couple of exceptions to that were hard to live down.

But you weren't getting just official gifts. You were working a rope line and somebody would be handing you—

Oh, yes, all kinds of things. Little animals made out of Legos and books. Some of the more bizarre ones—I'm sure there are some exhibits of this; if there haven't been, they will be in the [Clinton Presidential] library. One of the state gifts we had—I shouldn't laugh because this is offensive to some government somewhere—was a collection of rugs with the image of Bill and Hillary Clinton on one of them—I'm talking a 6 x 10-foot rug—with their faces woven into the rug and a little complementary one, like a little doormat-size one, of Chelsea Clinton. Some really bizarre things.

I've been in a room down at the library where Dave Alsobrook and Skip [James A. Rutherford III] had shown us through. I can personally testify that if the Tip O'Neill putter didn't get through, there must be about 3,000 other putters. They're the property of the United States government, right?

There's a distinction that can be made—Any gift from another head of state or another foreign official goes in the National Archives, becomes a part of that. If I recall correctly, the system works like this: People give him things all the time. If they're official people giving him official things, the thing becomes part of the archives; the library probably has a right to bring it in under agreement with the National Archives.

If a man or woman on the street gives him something, he either can keep it, in which case he has to claim the value of it on his income as a gift and pay taxes on it, or it goes into the National Archives, then he probably has first right of refusal to put it in the library or something like that. If the putter is nice, it's going to improve his game, and he wants to take the tax hit for the $200 or whatever it is, he's in business. Otherwise, it would pass straight through, or like I said, if it had some sentimental value to him, it would pass through the Oval Office/study/Residence office rotation on its way to the gift unit or sometimes pass through there and stay. I'm sure there are pieces from his desk that were never bumped.

When you were working the rope line and somebody handed him a baseball cap, you had to take the baseball cap and get the relevant information from the person who gave him the baseball cap?

Yes. You tried the best you could. There were probably four out of ten gifts where you couldn't document who gave it. The other thing was, I would try to employ the advance team to be supportive of this. When I was there, I created a little pocket form and tried to get the advance team, if they knew someone was going to give him a gift, to go ahead and get their information because we're going to need to thank them for it. There's no reason to wait until they give him the gift. I tried to anticipate it that way and get them in the habit of anticipating it and trying to get business cards and track it that way. If it's something that could potentially hide a bomb or be harmful in some way, first it had to go be checked by the Secret Service.

Food?

He couldn't eat the food. He was advised not to eat the food people gave him in that situation. I don't think there were any instances where that happened. Staff, on the other hand, could take their chances if they wanted.

Did you put on weight or lose weight when you were in this job?

Oh, I definitely put on weight.

Other than the Tip O'Neill putter, which was a tragedy of the first dimension, were there any other gifts he was particularly excited about?

There were a lot he was excited about. He's a good gift receiver, mainly because of what I said before; his capacity to remember the context then pass it on as it's relevant was really great.

One of his prized collections was the military coins. Different divisions of the military will mint their own coin that represents the unit and what they do. It's a practice in some circles to exchange these and give them to people who are special to the unit or whatever. He would frequently be given these coins by different military units. The Secret Service even had one they presented to him. This was rather clever. He was keeping all these things and for not-too-hard-to-imagine reasons. It was meaningful to him when military people would express their support for him. Inevitably, it felt like—if it wasn't expressed as—I may have had my doubts about you, but you've won me over and here's why. Either that or they were troops who were deployed somewhere and in harm's way. For both of those reasons, these were very meaningful to him.

Increasingly, they started taking up more and more of the space on the Resolute desk. I think President George W. Bush is using the same desk. Every time there was a formal Oval Office address, you couldn't have all this clutter on the desk, neither did you want it to be completely clean and look like he didn't actually work there. There was a very elaborate effort to remove things and put them back in the exact same order and the exact same positioning as they were, which of course was never right, because he would have to rearrange them.

He knew how things were arranged.

Yes. Going back to not just when he was thinking about something, but after a speech, you would have to rearrange them, too. Eventually it was so much that someone in the carpenter's office, which is in the Residence of the White House, built him a little tiered stand. That way, instead of laying them out flat across the desk, he could put them in rows, start building them up, and put them on the little credenza behind his desk in the Oval Office, which was where he was putting them by the end of my time there.

There must be a replica of that in the library. They have an Oval Office mock-up, but I don't remember seeing that.

One of your jobs was managing flow in and out of the Oval Office. At one point—maybe this was when Panetta came in—he began restricting attendance at meetings. George Stephanopoulos was really irked because he started being excluded from certain meetings. I'm curious as to how this was managed. Did they not tell him about meetings or did he know meetings were going on to which he wasn't being invited?

I don't know. He would have to speak to that definitively, but George's initial portfolio—His positioning was in a little office just off the President's study with a door that leads into the President's private dining room. That was George's office. His portfolio was to be able to sit in on whatever meeting he wanted, which spoke to his far-ranging influence on things communications and policy wise. My understanding is that Leon said, "No. You can't just come to any meeting you want. We're going to have people at the meeting designed to the purpose of the meeting." My understanding is he didn't exclude George—"You can't come to this meeting or that meeting"—but if the meeting was about this, then the people who were involved in that were going to sit in on the meeting. This would be in opposition, because George thought, Well, I'm involved in everything, so I'll sit in on the meetings that make sense for me.

I think that anybody who was coming to a meeting felt like it was a little overblown in the pre-Leon era, but he moved toward a more specific manifesting of the meetings. Who is supposed to be in this meeting? Who are the six people? Under his regime, we had a process of when someone showed up who wasn't on the manifest, we'd say, "You're not on the manifest." It was my job or Nancy's job—usually my job and Nancy's if I felt as if I needed some backup—to say, "No, I'm sorry, you're not," or to go in to Leon and say, "Jane Schmo is here and she said she's supposed to be here because blah, blah, blah. Yes or no?" Then he would say yes or no.

Once you spoke, did you encounter any difficulties with people who would push it?

It was frequent that people would say, "But I'm supposed to be here," and I would have to say, "No, you're not," or "You're not the decider."

I imagine people would try that power walk you were talking about using at the airport. The purposeful walk.

Do you recall any specific individuals who were serial violators?

Yes.

Do you care to mention any names of serial violators?

Not particularly. I can't see it serving any good.

OK. These would be staff people rather than others?

Yes, staff people.

Cabinet officers? Were there troubles with Cabinet people?

Most of the Cabinet officers would have to travel over to the White House to attend a meeting in the first place, so it wasn't really in their interest to take a chance on that. In addition, most Cabinet officers, as a privilege, would have respected that, for the most part.

There was a story from the Nixon administration that Interior Secretary Walter Hickel wanted a meeting with Nixon and had to wait years for the meeting. Actually, he left the administration before he ever got his meeting. Were you involved in the scheduling operation?

No. It was all produced and then delivered. As we would add or subtract things, that would be my involvement. If Robert Reich wanted to schedule a meeting, he wouldn't contact me about it. He would probably contact the Cabinet Affairs Office, then it would work its way to scheduling. On the other hand, if we were out and about at an event and Robert Reich wanted to steal his ear for a minute, he would come tell me to try to make it happen in that moment. Things that happened in the moment, we would be very much involved in, but things being planned or scheduled, we would receive it as something we should try to make happen that day.

A Washington Post article said wise people in the administration would check with you about whether it would be a good time to broach some new idea with the President. Could you expand on that idea?

We talked about the mood a little bit. There definitely were days of good and not-so-good moods. It was knowing his state of mind and whether this was a particularly harrowing day or a relaxed day. Let's say, for example, the press secretary wanted to come talk, but it was a day where one of those unfair articles ran. If you wanted to come talk to him about something proactive about next week's messaging, you weren't going to get it, because all he would want to do would be to talk to you about this article and how unfair it was and what were you going to do about it. I would be in a position to provide that type of intelligence. That's helpful, or at least it seemed to be.

In addition to the responsibility of managing people, you mentioned the books before. You were also responsible for taking the last look at the paperwork. Did you find the process of getting paperwork to the President in a timely fashion happened, or were paperwork delays a constant problem you had to deal with?

There were some. Mostly, it happened extremely well. There's a whole office called the Staff Secretary's Office, which pretty much does the paper.

[John] Podesta was still Staff Secretary when you came in? He left right after Panetta came in.

Todd Stern was the Staff Secretary for most of the time I was there. Maybe he was the whole time. Phil Caplan, one of his deputies, was Staff Secretary toward the end of my time or right after I left. Most of the people in the Staff Secretary's Office are career employees, and some of the kindest, most efficient, well-organized people you'll ever have the pleasure of working with. Their process of doing what they needed to do in getting it up to the Oval Office was very good.

Sometimes there would be substantive failures—They couldn't process and deliver a background briefing that hadn't been written by the Office of Domestic Policy Council. Many times the delays would happen in those offices.

In those situations, we would tag team. I would go straight after the Policy Council's Office and say, "Where is this?" This would happen with speeches or a memo that had talking points inherent in it. Usually it was something like trying to figure out what to say, or someone who was collaborating on writing the message was occupied with something else until now, things like that. Those were usually the reasons for not having it as soon as we would like it. I can't really think of instances where we didn't get it before we had to do the thing, certainly none of any significance. The NSC [National Security Council] and foreign policy things were always, obviously, top notch. They had a whole process and structure behind them that put anything else to shame.

You were more likely to have the foreign policy stuff to your satisfaction than the domestic stuff.

Yes.

The speech component—This would have been a case, as I understand it, where the President sometimes could be implicated in the delays themselves because he liked to tinker with speeches until the last minute.

Yes, right up until the last minute. Working on the State of the Union in the car was not at all uncommon.

Were you in the car with him when you were going—

No. The teleprompter snafu with the health care speech was the closest call ever. Speechwriters were in one office, in the map room or somewhere else on the ground floor, and he was up in the Residence writing things out in long hand. Mrs. Clinton was shuttling papers to me and I was shuttling to the speechwriters, trying to translate the writing. She was even having to translate some of the writing for me. That one was really up until the last minute, but in the end, we got it done enough at the White House to where we could leave. Then we had enough time, because at these events he goes in and there's a welcoming committee of members. When he first arrives, he goes to a little coffee and greeting with those people, which takes a few minutes. We were able to get it together.

So it ended up on the teleprompter?

Yes. That one worked out well.

Did you have any teleprompter follies? The one you talked about is not the only one.

No. At the '96 convention in Chicago—This one was a combination of delays and finalizing the text and some technical problems. The result was that the operator didn't have the latest copy of the speech to know when the pauses were going to be and how the speech flowed, the structure of the speech, and therefore would not be able to anticipate that. He would have to listen to the President and guess when he was coming to a pause. The solution was that Andrew and I were on radios with each other. We always wore a radio when we were traveling outside the White House because the advance team was on a radio and we could coordinate with them. I was on a garbage can on the dais, on the podium of the speech.

Now, "garbage can," that's not a metaphor for something?

No, literally, there was no chair. The design of it was that there were delegates or whatever at tables and a tiered dais on either side of where he was speaking. The closest point I could get to the podium, there wasn't a chair, but there was a garbage can, so I dumped it upside down and sat on it. I sat there with the speech, on the radio, watching the President, watching the speech text, watching the teleprompter, and talking to Andrew on the radio, telling him in real time what was coming up with the speech, what was going to happen. He was relaying it to the teleprompter operator: Speed up, slow down.

This was which speech again?

His acceptance speech at the '96 convention. Adventures in speechwriting is maybe what the job should be called. That first trip I did, to Nixon's funeral, before I had the job, was another instance. Don Baer, who was coming in as—I don't know if it was communications director—some communications role, was writing his remarks for Nixon's funeral. Don had just joined the White House staff. He didn't know how things worked and I was just filling in, so I knew only a little bit, but I knew enough to know that the speech needed to catch up with the President.

When the President was going off the plane, Don was still stuck on the plane, working on the speech. There was no way he was going to get in the motorcade in time not to be left behind. I stayed in coordination with whoever the trip director was then and we decided I would stay with the speech because they could handle the President, but his speech needed to get to him. My job was to get the speech to him. Neither of us knew anything about who worked on Air Force One or who did what or anything, but we knew we had this speech and we had to get to the event, so we commandeered a volunteer's car and took off, chasing the motorcade down to the Nixon Presidential Library.

Of course, the motorcade wreaks havoc and there was a traffic jam about a half a mile behind the motorcade, which we proceeded to get stuck in. Then, somehow, we flagged a highway patrol car, jumped out of the volunteer car into the highway patrol car, and they started speeding up and weaving through the traffic with the sirens blazing and the whole nine yards. Eventually they caught us up to the site, where we found all five Presidents in a room having a little coffee. This was my first introduction to the job. I was thinking, Is this what a day is like for you, Andrew? [laughter]

I thought I might go down through the timeline. I won't stop on every item, but see if any things from some of the major events might prompt any recollections. The one I'm looking at is this general timeline. If you want to start in '94 and eyeball down through those and see if anything jumps out at you. You have the death of health care reform, but it wouldn't be '94. It should be the end of '94, when you came on board.

It would have been right after the plan dying in Congress and before the North Korean one. Somewhere else you have a travel timeline. This was unfortunate for me, but there was a great trip to the Mideast in October of '94 that I didn't get to go on because I was too new at the job. To Jordan—

Maybe I should ask you about your foreign trips, then. Do you have any specific recollections about those foreign trips? I would guess that trip to Ireland must have been spectacular, because the news that came out of that trip was that the receptiveness to the President was extraordinary.

It was extraordinary, the popular reaction. Talk about off the records. It was a bit frightening to me, and shouldn't have been, I guess, but we did an off-the-record stop there in a pub district. It must have been in Dublin, but wouldn't you know it, just by happenstance, Gerry Adams happened to be at the same pub. [laughter] Go figure.

So this was a real coincidence?

No. I mean, you couldn't schedule anything like this. We didn't set out to make it happen that Gerry Adams was there, but someone on the Irish side took the initiative on finding out about the neighborhood we were going to be in. It was an off-the-record pub-crawl with a special appearance by Gerry Adams.

It was a very poorly maintained secret, either that or the unemployment rate was much higher than I expected, because throngs of people came from nowhere—and we weren't there that long. We stopped in one place, he said hello. I don't even know if he took a sip. Maybe he bought a pint of Guinness, then we walked out, and we said hello to a couple of other shopkeepers. Gerry Adams popped up, we said hello to him, and the next thing you know, there were thousands and thousands of people around.

The Secret Service agents were—It was the first time I saw them nervous. They were actually nervous, not that the crowd had weapons or anything like that, but they always want to know what their route out of there is and this and that. Many times in these situations, they might have felt as if they had been thrown under the bus, especially when Gerry Adams happened to show up and this crowd happened to show up. We had maintained that nobody knew about this stop, it was an off-the-record.

There was a little bit of play about Bill Clinton's ancestry and his connection to the Irish people, but he was taking this situation seriously and getting engaged. He was putting some political capital behind it. That crowd was definitely somewhat spontaneous, but the outpouring of public support for him on that trip was breathtaking.

It was always refreshing to travel internationally, because of the power of this country and the institution of the Presidency. Nobody holds it in as high a regard here as they do around the world. At least that was the case at this time. It's very humbling to experience that. It's cool.

What were other memorable foreign trips that you made?

Some places we went were maybe less than memorable. Moscow comes to mind, with the exception of being in the Kremlin complex. There was a trip where he overnighted in the Kremlin, which was before my tenure, but nevertheless, there were events in Red Square. There was a dinner—This was again on the occasion of the NATO expansion—in Poland at the palace where the Warsaw Pact was signed. That was pretty significant.

A little kitschy and scary but also memorable was Haiti, when we went to the ceremony of reinstalling [Jean-Bertrand] Aristide. [laughing] I shouldn't laugh, but there was a ceremony because it was his reinstallation, and it was incredibly hot, as you can imagine or know from ever being in that area. First, we helicoptered from site to site in the Blackhawk helicopters, which is usually a sign that they want to keep us moving quickly because they don't want us to be shot at. That sets the tone. There were riots a couple of blocks away from the palace. We landed on the palace grounds in the helicopter. The palace looked like the place hadn't been redecorated since Baby Doc [Jean-Claude] Duvalier. It was '70s-era kitsch.

At the ceremony, there was a release of doves to celebrate the peaceful restoration of democracy. Beautiful imagery, a great picture was going to be made. Well, the doves were collapsing from heat exhaustion, so whenever they were released, some of them fluttered up and came right back down. It didn't go over well. It was a perhaps prescient metaphor for the return of democracy to Haiti. [laughter] That was definitely memorable for all of those reasons.

The signing of the Dayton Accords at Elysee Palace was memorable for the cast of characters and what was happening there at the time. Because of my job—As with the Ukraine situation, if there was only one person who could stay from a staff perspective, it was usually me. Depending on what was happening, and the substance of it, it might be the Chief of Staff. It was always me until the President hurt his leg at Greg Norman's house. Staying at guest palaces in the Ukraine, in Japan, and in Thailand, those were all very fond memories. It's always nice to be a guest in the palace.

The President enjoyed these foreign trips, too?

He did. We never talked about it, but I imagine he was experiencing what I observed about the power of the Presidency and the hope people poured into the vessel of the United States.

They were always tiring. The hardest schedules we ever—You started with traveling to different time zones and worked from there. You had to adjust to that, but also the protections that would give him a quasi-normal schedule in the White House didn't apply when you took him out of that environment. Twenty-hour days were very common on the international trips. Many times, because of his personal style of diplomacy, there were international trips that were about circumstance or ceremony and show, and not necessarily substantive; you weren't negotiating something.

It felt almost as often, though, that there was something on the table, that they were close to trying to close something, or that they were going to use this state visit to make this or that accomplishment or negotiation. Inevitably, there was much work to be done during the course of the trip. It wasn't just reaping the rewards. That was the norm for an international trip, but it felt like too many times it wasn't. We were trying to do some work and get something done.

The [Yitzhak] Rabin funeral, did you make that trip?

Yes. That was a very powerful memory. Rabin had been in the United States two or three weeks before he was assassinated.

His assassination was November 4, 1995.

So mid-October, I think, he was in the United States. President Clinton had a very strong affinity for Rabin. It's hard not to, with his biography and the fact that with what he's lived through, he was trying to take risks for peace. Again, because of the personal style of diplomacy, that's the way Clinton is. He felt very close to him and we saw him a month before. Did I talk to him about the future of the West Bank settlements? No. We went to an event at the State Department and prior to the event there was a bilateral meeting between Clinton and Rabin.

Rabin's staff had not done their advance work and had not told him this was a black-tie event. President Clinton was in a tuxedo, as all the rest of us with him were, and Rabin was conversing with an aide as the bilateral meeting was ending. He was saying, "You couldn't tell me that it's black tie?" I said, "Mr. Prime Minister, would you like my bow tie?" Because he had a dark suit on, he could pull it off that way. He accepted the tie, took it, and went through the event. At the end of the event, they were walking out and he stopped and came back to start taking the tie off. I was saying, "Please, Mr. Prime Minister, no, no, keep it." "No, I insist. You were so kind." Anyway, I loaned him my tie, he insisted on giving it back, and he was dead for what he was trying to do a couple of weeks later. Not killed by an Arab, killed by an Israeli.

It was a very moving time for the President and it was a very moving time for me, personally, because this was the first international leader I had ever had a personal interaction with who was assassinated. I wouldn't wish that on anyone, but I can tell you, it has a profound impact on you.

A big delegation went over?

A huge delegation, yes. On a global stage, it's like a soap opera when all of the cast members are there. All the world leaders were there. It was incredibly chaotic because the burial was pulled off in a short period of time after his assassination. The tension—People were on edge with regard to security. There was a good representation from the Arab world there. Again, an Israeli had pulled the trigger, but the Arab-Israeli tensions were underlying it. The future of the peace process was very much a huge question mark.

To top it all off—There's always just enough kitsch to keep you grounded—there were yarmulkes distributed by the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament. It had provided the yarmulkes for the goys of us in attendance. They had great little white, silky-satin yarmulkes with gold foil screen-printing on them that said "Knesset," which struck me as funny for some reason.

That trip was definitely a powerful memory and ended up playing a role in the budget shutdown thing we were talking about earlier, in the sense that Gingrich and Dole traveled on Air Force One as part of the delegation and made claims about being snubbed in their treatment.

There were two claims: one was that they were made to get off a different stairway than the President, and the other was that he wouldn't talk to them during the flight. They could have negotiated.

Yes, and there were photos of him talking to them, which was the best thing, because that completely made them look stupid, saying he didn't meet with them.

I heard some report that only the President is allowed to go down this one stairway and everybody else has to go down a different one.

I don't think there's a hard rule on that. I couldn't quote you the precedent for this, but as a general rule, we wouldn't let anybody go off the front before the President. We, the President's aides, are always mindful of the visuals of things. Unless you have a reason to be in the television picture walking off the plane with the President, we'd just as soon make you wait until he's down far enough that you're not in the picture.

I would go down the front steps, but not until he was gone, or if I was running something of his to the helicopter in advance of him, but any guest who was on the plane—Now, if it was 2:00 in the morning or something and they were exhausted and it was Ambassador or Secretary Such-and-Such and they wanted to get in their car, then Godspeed. I don't remember specifically. It's hard for me to imagine anyone telling them they couldn't go off the front of the plane if they wanted to. Someone probably invited them to go down these stairs just to get rid of them out of no mean reason, and they felt like they were being sent out the back of the bus.

It was not a moment to be—I would think, knowing the President, what he'd just been through—it didn't seem to be a moment for getting back into a political discussion.

No. This was a real political issue at the time, but his mind was very much on, first, the loss of a friend; second, the strategic significance of losing someone who's such a key player in the peace process; and third, how you would defend me from stealing so many of those little yarmulkes. That's a joke.

I was going to ask you whether you had followed Rabin's example and given back the borrowed.

I do have the tie, still, to this day.

That could probably go in the library.

We weren't really planning to ask questions about Monica Lewinsky, because the Independent Counsel's Office did an excellent job of interrogating him.

Perhaps too thorough.

One question came up in that, the Bruce Lindsey issue. They asked you if you had spoken to anybody and you said you had spoken to Bruce Lindsey. They asked what you spoke about and you said that was covered by attorney-client privilege. Why was that covered by attorney-client privilege? You said your attorney told you to say it was attorney-client privilege.

First, the little fish of the [Kenneth] Starr team was interrogating me in front of the grand jury. I can't remember the guy's name; Starr's number-one deputy, who was notoriously aggressive, was in the room but sitting back, doing a crossword puzzle as far as I could tell, until that point, then he perked up and there was all kinds of activity. I haven't thought about this stuff in a while.

I had sought Bruce's advice about some things relating to the Lewinsky investigation before I had a counsel who was focused on me. When I had the conversation with Bruce, I clarified with him in that conversation that I was seeking his advice under the auspices of—because Bruce was a Deputy White House Counsel—him as the White House Counsel and me as a White House staff member. In that dynamic, our conversation would have been between someone who seeks his counsel's advice, and therefore, by our understanding, that was an attorney-client relationship. There was nothing at all remotely of substance or interest from a snazzy, sexual nature, let alone from a cover-up or power nature, to the conversation. Nevertheless, we didn't want to get into those kinds of conversations.

I don't know this for a fact, but I would imagine from Bruce's and others' perspectives, they would want to preserve that treatment of a conversation for other conversations that might have had more relevance to what they were talking about. I'm trying to think if my attorney and I had talked about that. I don't think we really expected it to come up in my testimony. When it did, it created this little mini firestorm. We adjourned and the lawyers figured out a way they could get to the nature of the conversation, or whatever it was they thought they might get from it, without us having to unlock that privilege. That's all it was. It was funny to watch them scurry, though, especially knowing there was nothing in the conversation that would be remotely valuable.

But you finally got their attention.

It was a very opaque reply, because if they were inclined to believe there was conspiracy in the White House, then there it was: Bruce Lindsey telling—

Exactly. You know, Bruce is always pulling those strings.

Telling Goodin what to say.

You may have never reread your grand jury testimony, I don't know.

I haven't.

A question had been raised, or you volunteered the information, that there was no factual information discussed in your conversation with him that you hadn't already talked about with them, which gave the appearance of there being a principled claim, as you suggested.

Right, yes. What I recall was that when we came back into session, either my attorney asked me some questions that redirected me to get that out or he told them what to ask to get it out.

That's probably what happened. It's not always clear. You can tell where there's a break in the deliberations, but you don't know, except by inference, what happened because of it.

Now you know; if you ever need to get a prosecutor's attention, that's the word you use, "privilege."

Let me come back at this from a slightly different angle. As John said, we have the grand jury testimony; it will be in the permanent record. You were testifying under oath there at a time when, presumably, your memory was much better than it is now about the specifics of the events, so it doesn't behoove us to spend much time asking about particulars other than to pose a generic question. Is there anything about your experience related to Lewinsky and the scandal that you didn't deal with in the grand jury testimony that, from a historical perspective, ought to be out there? As I mentioned to you before, if it's delicate and this needs to be sat on for a while, we're happy to do that.

My thoughts on that are, obviously, it's the one event of the administration that many people would take back, hopefully the President the first amongst them, if they could. There were a few people who may have hoped they could have done something to avoid the whole thing, but in the end, there's only one person who could have. I certainly have had my moments of thinking, What if this, and Why not that, but—you do the best you can to serve and protect the person, but there are some things they have to do for themselves.

Did you find a part of your job was to help keep temptation out of the President's field of vision occasionally?

It's interesting because there was speculation on that. I haven't seen it, but somebody told me John Harris, who is a Washington Post reporter, has a book that attributed that to be one of my key job responsibilities.

Or if not yours, the personal aides generally.

Yes, but as it was described to me, as if that were one of the things I was picked for, as though somehow I were better at chasing away the ladies than Andrew.

Your experience as a bartender.

I guess so. You would think that would make me better able to attract them.

Well, you doubled as bouncer, remember? [laughter]

Yes, exactly. No one ever, ever, remotely discussed, raised, suggested, or subtly intimated anything to indicate that was anything I had to do, nor did I ever think Bill Clinton was going to misbehave because there might be an attractive woman nearby. What I was always mindful of was appearances, because this was a guy who lived on the front page. This was what was also described about me by Harris.

If I could block an unfavorable photograph—It had nothing to do with his interaction with them or whether he was going to be tempted in any way—I was going to do it every single time for that guy. That was part of my job. One example of that could be if there happens to be a woman in Florida on the rope line who should have maybe worn her bra today, but not because I thought he was going to have some kind of reaction or couldn't control himself or something like that. It was because that wasn't the picture I wanted of my President. In the same way, if he were to be scratching his nose in such a way that it looked from the side as if he were picking his nose, I didn't want that picture out there, either. My job was to make him look good.

In the case of this woman, would you try to get him to skip that part of the line or try to get her moved?

That would be more trouble than it would be worth, because the same people who were going to take that picture were watching me, as evidenced by John Harris writing that that's what my job was. You'd look out for anything that could be misconstrued, and 999 times out of 1,000, it was just being misconstrued.

Of course, in the one case, you did indicate that there were some concerns about this one person because she was hanging around a little too much and that your impulses were to try to get her cleared out. Again, I don't know that there is anything more to elaborate on than the one or two episodes.

Trust your instincts, that's the one thing I've taken from it.

The President is a physical guy, isn't he?

Yes.

You said he's big. He likes to hug people. Physical contact for him—I'll give you a contrary point. We've done interviews with people who worked for President [Ronald] Reagan. Reagan was a wonderful politician in many ways, but he didn't like working the room and was not a particularly physical guy. Part of it was personality, part of it may have been generational, I don't know, but that's not true of Clinton, is it?

No. He's very gregarious and likes to hug friends. Yes, he's very physical.

It's possible that people can read that—can misconstrue it. Even men could misconstrue that.

Yes.

The only point I'm trying to raise or to get you to comment on is that a part of this man's personal charisma is related to his physicality.

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You left the President's aide job in late '97, before the story broke.

Yes. It came out in January.

January of '98.

I wish I could say I had incredible foresight, but I didn't.

The noise had begun to build a bit, because of the President's grand jury testimony, but I guess that was January, too.

The first that this crossed my radar screen was a Drudge item. I don't know that it actually named her, but it pointed people internally to start trying to put some dots together, but that was after—These are completely unrelated.

That was three or four days before the Washington Post story.

Yes. To be clear, I told myself when I started that job that I did not want to become jaded in it, because it's the most incredible experience in the whole wide world. I think this would be true for any public service job. It's going to have its share of frustrations. It's going to have its share of joys. When your frustration pile starts getting higher than your joy pile, then you need to move on.

I had started to get a little bit of parity in that regard. If I caught myself snapping at an advance person who—by the way, they were all volunteers—lost sight of the sense of duty of doing their job at the expense of standing there staring at the President of the United States in awe, then I knew I was becoming a little too—"What are you doing? Go get back in your car. Get out of here." If I caught myself doing things like that, where I was taking this whole duty thing too far at the expense of all those other things, then I promised myself I would leave, because I didn't want to do the job a disservice or those around it.

I reached that point in the fall of '97. I made the job change as a stopping point to figure out what I wanted to do next, to figure out whether I was going to stay in the administration or go into the private sector, which is what I ended up doing. I asked Erskine Bowles, the Chief of Staff, if I could do projects for him and for Sylvia Mathews, who was the Deputy Chief of Staff, during that time frame so I could get out, because there was no way I could think about, let alone look for, other jobs that might be interesting to me in the President's aide job.

Exactly, because there's no time.

"I really can't meet with you tomorrow because I'm going to South Africa."

Were there any other jobs in the administration that you looked at?

No, which was surprising to me. At the end, there was a high-level, generalist skill experience that I had in the job at the White House that was very difficult to replicate anywhere else.

The dilemma was, first, I wasn't that interested in areas of policy that were out there. Even assuming that I was, there was a bit of a bridge between being the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Commerce Department for emerging media technologies and preparing the briefing book. It was not quite enough issue expertise to be an easy fit for the people on the commerce side and a little boring to me to think, So, every day I'm going to do that thing. It was a little bit surprising, because I did intend to stay through the administration, until the end of it, but I didn't see anything that was interesting enough to me.

One thing that would be interesting for us to hear about is the post-January '98 reaction inside the White House. You were still there. What were things like when this awful news broke in '98? The second thing is about the impact of this on the people who were working there. You just mentioned that you had a sit-down with Bruce Lindsey to try to figure out how to deal with this. It would be very helpful from a historical perspective for you to walk us through what happened. How did you go about finding a lawyer? What were the meetings like with your lawyers? What is it like to find yourself testifying before the grand jury and those kinds of things.

It's not anything I would wish on anyone. Let me start with the lawyer stuff and go back to the overall environment. The worst thing about this period for me was the inevitable "criminalizasification" I'll say, to try to remove it from the real word of "criminalization." You end up with your picture on the web, in the newspaper, on the television, passing out of a courthouse with a caption saying you had just given your grand jury testimony. Unfortunately, in my case, it was on a rainy day, where you're in a trench coat with an umbrella, and you look like a criminal. I can tell you for a fact, the good citizens of Gainesville, Texas, population 14,000, Republican until the day they die, said, "Wow, that nice guy I knew from high school," or "That sweet little guy who was in my English class is a criminal, or looks like a criminal, at least, so therefore he's a criminal."

The sweet part is that I got all these calls from people saying, "We want you to hang in there. We're going to stand behind you." I didn't do anything wrong. It's definitely not a pleasant experience to go through, so it's nice to have those calls that people are thinking about you. It was even more frustrating, though, for them to be viewing it in a way that was a different circumstance, and to have more sympathy than I needed because they thought I was actually in legal trouble.

The people don't understand it. People don't understand half of the things that get covered in the news in depth day after day. They certainly don't understand one little passage. All they hear is "grand jury" and see you walking out of the courthouse and the people are trying to snap your picture, like that guy who kidnapped that little girl over there. The power of imagery is incredibly powerful. Unfortunately, this put a lot of people in that box and made them look tainted in ways that were very unfortunate. I had a lot less at stake in that situation than many other people.

So you had to find yourself a lawyer.

Yes. I started asking friends of mine in the counsel's office. A benefit of my situation was that—This was a good thing about the job, you could pretend to be just a tiny little junior staff person, you know, bat your eyes and carry my briefing book, or you could be, "I say you can't go into the Oval Office." In that job, you can be as powerful as you need to be, but when it suits you, you are just a little lowly staff person. As a result, I didn't have the constraints.

Many of the senior staff had to go out and hire lawyers. I was able to get a pro bono lawyer to represent me, a) because there's no way I could have afforded a real lawyer, and b) because it wouldn't carry any of the potential conflicts that if I'm Leon Panetta and I'm hiring lawyer X, who has represented A, B, C, and D, and whose firm has done Zed, Alpha, and Beta, it complicates thing. As a consequence, the Leon Panettas of the world are paying $300 an hour and up, for which you can get reimbursed by the government if you end up being a target of the investigation who is proven innocent, up to and including a rate of like $90 an hour. You don't want a lawyer who would represent you for that amount, of course, in this situation.

But if you're only a subject, then you're not reimbursed.

Right. If you're a passing, fleeting character, as most of us were, and I'm not just talking about the Starr investigation, although there were plenty of people in that category, but the Whitewater investigations and the Senate Finance Committee investigations. I know Starr grew out of Whitewater, but I'm talking about the hard core around the travel office and all those—

You weren't dragged into any of those, were you?

I was dragged into the finance one, but that was a deposition in a hearing room with a couple of Senate staffers and a couple of FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] interviews. So of course, I was an old hand when this thing rolled around. But yes, I wouldn't wish anyone to feel as if people think they look like a criminal. Most of my colleagues incurred an incredible amount of expense. Because most of the people I dealt with were more senior than I, they had those legal bills. You don't want to play around with that. You don't want to take any chances, so you're going to get representation and you're going to have the representation you need to get through it. You're going to have debt because of it, and many people do.

How did you find your lawyer?

I talked to two or three people in the counsel's office, who suggested a couple of people at this one firm. I knew someone else at the firm, so I met with this guy and he seemed perfectly fine to me.

Then he starts asking you a lot of uncomfortable questions.

The biggest takeaway of Witness Testimony 101 that the lawyers offered is—contrary to how I'm being today, fortunately for you guys—you say as little as possible. You don't talk. You don't know anything. If you don't know it with the same degree of certainty as you know your shoe size, you don't "know it." You might suspect it or think it or have reason to believe it, but that's something very different from knowing, because that's how you get yourself in trouble on the witness stand, by knowing things that end up not being the truth.

Is it fair to say, then, that you didn't suspect anything was going on earlier?

Gosh, that's a complicated question.

You didn't know it. Your testimony says you didn't know it.

Yes, so I didn't know it, according to my testimony and my testimony was accurate. Did I have reason to have concern? The public record is clear enough evidence that I had reason to have been concerned.

But you did what you could do.

I did what I could do. The timing was a little unfortunate. A date where I did everything I could to get her away from there ended up being the famous blue dress day. History is full of these little inflection points, "but if" and "I wish" and "blah blah blah," and before you know it, you're not sitting before the grand jury, and there are two and a half more years of successful administration.

How did he prepare you for the grand jury? He asked you a bunch of questions, then you went in. You weren't allowed to take your lawyer, right?

No, I wasn't. He sat in a room outside. If it weren't so sad it was really comedic, but there was a scurry of activity. It's pretty intimidating. There were a lot of people in the room. As with many juries, you couldn't really say it was a jury of my peers, because there's a certain demographic that ends up being impaneled on juries. A couple of questions came from the grand jury members themselves, but the rest of them were from the junior prosecutor. He didn't drill me as extensively as I expected, because there wasn't much they were going to get from me. I can't even speculate what they could have remotely thought they could get from me. What they ended up getting was a bit of a tutorial on the logistics of the West Wing, because they had a diagram that was inaccurate. That was one of the most surprising things, how little they knew about not just the spatial layout of the space, but how things work. That was a little surprising to me.

We've heard that repeatedly from others, saying, again, not even an accurate diagram of the West Wing.

If I were investigating that case, the first thing I would do is go down there and take a tour.

Did you feel any pressure within the White House? The other side of the coin is what was happening in the White House after this news broke.

Oh, not at all.

It's as if a bombshell goes off.

Not at all. The nefarious imagination around the Bruce privilege thing would be that Bruce was trying to shut me up, but not at all, not in the least. In fact, I contacted him and tried to ask him for advice and he said, "Tell them the truth. Tell them whatever you know and that's it. Everything will be fine." There was no pressure, overtly or covertly, to do anything.

I didn't mean that. Now that I listen to it coming back to me, it sounds like a different question than I meant to ask, but it was mostly the pressure of being in an environment where this has become an oppressive issue for the President. I'm assuming I'm not overstating the case.

Well, it blossomed in phases. You were asking about the climate in January. In my heart of hearts, I had my dark doubts when the story came out. This is long before there was evidence and I put the thing together about dates and stuff. I thought it was probably that he must have flirted with her. I'm not trying to assassinate her character, but she was not the most levelheaded person, quite obviously, nor was he, in that situation. I'm probably rationalizing a little bit. I figured there was going to be an explanation and it was going to go away.

Where were you physically located now? You had moved out of the office right next to there.

I was in the OEOB, Old Executive Office Building, and I very vividly remember the climate in January was, "Can you believe this?" I'll speak for myself. I was pretty sure that there was going to be a problematic but legitimate explanation and that this was going to shake out and be OK. Then he made his Roosevelt Room statement, "I did not have ... with that woman." That's when I felt otherwise; that's when I knew it was a problem.

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At that point, you knew there was a problem. How much longer did you stay in the White House?

That was late January when he made that statement?

It was before the State of the Union message, which is usually 21, 22, or 23.

Yes. It was anywhere from the 20th to February 1.

The timeline has it January 21 and January 27 was the State of the Union message.

That sounds about right. I was there for about another three weeks after that. I don't know what date I made my testimony, but I think it was after that.

Yes, it would have been well after that.

It was only about a month after the story broke that they first started investigating.

Yes. They moved quickly because, of course, as we found out later on, they had known about this for a couple of months before that. I stayed there for about three weeks. I was already in discussions for the job I ended up taking here in New York. To his credit—This is great—I placed a call to Barry Diller, again, with this looking-like-a-criminal thing. I said, "I want you to know this is happening, and this is the story. I'm sure you've read the story and seen the story. I'm going to be testifying on this date. I wanted to make sure you didn't hear it from somewhere else." He said, "Well, you didn't do anything wrong, did you?" I said, "No, I didn't." He said, "OK, fine." He went right to the heart of things and moved on. He didn't waste any time on that. It was February 20 or so when I left. It may have been March 10.

Was your grand jury testimony the last time they came to talk with you about this, or your last bout into this area?

Yes, I think it was. The process is, "Thank you for your testimony. We'll be in touch if we need you again." I dealt with a couple of administrative pieces remotely with my lawyer, follow-up questions on this or that. We may have sent a letter back or something like that. That was pretty much it.

You said you had already reached the conclusion before all the evidence came in that this was more complicated than you had originally thought. The only other piece of this I would want to ask you about was your reaction to the original—after he gave his August grand jury testimony, in which he admitted there was, in fact, more to it and made a public address that night. Did you happen to see that?

Oh, yes, I watched that.

And your reaction to that was?

I would have wanted a little bit more.

More how?

He could have afforded to have been a little more forward at that point. What I'm saying is a little bit unfair, because in a variety of venues, he has been much harsher on himself and much more self-flagellating than he was in that address that night, some of which predated that address. I'm thinking of the prayer breakfast venue and a couple of other covered but not widely publicized events.

The prayer breakfast, I think, came afterward rather than before.

Well, I may have the timeline wrong, but apart from that night, regardless of the precedent or whether it followed, he's been much more forthcoming and much more contrite. Contrition is definitely the quality. He missed an opportunity to do that that night. This was in the prime-time address. It's a very difficult situation, because there's a valid argument of the witch hunt that embraced this, but if you don't cast any spells, there's no witch hunt to go after. The first point of responsibility, as he has said, is there. My recollection is that he didn't go far enough in that regard that night.

The timing of that—In talking with other people, without divulging any confidences, there were those who felt he was partly the victim of poor staff work. He had just come out of five or six hours of very difficult testimony, and the call was left open as to whether he was going to say something that night or wait. It's conceivable that an address made the following day or the day after would have been exactly the same in tone, and maybe he would have stewed over it for another 36 or 48 hours, but at least among some people there's the sense that if somebody had put their foot down and said, "Don't do this while you're mad. You have to regain your composure, then let's do this right." Who knows? This is the type of thing we'll be debating forever.

That would be completely consistent with the situation as I can imagine it. I don't know who the character necessarily was, but there was somebody saying, "You have to do this right now. You have to get it out as soon as possible. If we can put a microphone outside of the testimony room," (which I assume was somewhere in the White House, the map room) "if we can have a microphone and a camera outside the map room, you should do it there." But I would agree with your analysis, which is that he should have given himself the time to reflect on it, because that was a very important moment.

Did you stay in contact with the President after you left the White House?

Yes. In New York, it's not difficult to cross paths a little bit. I see him from time to time at events and in passing.

While he was still in the White House, did you see him much?

During this era, I was probably down there four or five times over the course of the two years. I saw him and had a conversation with him probably on half of those occasions, other times I just saw him across the room. I'm glad to have not been in the White House during that time. You were asking about general mood. The people who served during that period probably deserve hazard pay for being there.

At the same time, I would imagine it would be very challenging to reconcile, internally, the service during that period against the siege mentality, which is to say how could you not be in there fighting that day in and day out, especially considering how ridiculous it got at the end. Look at all the energy, from a public policy perspective, that was spent on an incredibly stupid but very insignificant occurrence in the scheme of things, as against what those bodies exist to do, meaning the Congress, the Senate, the House of Representatives and the Presidency itself. At the same time, you probably had to feel like you were being persecuted.

Looking back on your time, you've already said you probably wouldn't go back. You probably would stay in the private sector rather than going back into politics. Am I misrepresenting what you said?

Yes, maybe a little bit. The public service experience I had there—I spoke very highly about campaigning. My experience from the campaign I hope has come through as a clearly positive one. The same thing with the administration experience. Again, I would change one thing, obviously, but I wouldn't change a thing by way of undertaking it. I would go into public service again.

I'll tell you, it did alter—and this was way before the Lewinsky stuff—my perceptions and thinking about being the candidate, being the principal in that situation. That's because I had such a unique glimpse of what the toll is on people by way of privacy and family sacrifice. I'm talking about the President, but I'm also talking about the staff people. For instance, now I'm the father of two children. Many of the people whom I looked up to, and who were the generation of cohorts just senior to me in terms of age, started having their families during that time. I don't know how they did it, because they were working as crazily and as hard as I was, if not more in some instances. It takes a lot to do that.

My respect for people who do it and my desire to want to do it are as high as ever. My awareness of what the tradeoffs are, particularly for the person who is at the center of that, the principal, in today's polarized and 24-hour media cycle environment, has given me reason to rethink. Once upon a time, I pictured myself going into elected politics, but not so much now. If I have the opportunity to serve again in an administration, I would do so gladly, yes.

Are there any pieces of the Bill Clinton you came to know that we haven't touched on that are important or that would come as a surprise to people who don't work with him or haven't worked with him on a daily basis?

The strength and resolve, as against the concession-making politician type. That's an important truth. It's not unique at all, his intellectual capacity, but words can't do it justice, so there's always so much to be said for that.

He has an extraordinary memory, doesn't he?

Yes.

Photographic? There's an actual psychological debate about whether such a thing as a photographic memory exists.

It's interesting. I was speaking with someone about this who was talking about President Clinton and now Senator Clinton as campaigners, and their differences. He will remember the situational and the relational aspects of something incredibly well. She will remember the factual aspects incredibly well. Whenever they see friends or former staffers or whatever, he'll be inclined to say something remembering the connection between this event and that event or this person and that person, and she'll be inclined to recall, "How is your son? He must be four now." You're amazed that she remembers those factual pieces together. It's a gift they each have in a slightly different flavor.

Are there any other ways in which they complement one another?

Yes. It's a little bit caricatured, but his expansive capacity and emotive operating as against her discipline and organization is very real. Again, it's overblown into a caricature sometimes, because it's talked about as though he has absolutely no discipline whatsoever and he actually has incredible discipline.

There are all kinds of little schemas that get thrown out to match this gestalt, if you will, like the eating. He only eats fast food and all those kinds of things. Many of those are completely false. That would be one to back into. He does have a level of discipline that people are quick to write off. Part of his MO [modus operandi] is that he goes along. Sometimes he may be a little less disciplined, and that feeds a situation that backs him into a corner, then he gets his act together, blows the situation out of the water, and comes back. That's part of his narrative, I guess, mostly fairly, but maybe sometimes unfairly.

We've covered an awful lot of ground, so it wouldn't be surprising if I've stumped you with this at the end.

I feel I want to grasp for some conclusion, even if one is not necessary.

I forced you into it, that's why, which is probably a sign of a bad question.

As I thought about it and started this morning, part of my thesis around my view of him was his ability to put out this aspirational vision and his practical grounding to advance against that vision. A piece we touched on a little bit is the human frailties that are part of that package, too. Whether they have to be, if they're part of that, who knows? That's for some psychologist to figure out, but those are important elements of him as a person.

His story is finding balance between those things. When he finds that balance, incredible things happen. That doesn't end with his Presidency. He's doing some incredible work through the foundation and on a global stage. He was on a global stage as President of the United States, but in a way that really builds on his work as President, he's continuing to make a difference.

We certainly don't purport to be able to put all of this together in a coherent or a cohesive fashion, but what we try to do is to get as many points in the picture as we can from as many different people. The idea is that all of this compiled into one place will give the people who have the better training in psychology or better training in politics, and what is more important, the perspective of time, to piece all of this together into something that may be convincing and help us understand this Presidency in history.

You've given us an awful lot to work with. I'm very grateful. Please recognize that this transcript is going to come back to you, so if you're driving home or taking the subway home tonight or you wake up in the morning and think, Oh gosh, I should have told him that, then we'll give you the same instruction that your lawyer gave you with respect to the grand jury testimony, just insert it. Feel free to do that. We ask everybody to do that with stories, or anecdotes, or observations.

Here's something that may be mildly interesting. There's a question here, "Was Clinton's public persona different from what you saw in private? How was Clinton different during official business as opposed to his personal time?" When I read that for the first time, it occurred to me that he wasn't all that different in his public persona as against his private time. That, of itself, is a bit remarkable. That's not to say he's not more polite and has his tie straight and doesn't chew on a cigar when he's walking around in front of the press.

There are some cosmetic things, but as far as his demeanor, the way he speaks, and the way he treats people—That's not absolute either. He might have been more relaxed and off the cuff in talking to me than with a random person, but for the most part, he didn't really have two personas. He didn't have the public persona and the private persona. I know many people in politics are perceived as being that way, and probably for good reason, because many people in politics are that way. They seem warm and nice and fuzzy on camera, then they're tyrants in how they run their office or something like that. That question really struck a chord with me, because it made me think that he is as complicated, in good and bad ways, in private as he is in public.

That's an interesting observation, because you had mentioned John Harris's book. One of the things that Harris concludes is—He goes after this image of Clinton as being a dissembler. He says, in fact, Clinton is completely transparent. He has a very complicated mind, so what people often thought was dissembling in public was Clinton's ability to, in a very complicated way, hold two conflicting opinions in his mind at the same time. As he was working his way through, people would see the cogs turning and this complicated mind trying to adjust for these two competing things. What came out, the image that was projected, was of somebody who was indecisive. Harris is fighting a bit of an uphill battle in some respects with that, historically.

Well, it's conventional wisdom, and it's conventional wisdom because it was politically beneficial for some people to promote that. When it fits with the narrative, especially in an unfavorable narrative, that's how things become solidified.

For us, the great thing is that we have the opportunity to talk to the people who were there. We recognize, once you've gotten the press accounts, the first thing most scholars will go to—Even now, if you're doing work on Franklin Roosevelt's Presidency, you go to the diaries, which don't exist anymore, and you to go the newspaper accounts. We hope to do a little bit better than that—not as good as the diaries, but a little bit better than the news accounts.

To your point of what you were just saying about Harris's observation on transparency, it would frustrate us sometimes, but the President would be a little too expressive and open sometimes, like at the 8:00 p.m. fundraiser in Houston after a whole day of campaigning.

There was a famous time where he got himself in trouble. "It might surprise you that I think I raise your taxes too much, too," was the off-the-cuff statement that started a firestorm, but that was not an isolated incident. It was seldom that it sparked news like that. The reason was that usually the press had also knocked off and was out—seriously—to dinners, drinking, taking Doug Sosnik to dinner and buying him two bottles of wine or something. In your studies—I mention it because it might be another interesting and insightful window, some of these White House Communications Agency transcripts or maybe even some open press event transcripts, where it was later in the day, at particular critical periods of time or something. He did have a tendency to be a little too frank in some of those situations.

Less guarded.

Yes, less guarded.

Interesting. Stephen, you've been very good.

Well, thank you.

Thank you. I always say at this point that we never exhaust all the possibilities we can discuss, but we sure exhaust the people around the table. I hope it was less painful than the grand jury testimony.

I like the recording mechanism here better because they had what I found to be a very antiquated system of the court reporter speaking into the cup. The stenographer was describing what was happening inside this cup, so it was also a distraction, because you couldn't hear anything, but you could see her talking the whole time.