Inside the Clinton White House : an oral history

465 Pages·2016·2.213 MB·English

by  Riley, Russell Lynn

Inside the Clinton
White House

Inside the
Clinton White
House
An Oral History
RUSSELL L. RILEY
1
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-i n- Publication Data
Names: Riley, Russell L. (Russell Lynn), 1958–
Title: Inside the Clinton White House: an oral history / Russell L. Riley.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2016. | Series: Oxford
oral history series
Identifiers: LCCN 2016010377 | ISBN 9780190605469 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Clinton, Bill, 1946—Interviews. | United States—Politics and
government—1993–2001—Interviews. | Clinton, Bill, 1946—Friends and associates—
Interviews. | Presidents—United States—Interviews. | BISAC: HISTORY / United States /
20th Century. | HISTORY / United States / General. | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Government /
Executive Branch.
Classification: LCC E886 .R55 2016 | DDC 973.929092—dc23 LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2016010377
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Edwards Brothers Malloy, United States of America
Contents
Preface vii
Editorial Note xv
Part I: Beginnings
1 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE PRESIDENT: Prelude to the
White House 3
2 THE DECISION 18
3 THE ANNOUNCEMENT AND “IDEAS PRIMARY” 24
4 STAFFING THE CAMPAIGN 28
5 VERTIGO: The New Hampshire Primary 36
6 COMPETITORS, ISSUES, AND STYLE 44
7 THE MANHATTAN PROJECT AND THE VEEP 51
8 THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION AND
THE BUS TOUR 59
9 THE GENERAL ELECTION CAMPAIGN— CLINTON VS.
GEORGE H. W. BUSH 65
10 THE VIEW FROM THE OTHER SIDE 74
11 THE TRANSITION TO GOVERNING 79
Part II: Domestic and Economic Policy
12 OUT OF THE GATE: Deciding What to Do First 105
13 THE 1993 BUDGET AND THE STIMULUS PACKAGE 111
14 NAFTA 127
15 HEALTH CARE 134
vi | CONTENTS
16 WELFARE REFORM 159
17 A DOMESTIC REFORM PRESIDENT 170
Part III: Foreign Policy
18 A NEW FOREIGN POLICY FOR A NEW WORLD ORDER 187
19 HAITI 194
20 AFRICA 203
21 THE BALKANS 217
22 NORTHERN IRELAND 228
23 BILL CLINTON AND THE WORLD 238
24 WITH FOREIGN LEADERS 262
Part IV: Politics and the Clinton White House
25 INSIDE THE WASHINGTON COMMUNITY 271
26 REPUBLICAN REVOLUTION— AND RECOVERY 284
27 THE RE- ELECTION AND PRODUCTIVE MIDDLE YEARS,
1996–9 7 299
28 SCANDALS—A ND IMPEACHMENT 307
Part V: Bill Clinton and His Team
29 CLINTON’S INTELLECT 343
30 CLINTON’S OPERATING STYLE 347
31 THE MAN IN THE OFFICE 358
32 AL GORE 375
33 HILLARY 387
34 WHITE HOUSE STAFF 398
Epilogue: Observations on the Clinton Legacy 413
Appendix: Clinton Presidential History Project 423
Index 427
Preface
Just over a year after Bill Clinton left the presidency, a stream of his former
White House aides and Cabinet officers began making quiet, unannounced
visits to the University of Virginia to reflect privately into a tape recorder on
what they had experienced. At an antebellum mansion named after William
Faulkner, they sat around a table talking with scholars affiliated with the univer-
sity’s Miller Center, a nonpartisan research institute with a special focus on the
presidency. Peering down at them from one nearby photograph was a group of
their predecessors fresh from Gerald Ford’s White House in April 1977, present
at the center’s very first oral history interview—i ncluding a surprisingly youthful
Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
In the intervening decades, the Miller Center’s Presidential Oral History
Program has conducted some seven hundred interviews, including major proj-
ects on Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush the elder, and Bill Clinton.1 The Clinton
Project is the largest ever of these efforts, comprising 134 interviews collected
over a ten- year span. Among those contributing interviews to this project were
Secretaries of State Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright, White House
Chiefs of Staff Mack McLarty and Leon Panetta, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin,
and several key members of Congress and foreign leaders who served during
Clinton’s time. Although the majority of these interviews were recorded in
Charlottesville, the job of collecting them also took the center’s scholars to other
places, including my own visits as project director to the residence of Nobel
Peace Prize winner Kim Dae- jung in Seoul and to Vaclav Havel’s modest but
whimsical office in Prague.
In November 2014, the first set of these interviews was opened to the public on
the Miller Center’s website. This book is an effort to present in an accessible way
a picture of the Clinton presidency drawn from those four hundred hours of oral
histories, an unmediated look into the White House as described by those who
were there. The chapters that follow include privileged, firsthand accounts of the
1. The center also has completed a major project on the life and career of Senator Edward

M. Kennedy, which included nearly three hundred interviews. A project on George W. Bush
follows the Clinton Project.
viii | PREFACE
1992 presidential campaign, a major budget victory in 1993, a failed effort to
reform the nation’s health care system, a successful reform of national welfare
policy, a recalibration of the nation’s position in a post–C old War world, a revo-
lution in congressional leadership, scandal management, re- election, and more.
They detail the inner workings of a presidency through success and failure, from
the painful learning curve of the first term through the effort to survive impeach-
ment in the second. And they provide candid portraiture of the rare political
gifts, prodigious intellect, and expansive appetites of the man who was the na-
tion’s forty- second president.
What distinguishes this published collection of oral histories from most is
that the reader has free access to the complete archive of opened interviews from
which its contents are extracted. Indeed, this book serves as a gateway to further
reading and research in that broader collection. Each of the interviews quoted in
this book can be found at http:// millercenter.org/ president/ clinton/ oralhistory.
There are two unique contributions these interviews make to our under-
standing of the modern presidency in general and of Bill Clinton’s presidency
in particular. First, because oral history is not subject to the legal regimens that
govern the release of official presidential papers, interviews can be opened for
public use relatively quickly. To the casual observer this will not seem to be very
significant. But today, for example, more than twenty years after George H. W.
Bush left office, only about 25 percent of his White House’s papers are available
to the public. (The rest either have not gone through the glacially slow process
of clearance by an understaffed archives administration or have been retained
in secret for reasons such as national security or personal privacy.) The dilatory
pace of this release deprives those who rely on documents alone as the bread of
their existence. Conversely, oral histories provide original evidence about recent
presidents while we wait out the protracted interval for the official papers to be
opened. If it were necessary to suspend our consideration of Clinton’s presi-
dency until half or more of his records becomes available, we would have to
delay any work until close to 2050.
Second, much that is historically important within every White House is
never written down— meaning that the written documents, even when they are
opened, will have significant deficiencies. To some extent this is a function of
the pace and culture of the modern presidency, where so much key interaction
takes place by word of mouth. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., recognized this prob-
lem as early as 1967, when in an essay for The Atlantic he bemoaned what use
of the telephone was doing to the presidential paper trails that historians had
always relied on— and he praised oral history as an invaluable corrective.2
2. Schlesinger, “On the Writing of Contemporary History,” The Atlantic, March 1967,
available at http:// www.theatlantic.com/ magazine/ toc/ 1967/ 03.
PREFACE | ix
By the time Bill Clinton came to the White House a quarter century later,
however, the paper- trail problem was catastrophically worse. The hostile inves-
tigative climate in Washington that began with the Vietnam War and Watergate,
and was exacerbated by incriminating email traffic during the Iran-C ontra affair
of the Reagan years, made careful record-k eeping in the White House a danger-
ous habit. The twin perils of leaks and subpoenas chilled virtually every form
of serious internal writing by presidents and their aides, as Clinton’s associates
confirmed over and over.
National Security Advisor Sandy Berger explained, “I did not keep notes, nor
did most of my colleagues. You recall that in the early days of the Clinton ad-
ministration there was a flap about whether [Deputy Treasury Secretary] Roger
Altman had tipped off the White House about something involving Resolution
Trust. I don’t even remember what the episode was. But Josh Steiner, who was
a young—t wentyish, thirtyish at most—s taffer at the Treasury Department had
a diary, and that diary got subpoenaed.3 Young Mr. Steiner spent tens of thou-
sands of dollars defending himself with respect to things that were in his diary.
I think one of the unfortunate consequences of what has been described as the
politics of personal destruction, which has crept into Washington to a large
degree, is that you don’t write things down. You don’t take notes.”
Press Secretary Joe Lockhart agreed. “I can tell you this. One challenge for
historians on this president is, for instance, if they ever want to find a piece of
paper I generated, don’t bother looking. They don’t exist. I didn’t keep them.
I didn’t have a bank account that could support the legal fees that keeping paper
would have [required]. My commitment to history is stronger than you might
think, but it was not that strong.”
And Deputy National Security Advisor James Steinberg told his interviewer: “I
have literally no notes from my seven-p lus years in government. I took no notes
because every time anybody took notes, they ended up … being subpoenaed.
It wasn’t worth it. It’s a huge loss. … But we understood the Federal Records Act
rules. I could make contemporaneous notes— if I threw them away at the end
of the day. And I did. They were not federal records. Nothing was saved. There’s
literally nothing— nothing left behind and nothing taken away.” Under such
conditions, memory often remains the only evidence of what happened.
But these interviews also provide an opportunity for scholars to probe into
areas for which there would normally be little written record under the best
of circumstances. On a matter of great delicacy, White House counsel Bernard
Nussbaum responded to questions about why he believed that rumors of an
extramarital relationship between Hillary Clinton and Deputy Counsel Vince
3. Congressional investigators were interested in knowing whether the president had
been given improper notice of a federal investigation into financial activities associated with
the failed Whitewater land deal in Arkansas. Steiner’s diary indicated contacts not otherwise
recorded.