The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House

563 Pages·2006·3.49 MB·English

by  John F. Harris

Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue: THE ASCENT
Section One
One - BELLS OF HOPE
Two - BEGINNINGS
Three - CROWN JEWEL
Four - HIGH NOON
Five - THE CLINTON STYLE
Six - FACES OF WASHINGTON
Seven - WAGER
Eight - PARTNERS
Nine - WHITEWATER
Ten - HEALTH CARE
Eleven - SEA OF FLAMES
Twelve - FLOOD LEADS TO FORTUNE
Thirteen - “NO! NO! NO! . . .”
Section Two
Fourteen - WINTER
Fifteen - UNDERSIDE
Sixteen - RELEVANCE
Seventeen - BALANCE
Eighteen - ROLL EVERY DIE
Nineteen - FUNK
Twenty - SEEDS OF TRIUMPH
Photo Insert
Twenty-one - SEEDS OF DISASTER
Twenty-two - WELFARE
Twenty-three - RE-ELECT
Section Three
Twenty-four - SECOND CHANCE
Twenty-five - THE QUIET YEAR
Twenty-six - THE SULLEN YEAR
Twenty-seven - MY KIND OF GUY
Twenty-eight - ALLIANCE
Twenty-nine - UNSETTLED
Thirty - TRAPPED
Thirty-one - LOYALISTS
Thirty-two - AFRICAN JOURNEY
Thirty-three - SURVIVOR
Thirty-four - ROCK-BOTTOM TRUTH
Thirty-five - AGE OF EXTREMES
Section Four
Thirty-six - KOSOVO
Thirty-seven - EMPIRE STATE
Thirty-eight - “AL JUST NEEDS TO BE HIMSELF"
Thirty-nine - SPRING TERM
Forty - TERROR
Forty-one - CAMP DAVID
Forty-two - EXIT
Forty-three - ARGUMENT WITHOUT END
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright Page
For Ann, with boundless love
Prologue
THE ASCENT
October 3, 1991, arrived as radiant morning in Little Rock, still more like
summer than fall. The governor of Arkansas began the day with a jog through
the city that had been his home for the past fifteen years. In a few hours, he was
due to make his appearance at the Old State House to announce his candidacy
for the presidency of the United States. The moment had arrived at last.
Clinton, promising face of America’s New South, had been fantasizing about
a day like this for decades. He had been organizing his life in pursuit of it for
years. He had been stewing about the merits of a candidacy in 1992 for months.
He had been agonizing, finally, about the precise words he would deliver this
day for the past several hours—an all-nighter at the Arkansas governor’s
mansion. At noon, a crowd of several hundred well-wishers gathered on the lawn
to hear him.
Anticipation about Bill Clinton’s future was nothing new in these parts.
Virtually everyone who had ever known the man—only forty-five years old as
he began his ascent to national power that morning—had supposed that he would
someday seek the White House. The young boy’s teachers predicted it in the
1950s. Two decades later, his law school girlfriend was so sure of it that she
dropped her own life plans and picked up for Arkansas, deciding to merge
Clinton’s life mission with her own. All through the 1980s, speculation about
Clinton’s career path had been a favorite parlor game of political Arkansans:
When would he run? His many friends delighted in the prospect. His enemies,
fewer in number but perhaps greater in passion, dreaded it. Neither camp
doubted the day would come.
It said something about Clinton’s capacity for drama that he could take a
moment of such transparent inevitability and infuse it with a measure of
suspense. Until Clinton actually uttered the words, however, there would be a
pinch of doubt. The governor, after all, had summoned a similar crowd of
supporters four years earlier. Old friends flew in from around the country. Then,
after a night of deliberations, he shocked the crowd by announcing that he would
not run for president in 1988. The friends and aides who knew Clinton best,
aware of how little prepared he was for the personal scrutiny that would
accompany a national campaign, felt sure that had been a prudent decision.
Many of these same people wondered whether his impending decision this time
might be a rash one. Clinton soon made their doubts moot. At noon, he delivered
the words he had spent a lifetime practicing in his imagination: “Today I proudly
announce my candidacy for president of the United States.”
A lifetime of preparation had culminated in the usual fashion for Clinton: in a
swirling cloud of last-minute chaos and indecision. The speech preparation had
proceeded with all the ease and grace of someone passing a kidney stone. The
evening was revealing in several respects. One was how Clinton, whether by
design or subconscious preference, placed himself between the tug of different
advisers. It was a pattern to be repeated endless times in the years ahead. He was
at once conflict averse, hating personal confrontation, and drawn to conflict as a
management style. Clinton found rivalries among his subordinates liberating. He
found his ideas and options, he once acknowledged, “in the seams” between the
clashing ideas of others. In this case the tug—civil, but spirited—for Clinton’s
mind was between a Washington consultant, Frank Greer, and a young
speechwriter and policy aide named Bruce Reed, on hand to help Clinton from
his perch at the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). Greer kept
pushing more personal detail and uplifting rhetoric about Clinton’s rise from
humble, small-town roots. Reed kept pushing for more policy substance, the
kind of details that would highlight Clinton as a new breed of Democrat, more
innovative and less wedded to old liberal pieties and programs. The Washington
visitors toiled away downstairs while Clinton stayed upstairs hunched over
successive drafts. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first lady of Arkansas, hovered
over the proceedings with the discerning eye of the corporate lawyer she was.
She softened her formidable presence with an unexpected maternal streak,
appearing in the speechwriters’ den with a plate of cookies. The speech was
finished at dawn. The governor went to clear his mind with a morning jog
through the streets of Little Rock. Clinton later told Reed that he found the
announcement speech a difficult process in part because he was not used to
working with speechwriters. In Arkansas, the governor simply wrote his own
speeches, or more often fashioned them on the spot from scraps of jotted notes.
Reed had been drawn to Clinton because of his reputation as an up-and-comer in
national politics. Clinton’s comment was a striking reminder that this lifelong
political talent was taking his game into an entirely new arena.
The opening hours of the campaign that would carry Clinton to the presidency
were notable also for their intimacy. Most Americans are familiar with the shape
and size of a presidential campaign only as it nears conclusion. They see charter
airplanes and motorcades, Secret Service agents and press handlers, cameras and
boom mikes, bands and banners—the entire swollen enterprise revolving around
a politician who by this date has become one of the most recognizable faces on
the planet. At its inception, though, a presidential campaign looks more like this:
four guys sitting in a hotel bar.
The bar in this instance was the lobby of the Washington Court Hotel near
Capitol Hill. A college football game was playing on the television, attracting
considerably more interest than the newly minted presidential candidate, who
attracted none. Clinton had traveled to the capital on a recruiting trip. His
campaign needed to assemble a roster of national-caliber consultants. Joined by
Bruce Lindsey, his longtime friend and retainer, Clinton had arranged a barroom
interview with James Carville, a flamboyant but erratic Louisianan, and his
younger and more even-keeled sidekick, a Texas native named Paul Begala. The
dynamic of this meeting was a bit peculiar, since it was ambiguous who exactly
was interviewing whom. Begala and Carville were then very much in vogue, as
the hot hands on the political circuit that year, and they were being courted by
several other Democratic campaigns. It was the prospective client who was
making the pitch, while the would-be employees listened inscrutably. Yet it was
a pitch so expert that Begala would play over in his mind for years what had
happened this afternoon. Often politicians try to make a winning impression on
political operatives by demonstrating their savvy. They boast of their fund-
raising potential, or likely endorsements, or sophisticated insights into the latest
polls. Even at this early date, Clinton had a reputation as the consummate
politician, so the operatives sat down waiting for a discussion laden with inside
dope. They got nothing of the sort. Instead, Clinton launched into an
impassioned discourse—nothing short of a sermon, really—about how troubled
he was about his country, with its fraying social fabric and struggling economy.
What kind of world would his eleven-year-old daughter find by the time she was
an adult? As the meeting closed, it dawned on Begala that a presidential
candidate had talked for hours with political strategists and uttered not a word
about strategy. The young consultant swooned. In his crush, however, he kept
enough detachment to contemplate that the session had been a put-on, and what
seemed like a wonderfully guileless performance actually had been a more
sophisticated brand of artifice. “Is this guy for real?” he asked Carville, who
mumbled noncommittally. The consultants signed on, and Begala would soon be
sharing hotels and airplanes with Clinton as a traveling aide. But he would have
numerous occasions in the years ahead to return to his original question.
As Clinton’s barroom sermon suggested, the 1992 presidential election arrived
amid a national mood of brooding and uncertainty. The anxiety had two
interwoven threads. One was a question about the state of the country. The other
was a question about the state of the Democratic Party.
It was an odd moment for the United States to be feeling cheerless. One of
history’s monumental conflicts—liberal democracy versus communism—was
just coming to an end, with a triumph for free society over totalitarianism. The
United States had reason to be proud of its victory over the Soviet Union, which
did not come in the cataclysmic war that people had feared so long but rather
was the result of a patient, decades-long effort at containment. The country,
moreover, was just months past a swift and impressive victory in a regional war
against Iraq, rolling back that country’s illegal invasion of Kuwait in the summer
of 1990. Yet triumphalism faded with astonishing swiftness. The victories
overseas seemed to belong to a closing chapter in history. As Americans looked
toward the future, there was a widespread belief that the United States had lost
its traditional edge in productivity and technological innovation to more
competitive economies in Asia. Within a few years such fears would be proven
fanciful, but the belief that the United States was a receding economic power
reflected mainstream opinion in the early 1990s. There hardly seemed occasion,
moreover, to celebrate the country’s new status as the world’s lone superpower.
All the military might that had been on such dazzling display in Iraq did not
seem to have much utility in the Balkans, where the end of the Cold War had
unleashed ancient hatreds that led to the breakup of Yugoslavia and the killing of
thousands in ethnic warfare of shocking ferocity. The emerging generation of
global tests, as they were perceived in 1992, seemed to underscore American
weakness rather more than power in the world.