John F. Harris - The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House

Contents

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 Americas 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 hoursan all-nighter at the Arkansas governors mansion. At noon, a crowd of several hundred well-wishers gathered on the lawn to hear him.

Anticipation about Bill Clintons future was nothing new in these parts. Virtually everyone who had ever known the manonly forty-five years old as he began his ascent to national power that morninghad supposed that he would someday seek the White House. The young boys 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 Clintons life mission with her own. All through the 1980s, speculation about Clintons 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 Clintons 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 tugcivil, but spiritedfor Clintons 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 Clintons 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. Clintons 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 bannersthe 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 discoursenothing short of a sermon, reallyabout 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.