From early stumbles to the rise and fall of Newt to Monica Lewinsky and the long economic boom, Clinton’s led us on a fascinating ride through the Roaring ’90s. Key advisers like Robert Rubin, Leon Panetta, George Stephanopoulos, Mike McCurry, Michael Waldman and Gene Sperling rode the roller coaster with him. Here are their memories.
The Deficit as Job One Robert Rubin, Secretary of the Treasury, 1995-1999 The moment that most sticks in my mind was the meeting we had with Clinton on Jan. 7, 1993, in Little Rock. We met with him for six and a half hours on what the budget strategy ought to be. From the beginning what we [the economic team] recommended was that there ought to be a dramatic change in policy, with the view that deficit reduction should create lower interest rates and spur higher confidence. Before the meeting George Stephanopoulos told me this was going to be hard, [that Clinton] would have to make that decision over time. But after about a half hour at the meeting Clinton turned to us in the dining room of the governor’s mansion in Little Rock. He said, “Look, I understand what deficit reduction means [in terms of public criticism for program cuts], but that’s the threshold issue if we’re going to get the economy back on track. Let’s do it.”
Bumpy Beginnings George Stephanopoulos, Senior advisor to the president, 1993-96 We came into the White House on Inauguration Day, and there were no computers. They’d all been disemboweled, all the hard drives taken out because of the various investigations going on in the White House. And we were already managing a crisis. Zoe Baird, Clinton’s nominee for attorney general, was flaming out on Capitol Hill. Her background check had belatedly turned up that she had failed to pay Social Security taxes for her household help and that the workers were illegal immigrants. She had to go, and we couldn’t even find a word processor to type a letter from Clinton accepting her withdrawal. She agreed to step aside only if the White House agreed to take the blame. My new deputy, David Dreyer, finally drafted a letter that stressed that she had fully disclosed her domestic situation to the transition team. Late that night, Clinton came to my office to sign the letter. He was dressed in sweatpants and a baseball cap and was munching a banana smeared with peanut butter. He told the group of staff waiting for him in my office that he was disappointed to lose Zoe, but added that he was happy to end it with a measure of grace. After he signed, I introduced him to Dreyer. Clinton stared at Dreyer’s long beard and asked when he had started.
“Yesterday,” Dreyer said.
Clinton smiled. “Well,” he said, “it sure didn’t take you long to screw everything up.” Showdown with NewtLeon Panetta, White House chief of staff, 1994-97 The government had shut down, and there had been a huge snowfall in Washington, I think about 20 inches. So the city was pretty much shut down because of the snow, but the country was shut down because of the government. And we were sitting in the Oval Office, and we’d gone through a series of negotiations. The president always had a hope he could cut a deal with [House Speaker Newt] Gingrich. As much as they had different philosophies and different views, the president always felt Gingrich was smart enough to see it was in his interest to cut a deal. Those of us who had experience on the Hill kept telling him it was impossible for Gingrich to compromise, particularly after leading the revolution on the Hill, that he was under tremendous pressure to hold the line. So I presented the president’s last offer and Gingrich and [House Majority Leader Dick] Armey said they couldn’t accept it. Finally the president just looked at them and said, “You know, I just can’t do what you want. I can’t go along with what you want for the country. I think it’s wrong. It may cost me the election, but you know, I’m not going to do it.” I think Gingrich had been playing the same card the president was playing–thinking that eventually the president would have to give in–and for the first time he realized it wasn’t going to happen. The line was drawn, and I think it was a turning point for the president, and probably one of the key turning points that led to his re-election.
The Monica Mess Mike McCurry, White House press secretary, 1995-98 When a reporter from the Washington Post called one day in January 1998 to tell me that an investigation of the president and a young woman named Monica Lewinsky was not mere rumor, I suddenly knew we were in for a huge and devastating story. But I didn’t know then how that story would further pollute Washington’s sulfurous atmosphere over the course of the coming months. The Internet helped drive the nonstop drumbeat of the endless news cycle and made it impossible to focus on anything else, even the telltale signs of an approaching crisis in Kosovo that would lead America to war. I dreaded my daily drilling, walking into the press room each afternoon knowing that the reams of information in my briefing book would yield to queries from “respectable” news organizations that were dredged from Drudge. Even the humorous asides that we concocted in advance–“I feel like I’m double-parked in a no-comment zone”–didn’t do well as body armor.
The great irony of the Clinton presidency is rooted in both the promise and the excess of the Information Age: President Clinton successfully guided economic and regulatory policy in a direction that allowed the Internet and the New Economy to blossom. But the Internet also helped make whispered rumor and bitter argument a defining feature of political discourse. The new technologies of communication gave life and legs to a story that might have run its course sooner, doing damage to the president’s ability to govern. The reinforcing cycles of Internet and cable television kept extending the shelf life of the story, turning it into a soap opera. We couldn’t find the “off” switch. I’d see these CNN promos under their “Crisis at the White House” logo, announcing that they planned to carry my routine daily briefing live. So I’d call CNN and ask “Why are you airing my briefing?” And they’d say, “Because that means we get 100,000 more households.” But simultaneously, those same technologies, especially the Internet, improved productivity and strengthened the national economy, which, in the end, rescued the president from the embarrassment of impeachment and scandal.
Midterm Blues Michael Waldman, Clinton’s former chief speechwriter The 1994 midterm election was a hammer blow, just devastating to Clinton and those around him. It was the worst electoral backlash for a new president in a century, and it was hard for him to escape the sense of personal rejection. But his mind was churning. He talked about how the public no longer wanted a strong, permanent governing class, and he saw the election as revealing just how profound was the distrust of government. He knew progressives had to do something to restore that confidence. If people thought government couldn’t manage a two-car parade, they’d never trust it to be involved in big things like health care. “We have to start having some small successes,” he told one meeting at Camp David. A few weeks later he delivered a State of the Union address that was an hour and 20 minutes long. All the pundits mocked it and it looked like his presidency was in the ashes. But it was a clear return to the centrist theme he had first run on. His recovery, in fact, had begun.
Rider on the Storm Gene Sperling, national economic advisor We’re in the [white house] family theater, going through the [1998 State of the Union] speech, the world outside is dominated by scandal allegations, and there he is, at this lectern, with his glasses on and us sitting in the crowd and he’s up there like the maestro, rewriting, firing questions to his policy staffers, and he comes to the punch line Michael Waldman [Clinton’s chief speechwriter] and I had written: “Save the surplus for Social Security.” And he looks at it and says, “No, that’s not quite right. Why don’t we just talk about the surplus and then we’ll just say, ‘I can answer in four simple words: Save Social Security first’.” And everybody just said, “Perfect.” And he said, “I still got it.” There he was, able to do every single person’s job in that room as well as they could, and everybody is looking at him work, while all this is going on and thinking, “This guy is amazing–his concentration is amazing under this type of circumstance.”
