Read All Too Human: A Political Education Online
Authors: George Stephanopoulos
Official Washington was transfixed, watching and talking at the same time. Minutes after he first appeared on CNN, Andrea Mitchell called to say, “This guy's a nutcase.” Brit Hume observed, “You guys dodged a bullet on this one.” “At least I take my medication,” joked Bob Boorstin, who often spoke publicly about his struggle to overcome manic depression. Hillary and I had exchanged apologies since our confrontation the week before, and she called to ask if we should “be giving psychological tests to our nominees.” The next day's coverage described Inman's performance with adjectives like “breathtaking,” “bizarre,” and “baffling.” Not since Ross Perot cited an alleged Republican conspiracy to disrupt his daughter's wedding as his reason for quitting the 1992 presidential race had the political world seen such a public display of delusion.
We didn't know that Inman was going to act out at his press conference. No one guessed that he would be so brazen, and we probably couldn't have stopped him if we tried. Accepting that the motives of others are inherently obscure, I believe there was a method to Inman's apparent madness — just as his prime target intuited at the time. “I think Inman is not crazy,” wrote Safire in response to the admiral's attack. “That was the old disinformation specialist in full manipulative mode, screening his final evasion in a newsy concoction.” On this weird episode, he deserves the last word.
Two days after Inman's withdrawal, six months to the day after Vince Foster's suicide, one year following President Clinton's first inauguration, Attorney General Janet Reno appointed a Republican former prosecutor and Wall Street lawyer named Robert Fiske to be the Whitewater special counsel. That morning's
New York Times
poll found that President Clinton had a higher approval rating than either Reagan or Carter on their first anniversaries in office and that the American public had more confidence in the economy than at any time since 1990. The pattern of the Clinton presidency was set.
C
linton loves giving presents. All year long he compiles lists and stuffs his closets with gifts for Christmas and special occasions. On February 10, my thirty-third birthday, he walked into my office holding a tiny brass battleship with an alligator clip attached to the back. The front was etched in black: “PT 109.” It was a rare souvenir from the 1960 campaign, one of those tie clips that marked a Kennedy man.
That same night, ABC News evoked memories of Nixon and Watergate. Eighteen minutes of
World News Tonight's
twenty-two-minute broadcast were dedicated to Whitewater, echoing the time in 1972 when anchorman Walter Cronkite startled the political world by devoting nearly an entire CBS evening news broadcast to the still-unfolding Watergate scandal. But in those early months of 1994, ABC wasn't alone. By mid-March, the three major network newscasts had spent 220 minutes on the fallout from Whitewater — three times what they gave to health care.
The saturation coverage reinforced our bunker mentality, which only made matters worse. The tighter we crouched, the harder they hit, and the stories just kept on coming: Clinton accuser David Hale cut a deal with Special Counsel Fiske; congressional hearings were held on whether the administration had tried to derail the White-water investigation; a
Post
story revealed previously undisclosed White House/Treasury “contacts” about the inquiry, precipitating a raft of subpoenas to the White House and the resignation of White House Counsel Bernie Nussbaum.
The
Times
also discovered that Hillary Clinton had parlayed a $1,000 investment into a $100,000 profit in the late 1970s commodities market, which provided a plausible theory as to why she had been so adamant about refusing to publicly release the Whitewater documents. The only real “news” in the documents, which would have included the Clintons' 1978-79 tax returns, would have been Hillary's windfall. Other Rose Law partners who had come to Washington with Hillary faced personal ethical problems. Associate White House Counsel Bill Kennedy, who had been responsible for doing background checks on administration nominees with “nanny problems,” had to resign after belatedly admitting that
he
had failed to pay social security taxes for his household help. Webb Hubbell resigned from the Justice Department over a billing dispute with the Rose Law Firm that later became the basis for a fraud and embezzlement conviction.
Whitewater became the catchall term for any allegation of unseemliness or impropriety against anyone anywhere near the Clintons or the White House — and it stuck. Health care and the rest of our legislative agenda were stalled, and the president's approval ratings drifted down. With the fire coming in from so many different directions, I was almost nostalgic for New Hampshire — especially when, for the first time, I had to confront a White House scandal of my own.
It began with a heated phone call on a harried day.
February 25 was not a casual Friday at the White House. I woke to a 5:45 bulletin from my clock radio: An Israeli fanatic had walked into the courtyard of a mosque in Hebron and massacred several dozen Muslims observing their day of prayer. Minutes later, I got a fill from the situation room and fed the latest facts to the television reporters preparing their morning stand-ups from the North Lawn. To make sure the president wasn't blindsided, I left a message at the usher's office for him to check in before his morning jog.
Our morning staff meeting focused on Hebron and health care, but we also spent a few minutes discussing the coverage of a tumultuous Senate hearing into the Resolution Trust Corporation's investigation of Madison Guaranty and Whitewater. The RTC reported to Deputy Treasury Secretary (and old Clinton friend) Roger Altman, but Republicans had demanded that Altman remove himself from supervising the investigation because his close ties to the president created a conflict of interest. Here was another needless fight: I argued that Roger couldn't, wouldn't, and didn't need to do anything improper to shield the Clintons, so why risk the appearance of impropriety caused by having him oversee the investigation? But Nussbaum cut me off, saying that Altman's recusing himself would be a sign of weakness. I didn't pursue it because I had to help brief the president for a nine
A.M.
meeting on the Aldrich Ames spy case with members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. At 9:45, I hopped into a White House car with Harold Ickes for a health care strategy session on Capitol Hill. By 11:30, I was back at the White House to help brief Clinton for his press conference on the Hebron tragedy.
The crisis had scrambled everyone's schedules. White House public liaison Alexis Herman asked me to fill in for Ickes at a meeting with business lobbyists on health care, which made me late for a long-scheduled lunch with two reporters writing a political history of the deficit. But after half a sandwich and a few minutes of conversation, Heather popped in with a request from the White House social office. Could I do an emergency “grip and grin” over in the East Room? A hundred party activists from Iowa were waiting for a reception with the president, who was running an hour late. Hillary and the vice president had already come and gone, and they needed another body to keep the crowd warm. Since the Iowa caucuses were our first barricade against a 1996 primary challenge, I headed to the East Room.
By the time I returned to my office, a few dozen phone messages had piled up. One of them was from Josh Steiner — an old friend from the Dukakis campaign who was now chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen. He was calling to let me know that Roger Altman had told Howell Raines, the editorial-page editor of the
Times
, that he would recuse himself from the Whitewater matter after all. That pissed me off — not because I disagreed with Altman's decision, but because the White House was still publicly defending his original stance. It would have been nice to know about the reversal before the
Times
did.
Already upset by the Altman news, I got something else off my chest to Josh. I had heard that Jay Stephens, a former U.S. attorney, might have been appointed by the RTC to investigate the financing of Whitewater, and I couldn't believe it was true. When Clinton took office, he had followed the practice of his predecessors and asked each U.S. attorney, including Stephens, to submit a pro forma resignation. Instead of quietly submitting his resignation letter like his colleagues, Stephens had called a press conference and gone on
Nightline
to accuse Clinton of “obstructing justice,” saying that the president was trying to derail his investigation of Democratic congressman Dan Rostenkowski.
How could a Clinton hater like Stephens possibly conduct an impartial investigation? This is unbelievable! He has a clear conflict. How could it happen?
I blew up at Josh and demanded to know how such an unfair choice came to be made and whether the decision was final. Doing his best to calm me down, Josh kept his cool and checked the facts. Later, he said that Stephens had been approved by an independent board of career RTC officials, adding that there was nothing we could do about it. When I heard these details, I knew he was right.
But I was still mad. A little while later, Harold was in my office when Altman called to explain his conversation with the
Times
. We yelled at each other over the speakerphone about Howell Raines and Jay Stephens until I concluded by suggesting that Roger write the president a note explaining his actions. Later in the Oval, I reviewed the day's events with Clinton as he packed up his desk, including a mention of Roger's recusal and the Jay Stephens decision. Hearing these two annoying pieces of information at the end of a long day that began at dawn with the news from Hebron, the president responded with a weary shrug. That was it — four encounters totaling about ten minutes over the course of a fourteen-hour period during which I had more than a hundred conversations. I didn't expect to deal with either Altman's recusal or Stephens's appointment again.
Until I got subpoenaed. Special Counsel Robert Fiske's grand jury requested that the White House turn over documents and testimony about any “contacts” between White House and Treasury Department officials concerning the investigation into Whitewater and Madison Guaranty, and my February 25 phone conversations with Steiner and Altman constituted “contacts.” By the end of my White House tenure, receiving a subpoena was a routine matter, another item in the in-box. But when news of these first grand jury requests was splashed in bold type across front pages all over the country, the whole West Wing was rocked. We looked like the Nixon White House now. Although I didn't think I'd done anything wrong, I understood how my phone calls to Altman and Steiner could be made to look like sinister interference with an independent investigation.
Carville was my first call, and he could tell from the sound of my voice that this wasn't just one of my run-of-the-mill bouts of darkness. He jumped in his Jeep, picked me up at the Southwest Gate, and calmed me down by driving around downtown Washington before dropping me back at the White House with a parting piece of advice: Get a lawyer. James then called his own attorney, Bob Barnett, a friend of the Clintons' who had played George Bush in our 1992 debate prep, and Bob offered to meet with me Saturday afternoon.
Over fresh fish at a little place off Dupont Circle, Bob explained that he couldn't be my attorney because his wife, Rita Braver, was covering the White House for CBS News. But he left the table and placed a call to the best political defense lawyer he knew. A few minutes later, I was heading to Stan Brand's office on Fifteenth Street. There are certain events — like my phone call to Josh — that acquire meaning only in retrospect. Others seem significant as they happen: your first kiss, your college graduation, your first house.
The first time you hire a criminal lawyer.
I remembered how my father had teased me by asking when I was going to stop playing around in Washington and get a real job. Now I understood finally and deeply what I should never have let myself forget: that I wasn't a precocious kid playing at politics, that my job wasn't just a game. Walking down Connecticut Avenue as a top White House official about to hire an attorney to represent me in a criminal investigation was a rite of initiation.
For my new lawyer, it was a routine Saturday. A former counsel to House Speaker Tip O'Neill, Stan had carved out his niche in the Capitol by defending political figures facing high-profile investigations. Brand was the perfect attorney for me because he specialized in cases at the intersection of politics, criminal law, and communicating in the Washington echo chamber. He answered the door himself in baseball cap and jeans and asked me to tell him everything. “Don't worry,” he said. “It's all privileged, and I can't defend you if I don't know the whole story.” After hearing me describe the phone calls with Roger and Josh, he was even more reassuring: “George, losing your temper may look bad, but it's not a crime. You didn't do anything wrong. The only way you can get in trouble now is if you don't tell the truth — and that's not going to happen.”
A few days later, a phone call from Stan rekindled my anxiety. “I have some bad news,” he said. “Josh kept a diary, and there might be some bad stuff in there.”
Bad stuff
? I knew my phone call hadn't been the finest few minutes of my career, but nothing else had happened — how bad could it be? For two nights, I barely slept. Then Stan put me out of my misery by calling back with the specifics, which he had finally received from Josh's lawyer. “It looks bad, George,” he said. “But in the end, the diary is exculpatory.” Here's what it said:
After Howell Raines from the
New York Times
called to say that they were going to write a brutal editorial, RA decided to recuse himself. Harold and George then called to say that BC was furious. They also asked how Jay Stephens, the former USA, had been hired to be outside counsel in this case. Simply outrageous that RTC hired him. But even more amazing when George suggested to me that we needed to find a way to get rid of him. Persuaded George that firing him would be incredibly stupid and improper.