All Too Human: A Political Education (8 page)

Clinton was on his way to Tennessee that Friday, where a throat specialist would make the first try at treating his persistent hoarseness. Anticipating the worst — or the best, depending on your point of view — we had prepared a statement for Clinton welcoming Cuomo into the race. As the filing deadline approached, CNN went live with cameras in Albany and New Hampshire. They even had a camera trained on the idling plane. Then Bernie Shaw broke in with a bulletin. Cuomo was out. The first big break of the campaign.

Clinton was just about to exit when I reached his plane. “Don't get off,” I said. “Listen to this.” Cuomo approached the microphones to make it official, and I simulcasted his statement to Clinton over the phone. Clinton seemed unfazed by the news, but I knew he was making the calculations in his head, and I guessed he was pleased. One of the reasons he had been so reluctant to hit Cuomo early was to avoid prodding him into the race in a fit of personal pique. Without pausing to comment, Clinton dictated a gracious statement for me to release to the press.

Meanwhile, Rahm Emanuel was playing the tough guy. “Damn.” His fists pounding his thighs. “It would have been so great if he came in. We'd rip his head off.” But he didn't linger. Cuomo's decision would free up a lot of New York money, so he had to hit the phones.

David Wilhelm then came into my office, and for a moment we just looked at each other across the desk. Like me, he was more liberal than centrist, more old than new Democrat.

“You didn't want him in, did you?”

“What, are you kidding?”

“Me neither.”

Not a single vote had been cast, but the complicated, almost alchemic process that creates conventional wisdom had made Clinton the front-runner. A similar process was solidifying my spot in Clinton's inner circle. The daily phone calls, endless meetings, late-night games of hearts on the plane, and early-morning reviews of the headlines were deepening the bond. Clinton seemed to have confidence in me, and he coached me on what I needed to know — even taking me into the bathroom once to deliver an important message on how to deal with a particular woman friend of his.

The night before, I had shared a car with Susan Thomases, a brassy New York lawyer and Democratic campaign veteran who was also one of Hillary's best friends. Exhausted from an all-night speech meeting and a full day of events, I didn't make a good impression. Bad move: She apparently told Hillary, who told Clinton that I was rude. When we got to the airport that morning, he gave me some advice over the urinals: “George, you know that Hillary and I have a lot of good women friends our age. You have to pay attention to them, ask them what they think so they don't resent you. You're smart, but you're a boy. You have to go out of your way to be nice to them.”

By the end of the year I was doing better in that department. Every Tuesday, before her weekly “ladies lunch” in Little Rock, Clinton's mother, Virginia Kelley, would stop by my office to chat before leaving me with a powerful hug as thanks for “taking care of my Bill.” Hillary knew she could count on me to get things done and let me know how much she appreciated it by inviting me to the family Christmas party along with a dozen or so longtime friends of the Clintons. We played parlor games and sang carols — an old-fashioned American-style Christmas in the South. The ethnic in me found the whole scene exotic but warm. I was becoming part of the family.

3 HEARING HOOFBEATS

A
fter a few days off with Joan at a funky Ozark resort called Eureka Springs, I caught up with Clinton on New Year's Day in Charleston, South Carolina. He and Hillary wanted a quiet family night after their annual visit to Renaissance Weekend — a gathering of credentialed baby boomers who flew to Hilton Head every New Year's for earnest talk and energetic networking. Once they were settled in their suite with Chelsea and her choice of movie rentals, I went out for a walk. The warm salted breeze and the gaslights guarding the turn-of-the century town houses by the bay connected me to another time. But I was thinking about the year ahead.

Things were looking good. Not only were we succeeding, but our rivals were stumbling. Cuomo was out, and Wilder would soon follow. Nobody took Tsongas seriously yet, and Harkin signaled that
he
wasn't a serious threat by taking a two-week vacation in the Caribbean. Jerry Brown was still a joke, and Kerrey had been hampered by a staff coup, weak fund-raising, and the revelation that he didn't provide health insurance to employees at the fitness centers he owned — a devastating charge given that the senator was trying to make universal health care the signature issue of his campaign.

Our team was starting to gel. Dee Dee Myers came in from California to be press secretary, and Bruce Reed moved down from D.C. to run the issues shop. I was back on the road — this time for good. I couldn't have been happier with where we were or how I fit in. If our luck held, we'd get the nomination. If it held a little longer …

The next day's main event was in an antebellum mansion with a staircase out of
Gone with the Wind
. As night fell, about a hundred supporters crowded up the stairs to watch Clinton go to work. These were his people — progressive Southern Democrats. And this was his place — a room big enough to perform in but small enough to forge personal connections. Mellowed by his brief holiday and building hopes for the new year, Clinton spoke in a soft drawl stretched out just a touch for his neighbors' ears. The crowd was rapt with parochial pride and the hope that this night might be a memory in the making — the year we began with the next president.

Clinton didn't simply speak to the group; he conducted it. When he recounted the daily struggles of single women working their way off welfare, they nodded in empathy. When he left rhetorical questions hanging over the foyer, they responded with murmurs and muffled shouts. When he condensed his life's ambition into a single closing sentence — “I desperately want to be your president, but you have to be Americans again” — the applause wrapped around him like a communal hug.

Joe Klein and I took it all in from the back of the room with tears in our eyes — moved by the emotional moment, expectation, and apprehension. Reporters are paid to be dispassionate, but Joe was either smitten with Clinton or doing a smooth job of spinning me. We talked openly and often now, either on the phone or when he hooked up with us on the road. As the paying guests sat down to dinner, we retreated to the basement. The campaign was going so well that we slipped into what Joe called a “dark-off,” whispering fears of future misfortune like a couple of black-robed crones spitting in the wind to ward off the evil eye.
We're peaking too early. It can't stay this good. Too tempting a target. What goes up must come down
.

“I come from Russian Jews,” Joe said. “Whenever things are good, we start to hear hoofbeats — the Cossacks.”

“Yeah, I know just what you mean.”

“Don't try to out-dark me on this one, George. It's in my genes.”

“Mine too,” I replied. “The Turks.”

The hoofbeats we heard that night weren't Cossacks heading for a Russian
shtetl
or Ottoman Turks bearing down on a Peloponnesian
chorio
. They were the ghosts of Clinton's past, summoned to life by his campaign's success. From Hot Springs and Little Rock, Fayetteville and Oxford, they were gathering together and galloping north — to New Hampshire.

New Hampshire's not only the first presidential primary; it's also the most intimate. You meet people where they live and work and play, and talk to them over cake donuts and Greek pizza, over Friday night boilermakers in the dimly lit Manchester men's clubs, and in bowling alleys on Saturday afternoons where families roll games of duckpins. Only in New Hampshire do presidential hopefuls still go door-to-door. Salt stains crept up my loafers as I followed Clinton through the snow.

A master at what James Madison called the “little arts of popularity,” Clinton was made for this kind of hand-to-hand campaign. No one could match him at a house party. He'd greet each guest individually while I checked in with headquarters from the kitchen phone. Then I'd settle on the second-floor landing with a Styrofoam cup of strong coffee and watch him do his stuff in the living room below.

Clinton would lay out his economic plan, and they'd fire back questions. Flinty and frugal, New Hampshirites wanted to know exactly how he was going to pay for his programs. But that year they also needed help. New Hampshire was mired in recession. Clinton's new ideas on health care, jobs, and student loans sounded sensible, and he answered every question — in detail. No one could stump him, and people walked away impressed. Here was a politician who cared enough to really know the pressures families faced, and with definite ideas on what could be done to ease them.

I summed up that sensibility in a quote I gave Joe Klein for his January profile of Clinton in
New York
magazine. “Specificity is a character issue this year,” I said. Like all good spin, it was a hope dressed up as an observation. We wanted Clinton to be seen as the thoughtful candidate — the man with a plan who knew what to do — and we needed that to be the character test of 1992. A good spinner is like a good lawyer: You highlight the facts that help your client's case and downplay the ones that don't. When the facts are unfavorable, you argue relevance. That's what I was trying to do: blunt the questions about Clinton's private behavior by pointing to his public virtues and saying that was what voters cared about most. It was, but “specificity” obviously wasn't the only character issue in 1992.

Which brings us back to Clinton and women. That front had been mostly quiet through the fall, except for “sweet, sweet Connie.” Immortalized in the Grand Funk Railroad classic “We're an American Band,” Connie Hamzy was a Little Rock groupie who was infamous on the rock circuit for her lusty backstage adventures. But in November 1991, she claimed that her favors had also been bestowed upon a certain Arkansas governor.

My assistant, Steve “Scoop” Cohen, heard about it on a local talk-radio station. They were promoting an upcoming issue of
Penthouse
, in which photos of Connie would be accompanied by her claim that Clinton had propositioned her eight years earlier in a hotel lobby. Hamzy's charge felt like a mortal threat to our embryonic campaign, so we scrambled into action.

I contacted Clinton on his way to a Texas fund-raiser, but he didn't seem too concerned. Sure, he'd met Hamzy, he recalled, but not the way she said. As he quickly recounted the story over the phone, I imagined his eyes getting wider and detected a little laugh in his voice. They had run into each other in the lobby of the North Little Rock Hilton. The governor was leaving a speech with a few associates when Hamzy, who had been sunbathing by the hotel pool, ran up to him, flipped down her bikini top, and asked, “What do you think of these?” Clinton seemed to take great pleasure in picturing the scene again.

Hillary was less amused. “We have to destroy her story,” she said from her seat next to him on the plane. I was with her. Hamzy's story didn't sound funny to me either. It was flimsy, but it could still do some damage if we didn't snuff it out fast. Thankfully, the facts seemed to be on our side. This wasn't just a “he said, she said” case. Working with Clinton's gubernatorial staff, I was able to round up sworn affidavits from three people who'd accompanied Clinton, witnessed the encounter, and corroborated his account.

The story broke before dawn on CNN
Headline News
. Barely into my first cup of coffee, I called CNN central in Atlanta. It took a little while to find someone with responsibility, but when I finally reached a night editor, I started screaming: “You can't run something like this without proof. You have to check a charge before you run with it.”

Stopping CNN was key. If they ran the story all day, however briefly, other news organizations could cite them to justify running their own stories. Our denials would be folded into the accounts, but the damage would be done. All of the trashy images —
Penthouse
, rock and roll groupie, bikini — would be out there, and they might stick. If a bad joke merited four stories in the
Post
, who knew what this would get?

When other reporters started calling, I refused to comment on the record. A denial, just like a mention on CNN, could become a pretext to run the story. So I denied it off the record and offered to fax the affidavits rebutting the charge on the same basis. The strategy was to convince legitimate news organizations that Hamzy's charge wasn't credible enough to be aired. It worked. CNN dropped the story after a single mention, and none of the other networks picked it up.

We'd survived our first bimbo eruption. The Hamzy episode was a test — of Clinton's character, our campaign's competence, and the media's resistance to tabloid trash. We all passed. Clinton was telling the truth, we defended him aggressively on the facts, and the media ignored the story despite the juicy details. Too bad it was only a drill.

My reward that night was an appreciative phone call from Hillary and the governor, who thanked me between spoonfuls of mango ice cream from the Menger hotel in San Antonio. This wasn't exactly the job satisfaction I imagined getting from a presidential campaign, but the exhilaration at being shot at and missed was tangible, and I told myself that the situation might have spun out of control if I hadn't been there. This first dustup also planted seeds of indignation and resentment in my psyche against Clinton's accusers and their potential accomplices in the press. I was mirroring the Clintons' mood, absorbing their anger and fear and turning it into my motivation. We weren't about to let “them” steal the campaign. I didn't know where the next charge would come from, but I was ready to fight.

Over the next month, my combativeness was calmed by rising poll numbers and the absence of dropping shoes. But that artificial sense of security disappeared on January 16 — our first “garbage day.” The
Star
tabloid was faxing around a story alleging that Clinton had had affairs with five Arkansas women, including Gennifer Flowers, a former lounge singer, and Elizabeth Ward, a former Miss America. The allegations had first been raised in Clinton's 1990 gubernatorial race, when a state employee named Larry Nichols filed a libel suit against Clinton. But the women denied them, the story evaporated, and Clinton won reelection.