Inside the Clinton White House Inside the Clinton White House An Oral History RUSSELL L. RILEY 1 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-i n- Publication Data Names: Riley, Russell L. (Russell Lynn), 1958– Title: Inside the Clinton White House: an oral history / Russell L. Riley. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2016. | Series: Oxford oral history series Identifiers: LCCN 2016010377 | ISBN 9780190605469 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Clinton, Bill, 1946—Interviews. | United States—Politics and government—1993–2001—Interviews. | Clinton, Bill, 1946—Friends and associates— Interviews. | Presidents—United States—Interviews. | BISAC: HISTORY / United States / 20th Century. | HISTORY / United States / General. | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Government / Executive Branch. Classification: LCC E886 .R55 2016 | DDC 973.929092—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016010377 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed by Edwards Brothers Malloy, United States of America Contents Preface vii Editorial Note xv Part I: Beginnings 1 THE MAN WHO WOULD BE PRESIDENT: Prelude to the White House 3 2 THE DECISION 18 3 THE ANNOUNCEMENT AND “IDEAS PRIMARY” 24 4 STAFFING THE CAMPAIGN 28 5 VERTIGO: The New Hampshire Primary 36 6 COMPETITORS, ISSUES, AND STYLE 44 7 THE MANHATTAN PROJECT AND THE VEEP 51 8 THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION AND THE BUS TOUR 59 9 THE GENERAL ELECTION CAMPAIGN— CLINTON VS. GEORGE H. W. BUSH 65 10 THE VIEW FROM THE OTHER SIDE 74 11 THE TRANSITION TO GOVERNING 79 Part II: Domestic and Economic Policy 12 OUT OF THE GATE: Deciding What to Do First 105 13 THE 1993 BUDGET AND THE STIMULUS PACKAGE 111 14 NAFTA 127 15 HEALTH CARE 134 vi | CONTENTS 16 WELFARE REFORM 159 17 A DOMESTIC REFORM PRESIDENT 170 Part III: Foreign Policy 18 A NEW FOREIGN POLICY FOR A NEW WORLD ORDER 187 19 HAITI 194 20 AFRICA 203 21 THE BALKANS 217 22 NORTHERN IRELAND 228 23 BILL CLINTON AND THE WORLD 238 24 WITH FOREIGN LEADERS 262 Part IV: Politics and the Clinton White House 25 INSIDE THE WASHINGTON COMMUNITY 271 26 REPUBLICAN REVOLUTION— AND RECOVERY 284 27 THE RE- ELECTION AND PRODUCTIVE MIDDLE YEARS, 1996–9 7 299 28 SCANDALS—A ND IMPEACHMENT 307 Part V: Bill Clinton and His Team 29 CLINTON’S INTELLECT 343 30 CLINTON’S OPERATING STYLE 347 31 THE MAN IN THE OFFICE 358 32 AL GORE 375 33 HILLARY 387 34 WHITE HOUSE STAFF 398 Epilogue: Observations on the Clinton Legacy 413 Appendix: Clinton Presidential History Project 423 Index 427 Preface Just over a year after Bill Clinton left the presidency, a stream of his former White House aides and Cabinet officers began making quiet, unannounced visits to the University of Virginia to reflect privately into a tape recorder on what they had experienced. At an antebellum mansion named after William Faulkner, they sat around a table talking with scholars affiliated with the univer- sity’s Miller Center, a nonpartisan research institute with a special focus on the presidency. Peering down at them from one nearby photograph was a group of their predecessors fresh from Gerald Ford’s White House in April 1977, present at the center’s very first oral history interview—i ncluding a surprisingly youthful Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. In the intervening decades, the Miller Center’s Presidential Oral History Program has conducted some seven hundred interviews, including major proj- ects on Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush the elder, and Bill Clinton.1 The Clinton Project is the largest ever of these efforts, comprising 134 interviews collected over a ten- year span. Among those contributing interviews to this project were Secretaries of State Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright, White House Chiefs of Staff Mack McLarty and Leon Panetta, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and several key members of Congress and foreign leaders who served during Clinton’s time. Although the majority of these interviews were recorded in Charlottesville, the job of collecting them also took the center’s scholars to other places, including my own visits as project director to the residence of Nobel Peace Prize winner Kim Dae- jung in Seoul and to Vaclav Havel’s modest but whimsical office in Prague. In November 2014, the first set of these interviews was opened to the public on the Miller Center’s website. This book is an effort to present in an accessible way a picture of the Clinton presidency drawn from those four hundred hours of oral histories, an unmediated look into the White House as described by those who were there. The chapters that follow include privileged, firsthand accounts of the 1. The center also has completed a major project on the life and career of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, which included nearly three hundred interviews. A project on George W. Bush follows the Clinton Project. viii | PREFACE 1992 presidential campaign, a major budget victory in 1993, a failed effort to reform the nation’s health care system, a successful reform of national welfare policy, a recalibration of the nation’s position in a post–C old War world, a revo- lution in congressional leadership, scandal management, re- election, and more. They detail the inner workings of a presidency through success and failure, from the painful learning curve of the first term through the effort to survive impeach- ment in the second. And they provide candid portraiture of the rare political gifts, prodigious intellect, and expansive appetites of the man who was the na- tion’s forty- second president. What distinguishes this published collection of oral histories from most is that the reader has free access to the complete archive of opened interviews from which its contents are extracted. Indeed, this book serves as a gateway to further reading and research in that broader collection. Each of the interviews quoted in this book can be found at http:// millercenter.org/ president/ clinton/ oralhistory. There are two unique contributions these interviews make to our under- standing of the modern presidency in general and of Bill Clinton’s presidency in particular. First, because oral history is not subject to the legal regimens that govern the release of official presidential papers, interviews can be opened for public use relatively quickly. To the casual observer this will not seem to be very significant. But today, for example, more than twenty years after George H. W. Bush left office, only about 25 percent of his White House’s papers are available to the public. (The rest either have not gone through the glacially slow process of clearance by an understaffed archives administration or have been retained in secret for reasons such as national security or personal privacy.) The dilatory pace of this release deprives those who rely on documents alone as the bread of their existence. Conversely, oral histories provide original evidence about recent presidents while we wait out the protracted interval for the official papers to be opened. If it were necessary to suspend our consideration of Clinton’s presi- dency until half or more of his records becomes available, we would have to delay any work until close to 2050. Second, much that is historically important within every White House is never written down— meaning that the written documents, even when they are opened, will have significant deficiencies. To some extent this is a function of the pace and culture of the modern presidency, where so much key interaction takes place by word of mouth. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., recognized this prob- lem as early as 1967, when in an essay for The Atlantic he bemoaned what use of the telephone was doing to the presidential paper trails that historians had always relied on— and he praised oral history as an invaluable corrective.2 2. Schlesinger, “On the Writing of Contemporary History,” The Atlantic, March 1967, available at http:// www.theatlantic.com/ magazine/ toc/ 1967/ 03. PREFACE | ix By the time Bill Clinton came to the White House a quarter century later, however, the paper- trail problem was catastrophically worse. The hostile inves- tigative climate in Washington that began with the Vietnam War and Watergate, and was exacerbated by incriminating email traffic during the Iran-C ontra affair of the Reagan years, made careful record-k eeping in the White House a danger- ous habit. The twin perils of leaks and subpoenas chilled virtually every form of serious internal writing by presidents and their aides, as Clinton’s associates confirmed over and over. National Security Advisor Sandy Berger explained, “I did not keep notes, nor did most of my colleagues. You recall that in the early days of the Clinton ad- ministration there was a flap about whether [Deputy Treasury Secretary] Roger Altman had tipped off the White House about something involving Resolution Trust. I don’t even remember what the episode was. But Josh Steiner, who was a young—t wentyish, thirtyish at most—s taffer at the Treasury Department had a diary, and that diary got subpoenaed.3 Young Mr. Steiner spent tens of thou- sands of dollars defending himself with respect to things that were in his diary. I think one of the unfortunate consequences of what has been described as the politics of personal destruction, which has crept into Washington to a large degree, is that you don’t write things down. You don’t take notes.” Press Secretary Joe Lockhart agreed. “I can tell you this. One challenge for historians on this president is, for instance, if they ever want to find a piece of paper I generated, don’t bother looking. They don’t exist. I didn’t keep them. I didn’t have a bank account that could support the legal fees that keeping paper would have [required]. My commitment to history is stronger than you might think, but it was not that strong.” And Deputy National Security Advisor James Steinberg told his interviewer: “I have literally no notes from my seven-p lus years in government. I took no notes because every time anybody took notes, they ended up … being subpoenaed. It wasn’t worth it. It’s a huge loss. … But we understood the Federal Records Act rules. I could make contemporaneous notes— if I threw them away at the end of the day. And I did. They were not federal records. Nothing was saved. There’s literally nothing— nothing left behind and nothing taken away.” Under such conditions, memory often remains the only evidence of what happened. But these interviews also provide an opportunity for scholars to probe into areas for which there would normally be little written record under the best of circumstances. On a matter of great delicacy, White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum responded to questions about why he believed that rumors of an extramarital relationship between Hillary Clinton and Deputy Counsel Vince 3. Congressional investigators were interested in knowing whether the president had been given improper notice of a federal investigation into financial activities associated with the failed Whitewater land deal in Arkansas. Steiner’s diary indicated contacts not otherwise recorded.