Two case studies in narrative shaping from Bill Clinton’s career

It’s 1990. Bill Clinton is planning his presidential run. But he has a problem. He has to get reelected as governor of Arkansas.

In 1990, Clinton has a very difficult primary. He’s clearly wanting to look toward running for the Presidency. He’s now been in office—I think it’s ten years. I can’t remember the exact number of years, but he was in the fifth term. Anyway, the justification for another term was hard to figure. He had a difficult primary and he was running against a former Democrat in the general. It was a real question as to whether he could, indeed, lose. Obviously, if he lost the Governor’s race, his presidential ambitions were done. 

This is pollster Stanley Greenberg, remembering in the first of his two oral histories for UVA’s Miller Center. What can possibly be the case for a fifth term? Greenberg and Dick Morris run polling and focus groups:

I figured out a rationale that centered around not going back. It’s not important to your overall narrative, but it was focused on things he had done, including sex education, which surprised everybody, that sex education was popular in Arkansas. The Republican running was against all this and many of the education reforms.

Turn the clock back became the symbol, and it was all around the idea of, rather than him having a new agenda for his eleventh year in office—whatever it was—it was focused on not allowing the clock to be turned back on a modern Arkansas. It was effective and he won the election.

Cut to 1992, the New Hampshire primary. The Gennifer Flowers story breaks. Greenberg describes the situation:

It was James’ decision that everybody get to New Hampshire, and that we have to throw every resource—

Anyway, James at this point says, Everybody in New Hampshire.

Riley

Is that because you want to have resources to deploy there, or because there is an efficiency in having all the heads in one place to figure out how to deal with this?

Greenberg

There’s a sense that this entire candidacy could crash in a second. If we don’t do everything conceivable to save it, it’s gone. And so, enough of these conference calls all over America. Everybody get to New Hampshire.

Here’s James Carville describing the situation:

George Stephanopoulos called me. It was early in the morning and he said, “Why don’t you meet us? Why don’t you come to the airport? The governor wants you to come . . . thinks that something’s going to break today about some woman.” And I said, “Aw, shit, every day something’s going to break about some woman.” You know what I mean? I was not at all fired up about getting on a plane in January. And he said, “I think you’d better come.”

So I went. As the incoming started coming, they were out campaigning. I was in between. They were trying to tell Mrs. Clinton, who was in Georgia at the time, that the story was going to break. . . . From then until the primary, the dominant memory I have is fatigue–just being so tired and not sleeping. And the story broke, and of course they had the sort of press conference, the Gennifer Flowers press conference and the stuttering John thing. . . .

Right after that, we went on a tour down south. . . . My dominant memory in all of that is being tired. We had an event in Boston, Massachusetts. . . . I know what it feels like if you’re at a soccer game and you lose control. The media throng there was so intense that I got pinned. Maybe it was three seconds; I don’t want to exaggerate it. But I didn’t have any control. I thought I was going to be crushed. I was just sort of lifted off my feet. There was this radio guy with a little tape recorder and a mike, and he was screaming and he was crawling over the top of the crowd. And I was sitting there, and my arms were pinned, and I couldn’t move my legs. Like I said, for two or three seconds, I panicked that it was out of control–that I wasn’t just going to lose the election, but I was going to lose my life–as they say, I was going to be “taking a dirt nap” pretty soon.

The day that Mandy Grunwald went on Nightline, you had a strategy session. What was the strategy?

I think the “cash for trash,” was the sort of main thing. . . .

Who came up with the phrase “cash for trash?”

I wish I could say it was me, but I honestly don’t know.

In your book, you said it actually was Bill Clinton.

Okay, then it was. . . . The book supercedes my memory.

What was the strategy, and who came up with it?

The strategy was to say that there was a lot of money that was passing hands here. It was all odd that this was coming up around 10 days before the election. The strategy was pretty obvious, and I think the strategy worked pretty good.

When Mandy went on Nightline that night and you all were watching, what was the reaction in the campaign?

“Attagirl! Way to go!” It was good. We had pretty good points to make, and people really resent it. At one event in New Hampshire, someone there asked the question, and it was actually a journalist who sort of posed–they didn’t identify themselves — and there was a time when I thought the crowd could have turned physical.

Against the reporter?

Yes, against the reporter. If you did focus groups, if you did events, if you did anything, there was a real backlash to the whole thing

When Governor and Mrs. Clinton went on 60 Minutes, you had prepared an extensive memo for that interview. What were you trying to accomplish?

In that environment, if you let the story take its own course, it was going to be bad for you. You had to get in the middle of the story. Governor Clinton, myself, and most of the people in the campaign all shared this one thing — we were not just going to let people do what they wanted to do. If they were going to give us a chance to get on there, by God, we were going to get on there. We were going to get in the middle of it. There’s a lot of times when people have a strategy to say, “We’re just not going to participate in that sort of witch hunt here,” or something like that. That doesn’t work for very long in presidential races in the United States.

You have to fight back.

You’ve got to fight back. Yes, sir. And our strategy from day one was to contest it at every point, and to have them out there… The best person to explain what happened … was then-Governor Clinton and Mrs. Clinton. And that’s why we did the 60 Minutes thing, because it was the biggest deal out there. You had to show that you were out there, taking it on.

Acheson on Truman (and Lincoln)

WILSON: Well, I think the question that you’ve answered in great part in your book, that I would like to put a little differently. You indicated that you were working for a remarkable man, Harry Truman.

ACHESON: Oh, yes.

WILSON: And I wonder how much again the contrast between the previous man’s administrative efforts had to do with your obvious admiration and ability to work with Truman?

ACHESON: You mean FDR?

WILSON: Yes. It was so much better.

ACHESON: Truman was straight, above board, straight in line.

Two days ago, Monday, former President Sachar of Brandeis University was here and talked about President Truman. He started off by saying, “Let me read you two or three paragraphs here about Mr. Truman, criticize that.”

And I said, “All right.”

And he began about how with totally inadequate preparation, education, and everything else, Mr. Truman was turning out to be one of the best Presidents, and went on and said, “What do you think of this?”

I said, “I think it’s the goddamndest collection of cliches I ever heard in my life, and none of it is true.”

Well, he said, “You agree that he didn’t have any education.”

I said, “I don’t agree to that at all; he had a remarkable education.” My younger daughter had TB at 19, after she had been in college one month, and just been married and her husband went off to the war, and she spent five years in Saranac and lost her lung; and in the course of that time she spent in bed she read and read and read and talked to all kinds of people. And she’s far better educated than I am. I went to the best school, the best college, the best law school. That isn’t the way you get educated. The point is what enters into your innards.

Suppose somebody sits under John Kenneth Galbraith for three years to get an education; a hell of a waste of time. Mr. Truman read every book in the Independence library, which had about 3,500 to 5,000 volumes including three encyclopedias, and he read them all the way through. He took in a hell of a lot more out of that effort, which he took out of farming when he did it, than he would listening to all of this crap that goes on at Yale and Harvard, and perhaps in other places–Harvard Law School education.

I sit here and talk about his preparation. I would think he did more preparation by being on the County Court or whatever it was called in Jackson County, than he would have being a Justice of the Supreme Court, a hell of a lot more. See how people work, how the thing runs, what makes it tick, what are the important things, what are the unimportant things. And it’s sort of significant comparing to other Presidents. Well, I think I said Washington should have been President. Tom Jefferson I would give a very low rating, too; he was a man of words, and was a poor Governor, a poor Ambassador to France. The only thing as President that he really did that was really worth a damn was the Louisiana Purchase. And that was contrary to everything that he was . . .

MCKINZIE: That he believed in, yes.

ACHESON: Well, he said, “What do you think about Lincoln?”

I said, “The best thing that can be said about Lincoln are the Trumanesque qualities that he had.

“He said, “That’s the damndest thing I ever heard, you usually think it’s the other way, the thing that is good about Truman is the Lincolnesque.”

I said, “That isn’t what he had at all; he didn’t have Lincolnesque qualities. Lincoln had Trumanesque qualities. He did things that were contrary to the baloney that he talked; he didn’t believe his own book. A house divided against itself doesn’t fall if you stand up and fight, the house stands up, and he proved it. All these things–it isn’t true that a drop of blood drawn by the lash has got to be paid for by one drawn by the sword, or that the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous–poetic talk, that’s fool talk. Dr. Johnson said to Boswell, “You can talk foolishly, but don’t think foolishly.”

from Dean Acheson’s oral history at the Truman Library. I was looking for the source of Truman’s “cry-baby” remark re: Oppenheimer, as dramatized in the popular film. There were only three people at that meeting, so how do we know what happened? How does that story come down to us?

from American Prometheus.

The authors cite as their source a memo in the Truman Library:

If any of my readers pass through Independence, Missouri, grab me a photo of that memo in box 201, will ya?

Buffett on Buffett

Warren Buffett said in a written remembrance Tuesday:

Jimmy loved the audience just as much as they loved him. He never lost a fan. Music changed, performing styles changed, but if you liked Jimmy in 1983, you wanted to see him again in 2023. And you wanted to bring your kids.

I never heard him make an unkind remark – either publicly or privately – in the more than 35 years I knew him. He made everybody feel good, particularly me. We weren’t related but in his first call to me, he began with “Cousin Warren?” and I replied “Cousin Jimmy” and that’s the way it stayed.

from WSJ. You know we had to make the cheeseburger in paradise per lyrical recipe (only thing we didn’t have was draft beer but we managed):

We admire Jimmy as a writer and storyteller.

what causes US political polarization?

The jet airplane?

Smith: It’s interesting to hear Alan Greenspan talk about some of the factors that led to the change. He said one of them, he thinks, is the jet plane. Because now members from the West Coast, instead of bringing their families to live in D.C. – that’s something that you hear over and over again – that, in fact, families were brought to the District.

Rumsfeld: And much less so now. You try to have a gathering for an evening celebration for some purpose and to include members of the House or Senate on a Thursday or Friday or Saturday or Sunday, you don’t get anybody.  They’re not here, the overwhelming majority.  Unless they live in Virginia or Maryland, they’re not here.  That’s one thing.  The jet aircraft.

Another thing, I think, is the gerrymandering that has been developed to a fine art in our country. Today there are relatively few Congressional districts that are considered contestable. The threats that members feel tend to be in the Democratic Party from the left, and in the Republican Party the threat comes from the right.  That tends to polarize the situation, and you don’t have this pressure, or natural political process that led people to work things out in the middle and to try to fashion compromises that would make sense for the country. So you end up electing people who tend to be most representative of their political party as opposed to their district.  That’s, I think, maybe as or even possibly more important than the jet aircraft.

from Donald Rumsfeld’s oral history at the Gerald Ford Library.

Robert Gates offers different answers in his George W. Bush oral history:

Engel

As a person outside of politics through that interim largely, what did you ascribe that to?

Gates

It depends on whether you talk to Republicans or Democrats. [laughter] But it mostly happened in the House. Some people will say that it began with Newt Gingrich going after Jim Wright and the viciousness with which that took place. Others will say that it was the impeachment of Clinton. Others will say the cumulative effect of the Democrats controlling the House for 40-some years and the arrogance with which they did that and then the Republicans’ determination to take revenge when they finally got a majority.

But the thing that really began in the early ’90s was the steady erosion of the numbers—my best examples are in the Senate—of the people—center-left, center-right—that I regarded as bridge builders. David Boren called me in early ’94. He had been invited to become president of Oklahoma [University] and he was wrestling with it. He asked me to come down to his Senate office to talk about it. We talked for an hour. At the end I said, “David, there is an easy solution to your dilemma here. When you’re in your car or on an airplane and daydreaming, are you daydreaming about what you can accomplish at OU [Oklahoma University] or what you can accomplish in the Senate?” He just burst out laughing. He said, “That makes it easy.”

So you lost in fairly short order Bill Cohen, Sam Nunn, David Boren, Bill Bradley, and then over time Jack Danforth, Bob Dole, Nancy Kassebaum, a number of moderate Democrats, of additional Democrats. More and more from both parties, even in the Senate, which is less polarized than the House, all those guys from the center were disappearing. Olympia Snowe is the most recent. It’s not because any of them were in danger of not being reelected. They were just fed up; they were tired and frustrated because there was nothing happening.

Or maybe it all began with C-Span. Ari Fleischer in his W. Bush oral history, he’s talking about his time as a Congressional staffer:

Perry

Could I ask about reaching the public? You said you were learning so much about how it could be done in a noneffective way with the Republicans in the minority in the House. Can you talk about the role of C-SPAN during this time? I’m thinking particularly of Newt Gingrich’s use of that to foment the revolution of ’94.

Fleischer

What a great point. People forget, now with Facebook and Twitter, how revolutionary C-SPAN was and how, in the Senate particularly, it was controversial. “What? A camera in the Senate?”

A group of people in the House minority all of a sudden got this idea that if you delivered a one-minute speech, you could create an audience and you could market that speech. You could do things with the speech that the New York Times would never cover, that your normal mainstream media would never cover, so it became one of the first, if not the first, ways around the mainstream press corps to reach a targeted constituency. I think Republicans in the House came to it out of desperation and a lack of anywhere else to go, so it was good timing for them. If you remember, [Thomas P., Jr.] O’Neill ordered the cameras to pan the empty House chamber, showing that these are just speeches, there is nobody here, this is theater, which probably propelled it even more, because then people started paying attention. “Hey, it is theater; I want to see what the theater is about.”

It’s fascinating. In retrospect, if there is one thing I could change–and this genie is so far out of the bottle I don’t think you could, and I think Mike McCurry would agree with this too–I would no longer televise the White House press briefings. I would take C-SPAN off the air. There is a piece of me that is just–“haunted” goes too far, but if you think about the institutions in Washington that are held in the highest regard, with the most respect by the American people, it’s the Supreme Court, where their deliberations are entirely in secret, with no transparency, and up until 2008 at least, the Federal Reserve. Their deliberations are entirely secret. There is something about the massive exposure that also can coarsen democracy and that’s at work in the House, the Senate, and the White House. The genie is out of the bottle, but it did start with C-SPAN.

fragments from the Bill Clinton oral history at the Miller Center

The University of Virginia’s Miller Center collects oral histories on recent presidents. Sometimes I go poking around in them and rarely do I come away unrewarded:

Dale Bumpers, US senator from Arkansas, remembers a first encounter:

All politicians consider anybody that has—I don’t know what the precise word is, but any politician who sees another politician with a lot of talent, speaking ability, intelligence, social mores, customs and so on can’t help but worry about the future. On the way home, I said to one of my aides, “I hope I don’t ever have to run against that guy.” We were discussing Clinton’s speech at the Democratic rally in Russellville, Arkansas, on the campus of Arkansas Tech. I had never laid eyes on him, but I had heard quite a bit about him, about how brilliant and charismatic he was. He was handsome. He had a good speaking voice. He had everything that a politician needs. 

…

So he stood at the podium without a sign of a note or a prop and talked to the audience. He talked into the microphone but he looked that audience over all the time he was talking. He did everything precisely the way you’re taught to do it if you ever go to a speaking school. It was beautiful. Every sentence followed the other one perfectly. I could not believe that he could deliver a flawless speech like that without a note of any kind. But after it was over some of his staff who were with him were standing at the door handing out copied of the speech. He had written the speech, memorized it, and delivered it from memory. It was roughly, I’d say, three to five minutes, which at most political events is quite long enough.

Charlene Barshefsky, US Trade Representative:

The first time I met Bill Clinton was in the Oval Office to brief him on the Framework talks. The second time was in Tokyo in July of 1993. My kids know the date because I was pulled away from our Fourth of July holiday to go back to Tokyo to finish the talks. I was in Tokyo. We had been negotiating all day. There were a couple of things I wanted that we didn’t yet have and it was 1:30 in the morning, maybe 2:00 in the morning. 

Mickey, Warren Christopher, and I went up to the President’s suite at the hotel where we were all staying—the Okura. He was at the dining room table of his suite and he was dressed in khakis and a plaid shirt, looking reasonably rumpled. He was reading a newspaper when we walked in. He barely looked up. To the left was a book, open, facedown—Marcus Aurelius Meditations. To the right, the New York Times crossword puzzle with a pen.

We walked in. He lowered the newspaper—he was wearing his reading glasses—looked up, and said to me, I’ve been waiting to see you, which took me somewhat aback. I said, Well, here I am. We sat around the table, and he looked at Warren Christopher and said, Chris? and Chris said, The negotiations over the Framework are at a very delicate phase and I thought Charlene should brief you and tell you what she needs. 

The President nodded and looked at me. The newspaper came up again covering his face. I remained silent and Chris motioned, [whispering] Go ahead. I thought, Well, all right. Mr. President, this is a complicated topic. We’re at a delicate point. There are a couple of trades I could make. I don’t want to have to make any of them, and so I want to lay out a plan of action. 

As I’m talking, the hand comes out from behind the newspaper, picks up the book, turns it over and he starts to read the book. About a minute goes by. The book gets put back down. The paper goes back up, he turns the page. A hand comes out to the right, and he fills in a word on the crossword puzzle. This is all true—I am not exaggerating. This is going on, and I’m thinking, I don’t care how smart this guy is, this is a completely disastrous briefing session. I finished what I needed to say, and the newspaper finally came down. 

He looked at me, and he said, I think we have an inconsistency between your briefing two weeks ago and where you are now. Let me see if I can spell it out. And he went through the briefing I had done several weeks earlier in the Oval perfectly. He also went through what I had just said and concluded that there might be an inconsistency in our approach. I explained why there wasn’t. He poked and prodded some with respect to a couple of other points I had made. He had caught the nuance in what I was saying, not only the words in the order in which I had said them. At the end, we agreed on the game plan and we were off and running. We concluded the Framework agreement the next day. 

I walked out of the room and Warren Christopher and Mickey both burst out laughing and said, Your expression went from astonishment, to disdain and despair in the beginning of the briefing, to amazement that he could multitask to this degree and miss nothing.

Dee Dee Meyers, press secretary:

Riley

The death penalty situation wasn’t a hang-up?

Myers

No. It was not my favorite thing, but by then I think I was probably convinced that a Democrat couldn’t be anti-death penalty and win a national election.

Freedman

Did that ever come up? Did you ever have a substantive conversation with him about capital punishment?

Myers

Yes, later, but just over time. Flying around, we talked about everything. I told him that that was one place where I disagreed with him. These are just snippets of memory, but I don’t remember him making a big philosophical thing about it. It’s just, “Well, that’s the way it has to be.” I think it was a very practical decision as a politician from Arkansas.

Edward Widmer, speechwriter:

 He’s a remarkable human being. He is routinely described by people as the smartest person they’ve ever met. I feel that that’s true. Also he has these shifting abilities. I mentioned earlier that he can talk to a car mechanic one second, a short-order chef the next, and then Stephen Hawking the minute after that. I wanted someone with those skills. I was not aware that he was a prodigy when I was simply someone reading the papers. I was a well-educated person living in Boston but I was not aware that a prodigy occupied the White House.

When I got there I began to become aware of it. I wanted the rest of America to become aware of what I was becoming aware of. I thought we should really maximize these speech opportunities. I’m not sure we ever did. That speech in Memphis that he gave off the top of his head may have been his best speech as a President of the United States. It’s an argument without end. He gave a lot of speeches. Not as many as I would have liked soared, you know, just jumped out at you off the page the way that Memphis one did. But if I talk about every speech in this much detail we’ll be here for 20 hours.

Back to Myers:

Nelson

Would he tease you guys?

Myers

Not about stuff like that. He loved to make people blush about whatever it was. So he would try to find your blush button and then he loved to, gently—

Freedman

For example.

Nelson

Give us some good buttons.

Myers

This woman, Wendy Smith, who was the trip director. He would tease Wendy. “I saw that Secret Service agent looking at you.” Stuff like that, which of course was always true. Wendy was doing everything in her power to get that agent to look at her, but the fact that he would catch her at it—She would blush. Then of course he would always watch, and she would always know that he was watching. Then as soon as he would even look at her she’d blush, because he would see her. He loved that kind of stuff.

Nelson

Did he flirt?

Myers

Yes, definitely.

Nelson

Say more, because that ended up being an important part of his Presidency, the flirtation—

Myers

He flirts with men and with women. I don’t necessarily mean that as a sexual thing.

Nelson

That’s what I meant.

Myers

He’s good, flirting is really about establishing a little bit of intimacy, which he was good at doing.

Nelson

What about the hundred million people at the same time?

Myers

A rope line of a hundred people—He could do that with each person individually and every one of them thought that he or she was the one person the President was going to remember at the end of the day.

Riley

The men and the women?

Myers

The men and the women, yes. 

These are compelling reading, cheers to the Miller Center.

James Carville

 I had never met anyone quite like James. His story is so interesting. He talks openly about how he was a complete failure until he was 40. One time he missed a flight; he was supposed to go down to Texas, I think, to work for [Lloyd] Doggett. He missed his flight and didn’t have enough money to take a cab to the airport to get another flight, and he sat down on the curb with his garment bag and cried. That’s one of the first stories that Carville told me about himself. This is not what I was used to in the braggadocio, swaggering world of political consultants. I didn’t quite know what to make of him.

Dee Dee Meyers in her Miller Center Bill Clinton oral history.

music you and I don’t know

Senator Alan Simpson remembers talking to James Baker III during the 1992 Bush-Clinton election

I did tell him that I thought it was very important that he stay away from the Cigarette boat (a racing water craft) during the campaign, and the golf course, and Jim Baker told him, At the Democratic convention, they’re playing music that you and I don’t even know—Fleetwood Mac or whatever it was. That was a Cadillac car to George and to me. We’re old farts. 

source. And how about this:

Martin

Do you remember what your sense was about Clinton as an early contender? Was he on the map of folks against whom Bush expected to run, or was he predicted in any way?

Simpson

No. Everybody else had quit. There are still guys wringing their hands in the Democratic Party because they didn’t have the guts to step forward. I won’t name them, but there are at least four or five. They would opine, I’m not going to run against Bush. My God, he’s the most popular guy we’ve ever had. Why throw myself on the fire? Clinton did. I don’t think they realized the intensity of how he would gather the troops. But you want to remember always that people don’t vote for; they vote against. I don’t think anyone won an election because people were for them; they voted against the other guy. That may sound insipid, but it is the way it is. 

That whole Simpson oral history is fun to read, what a storyteller.

photo from Wikipedia: Senator Alan Simpson fishing in Wyoming with President George H. W. Bush (center) and Senator Craig Thomas (left)

Is the UK turning American?

Even middle-of-the-road liberals in Britain live in a world of Daily Show clips and piled-up copies of the New Yorker. This wasn’t happening a generation ago. And the photo negative of it is a serene incuriousness about the mental life of their own continent. When did something European last penetrate the British cognoscenti? Prime-era Michel Houellebecq? Or the Scandinavian TV dramas? This is a Brexit of the mind.

And of the tongue. “Elton John is living his best life and I’m here for it!” How lost do you have to be as a British adult, how impressionable, to speak like this? Or to say “oftentimes”, “at this point”, “not OK”? There was a fine essay (as it happens, in the New Yorker) about the protean richness of multicultural London slang. How odd that some people in the same city prefer to converse, and tweet, in the register of an Amherst common room.

Janan Ganesh over at FT might be competing with Matt Levine as my most admired columnist. Both of them have the great quality of they’re always joking but you’re not sure how much. “An Amherst common room” so specific! really funny to complain London is sinking to the level of kids at a famously wonderful and hard to get into US college.

Perhaps a great power’s cultural influence, like an ageing gigolo’s charm, is the last thing to go. Long after Britain lost its might, there were people in Hong Kong and Zimbabwe moaning about their servants and describing things as “just not cricket” in a way no one in England had done since 1913. Plus anglais que les anglais, was the phrase for these tragicomic people and their affectations. How things come round. Don’t be more American than the Americans.