In New Hampshire, Hillary took the tack that they had agreed on the previous September. She told a crowd that her marriage was strong, that problems between two people who loved one another were nobody else’s business. The crowd cheered. Watching, James Carville whooped and clapped his hands. That night, when the Clintons withdrew to their hotel suite, an aide noticed that “they were practically giddy. It was like they were on a date. They were giggling. They ordered in Greek food, watched movies.” And waited for tomorrow.
The Clinton marriage was a durable partnership. At Yale Law School, where they met, their courtship ran to passionate sessions on the art of changing public policy. Hillary Clinton was born a Republican. To shock her family, one day when she was 12, she announced: “I’m going to marry a Democrat.” Aghast, her great-aunt Adelaide told her, “Hillary! You must not say that-not even in jest.” In growing up, she made the rugged passage from Goldwater girl in 1964 through Wellesley and the Vietnam years, losing one political faith along the way, then constructing a new one. If anything, she was tougher than Bill, a quicker study, better on details. She was also aggressive, stubborn and uncompromising-traits that made her very successful in her law practice. If she had one fear, it was that Bill might let both of them down. The early campaign debates made her so nervous she couldn’t bear to watch them.
The candidate’s persona was harder to fathom, but he was no Gary Hart. Outwardly, he was a consummate, round-the-clock politician, perhaps the best to come out of the South since Lyndon Johnson, totally obsessed, with a quick grin and a warm word for everyone. “He’s a mile wide and an inch deep,” said one staffer. “He treats you like you are the most important person he could be talking to at the moment, then you see he treats everyone that way. It cheapens it, but I love him.” Clinton was not just a glad-hander. Behind the down-home manners lurked a policy wonk so formidable that even one member of his staff called him Propeller Head. Some wondered how a walking position paper like him could find time for his family. He was affectionate with Hillary, no question about that, but occasionally there seemed something a touch newfound about his regard, as if he had rediscovered her after years of taking her for granted. Many of his top staff assumed that he had had affairs, but not recently.
Clinton found it difficult to give simple, direct answers to questions that touched on his private life. Under pressure, he sometimes waffled, and he had a tendency to retreat into himself. He said his mother had taught him “not to put his troubles off on anyone else.” He was uncomfortable talking about feelings. “I don’t know what to do about all this psychobabble,” he said. He could be edgy, impatient with his staff. The death of his father in a car crash several months before he was born left its mark on him. In philosophical moments, he would say, “I always felt I wouldn’t have enough time.”
Armed with his wife’s support and his own resolve, Clinton developed a core of steadiness on the “bimbo issue,” as the media shorthand put it. “Whatever happens, I’m going to be OK,” he said. “Hillary and I have talked through this whole thing exhaustively. I knew they would try to do this. It’s flattering that they think I’m gonna win, I guess. They don’t think they can beat me on the issues. Whatever the rules are, I’ll play the hand I’m dealt.” But the cards were about to get tougher.
A week after the Star’s first salvo, a fuzzy photocopy of the Star’s next edition rolled out of the fax at Clinton’s Little Rock headquarters. my 12-YEAR AFFAIR WITH BILL CLINTON, shouted the headline. A blond lounge singer was quoted as saying that Clinton had been fond of jogging over to her place for athletic bouts of sex; that he had talked about leaving Hillary but decided not to because a divorce would hurt his political career, and that there were phone tapes to prove everything. “This is devastating,” said Myers to David Wilhelm, Clinton’s campaign manager. Wilhelm grabbed a phone and called Frank Greer, who was in Washington. “Our smoking bimbo has emerged,” he said. “It’s Gennifer Flowers.”
Clinton may have suspected that trouble was on the way. Less than a week before the second story broke, he said he had received a call from a woman who told him she had been offered $50,000 and a job in Los Angeles if she would claim to have had an affair with him. As he remembered the conversation, “This person said, ‘I asked them if it had to be true,’ and they said, ‘Hell, no, don’t you know the press? They’ll run anything’.” The woman, he said, was Gennifer Flowers.
Two weeks earlier, another woman had phoned the campaign to report that two men with British accents had approached her looking for Flowers. They said they worked for the Star. She gave them Flowers’s phone number, then called in her warning. The night before the Star hit the stands, Flowers disappeared.
Alarm spread at headquarters. “Why was he talking to her?” Stan Greenberg asked, referring to the tape recordings of phone calls between Bill and Gennifer. “Those things sound damaging.” (Later, Clinton said that Flowers had been distraught about the rumors of an affair between them, which she had previously denied, and that he had only been trying to calm her.) Up in New Hampshire, Clinton looked rather “hyperactive,” one staffer noticed. He phoned Hillary from a pay phone at a small private airport in New Hampshire, then spent a three-hour drive through the snow reading “Lincoln on Leadership.”
Flowers had been one of the five women named in the first Star story a week earlier. Having denied those allegations, Clinton could hardly backtrack now. But for a moment no staffer was bold enough to bell the candidate on the key question: was it true? Finally, Carville, just then emerging as the campaign’s shrewdest crisis manager, braced Clinton. The candidate said her story was not true and he and Flowers had not had sexual intercourse.
As the scandal spread, Clinton tried to calm his people with a touch of levity. Carville reported that the London tabs were now offering $500,000 for the best Bill-and-me lubricity. Clinton laughed and said at least the campaign was driving up the cost of bogus stories.
But a light touch would not make the stories go away. Ron Brown, head of the Democratic National Committee, phoned Wilhelm. DNC people were afraid that another Gary Hart fiasco might be in the making. In Washington there was renewed talk that a new candidate like Richard Gephardt or Lloyd Bentsen should come to the aid of the party. “If we don’t turn this into a positive,” we’re going down, warned campaign consultant Paul Begala. They sent Greer’s partner, Mandy Grunwald-Lee Atwater in a Chanel suit, as one acquaintance called her-onto “Nightline.” She so thoroughly pinned Ted Koppel’s ears back on trash-for-cash journalism that even the Great Stone Face had to admit he felt a bit defensive.
Then Don Hewitt, producer of “60 Minutes,” offered the Clintons a chunk of prime time on Sunday night, right after the Super Bowl. Clinton had doubts about going on the show. “The danger,” he said, was that “the legitimate press will use it” to justify airing all of the rumors flying around him. But Carville argued that to confront the issue now made more sense than waiting for the fall, and the candidate agreed.
That Sunday Carville woke up at 6 a.m. He started to think about the Clintons going before the cameras. Any decent standard of privacy should have spared them from discussing such matters on national television. Carville began to cry; he couldn’t stop for half an hour. There was a brief prepping session later that morning. First the staff peppered Hillary with trial questions. She said she wanted to tell everyone how important her family was to her, but she was afraid she would break down and cry on camera. At that, most of the staff teared up. Then Clinton came in, looking calm. No one asked him the adultery question. “It was danced around a lot,” said one of the team. But no one wanted to touch it.
At the taping in a Boston hotel room, the Clintons sat side by side next to a fire. Steve Kroft of “60 Minutes” began: “Who is Gennifer Flowers and why is she saying these things?” In the control room Greer paced up and down muttering, “This is a disaster,” until someone told him to shut up. As the Clintons went through their prepared lines about loving one another, loving their daughter, sticking by their marriage no matter how hard some of the times had been, Carville started crying again.
Kneeling off camera near Clinton, Don Hewitt twice prompted the candidate to confess to adultery. He declined the gambit. Afterward the producer said “The last time I had something as important was the Nixon-Kennedy debate, and I like to think we helped create a president. I’d like to think we’ll do it again.” Aboard the Gulfstream jet on the flight back to Little Rock, the mood was ebullient if a bit edgy. Carville and Clinton sat playing hearts, the candidate’s favorite card game. Carville said, “We may go down, but at least that’s behind us.” Clinton nodded. The plane landed shortly before the broadcast. Clinton drove home, where he, Chelsea and Hillary watched the show together. He was furious at what he saw. The segment was much shorter than he had been promised, and he thought the most emotional parts had been cut. He was so angry that he didn’t sleep that night. He was even madder when he got up. “It was a screw job,” he said. “They lied about how long it was going to be. They lied about what was going to be discussed. They lied about what the ending would be. It couldn’t have been worse if they had drawn black X’s through our faces.”
BEFORE THE FLOWERS STORY BROKE, Clinton’s New Hampshire director had predicted he would win the state by 15 points. Now tracking polls showed that he had only a five-point lead over Tsongas. Flowers gave a live press conference; CNN turned it into a zoo. Hillary was incensed. She wanted to fight back hard. That night CBS and ABC played segments of the tapes without verifying them; it turned out that they had been doctored. “We’re going to have to go to war,” said Carville. The next day he went on the “Today” show to attack the credibility of Flowers and the media coverage. An ABC poll found that the scandal had swayed only 11 percent of the voters; 79 percent said the press had no business poking through such dirty laundry; 82 percent thought enough had been said about Clinton’s personal life. When Clinton heard the numbers at an air terminal in New Orleans, he high-fived Myers and pumped his fist jubilantly. But Hillary berated him for having been so vague with Flowers when she called. She told him he had to quit talking on the phone, watching TV, eating and working a crossword puzzle all at the same time.
Then The Wall Street Journal dropped a new bomb: Clinton’s draft record. The stories were various, the evidence confusing. A man who had been head of the ROTC program at the University of Arkansas said Clinton had promised to join the program in 1969 as a way of avoiding the draft when he was most vulnerable to being called-and then had reneged on his pledge. ABC had a letter in which Clinton thanked the ROTC chief for “saving me from the draft,” which he couldn’t otherwise have ducked without spoiling his “political viability.” Then, having dodged the ROTC obligation, Clinton drew a high number in the draft lottery and was never called up. Instantly, Clinton got questions about his courage, his patriotism and his fitness to serve as commander in chief. He also faced taunts that at age 23 he was so political an animal he would do anything to save his career. The sobriquet “Slick Willie” took wing across the nation’s prints and airwaves.
The new scandal caught Clinton flat-footed. The campaign’s research people saw no danger in the draft; it had come up during Clinton’s Arkansas campaigns, but the ROTC chief had never challenged Clinton’s story. Hillary wanted him to take a strong line in justifying his action; she did not want him to back away from his opposition to the war. But instead of spelling out the facts, he launched a diatribe against the “blood lust” of reporters who thought they had “a divine right” to tear things down. “People are entitled to know that I was hard against the war and didn’t want to go,” he told his staff. “Those are the facts. What I don’t think is appropriate is for [the media] to come out here and try 23 years after the fact to think that they can, like Sherlock Holmes, somehow fathom every little subtlety of what every little word meant and uncover some great unhidden truth.” The attack concealed a sharp twinge of embarrassment, if not guilt, on Clinton’s part. He was from the South; he had grown up within its tradition of military service. If anything, friends said, he was far more touchy over the draft than he had ever been about Gennifer Flowers.
The candidate’s evasiveness as to the details of his draft record probably hurt him more than not having served in Vietnam. Patriotism wasn’t selling any better than family values in 1992, but people did demand candor. Bob Kerrey’s aides griped that baby boomers in the media, few of whom had ever served in the military, were giving Clinton too easy a ride. On Valentine’s Day Billy Shore dashed off some doggerel for the press corps: “Roses are red, violets are blue/Clinton dodged the draft and most of you did too.”
Kerrey himself was finding the campaign increasingly frustrating. There were days when he felt like a trained chicken clucking after the chicken feed that his advisers threw around the campaign barnyard. New Hampshire staffers fought with headquarters in Washington. They began calling Doak and Shrum, his high-priced ad team, “Dumb and Soak Us.” His tracking polls went from uptick to flatline; he was stalled.
The problem was that voters wanted solutions, not scapegoats; they preferred work over Japan-bashing. During one Kerrey focus group, the leader asked the sample voters about trade. “Would you rather have a president who says, ‘Look, the problem is America. Get smarter. Work harder’? Or would you rather have a president say, ‘I’m tired of what the Japanese are doing; we’ve got to open those markets’?” They picked the first-the Tsongas line-and Kerrey was banging away at the second.
It got worse. One of the Clinton supporters in the group had read stories about how a small business that Kerrey owned with his brother-in-law didn’t provide health benefits for all of his employees. “He’s touting health care for everybody, yet he doesn’t give it to his workers,” she said. Wasn’t there a touch of hypocrisy here? A murmur of agreement ran around the room. “At least Clinton’s not going around saying don’t cheat on your wife,” she added. Kerrey couldn’t seem to find traction in the race; his wheels were spinning like tires on the New Hampshire ice. By primary night he was wondering aloud whether he should quit.
Tsongas, meanwhile, was growing stronger with his message of conservative self-reliance. He had written a book of ideas for putting the economy right; it got respectful attention. He also came up with some brilliantly timed ads. Early in the New Hampshire race Ed Jesser and Tubby Harrison, the pollster, met at a studio in Boston to examine some video footage. Jesser thought the initial idea was dumb. Then the two handlers found themselves looking at their man in his Speedo racing suit swimming directly toward them-rising, sinking, rising in a mighty butterfly stroke. “He looks so powerful,” Jesser thought. “He’s coming right in your face. This guy looks like he’s gonna swim right through a brick wall.” Picking the best five seconds, Tsongas’s ad team sprinkled the image through a bio spot and headed for the airwaves of New Hampshire. Jesser felt sunny: “We knew absolutely that this guy don’t look like he was going to die real soon.” It was their answer to the subliminal cancer issue.
Jesser also was sure that Doak and Shrum had misread the state with their Japan-bashing ad for Kerrey. New Hampshire wasn’t protectionist; people were ready to accept economic responsibility if a candidate showed them what they needed to do. The Tsongas team put together a spot showing a deserted mill with a voice-over that said: “All the Japan-bashing in the world won’t open this factory. America must take control of its own fate.” It worked. As Harrison noticed with satisfaction, “We knocked the hockey puck right off his message.”
THEY TRAINED THEIR third tough ad on Clinton. In the beginning of the campaign, the problem was that there seemed to be so little difference between the two men. At a DNC meeting in Los Angeles, Greer had sidled up to a Tsongas operative and said, “Paul really seems to like Bill.” Later in New Hampshire, Greer popped up again and said, “Why don’t we get it over right now and get them together as a ticket?” At the time, it was just a joke. Tsongas did respect some aspects of Clinton’s program: means testing for social security, a tighter fist on other social expenditures, educational reforms. But Clinton’s middle-class tax cut, derided by hard-boiled economists, disgusted him. So his media people devised an ad ridiculing the proposal as a cheap gimmick amounting to a grand total of 97 cents a day. As it happened, the ad began to run the day The Wall Street Journal embarrassed Clinton on the draft. The double sting hurt him.
Jerry Brown, the liberal, tapped into the same throw-the-bums-out revulsion that Perot would later reach as a conservative. But Brown could only inch toward the future. He worked the state in a van, wandering from colleges to radio stations to community halls and spending the nights with people who had phoned his 800 number. In his L.L. Bean togs and white turtleneck he looked like a lumberjack priest, and he had a high-minded message to match. He preached the gospel of purity, summoning his listeners to Manichaean battlegrounds where We the People would smite dirty politicians with the strong arm of integrity. It became an obsession: Mike Ford had to remind him in one memo that “observing paralysis and/or corruption is incomplete as a message.” Some days Ford thought his candidate was “a rebel without a clue.” Things improved when Jacques Barzaghi joined Brown on the road. Barzaghi, in his Soho-goes-skiing outfit-blue beret, black shirt, jeans, boots and insulated vest-kept Brown calmer and closer to schedule. But with Wilder gone, he found himself running dead last. The week before the primary, Ford phoned. “Get out of New Hampshire,” he said. “Go to Maine.” So Jerry split for the north woods, where the Maine caucuses were the season’s next prize.
That last week found Clinton struggling with what the conventional wisdom saw as a fatal “character issue.” The Clinton staff threw a surprise birthday party for George Stephanopoulos, who had just turned 31. They didn’t have much else to celebrate that night. In Washington, “Capitol Gang,” a talk show, had pronounced Clinton dead. When would the candidate throw in the towel? one guest at the birthday party asked campaign director Bruce Lindsey. “When Hillary says it’s too much,” Lindsey said wanly. At a strategy session the next night, Bill (in jeans and Yale sweat shirt) and Hillary (in green sweat suit and house slippers) needled the staff. “That damn middle-class tax cut has cost me my credibility on economic issues,” he said: he had never wanted it; his advisers had made him do it. Carville picked up a phone to get the latest tracking poll from Greenberg. “We’re in free fall,” the pollster reported grimly. In four days Clinton had dropped from 30 to 21 points. Tsongas was now leading at 32 percent. Carville was standing within sight of the candidate. He kept a poker face, trying not to let the sense of disaster show.
The numbers set off a homestretch frenzy in New Hampshire, a burst of energy that may have saved the campaign. Clinton had money. His fund raiser, Rahm Emanuel, built up the campaign war chest, not the disappointing treasurer, Bob Farmer. Emanuel put together $6 million. Admiring Clintonites called him Rahmbo. Clinton bought two 30-minute segments of TV time for electronic town meetings, answering questions from callers. He also set up an 800 number manned and womaned by friends from Arkansas who explained him to doubters. The night before the election, Clinton’s inner circle sat hunched over dinner in the Days Hotel when the final tracking polls came in. The numbers looked shocking: Tsongas 34, Clinton 18, Kerrey 14, Harkin 11, Brown 5. Clinton appeared to be sinking, Kerrey rising. If Kerrey finished second, he could parlay that into a victory in South Dakota, march on to the South with banners high and wound Clinton badly enough to finish him off later in Illinois and Michigan. If Clinton couldn’t do better than 20 percent in New Hampshire, he was probably dead.
Should they tell the candidate? They regrouped that night in Carville and Begala’s room. Carville was lying on the bed in a T shirt and boxer shorts, Begala and Grunwald sitting next to him. They knew Clinton was such a poll freak he’d soon get the numbers himself. Carville pulled on his pants and headed to tell the governor. Greenberg, Begala and Grunwald, worried that the moody strategist might project a sense of doom, padded along after him. Greenberg gave Clinton the bad news.
“I’m dropping like a turd in a well,” said the candidate. “We’re going to get killed.”
He lacerated himself for not responding quickly enough and strongly enough to the draft fiasco. Mickey Kantor, a top counselor also in the room that night, rushed into the breach.
“Listen, hear me out. You’re the best candidate in the field. You’re a young man. You’re 45.”
Clinton listened stonily. “In his own mind you could tell it was all over,” Grunwald thought. “The campaign, his career, his dreams of becoming president. He couldn’t quite believe that this would be where it would end-at the Days Hotel in Manchester.
