Excerpt: 'POTUS Speaks'

By Michael Waldman
Simon & Schuster
Nonfiction/Memoir
224 pages

POTUS stands for "President of the United States." Michael Waldman served as a special assistant and then chief speechwriter to Bill Clinton from 1992 to 1999. During that time, he worked closely with the president to write or edit nearly two thousand speeches, including four State of the Union addresses and two inaugural addresses. More than rhetoric, these speeches are where policy, politics, and presidential personality come together.

Waldman tells the stories behind the words at key moments in Clinton's presidency -- his speeches on the economy and trade, his calls for campaign finance reform, his budget showdowns with the GOP Congress. Waldman recounts how Clinton's dramatic 1998 State of the Union address -- a speech credited with helping to save his presidency -- came together. He shows how policymakers struggled to contain a worldwide financial crisis even as the press and the public were obsessed with scandal. Readers meet the players, from a president deeply involved in the process of crafting his speeches to the young, sometimes anonymous policy aides who guided the government.

EXCERPT

Chapter 1

High Hopes

Bill Clinton began his presidency with an enthusiastic stream of words.

On election night, November 3, 1992, the President-elect stood on a brilliantly lit stage in front of the Old State House in Little Rock, Arkansas. "My fellow Americans, on this day, with high hopes and brave hearts, in massive numbers, the American people have voted to make a new beginning," he declared. "This election is a clarion call for our country to face the challenges of the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the next century, to restore growth to our country and opportunity to our people, to empower our own people so that they can take more responsibility for their own lives, to face problems too-long ignored, from AIDS to the environment to the conversion of our economy from a defense to a domestic economic giant."

For the 40,000 people stretched out before him -- for the 44.9 million who cast their ballots for him that day -- this was a moment of supreme optimism and hope. For the first time in twelve years, in many ways, for the first time in three decades, those of us who had worked and voted for him would have a president in whom we believed. Our feeling of unity with America was whole and unreserved.

I stood a few yards from the side of the stage in a knot of campaign workers, standing on my toes to peer over the formidable hair of the governor's mother. "Today the steelworker and the stenographer, the teacher and the nurse had as much power in the mystery of our democracy as the president, the billionaire, and the governor. You all spoke with equal voices for change. And tomorrow we will try to give you that."

The President-elect, the Vice President-elect, and their wives waved and pumped the hands of those in front. Gore lunged out to grab James Carville, a few rows in, with Secret Service agents holding on to his waist. The loudspeakers blared the campaign song, Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow." To my utter amazement, that bathetic song -- the same soft-rock Muzak that made me gag in the seventies -- now put a lump in my throat.

More amazing was the fact that I was there at all. Four months earlier, I was a public interest lawyer in Washington, testifying and lobbying and writing books and articles. I ran Congress Watch, Ralph Nader's lobbying office. Occasionally, we blocked something bad. We never passed anything good. Four more years of George Bush was about as dispiriting a prospect as I could imagine. I wanted to wield power, to engage in the messy, compromised work of governing. I was impressed by Bill Clinton; I liked his message about modernizing the Democratic Party. Most of all, he was a Democrat who could win.

One day, shortly after the Democratic convention, the phone rang. It was George Stephanopoulos, whom I had gotten to know while I was lobbying Congress and he was an anonymous congressional staff member.

"Hi, congratulations again," I enthused. I had been helping the Clinton campaign informally by writing position papers and advising on policy. A mutual friend, historian Eric Alterman, had let George know that I wanted to join the campaign full-time. But I didn't think I would actually get the chance.

"I think it would be great if you came down to Little Rock," he said. "We have the money now and you would do great. We could really use you."

I leapt off my chair but tried to sound cool. "Wow, that's great, George. I have only one question." I felt awkward asking it. "Um, what role, what title, would I have?"

"You'll be senior, Senior," George said. "Wait, here's James."

James Carville came on the line. "Role! What Role! This is the Wah Room!" he shouted. I had never met the man. "Pack up your toothbrush and get your ass down here!"

As I hastily prepared to leave my job, Ralph Nader called. He had been a hero of mine since grade school. Ralph was a constant goad to younger staff members whom he believed were too soft, too focused on their careers. When former assistants went into mainstream politics, he routinely turned on them. During the Carter administration, his top advisor had left to run the auto safety agency. Months into her tenure, Ralph attended one of her press conferences and demanded that she resign. I knew I might well face the same treatment. He disliked Bill Clinton, distrusted his obvious love of earthly pleasures, and had repeatedly predicted that Clinton would never be elected. "They aren't going to trust you," Nader said. "The Cajun and the Greek. They won't trust you for a while." He paused. He wanted me to understand that my mission was to help steer the candidate in a progressive direction. "Remember. Your purpose is not only to serve but to swerve."

I met Bill Clinton a few weeks later. I was working in the War Room in Little Rock, writing policy proposals, conducting research on the Republicans, listening and watching Carville rant. In a generous effort to expose me to the candidate, Stephanopoulos dispatched me to the campaign plane to brief Clinton and Gore for a television appearance on the Phil Donahue show the next day. I knew next to nothing about the subject of the show -- a government program that apparently paid American businesses to move jobs overseas. Bruce Reed, an old friend who was the deputy campaign manager and policy director, introduced me to Clinton, who had just dropped into the seat opposite me on the campaign's charter plane. "Governor, this is Michael Waldman. He is our foreign aid expert." I swallowed hard. I had, at best, a paragraph or two of things to say.

Clinton pulled out a USA Today crossword puzzle. Gore opened a thick, three-ring binder that his staff had prepared. I studied Clinton. His red face, graying hair, and blue eyes made him look strikingly patriotic, like an American flag. I was waiting to see if he would try to seduce me, to forge an instant connection, the Clinton technique I had read about in newspaper profiles. Instead, he frowned at his crossword puzzle and marked it up with a ballpoint pen. I didn't know whether to wait for him to look up, but eventually I began to recite facts and figures about foreign aid, and job loss in the textile industry, and what they could expect from Phil Donahue.

Gore piped in eagerly. Evidently he had studied his notebook. They began discussing "the Caribbean Basin Initiative" and "parity" and "transition assistance." Their discussion was friendly but competitive. Each seemed eager to show how well he understood policy. I sat silent, since I had little to contribute. The briefing was done. Clinton closed his eyes for the rest of the flight. When he left the plane, I pocketed the crossword puzzle. (You never know what might be valuable someday.)

The fall campaign was a sleepless blur. Carville held court from a couch at the center of an open newsroom, and he provided an electric charge that was felt throughout the old newspaper building that housed the campaign. Every attack had to be answered immediately; every fact had to be footnoted. At seven every morning, and again in the evening, dozens of campaign workers gathered for Carville's War Room meetings. (It was easier for me than for my wife, Liz, three months' pregnant with our first child, who was working as a researcher defending the governor's Arkansas record and had to haul herself out of bed each morning.) I wrote position papers on regulatory reform and banking, went on TV to defend Clinton's record, stockpiled research on Bush, and wrote press releases every few days attacking various administration shortcomings. In truth, there was not much to show for my efforts. Clinton was relentlessly positive, rarely assailing Bush for anything other than the overall health of the economy.

On the campaign trail, Clinton was a wonder. His moist, empathetic style was becoming familiar to the country at large. More interesting was his message. For decades, the Democrats had been locked out of the White House, seen by middle-class voters as culturally out of touch, more interested in exotic issues than mainstream economic concerns. The year before, in a largely ad-libbed speech to the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, Clinton had attacked "the stale orthodoxies of left and right" and unveiled a new approach. The Democrats should offer opportunity for all Americans, he said. "But opportunity for all is not enough, for if you give opportunity without insisting on responsibility, much of the money can be wasted, and the country's strength can be sapped. So we favor responsibility from all." It's hard to remember now that for a Democrat to mention "responsibility" was innovative; some even heard it as a racist code phrase. Clinton called this social bargain a New Covenant. During the general election drive, that innovative message was lacquered over by a more orthodox populist attack on Bush's economics. But underneath, still visible, was a new synthesis.

Now Bill Clinton was the President-elect. Standing onstage, young, tall, improbably handsome, he had the makings of a transforming president, one of the greats. The ghosts of Roosevelt and Truman, of Kennedy and Johnson, all those who had used the office and relished its power, seemed present that night. The expectations were high. His exuberant words raised them. Did he realize the power of his words and how loudly they would now ring? Did he know how high the hopes were, the expectations that he excited?

As I look back after seven years, it is clear that Bill Clinton entered the presidency with a grand and contradictory sense of the office and how he would fill it. He grew up schooled in the ideas of what has been called the heroic presidency. From the first hundred days of the New Deal to the collapse of Soviet communism, the office had been the dynamo powering the political system. We elected presidents to do big things. To conquer fascism. To win a world war. To create a strong social safety net and help usher in the civil rights revolution. And for half a century, to face down the Russians in the Cold War. Chief executives were judged by imposing accomplishments, bold strokes that almost invariably expanded the reach of the federal government. They were to display mastery in a series of dramatic foreign crises.

Almost alone on the national stage, presidents commanded the bully pulpit. Their voices fit the media of the day: Roosevelt's tenor voice and measured cadences were perfect for radio. Kennedy's deft press conferences, vivid rhetoric, and glamour were perfect for an era when television was becoming more important, and photography was going color. Reagan's winking delivery of sound bites before beautiful backdrops fit a time when the evening news compressed political messages into small pieces. The modern presidency was televised. The very first half-hour network evening news program featured Walter Cronkite interviewing John F. Kennedy, just weeks before he went to Dallas. Congress, by contrast, spoke with a babel of voices; in fact, until recent years, congressional proceedings weren't photographed at all.

Bill Clinton was determined to fill the role of the strong modern president. His speeches were sprinkled with references to Roosevelt and Lincoln. The crowd at Madison Square Garden, at his nomination, was enthralled by the grainy film footage of a teenage Clinton shaking hands with JFK. His signature initiative, a national service program, was directly modeled on Kennedy's call for young people to serve through the Peace Corps. To interviewers, Clinton readily spoke of his affinity for young Thomas Jefferson.

But at the same time, Clinton -- despite his years as a governor -- had no fingertip sense of the great institutional machine that is the presidency. Few Democrats did. Over two decades, Republicans had held the White House all but four years. And in that brief interruption, Jimmy Carter had run as an anti-president -- with few tangible goals other than shrinking the office and diminishing its pretensions.

Throughout this Democratic diaspora, the party had altered its view of the office. The strong presidency was created by liberals. But after Vietnam and Watergate and Iran-Contra, a generation of Democrats worried more about the dangers of an out-of-control executive than they craved the benefits of a powerful president. In the 1940s and 1950s, liberal historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote reverently about "The Age of Jackson" and "The Age of Roosevelt," respectively. More recently, he had warned against "The Imperial Presidency." Young Democratic lawyers and policymakers, excluded from the executive branch during Republican administrations, filled the growing staffs of congressional committees instead, where they found ways to trim the power of the executive. Democrats didn't defer to presidents; they investigated them. The only other source of political power for Democrats was governorships and mayorships, offices filled with men who distrusted the federal government. When a party wins the presidency, it is a change as profound as if it had held no seats in Congress and now suddenly held the majority. Clinton had been thinking for years about how he would use the office. He was not ready; no Democrat was.

George Stephanopoulos urged me to rush back to Little Rock three days after the election, though I had no job. Within a few days, a hiring freeze was imposed. But George was able to argue that I was already there, and secured a place for me as one of his three deputies. The transition offices occupied two floors of what passed for a skyscraper office building in Little Rock. Transitions are a tossed salad of hard, often pointless work, ennui, and hope -- commingled with the terror, above all, that you might get left out. Nobody knew anything; nobody had a clear responsibility. Nobody could say for sure what his or her role would be, if any, once Clinton was sworn in. In one office, amid towering piles of paper, economic policy advisors Robert Reich and Gene Sperling began to pull together an economic plan. Two doors down, the foreign policy advisors worked, waiting for phone calls from Boris Yeltsin and trying to determine which calls were crank. A warren of offices upstairs were sometimes borrowed by Webb Hubbell, Hillary Clinton's law partner, and other ethics advisors.

Each night, transition staff members were feted by dozens of reporters at the few high-end restaurants in town: New Mexican food at the Blue Mesa in West Little Rock, steak at Doe's, ribs at a half dozen places. (Though the economy of Arkansas is heavily dependent upon poultry, it seemed nearly impossible to get a piece of chicken to eat in the state. Perhaps they know something.) The reporters had unlimited expense accounts. And they didn't even seem to care if we didn't give them any information. The journalists, especially the prominent ones, were happy to do all the talking. It was a heady and giddy time.

It was also, as it became clear soon enough, a missed opportunity. Of the wasted prospects in the Clinton presidency, the transition was not only the first, but in some ways, the worst.

There was, for starters, enormous wasted energy. The transition became the vent through which Democrats poured twelve years of frustration. Thousands of people went to work on task forces and clusters and committees. They combed through executive agencies and compiled bulky briefing books for the new cabinet. Nearly all of it was make-work. The transition's lawyers had ruled that the cabinet briefing books would become a public record, subject to the Freedom of Information Act, if they were actually brought into government by the new cabinet secretaries.

There were public miscues. The President-elect was discovering that his words now boomed loudly, ricocheting throughout the country within minutes. Simple gimmicks that would have gotten a few hours of good press on the campaign trail were scrutinized for the character traits they revealed. One of the communications staff suggested that Clinton, jogging on the streets near the White House during a visit to Washington, stop at a McDonald's to chat with the homeless as he had done in Little Rock on his morning run. He had to endure eight years of Big Mac jokes as a result.

The biggest mistake -- with consequences that would linger for months -- was the failure to understand the importance of the White House staff.

Clinton spent hours each day mulling over his cabinet, not planning his White House. In part, this was because Warren Christopher, the Los Angeles attorney who was supposed to be leading the cabinet search, had been penciled in as chair of the entire transition at the last minute. Christopher seemed to have little interest in doing anything other than filling the cabinet. And when he was chosen to be secretary of state, his attention was understandably drawn elsewhere. The cabinet that resulted was one that "looked like America," as Clinton had promised: it was ethnically diverse and had more women than ever before. But it didn't think like America, or even like Clinton's new electoral coalition. It included citizens of Cambridge, Berkeley, and Madison, Wisconsin, but none from swing states Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, or Pennsylvania. And, until just days before he was sworn, in, Clinton never got around to naming his White House staff.

Despite years of watching the evening news, despite H. R. Haldeman and Hamilton Jordan and Iran-Contra and John Sununu, the new president seemed not to recognize that the White House staff wields more power less accountably than nearly any cabinet secretary.

One day Harrison Wellford dropped by my office. He is a well-known Washington lawyer who had gotten his start working for Nader. He had served in the Carter White House. Now he had been given the assignment of reporting to the new administration on the possible structure of the White House staff. He showed me his report. Republicans, comfortable in the buttoned-down corporate world, generally appoint a strong chief of staff. Democrats recoil from the possibility of a powerful CEO and choose a weak chief of staff or none at all. Democratic presidents place themselves at the hub of a wheel with many spokes. Soon enough, they find that to be a recipe for chaos. Jimmy Carter started with no chief of staff. Halfway through his term he gave the title and full responsibility to Hamilton Jordan. Too late. Wellford was worried that the new White House would steer into the same swamp.

The failure to appoint a strong White House staff early meant that nobody was focusing on how the President would seize the stage in the first days of his presidency.

Stephanopoulos was the transition's communications director. There was still early Beatlemania for George. The New York Times published a large photo of him, looking tousled and sexy, in front of a Patton-sized American flag. (I stood next to him. My first New York Times caption read: "Man at rear is not identified,") He was preternaturally savvy and idealistic. If anyone had been charged with planning the first weeks, it would have been George, but even he was not given clear responsibility.

A plan for the first weeks did circulate. It was a memo that David Gergen, who had served as Ronald Reagan's communications director, had written to the Gipper in 1980. Scrounging through the stacks of the one decent bookstore in Little Rock, we realized that the most recent Democratic book on how to use the presidency, "Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents" by Richard Neustadt, was originally published in 1960 -- the same book JFK had relied upon when he was preparing to take office. It warned that presidential transitions were the most perilous time, and that few administrations knew what they were doing when they took power. Ha! At least we won't make that mistake, we thought.

As Christmas approached, the pace quickened. Every few days, Clinton would announce a new batch of cabinet nominees. And they would be subject to a grilling from the press.

"Senator Bentsen, you have been accused of being in the pocket of lobbyists and moneyed special interests. You had to cancel your 'breakfast club' when you would meet with lobbyists because of appearances. Doesn't this send the wrong signal?" I finished my question, playing a reporter, with perhaps just a little too much body English. We were in the den of the Governor's Mansion. Lloyd Bentsen had just committed to leaving the United States Senate to be nominated as secretary of the treasury. In a few minutes, his appointment would be announced to the press. The regal Texan was submitting himself to mock interrogation by the communications staff of the transition (it would have taken three of us to exceed his age). He bristled and glared. "I strongly support campaign finance reform. I have supported it throughout my career. And no one can question the way in which I have conducted myself in office." I knew how Dan Quayle must have felt when he faced Bentsen in the vice presidential debate. Clinton watched, amused. "None of the real questions are as tough as these guys," he observed.

Most of the domestic cabinet nominees were to be announced on November11. We gathered in the mansion's living room to prepare them. Stephanopoulos, communications aide Ricki Seidman, press secretary Dee Dee Myers, and Gene Sperling faced them on a couch. Bob Boorstin, one of the other deputies, and I sat on chairs. Nearly all of us were in our early thirties. Warren Christopher sat bolt upright, neatly pressed and silent, in the corner. Mack McLarty, a polite Arkansas businessman and old friend of Clinton's, was there. (We weren't sure why; the next day he would be named chief of staff.) Hillary wandered in and out, and finally sat by the door.

The last to be mock-grilled was Carol Browner. She was thirty-six years old. I knew her from her days as a congressional staff member and environmental activist in Washington, before she returned to Florida to become that state's environmental commissioner. Now she was being nominated to head the Environmental Protection Agency, with a budget of $5.9 billion. We pushed her with tough questions. "You used to work for Citizen Action, a left-wing environmental group. Aren't you too extreme?" "What about the Florida Everglades?" Browner earnestly rebutted each charge. We were done.

Hillary looked up. "You didn't ask her the most obvious question."

"What's that?" we asked.

"Aren't you too young to be in the cabinet?" She looked at us. "But they wouldn't ask that." She smiled. (I think.)

Stephanopoulos had assembled for Clinton a thick three-ring notebook of memos and essays from supporters and friends with advice for the new president's inaugural address. Among others, the great living Democratic speechwriters were contacted -- Ted Sorensen, Dick Goodwin, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. For Clinton, it was a way of tweaking his current staff: get me some real speechwriters. They were also a good source of lines and ideas. (The line in Al Gore's 1992 convention speech used to great repetitive effect -- "It is time for them to go!" -- was plucked by Bruce Reed from a memo by Goodwin, who had written some of Lyndon Johnson's and Robert Kennedy's greatest speeches.) For Clinton, I suspected, it was also the baby boomer's thrill at being able to summon up all his political heroes, akin to asking the Stones to play at a pool party.

I was assigned to write a memo about political reform. I wrote a broader treatise, suggesting that the inaugural focus on the need to renew our democracy. "Winston Churchill once was asked what he thought of a pudding. 'It lacks theme,' he replied. An inaugural address, to succeed, cannot 'lack theme.' " "The memo continued, "In crafting an inaugural address, the major question to be asked is: what is the condition of the country, what is the situation, that is to be confronted by the address? (The great inaugural addresses deal concretely with national moods or crises, tying them into more timeless themes.) In other words, what is the pivot? And in what direction does the new President want to push? "I would suggest that the need to rebuild the economy, while obviously the main reason Gov. Clinton was elected, is subsumed within an even greater imperative: Citizens are deeply cynical about government and politics, and thus distrust governmental solutions to problems. But they want to believe in the political system, and in the idea of the United States as a functional and thriving democracy." I urged that Clinton make the renewal of our democracy his central theme.

I finished it past the deadline and faxed it to the Governor's Mansion in Little Rock. I wasn't being devious or bureaucratically deft -- just disorganized. In any case, Nancy Hernreich, the governor's executive assistant, slipped it into the front of the briefing book.

A few days after New Year's, I was back in Little Rock. Stephanopoulos' assistant called me up to his office, one flight above mine. There was barely room for him, his desk, and me. He looked up with studied cool. It was the political equivalent of Ed McMahon arriving at your door with an oversized check.

"Governor Clinton wants you to work on the inaugural address."

Copyright © 2000 by Michael Waldman. From "POTUS Speaks : Finding the Words that Defined the Clinton Presidency" by Michael Waldman.

Simon & Schuster

Note: Pages will open in a new browser window

External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.