On the Edge
Drew, Elizabeth
BOOK REVIEWS ate last year, with the L tide of the White-water case beginning to rise around them, President and Mrs. Clinton resisted calls for the appointment of a special investigator....
...According to this book, the reason the Clintons submitted to this pummeling was just what many suspected at the time: that Hillary Clinton didn't want the investigation and her husband, to a lesser extent, didn't either...
...They left, ostensibly for "family" reasons, but Drew reports that they both quit in frustration at their inability to do their jobs effectively in the floating-crap-game atmosphere of the Clinton White House...
...And Clinton would respond, 'Sure, let's continue.' One participant said, 'There would be almost audible groans in the room.' . . . As a meeting went on and on, he would often remark, 'This is fun.'" Decisions that came out of such processes often turned out not to be final...
...On Bosnia, Drew reports, Clinton had already started to bail out on the idea of lifting the arms embargo and striking Serbian targets from the air, even as Warren Christopher was trying in vain to sell the European allies on the idea...
...As some of the meetings stretched to 8:00 or 9:00 P.M.," Drew writes, "someone would say, 'Mr...
...After two years, with his party in danger of a mass slaughter at the polls largely brought on by his unpopularity, Drew nonetheless writes, "Despite all the difficulties, Clinton had accomplished a great deal, and turned the country in a new direction...
...E lizabeth Drew, a veteran Washington journalist and author, brings to this book no antipathy toward the Clintons...
...Perhaps most prominently, they included the political consultants, James Carville, Paul Begala, and Mandy Grunwald, and the pollster Stan Greenberg...
...Begala also argued later that the president should abandon the fight for the North American Free Trade Agreement, Drew reports, because he believed it was an "elitist" issue...
...The Clinton White House is portrayed as a chaotic place in which lines of authority were vague, meetings were endless, decisions seemingly made were continually unmade, and the president exhausted himself trying to be in 76 The American Spectator December 1994 get at which the president made line-item decisions on nearly everything while worn-out aides endured it as best they could...
...But Drew says that what the Clintons most feared was a court-appointed independent prosecutor...
...We're about to lose our nerve...
...Clinton the services of a couple of capable Washington veterans, senior adviser Roy Neel and chief lobbyist Howard Paster...
...0 The American Spectator December 1994 77...
...He liked it that way, at least at first, because it made him a part of every decision...
...Clinton had also granted the run of the place to an assortment of other characters...
...But it is a tribute to her clear-eyed account that the reader feels no suspicion that her reporting is influenced by her sympathy for Mr...
...It will not be as clear to her readers that this is so...
...Clinton around...
...This book is an account of the first two years of the Clinton White House...
...and an independent counsel investigation (ordered by a court to take over from Fiske after Congress re-passed the independent counsel statute and the president, as promised, signed the bill into law...
...He is after all the one who resisted the hierarchical structure used by many Republican presidents, preferring something more along the lines of the "spokes in the wheel" concept used by John F. Kennedy (whose own presidency, Richard Reeves makes clear in President Kennedy, was hardly free of chaos...
...It is never easy to tell people who have just won the White House that they may not know what the hell they are doing, but the Clintons seemed especially oblivious...
...In addition to all the White House aides running around (likened by one of them recently to a small boys' soccer team with nobody playing his position and everybody chasing the ball), Mr...
...Neither she nor her husband had done anything wrong, she argued," author Elizabeth Drew reports...
...This latter group seems to have had more influence than comparable figures in any administration in history...
...In the end, of course, the Clintons got both: a special counsel inquiry (started by Robert Fiske...
...Republicans in Congress pounded them ceaselessly for holding out...
...Drew describes an extraordinary circumstance in which Bobby Ray Inman was waiting in a Washington hotel for word that he would be named to succeed Aspin, while the president, having met with Aspin, had suddenly developed cold feet...
...Drew describes the marathon White House meetings on the first Clinton budON THE EDGE: THE CLINTON PRESIDENCY Elizabeth Drew Simon & Schuster/462 pages / $24 reviewed by BRIT HUME in the military, the travel office scandal, and the Whitewater case, the Clinton White House was busy doing the great but unnoticed work of governance...
...She has certainly done that, and in so doing, made an admirable contribution to the literature of the modern presidency...
...They even had a seat at the table during the White House drafting sessions on the president's economic program...
...It's unsettling around here," she quotes Gergen as saying...
...Their nightmare," she writes, "was Lawrence Walsh's seven-year investigation of the Iran-Contra affair...
...Her overall appraisals are forgiving, even favorable...
...A desperate David Gergen frantically telephoned Admiral William Crowe, who had been advising Clinton on defense matters since the campaign, to enlist his help...
...Bernard Nussbaum, Mack McLarty, David Watkins, the late Vincent Foster, and even George Stephanopoulos all proved highly unsuited for the jobs to which they were originally appointed...
...Paul Begala usually occupied the seat and used it to urge that the program not stray from the populist themes of the Clinton campaign...
...He had a sense of where he wanted to take the country?ven a `vision'?nd how he wanted to improve the lives and potential of its citizens...
...Drew writes in an afterword that she has based her book on regular interviews with "every high official in the Clinton White House on the broad range of issues...
...The author traces much of the Clinton White House's difficulties to the attitudes they brought with them from their years in Arkansas and their experiences in the presidential campaign...
...Finally, the Clintons' lawyer, David Kendall, convinced them "that if they didn't accept a special counsel, an independent prosecutor would be forced upon them...
...As the confident new President took the oath of office," Drew writes, "he, his wife and his staff had no idea how unready they were to govern...
...Only afterward did he get around to choosing the White House staff, and did so with anaversion to Washington insiders...
...There is little support here for the proposition that while the media were consumed with such matters as gays Brit Hume is the ABC News chief White House correspondent...
...When Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos contended that it would be better to call for a special counsel and get it over with, Drew quotes another White House aide as saying, "Hillary jumped down his throat...
...on everything at every moment...
...President, do you have time to go on?'?oping, along with others who were also exhausted that he would call it quits...
...After all, the Clintons reckoned, they came here to change things, not to hang out with the usual crowd...
...Finding that out was a costly and painful process, one that cost Mr...
...A heavy price indeed...
...The result was that a host of aides had access to the president and claims on his time...
...Clinton," Drew says, "was to pay a heavy price for waiting so long to choose his staff and for preferring inexperience...
...Its overall landscape is very much the one sketched by the news coverage of the administration...
...That brought Mrs...
...Clinton, she writes, "was well-motivated and serious about using his time in office to serious purpose...
...She calls her reliance on these sources, who are not identified, as a "genre of middle-distance journalism, intended to catch events and people's involvement in them or reactions to them while they are still fresh...
...As it turned out, Clinton went ahead and fired Aspin, only to see Inman lose his own nerve in the face of criticism from New York Times columnist William Safire...
...Fortunately for the president, this advice was not taken and his come-frombehind victory on NAFTA may have been his single biggest success with Congress...
...They included (for a time) Harry and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, and Susan Thomases, the arch-liberal New York lawyer, political activist, and friend of the Clintons...
...When the president decided to fire Defense Secretary Aspin, he nearly backed out at the last minute...
...She yelled and fussed...
...p art of the trouble with the Clinton White House was the way it was organized, but Drew makes clear that the big problem was the president himself...
...Clinton and his goals...
...She notes that he chose his cabinet first, with a bythe-numbers devotion to "diversity" that gave him such dillies as the ill-fated Mike Espy and Zoe Baird...
...Indeed, if anything, Drew's reporting on what was going on behind the scenes during such episodes is even more disturbing than what could be seen out front...
...It was the worst possible outcome, one of many achieved by the Clinton White House and set forth in authoritative and absorbing detail in On the Edge...
Vol. 27 • December 1994 • No. 12
