Fine-tuning the Presidency
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Fine-tuning the Presidency HIS APPROVAL ratings are up, the economy is up and America is at peace with the world, if not with itself. So Bill Clinton, in his...
...Finally, the nato agreement in Brussels to renew a highly conditional threat to use air power to save the Bosnian Muslims collapsed in an acrimonious exchange between France and the United States over whether the U.S...
...And he strove to bridge the gap over priorities for health and welfare legislation that had developed between him and Finance Committee Chairman Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D.-N.Y), the gatekeeper for both in the Senate...
...But the President was led by others into an embarrassing misstatement last September when he introduced General John M. Shalikashvili as his new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff...
...There was a lot of bully pulpit?facing up to these [special] interests will require courage"—and some pulpit bullying—brandishing a hitherto unused veto pen to warn Congress against delivering a health care bill that does not meet White House universality and portability specifications...
...Next in emphasis, though, was crime, the issue a fickle public has lately elevated over health and even the economy as its primary concern...
...The prosecutorial Reno can be brusque where the professorial Heymann is inclined to be measured...
...Instead, he promised that a welfare bill would be introduced "in the spring," which gives him until June 20...
...No sooner had the President exited from the stage, however, when everything fell apart...
...Ambassador Strobe Talbott had to revise his "less shock, more therapy" advice to a warning against "more shock, no therapy...
...Just how delicate a tightrope act the President was doing soon became apparent: An excerpt from his speech released in advance said, "We must tackle welfare reform in 1994 even as we tackle health care reform...
...My source volunteered that the President meant to say North Korea would not be allowed to become "a nuclear power...
...He was undoubtedly thinking of the bomber fail-safe system...
...Heymann had to cope with her occasional vacillation about difficult decisions...
...So, when we are told "the President misspoke," we can't be sure whether the problem was a twisted tongue, twisted fact, or a new policy twist...
...The reformist leader of Belarus was replaced by a former Communist...
...His budget had cut them 25 per cent...
...would support with force the imposition of a partition plan in Bosnia...
...During the 1988 campaign, while criticizing Governor Michael S. Dukakis for getting the Pledge of Allegiance wrong, he himself misquoted it: "One nation under God with freedom and justice for all...
...Let's leave Freud out of this, shall we...
...Now let's get on with health security...
...You want to eliminate welfare "as we know it...
...But, whatever the reason, it can sometimes put a serious misspoke in the President's wheels...
...In a legislative menu generally devoid of new proposals, health was the centerpiece...
...Reno generates sparks of ideas, but without much follow-up...
...On the Defensive For the Clinton Administration and for the Pentagon, the appointment of William J. Perry as Secretary of Defense represents a dose of less shock, more therapy...
...Perhaps one cannot spend most of one's professional life spying, eavesdropping and code-breaking without developing a susceptibility to seeing dark forces plotting one's downfall...
...Knowing both of them, though separately, I can understand why they rubbed each other the wrong way...
...Democratic voters, he said, have found "they can no longer follow the leadership of the Republican Party, which has taken them down a course that leaves to disaster...
...Beneath the rhetoric egging on Americans to egg on their Senators and Representatives, the President was conducting a delicate negotiation with Congress...
...In a hushed tone as though he were committing blasphemy, a high official said to me, "The President misspoke...
...White House spin-doctors described Clinton as having turned in "a brilliant virtuoso performance...
...Not a chance...
...There was an echo of Truman's "The buck stops here," but also a dab of Reagan's "journey of renewal...
...President Bush was particularly prone to verbal mishaps...
...That is understandable enough considering the misfortunes that have befallen his overseas initiatives, other than in the area of trade...
...He was supposed to propose a phased reduction of ground-based missiles...
...Of course, Presidents sometimes really do misspeak, in the sense that the words that come out of their mouths are not the ones they intended to utter...
...A virtuoso performance to applause and bows...
...Ranking as a misstatement of historic proportions was Reagan's proposing the total elimination of nuclear weapons to Mikhail S. Gorbachev at the 1986 Reykjavik summit...
...The President had precious little to say in his State of the Union Message about foreign policy...
...Ukraine plunged deeper into the economic abyss and confronted a pro-Russian secessionist movement in the Crimea...
...You got it...
...Everybody seemed to breathe a sigh of relief before going on to the next personnel shock—the resignation of Deputy Attorney General Philip B. Heymann because of poor "chemistry" between him and Attorney General Janet Reno...
...Once, in 1953, President Eisenhower made a remark at a news conference that was egregiously out of line with known policy...
...This left still intact only the meeting with Assad, where President Clinton said a lot of things about Syria's peaceful intentions, most of which Assad did not repeat...
...Where Inman seemed concerned about his own comfort level, Perry was concerned about expressing gratitude for the confidence the President reposed in him...
...That fact, plus his charge that Safire had gone to the late CIA Director William J. Casey to lobby against Inman's restriction on intelligence sharing with Israel, suggests a subtext for the conspiracy...
...But more often in Reagan's case "misspeaking'' reflected confusion...
...President Reagan clearly misspoke in 1986 at a Nevada campaign rally for a Republican Senate candidate...
...Last year's "new directions" yielded to "hopeful beginning...
...Most ominous of all, the proclamations about economic reform in Russia being on track were followed within 24 hours of Clinton's departure by an exodus of reformers from the government and the announcement of new inflationary programs to subsidize failing industry and agriculture...
...and immediately added that this was on very deep background...
...You want a tough budget...
...The President misspoke" is a tricky way out of an apparent contradiction because so much of an Administration's credibility rests on the President's words...
...That meaning Russia was claiming a veto over the others...
...The Administration, to Moynihan's distress, had indicated that it was anxious to get health reform well on its way toward enactment before plunging into welfare reform and spelling out the actual costs of publicly-created jobs, training and child care...
...My idea exactly...
...But from the podium in the House chamber he omitted the words, "We must do both at the same time...
...For whiz-kid Bill Clinton it has not often been necessary to drag out the dread word "misspoke...
...All the persecutors the Admiral named as responsible for his decision to pull out—William Safire, Anthony Lewis, Ellen Goodman, CBS' Rita Braver (whom he called Braverman)—are Jewish...
...At an August 1984 news conference he said submarine-launched missiles were less destabilizing than ground-launched missiles because "they could be called back...
...In announcing Perry as his next candidate on January 24, Clinton seemed to have trouble remembering Inman's name, referring to him only as "the previous example...
...You want life sentences for three-time offenders...
...Admiral Bobby Ray Inman's withdrawal on January 18 from a nomination that was in no perceptible trouble was truly bizarre...
...His ultimatum on health care was accompanied by an open-handed offer to find accommodation with others promoting less far-reaching programs...
...The willingness of the Czech, Slovak, Polish, and Hungarian republics to accept "Partnership for Peace" as a way station to possible membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization someday, maybe, ran into a new obstacle when President Boris N. Yeltsin said Russia would like to join, too, but entry for everyone should be simultaneous...
...Precisely...
...So Bill Clinton, in his first formal State of the Union Message on January 25, was able to devote himself to fine-tuning his Presidency...
...He praised the General as one whose "family fled in a cattle car westward [from Poland] to Germany in front of the Soviet advance...
...who enjoyed a privileged life in occupied Warsaw...
...The cattle car reference was unfortunate...
...He would frequently state as accepted facts things that were simply not true, such as his claim in 1982 that supplemental food programs for women and children were "getting much greater money than ever before...
...We must do both at the same time...
...James (Scotty) Reston of the New York Times, leaving the meeting with me, speculated that Press Secretary James Hagerty's only recourse would be to say, "The President does not necessarily speak for this Administration...
...As was later revealed, Shalikashvili's father was a major in the Waffen S.S...
...In November 1986 the White House had to retract Reagan's news conference statement that the United States had not approved Israeli shipments of missiles to Iran...
...The official was trying to explain how Clinton had said on NBC's Meet the Press that "North Korea cannot be allowed to develop a nuclear bomb," yet subsequently his Administration began pursuing a policy that would, in effect, "grandfather" in any nuclear weapons North Korea already possesses...
...You want to halt defense cuts...
...You got it...
...His departure did not help her standing with the White House, where she was already less popular than her television image around the country...
...New Democrat Clinton has an artful way of borrowing the opposition's applause lines while pursuing his own agenda...
...During the same campaign he said, "I hope I stand for anti-bigotry, anti-Semitism, anti-racism...
...You'll get it...
...Well, What He Meant...
...Lacking both the pizzazz of the departing Les Aspin and the complexes of an Inman, Perry brings a technocrat's management style to that nervous behemoth, the military establishment...
...Perry came off as almost a mirror-image opposite...
...On his initial Presidential trip to Europe in mid-January he held six summits in nine days, count 'em: After the nato summit in Brussels, he met with four East European chiefs in Prague, three leaders of ex-Soviet republics in Kiev, Moscow and Minsk, and Syrian President Hafez al-Assad in Geneva...
...One would like to think a President can say no wrong, as in monarchies "the King can do no wrong.'' Acknowledgment of error suggests the President either cannot talk straight or misunderstands his Administration's policies—and neither alternative is attractive to subordinates...
Vol. 77 • January 1994 • No. 1
