-Caveat Lector-
ABC News
Dee Dee Meyers Interview
She was spokeswoman for Clinton's 1992 campaign and White House
Press Secretary for the first two years of his presidency. She
resigned in December 1994.
Interview conducted June, 2000 by Chris Bury
Tell us about the first time you met Bill Clinton.
The first time I met Bill Clinton was actually 1988. I was
working for Michael Dukakis here in Los Angeles. Mrs. Dukakis had
hurt her neck and the governor decided to go home and be with
her, but in Los Angeles a huge fundraiser [was already planned]
that [cost] $25,000 a couple or some astronomical figure. And we
had about 24 hours to find somebody to replace the candidate.
So [we] called around and the only person we could find who
could get there was Bill Clinton. And he flew in and came and
gave a speech at this dinner and completely knocked everybody
over. People thought, "My God, this guy's fantastic. Why isn't he
the nominee?"
He was sure of what he believed, he was funny, he was droll.
Then about a month later he gave that awful rambling introductory
speech at the convention which really put the brakes on his
career for a brief time.
How did you come to work for him in the '92 campaign?
I came in the fall of '91, through a mutual friend, a guy named
Mickey Kantor, who went on to be secretary of commerce, both of
us from Los Angeles. He called me one day and said, "You know
Bill Clinton's getting ready to run for president and he's
looking for a press secretary. Why don't you come spend some time
with him?" And I was ambivalent. I thought Bush was very popular
at the time, still sort of riding high on the aftermath of the
Gulf War.
Most of my friends had already sort of given up on the idea of
electing a Democrat in '92. But I was persuaded by Mickey. I had
met [Clinton] by then two or three times. I didn't know him, but
I had met him and seen him speak. [I] had listened to him and
thought he was saying some interesting things. So I agreed to go
spend the day with him. Bill Clinton is a very persuasive
individual. I was convinced that I wanted to go work for him [by
the end of the day]. And a couple of days later they called me
and asked me if I was offered the job would I take it? I said,
"Yeah." I was working on another campaign at the time, which
wouldn't finish for another four or five weeks. And they agreed
to wait for me. And so off I went in the fall of '91, not knowing
if I was going to be gone for a week or a couple of months or, as
it turned out, a few years.
What was it like on the road with him early in the campaign?
It's great to be at the beginning of a campaign because for many
trips it was myself, Bruce Lindsay, Bill Clinton, and an Arkansas
state trooper. No reporter is flying around in borrowed
twin-engine airplanes. But in many ways it's the most exciting
time in a campaign. And Clinton quickly captured the imagination
of the press corps. He was taken pretty seriously. It was not a
stellar field.
But there was still the one great question at that point which
was, will Mario Cuomo get in? And so the first few months of that
fall campaign there was a kind of guarded optimism on the part of
the campaign, which was small, and a guarded enthusiasm on behalf
of the media, which was still waiting to see if the liberal
savior Governor Cuomo would get in.
But it was interesting because by this time [I had] worked for a
lot of politicians. I saw a candidate who knew why he wanted to
be president and he knew how to get there. He didn't know whether
he would be successful, but he had in his head kind of a roadmap
based on issues. He had a sense of where the country was. There
was this uneasiness, this kind of economic anxiety and he was
pulling together a team that was going to help him get there. He
was the engine that was driving it and from the very beginning I
was really aware this was a special politician. This was somebody
who had more innate talent, both with the substantive side and
the politics, than anyone I'd been around. And it was just
fascinating to watch him.
Talk about the politics. Stephanopoulos calls Clinton "the
thoroughbred."
Yeah. We used to jokingly sometimes call him "Secretariat" �
which we stopped because we were afraid someone was going to
write it � because he was a thoroughbred. He was a pure bred.
I'm a baseball freak. So I say he's the guy who could throw a
no-hitter and hit 50 home runs. I mean nobody can do that. You
know, nobody can master the substantive side of policy and
genuinely thrive on the human contact of the politics. But he
does both. He was the best strategist in the campaign most of the
time. He was totally steeped in the details of how many electoral
votes, how many states are we targeting, why are we targeting
them, what's our organization in those states, who are the local
elected officials who are going to be with us, does this make
sense? Every step of the way he was totally involved in decision
making. And then he let James Carville and George Stephanopoulos
and people like that work through the details. But he knew what
was going on.
�Sometimes we had to, you know, I shouldn't say, save him from
himself. He's obviously tremendously successful. But one of his
tendencies throughout his presidency at times has been to try to
do everything, to talk about every issue, to emphasize
everything, which means you're emphasizing nothing.
So, that was the flip side of him. He's interested in
everything. He has encyclopedic knowledge. He has a voracious
appetite for information about everything from the Beatles to the
details of nuclear disarmament. That part of his personality was
fascinating. He's a genius in the sense that he can take
information from an enormous variety of sources and he can digest
it and synthesize it and come out with conclusions that are
slightly more interesting, slightly better, more original than
anybody else in the room. Clinton does that in spades and he does
it all the time. I never got tired of watching him blow away
people who underestimated him. I think he still does that. I
think every new batch of political opponents or Republican
legislative leaders or people who sort of thought they could
corner him have constantly been rich kidded about just how good
he is.
How much did he depend on Hillary Clinton in the campaign? What
was her role?
You know, I think it varied. I think [he] depended on her quite a
bit. It was complicated by Gennifer Flowers, and that happened
fairly early on in my association with them. I think he always
relied on her advice. She's much more linear and much more
disciplined in a lot of ways than he is. I think he relied on her
to bounce ideas off of, to kind of, for lack of a better term,
kick his butt from time to time. Just to sort of say the things
to him that nobody else could say.
January and February of 1992, the Gennifer Flowers thing broke
and they appeared on 60 Minutes together. There was a sense that
he was in debt to her. And he was obliged to take seriously her
advice. I don't know that he wouldn't have anyway, but I think
that there was a real kind of �
You're sort of saying here that Mrs. Clinton saved his skin.
Well, I think she did. Sure. By defending him and standing by
him and saying to the world, "You know, we've had our ups and
downs, it's none of your business. We're still together." And,
you know, "Leave us alone." I mean what could anybody else really
say at that point?
So there was an indebtedness to her because she had saved him?
Yeah. And I think that that's been a pattern throughout probably
their relationship before I knew them, but certainly in his
presidency. He tends to do worse when he's furthest and then he
screws up and she helps save him. And then he's much more, I
don't know, indebted, obliged, mindful, all those things. And I
suspect it probably was that way before I was around.
How did she handle the press when Gennifer broke?
I think basically all we tried to do was survive. It was really
a tremendous feeding frenzy. I remember we were making a swing
through the south right around the time all hell was breaking
loose. And we went to Mississippi and Louisiana and then we were
headed to Texas. And we got into Louisiana late. I don't remember
[but] it may have even been the day of the Gennifer Flowers press
conference.
And Governor Edwards was there and he said, "Now, what's this
story about this girl? Clinton kind of said, "Yeah," blah, blah,
blah. And he said, "How much did they pay her?" And Clinton said,
"Well, that's the point, it's $150,000." And Edwards says,
"$150,000? If they paid all my girls $150,000 they'd be broke."
And Clinton just cracked up because it was much needed comic
relief at the time.
Somehow we got through those few days. We did what we could to
battle back and to explain and to discredit parts of the story
because there was plenty in it that was suspect. Like the hotel
she claimed to have had her first liaison with him on X date
hadn't been built. There were facts that were wrong, right, so
you argue the facts.
But the accusation itself wasn't wrong. I mean the fact that an
affair had taken place, that was true.
Well, who knows? I mean I have no idea other than Clinton did
admit later in a deposition that he had had some kind of
relations with her once, whatever that means. Who knows what the
truth is? Obviously in hindsight it certainly appears that there
was more to it than that, but I don't know. It's one of the great
mysteries of Clinton. There's a lot you don't know.
Did that worry his staff? If there is stuff that you don't know
and you have to go out and defend him that puts you in a tough
position.
Right. And you know, that got harder over time. Because in the
beginning you think "Oh, well, he's saying this didn't happen.
Maybe there was some kind of flirtation there or something but it
wasn't a twelve-year affair as she'd described it." That was
certainly my impression in the beginning.
And there were plenty of facts in there that you could [have]
discredited. They were easily disproved. � You argue the facts
and you try to make the case that Clinton has always had
political enemies, Arkansas is an interesting state in that
regard. A lot of stuff had gone on.
But obviously over time as Gennifer Flowers gave way to the
draft, to other questions [it] became harder. It became hard for
people like myself and George Stephanopoulos, and Paul Begala who
had to go out there and defend him every day. You learn to be
very careful and you learn to listen very carefully to what he
said and you learn to try not to go further than what he said.
And we had a lot of conversations over the months and years about
"What do you think that means? What can we say? Where's the safe
ground here?"
Was there anyone among the staff who had the stature or the
courage to confront Governor Clinton and say "You got to give us
the truth here because we have to go out and defend you?"
Well, I think [at] different times James Carville did. To a
certain degree, I think George did and increasingly so over his
years with Clinton. But I mean at first you're not sure, you
don't realize that you need to. It took awhile for people to sort
of realize that. The draft was a good example. There was first
Clinton's original explanation. People came to him in the
beginning and said, "Look, some of these issues we need to really
look into are � one is the draft. What's the story behind your
draft?" He said, "I've been through 17 campaigns in 17 years.
Every question about my history with the draft has been asked and
answered a dozen times. There's nothing else there."
So you first think, "Well, that's a good point." [We were] in
the middle of a newspaper war in Arkansas, and it's a state where
there's a kind of ribald brand of politics, even though for all
practical purposes there's only one party, or at least there was
then. And so your first sort of inclination is here's the story.
You go back and look at the clips, read it, here's his answer.
Then things like the Colonel Holmes letter appear. And you have
some very angry reporters who had written stories based on his
explanations about what had happened. Now all of a sudden they're
confronted with a new reality.
And then a few weeks after that there comes draft induction
notice. And that left a lot of people inside the campaign
reeling. The reporters, the Joe Kleins of the world who were
contemporaries with Clinton look back and said, "How do you
forget an induction notice in the middle of the Vietnam War? How
do you forget that?" You know, that was an impossible thing to
explain.� [There's] the famous picture of George and Mandy and
James under the covers on that day. They were in their hotel room
figuring "What do we do?" And they're all on the bed under the
covers together. George in his classic darkness, "It's over, it's
over, it's over. The campaign's over." But it wasn't over, you
know.
One of the things I most admire about [Clinton], particularly at
that point, was his resilience. He never quit. You know, I worked
for a lot of candidates, in tough campaigns that lost. Most of my
candidates lost until Bill Clinton. There was always a point
where you look in their eyes and they knew it was over. And there
was never that point with Clinton. He never quit. He never gave
up. Some people might say it's shameless. But there's a
resilience and a fighting spirit about him that you knock him
over and he gets back up. And that was certainly true during the
campaign.
I don't think there's another politician that I've ever been
around in any capacity [that] could go through what he went
through in New Hampshire and survive because the campaign was
literally just in complete meltdown. The bottom had dropped out
and we lost 18 points in a weekend. You're starting with a 34 or
35 percent base to begin with, so now you're down under 20
percent. And everybody thinks it's over except Clinton.
[There is] something about his determination and his willingness
to sit down and think "Okay, what's our strategy? What are we
going to do?" And then to see him go out and tough it out for
that last week � to go to every town meeting, to go to every high
school gym, to never give up and give some of the best speeches
of his campaign. [He] came up with "They want this campaign to be
about my past, and I want it to be about your future. If you
stand up for me on Tuesday, I'll fight for you every day that I'm
in the White House." And somehow people responded. But there was
this rawness.
So, you're saying there is a paradox here. That in a way the
scandals helped Clinton that spring?
Over the course of his public life he's never been more focused
than when his back was up against the wall. I don't want to say
it helped him but it was the fire that steeled him for the rest
of the campaign. He was a much better candidate for going through
New Hampshire, not just because of the scandals, but [for]
getting down there and campaigning and looking in people's eyes.
He really did feel their pain.
It was an amazing thing to watch.� He took the energy from [the
scandals] and he did manage to boomerang it. He was the focus.
Everybody was watching him, waiting for him to go down. And what
did he do? He used that spotlight to turn the thing from being
about him to being about what he could do for the people.
Over the whole time I worked for him I've equally clear memories
of other things, but nothing is more compelling in hindsight to
me than watching him struggle through that week. It's one of the
most intense memories I have about all my years in politics
because I've never seen anything like it. And I know that in my
lifetime I will never see anything like that again. You know,
just the desire and the refusal to go down, and the ultimate
triumph.
Did that episode poison relations with the press?
No question about it, yeah.� The love affair was over, to the
degree that it had existed for a couple of months between
November and December. And when Clinton was first outlining his
policy speeches and as people began to say, "Hey, this guy has
got something to say. He's a little different. This is
interesting. He could be the nominee." So, a little of the bloom
was off that rose. But I don't think it was inevitable relations
would get as bad as they were from the press' perspective. And
the press was disillusioned because they were starting [to]
figure out, "Man, this guy really shaves the truth pretty
closely."
>From then on how were things different in terms of how Bill and
Hillary Clinton viewed the press?
I just think there was a level of suspicion � not just
suspicion, it had hardened into a conviction that the press was
against them. I don't think that was true but that was clearly
their impression. And leading to that feeding frenzy of Gennifer
Flowers and then the draft was, it was easy to understand how
they would be at least momentarily completely turned off by it.
But they never really recovered from that. And I think in a lot
of ways it was a combination of both Mrs. Clinton and the
president, but I think she really contributed to that. In a way I
think Bill Clinton is more likely to forgive and move on or at
least try to woo people who don't love him. But he never really
tried to woo the press as much as he might have.
You're saying there [was] a big difference though. For Hillary it
was something else.
His natural instincts might have been to kind of move on in a
way, but I think that her intense distrust of the press really
affected the culture of the campaign and affected the way he
viewed it in a lot of ways. I don't want to say it was entirely
her fault but she was much more steadfast in her belief that the
press was the enemy. And I think it became the kind of internal
culture of the campaign.
Us versus them?
Yeah. Because really by surviving New Hampshire and going south
� Clinton was going to rack up a lot of delegates in the south.
He had a lot of governors and good organizations down there
working with him. He had to win, but it was a lot easier to see
him as the nominee than Paul Tsongas, especially after the next
sets of primaries, which were all in the south.
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Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
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