The Former Insider's Rich Memories
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 11, 1999; Page C01
On Sept. 21, wired for sound in an ABC studio, George Stephanopoulos
watched President Clinton struggle through his grand jury testimony about
Monica Lewinsky. Stephanopoulos had been furious at his former boss --
"the intensity of my anger was both irrational and uncharitable," he says --
but now he felt sorry for the man. Off camera, Stephanopoulos started to
cry.
To the outside world, Stephanopoulos slid seamlessly from White House
insider to White House critic, from political loyalist to big-time media
commentator. But now, coaxed by a nearly $3 million book contract, he is
making some startling admissions: He doubted Clinton's veracity almost
from the start. He said things as a White House aide he didn't really
believe. He no longer thinks the "stupid, selfish and self-destructive"
Clinton was fit to be elected. And yet he had trouble breaking the
Clintonian spell: When as a Sunday morning pundit he praised the
president, he would relish the occasional call from Clinton.
His memoir "All Too Human" hits the bookstores today, sparking charges
that Stephanopoulos is just another turncoat selling his slice of history. Not
surprisingly, the ex-spinmeister is armed with a set of talking points.
"I understand people will be critical," says Stephanopoulos, 38. "But I
didn't create the events of 1998. Everything looks different in the context
of an impeached president. . . . The most honest thing I can do is lay it out
there as clearly as I can. Whatever falls from that, I'm prepared to accept."
Stephanopoulos is hard on himself in this book, clearly struggling with his
own legacy and that of the politician who made him a megastar. On
Gennifer Flowers, on the draft controversy, on Whitewater, on Paula
Jones, Stephanopoulos came to doubt what he was paid to tell reporters,
but kept quiet about those doubts until now.
Did Clinton lie to him? "I'm agnostic on whether it was forgetting,
deliberately omitting or at times deliberately deceiving," he says. "I can't
always tell the difference."
Did he have to include scenes in which Hillary Rodham Clinton cried --
once over Whitewater, when she told Stephanopoulos he could quit if he
didn't believe in them, and once when her health care plan was sinking?
Stephanopoulos says the book "actually gives a pretty sympathetic
understanding of her motives," that the first lady was trying to "avoid
embarrassment" rather than cover anything up.
So was the hypercritical press right about Clinton, and Stephanopoulos
wrong? Was he deluding himself then, and telling the truth now? Or is he
simply adopting the anti-Clinton line it takes for a former Clintonite to
peddle a $27.95 book?
Here again, Stephanopoulos treads carefully. "The press was right to raise
the warning flags" about Clinton's behavior, but was guilty of a "rush to
judgment. . . . I still have tremendous gratitude and affection for him. I think
he's been a good president. It's such a waste and a shame what
happened."
One thing is clear: Working in the cubbyhole office next to the Oval Office
exacted a psychological toll on the former Capitol Hill aide. He says he
should have gone into therapy and taken antidepressant medication a year
before he did, in the wake of Vince Foster's suicide, when the pressures
became unbearable.
"It was my fear of the scrutiny," he says. "I was scared to be treated when
I should have been treated. I feared that it would be a story. That was a
mistake."
When Flowers alleged during the 1992 primaries that she and Clinton had
had a 12-year affair, Stephanopoulos didn't press him on whether that was
true, and was never told the two had phone conversations, which Flowers
had taped. "Not knowing made it a bit easier to deal with the press; 'I
don't know' is often the best defense against a reporter on deadline," he
writes. But, he says, "I couldn't help but assume that something had
happened with Gennifer. . . . I needed Clinton to see me as his defender,
not his interrogator, which made me, of course, an enabler."
There were other messes to clean up. Just before the inauguration, Thomas
Friedman of the New York Times asked about normalizing relations with
Iraq and Clinton said that he was ready for a "fresh start." During the
uproar the next morning, Clinton said nobody had asked him such a
question. Friedman beeped Stephanopoulos, telling him: "I have won not
one but two Pulitzer Prizes, and I won't stand for being called a liar by the
next president."
"Clinton refused to issue a personal apology," Stephanopoulos writes, "but
he said I could do it for him." He lamely told reporters that Clinton
"inadvertently forgot" Friedman's question.
As White House communications director, Stephanopoulos "did the
Clintons' bidding -- giving no ground," while privately he was "arguing for
more concessions, an apology here, more access there. That only made
the Clintons believe I was going soft, pandering to the press at the
president's expense." Stephanopoulos admits he was a terrible briefer and
was soon eased into a senior adviser's job.
When the Whitewater story heated up, Stephanopoulos and his
then-colleague David Gergen tried hard to persuade Clinton to cooperate
with a Washington Post request for documents on the Arkansas land deal.
But the first lady refused, and the president -- "just a husband beholden to
his wife," says Stephanopoulos -- gave him an anti-press lecture: "The
questions won't stop. . . . They'll always want more. No president has ever
been treated like I've been treated."
Inside the White House, Stephanopoulos argued strenuously that they
should call for a Whitewater special prosecutor before one was forced on
them. But on ABC's "This Week" -- the very show on which he is now a
panelist -- Stephanopoulos insisted that "there's no need at this time for an
independent counsel."
Clinton's fury at the media is one of the book's running themes. When Bob
Woodward of The Washington Post published "The Agenda," his book
about White House policymaking, Clinton was angry that Stephanopoulos
and others had served as sources. Stephanopoulos apologized for what he
calls "a naive lapse of judgment."
"That Woodward book tore my guts out, and I didn't handle it completely
well," the president told him. "We all made mistakes. . . . But that
Woodward's an evil guy."
Stephanopoulos was pressed into service again when Paula Jones charged
that Clinton had pressed her for sex in a Little Rock hotel room. He called
NBC Washington bureau chief Tim Russert, CNN Chairman Tom
Johnson and others in a successful effort to keep Jones's news conference
off television. But after hearing the account of the former Arkansas trooper
who said he escorted Jones to the governor's suite, Stephanopoulos was
"angry about the fact that Clinton had let me go through the charade of
trying to prove he wasn't in the room when in all probability he was."
Told by the late Washington Post reporter Ann Devroy that the paper's
executive editor, Leonard Downie Jr., felt The Post had an obligation to
investigate the womanizing charges against Clinton, Stephanopoulos
notified the president. "This is sick, man," Clinton replied.
An off-the-record lunch between Downie and Stephanopoulos at the
Jefferson Hotel provides a portrait of a spin doctor practicing his craft:
"When I mentioned her name, I recounted, Clinton had drawn a blank, and
he didn't seem to be faking when he claimed that he didn't remember
meeting her. Omitting my subsequent doubts, I added that I had seen
Clinton fudge before and had believed him this time. Then I went even
further, saying that even if you believed that Clinton was a womanizer, it
wasn't credible that he had acted this way with this woman at this time." By
"printing Paula's charges against a sitting president, no matter how many
qualifiers are hidden beneath the headline," he argued, The Post would be
"telling the world . . . that her story is true."
Stephanopoulos says he was "proud" that The Post didn't publish reporter
Michael Isikoff's story until 2 1/2 months later, when Clinton hired an
attorney to defend against Jones's threatened lawsuit. "The lunch did not
influence our decision about the story at all," Downie said yesterday. "We
published the story when our reporting was finished."
After the 1996 election, a burned-out Stephanopoulos left the White
House. "I thought the second term was going to be boring," he says. But he
admitted this week that he still worried about pleasing the president.
"It took awhile for me to untrain myself from my old job," he says. "I
certainly wanted him to think I was fair. I don't think that could help but
weigh on you. If there was any pull, it was subconscious." His last
communication with Clinton was in leaving him a "hang in there" message
as the Lewinsky story was about to break.
Once the scandal erupted and he began assailing the president,
Stephanopoulos says he became a "nonperson" whose name could not be
mentioned to the Clintons. There were even strained relations with former
colleagues Paul Begala and Rahm Emanuel.
"Off the record, they suggested I was simply trying to please my new
paymasters by being provocative," while on the record they blamed his
"pessimistic and anxious 'dark side.' . . . There was just enough truth in
each of the charges to get to me. . . . Now I knew what it felt like to be on
the other side of the White House spin machine."
But the newly minted commentator continued to check in with them, and
his description of their discussions speaks volumes about the tangled nature
of Washington friendships:
"I was consoling them, but I was also reporting the story; they were venting
their frustration but also spinning me."
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