Cover: Is Bill Clinton For Real? Anointed -- prematurely -- as the front runner, he remains an enigma: a bold planner but poor manager, a conciliator yet sometime waffler. Still, many Democrats believe he's electable, and that's what they want. By GEORGE J. CHURCH Jan. 27, 1992 A few weeks ago most voters in the 49 states outside Arkansas had not even heard the name of Governor William Clinton. And those few political junkies who might recognize it would remember mainly one thing: his introduction of the newly nominated Michael Dukakis at the 1988 Democratic National Convention. Clinton's speech droned on through 33 minutes that seemed about five times as long; the cheers that erupted when he said "in conclusion" appeared to toll the knell of any hopes he might have had to succeed in national politics. Yet now, before a single caucus or primary ballot has been cast anywhere, the national press and television have anointed Bill Clinton as the front runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. Some pundits are speculating that he might even have the prize locked up in another eight or nine weeks. Their script: Clinton uses a victory or strong second-place finish in the New Hampshire primary Feb. 18 as a launching pad to wins in scattered primaries and caucuses from Arizona to Maine, and then storms the polls in 11 states, eight of them in his native South, that will vote on Super Tuesday, March 10. The next day the Arkansan will have the lion's share of the 1,400- odd delegates chosen by then -- out of an eventual 4,282 -- and so much momentum that he can finish off any rivals who might survive that blitz in the Illinois primary on March 17. Going further still, many analysts believe Clinton is the Democrat most likely to beat George Bush in November -- which, in a fine example of circular reasoning, is precisely why they say he has become the front runner. Well, now, wait just a minute. New Hampshire's cantankerous primary voters have a long history of giving a comeuppance to supposed front runners, from Harry Truman in 1952 (who lost to Estes Kefauver there shortly before withdrawing from the race) to Robert Dole in 1988. Even now, though Clinton has rocketed from 5% in a November poll of New Hampshire Democrats taken by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center to 23% in a resurvey of the same voters two weeks ago, he still trails "undecided" (26%). Similarly, in a nationwide poll taken last week for TIME by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman, "not sure" led with 24%; Clinton tied for second with ex-California Governor Jerry Brown at 22%. But Brown, who started out with far greater name recognition, has probably topped out, while Clinton is rising. From now on, most of Clinton's opponents can be expected to take dead aim at him, rather than scatter their fire against one another. And as he comes under close scrutiny for the first time outside Arkansas, Clinton may well be vulnerable on a variety of issues. One of them is his penchant for offering what sounds like detailed programs that on examination sometimes turn out to be distressingly vague. Nebraska Senator Robert Kerrey has already assailed the imprecision of Clinton's stand on health care, which is emerging as one of the hottest issues of the campaign. The Arkansan promises a plan that will combine insurance coverage of everyone

with cost controls so stringent as to make the plan "revenue neutral": that is, it would require no additional tax money to finance. To some experts that combination sounds flatly impossible. Then there are the rumors about womanizing that have dogged Clinton for years and resurfaced in sensationalist tabloids last week. Clinton called the stories "lies" but, asked point-blank by a New Hampshire television interviewer last week, "Have you ever committed adultery?" he replied, "If I had, I wouldn't tell you." He admits that his 16-year marriage has gone through some troubled times but says it is now solid. Friends, and even some foes, note that no one has ever been able to pin down anything. Perhaps the most distressing aspect of the Clinton boom is a suspicion that it is largely an artificial creation by the press. Journalistic pundits are constitutionally incapable of confessing that they have no idea what will happen in a presidential race; they are irresistibly driven to impose some sort of structure on the most shapeless contest. Last year many were looking for someone to cast as the principal rival to presumed front-runner Mario Cuomo. They came up with Clinton partly because he seemed the perfect foil to a Northern Big Government liberal: a Southerner who took many moderate stands -- on education and welfare reform, for example -- and talked constantly about the "responsibility" of people who receive government benefits to do something in return. Then, too, many journalists had repeated until it became conventional wisdom the idea that the Democrats have lost five of the past six presidential elections largely because they had become identified as a party of the poor, blacks, labor unionists, radical feminists and other special interests. Supposedly they could win again only if they chose a candidate moderate enough to win back middle-class voters, especially Southern whites. That idea was promoted most assiduously by the Democratic Leadership Council, a group headed in 1990-91 by none other than Bill Clinton. When Cuomo finally decided just before Christmas not to run, pundits of this school were pretty much stuck with hailing Clinton as the new front runner by default. Some who had complained endlessly about the interminable length of past campaigns are even beginning to grumble that this one may be over almost before it begins. But Clinton can not be dismissed as a mere creation of journalistic fashion. Many Democrats did not need the media to tell them that their standard-bearer should be someone who cannot be attacked as a McGovernite liberal. Reporters on the early campaign trail have been struck by the number of party activists who volunteer that this time around they are looking for "electability" far more than liberal purity in a nominee. Clinton got himself cast in that role largely because he could present solid credentials: as a canny politician who has run in 18 elections (counting primaries and runoffs) in the past 17 years and lost only twice; as a Governor with a genuine, though far from unassailable, record of accomplishment; and as a candidate who says things the nation is not accustomed to hearing from Democrats -- support of the death penalty, for instance. < Like every politician who comes out of nowhere to hit the big time, Clinton remains something of an enigma, the more so since he often seems a bundle of contradictions: a visionary leader and a poor manager; a propounder of bold programs and a waffler who talks on both sides of hot issues. All of which raises the insistent question: Is Clinton for real -- not only as front runner but as man, as Governor, as candidate? An attempt at some answers:

THE MAN. Though Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, tongue in cheek, introduced Clinton at a meeting two years ago as "the only politician to be a rising star in three decades," he knew pain and adversity in childhood. His father, a heavy- equipment salesman, was killed in a freak road accident three months before Clinton -- originally christened William J. Blythe IV -- was born on Aug. 19, 1946, in the little southwestern Arkansas town of Hope. Five months later, his mother Virginia returned to nursing school in Shreveport, La., to get a degree in anesthesiology, leaving Bill with grandparents who ran a small grocery store. When Bill was four, she returned to Hope and married Roger Clinton, a Buick dealer who moved the family to Hot Springs. Bill's stepfather was an alcoholic who sometimes beat Virginia and once fired a gun at her in their living room (she insists to this day he intended only to frighten, not to injure, her). Virginia and Roger divorced but quickly remarried; as a gesture to help keep the family together, Bill, then 15, had his name legally changed to Clinton. The turmoil at home seems to have left two imprints on Clinton. One was a driving ambition to get out and make something of himself in the big world, initially by being the perfect student. As a high schooler, he was selected a senator in Boys Nation, an annual promotion by the American Legion in Washington, and he got to visit the White House and meet President Kennedy. He came home starry-eyed and fixed on politics as his career. He enrolled at Georgetown University largely to be near the Congress he hoped one day to enter. Then came Oxford, on a Rhodes scholarship, and Yale Law School, where he met the brightest woman in the class, Hillary Rodham -- today a successful lawyer and a feminist who did not call herself Mrs. Clinton until her unwillingness to do so began to hurt her husband politically. Back home, Clinton lost a race for Congress but became state attorney general and in 1979, at 32, the youngest Governor in the country. Two years later, he was the youngest ex-Governor; he had impressed some of his constituents as an arrogant whiz kid who had surrounded himself with a bunch of outsiders who looked on Arkansans as barefoot hicks. In 1982 a chastened Clinton came back, apologizing to voters for developing a swelled head but vowing to reform; he has won every election since. The 1980 defeat also intensified a trait that is universally considered Clinton's greatest weakness. Even as a young teenager, he recalls, he often felt compelled to act as a peacemaker, trying to smooth over the violent quarrels at home. As a politician, he wants to be loved by everyone even more than most practitioners of his trade. Says Stephen Smith, a professor of communications at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and onetime Clinton aide: "He would really like to get 100% in an election." Clinton makes such extreme efforts to conciliate opponents that Arkansans jest that the way to get something you want desperately is to become an enemy of the Governor's. Clinton's compromising bent also makes him appear at times to take both sides of a controversial issue. To cite the most prominent current example, he claims to be the only Democratic candidate to have backed George Bush early and unreservedly on the gulf war. But on Jan. 15, 1991, the war deadline, the Arkansas Gazette quoted him as saying that he agreed with the majority of Democrats in Congress who voted against the use of force and for longer reliance on sanctions.

Asked to explain, Clinton launches into a convoluted exposition: "The people who argued that sanctions should be given more time had some good arguments," but he thought and said it would be wrong to vote "to undermine the U.N. resolution" allowing the use of force; he did not trumpet that opinion because he was a Governor, not a member of Congress, and "I didn't want to give any extra grief to my two Senators and my Congressmen, who had a tough vote to cast"; looking back, though, it seems clear that "sanctions would not have worked to get Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait." Such performances lead opponents to call Clinton "Slick Willie." In the partisan opinion of Sheffield Nelson, who lost the 1990 gubernatorial race to Clinton, "He'll be what the people want him to be. He'll do or say what it will take to get elected." Supporters retort that Clinton has merely learned the arts of building coalitions and crafting compromises between opposing views, as a Governor -- or President -- must. True, but a President also should be tough enough to knock heads together on occasion, and Clinton has given little evidence of that ability. THE GOVERNOR. Clinton has shown a rare talent for sniffing out issues and acting on them at a state level before they become hot nationally. Early in his tenure, when some experts rated Arkansas' schools the worst in the nation, he pushed through a reform package combining increased spending with standards that all schools had to meet. Most famously, he instituted competency tests for teachers. The exams were not especially difficult; 93% of teachers passed the first time around and 97% passed the second time. But Clinton's supporters claim that many teachers were required to take new courses to improve their skills. In any case it is hard to argue with the results: the percentage of Arkansas high schoolers going on to college, which was only 39% a decade ago, has increased to almost 52%. Clinton also has made several reforms carrying out his "responsibility" theme: parents who do not attend parent-teacher meetings are fined $50 for each one missed, and students who drop out of school can have their drivers' license suspended (1,000 have been since 1989). Furthermore, the Governor has implemented a welfare-reform plan, requiring able-bodied recipients to undergo training or schooling, and imposing penalties if they do not. So far, the results are inconclusive, but critics say the plan has been sabotaged by the state's sluggish welfare bureaucracy. If true, that would point up what many critics, and some friends, consider Clinton's greatest executive weakness: he is a poor manager who conceives good programs but does not see that they are carried out. A lawsuit filed against the state and Clinton personally last July charges that the Arkansas child- welfare system is riddled with abuse and neglect; children placed in foster care have been mistreated, and some have even died. The problems have been festering for at least a decade, but Clinton paid scant attention. Last summer he appointed a task force (quintessential Clinton: his first response to almost any hot problem is to appoint a task force or study commission), and since then he has been working to repair the system. He hopes to reach a settlement before the suit comes to trial, now scheduled for March, and plans to call a special session of the legislature to enact reforms.

Liberals contend that Clinton inherited a regressive tax structure (it presses harder on the poor than on the well-off) and made it more regressive by raising sales taxes while largely leaving alone income and business levies. Clinton replies, correctly, that the state constitution requires a nearly unobtainable 75% vote of the legislature to raise any tax other than the sales levy and, more dubiously, that he sought to change that and failed (critics say he did not make anywhere near the effort required). Characteristically, though, he adds, "What I've tried to do is to promote tax reform but also to give people what they wanted." Arkansas polls have consistently shown property taxes to be most unpopular, income taxes second, sales taxes the least hated. Overall, Arkansas remains a dirt-poor state, but during Clinton's tenure it has been rising, relative to the other 49, slowly but measurably in some rankings of well-being. In a 1991 poll, the nation's Governors were asked which collegue they would rate the most effective; Clinton got more votes (39%) than anyone else. That, however, is not necessarily an omen of national success. Two years before the last presidential election, the same accolade went to Dukakis. THE CANDIDATE. Press puffery apart, Clinton has got off to an impressive start. He has improved immensely as an orator; his latest efforts have been smooth, colloquial and graced with a touch of self-deprecating humor. He has raised more money (close to $4 million) than any of his rivals, and on grounds of electability has won the sympathetic interest, if not outright backing, of teacher groups and labor unions that might ordinarily prefer a more liberal candidate. But how cogent is his program? His proposals are more detailed than usual for candidates at this stage and contain nothing that seems flagrantly silly. Most are at worst debatable, and they do hang together rather than contradict one another. Some specifics: -- Taxes. Like two of the other candidates, Clinton promises a middle-class tax cut, but he has at least thought it out. His idea: reduce the tax rates on income up to $82,150 from 15% and 28% now to 13.5% and 26.5%; keep the present 31% rate on further income up to $200,000 but raise it to 38.5% on amounts above that. Supposedly these changes would collect the same amount of revenue as the present rates, but more equitably. Clinton also would allow entrepreneurs to exclude from tax 50% of their capital gains, but only on profits from money invested in new businesses and kept there for five years. He would grant tax credits on purchases of new plants and equipment, but only to small and medium-size businesses and only for purchases that exceed the average for the prior three years. The purpose is to spur new investment without giving a windfall to individuals and companies that cash in profits on investments made years ago or merely continue their existing level of buying plants and equipment. -- Recession. A nonpartisan criticism of Clinton's tax program is that it might help the economy in the long run but would do nothing to jolt it out of the present slump. To do that, the Governor proposes a variety of measures: speeded-up spending on highway construction, new regulations that would prevent banks from foreclosing on homeowners or business people who can at least keep up interest payments on their loans. Generally, these ideas seem helpful but insufficient. -- Defense. Clinton would chop $100 billion out of the military budget over the next five years, on top of the $100 billion Bush already proposes to cut. Some suggestions: cancel the B-2

bomber and the SDI antimissile program, cut another two Army divisions and two aircraft-carrier battle groups, in addition to the reductions Bush has suggested. -- Social programs. A main element of Clinton's much touted "new covenant" between the Government and its citizens is his plan to ditch the $6 billion student-loan program and replace it with an $8 billion program that would extend funds to any student entering college -- but require repayment, either through deductions from future earnings or by two years of low-paid community service as a police officer, child-care worker or the like. At times, the Governor is trying to find the middle ground on issues where none seems to exist. He has said abortion should be "safe, legal and rare" -- a formulation likely to strike moralists on both sides as waffling pure and simple. On foreign policy, he takes an internationalist line, agreeing with Bush on some matters but flaying him on others, notably for continuing "to coddle China." On trade, he is generally antiprotectionist and favors a free- trade pact with Mexico. But he has said the U.S. should tell the Japanese that "if they don't play by our rules, we'll play by theirs." Clinton has fed an almost palpable voter hunger for a new face and a new voice speaking neither liberal nor conservative orthodoxy. But that hunger can ( be dangerous. Suppose Clinton does sew up the nomination by mid-March and the Republicans discover a Willie Horton or Donna Rice in his background? They might choose to withhold the information until Clinton delivers his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in July, when springing it would be most damaging. The grind of press conferences, debates, primaries, caucuses has often been vilified in the past as no test of anything about a candidate except his glibness and powers of endurance. But a mercifully shortened campaign season can and should fulfill a different function, subjecting an intriguing but largely ambiguous new face to a rigorous examination of his character, accomplishments, failures, ideas and ideals. Clinton should be put through a competency test tougher than any he imposed on Arkansas teachers. The nation will benefit whether he passes or flunks. — Reported by Laurence I. Barrett/Manchester, Richard Woodbury and Michael Riley/Little Rock Questions Questions Questions Clinton appears to be well on his way to winning the nomination, but many voters still have qualms about his character and beliefs By GEORGE J. CHURCH Apr. 20, 1992 IS IT POSSIBLE FOR A CANDIDATE TO win a presidential nomination while convincing even many of his own party's strongest partisans that he does not / have the honesty and integrity to lead the nation? It would seem a wildly implausible accomplishment (if that is the word). Yet Bill Clinton is coming closer and closer to pulling it off. His primary victories last week in New

York, Wisconsin and Kansas, while far from overwhelming, further padded what already looked like an insurmountable lead in delegates. Moreover, former Senator Paul Tsongas' refusal to re-enter the race, despite his unexpectedly strong second-place showing in New York, virtually ensured that anyone-but- Clinton sentiment will remain unfocused, rather than coalescing around an appealing rival. Rarely if ever have party voters approached their choice with so many misgivings. Only 50% of New York Democrats questioned as they left primary voting booths said Clinton had the honesty to be President; 46% thought he did not. That was only a bit higher than the proportion expressing qualms in exit polls in earlier primaries. If Clinton stirs so much doubt even among the most committed Democrats, how will he be regarded by the broader electorate he must appeal to in order to defeat George Bush? A TIME/CNN poll of 937 registered voters questioned by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman last Thursday -- two days after Clinton's primary victories -- gives some startling answers. A month earlier, Clinton finished in a dead heat with Bush, 43% to 43%; now he loses by 11 points, 44% to 33% (a jump in the undecided column made most of the difference). In a three-way race, Clinton barely edges Texas billionaire Ross Perot, 25% to 21%, with Bush pulling 40%. It is rare enough for a candidate not to get a bounce in the polls after winning some major primaries; to lose ground is almost unheard of. Some reasons for the deterioration: asked if Clinton is "someone you can trust," respondents voted 59% no to 28% yes. Questioned more specifically as to whether Clinton is "honest and trustworthy enough to be President, 53% said no and 39% yes -- vs. a 59% yes to 37% no vote for Bush on the same question. A further indication of serious trouble brewing for Clinton: "the character issue," as it is generally though imprecisely called, has begun drawing the sardonic and sometimes fatal attention of those interpreters of the zeitgeist, TV's late-night talk-show hosts. Sample gibe from Johnny Carson: "Clinton experimented with marijuana, but he said he didn't inhale and didn't enjoy it. That's the trouble with the Democrats. Even when they do something wrong, they don't do it right." . Even amid the glow of his primary victories last week, Clinton rather plaintively acknowledged that he had to do a better job of convincing voters he is an honest man. Some well-wishers go further. "Clinton is going to have to find some forum in which he confronts these character questions directly," says former Democratic National Chairman John White. He has in mind something like John F. Kennedy's televised confrontation with Protestant ministers in Houston that defused concerns about his Roman Catholicism -- and its supposed influence on his policies -- early in the 1960 campaign. Natalie Davis, a political-science professor at Birmingham-Southern College, draws a different analogy. Says she: "At some strategic moment in the fall, he's going to have to give a sort of Checkers speech ((referring to the 1952 TV talk by Richard Nixon, rebutting slush-fund charges, that saved his vice-presidential candidacy)), and it will have to be dynamite. The great thing is that Bill Clinton is totally capable of delivering it." Maybe so. Clinton already has won the surprised admiration of many pols for surviving allegations that would long since have scuttled many another campaign. Yet for the candidate and his supporters, the massive mistrust he has aroused is maddeningly difficult to counter because it stems from so many sources. It can no longer be dispelled by refuting specific charges

-- not all of which are terribly important anyway. There are some indications that more voters are troubled by allegations of adultery and draft evasion than will admit it to pollsters. But youthful experimentation with pot is a proven non- issue in the case of candidates who admit it straightforwardly; it had no effect on the 1988 campaigns of Bruce Babbitt or Albert Gore Jr. or the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. And probably not 1 voter in 50 could even say just what are the questions that have been raised about Clinton's financial dealings. Far outweighing any specific issue is the cumulative impression made by the sheer number of them. Says Mervin Field, conductor of the respected California Poll: "If it was just marital infidelity, ((voters)) might have excused that, but the cumulative weight of that and everything else is too much. The degree of uncomfortableness is increasing day by day." Even while endorsing Clinton last month, former President Jimmy Carter lamented that the "volume and repetition of charges against him have created an image that he's not $ trustworthy" -- most unfairly, in Carter's view. Among political insiders too, the volume and repetition of charges have created a kind of shell-shocked wariness as to what revelation or pseudo- revelation might be coming next. There are indications that this fear is keeping Clinton from sewing up the nomination as early as he might have. It is not at all certain that the Arkansas Governor can win enough delegates in the remaining primaries and caucuses to give him the 2,145 votes necessary. To nail down the prize, he may eventually need a heavy majority of the so-called superdelegates -- basically elected officials and party bigwigs. But though the Clinton campaign claims the support of more than 200 of the 772 superdelegates, there was no rush among the remainder to jump aboard his bandwagon, even after his victories last week. California Representative Don Edwards held a meeting last week of 17 congressional Democrats who, like him, are superdelegates. They agreed, he says, that Clinton's nomination now looks inevitable but that nonetheless they would stay uncommitted at least for the moment. One reason, says Edwards -- who stresses that he personally has no doubts about Clinton's honesty -- is that "you always wonder if another shoe will drop." The situation has reached the somewhat absurd stage of rumors about allegations. Talk circulated around Chicago last week that some really damaging charges -- nature unspecified -- were about to become public, and it may have scared off some superdelegates from signing up with Clinton just yet. Among both ordinary voters and political cognoscenti, a great deal of the uneasiness about Clinton reflects his propensity to dance away from straightforward yes or no answers to any character question. He relies instead on legalistic, artfully phrased and heavily nuanced replies that may be technically accurate but also misleading. The resulting belief that he is incurably evasive has probably damaged Clinton far more than any specific issue. It ties in with a not very specific but nonetheless widely felt discomfort about his calculated ambition (he says he has wanted to be President since he was a teenager) and some alleged shifts of position on policy. At least among some people, these factors create a general impression of insincerity, of a synthetic politician who will do or say anything to become President. In fact, 67% of those questioned in last week's TIME/CNN poll said exactly that: Clinton "would say anything to get elected

President." That at least partly reflected a sour suspicion of all politicians; 60% voiced the same opinion about Bush. Clinton's admirers put much blame for Clinton's woes on print and TV journalists who, in their view, have been harping on largely trivial questions of character while ignoring the policy issues that are Clinton's strength. Result: the voters who have heard about Gennifer Flowers vastly outnumber those who have any idea that Clinton has put forth a highly detailed program on taxes and the economy, let alone those who have any notion of what his program contains. There is some truth to this, but given public attitudes, it is largely inevitable. Political scientist James David Barber of Duke University observes that many voters say to themselves, "I don't really know what the deficit means. Ido know what adultery means." To some extent, Clinton may be suffering merely from being a newcomer to the national spotlight -- and one who quickly got tabbed as the Democratic front runner, thus assuring himself of exceptionally early and intense scrutiny. Clinton's wife Hillary recently wondered aloud why George Bush was not also being relentlessly pummeled about his character. Though she quickly apologized for raising the particular issue that she did -- whispers, never substantiated, that Bush had had an extramarital affair -- she had a point. Why has Bush not been questioned incessantly about his son Neil's involvement with a savings and loan association that failed because of unsound banking practices? About his knowledge of possibly illegal and unconstitutional Iran- contra activities? About his flip-flops on abortion, taxes, Saddam Hussein and many other issues? About the widepread impression that he has no strong beliefs about anything except his own ability to fill the Oval Office? The answer, probably, is that Bush has been around long enough for people to feel they know as much about him, good or bad, as they need to; unanswered questions left over from past campaigns are regarded as old news. And voters do not have to guess what kind of President Bush is likely to be, as they must with Clinton; they can form their judgments on the basis of Bush's record through more than three years in office. Clinton may also be suffering more than his rivals, and more than past candidates, from the backlash of anger against all politics and politicians, which has been far stronger in this campaign than ever before. In another election cycle, the Governor might have profited from his reputation as a master politician who has shown a rare ability in Arkansas to convince often clashing interests that he is on their side. Clinton's defenders like to point out that the now sainted Franklin D. Roosevelt was often regarded in his day as a crafty politician promising something for everybody. But 1992 is the worst possible year to be called "Slick Willie" -- the nickname invented by opponents of Clinton in Arkansas that he detests but has never been able to shake. The specific accusations against Clinton are a mixed bag, involving two kinds of "character" questions. One set focuses on private character -- allegations of adultery and marijuana smoking, for example -- that have no correlation to presidential performance, except for whatever a candidate's comments about them reveal as to his general honesty or lack of it. Regrettably, this group of problems has received the most attention because it is -- well, sexier than questions about what might be called public character. These are matters such as conflict-of-interest situations and how a candidate might carry out the duties of office. The common denominator is that Clinton's answers to all these questions have generally been ineffective. In fact, worse than

ineffective: They have sometimes got him into deeper trouble than he was in before. Some details: INFIDELITY Clinton's general strategy has been four-part: 1) in effect, admit to adultery without actually using the words by repeatedly conceding that his marriage to Hillary has gone through periods of severe strain; 2) insist that they have patched things up and their marriage is now solid; 3) deny the specific allegations by Gennifer Flowers of a 12-year affair with him; and 4) refuse to answer any questions about other women on the grounds, essentially, that if Hillary is satisfied, it is no one else's business. There are some indications that this line is succeeding in convincing voters, whether or not they believe his denials of involvement with Flowers, that the matter is a closed book, with nothing more to be said, and not terribly important anyway. When Phil Donahue persisted in grilling him about adultery, Clinton won vociferous applause from the studio audience by informing the TV host that they would all "sit for a long time in silence" if Donahue did not get onto something else. But there are also hints that the issue is helping open a gender gap against Clinton. Illinois pollster J. Michael McKeon reports that dissatisfaction with Clinton is highest among women ages 18 to 44, and Sue Purrington, executive director of the Chicago chapter of the National Organization for Women, says "about 80%" of the women who talk politics with her have expressed serious reservations about the Arkansas Governor. Though she attributes these to the character issue generally rather than allegations of adultery specifically, she goes on to talk about "a gut-level feeling of distaste for his life-style, which is perceived as morally not upstanding. Women tend to feel that one's moral character is a whole element, that if somebody is doing something morally unacceptable, it affects that person's judgment on other issues." MARIJUANA A truly trivial issue, revealing only because it illustrates Clinton's penchant for legalistic evasiveness. Questioned about pot smoking, Clinton first said he had never broken U.S. or state laws -- an answer clearly designed to convey the impression that he had never tried the weed, without his actually saying so. When someone finally asked the obvious question -- what about while he was abroad? -- Clinton confessed that he had smoked marijuana as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford in the late '60s but felt compelled to add that not only had he not liked it, he had not even inhaled -- an assertion that many others who had smoked marijuana, then and later, found hilariously unbelievable. Clinton could have avoided the whole brouhaha, and what is threatening to become grist for a million late-night-TV jokes, by just saying "Yes, and so what?" the first time he was asked. THE DRAFT A far more serious affair. Just when Clinton might have thought he had put it to rest, a letter surfaced last week dated May 8, 1969, and written by Cliff Jackson, then a fellow Rhodes scholar and now a bitter political opponent of Clinton's in Arkansas. In it, Jackson informed a

friend back in the U.S. that Clinton "received his induction notice last week." Clinton, who earlier said he was never actually drafted, now asserted that yes, he received an induction letter in England. It came by surface mail, he said, and specified a date that had already passed; he got in touch with his local draft board and was told he could finish his term at Oxford. He did not mention it before, he said in essence, because he had just forgotten about it. But who could forget a draft notice? At any rate, the basic story does not change: torn between opposition to what he regarded as an immoral war in Vietnam and his sense of duty to country, Clinton kept himself out of the draft for a few crucial months by enrolling in an ROTC unit at the University of Arkansas that he never actually joined; he eventually gave up that deferment but drew such a high lottery number that he was never inducted. Whatever they may think of the war, many Americans would readily sympathize with the young Clinton's moral turmoil about it; he was certainly not the only member of his generation to do everything he legally could to stay out. But even some of his supporters have trouble swallowing Clinton's contention that his eventual decision to submit to the draft was a moral act, when he wrote at the time that he wanted -- even at the age of 23 -- to maintain his future "political viability." The latest dustup about what kind of letter he received in England can only reinforce an impression that he is saying whatever he judges to be expedient. SEGREGATED GOLF Clinton has made no attempt to justify playing a round of golf during the present campaign at the Country Club of Little Rock, which has no black members; he has said it was a mistake that he will not repeat. But his explanation of why he did it sounds distressingly lame: he and his hosts were in a hurry, and it was the only place they could reach in time. Nobody thinks Clinton is a racist; his pledges to try to heal white-vs.-black enmity are among the most attractive aspects of his campaign -- especially in contrast to past Republican appeals to whites' racial fears. But the episode does suggest even to some friendly observers that Clinton may consider himself above the restraints that apply to other people. He knows he is not a racist, and sneaking in a quick round of golf at a convenient country club will not change that, so why not? CONFLICT OF INTEREST Essentially, there are two issues. One is that in 1978, when Clinton was Arkansas attorney general, he and Hillary invested in Whitewater Development Co., a corporation that planned to sell lots for vacation homes. They maintained their investment even after 1982, when Jim McDougal, head of Whitewater, became majority owner of the now defunct Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, which was regulated by the state Clinton shortly was elected to govern. (After winning his first two-year gubernatorial term in 1978, Clinton lost his 1980 bid.) The other is that Hillary was a partner in the Rose Law Firm, which represented clients before the state government that her husband headed. Clinton has replied that he and Hillary never made any money out of their investment in Whitewater -- in fact, his lawyer has said they lost almost $69,000 -- and Hillary relinquished any share in her law firm's income from clients doing business with the state.

That defense seems to miss two points about at least the appearance of impropriety: a Governor should not be a business partner of a man subject to regulation by the state administration; and clients with state business to transact might choose a law firm they thought had influence with the administration -- and who would have more influence than the Governor's wife? POLICY SHIFTS Clinton has raised more than a few eyebrows by campaigning first as a centrist -- when he expected his principal opposition for the Democratic nomination to come from the liberal Mario Cuomo -- and then as a more traditional liberal, when he lost New Hampshire to Tsongas' attack from the right. Actually, these switches amounted to little more than the tactical shifts between what to emphasize and what to downplay that all politicians make and that are fairly legitimate, so long as they do not involve switches in actual positions -- which Clinton generally has not made. Even so, he has opened himself to Tsongas' bitter charge of pandering. In Southern TV ads, he assailed Tsongas for proposing a slower increase in the pensions of well-off Social Security recipients -- even though Clinton knows that some such action will be necessary if the federal deficit is ever to be brought under control (in fact, Tsongas' stand was not very different from one Clinton had taken in the past). Individually, none of these matters might seem of overwhelming importance. Taken together, they build up a picture of evasiveness that is starting to dominate the political debate. And the pity is that Clinton has detailed programs on taxes, investment, job creation, race relations, and educational and welfare reform that deserve far more debate than they are getting. CHART: NOT AVAILABLE CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 937 registered voters taken for TIME/CNN on April 9 by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. Sampling error is plus or minus 3.2%. CAPTION: Is Bill Clinton honest and trustworthy enough to be President? Is Clinton someone who would say anything to get elected? Is Clinton someone you would be proud to have as President? — Reported by Laurence I. Barrett and Margaret Carlson/Washington and Michael Riley/Atlanta What He Will Do Armed with more will than wallet, Clinton realizes he must stimulate the economy before delivering on such heady promises as health-care reform and job retraining By MICHAEL KRAMER Nov. 16, 1992

He was not a born king of men. . .but a child of the common people, who made himself a great persuader, therefore a leader, by dint of firm resolve, patient effort, and dogged perseverance. . . He was open to all impressions and influences, and gladly profited by the teachings of events and circumstances, no matter how adverse or unwelcome. There was probably no year of his life when he was not a wiser, cooler, and better man than he had been the year preceeding. -- HORACE GREELEY ON ABRAHAM LINCOLN EARLY LAST JANUARY, ON A cold, windy morning, Bill Clinton drove around Little Rock reveling in his good fortune. The Secret Service cocoon had yet to come and not a vote had been cast, but Clinton was already being hailed as the Democrat to beat. Dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt and with a University of Arkansas baseball cap tilted back on a head of hair considerably less gray than it is today, Clinton wheeled his state-owned sedan around town and laughed at the presumption of comparing himself to Lincoln. "Yet, you know," he said, "if you think about it, that description kind of gets at me some, don't you think?" Greeley's observation is contained in Lincoln on Leadership, a slim volume of 188 pages. Clinton, a quick study, could have devoured the book's central tenets in a few hours. But he carried it around for weeks, dipping in and out, rereading its advice, "learning a little," as he put it. "He keeps talking about it," said his aide, George Stephanopoulos, at the time. "It's like a private bible about how to govern." The epigraph of the book's first chapter quoted Lincoln's reason for relieving General John Fremont of his Missouri command during the Civil War: "His cardinal mistake is that he isolates himself and allows nobody to see him," Lincoln wrote. "That's it," said Clinton as he drove. "The key to being an effective political leader is getting around. Lincoln was always out and about picking up information. He wasn't a prisoner in the White House. He was one of the few Presidents to regularly visit working sessions of the Congress. I do that too, with the legislature here. You've got to go find the facts for yourself, and many of the good ones come from outside your inner circle. If I make it, the hardest thing will be to keep reaching out. A strict, formal structure just won't cut it. There's too much you miss if you don't forage around yourself." Two days after this conversation, the Gennifer Flowers allegations almost wrecked Clinton's candidacy. He weathered them, and others with the potential to destroy him, and afterward mused about the value of luck. "You work and you study and you position yourself and you strike back when you're hit, but without luck, forget it," Clinton said last spring. "Think about how I've gotten to this point. Bush was riding high in the polls after the Gulf War, so the big-name Democrats stayed out. That's luck. Then, the guys who chose to run anyway proved less than compelling because they didn't seem to have seriously thought through what they'd do with the job, so they appeared tentative and simply ambitious. More luck. And then, above everything, there is the luck of a bad economy. The case for change is virtually self-evident. When I talk about change, I'm tapping into a pre-existing desire for it. Best of all, if I go all the way, the economy will be on the mend, so I'll be playing with a deck increasingly stacked in my favor. Now that's real luck." That was then. Today reality has another face. Several days before the election, some of the men and women who hope to help the President-elect fix the nation's broken economy met to review the situation. They pored over the latest economic data, considered future projections and

reminded themselves of the promises Clinton made during the campaign. "Due to circumstances beyond our control -- and some of our own making -- the deck is not exactly stacked in our favor," says one of those who were present. "The reality is a cold shower. Expectations for Bill's presidency couldn't be higher, but the economy is stalled almost beyond reason. We changed our program last June and said we'd cut the deficit in half in four years rather than eliminate it completely -- but even that seems impossible now unless we get serious about cutting entitlement programs, which would probably require expending all of our political capital." Four years, the Clintonians realize, is not a long time. "We'll get some deficit relief in the first few years, as the savings and loan bailout is completed, but we're looking at a deficit that will climb again in 1995 and '96 when Bill is up for re-election," says the aide. "On top of that, we have incredibly expensive programs for everything, and many of the supporting numbers on both the revenue and spending sides just don't add up." A case in point, says this adviser, is the plan to collect $45 billion in extra taxes from foreign corporations over four years. "We'd be lucky to get a tenth of that," he says. "Bill's going to win, but his luck may be about to run out." Clinton promises a post-Inauguration 100 days reminiscent of Franklin Roosevelt's action-filled early push to lift America from the Great Depression. But budgetary constraints will force him to choose priorities among the many reforms he has promised, ranging from universal health insurance and college-loan programs to massive public works investments. The most critical decision he faces is whether to combine an initial economic- stimulus package with deficit-reduction measures or to postpone the belt tightening until a stronger recovery is under way. What to look for in the short term: -- Executive Orders overturning such Bush Administration actions as the ban on lesbians and gays in the military. -- Rapid legislative action on a spate of bills, like the Family Leave Act, that have stalled because of Bush vetoes or veto threats. -- Early staffing decisions that will set the tone of the Administration. Two key appointments: chief of staff, which will signal whether Clinton will follow a top-down or hub-of-the-wheel governing style; and Treasury Secretary, which must be someone who can reassure both financial markets and the Federal Reserve that Clinton will exercise discipline as he pursues economic reform. THE FIRST 100 DAYS CANNOT be successful without an intense interregnum. The time between now and Jan. 20 will tell the tale, and by all accounts Clinton is just beginning to focus on the transition. But for months a number of campaign insiders and several groups officially unaffiliated with Clinton have been thinking hard about governing. A small cadre led by campaign chairman Mickey Kantor, a Los Angeles lawyer, has been working secretly for eight weeks. In Washington the Democratic Leadership Council has been pondering policy and structural questions for even longer, and Clinton's aides expect its conclusions will carry special weight. Clinton helped found and was once chairman of the group, a collection of centrist Democrats whose views the President-elect has often echoed. The council's thoughts -- and those

of its think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute -- will be presented to Clinton later this week, and may offer the best window into understanding how he will proceed from here. More important than who gets what job is how Clinton conceives of his government operationally, whether he is able to winnow his varied and often contradictory promises to a few significant proposals capable of passing a Congress that will have its own agenda, and whether he is astute enough to understand that process and policy are inseparable. Clinton's first task, says the Progressive Policy Institute's Elaine Kamarck, must be "the definition of his mandate, something he needs to do early and often. If he doesn't do it, it will be done for him by the media, which will look to the exit polls and their own musings." Defining his mandate, claiming a rationale for his election beyond the rejection of Bush, is critical for Clinton for two reasons: 1) despite his impressive victory, a majority of Americans voted for someone else; and 2) there is a vast difference between being an instrument of change and being a catalyst for change. Clinton "thought about beginning this definitional process before the election," says Kamarck, "but the result was in too much doubt, and he had to make sure he won." Clinton's advisers hope he will emulate Ronald Reagan. Against the evidence, Reagan interpreted his 1980 victory as a vote for his supply-side nostrums rather than a vote against Jimmy Carter. "Reagan just said what the election was about, and pretty soon everyone bought his definition," says Kamarck. "Now, with a series of speeches culminating in his Inaugural, Clinton has to do what Reagan did." At the same time, the President-elect must set his priorities, determine the structure of his government and make appointments. "The order is key," says Richard Holbrooke, a Clinton foreign policy adviser who served in the Carter Administration as an Assistant Secretary of State. "If you appoint people first, they immediately begin protecting their turf, and they start making decisions in your name. Clinton should delay appointments till his priorities are set and until he has a governmental structure firmly in mind." Clinton believes he has already signaled the programs he will emphasize in his first 100 days: job creation, health-care reform and training the work force of the future. "These are the things we've run on and we'd want to + address right out of the box," says campaign director Bruce Lindsey. "But each of these implies hundreds of subpriorities that he hasn't yet ranked," says another Clinton aide. "Take job creation. What the hell is that, really? Do we go with a large economic-stimulus package right away? Do we increase infrastructure expenditures? Do we push all the training schemes he's mentioned at once and right away? Do we delay a middle-class tax cut in order to pay for it all, because the economy's so sour? These questions are crucial, and the list of them is endless. Simply enunciating what we call the Big Three major objectives gets you nowhere in real life." One of the important "process" decisions Clinton must make soon is whether he will control the appointment of sub-Cabinet officers instead of permitting the department Secretaries to select their own deputies. Clinton appears to have firm views on the subject. Carter's problem, Clinton said last winter, "is that he gave little thought to how his appointees would work together. He

went for the 'best people' without thinking about their loyalty to him or to his program, and he avoided getting involved with choosing the second-tier people, who are the ones who really run things on a day-to-day basis." The question here is whether Clinton will really avoid Carter's mistakes, or whether Clinton's conciliatory nature will cause him to accommodate all his philosophically diverse advisers in the belief that he is smart enough to adjudicate among them. "He doesn't want to do everything," says Clinton's campaign-issues director, Bruce Reed. "He wants to know everything -- and from that comes a tendency to make most decisions himself." Clinton views intellectual ferment as valuable in itself, and while he may have gone to school on Carter's shortcomings, he has described himself as being "quite taken" with Franklin Roosevelt's presidency. F.D.R.'s governing style has been captured best by biographer Kenneth Davis: "Whitmanesque in his zestful openness to a variety that . . . included contradictions, and in his 'yea-saying' to all and sundry, he was absolutely confident of his ability to 'weave together' antagonistic counsels and personalities . . . he talked with a steady stream of visitors, each of whom left him saying and often believing that he was deeply sympathetic with the visitor's views if he did not, in fact, share them." After hearing that passage, three of Clinton's closest aides say the same ( could be "said exactly" of the President-elect, and Hillary Clinton's own analysis of her husband supports that conclusion. "If you go in expecting that someone who is sympathetic with you agrees with you, then that is a very naive position to take," Hillary recently told the Washington Post. "When he says, 'I understand,' or 'That's terrible,' that is no commitment, but an expression of understanding." From this stance, his advisers fear Clinton will follow Roosevelt and reject a White House system that revolves around a strong chief of staff -- even if the President-elect permits someone to have the title. F.D.R. preferred what political scientists describe as a "spokes of a wheel" structure that had the President at the hub. Carter too tried a "spokes" arrangement for the first two years of his term. Jack Watson (who was Carter's last chief of staff) has described the disaster that ensued. Carter "wished to know the pros and cons and the ins and the outs of every issue," Watson said. "We had a spokes-of-the-wheel staff where there was going to be equal access. Many of our problems arose from that and from the fact that no one knew who was really speaking for the President. We should have started from the beginning with a strong chief of staff." Clinton should too, but there is no obvious candidate for the job besides Hillary. The testimony of campaign insiders highlights Clinton's need for a tough staff chief and indicates clearly why Hillary is best positioned for the role. "Hillary is quicker to clarify and make decisions than he is," says Carolyn Staley, one of the Clintons' oldest friends. "He'll maybe ((let)) things drag or wait for someone else to do them. ((Hillary's)) very organized. She's very thorough on follow-up. Bill relies on the staff to keep him organized." Betsey Wright, who served as Clinton's gubernatorial chief of staff, views Hillary as the "process" person in the Clinton political partnership. "She's the facilitator for making certain that the decisions he is leaning toward are ironclad," says Wright. "And by asking him the questions and walking him through scenarios

and playing devil's advocate, she keeps other people from imposing things on him. She has the trial lawyer's ((ability)) to punch a hole in an argument -- and she'll keep punching until he fixes it." Hillary has said only that she foresees a more "comprehensive" White House role for herself than that undertaken by previous First Ladies. Actually ) naming her chief of staff would cause a flap; but if Clinton won't take such a precedent-setting step, he will have to find someone of comparable skills or risk seeing his presidency go the way of Carter's. While Clinton needs to resolve such structural issues quickly, he must move with equal speed on several fundamental policy decisions. In 1960 Harvard political scientist Richard Neustadt told President-elect John Kennedy that "nothing would help the new Administration more than an impression of energy, direction, action and accomplishment. Postpone whatever is postponable. Concentrate upon the things that are immediately relevant." Kennedy governed in an easier time. For Clinton, too much that is immediately relevant is difficult and in some instances at variance with his campaign rhetoric. This is not to say that Clinton won't impress. He understands symbolism and will quickly act to telegraph a change in tone and direction. As early as his first day in office, Clinton will issue Executive Orders lifting the ban on the use of U.S. funds for fetal-tissue research and the prohibition of gays in the military. He will also support legislation that the Congress can be expected to pass triumphantly, like the Family Leave Act, a law mandating stricter child-support enforcement, campaign-finance reform, and tougher restrictions on lobbyists and government employees who seek work in the private-sector businesses they had previously overseen -- the so-called revolving-door problem. WITH THESE EASY STEPS accomplished, the road will become increasingly rocky. Some of the programs Clinton mentioned without caveat during the campaign are full of qualifiers, and those unfamiliar with the fine print of his plan will be disappointed. Many of Clinton's sweet-sounding programs, like requiring companies to spend 1.5% of their payroll on job training, will be "phased in" over long periods, and even when fully implemented, some will not have the reach many expect. Consider the plan to permit students to finance their college education with loans or a period of community service. Clinton has spoken often about national service, but he has never mentioned that the maximum tuition assistance available would be only $5,000 a year (less than the annual cost of an education at even most state universities), or that only a fraction of those who might be attracted to the idea could be accommodated. "We're not going to create another entitlement so that anyone who wants to go into national service can do it," says Bruce Reed. "We'll spend up to $7.5 billion a year on it and try to provide as many slots as that money can pay for." By that calculus, only about 250,000 students could become national servants, or roughly one-eighth of those who would be eligible if the plan had no monetary ceiling. A feature of Clinton's program to revitalize urban areas would give welfare recipients and low-income workers an incentive to save by allowing them to place money in special accounts. The

funds could be used for education, job training, the purchase of a home or retirement, and they would be federally matched with up to $1,800 a year. Families with incomes up to about $28,000 a year could participate. But again, as Reed points out, Clinton plans only a four-year, $400 million "demonstration project," barely adequate to meet even a minute fraction of the probable demand. While the mitigating details of the programs behind these promises have been established, there are others that have yet to be fleshed out, and still more that will most likely be relegated to the back burner, simply because, as Reed has said, "there isn't enough money to make everybody happy." So drug treatment on demand, 100,000 new cops on the street, expanding Head Start and other well-meaning ideas probably won't surface as legislative initiatives until well into Clinton's term, if then. WHAT WILL BE ADdressed is the truly serious business: how to do anything meritorious about job creation, health care and worker training when Clinton's advisers have already concluded privately that the country may face an annual deficit of $500 billion by 1996. Toward the end of the campaign, Clinton was almost desperate to dampen expectations. He knew, as he said, that "people are dying to believe again" and that he had "raised a lot of hope." But in the week before the election, in a reprise of George Bush's Inaugural assertion that "we have more will than wallet," Clinton quietly said, "There's a limit to what we can do because of the deficit." Then, in his penultimate campaign address, in the wee hours of Election Day in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Clinton said, "I'm here to tell you that we didn't get into this mess overnight, and we won't get out of it overnight," a line one of his aides described as consciously downbeat. Actually, Clinton had been hedging for weeks. During the third debate, on Oct. 19, Clinton responded to those who were incredulous about the arithmetic of his plan with these words: "I am not going to raise taxes on the middle class to pay for these programs. Now, furthermore, I am not going to tell you 'Read my lips' on anything, because I cannot foresee what emergencies might develop." That was fine as far as it went, but at no time since has Clinton defined "emergencies." Neither has he said that he will not raise middle- class taxes for other purposes, like deficit reduction, or whether he may increase "consumption" fees on items like alcohol and tobacco that, after all, are taxes by another name. The reason for all this gobbledygook is simple: the sorry state of the economy will force Clinton to offer a fiscal-stimulus program that he will then have to balance with deficit reduction. On the stimulus side, the strategy under discussion would involve speeding up Clinton's proposals for new federal spending on infrastructure improvements to create new jobs. Clinton's advisers contend that such expenditures have a multiplier effect that will spur private spending. They believe, for example, that better roads mean new shopping malls, gas stations and hotels. To hasten this ripple effect, Clinton may expand the investment tax credit beyond what he has already proposed, a pump-priming action that could be scaled back as the economy improved and the unemployment rate declined. But critics fear that infrastructure spending could be squandered on unproductive pork-barrel programs as members of Congress add their pet projects to the Administration's list. Pork aside, two former presidential economists (Republican Herbert Stein, who served Nixon, and Democrat Charles Schultze, who worked for Carter) are worried

that infrastructure spending will simply drain money from private savings and investment, thus defeating the multiplier effect. "There is a risk here of Democratic supply-side theory," says Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution. "The Democrats may be making a claim for public investment as ridiculous as the conservative claim for tax cuts." To blunt such skepticism, Clinton has professed increasing concern for the deficit. He claims that "there may be some ways to increase investment without increasing the deficit" (a view many economists find dubious), and he has lately spoken of "getting serious" about the deficit later. "But it is very, very difficult to be credible on deficit reduction when you are saying you are going to do it down the road," says Rudolph Penner, a former Congressional Budget Office director whose mild retort reflects a common disbelief among professional economists. Two other important constituencies have echoed Penner's qualms. "I would approach any stimulus package with a great deal of caution," says House Budget Committee chairman Leon Panetta. "It has to be linked to a definite deficit-reduction plan." Add to this the likelihood that the Federal Reserve might be tempted to increase interest rates to stem inflationary pressures in the wake of a Clinton stimulus program, and one gets a sense of what Clinton is up against. Clinton insisted last week that he has "worked hard to send a signal to the markets that I'll be disciplined, that I'll both promote growth and work to reduce the deficit." Maybe so, but the markets fret that Clinton will perform like a typical tax-and-spend Democrat. The question then comes back to balance: Will the markets remain calm if Clinton promises to get serious at some undetermined future date? Or will he actually have to enact a triggering mechanism that would mandate deficit reduction once a certain growth rate was achieved? A collateral problem here is that half of Clinton's projected deficit reduction in his first term assumes a healthy economic growth rate of more than 3% annually -- a rate the country hasn't seen since the late 1980s. The complexion of the Administration's economic team will be critical as the Congress considers Clinton's initiatives, especially since the core campaign group of economic advisers has performed less than admirably. Clinton unveiled a second economic plan in June, because the first program had failed to consider the Defense Department reductions already proposed by President Bush, a mistake that meant Clinton would have about $200 billion less to spend than he had anticipated. Besides such substantive difficulties, Clinton has been plagued by a sloppy staff structure he still tolerates. Throughout the campaign, as his economic plans were increasingly refined, the candidate found himself overwhelmed with extraneous information. A rigid paper-flow system was instituted during the summer, but only some adhered to its strictures. To this day, several dozen economic advisers end-run the process and reach Clinton on a regular basis, thwarting most attempts to organize the stream of advice. Assuming these managerial problems are resolved, Clinton continues to be in the position of having to reconcile wildly conflicting recommendations. His advisers were deeply divided, for instance, over whether Clinton should support the North American Free Trade Agreement -- and Clinton initially proposed establishing an Economic Security Council merely to signal to his own aides that he is serious about trade competition. On another key matter, two of Clinton's principal advisers differ greatly on which infrastructure projects the government should fund. Business consultant Ira Magaziner is entranced with cutting-edge-technology projects like fiber optics, short-haul aircraft and high-speed rail; Harvard professor Robert Reich favors more prosaic

investments like rebuilding roads, bridges and sewers. During the campaign, says one of his aides, Clinton adopted Magaziner's list because "it's vivid metaphorically." But the underlying tension remains, and Clinton may flip toward Reich's view once he assumes office. These and other conflicts will be magnified when Clinton chooses his economic team. The President-elect's tendency toward procrastination is legendary -- "Bill doesn't want to make decisions unless he has to," says a longtime friend -- and one aide predicts that many key spots won't be filled until January. Once the selection process gets down to short strokes, no decision will be as crucial as Clinton's choice for Treasury Secretary -- and that determination, again, will in large part revolve around the stimulus-vs.- deficit reduction conundrum. If Clinton won't -- or believes he can't -- address both problems in a single legislative package, and if his level of self-awareness is such that he understands his own soothing words may be insufficient, then he will have to appoint a Secretary with the stature both to calm the markets and reassure the Federal Reserve. Any of the four people prominently mentioned for Treasury fit that bill: former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen and investment bankers Robert Rubin and Roger Altman. In conjunction with the Treasury appointment, Clinton will have to make an even more fundamental decision: whether to appoint to the budget office, the Council of Economic Advisers and other important economic-policy offices people who share a basic philosophy, rather than a disparate group that could create a Carter-like stalemate. "What counts is that everyone is singing from the same hymnal once the decisions are made," says a senior Clinton adviser, "but yes, the potential for meltdown is always there when a President has strong people of different views jockeying for influence." A new day. A new man. Whether or not Bill Clinton challenges Americans -- as he promises -- they will certainly challenge him. None of his late-inning attempts to calm voters' expectations resonated. He has proffered the moon. His countrymen expect him to make good. But what do Americans know about this man who insists they are still just getting to know him? -- On five hours of sleep a night, he pushes himself relentlessly. "You've got to show others you're working harder than they are," he has said. -- He believes the 1992 election is the most important in decades: "The chances for change will be much greater than they've been in a long time, greater than after Watergate, because Watergate was not a mandate for change; it was a mandate for good government." -- He believes in American exceptionalism, the creed of self-reliance and self-confidence identified by Emerson -- that nothing really ever happened before, and that Americans are going to do it better anyhow: "Our ability to re-create ourselves at critical junctures is why we're still around after all this time." -- He worries about his toughness: "When I was younger, I was too eager to please everyone. It was a weakness. I think I've changed."

-- He believes in action: "I do not promise to be a perfect President. I will make some mistakes, because unlike the guy who's in there now, I'll do something." -- He knows the value of humility -- and isn't afraid to steal a line from Ross Perot in order to project it: "I'll wake up every day in the White House with the idea that it's not my house; it's your house. I am nothing more than a temporary tenant and your chief hired hand." -- He knows that Teddy Roosevelt was right about the bully pulpit: "Some look at the evidence and believe that if their conclusions are logical, others should accept them automatically. That's not good enough. You have to communicate -- constantly, emotionally and directly." -- He knows invoking his predecessors is the way to America's heart: "Be faithful to the ideals of Jefferson and Washington; be faithful to the sacrifice of Abraham Lincoln; be faithful to the optimism of Franklin Roosevelt; be faithful to the faith in the future of John Kennedy." -- He knew before he won what he would do first when the campaign ended: "I am going to thank God." — With reporting by Priscilla Painton and Walter Shapiro with Clinton 1992: William J. Clinton By Lance Morrow -- With reporting by Tom Curry/New York Jan. 2, 1992 For years, Americans have been in a kind of vague mourning for something that they sensed they had lost somewhere--what was best in the country, a distinctive American endowment of youth and energy and ideals and luck: the sacred American stuff. They had squandered it, Americans thought, had thrown it away in the messy interval between the assassination of John Kennedy and the wan custodial regime of George Bush. A wisp of song from years ago suggested the loss: "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?" Or perhaps the qualities were only hidden, sequestered in some internal exile, regenerating. Now Bill Clinton of Arkansas will ride into Washington brandishing them in a kind of boyish triumph. But are they the real thing? The authentic American treasures, recovered and restored to the seat of government? Do they still have transforming powers? Pick a year2000:George W. Bush1999:Jeff Bezos1998:Clinton/Starr1997:Andy Grove1996:David Ho1995:Newt Gingrich1994:John Paul II1993:Peacemakers1992:Bill Clinton1991:Ted Turner1990:George Bush1989:Gorbachev1988:Earth1987:Gorbachev1986:Corazon Aquino1985:Deng Xiaoping1984:Peter Ueberroth1983:Ronald Reagan/Yuri Andropov1982:The Computer1981:Lech Walesa1980:Ronald Reagan1979:Khomeini1978:Hsiao P'ing1977:Anwar Sadat1976:Jimmy Carter1975:U.S. Women1974:King Faisal1973:Judge

Sirica1972:Nixon/Kissinger1971:Richard Nixon1970:Willy Brandt1969:Middle Class1968:U.S. Astronauts1967:Lyndon Johnson1966:Young People1965:Westmoreland1964:Lyndon Johnson1963:ML King Jr.1962:John XXIII1961:J. F. Kennedy1960:U.S. Scientists1959:Eisenhower1958:De Gaulle1957:Nikita Krushchev1956:Freedom Fighter1955:Harlow Curtice1954:John Dulles1953:Adenauer1952:Elizabeth II1951:Mossadegh1950:Fighting-Man1949:Churchill1948:Harry Truman1947:George Marshall1946:James F. Byrnes1945:Harry Truman1944:Eisenhower1943:George Marshall1942:Joseph Stalin1941:F. D. Roosevelt1940:Churchill1939:Joseph Stalin1938:Adolf Hitler1937:C. Kai-Shek1936:Mrs. W. Simpson1935:Haile Selassie1934:F. D. Roosevelt1933:Hugh S. Johnson1932:F. D. Roosevelt1931:Pierre Laval1930:Gandhi1929:Owen D. Young1928:Chrysler1927:Lindbergh The full answers will come later. Everyone knows, for the moment, that Clinton's energy and luck are real. The world watched them. Clinton looked at very bad odds and gambled. He ran against an incumbent President whose re-election seemed, at the time, a mere technicality. And after an arduous, complex wooing, the American people made a fascinating choice--one that a year ago lay somewhere on the outer margins of the probable. They responded to Clinton's gamble by taking an enormous risk of their own. Americans deserted the predictable steward that they knew, the President who had managed Desert Storm steadfastly and precisely. At the end of the cold war, in a world growing more dangerous by the hour, Americans gave the future of the U.S., the world's one remaining superpower, into the hands of the young (46), relatively unknown Governor of a small Southern state, a man with no experience in foreign policy and virtually none in Washington either. They rejected the last President shaped by the moral universe of World War II in favor of a man formed by the sibling jostles and herdings of the baby boom and the vastly different historical pageant of the '60s. The youngest American bomber pilot in the Pacific war against Japan will yield power to a Rhodes scholar who avoided the draft because of his principled objections to the war in Vietnam. The election of 1992 was a leap of faith in a sour and unpredictable year. American voters, angry and disgusted and often afraid of the future, began the campaign feeling something like contempt for the political process itself, or for what it seemed to have been producing for too long--the woman-harassing, check-bouncing, overprivileged classes on Capitol Hill, and the curious vacancy at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. The White House of George Bush, impresario of Desert Storm, deteriorated in some surreal, inexplicable way--became feckless, confused, whining, rudderless. Discontent with politics was bottomed on a deeper anxiety. The famous sign in the Clinton headquarters in Little Rock stated the essential problem briskly: THE ECONOMY, STUPID! The chronic recession had eaten deeply into the country's morale. Americans sensed that the problem was not a matter of the usual economic cycles, a downturn that would be followed by an upturn, but rather involved something deeper and scarier--a "systemic" change in America's economic relations with the rest of the world and a deterioration in what America was capable of doing. The nation's moral and economic pre-eminence in the years after World War II--the

instinctive American assumption of superiority, the gaudy self-confidence--seemed to dim in the new world. The battleground ceased to be military and became economic, and Americans were not entirely prepared for this change in the game. Forty-six years after the Japanese surrendered on the deck of the battleship Missouri, the President of the U.S. went to Tokyo to plead for breaks for American cars and collapsed at the state dinner; that indelible vignette of American humiliation began the defeat of George Bush. TIME's Man--or Woman--of the Year is traditionally defined as the person who has most influenced the course of the world's events--for good or ill--in the past year. Bill Clinton's successful campaign for the presidency of the U.S. makes him 1992's Man of the Year because of its threefold significance: 1. Improbably, abruptly, the election has made the Arkansan the most powerful man in the world--and therefore the most important--at a radically unstable moment in history, with the cold war ended, the world economy in trouble, and dangerous, heavily armed nationalisms rising around the globe. 2. Clinton's campaign, conducted with dignity, with earnest attention to issues and with an impressive display of self-possession under fire, served to rehabilitate and restore the legitimacy of American politics and thus, prospectively, of government itself. He has vindicated (at least for a little while) the honor of a system that has been sinking fast. A victory by George Bush would, among other things, have given a two-victory presidential validation (1988 and 1992) to hot-button, mad-dog politics--campaigning on irrelevant or inflammatory issues (Willie Horton, the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance, Murphy Brown's out-of-wedlock nonexistent child) or dirty tricks and innuendo (searching passport files, implying that Clinton was tied up with the KGB as a student). A win by Ross Perot would have left the two-party system upside down beside the road, wheels spinning. 3. Clinton's victory places him in position to preside over one of the periodic reinventions of the country--those moments when Americans dig out of their deepest problems by reimagining themselves. Such a reinvention is now indispensable. It is not inevitable. Clinton, carrying the distinctive values of his generation, represents a principle at home of broadened democracy and inclusion (of women in positions of equal power, of racial minorities, of homosexuals). The reinvention will have global meaning as well. George Bush stated the winner's brief in Knoxville, Tennessee, last February: "We stand today at what I think most people would agree is a pivot point in history, at the end of one era and the beginning of another." Bill Clinton's year was an untidy triumph of timing and temperament, both elements at work under the influence of a huge amount of luck. Luck is a mystery--it is magic and by definition unreliable. The role of luck, good and bad, in the politics of 1992 has been conspicuous. Bill Clinton came to the finish line after hurtling like a downhill racer through a number of very narrow gates. He won only 43% of the popular vote, which is hardly a popular mandate; Michael Dukakis got 45.6% in 1988, though that was a two-man, not a three-man, race. For Clinton, the course of his campaign was littered with indispensable happy accidents.

One can advance the case that, paradoxically, it was George Bush's success in the Gulf War that destroyed the rest of his presidency and his bid to be re-elected. In the first place, Bush's extravagant popularity in the wake of the war (he rose as high as 91% in one public approval poll) persuaded the supposed front-line Democratic possibilities, including West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller, House majority leader Dick Gephardt and Tennessee Senator Al Gore, among others, to stay out of the race. Better to cede '92 to the unbeatable hero-incumbent and wait for '96. Thus Clinton entered a far less daunting field of Democrats than he otherwise might have. That same aura of invulnerability as a result of the Gulf War clouded Bush's judgment and prevented him, until too late, from seeing the danger that he faced at home. It was Clinton's luck that New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who would have been a formidable candidate both for the Democratic nomination and for the presidency against Bush, decided to sit out the race for reasons still unclear. It was Clinton's luck that stories of his womanizing surfaced early in the campaign, allowing time for Clinton and his wife to prove their own equilibrium and touching steadiness in the way they reacted, and allowing the American people time to process and absorb the charges, get bored by them and move on. If the Gennifer Flowers story had exploded all over the tabloids and networks in September or October of 1992, in the intense homestretch of the campaign, Clinton would probably have been defeated. It was Clinton's luck that Pat Buchanan behaved as if he were a mole and sapper in the employ of the Democratic National Committee. Buchanan dealt Bush devastating blows not once but twice. First he ran against Bush in the early Republican primaries as the candidate of righteous indignation. Buchanan softened up the President for Clinton, ranting about Bush's weaknesses as man and leader and demonstrating the incumbent's vulnerability by collecting 37% of the New Hampshire Republican vote. After that act of lese majeste, Bush should have run Buchanan out of the county. But (again Clinton's luck) the President felt he had to allow Buchanan back into the Republican fold. Then the President permitted Buchanan, the man who tried to destroy him, to speak at the Houston convention during prime time. Buchanan delivered a snarling, bigoted attack on minorities, gays and his other enemies in what he called the "cultural war" and "religious war" in America. Buchanan's ugly speech, along with another narrow, sectarian performance by Pat Robertson, set a tone of right-wing intolerance that drove moderate Republicans and Reagan Democrats away from the President's cause in November. If Houston represented the Republican Party, many voters said, they wanted out. Clinton's best luck was that the economy kept dragging along the bottom for the duration of the campaign. Bush's re-election turned on the hope that Americans would stick with the President and policies they knew rather than risk the economic damage that an unknown quantity like Clinton might do. More hopeful statistics, signs of the revival Bush had been promising for two years, held off until after the voting was done. The Ross Perot vote siphoned off 19%. Enough voters were so disgusted with the Bush performance by Nov. 3 that they were willing to take a chance that Clinton might (as Bush kept warning) tax and spend the economy into yet more trouble. If the brighter statistics had appeared before the election, Bush might now be preparing for a second term.

Isaiah Berlin once described Franklin Roosevelt in these terms: "So passionate a faith in the future, so untroubled a confidence in one's power to mold it, when it is allied to a capacity for realistic appraisal of its true contours, implies an exceptionally sensitive awareness, conscious or half-conscious, of the tendencies of one's milieu, of the desires, hopes, fears, loves, hatreds, of the human beings who compose it, of what are impersonally described as social and individual `trends.' " The lines suggest something about Clinton at his best, or about the promise of his character. History may eventually decide that the key to Clinton's accomplishment (assuming he does well) lay in his temperament--in his buoyancy, optimism and readiness to act, in his enthusiasm for people and his curiosity about their lives. Clinton emerges from the sunnier, gregarious side of American political character, home of F.D.R., Hubert Humphrey, Harry Truman--as opposed to the sterner, more punitive traditions distilled and preserved in their purest form in the mind of Richard Nixon. As a 16-year-old member of Boy's Nation, Clinton stood in the Rose Garden of the White House in 1963 and shook hands with John Kennedy--an instant of symbolic torch passing that had a powerful effect upon the ambitious boy from Hope, Arkansas. Clinton likes to invoke a parallel. Kennedy and Clinton do not look alike, though they share an air of youth and vigor and good health (deceptive in J.F.K.'s case). Kennedy had a physical elegance that Clinton lacks. Clinton's boyishness subliminally looks to be headed down the road toward W.C. Fields or Tip O'Neill. Other parallels unravel quickly enough: although Clinton speaks of the New Frontier as a time when vigor and new ideas came to Washington after eight years of stagnation and reactionary Republican policies, in fact Kennedy was most vigorous in pursuing the cold-war aims of Dwight Eisenhower--most embarrassingly at the Bay of Pigs. J.F.K. offered few innovations on the domestic side (the investment-tax credit, a proposed income-tax cut in 1963) and was excruciatingly cautious in addressing issues of civil rights. There are other parallels with Clinton's predecessors. Nixon in 1968, like Clinton this year, won only 43% of the popular vote and during his first term had to work to win the disaffected votes of the George Wallace constituency (Wallace won 13% as an independent candidate in '68), just as Clinton will need to win over the Perot voters in order to get re-elected in 1996. Woodrow Wilson was an innovative policy-wonk Democratic Governor who won a close three-way race in 1912 after the Republican Party fractured and produced the insurgent candidacy of Theodore Roosevelt, who won 27% of the vote. The voters rejected the Republican incumbent, William Howard Taft. Wilson ushered in an era of domestic change: tariff reform, creation of the Federal Reserve System, federal regulation of working hours. But Wilson was in many ways a conservative states' rights Southerner and, on issues of race, a reactionary. Until 1918 he refused to support a women's suffrage amendment to the Constitution. The Clinton approach is infinitely more inclusive. He has a progressive agenda (family leave, worker retraining, for example) and believes it is the Federal Government's job to carry it out. But Clinton knows--or has been warned within an inch of his life--that the lavish all-daddy government of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal is not a possible model in the '90s. Nor is Lyndon Johnson's bountiful Great Society. The $290 billion deficit sits at the edge of American government like antimatter, like a black hole that devours revenues and social dreams. Clinton

will take office under immense fiscal constraints. The better news is that those limitations will (as they say) empower Clinton's stronger side, his gift for improvisation--in giving poor people incentives to save money to start a business or buy a home or in establishing a national service program as a way for students to repay college loans. Clinton's domestic ambitions may also be overtaken by the demands of international problems. In six months or a year, Americans may look back at their preoccupation with the domestic economy, with the question of whether it would be a good Christmas shopping season in American stores, and be amazed at their own insularity. In the republics of the former Soviet Union, in the Balkans, in China and India and the Middle East there were dangers that promised to preoccupy the new President and might keep him from the domestic agenda--health care, education, public-works spending and the rest--that he was elected to address. A few days before he went to Washington in 1913, and 17 months before World War I broke out, Woodrow Wilson said, "It would be the irony of fate if my Administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs." Clinton is aware of the risk. "I might have to spend all my time on foreign policy," he admitted three weeks ago. "And I don't want that to happen." It will be quickly seen how the demands of an increasingly savage world may square with some of the gentler motifs that Clinton worked in the campaign--notably the themes of the recovery movement. Again and again in debates and speeches, Clinton talked about the need for Americans to find in themselves "the courage to change." The phrase comes from the Alcoholics Anonymous Serenity Prayer ("God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference"). Clinton, whose stepfather's violent alcoholism shaped his early life, and Al Gore, who often borrows recovery language and concepts, turned the Democratic Convention last summer into a national therapy session and display case for personal trauma and healing. Gore dramatically retold the story of his son's near fatal accident and the effect on his family. The subtext of the recovery-and-healing line is that America is a self-abusive binger that must go through recovery. Thus: the nation borrowed and spent recklessly in the 1980s, drank too deeply of Reagan fantasies about "Morning in America" and supply-side economics. And now, on the morning after, the U.S. wakes up like a drunk at the moment of truth and looks in the mirror. Hence: America needs "the courage to change" in a national atmosphere of recovery, repentance and confession. It is therapeutic for alcoholics and other abusers to tell their stories. Bill Clinton has a side of his character that is a mellow talk-show host. The nation saw this Donahue-Oprah style at work during the second presidential debate in the campaign, when a member of the audience, a young black woman, asked the candidates how the national debt (she meant the recession) had "personally affected each of your lives? And if it hasn't, how can you honestly find a cure for the economic problems of the common people if you have no experience in what's ailing them?" Bush flubbed the question. He answered defensively, "You ought to be in the White House for a day and hear what I hear and see what I see and read the mail I read..." Clinton, smarter in the format, saw his opening and stepped forward and, like Phil Donahue, urged Hall to tell her story.

"Tell me how it's affected you again. You know people who've lost their jobs and lost their homes." There are obvious limits to the approach. The President of the U.S. cannot invite a fanatic, murderous regime to come forward and speak of "the inner child that's hurting," the Inner Serb, the Inner Iraqi. The recovery attitude is useful in certain fragile, protected environments, but the world at large meets that description less and less. There remains a question whether Clinton's impulse to act can, when necessary, override the more passive, tender protocols of therapy. America periodically reinvents itself. That is the secret, the way that Americans dig out of their deepest problems. It is the way they save themselves from decline, stagnation and other dangers--including themselves. The American story is an epic of reinventions: Andrew Jackson's rough westward tilt of American democracy, the Civil War that ended slavery and hammered the states into Union, the vast Ellis Island absorption, the New Deal that saved American capitalism from suicide, the Civil Rights Movement that (legally at least) completed the work of the Civil War. Every time a melodrama of change (often raw and violent and, by definition, traumatic to the status quo) has brought the country to a new stage of self-awareness and broadened democracy. It is miraculous that the American transformations overall have been changes in the direction of generosity and inclusion--democracy tending toward more democracy, freedom toward more freedom. The Clinton reinvention--if it succeeds--will bring his baby-boom generation (so insufferable in so many ways, and so unavoidable) to full harvest, to the power and responsibility that they clamored to overthrow in the streets a quarter of a century ago. Clinton's selection of Al Gore to be his running mate suggested something of the energy that might be released--a sort of sibling synergy. The ticket of Clinton and Gore violated traditional political rules demanding geographical balance and even a sort of personality contrast between a party's two nominees. The very similarity of Clinton and Gore in generation and regional accent produced a powerful twinning effect--policy wonks in a buddy movie: Butch and Sundance. It is the boomers, born in the afterglow of American triumph in World War II and reared in the unprecedented and possibly unrepeatable postwar affluence, and now arrived at middle age, whose instruments most poignantly play the American note of mourning. It is a chronic, yearning noise, much like one that Thoreau made 140 years ago: "I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse and a turtle dove, and am still on their trail." For the moment, however, the loss note will not be audible. Bill Clinton will come down Pennsylvania Avenue blaring, parading and bringing the American stuff--youth, energy, luck, ideals--like booty to his new house. That Sinking Feeling Is Clinton up to the job? As a staff shake-up begins and his four-month approval ratings dip to record lows, Americans are starting to wonder +

By MICHAEL DUFFY WASHINGTON Jun. 7, 1993 Bill Clinton knew the House vote on his economic package was going to be close, but he didn't expect it to go down to the last 30 seconds. As the House of Representatives began to vote on his $246 billion deficit- reduction plan last Thursday night, Clinton calculated that he had perhaps one or two votes more than the 217 he needed for passage. But halfway into the 15-minute voting period, two Democrats the White House thought it had won over, James Hayes of Alabama and Tim Johnson of South Dakota, voted nay. Instantly, Clinton's margin disappeared. On Capitol Hill a nervous Howard Paster, the top Clinton lobbyist, telephoned White House chief of staff Thomas ("Mack") McLarty in the Oval Office. Mack, he said, "what's happening to our strategy?" McLarty told his boss the news, and in the next moment, Clinton saw his presidency pass before his eyes. His margin was evaporating, and with it faded his plans for cutting the deficit, reordering public priorities and overhauling the nation's health-care system. For a moment, Clinton looked utterly defeated. "I know the look in his eyes," said McLarty later. "It looked like 1980 ((when as Arkansas Governor he lost his first re-election bid)). It was a look of sadness and disappointment and anxiousness." Then he snapped out of it. Clinton quickly telephoned Representative Billy Tauzin of Louisiana and promised to tinker with the energy tax. He called Dave McCurdy of Oklahoma, who had been holding out all day: in return for a yes vote, he agreed to make additional spending cuts and shift his policies to the political center. McCurdy pressed McLarty in a separate call to see if Clinton would really deliver. "He gets it now," said the chief of staff. With 30 seconds left, McCurdy, Tauzin and several other holdouts fell in line. The final tally was 219-213; Clinton's package survived by a six-vote margin. But Clinton's narrow victory is the only bright spot in a presidency that has been beset since its inception by miscalculations and self-inflicted wounds. Clinton, in fact, was still stumbling from the missteps of the preceding week. His balmy decision to have his hair trimmed on Air Force One by a Beverly Hills coiffeur put the presidential scalp in national headlines, while a cronyism scandal in the White House travel office pitted Clinton's staff against the Justice Department. Later Secretary of State Warren Christopher had to telephone news organizations to contradict a speech by a top aide who had stated in public what many had been saying in private for weeks: under Clinton, the U.S. was retreating from leadership in the world. After a week of desperately seeking advice on how best to right his troubled Administration, Clinton turned to an unexpected source for help: a Republican. On Saturday he tapped David Gergen, a veteran of the Nixon and Reagan White Houses, to join his staff. Gergen, a commentator, replaces communications director George Stephanopoulos as Clinton's top spokesman, and is expected to help Clinton emphasize the moderate, centrist themes on which he campaigned. Even this decision was made in typical Clinton fashion: without much warning, late

at night, and with a last-minute O.K. from Hillary Rodham Clinton. In an interview with CNN on Saturday morning, Gergen quickly made it clear that he will work to reposition his new boss in the political middle. "I think the President wants to be more centrist," he said. Stephanopoulos becomes a senior adviser to Clinton, responsible for managing the President's battles with Congress. Though the budget fight took the White House to the brink, staffers say they realize it is a walk in the park compared with either the looming budget battle in the Senate or the costly overhaul of the health-care system that Clinton wants Congress to consider as soon as its work on the budget is complete. All that will have to be accomplished while Clinton's popularity with voters continues to decline. According to a new TIME/CNN poll, only 36% of the public approves of Clinton's handling of his job, a record low for a postwar President four months into his first term. Meanwhile, for the first time, fully 50% of the public disapproves of his performance as President. Dismayed by Clinton's preference for taxes over spending cuts, 58% of the public believes Clinton is a "tax-and-spend liberal." Such dismal ratings will make it easier for legislators to abandon the President in future contests. "At this moment," said a top political adviser, "nobody is afraid of him, and he has to find a way to change that." Clinton can take heart from the fact that presidential popularity is an extremely volatile substance. George Bush won an 89% approval rating after the Gulf War in March 1991, but 10 months later it had dropped by half. Clinton can reflect that the polls can just as easily bounce the other way: he has plenty of time to recover from his error-filled start. Still, intimates say Clinton has been "sobered" by "how fast and how far he has fallen." Though most of them continue to insist the President seems to enjoy tough challenges, his advisers say they can detect the stress. Says one confidant: "He says he is fine. But he doesn't sound fine." After months of light jabs, billionaire gadfly Ross Perot threw a wild, roundhouse punch last week, suggesting Bill Clinton is unqualified for high office and stating that he "wouldn't consider giving him a job anywhere above middle management." While Perot's characterization seems severe, the criticism about Clinton's administrative skills is echoed in private by some of his closest associates and colleagues. Said one, to whom Clinton turned last week for late-night advice: "His management style . . . just doesn't work at this level of government." That has been painfully apparent in the past two weeks. To build on the House victory, say senior Democrats and many Cabinet officials, Clinton must quickly reshuffle his White House. Gergen's arrival is a curious first step in that direction. Whether a Reagan Republican, even one moderated by years on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, can effectively lead a band of young, fiercely partisan White House communications operatives is far from certain. Gergen says he is "convinced" Clinton wants to "run a bipartisan government." But other than Gergen's appointment itself, there has been scant evidence of any commitment to the middle. Even with Gergen, Clinton will still rely on a staff that has almost no White House or executive experience. Political director Rahm Emanuel, a campaign fund raiser, is unsuited as a party enforcer and is widely blamed for being too enamored of Hollywood for the President's good. White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum, a former Watergate committee staff lawyer who gave

Hillary Rodham Clinton her first job, is seen by almost everyone in the White House as a political bumbler who has given his boss poor guidance on a host of matters from the nominations of Zoe Baird and Lani Guinier to the travel-office flap. Even congressional lobbyist Paster, one of the few officials with deep Washington experience, is too closely allied with the liberal House leadership for many House moderates and Senators. Other people are simply in over their heads -- literally, in some cases. Clinton asked Arkansas chum Bruce Lindsey to oversee the appointments process and remain at his side on trips out of town. But Lindsey is so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of paper crossing his desk that he has resorted to a method of filing that consists of crisscrossing documents as they came in: one sideways, one straight, one sideways and so on. When one stack grew too tall, he started another. When he ran out of flat surfaces, he added to a previous stack. Soon the stacks collapsed of their own weight and toppled into one another, scattering layers of undifferentiated documents from one end of his office to the other in a kind of latter-day paper Pompeii. Staffers joke that only by sinking exploratory shafts can Lindsey be found each night. Partly as a result, the appointments process is a sea of chaos. "Bruce," said one, "is in a world of his own." Nor did Clinton help himself by turning to three agreeable men to be his top aides. In McLarty, Clinton has chosen a chief of staff who has either been unwilling or unable to exert much discipline on the President or his staff. Deputy chief of staff Mark Gearan is well liked, but as one campaign consultant put it, "If Mack or Mark were really angry at you, you wouldn't wet your pants. So how scared do you think Danny Rostenkowski is going to be?" Clinton tried to remedy the situation by putting Gore aide Roy Neel in charge of "day to day" operations four weeks ago, but he is a soft touch too -- and still lacks an office, a desk or a phone in the White House. While the staff can be blamed for some of the confusion, even his closest advisers insist that Clinton is a big part of the problem. "A lot of it can't be laid at anyone's doorstep but his own," said one last week. Democratic Party elders admit to being stunned by Clinton's judgment lately. Having his $200 haircut and allowing a Hollywood producer to work out of a White House office and then intervene on behalf of friends to win White House air-charter business have done serious damage to his public standing. "The best politician the Democratic Party has turned up in a long time turns out to have a tin ear," said a longtime friend. "He has squandered his moral authority with a lot of this stuff. It leads people to say, 'This man isn't really a populist; he is a phony, a fraud.' And though this perception is completely wrong in substance, it is enormously damaging and has to be dealt with. He has to regain the moral authority to call people to sacrifice." The same officials say Clinton has spent too much time courting the left wing of the Democratic Party when he should be building ties to the middle. After promising to cut taxes on the middle class and "end welfare as we know it," Clinton has proposed a host of tax increases and disguised hefty new spending programs as "investments." Rather than reduce entitlements, he nearly succeeded in creating a program to provide free immunization for children, regardless of income. Asked last week if Clinton really was a "New Democrat," Oklahoma Senator David Boren replied, "That's the $64,000 question. We just don't know."

Just as troubling is Clinton's apparent resistance to discipline. He has extended automatic walk-in rights to the Oval Office -- a privilege that is heavily restricted by most Presidents -- to nearly a dozen people: Hillary, McLarty, Lindsey, Gore, Stephanopoulos, Neel, Nussbaum, economic chief Bob Rubin, personal assistant Nancy Hernreich and National Security Adviser Tony Lake. The open-door policy has forced him to be his own chief of staff and caused the White House to move in too many directions at once, with little coordination. Clinton promised to refocus his presidency on the economy after his $16 billion stimulus package was defeated in the Senate in April. But this vow proved short-lived: his aides bombarded House leaders last week with demands that they take action next month on enterprise zones, a crime bill and a community bank-lending measure. When a Democratic lawmaker asked the President last week to "stop the policy-a-day nonsense," the room full of lawmakers burst into applause. In public Clinton is little better: his speeches continue to be leviathan, rambling affairs, the result of his tendency to veer from his text as much as he sticks to it. Oval Office meetings that should take a few minutes often go on for hours. A brief update session last month on potential Supreme Court nominees that was scheduled to last 10 minutes dragged on for two hours as Clinton talked through the philosophies of various candidates. "He really loves the intellectual give-and-take," said an official. "But the time pressures and political pressures are such that he can't afford that anymore." The President has difficulty closing the deal. A recent health-care policy meeting dragged on for four hours, only to have him get up and leave the room without arriving at a decision. Last week Clinton met with three different groups of lawmakers at the White House to make his case for the budget plan. But in the session with freshmen Democrats, the pitch was all soft sell, and in the more important session with 30 Democratic whips, he never asked for the whips' support. That oversight staggered several who attended. "He didn't nail the whips," said a Congressman. "It shows that he is a little politically naive." One quality of presidential character is knowing what you don't know. Ronald Reagan relied on James Baker, and George Bush turned to John Sununu, because both Presidents knew they lacked the rigor required to run the Executive Branch alone. Clinton refuses to admit that he cannot do it all himself. "They need someone who can maintain iron discipline, who will look at the schedule and take a red pen to anything that isn't about the economy," said a senior Democrat. But Clinton needs someone who can also discipline Clinton. Says a close friend of 25 years: "They've got to get somebody to manage the President, hands on, full time. This is a guy who has to be told to do his homework and eat his spinach and get to places on time." Last Wednesday evening Christopher and longtime adviser Vernon Jordan met with Clinton and conveyed many of these same points (though Jordan reportedly used more pungent language). Late last week several senior White House officials said it was likely that New York lawyer Harold Ickes, who ran the Democratic Convention in New York City last summer, would join the White House staff in some capacity within a month. Already a frequent visitor to the White House, Ickes is regarded as someone whom Clinton trusts and who has the political acumen to stop the White House's free fall. But he will be able to do nothing if Clinton is not willing to be

bridled. Said a top Cabinet official: "It doesn't matter if he changes his players if he doesn't change the way he does business." Clinton's win in the House would have been broader had public opinion -- led by the deficit-reduction seminars conducted by Ross Perot and by Clinton at his December economic summit -- not moved far ahead of the President in January. The first sign that the Great Listener had lost touch with the public's willingness to sacrifice came in February, when Clinton unveiled a budget that delivered nearly $500 billion worth of deficit reductions but did so primarily through tax increases, not spending reductions. Then in April a $16 billion pork-laden "stimulus" package failed to win Senate approval. "The country moved ahead of us on spending cuts," said a Cabinet officer, "and most of the Congress is as surprised by it as we are." % Two weeks ago, it seemed as if history was about to repeat itself. As the House prepared to take up the President's 1994 budget, Clinton once more faced a mini-revolt by a group of 40 moderate Democrats, led by Congressman Charles Stenholm of Texas, who demanded a stiff cap on entitlement spending to keep the deficit under control. Liberals, led by members of the black and Hispanic caucuses, promised to bolt if Clinton gave the moderates an inch. Round-the- clock talks between the two camps were helping Clinton maintain a shaky majority in the House. But at one point last Tuesday afternoon, Stenholm suffered an attack of cold feet, and the talks broke down. Poring over a maze of call sheets and whip counts at his Oval Office desk, Clinton saw his thin majority evaporate into a crushing 30-vote defeat. He looked up and appealed to higher powers. "Where are the votes going to come from now?" he implored. "Where are we going to get them? They're just not there." Majority leader Richard Gephardt intervened to keep Stenholm at the table, and talks continued through Wednesday. But the negotiations broke down four or five more times during the next 36 hours, and it wasn't until 1 a.m. Thursday that Gephardt and Stenholm found a solution. White House officials later praised Stenholm, noting that he kept the rebellion "in the family and did not go looking for votes in the G.O.P." Meanwhile the Cabinet was getting rebellious too. Many of the agency chiefs were bewildered that their boss was struggling for survival without their help. Some had been cut out of key strategy sessions, and others had not spoken to Clinton for weeks except in passing or on other matters. When the President finally sat down with his counselors to ask for help, several complained that Clinton would never prevail in Washington if he continued to send inexperienced White House aides to lobby elected officials. "When I was in Congress," said one, "I made sure I never talked to White House staffers. But when a member of the Cabinet called, I cleared my schedule." Within hours, in a tone of firmness bordering on desperation, White House Cabinet secretary Christine Varney told counterparts at federal agencies that Clinton had decided "there is nothing any Cabinet Secretary is doing for the next two days that's more important than lobbying Congress." Working from White House lists of undecided lawmakers, Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy telephoned farm-state Representatives. Defense Secretary Les Aspin worked

Congressmen with major military installations in their states. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt buttonholed Western lawmakers. Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen reasoned with the Texas delegation. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor concentrated on Californians. During the next two days, the Clinton Administration bought, rented and bartered for every vote it could find. One Cabinet officer described his mission plainly: "Find out what these Congressmen want, and if possible give it to them." No price was too high or too low: parks, highways and other pork projects served as common currency. As many as 15 lawmakers from peanut-producing states switched when the White House agreed to curb the flow of imported Chinese peanut butter -- at a steep cost to American consumers. Clinton promised to toughen his policy toward Haiti to woo several black lawmakers. One telephone conversation between a Cabinet officer and an undecided lawmaker went like this: "Congressman, I'm sitting here chewing my fingers and wondering what else we can do to win this vote. I know you've talked to the President, and he wanted me to remind you how important this vote is to him and our party and our country. He knows this is a tough vote for you, and he and I both want you to know that if you can be with us, we won't forget it . . . Well, yes, I think we can help with your project. Can I set up a meeting with you on that for next week?" The bartering continued Thursday, the day of the big vote. Pennsylvania Congressman Ron Klink of Pittsburgh opposed the energy tax and the effect it would have on steelmakers in his district. He had campaigned against higher taxes and had told Clinton two days earlier that the bill would hurt his district. On Thursday morning Klink extracted a promise from the President that steel producers would get a tax rebate for steel exports, helping Klink's constituents compete in foreign markets. By 4 p.m. Thursday, Clinton "hit the wall," said an aide who was present, still three votes short. Between the hours of 7 and 9 that night, while downing a huge hamburger and a plate of French fries, the President promised to play golf with three different Congressmen sometime this summer. The numbers kept moving, right down to the last 30 seconds. When it was over, Clinton and his aides looked around the Oval Office with a mixture of relief and astonishment. "That was the closest vote of my life," remarked Bentsen, who spent 28 years in Congress. - In spite of the odds against them, Clinton's team is oddly sanguine about the coming Senate fight, set to begin on June 7 when the Finance Committee takes up the House-passed bill. The chief obstacle is Boren, from oil-rich Oklahoma, who opposes the energy tax and is the pivotal vote on the panel. Administration officials believe they may still pick off Boren, but Democrats on Capitol Hill are already talking darkly of retribution if he doesn't fall into line. One likely target: the Senator, regarded as pompous and self- important even by Senate standards, helped create the David L. Boren National Security Education program, which provides scholarships to graduates. "It's not a big thing," said one aide, "but it's a big thing to Boren." Bentsen and McLarty worked steadily behind the scenes last week to keep Louisiana Senator John Breaux quiet about his objections to the energy tax until the House vote was safely over. But eventually they realized they might do better enlisting the Senator to help broker a compromise to lessen the BTU tax's impact. Officials said House members' reservations would be taken into account when the Senate marks up its measure.

Clinton will hit the road again, trying to concentrate more on selling his program and less on everything else. Senior officials have discussed ways to nudge the President to the right in the coming weeks, such as by nominating a moderate Supreme Court Justice, dropping the controversial and probably doomed nomination of Lani Guinier to be Assistant Attorney General for civil rights and perhaps even suggesting additional budget cuts. There is also talk of "doing what it takes" to circumvent Clinton's vaunted 25% cut in White House staff. "You have to make adjustments where you can," said one official. But there is little evidence that Clinton will go along with such steps. If he fails to adjust quickly, he will confirm the widespread belief that the biggest problem with the Clinton presidency is Clinton himself. Unless he can, as he likes to say, make change his friend, he is in for a decidedly unfriendly 3 1/2 years. CHART: NOT AVAILABLE CREDIT: Sources: Yankelovich Partners Inc., The Gallup OrganizationCAPTION: DEAD LAST Presidents' approval ratings after four months in office CHART: NOT AVAILABLE CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 800 adult Americans taken for TIME/CNN on May 26-27 by Yankelovich Partners Inc. Sampling error is plus or minus 3.5%. CAPTION: Do you think President Clinton: Is a strong and decisive leader? Cares about the average American? Clinton's views and proposed programs are: Clinton vs. Carter Has the President made a good start on his campaign promise to: Make Americans feel good about themselves again? Deal effectively with Congress? Do you agree with Clinton's view that the free-trade agreement will create U.S. jobs, or with Perot's view that it will cost U.S. jobs? — Reported by Margaret Carlson, Dan Goodgame and Nancy Traver/Washington

Allowable Deductions The Clintons' tax returns from the late 1970s support their Whitewater story -- but they don't close the book By RICHARD LACAYO Apr. 4, 1994 Bill Clinton probably winces every time he hears that the Whitewater affair has raised "another question." And he probably never believed that he would lay all the questions to rest last week when he released his tax returns for 1977 through 1979. But here's a question he may not have expected to raise: Because the returns go some way to support the White House version of events on Whitewater, why didn't he simply release them sooner? During the 1990 Arkansas governor's race, the Clintons made public their tax records dating back to 1980. They drew the line there, which meant that the first two years of the Whitewater investment, which they began in 1978, were out of bounds. That kind of defensive perimeter is just the thing to get reporters sniffing. Earlier this year James McDougal, the Clintons' former partner in Whitewater, made matters worse when he began suggesting that the First Couple had never invested more than $13,500 of their own money. That sounded suspiciously like Whitewater was a sweetheart deal in which McDougal, who later headed a buccaneering S&L, made most of the payments in return for . . . just what, exactly? White House aides insisted that the Clintons had invested enough to claim $22,000 in Whitewater-related interest deductions on their 1978 and 1979 tax returns. But when reporters asked time and again to see the returns, which were handed over to the special counsel, they were told to wait until he had issued his report. When the returns were finally released last week, they did indeed show a total of about $22,000 for 1978 and 1979 in Whitewater-related interest deductions on two loans. Those included $10,131 that the Clintons say they paid in 1978 to Great Southern Land Co., a company mostly owned by McDougal that he now says handled payments to the Whitewater lending institutions at that time. In the following year, the returns show the Clintons paying $11,749 directly to "banks and loan companies," as well as $238 to McDougal. A new accounting of the Clintons' Whitewater investment released Friday shows payments totaling $46,636 -- the latest figure that the President gives as the sum he and his wife lost on Whitewater. (Of the $46,636 the Clintons say they lost, $41,000 was deducted and thus yielded tax benefits offsetting their out- of-pocket Whitewater investment.) Clinton's recollection of the $46,636 figure has been rather fluid. At his press conference last week, the President admitted to something like a recovered memory when he announced that he and his wife had not lost $68,900 on Whitewater, the figure they have claimed since 1992. While reading the manuscript of his late mother's forthcoming autobiography, Clinton said, he remembered taking out a loan to help her buy property and a cabin in Arkansas. When questions about Whitewater first arose during the 1992 campaign, Denver attorney James Lyons, who was hired by the Clinton campaign to examine and report on the deal, had included that loan as one

related to Whitewater. It became part of the figure that he calculated was their loss on the deal. But even if the $20,700 payment was not related to Whitewater, it would still be legal for Clinton to claim it on his taxes, presuming that it was, as he asserts, a legitimate loan-interest payment. Deductions were especially handy for the Clintons in those years, when they were needed to offset gains made by Hillary Clinton's foray into commodity trading. She added $26,541 to the family income in 1978 and $72,436 in 1979. Even with deductions, the growth of the Clintons' tax payments outpaced the rise of their income. For 1977, they paid taxes of $8,194 on an adjusted gross income of $41,731. By the next year, their income more than doubled, to $85,214, but their taxes grew faster, to $22,627. For 1979, when their reported income was up about 90%, their taxes increased nearly 300%, to $59,388. McDougal is embarrassed to have claimed that the Clintons were not making Whitewater payments. "My face is red, I have to admit," he says. "I think those are legitimate deductions. I am now convinced that I have substantially underestimated the amount they put in Whitewater." There may be more to be embarrassed about. Though the Clintons' tax records show that they paid more than $10,000 to McDougal's Great Southern Land Co. in 1978, records examined by TIME indicate that the banks received no more than $5,752 in interest that year. Just how was McDougal handling the Clintons' payments? Auditors may also question whether the Clintons could deduct the interest on the main Whitewater loan from their personal income tax report for interest payments made after September 1979, when the corporation took responsibility for the loan. So, Mr. President, will you take another question? — Reported by Richard Behar/Little Rock and Suneel Ratan/Washington OUR JOURNEY IS NOT DONE THE VOTERS HAND CLINTON A HISTORIC VICTORY BUT SEND A MESSAGE, NOT A MANDATE: WORK WITH THE REPUBLICANS By MICHAEL DUFFY; NANCY GIBBS Nov. 18, 1996 A nation born of a distrust of kings won't easily forgive a President who behaves too much like one. And so every four years, the people give a test: first we hand someone the most powerful job in the world. Then we demand that he not be too proud of himself for having it, too desperate to keep it or too sure that he alone knows what to do with it. And then we sit back and watch, until it's time to decide whether to re-elect him. In four years Bill Clinton learned that it is not enough to be smart or charming or plump with vision. His triumph on Tuesday night, for all the records it broke, was a victory for studied modesty; for a willingness to swallow his pride to preserve his power, embrace his enemies to

steal their ideas and march into history as the first two-term Democrat since F.D.R., not with great leaps forward but one baby step at a time. "It is time to put politics aside, join together and get the job done for America's future," Clinton said on the steps of the old statehouse in Little Rock on Tuesday night. "Tonight we proclaim that the vital American center is alive and well. It is the common ground on which we have made our progress." Four years ago, in that same place, the crowd was raw, the night was a party, dressed in Windbreakers and jeans and set to the tune of Fleetwood Mac. This year it was a press conference in a blue suit on a red carpet while a canned orchestra sprayed Aaron Copland: "'Tis a gift to be simple, 'tis a gift to be free." The most historic thing that happened on Tuesday was not that a Democratic President was re-elected for the first time since 1936 or a Republican Congress for the first time since 1930. Nor was it that both things happened at the same time. In 220 years, no Democrat has been elected to the White House when the Congress was controlled by the opposition. We have never been here before, ever. And we did not get here by accident. After a campaign in which the two parties together spent more than half a billion dollars getting their messages out, the voters finally had their chance to send one back: We have too little faith in your instincts or discipline to let either of you govern unchaperoned. And we have too many problems that have to be solved to trust either of you to do it alone. All through the campaign, whenever Bob Dole and Bill Clinton stumbled into any issue that could sting them, they volunteered to "take it out of politics" and hand it to a bipartisan commission. But since the issues they wouldn't discuss--entitlement reform, spending cuts, campaign finance--were the ones voters took most seriously, in the end the voters did just as the candidates suggested. They appointed one huge bipartisan commission, and said, "O.K., get to work." It couldn't be clearer if they had spelled it out letter for letter: voters elected a moderate Democratic President to carry out a moderate Republican agenda. And for once politicians on both sides seemed to understand, to the point that the campaign now looks like one grand conspiracy of cooperation. Clinton was so perfectly sensitive to voters' suspicions that he never really campaigned for a Democratic Congress. By the closing weeks, Republicans stopped even talking about Bob Dole and reminded voters that if they were going to vote for Clinton, someone needed to keep him in line. But every campaign also opens new wounds, and this year's survivors have scores to settle. The Democrats and their allies spent millions drawing blood from Republicans for planning to restrain Medicare, knowing full well that any serious effort to balance the budget would require doing just that. The questions raised about Clinton's fund-raising machine are an invitation to months of congressional investigations that could paralyze both parties. So which will it be? A replay of July, when in one week the White House and Congress moved forward together on welfare reform, health-care portability and raising the minimum wage? Or a bitter trench war in which both sides hunker down, snipe at each other and avoid anything resembling common ground?

THE PRICE OF VICTORY Clinton paid dearly for a victory he probably could have had on the cheap; he was a masterly campaigner running against a hopeless one, in a moment of peace and prosperity. Yet the tactics of his fund-raising machine looked so greedy--and may prove to be illegal--that he squandered the chance at a margin he could have read as a mandate. Clinton was cruising toward a clear majority of the popular vote and perhaps more than 400 electoral votes until two weeks ago, when the scandal surrounding D.N.C. fund raiser John Huang began to bite. Clinton lost ground he had held for months in part because he seemed to be forgetting the lessons he had learned about arrogance. He refused to answer questions about his party's fund-raising practices; this week the White House dribbled out new details of additional meetings between shadowy lobbyists and Administration officials, including the President. Ross Perot's sure slide toward oblivion was halted by his claim that he was the only guy in the race with clean hands. Clinton's final unpretty week cost him heavily among Republicans, independents and even evangelicals who were prepared to cross over to the Democratic ticket. Of voters who decided in the last week, 47% went for Dole, 35% for Clinton and 17% for Perot. Many actually sent their message by not voting at all: turnout fell below 50%, to the lowest level since 1924. Still, Clinton's victory hardly lacked for breadth. He won every state he captured in 1992 as well as Florida, a key state that eluded him that year. Clinton opened the gender gap to a stunning 16 points, nearly twice the previous record, while Dole ran 11 points ahead among white men. The President won the votes of 1 in 5 self-described conservatives; 1 in 4 members of the religious right; 1 in 8 Republicans; half the nation's Catholic voters. Clinton ran well ahead of Dole among every age group, including senior citizens, but among voters 18 to 29, the President ran 19 points ahead. It is tempting to see the results as a Democratic triumph; it is also wrong. For this was no repudiation of Republicans or the Republican agenda. Clinton ran as a deficit-cutting, budget-balancing, welfare-reforming President who now believes 16-year-olds should have a drug test before they get a driver's license. Voters did reject the G.O.P. approach to education and the environment, but Republicans knew they were so badly out of touch that they began pumping money and life into both back in the summer. Republicans widened their margin in the Senate, while they shaved it down in the House. They picked up open Senate seats in Arkansas, Nebraska and Alabama, which will have two Republican Senators for the first time since Reconstruction, but lost in South Dakota, where Larry Pressler fell to Representative Tim Johnson. Democrats held open seats in New Jersey, Rhode Island and Georgia and dashed G.O.P. hopes for further gains in Montana and Illinois. Gingrich, who on Election Day was privately predicting that he would pick up five seats, kept his balloons in the nets and his head down in a hotel in Atlanta long into the night as his margin slipped away hour by hour.

Nearly half the casualties came from Gingrich's militant class of 1994, who had pushed the Speaker hardest to the right and demanded the deepest cuts in popular domestic programs in their zeal for a balanced budget. Gone are at least six of 71 G.O.P. freshmen, including Dan Frisa of New York, who was defeated by Carolyn McCarthy, the widow of a victim of the Long Island Rail Road shooting, who ran on a single-issue platform: gun control. Extremists in both parties either narrowly escaped or were forced into the witness-protection program in order to win. California's loopy "B-1 Bob" Dornan, who loves to brag about having piloted every bomber in the Air Force fleet, was in a dead heat with Loretta Sanchez in his increasingly Hispanic Southern California district. Even Jesse Helms, North Carolina's conservative firebrand, started sounding more tolerant about abortion, touted his ability to direct federal aid to his state after Hurricane Fran left $5 billion in damage and boasted of his success in protecting the state's tobacco and peanut farmers from Republican budget cutters. Voters were so suspicious of ideology that they turned out the purists all across the country. New Hampshire actually elected a Democratic Governor, Jeanne Shaheen, the first female Governor ever and the first Democratic one since 1978; stubbornly Democratic West Virginia did New Hampshire one better, turning to a Republican for the first time since 1956--even choosing the exact same guy--Cecil Underwood. The first time he served he was the youngest Governor in the state's history; this time he will be the oldest. By moving toward the center, the candidates were just behaving like voters. The TIME/CNN Election Monitor, a year-long poll that returned periodically to the same group of registered voters, found that while a quarter of respondents who called themselves conservatives a year ago now consider themselves moderates or liberals, fully 40% of the liberals now think they are moderates or conservatives. HOW HE DID IT If Clinton owed any lasting debts on Tuesday night, it was certainly not to his party; it was to Newt Gingrich, whose triumph in 1994 reflected more distaste for Clinton's excesses than fervor for Gingrich's cause. In 1992 Clinton tried to turn 43% of the vote into an imperial mandate to rearrange the planets. By the time he was accused of shutting down a runway at Los Angeles airport to get a haircut aboard Air Force One, the story was devastating not because it was true but because it was believable. He had become the Boy Prince. And the only thing that could save his presidency was another pretender to that throne. Clinton in defeat learned humility; Gingrich in victory grew swollen with pride, until he reached the point where he said he was shutting down the government in part because the President had treated him rudely on Air Force One. The voters who elected Clinton in 1992 on a promise of change punished him two years later for delivering too much of it. But while Gingrich made the same mistake, overread his mandate and overplayed his hand, Clinton made a point of saying over and over again: I heard you, I listened; walk, don't run; cooperate, don't confront. There was a reason Clinton hardly ever mentioned his opponent from Kansas and even less often the Democratic Party: he was running against Gingrich, not Dole, as the better man to enact a Republican agenda.

Clinton's success owes most to his least liberal moments. He pushed through a crime bill whose federal portion paid for 100,000 cops by cutting federal employees and gave death-row prisoners a shorter lease on life. By signing welfare reform, he managed to win over moderates with his tough-love approach while convincing liberals they should stick with him as the best hope for fixing what they most hated in the bill he had just signed. In 1992 it would have been a wild, drunken Republican dream that by 1996 a 60-year-old entitlement like Aid to Families with Dependent Children would be demolished, the deficit reduced 60% and falling, a balanced budget pledged by 2002, the federal work force shrunk by 250,000 people--and that a Democratic President would have pushed for or okayed them all. Clinton won the battle, but the Republicans won the war. Thanks to policies he pushed and others he just borrowed, Clinton had a booming economy at his back, lower rates of unemployment, interest and inflation than any other President since 1968. These alone might have been enough to guarantee his re-election. But it was Clinton's special fortune to face a Republican who served in World War II, a man who distrusted polls, television and just about everyone who worked on his campaign, a Washington insider whose idea of mixing with the voters was going on the Sunday talk shows, a deficit hawk who, with 90 days to go, decided to pose as a tax cutter, and a man who never learned George Bush's First Rule of Politics: If you have to attack a member of the media, go after Dan Rather, not Katie Couric. SHOTGUN MARRIAGE The ace Clinton played at just the right moment was the one that trumped his own party--saying to an electorate that is sick of politics that he is sick of it too. That may be the theme of the second term. "We're trying to get away from the old D's and R's," said a campaign aide. "The President wants this term to be an affirmation that that's all gone, washed away." In a postpartisan age, anyone who hopes to fix anything will have to swallow hard and reach out across the aisle to find the needed votes. So if Clinton learned a lesson about hubris, the Republicans face one about bitterness. Late last week a senior White House official quietly telephoned a plea to a top Gingrich adviser. The White House knew it would win, and on the assumption that the Congress would stay in Republican hands, the aide was angling for a favor in advance. When the polls close on Tuesday, he asked, might the Speaker and Senate majority leader Trent Lott be willing to make just a few, genuine-sounding bipartisan noises? It was a lot to ask after such a nasty campaign, and yet the question is unavoidable for Gingrich, Lott and the rest of the G.O.P. leadership. Do they want to get something done in the next two years or just keep the blame-game going? Long before he knew the exact makeup of the House, Gingrich knew that his majority would be smaller, his freshmen chastened and, as Clinton completed his tack to the center, that the leverage of moderate Republicans would increase. There are nearly two dozen members of Gingrich's caucus who are moderate enough for Clinton and Dick Gephardt's Democrats to peel off. Last week Gingrich began exploring with his advisers, including his wife Marianne, how to reach out to the moderates whom just a year ago his freshmen openly attacked. The man who once criticized Clinton as a "work in progress" might chuckle now as he moves to the center too.

On Tuesday night, after Clinton spoke of "common ground," Gingrich talked about "common sense" just to let him know they were speaking the same language. Still, as with Clinton, not everyone believes Gingrich can stick to the script. "It can't just be a one-night theme," said Gingrich friend Ken Duberstein. "It must be a governing philosophy." Early Wednesday morning Gingrich said he had an "obligation, frankly, to reach out" to Clinton. "If he actually meant all those nice things," said the Speaker, "it's going to be a very productive year." But if Gingrich strays too far onto Clinton's common ground, he may find that his troops aren't behind him. His top lieutenant, majority leader Dick Armey, thinks Gingrich failed in his revolution not because he was too confrontational but because he was too ready to appease his moderate members. Meanwhile, Lott says he wants to get things done as Senate majority leader and can offer as evidence his efforts last summer to pass the minimum-wage increase, health-insurance portability and welfare reform. Yet the Senate that Lott inherits is more Republican than it was before, and run by more conservative Senators than the group that Dole herded around for years. The Lott-Clinton relationship is the newest, and therefore holds the most promise for cooperation. Put all the Southern charm of these two men in a single room, and the walls would melt, so it will be interesting to watch them work their wiles on each other. Lott respects Clinton, though he doesn't know him very well, and has been astonished by how smoothly the President has co-opted the Republican agenda. Each man is privately fascinated with the other, both have relied on consultant Dick Morris, and both can turn shirty on camera if they aren't careful. Lott brings one big advantage to the job that Dole lacked. Because Lott and Gingrich were House backbenchers in the 1980s together, he can give the Speaker advice in a way Dole never could. Perhaps the trickiest role belongs to Gephardt, the House minority leader. Clinton came back from his Little Rock economic summit in 1992 saying, "I love Dick Gephardt!" But after Gephardt opposed NAFTA and pushed Clinton away from centrist measures such as welfare reform, their interests diverged. A centrist who turned liberal when he ran for President in 1988, Gephardt has tacked back toward the center lately, promoting a distinctly moderate "families-first" agenda of baby steps such as portable pensions and health insurance for children. The two men could work together again, gluing Democratic votes to Republican moderates to get to 217 votes in the House. "We've all learned a lot from the last four years," Gephardt admits. But he may run for President in 2000 and face Vice President Al Gore when he does, which means the Missourian has to decide the same thing everyone else does: whether to go along or go his own way. PROGRESS OR PARALYSIS? With so many wounds to lick and decisions to make, it might be reasonable to expect everyone to take a month off just to map strategy. But this moment of greatest exhaustion collides with the moment of greatest opportunity. Throughout the campaign, no one wanted to do anything very big or dared do anything very brave. The minute the votes are in, though, the gun goes off on

another race. If Clinton and the Congress are going to face any of the hard issues, the reality is they don't have much time. Medicare will not actually go bankrupt for four years, but in the meantime it is losing billions every month. There is already talk of putting together a blue-ribbon commission by the first of the year to provide the cover for the obvious solution that no one else will propose: the Republicans want to save $158 billion over the next six years; the White House $116 billion; the two sides are $42 billion apart. All the commission needs to know is how to divide by two. "It's real easy," says a Republican strategist. "They do a report by March that gives both sides cover to come off their numbers." Clinton will have a harder time persuading both parties to wean themselves from the special-interest cash spoiling American politics. He needs to make good on his 11th-hour promise to fix the system, partly because he knows the Republicans will dangle John Huang in his face until he can get it done. But Clinton will first have to persuade his own party to break its addiction to soft money, the large contributions from fat cats that go to "party-building" activities. It is a measure of Clinton's lack of seriousness about reform that he simply informed his allies on Capitol Hill about his latest proposal two weeks ago. "We weren't consulted," said a Democratic official, "just told." If Clinton wants Democratic votes, he will have to fight for them. For some at the White House, the whole fight for Congress was motivated by two words: subpoena power. The West Wing is already consumed with responding to questions and document requests from Republican committees investigating Clinton's operation. The risk is that Clinton will go from the Permanent Campaign to the Permanent Cross Examination without passing through Governing. The atmosphere surrounding these probes could grow shriller if, as some predict, the leadership of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee probing the travel-office affair and the fbi-file flap passes from retiring Representative Bill Clinger of Pennsylvania to the more volatile Representative Dan Burton of Indiana. Overseeing Senate probes will be Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson, who worked on the Watergate Committee in 1973. But Thompson isn't without misgivings. He is worried that the spread of these inquiries could paralyze or even permanently damage the presidency at a time "when we need a strong Executive." Which is why Clinton must move quickly to set the tone. "There is going to be a tension between getting bipartisan reform and fending off investigations," said Al From, who heads the Democratic Leadership Council, the centrist group Clinton helped found. "It's very important that Clinton move early to draw Republican and centrist Democrats in, work from the center out and build a broad coalition around reform. If he lets the thing deteriorate into partisanship, it will be a lot more bitter and a lot less productive." Left to his own devices, Clinton would finish in the second term what he started in the first: more family leave for parent-teacher conferences and doctor's appointments; a broader Brady Bill to deny handguns to people convicted of domestic violence; more cops on the beat. After failing to provide health insurance for all Americans, Clinton sounds intent on doing it in pieces, covering children first, then the unemployed--getting to universal coverage one patient at a time. And he has promised to repair the parts of the welfare bill he doesn't like--the exclusion of benefits for

legal immigrants and the food-stamp reductions. The parties are unlikely to find a compromise on providing benefits for legal immigrants, but only a few billion dollars separate them on food stamps. Clinton's education policy remains an unfinished symphony. Most school reformers agree that some kind of performance standards for students are necessary as well as greater competition among public and private schools. Until now, Clinton has offered a lot of ideas but few that go far enough to alienate his staunch supporters in the public-school teachers' unions. He has proposed a $10,000 tax deduction for higher education, a $1,500 tax credit for two years of college or vocational school, tax-free iras that can be used to finance college tuition, a plan to mobilize a million reading tutors, a $5 billion program to fix decrepit schools and a program to connect every classroom to the Internet by 2000. There is virtually no chance that a G.O.P. Congress will agree to all this. But Clinton can find enough votes in the House and Senate if he accepts a pet program of the G.O.P.'s (and one that's anathema to the National Education Association): providing vouchers for parents to send their children to the public or private school of their choice. So while everyone in Washington is talking about baby steps and incrementalism, it is possible that the next four years will produce a flurry of change: a balanced budget, a solution to the Medicare shortfall, campaign-finance reform and continued education and welfare reform. "These are big deals," said a Clinton aide. "We all laugh when everyone says, 'This is a small agenda.' They won't be saying that in June." Perhaps that's the irony of the Clinton presidency, and the lesson too. Having campaigned in 1992 to make grand changes--only to fail--he ran in 1996 promising to tinker at the margins--and won. And that show of modesty, however carefully staged, was enough to convince a majority of voters that maybe he could now even be trusted to do the big things. He passed the test. As a result, the first Democrat in two generations to win a second term may actually have earned the chance to make some history. — WITH REPORTING BY JAY CARNEY WITH GEPHARDT, DAN GOODGAME WITH LOTT, J.F.O. MCALLISTER WITH CLINTON AND KAREN TUMULTY WITH GINGRICH Truth or...Consequences The worst week of Clinton's presidency brought tales of sex and cover-ups that threatened to sink even the Comeback Kid By NANCY GIBBS Feb. 2, 1998 Americans like to bring their children to the White House, maybe get a picture, take a tour, hear a story. This is where one man decided to free 4 million slaves, others to wage a just war, to build a Great Society, to topple an "evil empire." Great men, when they take custody of the

presidency, make the Oval Office shine, stake their claim to a portrait on the creamy walls. Lesser men, at the very least, are expected not to smear mud on them. When Bill Clinton got the keys six years ago, the voters knew he brought a lot of debris with him, joints he didn't inhale and truths he didn't tell and women he hadn't slept with ("They were awake at the time," his aides privately explained). It was a leap of faith by the voters that put him there. At the very least, they wanted him to keep the office clean. That is why last week the allegations of a President spotting a fresh face in a ripe dress at a White House party, and eventually inviting her into a private study off the Oval Office for oral sex, and remarking that if she never told, no one would know, was enough to inspire first dizziness, then a regicidal rage. Through Clinton's peaceful, prosperous tenure he has been forgiven a world of winks and wiggly answers about youthful indiscretions and adult lapses of judgment. Last week even his apologists didn't know where to begin. The only image as troubling as the spectacle of a teetering presidency was the possibility that a flirtatious, love-starved girl given to bragging about her conquests might have been spinning some ruinous fantasy about a love affair with the President. Monica Lewinsky's story was so tawdry, and so devastating, it was hard to know which was harder to believe: that she would make up such a story, or that it actually might have happened. Without proof, both possibilities were left to squirm side by side. Either Lewinsky was lying when she swore under oath that she had never had a sexual relationship with the President, or she was lying through the hours of conversations she had with her friend Linda Tripp, who would later betray her, keeping a tape running to spin a web that would catch a President. As each new tape surfaced, each new detail arose, of Secret Service logs showing late-night visits when Hillary was out of town, of presents sent by courier, of a dark dress saved as a souvenir, spattered with the President's DNA, the American public began stripping Bill Clinton of the benefit of the doubt. A TIME/CNN poll last week found half of Americans saying he lacks the moral character to be President and should be impeached if the charges prove true. That assessment was already looking generous by the weekend, as Americans resigned themselves to turning on the news or picking up their papers and having to read stories that painted the White House as a harem, the President as a lecher and the government as a hostage to his libido. No matter what he does, the President now faces a steady flow of ugly leaks from the conversations Tripp recorded or recalled having with Lewinsky. In those conversations, Lewinsky is graphic in detailing, and at times denigrating, the President's sexual characteristics and performance. Clinton, she claimed at one point, had a strict rule: oral sex only. "At my age," she says he told her, "you can't take the risk of intercourse." Lewinsky jokes that if she ever got to leave her job at the Pentagon and return to the White House, she would be made "Special Assistant to the President for b___ j___." Even White House soldiers trained by years of muscular damage control staggered last Wednesday when they picked up their morning papers. The first few hours were horrible, easily the worst day in a presidency with more than its share of bad days. Within the hour they faced a parade of hyperventilating talk-show hosts clutching the Constitution and handicapping the prospect of impeachment proceedings; of psychologists explaining how to tell children that the President might be a liar and a serial philanderer; of network anchors jetting back from Havana,

where they had thought maybe the big story of the week would occur; and of Clinton explaining that yes, the American people had a right to hear an answer about whether he had seduced an employee, but no, he wasn't ready to give it just yet. The normally surefooted White House spokesman Mike McCurry couldn't get through the daily press briefing without getting stuck in the contrivances of strict legalese over what was meant by denying any "improper relationship." "I'm not going to parse the statement," he said, not once, but five times. "It speaks for itself." "It's like we're standing under Niagara Falls, looking for a boat to get us out of here," McCurry said privately. Many in the White House had the air of experienced plane-crash investigators going about their business with grim efficiency. As with past scandals like Whitewater and Travelgate, the White House operation divided cleanly between the President's legal team--Charles Ruff, David Kendall, Bob Bennett--who didn't want Clinton to talk, period, and his political strategists, who wanted to send him out to calm the waters. And so, true to form, the President did both: gave his interviews but didn't say anything. And that only made matters worse. By this time everyone has learned that a Clinton denial must be decoded. The man who once said he had "never broken the laws of my country" when answering questions about his marijuana inhaling (he was at Oxford at the time), and who claimed to have "caused pain in my marriage" to avoid having to use the singular or plural when discussing his love affairs, now faces an audience no longer naive about presidential double-talk. Thus when Clinton sat down with Jim Lehrer on Wednesday afternoon and repeated, in heavily lawyered cadences, that "I didn't ask anybody not to tell the truth," reporters pounced on the use of the double negative as another linguistic trapdoor. Try as it would, the White House could not seem to manage a believable denial all day. And so by Wednesday night it was time for someone to take charge, and it was certainly not going to be the President. He was wiped out, flat on his back, depressed by the enormity of what faced him. That collapse was by itself taken as a confession of guilt even by those who had kept the faith for years. While the President lay dead tired on the sofa, Hillary went to war. It all had a familiar feeling. Six years ago this past weekend, just after the Super Bowl, Hillary Rodham Clinton held up her head with the velvet band, nodded like Nancy Reagan in her mother-of-the-bride sea-green outfit and saved her husband's dying presidential candidacy on 60 Minutes. Choosing his words carefully, Bill denied he had had a "12-year affair" with Gennifer Flowers; Hillary's expression of faith in him was far more persuasive than his answers; and Clinton went on to victory. To those who wondered why she didn't walk away then, and hasn't since, a close Clinton friend for two decades replies: "They do not have the kind of marriage you and I have." Whatever the latest charges against her husband, he is protected by her utter loathing of the man who brings them: Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. Hillary has always seen Starr as a deeply compromised, highly partisan enemy appointed out of political vengeance by a three-judge panel headed by conservative Appeals Court Judge David Sentelle. The Clintons have been dodging his searchlights for nearly four years now, as he rooted around old Arkansas land deals and Vince Foster's death and Travelgate and other alleged White House transgressions. The only

consolation was that however much Starr tried to stretch his jurisdiction, some things were still out of bounds. But they weren't off limits to Paula Jones and her lawyers. They have spent the past three years focused only on the President's love life, tracking every woman the President ever worked with, leered at, was alone in a room with, to try to prove a pattern of sexual harassment. Last week they let on they were considering deposing the President's cousin many times removed, Catherine Cornelius, to see if their relationship went beyond kinship. They have suggested that the list of women in their sights is a mile long. Up until now, the whole Jones operation always had a burlesque quality to it; however plausible her charges that then Governor Clinton tried to seduce her in an Arkansas hotel room, her affiliation with avowed Clinton haters helped the White House dismiss her crudely as just another book-deal-hungry gold digger. The catastrophe for the White House last week was that all the charges that were manageable when they were separate had suddenly become one scandal, indivisible. When Monica Lewinsky, subpoenaed to testify in the Jones case, whispered to Linda Tripp that Clinton had urged her to deny the affair, Starr wired Tripp up for confirmation. Then he went to the Justice Department to demand a skeleton key that would give him access to the whole ugly universe of sexual misconduct. It was Hillary's worst nightmare; the man she hates most in the world now has the right to probe the issues most painful to her. Even if the Jones case were somehow settled tomorrow, which it won't be, Ken Starr will never go away, and all the dark corners of their marriage will now be his for the hunting. So while others whispered resignation and worried about felony charges, Hillary decided the Clintons would both come out swinging. "We need a field general," she declared. None lives at the Clinton White House anymore. The Old Guard, always spoiling for a good fight, was gone long ago. Many people who are left want to leave. Most wouldn't dream of asking the President whether the charges were true, and wouldn't get an answer if they did: many aides were simply too stunned and tired to trust their judgment about what to say. While the nasty spin said Monica was too fat, too dumb, even for Clinton, those with a pulse murmured privately, as one put it, that "she fit the type too well." So there was really only one person who could muster the troops, just as she had in Arkansas in 1980, in New Hampshire in 1992 and in the Executive Residence in 1994, when the Democratic Party died. By Thursday, Hillary was putting together a new, combative team. She wondered if her old, ousted alter ego Harold Ickes could come back, and she added Mickey Kantor to the legal team, more for his political skills than his legal ones. Adviser Sid Blumenthal created a gigantic diagram inside his office outlining with circles and arrows the byzantine Republican conspiracy surrounding the tapes. A fierce argument raged over whether the First Couple, singly or together, should sit down for some big, cathartic confessional on the state of their union before Tuesday's State of the Union. But that idea was rejected, and by Saturday Hillary was fighting on several fronts at once. First, she asked attorney Bob Bennett to try to move up the trial date of the Paula Jones case, now scheduled to start in May, to keep that scandal from dragging out any longer. Besides, even if Jones has a case, it's a hard one to prove; and were Clinton to emerge victorious from that trial,

he could try to spin it into a big, warm blanket vindication. Then she decided that she would be the one to do the talking; she agreed to sit down for a Tuesday Today show interview. If she had lost faith in everyone else's ability to do damage control, she still had faith in her own. "They are digging in for the fight of the century," said a senior official tonight. "They are rolling out artillery, antiaircraft guns, and talking about never surrendering." There are at any given time 250 interns strolling the 18-acre White House campus, enrolled in the ultimate political science class; and much of the staff is not much older. In the early years it felt like a children's crusade: the President was in his forties, most of his staff were in their thirties and the rest in their twenties. One full-time staff member in the press office was 19. Kids and Cabinet officers seemed to have equal standing in the meetings that went on forever and ever. This was the land of the adolescents who dissed Air Force generals, wore multiple earrings and squeezed into every photo op with the President. The interns didn't just work at the White House; they seemed to live there. And Clinton was known for hanging out at the offices and cubicles where the prettiest ones worked. "It's a group of men who look," said a female aide. "They all look. It's a construction-worker mentality." Clinton made fun of George Bush for not having a phone line that he could dial out on; last week a White House official said, "There was a reason." It sometimes seemed as though ambitious West Wing staff members made a point of recruiting the prettiest interns--not only for their own aesthetic pleasure but in hopes that it would inspire the boss to come around more often. That tactic did not go unnoticed by the few senior women on the President's staff. A former White House aide tells TIME that on several occasions late in 1995 and early 1996, attractive young women were transferred to the nether reaches of government because Clinton kept dropping by unannounced to flirt with them. When Clinton "got too chatty with somebody," explained the former aide, "a couple of the older, more senior women on the staff would see that these women got moved." And that is just what happened to Monica Lewinsky. She had arrived in Washington in the summer of 1995, the daughter of a Beverly Hills cancer doctor and a sometime Hollywood gossip writer. Lewinsky had just graduated as a psychology major from Lewis and Clark College in Oregon and had come to the White House to seek her fortune filing and photocopying and answering the phones. Maybe get invited to a party. Maybe even get to meet the President. Interns would usually see the President's schedule a day ahead of time but were told to keep their distance. "We were briefed a number of times about what to do if the President is going to be in the building," says a fellow intern. "They'd say, 'Follow protocol. Get out of the way.'" A plum assignment was anything that required a blue pass for the West Wing, which allowed an intern to roam the West Wing more or less at will. Betty Currie, one of the President's private secretaries, was "an untouchable," off limits for networking, and any unsolicited conversation at all from interns. But Monica was not just any intern. The portrait that was painted last week, by the tapes and the tabloids, was of a rather insinuating, flirtatious young woman with a habit of walking into bosses' offices with coffee they did not ask for. She told her friend Tripp that she met the President at a party that November, where she appeared in a fetching dress and caught the President's eye.

Soon after, they began their relationship, she claimed, around the time she was hired as a regular White House staff member, working in the East Wing office of the legislative affairs shop, blue pass around her neck. But by the following April, she was out of the White House, moved to a job at the Pentagon in spokesman Kenneth Bacon's Office of Public Affairs. As fate would have it, however, Bacon's office was the wrong landing pad for a young woman who loved to gossip. Sitting not far away was Linda Tripp, another former White House aide, who had joined the Bush Administration as a secretary and later ran afoul of the Clinton team. Though Tripp was earnest and efficient, with good instincts and a gift for prose, few White House staff members had good things to say about her last week. "She was awful," says one former official who worked with her in the White House counsel's office. "She was surly; she was sullen; she had a chip on her shoulder and a nasty look on her face." She routinely fought with the other assistants. "We thought she was a Bushie," says one official, "but the real problem is that no one liked her. She was difficult, contentious; the other secretaries just hated her." How Tripp came to start taping her young friend is itself a cautionary tale for White House damage controllers. Tripp had a history of befriending women who told tales of intimate encounters with the President. She certainly shared the view of those who disapproved of the frolicsome Clinton culture, and was pleased by the 1996 publication of former FBI agent Gary Aldrich's book in which he alleged that sex toys dangled from the White House Christmas tree. Tripp was annoyed by the efforts of the President's men to discredit the author. When she was still at the White House, she saw a volunteer named Kathleen Willey not far from the Oval Office, her makeup smudged, her blouse untucked. Last summer, when Newsweek ran a story about Tripp's account of Willey's saying that Clinton had kissed and fondled her, lawyer Bennett publicly challenged Tripp's honesty. But lawyers for Paula Jones saw Willey and Tripp as golden witnesses and aimed subpoenas at them. Tripp anticipated that she would be asked about Lewinsky and that the White House would challenge anything she had to say. So last August she sought the advice of a friend, a literary agent and former Nixon operative, Lucianne Goldberg. Goldberg has represented the Arkansas state troopers who went public with stories of Clinton womanizing, as well as a woman named Dolly Kyle Browning who has been trying to sell an account of her own alleged affair with the President. The agent had approached Tripp through an intermediary months before to suggest she participate in a book on former White House lawyer Vince Foster; Tripp had been the last to see Foster before his suicide. The women never struck a deal, but they became close, and Tripp followed Goldberg's counsel on what to do about Lewinsky: she went to RadioShack and bought a tape recorder. Tripp's conversations with Lewinsky--some taped, some just recalled--tell a steamy story of sex and power, pressure and confusion. The women spoke all the time, in the Pentagon corridors, over coffee, when they met after work for a drink or drove home together. Lewinsky spoke of at least a dozen sexual encounters with Clinton, perhaps as many as 20. She claimed she would go to the White House, usually in the late afternoon or evenings, and be cleared in by Currie. When Lewinsky and the President couldn't rendezvous in person, they allegedly did it on the phone. The phone sex picked up in frequency as her invitations to see Clinton tapered off after the Willey story broke last August.

Lewinsky's account alternates from puppy love for the man she refers to as "handsome" to sorrow that she didn't get to see him as much as she wanted, to eventual bitterness at "the Creep" who let her be banished to the Pentagon. Talking to Tripp, she referred to his intrusive staff as "the protectors" and to ex-girlfriends in the White House as "graduates." At times the very amount of detail strains credulity. In one exchange, Lewinsky laments that when she tried to get into the White House one night to visit the President, the guard turned her away, saying another woman had got there first. There is throughout the account the sweet-and-sour scent of a high school romance. Lewinsky talked of presents they exchanged: he gave her a dress and a volume of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass; she gave him ties and a statue of a frog (an old Clinton obsession), along with love letters and a sexually explicit tape; the packages were addressed to Currie and delivered by private courier. Lewinsky also brought at least three microcassettes from her home message machine and played them for Tripp at the Pentagon. The President can be heard saying hello, but leaving no lengthy messages and certainly nothing incriminating. But in her conversations with Tripp, Lewinsky referred to the President's legal coaching: when she expressed fears about records of her comings and goings and what Currie might say one day in a sworn deposition, Clinton supposedly replied, "There's no proof. Look them in the eye and deny it." Even more damaging are the conversations that occurred after Lewinsky was subpoenaed by Paula Jones' lawyers in December. She said Clinton told her to see his friend Vernon Jordan, and he'd help her out. She met him in his Dupont Circle office, and she presented Jordan a list of public relations firms she'd like to work for. The next time they met he picked her up at the Pentagon to go meet a lawyer and draft her affidavit. "Take your anger and frustration with the President and vent them on me," he told her at the time, adding that perjury in a civil case is rarely prosecuted. Jordan confirmed last week that he had indeed helped her find a lawyer and guided her toward several job possibilities in the private sector, at American Express or at Revlon, where he serves as a director. In his statement explaining how one of the most powerful men in Washington came to be job hunting for a 24-year-old secretary, Jordan maintained that he helped Lewinsky because he himself stood "on the shoulders of many individuals who have helped me" and that "to whom much is given much is required." He also said that in their conversations Lewinsky had adamantly denied having an affair with the President, which begs the question of how that subject came up in the first place. By last month the corridor conversations between Tripp and Lewinsky had gone from girl talk to a deadly serious question about whether to lie under oath about the behavior of the President of the United States. Lewinsky apparently told Tripp she intended to deny the affair in her deposition and urged Tripp to do the same. Lewinsky warned Tripp that if she testified about the affair while Lewinsky and Clinton continued to stand fast, she would be isolated and vulnerable and her job would be in jeopardy. Excerpts of a small portion of the tapes, released by Newsweek, quote Lewinsky discussing whether to lie about her relationship with the President.

"I would lie on the stand for my family," she says. "That is how I was raised... I have lied my entire life." She adds, "I will deny it so he will not get screwed in the case, but I'm going to get screwed personally." She also discusses Tripp's faking a foot accident to delay the deposition, and quotes her mother as saying the idea is "'brilliant.'" In a sworn affidavit on Jan. 7, Lewinsky reportedly denied having a sexual relationship with Clinton. But Tripp meanwhile was pursuing a very different strategy. Lawyer Kirby Behre, retained by the White House to prepare her for congressional committees and grand jury investigations into Travelgate and Vince Foster's suicide, did not seem to Tripp terribly interested. So she decided it was time for a more aggressive defender. She brought her tapes to James Moody, a solo practitioner who specializes in fighting regulations, whom she had met during the Bush Administration. Moody had little faith in Janet Reno's Justice Department and agreed with Tripp that they should turn the tapes over to Starr. For Starr, whose investigation had been going heaven only knows where for four years, Tripp was a gift from God. They met on Monday, Jan. 12, and Moody was stunned by the speed of Starr's response. The next day, Tripp was outfitted with a body wire so they could tape her meeting with Lewinsky at the Ritz-Carlton in Pentagon City. Once again Lewinsky discussed her plans to cover up the affair, and her hopes that Jordan would help her land a good job. That Wednesday, Lewinsky drove Tripp home from the Pentagon and offered her a mysterious set of "talking points" about how to handle her deposition. It was clear Lewinsky hadn't written the document herself, but she didn't say who had given it to her. The document recommended that Tripp change her story about Willey, suggest that she could have smeared her own makeup and messed up her clothes. And it recommended that Tripp dismiss Lewinsky as a liar and a stalker of the President, in effect supporting Lewinsky's sworn statement that there was no affair. But Starr now had evidence that would potentially support charges of perjury, suborning perjury and obstruction of justice. He approached the Justice Department and received formal permission to expand his inquiry. When Newsweek called to say it was preparing to run the first detailed account of the Lewinsky affair, Starr pressured the editors to hold off, to allow him time to enlist Lewinsky's aid in stinging Jordan and potentially the President as well. When Lewinsky met Tripp at the Ritz-Carlton again on Friday, she quickly found herself surrounded by FBI agents and prosecutors and directed upstairs to confront her predicament. And so began the strangest and most pivotal chapter in the whole drama: the Getting to Know You duet between Ken Starr and Monica Lewinsky. In exchange for immunity, he wanted her to tell him all the details of the affair, and most important, to agree to wear a wire that would let him catch Jordan trying to keep her quiet. Otherwise, he had the tapes that would allow him to prosecute her for perjury. Faced with this choice, Lewinsky fell apart. She cried. She asked for her mother. "My life is ruined," she said. It would take a while for her mother to reach Washington by train from New York City; Monica was frantic, and Starr's team had to calm her down. They bought her cookies. They watched Ethel Merman with her on TV. They took her shopping in the mall downstairs at Crate & Barrel. Lewinsky's father back in California had reached a longtime family friend, a medical malpractice

lawyer named William Ginsburg, and Ginsburg reached Starr's team by phone around 10:30 that night. Ginsburg asked them to write down the terms of an immunity deal and fax it to him. We have no computer, they replied. Write it on hotel stationery, he suggested. They refused. Ginsburg offered to fly to Washington that night by charter if they would just put something in writing. No deal. By the next evening, Ginsburg had arrived in Washington and gone to Starr's offices, where they told him the deal was off. And so the big squeeze tightened. Starr had been burned before, offering Clinton buddy Webb Hubbell a light sentence if he would sing about Whitewater, and getting little in return. This time around, Starr needs Lewinsky in order to make his case work, but knows that she alone is not enough. He needs some corroborating evidence of obstruction of justice to head off a he-said/she-said battle, in which the Leader of the Free World would have the advantage. Starr was prepared to immunize Monica before the story broke; she would have had a chance to produce new evidence by secretly taping or gathering statements from others to support her obstruction story. But by the middle of last week, when the cover had been blown, she may have had nothing left to give but old trinkets and a stained dress. So it became all the more vital to portray her as a vulnerable victim of an ugly power struggle. Ginsburg may not be a criminal lawyer, but he knows how to do p.r. The bearded, besweatered, avuncular lawyer, looking every inch the indignant father figure, gave a string of carefully chosen television interviews. He directed his fire both at Starr and the President for "savaging" a "child." "My client...is at the vortex of a storm involving three of the most powerful people in the United States: President Clinton, Vernon Jordan and Kenneth Starr." The "immunity dance" proceeded in fits and starts through the week--part flirtation, part bluff, part intimidation, which will need to end in an embrace for both sides to survive. It was clear by week's end that Lewinsky herself was now a target of a criminal investigation. Starr told the FBI he was going to need "additional resources" to do all the legwork. And he began issuing subpoenas that would send agents throughout the city with a vacuum cleaner. By this time the historical echoes were so loud, it was time for a flashback: it came when FBI agents descended on the Watergate to search Lewinsky's apartment. They knew what they were looking for: her black and dark blue dresses; some T shirts Clinton allegedly gave her; a gold pin and trinkets from the Black Dog gift shop on Martha's Vineyard, where the First Family vacations; some hats; the volume of Whitman; a computer. Meanwhile, Starr subpoenaed the Pentagon and the White House for phone, computer and personnel records on both Tripp and Lewinsky. He served Lewinsky with a subpoena to appear before a grand jury this Tuesday. Certainly no audience to the spectacle was more entranced than the G.O.P. lawmakers on Capitol Hill, who shared the general belief that when your opponent is shooting himself in the foot, you don't get in the way. Early on, the Republican leadership spread the word to members not to comment or get involved in the scandal lest they lend credence to the idea that this is just another Republican attack. "We're trying to keep the fruitcakes under control," said one G.O.P. staff member. "For us it's better if this thing drags on for a while," the staff member joked. "At least we don't have to come up with an agenda."

Thus Newt Gingrich said he wanted to wait until all the facts were in; Trent Lott said that the allegations were "very serious" but that he'd been in Mississippi for two days and wasn't sure about the details. The political calculation among Republicans could be that a wounded Clinton who serves out his term is better than an incumbent President Gore who has put all this ugliness behind him. It was a measure of the President's free fall that his own former chief of staff Leon Panetta told the San Jose Mercury News that if the allegations are true, it might be better "if Gore became President and you had a new message and a new individual up there. The worst scenario is if there's substance to it and it drags out." For their part, other leading Democrats were loudly silent. In the midst of last week's public carnage, it's hard to imagine, but there were those who could see a strategy forming. Clinton will never resign, they insist; he will fight every inch to avoid becoming the second President in history to resign in disgrace, as opposed to one of several tarnished by sexual scandals that future historians might just decide to ignore. He will try to change the subject, with lots of purposeful activity, outlined in the State of the Union, a new balanced budget, a response to Saddam Hussein. Let people get used to some further degradation of the public discourse; spread the word, quietly, that Lewinsky was a flighty, gossip-mongering groupie. Above all, trust that if the affair ever wound up being tried before the Senate, that is the last body that would comfortably sit in judgment of a man who believes that a relationship based on oral sex is neither sexual nor a relationship. That doesn't mean that there will be anything left of his presidency. Clinton's grandest ambitions for his have already, repeatedly fallen prey to his scandals; one reason the whole health-care initiative fell apart was that it was a bad idea, but the other was that lawmakers could just ignore him as long as he was in deep trouble over Whitewater. A leader without ideology, with no movement to lead or party to follow, has only his stature and powers of persuasion to move an agenda. And those are dwindling fast.

— Reported by Jay Branegan, Margaret Carlson, Michael Duffy, J.F.O. McAllister, Viveca Novak, Douglas Waller and Michael Weisskopf/Washington

The Cost Of It All This scandal has scorched everyone it has touched--the President, his family, the prosecutor, the press. Even if Clinton's testimony puts it behind us, the damage is done By NANCY GIBBS AND MICHAEL DUFFY Aug. 24, 1998 Imagine spending your whole life wanting to be President and being told time and again that you could be. The favored child, you get the master bedroom. Your teachers call you a diamond in the rough. When you make mistakes, you charm the facts and the language into doing your bidding, and like magic, the problem goes away. You can have whatever you want. And when you reach the crowning glory, Hail to the Chief, you find that your luck and timing are so peerless that you get to preside over the most peaceful, prosperous era in the country's history.

You dream of greatness, statues, monuments, your name next to your heroes', maybe even your face on a coin someday. Now flip it. Most of the country thinks you are a liar and a cheat. A zealous prosecutor is working overtime to put you into early retirement. Every single night, the comics who truly write the first draft of history spit on you and smile. Your attempts to hide behind the powers of your office have diminished them as a result. Your hands are tied overseas; at home your agenda is dead. Your only daughter is back from college, and whatever you decide to say, you have to explain to her first. Your wife looks the way she did the day her father died. Psychiatrists report of teenagers who act up and behave badly who are using, as their last line of defense, "Well, hey, Clinton got away with it." More than any politician in memory, Bill Clinton does not hide his dark underbelly; he rubs it lovingly; it is part of who he is. His inconstancy makes him flexible; his mistakes have made him smarter; he is a glutton for sympathy. And so last week, as he considered what to say under oath, the best and worst in him took the measure of the hopes and fears in us. From its very first days this scandal has divided the nation between those who want to leave Clinton alone and those who want him to pay, between those who think everyone lies about sex--that he has been persecuted just because he is President--and those who think this fate goes with the job. Presidents aren't like kings, but they aren't supposed to be like the rest of us either. The office confers a mystic expectation, a combination of Roosevelt's brains and Johnson's clout and Reagan's grace, that helps Presidents persuade Congress and the people to follow their lead. The agony of Clinton's choice was that his best chance for survival demanded that he declare himself less than we expect a President to be and more like the rest of us after all. The moment Clinton confesses to anything, he loses some magical powers; his decisions during the past seven months have already cost him some actual powers as well. The shrapnel from this scandal is now embedded in the polity, the culture and the law, and it will take more than the passage of time to dig it out. The wreckage spreads across the whole field of battle: his moral authority, his ability to respond to a crisis, his room to negotiate with a Congress that might soon be his judge, and his ability to get the advice he needs. As for the rest of us, there is no going back. Boundaries have been broken and precedents set about the personal privacy of public figures that are already down in permanent ink. We may hate that this is so; we may curse every sex scandal to come along for the next generation; but whenever the next one does, it will have a new historical marker: "Not since the Clinton scandal..." The process of deciding what to say and how to say it began, as it always does with Clinton, late in the game, late at night. Early in the week he was still all business, raising money, threatening vetoes, worrying about Iraq and Africa. Because of the bombings, Hillary was filling in for him Wednesday at campaign events in Wisconsin with Senator Russell Feingold. She told her husband to get some sleep. But Clinton's friend Harry Thomason had just finished his testimony before Starr's grand jury the day before, and had arrived that night at the White House to see to his friend, play their favorite word games, talk things over.

For months the legal barriers that protected Clinton from Starr had been falling one after another, even as Clinton's denials remained intact. So at just the point when Clinton had to prepare the most important testimony of his life, he had to have the hardest conversations first. It is taken as gospel in some circles that Hillary Clinton has known everything about her husband all along, that she made her deal with the devil years ago. Neither her admirers nor her enemies can imagine this proud, private woman as a victim, trusting and gullible. But her best friends say otherwise. They will tell you that she loves him, has since law school, the brainy girl who beat out the beauty queens. She always dismissed them; they meant nothing to her. At least they didn't until now. There is knowing and then there is knowing, and whatever she may have suspected long ago and wondered back in January and feared as each new piece of evidence emerged, she did not fully confront it until last week, when her husband had no other choice but to tell her not just what had not happened but what had. The private confessions had to be completed by Friday morning, when the New York Times took over with a front-page story suggesting that Clinton was considering admitting to a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky but not to perjury or obstruction of justice. With that, the wheels of speculation spun well out of control, and the day was given over to lawyers and former prosecutors and anonymous aides writing an imaginary speech that the President had still not decided he would give. Hillary, meanwhile, had to play host at his 52nd birthday party on the South Lawn. Clinton knew going into his testimony that Americans by a vast majority believed there was sex; believed he shouldn't perjure himself; thought Starr had no case if it's just about sex. We don't want to know all the details; we just want an acknowledgment from him that he did wrong and then to move on. Clinton needed to give us precisely that--just enough and nothing more. The battle between him and the independent counsel can be cast as another skirmish in the 225-year-old war over whether any of us can be safe in our persons, houses, places and effects. Clinton is shrewdly counting on the notion that Americans would give up a lot to preserve their own fragile privacy, and so most will vicariously defend his. That is why he has done everything possible to suggest that this investigation is about something that is nobody else's business, obsessively pursued by a prosecutor who has no business asking about sex in the first place. It is why Starr will confront a reluctant Congress and an angry public if all he produces after four years is a report that reads like a family diary best left to therapists and theologians. And it is why Clinton's aides are most defiant when the subject of obstruction of justice comes up. Until recently, neither side showed much restraint, and each blamed the other for the cost. It has been maddening to watch Starr and Clinton go at it, because they gave the sense that they were in this for themselves and not the rest of us. If they were concerned about the tender pressure points between the branches of government, they would have called a truce long ago. Instead they barreled through, conducting the nation's business like alley cats. The only antagonist equipped to corner a man as elusive as Clinton is an independent counsel as relentless as Starr. Clinton did not think he should be forced to talk about what he considered totally private matters. Just as firmly, Starr thought that the President was lying in this case as he

had lied in others, and that the pattern needed to be exposed. Starr would make a demand, and Clinton's lawyers would try to block it, forcing Starr to ratchet up the demands. Because Starr had two things most career prosecutors never have--an unlimited budget and virtually unbridled power to probe--he was acting as his own judge as well as Clinton's. "You have to set your own ethical bounds as a prosecutor because of the sheer power you have, especially at the grand-jury stage," says former Watergate prosecutor Henry Ruth. "Because federal grand-jury case law is practically all on the prosecutors' side, the system places a lot of reliance on voluntary ethical limits. This is one of the great dangers of the independent counsel act." Starr hasn't paid much attention to voluntary limits; he may be in that tiny minority of Americans who have no secrets, and so sees nothing wrong with pinching the zone of confidentiality to a tiny crease. There is nothing wrong with summoning Monica's mother to talk about her daughter's sex life, nothing wrong with going after bookstore receipts and hard drives and voice mail; these are all standard prosecutorial tactics. Yet earlier prosecutors like Lawrence Walsh and Robert Fiske elected not to use all the weapons in their arsenal. Even Nixon's adversaries never subpoenaed the President. In the past there has been a grease of custom and compromise that kept Presidents and prosecutors from getting this far in the hole. "You never want to litigate questions of separation of powers," says C. Boyden Gray, George Bush's White House counsel. "When you litigate these things rather than bargain over them, you tend to lose them." But then Starr was dragged in that direction by the winner-take-all strategy employed by the White House. Clinton used his office to thwart an investigation sanctioned by his own Attorney General, thereby violating some precedents of his own. Ronald Reagan waived all Executive privilege at the start of the Iran-contra investigation, which arguably dealt with the very matters of national security and diplomacy in which Executive privilege is most legitimate. He turned over his documents and diaries; he told everyone, including White House lawyers, to do likewise, because he said he wanted the facts to come out. Jimmy Carter urged his lawyers and allies to cooperate in the investigation into the operations of his family's peanut warehouse in Georgia. Clinton, in contrast, tipped his bully pulpit into a street barricade. He asserted Executive privilege to prevent his aides from testifying, and lost. His aides invented a "protective function" privilege to prevent the Secret Service from talking, and lost. He invoked attorney-client privilege to prevent White House lawyers from testifying, and lost. By picking, and then losing, fights on Executive privilege, he gave a legitimate right a bad name and has made it harder for future Presidents to invoke it. "All they were doing," says presidential scholar Mark Rozell, "was buying time and buying time." At Williams & Connolly, David Kendall's firm, says Ruth, "they litigate every case the same way, and that's hardball. Give 'em nothing, tell 'em nothing, delay, fight at every turn. But when you're defending the President, you can't run a defense like you would for a private citizen," he says. Result: "Just like in the White House, after all the attacks, the prosecutor gets his own bunker mentality and starts to figure, O.K., this is a war." And by the time the White House

began attacking Starr for zealotry and moonlighting and hiring aggressive deputies, Starr felt he had no option but to meet Clinton blow for blow. Taken together, Starr and Clinton's decision to fight to the death will change the way the government works. Until now, it was widely assumed that government officials--the President, the Cabinet, members of Congress--could seek advice from government lawyers without worrying about those conversations becoming public. It is now clear that this and other presidential privileges did not have the force of law; they depended largely on the willingness of a President's enemies and critics not to challenge them. By testing so many prerogatives, Starr and Clinton have made good advice that much harder for Presidents to find. Although it is too strong to say, as a White House staff member did last week, that "there is now settled law that the President can't consult with his closest advisers," the whole White House staff feels under siege. Some legal experts suggest this shouldn't affect the normal, noncriminal workings of the White House, but that's too technical a reading, especially in a climate when so much that is political has the potential to be criminalized. "Who's to say that there might not be a criminal investigation into the granting of waivers for satellite launches in China, something that's been done since the Bush Administration?" asks a Clinton aide. "It's an institutional nightmare--Presidents will cease confiding in or seeking confidential advice from their senior staffs." So leaders are likely to try two things instead, both of them bad: form independent and probably unaccountable shadow cabinets outside government, to whom they can go for sensitive advice; or, worse yet, keep their own counsel entirely. And getting good advice in the future will depend on talented people being willing to expose themselves to new legal risks. "If somebody asked me to serve now," says Rozell, "I'd say 'No way.' You'd have to be independently wealthy even to think about it." Some White House staff members in private moments express bitterness about how their friends and colleagues have been hounded and forced to run up huge legal bills. "I will never again work for the U.S. government," one said. "And I've told other people, Don't do it. When you have these high-profile jobs that require Senate confirmation, there's somewhere between a possibility and a certainty that you're going to be investigated." Part of the gloom will pass once this crew leaves office, and a few years of normalcy could make much of this fretting seem quaint. But that assumes some restoration of restraint: at least a partial dismantling of the political-prosecutorial-press complex that invites journalists to make their careers by bringing down an official, talk shows to boost their ratings by analyzing events that haven't happened yet, political partisans to eviscerate the opposition rather than engage it, and prosecutors to seek more money and more power in pursuit of ever smaller transgressions. For that to happen, the American people will have to be heard, and it is hard to imagine their yelling any louder than they have for the past seven months. The Lewinsky scandal "is like the Hope diamond," says Robert Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs. "It attracts people and destroys everyone that comes into contact with it. The President's moral standing is destroyed, the political process is suspended and the press, instead of filtering out the fire hydrant of information in the information age, is like a dog urinating on it."

There are many reasons, some of them fiercely personal, why people hate this story so much. It makes it hard to watch the news with our children. It leaves garbage in the living room. Every story gets viewed through a dirty prism: How much is our foreign policy shaped by domestic scandal? Did the tobacco bill fail because the President couldn't afford the fight? Cynicism is a political poison we've been absorbing into our bloodstream for a generation. But this time cynicism is just the beginning. All along this story has been less about crime than punishment. From the nails in Kathleen Willey's tires to the jokes about Linda Tripp's chins to the around-the-clock evisceration of Monica Lewinsky, the story has nourished a culture of cruelty that sacrifices empathy for entertainment. If Clinton has been more mercilessly ridiculed than past Presidents, we can excuse it as partly a response to his own decisions--beginning with his decision to run for office. But the other civilians caught up in the story never ran for anything. They may have done something foolish or wrong, but who of us can imagine paying such a price in humiliation for our stupidities and failures? "This whole thing is horrible," says Todd Gitlin, a professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University. "I'm filled with disgust with what has become of this country, and I hold the media crucially responsible. What has happened is that in the glee, sometimes even the guilty glee, of enthusiasm for this story, the press has sent a very clear signal to the public that it lives in a different world than the world of a self-governing democracy." Gitlin and other journalism scholars are hard-pressed to remember any other story that has triggered such furor. It has forced some healthy choices, a necessary filtering reaction to the information age: so much is available around the clock that viewers and readers become editors themselves, making judgments not about what they can find out but about what they want to know. "The general discourse had been getting cruder and cruder," observes Judith Martin, a.k.a. Miss Manners. "Privacy and discretion had almost disappeared from the general public usage before the scandal. Now that the salacious nosiness has been carried to this logical conclusion, there's been a reaction on the side of propriety. Now, this is a society that has had nonstop television confessions for 20 years, people vying to get on and reveal everything they can. With this story, what a pleasant surprise--people are reacting by saying, you know, we really shouldn't be discussing this." And maybe soon we won't be. It is possible, even likely, that Clinton will skate through here. There is no hunger on Capitol Hill to go through impeachment. Senior Republicans have insisted for several weeks now that only a clear-cut case of obstruction of justice would compel them to start an impeachment inquiry. "We're not going to let the Republican Party go down in flames over a sex charge," said an aide to Senator Orrin Hatch, who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee. Some people believe that if Starr lacks clear evidence of obstruction, the decent thing for him to do is stop and file a report; perhaps the decent thing for Clinton to do is tell the truth and then spend a month in a monastery. But decency is a concept that gets more traction in a culture in which shame matters, like Japan, where the CEOs resign when an airplane crashes. America has

always been too big, too fractious for shame to work very well--and there are too many places to start over. Optimists and reformers already foresee laws that will undo the Supreme Court's Paula Jones decision and protect sitting Presidents from lawsuits; revisions of the independent-counsel law to preserve its value but limit its potential for abuse; even laws that would affirm a privilege for Secret Service agents and government lawyers. Clinton's successors, if they are men or women of unimpeachable character and conduct, can go a long way to set things right. Reagan was the latest President to test the resilience of the office: following the disgrace of Nixon and the disappointments of Ford and Carter, books about the presidency dismissed the job as an empty chair. Reagan showed what conviction and charisma can do. Even those who hated his policies acknowledged his mastery of the magic. Someone else will surely come along to restore the mystique; but it will take more than charm and skill in our future Presidents to undo the damage. — Reported by Jay Branegan, Margaret Carlson, J.F.O. McAllister and Michael Weisskopf/Washington and Andrea Sachs/New York "I Misled People" In apologizing, Clinton declares his family's pain a private affair. Is this just another clever evasion? By NANCY GIBBS AND MICHAEL DUFFY Aug. 31, 1998 When Chelsea Clinton was six years old, her parents used to make her cry in hopes that they could make her tough. Dad was in the middle of an especially ugly re-election fight, his enemies were drawing blood, and so they all tried a game at the dinner table: Chelsea would pretend that she was her father, making speeches about why people should vote for her, and then he would attack her, say really mean things, so she would learn to protect herself. At first the exercises reduced the little girl to tears: "Why would anybody say things like that?" But after a while, Hillary later wrote, "she gradually gained mastery over her emotions"; she came to understand people's dark motives; and, finally, she would come back fighting, fully prepared to handle the wicked lies that enemies might tell. What would it take to prepare her, so many years later, for the possibility that this time, the enemies were the ones telling the truth? And what would it take to prepare us? If we Americans watched and weighed Bill Clinton more closely this week than we ever have, we may have been watching Hillary even more carefully. Before the drama could play out in prime time, it had to play out in private, and at times it felt as though she invited us into her kitchen to role-play some more. You think this has been hard to discuss with your children? she would say. Imagine what we have had to say to our own. You hate this coarse and vulgar story? You at least can turn off the TV; you don't have to sleep with it.

Since last weekend, the Clinton circle has been betting that Americans would take their cues from Hillary. They put out the word that the First Lady did not know about her husband's betrayal until late last week. By Saturday she had disappeared. On Sunday morning she went to church with him. On Sunday night she said a prayer for him. On Monday she lit a fire under him. And on Tuesday, after her office issued a statement that "clearly, this is not the best day in Mrs. Clinton's life," she and her daughter took him by the hand and walked across the South Lawn into the most interesting summer vacation we may never hear about. But there was, of course, a crucial difference for us. Hillary Clinton's decision about whether to believe him or not, forgive him or not, was born of their life and her vows. We didn't marry him; we hired him. She signed on for better or worse. We elected him to make things better. When he decided three weeks ago to testify before Kenneth Starr's grand jury, Clinton was agreeing to make three of the hardest speeches of his life: to his wife and daughter, to the grand jury and to the rest of us. Before that was over, the Commentariat would also need to be fed, to satisfy its hunger for a story line with drama and pathos and a denouement, perhaps a body or two, certainly some blood and guts. By last Sunday, when the speech was nearly at hand and the predictions were buzzing like cicadas over the capital, there came a moment when private pain could even solve a political problem, and Clinton could argue that he had already suffered enough and should be released on probation with credit for time served. In the days leading up to Monday's confession, the mystery of what he would say to the nation was never as compelling as what he would say to his wife. Clinton had apparently found it easier to lie to 269 million Americans with Hillary at his side than to sit her down and tell her the truth. There are people at the heart of the White House who swear up and down that going into this weekend, Hillary Clinton still did not know, really know, the truth about Monica Lewinsky. Such ignorance in a very smart woman, they argue, is born of a mix of decision and denial: an unusual career--the brilliant Yale lawyer who gave up her work to make her husband better at his--and an unusual marriage, in which his serial infidelity was taken for granted by everyone except her. Clinton took his first step on Wednesday night, Aug. 12, a sort of out-of-town opening for the performances that would follow. He tried out a lawyer's redacted version of a confession, not on Hillary but on a friend whose reviews he could trust. He said the relationship had begun during the 1995 government shutdown; it strayed across the line, and it made him ashamed. What really worried him, now that he had to face the grand jury, was how he would prepare Hillary for the next four days. That talk came the next night, Thursday, when Chelsea was out with friends and her parents had some time to be alone. How it went is the only thing that is sure to remain between Bill, Hillary and their God. Friday was an endurance contest. The New York Times brought the curtain up with the news that Clinton might admit to a sexual affair with Lewinsky. The fact that this had been assumed for two weeks did not dilute the drama of the paper of record's stating what he would do and how he would do it: the legalistic parsing of definitions of sex that would let him admit to lying but deny perjury--a nifty legal trick. As if that were not enough, some observers suggested that the story

had been leaked to give Hillary the bad news that Clinton might not be able to deliver himself. Hillary, her lawyers and just about every White House official with a telephone would deny the report at least once that day. And in the meantime, Hillary had her own surprise to spring--an early birthday party for her husband on the South Lawn, complete with spice cake and the Marine Band and everything short of For He's a Jolly Good Fellow. Then the White House went dark. There's nothing so rare at the Executive Mansion as a quiet Saturday, when people can relax and Presidents actually get to play. But this was a whole new kind of quiet--hollow and grim. Clinton was looking, simultaneously, at the most dangerous prospect of his public life and the most devastating chapter of his private one. He canceled his plans for the weekend to prepare for his testimony; Hillary went into seclusion. She virtually locked herself in a room upstairs, forswearing visitors and talking to no one other than her mother and other family. Chelsea was nowhere to be seen either. White House officials later announced that Hillary had "learned" over the weekend, which naturally raised the question of what she had been thinking for the past seven months. Denial is a wonderful thing; it can stretch to contain an awful lot of evidence that looks hostile. A friend said her free fall had to do with the fact that in many ways, the Clintons' marriage has gone so well since they arrived at the White House six years ago. Some marriages would blister under such hot lights, but theirs flourished, partly because Bill was under what amounted to house arrest. What trouble could he get into there, right under her nose, not to mention the Secret Service's? Not before Sunday morning would Hillary show any signs of where she had landed. It's possible that hatred can be a comfort when the alternative is grief. At least a part of her anger at her husband was not about lying or treachery but about handing their mortal enemy a weapon to use against them both. She had stood by her husband when his character was in question, for dodging the draft and whether he had inhaled, through Gennifer and Paula. But prior to Ken Starr, her own morals had never been questioned. It was Starr who had challenged her judgment, investigated her law firm, friends and partners for four years. The Clintons have always believed in a conspiracy to topple them--they did when they were in Arkansas; they did when they ran for President; and they have since they've gone to Washington. By Sunday morning, says a friend, Hillary pulled on her boots and went to church. Then she prepared to go to war. "She didn't want Ken Starr to kill her husband," says the friend. "She wanted him alive so she could do it later." Whenever things go terribly wrong, it is always Hillary who leads the way out of the wilderness. By Sunday afternoon she was huddled with the lawyers, shaping the strategy. And though the White House has carefully framed the entire scandal as one immense invasion of privacy, by Sunday the First Family decided to turn on the lights in the mansion so we could see the shadows through the shades. In the middle of the most painful weekend of her life, Hillary invited into her home for comfort the one clergyman in America better known for his pulpit at CNN than at the Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church on Chicago's South Side.

It was hard to know what to make of the family's late-night house call by Jesse Jackson. Jackson has a way with people, and he certainly seemed to have a way with Chelsea. He had been at the White House to watch the Super Bowl back on the first horrible weekend of scandal, and he and Chelsea got along great. It was mainly for her that he was invited back last weekend, family friends said, to help talk her out of her funk. But if the Clintons know their Bible, and they do, they know that Jesus made a point about prayers: the real ones are done in secret, not on the street corner, to make an impression, but in a closet, just you and your God. But that is not where Jackson lives. He was actually live on CNN right up until he scooted off to the White House around 10:30, entering through the side door. He met Hillary on the second floor. She was dressed casually, in some sort of warm-up suit, and she and Jackson and Chelsea embraced. "We began to talk about one's faith and the storm," Jackson says. When Clinton came in, they greeted each other and chatted, but the President went into the third-floor solarium for a meeting with Harry Thomason, Clinton's old Arkansas friend, making it clear he wanted Jackson to spend time in the family quarters with Chelsea. Then, Jackson says, he talked to Chelsea about Adam and Eve. "Of course, at the age of 19 or 20, she knows about sex. She's seen videos, watched television, listened to music. She knows what is expected in marriage and knows what, in fact, happens." It was when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, he explained, that all the cover-ups started. "The moral here is, 'You should have stopped talking to the snake in the first place.'" Later he prayed with the family, and before he left, Chelsea said, "I love Dad. I'll handle it." Both women, Jackson said, knew what they had to do: Chelsea's "mission is to lift her dad up." And if Hillary was, as he said, bruised and humiliated, she was also standing by her man and holding to her vows and joining the legal team for the first time in weeks. Jackson held a press conference the next day and hit every network, presenting the tableau that the drama had been missing: the repentant father, the angry mother, the isolated daughter. The story needed its cleansing ritual of contrition and penitence and absolution. That was a high bar for Clinton to clear: a coerced confession doesn't count as much as a voluntary one, but he very deliberately chose not to give that back in January, when there was still a chance the lies might work. Still, if Clinton's sex life was his own business and not ours, then the subtext was that it was up to Hillary and Chelsea to punish him, up to them to forgive him. Whatever righteous indignation we may feel was Hillary's to express; any crockery we feel like breaking was hers to throw. And if she can put this behind her, the thinking goes, surely we can too. Not everyone bought it--not even the people inside. Some top aides in the White House could not fathom the possibility that Hillary did not know much more than the story line of the weekend allowed. "That doesn't seem real to me," said one. "They have no secrets," argued another. "They know each other. They know each other backward and forward." She had to profess ignorance, in this view, because the alternative to being a trusting sucker was being a cold-blooded liar. A longtime Democratic official, who has never been in Clinton's camp, watched the mopping-up operation and marveled at the way the Clintons had used their own misery, if that's what it was, to grow new arms and legs. "Do I think she may have been hurt? That it was potentially a much more graphic thing than she ever expected? That it questioned the validity of their marriage? Sure. But they are working hard to cast it not as a presidential issue but as a personal one. His

numbers will stay high as long as they isolate it to a sexual family matter," he said. "That's what they are trying to do." But since the damage clearly went beyond just the President's immediate family, the circle of victims had to be widened; at least that way Clinton could be seen as paying a price. By Monday, White House reporters were being fed tales of the President's other painful conversations. The word for the weekend was "betrayal"; the scene was of the President taking his loyal aides aside one by one and apologizing to them for what he had put them through. This was essential, since his willful abuse of the people around him was becoming a matter of public record. There were career civil servants, secretaries, Secret Service officers who do not have rich consulting fees in their futures, just high legal bills, courtesy of their visits to the grand jury. Then there were Clinton's political aides, the ones who talked while he did not, who became household names thanks to Larry King and Charlie Rose, defending the President, insisting that he was not being cute with language when he denied the affair, insisting that this was taking so long because Starr was asking questions he shouldn't, not because Clinton was simply refusing to answer them. By telling the truth now, the President was about to make liars out of them. The story of betrayed aides' being treated to one-on-one apologies continued to circulate through the weekend and all day Monday. But within the White House there was a strange echo chamber. The more the TV reporters spoke of his private contrition to colleagues, the more bemused aides were rankled about being out of the apology loop--until they called around and found that there was no loop. It was hard to find anyone who had talked to Clinton for more than about 30 seconds, and that time was usually used, pre-emptively, to say, "Mr. President, we don't have to have this conversation now." It was really not until Tuesday, when the stories of these painful presidential conversations had made the front pages, that Clinton actually decided to have some of them. The Washington Post would later report that aides drafted talking points for colleagues on how to answer questions about their own reactions to Clinton's deceptions. "Do you forgive him for misleading you and the country?" read a sample question. The talking points suggested the following answer: "It's been said that 'He who cannot forgive others breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself.' Of course I do." In the meantime, there was another audience to prepare for, and that was the prosecutors. Starr had many more choices to make about how Monday would go than Clinton did. It would have been unwise for Clinton's lawyer David Kendall even to consider allowing his client to answer direct, graphic questions about his conduct with Lewinsky. The President had, after all, not only denied having an affair with her in his Paula Jones deposition; he couldn't remember ever having been alone with her, an assertion that does not allow much room for elaboration. So there was very little leeway for Clinton to change what he intended to say to Starr. That meant that what mattered was what Starr would ask. If the White House held out an olive branch to the prosecutors, it could hope that perhaps he would stand down a bit, not provoke a constitutional crisis, focus on the most relevant questions about obstruction of justice and subornation of perjury and not press the graphic sexual material too far. White House aides were

quietly drawing reporters' attention to a hot scoop: "You know, the story no one has written..." The White House, they said, was backing off on Starr, hadn't attacked him for weeks. And of course, if none of that worked, if Starr came in with guns blazing, as every bit of his conduct to date suggested he would, the White House had some cover for fighting back. That was enough to give the commentators plenty to chew on through the long wait on Monday. The day began with an NBC poll showing Clinton's job approval at an all-time high, 70%. The markets were happy too: the Dow jumped 150 points. The weather in Washington was baffled, raining and shining and raining again through air that defied you to breath it. On "Monica beach," the 50-yd. stretch of White House gravel where the TV reporters do their stand-ups, 35 bright umbrellas sprouted like mushrooms, and the pressroom was packed despite a complete absence of news. Outside the White House, a man was arrested after he cut his throat with a screwdriver in front of the mansion, shouting, "Why do you care about Lewinsky? Bad things are happening in Iraq!" For once in his life, Bill Clinton was early: he showed up for his testimony at 12:59 and didn't even wait for the first question before speaking. When he sat down in the White House Map Room, with the grand jurors watching on closed-circuit TV and Starr and his six prosecutors spread out before him, he had a statement all prepared so he could tell his story before they had a chance to ask. Yes, he had had an "inappropriate" relationship with Monica Lewinsky. He had indeed been alone with her, but he didn't really consider it alone, since stewards and assistants were always hovering just outside the office, within earshot, as he suggested during the Jones deposition. He presented a brief history of the relationship and gave dates and places of their liaisons. On most issues the President's account of the affair generally matched Lewinsky's. He admitted giving her the gifts--the hatpin, the book of poems and a T shirt--that he had difficulty remembering when Jones' lawyers asked about them back in January. And he explained how the two had promised to keep the affair secret, though he stressed that those discussions did not occur after she was subpoenaed in the Jones case. But when it came to talking about the actual sexual encounters, the two stories went their separate ways. Just as the previews promised, the President claimed that he did not commit perjury back in January because under the definition of sexual relations that the Jones lawyers put on the table that day, he did not consider his behavior with Lewinsky to count as sex. During that deposition seven months ago, a source familiar with his testimony told TIME, "he construed things narrowly. He was accurate but not helpful. That was his goal, and that's what he did. That's why he testified honestly." That line of defense, of course, made the whole question of what he did and didn't do with Lewinsky relevant, especially since by her sworn account, what happened between them qualified under any definition of sex. Lewinsky, sources close to her defense said, had told the grand jury that Clinton fondled her breasts and genitals--the kind of activity covered by the Jones definition of sexual relations. Unless the President gave detailed testimony, there was no way for prosecutors to reconcile the discrepancy.

But when the prosecutors tried then to ask the specific questions, Clinton revolted, invoked his right to privacy, and refused to answer. Discussing the sexual-relations definition used in the Jones case, Clinton was asked about various activities that might fit the definition--and the President said oral sex did not make the cut. Yet he did not acknowledge engaging in it with Lewinsky. Starr and his team huddled, came back and proceeded to ask Clinton specific questions the President had just ruled out of bounds. The prosecutors pushed harder, drawing on the details they had from Lewinsky's testimony. He refused to budge, trying to screen out what his legal team described as questions of a "graphic and offensive" nature. Clinton's team insists these were the only questions he refused to answer--a strategy apparently aimed at making it appear that any further pushing by Starr would be an effort to get into the salacious details that no American would want to volunteer and that the country doesn't want to hear anyway. With prosecutors pressing for answers and Clinton balking, the tone started out tense and got worse. Starr's team reminded Clinton of his obligation to answer, implicitly threatening that they could issue a new subpoena at any time. At one point, Clinton told the grand jury members that they and Starr had done their homework, but he was not going to change his story no matter how long they asked. Starr himself asked a few questions, but most of the grilling was left to his more seasoned deputies. Nearly the entire session focused on the Lewinsky affair, with questions also coming up about Kathleen Willey's allegation of being groped in the Oval Office. When the agreed time of four hours had elapsed, Starr asked to extend the session. The President declined. The meeting broke up at 6:25, and attorney Kendall appeared outside the diplomatic entrance to say there would indeed be a speech that night. He then invoked the "four years, $40 million" mantra against Starr. That was a sure sign that the olive branch hadn't worked. The last part of Clinton's triathlon was always supposed to be the easiest; at the very least, he is usually a good talker. Public opinion hadn't budged in seven months: we know you did it, we like you anyway, please just make it go away. He never had to offer much more than a simple explanation and a genuine apology, and in the final days leading up, people competed to lower the bar for him. Yet the greatest irony in a year of ironies would be that the speech in which he had to admit he had been lying went bad because, for once, he said what he honestly thought. No one even wanted to confirm that there would be a speech at all, just in case things went too late or horribly wrong, or Clinton just couldn't pull it off after wrestling with Starr. Begala had begun working on a draft at home on Saturday. He tapped away on Sunday on a White House computer, without knowing anything about what the President was going to say under oath. He knew that an important element of the speech would be to say something about Hillary, but he had to leave that section blank for Clinton to fill. Begala's version centered on the President's own contrition, with no attack on Starr. Various friends sent in suggestions. Linda Bloodworth-Thomason helped with the language. The next morning, Clinton turned over his draft to Begala to hone through the afternoon. After Clinton entered the Map Room to begin his testimony, longtime adviser Mickey Kantor convened a meeting in White House counsel Charles Ruff's office that included Clinton's top

political aides. At this point, the phrase "legally accurate" as a way of describing a lie that does not count as perjury had not yet entered the lexicon. Clinton's proposed draft was circulated, and his advisers were alarmed at the language and the fury he directed at Starr. Though Starr is unpopular, if the polling had made anything clear at all, it was that public forgiveness was conditioned on an apology. To try to skip that step seemed an unnecessary risk: it might cost Clinton a lot to say that he was a liar, but it would only help to say he was sorry for it. Kantor, chairing the meeting, was clear about where the boss stood. Everyone who was trying to keep the President from going after Starr was wasting his time. Another meeting convened in the solarium about two hours before the speech, and it was a contentious scene. Aides kept arguing against an attack on Starr, and Clinton kept arguing back. Starr is the only prosecutor who would have delved into his personal life, he said, adding that not everyone in America knows this, and this would be an opportunity to tell them. He said there was an an anti-Starr group out there that would welcome his criticism. The aides persisted. Hillary turned to her husband and said, "It's your speech. You say what you want to say." Then she left the room, and the arguments continued. It is too soon to know whether, as the millennium approaches, Monday night was the moment the Spin Decade ended. Clinton's sharpest sword has always been his ability to persuade. And even as the speech approached, it was hard to know whether to root for or against the man from Hope, to wish that he might seize what the office affords him in grace and redemption: to apologize and, with just the right mix of candor and contrition, to make himself new again. Or wish that he wouldn't. After so much criticism of his promiscuous use of language, Clinton made his basic points very directly. "It was wrong." "A personal failure." His observation that even Presidents have private lives was compelling and legitimate--most Americans agree that what goes on in a President's bedroom is no one's business but his. It skipped right past the problem that the conduct he admitted to occurred not in his bedroom but off the Oval Office, with a junior employee, an act disgraceful enough that any manager in any other job would lose it. But he was tripped up by his anger at Starr and the collapsing weight of his own double-talk. He essentially did not say he was sorry for what he had done; he was just sorry he got caught. The reason he lied was to protect himself, protect his family and--this was the biggest error of all--because the cops were after him. And then he appealed for us to make it all go away. The language also had that Clinton smell. Seven months of lies and the famous finger wag somehow amounted only to an admission that he "gave a false impression." As for defending answers as "legally accurate," most people think something is accurate or it is not. The idea of establishing some new zone of semitruth immediately brings to mind another phrase, the one that still haunts Al Gore: "no controlling legal authority." That too was one supplied by lawyers. This may have been a necessary way of avoiding admitting perjury, but the whole speech said the opposite: I was lying then, I'm telling the truth now, but I never perjured myself.

The speech played beautifully to an audience of one. But other than Hillary, the instant reviews started out surprised and went down from there. The polls were generally neutral, didn't move up or down; but the editorial pages were blistering, and, more important, the Democrats lifted scarcely a finger to rally round their man. Democratic leaders on the Hill grew more incensed after White House officials, acting on Kendall's guidance, called Monday evening to report that the President's testimony had gone just fine. In the postspeech recap, the commentators hit Clinton hard for going after Starr and turning what was supposed to be a sacred moment into a profane one. But a White House insider argued otherwise: "It was a great piece of bait, and the Republicans took it." Instead of focusing their fire on Clinton's lying or misconduct in the Oval Office, he noted, they are using their sound bites to defend the most unpopular man in America. That may not pull Starr up much, and if the Democrats have any luck, it may pull down the Republicans. And it certainly is a diversion. Starr's team lost no time in signaling that it was not about to back down because of a four-minute speech. On Tuesday morning the independent counsel was back in his office by 5:30 and issued another call for Lewinsky to testify. The plan is apparently designed to test the President's latest testimony for perjury, by contrasting her detailed story with the President's evasive account. Far from receding in any way, the confrontation between Starr and the President seemed to raise the stakes and send both men back to their corners more ornery than ever. Starr and his team still have the option of subpoenaing Clinton. The President defied them, refusing to answer their questions fully. "No prosecutor would accept that from an ordinary witness," says John Barrett, a former Iran-contra prosecutor now teaching at St. John's University School of Law in New York City. "You'd get a subpoena the next day and ask specific, pointed questions until you got answers, or you'd indict the guy." But the Chief Executive plays by different rules. Legally, Starr would almost certainly win a subpoena fight--Clinton already conceded the grand jury's legitimacy by testifying--though appeals could take months if the Supreme Court chose to hear the case. The harder prediction was political. Would the public blame Clinton for dragging out a subpoena fight now that he's admitted sex and lies, or Starr for continuing to hammer away on more Monica minutiae? Starr's first steps after Monday showed awareness that restraint gave him strength in a war of attrition. Instead of picking an immediate subpoena fight with Clinton, he was apparently weighing whether the smarter course might be just to finish up a few remaining witnesses and send the House his report "of any substantial and credible information...that may constitute grounds for an impeachment." Along with other important evidence, the transcript of Clinton's answers and evasions could be included for the Judiciary Committee to make its judgments, and could help Starr's case. But Clinton seemed to relish a gallop to Congress, where those big approval ratings and the thought of a promotion for Gore have the Republicans paralyzed. By Tuesday morning, the First Lady's office, which never breathes a word without permission, officially notified reporters that "this is a time that she relies on her strong religious faith. She's committed to her marriage and loves her husband and daughter very much and believes in the

President, and her love for him is compassionate and steadfast. She clearly is uncomfortable with her personal life being made so public but is looking forward to going on vacation with her family and having some family time together." With that, the Clintons were walking hand in hand in hand to their helicopter, heading off to Martha's Vineyard on a vacation that insiders said over and over was likely to be awful. On the plane, Clinton worked on the New York Times crossword puzzle. At one point he sat back and smiled, bemused at 46 down, a four-letter word for "meal for the humble?" "Well," he said, "here's one that's appropriate for today." (Answer: crow.) When the plane touched down, the crowds were waiting, eager and therapeutic, waving handmade signs that called WELCOME BACK and MV LOVES BILL. At the bottom of the steps to greet him with a bear hug when Air Force One touched down in Edgartown, Mass., was Vernon Jordan. As they came into the crowds, Chelsea was, perhaps for the first time since her public life began six years ago, on center stage. She smiled with grace. She worked the rope line. She knelt and talked to the children, a bright-eyed American echo of other countries' princesses. No matter what designs lay behind those pictures, what sympathy they were designed to generate, there were some undeniable realities. The night before, she had had to watch her father admit to something hideously painful. It may not have been a surprise to her, but that makes it no less of a tragedy. Her ability to come back and fight for him, to walk with him and smile for him and throw herself before the cameras aimed at him, was an act of generosity and love that speaks better for Bill and Hillary Clinton than anything they could say or do in whatever public life remains to them. The whole family lingered, but the President had to pull Chelsea away when it was time to go. All that role playing had taught her well. — Reported by Margaret Carlson, J.F.O. McAllister, Karen Tumulty, Michael Weisskopf/Washington, Julie Grace/Chicago and Jay Branegan/Martha's Vineyard 1998: Bill Clinton and Kenneth Starr BY NANCY GIBBS We treat our values, like our children, not equally but uniquely, and we don't like having to choose which one we would sacrifice to save another. Which matters more, honesty or privacy? Justice or mercy? The President or the presidency? What punishment is reserved for leaders who would force such choices in the first place? Pick a year2000:George W. Bush1999:Jeff Bezos1998:Clinton/Starr1997:Andy Grove1996:David Ho1995:Newt Gingrich1994:John Paul II1993:Peacemakers1992:Bill Clinton1991:Ted Turner1990:George Bush1989:Gorbachev1988:Earth1987:Gorbachev1986:Corazon Aquino1985:Deng Xiaoping1984:Peter Ueberroth1983:Ronald Reagan/Yuri Andropov1982:The Computer1981:Lech Walesa1980:Ronald Reagan1979:Khomeini1978:Hsiao P'ing1977:Anwar

Sadat1976:Jimmy Carter1975:U.S. Women1974:King Faisal1973:Judge Sirica1972:Nixon/Kissinger1971:Richard Nixon1970:Willy Brandt1969:Middle Class1968:U.S. Astronauts1967:Lyndon Johnson1966:Young People1965:Westmoreland1964:Lyndon Johnson1963:ML King Jr.1962:John XXIII1961:J. F. Kennedy1960:U.S. Scientists1959:Eisenhower1958:De Gaulle1957:Nikita Krushchev1956:Freedom Fighter1955:Harlow Curtice1954:John Dulles1953:Adenauer1952:Elizabeth II1951:Mossadegh1950:Fighting-Man1949:Churchill1948:Harry Truman1947:George Marshall1946:James F. Byrnes1945:Harry Truman1944:Eisenhower1943:George Marshall1942:Joseph Stalin1941:F. D. Roosevelt1940:Churchill1939:Joseph Stalin1938:Adolf Hitler1937:C. Kai-Shek1936:Mrs. W. Simpson1935:Haile Selassie1934:F. D. Roosevelt1933:Hugh S. Johnson1932:F. D. Roosevelt1931:Pierre Laval1930:Gandhi1929:Owen D. Young1928:Chrysler1927:Lindbergh Bill Clinton did something ordinary: he had an affair and lied about it. Ken Starr did something extraordinary: he took the President's low-life behavior and called it a high crime. Clinton argued that privacy is so sacred that it included a right to lie so long as he did it very, very carefully. Starr argued that justice is so blind that once he saw a crime being committed, he had no choice but to pursue the bad guy through the Oval Office, down the hall to the private study, whatever the damage, no matter the cost. One man's loss of control inspired the other's, and we are no better for anything either of them did. For rewriting the book on crime and punishment, for putting prices on values we didn't want to rank, for fighting past all reason a battle whose casualties will be counted for years to come, Bill Clinton and Kenneth Starr are TIME's 1998 Men of the Year. Who has survived this odyssey without losing some part of himself? A public majority that listed declining morality as a top concern found itself defending a President who most of them believed had committed a crime. Republican lawmakers voted along party lines, over public protest, to impeach a popular President from the opposing party and in the process dissolved their authority in acid on the House floor. The press corps that viewed itself as the public's conscience became the object of its scorn. Hillary Clinton, who for years had been vilified for leveraging the power of her marriage, was extolled for having handled with grace its public ruin and so finds herself loved for reasons she hates. Ken Starr, who was once viewed as too moderate to beat Oliver North in a Senate race, was recast as a zealot who twisted the law into a vendetta; he finds himself hated for reasons he can't understand. Even the Justices of the Supreme Court were rendered unanimously ridiculous by this whole scandal, having blithely ruled that a sitting President could be made to stand trial in a civil suit without its impeding the conduct of his office. Now the favor has been returned, and soon the Chief Justice will have to clear his schedule in order to preside over the impeachment trial that the civil suit was never supposed to lead to. Alone among the players, the one who remained unchanged and unchanging was Bill Clinton. Many people had long ago concluded that he was a rogue and a cheat and impervious to pain;

this year he was himself, only more so. Even people who revile his reflexes acknowledge his charm. Ken Starr marvels at how attractive the President is, like a hunter who wants to pet the lion before he shoots it. The very first thing a new President does is put his hand on a Bible and promise to do what no other citizen can: defend the Constitution and the country--to the point of sending soldiers to die for them. He had better be better than the rest of us. Bill Clinton took the oath, but exaltation is not his style. He has polled us and tested us and talked to us until he's hoarse and spent, and we know so much about him, right down to his choice of underwear, that he made it hard for us to hold him to a higher standard. So instead his allies defended what was worst in him by appealing to what is best in us. How could we not be generous and forgive him? Has he done anything that many of us have not done ourselves? Are these not private matters? Any gentleman would, of course, lie about his mistress. Judge not... He's one of us. Ken Starr, while aware of Clinton's charm, held a different view of his conduct. Though he would never quite say so, he came to see the President as the elusive head of a vast criminal enterprise, who over the past four years of investigation would admit nothing, hold back evidence, block inquiry--all the while professing to cooperate in public while destroying his adversary's reputation in private. To the righteous defenders of law and order, Clinton's not one of us. He's one of them. That conviction may explain but not excuse the choices Starr made. By pressing his case, he forced us to define morality down. We don't approve of adultery. We abhor perjury. But we also don't like political plots and traps that treat the law as an extension of politics by other means, that leave us wondering whether we damage the Constitution more by making the President pay or by letting him go. We rely on prosecutors to exercise discretion. A novice at the job, Starr saw no virtue in restraint, without realizing how his zeal in pursuit of the President would alarm the jury that was called to judge them both. If nothing else, his legacy is plain: he will probably destroy the institution that created him. The independent-counsel statute, born of an impeachment drama 24 years ago, is likely to die in the throes of this one. We may well, as a result of his efforts, conclude that the government can't be trusted to investigate those in the government who can't be trusted. Starr handed his sword to the lawmakers in Congress, where the Republicans' superior numbers protected them from having to offer superior arguments. Like Starr, they think that it is long past time for Clinton to be held accountable for his actions; like the voters, they have strong personal feelings about the President. Unfortunately for Clinton, the feelings on Capitol Hill can be poisonous. In a country where everyone assumes that all politicians lie, politicians themselves regard a certain kind of lying as a special kind of sin. A President who breaks his word makes it impossible to do business when the doors are closed and the hands are played and the hard trading begins. Time and again, Bill Clinton made solemn, cross-his-heart promises, about taxes he would support and concessions he would make and difficult positions he would defend, and

once they let him have his way he stepped out and all but said, "Suckers!" and pushed them off the ledge. So most of them had no appetite for mercy in this season. They feared that if their punishment stopped at censure, he would claim vindication, light a cigar and lose not a moment's sleep. When in the final days the last undecided Republicans said, privately and publicly, just admit that you lied and we'll let you go free, Clinton would not run the risk of believing them. The terrain is laid with traps; assassination is a sport; trust turned to chalk long ago. When the bombs began to fall, the questions immediately arose: Was Clinton doing this to stop Saddam, or was he doing it to save himself? The very charge became evidence against him. A man who cannot be trusted to do the right thing is not trusted even when he does. This, then, is the legacy of a year that cannot end too soon. A faithless President and a fervent prosecutor, in a mortal embrace, lacking discretion, playing for keeps, both self-righteous, both condemned, Men of the Year. The Last Campaign Forget about compartments. Everything Clinton did during his amazing week served one purpose: to save his skin By NANCY GIBBS Feb. 1, 1999 Like a weasel, Bill Clinton emerges from the drainpipe shinier than when he went in. He has spent a year in the dark, ever since that night last January when he called his slippery guru Dick Morris and asked him to take the country's moral temperature. When Morris' polling suggested that people could stomach an affair but not a cover-up, Clinton's response was his mantra. "Well, we'll just have to win then." Now, on the anniversary of that vow, the President seems to have made good on it. After a year spent denouncing Clinton's character--the lies he told, the friends he betrayed, the garbage he collected in the campaign to save his skin--even his enemies last week were left wondering at the political skill that goes with it. The most hardened pros could scarcely imagine the assignment Clinton took on. He stood Tuesday night before an audience that included the Senators who are in the process of deciding whether all the ways he dishonored his office warrant stripping him of it--and then he flaunted its power and magic, bet the farm, promised the moon, massaged his approval ratings, and went out the very next day, even as his own lawyers were in the Senate defending him as a louse who still deserved a break, and thanked the roaring crowds of Buffalo, N.Y., for "one of the great days of my presidency." Bill Clinton is now waging the last campaign--a multifront war to keep his job by appearing to do his job, a war in which he has enlisted lawyers, pollsters, policy advisers, Democratic lawmakers and celebrities. It doesn't matter that he will be long retired before the promises he lofted hit the ground; his poll numbers are his legacy. Even inside the White House, some heard

an elegy Tuesday night. "It's like the speech you give when you know you're not getting anything passed, when you have no agenda," says an adviser. "So why not keep talking about the things you care about?" The head-splitting spectacle--trial by day, triumph by night--inspired another round of commentary about the compartmentalized President. And so it was easy to miss the secret of his success. Maybe Bill Clinton is, in the end, the only person in this whole divisive drama who has remained intact, with a kind of wicked integrity all his own. One reason he can conduct Middle East peace talks in the morning and legal-strategy sessions at night, spray proposals on everything from digital mug shots to national parks, is that all the wild gestures and every last ploy work to the same goal--his survival, his popularity, his eternally orbiting polls. Clinton's performance enthralled Senate Democrats to the point that Republican lawmakers conceded there was no longer a chance of finding the 67 votes needed to convict and threw open the question of whether this might all end sooner rather than later. "Clinton's won," said Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson on his 700 Club show, to the fury of many conservative allies. "They might as well dismiss the impeachment hearing and get on with something else, because it's over as far as I'm concerned." All that's left to argue is whether history will remember Clinton's gifts as reason to excuse the pain he's caused or as a reminder of how much promise he wasted. The White House spin all year, repeated five times daily like a call to prayer, is that the President is going about the people's business, not obsessing about his legal defense. But he doesn't need to pull every lever and push every button in order to control the campaign machine. After two elections and a full year of fire by trial, says a top aide, "we know what he wants, when he wants it, and how he wants it." The sharpest change in the President's defense last week was that after months of arguing the merits, the White House lawyers finally argued the facts--and that decision was pure Clinton. In the House proceedings, his team buried the evidence deep in their legal briefs, arguing in their rare public comments that the offenses, even if true, did not warrant impeachment. But once the prospect of a trial became real--and the President's lawyers got the time to make a variety of arguments--the direction of the defense came from Clinton himself. Lawyers Charles Ruff and David Kendall kept in touch with the President by telephone; meetings were avoided. Even upon their return from the Hill last week, Clinton simply called to thank them for their work. He was confident that his team knew how to make the most of the overall strategy. Plus, says a White House adviser of the case against the President, "he really doesn't believe he did it." While Clinton stays focused on business during the day, he grows more expansive as the hours pass. Mornings are consumed by press events and policy briefings, the annual winter wonkathon that produces both the State of the Union speech and the budget; he can use the afternoon to think and read. White House aides are very careful to insist that he does not watch the trial as it's happening, but as one aide put it, "it's not that he's oblivious either." And at the end of the working day, the walls come down completely. Clinton carries upstairs to the residence the fat folder of policy questions and decision memos that accumulate in his In box every day, but the rest of his life is up there waiting for him. He channel surfs among news, sports and nonstop talk

shows, thinks through the twisted case again and again, calls friends and supporters to gauge reaction to the day's events and, most important, checks in with his friends in the Senate. His call list varies night to night, but among the regulars are Tom Harkin of Iowa, Chris Dodd of Connecticut, John Breaux of Louisiana and Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the minority leader. Every morning the cycle starts again, with his focus back tightly on his job, the fat folder in chief of staff John Podesta's hands, with Clinton's scribbling on every page. The endless campaign has taken its toll, especially when it looked as if he was losing. A longtime ally recalls, only a week or so ago, a midafternoon phone call from the President. "There was a very down, discouraged sense and sound to his voice," the source says. Again and again, Clinton thought he might be home free, particularly in the joyous wake of the fall elections. But he underestimated Republican fortitude--How could they keep ignoring the polls he lives by?--and was stunned that he still hadn't managed to shut it all down. At recent public appearances, his eyes have teared up at inopportune moments--a lapse that's startlingly different from the calculated mawkishness he's known for. He has stood onstage staring into space while awaiting an introduction and has rushed from his public events at first opportunity. But the long year's work finally paid off, especially on Capitol Hill. Democrats knew the attack on Clinton threatened them too, and that survival depended on getting past both their disdain for him and their history of mutual backstabbing. The armistice talks began after the 1996 election as an effort to heal the wounds of the divisive campaign, but it was the scandal that forced Clinton into his fellow Democrats' arms. Without them he could not survive. So Clinton has worked the leadership hard, prescreening his proposals with Richard Gephardt and Daschle, burying porcupines like "fast-track" trade authority to maintain the peace. "A lot of this has been about keeping Gephardt happy," says a leadership source, "because they hope Gephardt will keep labor and other liberal groups happy." Every Friday senior members of the leadership staffs meet in Gephardt's conference room with White House advisers to talk about policy and message. Impeachment lurks but never sits down. "You talk about it before and you talk about it later, but the point of the meeting is to come up with an alternative message, something to put out there other than impeachment," says a participant. Says a Democratic strategist: "Defending himself against impeachment is just another part of the President's public relations operation. It's all clearly integrated." The problem is that while the scandal may have helped Clinton generate policy ideas, it has drained his ability to get them passed. Former chief of staff Erskine Bowles has privately said that last year the White House was ready to make a swap with Republicans: Clinton would support their plan for vouchers in the D.C. school system if they would go for managed-care reform. But at the last minute he realized he couldn't, because doing so would enrage the Democrats, whose votes he needed for impeachment. And one suspects that Clinton will judge last week's State of the Union speech not by how much actually becomes law but simply by whether it gets him two more years in office.

The speech didn't linger much longer than it took to give it. But its vapors still wafted through the week as the Clintons and the Gores hit the road again to sweet, screaming, Election Day-size crowds. By the day after the speech, the Senate floor might as well have been on the ocean floor. The minister delivering the invocation at the rally in Buffalo on Wednesday extolled Clinton as "the greatest President for our people of all time." Hours later in Pennsylvania, Clinton was so jazzed by the rope line that he went back to the beginning and worked it again--four times. "We've had a good day," he told an aide late that night. "We've had several good days." The broader Democratic Party machinery lost no time climbing aboard. People for the American Way sponsored anti-impeachment rallies in 23 cities and announced a $25,000 radio campaign in five states and in Washington to try to persuade moderate Republican Senators to join with the Democrats to shut the trial down. The Democratic National Committee organized 200 "State of the Union Watch" parties at people's homes to rally activist support. The scandal has been very good to the party: small-dollar direct-mail response in 1998 was up 53% over 1994, the last midterm year, and opinion polls have seldom shown a greater differential between the two parties in favor of the Democrats. Those numbers were not lost on the Senators stapled to their seats as Clinton's lawyers launched their defense. The lawyers' presentation was more factual, more respectful and more effective than anything they managed in the House. The idea was to alternate sober, numbing presentations of exculpatory evidence with passionate appeals to common sense and American ideals. Ruff opened the defense with a grave dissection of the House managers' conspiracy theory. He argued that the chronology broke down--Vernon Jordan was already on a plane to Europe when Judge Susan Webber Wright ruled that the Paula Jones team could question other women--so the ruling could not have triggered his meeting earlier that day to help Monica find a job. And Ruff offered the first of the week's rhetorical body blows. The former Watergate prosecutor, hunched in his wheelchair, took his case to the same battleground on which Henry Hyde had planted his flag the week before. The House Judiciary chairman had summoned the ghosts of Normandy as witnesses to the sanctity of the "rule of law." Ruff's voice trembled as he turned that appeal back on its author. "I have no personal experience with war," he said quietly. "I have only visited Normandy as a tourist. But I do know this: my father was on Omaha Beach 55 years ago, and I know how he would feel if he were here today. He didn't fight, no one fought for one side of this case or the other. He fought, as all those did, for our country and our Constitution. As long as each of us--a manager, the President's counsel, a Senator--does his or her constitutional duty, those who fought for their country will be proud." It fell to Gregory Craig on Wednesday to highlight the prosecution's overreaching. A perjury conviction, he argued, couldn't come down to whether Clinton lied when he said he and Monica had telephone conversations that included sexual banter "on occasion" when it was at least 17 times. He argued that the managers were coloring outside the lines when they tried to roll everything Clinton said in his January deposition into the perjury charge--even though the House specifically rejected the impeachment article charging Clinton with perjury in that deposition.

If Ruff was compelling and Craig meticulous, Cheryl Mills was a left hook. In Buffalo on Wednesday, Clinton asked top aide Doug Sosnik whether Mills had begun her presentation on the Senate floor. "Any minute," Sosnik replied. The President smiled as if he had a secret. "She's going to do great, and I think she's going to take a lot of people by surprise." Her very presence there brought some electricity into the gaslit setting. All lemony charm and discipline, at times condescending, at times lethal in her sarcasm and breathtaking in her daring, she argued that the Senators need not fear that acquitting Clinton will harm women or civil rights; she would vouch for him. After Mills was through, Strom Thurmond, the old segregationist, came over to congratulate her. Mills' White House office quickly filled up with so many flowers from well wishers that aides joked it looked like a wedding chapel. Like all good defense lawyers, Clinton's team sought to sow enough confusion into the House managers' case to grow a little reasonable doubt in the Senators' heads. But they could not completely smooth over some troubling parts of the case. It was hard to cast Clinton's conversations with Betty Currie as innocent refreshment of his memory rather than insidious coaching of a potential witness. As Senator Arlen Specter and others asked on Friday, how exactly would it help his memory to ask Currie questions that were all false--"I never touched her, right? We were never alone, right?" And the conflict over what body parts he touched was not a trivial distinction: in that difference lay whether Clinton lied in his Paula Jones deposition, since under that tortured definition of sex, it did indeed matter which parts he had touched, and the President was very careful to keep his eye on the line. If the legal defense was strong enough to corral any restless Democrats, it was not enough to guarantee the six Republican votes the White House needs to adjourn the whole thing. That job fell to Dale Bumpers, the four-term, just-retired Arkansas Senator who would come to the chamber to play the coda. The idea for his appearance, in fact, sprang from the Senate floor. Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin was troubled by how the Republican managers were like next-door neighbors who knew how to talk across the fence--even to Democrats. At the defense table, however, sat a bunch of strangers. So Harkin spent last Sunday reaching out to old members of the club to recruit someone for the President's team. Bumpers seemed to be the perfect fit: he knows the Senators' moves and speaks their language, could give them the cover they needed to end the trial. Trouble was, Bumpers was not familiar with the minutiae of the charges. "He was very reluctant," says Harkin. Harkin knew only the Captain could make the call. The problem was flagging Clinton on a holiday weekend. Harkin tracked down Terry McAuliffe, the President's moneyman and confidant, at his health club to run interference. Ten minutes later, McAuliffe got back to Harkin: "The President said it was a great idea, and he'll get right on it." Clinton put in the call from an AmeriCorps event on Monday. "Dale, I need you on this," pleaded the President. Bumpers was the guy who could make all his arguments for him, channel him, excoriate him for his private shame, and then defend him for

the public good. He could both embody and invoke the World War II generation in all its commonplace heroism and then gaze on its prodigal son, the generation it created that has messed things up and has to be forgiven anyway. His oration was the only part of the trial that the White House admitted Clinton watched in real time. It took an old guy to force the audience to face the future, to remember the Speaker of the House who had voted to impeach Andrew Johnson--James G. Blaine--and later regretted how close he had brought the nation to chaos. The more Bumpers talked, from his self-mocking warm-up jokes to his seductive reminders that being a Senator is the greatest honor in the whole world, the more you could hear Clinton speaking through him, finally making the arguments he had not been able to make for himself. This wasn't perjury and obstruction, Bumpers said; this was about concealing something Clinton was ashamed of. Nobody's perfect. Bumpers attacked the lack of proportion between crime and punishment, mocked the very notion that the President's conduct had cost him prestige around the world, rooted around the Constitution to remind them that impeachable crimes are supposed to be distinctly "political offenses against the state." The overreaching was, he scolded the House managers, the product of "wanting to win too badly." Clinton was worried that the Senators would dismiss anything Bumpers said as the gesture of an old Arkansas crony. Bumpers took care of that by impaling him: Clinton's conduct was "indefensible, outrageous, unforgivable, shameless." He went where none of the lawyers could: into Hillary's heart, and Chelsea's, when he described a "decimated" family. And he went straight to the Senators' pride, as the body that extols reason over passion. This is the most important vote you'll ever cast, he said. "If you have difficulty because of an intense dislike of the President, and that's understandable, rise above it. He is not the issue. He will be gone. You won't." Unless, of course, they fail to heed his advice. Earlier in the day, lawyer David Kendall had warned that extending the trial and calling witnesses would promise many more months of discovery and depositions. Bumpers held out both carrot and stick. If the Senators vote to acquit, he said, "you go immediately to the people's agenda. If you vote to convict ... you're going to be creating far more havoc than he could ever possibly create. After all, he's only got two years left." The combined defense arguments were compelling enough to trigger some quick shifting of strategy on both sides of the aisle. The clever Democratic ploy of enlisting West Virginia's Robert Byrd to offer a motion to dismiss "was a bombshell," as a Republican Senator put it. Any list of possible Democratic defectors always had Byrd's name at the top. "If Byrd is now offering a vote to dismiss, conviction really is dead." Which leaves at least some of the 55 G.O.P. Senators wondering what they gain by pressing on much longer. But having lost the popular center long ago, they can at least keep their conservative base happy by insisting on a full trial. And so at week's end they linked arms with both the House managers and Ken Starr in the effort to debrief Monica Lewinsky even before the question of calling witnesses was resolved. Bipartisanship was shredding as the two sides bickered over all the procedural issues they had sidestepped when the trial began.

By then the Democrats were worrying about such luxuries as appearing graceful in the victory they now expect. The White House was careful not to start the victory dance; advisers were put on "gloat patrol" to avoid annoying wavering Republicans. Clinton, having again asserted his mastery of his craft, cannot be seen celebrating dismissal or acquittal in a trial that has left so much blood on the floor. "It is not our purpose to embarrass the Republican leadership," said New Jersey's Robert Torricelli. The only way out is a careful one. "This is a dance that everyone must do together," Torricelli observed, "and no one wants to step on anybody's toes." — Reported by Jay Branegan, James Carney, John F. Dickerson, Michael Duffy, Viveca Novak, Karen Tumulty and Michael Weisskopf/Washington How Can We Miss You If You Never Go Away? Smelly pardons, expensive gifts, deluxe offices--is this any way for a former President to behave? By KAREN TUMULTY Feb. 26, 2001 When a president leaves office we expect him to disappear for a while, cede the stage to the new guy, give us some time to forget why we weren't so sorry to see him go. Jimmy Carter returned to Plains, Ga., to nurse his wounds and work on his house; George Herbert Walker Bush disappeared to Houston, content to load his dishwasher and walk his dogs. But from the hour Bill Clinton's successor was sworn in, the youngest former President in modern history made it clear that he didn't intend to fade from view for even a minute. "I'm still here," he declared as the jet engines revved at Andrews Air Force Base. "We're not going anywhere." The almost spoken promise: Clinton would dominate the power salons of New York City, bask in ovations on the lecture circuit, run the Democratic Party and lead the opposition in the national debate over George W. Bush's agenda. It would be a bold, triumphant new life. Instead, Clinton's ex-presidency is shaping up to be a shriveled version of his presidency. As he copes with a new crop of scandals--the $190,000 worth of going-away gifts, the $800,000-a-year midtown-Manhattan office suite he wanted to rent, the 177 last-minute clemencies he granted and, above all, the one he handed to fugitive billionaire Marc Rich--Clinton's new life feels like the old one, minus the power and the pulpit and the retinue of aides. His war room is a half-furnished Dutch Colonial in the New York suburbs; his lieutenant, a former White House valet named Oscar who keeps Clinton supplied with diet Coke while the ex-President dials through the numbers he has entered on his new, imperfectly mastered PalmPilot, calling to justify himself to his friends. Clinton's red-faced rages over the Rich scandal have familiar themes: "setups," overzealous prosecutors, unfair legal cases that never should have gone to indictment. What is hard to figure out is whether he is playing out his reasons for pardoning a fugitive or working through his personal grudge against the legal system. Did he pardon Rich or himself by proxy? Either way, sighs a comrade who answered the phone recently to find the 42nd President of the U.S. on the other end of the line, "you get tired of listening to it."

A meteorologist might call Clinton's first month out of office a perfect storm: a freak convergence of fast-moving, late-season weather patterns, a lethal collision of the profound and the trivial. The thunderhead of accusations confirms every fair and unfair thing his enemies have ever said about him--and puts him once again in the sights of a federal prosecutor, this time U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White of New York. Not only are there calls to haul him before Congress, but also they are coming from fellow Democrats who defended him through every past scandal. This time, for the first time, he is out on the cliff, alone. As Clinton's former Commerce Secretary denounces him and Morgan Stanley apologizes to its clients for paying him to speak, Clinton isn't the only one being damaged. His wife's Senate debut has been spoiled by the calls that are flooding her makeshift work space in the basement of the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Hillary last week went to three Brooklyn churches to talk about racial profiling--and ended up answering questions about whether she had properly reported the glittery handbags she'd received (she had). Where Democrats once expected Clinton to make the case against Bush's tax cuts, the former President's travails are instead drowning out their arguments. He's even dragging down Democratic fund raising, the one area in which he always came through. In Florida, where Democrats say they will need at least $12 million to defeat Governor Jeb Bush in 2002, a moneyman told TIME that normally dependable givers are citing Clinton's latest scandal, with its allegation that he traded pardons for campaign cash, when they refuse to put pen to check. And so it wasn't entirely believable last week when President Bush declared it was time to "move on." The furor, says Kentucky Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, is "a godsend for President Bush." Clinton is "making the honesty-and-integrity case for us," says a Bush aide. "We don't have to do anything." Clinton grouses in private that the Bush forces are quietly working to keep the controversies alive, but even he concedes that it's smart politics to do so. In truth, the scandal doesn't need much of a push from Bush. What keeps the story going is the accumulated weight of embarrassments, the fact that they fit so many preconceptions about the Clintons and the diversion they offer the cable-news networks. It might not have bothered people so much had the hubbub stopped when a few broken glasses on Air Force One were exaggerated into an airborne bacchanal. Or when Hillary accepted an over-the-top book advance. Or when, in the well-established presidential tradition of hauling home favors from the party, the Clintons lifted a few that hadn't been intended for them. The problem is the picture that forms when the dots get connected, with or without the evidence. The fracas over Clinton's $800,000 lease, which he at first offered to help pay, opened the question of where the money would come from, which led to his presidential-library foundation, which came back around to Rich's ex-wife Denise, who donated $450,000 to that library on top of the millions she had already given and raised for the Clintons and the Democrats. Not to mention that Rich's lawyer is Clinton's former White House counsel Jack Quinn. What matters most is that in pardoning a fugitive tax cheater who flouted the U.S. judicial system for two decades and who got richer by trading with Iran, Clinton used an absolute power of the office in a way no President had before. U.S. history has seen its share of controversial

presidential pardons: Andrew Johnson's of Jefferson Davis fueled his impeachment; Gerald Ford's of Richard Nixon helped cost him his re-election. But while Johnson and Ford paid a price in their time, history has also found larger purposes in those decisions. Even the elder Bush's Christmas 1992 pardon of Caspar Weinberger after the Iran-contra scandal--which had a self-serving element, since a trial might have focused new attention on Bush's role--found a larger rationale. Those earlier pardons "were attempts to put an escapade behind the country, to heal the wound, to bring the country together," says Chicago-Kent College of Law professor Harold Krent. "This is a controversy without a reason. That's what really differentiates it." A pardon without a rationale has demanded too much of those who rallied so dependably for Clinton from Whitewater through Monica. And it has revived the question that has confounded the Clintons' friends all along: How could a couple so attuned to the most subtle political rhythms be so tone-deaf when the issue is their behavior? A great many former allies are sick of trying to figure that out. "He's on his own," says a prominent House Democrat. "The only Clinton left now is Hillary, and she's the Senate's problem." The Clinton Administration diaspora has been nearly silent as well. "Total disgust," says a former Cabinet secretary, who has canvassed half a dozen others. "They want no part of it. They have had it--with both of them." Congressman Barney Frank, a Clinton stalwart throughout the impeachment scandal, told the Boston Herald the Rich pardon was "just abusive. There are people who forgot where the line was between public service and what was personally convenient for them." While Clinton maintains he has no regrets for what he did, others have been compelled to say they are sorry for their contribution to the collateral damage: Roger Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles, for lobbying for Clinton's pardon of a Democratic donor's drug-dealer son; Morgan Stanley chairman Philip J. Purcell, for paying six figures to hear the inaugural address of Clinton's ex-presidency. (Clinton has told friends that Purcell didn't seem to object to the standing ovation Clinton got, or the fact that he shook hands with Morgan Stanley clients for two hours afterward.) UBS Warburg may not be the last to rescind its speaking invitation. Even Yale University, which has invited Clinton and current and former Presidents Bush to help commemorate its 300th anniversary this spring, is a little skittish. "We hope it blows over by then," says an organizer. "He is an alum, so there's not much we can do." The only industry seeming to prosper under it all has been the publishing business. The Senate Ethics Committee last week approved Hillary's $8 million book deal; Bill is meeting with publishers to discuss his; and HarperCollins announced a new paperback edition of the 15-year-old, out-of-print Metal Men: How Marc Rich Defrauded the Country, Evaded the Law and Became the World's Most Sought-After Corporate Criminal. The pardon spree is also the first Clinton scandal to offer local angles to city editors across the country. Clinton pleads bewilderment over it all. If he were trading pardons for money, he asks his friends, wouldn't he have helped out his DreamWorks buddies, who were pleading on behalf of jailed Native American activist Leonard Peltier? "David Geffen will barely talk to me!" he says. His clumsy reactions reveal how heavily he relied upon his palace guards. All that's left of the Clinton spin machine is a succession of temporary press secretaries and an ad hoc group of

advisers. He is no longer able to change the subject with a merry economic report or poll-tested Executive Order or Middle East peace conference. His political scaffolding isn't holding together any better. When Clinton vacated the Oval Office, he basically left as his forwarding address the Democratic National Committee. In his final weeks as President, he helped arrange for his good friend and chief fund raiser Terry McAuliffe to take over as party chairman; perhaps he wanted the vehicle to be well oiled and shiny should someone else in the family decide to take it out for a spin. But Democrats now fear McAuliffe could be sucked into the post-presidency scandal, given the role he has played in raising money for both Clintons and the $150 million presidential library, where the gifts are unrestricted and not subject to disclosure--at least until they were hit with a congressional subpoena. So party strategists are hedging their bets and looking for new spokesmen--Democrats in Congress, think tanks, labor unions, even Al Gore. Clinton appeared to have lost his touch along with his job, but the one verity of his life is that he should never be counted out. His political instincts always seem to rescue him from his worst impulses, and for a moment last Tuesday, it looked as if the magic was back. The real problem with Clinton's New York City midtown office had been not its rent but the presumptions of privilege it implied. The champion of the little guy would be hanging with moguls like Barry Diller, trotting down to the Four Seasons for lunch. So Clinton announced he was heading up to West 125th Street in Harlem--a ploy so transparent it actually worked, bringing happy headlines to the tabloids and a cheering crowd onto Malcolm X Boulevard. It hardly mattered that Mayor Rudy Giuliani already had dibs on the office space (a temporary complication that a presidential advance team would have avoided) or that the inspiration to make the move came to Clinton while he was playing golf at a Florida country club that has been accused of discriminating against blacks and Jews. There were signs too that Clinton's damage-control muscles were finally flexing. Thursday night, Geraldo Rivera reported an exclusive interview with a "frustrated, angry, but still defiant Bill Clinton." And by Friday, an op-ed piece was being drafted for the New York Times under Clinton's byline. In it, he would not come up with the apology some party elders had been begging for. However, he would accept full responsibility for the Rich pardon and frustratedly, angrily, defiantly assert it was one with which he was comfortable. As he struggled to regain his footing, Clinton was even able to conscript a few ragged surrogates to put a noble if belated spin on the Rich pardon. Clinton did it, they said, to please Ehud Barak, as a gift to a man who risked so much for peace that he got kicked out of office. One problem with that explanation is that Israeli officials downplay Barak's role, saying it consisted of a brief mention during one phone call; sources close to Clinton contend there were at least three. Either way, the Rich effort paled beside Barak's unsuccessful effort on behalf of jailed Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. But in persuading Clinton, Rich attorney Quinn understood from his White House counsel days how impossible it would be to pardon Pollard and leaned heavily upon the idea of Rich as a consolation prize. The Rich pardon was sold as a sop to Israel that could slide under the radar in this country.

Harder to explain away was Senate testimony by Justice Department official Roger Adams suggesting that the White House had scrambled in the predawn hours of Inauguration Day to create a paper trail that made it appear that the Rich pardon had gone through normal channels. Adams suggested the White House even tried to slide it by Justice, portraying Rich as a jet setter "living abroad" and leaving out the detail that he was also a fugitive. If there is any comfort for Democrats, it is in their experience that when it comes to Bill Clinton, Republicans have never failed to overbid a good hand. The first evidence that this could be a replay of scandals past came when Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter raised the possibility of a postseason impeachment trial. And Indiana Congressman Dan Burton's committee, already on its second round of subpoenas, is the same crowd that got nowhere on Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate and a raft of other Clinton scandals over the years. More ominous for Clinton is the inquiry that U.S. Attorney White announced last week in New York. Absent an immunized witness or a wiretap, legal experts don't expect a bribery indictment. But if it could be proved that Rich, who claims foreign citizenship, gave his ex-wife the money she donated to Clinton, that could violate campaign-finance laws. At a minimum, a federal investigation could bedevil Clinton for months or even years to come. In the meantime, everyday life is not without its diversions for the ex-President. He boasts that he has memorized his new ATM password and offered his card to Oscar to pay for supplies. He brandished his new American Express gold card at a now infamous dinner last month in New York City's Greenwich Village, where nearby patrons said they heard him chortling with former Senator Bob Kerrey over lesbian jokes. (Kerrey insisted on paying, another perk ex-Presidents get used to.) Nor has anything he has done put Clinton in danger of ostracism in New York. He was never going to fit in with the city's blue bloods. A snooty Manhattan philanthropist suggested at a dinner party last week that it is the Clintons themselves who should be pardoned: "They are, after all, so unsophisticated. They are from Arkansas. They don't know about people who go to Switzerland." But the money-media-fashion-fame crowd that makes up Manhattan's most interesting social set--a highly mobile, mutually exploitative crowd for which it's better to be interesting than good--will welcome him regardless. Whatever else he may be, he's not boring. "Washington is pretty provincial," says Paul Wilmot, a fashion publicist whose firm handles Sean (Puffy) Combs' clothing line. "In New York, the most delicious thing on earth would be to sit next to President Clinton and ask him anything you want. There are going to be elbows and butts pushing their way over to him." It's hard to figure out why Clinton couldn't simply embrace his new life from the outset. If being President is the most difficult job in the universe, being an ex-President must surely be the most sublime. The speaking fees and board appointments pay enough to finance homes in any vacation spot one might fancy. Everything one says is wise, and everything one writes goes straight to the best-seller list. Ex-Presidents do good works, make the occasional peacemaking mission, oversee the construction of a shrine for their White House relics. The biggest payoff of all as a former President transubstantiates from pol to statesman is seeing the traits that annoyed and enraged people while he was in office--Harry Truman's commonness, George Bush's blandness, Jimmy Carter's righteousness--come to be regarded as virtues. To be a successful ex-

President, Bill Clinton must first find a way to let go of his presidency. Or, even harder, find a way to make it let go of him. Chat with Andrew Goldstein about the Clinton exit scandals on America Online at 7 p.m. E.T. Wednesday. Keyword: Live

— With reporting by Ann Blackman, James Carney, Elaine Shannon and Michael Weisskopf/Washington and John Cloud and Amanda Ripley/New York

A Generation Takes Power As America's first baby-boomer President, Clinton will bring to the White House a fresh mental map of historical impressions and pop-cultural symbols By WALTER SHAPIRO Nov. 16, 1992 ". . . the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace . . ." -- John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, 1961 These stirring words commemorated the last time that one generation ceded power to the next. The 22-year age chasm between President-elect Bill Clinton and George Bush is the second largest in U.S. electoral history, surpassed only by the 27 years separating Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower. But this generational conceit is unlikely to be updated as a theme for Clinton's Inaugural Address. Imagine a hapless Clinton speechwriter struggling to reduce the baby-boomer life experience to tough-minded Kennedyesque cadences. No way would the incoming President dare tell the unvarnished generational truth: "Again, the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born after World War II, nurtured in prosperity, aroused by Vietnam, sustained by rock 'n' roll, tested by drugs and promiscuity, embraced by the media and belatedly betrayed by the nation's decline in living standards." At 46, Clinton will be the third youngest President in history, out-youthed only by Kennedy and Theodore Roosevelt. For 40 years, World War II was a dominant life experience for eight Presidents in a row. All of them served in uniform -- even Ronald Reagan, who sometimes also projected the fantasy that he had seen the horrors of combat. Clinton was not born until a year after Japan surrendered. "World War II is as far away from Bill Clinton's generation as World War I was for George Bush's generation," observes Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University. "What is happening is that the first half of this century is receding in our institutional memory." As the nation's first baby-boomer President, Clinton will bring to the Oval Office a fresh mental map of generational impressions. Gone are the Andrews Sisters, Kilroy and the Berlin blockade. In their place come Father Knows Best, Elvis, 1960s folk music (Chelsea Clinton was named after the Joni Mitchell song Chelsea Morning), Vietnam protests, the 1972 George McGovern crusade and Watergate. Despite the politically exaggerated privation of his childhood, Clinton

came of age at a moment of exceptional national privilege, when a studious young leader from Hot Springs, Arkansas, could aspire to an elite educational odyssey that carried him from Georgetown to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship to Yale Law School. America of the 1960s worked for Clinton in ways that many children of today's hard-pressed middle class can scarcely imagine. A President, if artful, can transcend mere policy and become an avatar of an era. What difference will the final ascension of the baby-boom generation make in terms of the American spirit, the cultural zeitgeist? The irresistible Kennedy parallel would suggest that the symbolism of a Clinton presidency could someday outweigh its concrete accomplishments. From fashion (a continually bareheaded J.F.K. decapitated the hat industry) to sports (touch football and 50-mile hikes) to dallying with movie stars (Marilyn Monroe suggestively cooing "Happy birthday, Mr. President"), Kennedy defined a style that was half Harvard and half James Bond. But J.F.K. spoke for a generation that craved a larger-than-life icon, a President who legitimized both its bravery in World War II and its man-in-the-gray-flannel-suit struggles to create the affluent society. Baby boomers lack this palpable hunger for acceptance. "Unlike the Kennedy era," says Nicholas Lemann, author of The Promised Land, "Clinton's generation has already had its chance to make its tastes the country's tastes." Has it ever. Baby boomers -- especially the older ones like Clinton who were born in the 1940s -- have been pop-cultural imperialists since before Woodstock; the rest of America, like it or not, has had to endure their collective self-absorption as they metamorphosed from hippies to yuppies to competitive parenting. What is possibly left for them to gain from a Clinton presidency, other than perhaps good government? Hard to picture Clinton's peers celebrating their empowerment with buttons that defiantly declare DON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER 50. Or angrily marching on the White House chanting, "Hey, hey, Billy C., you've got a good job, how about me?" The ascension of Clinton gives older baby boomers a psychological gift that some of them will be loath to accept -- irrefutable proof that they are mature adults. Like the Doonesbury character Zonker Harris, baby boomers have been indulging in the longest adolescence since Archie and Veronica. True, parenthood has tamed many of their rebellious impulses. But the full awareness of the fleetingness of youth -- even with Stairmasters and cosmetic surgery -- was postponed as long as the World War II generation walked the corridors of power. "Instead of being able to feel like we're still kids and having to look up at the generation running things, suddenly there's a guy your age who is President of the United States," says Paul Hirsch, a sociologist at Northwestern University. "This is the first time that the country has symbolically acknowledged that we baby boomers have it all figured out." Every President ages in office -- and soon baby boomers will glimpse their own mortality in the new care lines on Clinton's face, in the slow droop of his jowls and in his Sisyphean struggles against the thickening of middle life. "I look at Clinton in his dumpy running shorts," sniffs marketing consultant Judith Langer. "He symbolizes the baby-boom generation: they think health, but they don't always resist that chocolate-chip cookie." In the waning days of the campaign, Clinton's reading glasses (for baby boomers the scariest word in the English language is suddenly bifocals) began to make a frequent appearance on the nightly news. As for the Vice

President-elect, Al Gore, just 19 months Clinton's junior, the passage of the years will probably be reckoned by the growth of the small bald spot in his still dark brown hair. For what is Gore profited, if he shall gain the second highest office in the land and yet be tempted by Rogaine? At a moment when the American libido seems to oscillate between Puritanism and rampant exhibitionism, how significant is it that for the first time in more than 30 years the nation has elected a President with sex appeal? The last six Presidents -- Bush, Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson -- combined do not conjure up enough erotic energy to fill a single room at the No-Tell Motel. Forget Gennifer Flowers -- this is not the moment to descend into the muck of her sleazy allegations. Rather, the swooning and the cooing on the rope lines during the last breathless days of the Clinton campaign were unavoidably reminiscent of Kennedy. In Louisville, Kentucky, the scene seemed out of Beatlemania. Women screamed when Clinton reached for their hands as loudspeakers blared out the Fab Four singing, "When I saw her standing there." Cheryl Russell, editor of The Boomer Report, a monthly newsletter on consumer trends, captures a new dimension in the national psyche when she confides, "Every woman I know is having sex dreams about Bill Clinton. We're finally getting a President our own age who we can imagine having sex with. I don't recall anyone having sex dreams about Michael Dukakis." If Reagan was shaped by Hollywood and Bush influenced by the prep-school verities of his youth, then for Clinton the seminal moments probably came at Oxford and Yale. He was there during the early, heady days of one of the most influential social movements of his lifetime -- the birth of modern feminism. Hillary is part of that legacy; few men of an older political generation would feel comfortable with wives who earned far more than they did. Sometimes lost < amid the Hillary hype is a larger truth: Clinton, like many baby boomers, feels comfortable around intelligent women. Politics has always been a locker- room sport, but in the Clinton campaign the role of women transcended tokenism and approached equal power. For all their activism, the Clintons are apt to play a surprisingly modest role as national tastemakers. They are far more likely to reflect baby-boomer trends than to shape them. Sure, there are fearless forecasts from marketing gurus. "Elvis memorabilia is going to go up to a whole new level," predicts Brad Edmondson, the editor in chief of American Demographics. "Remember Ronald Reagan and jelly beans. Jimmy Carter and peanuts." He may be right; too bad Graceland (privately owned) is not traded on the stock exchange. Beyond Elvis and the saxophone, Clinton's musical taste is broad but bland. Early in the campaign, he sat down with Rolling Stone for a lengthy interview about pop music. Among his favorites: Judy Collins, Dolly Parton, Michael Bolton, Otis Redding, Ray Charles, Harry Belafonte, the Temptations, the Beatles and Stan Getz. Nothing, in short, that cannot be easily found in a prominent place in any shopping-mall music store in America. This middle-of- the-road eclecticism is typical of Clinton's generation, lost in the rock- is-dead wilderness, casting about for a musical resting place between rap and heavy metal. If the President-elect has an unorthodox musical passion, it lies in his deep appreciation for black gospel and rhythm and blues. Unlike almost all white politicians of any generation, Clinton gets the beat consistently right.

Moreover, he understands the potency of pop-culture icons. In Chicago last month, Clinton discovered he was staying in the same hotel as the band U2. Taking advantage of his own celebrity, the candidate went up to the band's suite and hung out for a while, finding a common ground in swapping stories about life on the road. Afterward he dragged the band along in his motorcade to a Chicago Bears game. A pro football game and U2 -- that pretty well sums up culture in the age of Clinton. When it comes to fashion, both Clintons might best be described as conscientious objectors. "I don't think he even knows who Armani is," marvels an aide somewhat hyperbolically. Clinton's suits are still bought off the rack from Dillard's, a down-home Little Rock department store. In his casual wear, Clinton favors jeans and khakis, not even bothering to follow his generation in its mid-life enthusiasm for the Gap and Banana Republic. The President-elect's constant battles with his weight might influence fashion were not Levi's already hitting it big with Dockers, which are cut with a baby boomer's sagging physique in mind. "Bill Clinton is half hip and half hick," explains Steve Rabinowitz, one of the traveling staff members on the campaign plane. "You want to write about the hip part, but sometimes the hick part gets in the way." If nesting were not already a certified baby-boomer trend, President Clinton might get the credit for popularizing it. "This will be a very family- oriented Administration," predicts Derek Shearer, a longtime Clinton friend and economic adviser. "You'll see a lot of couples with kids at the White House." Equally visible will be the lights burning long after midnight in the White House family quarters; Clinton's idea of a good time is staying up late playing hearts with friends or discussing Hawaii's health-care system. A valid test for the limits of presidential leadership by example will be whether the nation begins to emulate Clinton's nocturnal body clock. Aides joke that Clinton runs on "Elvis standard time," valiantly struggling to avoid any event that requires his presence before 9 a.m. Never will power breakfasts have such a militant foe in the Oval Office. A few weeks ago, on his campaign plane, Clinton allowed himself a moment of introspection about what his election would mean to a generation whose first political act was both protesting -- and serving in -- an unpopular war. "If I win," he said softly, "it will finally close the book on Vietnam." Whether marching in the streets or marching in uniform, Vietnam introduced baby boomers to the sober realities of power. Another generation chose Vietnam as a battleground, but in very personal terms Clinton and his peers had to face the consequences of that decision. Now a child of postwar prosperity has ascended to the presidency. How both Bill Clinton and his generation adjust to their newfound power will determine the fate not only of the baby boomers but of the nation itself. — With reporting by Priscilla Painton, with Clinton A Time for Courage If Clinton is to fulfill his mandate for change, he will have to be honest about uncomfortable truths and brave in making tough choices By WALTER ISAACSON

Nov. 16, 1992 CHANGE, BILL CLINTON SAID AGAIN AND again during his long trek to the White House, does not come easily. It will take courage, their own courage, for Americans to choose a new course. Now that they have made that choice, it is Clinton's turn to be courageous. With his computer-like mind and his joyous addiction to pressing the flesh, Clinton was a brilliant campaigner. Almost too brilliant: toward the end his biggest vulnerability was his reputation as a dexterous accommodator, the schoolboy politician perennially concerned about preserving his political viability. On one of his last nights on the trail, Clinton told a crowd that Teddy Roosevelt had shaken thousands of hands at his Inauguration. "Maybe this is a record I will break," Clinton exulted. Maybe, but once he takes office the born pleaser will have to master a different art: that of displeasing people. He will need the courage to do more than husband his success if he is to fulfill the mandate for change that he sought. According to the old theory propounded by historians Arthur Schlesinger Sr. and Jr., every 30 years or so the nation turns, after a respite of conservative retrenchment, to a new era of active government, public purpose and liberal idealism. "Government is not the solution to our problems," Ronald Reagan proclaimed at his first Inaugural 12 years ago. "Government is the problem." Bill Clinton, on the other hand, has displayed an almost evangelical faith in the ability of government to improve people's lives. If he can turn his "new covenant" rhetoric into reality, he has the chance to personify the type of mood swing ushered in by the rough-riding progressivism of Teddy Roosevelt in 1900, the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and the New Frontier of John Kennedy in 1960. Once again, the mainspring that turns the cycle is generational. "It is only once in a generation that a people can be lifted above material things," President Woodrow Wilson explained to his youthful Assistant Secretary of the Navy. That young man was Franklin Roosevelt, and his activist presidency was the formative experience for the generation that came to fruition with Kennedy. Now the torch is being passed to the generation that was touched and inspired by Kennedy. Indeed, the most memorable moment in the convention video about the man from Hope was the scene of the eager student being inspired by Kennedy's anointing touch. But historical cycles are not inevitable. They depend on the strengths and frailties of those who become repositories of the hope for change. In a democracy, successful reformers must have, above all, the backbone to convey brutal facts unflinchingly. Especially now: America's current plight has been aggravated by a willful refusal to inhale unpleasant truths about the deficit, about racial divisions, about defense cuts and conversion of military facilities, about schools and about the workplace. Though hardly saintly in this regard, George Bush was not off base in charging that Clinton's tendency to waffle on tough issues was worrisome. The Democratic candidate talked only vaguely about "challenges," while avoiding any mention of sacrifice, and his economic program was a no-pain pastiche that involved taxing only the rich and foreign corporations. The resulting

doubts about his trustworthiness produced enough near death experiences for his campaign to serve as warning that being all things to all people will not work. There is also ample evidence that Americans are ready, even eager, to hear some of the hard truths that inform a yearning for change. It was a year, to borrow a phrase E.B. White used to describe a contentious New England town meeting, "when democracy sat up and looked around." Part of Ross Perot's appeal was his rapid-fire, flip-chart manner of laying out the bad news that Bush and Clinton did not want to discuss. Before he launched his famous first 100 days, Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed that "the country demands bold, persistent experimentation." He understood that the best way to protect the mandate he had won was to expend his political capital, to treat his popularity as a tool for governing rather than as an asset to be hoarded until the next election. He was re-elected three ; times. George Bush is living proof that the opposite approach leads to failure. Clinton has pledged, in the spirit of Roosevelt, to spend his first 100 days reigniting the nation's economic confidence. Instead of accepting a muddle- through series of compromises that offends few factions, he must be a leader, working with the new Democratic Congress to produce the kind of jolt that will cause Americans in their corner coffee shops to talk once again about the future with hope, not fear. The rare combination of an administration and both houses of Congress controlled by the same party means that the President can be held accountable for a change. But it also means that Clinton must prevent his seductive rhetoric about "infrastructure investments" from being translated by Congress into pork-barrel programs. Clinton's willingness to move beyond some of the old-time Democratic religion is auspicious. He has spoken eloquently of the need to redefine liberalism: the language of entitlements and rights and special-interest demands, he says, must give way to talk of responsibilities and duties. "We're going to empower people to take control of their own lives, then hold them accountable for doing so," he says. COMBINING CONSERVATIVE VALUES SUCH AS RESPONsibility and self-help with liberal ones like tolerance and generosity -- which is precisely the covenant that Clinton proposes -- could conquer the corrosive tactic of making wedge issues out of racial fears and sexual prejudices. In his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention, Clinton decried the us-vs.-them politics of division. "This is America," he said. "There is no 'them'; there is only us." He then maneuvered to ensure that, unlike in 1988, in fact unlike in any election since 1960, race was not an issue. Partly he achieved this by shying away from being cast as the tribune for the poor and blacks. Now he faces the more exalted challenge of acting affirmatively to heal the racial and cultural tensions that have frayed America's social quilt. By reviving a sense of common citizenship and civic good, by exalting the notions of public purpose and mutual obligation, America could grope toward a cease-fire in its divisive culture wars. Rather than being rhetorical weapons used to divide the country, such words as values and family could become unifying themes in a quest for common ground. Only then will America begin to cope with poverty, race, welfare, discrimination, abortion and even the deficit.

< Clinton has the credentials to lead such a unifying crusade. Unlike George Bush or Ross Perot, he has an intuitive feel for America's changing patterns. He is comfortable with women as equal partners in the workplace, in government and in marriages like his own. As an exemplar of the new South, he has dealt with blacks and gays, as well as good ole boys and businessmen, on a daily basis with mutual respect. And unlike any other prominent Democrat since Jimmy Carter, he is not tone deaf to the religious chords that can help bind American society. Not only does he know how to clap on the back-beat of gospel hymns, he also draws unabashed strength from his Baptist upbringing. With all that is at stake and with all the hope that America has invested in him, Clinton can scarcely afford to prove unequal to his task. Another failed one-term presidency would reinforce not only the notion that government cannot cope, but also the clawing anxiety that the country and its economy may be heading toward an inexorable decline. It would deal a further blow to the two- party system, opening the door to a stronger Perot or Perot-like candidacy in 1996. So Clinton has not just an opportunity but an awesome obligation: to make Americans believe once again that they are masters of an ever improving destiny. When John Kennedy, leaving Boston for Washington just after his election, listed the questions by which history would judge his Administration, he began with, "First, were we truly men of courage?" Bill Clinton, who put the same sort of question to his country, now has the chance to answer it himself. "I Didn't Get Hired to Fix Everything" Admitting that he has made mistakes, Bill Clinton tells how he feels he has learned to be presidential and to lead the journey toward the 21st century By MARGARET CARLSON, JAMES CARNEY, MICHAEL DUFFY AND BILL CLINTON. Sep. 27, 1993 Last Friday afternoon, President Clinton talked in the Oval Office with TIME White House correspondents Margaret Carlson, James Carney and Michael Duffy. On Clinton's desk was a hardcover book, The Culture of Disbelief by Stephen L. Carter, with the jacket flap folded in as a place marker. He appeared relaxed and spoke softly. Q. When you were on the stage at the signing of the peace agreement and you put your arms out for Arafat and Rabin to shake hands, did you plan to do that? A. Well, not exactly. It sort of came naturally. I wanted to be supportive of them and of the importance of going through with their handshake, which they had agreed to do in advance but which I think both of them thought would be a difficult moment. I thought I was making it easier for them. Q. What do you think you've learned in the first six months that you are applying in, say, the second?

A. Well, first, I think I've learned to try to focus not only my energies but my words. The way a President speaks to the people is different than the way any other citizen can or should speak. And in a way it's markedly different than the way a Governor or a Senator would speak. And maybe I just found the way to do that. Q. Is there something about the style of leadership that is required of a President that has made you change? A. I believe that one of the things I learned in the last six months is, to get people to really change, you have to create the conditions in which they feel secure and in which they can personally make the decision to do it. And the reason I think this Middle East peace thing worked is because we made it clear from the get-go that we were going to do everything we could to get the process up and going but that we would not impose a peace agreement. But I think what I have to do as President is to try to somehow call forth very simple but powerful feelings from the American people as we face each of these challenges. They have to feel both more secure and a greater sense of responsibility. I hope that maybe I can do a better job as we go along now of letting people know what the big motivating factors behind these decisions are. And I think that's really what a President's job is. A President is not America's chief mechanic. You know I didn't get hired to fix everything in that sense. I got hired to do what I'm now trying to do, to set forth a vision. Q. Is that what you always had in mind? A. I probably knew it before I came here. But I think a President needs a little time to set forth the big framework of things to the people, which I was able to do on Feb. 17 ((in the Joint Address to Congress)), with good results I think, but it's hard. I wasn't able to sustain it so well. Q. Besides talking about issues with the ex-Presidents who were here, did you get some general advice from the only people who can really know how to be President? A. We had a marvelous breakfast, the four of us did. We talked about NAFTA in the context of just this issue I've been talking about. I said, you know, the thing that bothers me about this is that we are caught in a time of real change and it is very hard on some people and a lot of people aren't secure in their jobs. But we've always been able to figure out how to take these challenges and face them, embrace them and come out at the other end of the process ahead. And now a lot of people seem to want to turn away. Q. Do you envy former President Carter being able to call Ross Perot a demagogue with unlimited financial resources to undermine NAFTA? A. From the comments around the breakfast table, I wasn't sure he would be the one to make that comment. Q. There were other candidates?

A. There were other candidates for the prize. But anyway, he won the award. Now, of course, if you're a former President, you have a different role and a different leeway. I don't think as President I should be trying to personalize this conflict. I think we've got a better chance with NAFTA if it doesn't degenerate into a shouting match but instead elevates into an honest discussion of the difficult choices facing the country. Not because anyone can see the future. These people did not sign this ((peace)) agreement out here last Monday because they knew how. All they did was make a decision that they would go on a journey and where it would end up. The most audacious example of that in modern history was when Kennedy said we'd go to the moon by a certain date, and then we just embarked on a journey together. I think now the problem for the American people is that with all the problems they are having now, this journey has a lot of aspects. The journey means different economic arrangements. It means having to d eal with the health-care issue. It means having to literally change the way the whole national government works. It's all part of a journey toward the 21st century that is just confronting us with a bewildering array of change. I've got to find the balance of security and responsibility that American families need to make it. But I think we're getting there. MASTERS OF THE MESSAGE INSIDE THE HIGH-TECH MACHINE THAT SET CLINTON AND DOLE POLLS APART By RICHARD STENGEL AND ERIC POOLEY Nov. 18, 1996 Presidential elections have most often turned on the great issues of the day: war and cold war, liberalism and conservatism, economic good times and bad. But in the post-ideological, slow-growth era of 1996 America, the election was won and lost on the Message--the ability to divine the hopes, fears and desires of voters, then craft the ideas, words and images that would best reach them. Bill Clinton built the most sensitive radar apparatus American politics has ever seen; Bob Dole looked at the same public mood but failed to read its meaning. This is the inside story of the Dole and Clinton message teams: the pollsters, strategists and admakers who made and sold their messages not only to the public but to the candidates. THE TEAM GATHERS

May 1995. A humid weekday afternoon in Washington. Seven men were sitting in the spare, modern living room of Bob Squier's Capitol Hill town house making tense small talk, eating deli sandwiches, sipping diet sodas and herbal tea. Although the debonair media consultant was the nominal host, the meeting had been called by Dick Morris, Bill Clinton's stealth strategist. Morris had been secretly advising the President for six months and had emerged from the shadows only in April. Now Clinton had asked him to assemble the campaign's creative team. But despite Clinton's endorsement, Morris' position inside the White House remained precarious. Many of the President's top aides (especially deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes, who was running the campaign) were gunning for Morris and trying to block his every move. Morris had convened the meeting in a private home, not an office; he didn't want anything to leak. In his blunt, breathless way, Morris went around the room describing the assets of each member of the team. He called Doug Schoen, the intense and bespectacled pollster, a superb numbers man and a loyal friend. Hank Sheinkopf, a straight-talking New York consultant, was a "raw talent" who excelled at making emotional attack ads. Marius Penczner, a video producer from Nashville, Tennessee, was a terrific shooter but didn't know much about politics. Bill Knapp, Squier's lanky partner, was a top-notch writer and manager, while Tom Ochs, the firm's third partner, was a tough political operative. And Morris said of Squier, "Bob and I have had our ups and downs." In fact, they loathed each other. They had tangled in 1986, while working opposite sides of a Florida Senate race. Squier had accused Morris of inflating his client's polling numbers, calling Morris "the Julia Child of cooked polls." Morris had been nursing a grudge ever since. Now, by way of apology, Squier said, "At least I didn't call you Chef Boyardee." But Morris didn't have to like Squier to appreciate his value. Morris and most of the others were renegade New Yorkers with few Washington ties; Squier, a consummate insider and confidant of Al Gore's, would be their consigliere. "This is the team I will present to the President," Morris told them. Squier shifted in his chair. "We could get killed in a coup at any time," Squier declared. "It's risky, but what choice do we have?" Along with Schoen's partner, Mark Penn, these men would help Clinton resuscitate his lifeless presidency--engineering the re-election of a man who looked for all the world like a one-term wonder, a political afterthought. The Republican midterm landslide a few months before had depressed the President, and for good reason. White House polling showed that voters gave him especially low marks for "effectiveness" and "decisiveness"--two hallmarks of presidential leadership. Clinton's approval rating was in the 40s; he trailed Dole in the presidential horse race by 15 percentage points. Voters associated Clinton with three principal issues: gays in the military, the 1993 tax increase and the health-care debacle. In focus groups, says one of the President's consultants, "people didn't want to see his face or hear his voice." To succeed in 1996, Clinton and his consultants would have to win two campaigns: the first against the President's own unpopular and liberal image, the second against his eventual opponent, Bob Dole. Only by achieving victory in the first war would they acquire the weapons to fight the second. In the end, they assembled a big-spending war machine fueled by "soft-money" donations to the Democratic National Committee and founded on a rocklike faith in opinion polls. The surveys were used not just to gauge voter attitudes but also to shape Clinton's

arguments, test and refine his television commercials and recast his public image. Because swing voters liked outdoorsy vacations, for example, the First Family would take their summer break in Wyoming. Clinton knew the campaign would be won or lost before the summer of 1996; Dole assumed that it began on Labor Day. While Clinton poll-tested every family-friendly policy, every nuance of strategy, Dole never had a strategy to test. ONE SMALL, UNHAPPY FAMILY Dole did not so much assemble a team as begin a desultory conversation with those already around him. The Dole clan was like a dysfunctional family, a cool, taciturn group whose members spoke in shorthand and didn't probe one another's ideas or motivations. There was longtime confidant Mari Maseng Will, a tall, genteel woman who had a real feel for what voters cared about. There was Bill Lacy, a buttoned-down Marylander and trusted Dole aide who would run strategy and message. There was a veteran G.O.P. fieldman named Tom Synhorst, who had managed Dole's winning 1988 Iowa campaign. And there was fund raiser JoAnne Coe, who started with Dole in 1967. They cared deeply about Dole but were not at all sure if Dole was serious about making the race. They believed in letting Dole be Dole. The Senator himself had been convinced just two years earlier that he was too old to run again. But with Clinton looking vulnerable, Republicans riding high and an underwhelming field of rivals, Dole thought, Well, why not? Dole dithered for months over his decision. Not even Elizabeth Dole knew what her husband was thinking; she only knew that he was. When he finally decided to run, he didn't bother to tell his group of advisers; instead, he tossed off the news in an aside to the Associated Press. Coe learned that her longtime boss was running for President from the newspapers. In typical Dole fashion, key decisions were made by default. When Will brought in press secretary Nelson Warfield, who had worked in Ron Lauder's unsuccessful 1989 New York City mayoral campaign, Dole met with him for all of seven minutes--and then pronounced him O.K. For campaign manager, Lacy selected Scott Reed, a cool bureaucrat who had no ties to Dole but who had run the Republican National Committee for Haley Barbour. Reed had to be persuaded that Dole would let the campaign manager actually manage the campaign. By the time Dole locked up the nomination, every member of the original family except Coe was history, replaced by professionals chosen by Reed. They shared one trait: greater loyalty to their careers than to the candidate. A SHAKY START The assembly of the November 5 group, as the new Clinton message team called itself, began a few months before the secret meeting at Squier's town house. In late 1994, Schoen was standing in a departure lounge at a Nashville airport, cursing his luck at missing a plane, when his beeper went off: "Call Dick Morris." Schoen dialed the familiar Connecticut number. "Doug," Morris told him, "I have this client, but I'm underground."

The client was the President. Morris asked Schoen if he was interested in doing some polling for the White House. It was an offer no pollster could refuse. Schoen was also eager to work with Morris, who had been a mentor to him. In high school Schoen had canvassed races for Morris on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Schoen and his partner, Penn, who had attended Harvard together, later distinguished themselves as New Democratic consultants and pollsters for Mayor Ed Koch of New York City, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Evan Bayh of Indiana. They had also polled for a succession of Arkansas politicians, including Clinton's rival, former Governor Jim Guy Tucker. Morris wanted Schoen but was wary of Penn, a large and rumpled man with an absentminded brilliance and a disheveled charm. Penn, who can work wonders with a laptop so long as he hasn't left it behind in a cab, could bring a nonpolitical, outside-the-box perspective to the team. He had been polling mainly for corporate clients, helping AT&T, for example, test TV spots during its corporate war against MCI. But Morris didn't really want him. A few years before, Penn had shot down some big-think Morris ideas during a meeting with a client of his, and Morris had never forgiven or forgotten. Schoen and Morris met privately with the President for the first time in February 1995. "I found him somewhat withdrawn," recalls Schoen. "There was a sense that the air had been taken out of him." Clinton asked for Schoen's analysis of the situation. "I remember you from our Arkansas work," Schoen told him. "Our polling then showed you as a middle-of-the-road Democrat. Now you have to get back to the center." He wasn't saying anything the President didn't know. Since November, Morris had been whispering in Clinton's ear about "riding the wave" of the G.O.P. tsunami. Clinton started paddling that way with his middle-class Bill of Rights speech. Schoen could see that the Clinton-Morris relationship was evolving but that the President was still on guard. He wasn't completely committing. "I don't want to read about you in the press," he told Morris and Schoen. "I'm sick and tired of consultants' getting famous at my expense. Any story that comes out during the campaign undermines my candidacy." Morris was brilliant, Schoen knew, but erratic. There was an excellent chance he would flame out. So when Morris turned to Schoen for help in assembling the message team, Schoen recruited one that could survive without Morris. At the heart of it was Squier Knapp Ochs, a firm Schoen had worked with before and one that had the manpower to handle a presidential race. Clinton asked Schoen if he could trust Squier. "Absolutely," said Schoen. "I'd trust him with my family and my bottom dollar." In the Yellow Oval Room of the White House residence, Clinton had been convening weekly strategy sessions that included members of the team. The meetings were small and secret, attended by Clinton, Morris, Gore, Schoen, Ickes, chief of staff Leon Panetta, senior adviser George Stephanopoulos and then deputy chief of staff Erskine Bowles. Schoen had persuaded a reluctant Morris to let Penn get involved, and he was beginning to attend. Penn and Schoen were disturbed to find that the President, a commanding figure, was not in control of his White House. The liberal institution was running itself. The White House staff had the power to get almost anything killed--even things Clinton wanted. The place was being run on an ad hoc, week-to-

week basis. The events of the week created the message of the week, which created the poll of the week, which created the meeting of the week. There was no long-term thinking. To the consultants, the White House Old Guard of Panetta, Ickes and Stephanopoulos seemed to have one short-term plan: to show Morris the door as quickly as possible. Panetta regarded Morris as Clinton's "flavor of the week," while Ickes predicted he would be gone within six months. Both men were valuable to Clinton: Panetta brought new discipline to the White House operation, and Ickes built a machine that scared away potential primary challengers. But to these loyal Democrats, the Morris strategy of triangulation--positioning the President above and between both parties--sounded like selling out. HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD Bob Dole had only one move to make in 1995--a shift to the right side of the road. For the close circle around Dole, the question was not whether to flank Phil Gramm, but how soon and by how much. Dole knew the truth of Nixon's dictum: run hard to starboard in the primaries; tack back to the center for the general. The trick, Dole understood, was not getting out so far that he couldn't make it back to safety. In early 1995, Will set about capturing the right-wing activists in Iowa and New Hampshire, all of whom were naturally suspicious of the pragmatic Kansan. Will believed the race would be about back-porch issues--not tax cuts or foreign policy but the everyday hopes and fears that Americans had for themselves and their children. If Dole could address those issues, he would not only outflank Gramm; he might even outflank Clinton. Values had always been Will's hobbyhorse, and others on the team, like Lacy and Warfield, saw things the same way. But in 1995, when they pushed Reed and pollster Tony Fabrizio toward the values axis, the two shied away. To them, values revived the tempests of 1992 and Pat Buchanan's talk of a cultural war. They saw values talk as code for abortion, and Dole wanted to steer clear of that. But Will pushed Fabrizio to do some polling about Hollywood. She understood that parents were concerned about trash on television, violence on the screen and the music their children were listening to. When Fabrizio finally posed a Hollywood question, the response was boffo. Dole bashed Hollywood in May 1995, and the right wing cheered. He seemed to be on message, and he left Gramm in the dust. BALANCING ACT Schoen and Morris were convinced that for Clinton to achieve credibility with the electorate, he had to come out in favor of a balanced budget. Schoen pointed out that 80% of Americans supported a balanced budget and didn't care how many years it took. As early as February, in meetings with Clinton and Panetta, Morris and Schoen had called for Clinton to propose his own plan to bring the deficit to zero. Gore and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin supported the move, but the White House liberals--Panetta, Stephanopoulos and Ickes--were vehemently opposed. At a strategy meeting in May, Morris pushed it again, and this time, instead of the Old Guard responding, the President did. He blasted the move, saying it would enrage congressional

Democrats and seem like another flip-flop. Schoen was crestfallen. But when Morris left the meeting, he was confident. Later Schoen figured out why. "I discovered that when Clinton is inclined to agree with you," he says, "he'll take a completely adversarial view." By June, Clinton's mind was made up. "I have to do this," he told Stephanopoulos. It wasn't negotiable. On June 8, the night Captain Scott O'Grady was rescued in Bosnia, the President invited Morris and Schoen into his private study. Clinton told them he had made peace with the idea of a balanced budget. Tony Lake, the National Security Adviser, came in to inform the President that O'Grady was still in Serb airspace. Lake looked concerned that the consultants were in on classified information. "Don't worry," the President told Lake, "these guys don't leak." FIRST BLOOD The initial strike in the first campaign--Clinton's war against his liberal image--was a series of crime ads to be aired 17 months before the election. Clinton knew he needed to boost his job-approval ratings before the nation would listen to him without scoffing. He had to persuade people that what they believed about him was wrong. "The idea," as Knapp said, "was, 'This is not the guy you think you know.'" Crime was the place to start. Clinton had bucked Democratic orthodoxy on the issue by supporting the death penalty and stiff sentencing laws and because he had passed the Brady Bill, the assault-weapons ban and a crime bill. Says Schoen: "We wanted to take crime off the table." The first ad went on the air in June, despite vociferous objection from Ickes, who controlled the campaign purse strings. He felt that a $2.4 million ad buy so long before the election was a waste of good money. But that's not the way his boss saw it. "The day the President hired me," says Schoen, "he told me the thing that most disturbed him about his first term was that the Republicans beat him on health care with $13 million in advertising." Clinton told another consultant, "If we don't spend $10 million on TV [in 1995], I could lose this thing." The crime ads aired for a month in markets across the country, but not in media centers like New York City; the spots got little notice from the press. The consultants, who split a 15% commission on the $2.4 million advertising buy, joked that Morris liked to spread his earnings across the whole tax year. But the early TV buy served a second purpose. It consolidated Morris' power inside the White House, demonstrating that he, not Ickes, was in control of the campaign and that he would run the President right down the middle. The remaking of Clinton had begun. Ickes took his revenge: he began a campaign of nickeling-and-diming his adversaries, refusing to authorize their requests for cellular phones and moving the high-living Morris into a cheaper hotel suite. Ickes launched a protracted effort to cut the consultants' commission, arguing them down to 7% from 15%. Clinton got tired of all the squabbling and at one point dressed Morris down. "Everybody's taking sides," Clinton yelled. "Harold's got his team, and you've got yours. Who's on my team?" THE NEURO POLL

Penn was concerned about the off-the-cuff nature of White House strategy. A longer, deeper view was essential, so in June he suggested doing a benchmark poll that would "define the keys to re-establishing the President's image." Morris, though reluctant to give Penn so large a mission, knew he was right. Penn's "neuropersonality poll" was no less than an attempt to map the psyche of the American voter. It became the blueprint for the campaign. Using the two secret Penn and Schoen polling sites--one in Manhattan, one in Denver, where hundreds of employees were phoning day and night--Penn polled every subject under the sun. "Do you go to parties?...Which spectator sports do you prefer?...Are you happy with your current situation?" He was attempting to form a psychological profile of each major voting bloc, searching for the big defining experiences that shaped people's attitudes toward politics. What emerged surprised him. If you looked at the race by class and by age, the traditional indicators, Dole and Clinton came out about even. The great divide was marital status. Those with families preferred Dole to Clinton by 10 to 15 points. The most prominent variable, the transformative event that affected people's views of politics, was the experience of having and raising children. Beginning in late July, Penn made a series of four neuropersonality presentations to Clinton and the White House team at the regular Wednesday-night sessions. Where Morris talked a blue streak and presented his ideas as if they came from on high, Penn was soft-spoken, professorial. In the first meeting Penn outlined the issues of greatest concern to voters. The economy, cited as the pre-eminent concern of 60% of voters in 1992, was mentioned by only 20% of his sampling. At the top of Penn's list, along with chestnuts like crime prevention and the minimum wage, were such family issues as banning tobacco advertising aimed at children, imposing order in the schools, providing for aging parents and lengthening maternity leave. In the second and third sessions, Penn described the personality types and life-styles of voters. Clinton voters watched mtv; Dole voters preferred Larry King. Clinton people liked rap, classical and Top 40 music, watched Friends and felt unsafe; Dole people owned guns, watched Home Improvement and listened to '70s music. Clinton did well with intuitive types and emotion-based people rather than fact-based people. The problem was that swing voters, by and large, were thinkers, not feelers. To win over these skeptics, who were sick and tired of grand schemes and unfulfilled promises, Clinton would have to make a strong statistical case for his record, then roll out a parade of bite-size, easily understood policies that could remake his image step by step by step. In the fourth and final presentation, Penn mapped out the electorate and posited two distinct groups of swing voters. Swing I voters (29%) were moderate, Democratic-leaning independents who could vote for Clinton but at the moment were not so inclined. Swing II voters (25%) were Republican-leaning independents. Swing II voters shared many of the concerns of the Swing I group on health care, crime and Medicare but took a harder line on fiscal issues and taxes, and when it came to welfare, they wanted a cutoff after two years. Says Penn: "The President had to prove his fiscal responsibility and toughness on crime and welfare before they'd give him the benefit of the doubt on anything else." Wooing both Swing I and Swing II would require a hybrid message. "You don't win by being either tough on everything (like Dole) or soft on everything (the old Democratic cliche)," he

says. "You need a synthesis." If ever there was a Zen candidate, a man who could hit two pockets on the ideological pool table at the same time by combining toughness and compassion, it was Bill Clinton. One rainy evening, on their way to a meeting in the Yellow Oval Room, Morris, Schoen and Penn were discussing their latest polling when Penn turned to the others and said, "Values. It's about values." In his presentation to Clinton a few minutes later, Penn told him that young, socially conservative families "can be appealed to not with religious values but with secular values like protecting their children and duty to their parents." The practical impact was to define a set of issues that Clinton could use to reach people with kids: smoking, education, flextime and family leave, and on and on through what became the values parade of 1996. "The truth was, 'family values' had been defined in an incredibly narrow way by the Republicans," says Penn. "It had been boiled down to a pro-life stance on choice and a position in favor of school prayer." After the meeting, the President called Morris with a question: Was Penn right? Should he talk about values or economics? Morris backed Penn. But Clinton realized that it wasn't values or economics; it was both--it was values wrapped in an expanding economy. On the campaign trail, he would come to embody both. THE MEDICARE PRESCRIPTION The Clinton team's second air attack was launched in August, when the consultants began broadcasting some very tough spots attacking the G.O.P. plan to trim the growth of Medicare. They had scrapped a set of even tougher spots, because they hadn't "mall-tested" well. In a mall test, which Penn had pioneered as a way of refining television ads for AT&T, Clinton spots would be shown to voters in kiosks set up in malls in 16 swing states. At the kiosk, a Penn and Schoen employee would ask a voter questions about his or her political affiliations and views of the President, then enter them on a computer. After viewing the spot, the voter would answer another series of questions. The whole thing took 10 minutes. Penn and Schoen distrusted focus groups (they regarded them as too small and easy to manipulate). The mall tests could yield a 200-viewer sample in a single evening, and they replicated the way most people watched ads--by themselves. The mall-test results for the first, hardest-edged Medicare spots reinforced Penn and Schoen in their belief that the G.O.P.'s position on Medicare had to be exploited without resorting to class warfare. They were latecomers to the value of using Medicare against the Republicans, a position that Stephanopoulos and others, using surveys by D.N.C. pollster Stan Greenberg, had been pressing for from the start. Penn and Schoen tested two sentences: "The Republicans want to cut Medicare so they can pay for a $245 billion tax cut for the wealthy" (the classic class-warfare argument) and simply "The Republicans want to cut Medicare." The latter tested much better. So in August the D.N.C. went up with Medicare ads minus the class-warfare tag line. The consultants made protecting Medicare a noble and patriotic duty and turned the Republicans into traitors to America's common values. The words in the ad were temperate, while the grainy, black-and-white images chosen by Squier and Knapp made Dole and Gingrich look like villains from a silent-picture show. They gave way to sun-dappled shots of the American President,

steadfast and true. And so was born a key part of the 1996 message: attack spots that hid their harsh negative material inside a lush pro-Clinton wrapping. To finance the massive TV buys while staying within Federal Election Commission spending limits, the consultants used Democratic Party soft money for many of the buys. A D.N.C. lawyer sat in on the creative sessions to make sure the ads were defensible as "issues advocacy." The law calls for such spots to be created independently of the campaign--yet Morris, Penn, Squier and Knapp handled all the D.N.C. spots. "If the Republicans keep the Senate," said a consultant, "they're going to subpoena us. Our only defense is that Dole did it too." The Democrats' ads blanketed the country. But Dole never responded--and never recovered from the blows. SHUT OUT BY THE SHUTDOWN Bob Dole never cottoned to Newt Gingrich's contract with America but realized that his party did. The conservative activists in the "early" states just ate it up. There wasn't much point in criticizing it, even if a lot of it did not make sense to him. So Dole resolved to make his separate peace with the Contract, telling a New Hampshire audience in June, "We want to downsize government, not dismantle it." He even tried to get some of Gingrich's agenda through the Senate but found himself stymied by Democrats at every turn. Dole knew a lot of Senate Republicans distrusted the Gingrich agenda, but he couldn't say that in public lest Gramm accuse him of being the M word--a moderate. But by the fall, Dole sensed people rejecting the Contract and its creator. He could feel it, hear it from everyday folks. This was a new problem: if people were turning against the Contract, against Gingrich, against the G.O.P., they could turn against Bob Dole too. Dole could see that Gingrich was determined to play a very public game of chicken with the President. And while Dole thought that was batty, he was willing to let Gingrich take the fall. Through the autumn, as the Democratic ads were raining on the Republican parade, Dole marched on, his fear of a backlash growing. A government shutdown was not what he wanted, and he could see it wasn't what the people wanted either. "There are people out there who live from paycheck to paycheck," he told Sheila Burke, his longtime chief aide. At a closed-door meeting in which Gingrich laid out plans for a shutdown, Dole had heard just about enough. "Look, it doesn't make sense," he told the Speaker. BRIDGING THE UNBRIDGEABLE As summer turned to fall and Clinton entered into protracted budget negotiations with Gingrich and the G.O.P. leadership, Morris kept predicting that a deal was imminent. By September, he said. Then by Halloween. Morris was back-channeling with then majority whip Trent Lott, but Lott couldn't deliver. Morris wanted a deal desperately. He thought it was essential to Clinton's re-election. He was wrong. Stephanopoulos and Gore were arguing that Clinton had to stand up to Gingrich on Medicare. Clinton agreed. It was the shrewdest move he made all year. Penn and Schoen polled four different budget-battle "outcome models" to see which worked best for Clinton. Penn was heartened to see that voters would blame Gingrich's "train-wreck"

scenario--a standoff that shut down the Federal Government--on the Republicans. Still, the President was concerned that the public ire would bruise him, as well. A few days after the first shutdown began, Clinton showed his political director, Doug Sosnik, an independent poll that indicated most Americans blamed the G.O.P., just as Penn had predicted. "Penn showed you that poll two weeks ago," the affable Sosnik reminded the President. Clinton laughed. When Gingrich shut down the government a second time, in December, Dole drew the line. He walked onto the Senate floor and ended it without telling Gingrich or anyone else. He was being true to himself, but he acted too late. Clinton had won. He shot ahead of Dole in the polls; it was never close again. Clinton's genius was to choose a winning hand from both sets of advisers: he co-opted the balanced budget, as the consultants advised, and demagogued Medicare the way the Old Guard wanted. This created his key message: "Balancing the budget in a way that protects our values and defends Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment." So often was this mantra used that the team referred to it as simply M2E2. Clinton had arrived at a golden synthesis, bridging the traditional Democratic notion of protecting entitlements with the New Democratic position of fiscal responsibility. Of course, he did it through sleight of hand. His budget proposals didn't come to grips with spiraling Medicare costs and deferred the most painful cuts until after his second term. ACCENTUATING THE POSITIVE During the budget brouhaha, Penn and Schoen became convinced that Clinton and his Administration were too downbeat about the economy. Thanks in part to Clinton's hard-won deficit-reduction package of 1993, interest rates were low and the economy was picking up. But Labor Secretary Robert Reich seemed permanently pessimistic. Ickes told the Boston Globe that the country was going through a period similar to the Great Depression. Penn became alarmed when, during a late-night interview on Air Force One, the President told reporters that he was "trying to get people out of their funk." The Clintonites, Penn and Schoen felt, were mired in their 1992 mind-set, avoiding what they called "the Bush mistake"--appearing to be out of touch by talking about economic progress when folks were hurting. But Penn and Schoen's polls showed that consumer confidence exceeded the upbeat levels of 1985. The President's handling of the economy had a 57% approval rating. Concern about the economy had dropped off the voter radar screen. In October Penn made an "optimism presentation" at the regular Wednesday-night meeting. "I'm not suggesting we go out and say this is the best economy in history," Penn told the group. "I'm saying we have to create the possibility that things are better than some people believe." In a memo for that meeting, Penn wrote, "Failure to recognize the optimism in the electorate and to correctly revive it...could be the single biggest mistake we would make that would cost us the election." If Clinton was going to run a sunny re-election campaign a la Morning in America, Penn maintained, he had better set the table now. "The sense that the country is moving in the right direction is something that Americans have to be led to conclude," Penn said. "They won't conclude it on their own." But the consultants had to fight a rearguard action by the White House liberals. Reich and Ickes began sending the President clips and polls that showed the economy was in the tank. After Penn

gave an optimism presentation to a small group of officials, Stephanopoulos was skeptical. "This is fine," he said, "but we need a contingency plan in case the economy goes bad." "That's what we have had," said Penn. "We've been executing it right through all the good news. What we need is a contingency plan for the economy's going well." MAKING RHETORIC REALITY Morris believed that the 1996 State of the Union address, which Clinton was to deliver Jan. 23, would be a make-or-break moment, an ideal showcase for a President in transition. Clinton's performance during the budget battle had boosted his standing, making voters give the new and improved Clinton a precious second look. The speech would be Clinton's de facto declaration of his candidacy. In December, Penn began polling a laundry list of values-based policy proposals that would become the heart of the speech and the laboratory for the Morris values offensive of the spring. To prepare the list, Penn met with a dozen White House aides and Cabinet officials, soliciting their ideas about themes and policies to include in the speech. He made a master list of more than 100 policies that were tested in a poll of 1,200 samples. And in conjunction with the speechwriting team headed by hardworking communications director Don Baer, he created 20 paragraphs, each expressing a different vision of the Clinton presidency. Penn poll-tested these competing visions and met daily with the speechwriters to refine the paragraphs he was testing. In January, Penn presented the poll results to 20 Clinton aides crowded into Baer's office. Morris listened via speakerphone from Connecticut. The top six issues on people's minds were crime and violence; balancing the budget fairly; protecting children from smoking ads, TV violence and drugs; strengthening the family; improving education; and protecting the environment. These would become Clinton's focus. Penn rated each position in terms of the percentage of voters from each group--Clinton, Swing I, Swing II, Dole--who said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who took those positions. One proposal, federal support of school uniforms, which was endorsed by the New Democratic policy advisers Bruce Reed and Rahm Emanuel, did not test well. Penn and Morris were reluctant to include it. (There wasn't room for ideas that didn't test well, Morris said. Polls showed that people didn't want a speech longer than 40 minutes.) But Emanuel and Reed took the matter to Clinton. The President had talked to Attorney General Janet Reno, who had recently returned from Long Beach, California, where school uniforms were being used to combat delinquency."I want it in," Clinton told them. "And here's how I'm going to say it." He scribbled down: "If it means that teenagers will stop killing each other over designer jackets, then our public schools should be able to require their students to wear school uniforms." On the night of the speech, that line received more applause and plaudits than any other. SIBLING RIVALRY "You're like a piece of wood," Morris told Penn. "I keep pushing you to the bottom of the lake, but you pop right back up."

Morris couldn't stomach Penn's new prominence. And Penn couldn't stomach Morris. From the start, the strategist had sought to repress Penn, and Penn had come to resent Morris' taking credit for his values ideas. But Morris couldn't contain Penn. Inside the White House, Penn developed a reputation as "the consultant who's not radioactive," as Stephanopoulos put it. Penn set up a jury-rigged workspace in a walk-in closet in Sosnik's West Wing basement office. This triggered Morris' paranoia, and when Penn had a one-on-one meeting with Clinton in the Oval Office a few days before the State of the Union, Morris blew a gasket. He summoned Penn and Schoen to his house in Connecticut and told Penn that Clinton was his client, the White House his show. Penn could submit or get out. Morris laid down a new law: Penn could see anyone in the White House except the President. (Later, Morris came up with an even stricter rule: Penn had to be at Morris' side at every interminable, Morris-dominated meeting.) Schoen, the peacemaker, advised his partner to accept. "You do what you're doing," he told Penn. "I'll deal with Dick." After the State of the Union, Baer drew up a list of every idea mentioned in the speech, matching each one with a specific policy proposal and a media event to communicate it. The result was two months' worth of policies, often with two or three events a week. The campaign model, duplicated again and again, was a low-cost proposal to strengthen communities accompanied by a bully-pulpit road show featuring Good Neighbor Bill. Everything was coming up values. Morris began cherry-picking good new ideas throughout the Executive Branch, using his unmatched zeal to push them to fruition. The West Wing became a floating policy meeting that gave way to a scheduling meeting that segued into a message-development meeting. Clinton loved the values assembly line. "Where were you boys in 1994?" he said to one of the consultants in April. "Could have used y'all then." GIRDING FOR BATTLE Clinton turned beet red. "That's a lie!" he yelled at the TV monitor sitting in front of him in the Yellow Oval Room. "That's a damned lie!" He was reacting to an ad that hit him with a wicked combination punch: his broken promise of a middle-class tax cut and his delivery of "the biggest tax increase in American history." The ad had been made not by Dole's media team but by Clinton's. "That was the last time we showed him one of those," says one of the consultants. Beginning in January, Squier, Knapp and Sheinkopf produced the kind of attack spots they expected from Dole. Penn and Schoen would test the in-house negative ads, then help come up with better ads to rebut them. Sheinkopf, a connoisseur of campaign hardball, hatched the ugliest attacks he could think of. Penczner then used an advertising technique called animatics, video rough cuts using dummy images that could be transmitted by computer to the malls where Penn and Schoen were testing the ads. Penczner and Knapp's people created a library of B-roll images, scowling Dole/Gingrich couplings, laughing children, kindly seniors, forceful Clinton--any of which could be popped into the animatic to create a spot quickly and cheaply. Clinton's response ads were tested, refined and retested until they actually left voters feeling better about the President than they had before seeing the original Dole attack.

THE BIG DOG BASKS IN THE SUN Bruised and bloodied by his early primary defeats--and by some $25 million in negative ads run against him by the Steve Forbes campaign--Dole locked up the nomination in March. He took a week off in April to bask in the Florida sun; his campaign went on vacation for a month. Don Sipple, the campaign's chief strategist, was unable to speak to the "Big Dog," as he called him, while Dole was working on his tan. Sipple was worried, and for good reason. No ideas were percolating, no plans being made, no strategy forming. Dole had talked of assembling a group of elders to hash out themes; it never happened. The Kansan had won the nomination with a bare-bones, hard-knuckled game of attrition: run as far to the right as he had to, then outspend or outlast Gramm, Lamar Alexander, Forbes and finally Buchanan. During the primaries, Sipple concluded that Dole's people were all Washington insiders obsessed with process. They didn't seem to know or care what the voters were interested in or worried about. They busied themselves with the calendar, with filing deadlines and debate schedules--everything but ideas. They were always running around with copy torn from the wires, worried about what the A.P. was reporting. Nobody watched TV. Sipple at first thought speeches would help. He recommended a series of high-profile addresses on hot-button subjects to get the campaign through the money crunch of spring and summer. But nothing happened. With the campaign close to broke, dozens of staff members were laid off, so there was no material for speeches. In late April, Sipple went to Reed. "Nothing's happening," he complained. Reed told Sipple that Dole wasn't engaged yet. "He doesn't want to worry about this now," said the campaign chief. Summer is when presidential campaigns are lost and won, and the strategy for those summer days is usually hatched in the spring. With the Olympics coming up in mid-July, the Dole campaigning had to start defining the candidate before America's attention turned to sylphlike gymnasts and gargantuan weight lifters. But it was not until May that Fabrizio launched a massive poll to find a way to frame the race, to come up with a message to run on. Penn had done Clinton's benchmark polling almost a year before. Fabrizio distilled his new data into a 35-page eyes-only memo, "Assessing the Current Political Environment and Thematic Recommendations." The memo offered reams of information but few recommendations. Fabrizio pointed out that women are stressed and too busy, that parents worry about their kids' futures, that voters are cynical about politics. In Fabrizio's memo, the Dole team had a pale version of Penn's neuro poll. But no one in Dole's camp ever figured out how to apply its meager insights. As a rationale for Dole's candidacy, Fabrizio pointed to the economy but offered few ideas on what Dole should say about it. The economy "sits in uncharted territory," he wrote, but even voters uncertain about the future "are not predisposed to believe that taxes are the root of the problem." Tax cuts were not a silver bullet. In June, Sipple proposed a new slogan for Dole: "Steady Dependable Leadership to Secure America's Future." It was a fine slogan--for Robert Taft, not Robert Dole. It felt older and creakier than the candidate himself. Sipple was an admaker, not a big-picture guy; he had written only a few memos, hitting on a few themes but never laying out a coherent message strategy.

Sipple was interested in the "Clinton Crunch"--the idea that higher taxes and bigger government had slowed the economy and forced people into two jobs. Many people did seem to be having a hard time making ends meet. But Fred Steeper, a seasoned pro, knew something that the less experienced Fabrizio did not. Voters always said they were having trouble making ends meet. They even said it in 1984, during the golden glow of Reagan's Morning in America. "Like farmers," Steeper said, "voters are never happy." What was significant, thought Steeper, was that voters were not blaming Clinton for their unhappiness. To sort things out, Sipple wrote his own analysis, relying on a newspaper poll instead of Fabrizio's data, and sent it to the Dole brain trust. In the memo, Sipple argued that Dole could not get a "clear win" on the economic issue so long as the public was generally satisfied with it. Instead, the breakdown of values--voter concern with crime, drugs, welfare and immigration--should be highlighted, he said, with Dole portrayed as a kind of moral policeman. "It is now urgent," he wrote, "that we come to an agreement on a rationale for candidacy, a theme and the message." Four months before the election, Dole's chief strategist was still searching for a strategy. Sipple didn't send the memo to Dole, but someone slipped him a copy on July 4. If the hope was that Dole would make his own declaration, it didn't happen. A few days later, on a rare dry Washington afternoon, Dole summoned Sipple to the roof of the campaign headquarters on First Street, where Dole had re-created his beloved "beach" from his Senate terrace. It was only a chair, a bucket of ice water and a phone, but it was a slice of heaven for the Big Dog. Dole would spend hours there, angling his face to the sun as he worked the phone. When Sipple arrived on the roof for a rare face-to-face moment with Dole, he saw his chance: "Senator, do you have a theory of this election?" Dole looked down for a moment, pondered the question, then turned his face back to the light. "Think I can win," he said. "Might be big." THE PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE WAR For the Clintonites, preparation was all. When Dole limped back to Washington from the primaries and planned to display his legislative mastery from the Senate floor, Panetta, Stephanopoulos, Sosnik, legislative assistant John Hilley and Gore chief of staff Ron Klain plotted ways to box him in on issue after issue. Coordinating with Senate minority leader Tom Daschle and his consultant, John Podesta, they decided to link the minimum-wage increase, which Dole opposed, to every bill that he supported--most notably an immigration-reform package. Dole pulled the bill so minimum wage wouldn't come to a vote. He thus appeared to have a soul made of leather. But the Democratic plan worked too well. It drove Dole right out of the Senate. That was something the Clintonites were not prepared for. When Dole announced that he would be leaving the Senate, on May 15, Morris was dumbfounded. "Dick doesn't respond well to surprises," says one of his partners. Morris hustled from the Jefferson Hotel to the White House

to plot a response. In a meeting with Panetta, Stephanopoulos, press secretary Mike McCurry and others, he argued that Clinton should go before the cameras and make a statement. "It's Dole's day," McCurry said. "Let's stay out of the way." Soon after, at a strategy session in the residence, Morris pronounced Dole's resignation their first moment of genuine peril. He stated that they had to "contain Dole's bounce" by driving up his negatives. Morris was so obsessed with this that he broke one of the campaign's cardinal rules: no personal attacks. Knocking Dole personally, after all, risked opening the character door, where Clinton was also vulnerable. Nonetheless, Morris wrote a spot that became known as "Quitter": "He told us he would lead. Then he told us he was quitting, giving up, leaving behind the gridlock he helped to create." When Morris played the ad for the President, Clinton was uncomfortable. "I don't really like 'quit,'" he said. "We have to put the lid on this," Morris told him. Clinton kicked the decision down to the staff. Ickes and Stephanopoulos proposed changing the word quit to resign. "We polled 'quit,'" Morris said. "We didn't poll 'resign.'" "There's so much riding on one word?" Stephanopoulos asked in frustration. Yes, Morris said. The ad ran unchanged, and boomeranged. The pundits lit into Clinton as a rabbit puncher who first praised Dole for his service, then thumped him with a low blow. At a Clinton speech, hecklers held up signs that said, DOLE IS NO QUITTER. After that, Clinton pounded his consultant. "It's easy for you," he told Morris. "You don't have to stand up there and take the shit." Morris pulled the spot, but he was unrepentant. The ad, he insisted, had contained Dole's bounce. THE FIRM Dole's resignation was not evidence of a strategy. it was the strategy itself. Apart from taking off his tie and giving the best speech of his life, Dole had no plan. The candidate kept the campaign manager off balance, and the campaign manager did the same to everyone else. Reed wouldn't let anyone get closer to Dole than he was, yet made little out of whatever closeness he did forge with the candidate. The campaign was like a law firm, thought new hire Mike Murphy, a shaggy, wisecracking adman who had worked for Alexander in the primaries and Dole in 1988. Everyone worked in a tidy little office, isolated from the others. To make the trains run on time, Elizabeth Dole had forced Reed to bring in Donald Rumsfeld, a Ford-era Defense Secretary with a buttoned-down style. Reed and his new favorite, John Buckley, became the campaign's twin partners, ruling on everything. Buckley, a refugee from Fannie Mae who became communications director in June, was someone who Reed boasted would be the big-think "corporate guy." Corporate was just about right, thought Murphy.

By midsummer, the message had been scattered across hundreds of little index cards. Murphy had produced the cards, handy "talking points" for aides, staff and Friends of Bob to carry around in their pockets. "The Better Man for a Better America," one card was headed. Below it were subheads: Economy, Opportunity, Quality of Life. Under each subhead were topics: Balanced Budget, Welfare, Crime. But this wasn't a message. It was a list. On July 24, Murphy and Sipple sent a two-page confidential strategy memo to Reed titled "Victory Strategy: Post Convention to Labor Day." It read, "The Goal: Get Campaign on the Offensive. Create Momentum. Hurt Clinton." Can't argue with that. The idea was to use the time leading up to the convention "to re-establish the right/wrong and moral-crisis agenda." Dole should launch his "tax cut/growth plan" during the convention, they said, then promote it on a whistle-stop tour. The idea had the virtue of directness: using moral issues to blame Clinton for the nation's decay, then offering the tax cut as a positive (and moral) alternative. But Reed and Buckley opposed its timing. They wanted the tax cut announced before the convention. Murphy and Sipple later surmised that Reed thought then--even if he hadn't yet persuaded Dole--that Jack Kemp would be the vice-presidential nominee. The tax cut had to come before the convention to make the choice of a pro-growth supply-sider more logical--and less craven. Sipple foresaw a huge problem: if they released the economic plan before the convention, they would have no money for the TV spots they needed to sell it. "Clinton's gonna kill us with his ads," he warned Reed, but the campaign manager's mind was made up. The next day, Elizabeth Dole called Sipple. "How's the convention plan going?" she asked. He could tell from her voice that she was fishing. "We don't have a plan," he said. "We don't have a message." He told her what Clinton's ad team would do to them if they released the tax plan before the convention, when they were broke. "There's a brick wall waiting for us," he said. "Whoa," Elizabeth gasped. Then, in her most syrupy voice: "Would you mind sharing that with Bob?" Sipple met that afternoon with Bob and Elizabeth. He repeated his view that Clinton would hammer the tax plan if it was released before the convention. "Have you told Scott?" Dole asked. Sipple had told him the day before. "When?" Dole asked, amazed that Reed hadn't told him. He turned to his wife. "Wasn't Rumsfeld supposed to fix this?" KILLING DOLE'S TAX PLAN

Schoen was convinced that taxes were the issue that lost elections for Democrats. If Dole succeeded in painting Clinton as a big-spending liberal, the race might tighten. Morris, Knapp and Sheinkopf fretted that taxes could give Dole the key to opening the "character door" by painting Clinton as a liar. They began looking for ways to undermine the plan long before Dole announced it. Penn and Schoen tested variations on these themes: that Dole didn't know how to pay for it; that it would blow a hole in the budget and force huge cuts in valued programs; that it was less responsible than Clinton's modest, targeted cuts. They had long discussions about how best to describe the plan, as they did not want to sell it unwittingly. They honed a line that, according to their polls, sank the popularity of Dole's plan from 65% to 17%: "A risky tax scheme that will balloon the deficit and raise taxes on 9 million working families." Since Dole's plan reduced the earned-income tax credit for low-income families, the consultants could turn his tax cut into a tax increase. The slogan pushed every negative button. "It took his plan out of play," says Schoen. SAN DIEGO BLUES At the G.O.P. convention in San Diego, Dole knew his campaign was ragged. Staff members were at war with one another. Sipple and Murphy had been cut out by Reed. On Tuesday, Aug. 13, Dole invited the admen up to his 33rd-floor suite. "What about Kemp?" Dole said, wondering how much bounce they could get from the new running mate. "It's good for a week," Sipple replied. "Maybe 10 days," said Dole. Dole asked Sipple, who had run several successful California campaigns, "Are we right to leave Jack here for 10 days?" "He's not ready," Sipple replied. "And the pictures of the two of you together are so good, you ought to keep it going." Dole nodded. It was a rare moment of unanimity. The very next day--one that should have been the most triumphant of Dole's candidacy--his campaign almost imploded. For weeks Dole had been irked at Buckley for briefing reporters about what the plans were: the date of a speech, the schedule for the week, the details of the economic plan. Dole hated all that. Why spill the beans? And now Buckley was telling reporters that Dole would mention abortion in his acceptance speech. It got under Dole's skin. By Thursday, he wanted Buckley's head. Reed told Dole that if Buckley went, so would he. Conscious of his image as a man who reacts to bad news by sacking his staff, Dole backed down. But he never again attended a meeting with Buckley. If Dole stopped by Reed's office and Buckley was there, he'd say, "Whupp. Have to come back later," and sidle away.

There was, miraculously, a plan for after the convention: do the economic message for four weeks, switch to crime, drugs and moral decline, then pivot back to economics to set up the first debate. Sipple and Murphy opposed this, preferring to stay on morals for the duration. But they lost, and their days were numbered. On Aug. 15, the campaign's long-awaited $62 million in federal funds arrived. Sipple put the first postconvention ad together--14 months after the Clinton air war began. Sipple's debut was an old-fashioned, positive commercial about Dole: Midwestern childhood, war wound, man of his word. Reed approved it, and Sipple showed it to Dole. But Dole was in a lousy mood. He hated it. "Did you test it?" Dole barked, watching it for the fourth time. Damn right I've tested it, Sipple thought. He had shown it to focus groups in four cities over two nights. But Dole was on to something; the ad had not scored well. It was too corny. The Clinton spot it was running against tested better. And the crime and drug ads Sipple was testing did better but didn't send Clinton's numbers down either. Sipple had also put together a tax-cut spot focusing on the fact that the average voter would get an extra $1,600 from Dole's plan. Again Dole didn't like it. Sipple's tests showed that viewers didn't believe the tax cut would ever happen. Dole growled that the tax cut should be mentioned but only along with balancing the budget, streamlining regulations, lowering capital gains. Sipple revised the ad, inserting a long list, making it even duller. He turned the master copy over to the campaign. A week later, he was gone. Sipple's work, said Buckley, "lacked edge." 21ST CENTURY EXPRESS For Clinton, the economic news was all going in the right direction. As Clinton was preparing for his train trip to Chicago, Penn called Baer to report that the country's mood was improving. "Almost as many people think the country is on the right track as think it's going in the wrong direction," he said. The metaphor was staring Baer in the face: train track, right track. He proposed the slogan, "On the Right Track to the 21st Century," and Clinton repeated it at every whistle-stop along the way. And each day he said it, the "right track-wrong track" numbers inched up. Penn was right: Americans did need to be told the country was moving in the right direction. Tipper Gore had watched Bob Dole's convention speech and been struck by Dole's elegiac hymn to a "better time." Dole's central metaphor--"Let me be a bridge to a time of tranquillity"--kept playing in her head. The only problem was that Dole was driving in the wrong direction. She told her husband about the image, and he mentioned it to Clinton, who relayed it to Morris and Penn. Other aides had been thinking about bridges too. It had a nice ring. Penn and Schoen set about testing variations on the bridge theme. When they tested four versions of the bridge slogan, "Building a Bridge to the 21st Century" appealed to 61%, while "Building a Bridge to the Year 2000" scored 54%, and the more frank "Building a Bridge to a Second Term" rang up only 39%. "A Bridge to the 21st Century" it would be.

On the train to Chicago, Penn declared a "mood shift." It was time to usher in some more upbeat, Reaganesque Morning in America rhetoric. Even the congenitally gloomy Stephanopoulos and Ickes were seeing the sunny side of things. The one person who seemed grim was Morris. His behavior was becoming alarming. He had been spooked by Elizabeth Dole's glittering performance and proposed that Hillary Clinton confine her convention speech to policy only--a bizarre suggestion for a First Lady who was still trying to live down her image as a backroom policy shrew. He had other odd ideas too. Penn and Schoen had tested Robin Williams, Barbra Streisand and other celebrities who might add star power to the opening-night theme of Americans who have overcome adversity. Christopher Reeve tested best. Gore's staff was handling Reeve's speech. Morris demanded that they insert a paragraph in the paralyzed actor's resolutely nonpartisan text that described the nightmare of lying in a hospital bed and hearing that Gingrich was plotting to cut Medicare. He was on some kind of manic high, thought Penn, who considered confronting Morris and relieving him of command. He was sure Morris would self-destruct. His premonition came true on Thursday, Aug. 29, when news of Morris' liaison with a prostitute brought the strategist down. The President was delivering his acceptance speech that day; Clinton's coronation was marred by the adviser who had helped make it possible. The man who had shown Clinton the utility of family values now made the theme seem cynical. When the story broke, Wednesday night, Schoen and Erskine Bowles told Morris he would have to resign. He could not come to terms with the chaos he had caused. "Dick, you had a good run," Schoen said. "Now go with as much dignity as you can." On Thursday morning, Sheinkopf and Squier escorted Morris and his wife from their suite at the Chicago Sheraton to a cab that whisked them to the airport before reporters knew what was going on. Even Morris haters like Stephanopoulos felt some concern for the fallen adviser. But Penn could not hide his sense of release. At the first residence meeting after Morris' exit, Panetta walked in and sat down in Morris' chair. It was a symbolic victory for the chief of staff, who had always regarded Morris with contempt. Panetta would now lead the meetings. "We all know what Dick did," he said. "Now we're moving on." There was relief in the room--and the meeting was more businesslike, and shorter. "That was it. Boom!" Stephanopoulos recalls. "I said to myself, 'What a cold business this is.'" Penn and Schoen began polling to gauge the fallout from the Morris debacle and discovered that there wasn't any. In fact, 37% of voters said the scandal made them more likely to vote for Clinton. The pollsters could offer no explanation of why this should be so. When Penn reported it at the meeting, Gore looked over at the couch where Penn and Schoen were sitting. "If things get tight," he said with a smile, "one of y'all's gonna have to go next." Shortly after Morris resigned, Clinton took Penn and Schoen aside. "I want you to stay on and pick up the slack," he told them. Penn, who had moved to Washington in December 1995, confessed, "Mr. President, the last thing I want to do is get a moving van and go back to New York."

"That won't be necessary," said Clinton. "Don't worry. I know that a lot of what Dick presented on values was your work." That weekend, Penn, Knapp and Morris had a long, unpleasant conversation about Morris' compensation. Morris argued that because so many of the campaign's ideas were his, he was entitled to "royalties"--a piece of the TV ad buy for the rest of the campaign. Penn and Knapp shot that idea down fast. Morris had already earned perhaps $2 million from the campaign up to that point. They offered him a buyout of just $30,000. ON THE OFFENSIVE In September, Sipple quit the Dole campaign after Reed told him he was bringing in another media consultant. Reed replaced him with a soft-voiced Cuban-born adman named Alex Castellanos, who immediately put up a spot attacking Clinton on the drug issue. A federal agency had just announced that teenage marijuana use had almost doubled in three years, and Castellanos' spot combined that bit of news with a 1992 mtv clip showing a grinning, callow-looking Clinton confessing that he'd inhale if he had it to do all over again. It was Dole's best spot of the year. Clinton took Penn and Schoen aside. "Look, I'm worried about this drug attack," he said. "How do we respond?" Dole hadn't put much money behind the ad, but the consultants decided to hit back hard. They came up with a spot highlighting Clinton's drug and crime policies, including the death penalty for drug kingpins, and hitting Dole for voting against creation of the drug czar's office. Just as he was finding his target, Dole abandoned the drug message and switched to the charge that Clinton was a "spend-and-tax liberal." The Clintonites were relieved. "With the drug spots," says Penn, "Dole was getting some traction by painting Clinton as a social liberal. The notion that he was an economic liberal was less effective because the economy is sound." But the consultants didn't like Dole showing signs of life. It was time to kill him off. The message team unveiled its tactical nuclear weapon, an ad they called "Wrong in the Past." Using black-and-white images of Dole through the ages, the ad traced his 30-year history of votes on the "wrong" side of issues such as Medicare and education. The ad homed in on voters' perception of Dole; one poll showed that it made 66% of Americans less likely to vote for him. But the spot had no effect on the horse race. Nothing did. With the exception of Dole's resignation and the Republican Convention, two brief bounces for the challenger, the numbers had been static for nine months. Nothing either side did seemed to move them. L STANDS FOR LIAR Paul Manafort, a Washington lobbyist who had run the convention for Dole, picked up the flag after Sipple left the field. The picture was grim. After Labor Day, Bob Dole was worse off than when he started. By early September, according to his own poll, Dole was actually 6 points behind where he was in August. Manafort drafted a 20-page memo dated Sept. 5 titled "Dole

Campaign Strategy Document," in which he wrote, "The strategy for the campaign must be finalized now...Otherwise, we will be adrift without a compass." Manafort recommended pressing on with the tax cut, moving to crime in September and then reaching out to swing voters with the debates. But Castellanos, who had worked for Jesse Helms and Phil Gramm, had other ideas. He had always been convinced that Clinton's great weakness was not policy but character. Castellanos crafted a series of ads called "How to Speak Liberal." But the L word he was concerned with was not so much liberal as liar. The first spot showed Clinton saying, "I will not raise taxes on the middle class to pay for these programs." Announcer: "In liberal talk, that means...I lied and raised your taxes." The ads were both serious and funny, and Castellanos wanted to run them on the eve of the first debate. Reed refused. Dole, he said, could not call the President a liar. In frustration, Castellanos showed the spots to Fabrizio and Manafort, who loved them. "Blast away," they said. Castellanos then called Elizabeth Dole, who called Reed and told him she wanted the ads reconsidered. Reed was furious that the consultant had made an end-run around him. Reed told Manafort, "I don't think this is the right time." One ad in the series ran. The word liar was excised, and it aired just once in Hartford, Connecticut, on the night of the first debate. DOLE'S LAST CHANCE Penn may have been an expert at interpreting figures, but he was still a novice when it came to reading his candidate. At the first big debate-preparation session, in a lovely wooden theater on the grounds of the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, Penn counseled Clinton to "engage, engage, engage." Stephanopoulos, however, thought Clinton should treat the debate like a press conference. When Penn saw Clinton losing his temper with a smooth George Mitchell (who was playing Dole), he realized his mistake. "Mark immediately dropped the engagement line," said Stephanopoulos. "It was very Dick-like." Penn and Stephanopoulos became Clinton's chief trainers. Stephanopoulos worked defense (on Whitewater, Filegate, character), while Penn worked offense (sunny economic statistics, vision of the future). Penn prepared what he called "Debate on a Page," a handy one-page primer with shorthand versions of Clinton's key messages. Like a college student cramming for an exam, Clinton kept the crib sheet near him at all times. Penn was sliding into Morris' job: molding the message, refining the ads, conferring daily with the President. Clintonites couldn't help noticing his taking over not just Morris' responsibilities but his persona as well. Gone was the shambling professor; enter the adviser who brooked no interference, who seemed as confident and quick-tempered as Morris had been. He vetoed a meeting between pollster Stan Greenberg and Clinton. And tensions were building between him and Schoen. Some thought he was excluding Schoen the way Morris had tried to exclude him. "WHERE'S THE OUTRAGE?"

Clinton had won the first debate handily, but the consultants were worried that unwinnable questions might dominate the second, a town-hall format in San Diego with questions from voters. The atmosphere was shifting. Dole ratcheted up his rhetoric and vowed to go after Clinton hard on character. At the first prep session, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Clinton tried hitting back, rebutting Dole's criticisms and calling him hypocritical. But everyone could see it didn't work, so Penn proposed a strategy of benign neglect: "Clinton Soars, Dole Whines." Answer attacks when you must, he told Clinton, but end each answer with a short upbeat phrase, like, "I want to build that bridge." Clinton barely acknowledged Dole's attacks in San Diego, but when he came off the stage that night, he wasn't sure how it had gone. Penn already had the poll results and showed them to the President. "We're fine," Penn told him. Clinton smiled. One weekend in early October, Clinton invited Penn over to the White House, and the two men hung out on Clinton's private putting green. Hillary wandered over and joined the conversation. "Shouldn't we do some testimonials to talk about the President's character?" she wondered. Penn liked the idea and suggested using emotionally charged "witnesses"--people like James Brady, the gunshot survivor whose walk across the stage at the Democratic National Convention had been one of the event's few moving moments. A spot in which Brady defended the President's character--"I say, look what he's done"--went up Oct. 17. After that, Knapp wrote an even more highly charged testimonial, one from Marc Klaas, whose daughter Polly had been abducted and murdered in California. Klaas looked at the camera with burning eyes and said, "I hear people question the President's character and integrity. It's just politics." Critics described the ad as shameless. "When pundits start calling it shameless," says Knapp, "that tells me it's good." Clinton pronounced the Klaas spot even better than the Brady ad. DOLE'S GLASS HOUSE When he attacked Clinton's character during the second debate, Dole made a point of saying he was talking only about matters of "public" ethics, not private behavior. On the stump, he wasn't hitting the issue of Clinton's character as hard as many Republicans wanted him to. Reed and Buckley knew why: Dole was worried that a story would break about his character. Meredith Roberts, 63, an editor for a Washington trade association, was telling reporters that she and Dole had had an affair from 1968 through 1970, when he was still married to his first wife. Roberts had been talking to TIME and the Washington Post since early August, but she did not wish to speak for publication. She said she felt "no rancor" toward Dole but wanted those who wrote about Dole to know that "he is not the great moral figure he's portraying himself to be." For much of the fall, the story hung like a sword over Dole and his aides. To gauge the depth of the problem, Dole's general counsel, Doug Wurth, arranged a meeting with Roberts. Over cocktails, Wurth asked questions and took notes. Had Roberts kept a record of her meetings with Dole? (Yes, she had kept detailed datebooks.) Did anyone else know of their relationship? (She had told several friends at the time.) Did anyone see the two together? (Her roommate had spoken with Dole as he was leaving her apartment.) Dole and his lieutenants would neither confirm nor deny Roberts' story, but Buckley, Warfield and Will urged the editors of TIME and

the Washington Post not to print it, and emphasized that Dole (unlike some of his surrogates) had not made an issue of Clinton's alleged dalliances. Although they said the story was irrelevant, Reed and Buckley did not want to put that to a public test. Dole might be especially vulnerable because he was running as "the better man." He had told the Washington Post that he was always faithful, and he was on the record as saying such issues were of legitimate concern. After reports of adultery forced Gary Hart to drop out of the 1988 presidential race, Dole told the New York Times, "Once you declare you're a candidate, all bets are off. Everything up to that point is fair game." By late September, the National Enquirer had learned of Roberts and offered to pay her ($50,000 by her account) for her story. She refused the money, but the Enquirer published the story anyway. Outraged at what she called "distortions" by the Enquirer, Roberts then spoke on the record to other reporters. But no major paper or TV news program ran it. The story took some of Dole's top advisers by surprise. Bill Bennett, Dole's national co-chairman and the best-selling author of The Book of Virtues, didn't know whether the allegations were true but had no doubt they raised a legitimate issue. "People should not cheat on their wives, whether they're presidential candidates or not, Democrats or Republicans," he says. "It's wrong. Last time I checked, Jews and Christians had a Commandment about that." The story had a chilling effect on Dole, who found it difficult to separate private and public character and go hard after the latter. Explained one campaign official: "He has trouble dealing with any kind of nuanced message." MONEY CHANGES EVERYTHING Dole did not campaign effectively on the character issue until the last weeks before the election, when he got an assist from the media: press reports revealed that a Clinton fund raiser named John Huang had collected more than $800,000 in questionable contributions from foreign donors. Clinton had designed his fund-raising juggernaut to ensure a big win, but now public disgust with his money machine threatened to whittle down the size of his victory margin. Clinton desperately wanted to get more than 50% of the vote. As some undecided voters broke for Ross Perot, Clinton's own polls showed him hovering just below the magic number. To make matters worse, the White House was caught off guard by the Huang story. No one plotted a rapid response. No one was deputized to handle the flood of press inquiries. In late October, Penn saw a poll finding that people thought Clinton had taken more money from foreign sources than had Dole. It wasn't true, and it represented a possible opening for Dole. Penn preached aggressive counterprogramming. He began mall-testing a devastating anti-Clinton spot made by Knapp showing a smiling Clinton among Indonesian fat cats. The tag line was, "The President says he did nothing wrong. But isn't the test of a President doing what's right?" This time, they did not make the mistake of showing it to the boss. On Sunday, Oct. 20, Knapp and Penn cobbled together a response. The spot they made accused Dole of taking $2.6 million in foreign money and being an obstacle to reform. Early Monday morning, Clinton told Penn he wanted to respond on the stump to Dole's attacks. Penn

discouraged him. "Anything we say becomes the day's lead story," he said. Penn told him about the new spot, and they decided to put it up immediately. To further blunt Dole's attack, the White House readied some Clinton remarks on campaign-finance reform. He would come out in favor of the McCain-Feingold reform bill, which he had done nothing to support during the previous session and which Dole helped kill. The late response didn't make the problem go away, but it seemed to do the job. Clinton's fund-raising tactics might end up hobbling his second term, but they wouldn't stop him from winning it. FAST FOOD No issue was beneath Penn's radar. One day in October, the President was going over some TV interview questions with Penn, Baer and policy adviser Gene Sperling. Nickelodeon had a simple question: What's the President's favorite fast food? "You can't answer that!" cried Penn. Baer agreed, and the two men made a heated case. Fast food was part of Clinton's bad old image: the burger-munching, sax-playing juvenile-in-chief. That Clinton had gradually given way to a grayer and graver President, with an optimism that seemed more deeply felt. Penn and Baer were aghast that Clinton might take a step backward. Sperling thought this message business was getting just a bit out of hand. "Just out of curiosity, Mr. President," he said, "what is your favorite fast food?" Clinton thought for a moment. He couldn't narrow it down. "Burritos, deep-dish pizza, chicken sandwiches," he said finally. "No! You can't say that!" Penn howled. "Why can't he say that?" Sperling wanted to know. "Yeah, why can't I say that?" Clinton demanded. And then he overruled his pollster: "I'm going to say it." MARATHON MAN The campaign moved Dole's events from large, half-empty venues to smaller sites, mostly high school and college gyms, where the crowds wouldn't seem so sparse. This was the bold advice of Dole's fourth and final message consultant, a Madison Avenue adman named Norman Cohen. Dole had started with a message of downsizing government. Now he was downsizing himself. The campaign's last idea, however, came from the candidate. "What about an all-out push?" Dole muttered. On Oct. 28, he broached a plan to end his campaign with a four-day, round-the-clock marathon: 19 states in 96 hours. When campaign headquarters faxed Dole a tentative schedule, he scrawled "nonstop, nonstop, nonstop" across it.

Forty-two hours into the run, however, Dole was almost out of gas. After rolling through a Michigan truck stop, a Newark, New Jersey, diner and a Philadelphia nightclub, he found himself in Indianapolis, Indiana, on Saturday, free-associating at a noontime rally--from Eisenhower to the war on drugs, from flag burning to Indogate, from partial-birth abortion to Boutros Boutros-Ghali. After months in search of a coherent message, Dole had returned to the splintered themes and message fragments of the primaries. There was only one difference: in March, it was good enough to win. ACROSS THE BRIDGE Like Dole, Clinton ended the way he began in early 1996. At every stop on his 18-state final tour, he spoke of unity and "common ground," of meeting challenges together, of "opportunity, responsibility and community." He distilled his first-term accomplishments into a few impressive paragraphs--10.7 million new jobs, 4.5 million new home owners, and on and on in a giddy boast that took flight and soared clear into tomorrow: "Let us build a bridge together, wide enough and strong enough to carry all of us into the bright future that is America in the 21st century." His face was flushed and glowing. He had not slept but was not tired. If he could have, he would have stayed in the moment forever. The messenger was the Message. — WITH REPORTING BY MELISSA AUGUST, JEFFREY H. BIRNBAUM, MICHAEL DUFFY, J.F.O. MCALLISTER AND VIVECA NOVAK/ WASHINGTON AND TAMALA M. EDWARDS WITH DOLE Inside Bill's Last Deal On his final day, Clinton makes a bargain to avoid prosecution. Here's how the secret talks went By MICHAEL WEISSKOPF/WASHINGTON Jan. 29, 2001 The meeting was as secret as any that Bill Clinton had ever held. Just after the new year, he sat down with his nemesis, independent counsel Robert W. Ray, for Ray's first visit to the White House since taking over from Ken Starr--and Clinton's first meeting with prosecutors since the videotaped deposition in which he admitted to an affair with Monica Lewinsky. In the Map Room, where Franklin Roosevelt plotted World War II, they discussed the broad outlines of an agreement that would avoid the first indictment of a man who had been President. On Friday, the last full day of Clinton's presidency, the deal was finally announced, and Clinton confessed his misconduct. "I tried to walk a fine line between acting lawfully and testifying falsely," he admitted in a statement, "but I now recognize that I did not fully accomplish this goal and that certain of my responses to questions about Ms. Lewinsky were false." He agreed to pay a $25,000 fine, and his Arkansas law license was suspended for five years. But the Arkansas Supreme Court's disbarment proceeding against him would be dropped, and Ray would close up shop and not prosecute. Another long national nightmare was over. The stunning news caught Americans by surprise, but the deal was more than a year in the making--and involved clandestine negotiations between the warring parties in which Clinton

helped shape "every clause, every word and every comma," as one source describes it. The agreement required compromises from both the President, who until now had insisted that he never lied under oath, and the prosecutor, who had vowed to uphold the rule of law. Ray planted the seeds for an accord at his swearing-in as Starr's successor, in October 1999, when he said it is more important to assure that "justice shall be done" than to win cases. Within days, Ray received a call from the President's private lawyer, David Kendall, who'd spent six ugly years battling Starr. But Ray and Kendall had a clean slate. A tough prosecutor in New York City, Ray had joined Starr's team as an assistant in April 1999--months after the Clinton impeachment ended. Now he and Kendall began a series of regular talks, and Ray tried to build faith in his fairness. Over the next 11 months, he closed investigations that Starr had allowed to drag on for years: the Whitewater land deal, the firing of the White House travel office and alleged misuse of fbi personnel files. Ray issued press releases clearing the President and First Lady of criminal wrongdoing--and made sure he finished several weeks before Election Day in Hillary Clinton's run for the Senate. "The underbrush had to be cleared away," Ray told TIME. His actions only made Clinton cockier. The President had suffered the ignominy of impeachment and a contempt of court finding, but now he was spinning hard, bragging in interviews that he had defended the Constitution by standing up to overzealous prosecutors. Ray knew he had to get Clinton's attention. In July he empaneled a new grand jury, and after the November election, called in Lewinsky for questioning, increasing pressure on Clinton to cut a deal. If there was going to be a settlement, he wanted it before Clinton left office. About three weeks ago, he asked Kendall for a meeting with the President, according to sources outside Ray's office. Clinton had let associates know that despite his public bravado, he feared the threat of indictment and wanted to put the matter behind him. He agreed to participate in the first negotiation of criminal matters between a President and a prosecutor. Kendall set up the meeting and joined the discussion. Clinton agreed to acknowledge some form of wrongdoing; the issue was what. Ray wanted him to admit that he had lied under oath when he denied having had sexual relations with Lewinsky; at the meeting, Clinton wouldn't budge. The lawyers worked on language over the next two weeks, arriving at a formula in which Clinton admitted for the first time to giving false testimony under oath. By avoiding the word "knowingly," the President skirted the legal definition of perjury. With that breakthrough, the deal came together. With his work completed on Friday, Ray waited for the reviews. "What will the country say?" he asked aloud during an interview with TIME. He had part of the answer by day's end, when Kendall praised him as a "real prosecutor." It was hard to find anyone who wasn't grateful that, just as the country prepared to turn the page to a new President, the Great Book of Clinton Scandals could finally be closed. — With reporting by Michael Duffy/Washington Pardongate Play-by-Play TIME.com's quick 'n' constantly updated account of the Clinton pardon scandals By JESSICA REAVES

Getting a headache from all this convoluted pardon talk? Tired of squinting at news reports, trying to decipher the meaning of the latest sordid developments? Never fear: TIME.com is here with a handy Pardongate timeline. Check back often for the latest news.... WHITE EXPANDS HER CASELOAD (3/13/01) Justice Department officials report that Attorney General John Ashcroft has asked Manhattan U.S. attorney Mary Jo White to expand her current investigation into some of President Clinton's pardons to include all 177 of the last-minute clemencies and commutations. According to sources, Ashcroft issued the directive in order to "consolidate" the ongoing inquiries. THE AG ROLLS UP HIS SLEEVES (3/11/01) Saying he is "troubled" by President Clinton's pardons, Attorney General John Ashcroft announces that the Justice Department will review its pardon procedures to ensure that crime victims and federal prosecutors are made aware of pardon or commutation applications. Meanwhile, pledging continued investigations into the pardons, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott says Congress must not "walk away" from the work left to be done. THE END OF THE ROAD? (3/10/01) House Speaker Dennis Hastert tells CNN the congressional investigation into President Clinton's pardons is "winding down." OH, BROTHER... (3/08/01) The Los Angeles Times reports that Roger Clinton, the former president's half-brother, is under investigation following allegations that he asked for $15,000 in exchange for help securing a pardon for a Little Rock restaurant owner. Philip David Young reportedly turned down Roger's offer, but was granted a pardon anyway. (None of the people Roger recommended for pardons were granted them). According to the Times, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White has added Roger's file to her office's ever-expanding pardon probe. SPECTER STRIKES BACK (3/06/01) Senator Arlen Specter proposes new disclosure guidelines for friends and lawyers who lobby for presidential pardons. The Pennsylvania Republican wants everyone involved in the pardon process to register — and for those records to be made public. This transparency, says Specter, might guard against Marc Rich–like cases in the future. NOT SO FAST... (3/05/01) The same Clinton aide linked to reports that the former president was considering offers to talk to two Senators about his pardons vehemently denies those reports, saying Clinton is "not considering Senator Specter's request at this time." CLINTON TETE-A-TETE? (3/04/01) A Clinton aide reportedly says the former president is "considering" an offer to talk privately with two Senators — Republican Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and a yet-unnamed Democrat — about his last-minute pardons. THE BURTON AND WAXMAN SHOW (3/01/01 [p.m.] Podesta, Nolan and Lindsey testify, along with Jack Quinn, in a very long day before the House Government Reform Committee. During their often contentious exchanges, the witnesses insist there was no quid pro quo between

Marc Rich's sponsors and President Clinton — or the President's financial interests. All but Quinn vehemently underscore their personal opposition to the Rich pardon, insisting they never thought the President would grant it. Ongoing appeals on behalf of Marc Rich from outgoing Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, Podesta says, may well have played a decisive role in Clinton's final deliberations. Reports emerge that Denise Rich is in negotiations with the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's office; she may be brokering a deal to tell what she knows about her ex-husband's pardon. BIG DOINGS ON THE HILL (3/01/01 [a.m.] The House Government Reform Committee prepares to hear testimony from former Clinton aides John Podesta, Beth Nolan and Bruce Lindsey. Democratic fund-raiser Beth Dozoretz appears in person only to take the Fifth. Republican Senators Arlen Specter and Orrin Hatch write to Clinton asking him to speak to Senate investigators about his last-minute pardons. Specter suggests that if Clinton does agree to sit down and talk, the Senate probe might draw to a close. Meanwhile, in New York, the Times reports that Hillary's other brother, Tony Rodham, helped obtain presidential pardons for Edgar and Vonna Jo Gregory, carnival owners from Tennessee who were convicted of bank fraud in 1982. Rodham's spokesperson says that while Rodham did ask for the pardons, he never received money from the Gregorys. Rodham has, however, worked as a consultant for Edgar Allen Gregory for about seven years. Even further north, in Albany, New York, state tax officials announced they are seeking $137 million in back taxes and interest from Marc Rich. According to the terms of his pardon, Rich is not immune from civil charges or penalties. A VOICE FROM THE PAST (2/28/01 [a.m.]): Former housing secretary Henry Cisneros, who was among those granted last-minute pardons from the former president, tells the Dallas Morning News that Clinton granted his pardon in part to remedy the "extremes" of the independent counsels. Clinton reportedly told Cisneros (who was accused of lying to the FBI about payments he allegedly made to a former mistress) that he suspected the HUD chief was investigated because he was close to Clinton. DENISE A NO-SHOW? (2/27/01 [p.m.]): Congressional Democrats dispute allegations that Denise Rich (ex-wife of Marc Rich) and DNC fund-raiser Beth Dozoretz visited the White House on the eve of Clinton's last day in office. Sources insist that while both women were cleared by the Secret Service to attend a party held for a staffer that night, neither actually came to the event. The alleged January 19 visit was under intense scrutiny; President Clinton granted Marc Rich's controversial pardon on January 20. Clinton waives his claim to executive privilege, saying three of his former aides are free to supply Pardongate testimony to Dan Burton's House Government Reform Committee. At the same time, Marc Rich announces that "on the advice of his lawyers" he will not testify before Burton's committee.

Clinton lawyer David Kendall agrees to release the names of 150 people who have donated more than $5,000 to the Clinton library, with the condition that only House Government Reform Committee chairman Dan Burton and ranking Democratic member Henry Waxman will see the actual list. WHITE HOUSE LOGS (2/27/01 [a.m.]): Unidentified sources say White House logs list last-minute visits by key Pardongate figures Denise Rich and Beth Dozoretz. Secret Service records reportedly show Rich (ex-wife of fugitive financier Marc Rich) and good friend Beth Dozoretz (FOB and DNC powerhouse fund-raiser) arriving at the White House on the evening of January 19 — the day before Clinton granted Marc Rich's controversial pardon. According to White House staffers, Clinton spent most of that night weighing pardon applications. Dozoretz's husband, Ron, insists it is impossible that his wife was at the White House at that time, saying she was with him on a flight to California by 3 p.m. that afternoon. Rich had no immediate comment. BETH TAKES THE FIFTH ROUTE (2/26/01): Key Pardongate figure Beth Dozoretz informs the House Government Reform Committee that she will take the Fifth if asked to testify in the Marc Rich investigation. WORKING TOGETHER (2/25/01): Ranking Judiciary Committee member Senator Arlen Specter and Representative Dan Burton announce they are considering combining the Senate and House pardon investigations. MORE TROUBLE FOR HUGH? (2/24/01): News reports suggest that Hillary Clinton's brother Hugh Rodham, already under the microscope for his involvement in two successful pardon applications, personally asked White House lawyers to consider granting pardons or commutations to Democratic donors Nora and Eugene Lum. The request, if it was in fact made, was fruitless. Marc Rich speaks out for the first time on the affair, calling his pardon a "humanitarian act." PARDONS FOR VOTES? (2/23/01): Manhattan U.S. attorney Mary Jo White announces her office is investigating commutations Clinton granted to four Hasidic men from upstate New York, amidst allegations the men promised to generate votes for Hillary’s Senate run in exchange for the presidential action. The men, convicted of stealing millions in federal funds, all received clemency, and their Hasidic neighbors, known for usually voting Republican, hand Hillary an overwhelming (statisticians say aberrant) number of votes. PAYBACK TIME (2/22/01): Press reports link lobbying by Hugh Rodham, Hillary Clinton's brother, to successful pardons for well-connected drug trafficker Carlos Vignali and mail-order scam merchant Glenn Braswell. Rodham was paid a reported $400,000 (including a $200,000 "success fee") for his work. Bill and Hillary express "disappointment" and ask Hugh to return the money. He says he will.

News stories allege that Bill Clinton's brother, Roger, presented the President with a list of 10 friends and associates who applied for pardons or commutations. None of the 10 applications were successful. Representative Dan Burton, GOP chair of the Government Reform Committee and longtime Clinton foe, fires off a letter to Roger Clinton, asking the infamous former first brother to clarify his involvement at any stage of the pardon process. JIMMY'S PEEVED (2/21/01): Former president Jimmy Carter calls Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich "disgraceful." BILL AND THE OLD GRAY LADY (2/18/01): The New York Times publishes a Bill Clinton op-ed piece called "My Reasons for the Pardons." In the column, the former president defends his decision to grant pardons to Marc Rich and his partner Pincus Green, and cites the approval of prominent Republican attorneys Leonard Garment, Bradford Reynolds and Lewis Libby. The three men vehemently deny ever expressing approval for the pardon. A growing number of observers suggest that Clinton's explanation may have done more harm than good. NEW YORK PROBE (2/15/01): Manhattan U.S. attorney Mary Jo White, in conjunction with the FBI, launches a criminal investigation into all the Clinton pardons. THE SENATE WEIGHS IN (2/14/01): Pardon hearings begin in the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is chaired by Republican Orrin Hatch. IMMUNITY CHALLENGE (2/13/01): U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft says he will consider granting Denise Rich immunity if she agrees to testify before congressional panels investigating her ex-husband's pardon. The pressure for immunity later diminishes for fear it could interfere with an investigation by Manhattan U.S. attorney Mary Jo White. LIBRARY DEPOSIT (2/10/01): Press reports show Denise Rich donated as much as $450,000 to the Clinton library. E-MAIL TRAIL? (2/08/01): The House Government Reform Committee, headed by Dan Burton, launches hearings into Clinton's last-minute pardons. E-mails made public at the hearings show Marc Rich's lawyers energetically sought a pardon for their client, even going so far as to discuss approaching Senator Hillary Clinton for help. There is no evidence she responded to any request they may have made. CONGRATULATIONS ALL ROUND (01/22/01): Rich's onetime lawyer, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, now Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, calls Rich to congratulate him on receiving a pardon. PARTING BLOT (01/20/01): On his final morning in the White House, President Clinton grants 140 presidential pardons and 36 commutations. Marc Rich, who has been living as a fugitive in Switzerland since his 1983 indictment on tax evasion and fraud, is among those receiving

pardons. The voluminous list also names several other controversial figures, including convicted drug trafficker Carlos Vignali and notorious snake oil salesman Glenn Braswell. Going the Last Mile By LAURENCE I. BARRETT/WASHINGTON Aug. 16, 1993 Bill Clinton's final sales campaign began last Thursday with an anxious burst of phone calls. Yet just five hours before the House would vote on his budget bill, he still lacked a majority. On the phone with Pat Williams, Montana's sole Representative, Clinton found no bargaining leverage. Unlike most of the other legislators with whom Clinton had been cutting deals all week, Williams asked for no specific trade-off in return for his vote. "Pat," Clinton finally pleaded, "I can't pass this without your vote, and my presidency depends on getting this thing through." But Williams refused to commit. A liberal from a conservative state, he opposed some of the bill's spending cuts as well as the gasoline tax. So he went to the floor weighted with ambivalence, hoping to vote no but fearing to be the agent of paralysis. A few minutes after 10 p.m., as the electronic counter tabulated the vote in progress, Democratic party whips realized that just three members controlled the outcome: Williams, Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky of Pennsylvania and Ray Thornton of Arkansas. If two of them voted no, the bill would be kaput. Williams went to Thornton, hoping that he would vote yes, thereby removing the need for Williams to do so, but the Representative from Little Rock had never intended to go with Clinton. He had already made his concession to the Democratic leadership, which was to withhold his no decision until late enough in the roll call so that an Arkansan would not be a bad example to fence sitters. Williams turned to Margolies-Mezvinsky, a newcomer from a normally Republican district who had gone against the budget in the first round. She remained unsatisfied with the budget's feeble effort to curb entitlements. She too had heard from Clinton, just 15 minutes earlier: Marjorie, how can I get your support? Margolies-Mezvinsky named an unusual price: Come to my district and preside over a high-visibility conference -- including all concerned interests -- on checking the cost of entitlements. They talked it through for a few minutes until Clinton said, "Let's do it." Now, at 10:15, the electronic tabulation was complete, and the scoreboard showed 216-216. Deadlock would have meant defeat. Whereupon Williams and Margolies-Mezvinsky went to the rostrum and cast their ayes on paper. "I did it not so much for the budget," Williams said, "as for movement. My vote was to help us set sail again." The House cliff-hanger was the prelude to another in the Senate. Early on Friday the Administration found itself still shy of a victory by just one vote, the holdout being Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, known among his colleagues as "Cosmic Bob" for his epic bouts of indecision. What struck White House officials most about Kerrey's resistance was what a senior Administration official described as the "inchoate" nature of his demands. Kerrey wasn't asking for anything specific. He didn't want a post office in Omaha or a dam on the Platte River. Instead

he was advocating a more aggressive effort on Clinton's part in selling the country on a disciplined fiscal life-style, one involving less consumption and more investment. Kerrey urged that Clinton -- who had defeated him in the presidential primaries -- display more "spirit," more "energy" in preaching reform. The President, he said, should evoke the styles of F.D.R. and J.F.K. After delivering that message during a Thursday luncheon with senior Clinton advisers, Kerrey went to an afternoon movie, What's Love Got to Do with It. That prompted one waggish official to suggest that Tina Turner be enlisted to lobby the Senator. Kerrey was enjoying his moments in the sun. His antechamber looked like the White House pressroom, with a dozen camera crews and a clutch of reporters seeking clues from Kerrey's typically elliptical ruminations. Sample: "This ((bill)) could be the first step towards something good or the first step towards something bad. This could be the first step to hell." Friday morning Kerrey met with Clinton in the family quarters for a 90- minute chat that one official described as almost entirely philosophical. Kerrey urged the President to, as he said repeatedly, "connect." Al Gore joined the meeting briefly, and Kerrey spoke separately with chief of staff Mack McLarty. Later, Finance Committee chairman Pat Moynihan went to Kerrey to say, essentially, If you don't vote our way, this whole ball game is over: the North American Free Trade Agreement, health care, national service -- everything. ) At this point, colleagues were beginning to get fed up with Kerrey's coy approach. Said a Senate leadership aide: "A lot of people here really resent having to go over there to court the guy. We didn't think it was a perfect bill, but it was the best compromise that we could get." Two hours before the final vote in the Senate, Democratic Senators Thomas Daschle of South Dakota and Harry Reid of Nevada walked into Kerrey's office. Both looked grim. When they emerged half an hour later, neither was smiling. Asked if they were confident that the President had the votes he needed to win passage of his plan, Daschle said, "Not yet." Soon afterward, two of Kerrey's staff members walked into his office, carrying bags of takeout Chinese food. Not much later, Kerrey called Clinton in the Oval Office; the President took the word of Kerrey's decision calmly and thanked him for his support. At 8:30, an hour before the vote, Kerrey emerged and said he was going to the floor to give his speech. There he took the opportunity to bash Clinton's bill one more time. "The truth, Mr. President, is in fact that the price of their proposal is too low. It's too little to watch the greatness needed from Americans now at this critical moment in their world's history." But it was all the challenge Congress could bear. With Kerrey on board and Gore's tie-breaking vote, Clinton had the bare minimum he needed. As he had been doing all week, Clinton on Saturday rewarded loyal legislators by inviting them to unwind with him. He went to play golf with Pat Williams and two other Democrats who had seen the light. — With reporting by Michael Duffy and Nancy Traver/Washington