The evidence of the 100 Days suggests that Bill Clinton is off to an energetic but quite bumpy start. He took office as an outsider and man of the people. On his better days he does shake up a city fixed in often antique styles and institutions of power. But on other occasions, he himself looks more like an old-fashioned, run-of-the-mill Democrat. No one doubts his formidable mind or capacity for absorbing detail; but at times it appears as if he is trying to do too much too soon-and all at the same time-stretching himself far too thin.
Beneath the surface of the 100 Days lurks a deeper issue. The president and his people seem to be control freaks. Yet are they really setting the agenda-or do events have a way of controlling them? The president’s collision with the Joint Chiefs of Staff over gays in the military showed that he could be naive at the very moment he was being peremptory. The defeat of his stimulus package demonstrated how much he misread a Perot fervor that has made deficit cutting, not new spending, the obsession of Democrats as well as Republicans in Congress. His youth brigades have turned the Old Executive Office Building into something resembling a college dorm. If they are fresh and idealistic, they can also be insufferably smug. And their tiffs with the national media do little to communicate a levelheaded image.
The president was elected to restore the economy, not go adventuring abroad. But his attempts to downplay foreign affairs, however well intended, have not entirely served him well. The perils of Boris Yeltsin and the bloodshed in Bosnia are drawing him steadily toward commitments for which he has no experience. The danger is that the impulse to duck might draw him into situations that have deteriorated to the point where they can engulf him.
In this exclusive account, NEWSWEEK examines some key moments in the first months of Clinton’s presidency. From Zoe Baird to Bosnia, the health-care task force to the VAT tax, Clinton’s first three-months-plus on the job are a microcosm of the global and domestic challenges he and his team of newcomers are likely to face in the years ahead. To see how Clinton and Company react to their triumphs and trials, you need to start at the beginning:
Bill Clinton did not run as a liberal, but social issues to the left, including gay rights, drew him close to Democratic interest groups in a way that complicated his political life. In his first imbroglio, the commander in chief found himself trapped between gay-rights activists and his own Joint Chiefs of Staff. The story opens eight days after the election on a very slow news day in Little Rock. Mobbed by bored reporters desperate for a story, Clinton said he was going to keep his campaign promise to end discrimination against gays in the armed services. “A huge mistake,” says one top aide. Clinton knew it. A few days later, Sandy Berger, a lawyer who advised the transition on defense and foreign matters, phoned John Holum, a Washington lawyer whose last assignment had been to draft the Democratic platform. Berger said Clinton was afraid that two campaign issues were about to blow up in his face: Haiti and gays in the military. Would Holum take on the latter? Talk to the military, gay leaders, anyone, but please find a solution. “I’d better stretch this assignment out,” Holum replied, adding that the next job Clinton offered might kill him.
The intermediary met with Adm. William Crowe, who had served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs under Reagan and Bush and had endorsed Clinton during the campaign. Crowe believed that it was right to put an end to the gay ban, but the media frenzy appalled him. “The president-elect has to consult with [the Joint Chiefs] and be seen to consult with them,” he said. So Holum paid a visit to Chairman Colin Powell. At the Pentagon, Powell orchestrated a surprise meeting with the service chiefs, who argued that Clinton’s promise would destroy the effectiveness of combat units. Loyally, Holum replied, “I am not here to advise the president-elect whether to end the ban on gays in the military. I am here to discuss with you how this policy change can be done in a way least disruptive to your military mission.” He noticed that Powell appeared to be firing for effect to reassure his colleagues; perhaps he would offer Clinton some maneuvering room. On talking to other defense experts, Holum concluded that Clinton had not been briefed on the complexity of the gays in the military issue.
By chance, a separate exploration was underway on the Hill. Les Aspin, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, was a leading contender to become secretary of defense. Two key staffers, Rudy de Leon and Larry Smith, began to war-game the gay issue for him. Using cynical language that would offend the gays and the military alike if it became public, they drafted a memo on how to handle the subject. Among other things, it said, “This is not a negotiation.” The staffers parked the memo in the “G-drive” of their committee’s computer network. There it sat on that open message dump-waiting to explode.
Holum was more diplomatic: he tried to devise a compromise acceptable to gay leaders and to Pentagon brass; but he did not think Clinton could propose absolute parity for homosexuals and heterosexuals. After Clinton picked Aspin for the Pentagon job, Holum advised caution: the president’s first public move should be a meeting with the chiefs at the White House. Clinton also needed to attend to the ego and power of Sen. Sam Nunn, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
On the Sunday before the Inauguration, Powell came to Blair House to meet with Aspin, Vice President Al Gore and other top Democratic counselors. After discussing Iraq, they turned to the gay issue. A new problem had come up. Once Congress reconvened, Republican Sen. Dan Coats of Indiana was planning to present a quick resolution confirming the gay ban. To vote against Coats, Democrats would have to vote for gays. They were pleading for a way out. Aspin suggested one: immediately after the Inauguration, Clinton should announce that he was instructing the secretary of defense to consult with the military to find a way to end the ban. Within six months the Pentagon was to come up with a new code of conduct broadly guaranteeing “the morale and efficiency of the armed forces.” Aspin argued that the right politically correct formula would prevent sexual misconduct by heterosexuals–of the Tailhook variety-as well as by homosexuals. Powell signed off on the idea.
On Jan. 21, Aspin went to brace the Joint Chiefs at “the tank,” their windowless conference room. He told them that Clinton meant to lift the ban. Then, as he put it later, he sat back and “let the chiefs vent all over me.” Furiously they told him that the administration had no understanding of the realities, demands and stresses of military life. Holding his ground, he told them they could not insulate themselves from significant changes in civilian society. The two-hour session seemed to help. Afterward, one of the chiefs said, “That was the best meeting I’ve ever had with a secretary of defense.”
Then everything fell apart. Three days later, when Aspin appeared on “Face the Nation,” a reporter confronted him with the Smith-de Leon “no negotiation” memo. Someone had plucked it from the G-drive and circulated it around the Washington press corps. The purloined memo made the Blair House meeting and Aspin’s dip into the tank at the Pentagon look like a double sham. Powell and the chiefs felt betrayed. They were furious.
At that point, Nunn strode forth. Conservative, sympathetic to the chiefs, he let Clinton know that he meant to define any deal on gays in the military. If Clinton balked, Nunn signaled that he would let Coats proceed with his antigay resolution in the Senate. In short order Aspin’s aides were pleading with Nunn’s staffers to “tell us precisely what the senator wants.”
What he really wanted, Clinton loyalists now maintain, was revenge. During the transition, they say, Clinton allowed Nunn to believe he might become secretary of state. Nunn took himself out of contention for Defense, clearing the way for Aspin, Clinton’s first choice. When Clinton decided to name Christopher to State, he neglected to tell Nunn. Now in the words of one glum Aspin aide, “Nunn has served public notice on Clinton and Aspin that when it comes to defense, he is going to be the one who decides.”
For a time the fallout was deadly. Clinton blamed Aspin for the leaked memo and the clumsy follow-through on TV. Powell people referred to the defense secretary’s ruminative intellectualism as “The Aspin University.” The relationship between Powell and Aspin is still more respectful than relaxed. The dust-up later cast a shadow over the president’s ability to work easily with Powell over Bosnia.
When Clinton took office, he offered not an ideological world view in the style of Ronald Reagan, but a hodgepodge of details. The devil was in some of those details. Just before the new cabinet’s first group photo op, harried White House aides had to sneak the attorney general’s chair out of the Cabinet Room: otherwise the pictures would have shown an empty seat. Diversity was Clinton’s mantra. He wanted a woman for A.G. so badly that at first he interviewed no men for the job. Then, rushing too quickly, he picked Zoe Baird, corporate counsel for Aetna Life and Casualty Co. Before The New York Times reported that she had hired two illegal aliens to help around the house-and had failed to pay their social-security taxes–she had told a transition staffer that the hitch was “no worse than a speeding ticket.” According to another confidant, Baird said, “I told Warren Christopher. Warren Christopher decided this wasn’t a problem. Warren Christopher is the smartest man in politics today. Therefore, this is not a problem.”
If Baird were her own worst enemy, she may have had a few others-in the FBI, an agency she would have supervised as attorney general. At one point FBI agents checking her past-but naming no names–asked the IRS how it would normally handle her kind of social-security tax problem. The IRS said it would be enough for the individual to repay the back taxes. The FBI then asked whether it would make any difference if that individual happened to be a nominee for attorney general. Thinking twice, the IRS replied yes. Now one angry talent scout for the transition says, “The FBI f-ed her.” The next front runner, federal Judge Kimba Wood, was out in Colorado skiing when asked if she had a nanny problem. She said no. Only later did a lawyer hired by the White House discover that she had hired an illegal alien, though not during the years when doing so broke the law. Having made that fine legal distinction, and keeping it to herself, Judge Wood had to withdraw.
Although Clinton preferred to appoint people he or Hillary knew personally, or those whom close friends could vouch for, he turned next to Janet Reno, the Dade County, Fla., prosecutor. “If you do a Nexis search on her you will find it contains very mixed reports,” says a transition staffer, alluding to race riots in Miami and close elections against weak opponents. “We thought, ‘Shoot, we don’t want her’.” Later they were still nervous. Reno volunteered that opponents had spread gossip that she was a lesbian. She assured the White House that the smears were untrue. Bruce Lindsey, Clinton’s close friend and special assistant for personnel, supported her. The Senate confirmed her-and the attorney general’s chair went back into the Cabinet Room.
The lesson behind the dual embarrassment over gays in the military and the A.G. was that Clinton clearly needed some better political advisers around him. Early on Clinton allowed Susan Thomases, a lawyer from New York-and a close friend of Hillary-to argue that James Carville and his handlers should be muzzled. She said they were just operators who lacked conviction. Clinton was an easy mark. (During the campaign he had regularly yelled at Carville’s staff, “You’re robbing people of hope.”) He chafed when people gave his campaign war room credit for electing him. But now, with reporters pawing at him, the headlines bad, the sound bites lousy, he sent for Carville and the pros: Mandy Grunwald, Paul Begala and Stan Greenberg. Carville bought a suit. Even the Ragin’ Cajun thought jeans and Converse sneakers looked odd in the Oval Office.
Nostalgically, Clinton people now refer to early February as a time of “joyful chaos.” With Carville restoring the verve of a permanent campaign, Clinton could move past obstacles like gays in the military to treat the main wound he had been elected to heal: the economy. In the Roosevelt Room, a policy-wonk president happily went over the budget line by line. At the table were Vice President Gore, Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, Leon Panetta and Alice Rivlin, the director and deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, and other top economic counselors. Operating on “Clinton time” meant that meetings called for two hours stretched to four and often lasted well into the night. Bentsen called the marathon “an incredible grind,” and said, “The man doesn’t seem to feel the need for sleep.” At the end of one session on taxes, Clinton led a chorus of “Happy Birthday,” honoring Bentsen’s 72d. In keeping with an administration run on a first-name basis, Clinton called out to the courtly Bentsen–a “Mr. Secretary” type for sure–“How long has it been that so many people called you Lloyd?”
The deficit hawks in the group were Bentsen, Panetta and Rivlin. Before being recruited by Clinton, both Panetta and Rivlin had called for cutting spending $2 for every $1 of new taxes, more than candidate Clinton had been willing to go. In all, the new president selected 150 individual programs for cuts or elimination. He altered several dozen entitlement formulas and health-care payments. He chose several dozen new tax cuts and tax increases. This initial trimming was done largely without consulting the cabinet secretaries, with the exception of Aspin. At times the exchanges were quite sharp. Rivlin made the mistake of saying sunnily to Clinton, “I have a slogan for your re-election. Why don’t you say, ‘Let’s end welfare as we know it for farmers’.” Glaring back, the president snapped, “Spoken just like a city dweller. Farmers are not leeches on society. We have no right to say that when we sit here safe and secure and well paid.” When he cooled off he went for farm cuts. But some of his younger people came away thinking Rivlin had been testy and uncooperative enough to fall out of his favor.
The budget Clinton ultimately submitted was also the work of liberal activists like Robert Reich, the new secretary of labor, and Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, as well as Gore. Communications Director George Stephanopoulos was also on hand to defend programs like Head Start and national service (“the very heart of what we ran on”), In adopting this programmatic approach, the Clintonites underestimated the way Ross Perot had mesmerized Congress. Clinton was a 43 percent minority president. Democrats elected by majorities in their own districts had therefore drawn votes from people who voted for Perot for president. They could not afford to ignore Perot’s message on the deficit. Yet Clinton insisted on getting far more corporate taxes and rich-man taxes and less in straight cuts than the deficit hawks wanted. As a result, he had to tack an extra percentage point on a higher new top rate for individual and corporate taxes. He wound up with a much higher percentage of taxation in his deficit plan than Bentsen, Panetta or Rivlin liked.
The president’s First Adviser, Hillary Clinton, also participated in shaping the budget. “They both have strong social conscience but both are equally practical and hardheaded as well,” Panetta said. In some ways, Hillary appeared to be better than the president at estimating the consequences and likely opposition to policy changes. When she wanted to, she could be quite tough. She insisted on considering cuts in the social security and federal retirement COLAs when just about everyone else dismissed the idea as too controversial. In the end, Clinton himself decided not to shave one percentage point from the COLAS; but the cuts remained in play right up until the end of the budget negotiations.
Perhaps the finest moment of the 100 Days came when Clinton delivered his economic message to Congress in mid-February. The text went through endless drafts with Hillary wielding a sharp pencil. Clinton left for the Capitol running late. His people thought that they had failed him, that the process of writing the speech had been too chaotic. Oddly enough, the president was singing to himself as he left. Later, as Mandy Grunwald watched him on TV, she leaned forward and said in astonishment, “He’s riffing.” Wandering from the text, Clinton gave a speech that was one-third extemporaneous. Afterward he called the TelePrompTer operator to thank him for keeping up with the mangled text. That night, back at the White House, he stood with his aides at the door of the solarium up on the third floor, slapping out high fives.
Deep in the background, the president’s foreign-affairs people studied the administration’s economic preoccupations with mixed feelings. Their orders were to cope with Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Russia and the Middle East and to prevent new crises. On major decisions they had to seek Clinton’s approval, but they couldn’t ask him to spend significant political capital on foreign affairs. “Tony, take care of that,” McLarty would tell national-security adviser Anthony Lake when a problem came up. “Keep the president informed, but don’t take too much of his time.” When the NSC had an hour to brief Clinton, Lake made a point of cutting the time to 50 minutes, ceding 10 precious minutes to the domestic staff. Lake made sure he and his aides stayed out of any photo op. Lake didn’t resent it. He owned a farm in Massachusetts, and when young staffers grumbled, he would say, “The president needs to keep talking to my neighbors back home.”
Clinton’s disengagement from foreign affairs was an exercise in self-discipline and realpolitik. “He knows why he was elected and it’s larger than Bosnia,” said one top State Department hand. Of the four or five top foreign-policy issues, Clinton didn’t “see a winner in the whole lot.” Even so, after his speech before Congress, he sent Christopher to the Middle East to revive the stalled peace talks and make good on his campaign promise of a warmer relationship with Israel. In Jerusalem, Christopher stood under the stars with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and said, “I’m not in the business of pressuring the Israelis to do anything.” In Kuwait, he told the emir that it was “very hard to explain to Congress” why the Kuwaitis boycotted American companies that did business with Israel. The emir said nothing. A few hours later, choppering into Beirut, Christopher asked for some paper. He scrawled a note that said, “This is outrageous,” and directed Assistant Secretary Edward Djerejian to have the U.S. ambassador in Kuwait “pass on the fact that I am still steaming.”
No matter how disengaged, the president could still grow hot over foreign policy. One Saturday, Christopher and Lake convened an Oval Office meeting to talk about Haiti. Clinton had had a late lunch of a hamburger and french fries but was still in a cranky mood. As his staffers gave their progress report, he exploded: “This just isn’t good enough. I want some action on this. I want to give the people down there some hope that they really will see democracy, not just a lot of words and empty promises.” “We hear your message and we will try to implement it quickly and totally,” Christopher replied. Others in the room were dismayed that no one defended them or pointed out that Clinton had gotten himself into a bind over Haiti by promising too much during the campaign. “I hope I wasn’t too tough in there, but I meant to be tough,” he told a senior adviser later. In fact, the flash of anger seemed less tough than temperamental.
The president’s interest in Russia, however, was far more compelling. He knew that if hard-liners returned to power in Moscow, it would be tougher than ever to persuade Congress to shift money from defense to domestic rebuilding. But helping Boris Yeltsin and his reformers could be like feeding fish to seals. The Russians had not succeeded in imposing monetary discipline on themselves. Clinton’s aides assumed that he would not be willing to supply more than the $700 million in the next year’s budget. He urged them to think bigger. “Be bold,” he told his foreign brain trust. “Let me worry about the politics.” He began to let meetings on the subject run long, interrupting them only once to take a phone call from Chelsea.
As Clinton’s Vancouver summit with Yeltsin approached, the power struggle in Moscow grew more intense. There were hints that the beleaguered leader might impose some kind of direct emergency rule. That Saturday Lake called Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s Oxford roommate and new ambassador at large, to the White House. The issue before them was whether Clinton should go ahead with the summit if Yeltsin took steps that looked dictatorial. Talbott argued that Clinton should be flexible, that the situation in Russia defied conventional notions of democracy. Lake agreed. As Yeltsin’s face came on CNN, they walked to Clinton’s small hideaway off the Oval Office. They were briefing Clinton when Gore walked in wearing a sweater and carrying a coffee mug. He had been listening to Yeltsin’s speech. “There’s some things at the end that raise questions about other decrees that might follow,” he cautioned.
Regrouping, the brain trusters wargamed a statement that offered total support to Yeltsin’s vow to take the power struggle to the people without giving an open-ended endorsement of specific steps he might take. They also doped out answers to the questions Stephanopoulos was sure to get from “the murder squad” in the press room. When they took the draft to Clinton, he was grumpily watching the Arkansas Razorbacks on television. They were losing badly to St. John’s in the second round of the NCAA East basketball tournament. Clinton told them he wanted to go as far as they could with Yeltsin. They returned to Lake’s office. After polishing a new draft, they raised Clinton on the phone. With Lake, Christopher and Talbott on three extensions, they read the revised statement. Suddenly the president sounded euphoric. “Yeltsin may look like he’s on his back,” he said. “But he may pull this out yet. Arkansas just did.” The Razorbacks had come back to beat St. John’s 80-74. If Boris did even half so well, he was still their man.
When the two presidents finally sat down together in Vancouver, Yeltsin looked exhausted and tense. He started by ticking off a long list of “irritants,” ending with the ramming of a Russian submarine by a U.S. sub. Looking steadily at him, Clinton said, “I’ll take care of all of these, but let me start with the last thing first. That should not have happened, and I’ll try to make sure that it never happens again.” Disarmed, Yeltsin seemed relieved. Clinton arrived with a $1.6 billion aid package. He told Yeltsin that he was ready to go to Congress for more. He asked how it might best be spent: to build housing for Russian soldiers or to help rejuvenate Russia’s hard-currency-earning oil and gas industry. The warmth of the summit only cooled when, on Sunday morning, Yeltsin began by reading a second laundry list of demands, a reversion to type, Clinton aides thought, as if Yeltsin were performing for hard-line hacks in the delegation. But it was a passing irritation. When they said goodbye, Clinton pumped the Russian’s hand. “Win,” he said. “Win.”
With the approach of spring, Clinton’s economic problems multiplied even as his attempts to avoid foreign entanglements failed. A few days after the State of the Union address, Panetta stopped by the Hill to chat with Rep. Martin Sabo, his successor as chairman of the House Budget Committee. Sabo, a liberal from Minnesota, told Panetta he would support the president’s $16.5 billion stimulus package and his five-year deficit-reduction program; but he warned the new man at OMB that Southern and Midwestern Democrats on the House Budget caucus thought that Clinton was calling for too much in taxes offset by too few spending cuts. Panetta shuddered. The president had calculated that selling the deficit reduction in his economic plan would be the hard part. Instead, it was just the other way around. Republicans and Democrats meant to outdo themselves in cutting the deficit. What they wouldn’t do was go docilely along with the spending Clinton had tried to disguise as “investments.”
Then Bob Dole, the Senate minority leader, handed Majority Leader George Mitchell a three-paragraph letter signed by 42 Republicans who vowed to filibuster the president’s short-run stimulus package as an unnecessary and wasteful addition to the deficit. Mitchell phoned the White House, setting off a frantic campaign to court perhaps a dozen moderate Republicans. They stuck by Dole. During the Easter break, the minority leader phoned Clinton ostensibly to negotiate a compromise. Clinton accepted the call in good faith, not knowing that Dole had invited a CNN crew in to film his end of the conversation. It was all a sham. “He’s a mean-spirited lowlife, a snake in the grass,” exploded one Clintonite. Whatever you called him, Dole was suddenly king of the hill. His filibuster won. “It’s almost unbelievable,” Panetta now says. “Every single major initiative of this administration may have to be negotiated in some way with the opposition; and yet we have majorities in both houses. This is really hard to accept.”
When the Serbs savaged eastern Bosnia, a commander in chief who had been at dagger’s point with the Joint Chiefs over side issues like gays suddenly found himself in a situation where he needed their close support. With U.N. choppers ferrying wounded Bosnian Muslims out of Srebrenica last week, Clinton summoned a full NSC meeting in the Oval Office. Christopher and Aspin were there; so were Powell and Lake. Powell insisted that U.S. military power be only for clearly defined goals with a good chance of success. Christopher argued cautiously that Clinton might try to lift the arms embargo but opposed the use of air power. Aspin, joined by Lake and U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright, thought air power might work, given a chance. “Whatever we do, we must have a clearly defined objective and clear limitations,” Clinton said. The stakes were enormous. If the president used force, would history call it courage or folly? If he held back, would that be judged as prudence or gutlessness? The meeting broke up with no agreement.
The next afternoon a reporter peppered Clinton with a question on assessing the 100 Days. Ticking off programs and statistics, he seemed supremely confident. “I think it’s amazing how much has been done,” he said. Immediately afterward one senior White House official reviewed the performance. Could the president really feel as good as he sounded or was the equanimity an act? “Both,” the adviser replied. “There are moments when he feels great frustration and it bursts out of him. But those moments subside. He’s like Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony-violent storms followed by calm as he takes the longer view.” The White House now expects the budget to be passed in July, though in what form it is no longer so clear. “The long record shows that Clinton can indeed make mistakes, but that he is not capable of sustained error,” says one loyalist. “He figures out what went wrong and he fixes it.”
The day Waco exploded, senior White House staffers congregated in the office of Mark Gearan, the deputy chief of staff, to take up what one called “the trainwreck problem.” Clinton now has so many initiatives in play that one strategist says, “We’re worrying about Carterizing ourselves.” At one point last week, the president was complaining that welfare reform was “not even on the radar screen.” Dutifully his troops began to craft a solution. This week Clinton intends to put campaign-finance reform and national service on the table. All of this arrives just as the launch day for health reform draws near. In ordering the staff study on the 100 Days, President Bill Clinton clearly meant to find out how much he can sell to Congress and the public at one time. And the answer should occupy him fully for the next 1,381 days.
Do you approve or disapprove of the way Bill Clinton is handling his job as president?
52% Approve 32% Disapprove
On balance, has Clinton accomplished more or less in his first 100 days than you expected?
7% More 24% Less 65% About what was expected
From the NEWSWEEK Poll of April 22-23, 1993
Which of the following applies to Clinton? (Percent saying yes)
65% Cares about people like me
65% Has picked good people for his administration
46% Is basically keeping his campaign promises
85% Is finding national problems tougher than he thought
43% Pays too much attention to special interests
From the NEWSWEEK Poll of April 22-23, 1993
How is Clinton handling these specific issues and problems? (Percent saying “approve”)
68% Relations with Russia
53% Health-care reform
44% The situation in Bosnia
42% Gay rights to serve in the military
37% Federal budget deficit
For this NEWSWEEK Poll, Princeton Survey Research Associates conducted phone interviews with a national sample of 750 adults by telephone April 22-23. The margin of error is +/- 4 percentage points. “Don’t know” and other responses not shown. The NEWSWEEK Poll 1993 by NEWSWEEK, Inc.
