A political consultant, he ran Clinton's 1992 campaign. He and George Stephanopoulos formed the War Room to respond aggressively to the 'incoming' that hit the campaign. Carville did not take a position in Clinton's administration, but continued to act as an informal political advisor. He co-authored with his wife, Mary Matalin, a 1994 book, All's Fair: Love, War, and Running for President. Interview conducted June, 2000 by Chris Bury What do you remember about your very first meeting with Bill Clinton? The first time we met was in the summer of 1991. . . We were involved in the Senator Harris Wofford race at the time. And basically, we had a pleasant talk. He was kind of what you would think--a very engaging, smart, warm guy. In his book, George Stephanopoulos says that the two of you were trying to "out-southern" each other. Do you remember that? The second time we met . . . it was like telling southern war stories. We're roughly the same age. What you'd say in southern terms is that we were just gee-hawing . . . Southern white guys, who were kind of Democrats, who had kind of a different view of civil rights and that kind of stuff. . . . There were only a few of us in our generation. The two of you were just acting like good ol' boys? Yes, you know, talking about Mama and that kind of stuff that southern guys talk about. You go to work for Bill Clinton in 1992. You set up the campaign in Little Rock, and you set up the War Room. What is your mission at that point? I went to work for President Clinton on December 1, 1991. And we didn't set up the War Room until sometime probably early July. So, at first, our goal was to survive. December went fine. New York Governor Mario Cuomo had decided not to run, and we were picking up pretty good in the polls. We had a pretty good December. Then in January, as we say in the trade, we got a little "incoming." We had the Gennifer Flowers thing, and the draft. Then there was the New Hampshire primary was at the beginning of February. . . . Frankly, the night before, we were not that optimistic about doing very well. So then we had to go through the entire primary process, which was pretty doggone tough. Think about it--as late as May, there was a front-page story in The New York Times saying that maybe we'd be broke at the convention. . . . There was real concern in the party that we would not break 25, which would mean that the party couldn't qualify for federal funds in the 1996 election. So, between the time I started to work for the president and when we set up the War Room -- those were kind of the glory days, but there was a lot of angst. . . . In January, the governor has begun the campaign. The first real crisis is the Gennifer Flowers crisis. What do you remember about how that broke? George Stephanopoulos called me. It was early in the morning and he said, "Why don't you meet us? Why don't you come to the airport? The governor wants you to come . . . thinks that something's going to break today about some woman." And I said, "Aw, shit, every day something's going to break about some woman." You know what I mean? I was not at all fired up about getting on a plane in January. And he said, "I think you'd better come." So I went. As the incoming started coming, they were out campaigning. I was in between. They were trying to tell Mrs. Clinton, who was in Georgia at the time, that the story was going to break. . . . From then until the primary, the dominant memory I have is fatigue--just being so tired and not sleeping. And the story broke, and of course they had the sort of press conference, the Gennifer Flowers press conference and the stuttering John thing. . . . Right after that, we went on a tour down south. . . . My dominant memory in all of that is being tired. We had an event in Boston, Massachusetts. . . . I know what it feels like if you're at a soccer game and you lose control. The media throng there was so intense that I got pinned. Maybe it was three seconds; I don't want to exaggerate it. But I didn't have any control. I thought I was going to be crushed. I was just sort of lifted off my feet. There was this radio guy with a little tape recorder and a mike, and he was screaming and he was crawling over the top of the crowd. And I was sitting there, and my arms were pinned, and I couldn't move my legs. Like I said, for two or three seconds, I panicked that it was out of control--that I wasn't just going to lose the election, but I was going to lose my life--as they say, I was going to be "taking a dirt nap" pretty soon. The day that Mandy Grunwald went on Nightline, you had a strategy session. What was the strategy? I think the "cash for trash," was the sort of main thing. . . . Who came up with the phrase "cash for trash?" I wish I could say it was me, but I honestly don't know. In your book, you said it actually was Bill Clinton. Okay, then it was. . . . The book supercedes my memory. What was the strategy, and who came up with it? The strategy was to say that there was a lot of money that was passing hands here. It was all odd that this was coming up around 10 days before the election. The strategy was pretty obvious, and I think the strategy worked pretty good. You were going to hit the press on Gennifer Flowers' motives. Yes, and I think it worked. When Mandy went on Nightline that night and you all were watching, what was the reaction in the campaign? "Attagirl! Way to go!" It was good. We had pretty good points to make, and people really resent it. At one event in New Hampshire, someone there asked the question, and it was actually a journalist who sort of posed--they didn't identify themselves -- and there was a time when I thought the crowd could have turned physical. Against the reporter? Yes, against the reporter. If you did focus groups, if you did events, if you did anything, there was a real backlash to the whole thing When Governor and Mrs. Clinton went on 60 Minutes, you had prepared an extensive memo for that interview. What were you trying to accomplish? In that environment, if you let the story take its own course, it was going to be bad for you. You had to get in the middle of the story. Governor Clinton, myself, and most of the people in the campaign all shared this one thing -- we were not just going to let people do what they wanted to do. If they were going to give us a chance to get on there, by God, we were going to get on there. We were going to get in the middle of it. There's a lot of times when people have a strategy to say, "We're just not going to participate in that sort of witch hunt here," or something like that. That doesn't work for very long in presidential races in the United States. You have to fight back. You've got to fight back. Yes, sir. And our strategy from day one was to contest it at every point, and to have them out there... The best person to explain what happened ... was then-Governor Clinton and Mrs. Clinton. And that's why we did the 60 Minutes thing, because it was the biggest deal out there. You had to show that you were out there, taking it on. Why did you advise the president that the best thing he had going for him in that interview was Mrs. Clinton? Because if the wife, in all of these things, is standing. . . You know what I mean? Remember the famous "This is not some kind of Tammy Wynette thing here?" But in the end . . . people overwhelmingly say "Look, that's his wife, they're fine. . . . Throughout his presidency, she's been the person who's meant the most to him and his job." You could say he's done a little better than survive, and that she has been most of his political prosperity. But clearly, had he gone on without her, it would have been a big gap. If she wouldn't go, my advice to him would be, "Don't you go on the 60 Minutes show." No her, no go. Throughout that part of the campaign, there was a sense that this guy is lurching from crisis to crisis -- that he lives on the edge. (Laughs) It sure felt that way. We had an interesting thing. When the draft story hit . . . we made a disastrous decision to go back to Arkansas. . . . I was up for just staying there in Boston if we had to, but don't just let the story go without us being in it. But we made that decision to go back to Arkansas, and we let the story take its course over a few days. And we had really bad results as a result of that. It was a really big mistake that we made. . . . George comes in, finds out about the letter, and he's shaken. But you see something in the letter that might work. We dropped 17 points in the polls. We had a collapse. About nine or ten of us . . . flew to New Hampshire. And we say "Look, we gotta have the best week we've ever had in our life to survive this thing. No mistakes." And I remember talking to Governor Clinton and saying, "All of your life has been in preparation for this week. You gotta perform like whatever." The plane lands, and there's ABC News correspondent Jim Wooten, and he had that look on him and he says, "You gotta look at this." . . . I took the thing and I read it and I said, "You gotta publish this. You gotta really want to talk about this. Publish it, get out front, and people are going to understand it." I was the same age, remember, and I served in the Marines during the Vietnam War. I was actually one of the few people who was very fortunate to serve during the conflict, but did not serve in Vietnam. But I knew people who did everything they could to get out of the draft. I knew what it was. And I said, "If anybody who is 21 or 22 years old could write a letter like this, you could almost see a future president there." So we took the letter, published it in the newspaper, and we get a Nightline date. . . And Nightline did an interesting thing. They read the whole letter. It was not a short letter; it must have taken ten minutes. Then he did the interview. . . . I think we took more good out of that letter than the letter took bad from us. In a way, the letter was a net plus. And we needed that, because we needed to bounce back a little bit in that final week. The other part of your strategy . . . was to blame the Republicans. You said that the Republicans had pilfered this letter out of the Pentagon -- which turned out not to be true. At the time I thought it was true (laughs). All's fair, right? . . . An impeccable source told me that they had the sense that it had come from someone connected. . . . In retrospect, as a tactic, I don't think it was particularly effective one way or another. . . . You write in your book that, on the morning of January 26, you woke up in the middle of the night sobbing uncontrollably. Why? That was the morning of the 60 Minutes interview. I was 40 at the time. I'm 47 years old. I had reached almost the pinnacle of my career in political consulting. I was a guy that mattered in a presidential campaign. I had been sleeping on floors and running statewide campaigns -- and it came down to the sex interview being the biggest event in the campaign. . . . And I didn't know which way it was going to go. I was tired and I was scared. I was scared for the people I was working with, and I was scared for myself. . . . It was fatigue, it was fear, and it was like, God, is this what I've worked all of this for? Did I come this far to get to this? So I just kind of lost it; I just got emotional (laughs). You talked about the "SMO" -- the Standard Morning Outburst. What is the SMO, and how did you deal with it? In a presidential campaign, a lot of decisions are made on the spot. The candidate is on the road, and there's a whole infrastructure out there also. . . . President Clinton is not a morning person. . . . So we generally had to wake him up to start the day. . . . We'd wake him with polling information and things like that. He'd often complain in a graphic way about a lot of different stuff, and then he'd be finished. It didn't last. He's capable of outbursts, but he doesn't hold it very long. . . . What's it like to be on the other end of a Governor Clinton tirade? . . . I equate it to an afternoon thunderstorm: it moves through, there's a lot of thunder and lightning, and then it's gone, and the sun is shining again. Also, he never had a tirade on big things. He had a sense when we had to buckle down. . . So you've survived the primaries, and now you're running the War Room. What's the mission of the War Room? . . . I think the Democrats were seared by the Dukakis loss in 1988. We wanted to be sure that we got in the middle of everything, were capable of responding, and also able to initiate attacks and that type of stuff. We also thought that news cycles had become incredibly compressed -- things happen in modern American presidential campaigns almost in real time. . . . The "War Room" was the apparatus we set up to react quickly, and to make decisions quickly. The idea was to have momentum to do things. . . . . . . In presidential campaign, everything outside of the paid TV literally happens between 10:30 and 2:30 Eastern Time. That's when the editors and all decide what's going to be on the nightly news, and in tomorrow's newspaper. Unless something really big breaks, by 2:30, eighty-five percent of the decisions are made about their coverage. . . . So my objective was that we knew what we were going to do at 9:30, Little Rock time, which is 10:30 Eastern time. My whole premise was that you have a four-hour window. Those four hours matter way more than any other four hours.