A Washington attorney, he served as a White House special counsel during Clinton's impeachment in 1999. Interview conducted July, 2000 by Chris Bury Hoe did you come into the Administration in the second term? I think it happened when the president [appointed] Madeleine Albright to be secretary of state. I'd known the secretary for many years when I worked for Senator Kennedy and done foreign policy and national security issues for him. So I had worked with her. And she called me up after her appointment and said that she would like very much for me to work in the State Department. She suggested that I work in the policy planning staff as director. And that's where your expertise had been... I think my expertise in foreign policy and national security and military affairs began when I turned draft age back in the sixties. Ever since that time I have followed it carefully, cared about those issues, been involved in it through law school, then got a chance to do it myself with Senator Kennedy when I worked for him on the Hill, which was very exciting--doing the Senate Armed Services Committee staff work for him. So then when I had a chance to work for the first female secretary of state in the history of the country and a friend, someone that I admire enormously, I jumped at the opportunity. The rap on the Clinton Administration in foreign policy had been, especially in the first term, that the president, because of where he had come from politically, didn't put a huge priority on it. What did you find out about that at the State Department? Were you on the back burner? No. I never thought that foreign policy was on the back burner with the president. I thought the president had gotten comfortable in that arena. He was very good at it. I spent some time with him when we were preparing for the president's trip to China. And as many people have [said] who spent time with him in small groups [how good] he is [at] absorbing information. It really is very impressive to watch a first rate mind absorb that kind of information and then use it to define issues to identify policy questions and then to mobilize that data behind a policy. I was very impressed with him for someone who really had spent most of his time in domestic politics as a governor in Arkansas and in the National Governor's Association. I thought he was not only comfortable, but he loved it. And he was very good at it. My perception was that he had an unusually harmonious foreign policy team, at least when I was there. I doubt that there's ever been a team that has worked as successfully together as Sandy Berger and Madeleine Albright, who have known each other for 25 years and really over time developed an understanding and approach to these crises that served America well during the second administration. What was the crisis du jour when you were in policy planning... Well, in real terms the crisis du jour was Iraq, because every day we were being tested. Every day UNSCOM was being challenged as to whether it could conduct the kinds of inspections that were required to assure us that Saddam Hussein had not developed weapons of mass destruction. So there was that. There was also the continuing saga of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the development of strong new states, particularly in the areas surrounding the Caspian and the Caspian energy challenge. Were we going to sit back and let one of the potentially richest areas of energy become essentially the monopoly of the Iranians and the Russians or were we going to try to play a serious game as a participant in the Caspian energy arena? What was going to be done with NATO, how NATO was going to develop in the face of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and what its mission was going to be was a very important ongoing discussion that was in the White House and in the State Department and very much involved with the policy planning staff, which I was running. In Iraq at one moment the president came out and made what was an unusual announcement that the United States was going to financially support the overthrow of the Iraqi government. I assume that that was not something that was off the cuff? No, it wasn't off the cuff. I think that my experience with the president is that in foreign policy he almost never did anything off the cuff. He always had thought through very carefully the policy implications and the impact of what his words would be and would have. And I don't think that was off the cuff in the slightest at all. We'd had some disappointments in that domain with respect to support for the opposition forces inside of Iraq and more than disappointments--we had some real defeats in the foreign policy front in our efforts to support an Iraqi opposition. That was a challenge that I think the president felt that he had to really step up to and meet and there was a good deal of Congressional support for that as well. So you are the head of the policy planning and your expertise is foreign affairs. And you get a call to come over to help defend the president after the Starr report is released. What do you remember about that meeting? I remember getting early warnings about it from John Podesta, who at the time was the deputy chief of staff for the president. I think it was probably a day or two before the president appeared before the grand jury and testified about the Lewinski related matters and then gave his speech to the Nation that John Podesta called me up and said that the White House was contemplating putting a new person into the White House to be a coordinator quarterback of what they expected to be an impeachment effort. And I said I could name to John ten other lawyers in America that could do the job as well, if not better. You didn't really want this job? No. I was thrilled with working for Madeleine Albright. She was a very exciting leader. She was a historian, a teacher, an intellectual, a professor of public policy. She loved policy. It was a place that I thrived. I loved my staff. We had really exciting people work with us. So I was not looking for any new job. I wanted to be a success inside the State Department and to help establish a post cold war footing conceptually and in strategic terms for the future. I had been reading in the newspapers that they were looking for some, I think the newspaper columnists were calling it some "ego" lawyer. I didn't think that phrase applied to me in the slightest. So I shrugged it off until John called and I said, "Forgive me, John, if I'm not enthusiastic about the idea." But they continued to ask me to get involved. And then you had a meeting with the president? This is September 11th or so, September 10th, shortly after the Starr report came out. Yeah. To be somewhat complete, there's one step that I really ought to include in that. And that is that I did talk to the secretary of state about it before I agreed to do it, because I thought that she was the person to whom I owed my fundamental allegiance at that point. And I didn't feel as though I could make a decision independently talking with her. After consulting with her, when she said that she thought I could make a difference and that it was important that the president as president and the presidency as an office constitutionally make it through this crisis, I agreed to do that. The president called me, I guess first it was on a Friday night. That was the day the Starr report had been sent to the Congress. And we talked about that, of what the impact had been and about his experience that morning with a prayer session that he had--a prayer breakfast. What did he say about that prayer breakfast? I remember the speech he gave that morning. Well, it was an important speech for him. I had the impression that he had been up very late at night and that it was--every word was his word. And he had made the use of various words to try to convey his feelings of remorse, regret, a sense of shame which was, I think, all very genuine and appropriate. The next night I went over and I talked with him about what had to be done in terms of coordinating the defense of the presidency over the next months. That was a remarkable meeting from what I've read and heard. Tell us about it. I can tell you only a limited amount because at that point I became his lawyer. He asked me to work for him. And I agreed to do that. And so that the contents of that conversation are really protected by the privilege. I can say that I was personally very moved by the anguish of what he was going through emotionally. This was a person genuinely troubled and angry at himself and frustrated, and someone who was also very concerned about the future. Did he feel his presidency was at genuine risk at that moment? I can't characterize it. I can't tell you that he thought he was at genuine risk. He knew he was in trouble. He knew he was in trouble personally. He was in trouble not only with his family which was, I think, first and foremost his concern. And, again, I would say it was appropriate for him to have that concern. The relationship inside the Clinton household, of course, was very, very strained at that moment in time. He had trouble with his Cabinet. And you can understand why that had happened. We had seen it very closely from the State Department because the secretary of state had been a very outspoken defender of the president back in January. And it turned out that the president had mislead the members of his own cabinet. He was in trouble with his staff. He had mislead his staff about what had happened. And the question of his relationship with some of the most important people that he worked with day in, day out was still a problem. I found out even more dramatically later on that he was seriously in trouble with his party members on the Hill. There was not a great fund of personal loyalty that the Democrats in the House felt for the president. They'd had five years, six years of a history with him that had been difficult. I can remember every time I walked into a member's office to discuss the proceedings in the House Judiciary Committee and the prospects for various alternatives to an impeachment vote, I first had to go through 15 or 20 minutes of, understandably from each member, about how angry [and] disappointed they were at the president's reckless [behavior] and at his shortcomings. So, yes, he was, he was in trouble. He knew he was in trouble. Whether the presidency itself was in jeopardy, I mean, I'm not sure I could tell you that. I felt that the presidency as an institution was in trouble. But at that meeting...this was a several hour long meeting. Where was it held? And if you would give us a little color. The first thing to be said is that on the telephone he told me to just drive into the diplomatic entrance on the south lawn and park right there where the heads of state get out of helicopters. And I thought that was, I mean, I was pinching myself as I drove through the gates. And on my left I could see the Washington Monument. On the right there was the White House. And I just got out, put my station wagon there where the helicopter is, and walked into the White House as though I belonged. It felt very funny. And I was pinching myself at that particular moment. They took me up to the residence and there is a living room area in the residence over the formal areas down below which has a beautiful balcony. I think they call it the Truman Balcony. And I wandered out there to just look at the Christmas decorations. It wasn't Christmas decorations. That was later. I wandered out there just to look at the view of the Jefferson and the Washington Monuments. Waited for the president. He arrived and we sat there and talked on the balcony. That weekend, that Sunday, the president's lawyers went out on the Sunday shows partly because the political people were fed up. They all told us they weren't going out to defend the president that Sunday. What was the problem from your view of the performance of the lawyers Sunday? Perhaps through no fault of their own, but it was viewed here in Washington as extremely legalistic performance with the president's lawyers making distinctions about sex and about perjury that, perhaps, didn't serve the president very well. Yes. And, in fact, the backlash was significant. It was a real wake-up call to the White House because I think both Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt wrote letters to the president saying, "Don't send the lawyers out again." There was a lot of mumbling and grumbling about how the president's lawyers had been of a disservice to him. I thought that Chuck Ruff [and] David Kendall's performance was absolutely essential to the defense of the president and was critical to everything that we did thereafter. I know it probably was not politically popular. But a very sharp line had to be drawn very early on that there was no criminal conduct here, and that we are never, ever going to compromise on that question. That line we stuck with throughout, and we never compromised on that question. It was important to establish it. It would have been so much easier for us to or for the lawyers to have said on the hand and on the other hand. But they were absolutely unapologetic about the fact that this conduct, which was clearly blameworthy and wrong, did not amount to criminal conduct and should not be considered in that category of conduct. Because of that drawing the line and mobilizing the defenses, we were able to move forward and make the case that, however blameworthy the conduct was, it didn't rise to the level of an offense that was impeachable under the Constitution. It didn't rise to the level of a high crime or a misdemeanor. That was where the battle took place for the rest of the session, the House as well as in the Senate. And so, yes, people can criticize the lawyer's performance. And it was a very tough moment, I know, for them individually as well as for the president personally. But it was necessary to establish the foundations of the defense of the presidency as an institution and Bill Clinton as a man. One of the common complaints from the political side throughout this is that the lawyers aren't confiding in them. So they don't feel they can do an adequate job of defending the president and feel very much in the dark. I think that one of the reasons I believe I was asked to come into the White House was because there was difficulty in communication between the political people that were advising and the legal people who were advising the president. Did you note that tension? Can you describe it or give us some insight into it and the reasons for it? It was clearly in the air. One of the very senior people in the White House talking about his personal relationship with the president said that he thought that soon after the August 17th grand jury appearance and his speech to the nation that the White House became almost dysfunctional. There was such a loss of enthusiasm, energy and momentum in the place; that people just sort of withdrew precisely at a time when there needed to be more energy, more positive activity, and more momentum forward. One of the elements of that, I think, was that the president went off on vacation right afterwards. It's hard to generate a lot of positive activity and energy in the White House when the president isn't there in the middle of summer. But that atmosphere, I was told, was just devastating inside the White House. Someone said it was like a neutron bomb had hit and everybody had vanished inside the building.